The Future Of The World Economy: A Discussion On Decentralized Cryptocurrency With Joshua Scigala

With the world moving towards runaway inflation, even possibly hyperinflation, we need to take stock of the tools we have at our disposal. One of these is decentralized cryptocurrencies, and in this episode, we examine why we must take a closer look at these financial assets. Monika Proffitt sits down for an insightful interview with the co-founder of TheStandard, Joshua Scigala. Joshua and Monika look at the current state of affairs and delve into stablecoins, collateralized debt and the threat of hyperinflation, and how crypto can help. Tune in to learn more.

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The Future Of The World Economy: A Discussion On Decentralized Cryptocurrency With Joshua Scigala

I’m here with Joshua Scigala Cofounder of The Standard at TheStandard.io. Thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you for having me, Monika. It’s fantastic.

I hear your accent. I’m wondering, where are you located right now?

I was born in Berlin, grew up in Australia and back in Berlin. I call myself an earthling at this stage.

I didn’t hear the Australian. I heard what I thought was a bit more of a British, but I understand now this is me having no idea what I’m hearing.

I’ve had to tone down my Aussieness for the Germans, so they could understand what I’m talking about.

People do tone a lot of things down for the Germans. My old family is of German heritage and that stiff upper lip and that need for precision. It’s almost everything, including now. I see even one’s dialect and accent. I want to talk about The Standard a little bit because we can pick on a lot of centralized structures and currencies throughout this conversation and that’s what I love picking on. I’m all in.

I wonder how or what type of centralized is because I’m based in the states and so many of our readers are based in the states. We often ignorantly end up with this SEC United States-centric view and a lot of times that that leads to an arrogant barrage of regulation and problems that we run into in crypto. We can still blame it on the SEC because they cause plenty of problems, but it sounds to me like when you talk about regulation, centralized currencies, governments and regulations in general, you’re not focused on what’s happening in the US. You’re looking at a broader issue of regulations that are meddling in a space that maybe they don’t have a real reason to be.

I come from the early crypto people who were obsessed with changing the system and the reason why Bitcoin was invented in the first place was to remove central authority from the ability for people to transact freely and have a win-win situation like in a typical free-market sense where at that moment that’s a win-win and people do a trade and hey, presto.

I find that a lot of the issues that we talked about include inflation and everything leading up to Bitcoin are built into the stablecoin structure as well as the CBDC structures that are being pushed upon everyone now, like, “CBDC is fantastic.” They’re extremely dangerous for human freedom and what we’ve built. It goes back to the Magna Carta. It’s taken a long time to get this freedom that we have now. To start to fall into a lot more control grids as we turn into a more of a technocratic society, we have to be careful on what we choose as technologies that don’t enslave us more, but rather free us and make the weak more private and the powerful more transparent. This is the way you want to move forward.

The reason why Bitcoin was invented in the first place was to remove central authority from the ability for two people to transact freely and have a win-win situation. Click To Tweet

When you say these are very dangerous things to have a centralized government-issued fiat-pegged stablecoin, some of our readers may be very new to crypto and many of us are not, so we know what stablecoin means. To talk about an algorithmically stabilized stablecoin is a different thing which is going to be interesting in and of itself. To first set the groundwork, what makes a fiat-pegged and a centrally distributed stablecoin a dangerous thing in crypto specifically.

If you go back in history, when people were walking around with gold and silver in their pockets, generally silver, because the gold was for more elite Kings and Queens and silver was for the plebs or the normal people. It’s very heavy to carry around gold and silver, plus it’s a bearer-based instrument. If you get robbed, it’s terrible.

What people did was go into voting facilities. They drop off their silver. They’d get a certificate and the voting facility will say, “You’ve got twenty grams of silver and here’s a certificate.” Instead of on the way to the market or going to the voting facility, I would say to the market person, “If you give me that watermelon, I’ll give you the certificate.” There in started the paper money route, and everyone was happy with this paper money pegged to silver and gold.

