Welcome to the Medici Ventures Day, hosted by Pelion Venture Partners. I'm Jonathan Johnson, Chief Executive Officer of Overstock.com, Former President of Medici Ventures, and a big believer in the world-changing power of blockchain technology. In April 2021, Overstock finalized a strategic partnership with Pelion Venture Partners to oversee the Medici Ventures portfolio of blockchain companies. Overstock became a limited partner, and Pelion took control of the Medici Ventures portfolio as the general partner. Pelion now supports the day-to-day management activities, having sole authority and responsibility for the fund's investment decisions and exercising all shareholder rights that Medici Ventures held in the portfolio companies. Though I thoroughly enjoyed my work as the president of Medici Ventures and the brilliant people who created and worked for its promising portfolio companies, Overstock did this deal with Pelion for two reasons. First, it would allow me and the rest of the Overstock management team to focus on Overstock's core business, a leading and now consistently profitable e-commerce retailer of home furnishings and furniture. Second, it would leverage Pelion's expertise, especially that of its experienced and well-connected professionals, who are now in charge of the day-to-day operations of the fund to take the portfolio companies and their disruptive blockchain-based products to the next level. In the 13 months since we've closed the deal, both have happened. In fact, I couldn't be more pleased with how Pelion is excelling as the fund's general partner. Actively helping many of the portfolio companies advance their respective businesses, and thus allowing the Overstock management team to focus on successfully selling sofas, mattresses, and area rugs online. Pelion has proven to be the source of guidance in raising strategic third-party capital and bringing in experienced industry leadership for some of the portfolio companies. We saw this earlier this year when Intercontinental Exchange invested in tZERO, and the former ICE Chief Strategic Officer, David Goone, became tZERO's CEO. I expect that kind of oversight and guidance from Pelion to continue. I remain bullish on blockchain technology and many of the companies in the Medici Ventures fund, six of which you'll hear from today. I think each of these six companies shows great promise. I'm enthusiastic about today's event. I hope each of you will leave with a greater understanding about and excitement for the Medici Ventures fund's blockchain portfolio and all its potential. We will now have the Medici Ventures general partner, Matt Mosman, go over today's agenda. Enjoy the day. I know I will. Thank you, Jonathan. I'm Matt Mosman. I'm a General Partner at Pelion Venture Partners, and I'm the Managing artner for the Medici fund, about which we're gonna talk today. I need to start with a disclaimer, so let me read that first. Let me remind you that the following discussion and the responses to your questions reflect the speaker's views as of today, May 10, 2022, and may include forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws. Actual results could differ materially from such statements. Additional information about factors that could potentially impact Overstock's financial results is included in Overstock's Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2021, in Overstock's Form 10-Q for the quarter ended March 31, 2022, and in Overstock's subsequent filings with the SEC. As a reminder, Pelion Venture Partners is the general partner of the Medici Ventures fund, managing the day-to-day operations and investing decisions of the fund assets, and Overstock.com is the limited partner. Overstock.com also retains a direct minority interest in tZERO. I'll begin by sharing my screen and showing you further disclaimers, just so you can, so we can get started here. One of the things that I am often asked, it's one of the first things that I get asked about the or about the Medici Ventures fund is just, "You've been here a year, and how is it going? How does the fund look to you?" I wanna start by just saying that this is a good-looking venture fund. It is a venture fund, and thus it's very risky. We do have several assets that look really good to me. I think there are some companies here that have potential to be eventual exits ending in some kind of round number billion. It's really interesting from that perspective. It's also like every other venture fund. It has some companies that are gonna do okay, and it has some companies that are not gonna do okay. It's a pretty common perspective for us, and we're very excited about the prospects of several of these companies and wanna share that with you today. You see the agenda on the screen here. Jonathan already spoke. I'm gonna give a little comment on the day today. We'll do an overview of Medici. My colleague Erika Nash will talk about company performance and some market trends. I'll talk to you about what our goal is for the fund, and do a little Q&A, and then we'll get to the company spotlights. We're gonna hear from Bitt, Spera, Ripio, Chainstone Labs, GrainChain, and tZERO. I wanna note here that isn't the six best companies in the fund. We didn't handpick companies that way. What I wanted to do is give you a kind of an overview of what the fund looks like. You'll see it leans a little in the direction of fintech, which is the way the fund leans, but we have a little bit of everything coming to you today. Then we have a keynote address by Chris Giancarlo, the author of CryptoDad and former chairman of the CFTC. I'll give some closing remarks. To begin with, I want everyone to understand what this day is about. We have heard for a long time about a desire for this day to happen. To be honest, I'm a little worried about how it'll be taken. We'll make clear in a minute, you know, this is not a report. It's certainly not an earnings call or anything like that. This is just trying to introduce you to these privately held companies so that you can understand a little more about the portfolio. We have heard you, though, that we need to get better at communicating, and I think I hope you understand that this is a new muscle for us. We're a private venture cap fund. We don't typically engage with public securities or anything like that, and we don't typically do public announcements of any kind. This is all new to us, and we're trying to get better at it. I think we're gonna have an expectation today, though, that you'll get a general overview of the fund and what the portfolio companies are like. We'll go over that, and some of that will happen in the fund reports that you'll see in a minute. We'll have some thoughts on market trends. We'll have a deeper vision into six of the portfolio companies that we talked about today. Here's what I want you not to expect. Overstock is public, but these are privately held startups, and I want to be sure that you understand that. Do not expect today that you'll get detailed financials or valuations or anything like that. That would be uncommon for a private company to share that, and it wouldn't be helpful for them. Don't expect forward-looking statements. Don't expect any kind of non-public development plans. Don't expect to hear about their current cash positions. All these things are things I know would be interesting to you, but these are private companies, and this is not an earnings call, as we discussed earlier. Private companies, the interesting thing to me is that they differ from public companies in a few ways. Usually people think of, well, they're smaller, but that's just barely the half of it. They're different in kind, in fact. It's less like a bear cub growing up into a bear than it's like a caterpillar turning into a butterfly or something like that. It's an entirely different kind of beast in a private company. They're dramatically less predictable. In many cases, they won't even have found product market fit yet, and we're trying to help them do that. They have extremely activist shareholders like us, who are very involved in the company every day. I know because I've heard people talk about this, that what they'd really like to do is be able to have kind of a discounted cash flow that they could do at the end of this to value the portfolio. That won't be happening today. Let me just say at the start that if that's your expectation for what we'll be doing, you kinda may as well just stop the video now 'cause it's not gonna happen. There's a reason that doesn't work with private companies. First of all, they're very unpredictable, as we discussed earlier. There's kind of a garbage in, garbage out problem, where if you can't predict, you know, for a public company, you might be able to predict revenues, for example, for a year or two or three fairly accurately. With these companies, you wouldn't be able to do that for a few quarters. The projections become extremely uncertain, and you kind of lose all claim to science when those inputs are uncertain. I understand that there are ways to mitigate that, but it really doesn't work very well. Even as revenues rise, you have a question about churn. Very often in some of these companies right now, you're starting to see a rise in revenues, but we don't really know anything about churn of customers yet. Again, being able to predict with any certainty, that's very, very difficult. Data won't be available on these key metrics yet. Then it's very commonplace for these companies to pivot, to move in a different direction. That's something we see every day all the time, and doesn't really panic us. In a public market, that would be a really difficult thing to get through. What do you want to look for as we look at these companies today? Here's what we look for. The first thing is we want to address a very large market. The reason we want it to address a very large market is that while we want these companies to dominate in their respective spaces, we don't want domination to be required for success. We don't want them to have to take a huge portion of the market in order to succeed. You see with these companies, a number of them address extremely large markets. You think of, Bitt that we'll talk to later. What is the total addressable market for money? It's just massive. We like that because if they take any decent percentage of their market, it's a home run. To begin with, addresses a very large market. We like to see the product finished and the solution to be, the product to be a solution to a clearly articulated problem. They'll talk about this in some of their pitches today. We think many of these companies have a product that is a solution to a really interesting problem. We like to see early traction with customers. You're smart, and we think we're smart, but we're not as smart as markets are. When you put a product out in the market, people vote with their wallets, and they tend to be brilliant in the way that they vote. Early sign of traction trumps almost anything, to be honest. Then a quality management team with a passion for the space is very important to us. Frankly, the earlier the investment is, the more you would, we call it, over-rotate on a quality management team. Quality management teams tend to be able to find what they need to find to make their companies work. Eventually it becomes about performance. First, it's really about potential. These companies, all of them, are still in a spot where you would say, "This is really about the potential for these companies to do extremely well." We have great potential in this portfolio. Warren Buffett said, "It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price." We're trying to build fantastic companies, and the price is whatever the price is. All right, a little overview of Medici, so you can understand the portfolio a little bit. We assumed management of Medici about a year ago. Overstock formed Medici, and there were some companies that they rolled into Medici. They had incubated some companies early, and then with an eye towards the creation of Medici Ventures, that was created in 2014. They invested then from 2014- 2021 in 21 companies. As you'll see, 19 of those are left. Two of those companies were sold in the past year. We assumed authority just a little over a year ago for all investment decisions at the company, which you all know. Jonathan, as he mentioned in his intro, remains super bullish on blockchain. They're very interested in what's happening within the portfolio. I interact with Jonathan a lot, and they decided that it was time for us to take it over and see this to its conclusion. We feel really good about that. Just a little bit about Pelion. Pelion is a roughly 20 year-old venture fund. We're located in Salt Lake City, Utah. I always tell people I think Pelion is the best venture fund nobody's ever heard of. We kind of hide here in Salt Lake City and just consistently produce great returns. Our fund 3 was in 2002. You see this is top decile returns in several of our recent funds. We currently are on our fund 7. That's a $367 million fund that's doing extremely well, and we're very happy about it. We inherited the Medici fund, as you noted, in 2021. Our investment team is a subset of the total Pelion investment team. I'm the general partner responsible for the fund. Whenever we do a new investment out of or a follow-on investment out of the Medici portfolio, this is the group that votes on it. It's me and Erika Nash, who you'll meet later, Susannah Duke and Zen Razavi. All quality investors who've been at this a while and we're excited to continue to support the Medici companies. The Medici Fund overview, just a quick note. 21 investments, 19 of them are active. You'll note here that we sold last year Evernym to Avast security company out of the U.K. and Factom to Inveniam. We have 19 investments left. The average amount of investment in these companies is $8.1 million. We have $163 million total invested in these companies. In terms of where Medici fits in terms of the world's investments in blockchains, we're kind of way up towards the top end of it. Obviously there are companies or firms like a16z and Pantera and some others that have done more investments than we have. We're up near the top in terms of the amount of investing that we've done in blockchain. We're excited about that. The companies are mostly in the U.S., but we do have companies all over the world. We have one in Asia, one in the Middle East, we have one in South America that you'll hear from today, and we have two companies in Europe. We own significant chunks of this. This is really interesting for us. For a normal venture fund, owning an average of 20% in these companies is really unusual. It's a very, very high percentage ownership, and you'll see that in a number of cases we're up around 30%, and in one case, way above 30% in these companies. Owning a majority is extremely rare for a venture fund. It would normally be that a fund would own in a range more like 10% or 15% for most of its companies. 15% would be a lot. This is a heavy ownership fund, which is really good because we think some of these companies are very good. Some of the value add that we've been able to provide in the last year, you all heard, I think, about tZERO, where we replaced the CEO with David Goone and secured a substantial investment from ICE. We'll talk more about that later, but I'm super excited about that. Then we added an outside board member, which is really one of the things that can really help drive a company is getting good outside board membership. Significantly, we re-domiciled the company from Barbados to the U.S., which allows us to offer employee stock options and other incentive plans that we think help drive value in companies. At Voatz, we added another new board member, and we've been promoting an electronic voting initiative there, which has been super helpful, I think, to them. FinClusive, we've helped with some fundraising efforts, introduced them just recently to a number of major potential customers. It's a company we like a lot, and we're trying to support them. Before I was ever in grad school, I was a high school teacher, and I like to tell stories. I'm gonna tell you a little story about where that will lead us to where we can reliably win in Web3. Web3 and blockchain and cryptocurrency is clearly a gold rush. I think we can learn from a previous gold rush about how we can reliably win. In the 1849 gold rush in California, it lasted for eight years and 300,000 miners extracted 720,000 lbs of gold from those hills. That amount of gold per miner is not only not a fortune, it's barely even a living. Miners, by and large, made effectively no money in the California Gold Rush. Very few of them were wealthy, and very few of them even really made much at all. Who did? Marshall and Sutter, when they built their mill, they knew there was gold. They had begun building the mill. They found gold in the traces and took it and had it tested. They knew it was gold, and they intended to keep it a secret forever. It turned out that two of the people that worked for them, Azariah Smith and Henry Bigler, went to a store in Sutter's Fort near Sacramento that was owned by this man, Sam Brannan. Sam Brannan also owned the newspaper in San Francisco, what was then called Yerba Buena. Sam Brannan did eventually become the person who created effectively the California Gold Rush by announcing it in his newspaper. He also ran around town with a vial of gold that he had gotten from Azariah Smith and Henry Bigler and told everyone who would listen to him that there was gold. Sam wasn't stupid. After he received that gold, he didn't do anything with it in terms of announcing it for a minute. He went out first, and he bought every pick, pan, and shovel in Northern California and jacked up the price and then proceeded to announce it thereafter. Then when people came and rushed in, he was the owner of all the equipment, and he became California's first millionaire. The people who actually made money in the California Gold Rush were Wells Fargo, who provided shipping services, Levi Strauss, who provided what he called waist-high overalls at that time, and our friend Sam Brannan, who sold picks and shovels. Those are the people who actually made money. We say this around the office all the time. Whenever there's a gold rush, be the one who's selling the picks and shovels. You could ask yourself, what are the picks and shovels of Web3 of blockchain? Well, to begin with, we think it's some of the companies that we have here. We're absolutely in on DeFi, financial services as it relates to blockchain. You see, we have a number of companies here in money and banking, a number of companies in capital markets. Smart contracts are gonna be huge, for sure in blockchain, and we have some companies there. Identity is a clear winner there. We've sold two of those. We also think electronic voting will be a thing, although we think it'll take a little longer, for that to move forward. All right. I'm gonna turn it over now to Erika Nash, who will talk for a minute about company performance. Thanks, Matt. Next, we're going to walk you through the performance of some of the portfolio companies in the Medici Ventures Fund. Starting first with tZERO, which is a digital currency brokerage for capital markets. This investment was made in 2015 and constitutes 45.6% of partner's capital. You can think of percent of partner's capital as the company value as a percentage of total equity. Some of the tailwinds that get us really excited about the opportunity that tZERO has in front of it is the first, the proliferation of digital assets as a means of exchange. Second, the ambiguity surrounding whether or not NFTs and digital currencies are in fact securities. And third, the fact that tZERO is approved as a registered broker-dealer. Next is Voatz, which is a mobile elections platform. This investment was made in 2017 and constitutes 2.7% of partner's capital. A few of the market tailwinds that we think are moving votes in the right direction are the fact that there have been many high-profile voter fraud claims and various ballot access issues in recent months and years that have brought to the forefront the fact that new solutions and more effective solutions could be a need in the market. Next is the continued adoption of smartphones and other digital devices across the globe. Third, the global regulations that are allowing for remote and online voting that are beginning to kind of pop up across the country and across the world. Next is Bitt, which is a central bank digital currency. This investment was made in 2016 and constitutes 7.8% of partner's capital. Right now, about 80% of central banks are considering a CBDC, which stands for Central Bank Digital Currency. The company was also re-domiciled from Barbados to Delaware, which was an important move that will open up a lot of opportunity for the company. They also recently landed a large deal with Nigeria that we think will open the floodgates for future opportunities, and deals globally. Up next is PeerNova, which is a data quality monitoring solution for financial institutions. This investment was made in 2015 and constitutes 3.7% of partner's capital. Some of the market tailwinds that get us excited about PeerNova are. First, there's been an increased volume and velocity of financial data alongside a shift among consumers and enterprises toward more real-time data. There's also been stricter data reporting requirements that have recently come to light for financial services companies. Collectively, we think that these tailwinds position PeerNova to capitalize on this opportunity. SettleMint is another company in the Medici fund. This is a low-code platform for creating blockchain applications. The investment was made in 2017 and constitutes 1.5% of partner's capital. Three tailwinds that we think are moving this business forward are, first, the high cost and complexity of operating blockchain applications today. Second, the need for faster transaction validation on blockchains. Third, the emerging standardization of methods to facilitate more collaboration in the ecosystem. Ripio is a cryptocurrency