Jamiel Sheikh on DeFi for CFOs

[00:00:00] Umar: Welcome to The Accountant Quits, brought to you by Request Finance, an all in one platform for crypto organizations and freelancers to easily manage and track their invoices, salaries, and expenses in a compliant way. On this podcast, we discuss how blockchain will impact the accounting profession and how accountants should prepare themselves for the future of work.

[00:00:23] Umar: My name’s Umar your host, and even if some might refer to me as the accountant gone rogue, my job is to provide you with the blockchain knowledge you need, that will be relevant for the accounting industry as a whole.

[00:00:37] Umar: Welcome to Episode 30. We’re currently at a tipping point. The traditional CFO with a traditional finance background might soon become obsolete and be replaced by the progressive CFO embracing the possibilities of DeFi.

[00:00:51] Umar: But there are no universities and there is no universal playbook, offering a curriculum on how to be a Web3 CFO. To get there, it involves one being crypto curious and not being afraid to experiment by dabbling into DeFi.

[00:01:04] Umar: To help us understand why CFOs should care about DeFi, today I have the pleasure to speak to the highly sought after Jamiel Sheikh. Take a deep breath as I give you a quick rundown of Jamiel’s bio. Jamiel is the founder of Instamint, a B2B NFT minting platform. Also the founder of Chainhaus, a blockchain and DeFi advisory firm, an educator at Blockchain101, an online blockchain education portal and the founder of the Central Bank Digital Currency Think Tank.

[00:01:35] Umar: Jamiel is currently offering a new book about DeFi, and he’s also the author of Amazon 100 best selling Mastering Corda. He runs Blockchain NYC, New York city’s largest blockchain and digital assets meetup group, consisting of over 30,000 members.

[00:01:52] Umar: In this episode today, you will learn how to turn from a Web2 CFO to a Web3 CFO, the process for institutions to invest in DeFi, permissioned versus permissionless Defi, what the CFO of the future will look like and much more. Jamiel, thank you so much for making the time from your packed schedule to be here today, I really appreciate it.

[00:02:15] Jamiel: Hey Umar, thank you for having me looking forward to this talk.

[00:02:18] Umar: Jamiel, when I look at your involvement in blockchain, I think of you as the Dwayne Johnson of blockchain, you’re everywhere and people love you. You’re the people’s champ of blockchain. Could you take us a bit back in time and share how your blockchain story all started and what’s the main focus of your work today?

[00:02:38] Jamiel: Sure. Um, so I started mining Bitcoins in 2012 by accident, just playing with it on a laptop. And that’s where I started to understand the idea of a cryptocurrency or digital currency.

[00:02:49] Jamiel: And then it took a break for a few years, and then in 2017, I started going into blockchain once more, and trying to understand what it is. And prior to that, you know, I had 20 plus years of experience in banking, trading and FinTech. And so reading code and understanding how, for example, the payments worlds work and the banking world works was not a problem, was kind of something I was used to.

[00:03:11] Jamiel: And so I kind of dug into blockchain around that time. And in late 2017, I started a community called Blockchain NYC. Now we’re about 30,000 plus people and growing pretty rapidly and started doing teaching really to kind of get information out in 2018 when Bitcoin hit $20,000, started doing classes then, and then that grew and we started getting requests for education and then services.

[00:03:35] Jamiel: Can you build this? Can you build that? And we started to do that and deliver that to clients. And that grew. And all this time, I was thinking about a product to create, when really didn’t have an idea to what to create, just really spending time with a lot of different people and executives and feeding information to them, and also collecting information about what they thought the future could look like.

[00:03:56] Jamiel: And then, so middle of last year, I came up with the idea of Instamint, which is an enterprise token API platform specifically for NFTs and DAOs, and allows the Web2 world, Web2 enterprises to interact and build blockchain based applications, just using simple APIs. And we provide analytics, graph QL APIs, all kinds of bells and whistles.

[00:04:18] Jamiel: So basically what Stripe is for payments, we’re for NFTs. So we just got seed capital from several different blockchain companies. They’re funding us. They like the idea. And so we’re kind of off to the races. On the product side, in the last year, I launched a CBDC Think Tank and we engaged with several different central banks globally.