Very quickly, the voting facilities were like, “Not everybody’s going to come and run to us and withdraw at the same time. Let’s start writing more receipts than we have gold for and ask interest for it.” All of a sudden, they’re printing money out of thin air and got so wealthy from this that people would, be amazed at the estates that these bankers, huge castles and mansions that no Kings and Queens would ever be able to afford that.

After that, the French revolution would happen and these revolutions where they started cutting off heads and people were like, “Can we calm down? Stop cutting off people’s heads. It’s not a good look. You let us as voting operators and bankers continue doing this, giving receipts out and charging interest for it and we’ll give you a cut as creditors.” This is where interest starts coming from and fractional reserve banking.

That became the legal structure of, “Let’s have less on deposit than we have out there floating around in a legal state.” A lot of these centralized stablecoins, let’s say USDC or Tether, say they have $1 sitting in a bank account and for one ERC-20 that’s floating around. That’s fantastic. It’s all great and good, but certain things can go wrong with that. One is that there are four levels of trust there. One is that you have to trust the software. It’s the software that you store your keys in that doesn’t get hacked. It doesn’t get changed. The second level is you’ve got to trust the issuing company.

Are they printing Tethers out of nowhere and saying they have less? You have to trust the bank that they’re storing all this money. Is it going to be another financial crisis where they collapse and it takes all this economy with them in the digital space? You’ve got governments where those banks sit. Are those governments going to say, “There was a big transaction on the DOCK markets with these stablecoins. We’re going to freeze the entire lot or we’re going to generate our own stablecoin and make you illegal.

If you look at these multiple attack vectors, they’re very scary and not only that, if you have a company. You can print as many infinite numbers as you like. By rare numbers like Bitcoin and Ethereum with those infinite numbers, you can basically start to control and manipulate the market on this rare asset market. There are multiple existential threats to the crypto industry by having these centralized power structures be so powerful. We got told by JPMorgan Chase that they have now categorized Tether to be up there with BlackRock in terms of purchasing power. It’s gone insane.

To think of Tether being on par with BlackRock is very alarming. When I think about The Standard, I do not know a lot about algorithmically stabilized coins. What I do know of them and this is where I’m going to say the wrong thing and then you get a chance to correct me. It sounds to me like there’s a whole bunch of math involved in trying to create something that is stabilized on its own and that has a more transparent issuing protocol behind it. It’s tied to a fiat system that hopefully can remain buoyant and stable, even amid other currencies, even fiat currencies falling. The only algorithmically stabilized coin that I’ve ever had any even brushed with was years ago with the Basis coin.

I believe they raised a bunch of money and then something went wrong and they had to give it back or the projects went away. That was the only time I had a founder sit down with me and say, “Here’s how it goes.” It was the first time I’d heard someone talk about an algorithm being in charge of stabilization. That must have been a bit of a different concept. I’m sure there are many ways that you can slice the algorithmic like a little pie up to make it affect a coin or not. What are the pieces that you baked together to make this stabilized coin on its own?

We’re moving away from a pure algorithm to stabilize, but let’s back up a little bit. DeFi or decentralized finance as the concept was started by Bitcoin because it’s the first decentralized financial instrument. Gold as well is decentralized. In the digital realm, we have Bitcoin. Later on, DeFi was started by a protocol called MakerDAO. It’s an amazing structure. What we’ve done is take that and we feel a way for the next generation of that. What we’re doing is we’re taking the idea of a financial instrument like USD and creating something that’s backing that with real assets. What does that mean?

That means to mint a stablecoin pegged to the dollar, euro, yen, shekel or whatever you’re after. What you want to do is throw assets into a smart contract. For your readers that don’t know, even if they know these things, a smart contract is no different than a computer program. A smart contract is nothing but a computer program. The only difference is the computer program generally sits on one computer. The problem is if one computer is dealing with money, meaning like Ethereum or Bitcoin, you can’t trust the output of that computer. It might’ve been hacked or it might have a virus on it. You can’t trust that what’s coming out of it is truth.

What a smart contract is, is a computer program running on thousands of computers around the world, all calculating the exact same thing and 51% of those computers have to have the same output, and that’s when the network goes, that we’re going to consider as truth because it’s usually a lot more than 51%. The fact is hackers couldn’t hack every single computer.

