The Future of Investing in Web3, Featuring Jens Siebert

In This Episode of Frontier3

In this episode, Jens lends his perspective, informed by his expertise in economics and background in product, to the Web3 conversation. Jens outlines many of the economic possibilities of a Web3 world. Ray and Jens talk about the ways traditional finance institutions will have to adapt to stay relevant in a Web3 world and the many business opportunities that come with the concept of ‘tokenised equity’.

Episode Highlights

• How some industries are ready to adapt and capitalise on Web3 and what others may need to do to catch up
• The new business models and corporate structures Web3 will foster
• The tokenization of securities, bonds, and shares, and the companies that will benefit most
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Episode Transcript

Ray Chohan: Welcome, Jens. Really excited to have you on the show today. I think before we started today’s conversation, we were going down various different rabbit holes, but would love to kick off with your background and story because we always find it fascinating how we speak to all these leaders who end up down the rabbit hole of Web3 and blockchain and everything within this new solar system. So I would love to hear your backstory and how you ended up as COO and co-founder of Invesdor DACH and focusing on the world of Web3, Jens.

Jens Siebert: Thanks for having me, Ray. It’s a pleasure. Yeah, I’m really excited discussing Web3 with you today. And, yeah, maybe a quick background. So what brought me into this topic? I’m working as a senior in various senior product management roles for many years. However, my educational background is a bit more in economics, and I think combining those two, being close to the tech and also having a strong economic focus, is something that helps a lot diving deeper into Web3. And, yeah, I hold a master’s degree from Rotterdam School of Management. And as you said today, I’m co-founder and COO of Invesdor. And at Invesdor, we are one of the biggest crowdfunding platforms in Continental Europe. We have teams in Finland, Germany, and Austria at the moment.

And I think coming from the crowdfunding space, we have been in love with peer-to-peer services that work with low or no involvement of intermediaries for quite a while. That’s the core of our business model, right? Bringing people together, investors and companies that are seeking for money. And I guess that is what brought me in close touch with Web3 at an early stage. And my feeling is that literally everybody who comes from a peer-to-peer world and background, when those people get in touch with Web3 for the first time, I have the feeling they fall in love immediately. It’s so obvious. And it was also to me somehow an eyes-opening moment when I first experienced the opportunities that come with the Web3.

Ray: Thank you for that context, Jens. And it’s interesting. I mean, this pod is really well promoted on LinkedIn. It’s interesting. When I look at LinkedIn specifically, that’s where I spend a lot of my time, and also obviously Twitter, but it’s interesting, on LinkedIn, I still sense, and you can see it from the metrics, the likes, the reshares, the general comments, people don’t really get it, Web1, Web2, Web3. So I think it would be super fruitful for our audience just to set the stage and hear your narrative on framing Web1, Web2, and now this new paradigm of Web3.

Jens: Yeah. It’s good you’re saying this, Ray. If I look into my social media channels, I have kind of the same experience. If I discuss Web3 with friends at the bar, there’s still so much confusion out there, right? And I think setting the stage and walking through the important milestones and the big phase transitions that the internet and the web has walked through over the past is extremely important to have a common ground here and a good understanding to dive deeper into that topic.

So let’s not start with the web, right, but let’s start with the internet. I think many people often have a problem really getting it sorted out correctly. What is the internet here, and what is the web? So the internet, I mean, that’s the physical wires, right, and the network protocol that gave the computers, for the first time, the capability to communicate to each other. That started in the ’60s, ’70s. In the beginning, some might remember, it had a strong academic and also military background, and that set the protocol foundation for the web.

The web itself, however, only emerged in the early ’90s. So there was a strong gap in between the internet first evolved and then the Web1 came out in the early ’90s. And the web itself, I think it’s important to separate from the internet, it could be defined as a document and application layer on top of the internet. And the Web1 allowed simple pages, other applications. And probably the most important feature of the Web1 was the hyperlink that allowed to connect content on the internet on different pages to each other.

The Web1, however, was characterized by mostly… It was read-only content. We had pages out there. We could consume information. We had some simple subscription services like mailing, some online ordering. You could say that Amazon kind of started in the Web1, although it made a strong phase transition into Web2. But more or less everything happening on Web1 can be characterized to be rather static, right? And then in the beginning of the 2000s, the Web2, you could say, made this whole thing a lot more dynamic. And for the first time, users were empowered to not just only read but also to write content and really interact. We got the social component joining the web.

And what is even more surprising than the whole social media boom, I think, that followed in the subsequent was that this literally helped completely new markets and business models to evolve on top of the web, considering models like Uber in transportation and mobility, Airbnb when it comes to housing and holidays, and, of course, social media. People really started to actively interact and participate with the Web2, and that often. I mean, it’s all around us, right, on a daily basis. However, and I think that’s the important point here, Web2, and more and more people realized this, has one fundamental flaw, I would say. And that’s the ad-based business model underlying most of the services and platforms that we nowadays use when it comes to Web2.

And this business model in the first moment makes most services in Web2 to appear priceless, right? You have the feeling. I mean, nobody’s paying subscription fee here for Facebook or Twitter, right? And you have the feeling, “Yeah, that’s a price-less service.” But that’s actually not really true. We pay through our data and the fact that we accept to be somehow constantly stimulated by companies and others on the internet that just provide us with ads really customized to our specific behavior and that you can see in our day-to-day usage of the web. And, yeah, I think this dynamic component of Web2 that helped to really, yeah, bring out some exciting new business models and in many points brought the world more closer to each other, yeah, has this huge fundamental flaw that, yeah, it’s mostly driven by this ad-based business model underlying most of the services there.

