Paulo Rodrigues on Public Mint's DeFi yield platform

0:00i'm ashton addison from block west capital for investment pitch media and the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews we have paulo rodriguez the ceo of public mint paula welcome to the show and thanks for taking the time oh thank you happy to be here likewise i'm excited to dive into the world of d5 so many people still need to understand

0:22how valuable this technology is and i think public mint's doing a great job in bringing more into the space and i would love for you to kick us off with a little bit of information about public mint in the d5 space and some of the solutions that you're delivering well thank you ashton yeah so at public mint what we're really doing is creating a new global money system so there's

0:44this disconnect between the fact that you're able to send an email instantly everywhere in the world and if you want to move your money it's not exactly the same thing so what we're trying really is to find a way to provide that level of service in terms of owning your money and being able to move it around as the speed of an email and if and providing at the same time some of

1:09the advantages that the banking industry provides like fdic insurers for the funds that are lying underneath so that is obviously one big building block that is necessary to support all the innovation that is happening in the d5 space and that's why i'm so happy to be here to answer your questions about it definitely thanks for the intro and you're right cryptocurrency transactions

1:32and managing your own bank is a little bit more complex than sending an email and i know your team is trying to lower those barriers you know even the amount of people in cryptocurrency is fairly small compared to the traditional markets and the amount in d5 is even smaller can you talk about some of those plans and strategies that you have to make it

1:51that easy as easy as sending an email yeah yeah i typically say that whenever i go to a bank to a clerk at a bank i never ask if they're what kind of database they're using underneath right the normal user doesn't care about technology we live in a world where there's this huge amount of innovation happening in the blockchain space but there's a lot of friction to get

2:14there so people hear interesting news about d5 about interesting yields but then they are faced with a learning curve that is really hard to overcome like what is a metamask what is an exchange what are gas fees ether cryptocurrencies and the regulator the afraid of around regulation so that's why a lot of people is skipping outside of this crypto bubble i should say because

2:40there's a lot of friction and what we're really aiming to do is to provide an ability for people to use this innovation in a regulated in a safe manner and as easy as pushing a button on an iphone app and that's how it should be for everyone not just for the not something available only for the crypto savvy users that's basically one the main issue

3:03that we're solving is the ability to have everyone on board and not just a few people that are into the crypto world definitely definitely apollo i agree and i would love if you could elaborate a little bit more i know that the platform you know there's a wait list right now it's it's in the works there's a lot of financial products that will be coming out as

3:25the platform grows but from the start can you give a vision into somebody that's just getting into cryptocurrency how easy is it for to get on the platform what do they do and then how do they start earning so from a from a regular user point of view it's as simple as downloading an iphone app or an android app and start depositing funds on your

3:50digital wallet and you can use wire you can use ach soon you'll have credit cards also as a as an ability to top up your wallet and once you have your money in your wallet it's just a click of a button in order to push that money into a earned solution that's the solution that we're launching in a few weeks and as you said there's already a waiting list on

4:13publicmint.com we're very happy to see that we're over 45k in terms of users already on the waiting list and we feel the responsibility and we're very excited to deliver that product to the to the to the public because finally the end user will have an ability to have to tap into earnings that currently are only available on the d5 space for people

4:40that know how to handle crypto and ether and metamask in our case we're work we're solving that all under the hood so we're working with partners like abra and celsius integrating also with d5 protocols like compound but for the end user it's as simple as pushing a button and putting your money into earn and start getting those earnings that under the hood are

5:04being provided by the partners that participate in the ecosystem definitely i think that's going to make it a way easier for beginners i'm also curious though a lot of beginners they're focused in usd maybe they understand bitcoin and ethereum a little bit and maybe tether and but they also would like to get back to usd easily as well is that something

5:28that's a primary focus you know to be able to move in and out of a fiat and crypto yeah yeah so one of our main goals is really to bridge between the blockchain innovation that is happening in the blockchain space and the real economy that runs on fiat currencies so what we've built over the last two and a half years is a solution that is a blockchain but it's fully usd

5:54native no crypto involved so if you if you look at it you have now best of both worlds you have the stability of dollars on one side and you have the instant settlement ability from blockchain technology that is the feature that it's at at its core on public made that's the underlying platform that enables all the rest and then there's this marketplace

6:18of use cases where the earn app that we're going to launch in a few weeks is just one first use case that enables the ability to have additional advantages on the fact that you now have your money programmable and instant at all times so what was what we're saying here is that you don't need to go into crypto anymore you can use your regular dollars and you

6:41can start benefiting from the fact that you're using blockchain technology but with dollars not with crypto wow and by the way by the way that's that's what's going to enable also and that's why we see a lot of excitement on the blockchain side because there's a lot of fin blockchain companies out there that are still struggling to access fiat because

7:03it's a regulated environment it has a lot of concerns around it and we enable through our open apis and through our development portal the ability for any company that is have working on the ethereum network to simply use those solutions and port it into a platform that is already fiat native so that's that's an important step that we believe brings a lot of advantages not

