Why Digital Currency Group’s Meltem Demirors Is Concerned About The ICO Craze

The DCG director of development talks about why she thinks identity will be the first tangible application of blockchain technology that consumers experience, why DCG supports Ethereum Classic as an investment vehicle and yet still supports Ethereum as a protocol, and how bitcoin itself as a global currency hasn’t taken off as much as she thought when she first got into the industry. She also explains what the top regulatory issue is for blockchain startups and projects — it’s a lot more mundane than you might expect — and why she doesn’t, at this point, have a lot of confidence in crypto hedge funds. Plus, she makes suggestions on how ICOs could improve and reveals her top picks for new tokens.

Show notes

Transcript

Laura Shin:

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Unchained, a podcast engineered by Fractal Recording and produced by me, your host, Laura Shin, a Forbes contributor covering cryptocurrencies and blockchain. Thanks for tuning in.

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Just a heads up, everyone, that this is the last episode of season two of Unchained. We’ll be taking a month-long break, but we’ll be back Tuesday, July 11 for season three with another 12 great episodes. Before we close out this season though, I wanted to give a big thank you to my partner in crime Chris Curran of Fractal Recording, who is my brilliant sound engineer. Chris is the person who makes the show sound just as good as it does, at least when we’re not faced with factors beyond our control like AWS outages, and I would not be able to put out this show without him, especially now since I produce it independently, so thanks, Chris, for doing such top quality work, helping me with every last little thing, and for being an all-around awesome person.

Apologies in advance for the background noise that you’re likely to hear today. We’re meeting in person and this was the best room we could find, but we’re probably definitely going to hear some footsteps, and maybe even some new voices or other noises in the background.

My guest today is Meltem Demirors, Director of Development at Digital Currency Group, a member of the World Economic Forums Global Future Counsel on Blockchain, and an advisor on future commerce at MIT Media Lab. Welcome, Meltem.

Meltem Demirors:

Hello, Laura.

Laura Shin:

So, listeners, just a heads up that Meltem cannot talk about DCGs bitcoin ETF filing, which I anticipate some of you might be curious about, so, unfortunately, I will not be able to ask her any questions about that, but she’s been very involved in the development of bitcoin and blockchain. So Meltem, tell us what it is that DCG does and describe your role here.

Meltem Demirors:

Absolutely. Digital Currency Group, it is really our mission, our goal as a company to accelerate the development of a better financial system, and when I say better, I mean more open, more inclusive, more efficient etcetera. We do this by investing in building, buying, supporting bitcoin and blockchain technology companies, leveraging our insights, our network, and our access to capital, so what that means specifically is we do a few different things here at Digital Currency Group. What we’re probably best known for is investing in companies, so to date, we’ve invested in over 100 bitcoin and blockchain companies across 27 different countries, which has been just a wild ride.

We’ve invested in over 100 companies across 27 different countries, which is just phenomenal to see, and they’re all in the bitcoin and blockchain space, and we’re very focused. We also have subsidiaries, operating companies, including CoinDesk, a media events, and research company. Genesis Global Trading, which is in an institutional trading firm that faces off against hedge funds, family offices, large institutions that want to buy and sell digital currencies, and then the last one is Grayscale, which is an asset management business that has two products currently. One is the Bitcoin Investment Trust, which is the vehicle that enables retail investors to invest in bitcoin, and the second is an Ethereum classic trust, and we just launched our newest subsidiary, DCG Connect, which I’m very excited about, which aims to connect enterprises and startups who are working on blockchain platforms.

Laura Shin:

Oh, interesting. So, tell us more about DCG Connect. Is that the new…

Meltem Demirors:

Absolutely. One of the things that’s been interesting about my journey through the world of blockchain, I started in my role really spending a lot of my time working with our portfolio companies as they were formulating strategies to go to market, as they were thinking about growth, and obviously our industry two years ago looked very different than it looks today, so there has been a lot of lessons learned through that process, and we really viewed DCGs most valuable asset being its network, right. The relationships we’ve created over time. We really want to be at the epicenter of this industry and to be able to bring different stakeholders to the table to help advance all of the different things that need to happen, whether it’s regulation, whether it’s developing relationships, commercial relationships between large institutions and startups, whether it’s ensuring there’s a lot of investors with capital they’re willing to allocate to companies.

We really want to play a formative role in that process, so over the last two years, working with these 100 portfolio companies what we found was so many of them were having the same challenges and the challenges are really, number one, how do I communicate what this technology is. It’s very difficult when you first start learning about blockchain. There’s a lot of high-level talk about blockchain that is potentially use cases, and then there’s a lot of really deeply technical information, but there’s really not much actionable information that you can get around what the technology is, what the products even are, and so it’s a very challenging space to navigate. The second is our network, so we’ve built this phenomenal network and we want to bring other people into the ecosystem, help other people connect with the right partners more quickly.

There’s a lot of blockchain tourism that happens where people will go out and meet with startups, and our companies don’t have the resources to be spending an hour with each different corporate and doing that over, and over, and over again and so we really started to look at this and say is there a way that we can build this network so that we can help make that process more efficient. It’s also really confusing, I think, for corporates who come into this space and they start talking to companies and there’s all these great ideas, but they have a really hard time figuring out who actually does something around the use case I’m interested in. How do I find that person? It’s a very interesting fragmented ecosystem we’re a part of, so we really wanted to use our network to create that conduit and make it a bit more efficient, and then the last is really related to application, so this is the aspect I’m most excited about.

Is today there are all of these different platforms around blockchains. There are private blockchains, there are public open blockchains, there are permutations of that, there are different platforms that startups are developing, enterprises are developing, and each of these platforms or protocols has developed their own application ecosystem around them, some of these are developed just by the company that’s built the protocol, some of them, like the Hyperledger Project, are more open and lots of people are using that platform to build their technologies, but the problem, again, is all of these technology communities are separate and distinct, and really what we want to do is to enable more robust application ecosystems to develop around all protocols, but also to start connecting some of these ecosystems so that companies aren’t having to choose between developing on one protocol or another, and aren’t having to make these really challenging design choices and sort of affiliation choices when they still haven’t really identified what their product is yet.

