Web3 and DeFi (#9)

Mikkel Svold (00:23):

Hello and welcome to Big Ideas Only, a podcast brought to you by Montanus, where we specialize in producing high quality content for marketing departments in high tech companies. I’m Mikkel Svold, and in this episode we are diving into the phenomena known as Web3, and also why it’s not just a faster type of internet.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (00:44):

Correct.

Mikkel Svold (00:45):

In this episode, I hope that we’ll get to talk about, of course, what Web3 is and what it means to how the internet is built. Since our guest today is also actually representing a bank, we’ll also talk about decentralized banking or decentralized finance and what does that mean. So really, there’s a lot to cover in this topic. And luckily I’ve got, again, Rasmus Risager Lindegaard back with me behind the microphone here at the Lunar estate, I’m just about to call it the Lunar headquarters in Aarhus. Welcome back Rasmus.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (01:15):

Thank you.

Mikkel Svold (01:16):

And Rasmus, we mentioned this in the previous episode, but for new listeners, you work at the Denmark based online only bank Lunar, where you’re responsible for the crypto and investment area. Is that correct?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (01:28):

Responsible, it might be a stretch, but I am probably the main product guy on the area. We work as a broad team across UX data and tech, and we try and bring the most beneficial products to markets for users.

Mikkel Svold (01:42):

Yeah, and that’s also why you are sitting here today because in your position you need to be updated on what’s happening and what’s happening with the blockchain, what’s happening with cryptocurrencies, all this. I think we talked about blockchain and crypto in last episode. Can you just recap in a few words what is blockchain and what is cryptocurrencies?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (02:03):

Certainly. So, I think there are two things that are worthwhile noting. Blockchain is a technology, that’s it. It’s a database technology. So, it’s not in and of itself super sexy, but what it enables is pretty interesting.

Mikkel Svold (02:16):

It just has a sexy name, right?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (02:18):

Super sexy name. It has become sexy. I think first time you heard it, you’re probably more like what the? But yeah, no. So blockchain is a technology that essentially is a decentralized database. Then why we are looking at it or why we care about it is because-

Mikkel Svold (02:18):

In Lunar.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (02:34):

… it then has potential to become so many things. Yeah, in Lunar. So the other thing worth mentioning is that when we then talk about cryptocurrencies, which are very closely linked to blockchains, that is again, many different things. Some of them were intended as a payment solution. Some of them are essentially intended as decentralized computing platforms, anywhere where you can put a task or calculation up.

Mikkel Svold (02:55):

I also think, we just talked about this before turning on the microphones, and because Lunar I know it’s a modern way of doing banking, but the bank function is basically an old school bank, it’s like any other bank. Maybe that’s a stretch, but it’s not a decentralized bank anyway.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (03:15):

No, not at all. So, we are a traditional organization. So Lunar consists of multiple companies. We have Lunar Block where we do our crypto activities. We have essentially our tech company where we do all the development. Then we have Lunar bank, which is then a regulated banking entity with definite similarities to the banking system or the other banks we know.

Mikkel Svold (03:35):

I’m a Lunar user myself, so I can also say there’s also definitely some things that are not similar.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (03:40):

I think we try and it’s not as with blockchain or any technology, it’s important not to get into technological masturbation. So, it’s really not about this is cool, let’s do this because we can. We really try and think very hard and long about what is it we have been missing in our own financial lives? What is it that we can help with?

Mikkel Svold (04:02):

But are you also looking at a blockchain crypto and also Web3, and all of these of course super interlinked, but are you also looking at that? Because it can actually make the Lunar bank part of Lunar, it can create shifts in how you do that business.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (04:21):

100%. I think we’d be remiss if we weren’t looking into this technology more broadly. I think any financial institution in Europe is to some degree, whether or not they are very far along in that journey, or are willing to talk about it. But I often call decentralized finance is potentially the doomsday machine for banking, because all the things we do in a bank, if you go and apply for a mortgage, well what happens, you’ll meet a lovely person in your bank, they’ll look at all your finances and then they’ll start putting a lot of numbers into a computer system.

