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Block by Block: A Show on Web3 Growth Marketing
[AUDIO] June Ou and Provenance Blockchain: Mortgages, Life Insurance, and the Future of Blockchain Finance
Episode is brought to you by Infinex. Experience crypto designed for humans:
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Summary
In this episode, June Ou, co-founder of Provenance Blockchain, breaks down how blockchain can streamline the financial system by removing middlemen and making transactions more transparent. She shares how Provenance started with lending and securities, but is now tackling more complex assets like life insurance and mortgages. June emphasizes that tokenization isn’t just about putting assets on-chain—it’s about ensuring the truth of ownership. She discusses how Provenance works with traditional institutions, educates them through working use cases, and tracks real-time loan performance to bring more trust into the system. With an evolving regulatory landscape and a focus on community building, Provenance is positioning itself as core infrastructure for the next generation of finance.
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Takeaways
– Provenance Blockchain aims to decentralize core financial functions.
– June Ou entered crypto to eliminate inefficiencies in legacy finance.
– Early focus was on lending and securities trading.
– Tokenization must reflect verified ownership—not just digital copies.
– Traditional institutions need proof-of-concept to engage seriously.
– Key on-chain metrics include loan volume and performance.
– Real-time data helps track market changes and risk.
– Regulatory clarity is improving, enabling broader adoption.
– Asset onboarding for institutions needs to be simpler and faster.
– Life insurance is hard to tokenize due to legacy systems.
– The mortgage market is a major opportunity for Provenance.
– Community is essential to drive adoption and education.
– Provenance is built to scale as regulation and demand evolve.
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Timeline
(00:00) Introduction to Provenance Blockchain and Its Vision
(03:46) The Role of Blockchain in Financial Transformation
(06:36) Building the Lending Ecosystem on Blockchain
(09:37) Challenges in Tokenizing Real World Assets
(12:50) Educating Traditional Finance on Blockchain Benefits
(15:48) Real-Time Performance and Transparency in Loans
(19:00) Simplifying Asset Boarding for Institutions
(21:43) The Future of Blockchain in Life Insurance
(27:28) Simplifying Blockchain Integration
(29:07) Digitizing Assets for Blockchain
(31:32) Navigating Legal and Compliance Challenges
(33:14) Building a Self-Service Blockchain Model
(36:26) Community Building in Blockchain
(38:47) Innovative Mortgage Products
(41:49) Regulatory Landscape and Challenges
(44:33) Exciting Developments with SEC Collaboration
(50:30) Open Dialogue with Regulators
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See other Episodes Here. And thank you to all our crypto and blockchain guests.
Okay, we're rolling. Oh, co founder of Provenance blockchain. Welcome. Thank you. You have a really rich background having worked as an executive at a number of projects or a number of companies. What brought you to crypto and what are your thoughts so far? Well, I think that crypto was always something that was interesting because of the premise that it started with, which is really the whole premise of decentralization and taking the middleman really out of the picture, banks, institutions. So my whole career has been around financial technology and building systems for either financial institutions or for my own startups where we are trying to create a better experience for the consumer and create efficiencies for our counterparties. So what brought me directly into blockchain really was thinking about this technology and the ability of it to transform the financial industry to break to sort of reduce costs and create revenue for their different products using blockchain. So what we did is we thought about our own experiences and the things that we know that are cost a lot, which is a securitization. And I can talk about details of that if you want to. But that's really a transaction that happens quite often in the financial industry. And a lot of times it costs over 100 basis points and it might take 90, 120 days to actually close. And that's really around the fact that buyers of those bonds or loans, they don't trust each other. Nobody trusts each other. So what they do is they go in and they audit every aspect of the asset as well as the company. there might be some idiosyncratic risk about the company that they need to go and do a risk assessment about. And so it all ends up being costing a lot. So if you're talking about a, you know, a hundred billion dollar transaction, a hundred basis points is quite a bit. Plus the time lag and the inefficiencies of being able to pull capital out so you can grow your business. those those third parties, you while they play their role, they also play a role in role of the company that's actually trying to build a business. So that's where we started. We started with that securitization use case. And it turns out to be, you know, relatively complicated, as you mentioned a little bit earlier, processes within the financial institution. and trying to break them away from that and tell them there's a better way to do it. Just because you've done it that way for 30 years doesn't mean that that is the right way to do it. That would create speed. and reduce costs, which then increases your revenue because you can actually grow faster and then create more product and build your business. And that's