Ray: And just pausing there on Web2, because you hear this a lot now, especially in the last, what, 12 months, where people are butchering the Web2 era and saying, “Oh yeah, the users have become the product. It’s indirect slavery.” It’s really aggressive now, some of the headlines on how people try talking to Web2 as this kind of not a good thing for the end user, which I get now with the enablement of a lot of the technology around the blockchain and that entire computing primitive. But would you say that was an unintentional outcome for Web2? So when things started kicking off in 2005, I like looking at the good side of human nature, would you say the Big Four who are involved in owning the major properties in Web2, it was an accidental outcome? They didn’t really intend it or plan it to be that way. It just kind of worked out that way with the natural arc of Web2, if that makes-

Jens: Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, is the devil out there, or is he not? Right? I mean, that’s a good question. I would try to rephrase it a little bit. I do not believe there was this dark plan by Mark and the others in the early 2000s sitting there and saying, “Hey, let’s build those data monsters.” I’m not having this position. I see good intentions in most of the Web2 applications we see out there today. However, and I think that also might be a good transition to what Web3 might change and what most of the users worldwide might benefit from in the future is, we have to understand one important other characterization of the web itself. This turned out to be truly important to the whole Web2 development, and that’s most of the services that we see in Web2 nowadays turned out to be what we call in economics natural monopolies. And I guess we need to introduce this economic principle quickly. A natural monopoly means that, theoretically speaking, the fixed costs of running a service are relatively high compared to the variable cost of serving an additional client.

Jens: And this might be difficult to understand in the first step, but let’s imagine public transportation systems or posture services, gas and electricity networks. All of those are good examples of natural monopolies. Building up a whole train network comes with significant investments, right? You need the rails and a lot of investment is necessary here into the infrastructure. However, as soon as you have the rails, the trains, the stations and so on, transporting an additional passenger on your trains comes at literally no extra costs, right?

And if you’re now look into the huge platform providers in Web2, we see some of the same characteristics. Building up Facebook was probably quite expensive, right, if we consider today’s status of the whole application and the platform. However, serving an additional client costs Facebook almost nothing, right? And that’s the problem with natural monopolies here is that, as the name already indicates, it’s extremely hard for new providers to enter those markets. If there’s one huge player that evolved and that secured most of the market share, it’s extremely difficult for competitors to step in. And I think this led somehow to a huge level of centralization of the web as we know it today. And to sum it up, I think there was no really bad intentions in the first step or anything like that. It was just a natural transition towards huge centralization driven by this fundamental principle of natural monopolies that we can observe in the today’s, yeah, structure and system, how the web itself works.

Ray: Yeah. Just pausing there, I mean, I completely agree with your view on that. Where I think it did get slightly nefarious, and some folks would say really nefarious, I would say from, say, 2011 onwards, you did have businesses which were trying to build on the Big Four platforms. Let’s look at Facebook, for example. But then Facebook would remove an API, remove direct access to said customer, and then make that business have access via advertising or charging for a particular fee to reinstate what they’ve built originally on the platform anyway. So, that’s where I can see where the community did get really upset, because they’re like, “Oh, now you’re pulling this away. I contributed with user generated content. And now you’re rug pulling me because I’ve got momentum on your platform.” That’s where I would say it did get it a bit hot and nefarious. Would you agree, Jens?

Jens: Totally. I mean, let’s look a bit deeper into Web2 maybe before we move forward to Web3. And I totally agree. I mean, all of the big platforms turned out to become somehow open ecosystems towards developers and companies. You had exciting new frameworks to develop exciting web applications that were introduced by Google and others. You had strong APIs that allowed you to easily integrate your web shop into Amazon. I mean, there always have been tendencies to build ecosystems and to facilitate the community around the big platforms.

However, the fundamental economic incentive model and also who holds control over, for example, the Amazon shop API, or who holds control over frameworks provided to have web applications integrated into the Facebook ecosystem, all of those ultimately stayed with the platforms themself, right? And if we see Web3 today becoming a more relevant topic that people talk about and that also shapes the opinion of a wider public, I think we will see, yeah, huge Web2 platforms, giants to either have two options, right? They literally can really open towards a more decentralized own corporate structure and a completely new way to interact with their communities. I think Jack Dorsey might be one of the few out there that might have this openness when it comes to making Twitter more decentralized and less centralized service. And at the same time they also have, yeah, the other option of increasing control, building up walls and trying to ring-fence their market position and, yeah, the assets they have built up over the past 10 to 15 years. And, yeah, I think it will be extremely exciting to not just only observe closely what’s happening within the Web3 community itself but also what will be the reaction of the huge Web2 providers out there towards this development. Sometimes I find this even more exciting, that-

Ray: Yeah, it’s interesting. Yeah. This is such a fun point. Before we go into Web3, yeah, spending some time in some of the big juggernauts in Web2 and their play into Web3 is interesting. So if you look at Jack, right, Jack Dorsey officially resigned from Twitter, or earlier this week, or I think it was Friday last week. He has Par in charge now. And obviously, he’s going to go all-in on Square, right? Which is, in essence, hopefully, a Web3 organization. You can kind of see what he's trying to do with Square and how you can now custody BTC and some of the other things that you hear, that how Jack Dorsey is all-in on, in particularly, Bitcoin and the Lightning Network and some of those other protocols around it.

But what would be interesting is imagine, so I’m playing a bit of a game theory here, but if you look at the way that’s positioned, you could add Square by Twitter for the social media layer. Square is a powerhouse payment rail layer with big Web3 commitments, right, in its roadmap and kind of now, well, kind of now in terms of some of the products it’s launching. You can see them being one of the incumbents to really ape into this opportunity, but originally from the Web2 world. You look at those two assets, Square and Twitter, they’re classic Web2. But if you were to make that play, he could be a Web3 juggernaut if they merged and worked together. Because if you look at Twitter, let’s face it, I know Twitter drives people’s nuts, but it’s an amazing product. It’s an amazing product. So if you had that, that could be one of the old guard making a big play in Web3, potentially.

Jens: Yeah.

Ray: And being a force in that, yes.

Jens: Yeah. I mean, fully agree. And then I guess we really, for our listeners, have to go a bit into the fundamental principles of what Web3 actually is. But I find our current discussion so exciting to that, I just want to make one more point on that one.

Ray: Sure. Go for it.

Jens: I think if it comes to the whole area of organizational theory, so how companies and teams organize themself and the whole Web3 development, I think it is such an exciting topic because more and more organizations consider to really make that phase transition from being a rather traditional hierarchy driven organization that is incorporated in some country into really making this transition into becoming a more decentralized organization. And I think Twitter and what Jack is now doing with Square, I think he really would have to make this kind of fundamental decision, giving away some of the clear assets of Twitter, like for example, user names, really, to the users, tokenizing those, and really making it that you as a client, as a Twitter user, always have the chance to walk away and take your intellectual property, all of your legacy and history of what you have done to another platform, to another provider if you feel it’s the right moment for what reason soever. I think that’s one necessary step.