Laura Shin:

So, how do you do that exactly? They come to you and then do you act as a consultant, like you kind of find out what their needs are and then you say oh, we think that this protocol is going to be right for you?

Meltem Demirors:

No, so I think again we don’t want to be a consultant or a sort of advisor. Really what we want to do is when companies come to us, they tell us what their product is, what their use case is, what type of partners they’re looking for to start to validate the ideas they have around their product. What we want to do is to be able to point them to communities that they participate in, whether it’s something like the Hyperledger Project, whether it’s something like Enterprise Ethereum, whether it’s something else and start to connect those dots for them and ensure that they’re part of the relevant dialogue for the particular use case they’re interested in, because there are so many consortia projects that are springing up, it’s impossible to keep track of it all, and so by connecting those parties we’ve found in the past over the last two years it’s really been one of the most valuable things we can do.

Laura Shin:

What was it like when you joined in April 2015 versus now? How would you say the industry and your roll have changed?

Meltem Demirors:

Do we have five hours? I actually got into bitcoin around 2011, kind of played around with it, but like many people, I was like oh this is interesting. I thought philosophically it was really interesting but didn’t really…

Laura Shin:

How did you hear about it?

Meltem Demirors:

I heard about it through my brother, who is a computer programmer and a geek like me. I’m a huge nerd, so he mentioned it to me and I went online to Reddit and just start digging in as many people did in those days, and I thought it was just fascinating to see this grassroots ecosystem developing, but there wasn’t really much happening at the time, You had buy bitcoin through local bitcoins, or you would mine them yourself, and I was like oh, this is so interesting, and quirky, and weird, and at that point bitcoin was also very ideological, and it was just…it was fascinating but I’m not sure that I 100 percent identified with everything that was happening in that community, so fast forward to 2013.

I was in graduate school at MIT, and MIT was actually a place where there was a lot happening around bitcoin. There was just this really active student group that was mining bitcoin in their dorm rooms, they were setting up bitcoin faucets. I think they got sued by the state of New Jersey, or something. Just crazy but very cool stuff, and then in 2015 I think bitcoin really had that first aha moment, and there have been many since, where you started to actually see platforms and products developing that were moving beyond just facilitating the buying and selling of bitcoin, or the storing of bitcoin, but people were actually starting to build really interesting products on top of the existing bitcoin infrastructure, and so when I met Barry and started learning more about digital currency group at that point we had invested in only 40 companies. We were still quite small, but also Digital Currency Group wasn’t really even formed yet, and so just getting to be a part of that process of really conceptualizing and thinking about how do we build this new concept.

Really, I view DCG as more of a platform. We have all of these different ways through which we work towards our mission, which I shared earlier, but it’s evolved so much. I remember my first day of work. We met with Mastercard, who ended up becoming one of our investors, and is just a fantastic supporter, but I just remember that first meeting. You could see the confused looks in people’s faces where they’re like what? Bitcoin? Isn’t that weird internet money? What does bitcoin have to do with us? So, in 2015 I think institutions, corporations, were just starting to learn. Now we see there’s just this massive interest, this blossoming of interest in what’s happening with blockchain, how people can apply it to different use cases, but we’ve also seen there are so many more products and companies that are being developed. Some of these companies are now starting to find traction, they’ve figured out their business model, they’ve identified the right product-market fit, and so it’s not even comparable. Now when I tell people I work in bitcoin and blockchain they know more about it than I do.

Laura Shin:

I totally see what you’re saying, in terms of this evolution. It’s been real interesting even the short time that I’ve covered this, but how has that changed DCGs strategy, or even its overall goals? It seemed to me for a while that you guys were focused on building a lot of crypto exchanges around the world, but I think that maybe that shifted. How would you characterize what that strategy’s been?

Meltem Demirors:

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s important to go back to where we were in 2013, so in 2013 Coinbase launched, and Coinbase was really the first time, at least here in the US, that you could buy and sell bitcoin on a safe secure platform using a bank account. That hadn’t really been possible before, and so you started with Coinbase, and then all of these companies around the world, those exchanges you’re referring to in countries like India, the Philippines, Argentina, Kenya. All of those companies had to be built first. That core infrastructure layer had to be developed, so we started really with the protocol itself needed to be developed over time, and then there were new protocols that emerged, like Ethereum, Zcash, Rootstock, Ripple. Then on top of that you needed the exchanges, the on and off ramps into digital currencies, and then those exchanges had to work together, so a lot of what we did in 2015 was ensuring those exchanges all knew each other, helping them set up relationships, helping them connect their platforms, which has been a really important aspect of building the infrastructure needed.

Then on top of those exchanges, we started seeing payment companies emerge. For example, Wire, which enables you to send S&E payments from the US to China, or Veem, a very similar model. These businesses needed that network to be able to build their businesses. That wasn’t really possible until 2015 when we had all of these companies that were building banking relationships, that were enabling people to move money into a fiat. Then on top of the payments companies, we started asking, okay we have digital currencies, we’re digitizing assets. What about identity? How do we deal with digitizing identity, and so that sort of became the next wave of investment we started looking at. Then on top of that we started seeing a lot of use cases around distributed ledgers, right, so if I have this digital asset and I have a digital identity associated with it how do I track that asset through its lifecycle, so we saw a lot of companies emerge using the registry component of the blockchain and then from there, I think, in late 2015 early 2016 we really started branching off into all of these new very much edge use cases around Ethereum finally launched in 2015 and now you had smart contracts that people started playing around with, so I think it’s really just been a gradual evolution where each wave of companies, of themes is building off what’s happened in that prior wave of innovation, and so it’ll continue to take time but I think watching the evolution and really understanding some of the infrastructures that was necessary to get to where we are today is something that most people don’t really think about or appreciate.

Laura Shin:

So, another thing that I’m really curious about is how is your perception over what use cases will take up? How has that changed over time? What are some things that you thought would take off that haven’t, why didn’t they, and then what were you, may be surprised that did take off?

