Creating Value For the Majority with Brendan Playf

What's up guys, welcome back to the episode of the Divi Crypto Podcast. Today I'm joined by Brendan, the founder of Massa Finance. How's it going Brendan? It's going great Steve. How's your day going? I'm really excited to chat about what we're working on and dive in more to this conversation with you today. Yeah, it's going to be a lot of fun and we were talking a

little bit before. We were recording about everything that you guys are working on and I'm eager to get into that and unpack that. But before we do, let's hear a little bit about you. Let's hear about your background, your origin story. How did you get into Web 3? Yeah, I really appreciate it mate. So the story goes back to where I grew up in the UK.

I come from a pretty underserved part of the UK. Smaller, I called North Oak Village of 50 people, took maybe an hour and a half to get to school in the morning and come back over the evening time. Nobody ever went to University of college from my class, I think three of us ended up going. Because it was so low income, at the end of sort

of my high school college phase before you go to university, I essentially couldn't go because of the wealth bracket I was in. I ended up going to University of later as a 24 year old, not as a 19 year old after working in local hospitality and sort of throughout my life, I've had credit or access to finance sort of helping back being from that sort of

background. I was living in California just outside of LA and all of this was unlocked for me in late 2013. I was formally hacking when I was younger in the late 90s. I had fortunate in the ISDM line of the computer that my mother bought on finance and I decided to start hacking Pearl servers, which was kind of interesting. And in those IRC chats, I was

still a member in sort of 2013. I saw a lot of talk and exciting around things. I was a bit coin and I thought that the best way of me acquiring Bitcoin because it was already getting up to the 800s at that time, was to start mining, realized that without an FPGA or an ASIC, you couldn't really mine. So I started mining Litecoin with 4GPUs, spent

1000 pounds on a 4GPU rig, and found that the difficulty of Litecoin was too hard. So I started looking through Bitcoin talk and found all things Doge. And I started solo mining Doge very, very early when it was launched, some of the first blocks, got some lucky blocks. And I made about 15 years of income in my local kind of economy in the first sort of

week or so of mining Doge, primarily the majority of it, solo mining. And what it did, it just opened my eyes to what you could do with some technology, like an internet connection, bit of ingenuity, scrapping around in this space at the time, all coins. And leverage that into becoming a reseller of BitMainStrees on eBay. I built that into like a really substantial mining business through

2013. 2014 and 2015 when I got ultimately shaken out of the market in the kind of cloud mining revolution that BitMain and others sort of drove. As is the case today in mining, margins got really kind of compressed and really struggled to be successful as a small as a small miner. And from that point forward, I sort of been able to be upwardly mobile from that

initial starting point, getting that opportunity, which I couldn't access from like a credit line, for example, coming to the end of the market. I didn't have a credit school when I got here, as you know, like any immigrant to the US has to start essentially from zero to get access to credit. And so I said about building a career around Fintech and like focusing on how

we could build new systems to enable other people that were in the same situation to myself to use Web3 or DFI to unlock capital. And that journey has led to the founding of Master and Master as a decentralized protocol that is intending to give a different financial identity. For individuals, primarily focusing on unlocking access to credit where you can, we actually are building a sold-out identity-level

credit and other use cases whether it be authentication or logins. And you're able to bridge Web2 data, your bank information, a FICO credit score with Web3 data, your on-chain activity, your centralised exchange activity. You can connect different sources like your discord information as well to create a layered sold-bound identity with all these different sol- links as we call them. And then you can share them with

a third party to get access to credit, financial services, do KYC and things like that. And the vision of Master is to build a new infrastructure for credit and financial access that you, the individual, own the data and the ability to access and leverage services through for building more wealth and opportunity. But I don't think that's a good idea. I was fortunate to have in 2013.

Very cool, very cool. And for all the people that don't know what Bitcoin talk is for the people that have joined more recently into this space, that was the central beating heart of everything that was altcoins back in the 2014, 15, 16 era where everything was just a fork of Litecoin. And you had all these funny kinds of things. What kind of similar to the ICO

boom, would you say? I mean, it was like this really interesting phenomenon. Yeah, it was already driven by, you know, getting basically wherever you saw Angelo BTC mining in a pool, go and hit that pool and you're going to probably get some luck. So when a proof of work coin launches for the first time, you have this magical window at the beginning where the difficulty to

mine is low because there's not huge participation. And if you solo mine within a very short window early on, you can hit lucky blocks and get the full block reward. Now that means being dialed into what's going on in Bitcoin talk, being on all the alt kind announcements, swear Ethereum was launched like Vitalik put the first. The Ethereum announcement in Bitcoin talk is still there today.

