7investing and CryptoEQ are embarking on a long-term partnership! Click here to see the official announcement.

One of 7investing’s key principles is to think longer-term. There’s a lot of short-term noise in the market, which causes significant volatility in stock prices. Patient investors who can tune this noise out and focus on the bigger picture have an excellent chance of improving their long-term returns.

There is also significant volatility in the world of cryptocurrencies. Traders obsess over the daily price of Bitcoin, rather than focusing instead of the growing global adoption of blockchains.

So what are the important signals that long-term investors should take note of for cryptocurrencies and blockchains?

To answer that question, 7investing has brought in the crypto experts. Spencer Randall is the co-founder and CEO of CryptoEQ, whose mission is to simplify cryptocurrencies and provide thorough research for investors to make more educated decisions. 7investing and CryptoEQ have partnered as organizations to help individuals better understand the collision of equities and cryptocurrencies.

In this exclusive interview, 7investing CEO Simon Erickson chats with Spence about the more important developments taking place in the world of crypto. The two discuss America’s recent regulations, countries who are adopting Bitcoin as legal tender, the potentially allocation of crypto in retirement accounts, and an intriguing opportunity for blockchain infrastructure in the Metaverse.

Publicly-traded companies mentioned in this interview include Coinbase, MicroStrategy, and Voyager Digital. Cryptocurrencies mentioned include Bitcoin and Ethereum. 7investing’s advisors or its guests may have positions in the companies or cryptocurrencies mentioned.

Timestamps

00:00 – Overview of cryptocurrency and blockchain global adoption

07:17 – The Big Macro: America’s Infrastructure Bill and the role of regulations

13:15 – Global Perspective: Several nations are adopting Bitcoin as legal tender

18:39 – Financial Services: Investment advisors are now buying cryptocurrencies for retirement accounts

23:10 – Coinbase is a publicly-traded stock that has direct exposure to cryptocurrencies

27:53 – On Spencer’s Radar: Blockchain infrastructure and its role in the Metaverse

Transcript

Simon Erickson  0:00

Hello everyone and welcome to today’s edition of the 7investing podcast. I’m 7investing founder and CEO Simon Erickson. One of the principles we always stress at 7investing is to think about things in the longer term. There’s a lot of volatility in the stock market, it seems like every single month, whether it’s tech market valuations being in a bubble, or Chinese tech companies being in a sell-off, we’d like to tune out a lot of that noise and look at the long term signals for investors.

And it’s really been interesting in recent years that there’s been another alternative for investors to consider, which is cryptocurrencies. And certainly, there’s been a lot of volatility in the price of Bitcoin in recent months. But we also want to think about this with a long-term lens in place. And as such 7investing has been excited to partner with an organization called Crypto EQ, to help us make sense of cryptocurrencies, but also to think about them as a long-term investment opportunity.

And so on today’s podcast, I’m very excited to be joined by the Co-Founder and CEO of CryptoEQ Spence Randall, who’s joining me from Houston, Texas. Hey, Spencer, it’s nice to chat with you with the 7investing podcast here today.

Spencer Randall  1:10

It’s great to be back. So thank you for having me.

Simon Erickson  1:12

Before we get started, I should point out that one part of our partnership with CryptoEQ is we actually have these calls on a monthly basis, we publish them as advisor updates for 7investing subscribers. And I know that you also publish pieces of info for CryptoEQ, as well. So it’s kind of nice to have a public facing conversation with you about a lot of these topics it’s going on in cryptocurrency world.

Spencer Randall  1:36

So much is happening, there’s so much to keep up with, I’m happy to share what I’ve learned with your audience.

Simon Erickson  1:42

Let’s start with the 10,000 foot level Spence because a lot of people hear crypto, and they just think about the price of bitcoin without getting too deep into what’s really going on out there. Can you set the stage at 10,000 feet of kind of where we stand with Bitcoin? And blockchains globally? Is it gaining adoption out there? And what’s really going on?

Spencer Randall  2:04

Absolutely. So Bitcoin started over a decade ago, it’s the first mover in the digital asset industry. And it’s gained tremendous momentum since its inception. So we are seeing hundreds of millions of bitcoin wallets around the world. So it’s not a question of whether or not mass adoption is going to happen. It’s more of a question of how you define that threshold. At what point would you consider Bitcoin mass adopted? Would it be a billion wallets? Right? So I think we’re on that path.

