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Investment, Impact, Tech: Shira Lazar Hosts Tony Chan (Pledge Finance), John Mullin (SOMA.finance), Chris Boundikas (Quoth, Inc), Shelly Palmer (CES), Daniel Eilemberg (Lil' Heroes), Brady Gentile (Hedera), Ivan Ravlich & Brenda Hua
We did it! Jeff, Josh and Eathan, along with the huge crew of Rockstar team members they assembled, just pulled off a stellar inaugural NFT LA event featuring the crème de la crème of Web 3, and leveraging the vibrant entertainment scene of Los Angeles. This episode is one of a series featuring content from the NFT LA event, March 28-31, 2022. Today’s session is one of a handful featuring impromptu convention hall interviews that our good friend Shira Lazar put together. We’ve organized them into tracks, similar to the content tracks we organized for NFT LA talks and panels. Today’s track: Investment, Impact, Tech & Platforms. Enjoy!
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
NFT LA Collection – Investment, Impact, Tech & Platforms: Shira Lazar Hosts Tony Chan (Pledge Finance), John Mullin (SOMA.finance), Chris Boundikas (Quoth, Inc), Shelly Palmer (CES), Daniel Eilemberg (Lil’ Heroes), Brady Gentile (Hedera), Ivan Ravlich (Hypernet Labs) & Brenda Hua (OP3N, LLC)
NFT curious readers, it’s Eathan here. We did it along with my incredible cohosts, Jeff and Josh, as well as a huge crew of rock star team members we assembled. We have pulled off a stellar inaugural NFTLA event featuring the Crème de La Crème of Web3 and leveraging the vibrant entertainment scene of Los Angeles.
This episode is one of a series featuring content from the NFTLA event, which happened from March 28th to the 31st, 2022. This session is one of a handful featuring impromptu convention hall interviews that our good friend Shira Lazar put together. We have organized them into tracks, similar to the content tracks we organized for NFTLA talks and panels. This track is on investment and impact plus tech and platforms. Enjoy.
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It’s Shira Lazar at NFTLA with Tony Chan from Pledge Finance. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you. It’s my honor to be here.
You are one of the sponsors here, so we appreciate it. Tell us more about what the company is and what you do.
We are a marketplace for financial NFTs. We take Bitcoin loans and convert them into financial NFTs. We let people trade on our marketplace. Also, later on, we will be taking all these NFTs and we can use them as collateral. People can borrow money against it. You don’t have to sell it.
If you have an NFT, you can get money against that or get loans against your NFT.
That’s the vision.
Does the NFT need to be liquid? It needs to have value, right?
The main reason is I’m a real estate broker. For years, I did a lot of real estate loans. We see Bitcoin, NFT, and Ethereum as a new class of digital assets. People should use this the same way as they do with real estate, where you can get a loan out of it. That’s the vision and the idea.
Do you need to deal with traditional finance to do that and you are the middleman?
We deal with traditional finance in terms of the lender. It’s the money from the traditional financial world. We have a lot of high-net-worth individuals, family offices, banks, and financial institutions. They want to loan out the money through the Pledge platform to people who have Bitcoin or financial NFTs as collateral.
That is so cool and needed because it brings more value to the space.
It’s very meaningful. I’m doing this because I’m a real estate broker for years. I see people who have a borrow demand. Some of my clients have bought Bitcoin at $200 to $300. I bought in at $4,000 in 2017. I would not be selling this Bitcoin myself like real estate. I started buying real estate in the ’90s. I won’t be selling those but at the same time, I need to borrow money against it once in a while to do diversification on the borrow side. On the lending side, it’s meaningful because there are a lot of people like my mom and dad. They put money in the bank and get less than 1%. The banks are scamming them. It’s a lot more meaningful to loan it out from our platform. They get 3% to 4%, which is a lot better than 1%.
How do you handle the volatility?
Volatility is very important. For example, anybody who wants to borrow $1 of Bitcoin needs to put $2 worth of collateral. When the Bitcoin drops down to, let’s say, 120%, we start liquidation, so we have a buffer to protect the lenders.
Where do you see the space going in the next few years?