Meltem Demirors:

Yeah, that’s a really good question. I haven’t asked myself that. I think the use case everyone thought would take off was bitcoin. Bitcoin for global payments. We had a lot of companies in 2014, 2015 that were enabling merchants to access bitcoin and we really thought bitcoin would become a new global currency, and new payment rail, a new payment network, and I think that use case has been slower to materialize. I think things are changing now a bit with Ripple being very successful at bringing banks on board and demonstrating the efficiencies that a shared ledger can create, but I think there were many businesses that were built on this concept and I don’t think people thought it would take so long, frankly, so that side’s been very challenging.

I think things that have taken off that have surprised me, I continue to be surprised, amazed, at how much enterprise blockchain product is out there, and not just that, how willing enterprises are to engage with this technology, which has been interesting, although there continues to be this tension between digital currencies and just pure blockchain technology with no bitcoin digital currency component, which is really a fascinating tension. I can certainly understand why I think there’s been a bit of a narrative challenge around the digital currency side, but it’s really amazing to see our companies working with some of the world’s largest institutions on projects that actually touch the core business, and so it’s been really rewarding just to watch these entrepreneurs who’ve been working on this for so long, who have been trying to beat down these walls for so long. It’s actually starting to happen.

Laura Shin:

And what do you think is going to be the first real tangible thing that consumers are feeling out of all that activity, because as you know both from, I think, last year’s consensus and even this year’s there’s all this talk about different proofs of concept and people are talking about oh when are we going to get to production, and this is the year everybody was saying that we’re going to do that, and we’re seeing a few projects here and there but I don’t…when I talk to people about what I’m doing they’re kind of a little bit like oh, and they really don’t see how it’s going to affect them, so what do you think will be the first project we’ll see?

Meltem Demirors:

I think the project we’ll see will be something around likely digital identity. I think there’s a lot of challenges with identity within organizations today, specifically how you verify, authenticate, attest. We’re already seeing organizations getting really interested in using blockchain technology to enable a new way to interact with our customer or other stakeholders, in a specific value chain of which I think digital identity is kind of that first element. If we’re using a shared ledger how do I positively verify that I’m the person I say I am, that I have the controls I should have, etcetera, so we’re seeing a lot of our companies doing really great work there, particularly NETKEY has been doing extremely well, so had BlockStack and Tierion, and they just announced that they’re working with Microsoft on a new decentralized identity nonprofit entity, which I think is very cool. It’s a very new type of partnership we haven’t seen before.

I also think on the enterprise side there are just so many frictions associated with global payments. I used to work in corporate treasury at Exxon Mobile and it was just mindboggling to see the amount of money that was being sent between the parent company and all of its affiliates all around the world. It’s extremely inefficient to move money around our world today, to move value around our world today, and there’s a real business driver there. If you can shave some cost out of those transactions within an organization that can start to become a very material cost savings over time but it can also enable very new business models where all of a sudden you don’t need to have all this working capital sitting in bank accounts, in different places in the world, so I see Ripple actually making a lot of very exciting progress with the number of banks they’re working with, but also just starting to really promote the use of XRP as a truly global, borderless value transfer mechanism. That’s interesting to me.

Laura Shin:

Yeah, that sort of came out of nowhere, I think.

Meltem Demirors:

It did.

Laura Shin:

Yeah.

Meltem Demirors:

But it didn’t at the same time. I think because we’re investors in Ripple and having met the team there and knowing what they were working on it was not surprising. I think the shift back to XRP has actually been a really material part of that change. They’re now starting to build an ecosystem. Again, this is all about networks. They’re starting to now create a network around XRP. There’s a lot more people who are interested in it, looking at it, and so once that network, that ecosystem develops you could very well see an entire wave of companies get created that are building on top of Ripple, right, and I think that’s just so cool.

Laura Shin:

So, you kind of referred to this earlier. You were talking about the different aspects of infrastructure that needed to be built up. What else do you still think needs to be built out in that respect?

Meltem Demirors:

The infrastructure side is actually the side I personally am most interested in. I think one of the challenges with digital currencies and blockchain technology is when people speak about it, I sometimes don’t know what they’re saying. I think, again, there’s a lot of people who have high-level visions of what this technology could do 10, 15, 20 years from now once fully deployed at scale and we have these large networks that are alive and in production, but I think today a lot of the infrastructure just hasn’t been developed yet, and we’re starting to see that it’s creating real pain points, because the challenge is if you go out and you say, for example, I’m really excited about a trade finance use case for a blockchain.

I want to use a distributed ledger for that, and you go out and you try to build that you’ll have to get one company to help you with the digital identity component. You’ll have to get another company to help you with the governance component of how you’re going to govern your network, then you need to figure out what protocol you’re going to use to run your network, what platform it’s going to sit on. You have to figure out who’s going to do the systems integration. There aren’t that many system integrators today who are doing work around this. You need to figure out what the end user application is, what that looks like. There are all of these different components that you need to fit together. It’s almost like taking Lego pieces and trying to fit them together, and again the challenge is how do you figure out what Lego pieces you need, how do you figure out which ones fit together? That hasn’t really been created yet.

There aren’t really product categories in our industry, so one of the things we’ve been working on is creating clear taxonomies and starting to identify and figure out what does production ready blockchain architecture look like, and what are all the different design choices you’re making, what are the different products you’re piecing together, and what exists in those categories today, but then here’s the really interesting thing. If there isn’t something in a particular category could we create a business, or could we get one of our companies to pivot into that, or can we work with our corporate members to figure out how we can build around that space, and I think that’s where you see companies like AWS really actively starting to take an interest.

Companies like IBM who are seeing all of this activity happening, they’re going to be the ones who support production level blockchains, right. They’re going to be the ones supporting enterprises, and so I think they’re really trying to identify how do we work with startups who are building on our infrastructure and how do we create a business ready ecosystem so that when people come in with a use case, we can quickly help them deploy that technology?

Laura Shin:

And you also brought up regulation. What are the challenges of helping all the different companies in your portfolio when there isn’t necessarily clear regulation, or it’s conflicting in different jurisdictions?

Meltem Demirors:

Sure. I think regulation is really challenging for everyone. I do think all of the companies in the DCG family have good relationships with regulators, they’re very proactive. I think the industry actually, thanks to the hard work of organizations like Coin Center have been extremely proactive at going out and engaging with regulators.

Laura Shin:

And just for the listeners, that was a previous episode I did with Jerry Brito and Peter Van Valkenburgh, and I will reference that in the show notes. It was a great episode.

