Bob Reid on Everest's global financial platform and identity

0:01I'm Ashton Addison from Block West capital for investment pitch media and today on the Crypto Coin Show we have Bob Reed co-founder and CEO of Everest back on the show with us Bob it's a pleasure to see you again and I'm excited to dive into Everest and all things identity and the crypto economy and wallets it's been about two years since you've been back on the show and

0:21and I'm sure a lot has happened yeah we've been busy well call it building through bear market right so I guess to update everyone some of the bigger highlights we took our identity infrastructure spun that out to a non-profit where it's called the foundation if you go to foundationnetwork.org

0:49we did that just to give everybody a free biometric identity and wallet and make a distributed and decentralized so that nobody including me CIA NSA Elon Musk nobody can see it right the other few things we've done since then is we did take Everest and get it licensed so we're grandfathered into Mika right so we have a Global Financial

1:18platform so when you want to take that free identity and wallets you can actually go hey now I want to buy trade cell I want to send remittances I want to do all this so those are connected in a relationship but very different organizations yeah it at first is a fascinating platform as a Global Financial ecosystem where I feel like you can do

1:45so much you know there's there's wallets and there's exchanges and there's other little crypto services that feel like you guys have sort of covered all bases and also with the regulation and the licenses behind it you guys have done so much I feel like more than anybody else can you just talk about all the steps that you had to do to sort of get all of

2:07these pieces into one platform well it's going back five years to the beginning of the underlying premise was centralized systems were brittle and decaying and going to fail right and I say that all Banks governments Enterprise and so if you want to rebuild it all you really need to start at the base level

2:33which is identity right let's let's assume blockchain and crypto become the de facto standard of how everyone operates over the coming decades if you do that you need to have like all societies a human and unique identity a little bit like what India did with adahar what Estonia is done with e Estonia you have to be human and unique and that didn't exist in the blockchain

2:59OR crypto world and we needed it to be user owned like let's let's be honest like I'm tired of having Google Facebook Amazon everyone monetize my data like that sucks it's not right it's a legacy of Web 2.0 so we started with that right it was like so human and unique attached to a wallet we actually have a patent on that you really use your

3:26Biometrics to verify like as opposed to worldcoin where you just do it at registration and then after that create the wallet then we started doing we have our own permissioned chain that accesses permissionless change so if you needed to do dollars Euros or even coming up from us in Q3 Q4 is going to be tokenized stocks like we built a whole financial stack on top of that

3:55wow that's awesome to hear and you mentioned there about you know different currencies and how identity is crucial and it's and also about like Estonia and sort of these platforms that are countries that are building onto blockchain platforms I think that's very important for these some of these countries to be more Innovative with Everest it's

4:17it's hard to be you know a global platform with all these different countries having different regulations and different stages of the innovation of moving towards having neobanks and digital global banking are you guys actually catered to the entire world or how did you sort of prioritize where do we go first and where's the Innovation happening and how

4:36can we get early traction it's a really good question so out of the 400 or so companies that came to Malta in 2018 when they were blockchain Island 10 of us ended up getting a license right that is everyone thought great blockchain Island it'll be fun and it is it's a lovely place it's like one of my favorite places in the world now but The Regulators are deadly serious

5:04part of EU and you had to be real and so we got lucky with an Innovative regulator that actually wanted to really move things forward for people so again one of the ten that showed up actually got licensed there's only two of us I think that are actually kind of retail focused which is crypto.com on us what we did that's really unique that

5:31they liked was we were doing Biometrics for end user-owned Biometrics so people can be until they do financial transaction you can have a completely Anonymous private identity just like your normal life and when you transact something that's a regulated transaction you share just the bare minimum that's legally required like here's my name and my address you don't

5:58get to see my gender and my age for example stuff like that so like we were able to granularly share just a little bit to be compliant and by the way when you're sharing stuff on Twitter for example no data totally Anonymous totally private right yeah look the to answer your question more broadly of global reach like we all kind of grew up of like we