solution for Latin America. This investment was also made in 2017 and constitutes 4.6% of partner's capital. We're excited about this business because of the high volatility of emerging market currencies, primarily driven by various geopolitical issues. There's also been, as I mentioned earlier, a proliferation of digital assets as a means of exchange. Finally, a need for simpler and more user-friendly cryptocurrency wallets. We think Ripio is well-positioned to serve the Latin American region. GrainChain is another company in the portfolio, and think of this as a blockchain platform for agriculture. The investment was made in 2018 and constitutes 5.6% of partner's capital. There are a few tailwinds that are driving this business forward. First, the fact that there's limited technology around agricultural economies today. Next is the need for expedited and more transparent agricultural payments. Finally, GrainChain's payment rails are now capable of reaching national banks, which we believe will really unlock the potential for this business to grow in a meaningful way. Medici Land Governance is a land entitling management solution. The investment was also made in 2018 and constitutes 5.1% of partner's capital. Three tailwinds that we're excited about with this company are, first, 70% of the world's property is unregistered, which causes tremendous land insecurity. Second is the emergence of high-accuracy drones, which has significantly reduced mapping costs. Finally, the governmental need to tax owned property to expand utilities. Chainstone Labs is a tokenization of securities and digital assets solution. The investment was made in 2017. You'll hear from this company a little later today. They constitute 1.5% of Partners' capital. Three market tailwinds that are driving this business forward are, first, the ambiguity surrounding whether or not NFTs and digital currencies are securities. I've mentioned this before and it's affecting other companies in the portfolio as well. Again, proliferation of digital assets as a means of exchange. The fact that Chainstone Labs is approved as a registered broker-dealer. FinClusive is a blockchain-enabled digital banking platform. This investment was made in 2018 and constitutes 1.6% of Partners' capital. We're really excited about this business because of the very high number of unbanked or underbanked individuals across the globe. We see that there's an opportunity to parse out perceived versus actual high-risk individuals from that underbanked and unbanked population. Not to mention the ongoing shift to KYC solutions that's speeding up the onboarding process in the ecosystem. We've also had two notable exits that we wanted to call out in the portfolio. First is Evernym, which is a self-sovereign identity management platform. This investment was made in 2013 and exited in December 2021, acquired by Avast, which is a large security company. Factom was the next exit that we had recently, which is an enterprise-grade blockchain layer. This investment was made in 2014 and exited in August 2021, acquired by Inveniam Capital. With that, I'll turn it back over to Matt, and we hope this has given you a helpful overview of some of the companies that we're working with and excited about building in the coming months and years. Thanks, Erika. I just wanna take a minute and talk to you about what we're trying to accomplish. What is Pelion's goal with these companies in the first place? I want to start by talking about the tZERO archetype, because I think we're both very proud of what we did at tZERO so far, and we also view it as the archetype for everything we do in the future. This is what we're trying to accomplish. If we think about what happened there to begin with, when Som left, we were just thinking about changing out the CEO and keeping on keeping on. But the further we got into it, the more we thought, "Wait a minute, we could really change the game. We could really flip the script for this company. That has become now the goal for all of these companies moving forward, that we're trying to really make every future interaction that they have easier. That has certainly happened at tZERO, where now with the backing of ICE, with David Goone in the CEO spot, every interaction that the company has is easier than it was just a few months ago. We think we've really changed the game for them, and we want to do that over and over again for these companies. The second piece is we can't really be afraid of complexity. That particular deal, bringing in David Goone, bringing in the money from ICE, turned out to be extremely complicated, and it felt like more complexity every time we turned around. We can't fear that. We have to churn through it and keep trying to do these big thinking type things with all of these companies moving forward. Notably, any change you make in startups is risky, anything. You may as well just take big swings and try and do big things with these companies. We're trying to build a juggernaut every time if we can. I thought it was a little bit comical we did here at Pelion when we first took over the Medici portfolio, and we heard rumors out there of people saying, "Well, Pelion took this on in order to just get management fees and, you know, just take some money and run almost." Which is just ridiculous. We from the very start, all we've ever wanted to do is build category winners. That's what we're doing. We're trying to create category winners with each of these companies. That's the goal for Pelion. There are some implications to that that are important to talk about. First of all, it means that you'll take smaller pieces of bigger pies from time to time. In the case of tZERO, ICE took a fairly significant chunk of tZERO. We own less of it than we did before, but we felt like we made, we increased the value of the company so substantially that it was worth it to do that. You know, it's an easy trade you'd make every time if you can, if you can get a smaller piece of a bigger pie. It's worth noting that as we do these things, they take time. It's not simple to get to create a juggernaut. Again, when we replaced Saum, and it took time, and as kind of months wore on, we heard people talking about wondering if we knew what we were doing, you know, and all of that kind of stuff. We heard it. In the background, we were doing a thing we thought was very big and we knew would be good for the company. We just kinda kept our heads down and churned away. I think what you need to recognize as we do that, you know, you can change out a CEO in a few weeks, but really creating the environment for a category winner could take months or in some cases even years. We're gonna be that patient as we seek to build these big companies. We have to ignore noise. You know, we have to ignore what people are saying about it, and we can't be driven by any sort of short-term thinking. We have to think long-term on these things. Everything that we're gonna do comes with an extreme degree of risk. It's very hard and these companies are very fragile in most cases. There just isn't a low-risk way to build a category winner. We all need to recognize that. Finally, they're just where they're gonna be winners and losers, and virtually nothing in between. That's kind of the way venture capital works, as most of you know. You make most of the money on a couple of companies, two or three, and you make a little bit of money on a bunch of others, and then there's some that just don't have it. That's gonna have some bad effects for some people in our portfolio because we're not gonna continue to fund everything. Companies are gonna have to start showing some traction, and if they will, then we'll continue to fund them, and if they won't, we just won't. But like most venture funds, you know, we'll have a $50 million exit in the portfolio every once in a while, and it'll elicit a yawn. That's not what we're trying to accomplish. Just understand that here at Pelion, what we're trying to do with the Medici portfolio is create these category winners, build juggernauts. That is the goal, and that's what we're trying to accomplish each time. A final word just on the whole portfolio. First, blockchain is not so much an evolutionary technology as it is a transformational one. Because of that, you should expect that there will be fits and starts and runs and pullbacks and things will go well and things will go poorly. All of those things will happen with the portfolio and even within each individual company within the portfolio. Expect that. Don't be surprised by it. We are betting on the long term for these companies and excited about them. Finally, just expect to be surprised. We are every day in venture capital by something that happens in our portfolio companies. Hopefully, they'll be pleasant surprises. Sometimes they won't be. Know that that's gonna happen. With that, I'll go to a Q&A section that we'll talk about in just a second. Thank you. We received some questions about the portfolio that we wanted to just address here. Let's just kind of run through some of the things that people wanted us to talk about. Here we go. First question we've gotten, and we've gotten a lot of this, or variations of this, is how do you think about valuing the assets in the portfolio? The short version of it is, we don't think about it very much. What we're trying to do is build companies and, the valuation kinda is what the valuation is, as we do that. I think if we build really great companies then, that will kind of come out in the wash. I think that's the way to build these portfolios, and it's the best thing to do for the Managed fund. It's the best thing to do for Overstock, is just focus on building the really good companies. If we're successful at that, if we build juggernauts like we talked about a minute ago, then everybody's gonna be very, very happy with this portfolio. I think there's a hidden question in there, though, that I also just wanna touch on. The hidden question is, how should I think about valuing these assets, as I think about valuing Overstock? There, I just wanna say that I'm just baffled by the fact that it seems to be a fact that Overstock effectively gets zero credit for holding these companies. I don't know what these are gonna end up being valued at. I'll say a couple of things about it, though. The first thing I'd say, and this does not constitute a valuation, for example, of tZERO, but it's just a thought to put in the back of your head. If someone were to come to me today and offer $1 billion for tZERO, I wouldn't give them ten minutes of my time. That's not my expectation for what tZERO will be. There are a couple of other companies in the portfolio that I feel similarly about. Again, that's not a valuation of tZERO today, but it's what our expectations are going forward are very large for this portfolio. The idea that Overstock gets somewhere between zero credit and negative credit for it is just insane. On top of that, I think there would be a sentiment that says, "Well, if I can't put, you know, a dollar value on it, then I'm gonna give it a value of zero." That strikes me as just lazy. This is an extremely valuable portfolio. It will be even more so going into the future. That's kinda my thought on the Overstock portion of this, and you can take that for what it's worth. The second question that we have gotten and get a lot is how soon should we expect liquidity events for these assets? Well, as you know, we had a couple last year. We're not really in the business of kind of pushing them towards a liquidity event, and each of them is on its own path. Some of them would appear to be approaching a point where you'd want to either sell them or SPAC them or something like that. Some of them are further away, and so it's hard to put a timing on the portfolio for sure. For individual companies, they'll all be on their own path and we should expect that there will be some liquidity events probably within almost each year, when you have 19 of them left. You would expect that there would be some events happening from time to time. Like I said, we had two of them this year. Maybe that'll happen this coming year as well. Or last year, I should say. Two last year. The last question we got, would we entertain acquisition offers for these companies? Well, look, every company in the world is for sale every day. This is right up my alley. I don't know, I mentioned it earlier, but my longtime history is as a tech M&A guy. I used to run the M&A function for Oracle and a few other places. I get the whole business of entertaining acquisition offers. We would entertain them for any of the companies any day at the right price, of course. We aren't actively trying to sell any of these companies right now. I think these companies still have some growing to do. You know, you have situations with each company that are a little bit different. There are some of the companies where I think if a good acquisition offer came today, we'd like the company to entertain that. Other companies, I wouldn't even think about it unless it was just knocking my socks off in terms of an acquisition offer. Again, every one of these companies could theoretically be sold at any time. I just wouldn't expect that anytime very soon for some of them. That's the set of questions that we get a lot of and that we've gotten a lot. With that, we'll move back to Erika for the market trends segment. Thanks. Now we're going to walk you through some of the market trends that we're seeing in the blockchain and cryptocurrency sector at a high level. The first thing we've seen is a significant increase in capital that's been invested into blockchain and cryptocurrency. Blockchain funding hit a record high in 2021. We love this statement, that investors must have a position or a view on crypto or risk missing the biggest market opportunity in a generation. On the right, you'll see 10 of the largest blockchain funding rounds that we've seen in recent years. You'll see that there's a mix of sort of sector type of companies. But you likely recognize some of these names, and we think this is a signal that there are even larger businesses and other opportunities to come. We're also seeing a lot of credible investors beginning to make bets in blockchain and crypto. Whereas previously it was maybe more of a skeptical market to enter. In North America, we're seeing a lot of activity in the Bay Area, New York City, Houston, Chicago. Here are a handful of firms, many of which you may recognize, notable brands that are starting to make big bets in this space. We're seeing a similar thing in Europe as well as Asia. The good news is we think that blockchain is still in the early innings, and we're still early enough that there's a lot of room to capitalize on some of these market trends. In Q2 2021, this is a view of the blockchain investments into blockchain by deal type. As you can see, about 38% were at the early stage and 38.9% were at the later stage, which signals to us that a lot of the companies that have been funded are now beginning to kind of transition and grow into these later stage companies, which is exciting, as we think that will help kind of build and strengthen the sector as a whole. There's also been a large amount invested on a per year basis, but blockchain invested venture capital dollars still make up less than 1% of the total global venture capital market. This statement kind of captures this concept, which is in 2018, when we raised our last round, financial institutions were not in the game. Every major financial institution in the world either has a plan or is working on a plan to invest in blockchain. Although today the dollars going into blockchain and crypto investing are still a relatively small portion of total dollars in venture capital, we anticipate that this is something that will increase and grow over time. Well, for our first company overview, I'm pleased to introduce you to Bitt. Bitt is a company we're very excited about. I talked about it earlier in the size of market. The size of market for a central bank digital currency is just massive. It's worth noting that Bitt is the biggest player in the space. It's the most successful. It has the largest extant central bank digital currency, the eNaira out of Nigeria. An excellent company that we're really pleased to introduce to you. With that, we'll turn this over to Brian Popelka, who's the CEO of Bitt. Hello to everyone attending Medici Ventures Day. My name is Simon Chantry. I'm Co-Founder of Bitt, and I'm here with you today to present on past, present, and future of Bitt and our digital currency management system. Let's start off with a quick overview of Bitt. We offer a complete suite of market-tested products that enable the deployment of wholesale or retail CBDCs and stablecoins with interoperability, security, and financial inclusion in mind. From the outset of this company, our desire was to build a platform that would enable financial inclusion in a sort of a very fast-paced, fast evolving financial technology environment. Over the past six years, we've got extensive experience deploying digital currency systems to market, to the point where now we have five unique digital currency deployments across three continents. We've built experience working in a regulated, collaborative, multi-stakeholder environment that includes central banks, financial institutions, regulators, down to merchants, governments, et cetera. We have unique solutions for financial inclusion, including both custodial and non-custodial wallets and a number of other tiers and configurations. We can facilitate integrations with other CBDC networks as well as traditional legacy financial system networks. Title of the slide, digital currency transition is well underway. With over 87 countries now exploring a CBDC, it's certainly the case that the trend has gone in the direction that we thought it would. Back in 2015 when we digitized the Barbados dollar, that was sort of the first national currency to be digitized in the way that we had done it, sort of in closer collaboration with the central bank, with the Minister of Finance. While not being fully a CBDC, we did recognize that national currencies would be digitized on these novel Internet native payment rails, blockchains, distributed ledger technology, and the world certainly seems to be heading in that direction. Of those 87 countries that are now experimenting with CBDC, the majority of them are using some sort of distributed ledger technology or blockchain-based system, for many reasons that I'm sure most in this audience are well aware of. Thirty percent of those are actually experimenting technically. That means they're sort of going through a similar process to what Bitt has gone through with the ECCB, where we work in private for some time, configuring a solution, testing behind closed doors, basically a sort of a sandbox deployment, configuring the solution to meet their specific requirements, and in some cases, customizing the solution to meet their requirements. Eventually, once they feel ready, rolling it out to a wider audience. A big movement here that happened by the OCC some time ago, actually, already. Feels like this is already about a year and a half ago, is that they green lighted U.S. banks to participate in what they call independent node verification networks. They sort of made their own name up for distributed networks or crypto, because what they effectively mean by that is they're okay with them integrating with Ethereum-based stablecoins, or Stellar for that matter. That came from the OCC. I think that's within roughly two years ago. More and more American commercial banks are now looking at integrating with stablecoins or even piloting their own stablecoin, which is also an offering that Bitt services commercial banks with. We're currently doing that with the National Bank of Belize and with TASCOMBANK in Ukraine. Transformation timeline is within five years. I do agree with this statement. It looks like the majority of central banks are moving in this direction and that we'll continue to see pilot projects and then, you know, as they feel comfortable, they'll roll out to full production systems that are sort of extended throughout the monetary system. So some of the benefits we have here on the right, payments and safety, robustness, operational efficiency and competition, financial stability, improved monetary policy implementation, certainly financial inclusion. I'll touch on the competition and how that leads to financial inclusion component and I'll touch on some of the remaining points in the rest of the presentation. The idea is that the CBDC networks effectively become national public financial infrastructure. What does that mean? That means that the central bank, in large part, will fund the operation of a public financial network, their national digital currency network or CBDC, and then licensed entities will be able to integrate with that CBDC network to provide payment services to the general public. Those licensed entities could be commercial banks, they could be payment service providers, or any other platform for that matter, that wishes to have payment capabilities and can meet the licensing requirements to integrate with the network, both technical and AML compliance. The idea is that by basically providing a strong rail, this secure, robust and commonly accessed national digital currency rail at very low cost, is that you're effectively enabling firms that may not have had the ability to pro... Process transactions, securely store user balances. Those firms are now able to effectively outsource that function to the CBDC network at much lower cost than what currently exists. Right now there's a lot of walled gardens in the financial system, and so not every sort of firm that may be able to offer a unique or valuable payment service to the general public, not all of them can do that, because they simply cannot get access to a lot of the legacy system payment networks. CBDCs are meant to be more open to more firms at lower cost, which should increase the number of firms in the market that are offering unique payment services, and then thereby increase competition, which would drive down the cost of payments to the end user, which then leads to financial inclusion. Let's do a quick overview of our team here. We have Brian Popelka at the top here, our Chief Executive Officer. Had a great career at Overstock before coming over to Bitt a number of years ago. Brian has certainly led the growth of the company over the last few years. 