But the other, however, at the same moment, would be yet to also bring and give a huge organization a transformation to your own organizational setup, possibly transforming into a foundation, trying to lower hierarchies within the organization and trying to really give up on power, and really transforming it into some form of incentive model that allows the community, and mostly the people that use your service, to actually get in charge. And give them more than just shareholder voting rights, but really giving them a direct impact on, for example, your product roadmap and what features should be developed next.

And, yeah, I think that’s, again, extremely exciting to see that really visionary Web2 providers, if they want to make that transition, somehow also have to reconsider their whole organizational setup and really have to consider, “What might be the right form of involving my community and my users around me to really make my service be invaluable, yeah, to wider public and to society?” And also, to some point, also really giving up on the mostly shareholder value driven structure that most of those organizations follow today, right?

Ray: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. We’ll go to Web3 literally in a few seconds, but I think you’re going to probably have one or two classic Web2 platform players probably do well in that transition. There’s got to be one. If it’s going to be one, it’s going to be Jack Dorsey, I think, because he still is bound there, he’s super smart. He already believes in the values of Web3 anyway. He isn’t all about the share price and his personal wealth. You can see that by the way he lives his life. If I was going to bet on one of the horses, it’ll probably be Square and Twitter to do something meaningful. Because they’ve got the scale, they’ve got the balance sheet, and Twitter’s got a phenomenal audience. So, that’s one. But another industry who are naturally aping into Web3…

We’ll go to what the definition shortly. Sorry. This conversation slightly span off, but I don’t want to move on from this point, because this is an interesting part, a rabbit hole we’ve gone down, but if you look at the big brands who are really trying to aggressively move direct to consumer, so you look at Nike, Adidas in Germany, you look at all their earnings calls. A big part of their earnings call is talking about direct to consumer versus retail accounts, and every quarter they’re trying to demonstrate to the market, we’re moving the needle on direct to consumer revenue because the margin’s better and the customer attention control is a lot better. If you look at NFTs and you saw, we had a couple of team members on Adidas who’ve been on the pod recently, and that episode will come out soon and literally 24 hours before that episode was recorded, then Adidas done that big announcement how they’re made a bet into the NFT world. They've launched Adidas/Metaverse, just signaling to the world we’re participating.

But what’s interesting about sports brands and apparel brands, they’re already trying to go direct to consumer for the last two, three years anyway, because that’s the future. Web3, more particularly NFTs, are potentially accelerant for that, because it is just a win-win. It plays and feeds into the direct to consumer plan. If I were to buy a pair of Adidas trainers as a 21 year old, I get the physical item, the real world item, but tethered to that item, I get the digital NFT and all the features that’s come with that, that just accretes to the direct to consumer business model. So, what that means is, the big legacy incumbents. There isn’t much political friction internally to build an NFT capability within the brand, because it already plays to the corporate strategy, which has been set to two, three years ago on being aggressive on direct to consumer. I feel there’s a number of other industries who naturally have momentum into Web3, and I think sports apparel is one of them, if that makes sense.

Jens: I couldn’t agree more. I think mixing the whole NFT topic also into the wider context of Web3, and to me, it’s really like Web3 is the huge puzzle that can give a really bright picture of the future, and then NFT could be one piece of this really huge puzzle within there, but I agree. This piece obviously becomes extremely important when it comes to corporates and clubs that have a high brand value. I think literally all industries that invested a lot into brand value, that look into your balance sheet and your profit and last statement of the last year and look how much you’ve spent on brand building activities. If this makes a huge proportion of your balance sheet, you should definitively consider NFT to be a relevant technology to your organization, because I give you the short explanation of why.

Investing into your brand, let it be Nike, and then just only indirectly monetizing on all those investments into your brand through selling products, mass products. It’s an inefficient way that can be significantly improved if you allow fractional ownership of unique pieces of your brand story and all of what you have built around your brand, and I think that’s why we see huge incumbents like Nike, Adidas, and others currently investing so much and moving rapidly into this area, because it allows for the first time to those brands to really… NFTs in the context of those huge brands for the first time allow a completely new approach of direct to consumer interaction that just was not possible in the past.

Do you remember those customization of shoes in the huge Nike stores?

Ray: Yep. I remember.

Jens: Yeah. That was five to 10 years ago. I do not remember exactly, but build your unique Nike. I think what we currently observe with NFTs here is just a lot. The logic and next episode of what we have done with our shoes there 10 years ago by customizing them. We get into unique pieces of experiencing this brand that those brands, mostly exciting brands, that have been built up there over the past.

Ray: Yeah. You know what’s interesting? It’s a boring accelerant, but it’s key. It’s people. So, you look at all the big brands baking in an NFT capability. It plays into the D2C strategy, which has board sign-off already, right? So, you already have C level buy-in with the big guys. It’s a no brainer to add that to your D2C strategy, and if you’ve got the right people at middle management.

Jens: In the context of an evolving metaverse, it might be your only product to monetize on brand value, right? You do not need the real life shoes and the sweater in a metaverse context. I think you really have to consider that. How much time we are spending in front of screens today, and obviously also driven by the overall pandemic situation of the past two years or so, but this whole meter versus discussion, although it’s sometimes a bit annoying, but it’s a natural fact in life that we spend more and more time within a fully digitalized context. I think you are in London right now, and I’m here in Frankfurt, and that’s just normal situation.

For all companies carrying a high brand value in the context of the metaverse society, NFT literally is the only approach to monetize on their brand value in the long run and the same holds true for artists and for many others that build up a reputation or brand and try to set up a business model around that. D2C in the metaverse context only can be NFT based in the long run, I guess, but obviously also happy to see what comes up over the next couple of years, might be new, surprising things coming there, but at the moment, that’s my key takeaway on that.

Ray: Yeah. It’s a fascinating space. So, now to Web3, obviously we covered Web2 and slightly blended into Web3, because we got a bit excited, but just for the audience, if you then could define that jump from Web2 to Web3 and actually, what is Web3?

Jens: Yeah, sure. First, I have to say what a lovely discussion and how we just quickly dived into platform business models on the Web2 side and also went into huge brands and D2C models. What is Web3 here, really? I think it’s important, coming from the Web2, we have the huge platforms. We all know them. We have a high level of centralization on the web. We talked about natural and monopolies. It’s a bit like the train systems we see nowadays in real life. We have seen those huge platforms to take more and more market shares. What we have also seen is the clear separation between providers and users, right? We have billions and billions of users on the internet, on the web and we see relatively low number of providers, and if you now remember back to the first days of the web, it was all those hello world pages.