what led you to founding Provenance. Is that right? Yeah. So what we did was we had talked to large institutions about our, our ideas and our use case that we wanted to start with. And they weren't really ready to work with us. Um, they wanted us to work with our R and D groups. And we said, no, because the only way we know if it works is to put it into production. So we started a lending business, and started to originate Helox. Um, so we started the company and January 2018 and we built an origination system in the first incarnation of the blockchain by July of 2018 and we started to originate loans on the blockchain. So every loan that we have originated has been boarded onto blockchain. That created the block chain, the provenance blockchain, um, and which has evolved since then, obviously, but that's when we built it ourselves. So we built our own origination system, servicing capital markets, tools, and, the blockchain all at the same time to, uh, complete the use case and the initial proving of the efficacy of blockchain for a true transaction. Gotcha. The market for real world assets is essentially anything that can be tokenized and has value, which is a massive market, obviously. Tell us about the specific verticals that provenance is initially targeting and how is that going so far? Well, the initial use cases we targeted was really probably the most evolved is the lending ecosystem. So if you provide a loan, any type of loan, you can board it onto the system. can disperse it and transact, um, as well as then sell it, either as a whole loan or sell it as participation or securitize it. And then they're servicing. So all of that is sort of the first use case that we built Provenance for. The other use cases that we have since built is on the figure market side where we built a marketplace where we want customers to be able to trade securities and non-securities. So we have a burger dealer license with an ATS exemption, which allows us to trade blockchain securities. We wrote that specifically in our application and with Gensler as the head, there was really no way they were going to allow anybody else to do that. Could happen now, but we can. And so we went about looking for assets that we could provide to retail, which is actually quite difficult so that they could trade those assets as well as crypto. as a non-security. And then we also built a democratized prime product where if you had assets you'd like to lend, you can do that. We also have crypto loans and we've just released a crypto mortgage today actually. So I think that we built a lot around the lending ecosystem, but on the market side, we're really thinking about transactions, right? So a lot of people, you know, back in the day would load um, any sort of asset and tokenize it and call it good. For me, I think that, um, like if you're going to do that, why bother, right? There needs to be some, you know, transactions, like if you're buying and selling or you're borrowing against it, right. That makes sense. Right. Then, then you go through, you know, the pain of putting it on blockchain because it really isn't that easy or simple. it's an interesting technology. Um, and there's a lot of things that. you know, might cause an engineer pain. But we've tried to simplify it in a way that makes it a little bit easier for someone to board an asset and then if they want to trade it to provide a venue for them to trade it. Now you mentioned a couple of things I want to kind of double click into. First off, congratulations on the mortgage product. We'd love to learn more about that. And the process of getting assets on chain, what does that process look like? I imagine it's quite manual. Well, some of these processes are very manual. supply chain, for example, it's with so many counterparties involved. also I think in some parts of securitizing an asset, I think there's kind of a lot of paperwork and process involved. We'd be curious to see, to know how, like what that looks like and then how the process by which it gets on chain and the value of it being on chain, like then what? Yeah. Yeah. We talk a lot about truth over trust. And the reason we say that is because you're right. There's tons of paper and all these different products. And a lot of times, you know, you lose the paper and you lose sight of the ownership, like the registry of that paper. So during the crash, you know, there were a lot of times where they didn't know who owned what bonds. because there is a system called MERS out there that's owned by ICE and they have a monopoly where you can update their system, which is a database of the ownership of a set of assets. Now, if you buy and sell and buy and sell and you don't tell MERS, then it doesn't have an updated record of who owns what. And so they actually contributed to some of the chaos of the crash. because they couldn't actually tell you truthfully, like what is the truth of the ownership of this asset? And so, you know, that's something that we think a lot about is the truth. So if you put an asset on and you tokenize it on the blockchain, but it's just a digital twin, there's no point because you could sell that asset on paper. So what we always say is that, you know, there's this term of authoritative copy. where you have to have a wet signature, right? Now, e-signature has come a long way from that, but when you used to have this authoritative copy, that was the truth of that asset, right? So you sign a promissory note for the mortgage, like that thing means that if something happens to that property and you're not paying, you were the one on the hook for that, right? So we think about that when you tokenize an asset, it's like, we wanna make