The Ugly Truth About Centralized Exchanges | Nick Nechanicky DSH #881

Put money like everything was good.

Like there was this product that, you know, they sold to investors.

Like everything was good, but the problem was the broker.

So they'd deposit funds into an account.

They'd be making money.

Like the owner of this like algorithm was like, everything was legit.

And then the owner of the broker stole the funds, deleted the domain, ran away.

And it happened so many times.

All right, guys, last minute episode, but we got Nick from Dextor on the founder, founder, right?

Yes, yes.

Nice.

Thanks for having me.

Crypto Exchange.

Yep, decentralized crypto exchange, derivatives exchange.

Nice.

Powered by Ethereum blockchain.

Why did you decide to go the decentralized route?

Yeah, so actually I started this immediately after FTX collapsed last year, you know.

And yeah, the whole idea was essentially I used to, I've been in this industry for like six, seven years now.

Started off in building fintech software algorithms for Forex traders, equities traders.

And then from there, I started my own Forex broker and I kind of saw how everything operated.

It was all old school.

And we were using crypto for like deposits and withdrawals.

And that's how I got into this whole world.

And

I just saw everything was heading to be decentralized on-chain.

And yeah, then once FTX happened, I sold that exchange and I took those proceeds and I went all into Dextoro because you don't want to see FTX happen again and I think people now appreciate decentralized exchanges you know especially like Uniswap is everyone's using Uniswap and Dextoro is basically like the Uniswap but for trading derivatives you know leveraged Forex you can trade everything as long as you know it has a price feed on chain you can trade it and have full custody of your funds.

I love it.

What happened with the Uniswap SEC stuff?

Are they still fighting?

Yeah, they are.

I mean,

I think it's going going to favor Uniswap for sure because there's really nothing you can do.

It's just smart contracts.

Ethereum beat SEC, so I feel like Uniswap has a good chance.

Yeah, you would assume that.

I think the SEC is just, they're just bullying any large protocol that they're trying to get their

feet into the industry and take a little bit of a share and bully them around.

But at the end of the day, it's just code.

Dextoro is fully powered by smart contracts.

I mean, once you execute them, they live on the blockchain forever.

You can't alter them.

You can't change it so you can't really do anything like you can't manipulate it yeah even if you sue them or if you uh block their i don't know ip address or something it doesn't matter like anyone who has an internet connection can use uniswap forever like the smart contract lives forever so that's that's why it's difficult you know they can go after binance obviously multi-year yeah they already are right now yeah they are and they can go after now they're going after coinbase i saw that yeah crazy because coinbase is the the number one exchange in the U.S.

They're publicly traded.

So you would assume that they're doing everything by the books.

Still.

So you can go after all of those because they hold your crypto.

I mean, they have it in cold storage.

They keep, I mean, I've talked to a lot of executives that keep like ledgers and like banks and stuff across the world.

Like they have a good system, but it's all centralized.

You need human beings that they have dedicated to access your crypto.

Right.

It's not on a hot wallet.

So you can control them, but with Uniswap and with decentralized protocols, I mean, the people control their funds the whole time.

So you can't go after anyone.

And it's distributed too.

So

all of our code base is distributed around the world.

So we use a unique tool called Fleek.

It's through like

the IPS.

And basically, we have like multiple copies of the software accessible anywhere.

So if like one domain goes down, there's like 100 other domains that are available to use.

So, that's like that's how Uniswap would work, too.

That's interesting.

So, Dextoro can't really be hacked then.

Can't be hacked, can't be shut down, can't be nothing.

Wow.

Yeah, I mean, they can go after me, like, as the founder, because, like, obviously, I mean, the Uniswap founder, too.

He's in New York, like, everyone knows who he is.

But what are you going to do?

It's like, did they go after him personally, or did they go after Uniswap?

After Uniswap, just, I think, to make a big, you know, to make a big headline news about it and

basically show others.

They always go after the biggest.

Yeah.

Is that scary to you, though?

Because you might be a target in the future?

I don't think so.

I think the difference here is that, like, okay, so they go after SPF, right?

