Avoiding Crypto Scams, The Metaverse, and More with Mark Basa

I believe just English itself, not all the other multi-language channels we have, and people love this token, what we’re going to do with it because what we’re trying to do is bring what we call a meme. Utility meme. The utility didn’t exist when these meme tokens came out, they were started as jokes.

They were starting. Some of them were pumping dumps scams. Some of them were trying to bring utility as to what you could do with your currency. And that’s the thing. With these mean tokens on these brands is unless you can do something with them or there’s no, or there are no plans to do something with them.

Then the project can very easily fail. So when I started at Hawk, they had all these plans to do these things. And I came on board and I said, listen, what we should do. Is built a financial ecosystem where you can send and spend your crypto the way you want through several financial products and services that replicate legacy finance.

So everything that you can do today, if you want to buy a pizza, go to the movies, buy an annuity, and anything you want to do with fear currency, us dollar, you should make products and services through. And people can use your currency to do so we’re starting this whole trend of doing so now the other tokens, some have celebrity endorsement, which is what makes them pop as dogecoin others have, I don’t know what made Shiba Inu so possible.

I know that the coin, like if you look at the charts, Bye rocketed. I feel like a couple of wallets just pumped in hundreds of thousands of Ethan and just made it go wild. But besides that, all the other meme tokens that are around more or less will fail unless they are building the future of finance.

We see this popularity specifically coming from young people. They would rather buy meme tokens. Then invest in real estate or us dollar or anything. What is it about a meme token that makes it so special? Now let’s say if you have that sort of brand demand, that kind of cult following, and you can use it for good.

You can build an ecosystem and young people this next crypto generation that mind you may never interact with a central bank in their life from like my son he’s a year and eight months old. He, when he grows up, maybe the only bank he’s going to have his own decentralized web three wallets. Maybe his first transaction will be a meme token.

So we’re trying to facilitate that for the next five, 10 years for young people and more crypto evangelists and novices. So going into meme tokens and, investing in these things can go up, they can go down, they skyrocket, they go left right up down, everything. It’s important to think about, what are you in this for?

Are you in this for a pump and dump? Do you think this coin is going to explode cash out, then just cash out when you’ve got something and know what you’re going to invest in and why and what your returns ideal returns are. But if you want to invest in something you think, okay, the next five, 10 years, this is moving this way.

I’ll put a bit of money aside and see how. That’s also a good option. 

So I think one of the biggest shifts that I see coming, and I’m certainly not an expert on this stuff, but I know a little bit about Bitcoin and Ethereum in particular. Ethereum is at least they’ve been saying for years, moving to a proof of stake model and that, that is progressing forward.

But in theory, I suppose that’s supposed to severely reduce the energy use of that user. Hopefully, I think bringing down transaction fees is a part of that. And I wanted before we move on here just to touch on that because. Folks out there who know maybe a little bit about crypto, but maybe more of the headlines may have this model in their minds about crypto being all just giant energy, wastage computers running at a hundred percent and, just burning off all of this power, but it’s not accurate.

And I just wanted to touch on that, while we’re here, proof of work versus. 

Let’s talk about the whole idea of energy consumption. Now there’s a lot of. The bad news about crypto, especially from centralized services banks, because it’s competing with them. And every banker that I’ve known at very high levels is terrified of crypto.

They don’t know that they’re going to have a job in five and 10 years. In terms of energy consumption, you have to take, for example, you have hundreds or maybe thousands of computers supporting a network all around the world. There’s your energy to run. You can see transactions. So every time I want to send you money, if there are lots of people using the network, We have to pay I have to pay a fee.

Those fees are pretty high right now because of the demand for a theorem. As an example, if you think about traditional finance and how much money and infrastructure and people and energy that uses it’s, It’s incredible how much bigger it is than crypto, which can be sent.

Even when it’s expensive, there’s so much more energy being consumed on so many levels. Crypto companies like myself and hoc finance. We don’t have a headquarter office. We have registrations, we have headquarters, you can say, but a team of like nearly a hundred people we run on. On a laptop and we use the Ethereum, the Binance, and HECO network on the, on, on Hubie.

