Michael Revy from Bulla Network on NFT Invoicing

[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.

[00:00:15] Umar: 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 prefer 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 35. The future of decentralized commerce will transform traditional commerce as instead of being built upon siloed systems, it intends to be interoperable between its network participants. One of the foundations to achieve interoperability for commerce lies in tokenizing an invoice. In other words, having an invoice minted as an NFT provides an immutable document of ownership for commerce resulting in a single source of truth to check the credit worthiness of its parties, thereby allowing invoice financing and factoring use cases, not only for large corporations, but also for retail needs.

[00:01:19] Umar: To discuss NFT invoicing today, I have the pleasure to speak to Michael Revy, the founder of Bulla network, an open source protocol to mint credit relationships and facilitate on chain commerce.

[00:01:32] Umar: In this episode today, you will learn, what is bulla network and how it proposes to tokenize an invoice, the first dapp of the protocol called Bulla Banker and how it allows the creation of an NFT invoice, the different use cases of an NFT invoice, composability within defi and the future of decentralized invoicing and much more.

[00:01:55] Umar: Michael, welcome to the show and thanks for making the time to be here.

[00:02:00] Michael: Thanks Umar. Happy to be here.

[00:02:02] Umar: Can we start by you telling us a bit about your personal background, how you first became interested with blockchain and the whole story that then led to you founding Bulla Network.

[00:02:15] Michael: Okay. Quickly, I was a trader on wall street for a long time.

[00:02:19] Michael: I had a hedge fund. That had exposure to Lehmann brothers. And I discovered via that, that the banks are essentially creditors to you. And after suffering through that bankruptcy and losing a little bit of money, I went back to my roots, which were originally in IT. I discovered Bitcoin, but couldn’t do much with the language in Bitcoin.

[00:02:40] Michael: People always talking about programmable money back then. I thought, you know, I, I didn’t see it. And then I discovered Solidity. Solidity made me brush off my old IT credentials. And I started programming furiously in Solidity, just basically experimenting. First thing I wrote was something called a friend lend, which was a wait for me to, to, or borrow money from my other nerd friends.

[00:03:03] Michael: This was when Ethereum was at $8 a token or something. And then buddy budget. And eventually though we’ve realized that we were talking about a primitive that was very useful for all kinds of applications. And that’s why we, uh, started, Bulla Banker, our first effort at an NFT invoice, but it’s really a protocol for NFT and credit relationships between parties.

[00:03:30] Umar: And can we start by you telling us then what is Bulla Network? Also, maybe sharing the story of what a Bulla is. I like the story of how you inspired yourselves to name it Bulla. Bulla goes back to a long time ago to, I read one of the earliest known civilizations. Yeah, the Sumerians. So maybe you can share that story and then speak to us about Bulla network.

[00:03:54] Michael: Yeah. If you think about blockchains, what’s the most important thing is a signature. And signatures are on all kinds of things, not just, I mean, bank notes, for example. And I was looking for a way to represent the idea I had. And the idea is the following, I sign for a group of loans or invoices or whatever it is, credit relationships.

[00:04:18] Michael: I verify that, that I agree to those things or that I have generated those things. And they’re a packet, they’re a group. And I was looking for representation of that to make it easy. And I found already the Sumerians, if they had had computers who knows where, you know, blockchain would be, but they were making bullas.

[00:04:36] Michael: And the idea of a bulla is you would take, let’s say a sample sheep or cow to a market. And people would like the sample and they’d say, okay, I’ll buy 50. You would then mint little tokens for each cow or each cheap. You would put it into a pouch. And fire it, a clay pouch with your stamp on it, or with the stamp of the local government.

[00:04:56] Michael: Then you could take that pouch with you and collect your sheep or cows. And that’s called a Bulla. And a Bulla is also, you know, if you think about people bulls, that was always a stamp. Like, you know, remember the wax people would have their ring. And so you knew that was your signature. So this is the ideas is you are signing credits, you’re signing obligations and you’re grouping them together under your signature.

