Ep. 534 Bringing the Next Billion Users Into Web3 with Astra Protocol

May 9, 2023 #CRYPTO101

In this episode of Crypto 101 we talk to Sakhib Waseem the CTO of Astra Protocol who is working on an application that brings the financial regulatory standards for 150+ countries and over 300+ sanctions and watchlists to the crypto industry without sacrificing anonymization. This is a great conversation to let yourself learn how the future of Web3 is not only in the US but around the world.

— TRANSCRIPT —

SPEAKERS

Bryce, Sakhib Waseem

Bryce 00:09

All right, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of the crypto one on one podcast. You guys know me I’m Bryce, and today I’m going to be joined by Sahiba was seen from Astra protocol. He is the CTO. sock. How’re you doing today? Yeah, I’m

Sakhib Waseem 00:25

good, Bryce. Really pleased to be here excited to talk with all the listeners about all things AML all things crypto regulation, and of course, ASTRA protocol.

Bryce 00:35

Cholera, ya know, honestly, when, when you say AML and KYC, I think there’s actually probably some listeners out there who don’t even know what those terms mean, they might have heard it, but they don’t know like, what it really all the context. And it’s really important. And there’s a lot of debates happening around KYC and AML. Right now in American Congress, and pretty much every Parliament there is, people want to know how to regulate crypto. So let’s just start there. Before we dive into your background, what is KYC? What is AML? And why is it a big topic of discussion in crypto?

Sakhib Waseem 01:11

Sure. I mean, that’s, that’s very, very important that we clarify what these things are. We use these acronyms KYC and AML. Everyday frivolously because we work in the industry, or anybody who’s listening who works in traditional finance, or is that or is really happening day to day experience with banking, was familiar with. But for those of you who who don’t know what it is, KYC is an acronym it stands for know your customer, and AML is anti money laundering. So really, these are two techniques that are used in the traditional or web to financial infrastructure around the world. Often these rules are set by regulators on standards or by central banks as to how they should be carried out, or really the diligence practices. So it’s all about understanding an individual or a business that might be entering in some kind of financial financial arrangement. And it’s about understanding the threat or risk of that individual possesses to a wider financial institution. So KYC will typically look at a few checks on an individual. Have they ever been involved in any kind of fraud? Do they exist on a sanction screening, watch list or monitoring list. And then of course, anti money laundering is really delving into an individual to understand whether they’ve had any financial criminal history, and how that may impact the wider ecosystem they’re trying to join up to. And regulators set these rules, kind of with one overall directive. That’s about insuring wider safety from a consumer protection angle, so that we’re not introducing scammers and people from illicit finance, into generally healthy financial ecosystems. And of course, limiting risk to the financial institution itself or being subjected to scams or illicit finance entering and then becoming a proxy to some of those issues. Banks try really hard to get this right, they don’t often do. Some of these practices can be worked around in web two, technology and web three, when we look at this from a defy from a crypto perspective. It’s, it’s a minefield, usually stands as a set either on a local jurisdictional basis. So if you’re from the States, it’ll either be state driven, or maybe it will be a federal check as well. But as we start to look at crypto, crypto is really borderless and is shrouded by a lot of anonymity. Don’t get me wrong. I think some of these features of blockchain and crypto as a whole are incredible. We’re very pro crypto, we’re after a protocol. We believe in the future of this industry. We personally believe as well, I personally believe and that’s shared by the founders in this industry as well, that this will eventually begin to replace a lot of traditional financial institutions. We believe that this will be the future or the underlying capability of blockchain crypto will eventually cannibalize over the web two practices for the obvious benefits that everyone is aware of today, faster transaction speed, borderless transactions, a fraction of the price when it comes to executing transactions, and more financial freedom for the underbanked as well. So Bryce, if I had to summarize KYC, and AML, for everybody out here know your customer and anti money laundering, it’s about providing safeguards to protect nascent users or vulnerable users from being exposed to scams or illicit actors and also to insulate those ecosystems or financial institutions from potentially harmful funds entering into that, that institutions. Beautiful, beautiful, I

Bryce 04:52

mean, that that that hit the nail on the head, and I think that gives a lot of people. A great jumping off point for some of the more, you know, complex Next aspects that we’ll dive into with Astra and how you guys are solving this problem and making it better. For instance, if HSBC, for instance, was using Astra protocol, maybe they wouldn’t be fine to fucking billion dollars every year for all of their money laundering and maybe JP Morgan would uh, you know, save some money. So I think, I think the banks, they might want to look at at this protocol here, but we’ll dive into that. How did you become the guy to do it? What’s your background? Were you at the banks? Were you at a tech company? What side of the equation? Did you kind of find yourself in here?

