Decentralized finance (DeFi) is a new financial technology that uses secure distributed ledgers similar to cryptocurrencies. This ecosystem’s key components are novel automated blockchain protocols for cryptoasset trading, lending, and investment, as well as stablecoins for fund transfers. Ivan Tomic is the CEO of SafeGram, a decentralised finance ecosystem, and he joins us on this episode of Diving into Crypto to discuss Decentralized Finance and other key themes.
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Transcript
DEFI’ING FINANCE-SafeGram
Participants:
JP (CMO of AdLunam)
Ivan Tomic (CEO of SafeGram)
JP
This is your host, JP from AdLunam, Inc. speaking to you about web3. And today we have a special program with a special guest who is the CEO of SafeGram. Right before we begin, I'd like to inform everybody that views expressed on this program belong to the speaker, and any information shared is for education purposes only. Without further ado, ladies and gentlemen, join your hands together and welcome to the stage Ivan, as the CEO of SafeGram. Ivan, say hi to everyone.
Ivan
Hello, everyone. Glad to be here. I'm excited to share with you my thoughts and looking forward to all the questions.
JP
That's awesome. Thank you, Ivan. All right, Ivan, so it's customary on the show for us to get an idea about the man behind the idea. So, Ivan, what made you dive right into the web3 space? Why don't you tell us a little about your journey?
Ivan
ed dabbling in crypto back in:Ivan
m then, obviously, we see the:JP
Excellent. I mean, that's a fantastic way to begin. Right. It just starts with your interest being peaked and the next thing you know, it snowballs into something as large as it has.
Ivan
Correct.
JP
Okay, awesome. So I'm certain a lot of us here in the room have heard about SafeGram, but in the briefest possible way, could you tell us a little about what it is you do? And I'm asking you this only because you're in a very unique space. So to educate everyone in the room, could you tell us a little about what SafeGram does? In essence?
Ivan
Yes. I'll be very simple in the way I'm going to put it together and I will be very broad in terms of what we do as well. So the best way to put it is that we essentially started as a project to resolve issues with how it's a remittance problems within the industry, meaning that crypto doesn't really cross over very good into Fiat. So, nice way to put it is we are the crypto to Fiat Bridge. If anybody understand cross chain bridges or need anything similar to that, they'll know exactly within that one term what we're trying to do here. We're the first crypto to Fiat bridge in the industry, meaning that we're able to cross one to one value of a crypto to Fiat in a transaction whereby the time it lands in, let's say, your account or you're sending somebody money, the value will be one to one.
Ivan
Now, what are the nuanced differences between that? I guess we're going to go through that, through the AMA, but the ecosystem itself has brought into having a juggernaut liquidity decks, what I would like to call it a Curve Wars redefined decks, and also a very unique Launchpad, which is blessed to be also partnered with AdLunam.
JP
Yeah, and that's absolutely fantastic. I like how you describe that, to dive a little deeper into how this works. I mean, what are some of the channels that exist in that sense then, to transition from crypto to Fiat?
Ivan
Yes. Well, I guess we can probably discuss what's available out there on the market. Maybe that would be the best way, which is basically the question that you're enjoying. It's a limited space in terms of how you can get in and out of crypto. Right. You have only a couple of what I love to call gatekeepers. So you have finance, coinbase, kraken. If anybody's been early enough in the industry, everybody knows how bad it was to even sign up with some of these platforms. In the beginning, it took sometimes weeks, even months, to even get accreditation to be able to use the platform. So it was a long process. Obviously. Now it's very a lot smoother, but some of the issues still remain and that’s they're centralized. They impose limits on what you can transfer and they require you to have money stashed with them.
Ivan
And I'm sure everybody has commented or even read about coinbase issues, where if they do go bankrupt, pretty much all the holdings that they have will not be yours anymore. It'll be used to pay off the debt. So are you the owner of that money? I guess that begs the question. But with us, we have flipped that upside down. Actually. We clean all that up for people where we are fully decentralized. We provide an ability for you to send money without us really holding any of your funds. You only are basically sending what you need to send through our processing platform. And even the process of you converting money or anything like that is basically taken care of through the platform. Meaning that if you're sending anything, you're sending that exact token that's available on the platform. And the rest of the stuff will be addressed by the actual process, automated process itself.