6:26all want to Swiss bank accounts right sort of the myth right but those are hard and you have to go off Swift and it's like you can't go buy your groceries back because it's too far takes too long too expensive well blockchain made all time and distance and price disappear so really we operate what looks like a Global Credit Union the users owned most of the network and

6:53they can access a European based Neo Bank crypto Credit Union from anywhere in the world that's really cool and on the identity part as you said sort of like it all starts with identity and that's part of the foundation I feel like it's a very Hot Topic in the news right now and maybe even controversial with the you know the launch of the world

7:19coin and the orbs they have scanning your eye for a few dollars of crypto and a lot of people saying hell no I'm not going to do that you know I'm sort of against I don't know if it's just the thesis of it overall or the fact of who owns World coin and Altman and these guys but I'm curious on your take on their approach and the consensus around

7:45the industry and how they seem to be rejecting the idea of actually using the platform look I think the crypto world has been correct I was actually heartened to see that they did the analysis and I'll give you a little background like one of the founders of worldcoin came to me about three years ago and asked how did you do Everest on any camera because that's hard right

8:11and we ended up we patented this and I was like look if you don't do it the way we did it you'll end up with proprietary Hardware with proprietary Hardware means you don't do verification on login means you own the Biometrics or the biometric hashes it means you don't reach everybody right and you end up with you know and you have privacy and security issues just

8:35out the Wazoo like that orb has a template should take raw Biometrics the template creates a hash and that hash goes into the centralized database so as soon as that template gets exposed to the outside world and that centralized database gets hacked those two things weren't Equifax again we're at Home Depot we're at every hack that's ever happened like all those identities are

8:59common so it was like for me world coin is it's a little bit like Libra I love the idea it's just the execution on it creates a public safety hazard I mean it's just that simple but the idea behind it is honestly wherever it started they've just executed what I think is not a safe way to go about it yeah that's a great Point Bob and

9:27especially people that have been in blockchain for a while they're very particular about you know obviously owning their own Financial assets but their personal data and having to give up your personal data to different platforms you really have to be particular about you know where it's being stored because it's so easy for some hackers to hack it and then all

9:47of a sudden there's identity fraud going on and you know I know very well as having a lot of people on these shows that are that are founders and just all in on blockchain that have been susceptible to Identity fraud Sim swap hacks all of these different ways of stealing people's past Sports the driver's licenses and Biometrics probably that

10:12doing it in a way that's secure and hopefully decentralized and giving minimal information I feel like is absolutely crucial otherwise people are you know they're not going to use the platform if they have to give up too much information it's almost like you know these social media is all over again we're giving you all our information what do we get out of it

10:34couldn't agree with you more I mean look at our you said I personally needed to get into a position where I could never open somebody's identity data store not with five billion dollars or a gun to my head I couldn't so literally we were like okay we pushed it to the non-profit right the foundation right and the governance there basically means nobody can ever open an identity store

11:04and the only thing the user has to give up like they take a selfie we'll do a 2fa just in case somebody needs recourse right it's SMS today it'll be probably email later after that you have an anonymous wallet you can connect other wallets to it and then where it starts getting really fun is like we just added Twitter you

11:32can associate your Twitter account with this anonymous wallet and you can have multiple wallets so you can do here's my hayc wallet and it has some of the data there and then here's my other wallet this totally dark web Anon nobody can ever see it and you can have you know all sorts of different personas with different credentials attached to

11:58different wallets yeah that's that's a great way to go about it and from what I see as a comparison you know people are already for example people that have iPhones they're already unlock their phone with their face ID or they download an app with their Biometrics it's really like the same thing you're just like you just open up your phone and you look at it and then

12:21you just get into the application and I'm probably stored in a more secure way than than Apples I'm not sure exactly how they're storing their their Biometrics but you know if this is done in the right way and I feel like that's sort of a status quo that people are used to they don't have to go over to some dystopian Globe at the conference center and look

