Today we focus on distrust and what it means to live in a world of genuine, fake and fraudulent trust. In a world where every day you are surrounded by information that directs your decision making and purchasing habits, how can you be sure what you are basing your decisions on are real.

There are so many factors that impact trust and how organisations, individuals and social groups are more than ever relying on fraudulent information to make decisions.

Damu covers key technologies including blockchain that will enhance how genuine trust can replace fake trust and its impact on how we interact daily with each other, corporations and governments.

Expect to walk away with:

• A different opinion of what trust is
• How future technologies will impact even greater what is genuine and what is not
• Where you can get Damu’s free ebook
• Why distrust is more important to understand than trust
• How Alexa, Siri and other game changing voice tech will impact trust

And don’t forget to stick around for the whole episode as we have a few laughs about 6 year olds teaching enterprise technology decision makers about bitcoin.

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!

Special Guest: Damu Winston.

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.