NEM prepares Symbol platform for enterprise adoption

0:21little bit on your background and how that led to your role at nem okay so i got into crypto fairly early on which i was fortunate to do i started a trading club in my university and essentially i modeled that off one of the funds in my city and we had like a currencies team a commodities team an index team

0:49and we split up all the kids and we were all just like going through all these verticals looking for opportunities and then one day one of our guys was like you know maybe we should check out maybe we should check out cryptos and we're dowelled in bitcoin a bit but we never really sort of sunk our teeth into it so yeah we got into crypto

1:10started like mining youth and this is when it was like below a dollar and you know 2017 came around and you know we still had the club going and i mean when that happened we were like one of the only bodies in my town well in the city who really knew anything about it so we had all these people coming to our lectures we were hosting and out of that i started a consultancy

1:36i was advising on primary and secondary market transactions nem ventures happened to be one of my clients and you know i was talking to those guys a lot they were telling me they're doing these like they're going through this sort of real process then you know i've always been sort of you know i think everyone was waiting for catapult and

1:59now it's called symbol but i was like somewhat in the loop of how that was developing but i mean so yeah when when like the reorg started to happen the ventures team asked me to come across to be head of trading but i mean more so the reason why i accepted is you know i think about markets through i mean particularly tech markets through the lens of like two primary sort of

2:26values one being the sort of underlying utility value of the technology whatever it may be and then the second being sort of the speculative interest that sort of ebbs and flows through that so i mean if you if you imagine sort of i mean development on if you if you sort of chart that it sort of would would look more or less constant

2:53on a large time frame right it could be up and down depending on sort of breakthroughs in technology lead to more development releases like new regulation like we sort of heard yesterday from the oc cc about banking like you know these sort of things create an environment where you can develop more within the space so i think about it through this lens

3:14and i was watching them and you know there's this real going on and they're bringing in some really incredibly talented and experienced people i mean not like to say that they weren't there already but i mean they're coming in and then you know we had this development going on in terms of you know like the symbol launches just around the corner

3:36yeah and so in my mind i was thinking about this and going okay like like you look at the trading volumes i mean the trading volumes are picking up now but the trading volumes on them as an asset had been very quiet and so just in that framework of my own thinking i was like well the upside the upside on this is enormous because like compared to sort of like the more

3:59popular popular like protocols like you know heath or i mean kidano's making a lot of noise nem's been quite quiet you know it's like a sleeping giant it's been around from from it's like started in 2015 it's never been hacked and you know there's all this development going on so i think sort of the upside on it is what really drew me over i think that

4:22was quite exciting so definitely that's how i've been that's that's great and you touched on the symbol platform you know for enterprise adoption of blockchains that's going to be big and i want to jump into that but before we do that i want to just get a high level overview you know for the people that have just they've heard of nem and it's a blockchain they don't really know

4:41anything else about you know the goals of the ecosystem or how it's different and unique if you could just touch on like a high level then we'll jump into some of the updates that nem is having after that all right well i mean a sort of good analog is probably ethereum right you know everyone sort of conceptually understands what ethereum does at a higher level

5:00so i mean we could probably start there and then what where i think nem's different is you know ethereum is great for these decentralized applications because you know you build the smart contract and then that's it you know you just let it run with an m you have a bit more flexibility with that so i mean and with the whole thing with symbol is

5:23you know it's going to be like this hybrid chain you know i kind of think about eth would be sort of where you would build a fully decentralized application but nem is sort of that bridge between real world business and then blockchain so i think that's like our gap that's our niche if that makes sense to people so yeah well i do know that

5:48nem provides a lot of on the developer side you know sdks and toolkits to help people build you provide a lot more support and especially with the symbol platform that's now launching with enterprise adoption maybe we could just jump into that you know how specifically are you helping enterprises secure their digital assets and integrate blockchain tech

6:08through the symbol platform that's now launching okay all right so i mean first off you know i come from a finance background and you know like to draw this back to ethereum you know you can build these amazing d5 applications but when it comes to regulating them it's hard you know traditional business needs to have something offline you know

6:37and i think the fact that symbol can provide this hybrid solution means that we can build sort of i mean d5 applications that will be will fit into a regulated structure so there's basically more room in my mind for us to sort of again like destroying it back to what i said earlier is like we can sort of bridge that gap you know there's a lot of pain points

7:04with securitizing assets like you know transaction speeds and the cost of transactions both of those on the simple platform will i mean we will we're it'll be fast obviously it's hybrid and it'll be quite cheap and you know we're seeing that now we're having a lot of sort of organizations that help secure assets on blockchains like looking to get involved with symbol

7:32So i mean that's it from sort of how the business point of view in terms of the technology you know like the news one blockchain's never been hacked since 2015. You know it's it was the first to bring in multi-sig and i think it's you know i'm not a tech guy by any stretch of the imagination but it's building on top of the multisig there's going to be aggregate

7:54transactions and i think sort of there's a there's a tiered multi-sig approach which would sort of allow organizations to have that same sort of contr hierarchical control through the organization but all on blockchain which i think sort of an innovation that is i mean will be really appealing to organizations yeah definitely appealing and you know

8:20it's one thing to tokenize financial assets but i know nem is really going out there and showing different use cases you know from everything from from watches and jewelry to other unique items and you know one of the recent partnerships that i read about with nem and wave financial is tokenizing 20 million dollars worth of bourbon whiskey so i wanted to touch on that because

