In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Wayne Marcel, Head of Business Development for the Foundation for Interwallet Operability (FIO), talks about FIO reaching 1 million crypto handles, NFt authentication, and the recent impact bank issues are having on the crypto industry.
About Wayne Marcel
Wayne Marcel is the Head of Business Development for the Foundation for Interwallet Operability (FIO), who has been managing, teaching, and coaching high-performing teams for over 20 years. In 2016, his passion for helping and teaching people was merged with his passion for technology as he dove into learning about cryptocurrency and blockchain. He published a book in 2018 called “From No Crypto To Know Crypto” and hosted over 140 educational podcast episodes under the same name. Since then, he has dedicated himself to working with projects that make using cryptocurrency easier for all.
Wayne Marcel gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
- FIO reaching one million crypto handles
- How usability holds the key to mass adoption of cryptocurrencies
- How NFT authentication and security could be improved with FIO signatures
- The impact recent bank issues are having on the crypto industry
- How FIO can easily help onboard new users to web3
- Benefits of operating as a DAO compared to a centralized entity
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We are buzzing as always. I am back in Toronto. It’s a little bit no bueno, I’m not gonna lie. Going from 30 degree weather and sun every single day. Coming in hot now we’re coming in cold. I think it’s six degrees today. Snow is still in the ground. Can’t win them all. Good to be back home. Good to see family, friends. Good to play hockey again. Good to smell that Toronto air, but Mexico will deeply be missed. Super pumped to have today’s guest on the show. He’s coming in hot. Coming in for round two. Wayne Marcel is back. The head of Biz Dev for the Foundation for Interwallet Operability, also known as FIO. Wayne has been managing teaching and coaching high performing teams for over 20 years. Got into Crypto way back in 2016. Published a book in 2018 called From No Crypto to Know Crypto. That is no know little wit there. And has hosted over 140 educational podcast episodes under the same name. He’s done it all. We had a great numero uno epi. Pumped to have him on for numero dos. Wayne, welcome back to the show, my friend.
Wayne Marcel
Hey, Matt. Thanks again, man. Definitely appreciate you bringing me back on here.
Matt Zahab
Last round was an absolute treat. We had a blast. You were dropping bombs left, right and center. We love to see that. Let’s get right into it. Last couple of months has been absolute craziness. I love the events. Unfortunately, again, as I’ve been in Mexico this year, I didn’t get to attend ETHDenver and Outer Edge, which was formerly known as NFT LA. I’d love if you could give me the rundown. What happened at those events? How were they? Was the buzz still there? Could you feel the electricity? Give me the whole nine yards on those two events.
Wayne Marcel
Yeah, absolutely, man. It was definitely two extremes from the two events, but both good in their own way. And this is kind of how I feel. I love events, especially in a bear market, because a lot of the hype is gone and you really meet people that are truly building in the space and man, ETHDenver was just obviously the best one yet. There was I think estimates were anywhere from 25 to 30,000 people there. Wow. For that one man, it was unreal. A lot of new projects, a lot of things happening in the space. I was even able to do a demo video. They had a Web3 vending machine there where I was able to take my NFT ticket, walk up to the vending machine, and it was time gated. So every so often I could go up to that vending machine, scan my wallet, sign a transaction in my wallet and get a free drink and I was just kind of highlighting the different aspects people don’t even think about. Everybody thinks about NFTs that have to moon, that have to be worth tons of money, or they think about tokens that have to moon. And really, utility is what’s going to get us where we need to be. So ETHDenver was amazing. It was cold, snowy. I’m like you. It was hot and sunny where I live, right outside of New Orleans and had to fly into the snow. And it was a great event. It was a great lot of people. And then Outer Edge, it was just different. Outer Edge is not a long established event. It just started last year. So it was definitely much smaller. You expect it to be smaller than the prior year with the bear market, but just the quality of people that were there was great. The people that we met that were building stuff, building things, and we actually had a booth for FIO there had quite a few people come up and just so many projects stopped to talk to us about how they could use FIO. And I’d say probably one of the best contacts we made there was some guys that used to be former executives at Upper Deck, the playing card company. They’re doing some really cool things where they’re merging physical cards with NFTs. And so they stopped to talk to us about what they could do. I actually met a lot of people out in LA too, that are working with agencies, whether it’s agents for actors or agents for sports or even with the NIL, the name, image, likeness being a big thing for college athletes. They’re looking to figure out the proper way to get those people into the Web3 space and capitalize on really owning their brand, owning their identity. So both of them are really great events.
