We Talk Cents

25. Crypto 101: Understanding cryptocurrency & decentralised finance (Part 2 of 2)

Episode Summary

Cypherpunk David Beros dials in to help us understand the meme-driven cryptocurrency. From Lego blocks to sushi bars, David delves into decentralised finance and how it will change the way we spend,manage and store our money in the future. This is part 2 of a 2 part series looking at cryptocurrency.

Episode Notes

This is part 2 of our 'Crypto 101: Understanding Cryptocurrency' series. 

If you missed part 1, you can catch it here.

David Beros is the Chief Product Manager from Digital X. Thanks David for joining us to share your knowledge.

If you enjoy the show, we'd love if you could write a review on Apple podcasts to  help other people just like you find us.

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Disclaimer
We Talk Cents is not a financial advisor and the information provided is general in nature and was prepared for information purposes only. This podcast should not be considered to constitute financial advice. Accordingly, reliance should not be placed on the podcast as the basis for making an investment, financial or other decision. This information does not take into account your investment objectives, particular needs or financial situation.

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Episode Transcription

The transcript is created by AI software so it might not be perfect - please forgive any imperfections or grammatical errors.

 

Blaize Pengilly  00:09

Personal finance, budgeting, cash flow, and investing don't have to be scary words. The We Talk Cents podcast is here to help you learn more about money and take control of your personal finances.

 

Blaize Pengilly  00:26

We Talk Cents podcast is not a financial advisor. This podcast is made for entertainment and educational purposes only. All information shared is of a general nature and does not take into account your personal situation. You should consider whether the information is appropriate for your needs and where appropriate seek professional advice from a financial advisor.

 

Dan Jovevski  00:45

For more information, please check out wemoney.com.au/disclaimer.

 

Dan Jovevski  00:51

Hello, and thank you for joining us for Episode 25 of We Talk Cents This podcast is produced by WeMoney a new Australian Smart Money app helping people take control their finances. I'm Dan, your finance expert.

 

Blaize Pengilly  01:04

And I'm Blaize a millennial who learned absolutely nothing about money in school or from her parents. So I am here on the We Talk Cents podcast to learn. Now today's episode is our second episode in our two part series about crypto currency. So if you have zero clue about Bitcoin Dogecoin Ethereum, all those terms. I recommend stopping this podcast right now. And heading back to last week's episode to listen to Episode 24. We are joined by Nesh Sooriyan in Episode 24, who gives us a real 101 on everything cryptocurrency and really nuts out there crypto basics. So if you don't have any clue about crypto totally fine. I didn't until last week either. So highly recommend you tuning back to Episode 24. If you listened last week, or you do have a basic understanding. Stay tuned, because this episode, we'll be looking at decentralized finance. But before we get into that news, money news, Dan, what'sbeen happening this week? And yeah, what's been capturing your attention?

 

Dan Jovevski  02:09

Well Blaize it's never adult day in finance in Australia?

 

Blaize Pengilly  02:16

Who says that?

 

Dan Jovevski  02:18

Oh, no, no, tell me about it. But I really wanted to talk about an article which you shared recently with, with the WeMoney team, and it's from Anthony Baum over at Tic Toc. And what's happening at the moment, Australia is that the government is considering repealing some of the Responsible Lending laws are introduced prior to the hain Royal Commission, and then forced and probably hardened after that after that timeframe. Basically, for people who don't understand much about the Australian Responsible Lending laws, it's basically provision to help

 

Blaize Pengilly  02:52

slow down that would be me. I don't know what the Responsible Lending laws are, what the repeal is, but it sounds confusing, then putting responsible laws so that they're responsible, and then they going on and no, we're not going to, we don't need to be responsible anymore. So what's the deal with it? What's happening?

