Building the world's most rewarding token with H.M. Rawat

0:01I'm Ashen Addison from the Crypto Coin Show and today on blockchain interviews with hm raat co-founder and CEO of lingo hm welcome to the show and thank you for taking the time thanks for having us ason very welcome I've seen lingo all over socials I dive into it a little bit but I'm excited to dive in with you today since you are have been working on it

0:24with your team for a long time now and this could be a big impact for web 3 and people outside of web 3 as well so let's just start from the top for those who aren't familiar or haven't heard of lingo yet I would love to just get a recap of the vision and Mission what you and your team have been working on with lingo and then we can dive into all the

0:43details yeah thing so lingo we built lingo with one Mission we want to create the world's most rewarding token and the reason why is because if you look at 2021 that was the last bull market there was over a billion people that were curious about investing in crypto so they over a billion people showed buying intent to get in but only around 3% actually got in and so we were like why

1:08is like 97% of people interested but not taking the leap what's stopping the everyday guy from from joining that space especially guys who are already curious about that space and so we took took a first principles approach and we tried to figure out what are the core blockers of most people and so it B down into three things number one is it's way too hard to understand people feel like

1:30need a PhD in white paper analytics to understand project and number two is that it's not it's too risky it's backed by nothing it's it's it's paper money fake Internet money and the third problem was people struggle to understand the real utility behind behind tokens and so our wild idea was simple let's build the token that's super easy to understand

1:56that's back by real value and that has great utility in real life and let's see what happens and so this is what we did we recruited the smallest guys we could find and two years later we built a token that is easy to understand the way it works is you get lingo you receive points by holding lingo and then you can claim those points for Real World stuff like vacations shopping

2:19experiences and more and the whole re rewards ecosystem is fueled by real world assets that generate cash every month so no matter the token PR you know that on the reward side there's still great loyalty perks happening and loyalty is something we really understand my co-founder he built the world's number one premium loyalty company called John Paul it's company

2:45that was acquired by aore hotels for $150 million a few years ago and this is lingo in nuto wow that's incredible and loyalty programs are have been huge in web 2 and I feel like all all of that is going to be transitioning into web 3 hopefully also backed by real world assets or backed by something and I feel like these early adopter programs of as you said only 3% of

3:11people that were actually interested in crypto got in because of these barriers to entry building a system out that can lower those barriers to entry lower the risk or lower the need to understand all the technical details will really benefit people that are early adopters maybe you can talk a little bit more about the lingo rewards system

3:32and how your team is sort of developing it out with more of a long-term Vision you know you don't want to be like one of those video games that comes out and then after a week or a month everyone gets bored stops using it how can you create value for Loyalty Rewards in the long term well there's two parts to this one is the actual rewards ecosystem itself

3:55and two is the value on the long term and so if we take we start with the ladder if you listen to I think it was a report by dcg saying that the tokenization of real world L has could possibly be a$6 trillion doll industry by 2030 and so this is a massive massive deal it's probably one of the biggest Financial moves in modern history and so for us what was

4:20important was two things number one is how do we generate sustainable value for the community over the long term but number two how do we stay relevant to crypto culture mhm because at the end of the day right now it's a 1 Point 1.34 billion trillion dollar industry built by by a whole new by a different breed of guys a whole new community of people who

4:46believes in a in a great vision and for us it's important to be aligned with that culture and that culture is sometimes a little bit Degen a little bit risky it's exciting it's we're going to change the world and so how do we how do we emerge the stability and sustainability of real assets but still be crypto relevant and so what we what we've done was in our model there's a

5:10complete separation between the Roy assets and the token element the token element is the fuel behind Ino ecosystem however the real world assets they help fuel the rewards ecosystem and so what we mean by that is the token is still a token it's still crypto it can still do a thousand a thousand X all completely crash however on the reward side we have we

5:34found a way to generate sustainable cash flow with r assets to keep rewarding our community and that's a massive deal because if you look at nine projects out of 10 the chart looks like this they start pumping and then they end up dumping and the reason the primary reason why according to us is that again taking a first principal approach

5:57analyze the top 200 coins and coin market cap they have have one thing in common and one thing only they have a massive Community rallied around their around their vision and so why do these most of the CHS Crush in the future is they don't they don't have a way to sustainably reward the community because there's two ways to really do it one is either they edop their own token