Matt Zahab
I love that. Let’s get right into FIO. You just teed up for me, Wayne. One of the biggest questions we got after our first pod was how FIO differs from something like ENS. Almost everyone in Crypto is familiar with ENS. There was that huge sort of run two years ago last year. I want to say in Q1, we had the run with numbers, and that was get your four digit ENS name, get your three digit if you were lucky enough, heck, even jump on the five digit train and you would have made a couple of ETH. Now, FIO has a much larger use case, right? A much larger potential use case. I’d love if you could sort of just give us the rundown on FIO in case our listeners missed round one with you. And to follow up with that, just sort of walk into a bunch of the use cases that the names have.
Wayne Marcel
Yeah, absolutely. So. You know, when we talk about our main use case for FIO, it’s it’s the wallet naming service. And most people bring up the fact that they under. They know what ENS is. A lot of people hell, I got my ETH way back in 2018. I’ve got blockchainwayne.eth that was one that I claimed way back when, because I saw that the necessity of having wallet names and people need to think, I’m just just like your email addresses or your social media handles. One, you want to get them before they’re gone. Two, when you think about email addresses, I’ve got handles for FIO that I make public that I give to everybody, and I’ve got other ones that are tied to cold storage wallets that I don’t give out publicly, just like I teach people when I used to teach people about getting started in Crypto. Have an email address that you give to everybody and then have a separate email address for your financial accounts that you don’t give out publicly. So that was the concept. And with FIO, unlike ENS, we’re interoperable with all chains, all coins, all tokens. We’re not limited to just EVM. We’re not limited to just certain coins or tokens to where even if you spun up a new chain tomorrow, the way our protocol is designed and FIO is built on our own layer one chain, immediately you could map those wallet addresses to that handle. So imagine whether it’s Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, Avalanche, Cosmos, and going on and Down the list, everything you can think of, even the Tether you have on your hat right there, right? So imagine Tethers on multiple chains. Imagine being able to map all of those to a single handle, to where when someone’s going to send it. It’s as simple as typing in an email address when someone wants to receive it. It’s as simple as letting someone know what that is. What’s the current process? We’ve got to copy and paste these long wallet addresses. So if I wanted you to send me Crypto, I’d have to copy and paste my wallet address, then I’d have to send that to you. You would get the message. You would have to copy and paste it leaves a lot of room for error. There’s also a lot of room for hacks, so it’s just making that easy. And also if you send Crypto to wrong address, if I copy and paste and accidentally fat finger a number on my phone because most people are using their phones when they’re using digital assets, then it could be gone forever. And with FIO, it also provides the guardrails where if I type that handle wrong, it won’t let me send it. If I type it right, but what I’m trying to send doesn’t have a map to address. It also won’t let me send it.
Matt Zahab
That’s huge.
Wayne Marcel
And we use the @ domain instead of most people that are familiar with the ENS and other wallet or any Web3 domain service they use dot. The problem with Dot is there could be a conflict with the centralized naming system for website addresses for top level domains. And we’ve seen that. I purchased some Unstoppable domains in the past and Unstoppable had to refund us the money because that domain ended up being there was a conflict with it.
Matt Zahab
Can you dive deeper into that? I don’t completely understand. So when there’s a dot in the domain ICANN, which is the process that reads the name, it screws something up in there?
