Rob Frasca on NDAU as a long term store of value

0:01i'm ashton addison from event chain for investment pitch media and the crypto coin show and today on blockchain interviews we have rob frasca the managing partner at a blockchain venture firm cosmo ventures director of o nero and one of the founding investors of endow rob welcome to the show and thank you so much for taking the time to be here today

0:20thank you for having me it's a pleasure you're very welcome i would love to kick off our conversation by first just hearing a little bit on your background in the venture space and in blockchain and how that led to you getting involved with endow yeah thanks thanks for that um so look i uh i've got a long history i'm actually a dot-com entrepreneur uh i uh used to fly jets for the navy

0:44and uh back back in the day in the 90s i was at carnegie mellon uh as a student there and i started one of the very first financial services on the internet uh in fact it was the very first commercially available stock quote server on the internet and when i was 29 years old i sold that company to intuit worked for him to it i later went on and uh went on to uh create a company

1:09called wisewire which was the internet's uh one of the internet's uh first ai companies and we sold that to lycos where we i don't know most people don't even know lycos these days but uh it was an early portal right behind yahoo and we took the company public for over five billion dollars which was uh quite the ride so i've been in the tech space now for a little over 30

1:31years and in fintech for 30 years and today i run uh with my partners uh cosmo ventures which is an early blockchain venture capital firm and we are extremely bullish on what blockchain is uh and what it what it what it brings to the market we actually believe that blockchain is going to create more value than the internet itself because it's essentially

1:58the decentralized value layer on the internet and we uh i'd say three almost four years ago we made an investment sizable investment into a project called endow uh right here and uh we're big proponents of endow and i'm thrilled to be here today to talk about it definitely and that's quite the background very exciting uh all these exits and and yeah i truly

2:22believe as well rob that the blockchain industry is going to be bigger than the internet itself and putting money on there and putting smart contracts to revolutionize everything uh in the entire world and it's very interesting that your team has is so bullish on on endow specifically and i would love to hear why and first of all just a little bit about

2:44uh what is endow for those who aren't familiar with and then we can dive into the details yeah absolutely so you know remember we always kind of i always kind of go back and i look at my experience as an entrepreneur right multiple companies multiple exits and what i always try to do is gauge where we at in the in the adoption life cycle are we in the

3:04kind of visionary phase where there's only a couple people buying into the technology are we into that early adopter phase where there's more technology people are more excited about the technology versus the value or are we in the later stage and generally that's about 10 of the market those two groups or are we in that kind of early majority phase

3:26where all of a sudden regular people kind of jump into the market and and really grab a hold of it because they're attracted to the value and what i saw with the internet was i i lived that right i built companies through those different phases and most of the value in in in that tech adoption cycle actually happens when the early majority comes online

3:49uh and the companies that enter the early majority are much different than the early adopters in fact google google didn't enter okay they were the 12th portal 13th portal to actually enter the market uh we were number two at lycos we entered in the early uh early adopter phase google entered in the early majority phase so what we're looking at here as

4:15investors what we did was we looked at this as investors and we said where are we at today with crypto and and blockchain and what we saw is is that we are right now i would say today in 2021 on that kind of transition from early adopter to early majority and what endow is trying to do is be an early majority solution uh to the long-term store of value

4:44and a lot of people i i talked to a lot of people in the crypto market they got a long-term store of value you know i don't get it is that a utility token is it is that a stable coin what's the use case well it turns out that the long-term store of value digital gold is actually the largest use case it's where all the value it's the big enchilada and right now bitcoin is being

5:06used as a long-term store of value as a hedge against the markets and what endow is trying to do is create a next generation of currency that's actually adaptive it's a currency that's demand um its supply is demand driven and it actually adapts to the market its monetary policy adapts to the market it's proof of stake uh which means you get a yield from it versus having to

5:31mine it uh and what it what it really is trying to do is create that that long-term adaptive store of value that has a staking yield some great points there and as you mentioned you know google they weren't first they were they're 12th or 13th in the list and it sometimes being first isn't right and i think just timing is so important you mentioned being on

