Next Level Adoption - Fuse Network's Mark Smargon Interview

and we should be ready to start i say it's excellent condition and we are good to go so guys welcome back to another live stream of box mining here and i chose a really cool topic for this interview because it's the next level of adoption and this is a project that's been building in stealth mode for a long time fuse network they've been working on building with communities building all the way of talking about scaling there's a lot a lot going on over here so today i want to introduce to you guys the ceo fuse network mark and mark let's get a little bit started i mean you know we don't have to be so formal here i kind of want to tell get you to talk about your story of how you got into everything and then we'll start doing some questions and then we'll open it up to everyone to ask questions in this live interview how does that sound mark amazing so i'll give a bit of a background about me and the company and first of all happy to be here and definitely there was a lot of like you chose an interesting topic for me to join this evening and so i actually started my journey 20 years ago started my first company long before there was a bitcoin it was an e-commerce provider in israel and i'm i'm based in tel aviv and living lived here most of my life and really at the year 2000 e-commerce just started the um inside of the company commerce like was a really really really new thing people were still asking me about like the internet is is this going to be a thing you know until recently people weren't sure if the internet will succeed or not uh so um when i saw bitcoin uh for the first time when i had a chance to buy one bitcoin uh just for the sake of experiment because i i learned about this technology in 2012 i think and then in 2013 i said okay either i'm buying one bitcoin or i can i can forget about it so i bought one bitcoin and i'm basically eight years since doing this full time yes and and i feel actually my fourth company uh third in the space and all the companies i started were around uh payments and and payment acceptance this is also the reason i'm i was so intrigued about crypto and bitcoin to begin with because when i bought bitcoin as an israeli e-commerce provider i know that the the the challenges of accepting money from people abroad like let's say i'm an israeli company and i want to sell something to americans i have to be registered in america so um bitcoin will kind of bypass extremely complicated expensive underwriting processes uh that are distributed to the mon like i i'm not exaggerating uh tens of thousands of companies that do it separately for each merchant you know field agents and underwriting costs and acquiring banks and issuing banks and and you hear about this complexity and see bitcoin so elegan replaces it so that's that for me was a sign okay we need to upgrade with times and this is what i've been doing since so i think this is something that i spoke you know the first time i spoke to mark i was like wow this guy's been in this space for quite a long time you know like you said start of the internet right and then moving on to payments and bitcoin and you saw the possibilities for that so that was very early on so how do you see how everything has progressed are you amazed by you know the developments that we see here in crypto and you know what what are you looking forward to as well yeah so i i think it's really interesting to start you know from the internet as a general product then going into crypto which is kind of like dealing with very uh essential part of our of our society and and then when i started the um and my first company in this space we really saw that bitcoin was hard to buy we weren't really planning to to focus on on you know ethereum it wasn't a thing yet it was really early days of okay bitcoin is an electronic cash system it's a crash replacement i'm i'm working in e-commerce let's just add this to our all of our stores so they can accept bitcoin as payments so we had like people buying cell phones with these food so we have places where you can go in tel aviv pay with bitcoin get meal but then we said okay it doesn't make sense nobody wants to use bitcoin to pay uh it's it's like paying with your stocks you know like going to store and buy something with gold nobody really like there's no consumer demand to use bitcoin as a payment system or like alternative to gold and then when we thought when we started colu which was my second company in crypto and became one of the biggest blockchain companies in israel this is where we really understood that this is fintech the end game is not really a bitcoin adoption it's really um for everything else so you know post-trade settlement to uh to gold uh tokenization to uh to like art and and and really colored coins uh the protocol that we tried to build really said uh very plainly let's let's represent real world value on the blockchain that was the idea those were the ideas that ethereum was born from in 2013 and uh around that time um 2013-2014 ethereum started the you know to grow in in the head of italic and before that it was actually part of colored coins and and the ideas were the the same the execution was different we we as colored coins uh developers we said we want to use bitcoin because uh forking bitcoin is a blasphemy especially in 2013 it's still a blasphemy to this day and and vitaly came and said i will create a new ledger because bitcoin is limited it's it's aimed to solve one business problem and we're trying to use it for another and that's in a nutshell why color coins you know this didn't succeed because you need to create a you know a special ledger if a special technology solution if you have a a problem a business problem so you can have like a technological one size fits all solution to all problems i mean i think this is so early i mean i think like so you were there with italic when he when the idea of ethereum was born in his head that was when the color project was on so you were you were there right this is like this is how early it was and i think like that was kind of the the evolution so you're talking really about the evolution of ethereum as well where it's now solving not just a payment problem right so bitcoin has a very limited scripting language um it has like basically 16 commands basically right but ethereum itself is turing complete so this means that programmers can program as much as well whatever they want without any limitations so that was the evolution of ethereum and now where does kind of fuse fit in this whole story for everything here so you you're talking about kind of turning the focus away from purely just getting merchants to accept bitcoin now where did you want it to go so naturally we had a very big research team and we at the colored coins we we looked into ethereum we looked into hyperledger one of the the first people there when this the bitcoin has a problem and more than it has problem it wouldn't accommodate colored coins like bitcoin people we talked with the uh