#116: The Future of Crypto, Elevating Cryptocurrency
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Today we have Mark Basa. He's the Global Brand and Business Manager for Hokk finance. And it's an early crypto evangelist. That's what Mark is. And he's got a decade of experience and expertise that establishes him as a thought leader in creating and building crypto brands. Welcome to the show, Mark.
In this episode, we’re discussing…
[1:52] What he’s been doing to specialized and develop brand conceptualization for early stages companies
[4:30] What is the meme token?
[6:00] What means going from a meme token into a DeFi 2.0 player?
[8:28] Why young people cannot relate to corporate banks?
[9:09] How can we get paid with crypto when we have a bank account, can we transfer money between them?
[12:01] The use of crypto vs. NTF’s
[15:05] Real Estate and blockchain investing process and real estate syndication with crypto
[18:56] What means USDC, and what’s called a stable token or a stable coin vs. volatility
[21:16] What he thinks the future of crypto is?
[24:02] How can we tax it or how can we regulate it?
Resources from Mark
+ Read the transcript
Mike Stohler
What if you could be doing something smarter with your money that creates income. Now, if you're wanting to get ahead financially, and enjoy greater freedom of choice, if you want a comfortable retirement, and you know you'll have more choices, if you can do more with your money. Now, if you've wondered who else is creating ways to make their money work for them, and you want actionable ideas, with honest pros and cons, and no fluff. Welcome to the richer geek podcast, where you here helping people find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom. I'm Mike Stohler, and in this podcast, you'll hear from others who are already doing these things, and learn how you can too.
Alright, everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Richard geek. Today we have Mark Basa. He's the global brand and business manager for Hawk finance. And it's an early crypto evangelists. That's what Mark is. And he's got a decade of experience and expertise that establishes him as a thought leader in creating and building crypto brands. Welcome to the show, Mark.
Mark Basa
Thank you so much, Michael.
Mike Stohler
Now, I'm an old guy. So you know, this whole Bitcoin token, all this sort of stuff, you know, flies over my head. Because you know, I just haven't studied that that much. Now. You're specializing and strategic development and brand conceptualization for early stage companies. You've been doing this for a while. So tell me what you're up to.
Mark Basa
Sure. So I joined Hawk finance about six months ago. So the background of hog finance, they were actually one of the original meme tokens. And if you've heard of these, these meme tokens, they predominantly the first one, the most famous one is, is Dogecoin. That's one that Elon Musk is supporting right now. He thinks it's, you know, the bee's knees. And we that actually, Hawk actually, Hokkaido Inu was the name of the token. And that launched around May last year. And that's when what was called meme season exploded, where all these meme tokens just came onto the market. And Hawk did like a 700 $800 million market cap, he did $100 million of volume in a single day. And that was because a lot of people saw Elon jump on Saturday Night Live, talk about Dogecoin and everything else and but I'm gonna leave with with these tokens that don't really have much value. There's no real utility, you can't use them in many places. It's hype, celebrity marketing, endorsement, that sort of thing. So I invested in a bunch of them made lots of money. Then the Bitcoin correction came. And of course, I lost some, but I came out on top, thankfully, sold at the right time, but a lot of people lost. And I think that's because, you know, the moment that the market corrects, people just want to bail out of something that has no use case anymore.
So I pitched to a couple of them. And Hawk actually wrote back to me and I said, Hey, I think I can help your brand. If you build a decentralized financial ecosystem around a young person's life, to help them send and spend the money they want to you will win this race. And so that's basically how I got involved with hock. I was involved in Bitcoin about 10 years ago, some buddies and I got together, developed an omni currency payment gateway. I live in Europe now. But but this is when I was back in Australia. And that was crazy back then. Because you know, Bitcoin was really, really early.
