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World hunger is not a food problem. It’s not a food problem, because if I go downstairs and go to the uh McDonald’s dumpster, there’s plenty of food in there. So the people in Africa need that food. Now the problem is connecting the food, the the extra food with the people in Africa and predicting uh who’s gonna eat the food ahead of time.
What’s up guys? Welcome to Financial Freestyle here on Yahoo Finance, and I’m your host, Ross Mack. And look guys, no matter where you are on your financial journey, you can never stop learning. And look, that’s why I’m talking to some of the most influential people in their own respective fields, and today is no different. As I’m talking to my guy, Armando Pantoja, investor and futurist. My dog, how you doing, baby?
How’s it going man?happy to be here, man. Always glad to chop it up withyou.
Ain’t nothing is better when I’m talking to my guy, especially when the crypto market is booming, man. But right, obviously we had an episode, so let’s just reintroduce ourselves to the audience. Who was Armando?
Uh, so, OK, so my background is in technology. Uh, later on I got into finance, so, uh, had a company back in 2017, crypto.At the time, uh, we got acquired one of the biggest acquisitions at the time, but this was almost 10 years ago, a lot bigger now, but I went on to, uh, invest a lot in the cryptocurrency, educate people on cryptocurrency. I have a, I’m the CTO of Kwan Index, which is an investment firm. We invest in immering technology, so what I am is I’m a futurist, an investor and an entrepreneur. I try to predict future trends and capitalize on those trends.
You know what I love talking about you, man? It’s nothing better than when the crypto market is really kind of in full swing, right? And so one thing, right, it’s obviously kind of the trends, right? And you talk about spotting futurist trends and we get, you know, asset managers buying crypto, sponsoring different ETFs, but another thing we’re seeing is stable coins, right? We’re seeing legislation. I just saw, you know, Goldman Sachs and you know, Bank of New York, Bonnie.are in talks of digitizing, you know, some short-term assets like to the tune of 1.7 trillion. So one, let us know what’s going on in the stablecoin and what that means for the overall crypto market.
Yeah, so recently, the Genius Act was passed and there was a uh a group of uh a group of laws and legislation that’s gonna uh regulate stablecoins and also to adopt uh full adoption.So that’s a positive news in the crypto market. So that signals that another signal that the US government is embracing cryptocurrency. The US always moves first, so if the US does it, all other countries have to follow. So, uh, that caused the new uh resurgence in attention and interest in cryptocurrency. You know, it pushed Bitcoin up at 15, 20%. Ethereum, got the best, uh, you know, returns on that, uh.On that boom, because most stablecoins trade on Ethereum, uh, and the XRP also did well because XRP also has a stablecoin. So it just was a signal that the US is moving forward in their, uh, Trump’s promises during the election to fully embrace cryptocurrency and make America the number one cryptocurrency on earth. Uh, so it’s a lot of positive news and uh it’s positive for crypto, positive for the US and positive for our economy.
You know what I love about crypto, right, is one.It’s decentralized and I think you said this last time. It was like, look, regardless of who was the president and regardless if they were an advocate or against crypto, crypto was still going to do what it was going to do. However, the fact that you do have the Trump administration from being huge proponents of it, it kind of just moved forward. It just pushed forward the timeline with respect to, you know, the overall adoption of it. So like, what is this new administration, kind of what they’re doing and how that is, you know.Having other institutional investors getting involved in, you know, the just kind of a more global adoption.
Yeah, it was gonna happen regardless. I mean, uh, the, the theme of the Bitcoin conference this year was game theory, and that means that, uh, you know, all people will have to accept cryptocurrency. The people who lag behind will not benefit the most. People who accepted earlier will benefit the most. So it, it’s almost a, it’s almost a a type of situation which everybody will have to eventually. So the United States, luckily, the last time we talked we were.Sure, but this time we see the US starting to make those moves because they realize that they have to be first. Then all the other countries start to catch up. So it’s just a part of what was going to happen anyway. And I’m glad that everybody is finally starting to see the true power of cryptocurrency and how it can affect uh and help the whole worldwide economy.