Sakhib Waseem 05:34

Yeah, well, my career started working in traditional finance. So I started as an analyst built some really interesting reporting modules went on to become a consultant for my own business, providing regulatory solutions to bank so really familiar with regulatory crisis in Europe, huge scandals in excess of the billions of dollars kind of shrouded a lot of actions from banks. So my job as an independent was to go in and develop transformative technology solutions that would kind of set practices more fairly for consumers, and really shine a light on some of the unfair practices for financial institutions. So my role kind of sat between the two, it was between the regulators, the financial institutions themselves, and the consumers. And I developed a lot of interesting platforms. Throughout my time, I worked with some of the top five banks around the world. Internationally speaking, I developed some automation practices for the banks to actually alleviate and make their systems run a lot smoother, build some reporting platforms out to the regulators as well to shine a light on some of the truths at banks, and about a lot of CRM platforms. And somewhere along this journey, I started to uncover, I don’t want to call them unfair practices of banks, more how the system wasn’t really tailored in terms of fairness to everybody. But that’s nobody’s fault. That’s just how, you know, rules and practices have been set for many years. So I started building out clever applications that would shift the balance of fairness, in respect of what regulators were looking to achieve, which is ultimately protecting consumers and ensuring that they’re done by in the most appropriate way. So as you said, banks, not always get it right, the rules are out there, but sometimes they’re not clear for them too. So really, I leveled the playing field for a lot of them. And somewhere along that journey, I think in around 2012, I was introduced to this. But what was described to me as untraceable internet money called Bitcoin. So I started researching Bitcoin started looking at smart contracts and Aetherium, and then started introducing blockchain platforms to major traditional financial institutions and how they can really help them a lot of the things that they were doing. I love it.

Bryce 07:59

And kind of one of the the points that I’m I’m kind of hearing is that maybe crypto and blockchain has the potential to enable truly fair markets and truly transparent markets. And I think a lot of the times people don’t really see that they just think they hear you know, the average person, oh, Krypto. It just means privacy and anonymity. And it’s a wild west and they hear these things on CNBC. So how do we resolve those two ideas in our mind of like, here’s the truth is like, it’s blockchains are transparent, they’re auditable, it’s going to level the playing field. But on the other side, you have the media, you have people like Gary Gensler and Elizabeth Warren, who are going to flood the market and say all these things, what what’s your view and how we could resolve these two viewpoints?

Sakhib Waseem 08:45

I think you hit the nail on the head that Bryce so blockchain is the truth, I suppose in some respects. It is it is publicly viewable. You can see where all these transactions are which demystifies. A lot of financial transactions, which we don’t see in web two, web two is private information that belongs to banks, and then is reportable outwards. So there is there is a lot of traceability issues that are exposed through blockchain. So firstly, level playing field, everybody knows where everything is at once. So it’s all there. It’s all readable. It’s all usable. That’s great. It doesn’t really get us to where we need to be. So I would say crypto and defy has established itself. I mean, if we look back pre 2022, we’re talking in excess of $3 trillion, which is nothing to be scoffed at. You can’t compare that to traditional finance, which is like $40 trillion, or even more significant than that, right? What we saw in this market was there was appetite and interest bank see innovative technology, they see ways that they can use it the same ways they can evolve their practices, but it doesn’t stack up to their risk and compliance. So it just isn’t usable. And what we saw at Astra protocol was huge amounts of institutional finance coming into this industry. So lots of passive investment or active investment into blockchain technology, but no real direct usage of it. And I think around 2022, we saw a huge meltdown in the industry, we saw public scams, we saw huge failings, accountability and risk really coming to fruition. And that’s because in our belief, there just wasn’t the regulatory frameworks in this industry. There are no real safeguards for consumers in this industry, there is no real way for regulators to endorse it in their view, and regulators, if we just go back to what I said earlier, which is the regulator’s jobs, whether they’re Pro, whether that anti crypto, that shouldn’t really come into any kind of effect, really, we don’t look at regulators for that opinions. We look at regulators for their ability to provide frameworks that protect the end user. And that’s what it’s all about. That’s a regulators position. So I don’t really listen to opinions. And we don’t really care for opinions of regulators we care for, what are they doing actively to actually push further guidance and more transparency out of businesses and the end user what’s going to help grow this industry. And we started building Astra protocol as a means to bring in the next generation of crypto. Now we talk about crypto is this massive financial revolution that is going to change the world. We do this with a glimmer in our eye. And it seems very exciting to all of us users who’ve been huddling for many years. But the stark reality is we can’t have this massive financial revolution or change unless it’s inclusive. And that’s not inclusive from an end user perspective is inclusive from a retail perspective, because anybody can can sign up and create an open source wallet and start entering right. But it’s not usable from a traditional financial perspective, when we look at the overall landscape of the economies of the world. And finance as it stands right now it’s not accessible. So Astra protocol starts to make it more accessible. What we have built is a web two and web three. Ubiquitous compliance layer sounds very fancy, it sounds quite complicated, but it’s not. We’ve created a KYC and an anti money laundering application that can be plugged into virtually any crypto app, which is great. A lot of people out there who are listening right now will say, Well, I’m not interested, I want to remain anonymous. And you know, my crypto is mind anyone, I don’t want anybody to know about it. And that’s fine. There will always be people that want to remain anonymous and remain private. And we’re not. We’re not. We’re not shy to that fact. Yeah,