 

Dan Jovevski  03:07

Totally. And so yeah, what are responsible winning goals is basically a law that's enforced by the government and also the head regulator ecig. That basically tells banks and financial institutions, they have to run the checks and balances to make sure that you can afford a loan. So what they do is they make reasonable inquiries to uncover what your expenses are, what your future plans are to do with your finances, your money, etc, to basically understand, is the loan or the credit that we're extending right now suitable at your stage in life? And can you afford it? And can you reasonably have an expectation to pay that back. And this onus is now on banks and financial institutions to confirm that fact. So individuals not being extended crazy amounts of credit where they can't manage now, before plays, the onus was more on individuals or consumers where we were responsible for ensuring that we didn't get into a situation where we got too much credit and we couldn't repay that back. And if anybody remembers the early 2000s, or the early noughts, there was no shortage of TV advertisements, telling people, they could do things like take equity out of their home to buy boats, and caravans and jet skis and basically anything to do with borrowing from existing assets. And also, of course, people getting heaps of credit cards or, you know, personal loans that would become unsustainable. What the government is now proposing is that they repeal all those safety measures and basically bring back the onus to consumers to make sure that they have done the right research and are covered with a lot I can afford. forms of credit, which To be frank is, I think, a lot a good thing and what if The prompt Tiktok home lines also talks about and you've got to get a really sort of think about this. Anthony is a lender. So there's people inside the lending community that is telling telling the government, they probably should repeal these laws. So we're in a really interesting situation. I think the government wants people to borrow money because the more money that people borrow, the more the economic machine, you know, moves ahead. But I think that's at the detriment of individuals that may be presented with opportunities to borrow money, where the banks won't have a consequence for extending credit hours. Does that make sense?

 

Blaize Pengilly  05:34

It did make sense. It makes sense in that it doesn't make sense because the government's doing a complete 180 it's like they're doing a backflip they've gone. Oh, wait, this wasn't that safe. You know, people were lending money that they couldn't afford to repay it people got people going into strife. Let's put in laws to stop this from happening. Oh, actually, no, we've changed our minds again. They're doing a very Yes. No, yes. No, maybe at the moment. Yeah, that's really interesting. And it is, like that article says about Tic Toc, the credit provider opposing the repeal of the lending laws. It is really interesting that you mentioned that it is a credit provider going Whoa, we don't actually think this is the best idea. Yeah, I don't know how I feel about it all. I kind of think, you know, if there was a need for the law in the first place after a royal commission, you know, I feel like you know, maybe it should stick around. But there's many, many more smarter people in the in economics and in the government making these decisions than I am. So yeah, I'm a bit iffy about the whole situation to be honest

 

Dan Jovevski  06:37

 And just to let you know, our position, is that we are very much in favor of support for measures where Australians are protected from any financial institutions of extending credit, whether or not doing the Responsible Lending check. So I think we've also got a position as a company, to communicate that in that we fully support appropriate and safe initiatives for the protection of individuals, the extension of credit, and I think, blows a lot of other Australians also agree. And we're going to be scratching our heads to find out what the government ends up doing in the next couple of months and how they're responding to the criticism that will when So,

 

Blaize Pengilly  07:16

yeah, well guess we'll see what happens if the backflip you know happens or not. Now, shall we dust off the crystal ball and look into the future of cryptocurrency and decentralized finance with David Beros?

 

Dan Jovevski  07:30

Let's do it. All right.

 

Blaize Pengilly  07:36

Okay, Dan, last week, we chatted to Nesh about crypto and understanding crypto 101. Are you ready? And what? Okay, there's more to learn. I know there's more to learn. But what more can we learn? And are you ready for it? No, I'm

 

Dan Jovevski  07:49

totally ready. I think this opened up my eyes around why Bitcoin exists, why we should get involved in us. And I'm really excited about that philosophy teased out. Well, we're going to discuss today around this concept of DEFI. I'm ready to get into it Blaize. Here we go tonight. All right.

 

Blaize Pengilly  08:07

Joining us today to continue the discussion on cryptocurrency and demystify the world of DEFI is an Aussie who has many years of experience working in finance and wealth management. He's built to digital financial services startups that have served over 10,000 customers today. He has previously been part of the winning team for a FinTech hackathon all the way over in London. And he currently volunteers as a co organizer for FinTech, Perth, and his role is Chief Product officer at Digital X a technology company specializing in block chain application development and Digital Asset Management Services. If you don't know what any of that means, don't worry, I have absolutely no idea either, but I'm sure we are about to find out. He joins us now via video link. welcome David Beros. How you going, David?

 

David Beros  08:53

Hey, yeah, very well. Good to be on.

 

Blaize Pengilly  08:55

Thank you so much for joining us, David. Now, what on earth is I honestly didn't know what half of those words in the in the intro were. So what is Defi what is blockchain? And why should we care about it?