Literally, there was almost no chance to make this distinction between who’s actually a user of the web and who’s a contributor, and I think that’s where Web3 and this fundamental idea comes in. To give it a bit more context, I think it’s important to keep in mind that overall, Web3 in the first step is an idea or more like a vision, you could call it. It’s not a specific piece of technology, not a specific protocol that you could name. It’s more the idea that novel technology, mostly decentralized technology will enable us to transform into a more decentralized version of the web as we know today, and this idea of a web where we as users where we are winning back control over our data and where we also winning control over the services we are using.

That’s the core of the Web3 idea and the whole movement around there, out there. How can I phrase it? You could literally really say that division of a Web3 is more characterized by the general idea of a global liberalization of the web and breaking those huge natural monopolies that we are seeing out there in the market at the moment, and that we are moving into a setting where we have a significantly more direct interaction of users on the web and that where we see a significantly lower involvement of central intermediaries and central platforms that provide our services.

Ray: Makes sense. So, now segueing, Jens, into your day-to- day in the world of Web3, what are you actively doing there at investor deck? Where do you spend your time as a builder within the Web3 community?

Jens: Yeah, good question. I think it will also help to narrow this whole idea of Web3 and give it a bit more context, because it’s always hard this whole Web3. We have to see it in a larger socio-economic transformation, I would say. Web3 will have the power to enable completely new forms of business models, and as I already said, we will see completely new forms of how organizations and form and how they collaborate, and the traditional corporate structure will be something that I believe will be less and less and important in the future. We will see a lot new forms of organizational collaboration that is less driven by hierarchies, and that brings me to the point what we are doing at the moment at investor, when it comes to applying Web3 to our own business model.

I want to give you an example here. We are within the Nordics. So, we are, as I said, we are doing crowd funding in Germany, Austria, but also in the Nordics, in Sweden and Finland and in Sweden and Finland, our business is mostly organizing equity placements and equity rounds for exciting growth companies, and you might know Republic or Cedars from UK, that’s our business that we are doing there in Nordics. If we provide equity issues for those companies, obviously most of those companies are non-stock listed, right? So, we issue new shares, investors decide to invest into those companies, and then we have a service we call owner’s portal, and this owner’s portal helps us to register those newly generated shares, and nowadays we still have a centralized database to keep those data.

That brings me to the point where we want to apply Web3. We are currently considering, and actually not only considering, but already working on transforming our own owner’s portal into let’s register all of the shares for companies that we issue within investment rounds on our platform on a decentralized ledger. Doing this, we will allow investors to not solely rely on us as a provider, as a company, but they literally can, if they invest 10 shares in some company, they have transparency on the public ledger. We will most likely use Algorand for this service and they can easily track their ownership on Algorand and see their investments. Now, let’s take the next step of what does this mean to us as an organization? Obviously, today, we are regulated to provide services like managing share registers.

If we now transform this service to be reflected on a public ledger, we can lower, possibly, we can lower regulatory requirements on our own business model, because I do not need like 10 compliance officers anymore overseeing if my shareholder registered that I keep in the centralized database works just fine. I socialize the service. I bring it into a decentralized verifiable infrastructure. By doing this, I also win opportunities to streamline my own business model and to make us, as an organization, more efficient on one hand side and on the other side, make us more reliable for all of our users and investors that believe investing through our platform is the right approach to install a good investment for them personally.

Ray: Okay. So, just pausing there, because this is interesting, because I think this is where sometimes people do get lost with the value unlock from adding a Web3 capability to what I might describe as a classic crowdsource Web2 business, right? So, what you’re saying is you’re working with Algorand, which is for our audience another one of the layer one smart contract platforms, and you’re enabling all of the administration, issuance of new shares people to execute purchase of new shares all within that Web3 decentralized form factor. So, what that means for your company directly, I’m guessing, is reduced people cost, friction, administrative cost, and for your users/customers, a more efficient, quicker, frictionless way to participate and buy shares in the companies on your platform, so it’s just a slicker, easier way to do it lying down on the beach, on your smartphone, and you’re done. Is that the real value of market?

Jens: Yeah. That’s obviously the long term vision here is to also streamline our operational efficiency. Obviously, we are dealing in a regulated industry. So, in the first step, I would say it adds transparency and verifiability for our users and investors. Obviously, I keep my compliance officers for the time being, and I keep my organization as structured, but I fully agree to follow up on that.

Ray: This is really important, because I hear this a lot in your world. We are adding verifiability. What do you mean by that?

Jens: Yeah, I mean that in the past, you know we are regulated financial entity, you know we are under continuous supervision of different national regulatory authorities in Germany and in Finland and in Austria. Why is that the case? It provides, from a point of our users and clients, this continued supervision by national authorities, improves customer protection in the long run, right? There’s somebody overseeing our business, and that gives some level of reliability that users and clients can rely on our services and know that we are dealing within specific boundaries and within a specific set of rules.

However, this whole structure also could be, and now I’m coming back to our decentralized share register that we are setting up on Algorand, by the matter of fact that I provide a verifiable, unchangeable register of all the shares that we are issuing through our platform on a trustless, decentralized infrastructure like Algorand is one of them, there are many others out there, but by doing this, I provide an extra layer of verifiability for our users because they can rely on us as a company, obviously.

They can rely on the national authorities that are overseeing our business activities, but if they want to take a shortcut, they can also just look on the decentralized ledger and see their ownings, their ownership positions and their holdings directly, and record it there in a way that makes it impossible for us to make any changes to it. That’s what I mean by verifiability. Obviously, in the long run division here is that we are able to also by not needing to be supervised and audited in a way as it is necessary nowadays being a regulated financial entity by having the opportunity to shift verifiability from being a regulated organization to the protocol level. Obviously, I see the long term goal of setting up a more efficient organizational structure that then ultimately is once again beneficial for our clients, because I’m capable of lowering costs and setting up a more efficient and streamlined operational model. Sometimes I have the feeling people think about today’s traditional businesses out there and then there will be from one day to the other, boom, there’s Web3 organizations out there and they evolved over weekend. I think it will not be the case.