12:40into it and who's on the other side of the globe I don't know yeah yeah I know it's a it's a little weird how they've gone about that Apple by the way they secure they're doing it on Secure Storage on device which basically means but you can't take it with you right you need an iPhone we did roughly the same thing of secure encrypted storage but in

13:04infrastructure that we don't control and nobody can turn off which is kind of the same idea but what it does it means if I lose my device if I can tell you it's about two and a half billion smartphones in the world that's not 8 billion which is how many human beings there are which means and we did this in Indonesia shirt on your back scan somebody's face

13:30and then they get access to their wallet so they can you don't actually need a device you have a feature phone if you want or go into a tablet so we do reach 8 billion people which you know if you're Zucker Elon or you know something like that like this is how you needed to get there and I love that you give that example of Indonesia you know and often I go back

13:55to if we're looking at Neo Banks mainly the people that are underbanked or unbanked in countries outside of North America would most benefit from this and everyone's able to get you know 25 smartphones that have a camera nowadays yeah I'm curious if that's been you know one of the higher priority areas is like helping people sort of get their financial banking sorted out in a new

14:22way in those geographic regions yes and I'll tell you something we learned along the way over the last five years of there's the cliche of let's Bank the unbanked well banking the unbanked really comes down to identity verification but it's compliance so like World coin and everyone can say I want to go Bank Filipinos Indonesians angolans Etc truth

14:50is as soon as you touch money or even crypto if you're reading the regulations correctly and you transfer it or do something with it you literally must verify an identity and so what we've had to spend lots of last couple years doing is work with my money laundering officer and my compliance officers to go we can take in and out a thousand

15:17dollars with no kyc at all right it's low risk and here's what we can do and we can offer them by trade sell we can offer them remittances like I said Q3 Q4 we're gonna be able to offer them you can buy Tesla or Apple stock literally a token that goes to their wallet and they get to own own it in their wallet which nobody's done I like again like remember

15:44FTX and binance were talking about you're looking at two screens of here's crypto and here but it wasn't tokenized not token moved to somebody's wall so long-winded way of saying yeah when you can offer most of the emerging and Frontier markets here's the NYSE and NASDAQ and CME tokenized into their wallets that's a bunch of compliance and a bunch of

16:11a bunch of work to actually get them to do it and yeah I think that'll be a really big it'll be seismic terms of its effect well I'm looking forward to that on the on the tokenized stocks as well because I've heard for years that hey you know the financial Market's going to be tokenized and we're going to be able to settle instantly and you know I always hear you

16:33know apple and Tesla will be the first ones but I've yet to see and I was even just looking last week like oh you know are we there yet and it seems like there was a few discussions of you know FTX or another platform or two and then it's like well they're gone now and like where's the tokenized stocks we're still settling you know plus three and these Limited hours and

16:56back to traditional Banking and I'm like I guess one day it's gonna happen it's wild I mean so look European Union has a whole sort of test bed set up where you can do you can issue for example tokens it's like issuing stock on chain and that'll take a couple years but just today what it requires to do here's tokenized stocks here's an Apple share held by a broker dealer

17:24we're gonna token send it to somebody's wallet and we're going to accept crypto as payment that requires broker dealer license a vast licensed crypto custodian license requires a permission to chain not a permission list one you can't do it on permissionless and it requires a mountain of compliance logic around it so that it doesn't start turning into

17:51bearer bonds if you start sending it everywhere around the world so it's a it's a really big moat like it's a Herculean tastic build all of that Under One Roof right so I think there's only one or two of us in the world that can do it right now yeah definitely and what you said about the licensing you know how only like 10 companies out of hundreds were able to get it I feel like

18:15it's a very strenuous process and a lot of companies and wallets and exchanges have just managed to sort of fly by without getting all of these regulatory licenses I feel like moving forward some of that might change and I'm curious on your insights into sort of the future of crypto regulation and if it's going to get more strenuous you know what's that going to mean for these