We were pitching to investors who said Bitcoin was a scam, they didn't want to give us any of their money. You know, it was just the typical, it was so early, and you can't blame them. 10 years later, it's now going to start now Bitcoin has robust vengeance, and the next 10 years is going to be really crazy. So I've been doing a lot of traditional marketing, digital marketing, but where I think I am very different to most marketers in crypto is that I understand crypto as well and blockchain and that's what's quite special about what we're doing at Hawk finance to actually transform them from a meme token to a real, you know, a real crypto company, a decentralized financial player that can beat the rest.
Mike Stohler
So what what is the meme token? I mean, what does that mean when people Joe?
Mark Basa
So meme token, so you would have seen a meme before on the internet, right? So someone makes a picture or a video of something funny, maybe it's a politician, or anyone you know? And they basically put some funny text or some graphics on it and that meme goes viral. So a meme token is predominantly imagery visual stuff that are based around something, you know, an internet theme, you can say. And that's what the brand is facilitated around, but also how the brand is how it resonates with community. So every minute, I can have these enormous communities that that, that worship these tokens that think they're, you know, just the next best thing. And these mean, tokens have this very special way of communicating and leveraging the community to market them globally. So if you consider Dogecoin has millions and millions of fans, on Reddit and other places, people just go crazy for it. It builds this community of trust and fun, and you know, where people can share memes and talk about the market and whatnot. So just think about a meme tokens like any other currency, like Aetherium, or Bitcoin, but really, it's about, there's a meme icon, and the marketing the way that it's used and the way that the community is built. So it's, it's quite fun and creative.
Mike Stohler
So you take it, and what is the process? If you're going from a meme token into like a defy 2.0? Player? What does that mean? And how does you how do you go from a meme token into this new atmosphere?
Mark Basa
Yeah, crazy. So it's actually quite difficult, because most mean, tokens are run like volunteer projects. They're fully decentralized, there's no hierarchy. There's no leadership, that's all kind of like, really passionate people volunteering to both donate their time and their energy, sometimes your money to get the show going. And to transform these brands, you literally have to build a brand new company, you have to actually, you know, get registration licensing for the right products you've got, you need a brand strategy, you have to have people like it's, it's, it's a very difficult thing, it's actually harder to do because you're not working with a clean slate.
And you've, you've got to remember that these mean, tokens are predominantly so fun and creative. So as soon as the community maybe senses a bit of like, Oh, are they going to be a corporate now? Are they going to be like white collar, maybe they get a little bit scared. So we have to basically prove to the community that we're still we're always going to be a meme token, it's going to be fun and exciting. If you imagine it's going to be like Pokemon, right? Pokemon is like a kids game. But it's run by, you know, this massive organization with a lot of different levels and leadership.
And so that's what we're trying to build right now. And in the last six months, you know, so many incredible things have happened. I've appeared on International News and BBC NTD, just to be an authority to speak about meme tokens, crypto and NF T's. And that hasn't happened with a meme token before, there hasn't been too many, front facing people speaking about this huge thing that's happening right now in the market, which is basically, young people want to buy or prefer to buy meme tokens, then they do US dollars. Now, that's a big scary thing for the future, if you are set on owning purely fear currency, because you will miss out on the big opportunity ahead, which is, how do I resonate with young people? And if you're not in that crypto space with what young people want to do with their money, you'll miss out. So that's what we're trying to lead is that focus about bringing a fun brand, and a currency to the next crypto generation.
Mike Stohler
Now, how can you know, I understand that the young people, I can't relate to the young people because they're born into computers, and they're born in you know, I mean, I come from the days of pre Google. So. So when you say that, you know, they can't relate to the corporate banks, you know, are they wanting everything to be now cloud base? Because if I understand it, the crypto and all of this and the mean, you know, the crypto and all this sort of stuff? I mean, it's just data.
Mark Basa
Yep. You know,
Mike Stohler
so how can you the world all of a sudden say, well, we need to start trading in this data that has to be mined. And you know, how can you sit there and say, you know, is it gonna be like a separate account, bank account, and I get paid this way and transfer money? And?