6:17so they dump their own token which is great in the short term but not not not a deal in the long term or secondly they launch other nfts or other tokens but again it's backed by nothing on our side we buy assets right now we're buying primarily real estate assets that generate cash flow every single month and then we use this cash flow to inject 100% of what we generate to fuel

6:41the rewards ecosystem which means that the dollar value of your rewards stay the same no matter the token pumping or dumping so that's one thing the second element is the rewards in itself and for that the power of community is massive so the idea is to the fact that we have a sustainable way to generate value in terms of rewards what that turns out to

7:04be can be anything it can be anything from holidays to shopping to mobile phones to concert tickets etc etc right now we are starting with holidays and hotels because this is where we are quite strong at a lot of our investors are Hotel owners themselves right now we have around 103 investors who manage over3 billion a lot of them are Hotel owners we also

7:29have the ex managing director of booking.com who's who's on our Advisory board so that's a low hanging food for us but ultimately the idea is our community will vote on what we offer in terms of rewards I love that's great to hear and I completely agree about the sustainability of the rewards and I think one of the reasons that 97% you mentioned of people that didn't

7:53get into crypto because the volatility of the uncertainty on where it's going to go and looking at a Loyalty Rewards plan you don't want to be getting rewards and then you know you realize that something crashed and the rewards are only worth 5% of what they were I recall at one point you know Starbucks changed the value of their rewards it had almost dropped it by 50%

8:15people were very very mad and to you should really have a system that you know it's going to be worth the same or even better in the future it's going to be worth more as it appreciates whether through that some token economics or the appreciation of the real world assets or some kind of sustainability of the community well that's the core of how

8:37we engineered our model because most most token ecosystems are engineered in a in a downward Trend like it's it's normally a vicious cycle because it requires new user influx which means that if you're buying at a price the only way you get a profit is someone someone else buys at a higher price price So eventually the Dan stops and you end up losing losing

9:03funds but this is the case for most most models in crypto today we've engineered it in a different way the way it works is every time people trade our token the transaction fees that we generate on the onch smart contracts is invested in real world Assets Now these assets generate cash flow as as we discussed the fact that we use 100% of

9:25the net cash flow to re-inject into our token ecosystem consistently means that we have a way to fuel a rewards ecosystem consistently what happens when you give people free stuff vacations shopping blah blah blah is it attracts in theory it attracts a community organically what happens when your community grows organically is it stimulates your trading volume and now

9:50when your trading volume is stimulated guess what we acquire even more assets and when we have more assets we have more cash flow when we have more cash flow we our rewards ecosystem is even more powerful which helps us attract an even bigger Community organically which allows us to buy even more real world assets and up and up and up that's the way we've engineered it

10:12and we haven't seen any other model like this yet that's really good to know and in these traditional loyalty systems you know I'm used to spending a lot on shopping or you know travel booking hotels flights things like that getting the rewards that can use for future flight it's great to hear that you have these major Partnerships with vacations you know who doesn't love

10:34going on vacation especially for free and now you're saying here about the trading volume sort of increases lingo ability to purchase more real world assets to back the system could you give an example of say I am I'm not really in crypto that much but I want to start having using a loyalty reward system like lingo that works very well would would it be similar to a tradition

11:00system where I can go in start paying for shopping or Vacations or is it just through the crypto volume that I could sort of gen start generating the Rewards well the crypto volume helps helps a more powerful rewards ecosystem in the long run it doesn't generate the rewards in itself what generates the rewards it's is a reward assets that we that we acquire

11:29and ear and manage and we decide to just take 100% of what we generate to inject back into the rod ecosystem so as a holder just by the fact that you own lingo nearly guarantees that you will get reward rewarded for your your loyalty and when you compare our model and the traditional loyalty system there's three things that we do

11:53differently and it's it's it's not because we are extremely smart it's because the technology in itself gives us an a great unfair Advantage number one is the fact that we can give way more value compared to traditional systems if you look at American Express miles or hotel points normally is between 0.5 and 3% of what they generate

12:19That gets reinvested in the loyalty and it's normal because they are shareholder driven companies they need to maximize profits for shareholders crypto is about Community so instead of 0.53% we use 100% of the net profits we generate and put everything back to the system so it gives you a crazy unfair Advantage because the model in itself works

12:42because we are Community Driven and not and we don't play by the same rules as as as as as web to the second difference is that once you receive miles from your preferred loyalty partner once you claim your miles you're done the only way to get more miles is to spend more with us as long as you hold even if you hold lingo once you keep receiving miles or points or