Once they go after somebody, they can take the whole business and that's it.

But if they like go after a founder of a DeFi protocol, okay, so you have the founder, but the business lives on forever unless you shut down the internet and the blockchain.

Oh, so it would still go on.

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Oh, it's still gone.

Even if something happened to you, you can't do anything because a lot of these smart contracts, they

basically renounce the contracts.

So even if you like get a hold of the D5 founders

wallets and private keys and try to go into there and try to switch it off, you can't.

They renounce it.

So it's like, it's immutable.

It's impossible.

Wow.

So that whole idea of going against like SEC is that now they're dealing with code, not just centralized entities.

So that's the whole, it's a whole different ballgame.

And I don't think they can succeed with any of those.

Interesting.

Any of those, yeah.

Yeah, it's been interesting to see how people feel about Gary, man, over the years.

Like at first, everyone loved him, and now it's seeming like people are going at him.

Yeah.

I mean, there's videos of him.

You saw it like 10 years ago, he was teaching about

crypto at universities and stuff.

And then all of a sudden, he gets that job, SEC chairman, and then he changes his whole stance.

It seems like something happened in the middle there.

Yeah, it seems like he got paid to promote the other side now.

Yeah.

Because there's a lot of big, powerful people that don't want crypto to become mainstream, right?

Federal Reserve.

Bank.

Banks.

Governments.

Yeah, yeah, especially when you...

When you figure out that you're basically your own bank.

Yeah.

Some tough opponents.

Same with Forex.

A lot of big people don't want Forex.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because a lot of people can make a living off Forex.

Yep, exactly.

I've met some of the top traders, and it's fascinating how easy they can.

Not easy, but they can make millions just from their phone.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, I know a couple here.

I mean, I was in Forex.

That was how I started all.

Here in Miami is the best place to meet all

Forex Capital.

And yeah.

I mean, I've been, I know all the Forex trades listening.

MetaTrader.

And so basically with Dextoro, we're building like MetaTrader, but on-chain.

What MetaTrader did is you basically you can start your own like broker.

And obviously MetaTrader has they have like 500 brokers that use their platform, MT4, MT5.

And so Dextoro, we're launching Dextoro Enterprise.

So it's basically like the same thing.

Anyone can start their own

decentralized exchange.

So they would white label Dextoro.

They would use our liquidity, same way, similar that MetaTrader works.

And then we'd basically be like Metatrader, but on the blockchain.

And it's more scalable.

You know, there's no like KYC, no red tape, you know, all this.

That's huge, man.

Cause selling crypto right now on a centralized platform, they limit your withdrawals.

Yeah.

And you have to KYC.

So like taxes and all that.

There's a lot of negatives to it.

Yeah.

KYC is the biggest thing.

I mean, you know, even if like the thing with KYC is everyone thinks as, oh, you don't want to do KYC.

You're definitely hiding something or you're criminals.

No, some people just value their privacy.

And

that was the point of crypto when it started.

Yeah, that was the point.

And then obviously

once TradFi comes in and makes their move,

soon they're going to.

I don't know.

I think everything is narrative-wise.

They're trying to make it look bad.

Obviously, the CBDCs,

they want to cause a problem.

They want to offer a solution to CBDCs.

And that's how I see this industry.

But I feel like

all the founders in DeFi

are,

I mean, they have like, yeah, they're building their own business and products.

But at the end of the day, I think the larger vision is we all kind of work together to make sure

blockchain decentralization doesn't get compromised

by the Tradify, by the institutions.

Yeah.

So how do you monetize this if everything is on the contract?

Yeah, trading fees,

swap fees, yeah.

Every interaction.

So obviously, like when you use Dextoro, we take make our take our fees.

So same thing.

You take a trade, we take a small cut.

Got it.

That makes sense.

Okay.

Yeah.

So the incentives are pretty aligned then.

Yeah.

I mean, they're aligned.

You know, everyone self-custody of their funds.

And it's basically, it's like Binance.