You know it’s crazy and I love what you said is like, one, globally, everybody has to accept it. But I’m a person that’s not spending my crypto. I’m owning it and holding it, but like, give me like that use case. Like I get right, transferring money, but like the idea of spending my hard earned crypto
because most people, uh,that’s that’s the most familiar cryptocurrency that people know. So this is the theory behind Bitcoin. A lot of people see Bitcoin now and they say, well, the price is 120. What am I buying? Nobody is spending it.Nobody, all everybody is doing is saving it like you and me. Now, that’s because they’re not looking far enough ahead. So the real use case for cryptocurrent Bitcoin specifically is that one day we will use it as a currency. Now it won’t be anytime soon, so what you’re doing is you’re buying something that’s gonna be used in the future at a well depreciated price. Now, let’s say the app before Bitcoin, everything gets adopted, Bitcoin gets plugged into a whole.Financial system, we start using Bitcoin for collateral, for payments, for everything else, uh, for transferring value. Uh, so let’s say it’s 10 million coins. So right now it’s 120. So people are buying it right now, you know, looking forward to what’s coming, and then one day it will be a currency or it will be some kind of a way that people will start to transfer value. So right now we’re just speculators getting in on an early trend before the technology is fully adopted.
There’s no shortage of what I think Bitcoin is gonna be right like.I see that now, um, you know, the kind of the Trump administration was saying, you know, from a Fannie Mae Freddie Mac standpoint, they will now allow you to, when it comes to underwriting you in order to get a mortgage, your crypto.Will now count in that, right? But I even take it a step further, right where I was able to effectively be my own bank. I had the ability, so as long as I kept it at a nice LOTV right? And what I mean by that is just the loan, the value of it. But I have the ability to borrow against my Bitcoin, meaning I never have to sell it. I don’t have to realize it. And the craziest part was I was only going to pay 5% APR on it. Now,I borrowed it purely just to see how easy it was for me to actually get it. I paid it back within, uh, I don’t know, 3 days, purely just so I could see and I paid, I don’t know, you know, $30 back or something like that, but like, bro, where do you see the ability because I looked at it like, man, I, I wanna be able to borrow, you know, 40 $50,000.By pledging my own Bitcoin just to go buy a house or buy an investment property and pay it right back, like kind of what do you see um other uses of or better because you’re a futurist, like what other ways will we be able to leverage our Bitcoin?
So one of the things that uh like, like Bitcoin was the first cryptocurrency and it’s more like, you know, we see it as digital gold, so it’s like somebody taking your gold, like you have a big, let’s say you had a big chest of gold, right? So, so I’m gonna keep this chest of gold until you pay me back my money. Now, I’m for, I’m sure that if you don’t pay me the money, I got the gold.You see what I’m saying? The gold’s gonna go up in value, but I always, it’s full, it’s the most it’s close, it’s almost close to cash. It’s the closest thing to cash, uh, in liquidity that you could possibly have as collateral for a loan. So the rates are gonna be lower because the risk is way lower than let’s say a house. Let’s say I take your house as collateral and the market crashes tomorrow, so I’m gonna lose money in that, you know. So if I have to give you a 100% loan to value ratio.So, and there’s the the most interesting thing to me is that there’s some cryptos out there and they were doing this real heavy in 2020 before the crash, but they will start again. Is that some cryptos like Salana, uh So, and also Ethereum, they provide staking rewards, right? So if let’s say for example, you loan to Ethereum. So now, I may not charge you an interest rate at all.Because I could take your stake it, and you know I can while I have it I’m generating a yield, and then once you pay me back, I give you the the back. So there’s ways that you can borrow money or with crypto at a certain loan to value ratio, certain, you know, the credit credit score some, I think they put that into our equation and you don’t pay any interest at all.Or maybe a very low interest, uh, because of the stake of rewards. So there’s a lot of interesting things that’s gonna happen in the financial system, some creative ways that they’re gonna come up with loans and and payments and everything that we only, we can’t even predict right now. It’s a pretty interesting thing and it’s a very exciting time.
So I remember, you know, I was asking like, bro, do you stake all your Ethereumani. He’s like, absolutely. And so I was like, alright, that day I went and I like started to stake all my stuff becauseThe average person don’t even know what steak is, and I happen to be one of those. So, we’ll just explain what steak is and I got more, a billion more questions.