[00:04:37] Jamiel: We bring them in to talk about what they’re doing on the CBDC side, and also probably advise them and work on some of the projects that they’re working on. And the book that I’m writing, maybe rename, and we may call it Finance 3.0 or something to that effect is really about all of what’s happening in the Web3 space as applicable to many different sides of the finance world.

[00:04:58] Jamiel: Hopefully that’ll be late in the year.

[00:05:00] Umar: I’d like to kick off today’s conversation with comparing Web2 CFOs and Web3 CFOs. So if you had to compare the two, what would you expect a Web3 CFO to be good at? I want to provide the listeners with an accounting and finance background on how to transition to this new world.

[00:05:17] Jamiel: I think there’s a large number of differences. So the Web2 CEO maybe concerned with or CFO, maybe concerned with budget and costs and you know, how new, new revenue sources, new SAS products and things like that. The Web3 CFO, maybe more concerned with emerging regulation and how that may be impacting how they do things.

[00:05:43] Jamiel: They may be more concerned with risk management, financial risk management. They may be more concerned with how a treasury management may be conducted. Especially the treasury management is crypto based. A wallet that has a single private key or is multisig. So there’s a whole host of those issues, and then constantly changing a rapidly changing ecosystem where, you know, one platform is viable today and then all of a sudden it’s not viable tomorrow in terms of managing liquidity in terms of the investments. I think those are all kinds of new things that CFOs are going to have to contend with. There almost are going to be taking some aspects of the roles that CEO takes, right. And maybe supporting the CEO in more ways than they typically have done in the past.

[00:06:33] Jamiel: And I think that’s going to be a continued situation for the next five years.

[00:06:39] Umar: If you have a CFO at an institution who comes and ask you how to get into DeFi, let’s say they already holding Ethereum in their cold wallet at the company, and they now like to participate in DeFi protocols by providing liquidity.

[00:06:55] Umar: If I were to participate in DeFi, I just connect to my metamask, click a button and I provide liquidity. An institution is not the same. So they would be investing into protocols that have a good track record by doing a fair amount of research there, and obviously not degen into something like I would do, sometimes.

[00:07:14] Umar: Could you provide us a walkthrough of the different transactions required from the cold wallet to providing liquidity for an institutions, mentioning the different levels of signing required?

[00:07:25] Jamiel: Yeah. I mean, typically an institution that want to get into Defi will probably bring on somebody that can go through that process with them, whether it’s key generation or it’s, you know, interesting somebody as a custodian, right.

[00:07:39] Jamiel: There’s a large number of options. For example, NYDIG is a group that brings on institutional clients and helps manage their crypto investments, whether it’s in DeFi or holding the Bitcoin and Ethereum. Now, when we say DeFi, it’s a very, very broad, broad definition, a broad category of things. In some ways you can say holding on to each ETH or Bitcoin might be DeFi.

[00:08:01] Jamiel: But if you’re talking about, hey I want to get into, into the AMM and provide liquidity to a liquidity pool, and I want to put in a large amount, you know, bringing a hundred billion, 200 million for whatever reason, I think there’s a large number of steps that need to occur. The most important is going to be the control and ownership of that position. The constant risk management that needs to occur. So the internal processes that are in place to evaluate constantly what’s happening with the protocol because there is liquidation risk.

[00:08:30] Jamiel: Or a number of different risks that can occur where some of that money can or all of that money can disappear. And so putting those controls, building the internal controls are probably the first step and then figuring out which protocol to be involved with and which ones not to be involved with.

[00:08:43] Jamiel: There’s a large number of best of breed protocol. Like Uniswap or you know, Pancakeswap and Aave, or they may not necessarily meet the objective or the risk reward criteria for institutions. So these institutionals will need to then determine that. So there is this kind of thing, the strategic work that they have to do to figure out where do we want to allocate and where they want, where they want to take that risk.