Bryce 12:42

of course in yourselves upon anybody, but you’re an option.

Sakhib Waseem 12:45

Well, we do feel that regulation will make Astra more of a standard across this industry or applications like Asher, we certainly feel that we’re leading the way in this. But our application effectively provides a safer onboarding onboarding route for users. So we’re trying to tackle this problem, we are tackling this problem, which is big banks have huge interest in crypto, they have capital to enter into these markets. And we would see more stability and more growth in this industry if they were actively able to put capital into crypto. So let’s just create a really good scenario here. So we’ve got a big bank that’s got $100 million. And it’s high risk capital, they have all the risk work done on their side, and they want to put that on a deck, they want to create a liquidity pool. Now they can do that. But regulation, as it stands right now will not allow them to do that because there’s just unquantifiable risk.

Bryce 13:40

So I kind of know who your counterparty is exactly this huge

Sakhib Waseem 13:44

counterparty risk, you don’t know who is going to transact with that liquidity pool. We don’t want to go down the route of just creating subnets. Whilst they are a lot more efficient. From a technology capacity to traditional frameworks. There’s the kind of exclusive to a certain kind of candidate like institutional investors and others. So How about how about this, you overlay Astra protocol onto a Dex, so that you have a non mandatory KYC mechanism. So if you’re a whale, or you want to gain access to large liquidity, you can now do that you go through our KYC module, your information belongs to you. With zero knowledge that’s you’re in control of all your information. And now you have access to liquidity from major traditional financial institutions. And likewise, financial institution that’s putting that liquidity in there risk is minimized because they can prove on chain that that individual was KYC verified at particular point in time, there was AML risk done on that individual. We brought in major legal compliance institutions, second anonymized view on that information as well to see whether the compliance stands up to their standards as well. And we’ve minimized that risk, which now means rather than just investing in the technology banks can make this technology usable. Now You’ve got banks using it, you’ve got everyday traders using it. And now you have large institutional traders as well who can join a Dex and do this and access that liquidity because one of the problems right now is with DAX is is liquidity, price slippage, being able to access all those assets as well. Yeah, so that’s

Bryce 15:20

solving. It’s a huge, it’s a huge undertaking, and Bravo for taking that on. Have you guys run into a lot of challenges have been pretty smooth? And if so, what what have some of those challenges been?

Sakhib Waseem 15:35

Um, I wouldn’t really say that we’ve had too many challenges. I think there is a need and a desire from both sides of the equation. So the crypto community have a lot to prove, in terms of the industry and economies and ecosystems being safe. And we have a lot of builders, and we have a lot of upcoming businesses as well. And entrepreneurs and technologists who are developing platforms who say, Well, I don’t want to be in a position where I build a deck. So I build a defy protocol. And the regulator comes knocking on my door and, and wants to run, you know, a review for the last three years with what we want to build this from the ground in a safe way. And then likewise, you have really massive platforms who are saying, well, we want to build blockchain as web 3.5, which is inclusive of financial institutions and really pushes the needle and has the regulators on our side

Bryce 16:27

is the ARC Program.

