Andra Nicolau gives us an all-round breakdown of what decentralised finance is. Why (and why not) to get involved in it. And what she envisages as the future of blockchain technology.

Andra is Head of Business Development and Strategy at Origin Protocol powering NFT ecosystems providing creators with branded storefronts and secondary marketplaces.

Andra’s prior positions have included Head of Growth at 1inch where she raised over $250M and helped the project become the second fastest growing DeFi network. She also spent over 8 years in Silicon Valley and studied Economics at UC Berkeley.

BWB is powered by Oury Clark

We're rolling.

We're rolling.

Hello and welcome to Business Without Bullshit.

I'm Andy Orie, and alongside me is my co-host of Bastards.

Hi Andy.

And today we are joined by the wonderful Andra Ola.

How are you doing, Andra?

I'm great.

Thank you for asking.

Nice Andra.

Is head of business development and strategy at Origin Protocol and an all round crypto veteran.

My God, that sounds, uh, almost like something you've, uh, gone through as a war.

Andre studied economics at uc.

Berkeley spent over eight years in Silicon Valley.

You poor thing, uh, and was most recently the head of growth at one inch, where you raised a lot of money, 250 million and helped the project become the second fastest.

Defi decentralized finance network.

Welcome to the podcast, Andrew.

Lovely to help you, and thank you for taking the time.

I think, you know, we, we always like to start with this question and, and I think it's a fair one, is what is keeping you up at night?

Uh, yeah, that's a very fair question, especially working in crypto, but, uh, Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, what keeps me up at night is unrelated to crypto, and it's more related to everything that's happening on the world all at once.

Uh, I don't know how much, uh, you guys, uh, read the news or, you know, maybe in England it's different in America, but it seems like everything is falling apart all at once, uh, on the, uh, political side, on social side, on the relationship side, on in every single aspect.

So, uh, a lot of those questions and issues keep me up at night.

Do you think?

You know, I feel, I feel like the whole world's falling a apart at once, but then I meet so many people and see so many ama amazing technologies that can fix all the problems of the world at once, or at least some of them.

Some of them.

Mm-hmm.

I feel like there's these nice supposing forces.

Do you see, do you see crypto for one of a, a better name as a, as a force for good in that subject?

In that, in that sense?

I do, because if I didn't, I wouldn't be working in this space.

Um, crypto's probably one of the most misunderstood, uh, spaces in the world at the moment.

Uh, but at its core, it starts as a force of good once it's actually properly understood.

What do you think?

So misunderstood about it.

First of all, um, a lot of the bad actors took over.

So, you know, the, the, um, image that crypto has now is like, it's a scam.

It's about losing money.

You can't, it can be trusted.

It's not a, it's not even solving any problems.

But crypto really comes down to technology and understanding the fundamental problems that it tackles.

Things like privacy, things like giving, uh, power back to the people like.

Uh, becoming more a demo democratic space where you have a voice and you can vote on the issues that care about, that you care about.

And you can get involved in the governance of certain companies, uh, where people can get together to accomplish certain goals.

And those are not talked about enough because everyone's just too busy talking about exchanges and coins and investing and trading and Ponzi schemes and all the other stuff.

Right.

What is it that it needs to do to overcome the misunderstandings and, and, and put sort of roots in the ground is, you know, does it need more scientists behind it?

Yeah.

We could always use more scientists, more reputable people coming in and, you know, surfacing a lot of the, uh, of value that's underneath it.

But I think, and a lot of people are not going to like this, especially if they're in crypto.

I actually think that crypto needs to take a step back.

What I mean by that is at an interface level.

So every time an average user, a person interacts with crypto, uh, everything should happen in the backend.

You should not know that crypto's powering this technology.

Uh, when you make a payment from, uh, let's say America to England or any other country, you shouldn't know that it's powered by crypto.

You should just leverage that technology in the backend.

Oh, so you're saying, I, I, I'm paying for something and it'll say 32 pounds, and I press the money and pay, and the fact that crypto is going on don't involve me in it.

You, you know, I'm just a consumer.

Yeah.