[00:09:06] Jamiel: What does that risk look like? What information makes this publicly and kind of internal due diligence. And then they have to set up internal controls and risk management processes. They need to set up ways to manage these accounts, whether it’s through custodian, they offer a different set of options.

[00:09:23] Jamiel: If you look at, for example, Ledger, which is this little USB thing, or you can store your cryptos, they also have the enterprise version of that. Um, so that may be an option. So really, how am I crypto held, holding onto my cryptos? Is it through custodian? Is that, um, and what those fees might look like, but the risk of the custodian may be because they’re holding cryptos that are fairly volatile, will that custodian be around themselves down the road.

[00:09:47] Jamiel: So there’s a large number of questions that need to get answered and probably can fill about 50 pages of questions that need to be taken into consideration and otherwise for an individual like me, a retail person like me, or you Umar, we can just plug in our Ledger or open our Metamask and we ape in and we’re get to go.

[00:10:05] Jamiel: And then we take a hit, we’re okay, we do our own risk management. We’re not holding anybody as custodian. We don’t delegate that out because it doesn’t make sense from a cost point of view. For institutions, they have to figure those out with everything from a to Z. And there’s probably easily, you know, 200, 300 variables that they have to take into consideration.

[00:10:24] Umar: So the biggest concern around deploying clients money, other people’s money tends to be around AML compliance. What are the questions that come around the most regarding compliance when institutions approach DeFi?

[00:10:39] Jamiel: Yeah. Um, so, you know, Defi by design is built to be anonymous. And in it are lot of questions that you, depending on what you’re doing with DeFi, you might not know who your counterparty is.

[00:10:50] Jamiel: So liquidity pool, the way AMMs work there is so when you trade for example through an exchange, you don’t know who your counterparty is, but the exchange knows who the counter party is. And in theory, the exchange has done the KYC and AML. You know, you have some kind of assurance that your counter party is somebody that is quote-unquote on an allow list, but at the same time, if you’re doing a trade on, a DeFi platform on an AMM platform or an automated market maker, the function of providing liquidity is bifurcated from the functional trading, right. It’s two different functions and people that are providing liquidity can generally be unknown and you may be trading into the liquidity pool, that pool in and out of that liquidity.

[00:11:31] Jamiel: And although you’re not trading with counterparty, there are counterparties that have provided that liquidity. And so there is a question of whether that money that you received as profit that you’re generating are coming from sources that you probably don’t want. And so I think this is a growing area.

[00:11:46] Jamiel: This is why private liquidity pools and maybe another option when you see Aave’s Arc or things like that, where there are known entities are coming on, and these are people that are vetted and then they come into these DeFi protocols and therefore there is a safety, or when you do a trade and knowing who the counterparty is.

[00:12:04] Jamiel: But this is an emerging space. The DeFi world is growing faster than the ability to KYC and AML everybody. And people are trying to intentionally avoid any KYC AML scenario. So you have a large amount of liquidity that is not KYC or AML, and that probably will continue to grow as DeFi becomes more and more mainstream and as cryptography becomes more and more sophisticated.

[00:12:27] Umar: Sometimes for institutions if AML and compliance issues can be like a barrier, I’ve been looking into like variations for this podcast at what permissioned DeFi is. I didn’t even know that existed. So even if we do want like a fully decentralized future, I’ve been thinking, should there be like a sort of compromise on the path, getting there. If some institutions can’t accept DeFi in its full decentralized form, perhaps a more permissioned version is better suited for them.

[00:12:58] So I noted Aave had unveiled Aave Arc a permission version, which has the same features of Aave but with some added KYC and AML compliance checks. So they have a white listing process where financial institutions can go through and before they start participating as liquidity suppliers and borrowers.

[00:13:18] Umar: My question to you is can this version of permissioned DeFi, be the future of institutional finance, maybe in the short term?

[00:13:26] Jamiel: Yeah, I think that’s a great question Umar. So clearly there is liquidity going in, into these permissioned world, that sits on top of the permissionless world, right. So when we say permissioned and permissionless, I think we need to clarify, what does that mean? So traditionally the permissioned role meant completely permissioned and not permissionless.