Meltem Demirors:

The work they do is just fantastic. It’s very much needed, and I think there has been a creative dialogue that’s been developed between various regulators and companies who are working in this space to try to move some of the uncertainty around regulation, and I think that’s really the biggest thing. If you don’t have a clear regulatory framework for your business it’s kind of like building on quicksand, and then there’s that fear that a regulation may get triggered, something may happen that all of a sudden completely disrupts your business model.

Laura Shin:

What are some specific challenges right now where you’re kind of like oh, it would be helpful if the regulators did x, y, or z?

Meltem Demirors:

Yeah. I think the biggest challenge is really around bitcoin companies, digital currency companies getting bank accounts. That’s really, really the biggest, biggest challenges. If you don’t have…

Laura Shin:

Even now, still?

Meltem Demirors:

Even now. Every day this is a problem we have. Operating accounts, but more importantly transactional accounts where you can actually transact with your customers, really challenging to obtain, but more importantly really, really challenging to maintain, and so this is where I think as an industry one of the dialogues, we’ve been having a lot, is would it be possible to create a self-regulating organization? Can we as an industry develop a set of best practices and start to self-govern to create that relationship with regulators to show banks that we are being very forward thinking in how we’re viewing the role bitcoin, digital currency companies, in the global financial system, getting audited by professional auditing firms, having data aggregation around market structures to ensure that there isn’t too much risk in the way the digital currency market is growing and evolving. There’s a lot of risk of centralization, of digital asset exchange on specific platforms, and I think…

Laura Shin:

Wait. I don’t know what you mean by that, centralization. What do you mean by that?

Meltem Demirors:

Yeah. What I mean is there’s a lot of systemic risk if you have one…

Laura Shin:

Oh, like risk, something hacked or something?

Meltem Demirors:

Right, but even the risk of a disruption of service, so today if 70 percent of the volume of trading happens on one platform that’s really problematic for the industry, right. If all of the companies in the space rely on four or five key banking partners and one of those banking partners has a bad interaction with their bank regulator, their bank examiner, all of a sudden you could have 20 percent of the companies in this space out of a bank account, and you can’t operate if you don’t have a bank account.

Laura Shin:

Right.

Meltem Demirors:

This is still a challenge. I think it will continue to be a challenge, but I do think industry leaders are all working together. We at DCG are certainly constantly engaging with our companies, we’re constantly meeting with regulators, really just trying to get the narrative out there, but starting to look at okay, if there isn’t going to be regulatory clarity what can we as an industry do? Let’s research best practices. Let’s find the most stringent regulation and apply that across all jurisdictions so that when the regulators do come to the table, we’ll have a president in place.

Laura Shin:

Interesting. Okay, so hold that thought. We’re going to break now for an important word from our sponsor OnRamp.

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I am speaking with Meltem Demirors, Director of Development at DCG, Digital Currency Group. There is something that’s been kind of interesting that’s been going on, which is, as we talked about, there’s a lot of enterprise blockchain stuff, but we are starting to see that some of these incumbents are getting into digital assets. Where do you see this trend coming from and where is it going?

Meltem Demirors:

Yeah, absolutely. I think going back to the conversation we were having a few minutes ago, one of the challenges is what is ready to go into production, right. If you’re an enterprise and you want to do something around blockchain, you have budget, you have enthusiasm and the organization around it, what’s ready to go today? It’s digital currencies, it’s digital assets. This is already happening in many places around the world, so I think as institutions look at what’s happening with digital currencies they start thinking about okay, even if we’re not on board with the idea of digital currencies, like Bitcoin, and Ethereum, and Ripple we are onboard with the idea of digitized assets, so a very interesting project the CME group just did with the Royal Mint and one of our portfolio companies BitGo, is focused on digitizing gold, and then enabling people to hold and store that gold in a digital wallet, and so I think what enterprises are looking at is really the concept of how you do that is really challenging and they can actually look directly at the analog of digital currencies to figure out how to do that.

So, how do you get an asset onto a blockchain? That’s question one, right, so a lot of these companies are really starting to think about, okay who issues these assets? How do we get them into a blockchain or a distributed ledger? How do we facilitate storing of those assets in a secure protected way, right, using multi-stake hopefully. What does that mean, in terms of the hardware we need to run internally? What does that mean in terms of the hardware our partners will need to have? Then once that trading begins what are the platforms, we’re going to use to facilitate the trading of these digital assets, and as I’m talking through this, you’re seeing so many analogs, so exactly what’s happened in the digital currency space.

It’s very similar it just happens to be an enclosed network with a defined set of participants rather than these open networks that we have in digital currencies, but I think as companies start going through that narrative they start engaging with companies who’ve traditionally been in the digital currency space who are now realizing there’s a tremendous opportunity to help organizations think about digitizing various assets they have and creating new marketplaces to facilitate the exchange of those specific assets.

Laura Shin:

So, speaking of digitized assets, tell us a little bit about the investment thesis behind the Ethereum Classic Investment Trust. Why is it that DCG supports Ethereum Classic as opposed to Ethereum?

Meltem Demirors:

So, I want to start by saying DCG supports Ethereum and Ethereum Classic. There is no active choice to say we’re not supporting Ethereum. I think our perspective is two-fold. From a technology perspective, from a protocol perspective, from a product perspective, we certainly see a lot of really interesting projects being built on top of Ethereum. We talk to Ethereum companies constantly. We’ve invested in one so far, but we would’ve readily invested in many more, so I want to separate the protocol from the token, so we see a lot of value in people building on top of Ethereum.

From a financial perspective though we have chosen to invest in ETC, Ethereum Classic, because of immutability, right. What happened after the DOW hack was concerning. The fact that you could fork a network and make a major economic decision as an investor looking at this through the investor lens. I think it’s very hard as an institution to get comfortable with that idea. I just have a real challenge seeing Ethereum being a store of value currency if that type of activity is possible, so to us what’s happening in the Ethereum Classic community there’s a lot of discussions around…they’ve set up a cap now in the number of tokens that will be issues, which I think is important from, again, an investment thesis perspective. There are two development teams that are working side by side to continue to advance and develop the protocol. There are now companies starting to build on the Ethereum classic protocol, so from a token investment perspective that’s where our mindset comes from, but again, from the protocol perspective I think there’s plenty of room for people to build on top of either Ethereum or Ethereum Classic, and I do think Ethereum, the token, has utility, right.