I think that trying to educate yourself on every single aspect of crypto, I mean, there's so many, right?

There's payments, there's NFTs, metaverse, defi, lending, borrowing, trading, all of these aspects.

You, unless you're very passionate about it, you don't want to educate yourself about the.

How crypto's actually changing ev every single one of these fields.

Um, you just want to like actually perform a certain activity.

For example, sending money or, uh, blogging onto this platform or purchasing this thing, and you don't really care about it.

We don't care today when we use a credit card.

No one knows how Visa processes payments and we don't spend time thinking about it.

We just tap it and go right.

But you, you said something really interesting earlier, which was that that crypto and defi, I suppose, is democratizing finance and giving people the chance to vote on things they're interested in and have more of a say in what's going on.

Can you unpack that a bit more about how crypto manages to, to do that?

Yeah, sure.

So first of all, the technology is built on decentralized technology.

So let's start with that, meaning that in an ideal world, these protocols are fully transparent, so the user could, at any point in time, see the status of that, uh, protocol.

What do I mean by that?

Let's take Silicon Valley Bank that just imploded, right?

You have no idea what's happening, be behind closed doors.

You don't know where their collateral ratios are, how much money they've borrowed, lending you any, everything is a, is a black box.

In Defi, you would be able to see this stuff, what we call on chain, which is really just the website at analytics dashboard where you can see all of these different, the, the different information and make decisions based on that.

So that means being built on top of, uh, blockchain and being a decentralized finance protocol.

Now, obviously depending on architecture, it can mean diff different thing.

It can mean, for example, peer-to-peer blending and borrowing so that instead of borrowing from from a bank, you're borrowing from someone else.

That's one way.

But now how do you actually get involved?

Um, A lot of these protocols issue the so-called tokens, right, that we're all, uh, well aware of.

And these are actually governance, right?

Most of the time.

And governance really means that it's, it's kind of like a share where you get to actually vote, uh, on certain important decisions.

So you just have your tokens and you go and it's like, Hey, I'm a shareholder or a token holder, and I get to vote.

And it's important decision, uh, regarding this particular protocol.

Um, so I have a direct say.

That is what democracy is, is when you get together and each person votes or maybe they delegate.

Their vote to someone else, and then they can vote on their behalf.

But the idea is that you have a direct say and there's not like one key player making all the decisions regarding that particular project, protocol, uh, business, whatever you wanna call it in, in the terms of you, you start in hinting into the shareholder, the DOAs and stuff like that.

I mean, Just to very briefly pause on them.

You do.

Do you see that industry flourishing?

I mean, I find it very hard as a, I know, no.

You know, I'm a citizen of nowhere.

I'm a citizen of the world or whatever.

When it comes down to tax and accounting and law, it's all very national.

It's like, well, where the hell are the people?

You know?

I had a meeting with the.

The lady from the dough and talk, you know, wanting to find pe, you know, and sort of saying, well, we're not anywhere, we're not taxable.

It's like, no, like people are somewhere like, like physically they're somewhere and that's all the tax man cares about.

But you know, briefly, do you see that industry flourishing or the, maybe a better question, do you see this user dough in these specific circumstances or a great use case for that kind of organization?

Yeah, I mean, in finance, like I said, it's working pretty well.

This is where we have the most traction, just because a lot of people got.

Got fed up with the traditional banking system.

Oh.

So in, in decentralized finance, most of the companies are decentralized organizations.

What?

Registered in Wyoming or wherever it is, isn't it?

Uh, usually, yeah.

Caymans or, yeah.

British Virgin Islands, yeah.

Oh, okay.

And then they operate as actual decentralized entities.

Um, so whatever tax residents or tax setup they have, right.

They, they pay taxes there.

But then, uh, the actual incorporation.

So, you know, in America we have LLCs.

In, uh, in crypto, we now have something called DAOs, or decentralized autonomous or organization.

And a lot of them are, are trying to get fully decentralized so they can actually check that box of being a Dow.

Uh, and there are groups working towards making this an actual incorporation style, just like an L L C or um, Whatever else.

Okay.