Oh, in theworld of crypto, uh, blockchain is the technology that moves the money and records transaction, right? So it’s just like a database. Uh, any database at work or whatever. It’s just a bunch of numbers and transfers so we can keep track of who has what and who said who what. Uh, so, uh, but these blockchains have to be secured one way or another. The two biggest ways are proof of work, proof or stake.Now, proof of work means that we’re gonna use computers, they’re gonna work hard, you know, use a lot of electricity, that’s where the electricity costs comes, that’s where the Bitcoin mining process comes and that’s, it’s gonna create, do all these programs, do all these things, and it’s gonna, uh, it’s gonna secure the network that way.Uh, but it’s, it’s energy intensive and it’s also costly when you have to pay for the energy, but that’s one way it’s secured because we know that the work was done to you know provide security to the network. Now, uh, because of those energy concerns they moved to another way which is called proof of stake. Now a proof ofThe stake is is that instead of me using my computer to secure a network of fast fast processor, I’m gonna put up some, you know, like the the uh the saying put your money up or shut up, right? It’s, it’s similar to that. So instead of using my computer, I’m gonna put 32 Ethereum into this node. And if any problems come from what I do anything malicious, I do anything wrong, I don’t uh agree you know, uh, be a team player on the network, they take some of my theory.So now you’re way more likely not to do anything. What are you gonna transaction comes through for let’s say $5 you know, US value. You’re not gonna steal the money or do anything malicious because you wanna keep your Ethereum, right? So now you’ve secured you know fes and gas to go to now they pay you some of those fees back in return for securing your network by more or less providing collateral to.No. Uh, so that that’s the way they secure network is to put your money up or shut up. So, uh, it, it’s very interesting, uh, that the methods they’ve come up with, uh, to provide security on decentralized networks. Uh, and like proof of stake is a new one, you know, Ethereum’s that way, uh, Solana is that way, a lot of cryptos that way, but, uh, it’s just a, you know, a beautiful thing that you can make a yield without.Uh, having to, you know, have a very fast computer and all that other stuff.
I love it. Look guys, we’re gonna take a quick break, but when we come back, we’re talking to my guy Armando, telling you any and everything you need to know about the overall crypto market and even more.Welcome back to Financial Freestyle. I’m your host Ross Mack, and guys, we got my guy Armando, and I wish I could just take calls from everybody because everybody want to know about crypto, what they should buy. So let’s start here, right? What are your top three coins and why if you just give one sentence on each? Now,
I’llgive you a reason for all three Bitcoins, the OG. So if, if Bitcoin falls, that’s the lowest risk play. Second is the the.Ethereum is severely undervalued. It took a hit in February because the it was a by-bit hack. A lot of people panic, got scared. Short sellers hit Ethereum and push it to well below its true value. It’s still below its true value. So going forward it’s gonna make probably more return in this cycle than Bitcoin. Now the XRP we talked about in the last cycle, I think it was like under $1 last time I came on your show. Now it’s almost, almost hit $4 last week.So, uh, the XRP always is a good choice. Uh, XRP also has an ETF on the horizon. So, uh, the XRP is gonna make a lot of people, a lot of, probably a lot of money, uh, especially early investors. It still has a long way to go. Uh, with adoption, uh, Japan banks are adopted it. They say that a lot of the banks are now starting to look at it. Uh, the lawsuit is gonna be a 100% resolved soon. Uh, they’re also talking about no taxes on US cryptos that fits.And that makes XRP fall in that falls into that category is a US based crypto. The fourth one is one called ENS Ethereum name Service. Uh, now that one, is, uh, because, uh, crypto right now is very difficult to use.You know, you gotta, I gotta send you a public key, send me a public key, you know, long strings of characters. A lot of people don’t understand that, but technology always starts like that, like the internet at first you had to type in a number, IP address to go to websites. Then over time it builds layers, layers, layers, it makes it simpler and simpler to use. Crypto is no different.The bottom layer, maybe layer two, some, we’re kind of a little bit through layer two, but as we go forward, we’re gonna start building layers. So eventually I’m gonna send to like let’s say for example Cashtag Ross and then that’s that’ll be where you get all of your cryptosat.
That’s epic. You wanna know what’s crazy? Is that that when I was like, I knew you were gonna do 4 instead of 3, the 4th 1 I thought you were gonna stay with Solana.And so the fact you said ENS just made me say, you know what, this ain’t financial advice, but I’m gonna probably grab a little ENS when I get off this call. And it’s been people that’s been XRP, you know, enthusiasts for I don’t know, 57 years right before the ripple lawsuit, etc. But you know, on your futurist flow, right, what would you say is the most underrated use case for blockchain that the average person is not even talking about right now?