 

David Beros  09:07

Yeah, it's good to hear in the previous episode, there was a bit of a blockchain teaser. And I think building on that decentralized finance is basically just a big umbrella term for all the projects and the teams and the startups that are working to build financial services and digital financial products on those blockchain systems. So it's really a catch all term covering a whole range of things. Those financial services could be anything from borrowing and lending, to investing to insuring Basically, any way that lets people access a decentralized financial service directly over the internet.

 

Dan Jovevski  09:47

What's amazing, David, maybe what's the distinction between the traditional world of finance in a use case and then how that how that use case be examined for defi what are some of the examples of a divide in Since that could relate to a real world problem that people try and solve,

 

David Beros  10:04

yeah, absolutely. I think it's particularly interesting at the moment, because we're seeing like a lot of Neo banks and traditional financial services startups come through with really good user experiences and mobile applications that are tailored for younger consumers as they start to get more and more wealth and have to make decisions with their money. And I think that's a fantastic thing. A really tangible example of that is just how far something like the mortgage application process has come where it used to be that you had to go online and type in what your expenses were, and then the bank would just kind of trust you that you weren't making any of that up, and they do a credit assessment on you, and and offer you alone. Whereas now, it's a really slick online experience where, you know, they'll be able to connect to your bank account, in many instances and suck in what your actual expenses are, and give you a really slick, tailored loan experience. I think where defy is different to that is, those better digital experiences are basically underlying that the same kind of mortgage products and services. So it's the same mortgage from the same bank. But it's always been, it's just a better experience on top, I think what defy is trying to do is change the underlying product by using these blockchain technologies. So one really interesting area at the moment is borrowing and lending. One of the simplest kind of most basic financial services. And the way that that's working, there's some platforms, an example is compound, although there's dozens, maybe even hundreds of others at this point, where essentially you put in one type of cryptocurrency, so it might be Bitcoin, as collateral, and then you can take out a loan in another cryptocurrency against that. And then there'll be an interest rate that you have to pay. And if you don't pay it back, then you lose your collateral. But that's a very early, I guess, example of how defi is being used today.

 

Dan Jovevski  12:08

Excellent. David serves as an example, the old world is I had a car and I don't have any loans against my car. So I take that to the bank. And I say, Mr. bank manager, I'd like $5,000, my car is worth 10,000. And that will give me a loan. In this instance, what we're doing is we're buying cryptocurrency, and then we're putting that up as security, and then you can lend against that. And that's a really interesting way to go about lending. David, I've heard that this is actually much more quicker, like in the event where people need to get access to lending, the traditional process of actually applying to a bank could take somewhere up to two weeks. But with defy protocols, this almost happens instantly. Is that correct?

 

David Beros  12:51

Yeah, it's it's pretty quick. So if you have a crypto asset that you want to use as collateral, like your car, or like your house, against lending some money against it, really, it's I mean, as quick as the blockchain transactions will allow, which typically is, depending on the fee that you pay, like between five and 10 minutes, you can be on one of these platforms, loads the collateral and instantly get back the other asset that you want to lend. Or sorry, rather that you want to borrow.

 

Blaize Pengilly  13:20

David, this is crazy. So is defi something that is only currently accessible in the world of crypto, or is it something that like traditional lenders, like the big four banks will move towards? Or is it purely purely for crypto and those in the world of crypto?

 

David Beros  13:38

Yeah, it's it's purely purely for the world of crypto. So I think one of the reasons it's proliferated, the last time I gave a talk about defy was at the end of 2019. And there was roughly 800 million US dollars worth of assets tied up in default protocols. Today, that's over 26 billion. I haven't checked recently, but it's somewhere in that ballpark. And the reason it's proliferated so quickly, is because it's just for crypto assets. So because it's all natively digital, all of these different defy platforms and assets and services. big fancy $2 word is interoperable, so that they can all speak to each other, and they share the same language. So the other term that I like us to describe the defi ecosystem, is that it's like money, Legos. So you have one money Lego, and then you can really easily build on top of it with other money, Legos because they all speak to each other. So yeah, to answer your question, there's not participation at the moment from the traditional finance institutions and the banks that we're all familiar with. It's just purely natively crypto.