And the strongest narrative we see for Bitcoin in today’s market is as a digital store of value, and an alternative to something like physical gold. So folks that are coming up, now, you know, more my generation, right? They’re looking at the options they have as a store of value. You’ve got things like physical gold, or you could turn to digital gold. And when with the younger demographics, especially we see a higher level of comfort with this idea and concept of a digital store of value. So we’re really seeing that narrative take hold in Bitcoin.

If you look beyond Bitcoin, your Bitcoin, historically, is about 40 to 60% of the cryptocurrency market. If you look at other assets, the second movement of Bitcoin is Ethereum. And one of the strong narratives we see with Ethereum right now is, it’s the evolution of the internet. It’s so this, it’s this idea that Ethereum could be the base layer for applications to be built on top in decentralized application. So it’s, it’s similar in the sense of like an app store, where it’s a place where you can build and distribute your app. But the key difference is building on top of Ethereum is decentralized, or deploying an app store in today’s current market would be centralized, where that that third party can control you know, what’s distributed within the store.

So that’s, that’s one of the narratives and see with Ethereum. Some of the other strong narratives around Ethereum are the idea of decentralized finance, and a more distributed open permissionless financial system. So that’s ‘de-fi’ if you seen that buzzword flying around. And then another narrative that’s very, very strong in the market today is NFT’s. And this idea of non fungible tokens or digital collectibles. So this idea that you would have a 1of 100 collectible that’s tokenized and living on the blockchain, a lot of NFT work is currently built to atop Ethereum. So whether it’s de-fi or digital collectibles or NFT’s, Ethereum is really dominating the evolution of the internet narrative, whereas Bitcoin is really dominating this idea of a digital store value.

So together they represent, you know, three fourths of the market in terms of market cap, so, you really can’t talk about crypto without touching on those two assets. They’ve done so much in our industry and for our industry. So those are two of the strongest narratives that we have today. I’d also like to highlight for your audience, crypto companies going public. So a startup from Rice University, actually Coinbase Global Inc (NASDAQ: $COIN), the founder went to Rice University.

They’ve been working on Coinbase for nearly a decade, they’ve crossed the chasm from a crypto startup, to now a publicly traded company. So that’s a huge thing to note to your audience. And there’s a number of other crypto companies in the process, pursuing going public or more entrenched, traditional players, shifting part of their offering or adding on to their offering, where you’ll have companies expanding that offer crypto services that are publicly traded, like a PayPal (NASDAQ: $PYPL) , for example, now getting into crypto in a big way. And then lastly, the infrastructure bill right here in the US. I think that’d be a great thing to talk about. Simon, if you want to set that up and provide some more context, on the infrastructure bill.

Simon Erickson  6:06

I absolutely would expense that as a fantastic 10,000 foot overview. I’d encourage anybody to rewind and play that one back about five times just to hear what’s going on globally. There’s so much going on with cryptocurrencies, this isn’t just something that’s bouncing around in terms of the price of Bitcoin. This is something that’s gaining adoption at an international level.

We’ll double click on a lot of those topics you just mentioned Spence, further in this conversation, I’d also recommend anyone to check out the the past advisor updates that Spence and myself and several of your advisors at crypto EQ, several advisors here at seven invest we do a collision course monthly, we publish those to 7investing.com/research, as advisor updates for any wants to dig in deeper to a lot of those things like NFT’s like international adoption, like Spence was talking about.

But let’s let’s talk what you just what you just mentioned there, Spence, I think they’re really kind of the macro picture is important to keep in context here. And let’s talk about the infrastructure bill, which is a trillion dollars, that it is going through the US government right now. And it’s got some interesting definitions that are relatable to crypto currencies. What’s going on with this? Why is this really important for investors to keep an eye on?

Spencer Randall  7:17

Yeah, it’s one of the positive things about the infrastructure bill from from a crypto perspective, is all of the support that rallied around the amendments. So there’s a number of proposed amendments to the Senate, that would change the original language in the infrastructure bill. Although those amendments were not included in that language was not included at the senate level, that the voices of the crypto industry were heard, there was a tremendous amount of support and awareness raised around the need for these amendments. So I want to highlight that, you know, crypto has arrived, regulation is needed.

