Winning acceptance for BSV in the financial world | Nathan Cropper | CG Conversations

Foreign hello my guest this week has worked for a big bank for eight years he’s worked for a Bitcoin mining company and he’s just started as head of Business Development in a Bitcoin SV Enterprise so to find out about all that I’d like to welcome the new head of Business

Development at the viennex corporation Nathan Cropper hi Nathan hi Charles thank you for doing this thank you for the invite it’s been it’s been a long time coming I’ve been watching your shows for a while and I’ve been excited for an opportunity to speak You’re listening to coin geek conversations with Charles Miller with your new job at vionex it’s called head of Business Development what does that mean you sort of actually roll up your sleeves and do on a Monday morning it’s it’s really trying to identify solutions for businesses uh bring back

These requirements back into the developers within vinex and actually targeting some development and actually providing some solutions and I gotta say firstly though I mean this is my fifth day inside vionics and it’s been an absolute world win so far um and to be honest the team have done absolutely fantastic without actually

Having any business development or sales inside the operations for so long I mean they’ve managed to complete over 40 Projects over the past 18 months um so it’s it’s I believe it would have been the right time around now for somebody like myself to have you know to

Get involved with bionics and really start to take it to the next level well before we actually Dive Into Your Role let’s just for people who are not really up to speed on vionex it sounds like a massive thing the vionics corporation and actually when you look

At the website there are all sorts of different products available releasia which is a wallet meta Shard which is kind of database and satolearn which is a tutorial business where you can learn and actually before we go any further let me just show off my Sato learn certificate

Completing the wallet Workshop which I must say was actually really good and um when I did it they didn’t have the certificates but I went back today and I found my certificate was still available so um I would encourage everybody to have a go at satolearn but perhaps give me if

You would your thumbnail sketch of what vinex Corporation is yeah I would describe vionics as a dynamic bsv blockchain infrastructure software developer as you described it with many of the different products which are available on the website from a wallet um and the data service which will be coming

Um I believe it’s going to be released during the uh the the next London blockchain conference I believe we’re gonna is that the Met is that metal shard metashard yeah so yeah we went through a phase I believe vinex went for a phase of trying to condense all the

Products into uh the Malaysia brand um but now after some time of refining exactly what real utility means where you’re looking to expand some of these individual products outside of that Malaysia uh brand itself um and of course Malaysia it’s a wallet you can integrate that into your

Application you could save it as like a competitor to other wallet providers or wallets in the ecosystem um and yeah of course satello learn which I think is actually a very powerful educational platform it’s not just static information you’ve seen it yourself you know I believe you enjoyed

The experience that you had uh I did it was it was it was slightly Beyond me in places because you actually get faced with you know lines of code and stuff which is not something I’m familiar with but I sort of managed to struggle through it and yeah I was rather proud

Of myself actually yeah and you’ve touched on something there which I think is also really important um you know even with some conversations that we’re having right now with um other learning providers uh where you know we’re looking at expanding let’s say some of our uh the courses we’ve set

To learn and trying to get them a little bit more mainstream it’s featuring lines of code right it’s focused towards developers we know that the decision makers and businesses are not going to be developers and programmers right they’re going to be the business heads so we want to be able

To transform this information and make it understandable and translatable for an audience which can understand the benefits as to why they want to have this infrastructure as part of their Tech stack right so this is something that we’ll be looking to explore um as time is going on and we’ve already

Identified some very interesting partners that we could potentially take this forward with as well well one question I suppose I have is I’m I mean I know that Robin Cosey is the founder of find X and there are these various products I I mean do they

Really relate to each other or are they just several brilliant things that Robin has thought of you’ll have to ask Robin no but I mean do you sleep with your sort of rationale for these different products being part of the same company or is that just sort of they just happen

To be here I I believe it’s a little bit of a bit of both and I think if we look at the way in which vineyx has grown it’s very much a you know it’s Persona is very much one of a BSB blockchain developer right so and we’re developing tools which

All have a recognizable um a recognizable Persona let’s say um which people have been the bsvp community will be able to understand oh there’s a the relational wallet I can do this I can integrate it like this into my application Etc oh settle and yes I’m going to learn about some Bitcoin Etc