So Dextoro's whole vision, and we'll probably execute this in like the next year, is to be like Binance.

but fully powered by smart contracts.

So that's the best way to put it.

DexToro is going to be like

Binance or Coinbase, but all smart contracts and no like, no one even needs to like, you know, there's no like HR, there's no like accountants, there's no like people that control your funds or approve your withdrawals or decline.

You care what, like it's just code.

It could be run by like a team of five.

That's awesome.

Yeah.

So that's, that's what's coming.

Blockchain, now we have like layer twos.

I don't know.

Are you like.

I've heard of the layers.

I don't know exactly what they mean.

Could you explain layer one and layer two?

Yeah, layer one is just Ethereum mainnet so it's Ethereum base layer that's that's uh layer one that's where all the transactions are approved sequencer fees are generated and then layer two is just scaling solutions so it basically uses roll-ups which bundle transactions into a roll-up and then they execute that off-chain and they send it to the mainnet so like Arbitrum, Optimism, base, Coinbases, blockchain base.

Those are all layer two blockchains on Ethereum.

So Dextor is on Optimism, Layer 2.

And still, it's it's fast.

I mean, it's, it's like costs like less than a penny to send you files versus Ethereum mainnets, like could be a dollar, could be $10.

I've paid more than 10.

I've paid like more 10,000, sometimes like 25, depends on exactly.

I remember during the NFT craze, like sometimes even 100.

100, yeah.

Especially to swap, send.

But now the next the next era, I mean, you could say it's not layer three, but it's just like what Solana has done, where obviously the transactions per second are like near the 100,000 transactions per second.

Then you have other blockchains like SUI launching that are doing similar, but we're launching Toros blockchain, which is going to be a competitor to Ethereum, Solana, SUI.

And we're trying to aim for like even higher TPS.

That's the C-Round you're doing right now?

No, that's going to be

like end of next year.

So kind of aiming towards a Series A.

Is that an ICO?

Yeah.

ICO, yeah.

Yeah, we did ICO.

We raised half a million like less than 24 hours.

Damn.

Yeah, it was pretty crazy, man.

That's nuts.

Dude, these token sales go crazy.

Like, I've seen some.

If you catch the right one, too, you'd make a quick 10.

100 degenerate meme coins raise like 10 million

a day.

I'm like.

The meme coin space is a whole nother world.

That's all insider trading.

I'm not really a fan of it, but I'm sure you love it with the volume.

Yeah, I only like it when you can actually see who the team is.

Like if they verify themselves and this is the team, you can see who they are.

There's a lot of scams.

So

there's liabilities, right?

they're held accountable for

if it's a rug pull or whatever it is.

These celebrity scams are like every day.

I see a new one.

It's like, why are you fucking up your reputation for Bitcoin?

Yeah, for like what?

To make 100K.

Exactly.

What's that going to do for you?

To do that, and then they move on to the next project, and they just keep rinsing and repeating.

And it's nasty, dude.

It's such an interesting world.

Yeah.

So, where do you rank right now in all the decentralized exchanges?

We are, we're, we're like top 10 right now.

In a year, yeah, but the thing is, we don't do marketing.

We haven't done marketing because

I'm like a nutcase when it comes to a product.

Like

it has to be perfect.

You feel like Elon Musk.

Basically, I can't leave.

I even tell my CTO, I'm like, dude, let me

do all the design, all the UI.

And I'm like, I should be out raising capital.

I should be out doing what a CEO does, but no, I'm like, I'm like in my office doing all the engineering, doing all that stuff.

I've even learned to code just by working with the engineers.

Like, all right, now I got to stop and like raise capital and do more, go to like the events.

Well, they say that's actually like a good thing, you know, because Elon believes product is the marketing.

He spent zero dollars on marketing with Tesla.

Yeah, yeah, I saw that interview too.

Yeah, so it's pretty mind-blowing because you know, as marketers, we're taught to spend money and get eyeballs.

But if you just focus all in on the product, that's a way of marketing.

Markets itself, exactly.

If it's so good, yeah, yeah.

