In his capacity as Head of Group Strategy at DIFC Authority, Christian is responsible to develop and continuously evolve the strategic agenda and initiatives of DIFC in line with the UAE’s commitment to innovation and development of future economies.

We start off speaking about the foundations of his experience in the region and work towards the future of fintech, blockchain and crypto within DIFC's ecosystem and the regional market places.

If you are looking to know more about regulations, setting up and getting ahead within the region, this episode is a great listen.

We want to give a special shoutout to our sponsor Blockfinex. Blockfinex offers one of the most competitive trading fees compared to industry leading competitors as well as a quick onboarding process for its users. You can find them at blockfinex.com

Special Guest: Christian Kunz.

Did you hear about that $69 million NFT sale on Christie’s? Well, we just dove right into NFTs! NFTs or non-fungible tokens are unique digital items that are not interchangeable. We are beginning to see the rise and value of NFTs take off, mostly in the creative industries, where we see digital art, music and other creative work being bought and sold as NFTs. In this episode we explore the state of play of the NFT world and how they have taken the world by storm this past year. Our guest, Ryan goes on to discuss the origins and beginnings of NFTs and the creative industries, namely creators and artists in Hollywood, his former hometown.

We continue discussing the potential and opportunity NFTs hold for creators that have been traditionally left out of the spotlight and off the stage. Ryan describes how new and young creators can take work into their own hands and start making a living for themselves without necessarily needing to answer to the current “gatekeepers” of the creative industry.

Ryan shares the work they are doing at Crucible and his vision for the platform and how it will contribute to a larger paradigm shift of what he calls an Open Metaverse. We also touch on the future of NFTs and how the world will look in a decade’s time because of this new technology.

We want to give a special shoutout to our sponsor Blockfinex.

Special Guests: Ryan Gill

Special Guest: Ryan Gill.

We start off speaking about what blockchain applications are currently live in the region and where enterprise utilizes blockchain for the betterment of business. Saqr and Akbar both share their views on the current state of blockchain use in the Middle East and general region.

We go on to discuss the challenges of raising funding for Proof of Concept projects. Both our guests walk us through their experiences in each of their domains and advise companies on how best to approach funding for a POC.

Finally we discuss what adoption of blockchain technology will look like, specifically for enterprises.

We want to give a special shoutout to our sponsor Blockfinex. Blockfinex offers one of the most competitive trading fees compared to industry leading competitors as well as a quick onboarding process for its users. You can find them at blockfinex.com

Special Guests: Akbar Farook and Saqr Ereiqat.

This was a great episode for us, both Ahmed and I really enjoyed challenging Mohanned and David to the perception and roles of PR in the industry. If you are looking to leverage PR and comms for your own project or want to know how agencies perceive the space then this episode is for you.

We want to give a shout out to our sponsor Coinsapp, a global social payments application for cryptocurrencies based on the Dan blockchain ecosystem. It empowers the world to send money around the world in seconds. You can find coins app on google and Apple stores. https://coins.app/

Special Guests: David Wachsman and Mohanned Halawani.

In this talk, we deep dive into what running a remote company is like, the transition from physical to remote, how to maintain strong leadership virtually, and more importantly how to retain talent (and how to peacefully allow your good ones to leave if they have an entrepreneurial bug!) There were so many awesome nuggets shared by Joe in this episode even way before we talked about crypto!

On the crypto side, Joe dives into what Bison Trails are doing and how they are helping to achieve a robust infrastructure set up to ensure blockchains can be easily secured and anyone can easily set up and run a node! This core infrastructure is crucial to the development and uptake of blockchain networks, where we learn how Bison Trails are leading the pack in this area.

So many things and more in this episode of Encrypted!

This is absolutely the episode for you if you are looking to know more about running a remote company, leading in a virtual world, a crypto entrepreneur or a project/fund/exchange needing core infrastructure services.

We hope you enjoy the episode and many thanks again to our wonderful sponsor, CoinsApp! You can find out more at https://coins.app/

Special Guest: Joe Lallouz.

We speak to 3 amazing guests, Dr. Delisle Worrell (the Former Governor of the Barbados Central Bank), Gabriel Abed (Founder of Bitt.com) and Simon Chantry (CBDO at Bitt.com). The three share with us stories from the past of how Bitt.com came about, how the idea of a Central Bank Digital Currency came to light and how Dr. Delisle Worrell as the Governor of the Central Bank gave Gabriel and his team the nod of approval to build out this concept.

We dive deeper into how the events unfolded over the years, what the future holds for CBCDs and how Bitt.com plans to implement CBDCs across the Caribbean.