So at the moment though, most decentralized finance that in, in, in my little tax mine, then they're not, they're not DAOs.

They're registered in an offshore territory and then have some local activities effectively, but keep the crown jewels, as we say, offshore if they can.

Yeah, because there was no way to become fully decentralized right off the bat.

Right.

I mean, the chances of succeeding.

There have been some that tried that, but uh, it just didn't work out there.

It has to.

Start with a more central entity that's incorporated somewhere, and then have a decentralization roadmap where you slowly remove a lot of those centralized pieces.

You know, if we just peel it back to what matters, you know, if I'm a, if I'm, you know, a medium sized business, I'm small business, I'm based wherever in the, in America or in the uk, and I'm hearing about Defi, what do you think I should be doing as a business?

Say I'm a software business with a hundred people.

Should I be paying any attention to it?

Does it matter?

Do I just use my bank?

What do you think?

Yeah, I mean, here's what I would say.

Uh, don't do it because it's a fathom, because you're just like, oh, I should get involved in crypto somehow.

But look at the pain points of your business, uh, on from the financial aspects since we're talking about defi.

What I mean by that is, uh, am I paying too much, uh, for, uh, payments?

Transactions, you know, uh, visa has fees, MasterCard has fees.

Uh, is that something that's taking a huge chunk of my profit?

Maybe are there too many delays?

For example, when I have international customers and it takes three to five days to process those payments, is that something that I could improve?

Because if I got the payments right away in my bank account, as a small business, every single cent matters.

Right?

So those are two examples.

Another one would be, I have money sitting in the bank that I'm not actually using for anything.

I have an extra 20, $30,000 pounds, whatever, uh, that's not automatically earning interest and there's no way for me to actively manage this, like going in and out of, uh, interest earning accounts.

Um, is that something that I should ex.

Explore more with.

Um, so this is where a lot of crypto, uh, starts to become useful, uh, because you get payments in real time right away at a freshen of the cost.

Uh, we were talking earlier about a, a bank transfer, uh, bank, an international bank transfer can cost up to like 40, $45.

Sorry, just to play devil's advocate now with FX Plat, these are all these FX platforms, like wise, transfer wise, you know, there's loads of them.

The instant payment, no transactions, I dunno what tech they're using, but.

Don't they do the same thing, or, or it's not as good still, or it, it depends.

So there's no such thing, it's free lunch, right?

So you're probably getting ripped off in the effects rate if you're not actually paying an upfront fee.

Um, so somewhere, somewhere has to like get a, get a share of this all in order.

They're all.

I mean, they're not ripping you off next to the bank, but the bank was ripping you off so badly anyhow.

You know, anyone could come in, you know?

Yeah.

So, so that was FinTech, right?

FinTech took, uh, took the first step, uh, from traditional finance and they said, Hey, we have this new digital way of like money payment.

Yeah.

And whatever else, right?

And then crypto is taking FinTech to the next level.

How can we make improve that even more?

Right?

How can we take you to the even next level where everything is like instant and everything is extra cheap and everything is transparent so that you know exactly who's getting a share of what.

I liked your primary point.

Your initial points.

Sorry.

Look at the pain points in your business.

See if this technology can help you because it's a new tech.

You know?

This is what technology is.

It's like, look, just think of olden times.

It's like they invented this newfangled car.

It's like, yeah, well, do you have anything where a car might be helpful?

You know, it's like, oh, actually be really helpful over here.

We'll get a car.

I mean, the second point I find confusing though, I've got.

I got 50 grand in my bank from a bounceback loan as many British businesses currently do.

Cause the government basically handed out cash, handed out cash, cash, cash, and, and it's helping a lot of people.

No doubt.

Anyway, anyway, let's not get drawn into it.

I got 50 grand in my bank.

You say that, you go look at Defi, say, Hey, we'll give you three and a half percent if you buy this coin and then give it back to us or something.

You're like, what the fuck?

You know, I, I barely understand investment.

You know, I'm, I, I as a business person, I'll be like, I'm gonna keep it liquid.