Sakhib Waseem 16:30

Exactly, exactly. But slightly, slightly more catered to a decentralized community, which offers this as an option. So then we can start to really build this crypto industry in different buckets. So you have this 100% KYC fully regulated bucket of crypto wallets that exist out there, right. And they’ll only ever interact with validated KYC pools and other KYC wallets, and maybe just these liquidity pools from banks. And then you have the mid risk, which is KYC wallets that generally only interact with these validated KYC pulls, but sometimes have transactions from anonymized wallets as well. And then you have the outlier as well, which is only anonymized while it’s only anonymized transactions not interested in anything KYC. And that’s fine, too. What we will see is a minimized risk, because I mean, there is illicit finance in this industry. It’s it’s obvious, right? And in times where, you know, we’re at the brink of war in Europe, or active war in Europe and this shroud Enos around the financing of, you know, war time and you know, the movement of arms around the world, crypto can be used as a conduit. And it’s easy to point at crypto as well, because it’s anonymous nature, right? What this does is it demystifies a lot of that and says Well, here’s a population that we can point out as help generally healthy or KYC approved in line with regulatory review right now. And then you have a slightly higher risk middle bucket as well, which, okay, needs a little bit more analysis. But if there’s risk appetite, you know, it’s usable as well. And then you have okay, this anonymized, and eventually what you’ll see is all of that shift and focus of generally, this whole industry is bad, and everything is scary in the eyes of regulators and banks and trust from governments will shift and the attention will be focused on. Okay, so there is fully anonymized, we can’t say that everybody in the anonymized world is bad. It’s just their preference. But within that, as well as a proxy through bringing in KYC techniques, you start to move some of those illicit finance or dangerous finance into that pocket as well, which becomes manageable, removes the risk, and then empowers the end user from an ethics perspective as well. So when I go into decks now, I don’t have to worry that if I make a swap, that LP or liquidity pool has been funded by somebody who’s in the shady side of finance.

Bryce 18:45

Yeah, you want to make sure you’re not interacting with North Korea or a sanctioned country. Definitely. Now, I guess one of the interesting sort of components here is, you know, the revealing of personal information to a party like Astra, where I think a lot of people were like, Well, is there an element of trust there? What if there’s a data breach? I don’t want my personal information out there any more than it already is? So so how do you guys kind of deal with that?

Sakhib Waseem 19:15

You’re doing anyway, today, right? So every day when you sign up for a bank, you sign up for a mobile phone, you give that information out, right? So you’re giving it to a web to company. One of the points that we address is transparency of where the information is and how the information is being used. With a web two company, you pass your private information across to them your personally identifiable or sensitive information to them, and you don’t really know where it goes, you sign a big terms and conditions and you can’t see it with us. We were on a parallel blockchain to this that shows you where your documents are, who’s accessed it, where it’s living. It has been provisioned outwards. We put you in control of that. So that simply just crushes any of you on that and also any specific regulation or data requirement for us to store or hold any information as well. We were up at Everything in full enterprise grade security around it as well so that we’re compliant on both sides.

Bryce 20:04

And could you almost see this Astra protocol evolving? Or maybe this was perhaps part of the genesis of the idea? Like, it’s not just a decentralized legal network and KYC AML platform for other blockchains. But you could actually have web 2.0 companies just have a an upgraded KYC AML system like banks could use this not just blockchains and Kryptos. So am I misreading it?

Sakhib Waseem 20:30

No, you’re 100%. Right, we are agnostic of who the customer is. So from an integration perspective, and I’ll take it a little bit technical here, it makes no difference whether you’re a web two or web three company in the eyes of Astra as a technology layer. So some of the benefits of our technology, superfast. So we can do a KYC check on an individual in a modernized nation around 10 seconds. So significantly faster than anybody else. Incredibly more cost effective, or about 30% more cost effective than web two standard providers. We do that through tokenization. And then, you know, obviously, the privacy concerns as well, that’s a major thing. But one thing I will touch on is global coverage. Crypto is global. Right? Most KYC providers in a web two cents have focused on particular areas, we have the regulation or regulatory frameworks for KYC for over 150 countries built into our service. So we can KYC pretty much anyone from anywhere around the world. And we’re inclusive, we’re not focused on modernized nations, we think emerging markets are really important as well, they’re an important part of crypto because the underbanked needs access to financial frameworks. And that’s what crypto provides. So even do manual data scrape. So if you’ve got a paper license, and your your country or nation doesn’t have access to digital systems, but you have access to a mobile, maybe your driver’s license, your current ID is stored in paper, we can actually source those documents locally, verify them, upload them into our system and compare and compare them. So we offer that as a manual service, too.