2021 was a huge year for us, and Brian's operational experience has been critical for that growth. There's a presence of the team. It is a distributed team. You can imagine why we have deployments across, you know, the Caribbean, Central America, through to Eastern Europe and Africa. This is sort of why you have this distributed team. There's a number of us in Canada. I'm myself, I'm Canadian, so is Laurent and Imran. Of course, we have quite a presence in Salt Lake City and yeah, all these nodes on the map. We have team members who are all collaboratively coming together and meeting daily to, you know, continue pushing Bitt forward. Okay, let's get into our digital currency management system. This is our product. This is what Bitt is operating, like I said before, across five unique digital currency deployments in three continents. What is the digital currency management system? Well, it's effectively a complete financial technology solution for financial and private institutions, monetary authorities and governments to integrate with or issue their own, or mint their own CBDCs, stablecoins and other digital currencies. It basically enables the full lifecycle management of a digital currency, from minting through to issuance, through to transaction in the economy by a variety of stakeholders back through redemption and destruction of the digital currency. So here's an overview of, the products sort of separated by stakeholder. Okay, so we start from the top. We have your monetary authority. In a CBDC scenario, the monetary authority is obviously the central bank. In a stablecoin scenario, it's the operator, the commercial bank that acts as the monetary authority. What does that mean? Well, that means that they use our minting solution, which is effectively a segregated hardware security module to follow best practices for cryptographic key pair generation and cryptographic key pair signing for the minting events, complete with sort of tailored governance. Minting is performed on our segregated minting solution and then ported over to the digital currency manager, which is the online solution, sort of the interface through which central bankers basically administer the digital currency. That's where they do economic analysis. That's where they transact with their financial institutions who require newly issued digital currency. It's where they perform a variety of monetary policy actions such as changing interest rates or setting their wallet tiers, these sorts of things. It's basically their administration panel for monitoring and operating the digital currency. They can also do a number of economic analysis and reporting functions from their digital currency manager. At the next level, we have the financial institutions. In this sense, the financial institutions play an intermediary role in a digital currency deployment, where they are basically interacting with the monetary authority for newly issued digital currency, and interacting with their enterprise and retail clients, to be able to service them with digital currency products. They use the digital currency operations manager to effectively perform those actions. Again, configurable governance so that certain individuals within the organization can execute certain roles, as well as, you know, managing reports and analysis and permissions and these sorts of things. At the next level, we have our enterprise suite, that is quite similar to our e-government suite. This mainly consists of three applications. One, you have a point-of-sale application that can be loaded on any smart device and left at the point of sale. We have an e-commerce plugin that can be integrated with e-commerce capable websites, and then an enterprise digital currency manager, so that the management team can see incoming transactions, manage cashier permissions, again, manage a number of roles and responsibilities within the organization, issue reports, and do permission transactions. Whether they need to pay a vendor or they need to pay staff, or they need to convert back to their bank account, if we have a core banking integration, they can do so. At the bottom level, we have our retail consumer wallet. Super proud of our wallet. It's been live in Barbados in some form or fashion since 2015. We offer two sort of configurations of the wallet, and that is custodial and non-custodial. Either hosted or self-hosted. That basically speaks to where the private keys are stored for signing transactions on the underlying network. The user experience has greatly improved over the years. We have some really cool features that we've packed into the wallet. One of my favorites is the map function, where as you can imagine, with any new payment rail, like a digital currency rail, users wanna know where it's accepted. One of the ways that we drove some adoption and awareness in Barbados was we implemented a map of Barbados and offered merchants the ability to list on that map to show, "Hey, we accept digital Barbados dollars." As we grow that functionality out, we're looking at how to do in-app advertising and capitalize on some of that, you know, merchant exposure that they can get through the wallet app. It's a quick overview of sort of top to bottom of the digital currency management system. It is a full suite. One of the reasons why we went so wide with the offering was because we recognize how early we are in central banks piloting their digital currency that we knew we needed to have everything if they were going to choose Bitt to pilot with. That's arguably why the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank chose Bitt. They were the first central bank in the world to sign a contract with a company like Bitt to actually digitize their currency. We believe it's because we had this sort of end-to-end suite ready and available for them to test. Similar with Central Bank of Nigeria. They recognized that we had the full suite and experience operating it in a number of different deployments. It was a game changer for us. Now we serve the institutions on the left directly and the institutions on the right indirectly, and I'll describe how. The monetary authority, financial institutions and government agencies, these are institutions that we license the monetary authority suite, the financial institution suite, the e-government suite, respectively. On the right-hand side, we white label our enterprise suite and our retail consumer wallet to financial institutions or other intermediaries that are looking to operate those sorts of payments products in market. Bitt itself is not looking to be a market-facing service provider. Our primary clients are central banks, financial institutions, and to a lesser extent, government agencies. The reason we've done this is because operating a payments service in market is sort of a much different operation than servicing a monetary authority or financial institution. It's heavily regulated, it's heavily competitive, and we're looking to be the technology solution provider for the financial rails of the future. Yes, we have these enterprise and retail offerings ready to white label those who want to offer those products in market. Those are experienced players in market well-funded on a country-by-country basis, who you know, who are better suited to sort of operate those. We deal directly with the monetary authorities, financial institutions, and this applies whether it's a CBDC deployment or stablecoin deployment. Again, the monetary authority would be the financial institution who is operating the currency itself. A little insight on our business model here. We basically have four revenue streams that occur almost in these same sequential stages. I'll walk through them here sort of case by case. The professional service fees, you know, not super interesting from a tech company perspective as far as valuations are concerned, but certainly interesting in the sense that they couple pilot projects. As in central banks require a lot of hand-holding and education in this process. We provide that alongside our software licensing model. If we get into a pilot project, first of all, we try and advocate for the central bank to bring in additional experts, whether it's a Big Four professional services firm or a trusted, you know, software consultant firm with domestic experience. In many cases, they still lean on us for some of these sort of professional services. We offer those in sort of in parallel with our software licensing fees for a pilot project, say. The licensing fees are basically recurring fees charged to the central banks and the financial institutions for utilizing the monetary authority suite and the financial institution suite, and then, of course, if they're using our enterprise suite and retail consumer wallet, that's additional licensing fees that we gain from the financial institution who then offer those products in market, and they can set whatever business model they want to set in market. Now, as we get into live deployments, what we're looking at is network market fees. These are basically fees charged to entities that are integrating into the digital currency network, but that aren't necessarily using our applications. You can think of this like kind of like an app store process where those institutions or firms are consuming APIs or SDKs to basically offer their digital currency payment service to the public. They don't wanna use our applications, they just wanna consume APIs and SDKs that enable them to create wallets and process a variety of transactions on the underlying network. That's sort of the marketplace model, which is, you know, getting interesting and certainly heating up as we move to sort of open up the APIs and SDKs in our deployments. Of course, the network usage fees are the large attraction here. Now CBDCs, the goal of a lot of these central banks is to keep the fees as low as possible. It looks like the industry is converging around a competitive percentage of network usage fees. Of course, it needs to undercut existing sort of financial infrastructure costs, I guess you could say, in the business model of existing financial infrastructure. Thankfully, those margins are pretty healthy. Even by undercutting them, we still have a really exciting business model and growth opportunity for the company. We have a land and expand strategy that we are currently under sort of pursuing across three continents, as I mentioned before. We have in sort of Central America, Caribbean, we have Belize, Barbados, ECCB. By land and expand, we mean when we get into a country to deploy either a CBDC or a stablecoin, there exists many opportunities when that system has been rolled out or when that platform has been rolled out. There's many, many opportunities. So what we look to do is land, obviously, the initial contract and then see how we can further develop opportunities in that region. You know, the next we have, of course, is Eastern Europe. This is a complicated deployment given the conflict now, but I must say that the Ukrainians are incredibly resilient, and they have not let up at all on this project throughout the entire conflict. We're pursuing a similar strategy here, where they're actually themselves pushing more and more expansion to include other commercial banks as well, in the e-hryvnia stablecoin network. Similar in Nigeria, we see a lot of opportunities to land, get the eNaira network up and running, which it is, and then build out other verticals and through partnerships or other sort of methods. Here's a quick overview of our current projects. You've heard me mention them throughout the presentation a number of times, but we have, of course, DCash with the Eastern Caribbean Central Bank. It was the world's first CBDC for a currency union, and it was almost the first CBDC generally. Central Bank of Nigeria, of course, with the eNaira project that went live at the end of last year. Biggest economy in Africa. National Bank of Belize with NBB Pay for the digital Belize dollar. The project with TASCOMBANK in Ukraine, I mentioned, a little bit on the previous slide. This is an exciting one because it effectively represents a continuation of the National Bank of Ukraine's CBDC projects. They've already done some CBDC projects on their own on the Stellar network, so we're integrated with Stellar for this one. It's like the National Bank of Ukraine are monitoring it closely as kind of a continuation of their CBDC pilot program. Super excited about that one. And then obviously the beloved, the first digital Barbados dollar deployment, mMoney in Barbados. That's still in operation. This served as our basically our pilot, our proof of concept, trying to show how we thought a currency could work as a network by you know enabling other payment processors, telecoms, even the government to integrate with that network to process payments in digital Barbados dollars. For Bitt, last year was a big year for Bitt in 2021 because we landed three of these projects, the middle three here, Central Bank of Nigeria, National Bank of Belize, and TASCOMBANK with the e-hryvnia. I don't think it's too bold to say we are the global market leader. We have the most digital currency deployments out of any company like Bitt. There are a number of competitors, and we certainly have the most digital currency deployments out of all of them. Furthermore, we ranked top in the retail index by PwC for our deployment in Nigeria. We're, you know, constantly winning awards, putting out thought leadership and working with some really prestigious institutions now. Our engineering team have been contributing to the MIT Digital Currency Initiative working group, that's associated with Project Hamilton, which is the Fed's U.S. digital dollar sort of test group. Really, really excited to be a part of that, and we're certainly gonna make sure that we have some part to play in the digital U.S. dollar testing. Let's see. Oh, that brings us to the last slide here, some FAQs. Yeah, these are some that obviously keep us up at night. We wanna be building systems that are enabling individuals that will not be used as control systems. I know that this is a concern mainly in the context of China. We know that some of the functionality that they've built into their digital currency is concerning. We're looking to build systems that empower people. Our old tagline was enable payments and empower people, and we certainly wanna do that. Do CBDCs pose a genuine threat to data privacy? Well, of course they do, and this is why we are at the table to help establish standards that preserve privacy and protect privacy. These are ongoing discussions now. There are no set standards for the data model and the access model, accountability by the operators. These are all standards that we are seeking to set, and this is where we've been having discussions with the likes of the Bank for International Settlements, the OECD, the IMF, industry think tanks, and everybody is concerned with, you know, what is the correct data model. The challenge is on a country-by-country basis, you could argue that it's different. We obviously want to go as far as we can to the data privacy and data protection side as well as the ability to hold central banks accountable for any access that they do have to data. I should say the way to answer this question is basically to say we are establishing standards with other industry leaders to ensure that CBDCs are systems that can be used for public good, where your privacy is protected. Why should the world's largest economy develop and deploy a CBDC? This is the hot topic in Congress now and throughout the U.S. My take is, you know, the digital U.S. dollar, I think it's inevitable, and it already exists in stablecoin form. The question is, could the Federal Reserve stand to benefit from existing monetary policy tools by implementing a digital U.S. dollar? Certainly the ability to interoperate with international CBDCs will be a big one. The ability to make real-time monetary policy decisions that instantly take effect on a CBDC network, that's another big one. A large one is integrating with this growing crypto ecosystem. This is the fastest-growing asset class in history, with aggregated market cap, you know, $1.5 trillion now, and 10 years ago it was basically nothing. The ability to interoperate effectively with this growing decentralized finance ecosystem, I think is a big one as well to consider. That's my two cents. I think I'm almost at the half an hour mark here, so I will close it off. There's a good shot of Brian for you to close off the presentation. I hope everyone enjoyed the presentation, and feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. All the best. Now we're pleased to introduce Spera, a company focused on helping financial institutions better communicate and facilitate payments to and from their customers. Greg Pesci is the CEO and has some exciting updates to share with you about the business. Hi, I'm Greg Pesci, the founder and CEO of Spera, Inc. We're doing business as MessagePay, which will become more clear to you as this presentation unfolds. At the very beginning, I'd like to say thank you to Medici Ventures and to Overstock and to Pelion Venture Partners for the confidence that you showed in us by investing in us. We received an investment from Medici Ventures in June of 2017, and that was very instrumental in allowing us to build our product and to make the progress that we've made so far. Progress that I'm happy to share with you today. Again, I wanna start out by saying thank you for that assistance. I'll tell you a little bit about what MessagePay is. As I started thinking about what we could do to try to help in the financial institution space, I was looking at the confluence of communications and payments, and thought, "What could we do to help financial institutions better communicate with and make payments to, receive repayments from their customers?" That was the genesis of developing MessagePay. We could see that financial institutions were on a digital journey trying to digitize nearly all of what they do to try to make things easier for their customers and to try to meet their customers where they are, which is largely on their phones. We started thinking about what we could do to make that happen. We developed our product in 2018. By the very end of that year, we were able to sign our first federally regulated financial institution. Since that time, we've been able to grow steadily. The general notion for us was we would provide these financial institutions with a white-labeled offering that allowed them to better communicate with their customers and take payments from them. Customers could use a variety of payment channels to do that, and we've built that into our product. They can use text messages, email, chatbots. There's a web portal capabilities as well. Excuse me. You also can use over the phone inside of call centers. We do all of that for our customers today. Our current status is as follows. We have over 70 financial institution customers. Again, our first one signed in 2018, although we did not go live with that customer until June of 2019. There were some issues on their side and on our side that kinda worked out nicely for us to be able to get both of our issues solved by the middle of 2019. We've been in business for now for three years with customers. As of 2022, MessagePay has reached profitability, we're happy to say, although we are looking at our ways to grow, and we'll be spending into that, but we are profitable right now. Our last round of funding was that round in which Medici participated, which was in June of 2017. We have not raised any money since then. We reserve the right to do so going forward, especially as we look to scale even faster, but to date, that has not been the case. We're again really grateful for the assistance that Medici provided to us and got us going along this journey, which I'll tell you a little bit more about now. How do we make money? MessagePay participates in all payment transactions that flow through our software. We decided that we wanted to make this process have as little friction as possible. In order to do that, we wanted to make sure there was few fees as possible and that's what we've done. When our financial institutions use our offering, we participate in every transaction that goes across the system. That has been very good for us and will continue to be so. The types of transactions that we have are debt repayment, which are programs that Visa and Mastercard have, specialized program by Visa and Mastercard that allows special rates in order for financial institutions to get their debts repaid using our system and other systems like ours. We do debt repayment, account funding, you can start an account with our software as well and put that initial deposit in it. You can actually then put in subsequent deposits. We do one-off payments, recurring or scheduled payments. Our fee structure has two variations right now, at least. One. There's a convenience fee approach, which is part of the debt repayment program that Visa and Mastercard have, where the borrower actually can, for the convenience of paying through this channel, can actually do so using a convenience fee. We also have traditional normal processing rates. Excuse me. Yes, normal processing rates where you can, like anyplace else where you swipe your card, there's just the interchange that the merchant bears. We do both today in the marketplace and are successful with both of them. There may be future opportunities for us to look at other transaction types, but that's where we're at today. From a fintech infrastructure standpoint, I think this is a really important piece that I wanna emphasize. We have been working diligently to make sure that we'll have the kinds of relationships and