So, but yeah, that's that's kind of the plan now is we're we're we're we're trying to be the MetaTrader in the Binance of on-chain, all powered by smart contracts, and then get into Tauros blockchain and just basically revolutionize derivatives trading.

I mean, nice.

I know MetaTrader is so outdated.

A lot of

people stand from the App Store, too.

Yeah, yeah, man.

That was crazy.

I was in a lot of like trades too, and I

went I went to Prague and then I had a different phone that didn't have MetaTrader on it.

And then I wanted to download MetaTrader and I saw that even, not even just in the US, in Prague, it wasn't available.

And I was like,

dude, what?

So I have to go to my desktop.

It was a trade.

That's sketchy.

I was like, yeah, I think it's time for a change.

Yeah.

So you're still trading Forex?

Still trading Forex.

Nice.

But I'm more or less trading Forex just to see all the flaws and all the improvements on MetaTrader and just try to buy still.

What flaws are you seeing?

Well, to start,

a lot of my friends who have brokers, they had to just recently, they had to change the address in the incorporation country of, they were like in St.

Vincent and Grenadines or these Seychelles and they had to change it to like different island and they always have to change things.

And Metatrader is notorious for having scam brokers.

I have friends that put money, like everything was good.

Like there was this product that, you know, they sold to investors, like everything was good, but the problem was the broker.

So they'd deposit funds into an account.

They'd be making money.

Like the owner of this algorithm was like, everything was legit.

And then the owner of the broker just stole all the funds, deleted the domain, ran away.

And it happened so many times.

It's like almost like a rug pull, but it's like they start this fraud.

Forex broker with MetaTrader.

And MetaTrader doesn't do like KYC properly.

They don't like.

And you could fake the trades on there, I heard.

Everything.

You can fake, and then when you're happy with it,

because the thing with MetaTrader is, so I had a broker.

When users deposit, so let's say somebody deposited a million dollars, like I have access to that million dollars.

And this is the dark side of owning a Forex broker is that they won't tell you is that you could fake, you can make fake

real and demo accounts, and you can fake those completely.

And they look the same.

Exactly.

And when users deposit funds, you have to manually transfer them to your liquidity providing platform.

Like we used,

we used a,

what was it,

Prime Zero, or I forgot what it was called, but you basically always have access to funds and it's really scary.

It's like you could start a broker and you can have access to all this funds and not have any accountability.

Wow.

And it's no licensing to start a broker?

No licenses.

So you could just start one or not.

Yeah.

Easy.

So easy.

I wonder why there's no regulation about that.

Nope, nothing.

And then

because MetaTrader just wanted more business.

And then they finally got to it.

And then they're like, all right, all these brokers without licenses, you're done.

And then so they were like trying to transition into getting licenses.

And they were like scurrying.

And then I sold my broker.

And the owners of that new broker were like, Nick, what do we do?

And I'm like,

I sold at the right time.

Sorry, brother.

Did you know it was coming?

I didn't know.

Oh, wow.

I didn't know.

Yeah.

I think something with the FTX probably also triggered that.

Probably they were probably getting sued on.

Meta trader side, yeah.

Because I lost out on a couple of those Forex traders.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I put in money into a few of those.

And yeah, they were scams.

You could fake the trades, but the common person would never know that.

Yeah, new wash trading.

You can say that it's a live account, but it's a demo account.

But yeah, I mean,

I think a lot of feedback from Forex traders that we've been talking to, we have a couple, some of the biggest actually in the industry that we're talking to to try to get them on the team for DexToro.

And yeah, they're just like, I've had this idea for so long, you know, like being able to trade Forex

on the blockchain without having to use MetaTrader or give my funds to some sketchy broker, you know?

And it's like, why do you use an offshore broker?

Well, it's because if you use a

Forex broker based in the US, they're regulated.

KYC.

KYC, you can only trade 50x leverage.

There's a rule called FIFA, which is first in, first out.

There's so much red tape.

So they will go to offshore brokers.

Those offshore brokers could take your money.

So it's like, what do you do as a trader here in the US?