[00:13:46] Jamiel: And what Aave is doing is building permissions on top of a permissionless world, much like the internet is permissionless, and you log into email system and its permissioned because you have the password right. And so that’s the world that you’re building. I think that’s the world that, that does have an enormous amount of viability because use cases drive adoption.

[00:14:05] it’s the idea that this specific thing is a specific need in the market, which is KYC and AML. Institutions want to know who their counterparties are, who is providing that liquidity, who’s putting money into this pool and they need to know if mandated to them. It’s a compliance matter. Otherwise they can’t engage.

[00:14:23] Jamiel: And so it may be the lesser of two evils. If we regard the permissioned world as being somewhat evil and it is regarded somewhat evil by the permissionless world, but it is kind of a happy compromise that allows liquidity to grow and may allow the permissionless world to continue to expand and continue to grow.

[00:14:42] Jamiel: And maybe a model for the future that I think remains to be seen. But the traditional permissioned world, which is where the chain is entirely permissioned at its core. And it’s designed. In that world, I don’t think it’s going to continue to survive. So because of liquidity, there’s just no liquidity there.

[00:15:00] Jamiel: The great thing about this permissioned world is even though it stems from our permissionless environment, it is that there’s already liquidity there. And that induces more liquidity that allows for more liquidity to come in because there is now trust in that, in that fact that that platform works. And there’s a willingness to add more liquidity.

[00:15:18] Jamiel: And given the additional requirements of KYC and AML, and that I think is kind of taking a stone that’s really moving forward already and to kind of add more, more bells and whistles to it so they can kind of keep or a wheel that keeps on going. But add more to it. So. I think the future is going to be this hybrid of this fairly large permission-less world, where a lot of the retail market will, will engage.

[00:15:43] Jamiel: They will be ramped in, and that will require a KYC and AML. They must be that strengthened. Um, I see, uh, Aave Arc as an example of how institutions can use DeFi and do business kind of as usual. And do it in new ways and ways that are more open and more specific to let’s say the new way that we’re doing these, the innovations and with the bifurcation of liquidity pools, bifurcation of the creators, a new world of trading and institutions can come in and start to benefit from that.

[00:16:14] Umar: Yeah, I agree. It might be a necessary evil for, I don’t know if evil is the right word, but for the short term, I want to speak a bit about how the CFO of the future and how the future of work will look like and have your opinion on it.

[00:16:29] Umar: COVID has like changed the way we work. When I quit my job in August 2020 and started traveling and working remotely, I met a lot of people who are living off their crypto savings or income, trying new different things. I met a copywriter I remember who started flipping and NFTs full time. I met another guy who was able to live off his DeFi gains every month from yield farming.

[00:16:54] Umar: The great resignation at that time had started. I didn’t even know that term. I didn’t even know, like I was part of this big movement of other people joining us. I want to ask you, how do you see the future of work and the new opportunities now for people with finance backgrounds, not necessarily, to work in Web3 and DAOs. It’s kind of a broad question.

[00:17:17] Jamiel: Yeah, it’s pretty broad. I mean, so I think the finance field will become more and more based on DeFi. I think in 15 years, 20 years time, my opinion is all the finance will be based on blockchain entirely, right. Because we move from the internet of information to internet of value. And like all of our work right now is digital because of the internet.

[00:17:40] Jamiel: The fact that we’re on the video together, just because of the internet, we’re moving information back and forth between each other. And that transition is not going to change that momentum, is not going to change. It’s just transformed into an internet of value. And so when we say internet of value, what mean, what we mean is all of finance will be on a blockchain in some due time.

[00:18:02] Jamiel: And maybe all of business, as we know it, in terms of movement of value will be on, on blockchain. And therefore the CFO’s role may actually expand because now we’re not just transferring information, we’re transferring value and that. The movement of value is necessarily the domain of the CFO, right? The CFO needs to track the movement of value in and out of their organization right.

[00:18:26] Jamiel: And what an organization looks like will also change, right? So if you combine in the notion of a DAO and more democratic way to establish a union or an organization of people that are willing to work together, and you couple in the ability to move money across borders more quickly than let’s say traditional rails and less with less friction and that will increase over time.