Wayne Marcel
No, ICANN is basically the centralized service that basically handles the distribution of website addresses and top level domains. So .com .io .net all of those different ones. So there was actually one for Unstoppable called that was .coin, and that one was they sold it to everybody and then there was a conflict because it’s using the same naming method that our current naming method is using when you go to different websites and FIO, the differentiation here is we’re not looking to build websites on FIO domains and FIO Crypto handles. The whole purpose is to be like your username, your wallet identity, your wallet handle, and in many cases so starting to go into use cases, we’re also seeing a lot of games show interest in the FIO protocol because they can get the @domain and as I mentioned that the Crypto handle is in the format of username @domain so you can buy an @domain. So say one of the games we’re working right now is called Altera. So @Altera they have their own domain that certain users can register their username at Altera if they want one, just within that game’s ecosystem but Altera is also offering their users. What we’re seeing is there’s different guilds or clans that are registering their own domains and then letting their members of that guild or clan register their username at clan name and able to have that identity to where it doesn’t matter if they’re playing a game on as play to earn games and Blockchain based Web3 games start to grow. Whether they’re playing the game on the Solana Blockchain or whether they’re playing the game on the WAX Blockchain they can have that universal handle that is across everything. So that’s their handle, that’s their gamer identity. But also when you want to send an asset to them, like most of the in game assets like shields and skins and all these things are going to be non fungible tokens. So if I want to send that to someone I don’t have to ask them what their address is, their name is their handle and I can send it to them. So that’s our biggest thing. The biggest thing when people say oh, it’s like ENS or it’s like Unstoppable I don’t feel really compete with those because they have their specific use case and we’re seeing FIO just kind of evolve into a lot more of that. we’re also seeing FIO handle is not something that standalone is a decentralized identity solution. But we’ve actually been talking to quite a few projects that are building true decentralized identity solutions to where you control your identity. There are certain ways to verify you without giving up all that sensitive information and. And the FIO handle is one portion of that kind of ties in that identity. Because let’s face it, right now, I mean, you go to a centralized exchange, you go to five different centralized exchanges and you set up an account, you got to give each one of them your name, a copy of your ID, potentially Social Security Number, all the sensitive data that is held across multiple places. And it makes more sense in the future to have certain indicators, certain things that you can do. If verify a certain digital identity on chain that can’t be altered, then that’s me. And if I go to another system, then if they can verify me without me having to give all that information, that’s better in the future. Not just for us, but as these generations come up, everything I do for adoption, I think of the future. Because for us, Crypto right now could be very speculative in terms of investments and strategies and things like that. Even gaming, really. But man, my kids and then my future grandkids that haven’t even been born yet, they’re going to grow up in this world, and it’s not going to be a world where a lot of people are going to be using digital assets, using Crypto and Web3 and not even realize they’re using it. And FIO is just one of the solutions that I know is going to make it easier to where when they go to send or receive something, anything. It’s a familiar process and it’s not this foreign thing. Like I’ve got to copy and paste this 30 character string of letters and numbers just for someone to be able to send me something.
Matt Zahab
I love that. We really need more apps that are built on Web3 tech that look and feel like Web2 tech, right? And man, oh, man, I’ll never forget the first couple of times I sent and received transactions and I’m just sitting there just parading to the man upstairs of the woman upstairs, whoever it might be that stressful that this four or five digit transaction is going to get evaporated into thin air. But story for another day. One of the milestones rather that you guys recently hit was. Reaching your 1,000,000th Crypto handle. Huge congrats to you and the team. That is incredible. The thing I love the most is that you guys continue to haul ass in the last sort of one and a half year bear market, right? Obviously we’ve seen DNS names besides the big sort of digits and the big blue chip ones. It’s really fallen off a cliff. And on the other side, you guys are continuing to buzz as I love if you could just talk about sort of grinding and continuing to focus and be motivated building in a bear market. And did you guys celebrate? Did you pop any champagne, do anything special for hitting that 1,000,000th handle?