A step like this with the infrastructure bill and having language in there for crypto is a good thing. Because we need regulation in our industry to help it mature past that $2 trillion level. It’s no longer this nascent asset class, it’s a trillion dollar plus market cap, it’s primed to expand and it needs responsible regulation for more and more institutional capital and resources to flow into our industry. So I see it all as a good sign and growing pains. That said, the amendments needed did not make it in at the senate level. And there is an opportunity, starting in September for amendments to be included at the house level and further review of the bill.

And to highlight kind of the crux of the challenge with the bill and the need for the amendments. At the heart of the crypto part of the bill is language around what a broker is. And from someone within the industry, the definition is far too broad. And it doesn’t have nuance to account for part of the technical nature of things like Bitcoin. So Bitcoin is a pseudonymous network, meaning that you have a public address, but that address is not tied to an individual identity. And so with the definition they have for a broker, for example, if you use a mining company, a Bitcoin mining company will issue Bitcoin to a number of pseudonymous addresses. As the bill stands today, it’s asking for all of those transactions, whether they’re small or large, have KYC AML information, so that you would need to know all of the the name, the address, etc, etc, of each and every individual person that transacts with the network.

And that’s really a non starter for a mining company, even if they wanted to be compliant. It would be impossible to organize and aggregate all of that information because the pseudonymous network nature of the network so that that’s one of the key issues with the bill. And we think there still is an opportunity to recognize the technical nuance here, and provide definitions and language that make it possible to be compliant. Because as it stands today, I think if the infrastructure bill were to stay exactly as is from a crypto perspective, it would push some innovation offshore, which that is not I’m sure that’s not the intention of the language. So hopefully, there’s a middle ground to be struck. And we can keep a lot of this innovation here in the US.

Simon Erickson  10:29

It’s a really interesting point, you make Spence about regulations, a lot of people think of regulations as a risk, right? People are thinking, Oh, bitcoins going to be overly regulated. And they and they think that as a net negative, you’re posing it though, as a net positive, that’s a validation that crypto is here to stay. And regulations, just as they are for any disruptive technology that reaches the mass market, are kind of necessary to because it kind of shows that this is for real, and you’re gaining adoption, and more and more transactions are taking place out there. Do you think that America is pro blockchain or pro cryptocurrency reaching the mass market out there?

Spencer Randall  11:07

I think in general, yes. I just think it’s a long road of education and awareness. I think the US historically, when it comes to technology, innovation has been pro innovation. I think that the United States is a great place to build technology companies. So I don’t think that we approach crypto differently in the long term. But there’s a tremendous amount of awareness and education that needs to be done on this incredibly complex asset class.

And I think that’s our current challenge is educating our legislative bodies on what this actually is, and overcoming all of those misconceptions and assumptions that may not be correct about about what we’re dealing with here. To further you know, it’s point after the infrastructure bill, and the the proposed amendments. This week, there’s been a call to action from Congress for the SEC and CTFC to come together, align and provide more clarity on Bitcoin and things like it.

So the SEC has a lawsuit open against Ripple Labs, and it’s asset XRP. on whether or not that asset is a security, that lawsuit has been ongoing for almost a year at this point. So that that coupled with the infrastructure bill, we are we’re near clarity here on some aspect of this asset class like is Bitcoin a security is ethereum a security etc, etc. and how to how to brokers remain compliant in tax reporting.

Simon Erickson  12:46

That’s some great points, you know, what we’re speaking about definitions of, you know, securities or what is a broker and all of these things. We’ve actually seen some positive developments internationally. You know, the US is figuring it out on its own terms. We’ve seen Bitcoin get recognized as a legal tender, now officially in El Salvador, and it seems that other countries such as Spain and Uruguay are following suit. What does this mean for Bitcoin to be recognized as a legal tender in some of these other countries, Spence?

Spencer Randall  13:15

Well, it means that in certain parts of the world Bitcoin is already money. And you know, I’d like to I like the El Salvador is the first country to recognize Bitcoin as legal tender, but a number of other countries have signaled that they’re interested in doing the same. So what you’ll have is your first mover, your second mover, and then it kind of snowballs after that. That’s what we’ve seen with big movements like companies adopting crypto as part of their balance sheet and their Treasury asset allocation.