8:42it's super interesting you know can you talk about you know what is it what does it do to tokenize whiskey and where is the whiskey you know can we get some okay well yeah well first off i'll say i'll just preface this by saying that this is all the hard work of dave he's out he runs the nem ventures and he's the head or chief investment officer he's a very switched on and smart man

9:06And he's sort of has been sort of spearheading this whole bubbles some of the tokenization on the simple blockchain on them blockchain so i can speak to it i'm not the guy who's been running it but basically you know if you want to invest in whiskey as you generally have to buy barrels or you have to buy the whole production line and then you hold that barrel for x

9:32amount of years and then you bottle it and you sell it and that's when when you make your upside right so what we're doing with wave is basically you know it's this standard tokenization plate we're taking that and we're breaking we're fractionalizing it and putting it on the blockchain so that you know people can get exposure to the whiskey market and the whiskey

9:52market is actually quite lucrative and i think this is the first sort of exposure that of this kind that anyone's going to be able to make into whiskey i think it's it's open to reggae and reg d investors in the us you know you can check out wave financial it'll be on their website how to how to get an exposure i mean there's a lot more of this stuff

10:16sort of coming out of nem and symbol i mean as we progress so with whiskey today which is delicious and then maybe we can get onto something else i don't know like gin i don't know that's great and yeah it's really cool all these enterprises you know with their products tokenizing them but part of the bigger picture and moving forward to mainstream

10:40adoption is you know central banks financial institutions and governments adopting potentially this technology as well and i know that nem has been working with a central bank in the central bank of lithuania which seemed to be very progressive and i was reading into this collectible crypto coin and you partnered with super how to tokenize this coin can you talk about

11:04working with the central bank and you know is this a step forward in the right direction yeah yeah so i guess this was this sort of responds directly to what i was saying earlier about like organizations real organizations and business will are starting to and will continue to view nem and symbol as sort of the go-to blockchain because of how we

11:32can bridge that gap between decentralized and real-world business and i think like nothing paints that picture more clearly than a central bank wanting to issue currency on the blockchain right so what they're doing at the moment is issuing six six tokens on our exchange oh sorry on our blockchain and you can you can buy those tokens on

11:59an exchange and then when you when you get six of these tokens then you get sort of the lb coin there's only going to be four thousand of them their the value is 19 euros and 18 cents which is i don't know how they came to that but yeah i mean look the fact that there's a central bank issuing currency on a blockchain is sort of what

12:26everyone's been waiting for since when when bitcoin white paper was first written right like this is this is this is actually happening right we have governments using blockchain to issue currency and they're using them to do that so i think it's i think it's extremely exciting yeah that's very exciting and that leads me to the next step in that evolution

12:47which is you know what are your thoughts on central bank digital currencies whether it's the us dollar chinese yuan or the british pound where you are yeah so i mean i can see it coming eventually it'll be there i think china's doing something like like this at the moment right the us and the uk i can see that being i can see that lagging behind

13:12a fair bit to be honest but i mean you look at the way the world's turning at the moment you know you have this mass unemployment and i mean prior to all of that people were talking about a universal basic income and i mean if you think about it what's the best way to issue that how do you manage that system it's probably it's probably with

13:34blockchain so i can see something like that probably emerging in this post-covered world at what pace i mean look i'm australian my well the australian government has been sort of cracking down on cash for a long time i can see an economy like that i can see like someone like australia adopting it perhaps sooner than than the us and the uk like i think

14:00you know just the way that those economies are set up you know i can see that they would be sort of lagging right behind but i can i can see there will be a transition period you know where there will be some currency i.e like a universal basic income issued on some sort of blockchain you know if anyone wants to talk you know jim was going to be pretty good for

14:24that so yeah yeah great nick well we're running out of time but i'm curious what are nem's goals for outreach right now are you looking for more enterprises to partner with or more central banks potentially or just more community members and how can they find out more about nem look i mean we're we're like a decentralized decentralized protocol

14:48right you know everyone can get involved at any time you know so community if you want to get involved we've got you know telegram channels we've got nem hub which just launched i think like check out nem hub like anyone involved in crypto should check out nem hub right now you know it's a good way to earn them you can learn a lot about sort of symbol

15:09and the snapshot that's going to take place and it's really good way to get involved with our community now in terms of enterprise like we are starting to get a lot of interest around symbol from sort of existing businesses you know and governments so i mean more than merrier google us if you're interested i guess you know we've got it's a symbol website

15:33the nem website and then just blockchain applications you know i don't know how much how much like people have read into what symbol could do but it's actually quite phenomenal and i think we're going to be sort of the first blockchain that has nailed atomic swaps so you know and then also like i said we have this hybrid functionality so in my mind i can see sort of like

16:02real businesses tapping into d5 via symbol and i can see that being sort of a space of great growth so i mean yeah like blockchain applications you know check out like if you're thinking about building a blockchain application i would take the time to read about what symbol can do because i mean if you if you can run an atomic swap quite easily

16:26it really opens you up to the whole universe of applications out there within crypto at the moment so i mean you could really build something quite exciting definitely well thank you i'll leave those links in the description box below for the viewers thanks so much for taking the time to come on the show nick i really do appreciate it all the best with nam and symbol moving

16:46forward and let's follow up in the near future no worries aston you have a good one eh