Mikkel Svold (04:52):

And then they’ll look me in the eye.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (04:53):

They’ll look you in the eye. But that’s not really going to count for anything, whether or not you get that mortgage. What counts is all the numbers they put into the system. Then the system does a calculation, all right, well how much can we approve for? These are the various terms and which we can approve for A, B, and C. Now, that’s a program. You could put that program on the blockchain and you didn’t have to go down and say hi to your lovely banking counselor. So, that’s a pretty interesting thought.

Mikkel Svold (05:19):

Yeah, absolutely. I don’t think you should go down that path right now, because we already touched upon that quite a lot in the last episode. But now this episode we want to dive into, like I said, Web3 or Web3.0. I think the first thing to get established is-

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (05:38):

What the hell is it?

Mikkel Svold (05:39):

What the hell is it? What is Web3? Also what about number two and number one?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (05:45):

Good point. So Web3 is a pretty interesting term. There’s also a Web4 right now if you believe Jack Dorsey of Twitter. But let’s stick with Web3 for now. Quick history lesson. So, when we talk about the internet, we typically say there was Web1, we count this from around 1994. Essentially what happened is you start-

Mikkel Svold (06:05):

The interwebs.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (06:07):

Interwebs. You started having these websites where you could go and read content. So you’d have a central produce of content, whether that was MSN, or as the New York Times, or somewhere where you’d go and then-

Mikkel Svold (06:20):

Ub.dk.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (06:21):

Ub.dk was the probably most famous local example where you’d go and you’d read content. That was procured and uploaded centrally, and that’s what you did. So essentially, what we call it is the read web. You could read what was there and that was it.

Then you got Web4 and there’s some argument to when exactly this came into play. But let’s say around 2004, that’s when-

Mikkel Svold (06:44):

Web2 you mean.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (06:44):

Web2, sorry, yeah. Web2, I think that was around 2004 is when you started having Myspace and some of these social networks. Now, the change here was pretty big because where before it was only centralized content owners uploading, now you went to the social web. Meaning that you still had centralized platforms, we know them very well today, Instagram, Facebook cetera, et cetera. But what you consumed on those platforms, i.e the product so to speak, was created by other users. When I go onto YouTube, I don’t watch someone who is hired by YouTube headquarters to create a video, I watch someone who’s uploaded it.

So, this is what we call the social web, because, one, it is consumer created content, that is the key value. And two, we are also able to interact with it. We know Discord is where you can go and have all kinds of discussions. And again, as social media, lots of comments, et cetera. So, that’s the key shift to Web2. You can read as you could before, and now you can also write, and write is just a techy word for putting stuff up right in the database. So, that’s that. That’s Web2.

Now, Web3 is still an unknown quantity. We don’t know exactly when it’s going to kick off, but we are starting to see signs of things that might indicate this shift. And whilst there’s a lot more uncertainties than certainties in this space, it seems like it’s going to include decentralized ownership of platforms. So, we are going to go from read and write in Web2, to read, write, and own.

So, to speak, YouTube today, the way it works is I’m a content creator. I create a lovely podcast or a video, and then I go and upload it to YouTube. YouTube then uses their proprietary algorithm, which I don’t understand and I don’t have access to find out how it works, and they place ads that they think will work well with my target audience or with the content I’ve created. Then YouTube takes all of the revenue from the ads, and then they pay for their own expenses, and then they take a bit of a profit, and then they give you what they believe is the right amount of value you have left. So basically, you are you’d call it a price taker, I think in traditional economics. You can’t really dictate what you get out of this exchange. You get what YouTube tells you you’re allowed to get.

Now, let’s imagine a decentralized platform. In the decentralized platform, blockchain based, you are a content creator. There is this decentralized platform owned by you and all kinds of other content creators. You own this by having bought up the cryptocurrencies and having put up servers to help run it, et cetera. You’ve done that collectively, all managed by the blockchain technology.

Now, I upload a video and I mint it as an NFT, and we’ll touch upon what an NFT is later, a non-fungible token. This says, all right, Rasmus has created this video. It’s original, it’s from this date. Then the algorithm, which will be open source most likely, will place ads onto this video because advertisers are still going to want to go where to use this on where the videos are. So instead of going to their YouTube account executive, they will have bought it off some website you’ve set up as part of this platform.