It will be exciting. We are part of the DeFi space. In two years, we grew from $1 to the last I checked $100 billion now in the DeFi space. In the next five years, I see this will be at least another 10X. All the banks have an issue with getting high-quality loans. It’s not efficient. The business model for banks is inefficient because, 1) They have to pay high salaries to their employees and, 2) They have to pay all this expensive rent for the branch offices. What we do is we write the software smart contract. It’s scalable.
For those who are also interested in the NFT side, which is an entryway to the DeFi side, what advice do you have?
My advice to these people is if you bought an NFT early on, you hold onto it and get ready to put it on the Pledge platform as collateral and you can get loans out of it. You don’t have to sell it. You can get money out of it and buy more NFTs.
Do I just connect my wallet?
You just connect with your MetaMask wallet or any wallet. We have a smart contract interact with it. Everything is done automatically.
Is there anything coming up in the future for Pledge that you want to talk about?
We raised $3 million in VC funding from DHVC. We did a $10 million public sale with Tokensoft. We listed our token on KuCoin and we will be listing it on different exchanges going forward.
Go check it out, Pledger.finance. Tony, thank you so much.
Thank you.
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John Mullin from SOMA.finance. Thanks for being here.
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
What brings you to NFTLA?
I’m one of the people who came the furthest. I’m normally based in Hong Kong but because of the COVID situation, I have relocated to New York for the time being. We are here to share about SOMA.finance and hopefully meet a bunch of new creators and potential partners that we can work with.
Tell us more about SOMA.finance.
SOMA.finance is essentially a US regulatory compliant DeFi platform. What that means is we are creating DeFi products but with a KYC, AML, and securities compliance behind it. We have essentially abstracted away a lot of the compliance elements to try and make it as Web3 and tech-enabled as possible. We have licensing underneath that supports us to be able to issue different types of securities to tokenize equities, ETFs, commodities, and all different types of assets, as well as compliantly, issue and distribute NFTs and other different types of tokenized assets directly to US retail consumers.
That’s very much needed and the balance between maintaining the authenticity of this space also.
You have the Wild Wild West. You have the NFT projects like the Pudgy Penguins and all these other kinds of things, which are cool. I’m all for that as well. I also have another project called MANTRA DAO, which is the other side of the coin. You do need regulation to a certain degree to give comfort to institutional investors and make sure that you are protecting the average investor to a degree as well.
Why have you been able to do this and yet so many other people are not?
Investment And Impact: NFTs is now starting to play into de-fi. In many cases, NFT collateralization is being used to take out loans.
To be honest, a big part of it is the team and the partners that we have. It’s quite an interesting makeup. You have me and some other younger guys who represent the crypto side of it. We have our other partners who run the broker-dealer business who have 25 years of investment in banking and securities experience and have come from a different world than what I’m used to. We are able to work together quite well and we have known each other for a very long time. It’s quite a unique partnership. That is able to bring the compliance and the regulation side of things and meet with the tech.
Is there insurance here, meaning is it backed?
We are a Federally regulated institution. When we get a banking license and things of this nature, we will be DIC-insured. For the time being, the way that we are tokenizing assets, particularly the real-world ones like equities and stuff, we are legitimately backing them 1 for 1 held in a custodial account with a traditional custodian like Merrill, Morgan Stanley or something like that. We will be auditing these regularly, so there’s complete transparency about exactly what we are doing.
To any hacks that happen, what would happen?
The good thing is because of the compliance elements that we have built into the system, there’s positive control over a lot of these different types of assets. We have to permit people to be able to use and interact with them as well as the ability to at least on some assets to burn, pause, mint, and freeze. Let’s say there is an infinite mint. If someone takes control of the keys and starts minting, we would have the ability to override that.
We have thought out the system from the compliance angle on how to make sure we are safeguarding users’ assets and funds even in the case of, let’s say, my MetaMask gets fished or my seed phrase gets compromised. If you have verifiable evidence and proof of that, we can legitimately reissue you new securities and burn the old ones that were hacked. That’s a pretty cool thing.
What do you have coming up? What are you excited about?
We are pretty excited. We are going to be working with some cool partners here. One little alpha tip is we are going to be working with Baron Davis. He’s going to be one of our venture partners. We have had some pretty cool engagements with him before NFTLA at his party in his compound.
I was at his dinner. He’s at a lot of different things. He’s so busy.