integrations that make our offering extremely powerful and allow it to have future use cases. Right now we have three acquiring banks, which allows us to provide merchant accounts to our financial institution customers. Those relationships are very, very key to us. We also have three different payment processors that we work with and fully integrated with. For all three of these banks and processors, we're in the marketplace today. In addition to that, we also have integrations and relationships with core lending management systems, and 14 of those. Really actually very proud of this because it's not easy to do. We actually have the ability to integrate into the back end a core system for banks. When... Say you have a loan and you're paying back on your loan, and there's a certain amount for principal and interest, and you make that payment. Banks have these large back-end cores that actually manage all that, the Fiservs, FIS, Jack Henrys of the world. These are huge companies, and we're able to integrate into those systems so that when a transaction is run across our system in real time, it goes end to end. That information goes across the processing system and goes all the way into the bank's core, updates that loan management system, and then sends real-time information back to both the bank and the borrower about that the payment was made, that it was received, this much went to principal and interest, and oh, by the way, your next payment is X amount due on this date. It's not an easy thing to do to get those integrations. We have real time with a number of them. We are working on getting even more. Sometimes we do batch modes because that's what our customers want or what is possible with a given core. But we continue to expand those numbers of core integrations, and we think that puts us into a very solid place from a fintech infrastructure standpoint and something that we'll be able to take advantage of, going forward. Our notion in building this product was pretty clear. We wanted it to be for both the financial institutions, in particular the borrowers, simple, fast, convenient, and allowing payments anywhere at any time. If you have your phone with you can receive a payment reminder, and you can make a payment from wherever you may be and at any time of the day. We know that this is something that our financial institution customers have wanted for a long time, even before the pandemic. With the pandemic, it accelerated these needs. People wanna be able to not have to go into a branch. People wanna be able to make these payments in a safe environment, and this accelerated the need in the marketplace, which was actually for us a pretty good fit. We all hope that the pandemic subsides. For us it was a pretty good fit and it did help with our growth. Speaking of the convenience of it, you know, regardless of our age, 89% of us have our smartphones within our arm's reach all the time. I have mine right here even as we're presenting. I'm sure many of you as you're listening to this have yours right next to you. Millennials rank the digital self-service as the most important attribute in their banking relationships. It even exceeds trust. As financial institutions are looking for ways to meet the needs of all their customers, particularly those in millennials and in Gen Z, having the ability to do this via the phone or at least having it being a critical part of the process is essential for them. Using text, it's not the only method, but it is a key method for us. We also know that 98% of all text messages are opened and 95% of text messages are opened and responded to within three minutes. It's a very key delivery method, and we've seen how effective it is for our financial institution customers. How does it work? Well, it's actually fairly simple. Customers can receive messages. These are payment reminders. You know, from your financial institution using our software, it'll come to you and it'll look just like your financial institution and it'll feel just like your financial institution. You'll receive a payment reminder from your financial institution saying, "Hey, Greg, you have a $400 car payment that is due on this day." You have the ability to respond to that. You can actually pay straight from the phone itself, or there are other mechanisms that a text message can take you to a portal. We also have email capabilities. We'll talk a little bit more about this. It makes it very, very simple. You get a message, you have the ability to put in for the first time some payment methods, which is a debit card, ACH, and in certain instances a credit card as well. You load that the first time and then in a completely PCI compliant fashion, and this is also TCPA compliant, you load that information the first time, then in all subsequent times you can just tap your screen and that payment can be made. Then you'll get information letting you know that the transaction was completed. It's actually very simple and very convenient and has worked well for us. Some of the features from the FI customer standpoint, as I said earlier, you know, MessagePay brings digitization to the financial institution customer experience. This is something that our customers want. They want digitized as much as they possibly can to make it easier for their customers to pay, and that's what we do. MessagePay replaces, you know, mailed in checks. You may be surprised how many financial institutions, even today in 2022 still get a considerable number of their payments through mailed-in checks and in-person branch visits. We provide self-servicing payment options, web portal, text, email, chat, and even at a call center that makes it much easier and convenient to make these payments. From the financial institution side, this is what we do for them, and this is, I think pretty key. One, we provide them a merchant account. That's why we have the banking relationships that I alluded to. Our goal is to make this for our financial institution customers, a process that is fully self-enrollment and instant enablement. That means that they can sign up for this on their own. They don't need any help from us or from anybody else, and that once they do so, we want that to go live, that merchant account to go live immediately. Now, we are not there just yet. We're very close on the self-enrollment side. On the instant enablement side, we're working with our bank partners for them to feel even more comfortable in allowing that to occur. That's our goal, and we're going to achieve it. We're just not there yet, but we're quite close. We talked a little bit earlier about the core processor integrations. This is essential and something that our financial institution customers really want, and so we work hard on that. We provide a set of tools, administrative tools, to our customers, where they have an admin portal. They can see all the payments that are coming into their institution. They can see who paid when, how much, what for. They also have all settlement reporting, transaction-level reporting about those payments. They even have the capacity when there are one-off calls into the financial institution that they can take payments through that administrative portal as well. Another key thing here is we have been able to embed payments into not only our software but also into the software of our financial institution customers. There's a gentleman named Matt Harris at Bain Capital Ventures, who I'm a huge fan of, and he talks about this kind of developmental model of where in the fintech space, where it started with digitization and has moved now towards embedded payments. The idea that if you have software that your customers use for a variety of different reasons, for whatever purpose your software serves, this is sticky software that your customers use. Instead of having an extra step for the payment purpose, the idea is to embed payments inside of your software itself. We've been able to do that, for our own software and also to help with our customers, where we've embedded our payments into their app, into the chat box that they may be using, into online banking. We see that as a important area of growth going into the future and something that we're quite proud of. In addition to that, we have also been looking at data analytics. As you can imagine, there's a considerable amount of payment information that goes across our system. Who is paying for what, to whom, when and how much and what amount. What we started to do was in a completely de-identified fashion, we started taking a look at some of these sample transactions and we're able to see if we can build some predictive modeling on this. It's very early in the process right now. We've been using some machine learning to do so, which candidly, I'm not even sure exactly how that all works, but we have members of our team that do. What we did was take a look at a sample of transactions and started to see could we predict who would not pay their loan on time in a given month. We achieved some pretty decent results on the accuracy of that model. We did 12 months of data on this for a proof of concept. You know, we didn't have any, you know, model optimization at the time. We were able to actually predict at a fairly high rate who would not make payment on that. That made us think about a couple of things from our customer standpoint, those financial institutions. First and foremost, they wanna be repaid. They, having a better idea of who is more likely to do so is helpful for them. We think this is a service that we're building that they'll be very interested in. In addition to that, not only focusing on who's going to pay you back and who might not, but also, could we build some predictive models that would give you an idea of who you may wish to actually lend to on the front end? We see this as a really solid opportunity for us going forward to help our financial institution customers, both with their existing loan base and how they're getting paid back for that, and also as they think about what are those, to whom they may wish to loan in the future, to lend, excuse me, in the future. This data analytics piece that we've been building is actually very key to our services going forward, and we think that our customers, we're gonna really like that. Others have asked us about, where else might—what other potential verticals may you go into as you expand? I wanted to share with you a couple of those potential verticals. Certainly alternative lenders. We've already been asked to provide some services to some alternative lenders. We are not currently doing so. We expect that we'll have our first alternative lender customer in the second quarter of this year. That's actually a pretty good fit for us right now because, while there's a little bit of work that needs to be done on the front end from a UX/UI standpoint, this is largely just what we're doing. It's an amount owing. It's a debt, one that needs to be repaid, and we're gonna help facilitate doing so. It's not really a reach for us or a stretch from what we're currently doing. It's actually consistent with our core offering, just expanding out to some additional customers who can and want to use our service. Along those lines, we also have been looking at automotive lenders. Again, this is not a big difference from what we're currently doing. There's an auto loan. These may be, you know, buy here, pay here, auto companies. We can provide for them the same service, allowing them to reach out to their customers and communicate with them and then to take payment from them. Again, we don't have any of those customers yet. We are looking into those. Then finally, a little bit off the beaten path, not sure we'll do it or not, but at least wanted to mention here, is that we do have some interest from healthcare providers who would love to have the texting and other sort of omni-channel payment capabilities where they could tailor a message to their customers and to their patients, and to send out to them text messages which would include embedded in them the capacity to actually pay back. You know, when you look at our current customers today, what we provide to them, among other things, is from the messaging standpoint, the ability to segment their portfolios and to say, "Okay," they give us their business rules saying, "I would like messages to go out to this group, you know, on this day," how many days before the due date, wherever it might be, and with this particular, customized content, what it actually is going to say, obviously in a compliant fashion. Our software is able to do that. We do that today. We allow financial institutions to say, "Send this message to this portion of our portfolio on this day, and send this other message to that portion of our portfolio on another day." We can do that and do it today with all of our financial institution customers and can also do that for all three potential verticals that you see on the screen right now. Again, as I come to the close of this presentation, I really wanted to say thank you to Medici Ventures, to Overstock.com, and to Pelion Venture Partners for the confidence that you have shown in us in your investment. Thank you for what it's done for us, because it's given us a chance to build this product and to develop the customers that we have today, which are over 70. We anticipate that we'll have over 100 by the end of the year and grow even faster into next year. For that, I'm very, very grateful and wanted to say thank you and appreciate this chance to speak with you today. Thanks. I've been asked to respond to a couple of questions that we received, and so I thought I would do that. The first question we have is, "Can your product be used internationally?" This is a good question, something that we're thinking a lot about. We don't currently have any international customers. However, we've been looking at doing so. The first location we think we may go is into Canada. What's necessary there is obviously we gotta be compliant with all of the laws and regulations in Canada, but we need to have a couple of on the payment infrastructure side, a couple of partners that will provide us with the ability to offer merchant accounts and processing capabilities in Canada. We need to have a banking relationship that will make this, make that possible for us and a processing relationship that would make it possible for us. We can go beyond Canada into other places because, yes, this product can definitely be used throughout the world. We're gonna start in Canada if we can and try to go as methodically as we can into other areas. The number one thing we'll need there is to make sure we secure those relationships. The answer to that is yes, it can be done. We haven't yet, but we're looking to do so in the near future. The second question that we have is, what do you need to scale your business? Okay, that sounds like a question from the latest board meeting. We do. There are a few things I think that, you know, in any business that you need in order to scale. You need to make sure that your processes and systems are in place and that they're strong enough so that and working well enough so that they can handle the volume of scaling. I believe that we are in a position to make that happen while we are growing well, and we would like to grow even faster. The things that we would need to do that are obviously making sure that we had the relationships in place to allow us to scale, the partners that we need to make that happen. Honestly, I think we will definitely, this wouldn't surprise a lot of people, probably continue to expand our dev team. That will be important for us to do that. Our sales team as well, as we look at those particular as to the plan in those particular areas where we're actually going to make that scale. As I said in the presentation there, you know, there's always a need for money to make that happen. We have a plan for this. We feel like our systems are in place to allow us to do so. We think we will be able to not only either from what we have today or what we can obtain, we'll have what we need to make that scaling occur. Finally, the third and final question was, are there other verticals that you might be able to serve? This question kind of goes back to what we talked about towards the end of the formal presentation, and that was. The answer is yes, there are other verticals that we can serve. We think it's logical for us to first start with expanding inside of the financial services industry. Maybe from just pure financial institutions, regulated financial institutions, to other providers within financial services industry. That's starting with some alternative lenders, as I said, and possibly going into automobile as well. Like I said inside of the presentation also, in other verticals that now get us outside of the financial services industry, broadly defined, there are other areas where we can use our product, and healthcare seems to be an area where we may focus first. We are very focused right now on the financial services space, first financial institutions and then some of these alternative lenders and some other alternative financial service providers. Thank you. The next company we wanna introduce you to is Ripio. Ripio is a company wherein we took a larger position this last year, invested more money in Ripio, and took a bigger stake of the company because this company is just killing it. This is effectively the Coinbase of Latin America, and we're so excited about what they're doing and can't wait for you to hear more about Ripio. Hello, everyone. My name is Sebastián Serrano. I'm the founder of Ripio. I'm an Argentinian. I grew up in the Patagonia and as I'm someone that loves technology. I code since I'm a kid and in love with technology and science. As an Argentinian, I saw many financial crises, at least three major ones. I experienced a lot inflation. About 2012, I saw Bitcoin for the first time. That blew my mind, not only on the technology about how we can change the world, but also as someone that has experienced the abuse of monetary systems and how this is a platform and a technology that we can use to build systems that we can trust and that can have a very positive impact in, and especially in a region. In April 2013, like nine years ago, decided to start a company to bring access to this amazing technology to Latin America. We started from Argentina, and today we have over 3 million users registered in the platform, over 300 people working in the company. Our main countries are Argentina and Brazil, but we are rapidly expanding through the region. Over the last two years, growth has been explosive. Before COVID, we had 400,000 users. Today with 3 million, that's very explosive growth. Growing across the region. We recently launched Colombia, Uruguay. We're about to launch Mexico and expanding. This explosive growth come from some strong needs. I mentioned like how inflation and economic crisis and weak institutions led to. or to have a very weak monetary system. Argentina today has over 6% monthly inflation and is rapidly going into a hyperinflation. This is a very cyclical process. It normally happens every 10 years or so. Not only that, there is also low banking penetration. Half of the population across Latin America doesn't have access to formal or semi-formal financial services. This technology really has a potential to grow financial inclusion and give economic liberty. With this background, our mission has become to democratize access with tools and knowledge. It's not only being able to use the technology, but have the tools to use it, but it's also the knowledge to be able to be empowered to take the most advantage about it. We're one of the companies that creates the most content in Spanish and Portuguese for cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology. This mission about providing access and democratizing the access to this technology is even in our name. Ripio in Spanish means gravel. Being from the Patagonia, there's a lot of connection with it because most of the roads are made of gravel. Kind of like the metaphor of the company is that we are making roads to access these new technology cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology and all the development of Web3 and the metaverse that are being developed right now. A solution we are constructing a powerful platform. It has a mobile app and web, which is a wallet that gives access to more mainstream users. My mom uses the wallet. She's over 60, and it's a very simplified experience to access Bitcoin, Ethereum, stablecoins, tokens that have parity with the U.S. dollar, which is very popular especially for people saving, and they're not volatile assets. We also have an exchange. The exchange is a platform for trading that has an order book, APIs, and allows bots to trade, and it's more meant for speculative users. We also have corporate services. We have an OTC desk that allows companies and institutions and high-net-worth individuals to get access to cryptocurrencies. We have over 500 companies currently using our OTC services. With it, there is also B2B APIs for companies that want to integrate with this technology. We have been in this work for many years, and one of the things that we're building that is very important to make this technology trustworthy and have more companies and governments to trust companies in this space is to have very strong compliance. We do KYC and AML, and we want really good users in our system. We don't want abuse to happen through us. We have very good KYC and AML practices. Our processes have been reviewed by Ernst & Young, Pricewaterhouse, and this has led us to be named by the World Economic Forum as a tech pioneer in 2020. We work with many of the local regulators across the region to work towards financial regulations in the space. In several of our countries, we have payment processors licenses, and today there is development on crypto licensing across the region. Today, our main countries are especially Argentina and Brazil, which are the first ones that we launched, but we're rapidly expanding across the region. We are already, this year, open Colombia through an acquisition, and