The thread is still active, Bitcoin talk is still active. And I guess it's similar to, you know, getting early access to ICOs, you would be an early miner. You would hit those lucky blocks. And then you would look to get liquidity on cryptocurrency or mint power one of the old exchanges, which no longer exist. And yeah, it was very similar to the ICO phase. And I

think similar to what's happening in NFT today, where in 2017, 18, you could claim a crypto punk really early on. And that's going to have like pretty significant value. So yeah, it was a high alpha, high alpha window into early all coins. And you there are thousands that have died. And a few of you know, I think that's a lot of money. I appreciate that. That's

for today. And all of you that we still see a lot today. Yeah. Yeah. And I encourage anybody listening to this to go and check. Bitcoin talk. Because it is such a unique. Just record of everything that happened. All the way leading up to where it is today, where, just like Brandon said. You know, Crippsy was around, and you could go in DM like, Richard from

Bittrix directly on there. And you could, it was almost like a chance of today was like Cryptopia back then where. Yeah. Cryptopia. Yeah. Yeah. What's this New Zealand base? And they're long gone now. But it was like everybody was really trying to come together in these really bizarre ways on the forum. And you could develop your own kind of terminology on there and just get involved.

And it was such a such a great little community. I have not been on there in a very long time. But once upon a time, I was definitely deep into all of the, you know, the an end threads for the announcements. Exactly. All that, all that good stuff. Yeah. Good memory lane there. There is, and there's probably still high alpha there with NFTs and Adrops. If

you're really looking for the pre crypto Twitter alpha. That's the kind of places you find it. Like we, we published a, an announcement thread in there as well to kind of engage with the OG community. And you get specific giveaways there and certain things that aren't available elsewhere. It's kind of a, it's an interesting, it's an interesting place to participate and still pretty active. It's going

to be very cool. Well, I think that's a good segue into masa. Let's talk a little bit about what it is. And what you guys are trying to do and how you got started. Yeah. So we, like I said, we started masa. I started about 14 months ago. Bootstrap the Pro School myself and bought on a few engineers to essentially build out. What, what would a

story. And the same is true in Web 3. We have collateralized lending, which has been pioneered really by Makerdale in the way that they launched DeFi several years ago. Through to Arve and many of the other kind of collateralized platforms we know and love today. But in order for lending to really go mainstream and for us to truly undone ourselves from either the banks or the

FinTechs, we need to have some notion of risk management and financial identity in Web 3. And what that means is being able to go to a lender and take out a regular loan, provide information on your risk profile and maybe give permission to your personal data that is then revealed to the lender so they can collect. When you default, if you're a bad actor, you can't

get a job. And the cold start problem exists in Web 3. You can't start building, for example, Web 3 credit scores. You can't start building Web 3 credit use cases until you have an existing risk management layer or risk analysis layer like a credit score system or a credit bureau system that brings together all of your Web 3 activity. And preferably your existing Web 2 activity

and allows you to use that on chain. So we realized that the fastest way of getting lending to the lender is to use Web 3. And then starting to build a new system, we started building Web 3 in a traditional sense was, what if we just bought all of the data that we had in the real world into Web 3, made it compatible there and then

start building additional features around it. Like how active I am in Discord, how many groups I remember, how many NFTs do I hold? These are pretty obvious metrics down to propensity to have a position that equated. What if we wrapped all of that into a singular sole, which is our wallet, create a sole bound identity that has different attributes or sole links that could be a

sole name. We're launching or will have launched a sole name, ENS service where you can claim your sole as we're calling it. And that'll be like a domain service or an ENS service for a sole bound token identity. And from there, you can connect, for example, your experience, FICO score, you can connect your bank information and you can connect, connect various other things. And from there,

share it with a lender in Web 3 or a smart contract in a public or private way. And that's what we've built. We've built this. It's owned by you. So as you can bring all of your data into Web 3 and access different use cases and value. And we have a lender that's live on our platform and many, many more use cases are going live over

the coming months. Very cool. Very cool. So let's talk a little bit about what stage you're at. I think a lot of people in this space specifically will talk a lot about building this technology, getting things off the ground. And I think it can often be a little bit misconstrued as to what's actually happened and is coming. So if you could kind of boil this down

as simply as you could, what is a use case for using Masa today? And then where do you want it to go? In the future. Yeah. So we've started off by giving users a very easy way of viewing their Web 2 and their Web 3 personal net worth and their credit scores all in one place. So you can sign up today. You can connect a range