18:42companies that don't have licenses will it be something that's required will it eliminate the competition and Everest will still be there or so what do you project moving into the years forward so Europe us Japan Singapore most the majors even Hong Kong and Dubai doing their own regulations they're all more or less saying like if you're doing crypto assets and you're doing Buy trade

19:09sells and receive activities you're going to need a license and they're treating them mostly like they're treating Fiat right you're going to have to have basic compliance identity checks reporting Etc so like I think that's pretty well accepted for anyone that's paying attention I'll tell you the Insight that the Europeans have told me

19:36that nobody's talking about and that is defy right and so if you get into decentralized exchanges or lending protocols where you're doing match a buyer with a seller and there's a price Oracle and that smart contract is doing the that is effectively a transfer agent and will be licensed like period

20:05like that's and what that comes with means you have to get a license which means you have to do full kyc above a certain threshold you have to do ongoing monitoring you have to do risk rating you have to do reporting and so there's this whole wave that's coming in 2024 and that's going to hit these guys just like it hit centralized exchanges in 2019.

20:32now the good news is like there's guys like us that can do like we'll just take care of all that for you if you're Sushi swap or something we'll just go like we'll send you a zero knowledge proof of the identity you can write on our license when the regulator calls and says hey is you know Derek Smith a money launderer we'll go ahead and remove them from your policy like we can

20:55do all this for them if not like they're signing up for it's a couple million dollars of compliance per year yeah so that's amazing that's amazing to hear and I feel like decentralizing changes are only going to increase you know because it seems like especially as we get into cross-chain Atomic swaps things like that people want more decentralized

21:20options just because some of the you know they don't want FTX to happen again and who knows who's actually custodian their their assets and all of a sudden it's donated to some other political party and your money's gone yeah yeah that was for me they again I we integrated FTX we were one of the first if not the first and the thing that shocked me was it proved

21:43simultaneously that it's called them tier two or tier three jurisdictions that don't really enforce regulations like the Bahamas compared to look at FTX us and FTX Japan yeah those guys were pretty well protected why because the regulations are really good The Regulators go like you will have those funds you will not go mingle them Etc and so like

22:08all right yeah I feel good again like about the tier one jurisdictions and do you find if I look they're going they're gonna have to adhere at some level so I think that's good for everybody interesting because for everybody that's outside of the US you know I feel like not from the US but I feel like traders in the US are like I wish I wasn't in

22:35the US because then I could trade on all these other exchanges that are more lenient and the ones in the US I guess you know they don't seem to have like it's like sort of Finance US versus Finance International the international one has just had so much more liquidity and there was more people trading and the US people couldn't get access to it

22:53but at the same time they're actually more protected in that you know their funds were more safe than the international one this is a trade-off absolutely you know you say like and you know go further down the road like if you get into D5 there's no regulations at all and what we see I mean like even curve and curve is one of the biggest and best in the whole

23:14industry and they gotta hacked right it means like they're audit like exactly if they were regulated and licensed security audits would have been better insurance would have been there like they're like all the reporting like that would have been really hard to have happen if you were in your in license for example I want to jump topics for a second

23:38and get your take on you know vitalik's thoughts on the identity and you know recently he was talking about attribution addresses and how we can sort of make it easier for people on the user experience on the wallet I feel like identity ties into that do you know about his insights and you know are you guys in line with that sure so look I don't know vitalik well we

24:06talked a whole bunch as I was building Everest early on and I'm actually better friends with other folks in ethereum and so I say this with all due respect and a caveat he's a bright guy identity is not his Forte it's just not right right so I saw his analysis last week of for example World coin and doing you know he's got he knows human and unique are the two

24:33problems to solve and so he came up with his analysis and the truth is he missed some things right like when he talked about for example in the world coin case like Biometrics will more equivalently do it does it registration they don't use it as verification one of the byproducts of that is you end up with identities being sold on the black market for World coin

