In an exclusive interview with cryptonews.com, Matt McGuire, CTO of Caduceus, talks about the future of metaverse development, the current crypto landscape, and the importance of being RVM compatible.
About Matt McGuire
Matt McGuire is the Chief Technology Officer of Caduceus and brings 18+ years of leadership, strategic business growth, and development experience. Building on his strong development background Matt overlays a passion for code and inventive solutions. Board and investor-level pitch specialist with a background as a digital innovator and emerging technology thought leader. Matt has a hands-on proactive and integrated planning approach to his leadership. He is a team builder and technical mentor with an impressive portfolio of award-winning work.
Matt McGuire gave a wide-ranging exclusive interview which you can see below, and we are happy for you to use it for publication provided there is a credit to www.cryptonews.com.
Highlights Of The Interview
Building pitch decks – keep it short and punchy, under 12 slides, show a good story.Cloud edge rendering – running decentralized GPU nodes and provide graphic streaming service.Fully EVM compatible – the importance of a multi-chain approach.Crypto liquidity pools have becoming so prominent – BTC and ETH won’t disappear.Current economic landscape – much worse than 2008.
Full Transcript Of The Interview
Matt Zahab Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Cryptonews Podcast. We’re buzzin as always, and today, today, today we have Matt McGuire on the show, always loving someone named Matt comes on the show. Matty is the Chief Technology Officer of Caduceus and brings 18 plus years of leadership, strategic business growth, and development experience. Building on his strong development background map overlays a passion for code and inventive solutions. He is a board and investor level pitch specialist. The background is a digital innovator and emerging technology thought leader, Matt has a hands on proactive and integrated planning approach to his leadership. He’s a team builder, and a technical mentor with an impressive portfolio of award winning work. Without further ado I’m very pleased to welcome Matt McGuire to the Cryptonews Podcast. Matt, welcome to the show, my friend.
Matt McGuire Thanks, Matt. I think I’m going to take that intro and borrow it. Use it myself. So thank you. Thanks for those nice words.
Matt Zahab I love it. We’re buzzing right now. Love to see it. You’re in London right now.
Matt McGuire Um, did? Yes.
Matt Zahab Is London back? Does London have its energy again.
Matt McGuire London London does it’s all I mean, London ng never really went away. I mean, COVID was super strange. For everyone and everywhere, I think but ya know, London. London’s definitely got the bus back. It’s very busy everywhere. Now.
Matt Zahab What happened with the sort of Prime Minister fiasco? That was a very quick and my apologies. I forget the lady and I forget the new man who is now in but what happened there was it was not pretty quick.
Matt McGuire Yeah. I mean, it feels like we’re getting a new prime minister every month at the moment. But let’s so yeah, Liz truss was she was only in 44 days. And now we have Rishi Sunak. Who’s our. So he’s the third Prime Minister we’ve had in I’m trying to think of this party. And I wanted people for Prime Ministers from the Conservative Party in the last two and a half years. So a little bit wild and wacky. Yeah. But seems to have settled down. Now. I think the markets have stabilized, which is a good thing, because there was a level of panic before. So financial markets, stabilizing is always a good thing keeps people a little bit calm. So Right. Yeah, back on back on track, hopefully now.
Matt Zahab Was that part of the reason why Liz quit, because she sort of jumped into Parliament and realize the type of economic shitshow she inherited?
Matt McGuire I mean, I think that I mean, this shit show, is there to stay now, right? I mean, when you look at the economic situation we’re in now, is this all post COVID. Right. This is a knock on effect of printing money borrowing money, sorry, what they call quantitive. Easing is the rational word, but printing and borrowing money and then ultimately handing it out to people that aren’t in work, which is the furlough scheme, right? And obviously, at some point, I’m trying to think of who the ally of Dr. Strangers and Dr. Strange movies isn’t, is it more modern, more do? He always says the debt comes due and like the debt the debts can do now, right. And it doesn’t really matter who the Prime Minister is, the debt the debts do, right? So we’re seeing wacky inflation, which the government loves, because that actually reduces the debt. But at the same time, they can’t let it run away with itself. So we’re seeing interest rates going up. So I know the Fed put up interest rates yesterday in America, or it was a Tuesday. And today, Thursday, the third of November, the interest rates went up by naught point seven, five here in the UK, too. So you know, these things are positive signs to the market, they help things stabilize, but it’s just a knock on effect of dealing with the pandemic and the financial situation we had there. So hopefully, hopefully, things will stabilize. But I still, the general feeling is it’s going to be a bit of a wacky ride for 18 months or so.
Matt Zahab Can you pretty bananas. Yeah, you and I are in the same yard. I think we’re looking at realistically, early 2024, or end of next year before things start to get better. And that’s probably the best case scenario, which is never a good thing to see. During your intro, one thing that really caught my eye is your level of expertise regarding pitching and pitch decks. And this is something that as someone who wants to dabble in VC as I get older, and just in more, you know, angel investing, but whatever the term you want to throw out there, I always love seeing a good deck come across my email. Do you have any tidbits of advice? Or do you remember looking at any text mean like holy shit, this is bananas this company is going to be some specialists their secret sauce for building a really good pitch deck, besides the obvious tell a good story.
Matt McGuire It’s good question. I mean, obviously now, I think I hate myself a little bit more from moving away from technology and into slide where, which is kind of kind of sad that I move away from code over the years of my career. You end up making decks and slides but um, no, I think I think Here’s just keep it succinct. Keep it short, keep it punchy. Like, anything that’s long and long winded people just glaze over and no one wants to go through that stuff, right? Keep it short and punchy. If you can get it under 12 slides, that’s where you want to get it. Like everyone knows what you’re going for you. If you’re pitching to a VC, you’re trying to get cash. To show them a good story. Keep it short and punchy, given the facts, be honest. And give them a good vision. And hopefully get them seeing your dreamscape of where things are going to go.