[00:05:23] Michael: That’s the idea of bulla.

[00:05:25] Umar: Could you then introduce to us what is bulla network?

[00:05:28] Michael: Oh bulla network. Well, we’re at a, I get a lot of flack for this. Bulla banker is the app that we’re using. I called it a network because I had the vision that this primitive could be in a lot of different apps. And so you might not necessarily wanna go to invoicing app, but go to a subscription app or some other app.

[00:05:51] Michael: So I called Bulla Network first. And the first app within it is Bulla Banker. That might be a little confusing. I might have to, I’m talking to a marketing branding person now, maybe simplify it, sorry for the confusion.

[00:06:04] Michael: But the idea is it should be a network. This is a primitive that can instantly, if you use it to mint anything. It will show up on this dashboard because the dashboard knows how to, knows your wallet, and it can find any of these NFTs that are minted. It will know from the context what it is, basically, if it’s an invoice or a payment, et cetera.

[00:06:28] Umar: So that’s one of the key features of the protocol is that it allows you to tokenize an invoice.

[00:06:35] Umar: I want you to maybe further elaborate to the audience on what is an NFT invoice. What does an NFT invoice allows you in terms of the different metadata that you can, how do you say insert on this NFT and also provide us an overview of what an accounting journal token is? It’s the same thing as what an NFT invoice is, but as I understand accounting journal token is being used in the context for Bulla.

[00:07:01] Michael: Yeah. Well, let’s go back just a little bit to the fundamental source of truth. What is the source of truth and why is that important? A source of truth is the blockchain. We can all see the blockchain, it’s immutable can’t be changed once it, you know, things are posted on it.

[00:07:17] Michael: So that makes it very valuable for collaborating in a decentralized way financially. So why do you want an NFT? Well, an NFT is a standard that people can understand. All of our stuff is on a public GitHub. We want to collaborate with people. It’s open source. So you have an open source standard that you can then mint credit relationships on and put them on a source of truth that everybody can see.

[00:07:44] Michael: And what’s cool about it is your point of view, determines how you see it, right. So if I NFT an invoice to you, Umar, then when you look at it, it’s a payable. And when I look at it, it’s a receivable, but we’re looking at the same thing. That’s the insight, I guess, or that’s what the blockchain brings to us is the ability to collaborate.

[00:08:07] Michael: And have a source of truth and you wanna use an NFT or some standard to then make things composable. If I had, you know, I could have made, and we did talk about trying to make our own standard invoice claim or claim token, but then we thought, well, you know, the world is going so fast, let’s put it in an NFT format.

[00:08:27] Michael: An NFT format also gives it some other features like metadata, like you’re talking about. So for example, I can IPFS a file and attach it to the NFT. I can change the logo right now. The logo is always Bulla Network, but I could put on, you know, anybody’s logo. So that would look cool on your dashboard.

[00:08:47] Michael: It comes up, you can see. You know the name of the person, maybe the logo of the business. Also when you purchase it, the ownership will switch right now. We’re in version 1. That’s not the case, but version 2 is coming where it will switch so that you had take ownership of that NFT.

[00:09:05] Michael: And then if you think about these things, NFTs, they have a purpose afterwards too, or they can. One simple example is just demonstrating that you have paid for something. You know, you have a record, it’s immutable, it’s on the blockchain and other ways it, once you NFT it, you could factor it or finance it because everybody knows it’s a standard. So that becomes much easier.

[00:09:29] Michael: And I’ll give you an example. Let’s say I invoice you in an NFT for a refrigerator. And I have a little dot or, you know, button on it that says factor or financable, and you click to pay the invoice with maybe a down payment click finance. And what would happen is the invoice is marked as paid on the NFT.

[00:09:52] Michael: Then I generate a new NFT that is a loan payable and a loan receivable to me. And that’s also an NFT. It’s just an inverted invoice. Once you start to be able to do these kinds of things, then you open up the whole, you know, capital available on the blockchain, which I think is immense. You can lower the cost of finance, I think eventually quite a bit more so than what exists with current banks.