24:59for example so I mean I can share with you know I took vitalik's analysis and put in whatever it looks like sorry for the eye chart but you can see this where he had privacy and then he had specialized Hardware here with World coin compared to the foundation

25:28right and Everest our ecosystem so privacy like I said we're probably the most private out there you can not only be human unique and you like nobody can see it and you can have multiple wallets and multiple personas right and not a gunpoint can anybody open this up accessibility well World coin has 62 orbs for example 62. we have every single webcam feature

25:59phone smartphone tablet we can reach 8 billion people like we have the most accessible ever robustness of decentralization well we're about as decentralized as you can be now again the decentralization and identity is not it's not nodes ceiling blocks that's not the deal with it's not the same thing as chain what you're really after with

26:25decentralization is access right who has access to this I to the storage of the identity and we made it very very decentralized and literally like I said no one can open it's in line with what had era did with their governance and ens did with their governance right so it's pretty pretty decentralized and then security against fake people like we're doing deduplication of one in

26:52eight billion and even on Twitter for example I can prove I'm not an imposter right so like we do that really well and better than you know anybody else truth is this social graph being security against fake people again like that's that's actually not true like I know personally have

27:20been to Villages where they'd go like oh we'll get 30 people to attest you're that guy like that would that gets games so social graph is not a really good security against fake people so well you mentioned there on the last part about about Twitter and I'm curious because you know Elon I feel like has this master plan now moving Twitter into X there's supposed to be

27:46payments coming in I feel like identity would be a part of that as well I don't know how deep they're going to get into it making it you know some kind of Global Financial platform do you think that he's going to have to implement some similar measures in whatever's has yes I mean like to cut to the chase I think he Twitter has two problems to solve one is thoughts and postures and

28:12that's only going to get much worse right that's an exponential like the reason he's talking about it Zack's talking about all these guys like they know what AI is going to do and next year like it's going to be an avalanche so he has to solve this without requiring a credit card which is how he's doing it today right how do you do free make sure Bob's

28:34really Bob or make sure this Twitter account is anonymously and privately just a live human being do that without a credit card so he's got to solve that and he hasn't done that yet the second piece is he has to do he has to well do the financial platform that scales globally and so he's already registered at fincen so he'll be able to do dollars and do

28:59payments like the man co-founded PayPal he knows how to do dollar payments when he wants to get to the rest of the world how do you get to India how do you get to Europe how do you do this how do you then tokenize Fiat how do you then tokenize like the whole financial platform yeah that's really hard as I put it I'm actually 27 this is what that took this

29:24is what it does to you when it when you have to go build one of those things so yeah you'll have to build you'll have to rebuild a whole lot of what we've already done yeah I'm interested to see how it's gonna play out and how deep crypto will be involved versus traditional payments and how he's going to fit in all the countries in the world and not just you know us regulations how

29:45do you how do you transfer to Indonesia and back and I feel like it's going to come soon I do too I say let me share with you paradigm shift because Zuckerberg's looking at doing the same thing with Instagram and threads Etc he knows he has to solve roughly the same problems right and by the way reddit's not too far beyond Behind them either and so each one of those

30:11still taking it from a Web 2.0 perspective they still want to own that identity database and that financial transaction platform and the way we've positioned the foundation plus Everest is I the user have my Twitter account I have my Anonymous Twitter account too I've got my Instagram and my Reddit and I get to share different data with each

30:38of them and it's my control on my network right on permissionless networks and so if the world is going to evolve into a better place putting the user at the center of all of those different social networks with their own wallets control of their own data and then be able to transact how they see if it that's unequivocally a better Paradigm to

31:04live in rather than having these guys repeat Web 2.0 yeah yeah it's the world's changing really quick and it's I'm glad that you guys are keeping up with it because someone's got to do it the right way I agree I agree yeah I hope I hope we can get more going where the users actually see the value of owning their

31:31own data and owning their own transactions and not seeding at all to Web 2.0 again yeah I feel like we're just getting an Ever more increasing Tipping Point where people are walking towards the edge of this cliff and when they realize the negatives of you know what they've been succumbed to then they're going to be like they'll jump ship and land on

