What's the right mix that makes a project investable? From investing insights, to community building and limitations with the banking industry CEO and Co founder of Gains Associates DAO Alexandre Raffin reveals his insights. Gems dropped from his gaming days in Europe to DAO management and future plans. Alexander speaks to AdLunam's Co Founder Jason Fernandes on todays episode. Tune in.

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Alexandre Raffin- Gains Associates

Participants:

• Jason Fernandes (Co-founder of AdLunam)

• Alexandre Raffin (CEO of Gains Associate)

00:23

Jason

So hello and welcome, everyone, to AdLunam’s Diving into Crypto show. AdLunam is the industry's first Engage to Earn, Proof of Attention Launchpad. Diving into Crypto is our Spotify series where we talk to some of the movers and shakers of the industry, share a little bit about what they're doing to push this space further. So before we begin, let's do a brief sound check. Can everybody hear?

00:47

Alexandre

Yeah. Perfect.

00:50

Jason

All right. Okay. Yeah. So feel free to use the reaction buttons when you hear gems from our speakers. At the end of the program, we'll open the room for questions and answers. You can send your questions across to our Twitter account at AdLunam Inc. And today we have a very interesting show for you guys. Today, our guest, Alexandre Raffin is legendary in the crypto space. Alexander is the co-founder and CEO of Gains, one of the largest, oldest, most active crypto communities in the world. He holds a master's degree in computer science, especially about new technologies. Sort of can't wait to get into new and exciting revolutions that will possibly transform the way we live. I know that we've had a chance to co-invest on a lot of projects together through NFT tech. And before jumping into crypto, Alexandre was into League of Legends, where he played competitively, playing on the stage in front of hundreds of people, peaked at ranked 300 in Europe.

01:52

Jason

So let's start with some questions. Okay, cool. So, Alexandre, let's get started. Tell us a bit about yourself, kind of how you got into crypto and where this switch flipped.

02:07

Alexandre

Right, awesome. Thank you for the I mean, I guess you should also tell people a bit about yourself, how you've been featured in so many magazines and your past as an entrepreneur. And I'm not sure how people know NFT take, how much they know about it, but it's by Mario Nawfal, the Guy who's been so popular on Twitter spaces, getting celebrities, 10,000 listeners and so on.

02:34

Alexandre

So you've been working with him just so that people know a bit about you as well.

02:38

Alexandre

03:26

Jason

Thanks. Thanks Alexandre, for that introduction and also telling people a bit about kind of how we knew each other and the work that I do, I guess. Interestingly, I came across Gains a while ago when I was over at NFT Technologies, which for the people that don't know makes a lot of investments in the Web3 spaces. Also has a sister company called IBC and Natural Blockchain Consulting which hosts a roundtable show which is also pretty popular on Twitter. But yeah, we ended up sharing a lot of deal flow back and forth and a lot of the projects. Gains has such a great reputation in terms of really understanding token architecture, tokenomics that I think a lot of retail investors when they see Gains on a deck are quick to realize that somebody who really understands tokenomics has examined the tokenomics of this project and thought it's worthwhile.

04:27

Jason

And I think that carries a lot of weight for a lot of people. But going from that, if you can talk about what got you passionate about web3, I know you sort of entered this sort of from a linear where you sort of saw a profit opportunity, but I'm curious because I can clearly see a lot of passion in the work that you guys do. So I'm curious where that comes from.

04:53

Alexandre

Right, well, there's a few things, but when I knew nothing about crypto, I stayed in it because I still had a feeling that there were so many smart people working on it and so.

05:05

Alexandre

I was asking dozens of questions to my friends to understand more. But I still had a feeling that It wasn't something like just academic or Intellectual just for the sake of it, like these smart people were executing and that was something I really liked. Also. It was really fast moving and I thought I would learn a lot in this fast paced environment. And I mean also I had a few bad experiences with banks. It's pretty crazy if you want to send just even a few thousand dollars abroad, they ask you so many questions and so on and so it's really not a good experience. And so for that, crypto is a good solution.

05:48

Jason

Yeah, it's amazing. A lot of people come to crypto from sort of all areas. Like some people are sort of libertarian and it's about freedom and it's about sovereignty and things like that. And for other people it's very practical in terms of just moving money about and how difficult it is. And I remember in our previous company I had a company called Smart Clock and we often had to send funds to China to get samples and LCD screens and so on. And it was just a nightmare because just sending my own money out, like 100, $200 out, I had to literally fill like an 89 page form and then literally specifies exactly what I was importing. And it says at the bottom of the form that if you're wrong about if you've said anything wrong that it's illegal and stuff. And they didn't have for example, they didn't have a section for development boards, so you kind of had to pick the closest possible to it, which is like I think it was like a controller timer or something like that.