Then we as content creators decide of all the revenue that goes into the ads, that comes from the ads, how do we split it? Do we just pay it all out to the content creators? Lovely. Yeah, I’m making a lot more money now than I did on YouTube. But wait a minute, we actually need to pay for some server costs. All right, let’s pay the expenses. Do we then just take the rest of the profits and run with it? Well, yes you might. Or you might think, but there’s other platforms out there. They are developing new cooler features, better algorithms, new way of interacting with videos, whatever it can be.

So, you say all of us content creators, we want to keep our platform being successful. So let’s take some of our profits and put it aside, we’ll vote about how much, and then we’ll vote on what features we want to build. Then we’ll go out to the broader community of developers and say we’ve got these 10 features, we are willing to pay this much for each, who wants to do it for us? And in that sense, you’ve basically democratized the ownership. The interesting thing here is you don’t have any corporate profits. You don’t need a return to shareholders because you are all of you the shareholders.

Mikkel Svold (11:08):

And you get it basically paid via the algorithm.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (11:12):

Yeah. Everything is in code.

Mikkel Svold (11:16):

Now we talked about this before, again, turning on the microphones. But now you have these big corporations, very powerful corporations that earn a lot of money from owning the platforms. So one would presume, I would presume, they would want to counter this movement.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (11:39):

Most likely.

Mikkel Svold (11:40):

Most likely. And that brings to mind two questions. First, can they? Is it coming anyway? And second, if you go on YouTube, as your example. So if I go on YouTube, there are millions and millions of videos. So, I’ve got all the content I would ever imagine would be nice for me to look at.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (12:04):

And a lot of content you wouldn’t imagine. Yeah.

Mikkel Svold (12:05):

Also. So, what would make me as a user swap over to some other platform?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (12:13):

Yeah, well I think there’s-

Mikkel Svold (12:15):

Because it starts small.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (12:16):

Yeah, exactly. So, there are a couple of things here. So let’s start with what you ended with, this chicken and the egg problem. How do you actually create a platform that starts having a relevance and effect? And that is super difficult. Typically, what you see, if you look at Clayton Christensen’s theories around disruptive innovation is you start by making a niche platform that goes very specifically after one use case. It might be, who knows that the next great global video platform might already exist today as a video platform for spear fishing and that’s a niche thing and they solved that really well, and then maybe build from there. I think that part is a bit uncertain, but we’ve seen it done before. It can be done again.

Then let’s think, obviously these big platforms aren’t going to take it lying down. I think there’s going to happen a couple of things. They’re going to try and co-opt it. So they are going to try and follow with the technology. So, they will allow content creators to create NFTs. Instagram is already doing this, I think, in beta versions. So, letting people actually create NFTs, which would then register ownership on a blockchain. Not necessarily in itself an issue, but it’s an easier way to manage copyright. But they also are going to try and compete on payments. They’ll pay more to content creators. So even perhaps-

Mikkel Svold (13:39):

That’s going to be a super hard competition for them though.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (13:41):

That is because they have costs that the others don’t, and they have shareholders that expect profit revenues. There’s wonderful quote from a US senator, I can’t remember which one right now, but you notice something profoundly wrong with our system when US tech has a higher take rate than the mafia. Meaning to understand that if you go onto the app store and you put content on there, Apple takes 30% of all your revenue. If you go to Instagram or Facebook, they take pretty close to 100% of all the revenue there. Then they might pay our little bit on the end, but you have no choice as a content creator how much. Now we are seeing cases like Joe Rogan who got $100 million to go to Spotify. So, there are exceptions.

Mikkel Svold (14:19):

Those are also the outliers.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (14:21):

Those are definitely the outliers. So, they are going to try and compete in price. The question is can they, when they’ve been so used to putting down 30% profit margins on these things? And over here you have essentially a non-profit. This autonomous organization is owed by content creators. Yes, they want their salary based on the amount of engagement and et cetera they create, but they don’t need the extra profit on top because they’re just paying it all out to salaries to one another. So, that’s going to be pretty interesting.