[00:10:20] Michael: So that’s the vision we gotta get there with a reasonable protocol first, but that’s the idea.

[00:10:27] Umar: Now the audience of this podcast, I would say mostly have an accounting and finance background. In simple terms. If you had to explain in the backend how Bulla Network would work in terms of updating the status of the payment on the blockchain and maybe reconciling payment against the invoice, how would that work in the backend

[00:10:47] Michael: On the back, well, you have a parts of truth, that’s you know, indisputable. So you get away from two sets of books, the double entry accounting on both sides. I don’t think anybody will ever abandon their own books. You can now have a source of truth upon which both parties should be agreeing and use that as. reconciliation for your own books.

[00:11:11] Michael: So it improves audit immeasurably. There’s really no question about how much your audit gets improved, because both parties can see you’re collaborating with the accounting, you know, part. So I’ll give you the dumb example. You know, when I was a trader, we always had a prime broker account. Right. And we had my own account and it was always on the phone.

[00:11:30] Michael: Yes sold you whatever 200. And I would write it down quickly on my ledger. On paper. I was never able to, I mean, we would confirm later, but there were always mistakes and this is different. If I send you an invoice and you pay it or reject it, or, you know, I can resend the invoice and redo it. I have much more overview, much more visibility.

[00:11:52] Michael: The other part though, if you want to reconcile your books, it’s this is not a, you know, just because you’ve, nft’d things doesn’t mean you’re you have a full accounting package. You will still need to take your NFTs, download them in a CSV and plough them into, let’s say your books and records of your own business.

[00:12:12] Michael: It’s not taking away that yet. I do think though, web3 accounting, it does have a future where you would have substantial amounts of your books on chain. But there are issues I think with, you know, publicity and how much do you want on chain? How much do you not want on chain? So there’s still reasons to have a hybrid system, but this relieves you, you know, audit headaches and finding the source of truth and losing trades.

[00:12:39] Michael: Like, like I used, like we used to do sometimes a trade would bang around for a couple of days before people, you know, recognized. Oh yeah, I did sell you that or I, I bought that.

[00:12:50] Umar: So Bulla Network is an open source protocol and different dapps can be built using the protocol. In your whitepaper, you mentioned that some of the dapps under development are Bulla Banker, Bulla DAO, Bulla Subscription, Bulla payroll.

[00:13:05] Umar: Now I know Bulla Banker is live because I’ve used the to issue an invoice. Can you start by telling us a bit about Bulla banker? And which is the first dapp being built on top of Bulla and maybe the different features and maybe a simple walkthrough of how issuing an invoice would work.

[00:13:25] Michael: Okay. The, the white paper’s a little bit old right now.

[00:13:28] Michael: Bulla Banker does a lot of things. It does invoicing it and it does payroll and it just does regular payments. The features for an invoice are very simple. You and it loads up contacts. We’re using a company called Ceramic to load contacts so that those contacts are not on chain they’re local. But what you can do is load up a bunch of contacts with their addresses on, well, you have to have a wallet to begin.

[00:13:51] Michael: Once you have a wallet, you can then go with the browser on mobile, or probably better on a computer, go to our URL bulla.network. And it will automatically load whatever it knows about you. If it knows nothing, you’ll see a bunch of blank screens. It’ll say you have some receivables, some payables. It’ll show you your net.

[00:14:12] Michael: It will have a bunch of panels that show you, you know, what is pending? What is not. It has a couple of panels too, that shows you recent history. And what you can do is there’s a button called create invoice, create payments, create payroll, batch payroll. And once you click on those things, then it takes you down a method.

[00:14:32] Michael: So for invoicing, create invoice, up comes a model. It asks you for the wallet address for your debtor and then description. You can put in a file and you can email put in an email. What happens with the email? It’s not stored on chain, but the email fires off an email to your counterparty.