Ivan
So you're not involved in, I would say, complicated accounting things for yourself where you're converting money for gains and losses or anything like that, in order to just send some funds either to yourself, to your family, friends, or to pay off something, a bill. So those are some of the very unique angles to what we do. But I will explain a little bit more into that. Hopefully that kind of makes sense to everyone.
JP
Yeah, it does. It sounds like you've almost cracked how an expat would be able to send money from, say, one bank to another and even if it had to cross geography right from one place to another.
Ivan
Correct? Yes. The money that lands as Fiat to Fiat at the last mile, it is a peer to peer set up. So basically, when it does land, it lands from let's just call it in a very simple term, if Joe sends money to Mike, Adam will basically address that request from Joe and deposit that money into Adam's account.
JP
Fair enough. Okay. This, of course, from an accounting point of view, you've got a system that's built around it. I want to dwell a little into the fact that there is a number of maybe administrations, a number of geographies that either haven't woken up to crypto yet or consider crypto as something that they don't want. So, for example, I'm sitting in India and the regulations a bit gray around. How do we deal with crypto, right? How does that work for you? Do you see any limitations in exploring different geographies where that's concerned? The remedy, for example?
Ivan
Yeah, well, we're blessed that the platform is digital, fully digital. Meaning that the process that involves the Crypto to Fiat Bridge is a fusion between a decentralized system infrastructure fused with centralized. Meaning that when we are bridging that gap between decentralized and centralized, the actual institutional buyers as well as accredited broker buyers are actually buying up the value of the money being sent from the Crypto side and then honoring the wish and sending it through the actual centralized system. So what actually happens is that by the time it actually lands, it is a Fiat to Fiat, I would say transaction between the banks, the accredited broker accounts and the actual receiver. So meaning that the destination address. So at the end of the process, the crypto is basically already addressed through the money sender businesses. It's also addressed through the broker account, accredited broker accounts.
Ivan
So the receiver itself or the actual destination address essentially receives it as a Fiat to Fiat. So what that means to the receiver is something that's up to them in that local jurisdiction regulation. Now, if you look at our website, we have up to about 120 plus countries that we can send to down that list. Always changes, rotates, but you're able to send money into different parts of the world. So you can check individually for yourself or anybody can check which country that they want to send money to. Now the periods of sending the money are for us really T plus zero. If anybody understands money services that means that we're able to settle the transactions on the same day. However, when we're dealing with the centralized systems and going cross border, there's some limitations in terms of how the banks operate. Meaning that when the banks are sending the money, another bank, or let's say that it's a subsidiary bank of a larger bank, it needs to process the accounts multiple times in order to get to that destination address.
Ivan
That means that the length of that will be extended by whatever the process is. But in the perfect conditions, we're able to do a T plus zero, which is extremely important for people to understand. Majority of the industry is set up as a T plus two. T plus three. Well, actually they lower that to T plus two right now. But essentially on the day of transaction, you need to wait two plus business days for the money to settle. So it's basically transaction day plus two more business days. Whereas with us, if you are in the right conditions and under right circumstances, you can have your money land same day, within hours of you sending. Not even hours, it could be within the same hour. And that's crypto to Fiat. Now, what some of these other gatekeepers are doing, they basically are holding the value of your money you have on your account verifying that you have that money.
Ivan
And therefore sometimes they can send money earlier, but they're not really sending the money. They're making a payment into your account by you paying an extra fee for that and then knowing that they have your cash in your account and that you're good for. For us, we are processing it in a different format where you don't need to have the money necessarily with us. You are sending the money of what you were intending to do and you're not paying anything additional to what the process is. The process will take care of it as fast as it's humanly possible within the ecosystem. So in essence, what I'm trying to say is Binance or Coinbase, they have different ways of tackling some of the speeds, but they're not intrinsically correct.
JP
Okay, that was interesting. So I'm obviously fascinated by the fact that you've hacked the system in a way that you're able to send money almost instantly as opposed to the old systems where they had these exchanges and like you said, subsidiaries that needed that much more processing time.
Ivan
Correct. And the beauty of it is that because we do have to cross both barriers, so there's limitations to what we're able to do with the regular monetary system as any other institution but the ATM portion of things that is actually built on a completely different decentralized network. So in that instance, when we actually roll those out, they will be fully decentralized, meaning that there won't be any of these swift like centralized movements between banks. And we're skipping a lot of those issues and giving it to you basically directly without any of those intermediary delays or problems.