If people want to use it to fuel different applications, or DApps running on top of Ethereum. Great. From an investor perspective, I think it will be very hard to go to a Wall Street institution and talk to them about Ethereum given what’s happened in the past. ETC is something that they can identify with that I think is more analogous to other assets.

Laura Shin:

Well, does DCG worry about potentially alienating the Ethereum community? I don’t know how it is that they’re taking your support of ETC as an investment vehicle. Do you get sense? I mean, if you still do support the Ethereum community I wonder if that’s something that you need to manage?

Meltem Demirors:

Absolutely. I attend Ethereum events regularly. I know a lot of people who are working in both the Ethereum space and on Ethereum Classic. Again, I think there’s room for both protocols to be successful. As we’ve seen, both tokens have been successful. We don’t aim to make any value judgments. We are making strategic choices as investors, right. As investors in technology products and companies build on whatever protocol you want. We really want to be agnostic, but from an in value investing perspective, from a token perspective, we did our analysis, we looked at Ethereum, and we have made the decision as a firm that Ethereum Classic makes more sense from the investment perspective.

Laura Shin:

But then why is it that we see that Ethereum is rising so much price, but ether classic isn’t?

Meltem Demirors:

I think both are rising. Both currencies have risen a lot.

Laura Shin:

Of course, and ETC is a fraction of the value so…

Meltem Demirors:

Sure. Of course. It’s also much younger. It’s a very new concept. They’re still pulling the community and the ecosystem together. I think Ethereum has been a really great platform. It’s gotten a lot of people excited about blockchain technology and digital assets, so I think it’s fantastic. I think there’s, again, plenty of room for both. What’s contributing to Ethereum’s rise, I think, frankly, a lot of it is speculation. I talked to a lot of my friends who have never heard of bitcoin, who are not into crypto at all, and they’re like oh I bought Ethereum. I bought ethers. They don’t know what the technology does nor do they care, they just see people making a lot of money speculating in Ethereum, and so they want to get in on that.

Laura Shin:

Oh, that’s interesting, but I feel like the same has happened in bitcoin. You don’t think it’s…

Meltem Demirors:

Sure.

Laura Shin:

Okay.

Meltem Demirors:

I definitely think so. Again, we’re in this new era. It’s funny, I was having this conversation with some exchanges who’ve seen their volume just go through the roof, right. It’s absolutely wild. We’re in this unprecedented time. It feels very strange. Everyone’s doing extremely well, and actually, people are growing at an unsustainable rate where some of our companies now are thinking about should we create a waitlist. How many customers can we actually onboard every day because the demand is outpacing our ability to build that infrastructure?

Laura Shin:

Right.

Meltem Demirors:

It’s really wild. It’s really fun. It’s a little bit scary, but I think overall…yeah, speculation is a huge part of it. Greed is driving a lot of this behavior. If someone comes to you and says hey, I bought this thing. I bought a stock, right. It was a dollar a year ago and today it’s worth 100 dollars you’re going to be like oh, that’s interesting. I want to get in one that. That type of activity, those types of returns appeal to certain types of investors who are more comfortable with high risk, high return investments, so I think we’re seeing a lot of that type of investor moving into this space and I think it’s great. I always tell people don’t put more money into digital currencies than you’re willing to lose. Always, always enable 2FA. Don’t keep your coins on exchanges keep them on a hardware wallet that you own, like manage your own keys, your own bank, and so I think the people who are getting into it they don’t know what they’re buying.

They don’t really care what they’re buying, I don’t think. They just are having fun speculating alongside the rest of us nerds, but they’re really not that engaged with the actual applications and platforms. I think that will start to change over time, but I think right now people are just excited about the crypto boom and they want to get in and get in early, but I would be curious. Maybe someone should do a poll to see how many people who buy Ethereum, Bitcoin, name your currency I don’t want to single out anyone, if they actually know what they’re buying. I would speculate that probably 50 percent of investors, maybe even more, have no idea what they’re actually getting.

Laura Shin:

Right. I just want to reference for our listeners who don’t know, she said 2FA, which two factor authentication, it’s when you’re logging in somewhere and then check who you are by sending you a text message with a code, but I am going to link in the show notes to a story I wrote about how people’s phone numbers are being hijacked, and their phone numbers were being stolen and then the hackers were breaking into their emails, and their financial accounts and stealing bitcoin by getting the two factor authentication code sent to their devices after they stole the phone number, but anyway.

Okay, so you sort of referenced a little bit about ICO trend. You were talking about how it’s driven a lot by speculation. What is your take on that? I’ve seen also that you’ve tweeted about there are some hedge funds that have popped up to invest in this and you’re kind of skeptical of that, so I want to get your take on the whole thing.

Meltem Demirors:

Sure. I’m probably a skeptic at heart anyway, but I like having my mind changed. I’ve been wrong about a bunch of stuff, I’m happy to admit that, so it’s good. Okay, so what’s happening with ICOs. I don’t even know where to start. It’s just nutty. It’s wild, so part…

Laura Shin:

So, what do you think…yeah.

Meltem Demirors:

Part of me thinks it’s really cool. The idea of bootstrapping a network by providing an economic incentive for people to participate in securing the network, in building applications in the network, invalidating transactions on the network. This is how Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Zcash, and Ripple got started, right. This is not necessarily a new concept. The way people are applying it now to companies, to products, to applications I think is really fascinating. I think Ethereum, the ERC20 token standard, has been a really fascinating driver of growth around Ethereum. Maybe that’s part of what’s driving this price spike because a lot of people are saying okay, I don’t want to build my own protocol, that’s really hard. I’m going to use an existing protocol and create my own token on top of it and leverage that network to bootstrap mine, but I think the overall trend, the gun, I would say that a lot of people who are buying these tokens don’t actually know what they’re buying.