Wayne Marcel
Yeah, we did some Twitter spaces with our team internally, a group of us just got together just to celebrate. I mean, 1 million is just a big milestone, but in perspective, it’s also very small in terms of where we need to be. But just like anything else, hitting that first million is a lot bigger to where I think the next million or 2 million or even 10 million is going to happen at a faster pace as we accelerate towards adoption.But it’s important and we’ve been focusing on utility and that’s the one thing we’re not flash. We’re not trying to put a bunch of hype into the market, but we provide a service that people need and that’s not always sexy and it doesn’t always get attention. So it takes a lot and it takes a lot of grind. And I was telling the team recently, we’ve got to work harder to drive more awareness of it, because when I’m at these events and people ask me what is Theo? And I explain our protocol to them in simplest terms, I get a lot of the same reaction. People are impressed, that’s amazing. Why haven’t I heard of you yet? And so it’s our job to do better of getting it out there. Obviously, you hear about an ENS domain selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but that doesn’t fuel adoption, that’s still just speculation. And, yeah, we like to see a lot more domains sold. But at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if we sell another million handles or a million domains even out there, but we don’t further adoption, then it’s just going to spike and come back down because that’s not really leading to adoption. So our goal is not just to drive hype and speculation and say, get this use field protocol, get your field domains and they could be worth a lot of money. It’s about driving utility where users are using it. They’re mapping it to wallet addresses. One of our great partners, Opera, has been registering a ton of Crypto handles because when their users set up an Opera wallet, they set up a FIO handle right away. And immediately every Cryptocurrency that’s in that Opera wallet is mapped to that Crypto handle. So it’s not just driving get your handle, it’s driving users to actually use it when they interact with those wallets. And that’s really what it’s going to take just to fuel adoption, to fuel more awareness. And for people, you’re right that there’s friction in that Web2 to Web3 transition and we’ve got to reduce that friction. And we’ve got some things in the works. We’ve got one of the partners we’re working on right now to develop a great solution to where when someone goes to play, say, one of these Web3 games or join get onto a Web3 platform. The process to set up and spin up that wallet is simple, easy, but it doesn’t compromise on security because typically if you do that, then you have these systems where it’s a centralized wallet where they have custody of the assets and you don’t have control of the private keys. So we’re actually working on that solution to where you can integrate this FIO protocol to give that user experience, but also have a wallet that’s easy for users to use. And I was hearing that actually at the events too, because when people learn about FIO, the next question they ask is about a particular wallet. And so this is just one of the solutions that we’re working with. But it’s needed because a lot of people that aren’t in this space already. They don’t really care if it’s Crypto, if it’s Blockchain, if it’s Web3, they just want a system that’s going to work. And if it’s better, if it’s safer, it’s more secure. And then they learn that they have better control over their data, their identity, their assets and everything. That’s just a bonus for them because if we make it too hard, people are going to go back to the centralized systems like, hey, I never had any problem with PayPal or Venmo where I lost money trying to send transaction, or if I did, they’d return it to me. So how are we going to solve for that solution? We all know that in the long run it’s better, but most people, they just care that it works.
Matt Zahab
Wayne, you got to take a quick break. Give a huge shout out to our sponsor of the show. And when we get back, we’re going to talk about how FIO can help onboard new users to Web3. First, we got to give a huge shout out to PrimeXBT longtime friends and sponsor of the Cryptonews Podcast. Our whole team loves the PrimeXBT team. Incredible people who have built a great solution offering a robust trading platform for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet, you can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT is also running an exclusive promo for listeners of the Crypto News Podcast. You can use the promo code CRYPTONEWS50. That is CRYPTONEWS50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Again, that is CRYPTONEWS50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. And now back to the show with Wayne. Wayne, let’s get into onboarding new users. We’ve talked lot about the use cases for FIO, more specifically in regards to how that helps. Maybe not even chiseled vets, but just people already in the space. Walk me through the importance of new users working in tandem with FIO to help onboard them into Web3.
Wayne Marcel