we launched Uruguay. We're about to launch Mexico, and we plan to cover the entire Latin America in the next few years. With that, we're looking towards the future. The most exciting things that are happening right now is the development of Web3 and decentralized applications, DeFi access. We build a special product inside the wallet called Portal, which allows our users to get access to NFTs and the entire metaverse. This is one of the areas that is the most exciting to us. We're also working a lot in payments. As our user base has grown into a very sizable user base, we see that the next use case to tackle is payments. We did a partnership recently with Visa. We're launching cards in Argentina and Brazil, but we plan to launch cards across the entire region, and we're also working on user-to-user payments through QR codes and tags and integrating with many of the local payment methods to make payments a big use case of the platform. With that, I'm going to close, and I'm gonna be around for questions. Thank you. Now we'd like to introduce Chainstone Labs, an advisory and investment company at the intersection of Bitcoin and securities. The CEO, Bruce Fenton, and his highly experienced team are doing some really interesting things in this space. The company's been performing well, and we're really excited about that because we own a large portion of this company. With that, here's Chainstone. Hi, I'm Bruce Fenton with Chainstone Labs, and I'm pleased to be presenting the Chainstone Labs portion of Medici Ventures Day, sponsored by Pelion. Chainstone is an investment and advisory company that is focused on the intersection of securities and Bitcoin. For various regulatory and structural reasons, that's comprised of three separate companies: Atlantic Financial, which is a registered investment advisor, the Satoshi Roundtable Event Series Corporation, and Watchdog Capital, which is an SEC-registered broker-dealer and FINRA member investment company. Securities are in our organizational DNA, and that's what our main mission is, working on securities for the era of Bitcoin. Many of us have a lot of experience in the securities industry. Mike and I are gonna talk a little bit more about our backgrounds. Both of us have been in the securities business for roughly 30 years. I think I have 28 years, and Mike has 29 or 30 years. Other members of our team have worked for companies like Putnam, RBS, Citigroup, State Street, and Morgan Stanley. We also, as I mentioned, have the Satoshi Roundtable event series and the event corporation that we run, which is profitable, but the primary purpose of it is deal flow and connections, and it's been extraordinarily successful now in its eight years. eight h year, it's had sort of a who's who of industry members that have attended, crypto founders, project heads, Bitcoin developers, CEOs, you name it, they've probably attended, and it's been a very successful event series. It's really a great way for us to have a front row seat for, to the industry year after year and see what is going on. We've made some great connections and some deals from that. As a firm and as a company, the most important thing that I think we can convey is how we look at the world and what we're doing in the way that we look at the world. That's probably best described as looking through everything that is happening in our world through the lens of a fourth turning or an epoch shift. There's a great book by Strauss and Howe called The Fourth Turning, and there's a lot of other literature and theories that kind of talk about basically times of epic change, times where everything changes in the world. Money changes, power structures change, who people trust changes, these kind of things. That is definitely what we're seeing going on in the world right now. Two years ago in April, I wrote an article called End of an Epoch, a paper talking about these changes and what I was predicting would happen as a result of the, you know, COVID reaction and other things. It was sort of inevitable, and we believed this even before COVID came along, that we were in this shift. As with previous times in history, there's always some kind of catalyst that's sort of the final, you know, pin that pops the balloon or however you look at it. The reaction to COVID was very, very significant. Obviously, the money printing you can see on this chart. You have U.S. money supply from 1980 to present, and you have this huge hockey stick and all of the other things that are impacted by that, as well as, you know, geopolitical instability, domestic issues, you know, legal, human rights. There's all kinds of things tied into this, including, of course, money, which is very, very important in the world and the economy and how everything works. It's sort of the backbone of everything. Bitcoin and how Bitcoin fits into that. We think that the world is changing very rapidly and more significantly than anybody alive has ever seen before. We think that our world is going through the type of change that happened when, you know, during the creation of the printing press or the American and French Revolutions. You know, this kind of epic time where the world is really unrecognizable in a period of five years or so. It's not unusual. It's actually the norm in history, and it's happened again and again. What we've spent the last, you know, couple years, even before the COVID situation looking at is how the world is changing and what the world will look like, and think about what money will look like and what a world looks like with Bitcoin as money and how things work, like securities. Bitcoin is a better money, and the technology can also make securities better. Now, they're two different things. To be good money, you need to be fungible, durable, portable, uniform, limited in supply, acceptable, divisible. We believe Bitcoin meets that very, very well. We love the saying, Bitcoin, you know, fix the money, fix the world. That's only part of the story, though. We also have to think about the next step, which is once the money changes, once Bitcoin changes the world, and whether it's, you know, however part of it Bitcoin is, money is going to change. There's no world where Gen Z is using the same kind of money systems that we have now. They're going to want the type of superior money that Bitcoin is. That's just an inevitable law of economics. Politicians can't simply print money from thin air without eventual consequences. Bitcoin fixes this. What it also does is that the invention of the distributed ledger for Bitcoin also has potential to improve how securities work. Right now, we have a centralized model, and that's the way the world had worked for everything prior to Bitcoin. You have a centralized party that says what is true. That's basically what a ledger is. You interact with ledgers day-to-day throughout your life. The ledger that says that you have the permission to be in the building that you're in, your apartment lease, your car insurance, your driver's license, your bank account, your credit card balance, your PayPal account, all of these things are ledgers, and they're all centralized. Stocks work the same way, and money works the same way until Bitcoin. What Bitcoin did is it invented a new technology, and this is something that's sometimes tricky for people to get their head around when they first get into Bitcoin. It is a new invention, and it's an invention that the toothpaste can't be put back in the tube. It's something that changes the world and changes how things can happen. Specifically, it solves kind of a variation of the Byzantine Generals Dilemma, which enables untrusted parties to share information and know what is true without having custody of the ledger. That's what Bitcoin does, and that has ramifications and, you know, potential for the securities industry to completely transform how it works. Trade has always found a way, and volume has often been limited by technology. As new technologies come along, including the chalkboard at one point was a new technology, the ticker tape, and these kind of things, firms and people move to use that technology to increase volume. The natural human state is to trade. Humans, and especially investors, want to naturally, buy and participate in the things that they believe in and that they feel that they know and understand. I love this slide. These are stockbrokers in the Baghdad Stock Exchange after the United States invaded Iraq and bombed Iraq and the Coalition Provisional Authority took over. What they're doing here is the stock exchange was destroyed and all the computers were gone, and there was no internet. Everything was closed. They still needed to make a market. What did they do? They grabbed whiteboards and the stockbrokers and other professionals got together in a room and they started matching markets. They say, "What is this company worth? What is that company worth? Is the CEO dead? Is the headquarters gone? We have no idea. We've got to have price discovery and we got to have trading. This is the natural state of humans. No matter what technology they have, they want to trade, they want to participate in value, they want to bet on the things that they believe in and avoid the things that they don't believe in. They want to buy and sell. It's a fundamental part of who we are and voluntary interaction and the kind of interactions that have driven the economy for thousands of years and will continue to drive the economy. What technology does is make this work better. If we can make it work better, we can make the entire world work better. The current system is broken. It's counterintuitive, it's slow, it's very complex. The hand-drawn drawing on the left is a basic representation of how stock certificates work now. A lot of people think that the issuer, ABC Corporation, for example, who issues the stock certificate, has the ledger. That's how startups work, but not in the big leagues of publicly traded companies or companies that move around a lot. You need transfer agents and clearing firms and custodians, and you have multiple brokers who do not trust each other, and intermediaries and agents and all of these other factors. Not to mention DTCC and Cede & Co., which you may have heard of, which are the ultimate kind of legal and beneficial owners of really all of the publicly traded securities in the United States. It's a very complex and counterintuitive system, and it has a lot of drawbacks. This complex system is the reason that it takes 10 days to move your shares in a company from one large brokerage firm to another Main Street brokerage firm. Yet, if you're in crypto, it only takes 1 hour to move your Litecoin from one exchange to another exchange. It's a big deal. It's not just about solving a problem of paperwork. It's not just about making it more efficient. It's about making access to these investments more available to more people. It's about unlocking trading, and it's about fulfilling that natural human desire that people have to voluntarily interact and trade. That's the piece, although this is a trillion-dollar industry, solving the paperwork issue is a big deal, but solving the ability for people to share value and share risk and trade it and unlocking the trillions, deca-trillions in value that is already there. -If you look out your window, you look at your office, you see buildings, you see businesses, small businesses, mom-and-pop restaurants, hotels, real estate complexes, multinationals, giant companies, manufacturing companies that are dismally failing and probably going to go out of business, companies that are on the upswing who are doing great. You see it all around, and there are deca-trillions of dollars in value that is right there. We don't need to create a new market. We just need to take the existing market that is already there and make it work better. Securities is the mother of all industries. It's the largest market. It includes everything. If we can make securities work better, we can make the whole world work better. You can unlock capital, you can create more capital formation. You'll see more businesses. You'll see enterprises having more value. Having more shareholders makes an enterprise better. You have more stakeholders, you have more people who care. You're gonna see more businesses that succeed, more businesses that do well, and more businesses that grow. It's a very, very big deal. To capitalize on that, our strategy is it's a very Bitcoin-focused strategy, but also understanding the ecosystems of Ethereum and Ravencoin and the rest of the overall industry. Understanding that Bitcoin is money, and we believe that Bitcoin is the best at what it is trying to do. We also believe there's a place for other things which will interact with that. Our focus has been on how securities will work. How does the mother of all industries work where there's new money? Money is what changes hands for securities. When you buy and sell securities, it's for money. If money changes and money becomes digital, what do securities look like? Can securities be truly digital in a way that they are not now? The Dutch East India Company, which this certificate shows, was the first publicly traded company. Hundreds of years ago, you had ships that would go on shipping expeditions, and you typically had one investor, and the ship would go out, and it would either sink or get attacked by pirates, or you'd come back and have a windfall. Very risky, very high potential for risk and reward. A brilliant person came along with the idea of sharing the risk. Instead of one shipping expedition, one owner, it would be multiple ships, multiple owners. With this, the first joint stock company was born, and it completely changed the world, and it continues to change the world today. Corporations and anything with stock, certainly all publicly traded companies and everything else has this invention to thank for it. It changed the world. It changed how people could share risk, and it made it easier for people to make those voluntary interactions to share value. That's a very, very, very big deal. That's what we've been obsessed with. That's what keeps us up at night. That's what we focus on every single day that we are looking at this. What we've worked on mostly is building around that and figuring out how this world will work and building a technology and regulatory stack to take advantage of these changes. Fundamental to that was our consideration that this is all going to be regulated. Securities are very, very regulated. I learned that at a very young age, seven years old. I learned about securities from my mom, who was a broker, and I got into the business when I was, you know, 14 was my first job, but I got officially licensed at 19. That was 28 years ago. We knew, Mike and I knew that this is a very heavily regulated business. There's no way you're going to get anywhere in securities without a heavily regulatory background. That's one thing we've built. We've built a lot of very exciting technology, and this is the foundation for what we are going to use to capitalize on this opportunity of securities in the world of Bitcoin. I'm very excited. We haven't talked a lot about this publicly. We've been private in our building phase. We've had our head down, putting everything together that we need to take advantage of this opportunity. I'm very excited for the first time to be sharing with it. I have Mike, who's the CEO of Watchdog Capital, who's going to explain a little bit more about exactly what we've done and what we have now. We build a stack of technology and regulated businesses that really build the foundation for what we see the future of securities to be in a Bitcoin world. On the right-hand side of the screen, you can see our FINRA membership. You can go to finra.org and look us up on the website and see our complete record of the firm from inception. If you go to watchdogcapital.com, you can open up an account. You can open up a brokerage account, and you can trade equities, mutual funds, and any of the other products that you would trade at any other major brokerage firm. You can also get involved, or we also have the capability to underwrite private placement securities under several different regulatory regimes. We can also effect secondary trades in those same types of private securities. On top of that, through an affiliate, we've put together a Bitcoin brokerage firm so that our customers can buy not only traditional securities that are focused on Bitcoin, but the actual Bitcoin itself. We've spent a tremendous amount of time on our technology. Showing on the screen here, customers have the ability to go online and interact with their regular securities account. They can fund the account. They can trade equities. We're also tying ourselves very closely to the Bitcoin ecosystem. We are supporting Bitcoin over the Lightning Network so that customers who want to have their Bitcoin combine with the traditional securities world can do so. You can imagine buying Tesla through Watchdog Capital and then also being able to send us your Bitcoin to pay for it. We're also integrating to the Liquid Network so that we can issue those private placement securities that we're licensed to do over the Liquid Network as a blockchain security. We've also put together an app called Capital Gain, and this will be the window into the firm for both our customers and the registered reps who will come to work with Watchdog and be able to sell all of our products, including Bitcoin, to their customers. This is a really important point, when you consider what we're doing with Watchdog, is every other Wall Street firm is completely against working with any sort of Bitcoin securities or and much less the native Bitcoin itself. For example, if you're a rep at any major brokerage firm, you can't even put the words cryptocurrency or Bitcoin into an email that you might send to a customer because your compliance department is going to come down on you like a ton of bricks. Bruce and I, on the other hand, we understand Bitcoin. Bruce has been involved in Bitcoin since 2012. We've both been involved in the securities business from a regulatory standpoint for 30 years, and we understand where the lines are drawn. We understand how Bitcoin works. We understand how securities work, and we're very comfortable operating in both worlds. Reps can come to us, and they can buy Bitcoin for their customers. They can transact in traditional securities that are Bitcoin-related. We can be involved in private placements of Bitcoin-related funds. That's the, you know, that capability to sell both traditional securities and Bitcoin gives us multiple avenues to earn revenue, and that's where we see the real value getting built in the company. I mentioned the Dutch East India Company. Here's a wonderful chart. I said it changed the world. 1637, they came out with this new structure, and it eventually grew to be the largest company the world had ever seen. Adjusted for inflation, and this is actually outdated because inflation has been so fast. This is a couple years old. It's probably more like 9 trillion now in today's dollars. The point is this one company was the biggest company the world had ever seen. It was bigger than Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple combined. What it did is it unlocked existing value that was already there and made it even more valuable. That's what we believe that the broader story of digital securities and distributed ledger technology will do for the securities industry. It will take this multi-deca-trillion dollar industry, it will make it work better, and it will make it even larger, and it will unlock trillions and trillions and trillions in value that is already there. This is our plan. We believe that the widespread adoption of Bitcoin across the world is confirmation of our thesis. You see it now everywhere. Major companies like Fidelity and other corporations, MicroStrategy are having Bitcoin focus. There's also obviously a lot going on in the broader cryptocurrency ecosystem. There's the work that ATSs have done. There's various things being built on Ethereum and other chains, and an overall ecosystem that makes the timing for this ripe. We believe that there's nothing that's going to stop our world from digitizing. There's no world that we can see in the future, 10 years from now, where the security systems are still using the antiquated systems that they're using now, which is multiple decade-old technology. It has to move to a distributed system. Even both previous chairs of the SEC have agreed with this. It must move and modernize to a distributed system. That distributed technology is here. It's here now in the form of Bitcoin. We know it works. We know that it has the ability to move something from one person to another without the need of a trusted third party to say what is true. That simple invention, just like it's changing the world of money with Bitcoin, it will change the world of securities. We believe that securities are going to be working on distributed ledgers, and that will mean every security, small mom-and-pop restaurants, privately held corporations that no VC or investor is interested in. Even, you know, benefit corporations, nonprofits, things that may have a weird model where it's, you know, something that only a few fans like, and it's not that profitable. Something that is very experimental. None of these things, by the way, you can make public now. It's a very, very narrow market of very large profitable companies that meet certain kind of criteria that are public. In a world where securities can trade like this, and you can move them between us just as easily as I can send you an NFT or a Litecoin or a Ravencoin or a Bitcoin, in that world, everything is made more liquid, everything works better. We unlock trillions and trillions and trillions in capital that is there. Those capital holders get new shareholders, they get new stakeholders, they get new advice, they have better transition plans in the case of small businesses, and on and on and on. When people can trade that value and interact with that natural human instinct to say, "This is something I believe in, I want to