If you are a founder or a business leader or in a management position, in almost every business model out there, you can identify areas where you can apply decentralized technology, mostly technology that brings verifiability into some sort of transaction or mostly into transactional situations that will really help to improve your own business model, improve your service offering, and what is even more important, brings you as an organization making one little first step into transforming into an organization is set up and operating model that will allow you to also stay competitive in a Web3 empowered economy and society that we are moving forward.

Ray: Okay. This is your first move, right? Just to recap, stage one, and I loved the way you put it there, because it’s not going to happen over a long weekend. It’s going to take years. You are saying there’s a lot of organizations who are dipping their toe, adding a decentralized capability, and then saying to their customers, this is just on steroids verifiability, and additional comfort of your ownership and complete transparency timestamped. You can see everything. You can’t tamper with anything.

So, as a customer, if I was to participate in investing one of your companies on your platform, I can see that gives me that additional comfort when I go to bed at night that everything is above board, but playing the slight bear case on this, what’s the incentive for the regulators, because wouldn’t the regulators say, well, that’s our job? We do that stamp and yet we’re not using the blockchain, but we’ve got the brand, we’ve been around for 75 years as the consumer group in that region. That’s enough. What’s the incentive for them to come on board, because you’re slowly chipping it away at their core value proposition, right? Isn’t there some form of indirect kickback where they’re not really on board, because they’re like, holy shit, that’s my job.

Jens: I mean, in the long run you might be right. However, if we should make the transition into a fully trustless Web3 infrastructure that is based on verifiability installed on the protocol layer through cryptographic proofs, like having this long term vision, I might agree that supervisory authorities as we know them today might become not needed anymore, let’s put it like this. But having somebody who oversees, who provides constant monitoring of the protocols, that looks into smart contract implementation and tries to identify flaws there, I think there will be always a positive contribution and a clearly added value from some, let’s say, independent authorities that oversee even a trustless, fully verifiable, decentralized infrastructure, just for the simple reason to maybe not identify bad behavior within that infrastructure, but just like bucks and simple flaws in the implementation.

So I think there can be a long term added value from somebody who oversees the infrastructure and tries to add value by ensuring a high level of quality on the implementation level, but that’s kind of 30 years from now or maybe 50. I don’t know. I do not want to put a date on that, but I try to bring a back into 2021 and what I have experienced mostly with the German regulator here. And I was pretty exciting. We have had a new law in Germany that was established in June this year, actually, and this law for the first time allowed that traditional securities bonds and also funds can be issued and can be reflected on a decentralized ledger.

And by decentralized ledger, I do not mean private permissioned ledgers, but I mean real decentralized ledgers, public permissionless ledgers. And I think this was a huge step that the whole ecosystem of companies in the German blockchain space that are related to tokenization and really facilitating use case in the financial market context, that was a huge achievement that we have had together actually with the regulator. There has been a blockchain strategy formulated by the German Government in 2019 and there was a clear goal to consider use case in a financial market context and we kind of followed up on that. We got in touch with the secretary of finance in Germany and we really worked hard on making a strong argumentation that, hey, in the long run the whole market is benefiting because we add some extra layer of transparency and verifiability into the security market infrastructure here.

If we do not rely on centralized databases, somewhere hold at central depositories, but by relying on the decentralized infrastructure that brings verifiability and transparency into the securities market. And one last point why I believe that regulators are kind of relatively or can be supportive in current times is those folks also see themself in a global competition. I mean, the German legislator or regulator also looks to France and as a whole European Union we look into China and into the US, and most of those folks, especially on the political level, they understand that in the long run functioning economy, and most importantly, a functioning financial market is vital to economic prosperity in your country and you kind of need this to get the votes when it comes to the next polls.

And I still believe in this kind of incentive chain and at least over the past few years I was in regular talks with the German regulator, with the German finance authority and I experienced a lot of openness and also willingness to get this new layer of technology also being considered in the context of new regulation and how this can help to automatically improve the financial market and the financial system as a whole.

Ray: That makes sense. On an international premise, I can see how there is an incentive for the regulators to represent that they’re forward looking and innovative in their approach, otherwise you’re probably going to have entrepreneurs leave that country and go somewhere where it’s just simpler to execute and there’s less friction. But I mean, we’ll come onto this big picture piece in a moment because I think you’re fascinating as an evangelizer of Web3 in the TradFi markets, because I know in Europe it’s not easy. But before we come to that, this is forward looking, three, four years out, fundamentally, if you look at what you’re doing right now, just trying to create a decentralized record of ownership, who owns what on a decentralized ledger like Algorand, but is the real north star ultimately to create your own liquid market?

So in essence, you’ve got a robust secondary market where people can trade in and out of positions, so that asset class, that private company, which is probably maybe B-round, C-round, still early stage, is tradable because the actual equity ownership is built on Web3. So you unlock a whole new, well, you add a whole new definition to this asset class or private companies where people can trade in and out of liquidity and you just kind of change the game really. Because I see a number of players trying to do this and I’m always thinking, God, the north star is basically to create a liquid market where people can trade in and out of positions whenever they want, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, sitting in Australia at a beach, is that the holy grail of this type of implementation?

Jens: I mean, obviously everybody in the crowdfunding space is looking for liquidity in the secondary market infrastructure. That is literally not there at the moment. And obviously tokenization and the potentials of decentralized infrastructure provides some really new and exciting new opportunities to really solve this liquidity issue in a secondary market scenario for small, medium companies and growth companies that decide to grow their business together with investors. And obviously those investors also have a vital interest if they have, I don’t know, change in their life situation to also sell their shares at some moment and not necessarily waiting for the IPO or for the company’s making some kind of exit scenario here.

But if I look into the secondary liquidity market topic, I think we have to separate two things. Looking in the full blown crypto space, we see Uniswap and other liquidity pools out there, DeFi is kind of already fulfilling this promise that we have efficient secondary market infrastructure that is highly decentralized already today. However, this whole DeFi ecosystem, as much as I love it, unfortunately it’s not solving the problems of most of my clients today. Because if the traditional growth company from the MedTech industry approaches me in Finland and tells me, Hey, I really want to grow my business together with you, let’s sort of out how we can organize my serious A-funding round. I’m the wrong partner if I’m saying, let’s do this fully blown tokenized and we set up a Uniswap contract to have secondary market liquidity straightaway for your token issuance. Because we might be there in some years time, but today that’s just not the right solution to them.