Um and that’s good and that’s been very successful so far but what we’re finding is if we want to really actually break out into obtaining mainstream content contracts and actually take it a step further we have to really break out of um the ideas of bsv or Bitcoin as a

Subject and actually focus on the Business Solution which you know it just so happens that we’re using Bitcoin in the back end to provide you with this solution so in business development then can you give me an example of the kind of a business that you might want to

Interest in what fire next has to offer and what would your what would you be offering them rather than just saying there’s this great thing called bsv what what solution would you think would be a good one to offer we were just celebrating the launch of the tegment

Website which would enable you to Overlay Bitcoin into any AAA game so this could be a really great opportunity for game developers to add elements of let’s say Esports where you know users can actually earn money by taking part in games you know the statistics which really matter and being compensated for

Those things this could be an area where we can see a lot of growth already we’ve seen a lot of money being invested in a lot of Esports e-gaming companies um even metaverse e-gaming companies over the past 12 months even when there’s this downturn so I believe slowly more and more entities are

Starting to understand exactly where the value add is or how to integrate to actually provide a value to the end user you know it’s it’s questionable whether or not a wallet in its current expression is actually going to be usable in the world of financial transactions in the future

Um and if it’s not then what is the Persona that it must take on and how can we even transition the products that we have to fit a more Enterprise large-scale consumer Market um and to that point it’s being agile and being able to to adjust your products and your

Services to fit that market is where I believe that vinex we’re probably the most capable to do that let’s just go back to the you know the the team and the people you’re working with there are quite a number of developers um is it all remote and um you know who

Are these people and where are they and what are they doing do you have you discovered that yet I’m like I said I’m still pretty early in the company I know that the team is very uh distributed um I I’m not sure if the whole team is remote

Um I mean I physically met a number of people um right but it’s not remote if it’s not remote it’s based in Cambridge I think is that right yeah I think it’s a hybrid between the two right yeah um but you know this is I believe what

Gives us the opportunity to have the ability to work more intensely around the clock right so of course you have to make use of remote workers right you have to um let’s just step back a little bit because your career has actually already covered quite a lot of different areas I

Know that you trained in software uh development for gaming uh you’ve worked for Barclays Bank in the financial intelligence unit uh this is amongst many other things and then you’ve worked for tal which is the um the mining the bsv mining business I mean let’s just go back to to Barclays

Perhaps because that was presumably where you first came across Bitcoin was it yeah it was I was working at Barclays as an antimony laundering investigator um just submitting let’s say do basic investigations and submitting suspicious activity reports uh to the local authorities right and um

We all started you know myself in my my previous colleagues we all started seeing these transactions with all these weird numbers in the narrative and so on things that we hadn’t seen before and then obviously with some research we came to realize that this is Bitcoin right there’s people who are making all

These trades with these weird computer money um and so that’s where really a fascination of this industry really sparked with myself um I mean did did the people that you were investigating necessarily have anything to do with Barclays they weren’t people who held Barclays accounts or anything were they or were

They oh yes yeah people who had Barclays accounts well this is how we had to see the payments right um because we’re seeing transactions between Barclays customers and whatever of a bank both domestic and also International and then within the narratives of those payments we were seeing all of the references which would

Allude to the fact that these people were trading buying selling Bitcoin so you immediately had the idea that uh Dr Craig Wright is very hot on that that this was not some Anonymous system that you could just lose yourself in because as far as you were concerned here was a

Barclays customer and you could pretty much see how they were plugged into the Bitcoin uh system I suppose well I would say that you could see when they that they were doing something what did it represent you don’t know was it legal or not we weren’t able to make

A decision so an initial knee-jerk reaction wherever right or wrong was to submit all of those individuals as suspicious activity reports because we have no idea what it is we don’t know if it’s a million we don’t know if it’s relating to drug sales or child pornography or anything like that

Which it could have been um and then on top of that as well Barclays like many other Banks also took the position that at some point they decided to take the position that we’re just going to start you know we may want to exit the relationship if some people

Are doing something and maybe doing it at such a scale we don’t we call them people because some people from buying and selling but when it looks like you’re doing some kind of operation you know then you’re in research terms and service but when you say reporting to the local Authority