What we do is create a smart contract. We allow them to Bitcoin in, Ethereum and physical gold. We can talk about that later and how that works. Tokenized physical gold into these contracts, and then this is a very volatile package, but you can borrow or generate from yourself up to 50% or we’re going to 85% of the value that’s in there in a stablecoin.

We mint another coin and we say, “This coin is pegged to the euro, let’s say, and how that pegging happens is quite simple. This is a debt that you’ve created for yourself. You’ve borrowed money from yourself. You’ve got locked up and to get these assets back, which is over collateralized, you’ve got more value sitting in here than you’ve borrowed. You have to go on to the free market, buy back what you borrowed and send it back to the contract, releasing the Ethereum and then you can go on and have fun.

The interesting thing is, how is this pegged to the currency? It’s very simple and central banks use this mechanism. What they say is, “There’s an interest rate attached to me, borrowing from myself.”

It’s a small interest rate. What happens is if the standard euro, which we’re calling SEURO, falls below a normal euro in price, maybe it goes to $0.80 cents. The network will vote on lifting interest rates for the next six hours or whatever it is on everybody, and some people will go, “That interest rates too much for me to bear. I’m going to go into the market and start buying SEURO back.” When demand goes out more than supply, demand lifts the price back to a dollar.

The Fed chairman will come out with quarterly new rates. Is what you’re doing similar in terms of treasury buybacks and a debt instrument used to help stabilize an economy, but what you have is something in real-time that automatically does it minute by minute, if needed rather than quarter by quarter? There’s less of a lag time, but a similar mechanism worked.

If SEURO starts becoming popular and it might become more valuable than the euro to a dollar, let’s say euro 10 and euro 20, then the system will say, “Let’s lower interest rates so more people start borrowing from themselves and flooding the market with more so it’ll come back down.”

I don’t know if the euro is subject to the same perilous tearing onto hyperinflation the way the US dollar. Forgive my ignorance, but if I were to think of this pegged to the US dollar, I would want something that would have buoyancy even as the US dollar slips into oblivion, which I believe it is and will continue to be doing. As something is pegged to a highly inflationary or potentially inflationary fiat currency, how is it that you’re not replicating the same monster in a way?

There are multiple existential threats to the crypto industry by having these centralized power structures be so powerful. Click To Tweet

The answer comes back to financial literacy. How do the wealthy protect their wealth during inflation? What do they do? They borrow a lot of money. They effectively go short the dollar. By borrowing dollars from yourself, you’ve got real assets. You’ve borrowed some dollars. Those dollars are inflating away. Effectively the inflation is paying off your debt because if you say you buy a car with your debt, you’ve borrowed from yourself and in five years, the same amount of money buys you a carton of milk, then you’ve effectively just borrowed as much money as a carton of milk. The wealthy have always protected their wealth during hyperinflation or inflationary moments. They borrow as much of this crap that is being printed as they can.

I’ve been doing it already. I’m in as much debt as I can possibly be in right now. Give me more money. Please do. I will take it all day long.

Throw it at me and go by rare assets. Buy forestry, houses, Bitcoin, Ethereum and gold, whatever you can get that’s red that’s copy printed. This is what we’re doing. The fascinating thing about this that I love is that you’ve got an entire economy that’s transparently over collateralized. There is more value backing this thing. If debt becomes under collateralized and the smart contract starts heading towards how much has been borrowed, it automatically liquidates.

Could this also be if the volatility of the price of these assets goes down dramatically?

That is right. When these processes go down, you want to either fill up with more or you want to pay off your debt and then do whatever you need to do. If it drops down and you’ve forgotten about it or you don’t care because you’ve already borrowed up to the maximum, you are going to sell it anyway to get whatever you need.

Rather than that, you’ve borrowed from yourself and it liquidates. You’ve lost 5% on top of what you were going to sell it for anyway. Effectively what happens is the smart contract liquidates everything that’s in it to the governance token holders that are holding the TST token that we’re distributing. It’s a mechanism that takes what Maker started and works on some of it. They were a pioneer in the beginning, but we feel that they made some mistakes.