We’re a pretty agile company. We don’t use paper. There’s no mail clerk. There’s none of that stuff going on. You compare us to some of the bigger, or even just smaller banks. There’s a lot of energy consumption that goes into that. So I think that idea is probably spread from people that don’t want crypto to take off in terms of.

Contracts and smart contracts and not to get too deep into the technicalities. Think of it as, unless the job is done on the blockchain. You will never receive payment. And this is the big thing about proving one’s transaction or one’s work over the network. Let’s say you’re a freelance. And right now I might use Upwork for example, and Upwork holds funds from the client until the freeway freelancer delivers.

There’s a third party, there’s an intermediary. That’s holding that money, earning interest on that money, trading that money, loading that money with crypto, that doesn’t happen. You have the network, you have a decentralized that controls that transaction and releases it according to when the work is done.

Now, that’s also good and bad because then who’s going to run disputes. On these on these channels. So if you want to work, if I have an agreement with you right now, and I do some work for you, then it’s up to you and me to do something. If it doesn’t work, we get a lawyer. So that’s the part about having an identity and a team where it comes into play.

That’s also very vital. If you’re going to run into start to encrypt our transactions. I think that in terms of energy and the way it works if you have an idea about using cryptocurrency, some networks are expensive to use to send money. Some blockchains, do charge quite a hefty fee. Even if you’re not engaging on any centralized platform, like for example, Coinbase takes a fee, but meta mask, a decentralized web three wallet, I can send you money, but I’ve got to pay.

Network, in what’s called gas fees over time, it’s going to get better. It’s going to get cheaper. Other solutions will come out. But I’m hopeful for the future that again I’m not too worried about the energy costs. I don’t think that’s the biggest problem. I think that the biggest problem is going to come down to identity privacy.

And when there’s too much money in blockchain and not enough in central Africa, what’s the world going to look like then? 

I don’t know. I don’t know, but we will deal with it. When it comes. Right now we’re going to take a quick break for our sponsor. All right, mark. I’ve got three questions. I asked every guest on the show.

Are you ready? I’m ready. Great. First one. What is the best investment you ever made other than in your education? 

Investing in myself. I would say it was the best investment. And in terms of what I invested in, I would say seeking knowledge, not taking no for an answer, and always trying to fight for that thing that I needed to know.

So when I was doing like, I was a true believer in Bitcoin way back then, and I’m glad I was and I was pitching to investors. Very wealthy men. They also, Bitcoin was a scam. And I don’t want to say, serves you right. A decade later I was right. But the point is, I think that if you’ve got intuition, invest in yourself to learn more about your intuition and your gut instincts, I think that’s the best thing you can do to open it’ll open a lot of doors for you.

Nice. We had the best investment. Now I go to the other side of that coin, the worst investment. What is the worst investment you ever made? 

The worst investment ever made was probably that thing. Again, doubting myself. I would say that coming down to intuition, you can be caught up in market trends. And when there’s a lot of bad news in the market, you want to sell early and I’ve sold early.

And I wish I didn’t and I was sold early on and I’ve lost money by selling too early instead of holding on. So I would say that was probably the worst in an investment decision. 

My favorite question here at the end of the show is what is the most important lesson you’ve learned in business and investing? 

My old mentor, a successful media agency owner, and a supercar phonetic and everything he’s done just about everything, a real serial entrepreneur. He always said to me, come up with a goal of where you want.

Excuse me. So if you want to be worth a hundred million dollars in five years, what do you. To actually obtain that and work your way back and have a plan and work backward. And that was an incredible piece of advice because it showed me about paths and strategies that I can help take small projects too, to becoming legitimate projects and being recognized by the press.

So have some sort of plan. I think that’s the that’s. The best thing I’ve learned is strategy is probably the most important thing. You can build a brand, you can hire CMOs, you can hire directors, but if you don’t know where you’re going, you’re never going to go. 

Nice. Mark, thank you for joining us today.

We haven’t had, this is probably the second cryptocurrency conversation I’ve had on this show and probably 350 episodes by now. So a great conversation and I appreciate you joining us. If folks want to reach out, if they want to get in touch, if they want to learn more about what you’re up to or anything like that, where can they track you?