 

Blaize Pengilly  14:50

Thank you for the Lego explanation because that is something I can understand the blocks, they've got to fit on top of the other books. That's that's awesome when it comes to when it comes to If I is it all, like if I'm borrowing money using this method? Can I be borrowing from anyone anywhere in the world? Or is it specific to our location? Or, like, how does that part of it work? Or is it just anyone on the web? Or like, Where? Where is it located?

 

David Beros  15:17

Yeah, so it really is anyone on the web and you don't know the individual person that might be taking the other side of your borrowing and lending transaction. The way it works is you put your collateral into a smart contract. And that locks it up and has a set of rules that basically say, if you don't pay back your loan over time, then you're going to lose your collateral. And that might sound really fancy and scary. But I think we do it all the time in regular society, whereby if you think of a home loan, the collateral against your home loan is your actual house, and your house is worth more than the amount that you've Lent. So you can never loan more than 100% of your house value. And that's why, you know, we have to save and make a deposit on a home loan so that we have about 80% of the value so that the bank knows that if the house drops in value, they've still got some value to recover d phi and in particular, defy lending works in the same way where you have to post collateral that is more than the value of what you want to loan out. The other really interesting thing is we've spoken so far, just about crypto assets generally. But to be more specific, there's a lot of crypto currencies now that are designed to be what's another fancy term, stable coins. So you might have a particular crypto asset like tether where one tether is one US dollar. So you can borrow a bunch of these crypto asset US dollars, and you could lodge as collateral. A bunch of Bitcoin.

 

Blaize Pengilly  16:56

This is blowing my mind defy crazy.

 

David Beros  17:01

Yeah, I really want to try and make it quite tangible as well, because it because it is so crazy and out there. It's easy for it just to stay in the abstract. As you're trying to get down to like you can actually go on the internet and use this today. Yeah, there's a little there's like 50 or $100.

 

Dan Jovevski  17:21

That's great.

 

Blaize Pengilly  17:23

Have you done it yourself before?

 

David Beros  17:25

Yeah, I've done a bunch of things I did the I use compound to do some borrowing and lending. And then there's another system called uni swap, which is basically decentralized finance for trading. Except the difference is that you can be the market makeup to everybody's trading. So if we think about that, that's essentially up until now being the role exclusively of investment banks, offering liquidity on securities exchanges. But now, because it's purely digital, anyone can basically be their own bank. So yeah, I've gone into a uni swap pool. And yeah,

 

Blaize Pengilly  18:08

that's crazy. Everyone can be their own monopoly bank, I live out their dreams. Yeah,

 

Dan Jovevski  18:13

that's really good point, David on everyone becoming their own bank. And I think this actually has a lot of profound consequences. If we think about the way the current banking infrastructure works, where you go to a bank, you walk in the front door, you go see a teller, you go see a desk, you go see a lot of people, you then see the ads on TV, you see the billboards advertised when you roll down the freeways? I mean, as consumers, we're all paying for this, right? This is the cost of banking, which is all the costs that a bank needs to wait to deliver the services to us. But in this instance with defy, there's none of that. Right. So theoretically, we should be getting cheaper access to financial products and services, because we've taken at all costs in distribution. Is that right?

 

David Beros  18:58

Yeah, definitely. I think one analogy that really helped me is, if you think about this digitization of financial services, and then think about, where in other areas of the economy has that happened previously, we can think about music. So it wasn't, I mean, I still remember being a teenager and having to go to the record store to like buy a CD. But with the proliferation of streaming services, basically, the cost of producing that music became almost zero and basically free. And what were the implications of that? I think one of the important ones is that instead of having access to just a record stores worth of music, I now have access to like the entire human back catalogue of musical history. And that's a lot more daunting tasks to have to navigate and kind of figure out what's good to listen to. And if you apply that analogy to like banking and financial services, I think a lot of those costs are going to get removed the marginal cost Producing financial assets is going to go down. And if we think about what impact that will actually have in our lives, I think we could speculate that there'll be a lot greater choice, there will also be the potential for people to much easily create their own financial services or be their own bank. And that's a little bit scary. Because again, it still comes back to the fundamental question of who do you know, to trust? And I think, to take it back to the music analogy, that's why we have like Spotify algorithms that tell me every, what is it Monday, what my discover weekly should be, like, put a bunch of songs in front of me, I think we're gonna need discovery algorithms for financial services, where they put in front of me the products that I can actually trust to go and get a loan or to make a trade or to get some insurance and, and do those fundamental things.