Matt Zahab Do you ever remember? Did you ever have any crazy ones that came across your desk that you’ll never forget? You’ve probably seen 1000s of them. So a.
Matt McGuire Bit of a lot of pitch decks I’m trying to think of some of the really good ones. Nothing that’s really stood out and you’ve gone oh my god, this is the next, you know, the next Amazon or the next Tesla or something. But no, you see, you see a fair few. The best ones are always the short punchy ones, the ones that are designed well, the ones that are really succinct and have the information just super easy to understand. Because ultimately you take that deck that comes in even on that pitch, and then you send it off to people for review. Right. So it’s got to be simple, straightforward. Have all the information in there that you need. Yep.
Matt Zahab love it. Let’s jump into your bread and butter. Right now you’re CTO at Caduceus. And you guys do a couple of things better than most. One of them is Metaverse development and sort of giving the user and builder a wide array of tools required to build in the metaverse. Can you give me the elevator pitch on what exactly you guys do? Because when I look into it their show so much how do you sort of distill that into one sort of what we talked about with the pitch decks? How do you distill that into a you know one or two line pitch?
Matt McGuireCaduceus is the metaverse blockchain positioned for Metaverse development, essentially in Metaverse growth. And that’s everything around GameFi. And I think the real the unique parts of Canisius and the real offering is that it’s super high transactional volume at very low cost. And the advantages, we’re also bringing decentralized cloud edge rendering to brands and projects and users that they can leverage and accelerate their projects into the metaverse while still enjoying and getting involved with the tokenomics of the Canisius blockchain.
Matt Zahab Okay, one that was very well said to show many angles want to take this three? Let’s start with the, what do you refer to as the cloud edge?
Matt McGuire Cloud edge rendering.
Matt Zahab Cloud edge rendering? I see this all over Twitter, I see this everywhere. Again, this is one of your guys bread and butter subsets. What the heck is that? What exactly does it do?
Matt McGuire Essentially, it allows you to do difficult graphical computational stuff that you couldn’t normally do on, you know, a local device. And instead of instead of providing a real time games engine to somebody, what you’re doing is you’re providing that as a video stream. So super similar to where Google position Google stadia, obviously, no, we now know that’s getting pulled out of market because their business model is slightly different that they’re trying to tackle the X boxes in the Playstations of the world. But where we see it as a value proposition is people can run decentralized edge rendering GPU notes, on the hardware, they may have lying around after you know big a big blockchain merge that just happened. And if they do, then they can run it on those nodes and provide that as a graphical graphics, video streaming service to the user that wants to have something on their thin client or their phone or, or, or low spec device, essentially. And then there’s a whole tokenomics model that benefits, the video creation, streaming and the video consumption side of things around that.
Matt Zahab Okay, so just to make sure we’re on the same page here, and in the same yacht, the cloud edge rendering, if I am on my current, you know, MacBook here at home, I could run a decentralized GPU node, and provide a graphic streaming service to someone else acting as a node similar to almost any other blockchain, you know, using my energy to better the whole of the blockchain and to help others. And this graphic streaming service is the equivalent to some crazy, I don’t know, game that you and I would play or whatever, that takes a lot of bandwidth. And so I’m giving up my bandwidth to someone else. And in return, I get incentivized in the native token.
Matt McGuire 100% that so yeah, exactly. Provide your GPU resources individually or as a cluster, to provide video streaming to a user or many people that want to have those high quality graphics renderings, but without having to have the hardware themselves. So you could stream something quite ridiculous to a mobile phone for example.
Matt Zahab And life just doesn’t make a whole lot of sense because this is something that not a lot of people have and without good WiFi, like even just with that one barrier to entry right there without good WiFi your you know, your hope. Like exactly do this.
Matt McGuire It’s the barrier to entry to buy, you know, a high end gaming machine or maybe the barrier to entry to get into whatever the metaverse is what however, whatever it turns into, it will have, maybe we’ll have some form of 3D space. And that 3D space, as we know, when you play, any kind of computer game gets pretty hungry. And if you don’t have it’s a barrier to entry is not just getting into the metal first, but also buying hardware to join that. That becomes a pretty big barrier to entry, especially for large parts of the world.
Matt Zahab How does this business model conceived? Like, when you’re one of the co founders, one of the C suite members, perhaps was someone just like this is? Again, this is a problem that so many people have many people, I’d say there’s more people that cannot versus can stream very high level graphics. It just seems like such a no brainer. Why isn’t anyone done this yet? Who could conceive this walk me through sort of the founding story?
Matt McGuire I mean, it’s not new, right? So obviously, Google’s been down this path with Google stadia. Obviously, their business, their business model is very different. So they’re, they’re targeting and challenging the console providers, like like Xbox and PlayStation, I think, you know, it’s not necessarily new. But I think now the time is, right. So I think we’ve just been very lucky with the timing and getting it ready for this time. Which means if you look at what’s happened with Ethereum and The Merge, just you’ve suddenly see a massive power saving, you know, they say they’re now using naught point naught 1%, of the power that was being used for mining, but they are using now, which is huge. And because of that there’s a surplus amount of GPU resources available globally, that we’re doing mining for Ethereum. And I think it’s the ability now at this Crux point to be able to tap into those power users or those farms that are doing those things and say, Hey, you don’t just have to mine a coin to generate revenue, right, which becomes progressively harder and harder to generate that income. But you can now provide those resources that you have, and generate a token for providing services. So it just changes the model slightly. But I think, you know, it’s serendipitous synchronisation of, time and ideas, right.