Mikkel Svold (14:50):

Then I think you mentioned something interesting here where you say you have these non-profit organizations, and those would also then be the organizations actually coding the platform. Because me as a content creator, I couldn’t participate in that. I might put content on and that will then serve me some ownership of the platform. But actually building the platform would be outside of my skillset, right?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (15:16):

Me as well, my coding skills aren’t really worth talking about.

Mikkel Svold (15:19):

I code a little bit in Excel. I don’t know if that counts, does it?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (15:22):

I know a bit of VBA, but that’s also the end of it for my part. No. So definitely, that’s one solution. You could imagine having these non-profit organizations, you actually see it already with Infireum Foundation on the Infireum blockchain, functions in that way. Another way, we are talking about a lot about the creator economy or the freelance economy. So you might just say these are the high prioritized lists of things we’d like you to develop, these are acceptance criteria, and you just put that out for public tender. Then anyone can go say, I’m on that. Or they might compete. Who gets it done first to the best quality then gets… You can incentivize these structures in many different ways.

Mikkel Svold (16:03):

But that’s actually using just pretty regular ways of doing business.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (16:09):

Exactly. I think that brings us to an important point. You could do that system on the blockchain as well. You don’t have to. Again, blockchain is a technology. It’s not the be all and end all. Sometimes centralized technologies work better. I think we’re going to see all kinds of different models people trying out and testing and failing and winning and it’s going to be just hyper interesting.

Mikkel Svold (16:31):

I think we need to get something sorted because you advertise that we were going to talk about or tell what is an NFT. So, that I think is the first one. And then just after that, we want to dive into the banking or the money side of this, and try to talk about the decentralized finance. So

, what does that mean?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (16:49):

So, an NFT means non-fungible token. The best way to explain non-fungible is by trying to explain what fungible is. So fungible means something that can be exchanged to something other of similar value and type, i.e. money is fungible. If you have 100 kroners and I have 100 kroners, we are pretty happy swapping that 100 kroners. We are not going to care. Non-fungible is then something that is more unique. So, let’s say I have a lovely Picasso drawing, just for the hell of it. I wish, right? And you have your four-year-old niece’s lovely drawing. Now, I’m not really going to be willing to swap that, even though they’re both drawings. Don’t get me wrong, they’re both drawings.

Mikkel Svold (17:34):

And they look alike.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (17:34):

They look kind of alike. Lines a bit sloppy both places, it could be. But they’re not going to be worth the same value. I think that’s one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is, another example of a fungible asset would be iron ore. If I have a ton of iron ore and I take away half of it, the value of my remaining iron ore is going to be half. If I take my Picasso and rip it into half, unless I’m Banksy, it’s not going to be worth half of what it was before.

Mikkel Svold (18:09):

But if you are Banksy, it might actually be worth more.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (18:11):

He has invented an infinity loop there. I think he needs to go deeper into that. So I think those are the two key things. Is it devisable to the same amount? And does it matter if it’s A or B, or are they the same in this case?

So, that’s the key difference. So, non-fungible tokens are essentially just an expression for a… The token is something you register on the blockchain and that means that you can register, this was minted, as you’d call it, when it was created. This was minted on this date by this user. You can write a small description of what it is, but you can also start writing in all kinds of stipulations in what we know as smart contracts.

So, let’s say I’m an artist, I make wonderful art. Today, I’ll go to a gallery and I’ll put my art up for sale and they will sell it and I’ll get a commission and that’s it. When the new owner of my art then sells it on, I’m pretty much cut out.

Mikkel Svold (19:09):

You’re out of the loop.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (19:09):

I’m out of the loop. I don’t know when it’s sold, I don’t know what it’s sold for. So, any upside in these value increment increases just goes past me. It might help me with my next gallery exhibition, but it’s not going to help me directly. With NFTs, you can actually stipulate into contract every time this sells, I get 10% of the sales price. That can go up, that can go down, but I still have some revenue.