gregory maxwell and people from the bitcoin community they didn't want colored coins they don't want anything to be able anyone to be able to create those you know ico's or or alternative means of exchange that are not bitcoin on top of bitcoin uh so we realized that we need to find a new solution uh looked into lightning looked into like second layer solutions uh and then uh i would say about four years ago um we basically said this would be probably the best alternative um erc20 made color coins obsolete overnight but in 2017 when when it it brought it came to the attention of mainstream uh it wasn't really usable so ethereum uh even today is not the most comfortable thing to use uh so even if uh all of metamask you know has millions of users and if you look at the defy it has like a little bit less than a million users something like that it's not it's not crazy numbers yet i don't see it goes to 50. i don't see metamask getting like mainstream adoption ever like you know there's a glass ceiling to where you can take ethereum main right now the way it's built and and and of course on the other hand it kind of became like the hdp of money you know in a sense any company today since the 2017 to till this day the entire digital asset market kind of captured within ethereum uh not i don't mean captured in the sense that you know ethereum as a currency but if there was a standard uh it has more adoption from developers than any basically all other platforms together so what we said is let's fuse together those protocols that they were built on top of ethereum this is where the name fuse comes from and let's take and do and do vertical integration for one specific use case which is simple transfer payments visa-like transactions that you can imagine people doing every day very useful very universal buying coffee sending remittance giving your kids allowance none of that will ever be done on ethereum or on bitcoin we want to create a system where uh where we're doing this vertical integration and it's really easy to implement for anybody and everywhere in the world and it's a different narrative it's using crypto as an infrastructure that is transparent to the end consumer as opposed to how crypto works today which is you know user usually consumer facing our consumers maybe don't want to pay gas or know about gas or deal with public keys or deal with verification times or with transaction finality wait for three confirmations to do that so all of those things we really try to to replicate what people already know which is wechat venmo square cash every country has their own you know a product and this is the experience that that they know about and places that don't know about wechat we want them to replace this replace physical cash with this which which is an easy sell in my opinion interesting so i think this is a long story i think a story of trying to get merchants to adopt crypto i think this is and you know this guys this is something that i've talked to mark for a while so for um you know we actually have bi-weekly meetings where we talk and his story is actually very interesting because you know there's definitely technological limitations along the way and approaching this it's all about kind of the idea where you know they're saying about fuse came along is that now it's finally achieving to a point where they can achieve a use case for um visa like transaction and that's that's what kind of drew me to the project in the first place and fat and we have quite a few friends in common which is great but um that was a kind of a primary driver like being able to have fast kind of kind of even without gas fee so how are you achieving that right now so you know i've looked at the kind of fuse network i've tested the apps but i guess for those who's not very uh introduced to this ecosystem how how is this even possible on ethereum yeah so i think the amazing thing is it wasn't possible until there was enough uh uh critical mass of adoption uh so if you look back on in 2017 most projects were projects were utilizing ethereum at the very basic um um functionality like icos and if if somebody wants to do something a little bit more complicated with contracts you had the doubt you had like hacks and and people were scared so not too many experiments for that were done done back then but since three years the last three years uh people uh seem to not notice the the crazy amount of developers that are working in this space and it's hard to to explain this if you're looking from the outside and but it took us six months to build everything we've built on bitcoin for two years and this is this is really the the benchmark that people need to look at like how easier it is to develop stuff that were previously complicated and very experimental and now they're kind of robust battle tested widely used and have like a lot of support and documentation so when we started doing colored coins protocol nobody uh ipfs wasn't a thing and nobody really used torrents we were the first people that said okay we need metadata to be somehow persistent and stored you know and every token has like a lot of information or can send the dock chains can store information how do we deal with information that you can fit in the chain so uh ipfs wasn't the thing we use torrents actually like uh like plain uh a hack like torrent files uh with the color code code protocol but today any any company that wants to use uh decentralized storage can just use it ipfs is like a main part of the of the infrastructure so goes to bip 39 metamask erc20 standards have evolved uh w3c and you know the the standards body for the web they actually create it created decentralized identifiers which which takes us forward you know with browser interoperability with uh with a digital or decentralized identity started that people talk about for years now they're starting to gain like more and more adoption a new team that will want to do stuff on crypto today has much more ecosystem much more tools and much less friction relative to even you know a year ago and if you remember stable coins were not a thing until like a year so really really early in the game this is something it is true i mean this year we saw suddenly the rise of not just stable coins right so suddenly you know people exploring beyond usdt you have usdc the die we have maker dow all of a sudden we started understanding decentralized finance and what you're saying is well the tech was catching up too so from the stuff that you built all right so you said you spent around six months to build what you built in two years on bitcoin so what kind of stuff did you build from the validator side to the the whole the app that works together what what kind of tech did you build there to to allow i mean visa like payments is the kind of the holy grail of payments here so yeah so everything that goes on top of a blockchain we had to build from scratch we didn't want to build it from scratch we had to because there was no like something that we can actually use so the network itself the blockchain