There’s a lot of centralization in the governance of this mechanism and there’s only one thing, it’s the USD. It’s pegged to the USD, but what we want to do is the ability for people to mint not only fiat-pegged tokens but also and do a whole lot like Pesos and everything. There’s a mirror what’s now somehow called the metaverse instead of cyberspace. Somehow Facebook rebranded the entire internet. We’re doing that, but also the DAO will decide, “Let’s also allow people to mint a token pegged to Tesla stock, to gold or to an industry like the NASDAQ.” You can have then stablecoins pegged to a whole bunch of stuff that’s sitting there.

You won’t get a dividend from Tesla, but you might want to hold that for some reason and then be able to pay that back into your debt rather than building an economy based on actual uncollateralized debt. You’re backing the whole economy up with force, saying, “If you don’t pay back this debt, you are going to get a black mark against your name or you’re going to go to prison for not paying your debts,” all of this stuff. You promote saving because this is another thing that gets my goat is that 78% of people in the US and I’m pretty sure this is globally a very similar number live paycheck to paycheck.

It’s absurd. Buy another gaming console or VR headset and don’t save it, maybe, because you might need it. We’re the most short-sighted species I can imagine. I’m sometimes like, “Did the stork get confused when it dropped me off here? How are these, my people? They don’t even know how to save more than two weeks in advance. Are you kidding me?” These are people that seem to be heavily in absolute vulnerability for no good reason like, “What’s that about?”

I wouldn’t blame the people rather than the design of extreme selling and marketing culture.

The people make and design the culture. Even those who benefit from it in the short-term, you would think you would finally get the memo that in the long-term, it’s not good for humanity. You should maybe change the design. That’s why I’m so excited to talk to innovators like you because it’s like this is the beginning of seeing people who have the insight, the ability, the desire and the longer vision to say, “We can build something that is better architected for the long-term needs of human beings.” Not for me, I’ll be plenty of rich. It’s fine, plus I can’t take it with me anyway. Maybe I want to make the system better.

When we’re lying on our death bed, you want to look back at your life and say, “I made a difference.” That’s important. It should be the driver for everybody. Unfortunately, it’s not. A token project doesn’t have a picture of a dog on it, but it is a very serious infrastructure project. We’re also very much working on the whole layer two solutions on Ethereum. We need our transactions to be sub-center in terms of fees.

We’re looking at a lot of the technology that’s coming from a few places. One of the companies is called Stock Where. They’re building an amazing layer two that’s using zero-knowledge validity proofs, which are a fancy way of saying that there’s a lot of cryptographic math into making a parcel of data very small so that it’s very cheap to transact.

When I got into Bitcoin, the whole thing was to bank the unbanked, unbank the bank, and let’s change the world. Let’s have a separation of money and state. This is a large philosophical move forward like the separation of church and state to say we are free to choose who we hold value from and how as well as what, what deity we pray to, choose to or decide to practice.

I feel that The Standard is the next evolution of DeFi 2.0. I would love it if people come to TheStandard.io. Check out Discord and help the conversation because we are a loose group of people all around the world building this protocol at the end of the day. If you do like early crypto projects that are interesting, there’s a lot of people that want meme coins, and they want to go up, sell it and stuff. We feel that we’re very strong. We will be around for a very long time and building large-scale infrastructure for a global economy.

It sounds to me like between the Discord channel and the large community, are you operating more and more like DAO yourselves?

We’re young at the moment and we started the world’s first gold Bitcoin exchange back in 2014. We programmed it in 2015. We launched it after the Mt. Gox collapsed. For those who don’t know, this was the first Bitcoin exchange and I lost a lot of money in that exchange. I was like, “How do we make a better exchange?” We launched Vaultoro because we wanted to build a transparency protocol to show other exchanges how transparent you can be. This was a Bitcoin and physical gold exchange and it’s still going. It’s been going for a long time. It has never been hacked, which is amazing because we’re attacked all the time, but we know what we’re doing. That’s a real sign that our tech team will build something.

Are you intending and drifting towards developing the company to act as its own DAO, Decentralized Autonomous Organization?