5:56that cusp between early adopters and early majority it definitely seems like there's a lot of interest you know even institutional interest and retail interest uh flooding into the market in in 2021 and we are on that cusp of a breakthrough and to have a long-term store of value that's successful in that time of the early majority i think uh is going to be very necessary

6:20because there are a lot of new entrants into the market that are looking for store value in a time when a lot of national currencies aren't holding their stores of value now can we talk a little bit about endow as uh as a store of value and you sort of compared it to bitcoin there maybe some differentiators and and what makes it unique in terms of comparing bitcoin as a store

6:43of value to endow yeah absolutely so first i want to i want to do i do want to make the point we are early we're we're early bitcoin buyers we're huge and very much like bitcoin uh in fact uh you know we were buying we were buying bitcoin you know years ago and we're holders we're not selling it we're buying it uh and we believe in bitcoin um and but uh with that said we think that

7:12as uh new markets move in just like you said um you need to really create uh additional stores of value uh beyond uh bitcoin what endow is trying to do if you think about bitcoin bitcoin uh is free floating to the market uh it's got a limited supply it's proof of work um and uh you know it it's it's the it's the leader it's the first generation what endows trying to do is say hey what

7:40if we what are the requirements what what what are the requirements for long-term store value number one um we it needs to uh have uh reduced volatility so it needs to have some kind of system in place to uh to have reduced volatility now there are a lot of people have created stable coins right which is great because they're flat they're pl they're fed to an asset

8:02a dollar or or a yen or a euro right the problem is is that uh if it's pegged to a dollar uh as a long-term store of value i don't know about you but i wouldn't want to hold the dollar right cash is trash in my opinion it's being devalued so what you want is reduced volatility but you also want the ability to grow in value as these networks grow right all

8:25networks grow exponentially which means and if all currencies are networks then all currencies should grow exponentially according to how fast their networks grow so in the case of endow what we wanted was a a currency that's adaptive that that understands where it is with respect to its market and adjusts its monetary policy to reduce its volatility so you want

8:48something about that reduces volatility you want something that has the ability to grow in value but also you want something that actually produces a yield it has to be competitive with other stores of value and you know the beautiful thing about proof of stake is is that if i stake my currency i can actually earn a bonus or a reward or if you want to use kind of banking language of yield

9:13or income and so that's really what endow is trying to do is create a currency that has the ability to climb in value has reduced bowel okay it's going to be volatile it's not going to be stable flat but it's going to reduce that valve and has the ability to grow as the network value grows and then what the team did was they said look if we're going after the early

9:38majority versus the early adopters we have to layer in more institutional level types of controls or systems you know the the early adopter can handle uh you know losing their key or uh you know sending bitcoin to the wrong address and going oh man i lost that uh but the early majority isn't going to handle that they're not going to be able to deal with that so endow actually has

10:05multi-sig built in and it actually has a recourse period in where you could you could actually unwind the transaction if you wanted to uh based on how you set that transaction detail so so you know long-winded answer to your question but that's really what we're trying to do create that next generation store of value in addition to a portfolio event

10:27definitely really interesting and yeah you mentioned there there are a lot of stable coins that are already in the cryptocurrency industry however tying it to a dollar although a dollar is still a dollar next year in reality because of inflation it's really not worth a dollar and it's going down so you need to have a cryptocurrency that's truly deflationary or

10:47in the case of endow i was researching the the buoyancy factor where it actually is increasing in value that's right that's right and and you know endow is actually issued it's a demand-driven supply which means it's issued on a bonding curve uh and so what that means is is that um it will only issue new currency if the price

11:14uh goes above the current kind of bonding curve or issue price and ever so every thousand and now that's sold on or not sold issued the price ticks up a little bit so so you know today for instance endows target price or issue price is around 36 and its trading price its market price is around 32 to 33 dollars so it's trading below issue so what that means is is that no

11:42new currency is going to be issued unless right why because there's no demand for it uh it's stable the market's kind of stable at that 3233 level now if somebody starts buying up endow the demand's gonna go up and then that means that if the demand goes up the price goes up and if the price goes up to a certain level then we will issue more end out uh to

