SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
816: Crypto: With $1b+ Cap, DASH Wants to be a Better Venmo
18 Oct 2017
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
creators of Dash, left a cushy job at a hedge fund, getting into this world because he believes in it.
Chapter 2: What improvements does Dash offer over Bitcoin?
Dash is doing really, really well, over a billion dollars in market value, 4,500 plus masternodes participating in the network, very democratic, totally unbiased, everything tied back to the success of the overall platform. He really wants to be, especially coming up next year with the release of the next product, the Venmo for payments in the decentralized community.
This is The Top, where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of revenue or customer base. You'll learn how much revenue they're making, what their marketing funnel looks like, and how many customers they have. I'm now at $20,000 per talk. Five and six million. He is hell-bent on global domination. We just broke our 100,000-unit soul mark.
And I'm your host, Nathan Latka.
Chapter 3: How does Dash's governance system work?
many of you listening right now don't have time to listen to every b2b sas ceo that i've interviewed if you want to get access to the database i've created with year-over-year growth rates customer accounts margins and many many other data metrics and data points you can go to getlatka.com here's the thing though this that database I keep it to myself. It's so freaking valuable.
And to preserve the quality of the data and make sure that the people that have access to it have a true advantage, I'm only letting 10 companies on each month. So we're full this month, but you can go to getlatka.com to get on the waiting list for next month. And look, there's big people on the waiting list. I mean, the biggest VCs you've ever heard of. You've probably heard of them.
They're big, private equity, billions and billions under management. So it's an impressive waiting list.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of masternodes in Dash?
Go get on now at getlatka.com. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Ryan Taylor. He's currently the CEO of the Dash Core team. Dash is an innovative digital currency that offers a number of improvements over Bitcoin, which we'll talk about, obviously, today. Ryan's an expert in the payments industry with over 15 years of experience in financial services and technology.
Ryan, are you ready to take us to the top? Thank you for having me on. You bet. So Dash is one of really the only survivors of kind of the early, how do we say, the early heydays of kind of crypto where there was all these kind of altcoins out there and such.
Chapter 5: How does Dash ensure its sustainability and funding?
So describe to us today, what does Dash do and how are you different than Bitcoin? So we are based on the Bitcoin code base. So it operates with the same level of security that users are accustomed to there. The three areas that we mainly improve on, number one is on governance.
We have an explicit governance system that allows the network to actually vote on changes as opposed to kind of having Reddit debates. about what should happen next that can rage on for quite some time with other cryptocurrencies. The second major area is we're self-funded.
Most other cryptocurrencies and certainly all the first-generation ones all rely on donations of developers' time, donations of server infrastructure in order to run the network and so on. And the only thing that's compensated is the mining activity.
Chapter 6: What are Dash's plans for the future with the Evolution product?
And we recognize that there's more than one need on a network. So we have incentives for the infrastructure and incentives for people to contribute to the network. The Dash Core team receives its funding from the network itself in order to operate. And the third major- How does that happen though, Ryan, real quick?
For people that aren't familiar with crypto, I hate to be so blunt, but how do you pay yourself a salary? So the way that it works in Dash is that we essentially have what is the equivalent of shareholders in the form of master node owners. Master nodes are special nodes on our network. In order to operate one, and anyone can, the only prerequisite being proving ownership over a thousand Dash.
Once you're able to do that... That's to prevent cyber attacks, correct? It makes it so that no one person can control a wide swath of the network, and it makes it very secure.
Chapter 7: How does Dash facilitate instant transactions?
And in so doing, we give those individuals the ability to vote. And then anyone, including the core team, yourself, literally anyone on the planet, can put a proposal up to the network requesting funding. Those proposals are voted upon and the highest ranking proposals pay out in a budget. on a monthly cycle.
And so every month, the core team has to go to the network and request continued support for the projects that we're working on, for our salaries, etc. And so we're very accountable back to the network. I mean, there's a screenshot on your website. I don't know if it's, I want to ask you if it's real or not. It says salary for Dash core team, yes or no. It's on a kind of a notebook piece of paper.
Chapter 8: What is the role of the treasury in Dash's ecosystem?
It says 11, 176 Dash per month for 90 months. which comes out to about $8,140 per month. And people vote yes or no on that. Is that accurate? Are those the actual numbers? Was that the actual vote? Well, the specific proposal that you're referring to is expired on the network at this time. Okay. Every month we put up a new proposal requesting the specific amount that we need to offer. Okay.
Yeah, so the specific proposal that you're referring to is actually expired on the network. At this time, we put up a new proposal every single month requesting the funding that we need to operate. We don't operate at a profit. We simply request the funds that we need to serve the network. So how many of you are there? How many are on the team that are getting a salary?
There's roughly 50 people on the team right now that are on some type of salary, either part-time or full-time. We have about another 15 positions that are open, and we're actively filling. So we're growing quite rapidly. Yeah. I mean, look, according to—I've got my research team's right here. So according to CoinDash, you guys have a market cap of about $1.4 billion. I believe that's dollars.
That comes out to about $437,000 Bitcoin, correct? Correct. Yeah, somewhere around there. And the volume is pretty healthy at around 33,000 or sorry, 33 million, which comes out to about 9900 kind of Bitcoin. So one of the things that I struggled in preparing for this, I mean, should we think about Dash as analogous to Litecoin and an Ether token and a Bitcoin?
And this is kind of a Dash is different because it's built on top of Bitcoin and you don't just have miners, but you have miners and also node masters. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's a much more sophisticated economic system than these first generation coins. And we continue to build on that by providing the correct incentives for people to act in the best interest of the network.
You know, when you're relying on donations of companies to fill developer roles, those donations come with expectations. Who's doing that right now? Like, is that a shot at Bitcoin or who's doing that? I think that primarily this is happening within the Bitcoin world in which the majority of the developers are funded by entities with interest in the outcome. There's bias. Exactly.
And so we want to create a system where those biases are removed and we truly serve the network itself. And we think that the system that we put in place is a very sophisticated one that meets those goals. The other thing is a lot of these are ICOs, but no one's answered the question, what happens when that ICO money runs out?
There's no ongoing source of revenue for these projects to sustain themselves for the long term. Do you like what Civic did with selling basically 33% and reserving another 33% for essentially rewards and incentives and another 33% for future raises where they maybe have to sell way less than what they sold initially because their valuation hopefully has grown?
I think that the issue with setting specific amounts aside is that don't require approval from the network necessarily is that you still have a group of people making those decisions. And the accountability is still lacking in such a model. And so in order to ensure that there's accountability, you need to be able to continue to do a good job before those funds are released.
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