He’s got his hand in a lot of stuff. Baron is a basketball player turned into a businessman. He’s going to be more known as a businessman than a basketball player in the future, which is going to be quite cool. We are looking to be the financial services and investment bank infrastructure provider to all the projects that he’s working on to make sure that he can do these things compliantly and that his team and his people can sleep well at night knowing they are not going to get in trouble by the SEC, FINRA, or something like this.
It’s so important that it’s part of where we are headed. What are your predictions for the future? Where will we be a year from now at NFTLA?
To be honest, sticking to a little bit of the regulation angle, I do foresee regulations to continue to come down the pipeline in the US particularly not just for crypto tokens but also for NFTs, whether that’s going to be coming directly at NFTs or rather the exchanges that they are transferring and trading on is a different question. With the Executive Order issued by the new administration or President Biden’s administration to show that there’s going to be intergovernmental communication and cooperation to regulate and control digital assets in general in the crypto space, that means it’s coming.
Do you think that is going to help or hurt the industry?
There could be some short-term pain because there are burdens with compliance. There’s a lot of stuff that would be easier if we didn’t do it the “right way.” That also adds other elements that are good for the industry. You don’t have the scams, rug pulls, and things like that. We can protect clients’ assets if they get fished. We live and see it all the time. It happens daily. There are benefits that come with that. Longer-term, it will be beneficial but I also think that too heavy-handed of a regulation is not necessarily the best way for people.
There almost needs to be a reimagining of it. How could we take the best of each space and bring it together?
I’m American myself. It’s interesting to see how power has shifted within the Web3 space from the US and then to China. We thought it was going to be in some other place. Now it’s moving back to the US as the epicenter of things again. That also comes with a responsibility to not be too heavy-handed. It will be interesting to see how things progress.
What advice do you have for those coming into this space?
Sign up for the SOMA.finance waitlist. That’s a little bit of a shell. My advice is to go out and meet people, come to these different events, network, get into the space, get your hands dirty, be careful, use a cold wallet, and always never share your seed phrase. That’s a lot of advice.
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Chris Boundikas from Quoth. Welcome. How’s NFTLA for you?
It has been great. The attendees, the booths, and everything have been awesome. There are a lot of people rolling through. There’s great energy. There are a lot of different crowds, young and old, and all-around new people. There are people that don’t know what NFTs are and getting to know NFTs. There are DEVs here that know way more than I do. It’s an interesting crowd.
That’s what LA is for. It’s tech and entertainment. Everything intertwines. What is Quoth?
What we are doing is we are indexing every NFT in existence. We are creating the Google semantic search of NFTs. Some of the pillars that we are offering are an authenticator API. For example, if a new artist wants to upload their newly created art, they can drag and drop it into our search bar. For a nominal fee, $0.50 to $1, they can authenticate that their NFT is 100% original. We will give them an originality score. That’s just one pillar. We also do real-time rarity. Within an hour, we scrape new mints. We will give a real-time rarity and because we have artificial intelligence, we can continue the rarity on a 24/7 cycle. There’s no lag with our technology.
It’s a bit more of a sophisticated version of some other tools or sites. Is it launched already?
We are days away from our closed beta launch with some of the largest NFT collections. One of them is here, Sup Ducks. It’s a great partner of ours. What we are doing is we are training our neural nets with our machine learning with the communities of those NFT collections. That’s going to help us spin up this index a lot quicker than anyone else can. Once we have that index, we go live with our full bells and whistles public beta.
If I did google an NFT, your site would pop up as a way to make sure I’m buying the right thing. Are you expecting people to ditch Google or to go directly to you ideally?
The plan is that we are building fences around the NFT space. I won’t cut around that fact. We are building the Google of NFTs, keeping it close with the NFT community first, and then opening it up to real-world NFTs as well. We are making it very simple. It’s a search bar. You can search semantically, “Black cat with a hat NFT.” Press enter and all the black cat NFTs will all show up in order of relevance.
They are all legitimate. You know where you should be going. How do you deal with the scams out there?
For the legitimacy or fake rugs, we are indexing every NFT in existence. We will give the originality score. We scan the contract for you and do all that research for you. If you see a pink checkmark on there, that’s the one you should buy. It will port you to where you should buy it.
Where do you see the future of all of this? What will we be talking about a year from now?
I thought you were going to pull the whole five-year.
Do you want a five-year?