The other issue I have is that a lot of these projects that have gotten funded they have no product. The network hasn’t been created yet, and so to me, it creates really perverse incentives. I don’t know what the intent of these teams is, right. I can’t speculate on that, but I do think there is this negative perception that people have when you buy these tokens. All these tokens are sold. The founders o the protocol, the developers, walk away with millions of dollars and what’s their incentive then to build the platform or the product, right. It’s just a weird timing mismatch issue, and we see digital currencies that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. They have massive market caps but there is no product, there is no network, there is no protocol, there is nothing.

Laura Shin:

So, what do you think would be a best practice? You kind of referenced before that you guys are thinking about best practices.

Meltem Demirors:

Yes. So, I think one thing is just really understanding the governance of the protocol and the tokens that are given to investors, and developers, right, so if you’re a founder of a new protocol or a new project that does an ICO I think there should be some sort of lockup similar to how VCs when they invest in startups there’s a lock-up right. You vest your “shares” over a period of time, and then you can’t actually share your shares until a certain point in the company’s growth once you’ve hit certain milestones. I think for ICOs it’s also important as an industry to start becoming a little bit more analytical around how these projects are structured.

What’s fascinating to me is no one really reads the white…no one really reads the fine print and then when they do, they’re somehow upset, but it’s like no, it’s all spelt out right there. We should be really analytical. We should really be looking at how are these projects governed and managed, and how are the incentives aligned? I think this is all about incentives and I would hate to see ICOs lead to some sort of negative perception issue around the digital currency space as a whole. When new investors come in who don’t understand the market, who don’t understand…who haven’t been through a bitcoin bull run and a bitcoin crash as we’ve probably both been through. I just worry about what that does to the perception of our industry.

We already have a perception issue, right, that we’ve been battling for four years now to overcome, and it’s taken a lot of education and advocacy, and just countless hours that people have spent advocating and educating people about what this actually is. I would hate to see ICOs contribute to that negative narrative, so that’s really what I worry about, and I do think as a community we need to be a little thoughtful again and how we build infrastructure on ICOs, so when you create a token whose responsibility is it to create a wallet for that token. Otherwise, you’re going to have everyone storing their coins on exchanges, which creates a lot of systemic risk, right. You’re then creating a massive honeypot for someone to go and hack and exchange. I’m shocked that people will keep millions of dollars of cryptocurrencies on exchanges. It’s mindboggling, but if there is not wallet for you to store it in and you’re not a developer if you’re more of a traditional investor, what are you going to do, right. It’s a real challenge so we need to make sure that as we’re onboarding all of these new tokens, as people are doing ICOs that we have platforms, products, and services in place to serve those customers in a safe way, in a secure way, and that we aren’t creating an undue amount of risk within the digital currency ecosystem.

Laura Shin:

How long do you think it’s going to take to build that out?

Meltem Demirors:

A long time.

Laura Shin:

Yeah?

Meltem Demirors:

A really long time. And now the discussion is, is it the responsibility of the protocol development team to develop wallets and that infrastructure around the token? Is it the responsibility of each exchange to create their own wallet for that token? How do you go through testing and auditing? One of our firms, Zeppelin, does auditing of tokens, right, of these ICO…

Laura Shin:

Yeah, I talked to him.

Meltem Demirors:

Yeah, so you’ve spoken to them.

Laura Shin:

Yeah, he was great. Yeah.

Meltem Demirors:

And so, we have some this starting to emerge. How do you manage study of funds while the crowd sale is going on? Who’s responsible for that? How would you get the tokens from the crowd sale then into people’s hand’s post crowd sale, right? These are all things that are being figured out. Can you do a one-click move to my ledger wallet, or my Trezor hardware wallet, right? That would be great to have, so I think these types of questions are the ones I start asking. I think, again, a lot of brilliant people in this space are thinking about these challenges, but it’s going to require coordination, it’s going to require collaboration.

Laura Shin:

But going back to the hedge fund question, why are you skeptical of some of the hedge funds investing in this space?

Meltem Demirors:

Sure. I’m skeptical because while I see why the hedge funds need to exist. I’m sure people call you every day. Your friends call you and they’re like, Laura, what is this ICO thing? I need some ethers. I need some bitcoins. Help me. We don’t have time to educate hundreds of thousands of people who want to participate on here’s how you set up a bitcoin wallet, here’s how you set up a ledger, here’s how you set up this, here’s how you go on this platform, so I see this as these hedge funds being important to enabling non-crypto people to get exposure to this asset class.

I think the challenge is, is that a lot of the hedge funds that are being created…right now we’re in a bubble. I do believe right now we’re in a bubble. My question is what happens to those funds. Everything’s been up and to the right but there will be a correction at some point. What happens when there is a correction? How are these people managing their portfolios? Have these people managed portfolios before? Being an investor that’s a very specific skillset, right. There’s a reason that venture capitalists exist. It’s because they have really learned how to identify great companies, great founders. They’ve learned how to strategically invest. You wouldn’t make just anyone a trader on a desk, right. You need to have a very specific skill set and I see a lot of people who have no experience with trading, who have no experience with financial infrastructure, who have no experience with cryptocurrencies starting to get into building these hedge funds, and I think everyone should feel free to pursue what they’re passionate about but I just worry, again, that it’s going to lead to bad outcomes that damage the space.

I don’t know. I wish people the most success in what they do. I think it’s interesting if you can make it work, but being a regulated financial entity is very different than buying cryptocurrencies in your spare time, and I just don’t know that people who are getting into that space understand what they’re signing up for. It’s not easy being an investor that manages other people’s money. It’s emotionally complex. It’s very psychologically complex, but also there’s a lot of technology that goes into it. You need to understand regulation. You need to have lawyers. All of these things. It’s just the infrastructure side worries me a bit.

Laura Shin:

Of course, I fully agree with you that there’s a bubble and we’re going to see it pop, but I’m sure part of the reason that you’re excited about this space is because you think that there’s going to be real progress that comes out of this and some of these tokens will definitely survive and go on to become hugely valuable, so which projects do you find exciting?