Absolutely. We’ve got in the Discord channel governance channels. We’ve got a bunch of channels where people do start to decide things. The next thing is to build the smart contracts for that DAO. One of the things I didn’t touch on is that DAOs have a big problem, and that’s voter apathy. People buy these coins and they have a whole portfolio. They never go and vote. They never go and help do these things that they do. In economics, it’s called the free-rider problem and they hope that it’ll go up.

When we have this whole suite of stablecoins that need decisions on where the stability fee or the interest rates are set on an hourly basis, we need a lot of people to participate. One way to do that is by an algorithm. To touch on what you said, the problem with algorithms is they can be gamed because if an algorithm is public, a smart person can sit there and study it and then play with it.

When an army crosses a bridge and all march, you start to get these oscillations and you can then pair down a whole bridge. That’s why they put the double step into a march. That breaks the oscillation. If you have an algorithmic stable computer or computer program going on, it’s too high, drop the interest rates. People can start to figure that out, dump and take it back. They start to play with the algorithm and then destroy it. This is why we liked the human factor because the humans have infinite entropy, meaning randomness within them to say, “I know better.”

We are walking chaos. That is what we are. “I know. I will do this.” Someone is like, “No. It’s wonderful.” Talk amongst yourselves. Keep talking, guys.

It’s one of the reasons I don’t believe in the grand conspiracies because there’s too much chaos and randomness. One of the things that we’re implementing and we’re talking with some amazing people along the way is how to use what are called prediction markets or decision markets rather than us voting. There’s a lot of academic research that prediction markets are the best way humans have of determining the future apart from going and seeing the witch at the local fair that looks in a glass bowl. That’s obviously the best way to determine the future. Prediction markets, what are they? They’re bets. You bet on which horse you think will win, and the odds tell us which one’s likely to win the most.

It’s never perfect, but it’s got a very good track record of accuracy. What we want to do is build a futures market between multiple options. Let’s say we need to peg a certain currency and we say, “Let’s build a futures market where in the future this one trades this much stability fee or interest rate to this debt and this debt has a little bit more interest rate. Which one will peg in the next six hours this currency closer to the euro? People will place bets and buy these contracts and then whoever wins, wins whoever loses.

If you’re an expert in economics and you think, “This market here is way off. People are betting on the wrong horse here.” You can place your vote and get paid for it. There is an infinite bunch of people always wanting to speculate. We feel that this is a much better way of scaling decisions, plus getting people not to be so apathetic when it comes to participating in governance.

It’s because you’re incentivizing engagement. You’re basically making your own investment strategy to engage on its own. If only we could add that to our general voting system so we could get paid to show up and vote and have a higher voter turnout rate. That would be fantastic.

We see how crap voting is. You have to look at some of the talent shows on television and people vote for all sorts of weird reasons. The guy comes on and says, “My dad died of cancer and this and that.” He’s a crap singer but everyone votes for him because his dad died. It skews incentives, but you could use prediction markets in actual politics.

If you said, “Which president is going to bring the mean happiness level of the country up to a certain scale,” happiness is the hard quantifier. Let’s say the jobs are right in a year’s time and people place their bets on them. The funny thing is when you put money into a decision, you tend to put away dogmas. For instance, you might be a staunch Cowboys fan or whatever the football team is, but you know the goalies screwed his knee. The guy has got COVID.

I love that you used goalie in a football thing for the Dallas Cowboys. That’s exactly how much I know about sports. When they get to the bat, the hoop and they slam dunk, it doesn’t work.

A lot of people say, “My whole family down to my father, my grandfather.”

It’s taking a complex idea that used to be dogmatically driven and breaking it into very small data points thing, but do you think that the contestant with brown hair is going to win the beauty pageant or the blonde hair and then you go, “Historically it’s been the blondes. We’re going to go with that one.” We no longer are like, “She’s Miss Minnesota and I’m from Minnesota.”

It’s taking a little bit out of it. Is it breaking down a complex idea into tiny little things? I don’t know if you’re familiar with the absurd, micro-oriented way of voting the state of California has involved themselves with or involves all their people with. Where they have these full-on encyclopedia long voting ballots and you have to know every single tiny little thing because you have a chance to vote on every single thing.