It doesn’t matter. NFTs are the future. We are already speaking with one of the largest 3D manufacturing firms in the US. They have 150,000 printers scattered all over the country. They have turned their blueprints into NFTs but they said, “There’s no infrastructure in place to verify these. There’s no trademark and copyright.” They need that instant verification. They turned to us and said, “How can we help? How can we partner?” That’s another real-world NFT adoption use case. That’s already here. In 1, 2, or 5 years from now, I am a proponent of everything that is going on in NFT.
It means they are still on marketplaces. You are not a marketplace but they could make sure it’s verified through you. The rarity tools show that. Your ability to show that and know if you have one that is rare is important in real-time. Would they click through to go to other marketplaces through your site?
We are also offering an APR-SDK service. It can implement on any wallet and NFT marketplace.
You are that one-stop-shop solution. Is there anything else you have coming up that you want to share? Are there any partnerships or you can’t mention anything now?
We are cultivating the crypto community and the NFT collections. A lot of NFT collections are reaching out to us and people who are ready to mint. Those collections that are ready to mint are saying, “I don’t want to pay those sites 1 ETH, 2 ETH or sometimes 5 ETH to register and load up on their site.” A big thing that we are hearing is that NFT collections hate uploading or updating their metadata if it changes. In some of the NFT collections, the data changes. Every time it changes, they have to give it to those sites and pay again. With us, it’s real-time and free.
It’s part search. It seems like it’s also a part marketplace.
We are not going for the marketplace feel. It’s more search authentication and NFT launchpad. Down the road in the roadmap, we have a multi-chain bridge as well. New mints can go across the chain immediately.
What advice do you have for people entering the space?
Do some research. Don’t get pulled into the hype. There’s a lot of junk out there. We see it all the time. Our AI is curating so much data. It’s insane. What I mean by insane is last we checked, there were 1,000 NFT collections launching a day. The amount of distraction out there is going to be intense. If you are new to the space, you can get called into that and spend a bunch of money on something that most likely won’t be around in 6 weeks, 6 months or a year. Heed to the distractions, do a lot more research, and be careful.
How will your tools help with all the noise?
We made our search pretty easy. If you don’t even know what Bitcoin is, you can still come to our site and do a simple semantic search, which is fairly difficult to do even to look up NFTs. As far as the whole scamming, getting rugged, and buying a fraud, that’s exactly what we are here to stop. If you come to our protocol, we help that because we do all that verification process for you. If you are an NFT degen, you might not need that part of our site because you can check the contract, contact in Discord the founders, and all that stuff. If you are newer and you don’t want to do any of that stuff, that’s the one-stop-shop that we can offer for newbies as well.
For those starting a project, how can they get in touch or get involved with the platform?
It’s easy. We have a partners tab. Fill out the five inputs. Our Biz Dev will reach out and put you on the waitlist. We already have a ton of NFT collections on the waitlist. Once we start ratcheting up, the AI takes over. It’s a very fast process and automated.
Even though you are everywhere else, you will want to be on this platform.
You can still go to NFT marketplaces and swing around but we are a research tool. We are aggregating all this data. It’s a lot easier to do the research on our site and then make the purchase on OpenSea or any other marketplace that you want to. It’s going to port you there anyway because we are not hosting the sales.
Thank you very much. I appreciate it.
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**It’s Shira Lazar from NFTLA with **Shelly Palmer
Keep moving with it.
That’s it.
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Daniel from Lil’ Heroes. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
How is your NFTLA experience going?
You were telling me one of your favorites.
It’s going to be a show and a brand.
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Brady Gentile from Hedera. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you. I appreciate it.
How has your NFTLA experience been?
Congrats.
Thank you so much for talking to us.
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Ivan Ravlich from Hypernet Labs. Thanks for joining us.
Thanks for having me.
How is NFTLA for you?
Where can people find out more?
Congrats again. Thanks for being here.
Thanks for having me.
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Brenda Hua from OP3N. Thanks for joining us.
Thank you for having me.
How is NFTLA for you?
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Important Links
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App Store – OP3N
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Dumbfounded – Twitter
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Spotify – Edge of NFT
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iTunes – Edge of NFT
About John Patrick Mullin
John Patrick Mullin is a performance-driven, high integrity, self-disciplined, goal-oriented leader with outstanding interpersonal skills and a proven track record of success at increasing levels of responsibility and authority.