sure that whatever is seen on the blockchain is the truth, right? So we don't ever think about a tokenized twin because it doesn't matter. Then you might as well just use a database, right? Because you're not actually transacting with the true asset and knowing the truth because it could have been sold underneath you. So that's kind of how we think about what we do and how we think about the process of putting an asset on the chain. If it's a fund, for example, then you need all of the eventually a fund to understand that the transaction has to be done on this province blockchain. Otherwise it is not a valid transaction, right? Any lending of that interest has to be done here or it has to, you know, it has to be written to province blockchain. Otherwise it's not real and it didn't happen. Right. So that's how we think about it. So it's almost like a version of the double spend problem. There's like the paper version, there's the online version, like which is the single source of truth. When you create an SPV or a special purpose vehicle, fund, and the investors in that fund understand that the transactions that really matter are the ones on provenance blockchain, like how does that agreement come about? Because I imagine a lot of these investors, probably some of these investors, are not familiar with the blockchain and why that matters more so than, you know, a transaction that they're familiar with. What does that conversation look like, sound like, and how do you get people on board? Yeah, that is one of the biggest issues that we've had over the years is convincing and really educating, you know, traditional TradFi financial guys that this technology can really help them service their customers better, to be honest. And so a lot of them want to do a pilot. They'll do a pilot. They'll do a, what's it called? Nazi to a. I forget what it's called. They'll do just a small fund and a feeder fund. That's what it is. They'll create a feeder fund and they'll put the feeder fund on the blockchain just to test it out and see what it looks like and see what the experience is. And so I think that, you know, once that happens and the use case of why we're doing it makes sense, then they really lean in. Right now. Leaning in is one of those things where, you know, they have a business they have to run. And so, you know, my feeling is that I get why a lot of these institutions haven't moved yet because they don't want to disrupt their revenue flow. It makes total sense. So we have to really get better at, you know, the user experience, the onboarding experience and all of that, such that, you know, it, it doesn't take away a lot of resources for them to move to a system like this. And, you know, we still work on those institutions, but we really try to prove it ourselves by building these businesses. And I think that's the difference in some of these other blockchains is we have full on businesses using provenance blockchain, where others are putting treasuries on and that type of thing. And, you know, that's fine, but it doesn't really give you the full picture of how a financial institution can run their business using this technology. Give us a sense of the provenance blockchain and how much business is being transacted right now. Like, I'm not sure what the metrics are, RWA projects look at, but I imagine it's some kind of like value that's on chain. Yeah. So it is a really interesting question because of the way that, um, that assets are seen on blockchains, like in general for us, you know, it's really the loan, the value of the loan. Um, so you could have $50 million of loans that were just originated on blockchain. And then you're selling that $50 million, right? And then the price of that pool of loans is something that we think about. So for me, it's really, you know, the number of units that you place on the blockchain, it's the value of the assets. Now, of course, with loans, right, you're paying down the loans. So those values, you know, come down, and some people pay it off really quickly. So then your value comes down. But that's okay. That's just a normal course of business, right? The transaction volume, however, for me should increase, right? Not only with the originations and the payments, but with the transactions, right? Because if we are building this correctly, then transacting, you know, a pool of loans or even one loan should be really simple and easy and, you know, allow them to create liquidity where it's a lot more difficult to create that liquidity based on the way that the loans are transacted today. Like, so you mentioned double spend, a lot of like the world right now, unless they're on blockchain is they still use spreadsheets, right? They use spreadsheets they call loan tape because it used to be a tape back in the day. And they email these spreadsheets back and forth. Well, when you do that, right? So you give them a pool of loans for them to evaluate and they say, well, I don't want 10% of this. like, okay. And so then somebody makes a mistake and leaves that 10 % in there. Um, you know, now you're screwed or they sold a pile of loans or they put them in a warehouse and now they're, they have some of the similar loans in a different spreadsheet and now you've double, you've double counted, right? And so, and so that's a problem. Like that could be considered fraud. So, you know, having the source of truth and knowing that when you're selling a pile of loans, you know that nobody else owns that and you are the owner of it or. it's in the warehouse and it hasn't been double-bledged, you know, that should be something that makes sense because that's a huge operational burden to then go over. all that because you