Matt Zahab And the tokenomics model, you brought this up a couple different times, can you walk me through it, and then the gritty aspect, that is one thing that our listeners do, absolutely loved, they love. And again, this is not financial advice, but they love knowing about tokens and how to potentially make money and profit and understanding the tokenomics, which that token is always a great way to at least have a little bit more data to make, you know, a data driven and smarter investment, that decision. So I’d love you could tell me a little bit about the tokenomics of Caduceus.
Matt McGuire Okay, so CMP is the native token for Caduceus, which stands for Caduceus Metaverse Protocol. We launched it about three months ago now. And it’s listed on a number of exchanges with more coming every week or so at the moment, which is pretty good. But it’s on ByBit, BitGet, MEXC. And there’s some other big ones coming soon in the very near future. Essentially, CMP is a token that you can mine and stake which is coming Q4 2022. And with that, there’s also ways to leverage and use CMP token and one of the things that we’re talking about earlier was cloud edge rendering, and how that ties in with that. So you’ll be able to generate tokens for providing cloud edge rendering services. So that will be the time and power and bandwidth that you use for providing your graphics capability. And projects and users that want to benefit from that cloud edge rendering will pay with the same tokenomics. So they’re able to collect those cloud based rendering whether it’s a scientific research project that needs difficult cloud edge rendering, or a Metaverse game, or something else that we can’t imagine yet that may that will lead those resources. Essentially, there’s this harmony between tokenomics that are needed to purchase those resources and being able to provide tokenomics to those users providing those resources.
Matt Zahab Interesting. And there’s a billion in supply. I’m looking at the breakdown in front of me on the website. Was there a reason why, you know, 15% went to investors nine went to core contributors. One of the things that I found very interesting was the mining supply 50% fit. That’s pretty high. Was there a specific reason? I guess is that because the bread and butter of the product is the graphic streaming service. So you really need to, you know, incentivize those people.
Matt McGuire I’ll do my best. Yeah, I’m definitely not part of the tokenomics team. But I think you know, it was there was a big desire to attract miners and hardware developers and just general software developers to the business and to the project. And I think incentivize people if there’s a large pool that can be tapped into,
Matt Zahab For sure. Totally makes sense. Totally makes sense. Now, let’s go back to the metaverse development as a whole here. What other tools do we need, obviously A Caduceus is a great start, but sort of on the tech stack things your CTO, you’re a tech guy. What other tools does let’s maybe focus we’ll start with the enterprise, and then maybe go to the end user, right? We’re both people. Both users, both subsets can contribute to the metaverse as a whole. But stemming from the sort of enterprise B2B side of things. What does that tech stack look like? If you’re trying to build a Metaverse or just want to participate? What sort of piece of software would you recommend for perhaps a fortune 500 company coming into the space and wanting to participate?
Matt McGuire That’s super tricky. I think because no one we haven’t yet quite defined what Metaverse is, right? Everyone’s got a different vision from it from you know, Facebook now Meta through to other companies, May for some people, it may exist as a 3d interactive space, like yoga labs and what they’re heading towards. For other people. It might be, you know, just a way of managing data and empowering users to own and manage their data within the blockchain. So it really depends on the angle that the business is coming in at. But I think the tools, the tools that we have from an enterprise perspective is so Caduceus is fully EVM compatible. So whatever has been created for an Ethereum-based chain, or contracts that have been written in solidity or whatever has been done, there, they’re fully portable and will work straight out of the box right on Caduceus, and we felt that that multi train approach was very important. And we believe that is one part of the future of the blockchain space, but the web three space and the metaverse space is definitely to be multi chain, right? Not everything is going to be on one chain just as web software that you use Now not everything is inside one particular website that you use, you know, people don’t just use one social network, people don’t just use one online bank. And I think the ability to be multi chain and have a business able to integrate and connect with your, with your products is a really important thing. So that’s something the team has been pushing for a long time, which is the multi chain approach. And obviously being EVM compatible, we have everything there that needs to be done already, you can just use the existing tools out there on the internet at the moment. Some of the wider things we have we have an incubator inside Caduceus as well which works directly with businesses or projects that may not have the technical skills, business skills or even the financial means to bring their project to life. The incubators function is to empower and accelerate those projects forward. So that’s something people can approach Caduceus about as well.
Matt Zahab So that’s almost like, you know, you come in and you and the team would literally just give the tools resources, expertise, whatever’s needed to build applications on Caduceus.
Matt McGuire Yeah, all subsets of any one of those Yeah, can be money or skills, and, or even business direction, or connections or strategic vision. So yeah, we will work with teams and projects and companies to help them and that can be traditional web2 all the way through to, you know, crazy web3 projects. Yeah.
Matt Zahab But if these come maybe folks, we’re gonna take a quick break and give a massive shout-out to response to show that is PrimeXBT. And when we get back, Matt is going to discuss the current landscape of the crypto space and how bananaland it currently is. Huge shout out to PrimeXBT, our sponsors of this show. I’ve been using them for a hot minute. I absolutely love them as they offer a robust trading system for both beginners and professional traders. It doesn’t matter if you’re a rookie or a vet. You can easily design and customize your layouts and widgets to best fit your trading style. PrimeXBT also running exclusive promotion for listeners of the Cryptonews podcast. Use the promo code CRYPTONEWS50. That is CRYPTONEWS50 all one word to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account again and that’s CRYPTONEWS50 to receive 50% of your deposit credited to your trading account. Now back to the show with Matt. Current crypto landscape absolute shit show we’re recording early November this episode is drop in early November in a couple of days. What do we have to look forward to what is going on right now? Is the current crypto market really just a reflection of the overall sort of macro? You know, TradFi market what’s going on? You have expertise in this you have history in this. You’ve gotten your reps and you have boots on the ground 18 years experience in the space. Tell us what’s going on here.