06:49

Jason

And it was just so scary because it's like, okay, great. If these guys determine that this is a lie or incorrect, that's literally illegal. And this is all because I'm trying to send $150 out. So yeah, I totally get where you're coming from, just from the perspective of sending funds over, but going back to projects that you've invested in and things like that. I'm curious, what would you say in terms of community? Would you say that's crucial to a project and sort of what role do you think that plays from a perspective of community?

07:24

Alexandre

Yeah, of course. So everyone uses the word community, right? Building a real community is very hard. There's no shortcut. You have to be active, you have to be genuinely passionate about your project.

07:36

Alexandre

So that you attract people with the same energy. And I think it's one of the reasons why we had so many fast growing companies, unicorns. In just a year or two, of course, the whole crypto industry was booming. But the way I look at it is you transform potentially all your customers, or even not like direct customers, but just your fans into business kind of, right? They're going to like on Twitter and they're going to make memes and everything they're going to tell their friends. You don't really tell your friends about Amazon or other traditional services the way you would about a crypto service. So it's just a huge leverage for all the network and the people that Love what you do because they get to have a stake in your success and it's fun. I think communities are extremely important for that reason.

08:31

Jason

So in terms of you picking certain projects to invest in, how much does that play a part in it and sort of what is your overall method? Because I'm definitely curious about that. Your overall method in sort of selecting projects that you guys invest in, right.

08:48

Alexandre

Does play a role. We have a few quick heuristics we use to check how strong the community is. For example, one that I like to use is checking how many people I follow. So people that I trust also follow a certain project. It's not even really about the number of followers because you can easily have 50,100 thousand followers. But that doesn't mean much in itself. What matters is 50, 15, 100 of people you follow also follow that project. For me that means a lot more. So that's one of the ways we take a look. And I mean, it's very easy when you develop a feel for it on Telegram you very quickly go and see if it's just like people saying hello or if there are actual good discussions and good banter or whatever. So that's quite easy to see. Regarding the criteria we use, there's quite a lot, but I would say the main three.

09:47

Alexandre

10:51

Alexandre

When we look back the team first, second, the valuation needs to make sense and we've learned our lessons. The valuations fluctuate based on market sentiments. So we try to negotiate the best valuations. We pass on a lot of projects that's with very solid teams because the valuation is too high, for example. And third, I would say the tokenomics, because again, there's a lot of very good projects, but we invest to make money, right? And we need to also protect our community. And so if the token is based on error, and sure, it can pump a bit with influencers at launch, but if there is no sustainable demand for the token in the long term, because that's where the real 100 X or more comes in, then it's not a good fit for us. So I would say these three team valuation, tokenomics and community, as you mentioned, are very important points.

11:50

Alexandre

But after some time in crypto, you don't think about it that much. You basically get a feel for people and if they bullshit you or not, but you do have to take the time and go in hundreds of calls and then you can tell very quickly if the project is good or not.

12:08

Jason

Yeah, that's a great insight and I totally agree with you. I think that team is really important. But I think it's more so from the perspective of their integrity and their sort of way of doing business and their approach to business. Again, also their business ethics. Because ultimately, the amount of power that somebody who is running a crypto company has, we know about FTX and essentially kind of how he essentially had nobody on his so and oftentimes that is the case with crypto companies where there's nobody really on the board. And so you're placing a large degree of trust on the founder itself and the founder's team and sort of their ethics and what they want to do. And I think that's so much more true with crypto than it is with equity. And I think people don't really pay enough attention to that, sort of like the ethics and the business ethics of the founders and sort of their history with money and things like that.

13:12

Jason

Because if you give a new founder a couple of million, two $3 million, and there's, like, zero accountability. And this guy's never had more than a couple of hundred thousand in his bank account at a time, it can be quite heady. And it can be difficult for somebody like that, especially a new entrepreneur, to sort of determine what are absolute expenses and what are things that can be things that they need to bootstrap. So I think that's something that as investors, I don't think that people give enough weight to. You mentioned Ian. Ian, great guy. I was on a spoke at a panel together at the Indian Blockchain Association. He actually came down to Goa. We hung out. We spent some time together in Pan Jam. He really liked Goa, said he definitely wanted to come back. Actually, his birthday was a couple months after that in Dubai.