have to then bring in humans to do it. And once it's on chain, correcting it becomes almost impossible. So how, how, do you do deal with that? Well, I mean, you correct it, but I mean, you just have to append the correct information, right? But you do see the mistake if you actually went, you know, and bothered to take a look at that particular block is you could see what happened. But that's also the benefit of it, right? Because you can see the efficacy of the payment of that loan, right? So this person has been on time every single month and then, this person was late, but then they cured their payment. And then here's a person who's in default, right? So, so that's also the benefit of it, right? Is you can see that and what happened when COVID happened, right? Everything shut down and we provide real time, um, performance information. So the, the owners of the loans that we had sold to could look on the system and see how their portfolio performed during COVID, right? Cause if people were I don't know, not working or they lost their jobs or whatever was happening. Like they were using our system as a little bit of an indication of what the market might do because they had real-time performance rather than waiting 30 days to see if a payment came in. and is as a loan provider, I'm not even sure the name of it, but if I had a basket of loans on Provenance, and would I be able to see the performance of it in real time? Do I have a dashboard available to me? at the moment, some of the things I'm working on, I did, I, my team did build this system, but then I stepped away. Um, and then I came back in late last year and so I'm kind of cleaning up some things that were not done. So this goes to the exposure of, of Provenance. Nobody really knows about us and I'm trying to raise that profile, but I also have to make sure people can see, as you just asked the performance of the assets. the increase of value in the assets, you know, just from an origination perspective and the transaction volume. So I'm building up to that. So hopefully in the next few weeks, I've finished my tokenomics document and doing sort of a relaunch, although it's kind of a launch because it was never really launched to begin with. And then I will have all of that data for people to see. I mean, some of the issue we had in the beginning was really convincing these institutions to use the system the way we wanted them to. And, you know, a lot of them shied away from blockchain because of the crypto, you know, there's just bad people in crypto. And so we can't have anything to do with crypto or compliance people, you know, scream bloody murder. And so we had to sort of accommodate them. And so that kind of forced us to. not show a lot of the things that we wanted to show because of their reluctance. And so that's a bit of what I'm cleaning up now and just really now proudly showing all of the things that we put on blockchain rather than hiding from. With the regulatory stance towards blockchain, changing from adversarial to now quite accepting in the United States, how do you see that changing the strategy and or kind of approach the Provenance is taking to tokenizing ruled assets? Do you see it becoming, I guess, easier to work with asset managers, et cetera? think so because I think that people are now a lot more open to considering the technology given the, it's almost like a relief. Like they were sitting in a prison. Don't talk about blockchain, don't think about blockchain. And now they get to think about it and they get to really dig in further into it. And they're a lot more open to how we might think about wallets. They shied away from a wallet concept. And I was like, well, just think about it like an account. Like that's where you go see your assets. Like how hard is that? Right. So, but they really shied away from it. And I actually found that, you know, from a semantics perspective, it was a lot of confusion and a lot of, um, sort of fear, right. Because you'd say, well, what address, right. And then you give them this big long string of they're like, what is that? I don't know what that is and what does it mean? And so there was a lot of fear. So I think that they are. you know, kind of venturing out and thinking like, okay, maybe I can now learn a little bit more about this. Um, it's, shouldn't be scary. It's technology, right? For me, it's always about, you should worry about what you normally worry about, which is security, right? And make sure it's secure and make sure that whatever information shouldn't be public isn't public. Um, and you know, that that's what we think about. mean, there, no, there's a lot of institutions like JP Morgan that are. They have their own private blockchain. I'm not sure I see the reason for that. Although I suppose I just talked myself out of the truth over trust. mean, I guess if they want truth internally, they can have that with a private chain. Sure. I'll give them that. I really want to get into the process of, you if I were a big bank and I have a set of loans that I wanted on chain, like what does that engagement look like with Provenance? Like what, like behind the scenes, like what does that actually look like? So another thing that I'm cleaning up is an easier way for them to think about boarding assets, right? Because in the beginning, it's sort of an evolving process where we created this really, not a huge... We think about metadata and we think about you put a little bit of metadata onto the chain so that you have a little bit of information. And we blew that out too big. we're, I'm kind of cleaning that up from a technical perspective with a couple of my guys where it'll be really dead simple to board