JP
Wow, okay. This is certainly something I'm certain that a lot of us as we get into crypto dodge a little, will want to see because you've managed to create something that brings crypto to more real life applications, right? Correct. My question at this point is considering you've got 180 countries that you can already send these remittances to, there's just a little over 200 countries in the world all over. What are the next places you see as a matter of fact, that are going to be more adoptive where crypto is concerned? And I know that number is small at this point. It must be around about 20 only at this point right, but what are the next spaces you're going to see that are going to have crypto being used more openly?
Ivan
Yes, that's a great question. As you can see, you have a couple of countries in the world that are already trying to, you can call it peg or tether their currency or their holdings as a country with Bitcoin or Cryptocurrency. So the attempt is already there to make that more of on a regular basis and to move from the regular monetary centralized system to the centralized. Now, as you guys know, there's also going to be different currencies that the countries are planning on releasing from, whether it's the United Kingdom, maybe US or other larger countries that will have their own digital currencies. Now that still works, but it will be fast tracked throughout this year, next year, and so on. In the meantime, the use of Bitcoin and other tokens are going to be here and pretty much remain because the communities have shown that it's organically a viable solution to basically regular finance conditions.
Ivan
If you look at what we've been doing in crypto over the last years, is we're replicating the real life, or what I would like to call it, more traditional finance systems and applying the centralized solutions to them with more accountability. Anybody that looks at the actual release of tokens for a project, they typically look at whether or not it has unlimited amounts of minting and 90% of projects today do not mint anymore. They have a hard cap post to it. So it's not a soft cap or anything, but if you look at currencies in many countries they can print whatever they want. So in many ways we're much more accountable to our constituents or users as project owners and as just the community at large across the entire industry to the user based and maybe more of the centralized systems that have enjoyed monopoly on how the monetary financial systems work.
Ivan
So just to kind of finish off on your question, what I would say is that the regulations will be sped up. You will see many of different tokens in the industry prop up. You can already see a lot of other places trying to use Ethereum, obviously BMB and other ones as means of value that they can use for fiat. Now we're doing in a sense dot plus DeFi smaller tokens as well. So it's a very unique thing that we're doing where it's not just a big like Bitcoin or Ethereum, that's where we stop. You will see basically smaller tokens through the bridge and through our ATMs that are able to be acquired. So what that means is a person that doesn't necessarily use Internet as much, maybe an older person, they can take their cash out of the mattress, go to one of our ATMs and just deposit at a very low fee.
Ivan
And I will tell you what the fees are. Now the fees are between two and a half to two to three and a half percent on average on our ATMs, which is pretty much anybody that uses ATMs in their lives, they know those are pretty much in line or one of the lowest fees you can enjoy on ATMs. So we're not adding any special additional fees to that. Whereas you see some other, how would say coinbase, I mean, other ATMs that have gargantuan fees on there, 15%, 10%, 20%, and that limits adoption. So we're here for a win situation, but I think I probably digress quite a bit. But that's kind of my input on where we are.
JP
Fair enough, I mean, it's good information and it's good to know that, Ivan, that you're leading the space in making this more accessible, more adoptable, because the larger the population that starts getting into crypto, the better the world becomes. Because that's unanimously what we all believe. Everyone in this room, we're here primarily with that same objective in mind, right, kudos to you and your team as well. My next question then goes to this, right? The same way that you have the current financial system having certain security measures in place and the constant thought of security where finance is concerned currently, how secure do you see the network that it is? And it's not just limited to the company, but overall, how secure is it? How secure is the system as a whole?
Ivan
If you're referring to the entire blockchain industry system and then applying it to what we're doing as a company, I can tell you that the crypto itself has intrinsically built in securities where, for example, let's just mention in layman's terms use of windows or any of the software. Those are built by centralized companies for centralized uses that are trying to now get on cloud have all of these abilities for people to use multiple things to basically communally use the platforms, but they've never been intrinsically built for that. And also the fact that you need to have well, obviously McAfee, obviously McCaffrey has passed away, but I will just use that as an example in terms of the probably people know the name that is also a security company in terms of antivirus and all of that. You need those type of companies or those type of tools to be installed in your computer in order to even use computer, because it's got so many loopholes, it's got so many open areas where hackers can get in crypto.