14:04

Jason

And I remember Evan called me because Evan Luther was another investor in the space. But interestingly, I believe he got hacked because he showed something on his screen and he lost. I think it was like just two $3 million portfolio. I think everything was drained. And I think since then he's been somewhat quiet. But very interesting guy, though. Interesting, that his investment philosophy. But I think if he gave a bit more weight to the ethics of those founders, as opposed to just sort of whether they worked at a big tech company, he probably would have been better off today. I don't know how he's doing today. I hope he's okay. But yeah, moving on, just a quick bit about that.

14:53

Alexandre

He's actually working at, I believe it's quite successful, The company named Token Metrics, and they provide insights here with some kind of AI on projects. So I think it's doing quite well. They've probably raised around already. But maybe one last point regarding how we choose projects. One key difference between games, which is a decentralized VC and traditional VCs, that we have the power of community, our own community. We have a research team, so we only have 24 hours. And by the way, Jason, there's some echo on your side. What I wanted to get at is we do check projects quite thoroughly, but especially in the bull market when things are super fast, having literally hundreds of eyeballs from the community, that they also invest their own money. So they're going to be pretty relentless. And it actually happened a couple of times. So a couple of times over 200 plus projects that people found things that we didn't see and then we passed on the projects.

16:05

Alexandre

We're like, okay guys, you're right. We thought it was good, but there's this shady thing that you guys found, so let's pass. And so that gives even more credibility. When you see gains on the cap table, you know that we have our experience five years full time in crypto, very good feeling about projects, our track records. And you also have hundreds of people that they're each putting their own money just like we are, and they also did their own due diligence. And at a traditional firm, you're going to have just a few people just like we do. So I think for that reason you can be even more confident in the projects.

16:40

Jason

Yeah, I'm curious also about that. How much does your community have, say in terms of in projects you invest in and projects that you are sort of messaging for complaints and things like that? How fluid is that sort of transfer of information or questions, let's say, from people within your community to companies that you invested in?

17:05

Alexandre

So we're actually going to turn into an On-chain DAO next month. Slowly the DAO will have voting power over different categories of decisions. For now, we take input informally from the community, but if we see people, they bring up an important point, then of course we engage in discussion and if needed, we take action, which could be passing, could be checking out a project, asking questions to find out more to the team and so on.

17:35

Jason

Yeah, because due diligence with crypto is really difficult. I remember there was a company that were considering investing in and they said that they had a partnership with TikTok that hadn't been announced yet. There was final stages and stuff like that they didn't want to talk too much about it because they didn't want to jinx it or cause any bad effects. And luckily for us, while we’re in the process of investing with them, TikTok actually made a partnership with another company that was doing something very similar to what they were doing. And so I got on a call with them and I said, hey, I've just heard that TikTok is putting this out. Why would they be announcing this and not be announcing the partnership that they have with you? And do you have any documents to share with relation to your partnership? And actually, believe it or not, they were extremely reluctant to share any information.

18:29

Jason

And finally I found out it's because they really didn't have anything and it was really completely a figment of their imagination. And it's very easy to say, oh, a partnership is in the final stages of happening and then use that as leverage to get massive amounts of investment and then all of a sudden go, oh, hey, the partnership fell through, but now we're invested by all these people, right. It's just so difficult to do due diligence, particularly in this space. Go ahead.

18:59

Alexandre

No, for sure. So what we do is also we've had this experience with projects saying, oh, X-Y-Z they're investors. And then we're friends with these guys and we're like, hey, did you guys invest in this project? And they're like, no, we're just in discussion with them. Product owners will conflate soft commits or just having had a call, and they will kind of lie because they know it gets the ball rolling. But if you find out if you have the network like we do to cross check the information, then it's just going to make us hard to pass on them because if they behave like that, what are they going to do? And also regarding what you said, it's super hard to do due diligence. You cannot verify everything, and you just have to accept some level of risk in crypto because you have incredible upside. You have the most upside, the asset class with the most upside on the planet. So of course there's going to be more risk than in other industries. That's just how it works.