Yeah, well, it’s just like any other business or platform. If you only have a certain audience that you’re speaking to or that’s using it, and you don’t grow that audience, you’re not really expanding the ecosystem or really growing business, even marketing, you’re just sending out to the same people. So we’ve got to grow that user base. One of the things that I haven’t really mentioned publicly before, but we’ve talked about internally, is FIO makes Crypto easier. And it’s funny because through my educational journey in the Cryptocurrency space, where I started educating others, my journey, I started out one, diving down the rabbit hole, learning about why this is important. Then I started helping people individually, just teaching people, not really not charting anything, just one on one. Because the more I taught people about it, the more I learned. And then I started working with projects which eventually led me to FIO. But the whole goal is if you want to grow your user base, there’s only so many people already in the space. You’ve got to onboard new users. You got to be able to bring people on. And a lot of times sometimes you got to start with the basics. So we’re going to be rolling out just some additional tools, just some basic educational information, like a small type of I don’t want to say like academy, but just educational resources to onboard new users to where, if they come to FIO, and even if they want to know what a wallet is, they’ve got the information right there I know this information is everywhere. But you see, platforms that are really focused on that, they house that information within their own site because the worst thing they can do is have someone come to your site, get stumped on something they see, and then they go to Google or YouTube to try to figure out what it is. The next thing you know, they end up on a scam site, a scam video. So that’s why it’s important. So we’re not competing with all these other platforms that have their own educational resources, but we’ve got to cater more toward and I think everybody needs to cater more towards those users that are coming in just to make that onboarding easy over last year we’ve launched a dashboard to where users can even use the FIO protocol and wallets and exchanges that haven’t integrated FIO yet. Which is really cool because it gives you the ability to manage that until some of those platforms get on board. Because our protocol is most powerful the more places you can use it. And so while we’re continuing to focus on growing our ecosystem and hey, if anyone’s looking listen to this, and they’re a wallet exchange, an NFT marketplace, or really anything in between at deals in the Web3 space, our protocol can be integrated there. And another thing that we do to drive new user adoption is we’ve got a bucket of tokens set up to pay for new users to get their first Crypto handle. So when someone goes to register a Crypto handle and it’s free, it’s still paid for on chain because we’re a layer one chain, our block producers, our stakers, everybody still has to be paid for that transaction, but it’s paid for out of that bucket. And then we also have an incentive for integration partners to where if someone integrates the FIO protocol, they also earn a portion of those on chain rewards and fees. So it’s an incentive for them to drive more use case I mean, what we saw with Opera is driving significant traffic to the FIO protocol. And through doing that, they’re earning substantial extra revenue each month. It’s a new revenue stream. So whether you’re a wallet and exchange or any kind of platform that you have users plug into Web3, we’ve got that set up. And hopefully that’s going to continue to fuel more people to use the FIO protocol because everybody is rewarded for using it and it makes it super simple. So that’s really our ecosystem. What we’ve got to do, we’ve got to start getting to people in places that aren’t just in the Cryptocurrency space. So if we’re only marketing to Cryptocurrency news sites, to Cryptocurrency platform platforms, those are important, don’t get me wrong, because that’s where people tune in to learn more. But we’ve also got to expand out. And we’ve had some internal talks too about focusing more on onboarding. Companies from say, Web2 to Web3, because if I help you on board from Web2 to Web3 and trying to figure out how to take your company from, okay, you’ve got a website, you’ve got this, you got social media presence, but how do you integrate Web3? And every business is different. So offer a little bit of consultation, some educating. At the same time, from that point, that company is probably going to want to get their company name as a domain on FIO and at a minimum, have their internal employees. If they’re going to be dealing, even with a small amount, say that companies start to pay their employees a small portion in Crypto or giving it as an option, they’re going to need wallets and those wallet addresses having handles will be easy because imagine instead of me as a business owner or business administrator, having to send out Crypto and having to send it to your long wallet address versus having to send it at MATIC Crypto news to say, okay, it’s there. So those are some of the things that we’ve talked about is just really thinking outside the box to where we can reach more people where they are, because I love bear markets. Bear markets is where building happens and where a lot of these ideas, we start to really think and you see projects really double down and create great things. But that’s also where the general public is like, oh, stay away, it’s not good right now. I heard it’s bad. Those people I’ll pick on some of the friends I’ve got that didn’t buy Bitcoin when I was talking to them about it when it was below 3000 and when it was over 60,000, they were calling me up, asking me if it was a good time to buy.
Matt Zahab
Of course.
Wayne Marcel
Those people haven’t really dove in to understand everything yet. And the worst thing that happened outside of price action is they come in, it’s too hard, they mess up, they send something wrong, mess up, send something on the wrong chain, right? As I mentioned before, you got Tether, so they’re going to send. They got tether in their wallet that says on the TRON Network, and they try to send it to an ETH address. It could be gone unless you’re using guardrails like FIO provides. So that’s our goal is just to think outside the box and really just partner with projects, man. That’s the biggest thing when I attend these events, is our protocol, like I mentioned, is only more powerful the more places you can use it.
Matt Zahab
Yeah, well said.