[00:14:50] Michael: It says, hey your wallet, and it gives the number has been invoiced by this wallet. And it gives the number for 20 DAI. When you click on that, what’s great about our system is it’s all URL based. So once you have a URL, it says Bulla Banker, you know, slash whatever, and then we’ll have a, a number on it that URL will take you directly to that invoice.

[00:15:15] Michael: It will show you the model. You can pay it, you can reject it. You can ignore it and then go back into the app and see what other payables you might have. What other receivables you have. So that’s just invoicing.

[00:15:27] Michael: Payroll is a little different. Payroll, you can choose to NFT payments to people, or you can do the direct meaning you don’t pay, cause if you NFT things that cost you of course gas. So in the payroll part, you can batch and we have a little upload from Excel. If you have the correct account, correct column titles, then it will know where to put things. It will upload it. It will show you all of your batch, current payroll efforts. It, you can also include invoices that somebody had sent sent to you.

[00:16:02] Michael: And it will put those all into the Bulla ready to go. If you’re using a Gnosis Safe, you can do that all with one safe transaction and then your other signatories will be able to use Bulla as well inside of Gnosis to see all of the detail of what you’re doing. So it, it allows you a little more information than what Gnosis currently has. That’s payroll.

[00:16:23] Michael: And you can also defer it. You can like prepay or NFT the payments to people, you know, beforehand and then pay them later. And that introduces another way of financing or factoring. Not only, you know, an invoice can be financed, but I can say to you, Umar, well, you have a salary six month payments.

[00:16:44] Michael: I’m gonna mint six different NFTs. That are payments and you can take those NFTs and potentially finance them. If you want, whoever is the debtor at the time, or, sorry, the creditor, you would be the creditor in this situation. Whoever is the creditor at the time of payment that’s who gets the money. Right? So if you were to sell that NFT on open sea, which you could do right now with some difficulty, then, you know, that’s what would happen.

[00:17:10] Michael: What else features. That’s really kind of about it. What’s, you know, we’re working on a couple of other I things, well, we already have multi chain. So, uh, what happens now before this was my frustration. I used to pay people in Avalanche and I was paying people over on Polygon and I was paying people, you know, on Mainnet, et cetera.

[00:17:31] Michael: Now we have a multi chain dashboard, whatever RPC you are attached to. If you click on the wrong RPC, it will ask you, well, do you wanna switch to pay this. And I will show you overall, instead of just receivables for Polygon, it’ll show you receivables for Mainnet, Polygon RSK we’re on Avalanche. You know, a couple of others, which I think is really cool and saves you a lot of time.

[00:17:56] Michael: Next, we’re gonna also add a feature where you can have multiple wallets, because a lot of people will use different wallets. They’ll wanna see, you know, given a group of wallets. What’s my overall P&L or, you know, obligations.

[00:18:10] Umar: Now I wanna ask you, what are the main type of clients using Bulla banker for their payment request today, based on the feedback that you’re receiving, I know there’s a lot of different dapps or other web3 applications being built for crypto payments, payroll.

[00:18:28] Umar: When people are using Bulla, what are like some of the key pain points that Bulla is, is solving for.

[00:18:36] Michael: The biggest pain point is batch invoicing or batch payments. And we have one, our biggest client who is called chorus. And what they do is they mint NFTs for people for carbon offsets and they like to invoice and batch.

[00:18:52] Michael: Which you can do also. And once all those payments are paid or invoices are paid, then they go and mint a bunch of NFTs and distribute them. So that’s our biggest user. That’s what they’re doing. They also use payroll because they like the batch feature. So it’s really batch and a good overview. Their dashboard is pretty good.

[00:19:12] Michael: Of course, everything could be better, but it has gives you a very good overview of, you know, your current situation. The other group that we have are really small people who do, let’s say expenses for a company, they like to, you know, post an expense or ask for an expense. We don’t have an expense category yet, but we’re going to, so you can kind of keep track of things on chain.