[00:18:50] Jamiel: Things like stable coins. And then you couple in the ability to potentially gamify and monetize work through all kinds of needs, like play-to-earn. Then I think what the world looks like in 15 to 20 years is radically different. Than it is today compared to, and we can look at how the world looks like today versus how it looked like 20 years ago when somebody didn’t even know what email was right.

[00:19:15] And people would go around asking, do you have internet? And do you have an internet connection at home? And nobody asks those kinds of questions anymore. Nobody even uses the word internet anymore. The last time you used the word internet, it’s probably a week ago. So the same thing will happen with blockchain, some CFOs today will really need to take this into serious consideration.

[00:19:35] Jamiel: Where are the implications of all this, right? Just the convergence of all the different technologies, DeFi and DAO, which are kind of the ability to put together an organization on-chain that is decentralized yet brings in global participation ability to globally bring in people through incentive systems and do governance through an incentive system is radically going to change how we do work. We will probably be all be working for 10 different DAOs in 10 years and generate revenues from those DAOs and not really necessarily have bosses.

[00:20:09] Jamiel: So what does that mean for a CFO? The CFO may be looking at managing and helping assist the finances of one or more DAOs and the participants are earning things through the DAO, either through work, traditional work, right wages or labor or other means gamifying. And I think that’s the world that we’re moving towards. So the CFO’s role is going to be very, very different. It’s it’s gonna be more fractionalized instead of centralized.

[00:20:36] Jamiel: Will that be in 10 years or 20 years? I don’t know. But all of the indicators suggest that we’re moving in that direction and that movement is accelerated.

[00:20:45] Umar: Yeah, I completely agree with you. Lately I’ve been meeting people who’ve quit their full-time Web2 jobs and are now either full-time contributors in a DAO or even part-time contributors, but the income they’re earning is enough for them to pay for all their monthly living expenses.

[00:21:02] Umar: So I’m seeing a completely different way of how people are working right now. Like contributing to a DAO which in the beginning for me, I didn’t really understand how. Because I didn’t have any technical knowledge. I thought in order to work for a DAO, I needed to have like coding or technical knowledge, but it’s not the case.

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[00:23:15] Umar: I want to also touch on your upcoming book. Could you give us a sneak peek into the contents of the book will cover. And maybe also why you wanted to write a book and what the target audience of the book will be.

[00:23:31] Jamiel: Yeah, I’m sure. So the book is going to be published by Columbia Press and I’m kind of in the middle of writing the book.

[00:23:36] Jamiel: So the goal of the book is to give the laymen the business laymen, the average business professional, a kind of a non-geek speak understanding of this entire new thing that we call Web3 or Finance 3.0, right. So really to go the fundamentals of understanding what blockchain is and its implications to understanding what DeFi is, what NFTs are, what the metaverse is right.

[00:24:03] Jamiel: And what, how a DAO functions and going through the different kind of groundbreaking disruptions that are emerging and really make it very easy for that reader to understand, and kind of absorb that information and really focus on providing analogy so that they can comprehend and understand it.

[00:24:19] Jamiel: And so the goal is to improve and increase adoption and understanding of these technologies. Unfortunately, the space is just congested with lots of technical talk and there’s lots of misinformation and the, and a lot of the information, even if it’s true changes rapidly. And the goal of the book is to provide these kinds of like eternal tenants of, of these technologies.

[00:24:42] Jamiel: Like what is consensus, whether it’s proof of work or proof of stake, what does that even mean? What’s the implications of a DAO. Is it something that can potentially change how we do business, change how we do governance governance and how we do government. Does it change those things and kind of delve into those scenarios.

[00:25:00] Jamiel: Talk about some of what’s been happening in space with some major use cases and make it very, very relatable, such that an average person can pick up the book, read it to well, I really now understand what DeFi is and what its implications are. What a DAO is, what the metaverse possibly means. And its implications are for us as a human civilization.