Tokenized real estate is an interesting space. It’s a hard space to crack, but someone will do it very well. Click To Tweet

As a voter, you don’t know, so you get a cheat sheet. Not that I’ve done this myself. I’ve never lived in California and voted there, but I’ve seen friends of mine get their ballots and I’m like, “What is that? A leaflet?” They’re like, “No. It’s a ballot,” and it’s so complicated. From the voter’s perspective, it’s like you’re asking me to be an expert on 1 million different things and that’s not been gamified properly because I want to vote this way. I’m not sure.

If you were to incentivize me with money, then I would become more of an expert, but also asking individuals to become an expert in more things seems like a difficult task. How could you possibly incentivize enough people to become generalist specialists to be able to know that many data points and provide them. I’ve thought about how to gamify engagement.

If you could say I’m in a pod, that guy understands squirrels and the environment. He gets mine for that stuff. Josh was going to be in charge of all the environment stuff, but I totally understand how cars should go and infrastructure rail. Everybody’s going to come with me and I get five votes from all my friends and he gets my vote along with four others and that’s that. I’ve thought about these ways of gamifying it around human behavior because it’s very difficult to get them and incentivize more than the ones interested in trying to become experts, which is still a subset.

It’s extremely complex. We’ve outsourced it to say, “We’ll vote for people that vote for people in some countries because that seems to be a way.” Voting is hard because we have to determine the future without any incentive. You can be propagandized into a character. For US presidents, we had an actor and Donald Trump was a celebrity. It’s because they’re great entertainers. People are like, “I loved his jokes. I’m going to vote for him.”

Have you seen the movie Idiocracy?

I didn’t know that that documentary existed.

It has existed for so long. I’ve seen it multiple times. It only gets more and more accurate the more times I see it.

We used to have t-shirts. We ran a podcast years ago and the t-shirts were in 1984. There is no instruction manual, and that’s also similar.

I don’t even know how to wrap this up from there because we can keep going on this down this rabbit hole. In terms of gamifying, how people are voting for things and getting people to engage, it sounds like from a community perspective, you’ve got some real legs underneath this through the Discord channel and all of that. If someone wants to go to TheStandard.io, what are they going to find and what is the first thing they need to do to become engaged with your project?

I would say sign up to the white list. It’s a list that you can sign and get emails from. Scroll right down to the bottom. First of all, read about the project and understand if it’s something you’re interested in. I’m not here at all say investments or anything like that. We’re not that. We’re a project that is building some protocol, but if this interests you to find out more, go to TheStandard.io. All the links are there. The Twitter is @TheStandard_io. Come and say hi.

I’m glad that we had this chat and that people can learn more about this. As I look at the Black Swan events that are on their way to us, not only in the crypto markets, the next crypto winter, but also in the fiat markets, you can’t print that much money and expect things to go well in the long-term. It’s a tough one.

To quickly touch on that. I want to make people aware of how large $1 trillion is because this number gets bantered about so much. The US printed $3 trillion. A million seconds is eleven days long. If you were to stand there and count that. A billion seconds is 32 years. That gives you a bit of scope of the order of magnitude from 11 days to 32 years and 1 trillion seconds is 32,000 years.

It took the first 200 years of US history to print the first trillion and in the first quarter of 2021, they printed three more. People don’t think there’s going to be inflation. By the way, this is a global problem because the rest of the world is going, “America is doing what? Can you turn on the printers as well because we don’t want to be left behind?” Everyone’s printing along with the US. This is the first time we will see it and we already are seeing global inflation. It’ll head to hyperinflation where we have a massive explosion of debt.

This is not investment advice, but only hold as much money in the bank as you’re willing to lose. They used to say that Bitcoin only put a much in Bitcoin as you are willing to lose. Now I say, “I only hold as much in the bank you’re willing to lose,” because they’re totally intransparent. Be careful, folks out there. Educational and entertainment advice.