invest in it, I want to participate," that is a beautiful and crucial part of human interaction and the backbone of the entire global economy for thousands of years. This technology will make that better. It's gonna make it work better, and we really believe that it is going to change the world. We've spent a lot of time and effort to build a very solid, stable regulatory structure that works in the hardest regulatory environment here in the United States, and we've built technology to match it, and we believe we are very, very well positioned with our connections, with our knowledge of the space, with the time that we've been in it, with our event that we run, that we are here to capitalize on this incredible opportunity. It's not just gonna be us, it's gonna be a huge ecosystem with a lot of participants. We're here to be well-positioned to be a part of that and to keep some market share as we go forward. Thank you again very much. Anybody who wants any information, you're welcome to talk to us, welcome to visit our website, and we also have some time for questions now. Thank you again. This has been a pleasure. Up next is GrainChain, a blockchain-based platform for agriculture that aims to improve supply chain complexities for small and medium-sized farmers. This is a classic example of a solution in our portfolio that addresses a real pain point in a massive market. Lots of work left to do, but we love what they're building. Hello, I'm Luis Macias, the CEO of GrainChain. Thank you for having us and listening to what we have to say today. The supply chain is something that's absolutely complex, opaque, and absolutely unfriendly to the small, medium-sized farmer. We, over the last couple of years, have been working extremely hard in creating an ecosystem that not only levels the playing field, but starts to create a beneficial supply chain. A supply chain that recognizes good work and leverages technology to truly impact what an individual producer can do, what his market looks like, and puts him at the level that all other industries are today. We're not sustainable today. Today, we're eating food and not knowing where it's coming from. We have the false certainty that we're always going to have the food that hits our plates in our supermarkets every day. Agriculture is becoming less and less real, less and less sustainable. Our small to medium-size farmers don't have infrastructure. They do not have defense. GrainChain is creating an infrastructure that not only is changing that, but it's giving them a voice. It's giving them a sword and a shield. A sword to be able to defend themselves, to be able to go out into the market and get the right price for their crop. A shield to be able to ensure that contracts are created, they're paid for, and they're executed properly. We truly believe that code is law, and if we're able to create an infrastructure in an ecosystem where the simplest farmer in the world can take advantage of technology as efficient as blockchain, of technology as easy as what we have produced today, we're going to change the world. The current infrastructure today is extremely manual and opaque. We have zero view into what's happening to commodities on the majority of our supply chains. It's riddled with middlemen, brokers, coyotes, and people who take advantage and provide very little into the supply chain. What we're doing is creating that transparency. By creating transparency and giving infrastructure, we're showing the world that not only can technology change this, but blockchain technology be the absolute law of what's going on. How do we give these small and medium-sized farmers the infrastructure? How do we give them the technology? How do we make them adopt? Even though they see that this is beneficial, how do they get their hands on this kind of technology? GrainChain is creating not only the infrastructure to do it, but digitizing the entire process. Focusing on that first mile, focusing on where things come from, we're able to truly impact origin, logistics, settlement, trading, and final consumer knowledge. That really does change the way things work. We are able to give not only a true view of what's going on, but we're able to show that with financial inclusion, innovation, we can change and impact everything that's going on. Our main focus is digitizing the supply chain, giving the infrastructure and the ecosystem that allows each and every farmer to have a say. Starting with our first product called Seed Audit. This gives us pre-harvest tools. It allows us to not only show the world what kind of fertilizer is being used, what kind of seed is being used, the geolocation of a farm, but it gives the farmer what we like to call a digital notebook. It gives us the ability to show not only what they're doing, but take the auditors out of the equation. Take the individuals who not only give very little and accurate information, but we get source information. We understand what's happening. Moving on the products into HarvX, we start focusing on logistics. We start giving the benefits of the rideshare apps of today into the harvest world, where we have apps that can track where the combines are moving or where people are harvesting, where a small-scale farmer can call in thousands of different drivers, and they're able to not only get lower cost logistics, but they're able to see where their product is going. They're able to communicate with drivers. You're able to communicate with one driver or a thousand drivers. You're able to have the power that complex logistics management systems have while tracking a truck, a semi, or a car. Giving this ability gives us not only the control of the logistics, but it gives us machine-generated data of where things come from. We're able to prove that the products were picked up. We're able to prove that they were dropped off and give instant quality assessments. We're able to pay the drivers, and we're able to truly expand the reach of that small-scale farmer. The middlemen who work in a lot of these different industries are there because of the logistics. We're able to give farmers the ability to share trucks. We're able to give farmers true control of what's going on and move their product to where they can get paid more and they can get recognized for what they have. Going into SiloSys, which is our storage management system, gives true real-time information of what's coming in. Our IoT integrations with not only the scales, the laboratories, the tank sensors, and everything around, gives us an absolute vision of what's coming in real time. It gives every participant a portal to see inventory reports, but more importantly, historicals. When a farmer has historicals, he has power. A farmer can go to a bank and show them what they have deposited, and they can see what their inventory is at all times, we start getting into very strong liquidity gains. Using something like Trumodity, which is our blockchain-based settlement system, gives us the ability to create smart contracts. Smart contracts that can include a multitude of variables. We can include banks, insurance companies, partners, brokers, landowners, and everything in between. When a farmer is able to go and drop off his product and 40 payments go out at the same time instantly, it changes things. Liquidity is instant. We're able to not only get mMoney faster in the hands of farmers, but we're playing a very, very strong game of financial inclusion. Working with our partners, we're creating digital cards, wallets, and we're doing settlements that are happening in seconds. When a farmer can get paid the second that he turns in his product, it changes the game. It gives them the certainty that they're gonna get paid, and it moves the money in a way where they're not waiting and selling to the lowest cost broker in order to get their money right away. Using products like SiloSys Transformation, it gives us a true and total ability to see what happened to the product, track and trace the origins, track and trace the processing, and give the end consumer a perfect view of what happened to that product from end to end. What we're creating is an ecosystem. An ecosystem that's modular, that works with other systems of the market, and it gives us a true, easy, big red button approach. At GrainChain, we focus on the big red button. If it's harder than pushing a big red button, it's not gonna work. We focus on adoption and expansion, and we've grown in ways that we couldn't even comprehend because of this focus. We are truly proud of the ecosystem we're creating. We're truly proud that we're digitizing an industry that not only needs it's a requirement for the future of our food. We're giving efficiency in workflows that changes not only how people work, but with a lot of the machine learning algorithms that we've been applying to what we're doing, we can enhance the product, enhance production, give better yields, give better suggestions, and understand where things are and where things are going. By creating true transparency, we're giving not only the end consumer, the processor, the roaster, the miller, the ability to see what's going on, where it's coming from, and the security that they're gonna get their product when it is, and it is what's being sold to them. Bringing in absolute speed to the settlement gives us not only a cutting edge on wanting to do business with anyone working with GrainChain, but it's changing the way that liquidity moves. We've got farmers who are coming in today, and the moment they drop off their product, there's physical money in their bank account. We're talking about seconds. For those who don't have bank accounts, GrainChain has given the ability to create not only bank accounts on the GrainPay platform, but the ability to be able to do instant issue cards to those who've never had a bank account before. We start increasing trust. We start creating an ecosystem that works, and we start lowering risk. When my banks can see what the inventory is, they can see that people are getting paid, they can see where things are moving, we start issuing bigger loans. When we start understanding the exact process, we start changing not only insurance policies, but we start auto-executing a lot of what we're doing. Together, we've been working all over the world. With our partners at Mastercard, we've been able to go into multiple countries, work on financial inclusion programs to be able to not only create bank accounts, but working with a lot of different other companies to be able to expand digitization, grow financial inclusion, and implement these systems in a fast and efficient manner. When we go into a country, our partners support us and make sure it happens. We're eliminating cash and increasing security. We were selected seven out of 1,500 AgTech companies in the world to partner with SAP.iO to be able to create a cohort and implement GrainChain systems on the SAP platform. We've been published, we've integrated multiple ERPs around the world, and our expansion is growing daily. In Brazil, we've done something that's absolutely unique. We've gotten to the point where not only are we creating efficient systems, but we're expanding in Portuguese, English, and Spanish, and we're doing something that nobody is doing in an efficient, easy manner. Let's hear a little bit about what we're doing in Brazil today and show the world a glimpse of not only how GrainChain is expanding into different areas, but what we're doing. Brazil is one of the largest agricultural markets in the world. They are the world's largest producer of coffee, soybeans, and sugarcane. Just like in other markets, Brazilian producers face huge challenges securing the financing they need to run their farming operations. Many Brazilian producers work around this challenge with a barter system between three parties, producers who pledge their current or future crop, a lender, Ag input supplier, or equipment dealer, and a trader that can hedge the carry risks of commodities. It's a complex system that limits options for producers and buyers, all while not addressing the underlying problems that lead to high interest rates and unwilling lenders. Estimates show 30%-35% of the national soybean and corn crop, for example, are financed through barter operations. How can we make the barter system better and open up the market for all parties involved? GrainChain has established a partnership with a Brazilian farm barter company to address these challenges. The newly launched platform, powered by GrainChain technology, digitizes and automates the entire farm barter transaction life cycle. Every workflow process, from contract creation and signing, to allowing producers to lock in floating market rates on their crop, to producers receiving cash advances via Mastercard credit cards, to the delivery and settlement process, is facilitated through the platform. The farm barter platform integrates directly with the Brazilian government's CIRC, a digital lien registry for commodities, improving the security and transparency of the barter market. What this means for small to medium-sized producers is they can barter with a wider range of companies, including big companies that usually only sell to big customers or cooperatives. We are making participating in the farm barter system easier for everyone, opening up new possibilities that were not available without our innovative platform. Perhaps most importantly, GrainChain and our Brazilian partners are connecting all parties together for the first time in a transparent, efficient, and reliable farm barter system that is better for everyone. At GrainChain, we're expanding not only different regions, but we're going into different commodities. We're focusing on growth, we're focusing on inclusion, and we're focusing on transparency. In Mexico, we started focusing on palm oil, giving the ability to not only see where it's coming from, but allowing for this product to be traded in the European Union due to restrictions of origin. GrainChain's providing the logistics, the origin, and the settlement that's happening today. This is not only changing the game, but giving us an edge in making GrainChain the preferred purchase partner. Let's hear a little bit about it. Palm oil is one of the world's most commonly used commodities. It's used in half of all consumer products, everything from detergent and shampoo to ice cream and even chocolate. It's also widely used for cooking. Palm oil is also an incredibly productive crop, producing a higher yield at a lower cost than other vegetable oils. Not surprisingly, palm oil production has increased rapidly over the last decade, but not without a high environmental cost. This valuable commodity grows only in tropical regions, leading to rapid deforestation. In the parts of the world where most palm oil is harvested today, millions of acres of rainforest have been cleared to make way for plantations, releasing massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and destroying rare and endangered animal habitats. Global demand for palm oil is exploding, and the region with the greatest potential for expansion is Latin America. It is the largest forested area in the world. In fact, five of the top ten oil-producing countries are already there. In Honduras, illegal palm oil plantations have already started to take over protected lands. How do we ensure that the environmental damage done there into other palm oil producing regions doesn't continue? How do we ensure that growing demand is met sustainably? At GrainChain, we're focused on implementing real-world solutions that create a positive impact on both the environment and people's lives. Our palm oil traceability project is focused on sustainability. We've launched a pilot with one of the largest palm oil producers in Latin America to provide full transparency and traceability through every step of the supply chain, ensuring that we can trace the palm oil back to its sustainable source, preventing unregulated palm oil from entering the market and thus protecting the environment. At the plantation level, Seed Audit, our pre-harvest tools, will provide traceability from the point of origin through geo-fencing and audit certification. HarvX, our logistics solution, and SiloSys, our smart inventory management platform, digitizes and automates processes while collecting more data than ever before. Finally, Trumodity, our transaction platform, will ensure palm oil data is verified and is able to execute smart contracts, helping farmers and buyers meet the complex regulatory requirements for sustainably sourced exports. The GrainChain palm oil traceability project will make it easier to regulate the industry and ensure sustainable practices are followed. It will help prevent palm oil grown in protected areas or unsustainable ways from being sold in the market. We're raising the standards of the industry to help the environment, farmers, and consumers by doing things the right way. What we're doing is we're creating not only a standard, but we're showing the world it can be done well. By giving this true transparency, we've been able to tap into liquidity markets and insurance. We've executed an agreement with one of the world's largest reinsurers to create micro-insurance products, giving not only vision into the data, but digitizing and automating the entire process, giving access to insurance to individuals that have never had it before. This changes the game. This gives us the ability to not only auto-execute smart contracts, but auto-execute insurance using all machine-generated data points. This gives us power. In Central America, we're scaling up strong. We're investing into infrastructure. GrainChain has now their full suite of products in production with over 8,000 new users in 2021, and we'll be hitting over 20,000 new users in 2022. We've completely integrated into full payment rails, allowing us to not only integrate into domestic banks, but international movement of money and the creation of efficient and fluid FX transactions across across international borders. We're deploying liquidity directly to producers through our smart contract solution with lowered risk and high efficiency. In Central America, we've co-created not only efficient IoT integrations, but also we've integrated into a one-of-a-kind optical sorting machine that gives us the data of what's going on. Let's see a little bit about that today. This machine not only has 80 cameras that go around the belt, and it reads every single color, size, and density of what's going in. What it does is it's giving us a statistical report of exactly what is being turned in by the farmer. Processing 10 tons an hour. With GrainChain proprietary software and overall hardware creation, we've been able to give statistical information to each farmer of the quality of their harvest. We've been able to create extremely high quality yields of what's coming out, and we're able to pay premiums to our farmers for work well done. This changes the game. This not only provides incentive for the farmer to do better, but we give feedback and training to each individual farmer of what comes in. When this information is written to our blockchain, the smart contract is executed and the correct amount is paid. This isn't an opinion. This is a machine defining exactly what should be paid, the premiums and discounts that should be done, and it gives a fair and very easy report to the farmer of the good work. It gives the buyer an absolute certainty of what's going on and how it's going on. We're changing the game with software. We're changing the game with hardware. We're making blockchain bring it all together. Today, we're focusing strong on providing financing for farmers, co-ops, producers, and everyone in between. We're doing smart contract solutions that auto deploy money directly to the individual farmers. We're creating wallets and financial inclusion, and we're creating an extremely easy way to fund all of the people along the supply chain. Our focus in the future is GrainFi, the ability to introduce DeFi into the financial markets. Giving individuals, institutions, and people around the world the ability to create financial inclusion and liquidity products. To be able to have safe and secure investment vehicles to be able to push into the sustainable supply chain. Not only creating an expanded loan option for the farmers, for the cooperatives, but creating a very efficient way for individuals to invest to be able to grow into tomorrow's supply chain and food supply. This is changing how things work. We're lowering risk, increasing insurance, increasing security, and making sure that not only your food tomorrow is gonna be where it needs to be, but allowing you to have a participating role in this process. We're not only democratizing capital markets, we're impacting lives. We're lowering the cost of liquidity, and we're bridging the agricultural and crypto markets for the future. GrainFi is where we're going toward. The ecosystem we've built, the infrastructure we've built, has made us grow to levels that we could never have dreamed of. Expand to levels that not only are we affecting individuals, we're changing markets and we're changing the way things are done. Today, we're processing over 24 types of commodities. We've completed over 480,000 smart contracts and processed over 22 billion lbs of products. We're over 18,000 participants and expect that to grow tremendously. We're in Mexico, United States, Honduras, and Brazil, and we're working on agreements in Colombia and Peru. GrainChain is gonna change the world. Hopefully, you guys can come along with us. Thank you. Well, here we are, the company everyone wants to hear about, tZERO. We couldn't be more excited about tZERO and their prospects. We're super excited about the ICE investment in tZERO, and especially we're excited about bringing in David Goone as the CEO. We'll hear now from David about tZERO. Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining today's presentation led by tZERO CEO, David Goone. My name is Alexandra Sotiropoulos, and I'm the head of communications at tZERO. We will begin today's webinar with a brief presentation, followed by a short Q&A session. Before I hand the call over to David to introduce the event, let me remind you that the following discussion and our responses to your questions reflect management's views as of today, May 10, 2022, and may include forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ materially. This discussion is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell, a solicitation to buy, or recommendation for any security, nor does it constitute an offer to provide investment advisory or other services. With that, let me turn the call over to David. Thank you, Alex. I'd like to also thank Pelion for inviting me to give an overview of tZERO today. I've been with the company now for just under two months. I have to say I'm very excited about all the opportunities that you'll be seeing and we'll be rolling out in the coming days, weeks, and months at tZERO. As I've been here such a short time and haven't disclosed our entire business plan, you'll have to forgive me ahead of time that I'm not gonna lay out everything we have ahead of time in the future for obvious reasons. First of all, material non-public information, as well as tipping my hat or showing my cards to competitors as we're in the process of expanding and rolling out our business plans. Saying that, I thought I'd give you a brief background on myself. Many, if not most of you don't know me. I spent the last 21 years at a company called Intercontinental Exchange. It's also the parent of the New York Stock Exchange. I started at a company when it was actually it was smaller than tZERO is. I came from the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, where I was part of the management team there prior to going to Intercontinental Exchange. We started the company in 2001 and grew the company to a $70 billion public company. It was a lot of fun growing the company. That was probably the most fun for me at the company, was the first five or six years growing the company, and getting it to a very quick path and trajectory of growth. That's one of the things that drew me to tZERO, is I saw the same type of potential and growth potential and wanted to have a lot of fun growing it. With that, when I was at Intercontinental Exchange, as well as I said, we own the New York Stock Exchange, I saw a lot of opportunities and things that were a little difficult, the way we were structured to explore. When I looked at tZERO, I see a lot of those opportunities available to me at tZERO. After a discussion with the CEO of Intercontinental Exchange, Jeff Sprecher, ICE/New York Stock Exchange decided to put a significant minority investment in tZERO, and I came over as CEO. As we go to the next slide, I'm gonna talk a little bit about tZERO, kind of what we are and some of the things that lay ahead for us. tZERO owns two FINRA-regulated broker-dealers, as you could see on the slide, including an SEC-regulated ATS. What's important about this is that tZERO has both a broker-dealer and ATS that is able to do digitally enhanced securities. I'd like to say we're one of the only people who do it, and certainly the market leader in offering these digitally enhanced securities. That gives us a bit of a competitive advantage in terms of everyone else and allows us to list a lot of products that are under SEC regulation. I think is many of the products in the digital landscape, including many NFTs, at least in my opinion, and I think many others, are really securities. The fact that they are not being regulated right now causes some issues. We think that the fact that tZERO is already regulated and can do this is a huge advantage for us. We have proven technology that makes transacting these private assets simple, as you said. Right now, as I stated, we have about 85% of the digital security volume as of the end of last year. We use the blockchain and smart contracts to create customized securities. Really, when people talk about the blockchain, the way I think about the key asset, especially in the securities world on blockchain, is that we have the immutable record of ownership, and that gives you a much more granular insight into the data and what you can do with it. For the issuers, you're gonna know who the owner is. You're gonna know as ownership changes. And that's something we will continue to expand and capitalize on through our product innovation as you see us moving forward. We like to say we democratize access to the private markets. I'll talk about that a little more later on in the presentation. What we allow this to do is the private market, allow access to the retail investor as well as the institutional investor, and we make it much more publicly available and transparent. As I said, one of the key things for me to come over here was not only hopefully I will bring some strength and assets to the institution here, but we now have the backing of Intercontinental Exchange and the New York Stock Exchange. We have a very close relationship and they're now a significant minority interest in the company. A pleasant surprise was the breadth and size of the patent portfolio that tZERO has in the company. We're gonna talk about that also as we go on to the next slide. I think when we talk about tZERO or when I think about tZERO, I kinda wanna give you an idea of where we're at and a little hint of where we may be going. What we do is list private securities on our trading platform. It's pretty simple. We do it on the blockchain and the fact that they're digitally enhanced. At the end of the day, we have a record of ownership. That's what we're doing currently with it on the blockchain as an immutable record of ownership. As you know, there's tons of money that is in the private marketplace. Actually, it's been growing certainly as time has gone on. This allows people who have a private equity investment or a private company investment. It allows people to monetize or get out of a position. You may have a private equity position for the last five or years, you know, an event happens in your life. You need the capital. Lots of events can happen. We offer a way for issuers to list them on our platform or theirs, which we'll talk about later, and then they can transact on that platform all under an SEC-regulated environment. We do that by tokenizing the asset. We actually tokenize the actual security on our platform. You can use our platform for capital raising, whether it's Reg D, Reg S, or Reg A plus, which A or A plus, and Reg CF. You'll see us concentrating, I think, more in the coming months ahead on not only just Reg D, which we've done a lot of, but also Reg A and Reg A+. What you're able to do under the Reg A+ is get to the retail investor. Reg D is the accredited investor until after a year, and then it can be opened up to the retail investor. Reg A+ can go right away to the retail investor, and that's at a $75 million cap in terms of raise. Reg CF, which is short for Regulation Crowdfunding, is really at the level of $5 million and under, and that also is for the retail investor. What we're gonna be expanding upon is not only getting into the capital raising, expanding our footprint in terms of getting into primary, which, prior to my coming, tZERO wasn't focusing on. We're also gonna be getting into white labeling of the software solution. A lot of people would prefer to have the listings on their app/website, and we are able to do that, and we'll be growing that business significantly, where it'll be powered by tZERO and still be able to meet all the SEC regulatory requirements, that we think are relatively unique to us at tZERO, and they'll be able to white label it on their platform. We have cryptocurrency. It is a cryptocurrency trading platform. Currently, I'm exploring all aspects of how we're going to look at the business and expand it, so I don't have a definitive roadmap for you today. What I can tell you, what we definitely are doing and will continue to do is have it at the very least as a facilitation for all the private securities markets. In other words, if someone wants to pay for any of the securities in crypto or receive it in crypto, we offer that service, and we will continue to offer that. We're also looking at potentially expanding it, if it makes sense, our cryptocurrency offering. We also support other digital assets like NFT and even public equities, which we are allowed to do as well on our platform. In terms of NFTs, we're working on ways to enhance and improve the way NFTs currently are being utilized and traded, and that you will see more from us in the weeks and months to come. A lot of what we also do is we call here product structuring, but it's really consulting and advising people as they go through the process of listing their private markets digitally on our platform, various aspects and hand-holding and alternatives they can do. That's actually a big part of what we do. Some of the surprises for me when I came to the company was. These were all pleasant surprises with some of the assets they had. I talked about it before, but tZERO has been around in the blockchain/digital asset world for quite a while and filed a lot of patents. It has a lot of patents in its patent portfolio. Also when Teleon came in the spring of last year, we also acquired all the patents that were at the Medici Ventures level. We have a variety of patents from the rest of the Medici Ventures portfolio. As we've been going through them and doing a deep dive and having you know some outside companies and counsel going through our patent portfolio, I actually think there's quite a few significant and strong patents in that portfolio, which we can use in many many ways in terms of potentially monetizing or using them as chips against others and using it as a differentiator on certain things that others can't do because we obviously would have a patent on it. That was an extremely pleasant surprise. The other very pleasant surprise was that tZERO owns 81% of a company called Verify Investor. What Verify Investor does is it provides third-party verification for accredited investors. They call this the 506(c) investor. That's for companies that are soliciting accredited investors for their private funds or private equity investments. It's a business that's actually growing very rapidly and has access to a database of 43,000 and growing every month unique accredited investors. We have access at tZERO, and we're looking at ways to capitalize on that of a pool of 43,000 accredited investors through Verify. The other thing we're going to be doing is expanding Verify's footprint to get into things beyond 506(c) investors. I think there's a huge opportunity for the 506(b) investors, which is probably a tenfold larger number of investors than the 506(c), as well as looking to get into KYC and AML with them. The other thing tZERO has in its portfolio is a 50% ownership in the BSTX exchange, which many of you have read about, which is just recently got SEC approval for listing of digital securities. Those are some of the assets we have that are pleasant surprises. We look forward to expanding the footprint on all of those. In terms of some of the things that I think you can see us work on is I'm just excited about expanding the footprint across all the things that tZERO is doing. I feel in the space right now a lot of people will say that the blockchain, well, everything on the blockchain, including the crypto space, is a bit of a Wild West. We're gonna be approaching the company using more of a, I don't wanna call it traditional approach, but more of a seasoned approach. I'm bringing in a lot of several people who helped me as we built the ICE platform. I've already brought in several of those people [who] are now tZERO employees who are helping to expand in those areas. We're also working on expanding the footprint of what we offer across the digital marketplace, the private digital marketplace, and you'll see that in the coming weeks and months of other products we're going to be offering and will be offering as we move forward. You know, I'd like to say that we're gonna be solving real-world problems by using the blockchain. I feel we're not gonna be trying to come up with a solution and wait for the problem to present itself. We're gonna be working hard in leveraging the New York Stock Exchange's not only relationships, but helping them expand into the digital securities marketplace, and hopefully be a bit of a precursor to a lot of companies who may wanna go public and we will provide them access to that through helping them raise capital and trade their products on our system in the as well as advising them on how other ways that they could use tokenization and digital products to not only increase the value of their companies but increase the user experience for their shareholders. With that, I think we can talk a little bit now. I think we can go and take some of the questions and answers, if that's okay, Alex. Thanks, David. We'll now turn it to the Q&A portion of today's session. I will be reading questions that were submitted leading up to today's event. With that, David, our first question, which you answered a bit at the beginning of the presentation, is why did you decide to join tZERO? Yeah. I did answer that a bit. I just you know, I was telling somebody else I wake up pretty much since I started at tZERO every morning at, like, 3:15 A.M., and I come up with, like, just a list of potential ways we could use the current structure that the SEC has laid out for opportunities for companies to both raise capital and importantly, use the blockchain to get down to the true ownership of their shareholders and potential ways that they can monetize that database, streamline it, use it for a whole bunch of purposes, and the list goes on and on. You know, it's also for me very exciting to get back to building a business. You know, when I was at ICE, we went from a small startup to a $70 billion business. I think they probably have over 10,000 employees. As I said, most fun is always, you know, the entrepreneurship of starting a company, building it, working really hard, getting, you know, looking at all the opportunities and actually executing in a fast and actually a lot of fun, in a fun way. That's what drew me to it. Being able to do a bunch of things we couldn't do when I was sitting at Intercontinental Exchange, just by the way ICE was structured. Now we can be kind of that one level prior to those people becoming public. I just keep coming up with tons of opportunities, and I'm doing tons of networking, and it's just a lot of fun, and I love building the business. I think that answered the question, Alex. Moving on to the next question, David. What are some of the exciting trends and potential you see in the digital asset industry, in particular, its crossover with traditional finance? This gets into some of the problems with traditional finance issues. What the blockchain does or digitalization does is, I touched on it in my last answer a little, is if you can get down to knowing the owner or the ownership portion on the blockchain, it opens up a huge amount of opportunities in so many different ways. Not just in the trading of securities, but in the tokenization and in smart contracts that you could attach to these products. The variety of things that an issuer can do, and that hopefully we can help them do, is really infinite. There are ways that you can just increase the value of these products and assets in such a great way using this technology. I think there's also tons of things that still are yet to be done and can be done, particularly in the tokenization and NFT space that we see, that you'll be able to do with these technologies that can just help a company grow, know its customer base better, monetize that, use it for information, for just a whole host of things that you can't do in traditional finance in an easy way without it costing you a fortune and a lot of wasted dollars. I think that's a huge opportunity for us. Thanks, David. You're welcome. Our next question touches on tZERO's global footprint. This user says, tZERO's focus has been principally on the U.S. domestic market. Given the potential of digital technology, can you share your perspective on how critical global reach and footprint are for success in the industry? Okay. Once again, I haven't been here that long, less than two months. Right now we have this thing called reverse inquiry. Reverse inquiry is if somebody comes in from an outside country and, you know, wants to set up an account, we haven't reached out to them, but they've reached out to us. We actually have probably customers from over 50 countries. I might be a little low on that. We have, you know, a fair amount of international business now. Saying that, one of the things I have on our list is that I wanna be active on the international front and offer our products not just domestically, but globally. In terms of doing that, we have to, and we are right now in the process of extending our footprint so that we can actively solicit business in a variety of jurisdictions for all our products. I think that opens up a whole huge host of opportunities for us, using not only you know the contacts we have, but the contacts I have coming into tZERO. Looking forward to expanding that, and I think you'll see that in relatively short order coming from tZERO. Thanks, David. We have time for one more question. tZERO has been historically focused on investing heavily in regulation and compliance. Do you think regulatory and political changes in the digital assets or blockchain technology space will continue to create competitive differentiation and opportunities that favor tZERO and set it apart from other market participants? You know, if you asked me about tZERO coming in, I think one of the things they did well was pursue regulatory approval, so currencies were approved in virtually all the states for cryptocurrency. In terms of, as we've talked about many times already today, we have the ability, almost unique in the fact that, we can do digital enhanced securities in the U.S. under the SEC and FINRA. We think that's, that is an advantage. More importantly, I think as we talk about it, as I referred to NFTs and other things, we're a place all those things that our securities can trade. A lot of other people are trading these products, which at least in my opinion, many of them are truly securities, and they're being traded as if they're not securities. They're being traded outside of, you know, that regulatory situation. I think it's been pretty clear that the, for lack of a better word, the signs have been that the regulators are going to be, I don't know if clamped down is the right thing, but certainly scrutiny is the right word. But they certainly have a scrutiny on, you know, making sure these products that are securities are in fact regulated as securities. The fact that we already have years of experience doing this, we already can do this, will probably allow for us to have a competitive advantage, whether it be partnerships through existing people or us creating things on our own. Once again, we're gonna do it. We're gonna do things the right way from a regulatory standpoint. That's kind of the mantra of how I operate. I wanna do it in an ethical and regulatory compliant way, and I think that's how you're gonna see us move forward with tZERO. To the extent that you in the question you say, are you gonna capitalize? It's like, that's the way we know how to do business, and I think that's the way we're gonna continue to do business, and I think the business will come to us in that regard. I hope I answered the question in that regard for that, the person who submitted it. Thank you. I think we're almost out of time here. Thank you to everyone who joined today's tZERO presentation as a part of Pelion's Medici Day. That concludes our presentation. We thank you all for joining and look forward to continuing the conversation. As Medici Day comes to a close, I'm excited to introduce our keynote speaker, the Honorable J. Christopher Giancarlo. Known as #CryptoDad for his celebrated call on the U.S. Congress to respect a new generation's interest in cryptocurrency, Giancarlo served as thirteenth chairman of the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission. Considered one of the most influential individuals in the field of financial regulation, Giancarlo has been a member of the U.S. Financial Stability Oversight Council, the President's Working Group on Financial Markets, and the Executive Board of the International Organization of Securities Commissions. His new book, CryptoDad: The Fight for the Future of Money, is an account of his oversight of the world's first regulated market for Bitcoin derivatives and the coming transformation of financial services. Giancarlo is a director and advisor to numerous technology and professional services companies, which includes his notable role as senior counsel to the international law firm Willkie Farr & Gallagher. He is also co-founder and chairman of the Digital Dollar Project, a nonprofit initiative to advance exploration of a U.S. central bank digital currency. Since the release of CryptoDad, Christopher has been interviewed on radio shows and podcasts, as well as the featured speaker at numerous events throughout the U.S. focused on cryptocurrency, banking, the financial industry, and the coming digital economy. We hope you enjoy his keynote address. Hello, everybody. It's great to be with you and our friends at Pelion to give you a few final remarks to close out this Medici Day program. I'd like to try to put some context around what you've seen and what you've heard today. There may be still a few in our audience who believe that crypto is a code word for some funky, new tradable asset class that may or may not stand the test of time. I get that. I used to wonder about that myself. Let me suggest to you that what you have seen and what you've heard and what you've experienced here today and elsewhere suggests that crypto is something much more. I want to suggest to you that this topic we broadly call crypto is nothing less than an entirely new architecture of confirming the ownership and transfer of