20:04

Jason

21:00

Jason

And I think that's something that's really useful to look at when you're investing in founders is to sort of be able to track their history and see what have these guys done before, and also kind of how they know each other. Because one of the things that happened to me is we invested in a company and then all of a sudden the two founders had a falling out and one founder just left. And the reason we'd actually invested in the company was because of the founder that had left. And so then were kind of stuck with this company in our portfolio and really never did anything because when you have a founder leave, I mean, that's the other thing. It's like sort of what is the chemistry between the founders. So I think the team is super important.

21:44

Alexandre

Yeah, this is actually something we have in our deck because we have Gains, right. The investment part where people can join, but we're also building, YouMeme, a social network for memes and we're raising for it. So we have a deck for that. And on the deck there is written that the founders, we have known each other for the past five years. We have worked together actually for the past five years because the first cause of startup failure is founder disagreements. Because if it gets hard, you have discussions, if there's too much money, you have issues as well. So there's lots of reasons for hard discussions. And when you have been through some time together, you have gone through the very bad and the very good times together. And if you have come out of it alive and together, then that means a lot.

22:40

Jason

Yeah, I mean, you mentioned YouMeme, and I think that brings us perfectly into the next topic I'm curious about. Can you tell us more about your track record, sort of the projects that you've invested in, the ones that have worked really well, and some of the lessons that you learned kind of from that?

22:59

Alexandre

24:02

Alexandre

Gaming infrastructure, we invested in Reef, for example, went on Binance, did very well, something like 50 X and many other projects. I guess that's it.

24:16

Jason

25:10

Jason

I'm not sure if we did or not, but that would have definitely influenced that decision. But yeah, those are some great projects. Did you invest in Avalanche as well?

25:19

Alexandre

Yeah, we did, and I did also personally. So that was a very good one, for sure.

25:25

Jason

Yeah. I love Avalanche. I had some discussions with them earlier a couple of weeks ago about sort of what they were doing in India. And I think that they've got this subnet strategy, which is really interesting. I think that's going to really make that token extremely valuable. Because the way in order to create a subnet and a lot of companies are doing that. A lot of companies, matter of fact, that NFT Tech, I think, and Games has invested. I think one or two companies have actually created subnets on Avalanche. And what that means is that allows them to be a lot more efficient. These guys can also have their own tokens, that they have their own subnet, but it increases the utility for the main avalanche token because you need to stake a certain amount avalanche tokens before you can create a subnet. And not only that, but anybody who mines tokens for your subnet has to also mine tokens for Avalanche.

26:22

Jason

26:47

Alexandre

Yeah, YouMeme. So the website is, youmeme.com, it's like YouTube, but with meme instead of Tube. So if you guys want to check it out, if you love memes, if you need five minutes out of your day to relax, feel free to go there. For now, it's tokenized only with off chain points. So there's, YouMeme, diamonds, and these will be convertible to human tokens later on. And basically it's meme to earn so you can create memes. And there's meme contests with various crypto projects. And if your meme is selected among the winners, then you get some USDC. And later on you even get Tokens.

27:25

Alexandre

So that's pretty cool. We also have lots of amazing features coming. And the one I'm particularly excited about, because I've been a gamer in my childhood and teenage years, is the Gamification aspect. And it looks just amazingly beautiful. And it's going to be the first social network in the world that's going to be gamified. So it's going to be in between a video game and a social network. So you literally will have levels, quests, achievements, rewards if you log in and all that is just going to make the experience more fun, more engaging. I'm super excited for it. And also with games we have lots and lots of things planned. We have a launch pad of our own because we do recognize that the public sale market is, I don't know, probably 100 times bigger and actually easier than the private sale market because public sales just attract many more people.

28:26

Alexandre

29:14

Alexandre

And we have a few other more minor things plans, but I guess these are the big ones for now.

29:22

Jason

Yeah, I think from a philosophical perspective, we definitely agree with you on that, because one of the whole points of AdLunam as a Launchpad is to sort of have to allow projects to have a significant amount of being able to dial in who even their public investors are sort of on a more closely to the way they would do their private investors. So I don't think that it's ideal for projects to have even public, sorry, retail investors that expect to flip their token and I think that's not what most of them want. So I think what's going to end up happening is what we're trying to do anyway is provide that data to them. So for example, if a guy has sort of never played any games, then maybe he's not the person that you select to invest. So maybe there's not just an open forum but there's also like a pull and a push where you also sort of select certain people to be investors and then some investors are sort of selected by the company.