7:27only for the end users that finally can tap into this innovation but also for the for the blockchain companies that now can enable their solutions in dollars and with that being able to open up the market to much more users than they are currently having on their systems definitely no well said and i like that you mentioned there the regulation when you do have fiat currencies in usd

7:53that gets involved in there and it's been a barrier of d5 platforms that want to be just crypto and ones that want to add in that on-ramp but to make it easier for people to get into the platform but also does that make it harder for public mint or for the users or have has all the regulation already been solved out and approved yeah so at public mint we are we have a mix of

8:19tech entrepreneurs we have a mix of people that come from the from the legacy world like myself i used to be responsible for swift service bureau that was connecting all the banks to the swift network into real-time growth settlement systems and we also have software engineers with a lot of experience building systems like these around payments so regulation and

8:38compliance is at the top of our list we have our own bsa compliance program in place our own bsa compliance officer we work with regulated entities that hold the money for us so public mint at its core it's kind of like doing what swift did three thirty years ago we're just a fintech company that is enabling blockchain technology to make money more easy to move around

9:03but at under the hood you have trust companies and banks that are holding the money and they are the entities that are regulated to do so that's why we are able to provide fdic insurers through these partners and that's why at the same time because we create this synthetic version of dollars on the blockchain we enable the ability to have instant movement of money on the

9:26ecosystem so yeah so regulation and compliance is in the top of our agenda and we will continue to make it so as we as we operate that's good to know and with d5 growing so quickly there is it's hard for regulation to keep up sometimes and you know the tech guys just working non-stop to keep innovating with new products defy is expanding into different ways to capitalize on your

9:53assets i'd love to hear your you know your vision for what you think d5 will look like and what public mint will look like you know in five years from now and beyond yeah so being having having worked in both sides i've been working the highly regulated environment i really respect and i understand the challenge of regulators these days because it's really difficult to keep up

10:18with all the innovation and still continue to fulfill their mission of protecting customers and making sure that everything is compliant and regulated and on the other end you see this huge amount of intellectual power that is happening on the blockchain space that wants to thrive and wants to bring more more utility to the end users so what we believe public mint will be in the next

10:44few years is effectively this underlying bridge between these both these two worlds that finally enables the ability for more conservative environments like banks and big corporates to be able to finally start having true innovation in their solutions because we all know up until now we have big corporates around the world trying out blockchain but they're still very

11:12It's still very early days because they're they're still not comfortable with the fact that they need to work with volatile crypto so the fact is that they don't they can effectively continue to work with fiat because now they have the ability to tap into that innovation using dollars not not some volatile crypto token so we will continue to do our best to

11:36be as compliant as possible there are gray areas that even for the regulator is still difficult to understand how to regulate but as always we will continue to push our efforts to make it as compliant as possible and as aligned as possible with regulators and compliance definitely and now we talked about how there's a wait list the platform is coming out soon you

12:00know we just talked about the five-year vision and beyond i'd love to hear about the near term and what are the next steps for public mint as you head towards launch so when we launch the underlying instant settlement platform that is blockchain and fiat native it's really not an appealing use case people don't grasp the advantages of that right you need to have concrete

12:24use cases for people to relate to so we decided to launch the urn app as one of the first low-hanging fruits that it's obvious because now you have you have your wallet and now you can start earn earning on top of the money that you have on your wallet and that has a tangible advantage for the end user from our perspective we have and i we have a clear road map in terms of building

12:48other building blocks just like earn or four or five building blocks that enable the ability for a person to move their money around and to have some concrete advantages like they have with the banking industry but moreover what more importantly is that we have a whole marketplace in a whole community on telegram which is around 50 000 people

13:13right now they are the ones that are going to drive the innovation because these people can tap into our open ecosystem they can use the open apis and start developing on top of programmable money so on one side we have our own vision and we believe that there are some use cases that are obviously something that needs to be available on the wallet like

13:38earn like loans like debit cards like instant forex those are things that are something that a person would obviously require but then there's this long tail of innovation and we're very excited to see what's happening already so we have for example just to give you an example developers already already deploying on our sandbox interesting stuff like decentralized

14:02exchanges using programmable dollars or even an nft marketplace and these these are initiatives that are being led by the community of supporters it's not really our efforts our team it obviously we give all the support as possible to these these innovators but we want these innovators to thrive and to push more and more utility to the whole ecosystem

14:28so the goal is when you whenever you have money on public men you should feel that you can do a lot of things with your money you're free to do a lot of things with your money on that marketplace and that's the whole vision around public men being the earnest first the first used yeah i love that and i think that's going to be super important moving

14:52forward and for the viewers that are looking to follow along with all of these updates and get on the wait list and learn more about how they can capitalize with usd and cryptos what's the best way for them to get involved so obviously we have our own telegram channel public mint which i advise you to follow because that's where we typically push our

15:16latest announcements you have you have our website publicmint.com the waiting list is available on publicmint.com and you can check out all the latest information there so and any we're always available on telegram if anything is needed sounds great paula thank you so much i will leave the telegram and the website links and all the other links as well in

15:39the description box below all the best with public mint moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thank you ashton thank you