[00:19:36] Michael: And finally, it’s just solopreneurs. Most people that work for me are doing it on a contractual basis. So they, I insist that they invoice me using, you know, the stuff we’re working on. Of course the problem with that is still traditional finance is so strong. If somebody wants to buy a house or demonstrate that they have assets.

[00:19:58] Michael: You know that story, right? So that’s another hill or battle against, adoption of these kinds of technologies. I think that goes away over time. But the solopreneur is somebody who I really think is our bigger future because these people, I think we’re gonna go more in a gig kind of economy way, you know, where you can program or offer your services to whatever DAO.

[00:20:21] Michael: I had hoped, I’m trying to get a very big DAO right now. I have to admit that most of the DAOs I talk to are very disorganized. There’s not a lot of leadership. People are hesitant to take responsibility, so it’s very difficult to get DAOs. I thought DAOs would adopt quickly or, you know, at least look at it more, our stuff works beautifully in Gnosis but I’m really getting resistance.

[00:20:45] Michael: And I think it comes from the following. You tell somebody, first of all, an accounting system, SAP is a very difficult accounting system, right? Even QuickBooks is pretty scary. So you tell somebody, Hey, yeah change your accounting and you think, well, you know, it’s so easy cuz I do it all the time and oh this is the NFT source of truth.

[00:21:04] Michael: This will be great. But you know, they barely understand the current accounting much less wanna make the transition quickly to this new form of accounting. So I think that’s a big, big hurdle to adoption, especially in the native arena that I’m in. They’re you know, my competitors are still are kind of mixing web 2 and web 3.

[00:21:25] Michael: And that tells me that there is demand for this kind of service, but they’re not ready to give up on the web 2. They have a lot of legacy. You know, these things are hard to do.

[00:21:36] Umar: This is interesting what you’re saying, because actually yesterday I was speaking to someone, well, he’s not from a DAO or working in DAO, but a web 3 startup.

[00:21:46] Umar: And he was telling me that he’s actually, his team has tested like 20 different web 3 accounting tools. And the one that actually came out on top, and I’m not gonna mention the name right now. Why it came out on top is like he said, because that product was like a mature product. Most of the accounting tools right now are like very new and have not proven themselves.

[00:22:12] Umar: So that was one of the reasons why they choose that one. The second one for them was like the customer service and support. So it give them the impression that they’re there to help them integrate with that particular tool. And then the fact that it integrates with QuickBooks and Xero. Well, so that was what pushed them to actually use this accounting tool.

[00:22:34] Michael: Yeah I have to tell you the, so this client that we have it, our support channel was on fire for, you know, a couple of weeks. It was great. And gosh, I wish I could get more people to, you know, hound me on discord. I also think back to the, you know, doing payroll for a DAO, it seems to me the better business model is not do it yourself, but to offer it as a service.

[00:22:58] Michael: And I’m happy to do that right now. I’ve been talking to this one DAO in particular, I want customer success. I will do it for you. Send me your Google spreadsheet. Make me a signer and then the CFO just has to, oh, you know, does the budget match with what’s going out? Does it look okay? Right. And, and he signs it.

[00:23:18] Michael: I think that’s a better model. I’m moving towards that. Or if anybody, you know, on this call wants that kind of service, we’re ready. We can do that kind of stuff.

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[00:25:20] Umar: Next, I want to speak a little bit more about the different use cases of, well, when having an NFT invoice, you did mention before if I issue or if my employer is showing my salary in like for six different month and I can actually finance those invoices.

[00:25:37] Umar: What are some of the other use cases when an invoice is tokenized? I’m speaking of such use cases around, I mean, the one that you’ve mentioned is around invoice factoring, but feel free to touch on some of the other use cases maybe in DeFi, because now the invoice is composable.

[00:25:55] Michael: Yeah. Well, I’ll give you a huge one.

[00:25:57] Michael: Think about perishable things. So. Let’s say you have, I don’t know, a concert, you’re an artist that you have a venue and you wanna fill the venue and the venue has a hundred seats. Okay. So you generate invoices or, you know, some other format. I don’t, I’m working on this idea, but basically the idea is the following, you sell out your a hundred seats in NFTs, and then if anybody, then the club has to say, well, we’re sold out.