Today what I can offer them is, Hey, exciting, we make a share offering, we can tokenize that one, but still I have normal investors, KYC processes. I have regular payment processes in field. And just naming those two, I think that’s the two main building blocks that we are currently missing in the token ecosystem that would really facilitate secondary market liquidity. And that’s, first, we need verifiable identities on layer one that simplifies KYC processes. And by KYC processes, I mean those that are accepted by AMR regulation. And I think that needs to be solved in order to get into an efficient secondary market infrastructure.

And second, we do need some widely accepted either stable coin, Euro nominated, or even better Euro CBDC. Looking at my target market, this would clearly facilitate our secondary market capabilities if we would have the chance to have a really seamless user onboarding, investors onboarding through verifiable identities. And if we have a settlement currency that allows autonomous settlement in secondary market transactions and does not require me to always have this painful sync process of ownership transfer on layer, on the protocol layer, payment processing in the traditional [crosstalk 01:00:10] payment system.

Ray: It’s got to be all connected. It’s got to be in one uniform place and you can see how, then it would work. It’s interesting. I see that. I mean, those businesses are not token based businesses. I’m guessing most of them on your platform, you might get one or two, but it is general equity based businesses. But if you could tokenize that equity and then attach a stable coin to that where there is no off ramp, it’s all done in one Web3 ecosystem, well, that would change the game because then you would have…

Jens: Totally, totally.

Ray: … you would enable global liquidity, global access, a lot more flexibility, you’d have more participants. You might have that initial kind of crazy period where people are trading in and out of positions, but that would die down and you still would have your typical long term holders in early stage businesses looking to hopefully one day have a meaningful outcome. So that category I find fascinating. So thanks for that. We’ve got a great overview.

Jens: But Ray, I quickly have to follow up on that one because tokenizing equity kind of I agree, exciting topic and we are working on it, and it’s kind of it’s a nice first step into a tokenized economy. But the potential on the table, just so much bigger. I mean, to just give you an example, once again, from our own business model. Imagine we not just only tokenizing our own equity as a company and really make it being… Today we already have more than 700 shareholders. So I’m happy. We are kind of already strongly decentralized at least in our shareholder structure, but let’s imagine we have an investor token that has a full token economy attached to it that goes beyond just pure ownership in the company.

That, for example, if you bring an exciting company that does a next equity funding round with us, you get some extra of those community tokens allocated to your wallet. This once again can be a step to somehow decentralize my whole sales activities. I’m currently doing detailed due diligence processes on the companies that raise money through our platform. I could make this DD process that involves lawyers, that involves financial analysts, also distribute those tests to the community and then compensate for those tests once again in community tokens. And following this whole idea, you can do so much more and you can generate so much more involvement of your users and the community and the whole ecosystem around your company if you consider and think about a more holistic token economy that you mostly will be specific to the business model and the specific situation of the company and the problem it wants to solve.

But now I just gave two examples of our business model and I’m almost 100% sure that in almost all business models out there, you could identify comparable tasks that are currently internalized that could be externalized and brought to the community and to the users if you put the right incentive structure in place. And that’s where smart token economy becomes necessary and I think that’s the important point here. I told you I come I’m from peer to peer and I think everybody who came from peer to peer, the peer to peer wallet, maybe we were a bit over optimistic in the beginning, because we were always hoping that our general idea of how we facilitate for good services to the community will somehow be appreciated.

However, the problem is peer to peer compared to centralized structures is always more complex and has disadvantages because you mostly miss resources, you miss efficient decision making processes, and all of that was not in place when the whole general idea of peer to peer came up. And I think that decentralized technology, and more importantly, a smart incentive layer that can be installed through good token incentive model for the first time allows us to bring peer to peer business models kind of into a good competitive situation compared to centralized business models. That’s why I find the whole incentive structure that you can lay out through a smart token economy such an exciting topic. On top of the new technology of cryptographic proofs and everything, I think those two really have to come hand in hand to get into a long term transition of many of the business models that we see out there today.

Ray: Makes sense. So just to unpack that further, if you were to launch your own Invesdor DACH token, which makes perfect sense, the value of that token is basically index exposure to every company which has been invested in. Is that in essence the creative value to a token holder? Is that the vision you have, where if I hold a token, I’ve got indexed exposure to every company within your company?

Jens: I wouldn’t say so, because this would mean that we also get invested into each and every company that does a fundraising through our platform. Today that’s not the case. And this would more follow there would always almost be a tokenized fund. I mean, you kind of invest into an exciting portfolio of startup companies. I mean, that also could be considered, but my approach or my vision of an investor, that token would be more one of a token that reflects the whole infrastructure that is necessary and the value that is kind of the value of the infrastructure that you require to first acquire good companies that are willing to do fundraising through our platform, doing a careful due diligence process for those companies, getting into a nice campaigning and fundraising, also doing road shows, for example, to me this investor of that token, if you would call it like this, would more reflect the intrinsic value of this whole infrastructure that is necessary to bring exciting companies and investors that want to have impact through their investments together in an efficient way.

Ray: Okay. Makes sense. So it’s kind of like a productivity capability you’re adding to the network that you’ve built. So brilliant. Well thanks for that context. And so now looking at big picture, and this is interesting, obviously you’re working in the Nordic region, working in Germany, obviously I know in Europe it’s an education winning hearts and minds, trying to get organized on ramps with trad fire, traditional finance organizations, do you spend any time there?

Obviously you’re an active participant in the Web3 movement, so do you have a good sense of where we’re at in terms of TradFi getting Web3 and then executing next year on this? Because it looks like in North America things are moving fast where you’ve got traditional TradFi banks making moves already in preparation for next year. What’s the lay of the land, Jens, in the Nordics and in Germany in terms of traditional financial institutions adding Web3 capability? Be it kind of basic custody services or maybe something deeper, what does it look like right now?