So you know, with with legal tender, El Salvador is front running and pioneering here and doing a lot of the early work but we expect a number of countries to follow on with accepting Bitcoin as legal tender. What El Salvador has done is provided people an option, so the transactions can be settled in Bitcoin. So the merchant, the consumer can spend the Bitcoin in commerce, and the merchant can accept the Bitcoin as money or it can be settled in FIAT. So they have an option, if they would prefer their correct currency, which is the dollar the dollar is legal tender and El Salvador as well.

They can continue with business as usual, where the consumer spends dollars or Bitcoin and the merchant received dollars or Bitcoin, if they would like to participate in what we see as the future of their economy in El Salvador or they can choose to accept Bitcoin as legal tender, so that you know on the ground, that’s what it means. Part of the innovation that making this possible is second layer Bitcoin technology. And what that means is, Bitcoin is the first layer it’s its infrastructure for moving value around the world. Because of all of the small transactions needed to support an economy like El Salvador, there’s something called the lightning network.

And this isn’t something that’s happened overnight. The lightning network has been developed for years and years, and El Salvador is proving to be a great testing ground. And a great test strip is a great stress test. For the lightning network. The lightning network is something that’s built on top of the layer one of Bitcoin to facilitate and make possible all of the volume of transactions needed to support an economy of country.

Bitcoin wasn’t built the layer one a Bitcoin is not built for millions of microtransactions. It’s built to be the most secure decentralized blockchain in the world, and is fantastic at moving large amounts of value anywhere in the world, in a relatively short period of time.

Simon Erickson  15:59

It’s really interesting, Spencer, especially when you talk about moving money across the world, right? You, we know that Latin America, South America, especially Argentina, Venezuela, I mean, a lot of these countries have gone through hyperinflation, with their own currencies. It seems like when you see El Salvador and others of the of the region adopting Bitcoin as a legal tender, it’s a great opportunity for global remittance to kind of avoid a lot of those fees, a lot of the concerns about inflation of the local currencies, I mean, we could see something where Bitcoin becomes kind of the local regional currency for this kind of error. Is that on your on your radar, as well as a use case for remittance for Bitcoin or crypto?

Spencer Randall  16:41

Yes. And there’s even assets that have been developed beyond Bitcoin that specifically are attempting to tackle that use case of global remittance. If you if you drill down and you think about Bitcoin for global remittances, one of the interesting things about Bitcoin is the fee structure doesn’t scale with the value of the transaction. So if you’re sending a large amount of Bitcoin at a small amount of Bitcoin, you can expect a very similar network fee. And you can see that, you know, if families are sending value, for example, from the US to El Salvador, why would it be beneficial to transact in Bitcoin? Because a lot of the traditional ways of doing that have large large fees that will, you know, extract some of that value that would have gone to your family or your friend, or if it’s commerce and business to the business or the in person. So that that’s one of the advantages of transacting in Bitcoin.

Simon Erickson  17:36

Yeah, fantastic. Be interesting to see this catch on in South America has also an Africa I know there’s a lot of fees associated with sending money between the borders of countries in Africa. Switching gears a little bit Spence, let’s let’s talk about the investing side of this as well. We’ve talked about Bitcoin and crypto for use for remittance for use for commercial transactions in El Salvador.

But we’ve also seen even within the United States, cryptocurrencies are starting to be accepted by brokerages and also kind of administers of 401k retirement plans we saw a couple of months ago, I investment asset manager for us all has, who manages $1.7 billion of retirement funds and 401k plans, has now accepted certain select cryptocurrencies to be included into 401k plans. This could be really interesting, Spence, because last I checked, there is a couple trillion dollars in US retirement funds out there.

Spencer Randall  18:39

Yeah, something we’ve been following closely. We’ve seen a number of offerings within the crypto space that help you allocate some of your retirement or your IRA or your 401k to physical Bitcoin physical Ethereum where you would actually be able to trade the asset within your retirement account, or within your IRA.

From a more of an investing standpoint, a number of services have come online, and a number of partnered with some of the reputable exchanges that we share with your audience for the US. Coinbase, Gemini and Kraken are amongst three of the best crypto exchanges that are tried and true and have been around for years and years. They’re partnering with providers to make it easier for consumers to allocate, you know, 1 to 3% of a retirement portfolio to something like Bitcoin.