Or I'm gonna put it to use, you know, but what would, what would I do in D five?

What, what is a, a sensible thing to do?

Yeah.

Well, this takes us to exactly the product that I work for.

So that was a p ah,

uh, yeah.

So at Origin, which is a company that I work for, uh, we have a product called O U S D or Origin Dollar.

But that aside, what it really does is, uh, it allows you to get instant access to some sort of yield.

Uh, this yield varies.

I can, we never promise that you're gonna get 5% or 10% or whatever percent, right?

But when you're a traditional bank, you're probably getting zero.

Point zero five, maybe 1%.

Uh, if you are in a high yield savings account, then you're getting three, three, 4%, whatever the case may be.

Now, the beautiful thing about Defi and if it's done properly, and what I mean by properly is what I said earlier where a lot of this.

Garbage that you don't need to understand.

The technological complexity is abstracted and you simply get the, the benefit of it.

And what I mean by that, as a business owner, you get paid you from whatever, bounced back into your 50 grand, right?

And then it automatically starts earning, uh, interest without you having to press a button or you, without you having to move it into a different account without you understanding how it all works.

You just see your balance of 50,000.

Oh, so you are out the back doing some stuff with it and then gi giving some money back.

Yeah.

And but what about security?

Like, so it's still in my bank though.

Yeah, it's still in your bank.

You can still spend it.

It's liquid.

It's not locked up anywhere.

So this is where again, you're getting, extracting the benefits and then if you want to understand how it works in the backend, that's where it gets incredibly complicated.

And yes, there are of course security risks that come with that.

No, what I think one of the things you wanna know as a business is what are they doing with this?

To the sort of whole fruit fraud confusion.

You know, I get what a bank does with it.

They lend it out too much.

Yeah, but what are, what are they do?

What's, what are they doing with it in crypto when they tell me to bet my thing for the next version of something, you know?

Well, well, I don't know the case that you're referring to, but I can tell you what we do and how we get that yield.

Um, we do the same exact thing as the bank, which is the lending and borrowing.

There are already decentralized version of that.

For example, one is ave protocol.

That's.

Actually, uh, based out of London, the founder at least, is based out of London and it's a, uh, decentralized, uh, lending market.

So you can lend and borrow, uh, money as you see fit.

And you, what you would do is you would get yield from lending out your assets.

Um, and that is exactly what a bank does, except that a bank tends to keep a, a huge portion of that.

And that's what I was speaking earlier about transparency, is that you don't know if the bank is 10 taking, uh, 20%, 30%, even maybe half of your half of that.

And how many other intermediaries around.

Uh, along the way are also taking a chunk of that, but with decentralization, everything is direct.

It's peer to peer, so there's no middlemen in that sense, and therefore you're getting a higher benefit.

That higher benefit translates into higher yield most of the time.

Okay.

And you mentioned there were risks that came along with ads.

Yeah.

So this is something that, that, that needs to be discussed.

Crypto is very early stage, right?

Everyone says it's just like the internet back in the nineties where a lot of like bad actors were a lot of like, just.

Thing, bad things were happening in general.

Um, the, the biggest risk in crypto are the security risk, uh, of the actual, of the code, of the technology.

Uh, we are seeing hacks every day because, you know, for every good person, there's one bad one trying to take everything.

You have a hack literally into the, the software itself.

So it stops functioning and they, and they steal it, or they just make it not work or, yeah, usually they, because it's digital currency, you can just take these digital currencies and then you can do whatever else you want with them.

Basically, they're, it's just like having money in your bank account.

Right.

So, um, in that sense, yes, the security of the protocol is something that's incredibly important.

Now, what are we doing to protect against that?

You can get audited by like incredibly, uh, talented firms, right?

So you get these cybersecurity firms that all, all day long, they just look and protect code because even banks today, right?

They also have a ton of code and they also have a bunch of protections in place that keep.

People from trying to hack your bank account.

And, um, and the same technology can also be applied to crypto, the same security measures.

But again, we're just very early stage.

So that's number one.

The second part is just the architecture of the underlying protocol.