Matt McGuire It’s good question. Where are we? Where are we heading? So you know, the way I explained this to anybody really is that crypto is the kind of the more wild ride at the end of the chain, you know, when you like flick a rope in the air and you get like a nice kind of like standing wave like it Crypto just like at the end of that chain. So you might do a little flick with your wrist. So imagine like traditional banking as like the beginning of that rope and you give it a little flick and you’ll get volatility, and then you’ll add stuff All the way down that that rope, right and, you know, right at the end is like NFT. Just before that is probably like crypto. And then you work all your way back through like while their assets until you get like super safe. But it’s so whatever happens in, in the wider economic market, whether it’s you know, high inflation, high interest rates, volatility stocks and stuff going up and down, look at tech stocks right now I put that kind of like halfway down the rope, you know, you’ve seen, you know, Amazon’s taking a beating, Facebook’s taking a beating Tesla’s down about it, about about 20% 30%. But it’s, it’s, I think, if you look at it like that, and then you look at crypto and you know, NFT projects go beyond that. They’re just further down like that rope. So when the rope is flicking, and it’s going really well, and it’s an upward trend. It’s like insane, no one’s seen anything like it. But then when you’re in, you know where we are now, crypto winter, or whatever we want to call it. It’s that volatility goes both ways. So it goes up and down. So where are we I think, you know, we’re in a very strange time economically, globally, I’ve never seen anything like this. In my adult lifetime. You know, I do remember a bit of a financial impact in 1990 1991. And it was when I was a lot younger, but it was, you know, a difficult time for the, for the world, right? Interest rates going up people losing houses and those kinds of scary things.
Matt Zahab So you, sorry to jump in on you here, you wouldn’t relate this to 2008 at all, you think this is much worse?
Matt McGuire Yeah, worse.
Matt ZahabWhy?
Matt McGuireYeah. 2008 was just around housing. So it was about bad debt wrapped up into housing market stuff, right. So it wasn’t a wider economic challenge. We didn’t see crazy inflation. You know, we’re double digits inflation. On a good day. You know, it’s no double digits. But in reality, what we have in the UK is something called the Consumer Price Index, which tracks standard staple products and tracks that price, right. But it doesn’t track the wider volatility of more enriched goods. So it’s more expensive products, for example. So I think, no, this is definitely 2008 was there. And it was a challenge. But it really only affected one sector, which is like the banking sector. And that was caused by the housing market. Where we are now today, you know, we’ve got the knock on effect of quantitative easing, so borrowing, printing money and giving it out for free for two years. And that has to be paid back. Right. So it’s gonna be a challenging time, economically, generally, until we come out of it, just like you said, I think, early 24 Sometime around then. So how does that have a knock on effect into the crypto space, it just means that the everyone’s a little bit more timid about investing, about taking a chance about growth because no one knows what the safe bet economic situation is. So everyone’s a little more conservative, you’ve seen that people pulling back, which is fine, because consolidation isn’t a bad thing. For companies like Caduceus or other crypto companies out there or other projects, it’s just about consolidation and surviving, surviving what’s coming out. And during that phase of consolidation, it’s about building, listening, adapting, pivoting your business model, and just trying to come out of it when it is strong again, and that ended up rope flips back up, it’s about being ready and being poised at the starting blocks ready to just smashed out the park.
Matt Zahab Well said yeah, you know, keep pedaling, and have that capital on the sidelines ready to be deployed when? What’s the Warren Buffett saying when there’s blood in the water? Or when there’s die? I don’t know, something in the streets, whatever. He’s a.
Matt McGuire The only Buffett phrase I know, is what he said. He said, he said the stock market, it’s just a game of patience. It’s just and it’s the same with crypto, right? I mean, everyone said crypto was over in 2017, you sort of crashed and, you know, you saw Bitcoin and Ethereum go down everyone’s eyes over never gonna happen. And, you know, then you see, you know, end of 1920 come around, and it’s just the road going back up again at the end. So, yeah, we’re on a bit of we’re in a bit of a global economic challenging time, but I don’t think it’s driven from crypto. This is driven from traditional finance, traditional money lending that was broke, that’s kind of broken the economy at the moment and making it a hard time. But it’s not driven by crypto this time, and I which is really good and really interesting, because it just shows that crypto is tethered to regular economics, which isn’t a bad thing. The more that they’re tethered, and the tighter integration we have between crypto finances and traditional finances, it’s just going to create more longevity and more connection projects. Right? Huge. More fusion 100%.
Matt Zahab Yeah, the hope that the cohesion aspect is absolutely massive before we not before because we already doing this but before we talk more about the current crypto landscape, I just want to keep pausing on sort of the TradFi you know, economic landscape, which asset class, do you think it’s gonna fall first? Do you think there will be a domino? I know we were pretty close with the whole. The Swiss. Oh, wow. forgetting the name here.
Matt McGuire Credit Suisse?
Matt Zahab Credit Suisse. Thank you. Credit Suisse, you know, it was one of the first ones to absolutely get hammered. And they’re in bailout city right now, what Domino is gonna be the first of all.
