Episode 170 Scott Adams coinpulse io Founder Chez Darji Explains Crypto
Date: 2018-08-07 | Duration: 15:38
Topics
Topics: coinpulse.io Founder Chez Darji explains… Crypto exchanges, crypto wallets and the Interface app by WhenHub
Transcript
[0:06] Hey everybody, I hope the sound is better this time. If it’s not, we’re going to forge ahead anyway with what we have. I want to give you a little tutorial on crypto wallets and crypto exchanges and where your money lives on the blockchain for people who are not familiar with this world but want to get an overview. Then I’m going to introduce my special guest after I give you a quick overview.
If you have any kind of cryptocurrency, whether it’s Bitcoin, Ethereum, or any of the hundreds of other coins, your money lives as zeros and ones on the internet. It is spread across various servers in a special kind of database called the blockchain. When you want to pay somebody or receive money, the changes are just changes in the database. So the actual money just lives spread out across servers on the internet. Once you want to manipulate your money, you need something called a wallet, but the wallet is a misleading term because the wallet…
[1:08] …doesn’t actually hold any money. It’s just a piece of software, or it could be a software and hardware unit for a little extra security. Think of this like a viewer that lets you look into the cloud, see your money, and then change its addresses essentially so that you could pay somebody by assigning your money to someone else or vice versa. So money never lives in the wallet; that’s just a piece of software for accessing the money.
Likewise, if you wanted to exchange your cryptocurrency for some other kind of crypto, you need something called an exchange. My special guest, whom I’ll introduce in a moment, will tell you more about that. That would allow you to change, for example, from a WHEN token to a Bitcoin to an Ethereum, that sort of thing, so you can make those kinds of transitions. My startup, which you’ve heard of before, has an app called the Interface app. It’s available in all the…
[2:10] …app stores already for both Apple and Android, and it allows you to connect to an expert and pay that expert either in cash or crypto. If you want to use crypto—and there’ll be lots of reasons you might want to do that—you might already have cryptocurrency and you’re looking to spend it. You might want to keep something off of your credit card. You might want to not deal with banks. You might be in another country and not deal with tax stuff the way you would if it goes to the bank. So you might have lots of reasons why you want to pay in crypto.
In our app, whether you buy your tokens that in our world are called the WHEN—it’s our own cryptocurrency that, like others, lives in the internet—you can use them to pay experts who are available in real time. Like right now, you just say, “Where’s my expert right now?” and you’re connected with a live video call. Now we have a wallet also—think of it as if you were to see your money…
[3:11] …you move it around built into the app, or you can have a separate wallet. You could have as many wallets as you want because remember, the wallets are not holding money; they’re just viewers to look at the money that’s spread across the internet with a special database called the blockchain.
You should all check out the Interface app. What I want to tell you about this is that if you’ve seen the ICOs, you know that a lot of companies, including mine, have issued their own coin or token, and they do it for a variety of reasons. Most of the ICOs are nothing but an idea in a white paper. Somebody writes a document that says, “If I had money and if I knew how to make things, I would make something and it would be valuable,” and then they issue a coin. That’s very speculative if you’re buying one of those coins. It’s a little bit safer, but by no means I would call this an investment, by the way… nothing you hear here…
[4:13] …is investment advice, because these are not investments. They are things which can go up in value or down in value, but they don’t qualify as investments and they’re not safe in the event of a normal investment. This is your overview. If you’ve got the Interface app, you can talk to experts, you can pay them in our coins, you can change those coins for other crypto, and from there you can turn it into cash in a few places that will do that for you.
I would like to introduce now my special guest, Chez Darji. I’m going to bring him over on this device, or maybe I’ll turn this this way and see how that works. Chez is the founder of CoinPulse, the exchange that my startup will be part of…
[5:14] …in a few weeks. Chez, say hi to my Periscope. How long has CoinPulse been around?
(Chez Darji): We started this project back in November 2017 when we airdropped our tokens. It was EBCH back then, which is CPX now. So we started this project in November 2017. We had a community of around 15,000 members at that time. CoinPulse is actually an exchange, a global digital currency trading platform which is built based on users’ suggestions—meaning community suggestions.
(Scott Adams): So that’s what makes your exchange different from others, is that it’s built from the ground up by user…
[6:14] …suggestions, including what coins you have on the exchange?
(Chez Darji): Yes, we took suggestions from the community members, and each and every feature that we have added today is all from the community.
(Scott Adams): And what’s the difference between a centralized exchange, which you are, and a decentralized exchange? Why does somebody want one over the other?
(Chez Darji): In a decentralized exchange, the user will have control over the funds and each and every transaction that the user does goes through the blockchain. But on a centralized exchange, you just deposit once and start trading by paying a trading fee to the exchange, which is usually cheaper than a decentralized exchange.