itself of course nobody since satoshi ever built his own blockchain from scratch there's no not such even vitalik you know and so and the network itself is uh as similar to ethereum as possible everything you can do on mainnet you can do here which is very similar to the to the direction where all the big options are going all the ethereum killers have ethereum support like without exception so that's like the first rule we need the durability we need every solidity contract and every tooling uh remix to ganache and all those developer tools to be interoperable um with use that's first thing and then we want a non-technical people because right now blockchains are more more um easy to use by developers you really need to be a developer now it's more comfortable if you're a developer if you want to use crypto it's more comfortable right now for developers we want to make it uh so everybody can can use it uh so if i want to create a near c20 and i want to launch a wallet and i want to create another program and i want to do stuff that's very similar to what they would want to do with maybe wigs or shopify now shopify you can create your own e-commerce store so on fuse you can create your own marketplace or your own store your own wallet it's very similar we don't want this this ability to be only for developers so naturally that was uh that's that's something that we made like 10 different iterations if you go to fuse.io you will see the studio it's like the 10th version we're building for the last two years uh so making it usable by non-crypto people is a huge challenge like technical non-developers and next thing which probably was the biggest effort in the last last year uh was really building a wallet and that would be uh replicating mainstream experience like wechat venmo but still not custodial and open source so that's a huge technical challenge how do we keep like centralized experience and not custodial so just show you guys the wallet here so this is the fuse wallet so you guys can check it out already it's already here you can either generate wallet and can switch communities and then you can also issue out your own token so this is something that i've been looking at quite deeply over the past few weeks and also been generating my own test communities as well and the kind of interesting um part about it is that it's so kind of really fast to do so like you click a few buttons you create your own community you can also create with your own coins and tokens and then send that between the members um for basically for free like for a transaction so so um you know one of the biggest questions right now right obviously because you know it's like ethereum but it's not ethereum right so how do you get around having like the gas issue right we saw ethereum clogging up i mean luckily these few days is less clogged but you know during the cloggy days of ethereum gas transactions will cost you know two to three four dollars for our transaction how would you get around the gas issue so we we worked our way backwards uh from the business need we said that our goal is to have one million transactions a day uh costing one cent per transaction in two years from now so we kind of worked backwards from that we said the the the the fees have to be fixed we won't have merchant adoption unless we have fixed fees like no merchant will ever use something that can you know fluctuate one time it's five percent one time it's zero uh so that's that's definitely one main thing for adoption that is important the second is is horizontal scaling so uh to create uh to create a global ledger a global settlement network that has like a limit on tps you have to have a fee market but if you're a marginal cost for every transaction is negligible there's no reason transactions will cost more than one cent because we're optimizing for a specific use case people that use few that use mainnet they want to buy dollars they want to use you know financial instruments on fuse they will always do one specific uh a p2p transfer so that that's not traders not speculators we're not talking about a high friction trading or something like that so we're optimizing for for this specific use case and horizontal scaling means that that we can use like second layer which is like vertical scaling but if we would create a secondary solution right now we would be doing the same mistake we did with my previous company trying to build their own software stack that only we're using that's that's really the main thing the reason we also chose the name fuse because we wanted to integrate to the standards that already exist didn't want to create a new standard for layer 2 uh there's enough companies in the world right now so many companies trying to solve scalability problems for ethereum i would argue ethereum doesn't have a scalability problem has demand problem if only million people can use it right now uh you know if you can ramp it up to 50 million it doesn't mean overnight you will get 50 million users uh so with fuse we really want to to build it in steps right now what we have is a 100 tps it's not faster than visa but it's faster than ethereum and it allows us to to bring the network to one million transactions a day and once we reach it we'll have fuse 2.0 which will be more scalable than ethereum and then visa so the goal is not to look at trying to outcompete ethereum it's really outcompete visa so that's like the really like the philosophy behind our pricing right so you price it as a stable stable price okay so having it um you know having a target at the start saying okay this is how many target um how many transactions we want to target for and how to aim for but yet again scaling this on a decentralized network is not easy though right so you you said you use um you wanted to adopt similar standards that's great but yet again um you know bitcoin can and bitcoin ethereum we also we are both both you know have a very low maximum tps how how do you achieve this from a tech standpoint you know are using some sort of scaling technique or you know how does that work the the only reason blockchains are slow is because of propagation time uh which ethereum 2.0 tries to solve with like i mean if you're storing a million transactions that also requires a lot of space i mean bitcoin you're always talking about that you know block size and you know like yeah um you know how do you get around that problem are you gonna have this infinitely you know huge uh blockchain database of transactions so yeah so right now like as i said that's a first step second step first step is being faster than made than the ethereum and this is achieved by having a lower amount of validators lower amount of validators more less propagation time faster dps and then you can optimize to 100 and the the the the advantage here is although you're not as fast as possible like it's still not like really crazy fast uh it's battle tested robust it's using proven code you can you don't need to run it one year in production to trust it you know usually every new blockchain