Matt McGuire I mean, governments won’t let traditional finance fail, right, especially the big ones. They may let some of the smaller outlying banks disappeared, like we saw in 2008. With, you know, the one the ones in North America, governments won’t let big, big institutions fail, because they are an incumbent, they are institutions. So the government’s will ensure that they’re stable. And we’ve already seen that from 2008. So there’s a proven model, the government won’t bet those institutions fail. Smaller outliers may fall down, but I don’t think we’re gonna see, when I hope we don’t have like large institutions fail. I mean, that would be horrifically bad. I don’t think governments will let that happen. I think there’s enough. I think, I think with what we’ve seen during the pandemic is governments printing and borrowing money and I think, if needs be, they’ll spell spar more money.
Matt Zahab 100%. Yeah, that’s, that’s my not worry, per se, but like most of my, you know, gunpowder is on the sidelines right now. And I just, I would have to be so disappointed. And again, you know, tomato tomahto, it is what it is, but I’d be so disappointed if the Fed comes out with a crazy high interest rate higher than the next expected zero point 75 bips and perhaps a point and a half or full point, which literally tanks everything. And then when they do.
Matt McGuire It’s too damn bad. So so high interest rates by the Fed also mean that everybody wants to invest in the dollar. So all the other global currencies dropped down. We’ve seen that over the last two months with GBP. And US dollar, like GBP went down to 1.03 to the dollar, which was for British people is shocking, right? Yeah, we’re almost parity with the dollar. And, you know, if we spin back to the 1940s, we were for dollars to the pound, right? And that only really changed in the 80s, where it became like $2 to the pound. And the fact that we’re almost parity is like what’s going on? Yeah, so I don’t, you know, I think I think high interest rates aren’t necessarily a bad thing. It’s just they need to be controlled. So people who are borrowing, don’t get going, don’t get, like absolutely ruined in a three month or three month time window, right? Or was that challenging for mortgages and stuff? So, yeah.
Matt Zahab But that and that was gonna lead me to my next question for you, Matty, what’s, what’s the deal with the whole housing market, because like, I have friends who bought homes over the last two years, you know, I’m 27 years old and turning 28 in January, and a lot of my friends capital went into this, this is, you know, this is the time in our lives where this is when you get into the property market. And a lot of them did not go fixed and variable, interest rate. And they started and they’re paying, you know, two and a half points every two, whatever, two weeks, a month. Now, they’re paying three, three and a half for four and a half. What happens if it goes to Seven? Eight? Like, they’re gonna have their own time? But the trickle effect and then you don’t have someone like Canada, a country like Canada, who has, I believe, the highest household debt to GDP ratio in the world, because half of our economy is based on its home prices. It’s like what happens and I know I know Britain’s pretty bad as well. I know Australia is terrible. What happens when that when, when the shitshow domino starts to fall over?
Matt McGuire You got to go native got to go live in the wild. Gotta get gotta, gotta, gotta hunt, get some face paint on. Just get out there. No joking aside, honestly, I don’t, I don’t know. It’s scary. You know, I look back at my life, I’m a little bit different position from where you are. Now, I’m 42. You know, I went through that phase around your age now where you buy your first place. And, you know, you chuck all your money into your pocket equity into, you know, how to have a smaller mortgage as possible, but it’s still more monstrous. And then and then you pay it off. And if and if interest rates went up, I mean, it would have been really painful. For me as a look, looking back at my younger self. I think that in a way, though, we’ve lived in a golden period. And I think we’ve been very lucky in that golden period. So if you if I look back at my parents, and you know, the late 80s, early 90s, interest rates in the UK on mortgages hit 15%. Right. So which is absolutely savage. Right? It was devastating. People lost their homes and lots of bad stuff happened. But you know, it’s, we’ve lived in this golden window where interest rates have been below 5% for a very long time. And
Matt Zahab I don’t even know what that looks like. I don’t think I’ve lived long enough to know what that looks like.
Matt McGuire And the thing is nobody’s actually lived like that because beforehand, you could only borrow three times your salary, roughly three, three and a half times your salary against a higher interest rate. which was you know, was accepted because you borrowed less and the interest rate was higher, your repayments were still kind of okay and manageable. But no one’s lived through this. We’ve lived through a period of 15 years, maybe a little bit less, maybe like 13 years of like, less than 1% interest rates half a percent. Look at Japan and the euro, or the European Central Bank’s tracking rate, they were both negative, they would have negative interest rates from the central banks, which is blows my mind that someone’s paying you to borrow money on money. Yeah, exactly. Borrow money will pay you. I love that amazing. So obviously, we’ve lived through this strange time and where they then let people borrow four times five times five and a half times your income. So now when interest rates are creeping back up, and you know, you’ve got the Bank of England and the Fed saying they’re probably going to peak like five and a half, six, I hope that’s, that’s as far as they’ll, they’ll go. What’s the impact of that? It just means less surplus money in the economy, right? Because everyone, so some people are going to lose houses, unfortunately. And that’s going to be really sad. But for the majority, the vast majority, it will mean less liquidity in the market, so less people buying stuff. And obviously we live, you know, we live in capitalist Western economies where trickle down economics exists. So there’s more money at the top of the funnel at the hopper, and it just filters down through, right. So that requires spending and surplus liquidity. If that surplus liquidity isn’t there, everything kind of starts to like seize up a little bit, your engine starts to run out of oil, right, and everything starts to grind a bit harder. And therefore the companies will have a knock on impact where they put up the price of their goods because they need to cover their costs. And that has a double impact, though. You know, it’s like a bad Van Damme movie, but I don’t know if everyone loves double impact everybody. So it’s, it’s a wild time that I don’t think anybody’s seen for 40 years or so. So it wasn’t 2008? Absolutely. Can we ride it out? Yes, I just think it’s going to be kind of a steady bit down and a steady up. There’s no like epic crash, we’re not going to fall off the cliff or anything. But we’re not going to have a rocket launch recovery there, it’s going to be kind of steady down for a while, but steady up. But hopefully the banks can sort this stuff out, we just need. Unfortunately, we need high inflation, which is going to be painful for everybody. But we need it because it pays off national debt. And paying off national debt means we can then lower everything else and then calm it all down later. So we’re in a couple of years of stickiness. And hopefully it will come out as you’re saying 24 Fingers crossed.