Who who would that be to then that would go to the National Crime agency so the National Crime agency are charged with receiving all of the suspicious activity reports which are submitted by financial institutions and then dependent on the location of the subject then that will be distributed back out

To a local Force who would then begin investigating did the Barclays customer who you were looking at um did you tell them that you were doing this or did they just get a ring on the doorbell by a policeman at some point oh man no nobody knows

Nobody knows that you’re going to be having a suspicious activity report submitted on you right I mean that would be a breach of the uh of the law and you know the analysts could potentially uh end up in prison if they were to let somebody know

Um so I can only assume that the police maybe made some inquiries where necessary um but unfortunately I do know that the police are overworked and I know that that reports are you know plentiful let’s say um so possibly well it sounds it sounds like a job that

Slightly lacks job satisfaction if you can never see what the end of the story is yeah well I mean when you’re working in a role like that your your role is to develop intelligence you’re you’re not a you’re not the judge or the Executioner well in some cases you could be the

Executioner because you have to close an account but it’s not your job to um be a judge you can only submit a report based on a suspicion that that you may have um but if we talk a little bit more about the activity of what I was uh what

I had come to to start to understand hmm I kind of took it one step further and as my role progressed in Barclays so did my interest in all of this crypto that was moving around and I decided you know with some help of some previous

Colleagues that we were going to map out all of the exposure that Barclays at the time had to everything crypto right and we were able to pull all this data there were a lot of payments many many more than anybody had ever imagined um but then out of that we were then

Able to help the bank to address the pockets of crypto activity that they had no idea about which were taking place in places which you know we’ve invested relationships and so on you know because at some point the banks are closing accounts and then this activity had to find a way to

Continue to exist and so they have accounts and relationships between nested relationships Etc um but it was at this point I was able to identify a particular user who was actually uh receiving money uh from the now closed down btce exchange uh which was shut down by the FBI he was receiving

The money into his account and he was buying a Ferrari and paying off all his debts and all that sort of stuff and on his profile he was a biochemist right so right exactly to what that was so am I right in thinking that your way of

Um making the sort of connection with this other world would be to see who was sending or receiving payments from crypto exchanges that’s right that’s what it kind of comes down to really yeah exactly and then you have to then work back on that and maybe look to see if there’s any

Suspicious activity involved in any of those transactions right and if Barclays decided from your information that somebody’s account needed closing down did they have to give a reason or did they just say well we’re closing your account down the the reason will always be from a breach of terms of service in

Terms and conditions you know every institution reserves the right to exit the relationship there’s no reason why they didn’t have to maintain the account so if the activity goes beyond uh the level of risk that the bank is willing to accept then they maintain that position to be able to close down an

Account right so they don’t have to exactly explain what they’re suspicious of no right yeah that’s interesting well okay let’s let’s leave that murky World behind us and um so how did how did your interest develop from there and how did you get from there into your role at tar

Yeah so this is also a little bit of an interesting story you know because that at a time when I was at Barclays I was known as a crypto expert right I’ll put some quotes there and um it was really at that point when I started to take a deeper dive looking

Even closer into this world of Bitcoin and so on you know asking questions about you know identity and the ownership of of your of your of your wallet Etc and then I came across a a short clip on YouTube of Craig talking about ownership right it was yeah of Craig Wright and

The the thing that he said in this two minute clip answered so many questions in my head um that I had previously and they weren’t being able they weren’t able to be answered by you know the rest of this community in the world of crypto I was

Like wow this guy just said something fundamental I’m going to actually spend a lot more time looking at what he’s talking about and also this thing that people are calling bsv and actually take a closer look in understanding about what it is um and from that position that’s where

Ivan ended up inside tall um the reason why I got into tall is because actually I had a very keen interest in business development when I was working at Barclays let’s say I agree what you said earlier you know it’s a very murky it’s not always that

You know uh the most exciting uh line of work let’s say if you’re always having to close out accounts or submit reports my interest kind of changed a little bit to how did these guys make money you know because you you come across many legitimate accounts as well as

Suspicious ones and when you come across these legitimate ones and you’re looking at the way that money moves I just became totally um like mesmerizer how businesses could scale and so when I then started to take a real understanding of Bitcoin and this kind of util this kind of utility that