One of the biggest problems we have in this world is logistics. If you don’t realize that, I’ll give you a good the biggest one of the biggest problems you have the world hunger, right? Now, world hunger is not a food problem. It’s not a food problem, because if I go downstairs and go to the uh McDonald’s uh dumpster, there’s plenty of food in there. So the people in Africa need that food. Now the problem is connecting the food, the uh the uh extra food with the people in Africa and predicting uh who’s gonna need the food ahead of time.And also providing that food right when they need it. Now that’s all a very, very complicated problem. So it’s gonna provide quantum computers will also add to that, but also blockchain can help with logistics to move that food around and track the food all over the world. Uh, and so a lot of problems like world hunger and all these other things is, is we can fix it, we just don’t have the computational or the, the database or the data, uh, uh, you know, solution yet.And if we had those we could fix a lot of problems that we have in the world. Uh, most of the problems are not at the root level cause it’s actually just uh logistics.
To that point, we’re right, maybe over the next 35 years, what do you see an intersection between blockchain, crypto, and AI?
Uh, I thinkall three will eventually merge. I think AI needs uh crypto to grow, uh, it’s, it’s another group of crypto that I think could do well. I didn’t see it before but called AI tokens.AI tokens are uh tokens that uh help power AI. For example, one of the biggest things AI AI agents, we’ve heard that term recently, but AI agents, they can help right now. Chad GPT just launched a new way we need an agent to do things for you autonomously or whatever, complete projects for you, multiple step projects. But we go to a higher level. AI agents will one day run entire companies from the CEO level all the way down to the workers. Uh, so it’d be just one big.So how would the AI be able to get raise funds? How will it be able to process funds? Remember, AI thinks a lot faster than us, our banking system is too slow for the transactions. So we’ll have to use crypto to be able to, to, to first tokenize itself, be able to offer shares much like a, you know, IPO. Secondly, we’ll be to move money back and forth between us as separate units within that AI model. All of that is crypto. That’s what crypto fits in.Quantum computers will actually make AI smarter a lot faster. So all those things will be merged in the next 1020 years to just, you know, the whole world will bechanged.
Person that’s at home, where are you telling them to one, buy their crypto, right? And then 2, are you storing it on there or are you using like a hard wallet AKA like a ledger? Kind of talk us through that to a person that doesn’t own crypto yet.
Uh, so Coinbase is a good place for all beginners to start. I always say in the most secure. Gotta be careful because there’s a lot of scammers out there with crypto. Don’t, don’t buy crypto with somebody that message you online. Don’t invest crypto with somebody message you online. Nobody does that. Uh, secondly is about the code, you know, it’s, it’s two ways to store your crypto, but you can leave it on the exchange, uh, and for small amounts, I would just say do that, like it doesn’t make sense that you got $500 with crypto $1000 doesn’t make sense to go out and buy a $100 wallet to put it on there.Uh, and you know, maybe if you’re, if you’re gonna accumulate, but, uh, if you do lose some in the transaction fees and, you know, but if you got 1000, maybe you even over 500, it’s best to move it to what’s called a cold storage device. Now that’s a, a separate device you can buy on Amazon or at the manufacturer website. I would I prefer you bought it manufacturer website, uh, and you can store your crypto in there.And it’s something like, remember FTX is a cryptocurrency exchange back in 2021 that failed, and when it failed, it took everybody’s money and held it for a few years. Now, some of the people got the money back, uh, but, uh, it could have been a situation in which you can get hacked. Sometimes exchanges have got, sorry, exchanges have gotten hacked and then you just lost your money. If you have it on a cold storage device, that can’t happen.Uh, you control it, you have it, and only you know how to get into it. Uh, a good one is Arculus, another one is treasure. Uh, there’s a a few more out there, uh, then you know that that people use a lot, uh, but I like those two. But, uh, if you have large amounts, put on cold storage. If it’s not your keys, not your crypto, so that means that your keys have to be on, uh, a cold storage, uh, yeah, cold storage device.