 

Blaize Pengilly  20:52

That's so interesting. When it comes to what happens with the regulation like, Is this an industry that's regulated? Is there any rules around it? Is there any tax or anything involved when it comes to this? And, yeah, is it safe, I guess,

 

David Beros  21:08

I think it's one of those classic instances where technology definitely moves faster than the legal system can keep up in Australia, I think the direction that like assets of financial securities regulator has taken is that we do have existing financial laws and like the Corporations Act, and that the decentralized finance and crypto industry is no different in terms of what it's offering people. And so it should fit within that. I think there's some challenges there, because software and digital products in particular, are just infinitely flexible and infinitely malleable, that it doesn't fit as neatly into the definitions of things like the Corporations Act. So that's a weird way of saying that it is kind of regulated, but it's also totally not regulated. And there are a lot of risks. And people should be extremely cautious when they're investigating or experimenting with d phi. And I think a good piece of advice that I received a few months ago was that the best investment that you can make in defiis actually investing your time. So you can understand it and get to know it, rather than investing your money. And I think that's one of the really, really cool things about d phi is there's not if you consider any particular product or service, there's not actually a company or a person in many instances that is behind that or controlling it. It's more like community driven, where you might have a crypto asset token that represents the right to vote on what the product is, and what changes go into it. So to give a tangible example of that, we've already spoken about the borrowing and lending example and collateralized loans. For some of these platforms, you can have a token that lets you vote on what type of crypto assets will be accepted as collateral, or what the interest rate should be. And really interesting things like that. So yeah, although it's not regulated, I think one of the interesting things, given that it is risky to do is to invest your time and get involved in those communities.

 

Dan Jovevski  23:20

that's super. David you've talked about communities and everybody's on an education journey about crypto, but who do we follow? Who's Where are the best resources? And how do people get started to understand a lot more about defi?

 

David Beros  23:33

Yeah, I think the approach that I've taken is over time, I've built up a list on Twitter of people that offer really good research, and then it kind of snowballs where then you follow who they follow. And I've tried to keep it really selective, like there's only 30 or 40 people on my list, but anything that they kind of talk about or say, I know that there's some element of trust, and there's also like a chicken pellets of other people in the community calling them out so people can check out my defi list if they'd like. But I think really notable voices in the space. Guys like Lexa Colin, here, he writes really fantastically detailed analysis on not just the technology and the finance, but also the cultural and social implications. Another one I'd really highly recommend is an Australian guy actually called Anthony sassano. He has a daily newsletter called the daily way. And that's a really bite sized easy to understand blue pill into the crypto or is it the red pill? into the sci fi landscape?

 

Blaize Pengilly  24:40

Blue pill, red pill, I've got a confession guys. I've never seen the movie over my head. Never seen it. That's something on my on my to actually so I can't I can't help you there but I'm assuming it's one of them. David, when sorry. Okay, so say one Okay, as an example, I would like to buy a house one day I have been saving for a little while for deposit. If I wanted to use de fi to borrow money, how would it like? What are the practical steps I would take to do that to buy a house? And can I do that? Or like what how do you do it?

 

David Beros  25:16

Yeah, I think that's one of my predictions for the future of defi is that these real world assets will slowly make their way into the defy ecosystem where you might be able to have a token that represents ownership in your house, and then you lodge that as collateral against the loan. That's, that's really far off right now. But what you can do is really, tangibly, you can buy some aetherium, using Australian dollars on a Australian cryptocurrency exchange, you can send that aetherium to a wallet, a good one is called meta mask, which you can use in your web browser. And that effectively lets you use that aetherium through your web browser on decentralized finance applications. I'll just say at this point, like, just do it with like, 50 or $100, like, a small amount of money that you can afford to lose. And take the mindset that it's a lot like sending an email in like 1996 or 1997. Like, it's a really early. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, you can put that aetherium in a web browser wallet like metamask, go to a website like d fi pulse.com. And it lists what are the most popular defy applications, and they all ranked by how much money they've got going through their ecosystems. So check some of those out. If there's one that takes your interest, you can go to their application online, you can get involved through that meta mask wallet by creating a loan or borrowing some money. It's frighteningly scary how good their user experiences are already. A lot of them too, because it's it kind of plays off the the cypherpunk kind of tech culture is really meme driven. And so often the designs like there's a market maker called sushi swap, where you go to the sushi bar, and you buy some sashimi, which is really like this liquidity pool. So really, really cool, like fun user experiences that make it feel a lot more like a game than a financial service, which I think is both really exciting. But also someone who's worked in like traditional financial services is a little bit scary at this point. But I'm optimistic that it will find its way in the end.