There's a lot of experimentation now, and what I mean by that is, Uh, all those, all of these different protocols that are shilling you something as we say, meaning, oh, put your money here because we're trying this new thing.

You're gonna get 20%, put your money in this other one because of whatever reason.

Uh, but a lot of that is experimentation and it should not be done by those that don't fully understand what they're doing.

Right.

Uh, so the, the risk is that you could lose you all your money because again, it's very experimental and it's very early stage.

So that's, that's one of the risks.

What I, what I mean is that the architecture cannot be solid enough.

It's not a tried and trusted protocol.

For example, ave the one that I mentioned earlier.

Has been around for, I don't even know, I wanna say four, maybe five years now that in crypto we call, you know, battle tested.

We call it a blue chip because that is old quote unquote.

So that is, that is another risk, is that getting involved in these very early stage experimental sort of things that if you don't understand, just.

Don't get into it.

Okay.

So I'm in my business and basically you're saying, look, you can do this investment stuff, have a look at your product, but if you don't feel comfortable, cause you don't understand it, don't do it.

But if you, you can, you can look at your business and where you've got problems and you might, it might be a new set of tools to solve that problem with is in, you know, don't, don't, don't be afraid of the technology.

Do you think, I mean, is there, you know, do do, there's so many different coins now available.

You know, should a, should a business accept payment in coins?

Should it be holding coins?

It goes back to the level of expertise.

Again, if you're just gonna have crypto, but you have no idea what to do with it, then again, probably don't.

Because you need to be able to turn it into cash to pay your employees, your payroll, uh, whatever expenses you have for your business.

So if that's going to take away a lot of your time as a c E O or a, a, uh, owner of a business, then don't, don't do that.

Right?

Uh, again, this comes more from a place of comfort.

Where do you see it kind of going next?

Yeah.

In the next couple of years.

Uh, you, you know, presumably you are sort of plugging a U S D and you know all about that, but is that something you see as those kind of new coins coming more and more, or new tokens coming up?

Yeah, so I like to think of it as use cases rather than coins or tokens.

Um, just because as I mentioned, I.

See it as something that, that ideally would happen in the backend.

Now there are some front facing use cases, for example, uh, metaverse or gaming or NFTs.

Like all of that is fun.

Uh, and that can actually, uh, interact with, with the end user.

Now, I'm not encouraging anyone to actually buy a bunch of coins and, uh, just hold them because.

They, they, they just wanna be part of it.

They could, if they can afford to lose, um, in value during Denis bear market.

Uh, but where, where is it going to go?

So I think there will be some winning use cases and there will be some, uh, losing use cases.

The winners will be, like I said, um, I think NFTs are going to do well, and I don't just mean those like.

Cool images that people post online, uh, but actually mean NFTs as something that's unique that can hold intellectual property and can easily be transferable, which can apply to real estate.

It can apply to the legal environment, it can apply to intellectual property within the legal ecosystem, and so on and so forth.

I think that there's also a lot of use cases to be unlock in gaming.

Um, so that's where there's a lot of inefficiencies in the game architecture, uh, and crypto can solve a lot of that.

And of course, I believe that defy or decentralized finance is going to be one of the winning use cases.

Uh, and what I mean by that is I, I don't think that the future is fully decentralized.

I think that the future is somewhere at the, uh, um, combination of centralized interfaces that are easy to use, easy to understand.

Again, you just pay this button, it sends money, you pay this button, you get interest, and so on and so forth.

But in the backend, it will be, uh, fully decentralized in, in an ideal world that is, in my opinion, what should happen in order to, to reach that mass adoption.

Is there anything you're worried about with crypto?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So for example, uh, regulation that is not sound, right?

That's something that you, you're asking me about the future of crypto.

Um, I think that we as, as builders, need to play well with regulators because that is their job.

It is to protect the interests of people, right?

Uh, that, those that don't understand what they're doing.

Um, but in order for this to evolve and for technology and.

The financial system maybe to get better, you have to have sound regulation.

I think the regulators are not spending enough time really understanding exactly everything I'm talking about here, like the underlying use cases, how it all works, what the purpose is in order to issue sound regulation that will protect the consumer in the end.