you really need takes time until it reaches a point where you can actually have money on it so it takes time if you're running untested product product here we know it's tested it's faster because there's less propagation times second phase you're doing transactions of chain so uh either with zero knowledge proofs uh optimistic rollups uh you have plasma you have like millions of solutions all of them try to achieve the same thing let's move to a second layer trading in in cryptographic proofs don't store all the information on chain and it makes a lot of sense if you want to optimize for p2p transfers and have million p2p transfers there is a way to do them off chain if you have like a a good vertical integration for that then uh you won't you're right so you have a scalability solution and you have adoption and users but still you don't you don't want to have like a scalability solution one million tps but zero users so it's kind of had to go hand in hand this is the problem with eos they they said we will solve the propagation time we'll have 21 nodes and you know you're making transactions really cheap so you can make a lot of transactions but no real users or no no like nothing that really can compete with the theorem so scalability is not the only thing that matters you really need to scale hand in hand with adoption this is what the theorem does like really true i mean we've seen so many you know next generation blockchains right and the biggest problem is well you know why aren't people using that right you know all the all the all the ethereum killers have already launched and we're still on ethereum so that being said of course you know if you don't want to fall down that well um of lack of adoption right so you know what's your goal here i mean your goal is brent right like from a strategic angle you want merchant adoption want more and more people using it but at the same time you're creating a new currency a new coin and then you know that obviously has a less smaller audience than ethereum so how do you plan to create the adoption so i think i think it's really confusing a lot of times in in the crypto space uh like i can ask you do you think if there is a b2b platform or a b2c platform oh that's i think ethereum is still a blank piece of paper right now uh exactly so it's kind of tricky question you know um like if you think about it it kind of blends the the the terms because it's kind of like in in terms of utility it gives you sort of aws like services right but it's also an investment vehicle and and kind of like some people want to turn it into money so it has a consumer appeal which is amazing like i think second in the space probably uh so i wouldn't say that uh that fuses b2c for sure it's not consumer facing we're saying like the future in uh you have more than one blockchain so probably blockchain is not going to be consumer products uh you you have like thousands of different blockchains and maybe as a consumer you wouldn't care if it's running on this blockchain or that blockchain it doesn't seem um it's a it doesn't seem possible to teach people about the intricacies of what's happening with their transactions on presenting them so in a world where you where you have more than one blockchain and value flows free between blockchains you need the product like fuse and it doesn't necessarily needs to have consumer appeal because it gives you kind of the aws equivalent service and a lot of projects are exactly like this model they they they're used by the backend they're used by the operators they're used by the by the providers they they consumers can hold them but it's not a consumer product so i think a few things here too i think this is kind of very interesting when you just bring up the whole battlefield and whole situation of crypto i think what's interesting i mean for me right um and i always try to exit this angle but i'm being i'm in crypto all the time so um it's so natural for me to use x y and z but if i want to teach someone how to use it it actually takes quite a lot of explaining to do and this is where the barrier of entry for crypto comes you know it's hard right and this is where the challenges for bringing mass adoptions has always been i think for example like i recently got a few friends into crypto and i'm like okay you know if you want to learn a little bit and you want no risk try some yield farming but like for them to install metabask draw out that if and then start approving that transaction then trying to understand what a liquidity pool is that took like literally like a week to explain that and it was hard it was hard work and you know i've evolved the process over time but i find that this is this is going to become it's still a very very large challenge and i think you realize that from the get-go right i mean i think when you started you said you bought your first bitcoin and then you wanted to convince merchants to use it in israel and um it just turns out that first of all to convince someone is hard but also for customers to be there there's no customers right at that point eventually we'll get there right but and i think maybe going i'm being from a very abstract view and we we went to a very abstract place we're saying look um for this kind of like everyday payments i can see a lot of power for particular items but at the same time here right like um if you abstract away all the difficulties about blockchain there is also one big problem where you get less and less decentralized right you're starting to abstract away these problems you're trying to remove um you know how how do you even back up your private keys okay you know maybe you shouldn't worry about that maybe we should put in a centralized location or maybe like yeah you know if you want something faster you don't want so many nodes because propagation time is slow you're saying the more validators there are on the network the slower it is or maybe what happens with reducing the number of validators so i think that's an issue right wouldn't you say that as we start to abstract away these problems with blockchain and you know you said fuse is important but would it fuse walk towards that problem what becoming more and more centralized yeah but i think um somebody smart i think it was mark andreessen that said the way to make money with the software is by bundling and unbundling and it's true but with crypto as much as it is uh for like regular software uh but if you look at uh at stripe for instance they bundle a lot of like the value chain of the payments industry at least for north america europe and and bundle it in the product and a business model that can easily be used and understood by the the merchants so that that's the secret of their success square is is same thing uh we want to be a decentralized version of that we want to bundle those like crypto primitives uh um pieces of code infrastructure back-end apis standards best practices uh bundle them but in a way that doesn't change the end consumer experience that replicates it instead of trying to teach something