[00:26:25] Michael: With NFTs, the club could say, we’re never sold out. There’s always an aftermarket. And in fact that aftermarket could generate, I know NFTs is a bit of a, you know, you have to trust that people will adhere to the royalty stuff in an NFT, but the idea is an aftermarket can always exist for something that is perishable or that has a date, a hard date, anything like that is I think a huge opportunity for all kinds of businesses.

[00:26:53] Michael: And it starts with an NFT. It starts with something that we all agree on as a primitive and. Yeah, once it’s fulled and boom, it goes to another aftermarket and the people that benefit are the artist, the venue, right? The people more directly related to the actual provision of the service. So that’s a huge, I think that’s giant.

[00:27:15] Michael: And, you know, I, I hope I’ve been working on some Figmas to, to get there. So there’s that. And then what I mentioned already financing things, real world assets, I think also. Just lending between people. We’re gonna back to my original idea FriendLend I don’t like the whole idea of, you know, what? We just went through this whole CeDeFi blowup.

[00:27:39] Michael: Right? You’re borrowing money from pools and you’re doing swaps. I mean all that stuff. I was a trader for so many years. I can tell you it. You know, I didn’t trust it, but what I do trust is the following. Just because we’re in an anonymous sort of, you know, blockchain world doesn’t mean you’re gonna do business with people you don’t know.

[00:27:59] Michael: Right. And ergo, if I can facilitate a really simple lending protocol and FriendLend would be it, why not? And I think that applies to a lot of people in the world who don’t have banking. Who have a phone, right? Who have maybe a hierarchy like the patriarch or the matriarch, you know, who wants to give money to the son-in-law or the daughter-in-law to start a business.

[00:28:23] Michael: Well, you just have a couple of friend lands, couple of loan payable, loan receivables. It’s just between parties that know each other. There’s an IPFS document that maybe has some language about, you know, settling in arbitration or something. But you see what I mean? That is, to me, the promise of DeFi, it’s gonna bring finance all the way down to the consumer level.

[00:28:44] Michael: It’s gonna make it much more suited to the actual people involved. Instead of this, what we have now is, has gotten us awfully far. I don’t wanna bash the current system too much, but it’s, it’s too many parties away. It’s abstracted away from the actual individual. And their needs and et cetera. So that’s why I love decentralization and all these protocols, we build enough primitives.

[00:29:07] Michael: And then on top we can abstract to the cooler stuff for the individual.

[00:29:13] Umar: Now it’s great to have my invoice as an NFT, but I also have to do my accounting for reporting purposes. I have to prepare my UN financial statements for filing. I have to do my tax return. How these transactions today from Bulla Banker relate to all these popular accounting ERPs.

[00:29:31] Michael: Well, we have a CSV download in every way, shape and form that you need. So it is basically right now, the connection would be to, and we have a tagging mechanism. So you can logically you can make business logical groupings, so you could download by grouping, or you could download everything in the system by dates, by wallets, by currency, et cetera, and put it into your QuickBooks or Xero.

[00:29:58] Michael: We’re gonna do some more work on getting a better, you know, getting a premade format for QuickBooks. But right now that’s the level of it. It’s system lets you get all the information that’s on chain off chain and into a CSV.

[00:30:13] Umar: The irony is that even if payments reside on the blockchain, all these transactions, like we just said, still have been transferred to these traditional accounting softwares.

[00:30:24] Umar: Will there be a need for like a web three accounting software in the future that today traditional accounting softwares cannot do. And what would be some of these missing features at the moment?

[00:30:35] Michael: I think the biggest one is value added tax. The moment governments understand that, or you could put in a domicile for whatever person you’re invoicing for whatever object you could automatically calculate the VAT. That VAT could then automatically go to some kind of government and escrow account that relieves you of a lot of headaches that people have in, you know, VAT kind of countries, same idea with sales tax.