Bryce 22:00

I love that. And I think that, you know, I want to kind of hit on that as well, because I saw a statistic literally the other day in regards to, you know, you trying to serve more emerging markets, and not necessarily America and all these developed sort of countries, it’s like, we already have those systems. But you know, Nigeria is going to be by 2050, the third largest of the third most populous country in the world, greater than America surpassing and like, you can see the demographics of America is like, you know, we’re kind of topping out. And, you know, when a population starts to decline, you know, humans are capital, that’s actually a fundamental deleveraging of that population. And when you have a population like Nigeria, which is on the up and up, but they don’t really have as many, you know, KYC, AML, or just normal infrastructure, right. And so being able to build for that population is actually a really smart business play, I think, because you’re going where the growth is?

Sakhib Waseem 22:56

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think you have to look at trends, we take a very analytical approach to everything that we do after. So we look at trends, number of users who are growing from a nation basis as well. And then we offer our services out to the crypto industry, just blanket, we do it in a low touch way as well. So you can literally just contact us take our API kits, take our smart contract capability, plug it into your service in a way you go, and you can accept onboarding from 150 countries becomes super easy. And emerging nations have to be a part of everybody’s plan. I think I think there’s already well established nations out there, where there probably isn’t much attraction or probably harder competition, and then you can start looking at emerging nations as a hub of good customers and returning customers will build loyalty with

Bryce 23:38

you as well. Yeah, no, totally. One of the things I was thinking that I want to go back on is the tokenization aspect you had mentioned there was, you know, upwards of maybe 30% cost savings due to this feature for your end users. Can you talk about, you know, what tokenization looks like in your guys’s system?

Sakhib Waseem 23:57

Yep. It’s very straightforward. So like I said, I’m a developer, I come from a technology background, CTO now so more managerial position in the company. But one thing that no developer likes, and this is a heavily developers, that industry is, you know, touch points. Nobody likes the SAS model. It’s, it’s it’s been around for a long time, but it’s not quite working. There are ways to innovate on that we found a way to do it through tokenization. So tokens exist on them on the market, you can take our technology capability and plug it into your application with very low touch in terms of speaking to anybody at the company to take the information and plug it into your service through user guides and some some user support from our side. And then you can go ahead and buy tokens out in the market, you can lock them into our dashboard using a smart contract, and then you instantly have access to our platform. Now, now that you’ve locked those tokens into our platform every time a KYC occurs, we’ll remove the relevant number of tokens versus the dollar cost for KYC. And then we’ll provide a reward back to you at the end of your you know, a At the end of your period of locking your tokens into our platform, which basically just gives you a rebate or a cost reduction at the end of that tube. But even at the base level of our model, we know that this is a huge market. You know, there are millions of users in crypto, and that’s only growing year on year. So these are completely new customers this system. So on a cost basis on a three year projection, we offer our basis prices and dollar costs 30% cheaper than leading companies in what’s it.

Bryce 25:29

Wow. That’s incredible. And I wonder, you know, if this sort of breakthrough, if you will, is one of the main pull factors for big executives, that you guys have been able to actually attract to Astra, kind of the most notable one that I read about was the former chief strategy officer of Samsung, and who was also the corporate president of Samsung, who, who left a guy named young son, and he joined Astra protocol on the board of advisors. Did he kind of give any color to why he joined Astra?