30:25

Jason

And on the flip side, some of them is sort of the investor selecting which companies they want to invest in. But going on to YouMeme, which you mentioned, I think you guys are really onto something there because the entire communication for Web3 today is memes. That's how communication happens. There's not a lot of points being made outside of memes and it's. Interesting because if you think about it, even in finance, on something like Wall Street bets and something like that, all the main discussions and everything that's being said, that's of consequence, that moves markets are memes. And that's sort of what the currency of the day is. So I think that you guys are really onto something in terms of why is there not a social network focused on memes, like gamification of memes? Because creating this content, why are those guys not being reimbursed or benefited in some way?

31:31

Jason

But if you could talk a bit more about sort of, YouMeme, how it does it, what your plans are. We have a bit of extra time, so I think maybe we can spend it doing that.

31:45

Alexandre

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I've done so much research on memes and social networks in the past six months or a year, and the more I learned, the more convinced I was. I'll give you a few facts. Memes, they get ten X more reach than usual content. And so if you're, like, in charge of marketing for a company or whatever, you essentially have no reason not to post memes. So I guess that it's. Just maybe you don't post only memes because it might be weird, but it's like, people know memes are good, but I don't think they know how good they are. I don't think they're utilizing the full potential of memes. So that's the first point. It's like crazy, right? I mean, if you have a magic trick to get ten X more reach, just tomorrow, just post a meme instead of posting like, traditional text or traditional image.

32:42

Alexandre

That's pretty crazy. So that's the first thing. And the second thing is the social networks. And everyone is talking about social networks. In Web3, there's been values issues, governance issues, censorship issues. We have the Twitter files, the Facebook files, knowing how the FBI had kind of not god mode, but close to that, access to DMs of people and everything. So it is needed for our society that we have a social network where we know that everything's going to be good and we're not going to be cheated. Our data privacy is not going to be violated and everything. So people know there's going to be a global Web Three based social network. And many people have tried so far, but they kind of have all failed. And there's multiple reasons why. Maybe it was too early, but I think one of the main reasons is that these guys tried to be too generic from the get go.

33:44

Alexandre

And so that doesn't work. You need stickiness, you need something special, unique to bring a tight core user base, and then you can expand mainstream much later into something generic. And so that's our approach is to start with the meme niche, and for now, it's working very well. So I guess these are a few thoughts on memes and social networks for you.

34:07

Jason

Yeah, I think people I've worked for a lot of traditional Web3 companies like web3 companies that just sort of shoot from the hip a little bit less and are just a little bit more slow moving and they see memes sort of with suspicion. I remember being at this meeting and I was telling them that their social media team, that they really push memes and essentially do a meme contest and everything. And they felt that it was just distasteful and off brand. And it lowered their brand to have me associated with, let's say, guys posting Pablo Escobar photographs or whatever from the Netflix related to them. But I tried to tell them, I was like, hey, this is how communication is happening in Web3 today. This is what we have. The tweets that you're putting out, nobody's reading, they're checking out memes. But yeah, speaking of sort of the industry sort of situation, I'm curious, what do you think in terms of the IDO?

35:15

Jason

I mean, we know Bitcoin is now just about coming up. Yesterday went 23, eight. I think now we're at 23 one. What do you think we would need to be at in order to start for the ideal market to pick up? Or do you think it's already sort of picked up already and sort of the funding market for early stage projects?

35:40

Alexandre

I'll answer, but just before that, I wanted to add one cool fact about memes. So Elon Musk, arguably one of the most powerful men on the planet, one of the most successful entrepreneurs. So definitely he understands something about humans and society and he tweeted, who controls memes, controls the universe. So I think that says a lot. And the more I was thinking about it, I think there might be a future where society is slowly but surely memefied, that in most of our interactions we use memes more and more naturally. It's already the case in some young companies. You have memes when you do business presentations. You might even use memes as thumbnails of articles. So maybe not on Forbes and the Wall Street Journal yet, but maybe in a few years, who knows? Just to conclude on the memes with that, regarding the market sentiment and the ideas, I think we're not there yet.

36:38

Alexandre

37:37

Alexandre

I think it's a wise bet to start placing chips slowly.

37:45

Jason

So do you think stuff is sort of heated up in the private investing space too? Because I know that generally speaking, when we make investments in these projects, your unlock happens related to the TGE. And a lot of these projects are delaying the TGE. So a lot of new investments don't really make a whole lot of sense because you have really no idea and the company has no idea when they intend to do a TGE. And so I'm curious whether you see that changing and sort of what is the scene that you see sort of in the private sale investing stage. I know there's a lot of projects right now that are sort of desperate for funds and having a hard time sustaining.