[00:31:02] Michael: I think, you know, the problem with getting all of your books onto, you know, on chain is of course there is so many, there are always so many journal entries that you have to make to remedy whatever was put in wrong, et cetera. And I don’t think you can ever program every eventuality inside of a business, especially if it’s gonna cost you money each time that you have to make a modification.

[00:31:26] Michael: So I think the problem is there is human error and how people work and. The malleability of off chain is so much higher than that on, on chain, you have to start to distinguish, well, how much do I want on chain? What is important that should be on chain and what, what can I do off chain to, you know, manage myself, get myself back in order.

[00:31:48] Michael: So I kind of don’t believe that, you know, like, uh, MicroStrategy or IBM is gonna have their entire books on chain, but I think they’ll have significant amounts, especially where they want to collaborate with governments, for tax reasons, with their counterparties, for audit reasons and with their finance people for also audit reasons and finance, because they’ll be able to more easily assess the credit of somebody.

[00:32:15] Michael: If it’s on chain. Right now you have to rely on, you know, an audit from the Big6. And I can tell you already, you know, there have been some famous right famous Ponzi schemes that weren’t caught by the Big6. Not that I’m. I think there are great people there too. Very smart. I wish that I hope they all come to web 3 accounting and understand its promise, but you know what I mean? That’s the reason why you wanna be on chain

[00:32:39] Umar: You mentioned before that once my invoice is minted on Bulla, I can use those NFTs to potentially obtain financing from those NFTs. Are you working with maybe some defi protocols today that would allow me to have financing or, and are there some other protocols today working on reputation systems?

[00:33:01]

[00:33:02] Michael: Yeah. The only two companies I’ve approached Creda is doing a credit token, trying to do what you’re talking about. Determine the, you know, credit worthiness of a counterparty or a wallet. There’s another odd company called Gluwa, which is doing their own credit chain. I’m talking to them.

[00:33:19] Michael: Centrifuge, I would love to talk to, it’s really difficult though. I’d tell you, you go to the Discord and you don’t know who to talk to, but centrifuge is interesting cuz they’re taking or trying to take real world assets and linking them with a pool of financing. I think that factored invoicing would fit very well with them.

[00:33:36] Michael: One of your users could open a door for me here too. I’d be very appreciative, but right now I really I’m focused on getting the conveyor built so to speak. Built such that I can then deliver a credit product to a finance or financing partners. I don’t necessarily, I don’t wanna be JP Morgan bank. You know, I don’t wanna own the whole space.

[00:33:58] Michael: I want it. It should be composability right back to what we’re talking about. If I wanna be all things to everybody, then I need to raise a lot more money than, than I have . So I’m looking for partners. I’m looking for collaborator.

[00:34:12] Umar: And next, I want to ask you some of the biggest challenges that you’re facing today for adoption. We mentioned that there’s a lot of web 3 accounting tools, but even beyond that, I want to ask you about how the challenges for people today to transition from web 2 invoicing, from what they know of to web 3 invoicing.

[00:34:31] Michael: I think the biggest challenge is just understanding why do you want it to be on a native app? And until you get canceled, like I did by Lehmann brothers, you might not really understand that or appreciate it. That’s the biggest hurdle, you know, anybody who has a backend with a server. That could be shut down or ransomware or whatever, suddenly your books are partially or, you know, half gone or they’re offline for too long, especially if it’s a mission critical kind of thing.

[00:35:01] Michael: But I, that needs to be better understood. I don’t think people really. You know, there’s nothing too broken in our world yet in terms of currency. And in terms of web 2, usually stuff will work until, you know, there’s a problem. My protocol, or, or DeFi in general, if what you’re doing is on chain native, no server in the background, then there’s no, it’s unstoppable.

[00:35:28] Michael: And that’s the, I guess, so yeah, unstoppable is underappreciated if that makes sense.