All this and more on this episode of Encrypted!
If you liked what you heard, please do leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and the other platforms. Don’t forget to support us by spreading the word and hitting that subscribe button!

This episode is sponsored by CoinsApp!

Special Guests: Dr. DeLisle Worrell, Gabriel Abed, and Simon Chantry.

Sponsored By:

• Dan Holdings

Woodstock Fund is a new and emerging crypto fund based out of India and Pranav delves into how their fund operates, in particular, their 3 core focuses, which include:
Public decentralised ledger technology
Decentralised finance
Web 3.0

Pranav shares his experience of co-creating creative solutions in sales and distribution and how his learnings through creating this led him to create the fund he is running today.

Ahmed sets the theme for the episode which focuses on the right investment vehicles behind cryptocurrencies and assessing the optimal token models that make sense.

Starting off with public chains, Pranav explains their thesis behind the investments they made in Holochain, Casper Labs and Elrond. From a decentralised finance perspective, Pranav shares why this emerging sector is not just important for the new value it can bring but how it’s solving problems that currently exist in traditional finance. Web 3.0, according to Pranav, is all about being more human and unbundling of the human potential wherever you are in the world.

Pranav expresses that the right economics has to come into play before any consideration of investment. Ahmed is intrigued about what is the right vehicle when investing in these projects as the investor can invest in equity, tokens and convertible notes. In the past two years, countless projects used tokens as a way to raise money without necessarily thinking about how token economics will play and pan out in the future.

How do you define the right instrument when building out a project? Pranav argues the business model should drive this decision and currently, in this cycle of the crypto market we are seeing more projects using the right instruments during fundraising.
But the question still arises, should investors go for equity (which has legal recourse) or go for tokens which are still largely unregulated with not so much legal recourse.

Running a pro token investment fund, Pranav gives many suggestions to the above, from a dual equity-token structure, or raising through an STO which can then be converted to a utility, or the project themselves having to bootstrap the project until they find minimum viable utility where a token is the right instrument in this case.

Tokens as a unit of trust
Ahmed and Pranav then discuss the different ways to assess token models and how an investor can discern whether a token model makes sense or not. Pranav shares his experience with the 6 investments they have made and that a token model should be looked at from two important aspects: Ecosystem and adoption.

Someone can create the best technology ever, but if the ecosystem is small and there is zero to little adoption, then what is the point? Pranav also shares a technical-economic response between demand and supply and how the right economics should facilitate more adoption in a perpetual enforcing cycle.

All of the above and more will be on this week’s episode of Encrypted!

If you liked what you heard, please do leave us a review on iTunes and the other platforms. Don’t forget to support us by spreading the word!

Special Guest: Pranav Sharma.

With an established career in engineering, entrepreneurship and investing, Ahmed was intrigued to find out Richard’s core and to see what influenced him to become the person he is today. Richard shares parts of his childhood experiences when growing up and how his post-university experiences, particularly in building companies, has built much of who he is today. This led him to believe that developers and computer engineers are the primary driving forces behind successful businesses.

Moving onto Web 3 and its construct, Richard talks about why Web 3 is his focus touching on the intersections of easily architecting software that is easily interwoven in our lives, how the world currently works and how start-ups succeed.
As Google came up with the motto “Don’t be evil’, Fabric Ventures thought about this differently. Their motto is ‘Cant’ be evil’ and Richard discusses the story behind why they came up with this motto and concepts such as privacy by design.

As Fabric Ventures are currently fundraising, Ahmed was intrigued to find out how Richard and the team are trying to convince the wider investor community and traditional LP’s to invest in this new wave. The ideas surrounding Web 3 are great, but how can you rally traditional investors to back you? Richard articulately lays down the the things that get the investors excited and things that they should avoid.

Ahmed shifts the conversation to the types of entrepreneurs that Fabric will typically back. If you’re a Web 3 entrepreneur reading this or listening to the podcast, make sure you listen to what Richard had to say!

Enterprise and tech titans - how are they looking at this and will they be adapting? Ahmed and Richard discussed whether or not the current incumbents will be able to change their business models to the new world of Web 3 and the new value chain that will emerge as a result. Richard draws interesting comparisons from history citing the move from IP to cloud (around 10 years ago) created lots of software applications and resulted in huge value creation. He argues we may see something similar when we move from IP to an architecture whereby people and companies all hold their own data and share it at their will in an interwoven system.

Finally, the two touch on regulation to see how GDPR and Open Banking will be able to aid this nascent industry in moving forward!

All this and more is discussed in the week’s episode of Encrypted!

Special Guest: Richard Muirhead.