He is an impact player and proven leader within both large corporations, startups and growth-stage companies. He has proven experience in traditional finance, FinTech, blockchain, venture capital, and investment banking as well as employee development, education, and training.
He is also a professional public speaker, writer, and educator with previous experiences working with large multinational companies and prestigious academic institutions.
About Tony Chan
Introducing Tony Y. Chan, founder of Pledge Finance, earned his Electrical Engineering and Computer Science degree from UC Berkeley. He then went on to earn his Masters in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1996. He was picking EECS because it’s one of the hardest majors at UC Berkeley and he wanted a challenge.
Soon after graduation, Tony pursued a career in Software Engineering through Microsoft. He picked Microsoft because he wants to write software for the mass market, and achieved that by writing part of the Windows 95. In 2003 he founded his first company in Facio Software Inc., where he grew the company from $0 to $1.8 million in just 18 months. Tony continued to work as a VP of Sales, VP of Marketing and Consult for China at several other companies.
It was not until 2013 where Tony found his niche in the world of real estate. He started as a licensed realtor who specialized in investment properties throughout the Palo Alto area. He does about $20mill in sales each year. In 2017, Tony had an interaction with a real estate client who wanted to buy a house with bitcoin. This sparked the idea for Tony to found Pledge. He realized high-networth individuals view bitcoin as a new asset class and they have borrowing needs. At the same time, his investor clients wanted to look for stable fixed-income investment opportunities. Unlike its competitors, Pledge is a financial lending platform that caters to customers seeking longer-term and fixed rate financing. Pledge intends to primarily serve crypto-asset holders who are looking to diversify their profile with non-crypto assets and miners who need cash to pay for electricity.
About Chris Boundikas
A proven leader in the financial services and crypto DeFi with extensive experience in futures trading, blockchain and business consulting, a recognized authority on all things tech related with 17,000+ connections.
A thought leader with exceptional communication and organizational skills who thrives in fast paced, high pressure start up environments.
About Shelly Palmer
I’m a business advisor and technology consultant based in New York City. I create value for my clients by keeping them up to date on the latest technological trends and helping to make that knowledge actionable.
My company is called The Palmer Group. We work on digital transformation, marketing, strategy, hybrid workforce solutions, and blockchain (decentralized finance, cryptocurrency, NFTs, and Smart Contracts) with Fortune 500 companies like Ford, PepsiCo, Walt Disney, Facebook, Delta Airlines, Charter, Travelers, GSK, Marriott, Viacom, Discovery, SunTrust Banks, and PVH, to name a few.
Aside from my business advisory work, I am the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications. I write a daily blog and host a weekly show called, “#Web3Wednesday.” I cover tech and business for Fox 5 New York, and I’m a regular commentator on CNN and CNBC.
If you’d like to get in touch with me, email, Twitter, and LinkedIn are best. Here are a few pages that might interest you:
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Bio & Headshots – My biography, headshots, speaker kit, etc.
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Original Music – yep, that’s where all this started.
About Daniel Eilemberg
With a stellar record of building and acquiring media businesses, I have comprehensive experience overseeing content initiatives across multiple platforms and formats, with a proven track record of driving production, sales, launching brands, leading strategy, building teams and partnerships, and delivering award winning content.
I am able to leverage a strong strategic business acumen and creative experience to engage with talent, representatives, buyers, and senior corporate leadership. I have a strong understanding of media production processes, both technically and creatively and a proven track record at initiating, driving, designing, and leading successful projects.
About Ivan Ravlich
Ivan has been involved in many cutting-edge technology startups: from biofuels to plasma rockets. His time as a Ph.D. Candidate in Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford bridges his scientific expertise with business acumen in developing a multidisciplinary approach to technological hurdles.
With his co-founder, Todd Chapman, Ivan has grown Hypernet Labs from a parallel computing marketplace company to innovating digital commerce and Web 3.0 applications for greater accessibility for borderless product innovation. When Ivan is not guiding Hypernet, he enjoys playing music, board games, and ballroom dancing.
About Brenda Hua
Work experience spans across music marketing, production, agency, sponsorship, and management. Just trying to get as tangled up in culture as possible.
About Brady Gentile
Experienced Product Marketing Manager with a demonstrated history of working in distributed systems, security, and public blockchain / distributed ledger infrastructure.