Wayne Marcel
So I’m at these events, man, it’s great because I get to learn about what everybody’s building, what they’re doing. And in a lot of the cases, it’s, hey, they see the value in what they can use FIO for, and even the ones that maybe, okay, your use case doesn’t really line up with. You don’t really have a need for FIO and your product, whatever you’re building. But we still connect because this is one of those things where rising tide is going to rise all ships. So the more we can help each other out and those have led to other things to where, all right, we may not have a great synergy for a partnership, but then I meet somebody else that’s great for that project, and I send them to them. And the same thing just this past week, I’ve had two people that I met at events that they were more in a different space to where FIO wasn’t really part of what they were doing or a fit, but they’ve sent multiple connections over of people they know that they were able then able to talk about FIO. And that’s what we’ve got to do. We’ve got to find these great projects, and everybody needs to be and I’m not saying just FIO I’m talking about others everybody needs to be an advocate of those projects whenever the opportunity presents itself. I said a whole lot there. But all of that is really just going to help move the space forward. If we keep focusing on these silos to where you only operate on your platform, operate on mine. Or even if I sit there and tell people, don’t use ENS, use us. Look, if people are using ENS Unstoppable and us. And we drive more adoption together. That’s great. There’s so many people out there. There’s what, 8 billion people in the world now? I think we’ve exceeded seven point whatever, billion for a while, but I think this is close to 8 billion now. There’s a huge market out there, and a lot of people need this technology. Not just speculative aspects, but a lot of people need this technology because they’re seeing things where currencies are collapsing, economies may be collapsing. And I’ve talked to people from Venezuela and Zimbabwe that Cryptocurrency for them wasn’t a speculative investment. It pretty much saved them their ability to be able to provide because their currencies collapsed. And that’s where we’ve got to get those people that don’t even have access to financial systems. I think the world is going to be a better place the more we fuel adoption, because this is something from day one I’ve always told people when I learned about this was when you look at the fact that there are probably millions and millions of great ideas that never see the light of day, that die with the person in their mind. They have these ideas of things that could potentially, positively change the world. And they never come to fruition. Because that person, where they live, what side of a border they were born on, or their means they’re limited or no access to financial systems. They never get a chance to bring it to fruition. And this interconnect the world, it’s more than just a currency. You’ve also got a technology that allows anybody, any two people, to interact. And so you could see a lot of things happen. I see a day where somebody in a small town in Africa has an idea and they’re able to get it funded by someone that they meet online that’s maybe say VC in California. Next thing you know, that project is coming to life that never would have happened before.
Matt Zahab
So many good points there, Wayne. It’s so true as well that the world pie is so bloody large. Like there’s so much of it. And we can all dip our spoons in and take what’s needed, and there will still be plentiful left for everyone else. One topic I’d love to get into is a DAO. I know you have spoke upon DAOs many times, Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. One of your more recent points that I’ve seen within sort of the Wayne media cycle is the benefits of operating as a DAO compared to a centralized entity. You nail this point on the head, and I’d love for you to build on that one.
Wayne Marcel
Yeah. So every DAO is different depending on your governance model, but all it really ensures is that you’re not centrally controlled by, like, one person or one or two people. So for us, token holders actually vote on our board, who gets to be on our board. And in fact, in December we had an election and it was actually two people that were not reelected and two new people, great additions that were selected. Then the board selects our steering committee. So even in DAOs, there’s human input. So a lot of people think, okay, a DAO means that you’re just governed off of rules and that’s it. And it really depends on how you structure it, but it just prevents that centralization of power because we know what happens when power is centralized. The same reason why a lot of us are in the Cryptocurrency is because when power is centralized, it leads to the potential for corruption. Because when someone has total power over something, and it’s not always obvious and it’s not always illegal, but it leads to where unethical stuff can happen, to where, okay, I’m in power, so I’m going to make rules and decisions that favor me. And it doesn’t take much, but then to just look at our current government system right now. Right. So DAOs are not perfect. They’re still a lot of progress to be made. But it’s important to understand that you give more power and more voice to the people. And I think about back to my corporate jobs over the years where a lot of times where my teams performed the best was when I was getting that feedback from those people and insights from people that are actually doing the job, working in the field. And it’s the same thing here. Because where you see company, many companies fail is the executives or those that are in power make the decisions based off of what they think, without even taking into consideration, I’m not doing this job, maybe I should talk to the person that’s doing it. So a DAO just gives you more ability to get your voices heard, more ability to really just have a voice, have a say so. But it’s not perfect. You got to figure out that right governance model, because there’s a lot of DAOs that are governed off of just the token holders, and it really depends on what kind of model they’re operating. We joke about this all the time. Is that the reason for the board being a buffer between our token holders and the business is because the last thing you want is a bunch of people that don’t understand your business voting on how your business should go.