assets. Right. And then those, they'll all be able, they'll be able to create a pool of assets. Right. And then if they want to sell, they can sell it through our marketplace or they could sell it in their own marketplace, but then they'd have to build sort of a, interface for that. So I'm trying to create a much easier, more standard way for people to actually board assets in order to then transact or just even to take payments. So those are the kind of the things that I'm working on right now that will allow larger institution to, you know, be a little less intimidated by what this might be. Let me let me read a tweet that That the Provenance blockchain account retweeted recently. I think it was a partnership that That you guys recently closed with in Finio group So life insurance is a three billion dollar market with seven point four billion in benefits unclaimed every year policies are lost forgotten and never reach their rightful beneficiaries That's a huge opportunity And I imagine a lot of the, this is all paper. Most of it is papers, probably some digital for depending on the maturity of the life insurance company. How do you deal with getting that much information on chain? Like that's a lot of work. Well... trying to think of how much I know about life insurance. I think that there's certain bits of information that are key to that life insurance policy. Right. And so I think you hone in on that. Right. I don't think you put all of that paper on. I mean, you just think about a loan, right? Like a traditional mortgage. In fact, I was cleaning out my house because I put it on the market, but I was cleaning out my house and I find all these mortgage documents. And it's like an inch thick of paper, even if they print it double-sided. And so we don't put all of that on blockchain because blockchain can't handle it from a scalability perspective. So we put on the blockchain minimal amount of information to be able to make sure that people can see that this is like an NFT on the chain. The data itself is held just in an encrypted store where you can link it back to that blockchain address to know that that is the actual policy. And then if you have to dig more into the legalese of that policy, you can do it there. But I would never recommend putting that much on blockchain. That's what we did in our first incarnation. We actually put the entire loan on and then we started to calculate what that might be if we went to scale and we're like, ooh, that's not going to work because of the nature of blockchain. So we kind of had to think about what that needs to be. And so we've got continuously thought about simplifying it to the point where now we're just going to make it really simple. So it's not so onerous, right? Because before we had this whole big, you know, configuration of cryptic object store and then you have to do this and you have to do that. And it's like, well, you really don't. Not anymore. Right. Well, not in the province blockchain because we just try to, I mean, we think about the teams in these organizations and what they're faced with if their leader comes up and says, their CEO is like, okay, we're going the blockchain route. And then they're all like, ooh, what does that mean? And what do I have to do? And then do I have to go hire a pile of consultants that I have to... a lot of money for to help me. No, I'm trying to think about that and think about just a way easier way for them to put their assets on and just get what they need to get to, which is the truth and which is an easier way to transact. So going back to the Infineo group example, let's say these life insurance documents are actually on paper and they have not made a digital copy yet. Do you make a digital copy and then make that an NFT on the blockchain? I guess like what's the I guess, what does that actually look like, the onboarding of an operation that large? Yeah. So, I think that my view is that you digitize the entire thing and then you destroy the paper. And that's what I would do. Um, I don't think they're doing that. Um, I think that, you know, there's still a little bit of trepidation and I think about worst case scenarios and worst case scenarios are, that you, you know, You pull it down, new printed. But if you really want the truth, you need to have it truly on the blockchain and digitized. Right. So yeah, and you don't have to put the whole thing on blockchain, but you have to digitize it and then, you know, link it to the blockchain address so that you can find the truth of that asset. Right. And if they do end up selling, and I don't know if life insurance policies get sold, cause don't know this industry very well, but If you do end up selling it, then it's a much easier process to sell it with the truth on the chain and not like shuffling paper that sits in cardboard boxes. Right? So you're getting to the heart of the problem, which is that we are so ingrained in the paper that, you know, people just think, okay, fine, I'll digitize it, but that just means like PDFing it. But that's not what it is. Like you have to make sure that. you know, from a legal perspective, compliance perspective, that the actual asset is, is on is you go to the blockchain to see the actual asset. Now, the mortgage industry kind of has gotten there with the E, um, E docs, E sign and the E recordings where there has been, bankruptcy. cases where they've gone to court with a digital copy of what's on in the cloud. Right. So before, you know, you would have to take it down and you'd have to do some legal thing to then take it to court and say, this is the actual instrument for the mortgage. Right. Because the mortgage, the mortgage paper is, a very different beast than any other paper. And you had to go with the wet signature to court. But once people started to say, okay, let's figure out what this e-signature really is and how can we just prove that that person was the signature, true signature of it. And they have come up with a process that says, yes, if you e-sign this mortgage document, you can then go to court and say, here's a copy of the digital Um, version that is the actual true copy is the digital version, but you can go to court and say, I was authorized to take a copy of this, to bring to court, to do what the owner of that asset wants to do, which is foreclose. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. I'm thinking in terms of the business development side. it sounds like a portion of your customers or Provenance Blockchains customers are Infineo group that they have a number of documents or policies that they want tokenized and put on chain. then Provenance Blockchains serves as kind of a service provider for them to help them onboard and do that. And you have a set of customers, sounds like you help them tokenize their assets. And then once it's on chain, they can also do other stuff with it, like sell, buy, and there's a full audit trail. It sounds like you, I'm guessing you might have a, do you have a business development sales team that actually does outbound and works with these companies to, web two companies to help onboard them? So. I don't have a biz dev team per se right now. For me, my goals are to clean up the the protocol, to create a tokenomics document, to create a go-to-market strategy, and really start to market Provenance blockchain. Now, I get a lot of referrals of these types of institutions from investors from the parties that hear about figure and figure markets. So I get a lot of inbound and the conversations are interesting. Some of them are a little bit exploratory. Some of them are, you know, okay, what do I do to get started? But over the years, what the people that have been most interested, which probably makes sense, are a lot of startups, right? Because they think, okay, well, I'm building this business. I'm going to build it on blockchain. And so those are interesting because they're very enthusiastic. and you know, I want to open up a way for them to do this without me having to handhold them, right? That's part of the work I'm doing now because yeah, it's, I want it to be self-service because, know, I don't want to be a consulting firm, right? Like I do want to help and I can help. sort of talk them through what it might look like. can help talk through what an architecture of what they want to do might look like. But I don't want to have a staff of people that actually, you I was in consulting once and it's really a painful business. So I think that, you know, it isn't something I'm necessarily interested in, but there's others that might do that, like Prawns Labs, like they're, they're really a consulting firm to help. people because at the moment it's relatively complicated to get assets on. So that's part of what I'm trying to do and not to take away from any consulting business, but you you shouldn't have to go spend a whole pile of money on consultants to bring blockchain into your world. The real world asset space is really interesting because it obviously involves tokenizing assets in the real world, which is a massive market. because crypto is involved or blockchain is involved, and most blockchain projects involve a community that may or may not be totally interested or know much about the product. but are instead interested in being part of the community and supporting the vision, many of whom are probably not technical. Tell us about your community building efforts to build a community around Provenance blockchain that are, and many of these community members likely will not be users, but just community members. Tell us your thoughts around that and your efforts around building community. Right. Well, to date, after we kind of let, sort of pushed Provenance blockchain to be on its own, there really wasn't a lot of community building. The leaders we had in there are very TradFi. And so, you know, they went and tried to find some other people to put some other institutions to put assets on and not really build the community that you're referring to, which is really the crypto community that really wants to be part of it. And so what I'm doing is I'm trying to provide, and this is where my tokenomics comes in. I'm trying to provide a way for them to be able to participate, you know, in the growth of the assets, because I'm going to put milestones on it where I will have rewards against that. for example, if the, you know, the dollar value of the assets increases by 10%, I'm going to drop some rewards. Right. Now, what's interesting about what I have with figure and figure markets is that if you go get a HELOC, you're adding to the asset value. Right. If you are trading on figure markets, you're adding to the trading volume that we're going to have. So I'm going to set the metrics of these airdrops against the milestones of businesses that are running on blockchain. So in Finio. with their increasing policy values on chain will help with the increase of value of assets. I just don't know how many people want life insurance right now. As a younger crowd, they're probably not thinking about it because they shouldn't need to. But on the figure side, you can get a loan. have crypto loans. And on the market side, there's plenty to trade. And we have... We do have crypto trading as well. it's, we're not trying to compete against all of the different exchanges out there, but we just wanted one place for you to be able to go get, you