 

Blaize Pengilly  27:39

This is crazy if you think about money, right? So what was it we used to trade cowrie shells as a form of currency. And then we went to traditional banks, where everyone's in their suits. And then we have the heartwarming ads, where there's like a, you know, a pregnant mom holding your stomach at the front of her house that she's just bought with a loan from one of the big four banks, and it's all moving and has the orchestra like orchestra in the background. And now you can learn money through a virtual sushi bar. Like where that what's happened so far is crazy. Where do you see the future of defi going?

 

David Beros  28:18

Yeah, I have a few, I think speculations on on where it could go. I think Firstly, one of the big problems with defi is that the transaction fees are quite high. Like most of the defy activity is happening on the Ethereum blockchain. There's other blockchains that are less will adopted, but because there's only scarce amount of space on that Ethereum blockchain, the price to access some of that space to go and use defy is and can be quite high. So I think one of the things that we'll see is that the barriers to that will come way down. And there's like, some crazy technical work going on to help a theorem scale, which will basically mean that the costs are lower. I think once that happens, it really does open the door for traditional financial services applications to start hooking into d phi as a back end. So at this point, I'm not I'm not totally convinced that in the future, we'll be interacting directly with the blockchain through a wallet, because that is still kind of a technical scary thing to do. I think there'll be some extent to which, like Neo banks start offering defy products in a way that we're familiar with today. I see that as one area where to go. An example of that at the moment is an app called Dharma, which is interesting to check out and they facilitate a lot of defy through a credit card for us citizens. I think because of that, my next prediction is that the regulators will take a much, much closer interest. And, I mean, that's anyone's guess on on how it'll play out because at this point, given that it's accessible to anyone in the world over the internet, It's it's gonna be hard to contain. And also on top of that it's not actually controlled in most instances by a company that you can knock on the offices of or like, prosecute the directors of it's run by a community of open source software people. So that's my guess, third prediction. And then fourthly, yeah, going back to that record store analogy, we've also seen it with digital cameras and the advent of Instagram, where previously another kind of old thing that I remember is going to the department store with my family to get family photos taken. And we were a consumer of those photos. But now that those photos have become digitized, we are all producers of photos. So we've shifted from the demand side and the supply side. And I think that'll happen with financial services, too. So already in the defi ecosystem, I can be a producer of something that looks a lot like an ETF. There's one defy a product called set protocol, where you can basically create a cryptocurrency that is a basket of other cryptocurrencies, in the same way that we think about an ETF in the investment landscape. And I can start earning fees on other people that jump into my ETF as an example. So I think like we spoke about earlier, that will lead to a massive amount of choice, a massive amount of flexibility for consumers as well. But it will come back to who do you trust, and what is the best product for your own financial situation?

 

Dan Jovevski  31:39

Excellent Dave. And I think we've covered a lot of ground today. So if you're a person that may be not like the big banks, or banking, being involved in every part of your life, and you want to sign up to become a crypto anarchist, there is a pathway now through d phi, that you can go and navigate your financial life without institutional involvement. I think this is a growing trend, that the genies out of the bottle and it's not going back. Often these things are talked about as jokes, and they're frowned upon in the very early years, and then they become the mainstream. And I think just add what you just mentioned, Dave, I, I think maybe in the next 10 years time, we actually even stop talking about crypto because it becomes the default, though. Also, he talked talked about another really interesting thing, which is learning right and a 50 to 100 bucks to test an experiment. That's what's going to develop your muscle memory, to then understand how you might be able to use d phi now as an experiment, but more importantly, open your mind up to potentially using a d phi protocol system to solve a real world problem. And the more more people do that, the more likely we are to move away to this future of everybody becoming their own bank. It was a fascinating insight. I learnt a lot. I think please do too. Yeah. So as we wrap up, how do people find out more about you? And where do they where do they go to?