Matt Zahab
Good point.
Wayne Marcel
I mean, DAOs are important. I see a future where DAOs could be replace a lot of industries that have a lot of headaches right now. My personally, I don’t know much about insurance companies and how they operate, but I can tell you from what I saw living in South Louisiana and going through a major hurricane where me, personally, I had to fight with an insurance company for a while just to get the money to repair our house. A DAO could easily fix that because there’s so many different things you could do. What happens when there’s a natural disaster? Insurance adjusters go out, they take pictures, video, they verify everything, and then they send it up. I mean, those process can still happen within a DAO to where every member can contribute to that DAO. And then whenever there’s claims, payouts can be triggered by on chain governance voting. When people see, okay, this is what’s this is what’s happened. This is what needs to be paid out based on that policy terms, and it can happen. I’ve got friends today, and we’re talking 600 plus days later that are still trying to fight insurance companies because those insurance companies either are still refusing to pay or some of them claim bankruptcy so they wouldn’t have to pay and that’s just one example.
Matt Zahab
That’s crazy.
Wayne Marcel
That’s just about homeowners insurance. But when you talk about medical insurance, I just think homeowners insurance and automobile insurance potentially are easy ones because not saying there’s not a lot of regulation, but there wouldn’t be a lot of friction to compete with that. Whereas like medical insurance and using DAOs and Blockchain within the medical space, there’s a lot more rules and regulations relations there. But I think no matter what, in the end better technology is going to win out. Like I said, I put this out there hopefully somebody with a big insurance background that understands Blockchain is listening. And they say, yeah, let’s create that DAO, because I’ve had that conversation with a few people. But it gives us a better chance for a better place to where we’ve seen what happens with these CEOs and executives, where they’re in control of a company. They can either take the company to great places or they can really crash it through poor decisions and in some cases, giving people that ability to have a say so in that it’s important. But like I said, DAOs, they definitely still need I mean, we’ve learned through some hiccups and headaches that there are certain things within a centralized company you need to take into account and maybe figure out how to have like a governing board or governance model to include that. Because there are some good things in the structure of centralized companies and we just want to take the best parts.
Matt Zahab
Again when you’re on fire very well said. We are getting a little tight for time here. We got to jump into the hot take factory. Let a couple of hot takes fly. I know last time you had a couple of great ones. Any new ones from Wayne, perhaps things that only you believe in, whereas most other people do not. Doesn’t have to be Crypto related. It can be health, wealth, happiness, you name it. But give me a couple of Wayne hot takes before we end the show.
Wayne Marcel
All right, so actually, two come to mind. One for me is whether you’ve been in this space a while or you’re just trying to dabble in this. Everything in life is predicated by your belief and mindset. So if you don’t have a belief in it, you’re not going to dive in, you’re not going to be successful. You’re not going to really be able to participate in certain things. So that’s why I leave with education. But education that’s not applied is worthless. So I would challenge everybody. When you’re looking to understand that, get in the right mindset, figure out what that is to where you are open to learning about new things, and don’t close yourself off to things you’ve heard, because that’s the way they’ve always been done. We’re seeing so many different things. Banks have always been great for people to keep their money and right until they’re not. And that’s one thing I teach people, just be open to new ideas. And the second thing that I’ve been talking about for years before I understood what Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency were. I bought my first few Bitcoin in 2016, and as an ode to it, I’m the type of person that I have to learn about it. And so the first thing I did, I didn’t try to understand, okay, what is Bitcoin? What is Cryptography? What are all these different terms? I wanted to learn the history of money and how our current financial systems operate. And actually when I dove in and I learned about the federal reserve and fractional reserve banking, I think my exact thoughts were, holy crap, we’re in trouble. This is eventually going to lead to a disaster. And you think about when Bitcoin was created on the heels of the 2008 financial crisis, and that’s when I really started telling people, you’ve got to understand those systems. So I would challenge everybody just to you’re starting to see it happen. We saw quite a few banks collapse recently, and I would challenge everybody. No bank is truly solvent if you don’t have trust in it. Because if only 5 to 10% of the people decided to get their money out of banks right now, the banks wouldn’t be able to withstand this.