Do you settle for 50x leverage with, you know, like forex.com or Oanda, like a pretty reputable broker, or do you go offshore?

And so my broker was offshore, but we had licenses

in SVG.

But it's, I don't know, it's just, it's old, outdated.

And this is.

Yeah, there needs to be a better way.

So what will Dextoro do with the Forex stuff, then?

Yeah.

So right now we have Euro, USD, Pound USD, Australian.

gold and silver for now you can trade those with 25x leverage on the blockchain like and here's the difference is that when you trade it you can see all your trades on on chain like on the block like you can see your transaction hash and everything and you can see where you got out of what your profit is how much ETH gas you paid on the fees and with MetaTrader you can't see any of that even when you trade on Binance or Coinbase you can't actually see exactly like how it's executed in the order book.

Wow.

And there's no transparency.

They could use scam wicks, right?

They could like hit your stop losses.

They can do like the craziest stuff when i had my broker i had the ability to do like uh there's a book and b book and they even gave me the ability to like be able to make like wild candlesticks and take people's like money like stop loss hunting and and i was like no i don't want that but they give you that option to like just fuck around with everyone's uh money and they have no idea no idea all the broker people who own brokers they know what i'm talking about

and uh yeah so so dextoro is all on the blockchain transparent and like you can't scam wick anyone um you know you deposit you withdraw you control everything with with a smart wallet that we created um on ethereum it's a smart contract wallet and that's it i mean and all the um i guess a lot of forex brokers owners their their feedback was like this is awesome i love it you know i want to join and some of them were just like is they were so like jealous and they were so like oh i bet they're like man i want to i want to do this myself this is crazy but you might have to white label it like go high level dude that's what we're doing yeah enterprise we're uh building our own liquidity provisioning pro so we're basically renting out liquidity and then it's like anyone in the world like you know hey i want to start my own um trading platform uh but with meta trader you need you need at least like 50 grand up front and just legal stuff corporation but with dextoro you can white label it you just have Dextoro a trading platform.

You put your logo there.

We'll get you set up.

We'll make like the GitHub repo and everything.

You rent liquidity.

You're ready to go.

Wow.

You can start making money literally from day one, as long as you have somebody to trade.

Holy crap.

Yeah.

And then all the fees, everything is like, it gets sent to like a smart contract that everyone can see.

The white labels get their own fee.

Everything gets automatically distributed.

Wow.

Everything is so transparent and scalable.

Like we can have, we can have thousands of people that have a white label.

That's crazy.

And we do that in like one day because it's just replicating the code.

Put your logo in.

This is your unique like tracking code.

You can see all your volume.

And then you just get paid here.

And you don't have to, like,

oh, am I going to get paid?

Like, no, it's all.

I love that, dude.

I've always thought about starting a broker because it seems like good passive income if you get a few big traders under you.

Yeah, exactly.

That's cool.

I like your platform too because you can't fake the results.

Can't fake it.

Because there's an app called Involio.

Have you heard of them?

I haven't.

A guy named Cy Watson started it.

He's like in the crypto space, but it shows people's trades, but you can't fake it.

And then it shows like your win rate and everything.

And then people pay monthly to be part of it.

Is that like MyFX book have you heard of that i've heard of that one but can't you fake that one i think you can yeah yeah this one is connected somehow in a way where you you can't really fake it i think it's connected to your crypto wallet or something oh okay so this is for for crypto for crypto trading people do stocks on it too yeah that's that's cool yeah so with dextro that's basically built in yes but that's cool though because people that follow people's trades on your platform they know it's legit trade it's not like a fake exactly plus we have like a leaderboard so you can see all the traders on our platform So you can see like how many traders we have in total, registered, active.

You can see we have a trader who

like $12,000 like last week on one trade.

And you can literally see it on the leaderboard.

You can see their trend.

You can, like, if you, if you know how to do like on-chain detective, like you can see everything, like proof, timestamps.

That's fire.

Because then you can set up a copy trader.

Copy trader.

Exactly.

I've seen a lot of people make money off those.

Yeah.