of different data sources from Web 2, your credit identity, your bank information and or your crypto accounts. You can see, holistically, your net worth and your credit worthiness across both of those ecosystems. And then from there, you're able to use your identity to, for example, register for an NFT whitelist. You're able to, in one particular country, you're able to use that to apply for a loan

today through our mobile application. And that's where we started. And we built a user base of about 50,000 users right now that have registered and signed up alongside that we have a zero knowledge, like chain link for credit data. We just live on our Tesla. We have about three and a half thousand and validators on there. And you can sign up and participate to the incentivized

test net today. It's really to run based on like a get fork and on that test net, we relay private transactions for credit data to smart contracts. So we really focused on first capturing the end user, validating and verifying that there is value in connecting all your data in one place to then be able to, um, use your like, sold-bound identity to access this loan in

my market, register for whitelists and do KYC for, uh, DeFi protocols, if, if they require it. Um, and, you know, primary go to market for us has been allowing users to claim their sole name, uh, a unique sole name that is like ENS and, um, that's your kind of primary like identifying attribute for, for your soul. Got it. Got it. And for the beginners that are

watching, we were talking briefly before you start, we started recording. Could you walk us through the, just from a high level when you say soul and when you say what fatalic had mentioned, I definitely, we probably should have touched on that first. But for everybody that's listening that has not, you know, read the, the white paper that fatalic put out or the, uh, Twitter thread that

it was about it, could you give us from a high level, what he's referring to and what you're referring to when you say soul. Yeah. So, um, fatalic published a paper which is, um, uh, finding Web 3's soul. Um, it's a really great paper. It's, um, pretty easy to digest. And, um, it goes into the fact that as it's based on a world of warcraft sort

of knowledge that you're kind of avisaur or, uh, representation in this world is, is your soul. And we're all souls in a decentralized society. And what would it take for us as individuals to, um, participate in a fully decentralized society? Well, I might need to prove that I've got a driving license to drive a car. I might need to prove that I have insurance, um, to

be able to be on the road in my car. I might want to prove that I have a history of a job for a new employer. And that each of these attributes are parts of my, of my soul. And when you think about the way in which you can use NFTs or assets or, or different on-chain representations of your identity, all of those things I described

or attributes or identity, um, you're binding those attributes to your soul. So, what a soulbound token is, it's a, it's a non-transferible publicly verifiable or even in our case, it's privately verifiable. That's a little bit different. We do allow for private verification using, uh, ZK, um, technology. And those, um, non-transferable tokens are like an end NFT. They have a, a link to a bit of data

in the case of the example. I just said, you have a token on your wallet that links to a copy of your driving license held on IPFS, for example. You maybe don't want your driver license public on IPFS, but you can choose with whom you share that with. And SPD's act as a type of, like, digital CV or digital representation. And at the moment, there is

no standard for soulbound tokens. So we built a standard for this and an authentication layer where you as the individual can, in the example of the driving license, you can reveal the picture or the representation of the driving license to one person, not the entire world publicly. And we see that, you know, if you go to a conference, you might get a SPT for conference attendants.

This is a bit like pokes and badges. And essentially, as you mature your soul in the web3, you gradually build up more and more of these soul links, as we call them, of attributes. And your wallet becomes more valuable, more powerful. You can unlock incentives, you can unlock different use cases like lending, inferred and implicit KYC. So no more biometric KYC. If you connect to your

wallet and it's got a soulbound KYC, the party knows that you've done KYC and will let you immediately into the platform. So you can reuse a lot of these identity attributes. And it's from the website. It's a really interesting and expect to see, we're calling it a summer of soul, even though it's late into the summer. We're doing, we've been doing a campaign recently for onboarding

new users and expect to see like soulbound attributes and platforms be a pretty big wave at the next cycle. Awesome. Yeah, great explanation. And before we get into sort of what you're excited about in this space, I want to talk about corn. And the token. I can't, I can't not talk about that. So I think before we were recording, I had a little giggle about, you

know, how to pronounce the name correctly. And then I saw that the token name was corn. So I immediately knew that it was masa. And I want to understand a little bit about why, why the token. And, you know, I know it's for validating data on chain. But can you walk us through a little bit about the token and why it's needed. Yeah. So masa comes

from, if anyone doesn't know, it's a ground coal that's used to. And then I think it's a very, very good thing to make Mexican or Southern American cuisine. And we have, we've had huge high value years ago for, for currency in terms of building civilizations. And the reason why I call masa masa is that we believe that this foundational layer of like identity and soulbound identity