Matt Zahab
Bank run.
Wayne Marcel
I’m not telling everybody to make a bank run, but I’m telling people to learn about your different options, your different systems, and where to store your wealth and your assets. And it shouldn’t be 100% in the bank. I tell people all the time. I’m not telling anybody, go 100% in on Crypto either. I do my own things based off of my own beliefs. And it has to be based off your belief. But at the same time, I’m telling people, don’t be all in on that and really start to study, learn the economy, learn the way things are working. Because if you don’t do that, then you’ll be susceptible to some of the narratives that are out there. Will they say, okay, the pandemic caused all these problems with money? No, it didn’t. And now they’re going to try to say, okay, Cryptocurrency caused a lot of the instability in that. No, it didn’t. I mean, these cracks were already there before the pandemic in 2000 and 2019. Most people don’t realize this, but banks were borrowing way more money than they should have. It was called repo loans that they would borrow money overnight just to help with liquidity crisis. And it was in the hundreds of billions of dollars weekly that were just being borrowed, and it was going to lead to a crisis. And then what happened? Pandemic happened. Oh, let’s print all this money. And that was a temporary fix. But I challenge everybody. When you’re looking at this technology or if you’re thinking about an idea for something to build in the Web3 space, really don’t just think about is it better because it’s Web3? Is it better because it’s on the Blockchain? What is the reason? Like, what problem does it solve? And what problem does it solve by having it on chain or utilizing Web3 technology? And if it solves something, then push forward.
Matt Zahab
Wayne, what an episode, man. Appreciate you coming on, as always. Can’t wait for round three and super proud of you and the team. Again, 1 million handles is a huge achievement. And heck, but the next time, I’m sure it’ll be at two or three mil. We’d love to see that. Before you go, can you please let our listeners know where they can find you and FIO online and on socials?
Wayne Marcel
Yeah, absolutely. So @blockchaynwayne on socials, you can find me. I’ve actually finally got all the blue checks because I had so many fake accounts pretending to be me. So if you go to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, you see the blue check that’s me. FIO, you can go to fioprotocol.io on Twitter we’re @joinFIO check us out. Go to our website, you can click on our dashboard page and check it out. You can register a free handle and just see how the process works. Even if you’re not sending and receiving digital assets every day to day, eventually it’s going to be the norm. So go ahead and get in and kind of a little plug for me when I talk about handles is because my Twitter account is the only one where @blockchaynwayne is spelled slightly different because it was already taken when I went to get that username. And what kills me about is the guy that has it has never really used it for anything. And so it’s the same thing when you think about wallet handles. If there’s a username or handle that you want to get even if you’re not going to be sending assets for a long time, check out our protocol register free handle. Try it out. And if there are certain names or handles that you want to set aside, go ahead and get them now before they’re taken.
Matt Zahab
Love that, Wayne. Thanks again, man. I appreciate it. And Elon, if you’re listening to this slim chance, but if you are, let people get their old handles back. If some clown is not using their old handle, that would be used in an ethical efficient and good capacity overall. Let the folks get the freaking handles back. Maybe do a little bid Elon it’s for profit. It’s always been for profit, but now it’s a private company. Maybe make some money back. Honestly Wayne, I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon made a couple of hundred million. I feel like there’s a lot of people who would probably give five, six figures to get their handles back, right? Or the GOAT handles the old @Wayne or @Matt that currently isn’t being used. That’d be sweet. So, Elon, wakey wakey, bud.
Wayne Marcel
Yeah, it’s all about the demand.
Matt Zahab
It’s the best. Wayne, thanks again, man. Really appreciate it and looking forward to the next one.
Wayne Marcel
Awesome. Thanks. Take care, everybody.
Matt Zahab
Folks what an episode with Wayne Marcel. Love when our guest come back on for round two. Wayne was dropping knowledge bombs left, right and center. As always, if you want to learn more about replacing public wallet addresses and usability, look no further than FIO. Love the team at FIO. Huge shout out to Wayne and the team for coming on again. Folks if you enjoyed this one, and I hope you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and I. Speaking to the team love you guys thanks for everything. Justas you’re the best appreciate you and to the listeners, love you guys. Keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy. Bye for now and we’ll talk soon.
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