31:53the Everest boat yeah yeah exactly like I used to joke with you know some healthcare government guys of like you'll call me after you get hacked right the idea of investing in that in really good secure distributed and encrypted and decentralized data storage you won't care and want to invest in that until the day after you get hacked and then a day after you'll call me

32:17and go like here's a better Paradigm to go for to make sure this doesn't happen again definitely and that's why it's always important for people especially in blockchain but even just everybody that's using the internet to sort of You Know cover your bases and be privacy focused and don't have the same small bad password for every account and

32:40and then leaving all your personal information on the internet because you know it's sort of like D5 platforms and smart contract platforms too you never know how secure your information is until it gets hacked and then you realize oh man I wasn't I wasn't good enough you know there's no yeah there's no sort of score before you get hacked I'm like is my account secure

32:59or not you just have to stay on top of it yep I agree 100 look I think we have a really big part to play in that and you know hopefully with this new Twitter campaign to get you know here's my verified account on Twitter that should be the beginning yeah and can you tell me a little bit more about that because yeah Twitter it seems like the place to be right now

33:24that I don't know what's going to happen on the payment side but in terms of active users they seem to be continually growing and now you guys are running a Twitter campaign I feel like this is the right place to do it to bring awareness to what you guys are doing yeah so look currently there's a bunch of people by the way not many you would think that are paying along Twitter

33:46eight dollars per month for the blue check mark and that gives you a bunch of features of how you can you know segment your feeds and you know write longer tweets and things like that and there's some value there but a lot of it is simply are you a verified user and so what Everest is doing saying here's a verified user and a wallet and we're going to pay you to

34:09do it we're not going to charge you so we're giving away 10 million ID tokens to incentivize people to basically here's your little check mark from Everest that you're a verified human being now in addition to the 10 million ID tokens you might we're basically a financial services platform we're giving 10 of our fees to everyone who signs up and who

34:35follows them so if you were to sign up you'd get here's a thousand ID tokens right off the bat everyone who follows you get 10 of their fees so if they're trading Bitcoin eats sending remittances to Mexico what have you get all that right now you're the bank now sound so it's compelled yeah so are people signing up through

35:04seeing others on Twitter or do you just go to the platform and you know scan log in with your camera we actually set up a special site called verified wallet dot me so I'll verify wallet dot me literally gets you to here's the campaign you sign up as a matter of fact do a quick one for you I've got my browser open right so

35:44it already verified while dummy takes you to here here you can see here's we have a thousand followers you get this many all the way down here's sign up yeah and if you want to see it real quick I'm I've already created an account I've already done a connected wallet sign in

36:12is that wow I enter my pin and by the way here and just geek out with you it's pretty cool right there's my birth date and all that and retweet I'll post this to Twitter

36:49down if I go to Twitter Shane see I've already that one's from the 14th but this is what it looks like right and my wallet so if anybody comes here you can see I'm human I'm not a bot not an imposter

37:18there's my Twitter we'll be adding Instagram and a few others coming anyone who signs up here I would make the affiliate fees very cool that's straightforward awesome I'm definitely going to sign up and I'll use your link and use your own I'll yeah I guess you probably have a few tokens there already but I'm definitely going to check it out

37:45because it's just it sounds a lot better than looking into a dystopian orb at the conference center and just using your phone and more importantly secure decentralized and like encrypted yeah that's the plan amazing well thank you so much for you know the insights into this and also just your thoughts on identity right now World coin vitalik's thoughts the way

38:11that we should be approaching Global Financial systems of the future which are going to require identity and it's going to come to a turning point where this is a very hot topic it's already happening with the launch of worldcoin but I feel like people are going to be looking for a solution that's going the right way and it's interesting to hear your guys's approach

38:32so I really do appreciate the time Bob I appreciate it too thank you great day thanks foreign