Sakhib Waseem 26:04

Well, we’ve got a young son, he’s an incredible board advisor to have his, you know, his his incredible reputation at Samsung well respected across the organization still very close to their entire infrastructure as well. I still think he sits across the autonomous vehicle division and is involved in the business still to this day. But we’ve we’ve brought on a number of advisors, right? We have Mick Mulvaney, former chief of staff to the United States White House, we have Kirsten Nielsen, former head of Homeland Security and cybersecurity for the US Federal Government. We have Phil Hogan, former head of the EU trade commission sitting on our board as well, and a whole raft of other, you know, serious individuals across our team. But they all share one view, which is crypto really is going somewhere. But there needs to be the relevant infrastructure level changes, that makes it more accessible. So they all share that belief. They believe that this technology that Astra has created, and is globally patented, and might add as well can really serve this industry, it’s for its massive growth face. And we’ve seen a large growth phase, but we’ve not seen a huge growth phase. And that’s going to come from more inclusivity and more capital directly being able to utilize this technology. So they will believe in what we’re doing right. And as a result of having these board members, it gives us a couple of things gives us access and dialogue with regulators. So we can help demystify and inform them on the differences between web two and web three, and how regulation doesn’t quite fit that right now. And also, at some lessons, show them what we’re doing and how we’re building this industry in a stronger way as well. We have a lot of support from a number of regulators around the world. It also allows us access to massive web two giants as well. So we have conversations with huge electronic companies, banking companies around the world who are all interested in crypto and are doing crypto things. But of course, lack that regulatory infrastructure that we provide

Bryce 28:00

incredible. So out of all the ecosystems that exist or that you’ve interacted with in crypto, you know, Bitcoin, Aetherium, Solana, there’s, you know, hundreds of them now, do you guys find any certain ecosystem to be, you know, your favorite or that you love developing with you like going to those conferences? Do you guys have any, like, preferred partners, if you will? Show I

Sakhib Waseem 28:26

mean, I’ll tell you personally speaking theory. I mean, that’s just my personal opinion on this theory. And I think it’s been incredible to see the journey of this ecosystem and technology grow and grow continuously grow year on year, and the team and all the devs around this ecosystem have just been piling huge amounts of work into it, which is incredible, right. But there’s also been the most maturity in terms of the market as well for theory in terms of applications in terms of the number of users in terms of the credibility of this blockchain as well. So we actually started building everything and Aetherium for that basis, in that there are customers that has credibility, and there’s interest as well from the web to site. So we took an analytical approach and said, Okay, we’ll start that. That doesn’t limit us because we consider ourselves to be agnostic, we’re having some really powerful conversations with one another, with a number of EVM compatible blockchains out there, and others to the right, who aren’t even EVM compatible, just doing their own thing as well. We feel that every blockchain will benefit from this. I mean, you know, if, you know, I think Deloitte Survey was something like 80% of the challenges faced by web to adoption into into crypto and web three is regulatory hurdles. So if if that’s what the traditional world is saying, I mean, the crypto world is really, you know, dying for a solution like ours, and we’re here.

Bryce 29:49

Do you have any hot takes or predictions on some of the American regulatory hurdles and I know you’re not in the states and so maybe this is a A non sequitur or whatever, but do you have any hot takes on what’s kind of unfolding in the States with all the regulatory confusion?

Sakhib Waseem 30:08

Look, I think it’s kind of the states have been in a battle for a long time between the CFTC and the SEC, right. So I would say, look, from a US perspective, until there’s more clarity from which regulator is really taking the lead point on this. We’re not really going to see much movement. I think there is much more clarity from an EU perspective, although we also saw the IMF Sherpa trail give a lot of guidance on cbdc and stablecoins, which seems to be a hot topic after Luna Terra last year. Right. So. So I think there’s a lot more guidance coming out. I think FTX. Having CEO, you know, being from the states created a lot of finger pointing at the US regulatory system right now. But they’re working hard to actively put stuff out there. And I can’t blame the regulators. This is quite a tricky industry, I think we need to do more outreach from an industry lead perspective. One of the great things of our board board advisors, in particular MC, who said that the blockchain caucus in the states is that access to regulators and being able to share dialogue and inform people about what we’re doing. I would say, comparatively, if we look at the EU, they’ve made leaps and bounds. Now, it’s quite controversial. I mean, you look at AML D six, so the six directive from the maker or the EU Commission on on crypto assets, I mean, they’re now saying that any transaction or payment above 1000 euros must be KYC, which is very interesting. I mean, that was approved. There are pieces of legislation and draft that are making this enforceable now, it’s coming out of the EU single rulebook for regulation as well for conducting due diligence and fair practices and individuals. So I think anybody who’s building a defy protocol out of the EU really needs to start speaking to Astra and put themselves in a position where they’re more informed. But again, I think a lot of these actions are coming out of the brink of war on the border in the EU as well. And crypto transactions that are coming out of this. I think they’re the regulators are cognizant of how this is actually limited. A lot of usage. I mean, if we’ve talked about sanctions, and you know, ring fencing, the Russian banking ecosystem, as well as actually forced people to adopt crypto, more wholesale. But then again, regulatory practices need to be put in to stop that being shrouded by the murkiness, like we talked about earlier with these different subsets and, and buckets, as we call them of users. I mean, seeing this kind of tough regulation out of Russia and the wider world, for obvious reasons, has, in some ways, made crypto a lot more accessible to a number of people, people that you wouldn’t even imagine. I mean, our our goal, and my personal goal has always been how do I get my dad’s a US crypto? I mean, how do we make it easy for him? Right?