know, security or some different type of alternative asset, as well as crypto on one place. Got it. Tell us about the mortgage market that that provenance recently launched. So the mortgage market's the trillion dollar market, right? It's like the second largest market out there. And so that's part of the reason why we started with loans because it's also a good way to generate revenue pretty quickly. So we started with the traditional HELOC and not the traditional HELOC, I'm sorry. It's a little bit different from the traditional HELOC. Where we disperse it immediately and the crypto loans we have we have, you your normal You For against your Bitcoin and then what we did launch is a crypto heloc, which is You normally have a first lien already on your house and then you have a lot of equity so you want a second lien And so what we're providing is a HELOG product where we then take the loan that you just qualified for and the disbursement and we buy Bitcoin with it. And then we will hold that Bitcoin as value against your home so that we can actually increase the LTV on paper. It looks like we're giving more than 100 % of LTV, but the value of the Bitcoin adds into it, which lowers the LTV almost like lower than the actual dollar that you might have taken out for the initial, the first lien that you have. So it seems like a really interesting product because I don't think anybody else has a product like this. And it seems super popular when we tweeted it just to see what reaction we would get. And there seemed to be tons of people that loved that because, you you're sort of increasing your assets by using the equity in your home. And people really like that. So we'll see. I mean, it's, it's just launched today. We'll, hit some marketing against it and see what happens. I think there's a lot of potential there. I actually heard someone on, I want to say CNBC talk about a similar product except in the multifamily space where they raised US dollars from limited partners and then they would buy an apartment and then with the funds, I believe with the revenue from the apartment, they would buy Bitcoin with it. and then they would find some way to distribute that back to LPs, something like that. But I believe I heard something similar to that. I mean, obviously the single family market is much larger. But I think there's a lot of potential there. That's quite exciting. What regulatory hurdles have you encountered with the creation of this product? So to be clear, I'm talking a lot about the figure side and they have over 200 lending licenses because each state, because they're a non-bank lender, each state has consumer licenses, consumer lending licenses, mortgage lending licenses, servicing licenses. So each state has know, several licenses you need to actually apply for. Is that it for the lending side? Yeah, think that those are the majority of the licenses they need to actually be a lender. which is a lot. Maybe give us some clarification on the figure is a partner to provenance. And I guess what's the relationship there and yeah, what's the relationship there? Well, I mean, technically it's separate, they're separate entities. There's just a lot of synergies because we built, I built all of it. And the growth of figure lending is really key to, you know, how we show provenance's success because of the number of assets. And so that's how we're going to prove the scalability of provenance. as well to be able to handle the number of transactions from the lending perspective as well as the figure markets perspective. technically they're very, very separate. It's just, stepped into kind of clean up province blockchain right now and my future with province blockchain is a little bit up in the air, but I'm here to stay for the moment until I can get a community going. could get the marketing going and make sure that, you know, all the different partners like the infineos of the world can use the blockchain, use Provenance blockchain in the way that we intend it to be used. That sounds like a And with the way the world is going with the more laxed and positive posture towards crypto and blockchain, I see projects like Provenance, think the headwinds are gone. And so you've got tailwinds kind of pushing you forward. And I think that's quite exciting. As we near the end of this interview, what are some things that you'd like to share with the community? with the blockchain community in general and maybe any announcements you'd like to share and how people can get involved. So. So we've been working with the SEC for a couple of years on a product, on a security that is a little bit obscure because they haven't issued one of these in over 50 years. It's called a face amount certificate. And the unique aspect of this particular thing is that you can transfer it peer to peer. So if I bought a chair from you, I could pay you in yields, which is what we're calling it. And it's going to be the yielding stable coin. So we're close to the end of the process. And it's very exciting for us because I think that while the head ones are gone, I don't know how the banks react. So I know that one of the biggest hurdles for crypto firms is the banks, know, the fiat on off ramps. And so this solves that and it can be a settlement mechanism where, you know, it yields, right? So. Then you start to question why you would hold a same coin that doesn't build. So that's one thing we're pretty excited about. We'll see how it goes. But I mean, this thing, you know, when we first started, it was written into the 40X. it wasn't, it shouldn't have been something novel for the SEC to consider. But it was just because they hadn't issued one and nobody at the SEC has seen it