I appreciate it. That’s exactly how I feel. It used to be a continental drift. It was a little bit of a balance. This and that, try it out and you’ll get in the equities markets and trade options, trade all those things on both markets, but now I’m like, “I want to make sure I’m already set up and I’m ready to short the markets as they start to tumble because they all will together.” She who shorts the best will win because it’s going down. It’s not going to do well.

You might as well play with real money and not paper money. That’s going to lose. Even if you short the equities market well, as it tumbles, you’re shorting it in paper money that’s not worth anything. Who cares. You might as well short the crypto market that’s going to follow that a bit as it did in the crash of 2020, but it’s going to recover because it’s backed by a real thing, which is the absolute opposite of what newbies to crypto think, but we have a much better bedrock.

Why did gold crash? We’re one of the oldest gold Bitcoin exchanges. At that moment, everyone needs liquidity and they’re selling whatever they can to be able to cover different positions.

The dogma of gold goes away when everything needs to be liquidated immediately.

In the long-term, when you have systemic corruption, you’re looking at rare assets, whether that’s forestry, bricks and mortar, gold, silver, crypto and things that cannot be printed out of anywhere. That’s where you want to be holding. If you haven’t got the gold to short things because you need to be fairly sophisticated to do that. You can do something very simple and that buy rare assets and hold them.

Hopefully, tokenized real estate as an asset as well, which can be traded, held and backed by something real and hopefully added to other stabilizing features as a stabilizing feature to things like The Standard. I’m hoping that we’ll have more places to put those things. Let’s talk about the future. It’s coming.

There’s a lot. Tokenized real estate is a very interesting space. It’s a hard space to crack, but it will. Someone will do it very well and it’s something that can be used to collateralize in The Standard for sure.

I would love to have a round two with you if we can do that. I’m sure we’re going to have plenty to talk about as Q1, Q2 of 2022 shows up and all the markets drift the way that we pretty much can see them coming. It’s like watching an avalanche in slow motion. You’re like, “One more snowflake and that thing’s tumbling.”

People are like, “You’re amazing. How did you see this coming?” You’re like, “How did you not see this coming?”

“I don’t know.” This has been fantastic. It’s been lovely to hear your thoughts on this and I appreciate your complete and utter similar disdain for centralized currencies. I’m very glad to see more and more options and opportunities to get out of them and get into something that also is still stable being made. Thank you so much. You are an early innovator and creator in the space. I’m not quite as early as you, but as you have a Cypherpunks on your hat, I have the same desire to see a better system built. Becoming a gazillionaire is not my end all be all in life. It’s seeing something in for our community. I feel so special at some point. Thank you again, Joshua Scigala.

Thank you so much, Monika. It’s been an absolute pleasure.

We’ll be staying in touch and I’m going to wrap this up by saying I’m signing off on the show. Joshua Scigala and I have had a wonderful conversation and we hope to have it again. Thanks a lot for reading and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

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About Joshua Scigala

Joshua Scigala is a distinguished designer, animator & entrepreneur. Initially training as a designer and special effects artist in Sydney, Australia, Joshua went on to establish himself as a sought after senior designer in some of the best post production houses in Australia. Joshua in turn turned his attention to the television industry, designing & producing for some of the biggest show brands in the world, such as The Big Bang Theory, 24 & Australian Idol. As well as rebranding whole networks like 4meTV singapore and Sydney. In 2001, Joshua established swapstyle.com an online swapping web app designed to combat the huge waste accumulated as a by-product of the textile industry. Swapstyle.com was the first website in the world to provide clothing swapping facilities and was featured on Fox News, Dr. Phil & Bloomberg (sold in 2014). Joshua is also the founder of ozdesigner.com, one of Australia’s first online fashion boutiques selling on behalf of exclusive Australian & New Zealand fashion houses(sold in 2008). After developing cutting edge IOS application technology as the director of The Mobile App Company Pty Ltd, Joshua turned his attentions to the advancement of Crypto-currencies and has been an avid member and proponent of the Bitcoin community since 2010. He moved to Berlin in 2012, and with his interest in alternative economies established Vaultoro.com as a co[founder together with his brother Philip Scigala.

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