Um, so that's something that still needs to be figured out, especially in America.

The, the type of legisla or regulation that's coming out is just.

It makes no sense.

It's like you clearly don't understand.

Like there again, they're starting to, but it's gonna be a process.

Business without Bullshit is brought to you by Ari Clark.

Straight talking financial and legal advice since 1935.

You can find us sad ari clark.com.

So Andrew, what do you think is bullshit in business?

I'm gonna go with, um, celebrity partnerships.

Ah, I the test.

Oh, good shout.

Let, let's picture about celebrities and people in partnership with celebrities.

I'm excited.

Have we got some examples of this?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gosh.

I mean, FTX and, uh, Tom Brady or Gisele, um, wait, wait, wait.

Fdx is a crypto company and did it with Tom, Tom Brady, the world's most successful American football player.

Yeah.

Why do you think that's bullshit?

I mean, I, I don't believe in celebrities endorsing something unless they're using it day in and day out and understand it, uh, perfectly.

I don't think that Tom Brady sits at home, oh, fires up his ftx, or used to fire up his FTX and start trading on leverage.

And, you know, un fully understood, uh, how it all worked.

They sort of have to put their money where their mouth is.

Yeah, I mean this is, it's, it's happening everywhere.

Kim Kardashian and like private equity firm.

I'm like, does she really understand how private equity works or are they just using her name in order to get deal flow right?

Presumably if you, if you are properly invested in it, so something like we have this big thing over here, or fairly big thing about re and football club.

It's not that big.

No, that's owned by, have you not heard this?

It's owned by Ryan Reynolds.

Yeah.

Oh yeah.

Everyone loves Ryan.

Yeah.

But he, you know, he actually has paid money to own something and turns up at all their matches and makes an effort presumably, that kind of thing's.

Okay.

Yeah.

But this is different because, for example, ftx, it's trading, I mean, most people dunno how to trade.

So if I were like the, one of the world's most famous.

Supermodels, football players, doesn't matter, whatever.

And I knew that my audience is someone who respects me for that.

And I know that the product that I'm selling is a trading product.

I'll be like, hold on.

Uh, am I selling something that people actually understand?

Could they lo lose all of their life savings doing this?

If I'm selling like, uh, some skincare that's 20 bucks, who cares?

You bought it, it didn't work for you.

Whatever.

I actually think you'll bang on.

I, I think it's fair to say that, uh, you cannot lend your brand of trust to something like this unless you really understand it.

If you really understand.

Stood it.

And then I think in something as complex as this is a celebrity, you'd have to say, I'm not going on public endorsements, but I am happy to explain it on a podcast or something.

What I understand my experience of it, why I think there's some positive aspects.

I also think, given that America's the most litigious comp country on the planet, that why aren't they thinking to themselves What's gonna happen when somebody who doesn't understand it loses a.

Buck ton of money and goes to court and says, I only invested in this because Tom Brady told me to, and I've now lost money.

I think, I think they'll be friends with the owners for starters.

I think that's where it starts.

So they'll think, oh, I trust them, and they, you know, they'll be lots of legal contracting about protecting them, but I think you'll fucking bang on, I think it's fucking outrageous to go out there and promote something as risky and complicated as crypto.

Unless you, you, you, you, you are.

Proper in that space and, and have the right to endorse it.

So yeah.

Ding ding.

I think that's a great show.

Okay, this is quick Far Round's.

Gonna keep a short and punchy.

We're gonna ask you a list of questions, get to know you a little better.

You have about five to 10 seconds per answer per question.

We are not gonna interrupt you these, putting some music on Ham.

Hammer off.

What was your first job?

Uh, I was working a campus job at university where I was swiping cards to make sure the students, uh, lived where they were supposed to live.

What was your worst job?

Uh, I owned a physical c commodities trading company.

Uh, so even though I ran a company, it was the worst.

A what?

A work company my life.

Physical C Commodities Training.

Commodities.

Oh, commodities.

Physical commodities training.

Yeah.