before. The only other company that has one is Ameriprise. So it was super interesting. Like I ended up pulling up the 1940 investment company act. it's a really hard document to read, just to understand the mechanics of it. And that was something that I think the SEC staff had to do as well, because they just didn't know. And so we all were educating ourselves on this particular thing, but it's really exciting because when did you ever have a security that you actually transfer peer to peer? Normally you'd have to go through an interesting broker like Schwalb. So, and that's another thing that we're trying to sort of think through on the market side is really to get rid of that set of, you know, third party rent seekers, what we call it. Why should I have to, you know, transact through an introducing broker? Why can't I just do it with, you know, my buyer? Right. And as long as you settle the transaction and it makes sense and the trade doesn't break, then it should be fine. Right. The inefficiencies of having to hold capital at DTCC, know, Robinhood hit that, like they hit that issue and they had to go and raise a pile of money that probably wiped out their cap table. And so, you know, why should you have that? Why should you have that, you know, huge burden to lock up your capital that you might need to actually grow and service your customers? With this product, how long is that process in the back and forth with the application and working with the SEC? I think the audience doesn't know kind of the ins and outs of a process like that. I'm curious how long that would take and all the work involved. Yeah, I mean, it took like two and a half years to two or two and a half years. We talked to them for about a year ish sort of what we wanted to do before we filed the documents. So they kind of understood what we were doing. We were working with them so that they understood all the different aspects of it because Provenance blockchain had to be written into the application because we were using blockchain. So they're very familiar with what we do. I mean, we have a broker dealer license on the market side. So they know that we are as compliant as can be. At this point, because the headwinds are gone, it makes it a lot more freeing for us to take a little bit of risk on the boundaries. Like we usually are pretty much towing the line, but now we're like, let's have a little fun now. Right? Because it's an easier way to service our customers. Like we've always, if there was a grayer in the regulations, our decision was always for the benefit of our customer. Right? We never tried to take advantage of our customer. Like we want them to be happy because that's why we're here. We're not trying to commit fraud or screw the customer in any way. Like I know that some people might be unhappy with the experiences they have with us and we really try to fix it. And we try to make sure our operations team is very customer focused. So I think that the regulators have seen that and they, you know, they just call us and ask when they have questions. So we have a pretty good relationship. if having an in to David Sachs, the new crypto czar would be helpful, at least in clarifying some of the regulatory kind of gray areas that there are right now. And I know he's focused on making sure that guidance is clear and working with operators and entrepreneurs that are building in the space. And it might make sense to... you know, for him to approach you and say, Hey, June, help us out here. Well, we do have some calls set up with his team, so it is good. if I had an audience with him, I would say, look, there's regulators out there like MAS in Singapore and ADGM in Abu Dhabi who are actually incredibly curious about the industry and about how the industry thinks about certain things. And it's just a really nice conversation, right? So one of them said to me, because I explained our business, both figure markets and Provenance and figure lending. And what he told me was they hadn't, he hadn't thought through all of the lending aspects of the crypto side. And so he wanted to continue talking. I'm like, great, I would love to tell you how we think about it. And he was just open to it. And Singapore was as well. so I'm like, why can't the SEC be like that? Why can't, you know, the other state regulators be like that? And so, um, I so welcome a more open dialogue with them so that they understand what we're doing. Right. And I, and they should want that too. They shouldn't want this. Like, no, just whatever you ask, I'm just going to say no. Like it's just, it's ridiculous. Like, and, and if you do it, I'm just going to come, you know, bring my enforcement on you. So. There was one thing that they thought we were doing out of compliance, but they called our outside counsel and she said, no, no, no, no. They filed the right paperwork for that to be a compliant product and they backed out. So it's always good to be on the good side. It doesn't mean that you have to stifle your business for it, but I do welcome the open dialogue with the regulators. Yeah. And the best you can do is, know, with the little guidance we do have, know, do your best to follow, you know, whatever regulations there are. And then that open dialogue is key. And going forward, especially with the new regulatory stance, that's more friendly. I hope that opens up lots of opportunities and doors for Provenance blockchain. And thank you for taking the time to meet today. And kudos to you guys. You guys are are growing in a really, really large market and tough market also, working with both Web2 customers and also Web3. So thank you, June, for taking the time to meet. Thank you very much for inviting me.