Mark Basa
Yep. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. It's a great question. So the way you have to look at it is and first, I'll start with why they can't resonate with with banks. So centralized banks typically have, you know, run the show for centuries and in what they offering young people today is not what young people are getting in their everyday commerce experience. So take, for example, our our utility token, so you buy this token and you can use it in our ecosystem. Okay, we're on telegram we have people all over the world working 24 hours a day, sending memes, and jokes and videos and gifts and 100% engagement, if, if I try to bring my bank now, it's only because I've, you know, my, I've lost my credit card, that's your really I can I can speak to.
So you think about that level of engagement between a centralized bank and a meme token, it's right there, there's people that you can relate to straight away. Now, in terms of it being used as a currency, you just have to build things for the currency to be used. So for example, we have our token on three different chains. So Aetherium, finance and HECO. Chain. Now, what's really interesting about that is is that you can bridge those tokens across those three chains, to whatever your preference is a new them in our ecosystem, right now we've launched this product called Hawk premium, where you can take your Aetherium and your USDC, that might sit in your decentralized wallet, and you could almost like stake it, like you would invest gold in a bank, for example, and you can own yield. So we're building products for people to actually use in their everyday life versus just a token that you would need a lot of infrastructure for.
So eventually, when the local cafe or the movie theater starts accepting Aetherium based tokens, for example, you'll be able to use something like Hawk, because hog is based on a theorem on that chain. So I would say that the future of the world has to be more in terms of, I think there are going to be a lot of currencies, or at least a lot of dominant chains, like, for example, Bitcoin and Aetherium. And then you're going to have a lot of different currencies, and people are going to accept more, and you're going to get that conversion, it'll be much more simplistic, but it will, it will be broken down more, I mean, Microsoft will probably want to have its own coin. And that's all you can probably buy Microsoft products with
Mike Stohler
that sense. It's very interesting. So the future of crypto, though, I'm going to have regular currency, but then I'll have another area or count or website to go in. And I can see how much crypto I have or Aetherium. Do you think that crypto we'll get to the point where it's used more like an NF T? Because when I think of an NF T, I can sit there and say well, you know, I made this guitar, I made this or I'm I have 100 Episode podcast and I put a value of it on it and sell it for these NF T's. So it's more of like a physical thing. Or a value that I have, do you think crypto is going to start doing that? Or is going to need both NF T's and crypto?
Mark Basa
Well, it's actually it's pretty much the same thing. So the NFT, the non fungible token is that is that you know, series of, of letters and numbers that represents something on the blockchain that's unique, and it can never be replaced. There are companies out there that are that are merging, on chain and off chain assets. So that guitar, for example, let's say if it was signed by Jimi Hendrix, really valuable, you could sell that NFT with that physical asset, which would be like the certificate authentication, which could never ever, ever be replicated. That's that's the brilliance of an NF T. I think NF T's are going to replace a lot of things. I think they're going to replace things like stocks and bonds. I think they're going to replace what we traditionally think of when we think about if you consider that you can put money into something like a bank account, well, for example, without NF T's right now, we have a collection, Hawk NF T's, the moment that you meant an NF T, the NMC starts generating yield, the moment you own it, which is kind of like really interesting because NF T's predominantly give you access to something but this has actually given you yield the moment it's yours. So now think about what else could you do? I mean, what if that what if that piece of land you bought a piece of real estate was represented by NFT.
There was liquidity behind it, like real, real cash, right in, you know, on, let's say, was Aetherium based, and it and it earned yield just by sitting there as the market change and the investment grew. Like that's the future of these sorts of things. So I think you'll have find that crypto experience NFT experience is all going to be it's all going to amalgamate come together. And you're just going to be doing so much more. I know so many, like for example, when you do a token raise for your crypto projects. Now, people aren't offering tokens anymore. They're getting a collection of NF T's People buy them. And that's what pays for the for the project. It's brilliant.