Mikkel Svold (19:33):

This is actually really good news for artists and aspiring artists, because then they can basically make an income stream that is more or less infinite.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (19:43):

Yeah, exactly. It’s going to be pretty interesting for a number of things. You might have these slow burn artists. We know a couple of examples of them. So, van Gogh wasn’t really successful until after his death. If he created NFTs, his family could live well off that today. So, that’s going to be pretty interesting also how that plays out. But these smart contracts, when we go beyond the NFTs can be used for all kinds of things. I think that’s probably a good segue into banking.

So as mentioned before, when you apply for a mortgage, 90% of the decision-making is being made by a system, by a computer system. I can code that system into a blockchain. What we’ve seen in examples with DeFi lending in 2021 was at the highest point there was $21 billion worth of outstanding loans in decentralized platform. No person had gone in and said I approve that loan or not. No, it was all done algorithmically by the system. So, this is pretty interesting because what happens is you cut out people, people are expensive. You can also cut out things such as bias, now that remains to be seen as we know with various AI initiatives, bias has-

Mikkel Svold (20:57):

They’re not really good at that yet.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (20:59):

Bias has a creepy way of getting built into systems. But in theory, you could perhaps cut out bias. You could make decision making a lot more transparent, i.e, why does this lender get to take this loan, and this lender doesn’t even though they look the same? Well, this lender has a wife who has a better paying job than this one. All those things can be open because it can be visible and read in the code. Now that’s super interesting as a financial company. It’s also pretty scary because what we do, banking is essentially a time machine. Banking is about taking the money you don’t need today and lending it out to someone that needs more money than they have today, i.e alone, and facilitating that time machine works without a kink.

This is going to be interesting for a couple reasons because can you, in an algorithm, take account of all these variables? Can you manage liquidity when a worn Ukraine comes on or when the value of a certain cryptocurrency falls massively? How do you manage these things? And we are seeing a lot of examples of where it works really well. I think MakerDAO is an autonomous organization that actually manages these liquidity events pretty well. We also see examples where it works really poorly. The recent one was Luna Terra back in May where it basically imploded because they-

Mikkel Svold (22:20):

Which basically has nothing to do with Lunar bank.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (22:23):

No. Just to be clear, it’s Luna without an R and it’s South Korean Terra labs that’s behind it.

Mikkel Svold (22:31):

Yeah. Now let’s try dive a bit deeper into this decentralized finance because what is going to be, you think, the consequences and when will it actually happen?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (22:47):

Yeah, it’s a good question really for both of them. So, I think that the consequences, hopefully, if you have the optimistic glasses on, is that things are going to get cheaper for consumers. If you look at Visa and MasterCard. Now in Europe, there’s a lot of laws that dictate what money they’re allowed to earn. In the US there isn’t. So, Visa and MasterCard in the US has been in the top 10 of profit margin companies in the US for something like 30 years. That’s basically unheard of. No other companies are able to stay there.

Mikkel Svold (23:24):

I guess when you sit on the transaction. Every time someone else has a business, you have a business,

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (23:30):

Everyone needs you. That’s going to be pretty interesting if you look at someone like Chamath Palihapitiya, former VP of Facebook. Very clever guy, big investor, Silicon Valley chap. He selected MasterCard and Visa as the potential biggest losers of 2022. So it could already be happening, we don’t know. But let’s say, I don’t know, I’m not really working that hard on the card or the payments part of our business. But what we do know is that there are blockchain platforms out there where they can facilitate a transaction for $0.01, fixed price, regardless of the size of that transaction. That is very cheap.

But then of course you have to remember the thing about payments is the hard part isn’t doing the payment, it’s all the other stuff. So it’s all monitoring, it’s all what happens when you want to get your money back because you’re not happy with the product. How you manage all these things, how you manage fraud, all of those aspects. So, that’s going to also increase the price. Let’s assume that these centralized platform remain no touch or low touch, it’s going to be really interesting to see how they can actually manage this complexity, if they are.

Mikkel Svold (24:11):

Do you think they will be?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (24:44):

If we go back to the mortgage example, the vast majority of it is already being done. So I think you can, but it’s definitely going to go wrong before it goes well.