 

David Beros  33:01

Yeah, so my day job, I work at Digital X. That's a ASX listed blockchain company. So where although I'm highly interested in this, were more on the traditional side, building blockchain applications for things like the ASX is DLT. But yeah, connect with me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Yeah, happy to engage in any questions or insights you might have.

 

Blaize Pengilly  33:25

Thank you so much for joining us, David. It was a pleasure having you on the show. And yeah, thanks for demystifying the world of defy for us.

 

David Beros  33:32

Yeah, it's been a pleasure. Thanks, guys. Thanks. See you later.

 

Dan Jovevski  33:41

WeMoney is a smart money app. It helps you understand your finances where your money is going, tracking and monitoring your credit health. But also we have a community feature that allows people to communicate with other WeMoney members in a safe environment plays What have you seen on the WeMoney community recently that's caught your attention?

 

Blaize Pengilly  33:58

Oh, Dan really liked was one of our users is making their own cleaning products. And they were making their own Windex. And you know, I've heard of people making their own Yeah, Windex, oh, Ash, you know, window cleaning products, maybe as what I should say. And I've seen people make their own toothpaste and what is it dishwashing and laundry detergent before and it kind of just made me It made me have a little chuckle to myself because back in the olden days, they wouldn't have had all the fancy products or the fancy bottles and everything that we have. And it seems like we've gone on a bit of a bell curve, you know, where we used to have to make all of our own things and cleaning things with vinegar and really basic products. And then we started adding more money we start paying for pre packaged cleaning items out of pure convenience. And then you know you can buy used to be able to buy baby wipes and they can buy with specific wipes for every different service surface in your house. Right. So it just makes me think that how much money are we actually wasting on these convenience neatly packaged cleaning products when they are really just simple ingredients you can vital a home. So yeah, that was a that was a really interesting price for the recipe for window cleaning product that when my little spray bottle runs out, I think I might have to give it a go.

 

Dan Jovevski  35:15

Oh, yeah, we're going full circle, right? Gone are the days where we have to think about buying stuff off the shelf. We just use stuff at home. And I think that's a big movement that's taking off. One interesting fact is fun fact, along that side is that most modern humans have only been brushing our teeth for about 100 years. Toothpaste was an invention of a marketing company that made us feel like our teeth were clean. But it just begs the question, What are human beings doing to the last 100,000 years? Maybe bad breath was just a feature of humanity that people will learn to deal with?

 

Blaize Pengilly  35:52

Oh, my goodness, I did not know that. marketing companies. Goodness me they have really done they've really done a number and I've haven't, we spent a lot of money we don't need because of marketing companies. So you know, I mean, I do like the feeling of clean teeth. And I do like when I and my friends and people around me have clean, clean, tasty breath. blahs. If you want to see any of the community posts in the WeMoney app or check your finances, check your credit score keep up to date with your net worth, you can download the WeMoney app for free and if you use the code podcast on sign up, you'll get $5 when you connect an eligible financial account

 

Dan Jovevski  36:36

Thank you for tuning in to We Talk Cents if you want to get in touch with us feel free to head over to Instagram and get in touch in the handle gateway money we'd love to hear from guests of the show. He suggestions hidden tips how we can improve orders topics that you want to hear about. Please let Blaize and myself know and if you liked the show would be awesome. If you left us a review on Apple podcasts or wherever you find your podcast he help other people find the show also.

 

Blaize Pengilly  37:02

Yes please do that. We would love to see your reviews and we do love hearing from you when you slide into our DMS on Instagram so we are @getWeMoney and like them said anything you want to share. We are happy to hear from you. Thank you again for tuning into We Talk Cents. We will be back next week with more money hacks. Have a great week and we'll catch you then. See ya

 

Blaize Pengilly  37:21

Bye


 

Disclaimer:

The author is not a financial advisor and the information provided is general in nature and was prepared for information purposes only. This article should not be considered to constitute financial advice. Accordingly, reliance should not be placed on this article as the basis for making an investment, financial or other decision. This information does not take into account your investment objectives, particular needs or financial situation.