Ivan
It's hermetically closed for the most part, meaning that it has a built in redundancy and built in safety net, where even if some portion of that can be hacked into, they can't hack into everything. And it self corrects itself. You have to have extremely powerful systems that are not yet available not only to users, but even countries to be able to even accomplish messing with one transaction, let alone a multiple. So most of the mistakes you see in crypto are based on some coding issues that either the coding team or the actual coding mistakes or actual misses within the actual or open items within the actual code that have allowed somebody to exploit the service. But in itself the blockchain does not have that many ways for you to be able to compromise it. On our end, we're using basically a decentralized form of Swift since we're talking about this, meaning that we're using the blockchain to be able to call it essentially a decentralized messaging system, swift like messaging system for money and remittance services.
Ivan
Meaning that we're sending the information to centralized players as well as decentralized players across an entire infrastructure to be able to send the funds in the right way. So we're as secure as it can be. Obviously on the Swift system that's being run on Windows, I believe seven, that's basically run by centralized banking systems, I think it was even worse before. I'm not sure if they upgraded that, but that's something we don't control, obviously. That's something that's used by traditional monetary systems for decades now. We're secure in Ireland. And I do know that most of the banks that everybody interacts with are as secure as they can be based on the systems that we use.
JP
Okay, all right. So if there's a vulnerability, it will be at the last mile of perhaps a banking system, if any, and there are ways and measures to counter or other to fix that. That's effectively what you say?
Ivan
Correct,yes.
JP
Okay, fantastic. And that, by the way, ladies and gentlemen, was a question from one of our community members, Stan. The next question, Ivan, that I've got for you comes from one of our members called Francis. So Francis wants to know is that the interface for a lot of projects is sometimes coupled with high gas fees, which is of course a turn off. Are there any improvements that you see, or rather, are there any improvements, are there any solutions that feed into the system that eliminates that where these transfers are concerned? Does that factor in as well when it comes to remittances?
Ivan
I absolutely love that question and it's something we're going to probably focus a little bit better to explain to folks what we're actually doing and how that's important. So let me answer that in the best way possible. When you're sending money through our bridge, you are simply sending it from a decentralized or centralized wallet, whichever that is, whatever you want to use. I do recommend decentralized just because of redundancy and ability to correct anything that there might be a mistake on inputting data from the actual sender, meaning yourself. So what I would say is that when you're sending it, you're only paying the fees that you would typically pay fees to send money from one wallet address to another, meaning that you're not paying any of these astronomical fees. For example, cross chain bridges, they incur a certain amount of cost, they incur a certain amount of slippage anywhere between 1, 2%, maybe more.
Ivan
Obviously, when you're converting tokens multiple times in order to even get to a satisfactory token that you can even invert on a bridge, then convert it. I mean, you have multiple steps, probably about five steps. We can probably even go through that in detail. But let's just say there's five to six steps. There's only one step here. You essentially take the exact value of what you need to send and it's going to basically indicate what that is in B and B or E. We're going to basically list a bunch more tokens on there. We're doing this for a reason because we don't need to add as many tokens right now because we have a huge liquidity pool in the background that's being tapped into by institutions. So it's easier for us to just have some of the main ones. But as long as you actually are transferring that token, all you have to do is send it to the administrator wallet that's indicated in the actual platform and the process starts.
Ivan
So you're not converting, you're not changing it to another chain or anything. So you're able to right now use BSE chain and Ethereum chain with no problem. And that's a huge deal because you know how much fees are on Ethereum. Of course.
JP
Yeah. Fantastic. But yeah, please go ahead.
Ivan
In terms of the fees, they're pretty much completely nullified by the system because it's doing it all for you. It's all being taken care of. If you're sending money through a decentralized wallet on an Ethereum, typically even during the really costly times, it might be a couple of bucks. Whereas if you are swapping it on Uniswap or any exchanges or you go to Cross chain Bridge, you're going to pay $30, $50, $300. I'm sure you guys have seen some of these astronomical fees, and we're just talking about you, Bridging, from BSE maybe to Ethereum, then swapping the token in order to conform it to the right token that, for example, Coinbase would accept, and then sending. Whereas with us, none of that needs to happen. All you have to do is send this token into the wallet. Everything else is taken care of. No conversions, nothing else.