And it does a couple of things. But one of the most exciting things for people in the US would be tax advantages. So if you’re investing within a tax-advantaged vehicle like an IRA or 401k, then you can see how you know when an asset class that compounds annually at a 200% growth rate, which is historically what Bitcoin has done. You can see the advantages of holding that add value in a retirement account.

Simon Erickson  20:02

That is really important for retirement accounts. Because we’ve kind of seen traditional thinking, saying you should have your age should be the percentage of your retirement accounts, it’s in bonds. At least that’s kind of traditional thinking that we’ve thought about it. But bonds have been dismal performing assets for decades now. Is cryptocurrency replacing bonds as a store of value in retirement funds? Or where’s the money going to come from the could go to 5%, or more of an overall allocation to crypto?

Spencer Randall  20:34

Yeah, when I first built my first investment portfolio, bonds were an essential piece, right? If you had this was before Bitcoin, you had your 60-40 split or something that was classic, right? 60%, equities, 40% bonds. And I think it was, what’s happening with bonds is reminds everyone the importance of keeping an open mind and constantly learning about changes in the macro environment. So bonds for this entire pandemic period have had negative real return. So the only guarantee there is that the value that you would invest in the bonds is likely to decrease in terms of purchasing power and actual value.

So then you start to ask yourself, well, where else could I allocate? And, you know, I wouldn’t, I would advocate that, you know, folks blindly, you know, trade it and displace all of their bond investment into crypto. But I do think there’s an argument to be made for a portion of what was previously held in bonds to be allocated to digital assets, especially high quality digital assets, like Bitcoin. So Cathy wood, for example, has been an advocate of what she thinks the future structure and responsible portfolio would be. The 60-40 would give way to like a 60-20-20 split, for example, where 20% of that portfolio would be something like Bitcoin and other digital assets.

Simon Erickson  22:01

That’s great. Spencer, you know, one of the other things I always enjoy about our Collision Course conversations every month is we kind of talking about how equities and cryptocurrencies are playing together in the same sandbox now. Now, in addition to buying crypto directly, you can buy publicly traded equities that have exposure in many ways to cryptocurrencies and everything that’s going on in that market as well.

One of these is Coinbase, who came public just a couple of months ago as an option. You and I have chatted about this company several times. But Coinbase is kind of one of the largest American brokerages and exchanges where you can buy cryptocurrency 60% of its trading volume is coming from Bitcoin & Ethereum. But it’s also got more than 100 different crypto assets you can buy and sell.

Spence it seems like right now Coinbase is deriving the majority of its revenue from custodial fees commissions when you’re actually placing trades when you’re buying or selling these assets. But what do you think the future looks like for Coinbase? I know this is a competitive sector out there. And there’s a lot of attention. How do you think that things play out for the largest exchange out there in America?

Spencer Randall  23:10

Yeah, I’m thinking about Coinbase. I’ve use Coinbase over the years, they’ve really built a great moat around both retail and institutional work here in the US. So as a retail trader investor, they have a great first mover advantage here in the United States and are recognized as the household name for setting up a crypto account. So incredible moats there on their brand. And they continue to improve their offering for retail traders and investors.

What’s really developed over the past few years is an increased focus on institutions. And so they are also the go to provider for microtransactions in entering the market, from an institutional perspective. So if a company for example, MicroStrategy what they did was to allocate an incredible amount of capital from their balance sheet to Bitcoin. Coinbase was the lead provider, they’re helping facilitate all the micro transactions needed to enter the market with that amount of capital without moving the market.

You could see how if you’re going to make a significant investment in the crypto market relative to its overall market cap, how you need to distribute those order books, through different markets for Bitcoin, so that you didn’t move the market up as you were entering. So they really do focus on institutional clients now as well. And from some preliminary research for a new product that we’re working on for Crypto EQ, we can see that all the competitors that we talked to respect Coinbase as a significant player in institutional investment and crypto.

Simon Erickson  24:52

It’s really neat to see them get more and more vertically integrated over time. It’s the same thing you saw at several of the brokerages for equities right? Schwab and Fidelity, you know, you can trade equities on those platforms within they’ve also got advisors and funds you can purchase for retirement and other things as well. So it’s really interesting to see Coinbase taking the next step and getting more institutionally involved.

The other thing that I’d like you to chat a little bit about is how Coinbase is different than several of these equity brokerages, I can go on fidelity and buy Apple stock. But if I’m going and buying ethereum on Coinbase, I’m not just holding that I can actually monetize the assets that I have on the platform, right?