new so uh so basically in the future the way the way i see you will you will not have like crypto wallets and regular wallet it just doesn't make sense any more than uh i call it a linux phone you know my iphone has linux behind the scenes but i don't call it a little spawn and if you really ask about linux uh 15 years ago nobody would tell you that they're using it or it's somehow a successful product but today it's a it's a something everybody are using they're not even aware like right now our stream is probably going through like probably a dozen linux machines and my phone is linux on behind the scenes and so this is really something that was useful for developers and then consumers used it as a transparent layer and this is what i believe we're adding with crypto and not only it's not something i invented i i see it's happening slowly if you look at argent for instance philis transactions you don't need metamask ads you see signs of the things to come within the crypto space today you can see those products you can see it's possible so if it's possible you know it's it's really close to be scalable it only need men if there's demand you can build it like i don't see the technical blockers uh to to make this happen what i'm describing here to replicate centralized experience i think this is interesting because i think um my background has been science and you know there's a bit of imagination in there but also i think i've been very very focused on you know what um has been rather than what will be and i think this is something that you know i've learned a little bit from mark as well which is you know having the vision to see what's kind of out there so now okay let's say let's say you know let's say everything successfully launched what do you see in like three years for fuse how would you see people using it what uh what what's kind of your vision and goal there yeah so uh we are focusing on operators like local franchises and we want to have a 1 000 within two years 1 000 franchises that will basically do different stuff but all share one same uh need which is a good payment experience it's very universal consumption spending uh uh easy you know payment easy payment those are like universal stuff doesn't matter which language and we're already translated to 10 languages so we know the pitch works really really well and the focus on the long tail you know instead of going the top down focusing bottom up focusing on the small communities on places where there's absolutely no reason somebody will physically go there and build something like that but because it's open source it can reach any point in the world we actually have a community in the amazonas a village in uh in brazil and it has thousand people live there and they use a paper currency called verde and they they started to transact uh with this currency and everybody have phones and so paper currency is not really comfortable not really scalable young people don't use it so it's it's really something that that has a like even stronger than crypto adoption even stronger than than open source those two trends the biggest trend more than that is that cash is disappearing everywhere physical cash is disappearing and so we want to capture this market and this is right now the opportunity it's going to quadruple in the next five years and there will be just more wallets more places in the world that you know that that have this like push uh i saw this in my previous company we had a centralized service uh we end up with uh with using a database there because bitcoin wasn't ready and we had something half a million installations four thousand merchants it's possible to reach those numbers and very fast because there was a consumer demand and where's the consumer demand you know it's easier to to you don't need to educate the market as much as you would like one small company would have so that's really the vision um like tell me a little bit about what you're doing so so there there's um small communities that they just choose to adopt fuse but why would they choose views over anything else and how are they using it at this current point like for payment or for um yeah for their own currency or whatnot so a great example uh we have a company called the pay wise from trinidad for instance uh that um in trinidad for instance uh it's an amazing place to launch something like that they have a currency that is back to dollar their national currency they're sovereign so they have their own central bank and they don't have any they have they don't have a lot of uh of uh credit card penetration it's mostly cash based society all of them have phones so there's no like a smartphone adoption problem um and uh because the currency is back to dollar you can actually back it by die you you know it's possible to be those uh to think about those uh interesting stuff but what are what is the problem you're solving they don't have foreign exchange they don't have local banking they don't have payment apps there's nothing like that there because it's only a million people that live there there's no there's not not necessarily the resources to develop our uh advanced you know a banking infrastructure so this isn't a good example of a company a local operator that already has merchants that just came to fuse and and started working we have another company in spain with the same exact product they want to do cash handouts and physical cash for charity is terrible it's absolutely terrible because you give cash handouts you don't have any idea what people are doing with them maybe they're buying apple with them you don't have like an expiration date or something or maybe something like more similar to food stamps so this is what we did in in in seville in spain one of the poorest places in in in spain uh you can go and buy stuff uh with digital vouchers and this was launched like in two weeks so the big advantage you don't need to invest a lot of money you don't need to wait a lot of time and a lot of approvals you don't need money transmitter license you don't want to be the issuer so you don't want to have e-money so if uh if usdc meets usdc you don't really have to to have license to accept this usdc as a as a as a default currency in your community so you can deal with third-party issuers uh for instance in europe right now there's two uh two issuers of uh of euros you have uh like only in indonesia for instance there's like three major stable coins that are back to uh to indonesian i think it's rupee i don't remember but yeah you have like those small stable ecosystems that form that remove you from the the regulatory need to have like a license to for e-money and issue your own stable coins so you can use you know somebody that already did that and uh tap into that ecosystem so this is really the vision so you can it's like money legos but for the real world interesting i think like and that's just kind of um two facets right so you're saying that you know and i think this is quite true i mean we saw that happen in china as well where china kind