Jens: Yeah, good question. I mean, I’m currently in Frankfurt and visiting some friends and folks from traditional finance here and we have worked hard over the past two years to really bring a good knowledge transfer into traditional finance when it comes to applying decentralized technology within their own business and servicing model. And so what I’m observing in the German market, first there was a lot of, that’s not relevant and let’s ignore, this is just the trend and a scam and it will go over. And this kind of ended in 2017, ’18, I would say. And then there was kind of the first ones considering, Hey, this might be a new technology that is here to stay and we should start dealing with that. That was then probably one or two good years for big consulting firms out there selling some projects on, Hey, let’s define your digital efforts and blockchain strategy for the banks.

And most of them realize, Hey, they’ll really know how to bring this into really then getting into building real applications based on those strategic ideas and kind of was probably a good sell for the consultancies, but not really for traditional finance itself. And what I observed today is that there’s a true transition coming, at least in the German market, because we see the regulatory framework for digital assets to emerge and to become more and more formalized. We have crypto custody services being a regulated financial service in Germany, we have managing crypto share registers being a regulated financial service in Germany as of today, and we see more and more banks, mostly depot banks and banks that come from the asset management or that have strong asset management businesses running to really look deeper into mostly crypto custody in the first step, I would say. And that kind of also makes sense from a bank’s point of view, saying that we have been a reliable custodian or custody partner for institutional and retail clients for decades. Let’s bring this trust that we have built up also into the world of digital assets. So, I think that’s a smart move but that’s, kind of, let’s also face reality. If you decide to build up a full blown crypto custody business, it’s not just only about having some consultants supporting you. You really… Banks are hiring now. They are building up teams. Most banks started with one Head of Digital Assets normally, some fork that explains the blockchain to the senior management but now they really, the whole topic moves into the more operational units of the banks. I see more hiring in the risk management units, in banking operations, in the tech departments of the banks because they realize this technology is here to stay and it will impact our overall operating model.

That’s, to me, it’s a positive development we see through adoption nowadays and it’s more than just having some high level PowerPoint slides that try to formulate what we might do in three year times but it’s true investments happening at the moment and obviously also some exciting collaborations between FinTech companies and organizations from the decentralized space, with traditional banks and asset managers. What I believe is the right step to combine strengths and improve knowledge sharing to really spread the good word of decentralized technology also in the old fashioned bank towers. What we could do.

Ray: So is it fair to say, Jens, that’s great progress and I’m guessing you’re one of the community members there trying to advocate and beat the drum for this transition. So is it fair to assume in Q1 and Q2 of next year, we’re going to see some big names within [DUC 01:14:32] and Nordics launch, officially launch retail services where there is custody of digital assets and maybe some form of light yield offering. Do you see that in the first half of next year?

Jens: Yeah. I think we have to separate here a bit. I think if we look for services like crypto fiat, ramp-ups. If we look into crypto trading for retail clients, I mostly see the huge online brokers and the challenger banks to be the first one providing those services on the retail side, that will bring more mass adoption here. So, N26 just after their huge 800 million funding round announced that providing crypto investments, direct crypto investment opportunities and custody will be core to their strategy after they left the US market. Focuses now on Europe and setting up digital assets capabilities there. I know that Bitpanda is now working into traditional finance. So, I think we will see those focusing on the retail side, what I find more exciting and where I’m more also personally involved is the institutional investors side. If you look into the 20 biggest Depot banks in the German market and the big money lives within the fund industry and on the institutional investors side and out of the 20 biggest Depot banks in Germany, when it comes to assets on the custody, they represent 99% of the total market share here. 10 have announced that they are currently in the application process for the crypto custody license. Four more have announced that they are considering applying for the license and five or six didn’t respond. I think this is a groundbreaking outcome of this survey because it shows that literally half of the market of traditional finance, when it comes to custodian services for institutional clients, is moving towards crypto custody services and once again, what I said, if you apply for a new license with the German BaFin and that holds true for all regulatory authorities all over the globe, this means significant investments into your own organization.

That’s not something you do like a site project. That really requires building up teams, hiring typically new MDs because you do that normally in a subsidiary you’re setting up, that’s defining new processes, getting new IT providers onboarded. Those are heavy projects that require a lot of resource allocation to them and that’s why I’m pretty excited and looking forward to 2022, what we will see there mostly on the institutional investor side and what traditional banks and custodians will provide on that side.

Ray: That’s interesting. So 50% of the big players within an institutional space have announced they’ve made applications.

Jens: Yeah and another 25 considering it. I would call this sustainable trend.

Ray: Great. So, where do you think that leads to? Obviously they’ll be offering some form of treasury management capability to, got all those wonderful SMBs in Germany. There’s some amazing ones there, everyone in the world knows about those hidden gems but is that what they’re trying to offer? Some form of yield product for a lot of companies who might have a lot of cash on their balance sheet and obviously that money’s melting away in terms of purchasing power. So is that phase one of an entry level yield offering or exposure to say the top five digital assets to enable that kind of on-ramp and first exposure to this asset class? Is that what it looks like next year in Germany?

Jens: Yeah. I see two general trends and probably the first one, if we just look on the institutional investor side now for a moment, I think the biggest trend that I’m seeing in the German market at the moment, institutional investors typically invest through funds. So they are setting up a fund or they directly invest into funds. Let it be huge pension funds, life insurance, whatsoever and there has been an update to or a change to existing legislation in Germany recently that alternative investment funds are allowed to allocate up to 20% of their total investments into native crypto assets.

Obviously that is a relevant new news to the market because existing fund structures now are capable of, get a little proportion maybe but if they want to up to 20% of their total assets invested directly into crypto and obviously custodians and alternative investment fund managers and the whole industry now is adapting and building up structures and processes to make those re-allocations into crypto assets possible and I think this will also help to see a significant amount of institutional money actually flowing into crypto. What I find extremely exciting, because it will just help the market and it will help those projects to continue growing. So, I think that’s one major trend and the other one [crosstalk 01:21:07]

Ray: … recap for our audience. That’s your really traditional capital allocators, so pension funds, sovereign level funds now have the ability to make up to a 20% allocation.

Jens: Yes.

Ray: Within the bucket of alternative assets, within that bucket digital assets is front and center.