Mike Stohler
Now, how do you think, you know, for instance, one of the big things I keep hearing about is real estate blockchain investing. Okay. So let's say someone's trying to raise $10 million. They want to buy multifamily complex or a hotel or just some type of a real estate project. Are you pretty much like right now? You'd have to? If I'm going to build something, it's, I'd have to probably raise enough. Because, you know, because, you know, the way I'm seeing is what the contractor that's going to build it. You have to accept it. Or else, you know, there'll be some way or if I go and just buy something, how do I go to a bank say, hey, you know, I have $5 million worth of crypto, I want to buy this $5 million asset. Gotcha. You know, you get my point.
Yeah, the process, because then that bank is going to know, I want cash. I don't want 5 million. So what's the process? You know? That's another thing. And then if we do like a syndication, the real estate syndication and I started, half the people want to give them cash, half the people want to give me tokens, or crypto. And then I have to combine all this in order to buy something. Are we there yet? Are we have to kind of wait till the banks all get on board?
Mark Basa
No, we are here. We are definitely here. So you will have heard of Coinbase and binance. These are centralized exchanges. Let's use Coinbase as an example. So when I buy crypto when I buy bitcoin, or I buy a theory, I have to use, for example, US dollars, I have to use fiat currency. Okay, so it leaves a central bank and enters the blockchain. So you can reverse that. So the moment you've got, you want to raise $5 million, you simply reverse that pattern is that you take your eath and your Bitcoin and you convert it to USD on Coinbase. And then you send it to your bank account. So your contractors, your builders, they don't have to accept crypto because you can pay them in whatever currency they want. The difference is that is that when you raise when you raise money, you can raise so much, so much faster, and so much easier.
I know guys out there that are raising millions and millions of dollars from crypto VCs who are like, okay, who's the team? And is it is your contracts audited? Okay, I'll send you a million bucks. Yeah, like, it's, it's a different world, we are moving away, we're moving away from like physical, tangible paper contracts to smart contracts, you know, you put something in, you take something out. So if you wanted to raise five, 10 million, whatever you wanted to raise right now, for a real estate project, you could absolutely do it through anything from NF T's to to, you know, tokens, whatever, it's already there, and you could pay people in whatever means they wanted to be paid.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, that's fascinating. I guess you'd have to find the law firm that knew how to create the syndication paperwork, and know what they're talking about in order to add those clauses. Crypto because you
Mark Basa
know, you could, you could, what you could probably do is that you could probably, you could probably release NF T's to owners. And then that that liquidity pool in which they add money to when they when they've minted an NF t when they've created one that would maybe somehow legally represent that complex you're trying to build that they own. So the ownership is tied to that just like a contract would be tied to it.
Mike Stohler
And how difficult would it be? I don't know what the dollar per token change ratio is, you know, the exchange rate, would you would you have to have someone that says, you know, okay, I'm gonna pay you a million dollars worth of crypto because I wouldn't be a million dollar investor. I go and say, Okay, now I convert that to US dollars in order to pay the bank. Is it right now like a one for one or I could at some point, because I know what goes up and down like kind of like the market. I go on to turn to the bank and all sudden it's only worth 800,000.
Mark Basa
Yep. Yeah, yeah. Right. Yeah. And that's the big thing with with the, with the volatility, it's, it's mostly been sold right now from what's called a stable token or a stable coin. So there's something called USD C, which is US dollar coin on Aetherium, for example, and that's basically a token that represents the real value or reflects the value of the US dollar at Anytime, and it changes up and down based on the amount of cash that they have at any one hand. And so when the when there's too much US dollar coin, then they kind of reduce it from the supply. But But right now, for example, you can accept USDC as a as a stable coin, and you won't lose any value. And when you go to the bank to exchange it for a million, you'll get a million.
There's no doubt about that. If you accept it in a theory, Minh, and if you take if right, and then it takes 10 20%, by the time you drive to the bank, yeah, that's a problem. But it could also do the other way, it could also go up 30 40%. So what I would do, if I'm going to raise money for anything like this, that's more of a, you know, low middle risk asset that you don't want to bring too much volatility to and in the means in which you accept capital, and I would be accepting us DC. That's how most token races are done right now for projects. So if I'm going to raise money, like this year, I mean, I've been I've got two projects under my belt. And if I go out and raise that I'll raise money for, you know, in US DC because I don't want to have that same problem that you just mentioned.