Matt Zahab Another crazy thing about inflation is prices never do go back to their regular scheduled programming, you know, like, and a lot of people. I don’t want to sound rude here, but perhaps the less informed and less educated again, you and I are in finance, we’re getting reps in every single day, we both probably spend way too much time on Twitter, you know what I’m talking about. But those who don’t fully understand inflation, it’s not like the prices are gonna go back to January of 2020. Like what you see in the freezer grocery store aisle is what you are going to see best case scenario, it’s still gonna get worse, it’s still gonna get more expensive. And I feel like a lot of people don’t understand how much like how exponential, the everyday Joe and Josephine item has become. And that’s something that again, all you can do is work harder, make more money, you know, and sell goods and services that have similar price. Like it’s shitty, but it’s just it’s the way she goes.
Matt McGuire It’s just the way it is. I mean, those prices are never going to come down. That’s just not the way it works. And we can see that with the fuel the rising cost of fuel right once they go up because of a production issue or a government issue, yeah.
Matt Zahab Market manipulation issue.
Matt McGuire Yeah. Then you can see I mean, I don’t know about the states, but, or Canada, but in the UK, like our energy companies have just published record profits, like record, like absolutely smashed it out. It was it’s like raining dividends. They love it. So you know, I think I think we’re, we’re here it goes after that. Everyone’s like, it’s like, it’s like Scrooge McDuck of dividends. It’s brilliant. So they’re all diving through their money. But it’s so yeah, I mean, what’s the knock on effect is that there’s obviously a delayed response of salaries that catch up with those rising costs of inflation is they usually staggered by about 18 months or two years behind. So what does it mean? It means it means ultimately, a lot of people start looking for other jobs, they start trying to change their jobs. Because you can you can get an instant pay raise if you change jobs, right? At all, unfortunately, people start looking for second jobs, right. And that’s and that and that. That’s the harsh reality of things when it gets tough and tight like this. It’s, you know, you do whatever you can to make ends meet.
Matt Zahab Yeah, do what you gotta do. And let’s not be let’s tie all this over to crypto. Again, way harder. The things that you just said, I agree with every single thing, the sort of predictions and hypotheses that you have. Again, you and I are in the same yacht. And I feel like a lot of this is because there’s more data we have more or kicks out the can you know, society as a whole has been through recessions? No one really knows what’s going to go, what’s going to happen and what’s going on in the crypto space. We talked about sort of the, you know, TradFi and general, macro econ, what’s going to happen over the next couple of years, what do you think is going to happen? For crypto over the next couple years?
Matt McGuire I think we’re gonna see, I think we’re going to see crypto kind of like ebbing and flowing along, it’s not going to be too crazy. I don’t think we’re going to see any epic crashes, people are moving money into safe areas. But then again, I’ve kind of got a bit of a gut feeling that some of the larger kind of liquidity pools within the crypto space, some of them are quite safe, right? Yes, there’s volatility in them. But it doesn’t mean they’re not going to disappear. But we’re not going to see Bitcoin and Ethereum disappear, it’s not going to happen, right? So that’s, so in a way it becomes safe, volatile, but safe, right? Whereas if you put your money in a small outline bank, or some stocks and shares, you might see companies disappear. Right. But I think I think that crypto is now so distributed. And don’t forget, we’re still only at like 1% global penetration of people that are in crypto. So as that increases the market potential growth for crypto is massive, is fundamentally huge. So if you tie massive potential market growth, with high volatility, to be fair, it’s still a safe bet. Whereas I think if you put your stuff in traditional stocks and shares in a company that might you know what I mean, look at Facebook, you would have said that meta Facebook, three weeks ago was sort of stable. Yeah, it was a shoo in, right? And then they just tanked 25%. And you’re like, Whoa, what the hell’s happened there, you know, Amazon, saying that they’re not gonna have great, great winter sales. But, again, maybe that’s a knock on effect of the liquidity pool and the trickle down economics. But I think that, you know, I think crypto isn’t a bad bet. At the moment, I think, yes, it’s volatile, but I don’t think it’s going anywhere. We’ve seen, we’ve seen the World Economic Forum, and some world leaders who were associated with the WDS, start talking about cbdc. So if they’re, if we’re talking about imagine a Federal Reserve, central digital currency, and the Bank of England, and so on and so forth, it will start to be very interesting. And that would only bolster where crypto is, you know, we’re starting to see that. No, crypto is being standardized and adopted inside Hong Kong, you just have to be licensed to operate and trade there. But these things are really interesting. These things are good. These things are showing that the marketplace has now been accepted offer got rejected for so long. It’s now being embraced. And we’re finding ways that crypto can grow. And as I said, only 1%, give, give or take a bit is actually holding or owning crypto in the world. So I think the crypto space has massive growth, massive growth ahead of it. I think you I think if we weren’t in times of economic uncertainty, we’d be seeing growth on the cards.