38:30

Alexandre

Well, maybe to understand a bit more. So VCs can be quite predatory and VCs, they also have a pulse on the ecosystem, right? And the VCs, they want the best deals possible. So want entrepreneurs to be desperate, they want them to run out of funds and to lower the valuation. The VCs want to negotiate hard and the more they wait, the more they have leverage. There is a ton of capital, I don't have the exact figure, but billions and billions, dozens of billions in various funds waiting to fund these projects. But I think at the high level they kind of all agree, maybe passively, that it's good for them to wait and to push entrepreneurs to their limits to get the best deals. So I don't think we have really seen that. I think we can get more pain. It feels weird. I have a lot of trouble to believe in.

39:30

Alexandre

Let's say we're going to go up from here a lot, but who knows.

39:34

Jason

Maybe yeah, I totally agree. It's funny because we advise some projects at AdLunam, I think we advised two or three projects. And some of these projects, both the ones that we advise and just other ones that we are associated with, some of them never raised funds at all. They're just brand new and turns out that they decided to start in a bear market. So they've raised almost no funds. They have a hard time getting by and then they start getting desperate and doing things like thinking that lowering their valuation is going to help or why are their advisors not introducing them to other advisors? I mean, it doesn't make sense for advisors to introduce you to other projects because really even the advisors sort of their pay usually comes in advisor tokens that again don't kick in as part of their TGE. So they're going to be less likely to be interested in advising new projects, too, which is something that I've often told, brand new projects coming out, that now is not the time to put you in front of a bunch of advisors and investors.

40:42

Jason

Now is sort of the time to wait and not be desperate. You guys need to sort of focus on building, and when the market's back, then go to fundraise. Because there's no point spending a whole bunch of time and money trying to fundraise and raising a really small amount of money when your time is better served, perhaps building your product and actually moving forward. That's one of the things that I tell projects. Getting desperate is not the way to attract investors. And I tell them, it's amazing how little this is internalized by entrepreneurs, because I've had entrepreneurs go like, hey, we can do this. And I'm like, you're not helping your case by coming off desperate to these investors. It's not going to get you any further. But, yeah, cool. We have another few minutes. I think we can just check in with some of the audience questions, if there are any.

41:42

Jason

Let me just double check. I'll have those sent to me. In the meantime, would you like to talk about sort of Gains' overall philosophy? So the audience would want to know what your personal philosophy is. Let's say what your personal philosophy for Gains is, and then what is your personal philosophy for now? Alexandre and in terms of what keeps you going in this industry, and what are you hoping to achieve? I mean, clearly a lot of people have more money than they would reasonably be able to spend, especially people in this industry, investors and stuff, they're not working for money. They're working to make an impact in some areas. So I'm curious what impact you see yourself making, what's your personal philosophy and also what you see for Gains?

42:33

Alexandre

Well, what a question. Thank you for asking. I guess there's a lot to say, and I'd be curious to return the question after. So for Gains. Well, when I was learning how the financial system and investing works, at some point I was very pissed off because it feels like it's a closed system for people already rich to make them richer. And in traditional finance, there is this concept of accredited investor. And you can be an accredited investor in a few ways, but essentially, you need to have money. Either you have more than 1 million in assets, or you need to prove that over the last two years, you made more than 300K or something like that. There's a few ways you can become one, and then you get special deals. As an accredited investor, you have a network that traditional people do not have access to.

43:23

Alexandre

But let's say you have a regular job, you make some money, and after work, you decide to spend a few hours. You research on your computer. These crypto projects or these traditional companies rather. And you want to invest but you cannot because you don't have the money yet. So basically smart but kind of poor or average people do not have access to the opportunities that maybe dumb and rich people have. They may be smart and rich anyway. It feels very interest that there's this discrepancy in opportunity based on how wealthy people are at the start. And of course, I mean it's in the name of protection, but in crypto because it's still unregulated and even with regulations we can do things differently, which is the beauty of it, because Gains is, by the way, in the process of being regulated, but we still have these amazing opportunities.

44:21

Alexandre

So what drew me to crypto in part was that there are literally life changing opportunities financially for everyone, right? And that is so strong and so powerful. And so the idea of Gains is to really make that possible for as many people in the world as we can. If you hear of Gains and you want to get in, you can buy the token, access the deal flow and then you get in on dues. And also with Gains we support the projects, we contribute to their success. So that's what Gains is about. And small, like Easter egg, gains is also an acronym, so the letters they stand for Group Action is Never Small. And our logo is a whale made of fishes to show that lots of fishes. Small investors can be as strong as a whale and have the same opportunities, if not better than them.