Mike Stohler
Okay, yeah, it's interesting. It's, you know, the world is. It's, it's crazy, you know, you think about 100 years ago, 50 years ago? And what's going to happen just five years from now, 10 years from now, where do you what do you think we hit on that a little bit? What do you think the future of crypto is? Are you going to have more and more and more and more? Are they all going to be? And you know, you said Microsoft might do one? Who knows Elon Musk plant, you know, have? Tesla coin you know, you just, you know, if he decides to do it, he'll just do it. Do you see all of a sudden having like, hundreds of all these different things going around?
Mark Basa
Yeah, I think you'll have the dominant players, I think that the next five or 10 years will be interesting, because a lot of them are going to drop off there. But there are a lot of lower market cap tokens right now that will explode. Because we're still so early in I mean, like, like trillions and trillions of dollars are going to come into this industry. The scary part about this, actually is is more what happens when there's not enough centralized money. And that's something that no one can really predict. But if you want to play Doomsday, then it's the end of the world. Because at some point, the bank has to say, there's now 25% of centralized money in the blockchain, and we can't get it out. Because remember that crypto money is your money, you can lend it, you can send it you can spend it. It's not controlled by any centralized service.
So what happens to crypto at that point, but more so what happens to fear at that point? Because the Western world can't, we can't have the same level of inflation in some of the South American countries or, you know, parts of Africa, we can't bump up inflation like that, where it's like a trillion dollars to buy a loaf of bread, because it will, you know, it'll really crash. We are, you know, big consumers here, manufacturers, everything. So, the scary part is more hundreds of currencies, but more what happens to fit? How do they play a role together? I don't know.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, it's because everyone knows that the government's in on the western world, they're reactive instead of proactive. So the wait till it happens, until they say, Oh, my God, we need to fix something. You know, you think that right now, they would sit there and say, okay, look, this is happening. Because I think their only thought process right now is, how can we regulate it? And how can we tax it? Exact how
Mark Basa
we can tell you with it? Yeah, exactly. It is literally impossible to stop this movement. Funnily enough, I talked about meme tokens going viral blockchain has gone viral. And you cannot just put this under the rug. It's because because crypto is an idea. If you plant an idea into someone's head, and you say, this money is yours, you can control it. You can do anything you want with it. Anytime no one owns it. They almost don't grasp the concept. But what about a bank? Well, banks in this model don't exist. They don't provide anything anymore.
So you're right governments are they're so far behind because they don't even understand it. And I actually spoke to a woman some time ago who was leading a very large bank in their sort of anti money laundering department about specifically about crypto you know, people not wanting to pay tax because you Basically, you only pay tax in a certain region, when you realize your crypto otherwise you could be a trillionaire in crypto and never pay that, you know, tax. But anyway, she didn't know what a centralized exchange was. And I'm like, How was anybody at your level, not knowing what a centralized exchanges like, didn't know what a what a web three wallet was, or these blockchains or anything. And I'm like, this is really crazy, because you guys are so far behind, not just about catching criminals, or the guy that doesn't want to pay his tax, but just far behind on the industry, like, if you're going to appoint a head of a big bank to, like, catch people and understand this space, you'd better know, at least what Coinbase is, at least just so you can catch the bad guys.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, yeah, seems like here in America, you know, they're just, they're so concerned about catching the bad guys, you know, we now have to everyone has to report if I exchange more than $600, you know, PayPal and things like that. I'm like, That's not where we need to be focusing on, you know, the $600 things, you know, it's, it's the future and it is scary. And now another thing is the amount of energy do you think, the amount of energy to mine have this? Do you think that's going to be get easier?