of leapfrogged from the credit card system so they went from cash straight to wechat and now they're leapfrogging again to dc ep right so their central bank digital currency so that market is already quite mature so it's hard to penetrate but what you're saying is smaller communities that don't have the facilities and you know they're relying on and choosing an open source solution because it's much cheaper to implement so that's the kind of the sector you're targeting right now so it's not exactly the biggest biggest communities in the uh like the the most wealthy communities i think that's already visa already has a big foothold in north america and it's gonna be quite hard to kick that out but what you're saying is um in small communities this is absolutely possible so um you see you listed a few a community in amazon um so view i'm kind of surprised i mean yeah explain so so so okay take me through this like let's say if i'm in spain how um how would i get exposed to this is it only for a particular residence or is it only for particular shops how many shops accept that yeah so right now it's a it's a small pilot we only did like 5 000 euros and let's move through there and the 5 000 euros are a stable coin that is created with the studio with our product it has a local version that you can download from the app store called wikibank you can all go on our home page and see the the link it will show you five merchants where you can spend the money and the the local organization wikibank is accepting donations and giving the handouts they they onboard the merchants and charge a fee from the merchants so in my opinion now and i think it's smart you don't want the charity to be like a non-profit you want charity to have a business model if uh if uh if you want to do like operations and actually have show donors uh what their money is doing and track it and you know being able to to to to to be accountable for the money and uh you need to have a business model around it so this is really something that we we really focus on with fuse every one of our operators like i said it's a franchise they need to earn money so in spain for instance they're getting donations from those third party basically anyone can donate and this company is basically doing the distribution and they do the footwork and they deal with the money out for merchants and they deal with uh with basically getting those merchants discovered let's say that we don't have this product that we the alternative is using visa or just a big retailer and then the money goes to big retailer you know so uh what wikibank is doing is then adding only smbs so you can only the money you're getting for charity you can only spend them on solve businesses so there's a lot of aspects to this that they that are not necessarily about charity it's also about trying to keep the money kind of circulating inside so one dollar i'm not charging we're not charging like three percent like visa or like sorry drive square paper they all charge three percent here it's one cent per transaction so incentivize to move it around one dollar can have like much much more economic activity than if you just pay with mcdonald's with visa and just you know the money leaves the system so it's really trying to find those uh places where we want to create economies this is also our tagline it's not about just accepting payments it's about circulating the payments making b2b payments making uh p2p payments uh but in the end of the day it's even larger than this think about uber airbnb companies like that all they're doing is basically giving you credit they're they're basically doing payments and reputation those are the two main uh things that the the two main services that the companies like uber provide when you go to a cab you're actually getting uh your credit checked within the uber x system you're actually getting clear to enter the cab by the bank which is uber so you because you can't really like if you notice the experience of paying with uber is very pleasant because they did this integration and they're managing the reputation and they you know you're good with the money and they clear you and it's taking 30 percent so everywhere where let's say that they have scooters and i need like i'm living in the middle of the desert i have a small village and i bought scooters and i want to integrate payments and reputation to those scooters naturally i wouldn't charge 30 percent you know i just want like a very simple integration so this is what you allow i would say like it's more than just a bank i think uber still also kind of guarantees that the drivers won't scam you and they they're not thieves or they won't send you to the wrong location i mean there's a little bit more than just purely credit i understand you know 30 i'm exaggerating i'm exaggerating i just said it's a it's a it's like payments and reputation yes so mainly like airbnb it's paying yeah and a little bit of insurance i think that's that's where the 30 because yeah 30 is actually very very steep i mean if you think about it like yeah like um the the the driver gets like 70 cents for every dollar you spend so that doesn't make sense right yeah so um yeah so building a payment network is simpler there but okay so you proposed a few things right so i think we'll um towards the end of the interview we'll also ask a few questions so basically um i'll i'll read through the um the question list um as we go towards the end so we have quite a few people i just want to give shout outs to nick bernard we got alquan buzz in the house as well as well as try try b so thank you guys all for watching and showing up so one of the questions that nick posted was you know like okay how do you replace stripe though i mean you kind of named that as one of the early guys you know you start building from these smaller communities sure but eventually you know how do you become bigger otherwise the giants will just keep eating you alive at this point yeah so i think that the main selling point this is why we compare ourselves to stripes where you just get a lot of tools uh that they that get you up and running really fast with stripe and those companies as i said before just like they bundling uh the payment value chain you don't need to deal with uh with payment processors and fraud detection they're basically doing clearing you and from this point on you can use anything out of the box free you only need to pay three percent so that's a steep cost so uh what fuse is doing is very similar you you don't need to be a developer you don't need to know crypto you can launch very fast you can operate this thing with other people and do the footwork deal with the customer support set your own business model and so we're bundling all those tools together and making it very easy and actually since we started last year we had 300 people that 300 communities created on mainnet i would say that without marketing this is a very high number because again it's very very low entry barrier anybody can do it it costs almost nothing and allows