(Scott Adams): So the centralized is cheaper. Is it also safer? Is it more secure? It depends…
[7:16] (Chez Darji): We are using multi-sig wallets for our exchange and over 90% of all the coins are stored in cold storage, which is not at all hackable. So it depends on what technologies exchanges are using.
(Scott Adams): How many coins do you have on the exchange?
(Chez Darji): Currently we have about nine to ten coins. Majority of them are standard coins as of today: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Ripple, Zcash, Dash. Then we have our own token which is called CPX. Then, based on our voting page, we have added two more coins: one of them is Hydro and the other one is Apollo.
[8:16] (Scott Adams): Soon I’ll give the dates when the coin that my startup has issued will be listed. On August 15th, it will be listed on CoinPulse, but that just means you can put your WHEN coins in there. It won’t be until September 20th that it will be active for trading. Those people who are experts on the Interface app can earn their WHEN coins, or they can be paid cash, but if they are WHEN coins, they can trade them in on CoinPulse. Now, the value of your coins—can you explain what determines their value? How do you know how much you’ll be able to trade them for? In other words, it’s a market-based value, right?
(Chez Darji): Value is actually determined by buyers and sellers. It’s all on traders, depends on what price…
[9:20] …they want to buy or sell a particular coin for.
(Scott Adams): On day one when our coin is listed, its value could be much higher or much lower than it would be a week later. It depends on what the market is. In our case, because the coin or token—as we call it, which would be technically more accurate—it’s a utility token because it’s used in our app. There’s a limited number of them by design, and people need them in order to use the app. The demand over time should go up as the app is more popular because they need these tokens to use the app. That should, in theory—but there’s no guarantee, of course—make the value of them go up when people put them on the exchange. Is that accurate?
(Chez Darji): Yes, if supply is less, the money is…
[10:20] …definitely going to go up, and that will also have an impact on its price. I expect it to go up.
(Scott Adams): Of all the ICOs that are out there—and there must be thousands of them—would you say that 90% or more were based on just an idea, just a white paper, where nobody’s actually built a product? What percentage of all the ICOs were not based on a product they had already built? Is it most?
(Chez Darji): There are actually only a few projects, a few ICOs, that will have their own project already ready for the users when they are doing their ICO. So WHEN definitely has its project ready…
[11:21] …for the users. This is something unique for an ICO. While I don’t make any investment advice, and owning ICOs or owning coins is not an investment per se, it is safe to say that if you’re trying to hold a portfolio of different ICO coins, you probably want something in your portfolio that’s a product that’s already built.
The second big thing, and I think you’ll agree, Chez, is to be able to get on an exchange, because that’s really hard. It’s not automatic that you could ever get on an exchange. Most of these ICOs are creating coins that are just random; they can’t be used for anything. But we have a product that’s being used already, it’s in the stores, and it will be on the exchange. We’ve already scheduled that on CoinPulse. Certainly…
[12:23] …you should consider that type of coin or that kind of token. What else do we need to know about an exchange? How hard is it to use? Let’s say you’ve never used one. It’s a webpage, you’ve got coinpulse.io. I assume that you’re just signing up with your credentials and then… I understand that even the users had a lot of input on the user interface to make it as easy as possible, so they should be able to work their way through it the first time they use it, probably. But if they need extra help, they could go to YouTube and just search for CoinPulse and you’d find a little YouTube tutorial.
I’m dying to ask: how hard was it to build an exchange from a startup…
[13:25] …perspective? How many people did it take? You did it in less than a year, which is amazing for any startup. How hard was it? Was it crazy hard?
(Chez Darji): It was really tiring on my end. I used to spend around 17 to 18 hours daily since the last 3 to 4 months on this development part. In our team, we have actually around ten people as of today. They have been with us since inception. We have developers, a support team, and a listing team. We have a bunch of people doing the research on various coins or tokens that they want to get listed on the exchange. Altogether, we have about 30 people in our team regarding…
[14:28] …development. As I mentioned, I used to spend so many hours, not just me but my entire team. Every day we used to finish a new hurdle; like one feature will work and something will go wrong. Try it, test it again. We tested with our Telegram channel. It was a very difficult time, but surely it worked out well for us. It’s all up and working.
(Scott Adams): You’re in the right place at the right time in history, it sounds like. Chez, I think we’ll keep this short because people have short attention spans, but thank you so much for joining me and for helping me explain this world. It’s coinpulse.io. You’ll see the WHEN tokens listed on August 15th and available for trade on September 20th…
[15:28] …2018, if anybody’s watching this. And that’s all for today. Bye.