[00:25:19] Jamiel: So the goal is run that base. Cause right now we are, the crypto world is relatively speaking, pretty small, right. You know, we have what, 7 billion people globally. And we probably have maybe maximum, maybe I dunno, 50 million people, 40 million people that are really understand crypto or dabbles in crypto. And those that really understand crypto, probably a 10th of that. Think that needs to change, so the goal is really educate and to give the reader a means to really understand the details without getting the technical jargon too much so that they can understand it, and create more experts.

[00:25:54] Umar: I actually discovered your work through Blockchain101 last year, and I attended one of your courses. And I can say to everyone listening, I will include a link, and of course on the website. It’s one of the, hands down, best courses I followed on DeFi. At that time, I was struggling to understand the concepts of how AMMs work. There was a back-to-back course on yield farming, I remember at the time.

[00:26:17] Umar: So that was super helpful for me. And to this day, like today, I’m super happy that you’re here, Jamiel, that I’m able to speak to you. Because at the time I was struggling with some DeFi concepts and that course was super clear. So yeah I’ll encourage everyone to hop on Blockchain 101 and there’s like a lot of topics that you’ve mentioned today about CBDCs, DAOs, NFTs, DeFi, everything is covered there. So do check it out.

[00:26:41] Jamiel: So we did a DeFi 101 at Blockchain101.com. And how an automated market maker works, what a constant product formula is, but the losses is, a lot of people, even if they know the terms, they don’t know what it really means. So we spent a couple of hours kind of walking through how that works, but I think that’s very useful for CFOs. I think CFOs do need to understand these things in great detail. And I’m happy to hear that you were in the class. I didn’t know that that you were in the class, but happy to hear that it benefited you.

[00:27:11] Umar: I want to speak a bit about Instamint as well. I want the listeners have a better understanding of it. You introduced it early in the introduction. So Instamint you said is a B2B minting, NFT minting platform. Could you provide us with a bit more details on what kind of NFT products these companies will be able to mint?

[00:27:31] Jamiel: Yeah. So what we have three API, one called Meta. What Meta lets you do is mint and transfer NFTs, whether it’s custodial or self custodial.

[00:27:39] Jamiel: And we probably web2 APIs to do that. And then you have a dashboard to see your NFT inventory. It’s a platform for all the platforms. So we’re not a marketplace. We allow other marketplaces to emerge in for NFTs. Our definition is any business assets. So any assets occur, a credit default swap, a bond and what we’ve provided templates of smart contracts.

[00:28:00] Jamiel: So you don’t need to go the on smart contracts, we provide templates and you can mint to an existing smart contract that’s held on chain, or you can deploy your own smart contract and mint onto that smart contract through API. The second API we have is called Disperse, which allows you to do things to NFTs that are after if it’s been minted. So we provide option engine API and could you it, and those are really things that useful for marketplaces.

[00:28:25] Jamiel: We have different kind of options, dutch auction, blind auction. We’ll be adding in sophisticated offchain world. If you’re a creator from creator and you want sophisticated way, event-based royalties that this happens on, royalties should be made. Payments should be made to this person. Whether a sale is made or whether a date passes by or something occurs, royalties should be paid out.

[00:28:49] Jamiel: So we provide that. And the final API is called yield, which lets you take your NFTs and to get to data from protocols and tells you their risk and reward profile. Let’s say, hey in Aave right now, this is your risk profile. Uniswap this is your risk profile. And if they accept NFT staking through the API, you can stake your NFTs.

[00:29:10] Jamiel: So you can build enterprise grade applications to the API and we’re adding in something called designer, which lets you visually put the business users can visually design their assets. Right? So I want to create a bond. I would drag and drop a field and drop in okay maturity date and interest rate and create a bond. I’m going to call it My Bond.

[00:29:28] Jamiel: And then through the API, you can mint more My Bond. Has many different values. So our world, our view is that in 10 years, B2B interaction of value would be all NFT based. And people want enterprise applications and tools without having to worry about how the underlying blockchain plumbing to the point where they want to even know that they’re using blockchain.