All right,so question, right, like.So the people that don’t know, my understanding of a cold storage is like a little ledger that’s the size of like a thumb drive, right? A little USB thumb drive.And so my question is one, right? Say I put the the thumb drive on my computer, I go on Coinbase and same way you make that transaction. I put my little 25 key to send it to to there.Is there a way to kind of track how much you have all the time? Like, for instance, if I was to open my Coinbase, you know, the average person ain’t gonna be able to see, oh, I’m $100 I’m up for $1000 whatever it is, and you see your overall balance.If you put your, you know, your, your crypto on a, on a cold wallet, how does that look when it comes to tracking
contract, but now they have apps, companion apps, so you put it on the device and the app will connect to it, right? So anytime that, like, for example, with uh Arculus, it’s uh it’s basically a card, right? So anytime the card is close to your phone.It will tell you the balance. So you put the card in this in a storage or maybe like a safe deposit box. Some you come and you check it, and whatever it is at that time, your card can be somewhere else, it will keep track of the last time you synced it. So your your uh your account or how many crypt, how much crypto you have will be on the app. So you can track it through an app or whatever, uh, you know, now they havethose.
All right, so now my next question is, if I was to lose that cold wallet, if I was to lose that Arculus card or that ledger or whatever, what happens?
Uh, they have what’s called key phrases, so you, it’d be basically sentences of, you know, random words and you store that somewhere and you can always restore it from that. So basically you have the hard, uh, physical place when you store it, you also have a backup, uh, and you basically you store those in two different places, so if one gets lost, you can always restore it to another uh another device. Uh, so it’s almost, it’s like a backup, uh, backup phrases.
Yeah, I’m always interested to.You know, figure that out, but,
um, like we don’t like right now we’re we’re accessing IP addresses going through network hubs and everything, we don’t know that we’re doing that because the apps and all that stuff takes over from us. So all we know is you press a button and I see you on Zoom.So, uh, that’s what’s gonna be crypto in 1020 years will be like that. We won’t know all the things that are happening behind the scenes and the more difficult stuff. We’ll just know that we send you money and it works, you know, that’s all, that’s what it ends up being.
So right now we got Bitcoin wrapped around 116,000, right? I see price targets at 250,000, price targets at a million. What does it take for us to get, you know, Bitcoin to a million?
One of the biggest things that’s gonna happen is what’s the breakdown Bitcoin is denominated in Bitcoin, right? So, uh, what that means is that if we go to an exchange it says 1 Bitcoin equals a million dollars, uh, not, not a million, but $120. Uh, the problem with that is that as the price goes up, people get more and more scared to buy it. I and it’s fractional. You can buy pieces of Bitcoin, but that doesn’t matter because stocks are fractional.But as the price of the stock goes up, there’s less liquidity and there’s less people interested in it. That’s why companies do stock splits to get more interest in the stock at lower prices. So basically what they do is they get a stock divide it up, and now since that one test of stock, you got 5. Now that increases the liquidity because the the units are cheaper and also psychologically it makes people say, oh yeah, the price is a lot cheaper. I can buy, I can, I can conceptualize a $100 test as opposed to a $500 test.So same deal with crypto, right, crypto is fractional already, but we denominated Bitcoins, we said it’s 1.0 is a bitcoin. But all you gotta do is move the desk place over, and now you can denominate, uh, what, a few places over. You can nominate what’s called Satoshis, which is the lowest unit of of Bitcoin, and then Satoshi is 100 million Satoshi’s in one Bitcoin, butIt’s a fraction of a cent right now. So we will, I don’t believe we’ll ever see a Bitcoin on an exchange because they’ll denominate in something else called Satoshi’s. So instead of us seeing one Bitcoin because a million will see one Satoshi equals like 10 cents or something like that. And then that’s how we’ll see it, uh, and that’s the next step I believe to to increase adoption with the retail investors. That’s
that big. As always, man, I love having Armando on the show because he’s somebody that uhAnytime I got a crypto question, any futurist type question, it could be Quantum AI, I’m gonna hit my guy. But ladies and gentlemen, that’s it for this episode. I want to thank Armando for coming on, and you guys know, make sure you like, subscribe, share this with your auntie and your cousin. And until then, I’ll see you next week, but make sure you tune in each and every week. It’s your boy Ross Smack. This is Financial Freestyle.
This content was not intended to be financial advice and should not be used as a substitute for professional financial services.