you to do something very expensive for almost free you only you only pay on chain fees so that that's really how we plan to grow by by bundling this and offering it uh with a easy use usability and free so it's all about fees right okay um going from this right so now we have the fuse token and people have um kind of uh asked about the price i think something that we do want to say here is that um you are launching a kind of uh uh liquidity offering i would say so can you tell me a little bit about you know where the token direction is going at what's the current plan at this current point yeah so we want we didn't want to be the only company that will make fees from this or will make the data you know most business models around payments are data related we didn't want to like mine the data on that from everything is free on only we're we're reading your transaction history so that wasn't the purpose also we wanted to create an open source ecosystem how do we not selling code you know which is the business model where most financial services is are built on it's either data fees or or selling code so if you want to create an ecosystem that will compete with visa naturally you can't just you know lose their own business model you need to uh to invent something new in my opinion after doing eight years this is not a project that can be created without a token and to create an ecosystem token is the best tool and this ecosystem doesn't need to be like with us as a gatekeeper so how do we create a business um an ecosystem that we're not the gatekeeper we don't make all the money from the fees we we don't make all the money from the data and it stays free forever so we built the dpos a blockchain and we are big fans of tezos as a governance method dpos solves a lot of problems for base layers uh specifically how the economic majority can you know steer the way let's say that uh i'm a holder uh i see that suddenly the validators uh want to increase the the fees uh by 100 percent i can actually vote with my money and uh an economic majority can basically uh govern uh which is very important because if we just let one group govern that's a huge problem so dpos with the state and the ability to participate you know in governance not necessarily by run directly with like representatives by delegation i think this is a um a great invention and uh definitely a good base to build on and this is why we're releasing the token and we write only right now we didn't want to raise money on the white paper we wanted to raise money on a functioning network with with delegations taking everything working actually we're one of the 70 validators currently secure in the network and so we wanted to show that it's functional working there's people interested in joining those validators that actually running in the network for a year so people can talk with them just more uh more uh proof that the the this is a project you know ready to to break out instead of just you know starting working on the product finishing with the white paper so that's that's really what it was the approach so message is going to be 10 million tokens and it's the first time we're doing this public distribution we did a private private set of the tokens never um never did any icos or public distributions like that so so a few things right so one of my biggest concerns obviously i'll just be very honest with you guys here was that the token already is launched on uniswap right so right now it already has a trading price how does this fit with the liquidity offering as well yeah so we released we minted 300 million tokens one million out of them when we started selling to validators uh at patches of 100 000 tokens so we're talking about very minimal amounts to only several validators today what we're releasing is 10 times bigger than that so there is small liquidity in the market because we had to build the network and without the token the network can't be functioning and naturally when you have validators some of them want to sell because you know they have expenses so i think if you see at the price which is holding up pretty nicely the liquidity is very very low and the massive event is to change that to increase the quality in the market and so every time somebody wants to buy more than like 10 bucks of worth of fuse you wouldn't like should the price way up now so uh right now uh liquidity on uniswap it's very transparent why we did that and how much value there is there and you can see that there's not a lot of sellers so we didn't really distributed uh anything out of that circle of validators okay so right now there is a price of mesa someone was asking what the price was i'm not mason on uniswap but okay so so yeah will the mesa price be lower or higher than the current unit swap price so a mesa is six cents right now in uniswap it's about it's around 10. uh but you need to see the market depth because the market depth is like 150 000 tokens so we're not we're talking about something that can't really be used with a larger amounts we're talking like an ether here either there you can right now bound buy on uniswap so it's hard to say market price with only 150 000 tokens uh on mesa we're going to release 10 million tokens and it's going to start at six cents which is lower than uniswap why because we wanted to start from where the private cell left off you know we wanted to start from the private cell um price got it so so that's that's kind of the start so people were a little bit concerned at the start and definitely i want to say you know right now in uniswap the liquidity is very low so definitely be cautious um you know it could go and swing very wildly in price but after they liquidity event which is at six cents that's when kind of we're going to increase yeah that's when it's going to increase people were asking about this these are pumpkins i bought them for fun i guess caloween's coming up soon so i i bought something a little festive something a little orange um on my desk i'm also going to open up to questions so um we'll have uh questions um from the the channel as well so if you guys have any questions to ask we'll definitely um ask and see here um okay so now now coming up to this like um you know you talked about a few things so during the last call you talked about product hunt as well and how you're launching this how how's that going um what's the product launch um like yeah so so product hunt is one of the one of the things we launched uh straight when we started the company but we never uh we never really uh like we were the plans to launch the lunch it and we said like right before we're launching messa we have lunch on on product hunt so it's going to happen tomorrow and this is a really uh interesting that it's like right before mesa uh good timing um and i think uh we'll share a link on our social channel so just subscribe and and we'll share with everybody but really it's the biggest product community in the world and not necessarily for crypto so if we can get a nice score there it's definitely not for crypto