Meltem Demirors:

Yeah, that’s such a great question. There’s so many exciting projects. IPFS we’re an investor in. I’m very excited about what Protocol Labs, the company who’s created IPFS, what they’re building. They’re about to launch Filecoin, which is the token that incentivizes people to share their storage capacity on the IPFS network. There are already a lot of projects that are using IPFS as their storage layer, so I think this is a great example of a token that’s being created to incentivize activity on a network that already exists, it already has people building on top of it, and they’re working with Naval Ravikant and AngelList creating a new platform called CoinList, where accredited investors can invest in digital tokens, so I think that’s an example of a really intelligent, thoughtful way to approach an ICO, and I like the fact that the product is already live. I’m biased, so I think that project’s really interesting.

I think what Brave is doing with basic attention token is also very interesting.

Laura Shin:

The Brave web browser?

Meltem Demirors:

The Brave web browser, right. They’ve created this fantastic browser product. There is a wallet embedded in it that enables you to pay for content, but now they’re coming out with something called basic attention token, so what’s actually interesting is many people have tried this kind of concept before. We had this company reveal in 2015 that created their own reveal token. They were the first app token, but no one really knew about it. It took off for a bit, but they had this token that incentivized people to answer video messages, kind of the way that 21 enables you to ask questions to people in exchange for getting a little bit of bitcoin. They were doing this with video and enabling people to ask and answer questions.

I think what Brave is doing with basic attention token is an interesting conceptual task, so basically what they’re asking is we’re going to create this token that advertisers can use and consumers…users of the Brave web browser can use where if you’re being served an ad you can get paid to watch the ad, or if you don’t want to watch it you can pay a bit of basic attention token and say you know what, time is money. I’m going to give up some of my money so that I don’t have to watch this ad.

Laura Shin:

I love that idea.

Meltem Demirors:

It’s such a fascinating idea, but again the browser is already live. They already have lots of users using it. It’s been in the market for almost a year now, so I think they have taken the time to develop the idea. It’s experimental. Yes. Is it a concept that will work? I don’t know, but I think, again, they have a real product that’s here. People are already using it. When the coin launches it’ll have actual function within the browser, so these are the types of projects that I’m really excited about.

Laura Shin:

Okay, so I could talk about this stuff all day, but I want to move on to a few other things that you’re doing. What is the World Economic Forum doing with blockchain and what is your role there?

Meltem Demirors:

Yeah, absolutely. The World Economic Forum is doing a lot of work around financial technology in general. A lot of their focus is on the fourth industrial revolution, so really this idea that increasingly the world is going digital. We’re changing business models, we’re changing entire industries with technology, and so one of the themes that has emerged is around Fintech and the role Fintech plays in not just global financial inclusion, but also in making markets more efficient in bringing new stakeholders online, and enabling all different sorts of new commerce, and so the World Economic Forum took a very active interest in blockchain because it’s such a critical component to enabling some of that change, and so they’ve put a lot of energy and resources into setting up a Fintech and blockchain group, which is run by Jessie McWaters who is phenomenally smart.

They’re setting up a blockchain lab in San Francisco, which I think will be fantastic, but the World Economic Forum really wants to help shape the global narrative around this technology and its use cases, and so a lot of it, again, is focused on that education and advocacy component and really taking the use cases people are working on, the progress that’s happening in different places around the world, and bringing it to a massive audience, right, and so they’ve assembled a group of 25 of us from the industry who are working across various streams, so I’m in the ecosystem stream.

We have one that focuses on governance, we have one that focuses on the technology component and understanding all of these different protocols, and public versus private blockchains, etcetera, but we’re really starting to just think about what are the frameworks that we can create, how do we break down these concepts in a simple way so that we can deliver them to an audience of regulators, world leaders, people who run our world’s institutions, people who run corporations, people who allocate millions, billions of dollars of capital how do we get them to easily understand this is what this technology is, here is what’s it’s being used for, here are all of the things that we still need to figure out, and really broadening the umbrella so that more people start participating in our ecosystem. But what’s fantastic about it is half of the council is female, which I really love, because when we went to Dubai for the gathering of all of the counsels that meet it was fascinating to see many of the counsels were 20, 30 percent women, but ours was 50 percent and we’re one of the nerdier areas.

Laura Shin:

That’s great.

Meltem Demirors:

Yeah, so that was really exciting to see.

Laura Shin:

Well. So, this is actually a perfect segue to my next question because I wanted to ask about your Women in Blockchain series. First of all, is it just something that you’re doing on your own, like on medium, or what is it and why did you decide to launch that?

Meltem Demirors:

The Women in Blockchain blogs that I’ve been writing started out as a simple idea. I’ve met so many wonderful women working in this space, but people always come to me and they say, oh there are no women in blockchain, and I’m like no, that’s wrong. There are lots of women who are working on really important things across their companies, and so I thought okay, why don’t I just reach out to some of my friends in the industry and I put together a list of, I think, six or seven questions. I would just email them the questions, or we’d have a phone chat, and I’d transcribe it afterward, and I would just have them share their thoughts.

How did they get into the industry? Why did they think the work they’re doing is important? What do they think is going to happen over the next two years, five years, 10 years? What are the things that worry them, concern them, etcetera, and so I started…I decided okay, in March. International Women’s Day is in March, and I said okay, why don’t I just do one every day in March and it was something I just kind of did on my own. Medium is great for just pushing out content, and then I started getting all of these women reaching out to me saying hey, I read this. I would love to share my story, and so it started to grow and grow, which was just really fun to see because it was just this nerdy little pet project. I was like oh, it’ll be great to just share some of these stories. I didn’t really think people would read them, but what I love is that so many people when I’m at events or when I’m meeting people, they come up to me and they say hey, I read the Women in Blockchain series. I’ve read the post that was done on this person and it inspired me to come to this event today. I am now actively looking at working in the industry. I am really excited about this technology, and I love that.

I want there to be stories of women at all levels of organizations, right. There are obviously some female founders and CEOs in our space that are very well known, but for someone who’s early in their career, or someone who works for a regulator, or someone who works at a bank you can’t always really identify with that person, so I think by sharing stories from a really diverse group of women we can create more reference points for other women who are looking at getting into this space, and not just women, for anyone looking to get into this space about, what roles people have, how they got into them, and provide inspiration.

Laura Shin:

So, last question. This is something that I’ve been thinking about so much recently, but where do you think this is all headed? What is the life of the average person going to look like three, five, 10 years from now when we’ve got multiple blockchains going and all that?