45:19

Alexandre

So I guess this is what we do at Gains.

45:23

Jason

I had no idea. That's totally new to me. I did notice your logo, but I never noticed that there were actually fish in there, which is really crazy. I guess I didn't look at it close enough. That's really cool. Even the name group action is never small. That's also news to me. So I definitely think you should put that out more. Very few people actually know that AdLunam is to the moon in Latin. That's what we're all about. So it's really cool. I think somebody should do a show just on the origin of the names of these web3 companies. But I think overall in terms of philosophy, I think AdLunam definitely shares Gains philosophy in terms of sort of democratizing crypto investments. I know one of the things you're looking at is for most IDO Launchpads. If you wanted to get in a launch pad, let's say a paid network, for example, where Lawrence our CTO was previously, I think it's like 10,000, $20,000 in order to just invest $300.

46:32

Jason

So if you're somebody just starting out, there's no way for you to get involved in the whole idea industry at all. I mean, I know a lot of people ask me what projects to invest in and I often tell them other than some of the main tokens like in the top five. I really don't invest in a whole lot of altcoins other than early stage projects pre IDO. If retail investors really want to see gains, that they want to look at their portfolio and then say, okay, look, I'm going to have, let's say, 30% of this portfolio with something like Bitcoin and ethereum and I'm going to have, let's say, 70% of this portfolio because I have a high risk tolerance. You might want to have 70% of your portfolio in IDOs, for example. Well, you can't really do that if you have less than a certain amount of ticket fund to get in.

47:28

Jason

And so I think that was one of the things that we felt at AdLunam, is that let's have the people that are contributing to these projects, that are contributing, that are building the hyper lease projects, just award them by allowing them to partake, giving them an option to partake in the best success that's available in the industry, which is sort of investing in IDOs. I think from a philosophical perspective, that's sort of where we align with gains, I think. And that's sort of what we're hoping to achieve with AdLunam. With regard to me personally, since you mentioned curious about how I came to this from when I was in college, my final year, I was a political science major and I wrote a thesis on democracy and whether the United States should be the United States’ strategy to be spreading democracy worldwide. And ultimately what I wrote was that it was more important for countries, if it was in the US best national interest, that other countries were democracies.

48:37

Jason

It was more important that America spread democratic values rather than democracy itself. Because democracy isn't about being able to vote. It's sort of about a number of factors. It's more like a mini prong test. So for example, does a country have a two party system? Does a country have at least a two party system? For example, do you have like 98% of the people voting for one politician? Then maybe that's not a fair election system. And then of course there's freedom of the press. But I think one of the key things is the control of money, right? I think somebody said, give me control of a nation's money and I care not who makes its laws. And that's really where it comes down to it's Like money is a form through which governments are able to control their people. To some extent, that control can benevolent.

49:38

Jason

But when it comes to governments sort of digging into people's finances, for example, in Greece, we know that the government literally went into people's bank accounts and took money out of their bank accounts just willy- nilly. And that's something that shouldn't be able to happen. And we've seen other areas where interest rates, for example, are being changed, quantitative easing. So for example, if much more money is in the system, then your money is worth less, which means the government has effectively, essentially reached into your wallet and taken out money. And I think that crypto is sort of a solution for that. Crypto is something that can guard against and give people the little guy a way to fight back against systemic oppression. And I think that's probably what drives me the most when it comes to crypto, for sure.

50:33

Alexandre

That's awesome. By the way, I apologize for this sound because I'm currently in Dubai Mall going to meet one of our investors. But, yeah, I wanted to add that bitcoin is freedom. And it might be hard to understand exactly why because that's, like, very quickly said, but for sure, 100%.

50:51

Jason

Awesome. So I think we'll close this up now. We're getting to the NFL broadcast. I guess so, but yeah. Thank you so much for joining. Alex Alexander. It's been awesome having you in games on. We really appreciate you as partners. It's been great having you on. And everybody else, please tune in next time. Same time, same channel for Diving to Crypto. Thank you so much, everybody.

51:19

Alexandre

Thank you so much. Jason, see you.

51:21

Jason

All right, you have a great day. Thank you, everybody and see you next time.