people those people don't know about metamask if you can somehow create any traction with you know the crypto product with these crowds this is a huge thing so this is why we we're always pushed for a product so tomorrow it's going to happen nice nice i hope they didn't reveal too much there but i think one thing to do to ask this community as well as um i think you know something that you know fuse has been trying to do is push for the greater adoption and that's something that i definitely wanted to do throughout you know um all this time so if you guys can support them on a product launch and go and check it out i'll definitely encourage you guys to do so it will really help with uh whatever what fuse is doing and what they're pushing forward so how you highly encourage that um and also of course if you guys are interested in the fuse token and the governance model itself then definitely check out the man's sale as well so with the mark we'll open up to some questions um we got mark jesus um i need a telegram link also off i'll throw in the link so i'll definitely add the socials um after this video is done i'll also like i'll find a way but it's it's a little bit hard because i turned everything off to add the the links here but we'll do it so um so okay so so so that's next that's the mesa launch so what can people expect so once they have the token um you know how do you how do people even use it on the platform then on that in that case yeah so first of all uh um i want to to just um um um say like we usually don't use it in our advertising but every time you use the the platform every time you create a community on on on the studio you're actually getting some views behind the scenes especially if you do it on mainnet you're right now getting 100 few tokens which is a a a nice amount of money yeah this is like the equivalent the way we we see it it's like amazon credits you know usually when you use aws they give you like a little bit of credits so we want to give credits to like fuse credits to people that are using the platform so that's one thing another thing that people don't know about yet and it's kind of secret but i'll tell it to you here and we're going to launch fuse swap after a messa which is a basically a unisop unisop fork that will run on on fuse and every people every time people will use it they will get fuse in the background so i think what's interesting about this uh gasless uh exchange um is uh actually we didn't really release it yet we will communicate this after messa uh but it's it's this is of use so it's using unisop but without fees but also without a lot of friction uh so this is something we we will communicate right after messa and so there's a lot of stuff that that we like a gunpowder you can call it like we didn't use everything we have in our arsenal and and one of the things we're excited the most is really announcing our future plans and because they're really ambitious and and those really interesting stuff that we only recently discovered are possible so definitely the roadmap i think is one of the interesting stuff you know just throwing money on marketing and bringing uh um you know more attention and and brand awareness that's one thing but uh creating 100 communities and fuse and creating all the products and tools you need for them that's that's really important everybody knows uh where this platform is headed so this all happens after messa so and that that that's going to be an interesting ride definitely and i think that's cool something to share so this is a um from markets himself i think and and i think that's quite quite amazing as well i mean and we saw uniswap how it took off and this time you know being gasless and free i think that's something that is kind of the holy grail for everything so it's definitely something i'm very much looking forward to so i think like yet again concluding uh today's session it's actually like um it's kind of funny it's actually like 12 a.m over here so concluding this i'll definitely say you know guys um they're releasing on product kind i'll definitely try to encourage you guys to just definitely just show them a little bit of support i'll be doing that too just to say you know tomorrow tomorrow and then also of course checking out what they're trying to build as well i'm pretty excited for the roadmap as well so hope you guys can check it out um some people ask me my involvement as well in this i did invest um into um uh and into fuse and i did buy fuse tokens and the reason is it's mostly mostly to do with what they're building i think um there's some like okay from a very personal from a more deeper level right so um i've always wanted to have stuff that can improve adoption for crypto and they um fuse is definitely approaching this from a different angle um being being a free and open source and being able to provide communities with tools to build their own ecosystem to build their own coin and potentially in future to swap that you know that provides power and that provides a unique value proposition and that's kind of my reasoning for everything behind here obviously there's a lot of vision here um i think it's a very big contrast to the content i do as well um you know uh for me as a person i'm a very kind of like okay what can we do today person and sometimes you have to expose yourself to what can be there tomorrow right and i feel like this is one of the talks that is a lot more visionary and i hope you guys enjoyed that as well so definitely definitely um i encourage you guys check it out um people asking stefan asks what is the mesa he's referring to so mesa is a site to do a bonding curve sale or to do sales so um i'll link that as well so mesa is an exchange basically yeah um okay so uh yeah yeah i guess is um wait how do i buy fuse tokens though so fuse is being offered on mesa for a sale so that's probably the best way for liquidity um currently it's also on uniswap but you know swap has very small liquidity right now so that's the the the real way is really through the mesa sale um okay so um we got uh lachne said jett says is fuse a dex no i think no this is not the best fuses uh is a is a blockchain it's a public blockchain okay so yeah so we got jetta says fuse is level two tech specialized in payments there we go so i think that's pretty much wrapping up to for today's session um we've got troi basis thank for school uh thanks for the scoop mark thank you definitely thank you mark for coming on board today i hope you guys all have a great day um you know enjoy halloween coming up soon and i hope uh mark also you have a great day as well you too thanks for first thanks so late thanks guys thanks guys yeah i also thought this was a good time for everyone here too so tell me if this time is good for streaming if you guys have any comments and feedback leave it in the comment section down below and yeah uh we'll try to answer as much as possible get mark back here to try to answer them as possible on the stream so guys thank you guys so much for watching i'll see you guys soon