Ivan
Just make sure you have BNB or ETH, and we're going to have a ton more listed, so you're going to have even easier ability to do that and more. And when I say that it'll be Avalanche, Solana, Phantom, Cardano, you're going to have a lot easier way to send money. You're going to essentially avoid a lot of these headaches that people are incurring now and losing a huge amount of money just to send maybe $500 or $1,000 to themselves or even more, whatever that is.
JP
All right. Thank you, Ivan. I think that puts it in perspective because right now I've got a vision in my head that one of these days, you're just going to have a card that's going to be your wallet, right? And you're going to use it, transfer money across the world, withdraw it if you want to, from any ATM anywhere, right?
Ivan
Correct. Yeah. Actually, let me put it this way. You already have that in your own wallet on your phone. That's why this whole thing was built. If you really think about it, your wallet is on your phone. Therefore, your own walking bank is what we typically tell to people. We are only providing you the fusion between digital and physical. So instead of you going to a brick and mortar store, now you got a Safegram ATM at every corner where you can go and just cash out money. That local Fiat, by the way, not some other Fiat, then you got to go to a bank, local Fiat. So if you're in India or if you're in Philippines or Indonesia where cash is king, or even in the Middle East, and pretty much cash is still king in many places, people don't really understand the value of that part, but none of these other players are tapping into that, we are.
Ivan
So the fact that you don't have Coinbase running with ATMs, you don't have Kraken or Finance really tapping into that. Yes, you have MoneyGram and Western Union trying to do something, but they're dinosaurs when it comes to knowing what to do with this centralization. So they're trying to partner with multiple things. We have everything within one place, one house, so to speak. For you to be able to tap into that's amazing.
JP
That truly is amazing. I mean, kudos to you and the team. Again, we're coming close to the end of the program, so I'm going to ask Nadja if she has a question, and then I have one more for you before we end the show. So, Nadja, is there a question you'd like to ask either?
Ivan
Sure. Did you ask me to ask a question? Is that what you said? I didn't hear you. Well, I'm sorry. My apologies.
JP
I was hoping our co-host, Nadja, if she had a question for you. If not, then I have one more before we end the show.
Ivan
Perfect. That's fine.
JP
Nadja, you'll have to unmute, you are as a speaker, so you press the little button on the mic, and then we can take your question if you have it. Okay. It looks like the location she is has maybe some Internet issues. So, Ivan, as your closing thought, right, as your closing thought, if you had a wish and you would want people to know this about the utility of crypto everywhere, right, in terms of not just adoption, but using it in your day to day life, what would your message to everybody be?
Ivan
That's a great question. As you know, very hard to explain to people the difference between blockchain and decentralized type of uses because everybody lived so long within the traditional system. So I've spoken to IBM technology experts that didn't really understand crypto. It took 30 minutes to really for them to grasp the issue. So I don't expect everybody to understand it. I think it's more of a,use it, you will start understanding the implications of it. I think that the best way to put it is this will be the solution to pretty much I don't want to say everything in life, but it will be a solution to all the headaches that we see, from inflation to accountability with even not only transactional, but accountability for lost goods. I've been privileged to actually work with and work on and consult on projects that were, I would say, trying to address even car part.
Ivan
I would say solutions where somebody would be buying OEM products, meaning original manufacturer products. Or equivalent to manufacturer products and things like so it's about bringing back accountability, authenticity, transparency to all of us across the globe and fusing that with freedom to do whatever you want to do with your own funds. Nobody else is controlling them. You don't have to hide your money in a mattress. You can use the blockchain to live freely across the borders, wherever you want within the globe.
JP
Yeah. Wow. That's a great wish for everybody, and I'm certain that we're going to realize that soon. So, Ivan, thank you so much for being part of the show today. Thank you so much for being on this program. I hope you had as much fun as I did.
Ivan
Likewise, I had a wonderful time and thank you for all the great questions, and I look forward to seeing you all in the Crypto space. Thank you.
JP
We certainly will Ivan. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. Before we end, please give Ivan a reaction on, you know where the buttons are. You can use all of them if you'd like. Thank you so much for being part of this show today. We will be back with a new show next week at the same time at the same space. This is JP from AdLunam, Inc. speaking to you about web3. Have a good one. Cheers.
Ivan
Bye. Bye, everyone.
JP
All right, cheers.