[00:35:34] Umar: Yeah. Michael, we are coming to the end of the podcast. I wanna ask you as closing thoughts, what message do you have for people who are already familiar with the crypto payments? You mentioned DAOs before how you thought DAOs would get the message.

[00:35:48] Umar: It would be easier for them to understand the value proposition of Bulla. What kind of message do you have for people like these who are already familiar with crypto payments to use Bulla and maybe what are you looking forward to for, until the end of this?

[00:36:01] Michael: Well for DAOs, my proposition is the following.

[00:36:05] Michael: A lot of competition I see is great. There’s some good stuff out there, but it’s sending data out to people. If you use Bulla it’s 2 way. You get a front end for your DAO. And so does the recipient of the payment. They get a front end as well, and they can easily see from whom and where did this, uh, money come from?

[00:36:23] Michael: So that’s my value proposition is it’s a two way thing, just like source of truth, point of view. And that’s, I think very powerful, especially for DAOs when, you know, do you want to continue to get an invoice to your, you know, accounts receivable.gmail, put it into an Excel spreadsheet. Send it off and then somebody calls and you don’t, you can’t verify who they are and, you know, did you send, do you wanna continue that way or do you wanna get, people who are collaborating with you with the information that they need such that when they do make a call, it’s a more informed call.

[00:37:00] Michael: And when you look up your own books, you can quickly see, you know, did I make this payment and win, or did I go to the wrong address God forbid, you know, that kind of stuff. And then you asked about the future. I was expecting your quote question, but the future, I think is really, you had a gold standard. Then you had president Nixon, take us off that standard.

[00:37:21] Michael: You know, we had a different base for money and now we’re gonna have, I think, a new base and that’s gonna be Bitcoin, Ethereum. It’s gonna be crypto and people are not recognizing it or, or hiding from that fact. It’s gonna be a big change. And I think a very positive one, a really good one that will have super externalities for the world because you’re not gonna, you know, be able, states will have a much harder time leveraging themselves against your hard work and your assets.

[00:37:51] Umar: I should have said it’s my second last question, because my last question about the code is coming. I have to end the, the episode like this.

[00:37:59] Umar: So I wanna ask you, so do you have a favorite quote or a maxim that you live by?

[00:38:04] Michael: I do. And this quote comes from trading and it would be something like, Hey Mike, it’s really cheap. And if, and I would always respond cheap for a reason. And what I mean is I traded high yield bonds and high yield convertible bonds.

[00:38:18] Michael: And so you were looking at yields. And the yield, you know, Mike, this is 17% yield and it’s got exposure to the equity. Come on, you gotta pile in it’s cheap, cheap, and I’d say cheap for a reason because I would buy it. It would go to, you know, 20% yield and, you know, blow up. Right. And the reason I bring that up is because when I was looking at all of these, you know, uh, swaps and lending protocols that were offering higher and higher yield, When in Switzerland, there’s a negative yield. In Europe, there’s maybe a 0% yield. And in here there was maybe a 1% yield. I just knew it’s cheap for a reason, cheap for a reason. I don’t know what the reason is, but it’s cheap for a reason. And now we see it’s a dumb oh yeah. Yeah.

[00:39:02] Umar: Michael. Thank you. Thank you so much for coming today. I really enjoyed learning more about NFT invoicing.

[00:39:09] Umar: And I want to ask you if people want to learn more about where should they go and where should they reach out to you on social media?

[00:39:18] Start with bulla.network and then we have Twitter feed , bullanetwork, all one word. Those are two good places to start.

[00:39:28] Umar: Perfect. And then I’ll share the link to your Medium page as well.

[00:39:33] Umar: There’s a, yeah, there’s a lot of interesting articles there

[00:39:35] Michael: My ravings, my ravings.

[00:39:37] Umar: Well, thanks a lot, Michael. It was a pleasure to have you today.

[00:39:41] Michael: Okay. Thanks Umar.

[00:39:42] Umar: I would like to thank everyone for listening to this episode, you will find all the links of the episode, shownotes and transcripts on the website of The Accountant Quits at theaccountantquits.com.

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