It could bring it just let me down the path of well look I have got so many ideas about how we can integrate and how we can you know connect in with the banking system let’s say or how we can provide a solution into this part of the world and I really

Wanted to try and bring all that energy into Bitcoin because I knew that this is an opportunity but I wouldn’t you know I would hate to miss tall is really the sort of at the center of the the business because it’s in mining or it prefers to call it transaction

Processing I mean now you’re moving slightly out of the center of the circle in the sense that you are with vionex interacting as we as you said earlier with the end user what would be the sort of master plan I I think in the ecosystem the the players who have the ability to

Be significant I believe that we really need to still come together and think strategically about the things that are needed to actually get use on the network right and we need to really start to distill a lot of the concepts that we uh speak about as common knowledge within the ecosystem

And translate those into actual real world use cases real world application for example a key area of development that you know I’ve been speaking about you know internally and externally with other people is having Bitcoin be used as Financial Market infrastructure okay now Financial Market infrastructure is the classification that technology

Receives once it’s able to demonstrate that it can meet a number of principles and MasterCard have done it visa has done it the faster payment system have done it there’s a whole load of financial technology out there which have demonstrated that they can be considered Financial Market infrastructure because they’ve done the

Things that Regulators require exactly right and it’s it’s deeper than things such as kyc you must have anti-money laundering when we speak about infrastructure we’re talking about the principles right that they have and these things are more about mitigating risk on the network how can you ensure

That the network won’t fall down if you were to have a blockage let’s say right if there’s something wrong taking place on the Visa Network it would be absolutely terrible if everybody’s car stopped working that would be Dreadful they can’t allow that to happen so we

Need to be able to demonstrate that we are have the same level of controls in the bsv network so that we can actually encourage uh big players to want to onboard the network and have people transact on top of it so to my knowledge and this is where let’s say we can have

It’s interesting to see the developments in the whole world of blockchain I know that there’s sometimes a little division between the world of crypto and the world of Bitcoin but in reality we’re in the same boat because we’re all trying to demonstrate that we’re Innovative and we’re trying to do something

And it’s in this point here that one of our competitors let’s say a competitor network uh one of the companies that operates on top of them have actually been recognized by the treasury here in the UK that they have a systemically important payment system right because they’ve been able to

Demonstrate that their technology is capable of being a financial Market infrastructure now that they have are you able to say who that is yeah the company is called finality but it was towards the end of last year or around August last year they got the recognition from the treasury and so I I

Really want to see a change from the idea of you know we need to just do what The Regulators want you know it’s it’s not like people are against Bitcoin it’s that Bitcoin just needs to demonstrate that it’s capable of doing what they say but when you know the treasury or somebody some

Authority is looking at this question are they I mean when they’ve okayed this particular business does that mean they’ve given the stamp of approval to the Bitcoin Network or just this particular application on it because presumably they must have thought the network itself was robust enough if this

Application is considered okay exactly I think you’ve hit the nail Under head it’s a bit of both it’s number one the application or the service right and then the service has to demonstrate with the technology that it’s using is suitable so if they get the green light but this service is okay

Then the technology that they’re using is also suitable so in that sense if once somebody’s got the green light other people coming along will presumably have an easier job because they can cite this and say well we’re just using the same basic technology that these people you’ve already

Approved have got yeah I I think um there’s a lot of hard work in visvo right there’s a lot of hard work and it’s not simply going to just be an easy Road it’ll be a challenging one it’s one which I think uh collectively as an ecosystem would be extremely valuable

For us to do um I know that at Via next we definitely have an appetite to take on the most Innovative challenges uh you know and be able to demonstrate all of our skills and you know it’s it’s something which would at least demonstrate that the network is

Actually suitable so so will it be part of your job in in relation to Malaysia for instance to get those kind of approvals so that you can then go to customers and say you can use us because we’ve been validated um so this is where the role of Business

Development is a lot more dynamic um this is not necessarily A individual task of Malaysia um you know but we do work closely with the Bitcoin Association um they definitely have an interest in making sure that the network is used you know we definitely maintain really good relationships with all the parties