Bryce 33:04

Totally. No, I love that now sock. That’s, it’s totally what I think about too. And I, you know, started everything over here with crypto 101. And we wrote crypto revolution, it’s like, how do we bring this down to the level of the average consumer, right? Where that’s the most that’s the majority of people who are actually going to do it to use this stuff or to affect markets? It’s like, how do you get the common man or the everyday person to understand this stuff? So that’s really what we try to do as well. So definitely a shared vision there. But sock before we let you go, I kind of got one final question. It’s a pretty simple one. But for those of those in the audience who are listening to this podcast, they might be entering the world of crypto for the first time. And what would you as a crypto expert, really want them to know whether it’s about Astra or just about our, our crazy industry in general?

Sakhib Waseem 33:59

I would say stay safe, right? I mean, if you’re using a crypto platform, there’s a lot of diligence that needs to be done right now. So check. There are obvious ethical components to crypto when you’re using it, which is do I know where that money has come from? And how its financing some of these defi platforms? Do I inherently trust that it’s safe and is going to be okay to use. So do a lot of research when it comes to that. And otherwise, I would just say, you know, take your time with it. Understand how this industry works. It’s very different to the traditional framework. So other people today are familiar with stocks and shares and maybe buying assets and things like that, but crypto is a whole different beast. So take your time, do a lot of research. Be safe out there as well, because scams are quite commonplace. Some of the things that we’re helping resolve through our technology. If you see the Astra logo on a website, you know that it’s going to be safe and the user base of that platform is going to be vetted and you know, there aren’t going to be let’s let’s call them LGP PL or illicit finance isn’t going to enter those ecosystems, we’re doing our best to ensure that it doesn’t. So so that would be my advice to anybody who’s going out there. But enjoy it, learn research, there’s a wealth of information out there podcasts like crypto 101 help you demystify a lot of that as well. And, yeah, I mean, a lot of blockchain companies or crypto companies are really accessible. One of the things that sets them apart from web two companies is they normally have a telegram or they have a user base or a Twitter and they’ll be very responsive just like we are. We’re accessible on telegram and Twitter and a number of different mediums you can always reach out to our team and they’ll always help you through that journey as well.

Bryce 35:38

Love it. No, I loved also what you said about you know, as you kind of go around and you see maybe estrus stamped on an application, you could kind of trust it right where it’s like you know, they have Intel Inside You know, you’re gonna get reliable compute. It’s like Astra inside your, you know, you’re gonna get reliable KYC AML and a safe venue. So exogamous was awesome. Thank you so much for coming on. talking to us about KYC AML and Astra protocol.

Sakhib Waseem 36:07

Appreciate that Bryce. Thanks for listening guys really appreciate that. If you want to find out more information on astral protocol, you can find us on Twitter at astral protocol and you can also find us on telegram as well so with guys reach out to us and give us a follow if you if you like what you see about us the astral token is on exchanges as well. So just search for dollar Astra built to see us there around trading on the market as well. But of course, do you research make sure informants we make any financial commitments?

Bryce 36:35

Love it. All right. Well, we’ll catch you around hope you can come back on the podcast again soon as you guys got some more updates.

Sakhib Waseem 36:41

Yeah, absolutely. Always available, Bryce. So just give us a shout whenever you want to talk regulation.

Bryce 36:45

Sounds great. Take care. All the best. Bye

Ep. 534 Bringing the Next Billion Users Into Web3 with Astra Protocol

Your Journey To Freedom Through Cryptocurrencies Starts Here