Mikkel Svold (24:56):

Do you expect also that this is going down in 2022, that’s this year, so we’ve got a couple of months left.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (25:02):

I have yet to see the proof.

Mikkel Svold (25:04):

Yeah. But do you think it will come along as close to where we are now, next year, within five years? Or are we talking a technology that will have a slow entry of say 10, 20?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (25:20):

There are a couple of ways of looking at this. If you look at the development of the internet or home computers, we forget how long it took for that to become mainstream. If you look at it from that sense, I don’t think blockchain technologies are behind the curve. They’re probably a little bit ahead of at least home computers. So, I think we’ll see it. What we are seeing already now, so in January, Amazon in the UK went out and said they were going to stop accepting Visa. Straight up. Coincidentally, they at about the same time hired ahead of cryptocurrencies and blockchain in the organization. I don’t know if those things are related. But there was definitely a clear message. Now what happened was these visa, again, two weeks later became accepted by Amazon in the UK.

Mikkel Svold (26:15):

They figured that people couldn’t pay.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (26:17):

No, I don’t think so. I just think they got a better price.

So, you are already seeing it as a little bit of a boogeyman. Well if you guys won’t sell us this cheaper, then we will go to the blockchain. In principle, I’m technology agnostic. If, let’s say, a card processor can do it cheaper than a blockchain, fine, use that. Whatever you do. But what’s really interesting is can we actually effectivize society to a point where we all have more money for ourselves, we’ve all got more money to invest in new financially beneficial ventures, or the environment or whatever else it might be, which clearly needs money. So can we prohibit abnormal profits is going to be interesting.

Mikkel Svold (26:58):

I’m wondering, is Web3 and the technology behind blockchain and the technology that goes into creating this distributed ownership, is that a better version? Is it better? Are we upgrading or are we just doing something else? Do you understand the question? I don’t even if I understand myself.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (27:21):

No, I do. It’s not inherently better. Technology isn’t inherently anything, I believe. I’m sure there are some interesting philosophical arguments out there. But for the sake of it, technology isn’t inherently anything. So, it more depends on how is it going to be used? What are the use cases? So the last time there was a lot of buzz around crypto was back in 2017, and back then there just weren’t any good use cases. There was the payments case, but people hadn’t really figured out how to make it scalable. Then there was very little else, there was very little mention of smart contracts, at least in the mainstream perspective. That is much different now. You are seeing a lot of different solutions. You’re starting to see run to earn apps, where you can buy an NFT sneaker and then you can put that NFT sneaker on when you go for a run and then it registers and then you get paid out crypto for amount on sweat you’ve had, or distance you’ve done.

Mikkel Svold (28:24):

That’s such a funny use example.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (28:25):

But if you think about it, again, you could do that with a centralized product. Let’s say that the Danish Public Health Authority decided we need to get Danes to run more, give them an app that logs their running and then pay them Danish kroners every time they’ve done a mile. You could do that without using blockchain. But I think what’s interesting is because you can do these things and you create inherent accountability from the system, because the system logs everything and it’s not a central authority. So everyone can go and audit and validate it. Because you have this inherent accountability in it, you can create all kinds of use cases that would be a lot harder to do. You can do it on a global perspective because if I’m a Norwegian, I don’t have to trust the Danish Public Health Authority. You probably wouldn’t want to pay out to me anyways. But I don’t have to trust them to keep my data. So, I think that there’s going to be new things that we can’t see. It’s not all going to be the same but on a new technology. But a lot of it is going to be just that, the same on a new technology.

Mikkel Svold (29:25):

Also, many of the things that are the same just on new technology, I guess a lot of the users, they won’t even notice. It’s not going to make a really big difference in their usage of their phone.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (29:39):

Hopefully not. So, it’s really interesting when you talk to people about crypto and they’re like, “I don’t understand it. How does it work?” I’m like, all right, well can you explain to me how your payment card works? Yeah, you touch the terminal, what happens? Where does it go? What are the steps?