Matt Zahab Yeah, it’s, I agree with most of that my one, not issue with the one thing that that does. And again, I was someone who used to be fully pot committed to this narrative. I was also a fan of the Bitcoin as a hedge for inflation. And that’s one thing that like, if that narrative would have, and again, what it could have should if it would have stayed true to its core ethos. This, I don’t think there’s a more powerful narrative for crypto as a whole, you know, because when Bitcoin rips, everything else rips. It’s great for the crypto economy and script for the ecosystem landscape. It’s proven that it is not a hedge against inflation one bit, and maybe it is it’s just we don’t know yet. But like, as of right now, it’s sure as hell isn’t because inflation is going rampant. And Bitcoin has had, you know, have more than that last 66% of its value from the peak. So and again, I know it’s not because of inflation, it’s because of just like you and I talked about, money is not, you know, there’s not a plethora of it anymore. It’s not just flowing around. We’re not just turning money printers on and we’re these trickle effects are hurting us, they’re affecting us. But that is one massive, massive narrative, Matt, that I wish stay true to its course.
Matt McGuire Yeah, I think I mean, it depends on the timescale you’re looking at, like these, these, you know, talking about the very famous anthropologist Simon Sinek. Right. And when he talks about the infinite game, it’s what timeframe are we measuring that in? Right? So if you measure that in, we’re measuring that let’s say now and a two year timespan will be like, Oh, my God, bitcoins the worst. Right? But if you measure that in a 10 year timeframe, yeah. Like, yeah, exactly. It’s like, it’s like, whoa, should have bought more of that.
Matt Zahab But that has nothing to do with inflation. You know what I mean? It’s just when people talk about crypto who don’t know a whole lot about it, what’s one of the first narratives that always hear, Oh, man, is Bitcoin a hedge for inflation or a hedge against inflation, blah, blah, blah, and back in the day, I would have always said yes, yes, yes. Now, I don’t know. Right. I can’t.
Matt McGuire I agree with you. I don’t think there’s enough data to make a we haven’t lived crypto hasn’t lived through enough on Economic Times of volatility. So crypto didn’t really live through 2008. Right 2007 There was a little twist in 2017, there was a kind of a little one. And now’s the first time. This is the first kind of economic turmoil that crypto had to go through. And we need at least two or three of these over the next 20 years, 30 years, right? They usually come every you know, seven or eight years, we see some kind of economic need more data, we need more data long term to look at it and say How does crypto survive economic challenges? What happens in a downturn what happens in an upturn? I just don’t think we have enough data and we’re looking at it at a very thin slice and I think what we need is a wider macro data view.
Matt Zahab Matt has been absolute treatment really appreciate you coming on and we’re getting tight for time couple more questions and then we will wrap up let’s jump in the hot take factory let’s put our shit kicking boots on give me a couple of hot takes the only Matt believes in that no one else doesn’t have to be crypto or econ or finance related can be sports, politics, food, geography, space, you name it. Couple hot takes our listeners absolutely love them. And the other man on the other end of the mic loves that as well.
Matt McGuire I love them, too. You might give me some back off after the call. What do I think? I mean, I read about the SpaceX IPO that might be coming up in 2023. I mean, this is exciting. I mean, I would say that’s something I’ve been keeping an eye on since they sued the government and won and then started to get lots of contracts. I mean, they launched cheaper than anybody else. They send humans into space, the only other people that can do that the Russian Soyuz rockets. It’s kind of a no brainer. I’m just waiting for sorry, I don’t think so. I don’t think SpaceX might not float till a few years later. Sorry, I was thinking about the wrong one. Starlink might be 2023, which is an interesting business. I think. I think that’s an interesting business case of where it sits. I think Starlink has a unique offering, no one can compete, because they can’t get satellites up there that cheaply. If, if anything happens to globe, the global fiber network, you know, we’ve seen some issues going on with some pipelines recently, between Russia and EU oil pipelines. And we’ve seen some other things going on. I mean, nothing’s gonna happen too crazy with the global fiber network. But I think for if you live outside of cities, or you want to travel and have decent internet, like Starlink is the only company that can give that to you. There are obviously traditional cell satellite networks like iridium and some of the others, but I think I think if Starlink IPOs next year, I’m going to be personally looking and seeing what’s going on and following it very, very closely. SpaceX, I mean, I think there was talk of it IPO and but I think that’s probably a little bit further away. From I think some other interesting stuff.
Matt ZahabBoth those shares are the private shares, obviously, they’re not public yet are trading at not multiples, but probably pretty high premiums on the market. And you got to know someone who knows someone kind of thing because no one wants to sell. So.
Matt McGuire Ya know, my I’m my, my wife’s cousin’s brother works for SpaceX. My wife’s cousin’s husband works for SpaceX. So he has a very cool job. And he’s ex Air Force Base force. And he’s a really cool guy. He’s helped me he’s just he just exudes color as he walks about. Free, nice. But no, he, I think, yeah, obviously, all the employees get private shares there and they’re trading super high. So it’s, it’s they’re both really interesting companies. And obviously, being a technologist, I find it a lot easier to follow tech stocks and tech companies. Amazon is not going anywhere, right? Like, I don’t know what people say, I don’t know. I personally don’t know why it’s gone down. If you look at the growth of prime subscriptions, for the last five years, Amazon’s not going anywhere. Like everybody ordered stuff on Amazon, no one can be bothered, because ultimately, humans are lazy, right? And we just want to get shipped tomorrow. So I’ll do it through an app where I don’t have to think I don’t have to walk anywhere.