Mark Basa
Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think like new technologies always coming out, you know, there's so many things about some countries will go towards nuclear power, and there's like, there's so much stuff going on. So the energy, there's also the argument of energy that Bitcoin is, you know, more energy, like wasting, but you know, if you consider how big how many, how large, the private banks are, how many staff and those enormous concrete skyscrapers they have, like, a lot of energy has gone into that for a very, very long time. Bitcoin is very, very new. I wouldn't say that, but But again, it's kind of like, it's kinda like the feel they put out there. Like I like, for example, our babysitter, we were talking today, she's 19 years old, and we were talking about Bitcoin and she thought Bitcoin was only used by criminals, she didn't had no idea about this stuff.
Now, she's, it's funny, because Bitcoin is more familiar to her than it was when I discovered it, I discovered it when I was like, 23, for example, I'm 33. Now. But, you know, it's kind of like the fear indicator of what they want the average retail investor to actually think, because a lot of money can be made right now in crypto the next 510 years is going to be insane. But I just feel that the government doesn't want you to make that money, they want to more or less, facilitate what money you can make, or more importantly, facilitate what money you should be paying and what you owe the government.
Mike Stohler
Yeah, exactly. That's just the way the world works. Well, well, Mark, it has been a pleasure. Thank you. So you know, I'm enlightened and kind of scale, kind of like, wow, you know, because you brought up some some things, I'd never thought about what will happen when there's more crypto than there is? Dollars? Yeah, you know, because the whole world all of a sudden, is going to sit there and say, Wait a second, you know, because there will be inflation, there will be the world will need to proactively and very quickly figure out how to do this. Exactly. And that's scary. But it's exciting until, you know, hopefully, I'll be retired on some island, you know, before. Before all that happens.
Mark Basa
Weldon's,
Mike Stohler
any parting comments mark?
Mark Basa
I would say that if you're interested in, in real estate and crypto like there are a lot of great projects out there where you can learn about off chain and on chain assets on chain assets, specifically being about, you know, NF T's and tokens on the blockchain and how they can work with off chain assets, like like a building, or an apartment. There's a lot going on. But I would say that if I can leave one message is that, you know, the next five or 10 years are going to be the biggest transfer of wealth in history. And if you can, invest what you can afford to lose, as they say, and just have a little play around and see how it goes. That's the best advice I can do. And I would say my I've always been right on my gut instinct about getting into crypto. Now. That's all I do. I don't do anything else besides crypto, and it's changed my life. So yeah, there's a lot of opportunity out there.
Mike Stohler
Where can people find you?
Mark Basa
You can find me on LinkedIn, LinkedIn, I'm always on. You can just search my name Mark Bassa. Of course, if you want to visit where I am established now as a global brand and business manager at Hawk finance, that's H O, k, k dot finance. And you can see all the cool things that we're building right now.
Mike Stohler
Very cool. Thank you so much.
Thanks for tuning in to the richer geek podcast, where we're helping others find creative ways to build wealth and financial freedom. For today's show notes, including all the links and resources from our show, and more information about our guests, visit us at www.therichergeek.com/podcast. And don't forget to jump over to Apple podcasts, Google Play Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts and hit the subscribe button. Share with others who can benefit from listening and leave a rating and review to get the podcast in front of your eyes. I appreciate you and thanks for listening.
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ABOUT MARK BASA
Mark is the Global Brand and Business Manager at HOKK Finance. With his extensive experience and knowledge in crypto brands, Mark is Dedicated to bringing HOKK Finance into DeFi 2.0 as a leader for the next generation.
Mark specializes in strategic development and brand conceptualization for early-stage companies and is an early crypto-evangelist. Co- founding a payment gateway called Airleet in 2010, the system enabled fiat, loyalty points, and Bitcoin payments in a single transaction, where the start-up partnered with Microsoft and the Australian government. Mark also designed a decentralized, clinical trial marketplace brand that also partnered with a $10B per year biotech company and the fastest growing chain of medical clinics in the US.
In his spare time Mark is building a decentralized loyalty point platform for merchants to create their own reward systems. He is also designing a marketplace for game developers to design and sell modes-of- transport in the metaverse.