In the ecosystem and of course when there are ideas such as this one we like to uh we like to raise awareness about them you know I know that Brian Brian Doherty he is absolutely fantastic he’s on the road all the time and he’s speaking to very important people and

Really raising the awareness around around Bitcoin um and you know he also shares a sentiment that you know we need to move forward and actually do the things that are actually going to get the network recognized so people can actually use it so then we can actually have something

To actually take forward as a competing product um so we need more people like that really to be able to get together I mean this guy is he’s worked beyond belief you know we need at least four or five more Brian dokates to take on his workload

Um you know um but it would be great to have um you know the ability to really can bring this together to have some kind of vision about how we can move forward as a network because if we’re able to demonstrate something similar to a financial Market infrastructure or

Demonstrating that we can you know the network is capable of operating and doing these things then we can get all kinds of adoption it would be very very simple I mean I know that Brian um is working very hard as you say in relation to the American authorities

Um I suppose that one of the things is that we kind of need a Brian in every single jurisdiction don’t we because yeah you want to the whole point is that it’s it’s across borders and we need we don’t need these uh approvals uh separately for all all these different

Places I suppose but maybe you can be the Brian of the UK maybe and you know the beautiful thing about a financial Market infrastructure is that these principles are a minimum standard globally so once you have whatever recognition you can take this technology anywhere and everybody is able to legally connect

Legally right so again it’s a bit like you know once we’ve got one place signed up the second place will be that much easier in the third place easier again so maybe there will be a a sort of uh maybe it won’t be quite as hard as it

Seems at the moment when when the momentum gets going of course I mean I have to then put a uh you know put it put a little point there saying that you know at the end of the day I’m just like a business development person so I identify opportunities such

As this and we bring it back into the fold and say look can we do this can we move in this way you know it’s uh it’s extremely important to ensure that we’re listening to the clients and the clients are telling us all the answers that we

Need in a variety of ways whether it’s through the releasing of legislation which says to do this you must do these things and then we will give you the okay or to the client who says I’m having this trouble um you know securing my database because somebody kept on changing my time entry

And that’s how I got hacked and you know and this is where we really want to react to those responses and you know even to that point um there is a new product that we will be looking to release uh very soon which is looking to actually focus on that

Time stamping feature of the blockchain you know this it’s one little thing which seems to be this overlooked aspect to the blockchain but maybe actually be one of the most powerful Parts um you know the ability to let’s say synchronize that timestamp with the time entry in any database globally so just

Getting back to your new role are you do you have a sort of list of Target businesses that you’re going to be approaching or do you have a list of people who have got in touch who want to talk to you or how does it actually work

In a day-to-day way yeah the list is ever growing uh the connections are coming in uh fast and I really feel and you know it’s it’s interesting because you know I was watching your your session That You released earlier with with Kurt and you know he was right about many things and it’s

It’s it’s it seems as if the bear Market is good because it’s actually squeezing out you know we need to have real value right so we’re actually now targeting the development to actually meet the requirements of a business and I think this is actually going to be

The change and it’s it’s like it’s so obvious we should have been doing this from ages ago right and uh but I believe this change is actually coming uh businesses still need a little bit of help in understanding the value add of blockchain uh but that’s down to us to

Really translate that but the requirements are coming and yeah we will definitely be reacting to those brilliant well I wish you every luck in your new role Nathan and I hope we can talk maybe in a little while and you can tell me all about all the brilliant

Things that you’ve managed to make happen but for the moment thank you very much indeed for talking to me today thank you very much for the opportunity Charles I appreciate it foreign thanks very much to Nathan Cropper next week in a special edition of the show from the Philippines my colleague Claire

Celdren will be talking to the chair of the board of enchane Stefan Matthews so please join them for that and until then thanks very much for listening and from me Charles Miller goodbye Hello We’re creating something epic that brings a new light to the world the London blockchain conference draws everything in renowned experts investors Regulators Global media developers entrepreneurs thought leaders coming together to network share ideas and make a difference delve into the most engaging discussions about blockchain utility explore this

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On this week’s #CGConversations, Nathan Cropper talks about the intellectual and career path that has taken him from Barclays to his new position as Head of Business Development at the Vaionex Corporation, and how his education in the murky side of crypto opened his eyes to its potential for legitimate business.

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