Meltem Demirors:

In the world of many blockchains. Okay, so I think…

Laura Shin:

Or it may be one. There are some people who think there’s only going to be one.

Meltem Demirors:

The one blockchain to rule them all?

Laura Shin:

Yes.

Meltem Demirors:

I don’t know what the future will look like. I don’t think any of us do. We all have ideas, obviously. So, number one, I think digital currencies are here to stay. I think we now have so many people who hold digital currencies, who are using them. In the US I don’t think people use “digital currencies” as much as they do in other parts of the world where maybe there isn’t as much financial infrastructure, but digital currencies are here to stay, whether it’s Bitcoin, whether it’s another digital currency, whether its bank-issued digital currencies, or government issued fiat on a blockchain. The idea of digital money, digital currency is here to stay.

I think we are not going to know we’re using it. So, I grew up in Europe, right, and I remember as a kid going from country to country. I had a little wallet that had all of the different currencies in it. I think I still have a coin collection somewhere.

Laura Shin:

That’s funny. That’s so cute.

Meltem Demirors:

I was nerdy from a young age, but you would change all this money out and in today’s world, we’re still doing that. We’re doing it digitally but we’re transferring from USD, say, into Turkish Lira when I send money to Turkey. Why do we do that? Why can’t we have one global currency that’s sort of a reference point? Right now, we reference everything to USD. I could see bitcoin or a digital currency being a non-political form of money, right, where it’s a globally accepted way to move money around and that’s what your reference is, and then when you go into countries you can frictionlessly exchange those tokens for other tokens that you can use in that country, right. Potentially something like that.

I don’t know what that will look like, but for example, one of our companies BTCC in China has created this great platform Mobi that’s enabling people to do that. You don’t even know you’re using bitcoin, so I don’t think people will know they’re using a digital currency. All they’ll know is the process of transacting is much simpler, it’s much easier. You can move money around much more efficiently, so I think that’s one. I think as it pertains to blockchain more on the enterprise side, I think, we’re going to start to see a lot of identity products starting to leverage distributed ledgers in some way. I think the identity space will be fascinating to watch because identity has so many implications for how we live our lives. A lot of people don’t think about how important identity data is until something bad happens to them, until something catastrophic happens in their country, maybe, but I think there are a lot of reasons that digital identity products are very important, self-sovereign identity is very important, being able to actually own your identity and manage it is very important, and so I think some of those products going into the market.

Again, no one’s really talking about blockchain anymore. I think smart folks in this space are starting to move past…It doesn’t matter if it’s a blockchain. The technology doesn’t matter. When I use my iPhone, I don’t say I’m using TCPIP. You don’t talk about that you talk about the product you’re using or the use case, so I think identity products will start to become used more and more frequently and I think actually some governments and large institutions are actively working on rolling out new digital identity products, and I think once the country does it…I think Estonia already has it effectively but once a country does it we’re really going to start to see that take off, and then I think the trend towards digitizing assets and putting them on distributed ledgers, putting them in a blockchain registry, facilitating the trading, transacting of digital assets will be also a massive area of growth.

And when I say digital assets part of it is taking physical assets in our world, creating digital representations, and putting them into this ledger, but another thing that really excites me is there are all sorts of assets that we don’t think about today, right, like basic attention token. Our time is an asset. Our digital property is an asset. We have virtual identities that we’re managing that may own assets, right, so for example, if you have 100 thousand Twitter followers that’s an asset of sorts, so I think as people are thinking about these businesses, these new ways of creating networks and creating value some of it’s pretty far out there but it creates a lot of really stimulating questions about how we assign value to things in our world and then how we leverage the value that we’re creating, and so I do see….we’ll start with the more mundane digital assets, right, taking something like gold that people already buy and really identify with as a store value, digitizing that, great, but I think thinking about the future of marketplaces when we have all of these different assets is going to be really fascinating.

That’s more of like a 20, 30-year vision but that’s where seeing…having a browser that has a wallet in it where you can use tokens on different platforms. You have one identity. You don’t have multiple logins. Something like that, to me, is really what the future might look like. We’re not going to know we’re using blockchain. I don’t think that it matters that we’re using blockchain technology. What matters is it makes people’s lives better, it makes the processes more efficient, it makes things…it makes our system more inclusive, it allows more people to engage and actively participate in financial systems and marketplaces. Those are the things that we’ll be talking about. It’s not about the technology it’s about what are we using it for, so hopefully five years from now we’ll be having this conversation. The podcast, after we record it, will be put onto a decentralized web that’s backed by IPFS storage and then if someone wants to view it, they can use tokens to pay for the…

Laura Shin:

To pay me.

Meltem Demirors:

To pay you, yeah.

Laura Shin:

And my amazing sound engineer, Chris. Okay, great. Well, this has been so fascinating. Thank you, so much. Where can people learn more about your work and get in touch with you?

Meltem Demirors:

Twitter seems to be the medium of communication for this industry, which is interesting. Always happy to be reached via email, probably [email protected] is the best.

Laura Shin:

And what’s your Twitter handle?

Meltem Demirors:

My Twitter handle is @melt_dem. That’s a great way to learn. The DCG Twitter handle is dcgco, so we’re always tweeting stuff from our companies, our partners, what’s happening in the industry. That’s a good way to get engaged, and I go to a lot of event s so please come and find me, say hi. I always love learning about what people are doing. I learn so much every day. I love it. It’s such a fun space to be in.

Laura Shin:

Yes, I agree. I agree. Well, thank you, so much, for coming on the show.

Meltem Demirors:

Thank you.

Laura Shin:

Thanks, everyone, for joining us today. Before you switch off this podcast don’t forget, go to surveymonkey.com/r/unchained to give me your feedback. If you’re interested in learning more about Meltem check out the show notes, which are available on my Forbes page, forbes.com/sites/laurashin. Unchained comes out every other Tuesday, although not for the next month or so. This is the last episode of season two, so we will be taking a break and starting up again on July 11, Tuesday. Please, in the meantime, still share the podcast with friends and on social media and remember to review, rate, and subscribe to Unchained on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn, or iHeart. Thanks, again, for listening.