Okay, welcome about that.

Favorite subjects at school.

Math, uh, what's your special skill?

Ooh.

Uh, let's go with creative thinking, lateral thinking or creative thinking.

La uh, creative thinking.

What did you wanna be when you grew up?

A lawyer.

Now that's just good choice.

What did your parents want you to be, grow up when you grew up?

Happy.

Oh yeah.

Common.

What's your go-to karaoke song?

Hmm.

Um, something Whitney Houston.

Okay.

That's difficult to sing.

Sing.

I'm now thinking bodyguard.

Yeah.

Everyone thinks the bodyguard.

Yeah.

We don't need that.

Isn't that it?

We didn't say that.

There is usually alcohol before karaoke.

That.

Without that I would, that wouldn't have choice.

Karaoke choice is amazing.

I mean, honestly, we could solve a lot.

I think they would do a lot better.

These, uh, big political conferences where they've all gotta get on that.

Richie and all the world leaders have to do a karaoke on the first stage just to get over just to, just to get over their shit and loosen up a bit.

I mean, how much better do an a and b studies with their decision making and, and, and, and politic?

What is this happened?

Did it Yes.

No way.

Well, the, the person in UK politics, he's obsessed with karaoke and used to throw karaoke parties all the time, at which all the other politicians used to go and sing terrible songs.

There's a.

Terrible clip out there is Liz Trust.

And look what she did to our country.

Oh, she, for the three and a half minutes, she was Prime Minister office dogs, business or bullshit business all day apart when they need a we.

Oh yeah.

Um, have you ever been fired?

Does mutually agreeing to leave a company?

Yes.

Yeah, Alex, cuz that's basically why happens when get fired.

You go, I'm gonna fire you, or you could resign, you know, what's your vice?

Ooh.

Uh, I would say, uh, Anger, maybe I do have a hot temper, anger.

Oh, and that's your vice.

That's like, so you must do like kickboxing or something.

Do you, what'd you, what'd you, how do you, how'd you, oh, you smoke a lot of dope.

What's the, what's the solution?

You know, uh, I do a lot of strength training, so yeah, I do have an outlet.

So when, when you get angry, you can hit hard, is that what you're saying?

I could, yeah.

Uh, right.

Uh, that was it.

You did great.

Um, fantastic.

So this is where we're gonna give you 30 seconds just to pitch a company, um, or whatever you'd like.

Uh, go for it.

All right.

So, um, I work at Origin Protocol.

Origin is in the business of bringing the next 100 million users into crypto.

We're starting with two use cases.

One is actually in the NFT space, which is why I was reluctant earlier.

Uh, and what we're doing there is, uh, enabling creators to.

Create their custom storefronts for their N F T collections.

Whether you are an individual creator, an artist in London, or even a big brand, um, you have your own interface where you can have, uh, where you can connect with your community and, uh, sell your art or whatever, uh, product you, it is that you're selling by NFTs.

Uh, on the other side, we are leveraging the power of decentralized finance to build a suite of products that will onboard, like I said, hopefully millions of users in the long term.

In the ecosystem, we're starting with something called O U S D or Origin Dollar, uh, which is a simple way for anyone in crypto who understands crypto and defi, uh, to earn superior yield, uh, on their holdings.

Um, so what that means in simple terms is that you hold.

A stable coin such as, uh, a dollar in your account and you're getting yield anywhere from, you know, a couple percentage points to double digit, uh, yield on, on it, uh, passively without having to learn how it all works, what happens at the backend, uh, visiting a bunch of websites and so on and so forth.

I think that was slightly more than 30 seconds, but we'll let you off and if people wanna find out about you, where do they go?

Yeah, I'm, uh, I'm on LinkedIn.

I also have a Twitter that I never use, but, uh, you can't hit me up there if you'd like to learn more.

Um, man.

Yeah, those are my platforms.

So there you have it.

Thank you very much, Andrew.

That was great.

Uh, thank you to Pippa, thank you to de our producer.

Uh, this was this week's episode of Business Without Bullshit, and we'll be back with Bwb Extra on Thursday.