Spencer Randall  25:36

Yeah, it’s a very important point for your audience is the difference between a crypto marketplace where you can buy you know, quote, unquote, IOU for the crypto and like an actual crypto exchange. So with Coinbase, once you purchase the asset, you can store the assets on the exchange, or you can do what’s called a withdrawal to your own wallet. And that’s, that’s what makes crypto different is this ability to be your own bank and put the crypto that you purchased in your own wallet.

You could put it in a cold storage wallet, for example, which is offline, or you can put it in another wallet that is online, for example, a mobile wallet that will be separate and apart and outside of Coinbase. And that’s that’s one of the things that’s very unique about crypto is this idea of being your own bank self custody, the responsibility of the assets are yours, which makes crypto both scary and exciting all at the same time.

Because with that, respond with that privilege of having the assets in your own custody comes the responsibility and and educating someone around you know, what Bitcoin is, is much different than educating someone on how to self custody. So but Coinbase provides that opportunity whereas for example, buying Bitcoin on Robinhood does not it’s a key difference. coin base and things like it allow you to self custody the assets if you choose things like Robinhood today, I will not allow you to withdraw the physical Bitcoin.

Simon Erickson  27:13

Perfect and Spence as we’re winding down here. Having such an innovative and visionary guy like you on the podcast is a lot of fun. And I wanted to ask kind of one last question, because you really are kind of at the very front of this trend that’s developing out there. And I wanted to take the opportunity to ask you what is something you’re excited about that’s going on out there with cryptocurrencies or with blockchains that isn’t on anyone else’s radar yet? It isn’t hitting the mainstream in the media. And you came up with the use of blockchain infrastructure in the metaverse Just tell me about  what you’re so excited about this development that’s going on out there.

Spencer Randall  27:53

And there’s, there’s been periods of my life where I spent an inordinate amount of time gaming. And I think that a lot of a lot of folks in the audience could probably relate to that. So every now and then, like a use case will come across my plate within digital assets, or it just immediately clicks. And so I think that’s a short list for me of like assets that I think are high quality that I’m really excited about. Bitcoin was the first as a digital store value. The theory was, the second for me is evolution of the internet. And then let since then I’ve gotten really excited about tokens that allow you to have integrated financial services.

So crypto.com is a good example of that with their CRL token. And really that that probably since ethereum and that’s what I’ve been most excited about is this idea of a token that allows you to have like an all in one type of crypto financial services experience from like the debit card rewards to trading to interest bearing accounts, things of that nature. Since that point, which was last year, that the one thing I’ve been most excited about is this the metaverse movement.

And I’ve read a lot about NFT’s I mean, it’s hard to miss. If you’re a part of our industry, it’s been a massive talking point. And there’s been a lot of exuberance around NFT’s. But with metaverses it really makes sense in terms of the utility for me, it’s one thing to store a piece of art on the blockchain. It’s another thing to tokenize a game. And so with metaverses what we’re seeing is this migration from a play for fun model and free to play model to a play to earn model. And so what’s really the opportunity here is that people can monetize directly the efforts and pursuits within the game.

So the first mover here, or at least the most notable mover, is a game called Axie Infinity. And to frame that for people, it’s really like Pokemon on a blockchain. So it’s a tokenized Pokemon, if you will, where you build your team and you battle your team against other people around the world. And there’s a play to earn component Where you can receive a token in the metaverse and then take that to a marketplace along with all of your in game assets, and have a direct route to monetize the assets and the earnings.

So you can exchange what happens in the game for real world value and realize the fruits of your labor and your efforts in real world value. That’s, that’s what’s revolutionary about things like Axie infinity. Another example that I’m just now learning about is the sandbox. And the sandbox is a tokenized Minecraft. So Minecraft is a household name, the gaming industry is very, very popular global game. The sandbox is developing a tokenized version of Minecraft, where you build your worlds and your assets.

And again, there’s a marketplace because of the blockchain infrastructure marketplace for direct monetization, of your assets and your efforts. What makes this different is it within the past 10 years of gaming eSports has exploded online gaming is up and to the right. I mean, it’s very clear trend. That what monetization looked like two things when monetizing the attention that you had as a gamer. So if you’re really, really good gamer, you can monetize your attention through things like Twitch, right, your social media platforms.