13:08rewards loyalty as long as as you stay in the community you don't need to spend more and the third Advantage is that it's liquid tomorrow if you want to resell your points you can't do it for most projects and the fact that it's it's onchain with us you will be able to that's incredible to hear and I love that and yeah it's you

13:33know there's so many issues in traditional loyalty whether you lose your points from them being expired or they're worth less you're always getting the short end of the stick and I think it's just because of that traditional shareholder model they're trying to maximize for their shareholders and it sort of ends up hurting the Loyalty people and it

13:50hurts their Community overall and like this shift to a more decentralized govern governance and being able to reinvest 100% into the community into the project is like unheard of before which is incredible so I'm really looking forward to seeing how all of this plays out yeah well it's a mindset you know it's it's on the one hand with the traditional systems it's okay how can we

14:13give the minimum possible to the community so that they stay loyal more than the competition and we make the most cash where we're like that let's give the maximum and see what happens yeah and it's just a different game definitely and I'm curi ious on the real world assets you know I've been in discussions with many people who are foreseeing the size of the

14:37market value of what real world assets will become when they're tokenized We've really not even hit like a 0.1% yet eventually most Assets in the world will become tokenized but of course real estate is a major player for that and I've had some great discussions recently on how more people are being open to tokenizing real estate can you talk about the decision for lingo in

15:00where to start investing in real world assets to the for the start in sustainability or good returns and where you're sort of focusing as you grow out the asset portfolio we have three criteria for our asset acquisition number one is it needs to be in a tier one jurisdiction for example Paris Dubai Miami Etc and the reason why is because the token

15:27element is risky in itself because the facto in that space 90% plus if not more of people they get into the they buy two tokens because they want to make they are speculators essentially they want to make five 10 20 whatever X on their funds knowing that if you can make 100x you can also go to zero so this is the nature of that space in itself so

15:51that aspect is risky in itself on the real world asset side this is really not the place where we want to be risky and aggressive so t1s in general are are as safe as you get in terms of Market fluctuations the second criteria we have is the net yield on long-term rentals so we optimize for apartments and holiday lights

16:19and hotels our goal is to do at least six% net yield which is also not easy to do in T1 jurisdictions but with our Network and investors we are able to find these kinds of deals right now and thirdly is ideally needs to be optimized for shortterm rentals where you could aim for a higher seven to 10 net yield but also have extra utility for the community going

16:47forward amazing well thank you for explaining that hm and I'm curious on how people can get involved or exactly at what stage are people able to start earning their rewards getting involved and figuring out how to maximize their participation in the community and in the system right on there's three phases in which people can get can get involved

17:10number one is on the private round which it might be closed now but if guys can add value in some way in the sense that you know guys who have an impact in the web 3 space or in the web two space or in the reward space avilable asset side if there's an appetite to add value this is we generate open for guys to get in our

17:36private round well it is quite expensive the minimum ticket to get in is 25k but for us it was important on the private run side to surround our sales with small investors who can add value the second way will be our community pre-sale which we will announce very soon so stay tuned on our Twitter and Discord and the third will

17:58be will be when we list the token and once the token is listed on our on our dap and our reward so you'll be able to St your lingo tokens and accumulate those loyalty points to claim rewards very cool hm and I can leave the Twitter and the platform links and the other Social Links in the show notes below as well is there anything else that you want to mention before we go I

18:21I would love to follow up with you in the near future as well but just for this conversation is there any last words we're very excited this is we've been building for the last two and a half years so imagine worst B market in crypto history our vision was simple Let's test it out let's do something that's easy to understand with real value and real utility and see what

18:42happens and we were ex surprisingly extremely surprised when we started our private round in November 2022 the peak of the bare market and we sold around nearly $6 million of lingo tokens with nearly no marketing which showed that there is a massive need of something easy to understand with real value and real utility in that space and no one's doing

19:08it and so for us it's the ultimate it's the ultimate proof that there is a need to solve these problems in the space and this year is super exciting we just crossed 51k today after so many years bit Bitcoin I'm talking about Bitcoin ETFs got approved having is in a month we have the US elections and we're launching this year so we are

19:33we're super excited and with people who pleas in our vision you can join our Discord speak to anyone from our community members and hopefully you hop on board the lingo train all all very exciting things thank you so much for your time hm all the best with lingo moving forward and let's definitely follow up in the near future appreciate your time

19:57ason