And then with when you, with traditional Forex brokers, like you got to pay another company that has the tech for a copy trade or you got to pay them now, like $3,000 a month to use their tech.

Then you got to integrate it.

Then you have to, all these different licenses.

And it's like

with blockchain, you can just build out one smart contract.

You just connect your wallet and it copies.

Or you can build out another smart contract and you could set it to do anything you want.

So it's like the future is smart contracts.

They're going to power.

real world assets, right?

BlackRock always talks about that.

And it's, I mean,

the future of all of finance, not just trading, like everything, like tokenizing, like, like

you own this office, right?

Like the ownership is, it's held like on a specific database where they hold like property ownerships and mortgage and everything.

But soon that's all going to be on the blockchain.

And it's going to be powered by smart contracts.

So that's why we have like some of the best smart contract engineers in the world.

And that's why I'm...

I'm like, I'm trying to find them right now.

I'm still scouting for talent because I know that we can build anything.

So like we're with Dextoral, we can have a section where you can tokenize like anything, like ownership, mortgages, auto loans, and you can just tokenize it.

And then from there, you can like even trade it and

you can refinance those all like permissionless.

You can do all that stuff on-chain.

Dude, that's really cool.

Cause the home buying process right now is terrible if you have crypto.

Yeah.

You have to liquidate it and pay capital gains tax.

And then

you have to buy it, convert it.

There's a fee to convert it.

Imagine if you could just buy it with crypto crypto with a smart contract.

Exactly.

And on one chain.

So soon, like with Chainlink, CCIP, and, you know, because everyone's like, oh, Ethereum, there's Binance, Smart Chain.

There's all these different chains.

So I think by the end of this year, there's some big things happening with blockchain tech.

And you'll be able to

kind of operate on one chain, like without bridging your assets.

Wow.

Yes.

That would be massive.

Exactly.

So if you're on Ethereum, you don't have to bridge to

Binance or something.

Like soon, there's going to be like one layer where it's just interoperability.

That would be major.

Because right now it's so annoying with Solana, Binance, Ethereum.

Yeah, it's annoying.

A common person can't figure that shit out, to be honest.

It's already annoying for guys like us.

They can't.

Yeah.

That's another thing is that the reason why, like, for DexTor, we have like 300 traders, but daily active, we only have like

10.

Oh, really?

10, but we still generate like 70,000 in trading fees.

Holy crap, under 20 million in volume.

No, 70,000 total.

Oh, total.

Okay.

But it's like 10 traders.

Like, what do you expect, right?

Yeah.

Because we haven't done marketing.

But, um, but yeah, so the whole thing is that it's difficult to convince people to move from centralized exchanges to use decentralized exchanges because they have to learn how to use like MetaMask or they have to learn how to like, you always have to have ETH for gas, then you have to have your stablecoin, then you have to connect your wallet.

You have to make sure like you keep your private key key and your seed phrase

private

so you don't get hacked.

And there's like so many steps.

It's so fragmented just to use like DeFi protocols.

And with like Coinbase or Binance, you just email, password, sign up to FA.

Thank you.

That's it.

Yeah, that make it easy.

You have an app.

And so we're doing that now.

Is that we're implementing, it's called account abstraction.

So you won't even have to use a MetaMask anymore.

You just sign in with your Google account or your Apple ID with

Face ID, and you can start trading on Dextoro just like that.

Wow.

Like a centralized exchange.

That's going to make it easy.

So easy.

Yeah, that's smooth, man.

Yeah, there's always the risk of being hacked in crypto.

You see it every day on Twitter.

Yeah.

Someone gets wrecked.

Twitter crypto is crazy.

Yeah, it's so negative.

I actually had to stop.

You have to be on it for your job, I'm sure.

But it's so toxic, dude.

Yeah, it's overwhelming.

You don't know what to...

Like if you're on there to find some new like alpha, some new coins, or you want some news, like, no, you're going going to get bombarded with some

exploit, some hack, some whatever.

Any day the market's down, do not go on crypto Twitter because it's just a bunch of people contemplating weird things.