Jens: Yeah, that’s all alternative investment funds up to 20% into digital assets and I think that’s a… Yeah, provides completely new opportunities here too that will help to, as I said, see significant inflow of institutional money from Germany into crypto. Yeah. That’s one major trend I’m seeing here in Germany at the moment and the second one is actually tokenization of securities and I think if we now look into typical investment strategies of large institutional investors, if they now say, hey, let’s have, I don’t know, seeing a digit percentage of our portfolio invested into crypto assets directly. The rest normally is sold in securities, bonds and shares. And as I said, new law in Germany today already allows to tokenize bonds. So, traditional financial industry also looking closely into this. We are now getting prepared to allow direct investments into crypto assets but we also, at the same time do the necessary steps to also be capable to serve tokenized securities because if you set up a custodian infrastructure for crypto assets, it’s the same infrastructure also works for tokenized assets, in most cases.

Ray: Okay, so just pausing that, this is interesting. So, the tokenization of some of the traditional asset classes, securities, traditional bonds in a tokenized form factor, that tokenized form factor can then be used as collateral to deploy in the digital asset market. Is that what you’re describing?

Jens: It’s more like that… Obviously, if today most of the institutional money obviously is invested into traditional assets.

Ray: Yep.

Jens: And if you look into the more risk averse institutional investors, like huge pension funds and life insurance companies, it’s mostly allocated into fixed income products, bonds. As I said, those bonds nowadays can be tokenized in Germany. We do not see that many tokenized bonds especially, we do not see them for large cap companies because they feel, at the moment they still feel more comfortable with the traditional setup of issuing a bond, having your book runner, your investment bank that you’re trusting in, having the security traditionally issued and distributed through the security market infrastructure to then fiats more affordable.

It’s also, they associate lower risks with still using the traditional financial market infrastructure here but smaller companies, we just recently tokenized security for one of the companies that did the funding round through our platform in Germany. That’s for small, medium size companies, this becomes more common to actually use this new opportunity to not use a traditional bond to refinance but to use a tokenized structure. I think tokenization in the first step, we will see it mostly, most adoption on the side of small, medium size enterprise and everybody knows that those are the backbone of the German industry and the German economy and I’m pretty excited that those companies, through tokenization will win better opportunities to get less dependent on traditional bank financing and get a better and more efficient direct access to the capital market.

Nothing else is tokenization providing here. It provides an easier, more efficient and streamlined approach to issue a bond and if you issue a 1 million or 1 billion bond issuance, the way you structured and the way you do the issuance relatively to the total volume is not that important. It’s some basis points up or down but it doesn’t really matter. But if you just issue a security or a bond of total volume of 1 million or 2 million Euros, structuring costs and distribution costs become really relevant at short notice and that’s where tokenization and relying on a more efficient structuring and distribution approach has the biggest benefits. That’s why, I’m happy to see that in the beginning, mostly small, medium size enterprises will be the one that benefit most from the opportunities that come with tokenizing bonds and securities.

Ray: Brilliant. So, it’s great to see things are moving swiftly in the Nordics and Germany. So, just to wrap up, Jens, sorry we covered so many exciting points today, going into next year and the year beyond, on the big picture, what really excites you around Web3? What are some of the things you’re keeping a close eye on and really energizes you?

Jens: Yeah. As we have discussed so many finance topics now, I think maybe start it with the DeFi CeFi topic quickly. What I’m expecting for 2022 is that we see adoption towards DeFi and traditional finance. We see regulators coming up and shaping the regulatory framework for digital assets. However, I still expect, and I don’t know if this will be in 2022 or maybe later but I still expect some kind of clash and conflict between CeFi and DeFi because this whole adoption that we are seeing by traditional finance moving into the DeFi direction is always… It still follows the old approach of we have a bank that is an intermediary here, that is regulated. Although the regulatory framework is adjusted and the technology applied to somehow decentralized to some extent it’s still not following the full idea of DeFi.

I think we see this transition and that those two are moving closer to each other but I think they will never become one and at some moment there will be this ice opening moment of, hey, we had some transition here but only to some point and now what’s the next step and I think this will also be the moment when traditional finance will try to do a lot of lobbying against DeFi, once again and where we will see that things might turn out to be a bit more controverse and be discussed a bit more, that discussions are heating up there. So this is something I’m expecting on the DeFi CeFi side, to come at some moment and maybe even in 2022. If I look into Web3, generally, I think we are just seeing so many exciting projects out there that really, on the layer one side that carry some huge capabilities and potential to really facilitate Web3 applications that probably were not come to mass adoption in 2022 but to wider adoption at least.

The areas I’m mostly looking into, as everybody’s already looking into NFT, I do not have to look there as well that much, although I’m doing on a daily basis but what I think where the whole concept of decentralized applications and collectibles and the whole idea of a metaverse and all of those components of a holistic Web3 vision, where they will apply first is in the gaming industry, that’s my expectation, because the target audience you’re addressing there has some, generally speaking, good understanding of new technologies. You have a handsome and good user base from that point of view that does not necessarily requires the best user experience in the first step in order to get into adoption.

And it’s a community that is used to live in and act in a digital space, let’s say that are… We have traded World of Warcraft Gold on eBay 10 years ago. It’s the whole idea of collectables and having digital assets is also extremely natural to this community and yeah, I’m really excited to see more adoption of decentralized technology in the gaming space as I believe some exciting opportunities are there and I also imagine it to be one of the areas where mass adoption could come first and that’s my outlook into 2022, I guess.

Ray: Well, Jens, it’s been awesome having you on today. Just for our audience, where can people find you? Is it Twitter, LinkedIn? What’s the best place for people to reach out and get-

Jens: Yeah, you can find me on Twitter. That’s first name, last name, Jens Siebert. But you can also find me on LinkedIn. I’m quite active there as well, trying to keep in touch with, as I said, traditional finance regulators and really building those bridges. LinkedIn is the right place to do that, to not just only being in the decentralized community but also trying to stay in touch with incumbents and discussing with them together how we can make this exciting transition into a more decentralized web that allows users to really own the assets that belong to them, to really have transparency and verifiability in the services they are using and not being captured in an at based business model that probably was never intended to be there in the first step but actually it’s just there and I have the feeling for the first time we really get the right tools at our hands to make the next big, and from my point of view, necessary face transition in the web possible and extremely excited to see this one happening rather sooner than later.

Ray: I share your same sentiment. Well, Jens, it’s been awesome having you on and let’s do part two, hopefully in the summer, my friend and hopefully speak next year.

Jens: Thanks, Ray, for having me. Cheers. Bye.

Ray: Bye, bye.