Matt Zahab It’s also, I look at Amazon the same way look at Apple. It’s one of those businesses where a lot of people genuinely couldn’t live without the product and speak so highly of it. Like I pardon my French I fucking I fucking love Amazon, you know, nice days. I’m on the it’s one you know, 1:30pm for me right now. I could have a package at my doorstep by now by the crack of dawn tomorrow morning.
Matt McGuire I love it. I love it. I mean, obviously, you know there’s ethical things around it like carbon footprints, all that stuff, but you don’t give a shit about that at 130 by 8am, like I need. I need some pop tarts by 8am Come on. Right. And then they’re there. Right. So Amazon, Amazon just plays into human nature, which is convenient. So I think that’s a long term. That’s a long term winner, right? I don’t think it’s going to be drastically rapid and like flying up and giving you massive returns in months but super, super interesting. Facebook. Facebook meta, I don’t know about this one. I sit on two sides of the campaign. Yes, they generate revenue through advertising, which is super cool. And that’s their business model. But I don’t I’ve got three kids right there that you know my job. My first one’s about to be a teenager and my other two are a little bit younger, but I don’t Know anyone under the age team that uses Facebook?
Matt ZahabYour kids are on what TikTok and Insta.
Matt McGuire Just other stuff. Exactly. They’ll just be on other social networks. But I speak to like some teenagers that are friends with my kids that are slightly older. And I’m like, do you guys use Facebook? And they’re like, scoff at me? No, no, not using that as for old people? I think I think I’ve still got a Facebook account shit. So no, they don’t use that stuff. Obviously Instagram super popular, which isn’t it, which is a revenue stream for meta and WhatsApp is super popular as well. But anyone of a certain age group and below don’t use those services. So I wonder about their long term stock value, and how it will convert and how it will look like in 10 years or so. I don’t know what’s gonna happen between now and 10 years. But if you just look at human trends, like generally, what gets adopted in the technology sphere is what’s used by the younger generations.
Matt Zahab Yeah, they started the parades. My I have a thesis about Facebook, where it’s like if they charged two bucks a year for WhatsApp. I think WhatsApp has like 1.8 billion users, like you just added for built here, whatever 3.6 or 3.6 billion, your balance sheet just on one thing and that costs. Like think about the thing about the ROI on that and the margin. That’s again, 99.99999% margin. So easy. Who wouldn’t do that?
Matt McGuire I mean, then you’re just following what Elon is doing with Twitter at the moment? Exactly right. If you want to blue tick, if you want to look like a big daddy, and you want to have your comics go to the top and you want like an OG gangster right, then you pay $1 a month, but I think you know, messaging services have other value. I mean, I don’t want to go down a conspiracy spiral. But you know, obviously WhatsApp allowed to function in countries because they give decryption keys to governments, right, just as BlackBerry was forced to with BlackBerry Messenger service to WhatsApp WhatsApp is allowed to function as long as government has a backdoor into all their messaging services. You know, governments like that stuff. So I’m sure governments will make sure that WhatsApp doesn’t go anywhere. And if someone needs money, I’m sure that all the governments of the world will unite and go you know, it’s like a boat. You need some cash you but short will sort you out. Don’t worry.
Matt Zahab Yeah, crazy. Man, what a three man really appreciate you coming on. One thing that I always ask. And I know it’s so cliche, but I’ve gotten more into football over the years I always asked my British guess what team they support. Who do you love? What do you sport?
Matt McGuire Not not not a football fan, I’m afraid, which is probably unusual for British guests. But I’ve been pseudo-adopted by my brother-in-law who is a big Arsenal fan. So he gunners he now lives stateside, but still has season tickets that he won’t let go off because he absolutely loves them as a club. So every now and then when he flies back, we do go to an arsenal game together. So it’s good, fun, lovely. Take the kids and stuff. That’s cool.
Matt Zahab It’s a question I always ask just because again, I’ve been to games in Europe and that’s something that like, there’s nothing close in this in North America. That replicates European football it is on a whole nother level when I you know and my friends asked me Oh Matt, how are the games and I say you can’t even drink inside the stadium like to like white because you know here you can they literally will pretty much give you an IV of pints right you can just load them up all day and get absolutely destroyed. no one bats an eye and then again,
Matt McGuire You can I mean yeah, you lose that at the cricket. Yeah, they’ll just give you pints
Matt ZahabReally. Yeah, well I guess if it’s like 24 hours long they have to but yeah, I’ll never forget
Matt McGuire days some some of the years or five days.
Matt Zahab It’s crazy. Anyways man I really appreciate it man before you leave, please let us know where our listeners can find you and Caduceus online and on socials.
Matt McGuireCan do indeed. So if you head to Caduceus.foundation that’s kind of the core website and then just search up the Caduceus on Twitter all our main information is there and you can find everything you need to this press release is going out almost every day of new content and new items and some of the new partnerships that are coming through but yeah, just find us on our website dig up the socials from there and then you know engage and interact with what’s going to be community on Discord you can come and join that as well.
Matt ZahabMatt, thanks, man. Really appreciate it and can’t wait to have you on for around two.
Matt McGuireCheers, Matt. Thanks very much.
Matt ZahabFolks. What a great episode with Matt McGuire from Caduceus dropping knowledge bombs left right and center we absolutely love to see it do go check them out. As always I will include everything in the show notes. I really hope you guys love this one. If you did, please do subscribe. It would mean the world to my team and speaking of the team, love you guys and to the listeners. You are the GOAT loving more than you know keep on growing those bags and keep on staying healthy, wealthy and happy bye for now and we’ll talk soon.
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