were allowed for, you know, wealth creation and opportunity for people in a decentralized society. And corn being the slightly me mish tongue in cheek, you know, ticker for the token itself. In order to be a valid data and to be able to relay private transactions, you you state corn to that layer, very similar to slana. And then if you're minting or transferring or accessing data from

a user's SBT, you're using corn to pay gas or pay fees on that layer to access it. So it's very similar to many of the other kind of layer ones or layer two's which allows for the security and then the flow of value through the protocol. And that's what I'm going to do. And it's sort of a payment for bandwidth on the data layer or a

payment for security as well, where we're validators coming on participate. And there's a capped inflationary reward on the token that is to be voted on by validators when the protocol goes live. So we're going to decentralize the decision around what inflation looks like very much the way that Solana went live and using it as one of those core layer one bits of architecture to secure the

network and fully decentralized government. So we're going to open up samenleances as well on the ProCole, for example, at that launch, token holders and validators will will vote on the exact inflation schedule and how the token amits. So also moving to decentralized Governments of this, what we think is a critical data esay for way. Very cool very cool. Well, that leads us to the finale question.

Of someone that's been in the space for a very long time, it's very special. That you brought up the coin talk and a lot of that, all that fun that started very early on in the space and just sort of was chaotic looking back on the prices of things, like ping pong games worth thousands of dollars and things like that. I'm curious to hear what you're

excited about. You know, you've seen a lot coming and going and I want to know what it is when you get up in the morning that you're just overly hyped to check your phone and see what you're just super, super pumped about. Yeah, for me, you know, having seen three or four cycles now, cycle one was all about exchanges and, you know, building all Mt. Gox,

right? It's supposed 2013 was which of these exchanges are going to stick and as you kind of recounted a lot of them died and out of that was born Gemini Coinbase. Bittrek still to some extent exists. It was the market leader and like the gold stand of the time, Binance, so on and so forth. So that was Wave 1, Wave 2 was like the DeFi Wave

and building on Ethereum post ICO, like we've done this ICO, what the hell do we do now? We've got to build something and certain things of stocks and things happen. In this wave, you know, it's been much more about the consumer, it's been much more about, you know, mass adoption, everyone, everyone's been using mass adoption for as long as I can remember, but really what excites

me is providing sustainable value for a majority of users, not a few insiders that are in the space and, you know, I get up every day wanting to build a system that's fairer, better and faster than the existing paradigm that serves more people, more fairly and gives more people a chance where ultimately you're accountable for that chance. If you choose to go and de-gen that on

120X on Binance, if you can even do that now that shows I don't do that, I don't even know if you can do that now. But that you get an equal opportunity to participate in the system. I think NFTs are a great gateway for this. I also think credit is like a massive Trojan horse to get people into the system. So many people are fed up

with the way the credit system works, post 2008, that it just means that there is a flood of people coming to a land where we're building mechanisms that provide economic value at its core. And, you know, the next cycle really excites you because we're going to go from, you know, four or five thousand, four or five thousand, four or five million D-fi wallets up to our

next like 100 to 150 million wallets. And that really is good. We're bringing in true adoption and everyone says we're really early, but given that there's only four and a half million D-fi wallets or 4.8 I think it is now. We are still incredibly early and there's so much opportunity. So I'm excited to see what other people build. I'm excited to see the role that we

can play and bring in more people as the ecosystem and the kind of value we create for a majority of people, not a minority. And that's what I'm super stoked about. Well said. Well said. And I would agree with you. I'm excited. I'm sure all these sort of traditional instruments to find a decentralized, you know, suitable home in the web three. It's going to be a...

It's going to be an exciting future. Move away from solutions looking for problems and solve real problems is the phaser in now. And there'll be a few people this cycle to unlock that. And they'll go on to build massive value over the next 10 to 20 years. Agreed. Agreed. Well those are all the questions I have for you, Brendan. Where can people go and learn more?

You can drop into massive.finance. That's our website. You can drop into our discord, talk to our community members, telegram as well. You will see that we have an announcement in Bitcoin talk. So come and hang out and say hi on that as well. And we'd love to get to know you and test the product, claim your soul on our soul claiming flow. And you know, we'd

love to feedback what we're building. Beautiful. Awesome. Well those are all the questions I have. All the links that Brendan mentioned will be in these show notes. And thanks so much for coming on. And sharing your story. Thank you so much, Steve. Really, really enjoyed it. Say.