But another way was this the kind of secondary market that would develop where you would sell your accounts or your in game items on something like eBay. And so that this is this is kind of confirmation that this is the way the world is moving, because these secondary markets are now being created as more of a direct marketplace, because you’ve got the blockchain infrastructure and the transparency around the transactions. So instead of having to go to eBay, to do this, like secondary, kind of almost black market exchange of your in game assets, you’ve got a marketplace built into the game where you can transact within the metaverse. So something that I’ve been personally very interested in, as well as it’s just been something we’ve needed to know, in our industry because it’s been so popular.

Simon Erickson  32:05

Yeah, so tokens are basically providing a frictionless way to monetize anything that’s taking place on the internet these days.

Spencer Randall  32:13

Exactly. They’re providing the infrastructure needed for more direct exchange, a peer to peer exchange, of value, whether it be a physical gold, or sorry, a digital gold and Bitcoin or an application like adapt built on ethereum, or an NFT in a metaverse like Axie Infinity, or the Sandbox.

Simon Erickson  32:35

Well, there’s a lot of exciting things going on with with cryptocurrencies, with blockchains, with the infrastructure that’s kind of touching all industries out there, I certainly enjoy these conversations on a monthly basis. As we close out Spence, you had a recent announcement with crypto EQ that you’ve just launched something you’re calling v5. Can you tell us a little about what that means for your organization?

Spencer Randall  32:57

To frame it for the 7investing audience, the other the hard work that Simon and team does for equities research, Crypto EQ does for digital assets. So we recognized early on that it was very complex industry. And we’ve been on a mission for years to build the best go to resource for research and market insights on crypto. So v5 is our latest offering on our journey to be that go to household name for digital asset research. v5 is complete rebuild of the web app.

So we’ve had four iterations prior to that, all with different features and builds and aspects to it. We listened to our audience, we’ve listened to the feedback, the asks, and v5 is our effort to answer answer the calls to action for a number of tools. Some things to highlight there that are new with v5 are a sentiment analysis, and this idea of quantifying emotion and markets, set alerts features. So now folks can get the signals that they want however, they’d like to digest them. So they can opt in to different signals and alert features.

A new card system. So we can now pass through, you know, tweets and news articles, and headlines right there on our dashboard. And so what does all this do? Well, it really helps you separate the signal from the noise is there’s 10,000 digital assets. And it’s taken for me firsthand, it’s very difficult to monitor all of them at once. And so the web app helps you distill all that down and screen through what you should really be focusing on within a given digital asset.

So if you’re focused on Bitcoin, you can screen the news and the tweets and the headlines and the charts and the price action and research. All right there in the dashboard, all in one stop shop. And we do that asset by asset. So we’re really excited to bring v5 to the world it is live and we encourage everyone to check it out at 7investing.

Simon Erickson  34:52

And where is the best place for anyone interested in CryptoEQ to learn more about your organization and the updates that you’ve been putting out there?

Spencer Randall  35:00

Yeah, cryptoeq.io is the domain for the web app. So you can go access the web app for free at that domain. And then @CyptoEQ is our handle on virtually all social media platforms. And we share content daily. So give us a follow on your favorite social media platform. And that’s the best way to stay in the loop and talk to the team.

Simon Erickson  35:23

Absolutely. And if you sign up with crypto EQ, and use promo code 7investing with the number seven, you get $10 promotional credit off of your order. We really enjoy these conversations. I really think that blockchains are disruptive and they’re touching so many industries out there and actually impacting so many equities.

It’s been a real pleasure to partner with Crypto EQ, and talk about what’s going on out there and digested from kind of different perspectives, whether that be from the cryptocurrency or the equity perspective, Spence, really a pleasure having you on the podcast. Thanks for joining me here today.

Spencer Randall  35:56

Thank you, Simon. I look forward to our future conversations on crypto and equities and all the wild changes that we’re seeing unfold in the world.

Simon Erickson  36:03

Absolutely. And as we mentioned, for anyone who wants to follow up on some more of those conversations that Spence and I have had in the past, go to 7Investing.com/research, search for our advisor updates where we’ve captured several of those takeaways and several of the topics that we chatted about here today. So thanks again for tuning in to today’s episode of our 7investing podcast. We are here to empower you to invest in your future. We are 7investing.