things of value, including money itself. I've just written a book entitled CryptoDad: The Fight for the Future of Money. The book is a story of my four decades in the intersection of law, markets, and technology. First 16 years as a New York and London lawyer, then 14 years building a successful trade execution firm on Wall Street and taking it public onto the New York Stock Exchange. Five years as a senior markets regulator in Washington, and now as a corporate director, business investor, and book author. A decade and a half ago, the firm I launched on Wall Street became the world's leading trading platform for the multi-trillion-dollar market for credit default swaps, only to find itself in the epicenter of the 2008 financial crisis. That experience led me to support reform of global financial markets, including the U.S. Dodd-Frank Act, a law that I now view as the last major patch of the long-standing analog account-based financial system. Those experiences resulted in my appointment to one of the world's least understood yet most important financial market regulators, the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the CFTC. I was first appointed by President Barack Obama and unanimously confirmed by the U.S. Senate, and I was subsequently elevated to the role of chairman by President Donald Trump, and again, unanimously confirmed by the Senate. I went to Washington in 2014 as a political amateur with reformist goals. My immediate objective was to complete and improve reforms to the over-the-counter derivatives market. Yet halfway through my term, I was staring at the first ripples of the next wave of the Internet, the Internet of value, of Bitcoin, and of cryptocurrencies, a wave that I believe will shake the existing financial system to its very foundation. The immediate challenge in 2017 was a new futures market product called Bitcoin Futures. As I explained in my book, I faced significant pressure to prevent Bitcoin futures from being launched. I resisted that pressure, not without a few moments of self-doubt. Instead, I led the CFTC to create the world's first significant regulated market for cryptocurrency. The decision paved the way for the emergence of an enormous new ecosystem of retail and institutional cryptocurrency greater than anything I could have anticipated. By braving political risk, the CFTC reduced regulatory uncertainty for financial market innovators. I also recognized the growing generational divide in attitudes toward crypto, a divide that continues today. For that reason, the online cryptocurrency community dubbed me Crypto Dad, which I've used as the title for my book. Well, what I'd like to do right now is tell you where I think we are in the crypto evolution. Let's start with our legacy financial system. If money makes the world go round, the legacy financial system is the engine, the drivetrain, the gearbox, and the suspension that drives it. U.S. dollars are the preferred fuel, and an increasingly consolidating group of gigantic U.S. banks are the racing teams that dominate the global action. The legacy system is massive, it's powerful, and it's deeply ingrained in the global economy. It's operated by a host of intermediaries, functionaries, and service providers the world around, all of whom ensure the allocation of global capital and availability of financial resources. The core technology of this system is account-based and recorded on proprietarily owned centralized ledgers. Critical data, such as information about who holds, transfers, or receives things of value, including money itself, is recorded and managed by central intermediaries like banks and asset managers and insurance companies and clearing houses. Your 401(k) statement is not a receipt for actual stacks of dollar bills owned by you placed in some vault somewhere. It's a confirmation of a unique commercial liability to you by that 401(k) provider that is unlikely to be fully backstopped by a sovereign government. Now, the system is broadly effective, though not readily transparent or automatically confirmable by participants in the system. Effective confirmation of your ownership of value comes through the indirect means of third-party auditing accountancy. For decades, this legacy system has worked and generally served well. As I said, it's fueled the U.S. economy, the largest, most diverse, most creative economy the world has ever seen. The system is the basis for millions of jobs and careers, from Wall Street bankers and traders to lawyers and accountants and central bankers and academics and regulators. The system has put a lot of food on a lot of tables, including my own. Yet at the same time, the shortcomings of this legacy financial system are increasingly becoming apparent. The system is slow, and the system is expensive. That's so because of the built-in cost of centrally verifying the world's account activity and collecting and reporting activity data from so many entities. Systems for check payment and settlement, shareholder and proxy voting, investor access and disclosure, and financial system regulatory oversight that were once state-of-the-art and global models in the 20th century have fallen behind the times in the 21st century, and in some cases, embarrassingly so. For example, it typically takes days in the United States to settle and clear retail bank transfers. In many other countries, it takes mere minutes, if not seconds. It also takes days to settle securities transactions. It's ridiculously expensive to remit money overseas. It's often faster to move dollars around the globe by stuffing cash in a suitcase and getting on a plane than it is to send a wire transfer. Nothing better reveals the limits of our existing financial system than the U.S. government's initial financial response to the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. Tens of millions of Americans had to wait a month or more to receive relief payments by paper check, and more than a million payments were made to people who were dead. Worse than slow and expensive as shortcomings of the system is that the existing legacy system is exclusive. The system is exclusive because it's identity-based to prevent tax evasion and illegal conduct. Without credentialed identity, you cannot access the existing financial system. Yet in a world of over 8 billion people, over 1 billion do not have adequately credentialed identity to obtain financial services. Here in the United States, the situation is only somewhat better. Thus, it's the very architecture of the legacy system itself and the concentrated power of its central players with their proprietary account ledgers that makes it slow, expensive, and exclusive. Meanwhile, as this legacy centralized financial system evolved from the twentieth century to the twenty-first in its broadly effective but creaky state, most other forms of human commerce have gone through a profound digital transformation. That transformation was made possible by the mid-twentieth century computer hardware breakthrough in semiconductor development. That led to the production of inexpensive microprocessors that stimulated the personal computer revolution, putting enormous data processing power on the desktops of people and businesses across the earth. Yet as important as was that hardware development, perhaps more important was in the area of software. Global agreement on a set of key internet protocols, especially a protocol known as TCP/IP, enabled the world's billions of personal computers to be networked into a giant supercomputer. What we refer to as the Internet, a global system of interconnected networks of computer devices more powerful and unassailable than any single mainframe computer. This development of standardized protocols for communications among the world's computers gave birth to the first Internet wave of the late twentieth century, the wave we consider an Internet of information. This first Internet wave has transformed so many human activities. From music, think Pandora and Spotify, to retail shopping, Amazon and eBay, to local transportation, Uber and Lyft, and photography, Flickr and TikTok, and social networking, Facebook and LinkedIn, and communications, Twitter and FaceTime. This first Internet wave was superseded by the second wave, the Internet of Things, in which most every place we shop and dwell, everything we wear and drive, and every device we engage with is being connected to the Internet. The catalyst for the second wave of the Internet was the development of ever more powerful and compact semiconductor hardware placed in everyday devices. Again, the real breakthrough was in software in the form of wireless communication technologies and protocols such as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and 5G technology to allow smart devices to communicate with each other. Well, here's where we come to where we are today. We're now experiencing the Internet's third wave, an Internet of value. This wave is exploring use of that World Wide Web of computers rather than proprietary commercial and central bank infrastructure to govern our relationship with things of value. In fact, this new Internet of value holds the promise that all things of value, like energy, agricultural and mineral commodities, and contracts and stock certificates and land records and proprietary titles, and cultural assets like music and art, and personal assets like votes in an election, even our personal identities, can be stored, managed, transacted, and moved around in a secure, private way directly from person to person without dependence on opaque central intermediaries. You might call this idea bookkeeping without bookkeepers, or at least without centralized bookkeepers. Instead, it's about using the computational power of the world's billions of computers to talk to each other and provide algorithmic certainty of ownership of things of value, rather than relying on the balance sheets of large financial institutions and the accountants who audit them. Here's a simple way to think about it. When I was a college student traveling in Europe, it was expensive to call home to my parents. Those phone calls had to travel over proprietary phone lines operated by British Telecom and the Bell System that charged handsomely for their usage. Today, however, my son, a grad student in the U.K., can call me at any time, day or night, at virtually no cost using FaceTime. Similarly, I can send him a photo or a music file instantaneously at no cost. Why? Because I'm bypassing the proprietary phone lines, and I'm communicating using agreed protocols through the Internet. Well, what if we could similarly use the Internet rather than the proprietary ledgers of banks and 401(k) providers and clearinghouses to confirm who owns what and who transferred what to whom? What if I could send my son money as easily, immediately and cheaply as I send him a photograph? Of course, as with the previous Internet waves, all that's needed was agreement on various protocols. Well, the breakthrough came in 2009 with the white paper of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin's pseudonymous creator. It proposed using the decentralized network of the world's unrelated computers, the Internet, to reliably reach agreement with each other on the question of who owns what and who transfers what to whom. Like TCP/IP, like Bluetooth, what the Bitcoin blockchain is a protocol, a protocol for the Internet of value. It's a protocol that is competing for patronage with other protocols like Ethereum, like Solana, each with different features, attributes, and shortcomings. When you think about crypto, think about the underlying distributed ledger protocols as the basis for the inherent value of their tokens. The ledgers are vying for the role in a new Internet of value. Now, when you think of the individual tokens of these protocols, think of the rights they convey to play a role in building and governing the development of those protocols. Market demand, and hence price of individual tokens, is affected by the perception of the possible role those protocols will play in the future Internet of value. Just as the Internet of information is a network of networks using different protocols with different features and properties, so too the future Internet of value is likely to be one of numerous protocols, like the Bitcoin blockchain with its programmed scarcity, and like Ethereum with its smart contract programmability and other protocols, that some we have today and some that we may have in the future with different features and capabilities. Frankly, it's naive to think that this wave of the Internet will not transform banking, financial services, and money itself in the same way that earlier waves of the Internet transformed information sharing, social interaction, retail shopping, local transportation, photography, music, entertainment, and so much more. It is going to happen. In fact, it's already happening. Money is changing right before our eyes. Like text messages and photographs, money is becoming digital, decentralized, tokenized, and borderless. Thanks to stablecoins, value is now transferable around the world in nanoseconds, 24/7, 365, in a way that is increasingly decoupled from the traditional bank account-based system and correspondent banking services. It shows no sign of abating, with crypto developer activity reaching an all-time high in 2021. Today, more than 200 million people worldwide, and as much as 60 million here in the U.S., are participating in this technological revolution, empowering creators, innovators, and developers while introducing needed competition to the world's ever more concentrated financial markets. Many of the new cryptocurrencies that we hear about are really just components of different protocols or blockchains that are competing for public patronage. That's why I say that what is happening is much, much bigger than some faddish new asset class called crypto. It's a totally new internet-based architecture of finance and money itself, and the economic, social, and geopolitical impacts of this new innovation will be inestimable and yet seismic. What should be the public policy response? If we look back a quarter century ago, we see that the first wave of the Internet was greeted in Washington in a timely, enlightened, and bipartisan manner. A Democratic White House and a Republican Congress came together to promote development of online commerce and an Internet of information that was unfettered by inept federal and state law. This wise policy response adopted the Hippocratic Oath of first do no harm. Only in time will we be able to appreciate the critical role of the 1990s Washington policy response in furthering the extraordinary societal impact of the democratization of global access to information wrought by the first wave of the Internet. In our current era, Washington's official policy response to the Internet of value has largely been ad hoc and uncoordinated. U.S. government has largely stood aside during the past decade and a half since the Satoshi Nakamoto white paper. That is changing, however. The Biden administration recently published an executive order on cryptocurrencies. It's reasonably balanced, it's comprehensive, and it's forward-leaning. It takes a careful view of private sector innovations in money, such as Bitcoin and so-called stablecoins, and instructs U.S. government agencies to increase their understanding, consider new regulatory standards, and coordinate their efforts. Notably, the executive order declares that U.S. efforts to develop central bank digital currency, known as CBDC, are, in their words, urgent. As with all new technologies, including the first wave of the Internet a generation ago, there are honest concerns about use of cryptocurrency in illicit activities, fraud and manipulation, and schemes that trap the unwary. There are also legitimate concerns particular to crypto, such as the environmental impact of proof of work blockchains that rely on mining. There are also systemic concerns about financial runs and other disruption to the existing framework of financial intermediation, lending, and payments, and the manner in which they are overseen and regulated. Some critics see digital assets as a threat to intermediated, centralized finance. Yet there is undoubtedly a generational divide between operators of the legacy financial system and the pioneers of the Internet of value. It's something that I write about in my book, An Institutional Trust Gap. Legacy financial system operators tend to be older, like me. We became comfortable with branch banking in our teens with the deposit of our first paychecks from summer or after-school jobs. We spent a lifetime immersed in the existing account-based financial system and don't readily envision alternatives. Yet today, most kids form institutional relationships with mobile phone providers, video game and social media platforms and online retailers well before the age of 14. They have operated in a 24/7, 365 peer-to-peer world all of their lives. Convincing such young people that Bitcoin and cryptocurrency is dangerous while tradition, traditional banking is somehow fun and safe, it's about as effective as, well, telling them how important it is to drive a manual transmission car, if they have any interest in driving at all. The fact of the matter is that crypto has attracted more of their interest and excitement than Wall Street has enjoyed in a generation. For young people, digital technology is an essential agent of social change and expression. This characteristic needs to be taken into account and respected in any crypto policy response by Washington. The question is: How to craft public policy that brings together these two worlds, the legacy financial system with the new architecture of decentralized trust? Well, I believe we need to start with congressional action. In democratic systems like the U.S., it's for the legislative branch to gather public opinion, sort through various and sometimes conflicting policy objectives, and arrive at overall national policy. I also believe that such national crypto policy must be established on a bipartisan basis. It should not be one party's signature accomplishment or another party's wedge issue. To ensure that any resulting legislation enjoys wide and long-lasting political legitimacy, it must be accomplished with broad bipartisan support. Both parties must have a stake in the future of value, internet of value. There also must be ample opportunity for substantive public input through congressional hearings and legislative review and comment. This is especially important as the ethos of the emerging crypto industry is individualist, egalitarian, and not natively deferential to venerable regulatory frameworks. Legislation and regulation that suggests a top-down approach will not gain the respect of the internet generation. Congressional action and subsequent regulation must garner industry skin in the game through active industry dialogue and engagement. Further, Washington's crypto policy response must be comprehensive and balanced and tailored to the unique features of the emerging technology. It cannot be a defensive program to preserve the financial status quo. Rather, it must recognize a national interest in fostering healthy development of crypto innovation, well-ordered crypto trading markets, and their contribution to the modernization of the existing financial system. Finally, national policy should seek to realize crypto's potential for greater financial inclusion than has been achieved by the legacy financial system. Congress must establish a national crypto policy framework that allows ordinary and non-wealthy citizens to engage in digital asset investment and risk exposure in an informed and self-directed manner. I will now close with one final thought. The standards, protocols, and rules for the digital future of money are being established today. If we act now, we can make sure that democratic values, the values of a free society, such as freedom of speech, the rule of law, individual economic privacy, free enterprise, and free markets, are encoded in the digital future of money. In so doing, we can harness this wave of innovation to maximize financial inclusion, capital and operational efficiency, and economic growth for generations to come. I'm convinced, and I hope my book and this talk today will persuade people, that money is changing right before our eyes, and we must take hold of that change. Money is as much a social construct as it's a government construct, and democratic societies must assert their voice in the digital future of money. We each have a role to play. Thank you very much, and I look forward to your questions. Thank you, Chris, for those insightful comments. I appreciate the time you took to put those together and present them to us. Thank you. I wanna also here at the end thank a few other people for helping put this together. To Eric and Ash who did a lot of the legwork here. To Stacy Rosario, who keeps the trains running on time here at Pelion. I also want to thank Jonathan Johnson for offering us the opportunity to be involved with this really, really good portfolio. I hope you can see into some of the value that it's gonna provide to the world. We're very excited about that. I wanna also have a couple of housekeeping items here at the end. Some of you have talked about going to MediciVentures.com and seeing that that website is down. That's down forever. There is no mediciventures.com. If you wanna look over the Medici portfolio, you should look at Pelion for pelionvp.com, where it exists now. I mentioned at the start that we're gonna try and do a better job at communicating. We missed a couple of times early on some big events that happened within the portfolio that we didn't get ahead of in terms of the announcement. We're trying to do better at that. So look for that to be an area of improvement for us. Thank you again very much for taking the time to attend. We really appreciate it. I really hope that this was helpful to you, in terms of being able to get a picture into what's happening at these really great companies in the Medici portfolio. Thanks again. Bye.