Yeah, yeah.

I just, I honestly, I, do you know, like, the newsletters, I subscribe to like Hillcroat or just a couple of them.

Yeah, Sean Purry's, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Or is that Sam Parr?

One of them has a crypto one, I know.

Yeah, so I just, I don't even go on those.

I just have one email that hits my inbox a day for a full coverage of all the news, and that's it.

Smart.

It's too uh, it's too overwhelming.

Oh my gosh, dude.

It's yeah, it really puts you down.

Yeah, yeah, crypto Twitter, man.

Yeah, man.

Yeah, all the NFTs are down bad, so people are just depressed.

And then the meme coins, yeah.

It's funny, all the celebrities, or did you hear the Justin Bieber?

He bought that one for like the board eight, and then now it's it's worth the 99% down, it's like worth like ten dollars or something.

Oh, yeah, and he bought it for like half a million.

I almost bought a board eight at the peak, yeah, for like 100K.

It was it was like a good like flex, though.

You know,

the 11 nightclub has one, I know.

And they put it on that big

on the field.

They actually probably made their money back off it.

I think so.

But most people lost money.

Yeah.

The thing is, you can't generate, like, you can buy it, but then you can't generate income with it.

It's not like you can buy ETH and stake it and generate yield.

You can't really do that with NFTs.

I was a big fan of staking until Celsius happened.

Man.

They made it so easy.

And then dude, that founder, he would go to these conferences.

He'd have that shirt that said, banks are not your friend.

I'm like, dude.

He did a phenomenal marketing campaign.

Amazing.

I can't even knock him for that, but yeah.

Yeah, that was messed up, man.

Is he in prison or no?

He should be if he's not.

I don't think he is.

We got like 30% back, but everyone else lost 70%.

How does that work, though?

Who determines who gets they went to court and there was a class action?

And

yeah, everyone got like 30% of their portfolio back.

Wow.

But it was at when ETH was like 2,000.

So

it wasn't even really 30%.

It was like 15, 20%.

And so that was basically just a Ponzi's game, just a classic Ponzi's game, right?

Yeah.

It's crazy that they got that far, though.

Yeah.

And they were like pretty, I thought they were regulated or something.

Were they public?

I think, honestly, I think it's just the founder.

He would always be on press.

He would always be at conferences and speaking on stage.

And just like, he was so good with his words and convincing everyone.

It's like, that was the regulation there.

It's like you put your trust into him and you see him speak.

And the same thing with SPF.

You know, he was like, he was good.

He was like this philanthropist or

half your money.

Well, yeah, what's that?

Like, he wants to donate all of his money.

Yeah, there's a word.

Yeah, I know what you're talking about.

He doesn't care about the money or something like that.

And that's what.

That's what got me.

I didn't even use FTX, but I've respected him from those videos.

Yeah, because they would always, okay, so it was like at the time, it was Binance and FTX.

It was the top ones.

And it's like, the whole narrative that they kind of impose on you is like, okay, Binance is, you know, Chang Peng's out, this Chinese guy, and like, you know, some people against like China and all this stuff about it, and all this like FUD they'd create, they're money laundering.

And then you have FTX here, like based in the U.S., they just bought that American Airlines arena, and they're so the founder is so good.

And that's why FTX was a huge threat to Binance.

And that was the whole success, you know, behind behind them is that they really use that to get users in and obviously paying Kevin O'Leary and paying all these, like Tom Brady, and paying all these athletes and celebrities out of users' deposits.

Nuts.

Dude.

Crazy.

They got away with it for a while.

Yeah.

Man.

Do you think those, do you think they should be held liable, though?

The celebrities?

Yeah.

I think they got sued.

I don't know what happened, but I'm assuming they settled by now.

Yeah.

They probably gave most, if not all, the money back.

Yeah.

They probably didn't know, to be fair.

Yeah.

So it's a tricky one.

Exactly.

Yeah, they probably had no idea.

They were just like, oh, crypto.

I mean, when someone offers you like 10 million just to represent the brand, you're not going to turn that back.