Mikkel Svold (29:56):

Explain to me what happens when you’re on a Zoom call with someone in the States.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (30:00):

Exactly. The same thing with the engine. You go out, you turn on your car, what happens? We know it revs, but what does that actually mean? What is it that’s going up and down or circling around? So I think we are going to reach a saturation point where you’re not going to care. We are not there with blockchain, and that’s a key thing. The UX of the vast majority of blockchain solutions, I think we do a pretty good job on ours.

Mikkel Svold (30:24):

The user experience that is.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (30:25):

Exactly, the user experience. I have to be prejudiced around ours. But most of them are still too difficult, they’re too complicated. I think the other challenge right now is lack of regulation. So, there’s this wonderful statistic around Bitcoin specifically. So, I think in a couple years we should have around 18 million bitcoins in total, something like that, or we have around 18 million now. They have a top on it. But at present it’s estimated around 24% of all the Bitcoin that has been created isn’t available to its rightful owners.

Mikkel Svold (31:02):

Because they forgot their password.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (31:04):

They lost their key. They threw the USB out. It’s in that Welsh garbage dump with a couple billions worth. That’s the thing. That’s a very good example of this just wasn’t user friendly. So how do we do that? How do we get that? More importantly, in Denmark, we all rely on name ID. In the Nordics in general, we rely on these centralized proofs of identity that can give us access to pretty much anything we need. But is there going to be a decentralized version of that you can trust but it’s more user friendly? And how do you manage all these things? There’s a few questions still to be answered.

Mikkel Svold (31:40):

Absolutely. Now I think our time’s up, but I think just in three lines, can you summarize, what is Web3? What is decentralized finance, or how do they connect? Then I want also to ask you just one last question, what are you looking into in the future? What are you keeping an eye on that you find interesting in the developments of this field?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (32:08):

Sure. So starting from the top, Web3 is essentially a hypothesized future of the internet where users can read and write, as they already can today in Web2, but where they can also take ownership of the platforms. So, imagine a Facebook without a Meta company behind it, is essentially the potential here. Decentralized finance is sort of the same but for banking. So a bank or bank services and products without a centralized bank on it. Now what are we looking for the future? That’s a really good question, I think.

Mikkel Svold (32:43):

What are you looking for? What do you find interesting?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (32:46):

All of it, and that’s my problem I think. No, what I’m keeping a particular eye on are blockchain based use cases that are accessible to the mainstream where you just get it. I think these run to earn cases are interesting, because I use Strava a lot. Well, not enough, but a lot. It’s so interesting. There’s already a proven case that people would like to register their runs, could they be rewarded? Could they reward each other with crypto? All these things are pretty interesting. So, the key thing is what is the use case that you can get your mom to use?

Mikkel Svold (33:30):

Yeah.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (33:31):

That’s probably-

Mikkel Svold (33:32):

That’s actually quite often a good question.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (33:34):

Generally yes.

Mikkel Svold (33:35):

Generally yes. Now just before we run over, where can the listeners follow you or find out more about you if they want to?

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (33:43):

Yeah, I can-

Mikkel Svold (33:44):

Although, you can also go completely incognito.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (33:46):

Oh, almost. Following me or not is pretty much the same. I’m not very good at posting. But I can be found and reached out to a via LinkedIn, Rasmus Lindegaard. If not, we have a Lunar Instagram page that can be worth following. We also have a bit of news on what we are doing there.

Mikkel Svold (34:02):

Absolutely. Rasmus Risager Lindegaard, once again, thank you so much for coming. To you out there listening, if you liked this podcast, please do help us spread it by subscribing and sharing it with your friends and family and just tell them, don’t share the link, just tell them go listen to Big Ideas Only.

All the stuff that we’ve talked about, you can find links to all the stuff that we’ve mentioned or that you’ve mentioned on our show notes. Those show notes you can find on montanus.co/bigideasonly. Of course, if you’re interested in building thought leadership for your own company, but you can’t really get started with the blogging and the podcasting and all, whatever that is, don’t hesitate to reach out to us because that’s actually what we do for a living. You can also do that on montanus.co. That’s it for now. Thank you so much for listening.

Rasmus Risager Lindegaard (34:52):

Thanks a lot. Bye.