12:05meet that demand so it's truly demand supply which is key definitely definitely key and can you give a snapshot for the viewers who you know who aren't familiar with endow and where is it at right now and being in the market and have you partnered with lots of different different partners and different exchanges to help bring access and liquidity to the currency yeah absolutely so

12:31uh like i told you we funded a company called o'nero that that helped to build the currency and now endow is open source uh and uh it's run uh through a foundation the axiom foundation uh so it's it's a completely open source the blockchain is built on cosmos tendermint delegated proof of stake it's its own native blockchain uh and it was originally launched

12:57the actual blockchain has been live mainnet now for over two years uh and uh there's a native wallet in ios and uh android and it was originally launched on a small exchange called bitmark uh and later added uh bittrex global and and now liquid uh and there are plans now to get it on some much larger we've signed agreements that the group has signed agreements with much

13:24larger exchanges uh to uh to grow um the overall liquidity uh there is a group working on a rapt endow there's a lot of really interesting projects in the ecosystem a lot of node operators are coming online uh as well uh so you know overall i think the uh the ecosystem is is really growing uh one of the biggest partnerships that i'm particularly excited about

13:53is recently a a network promotion firm there's actually a public company in the u.s called invest view and they're a big bitcoin miner and they own a company called igenius which is a network marketing firm and they have over 30 000 people in their affiliate network thirty thousand people worldwide uh and this group is now uh promoting

14:22uh endow in countries like egypt france germany italy korea japan colombia all over the world and what i particularly like about that is this is an early majority kind of affiliate network they're going after new people uh that are coming into crypto uh and so the adoption for endow has really been

14:48uh quite uh fantastic through that group uh last week we we uh i believe people in 37 different countries uh purchased uh and are now holding endow uh in their wallets very cool rob that's great to hear and you know looking forward uh in the future there seems like there's so many different use cases uh potentially for endow with everything from obviously the long-term store

15:15value uh the proof-of-stake defy central bank digital currencies uh expanding into more liquidity more access in the next six months to a year let's say what are the the primary focuses on growing the endow platform yeah that's a great uh that's a great question so uh ultimately uh the number one goal here is to increase the the network of owners and in uses of endow

15:44and really uh bring it to you know the early majority uh and we believe that uh that can be done through more exchanges larger exchanges and larger exposure so that's kind of the number one priority number two priority for the team in the in the near future is highly localized marketing efforts in places like egypt in greece in france in korea in colombia

16:12really bringing in those localized uh markets all of the marketing material promotion website apps are all being localized uh in those native languages uh and there are native teams so that's uh that's important and then to really go after the defy market uh today we've got a rap end out we've got to get it into kind of the ethereum markets marketplace so you'll see that coming

16:37pretty soon with some pretty cool reward programs uh around that and then finally uh institutional acceptance particularly around cbdc in emerging market economies uh you know as i said endow was built with a lot of institutional level controls and so the idea here is is to bring that type of functionality to emerging markets uh as potentially a cbdc or an alternative currency

17:06definitely all great milestones uh and those countries that you're targeting i feel like that's a that's a great first market for some of these currencies that haven't been doing so well where those uh the patrons there are looking for a long-term store of value so i'm looking forward to seeing the adoption in those locations now you mentioned end out trading on a

17:26few exchanges already that's great for the viewers that are looking to follow along for these updates uh with the wrapped endow and all of the other updates uh that are coming to the platform what's the best way for them to follow along and to get involved in the community yeah so uh endow dot io io is the website uh on the website there's an extensive

17:51knowledge base of videos on everything endow uh there's a there's a blockchain explorer if you wanted to really see what's going on on the blockchain it's in it's in details and from that website you can also go to the telegram channel uh you know the twitter uh etc uh and uh we'll look to see multi-more multi-language support as well on endow.io coming soon

18:19sounds great rob i will leave all those links in the description box below as well all the best uh with endow and your projects moving forward and let's follow up in the near future thanks i really appreciate your time today and uh we're thrilled uh i'm thrilled to be here you