Yeah, put yourself in their shoes because people shit on these guys, but you would have taken that money.

Yeah.

99% of people.

Exactly.

You know what I mean?

And then you see them hate online.

Yeah.

What's going on with FTX?

Do you know anything right now?

I heard they found all the money.

That's the last thing I heard.

I think the new CEO was trying to

get the brand back going and

get it back going.

I don't think so.

I know they had a big Solana position, and then when that spiked again, the $8 billion was restored.

I don't know what happened, but we'll see see if they can recover.

It's going to be tough.

Yeah, it is.

I don't know.

Their rep is so tainted.

Yeah, I don't think so.

I mean, yeah, I think the future is

DeFi on chain.

And

that's why Coinbase did base.

Is that DeFi?

Yeah, they have their own

layer two blockchain.

And they have so many

interesting projects on base.

DexToro, we were about to go on base, but we have our own plans with Toros.

But Coinbase knows it.

Everyone knows it.

And I think it's just a matter of time.

I think we'll see it early next year.

All these large centralized exchanges, they'll have their own blockchain.

I mean, crypto.com already does, right?

They have the crypto OKX has their own blockchain.

Yeah.

And yeah, that's.

I think whatever exchange can lock in with a credit card company will be massive for the average exchange.

Yeah, yeah.

But that's been such a hurdle to overcome.

Yeah.

I just tell

a lot of our traders, same thing.

I just like, you know, use Moon Pay or use something that's easy.

You can't use credit card though.

Too many chargebacks, right?

Yeah, only debit card Moon Pay allows.

But that's how I've been using

to get into crypto.

Which bank debit card allows crypto purchases?

All of them.

Oh, all of them?

All of them.

Oh, I thought they banned them, like chase and stuff.

No, no, all of them.

Yeah,'cause'cause Moon Pay is very regulated.

And, like, every time you do that, you have to, like, confirm text text message.

And when you do that, you can't say it's fraud.

Cause because like they have your oh yeah they have your digital footprint so a lot of people would be like make like a ten thousand dollar purchase on moon pay and then they'll like say it's fraud they get they get free crypto and so with adding the text message it adds that additional layer smart footprint and they they can't yeah they can't win that one it's like no we sent you this message and you included it and uh it's not fraud you could say you got sim hacked i guess but that's a tough yeah yeah i actually did get sim hacked once oh you did yeah they went they went after me so what they they like stole your phone?

No, so SimHacked is they call your phone carrier, pretend to be you,

buy your social security number off the dark web, and then switch the phone to their phone, like a new phone.

Yeah.

And then say forgot password.

And then if you have two-factor SMS set up on all your shit, they get a text to that phone to reset the password.

Wow.

Yeah, that's that's why I only use authenticator apps.

Yeah, I only use authenticator.

I use SMS.

Yeah.

I would have been screwed if I was using text on my phone.

Yeah.

I think also a password manager

does change my life because

I use one password is definitely the best.

I've heard of that one.

Have all that credentials, use like 100 characters for all my passwords.

Jeez.

Yeah.

100 characters.

No one's guessing that.

Crazy symbols, everything, two layers of 2FA.

And I mean, you have to, because my industry, you know, you're a target for sure.

Crypto DeFi, like cryptography.

And I just love the security stuff about it.

And yeah, that's why I'm so passionate about building this

future, future of everyone controls their own data, funds, everything.

Love it.

Just interact with that.

Where can people find you and more about Dextoro?

Yeah, dextoro.com.

You can, you know, right now, so we do actually have a live token sale too.

So it's, I think we're, we'll probably end up doing the whole two and a half million within 30 days.

Yeah.

So, I mean, if we did the half million 24 hours earlier this year with one influencer, so I think we'll probably fill pretty quickly.

And yeah, then we deploy, we launch all of our suite of products.

We get into Tauros blockchain.

And I think it's getting over

and be massive.

So love it.

We'll link it below and check it out, guys.

Thanks for coming on, man.

For sure.

Yeah.

Thanks for watching, guys.

See you next time.

Thanks.