[00:29:48] Jamiel: They know that if I transfer to you at invoice, it’s an NFT or the invoice maybe, now if I send you an invoice for something I can not go out and sell the invoice. After my invoice is all done through the blockchain. I don’t really know it. I don’t really care that it’s done. It’s done through that manner.

[00:30:04] Jamiel: All I care is that invoice has liquidity. Somebody who can factor in at the best possible rates, maybe there’s an option for that. And so we’re just providing the plumbing for that. And the other enterprises that provide their client applications, their user-facing applications, their brand on our brand. So we’re kind of like Stripe is for payments. We are for NFTs.

[00:30:23] Umar: So Jamiel and I want to be considerate of your time and maybe end this session today by asking you about for 2022, what would be a good year for DeFi institutional adoption? And what are you looking forward to for this year? We already in April, but for the nine remaining months.

[00:30:44] Jamiel: Yeah, I think we already in the throes of institutional adoption, maybe, you know, like pension funds are not rushing in, but other institutions are rushing in. I just saw a news article, like Neuberger Berman, tying up with Anchorage Digital, you know, about half an hour ago and, you know, these are big institutional houses. I mean your wealth managers and things like that.

[00:31:05] Jamiel: So I think the institutions are coming in, sorry. The institutionals are coming in. And I think we’re going to continue to see that. I think we’re going to continue to see, um, more clear regulatory environment. I do feel like we in the US are somewhat stifled but hopefully we fix some of that.

[00:31:21] Jamiel: Otherwise there’ll be a flight outside of the US, the capital and talent will leave the US and hopefully that some that can be addressed in the coming year. But this year much like last year and the summer of DeFi, it’s still about DeFi. DAOs have come to the forefront in many ways and anything that can threaten a Gemini is if there’s anything that’s got 10 Gemini, it’s not really cryptocurrencies, it’s something like DAO.

[00:31:45] Jamiel: So keep a very close eye on DAOs and see how they evolve the new way of doing democracy. And I see this year as kind of a watershed year and part of last year as a watershed year for DAO to continue to grow. And I think there are still a lot more things that we don’t know that are going to emerge. We never expected the blockchain, we never expected ethereum and we never expected DeFi, we never expected DAO, but all these things came out of nowhere and think we’re going to continue to see that type of innovation this year. And next year , and in the coming couple of years.

[00:32:17] Umar: I always like to end the episode by asking my guests, if do you have a quote or a Maxim that you live by?

[00:32:24] Jamiel: Be kind, that’s it. I learned that a couple of years ago I had COVID in February of 2020, and I thought I wasn’t going to make it. There was a day when I thought I’m not really gonna make it. I was just, my body was going haywire. And I looked back at my life. And the only thing that I regretted was not being kind to people.

[00:32:44] Jamiel: And I realized that just being kind to people is probably the will probably allow you to die comfortably. And anything else that you do, like, you know, business and money that you have and all that probably does not really matter. So be kind.

[00:32:56] Umar: You being here today is the perfect example of that kindness you making the time from your super packed schedule. Like the listeners don’t know, but we had to reschedule because you were, you had a flight from Frankfurt coming in and we initially planned to do the podcast the same day. But reschedule it for today. So I’m super thankful to you for accepting to do this podcast and sharing why CFOs should care about the DeFi today.

[00:33:22] Umar: So just before we go, if people want to learn more about you, where should they do so? Of course, I think if I include a link of your website in the show notes, I think they’ll have all the links there.

[00:33:34] Jamiel: Yeah so, my personal website is jamiel.io, And then, you know, to learn Blockchain 101 um, if you want to join our community, it’s meetup.com/blockchainNYC. Reach out to me, if you have any questions, any things you’d like to discuss, I’m very open to have a conversation.

[00:33:50] Umar: Thank a lot Jamiel. I really appreciate you coming.

[00:33:55] Jamiel: Yeah, thank you Umar. Thanks for having me. It was a great talk.

[00:33:58] Umar: I would like to thank everyone for listening to this episode, you will find all the links of the episode, show notes and transcript on the website of The Accountant Quits at the accountantquits.com. Please note that this content is for general information purposes only, and is not a substitute for consultation with professional advices.

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