Mike Townsend: Today's conversationis with Tom Tirman. The CEO of PARSIQ. PARSIQ has raised over 3 million. Wetalked about their fundraising strategy. Tom is based in Estonia, and we talkedabout the Estonia's policy on E residency attracting a ton of crypto and remoteprojects into Estonia. And what is making Estonia a standout smashing successfor web three companies.

Mike Townsend: Both incorporating andthen people actually moving to Estonia. we talked about, of course PARSIQ whatthey're doing and connecting the layer one, the data from the layer, oneprotocol, smart chain, smart contracts and chains to the front end interfaces forweb three developers. We talked about why this a big deal and what he sees isexciting.

Mike Townsend: Other uses for tokens,both specifically for pars. But also tokens more generally, which is kind ofshocking hearing his perspective on it. You know, 97% of all tokens out thereeffectively don't have any practical use, they're just correlated to theproject. And so it's all speculation, which is interesting to hear.

Mike Townsend: Hope you enjoy thisconversation. Here is Tom Tirman.

Mike Townsend: All right, Tom.excited to be chatting with you. I love what you're working on. I love whereyou are. why don't we start there just out of my own curiosity, you're based inEstonia, born and raised, as you mentioned a few minutes ago. what do mostpeople not appreciate about Estonia? Certainly Estonia is a small country.

Mike Townsend: One point somethingmillion people it's been on the map recently for its adoption of, cryptofriendly policies. How do you describe both living there and then the generalattitude of the people there, the culture what's your take  

Tom Tirman: Estonia is, is a smallcountry. we're just like, 1.2, 1.3 million people .It's, we're somewherebetween the Scandinavian countries and, and the rest of Europe. So. it's an,it's an interesting, country to live in because we were under the Soviet unionfor, for, for a long while. And only 93. We had like capitalism and freemarkets, come in. but, due to the small population, we've been able to be veryorganized and that's why the digital advancements there are like, they are, Ithink we have one of the. Biggest numbers of unicorns per capita in, in, in theworld.  

Mike Townsend: Hmm. Per I like thatper capita. interesting. And then is this, re is it, have you noticed since youhave been living there or even maybe a generation before you a massive changein the day to day living through the, either recent changes in policy orcontinued integration of capitalism after the 90.

Tom Tirman: Yeah, nineties. We'rea really, interesting time. I remember when the first McDonald's was opened inthe nineties and, and, and so on and so forth. But, again, due to the smallsize, it was very easy to, integrate with the rest of the world. and, You couldsay that, the government and the people they're very nimble, because it's just,it's just simpler to, integrate such changes, test them out and, and make themsuccessful in a, in a smaller country.

Mike Townsend: Yeah, interesting.And, and tell me a little bit about your background. So you're now runningPARSIQ what was the early days of the conception of the project?  

Tom Tirman: Well, I, I come from,traditional finance and FinTech background. and in 2017, I, I discoveredcrypto, never, never bought any, but, I saw the hype from, the sidelines and Iwas thinking there has to be something behind it.

Tom Tirman: Right. So I startedresearching the underlying technology and, for me, this is what I thought. Thismight be my opportunity, cuz I was too young during the collapse as a Sovietunion when there were opportunities in Estonia, new types of businesses, youknow, new, new types of markets. Some then I was too young during the internetrevolution.

Tom Tirman: So I missed that boatand I thought this is. , this is my shot. And, as the more I research, the moreI believe that this really has, has the potential to disrupt so many, so manyindustries. globally. And, of course I knew I could be wrong. So it was apretty high conviction bet, but, I decided to go for it.

Tom Tirman: And in 2018 I met myco-founders and we, we wanted to get into the space, start our own, companystartup. And we decided that the blockchain data. Niche is, is untapped becauseif, if really a lot of, you know, financial assets, will be tokenized financialsystems, financial rails, not just financial, but you think social gaming,supply chains, and all that data will be on chain.

Tom Tirman: That data could beworth a lot and everyone will need easy, efficient access. To that data withoutany kind of friction or complexity. And we thought we'll go that road and, and,see if we can solve these pain points for future builders in web pre that's,how Parsi came about. And, and  

Mike Townsend: What specifically, howdo you articulate exactly what PARSIQ is doing and what are the like, paint methe business model a little bit, how much you guys have raised what the revenueis, how it sort of works?

Tom Tirman: Well, it's, it'spretty much a B to B soft. Company. And, we provide data infrastructure for anyprojects, any companies, building in web free or integrating with web free.And, the main idea is that any kind of data you need from the blockchain.History of transactions, what smart contracts are doing, calculating, thingslike total value lock wise, ROIs and, and so on and so forth.

Tom Tirman: you should be able toget all of that. Doesn't matter if it's real time data. If it's historical datahappened years ago and. Without, all the hassle of, of actually, you know,going through it manually without having to, you know, host your own blockchainnotes to get access to that data without having to develop complex, solutionsin house, spend developer resource, time, money, you just come, you click, youwrite a line of code and you get everything you need instantly.

Tom Tirman: And, and, and why,because. . If you imagine a web free product, a web free application, you havethe blockchain layer, which are the smart contract, the blockchaintransactions. And then you have the front end that the users see and everythingbetween that is the back end. Somehow the data from the blockchain has to reachthe backend and the front end for the user to see what they're doing, theirdeposit.

Tom Tirman: Came in, they, made aswap, they took a loan, anything. And, and, and, and it's actually a pretty bigpain point for developers, to get proper data. From a solution that is scalableand, doesn't require extensive, extensive in-house development. And this is,pretty much what we went for. So you, you have your smart contract, your blockchainaddresses, you have your front end, everything else you can easily build onpar.

Mike Townsend: Got it. So the smart,you have the smart contracts in the back end and the front end, and you are thepipeline between those two. So you're connecting both to the front end. Thiswould be like, would this be like a JavaScript API in the front end that thenconnects to PARSIQ that pulls in the data and then you're pulling it from thissmart contract.

Mike Townsend: So do you view themajority of the technical load that PARSIQ is built as the integrations withthe smart contract?  

Tom Tirman: So, yeah, we have arestful API that, you can take an AP API key and get any data you need and evenintegrated into your application with a line of code. the, what, what we havedone is we, we run full notes.

Tom Tirman: Of all the chains wesupport and we have, plugins our own software embedded into the nodes. So wesee every small, fine grain event that is happening there. We are indexing allof them all the way back to the Geneses block, to the very launch of the chain.And we have all the transfers, calls, logs, everything that's ever happened onthe blockchain indexed in a database.

Tom Tirman: So you can. in, inmilliseconds, get data from the last 1 million blocks, 2 million blocks. And ifyou're not interested in historical data, you can, set up, what we calltriggers, which is you put in your conditions. What exactly you're interestedin monitoring of on any asset and any address on any smart contract.

Tom Tirman: And if that happens, ,we push the data to you. So you don't have to ask query the APIs all the time.We just push it by, web hooks to your site. So pretty much we take care of allthe data site. You don't have to, think about it. And  

Mike Townsend: Where are you? So yourun full nodes. does that, is that the single source of data that you'repulling from?

Tom Tirman: Yes. Yes. The notes,the blockchain notes are, are the source of data. We have a distributed pool ofnotes, so we don't run a single note of each chain. There are many, to maintaindata integrity, and to make sure that if, if a node has some problems withsyncing new blocks, if a node crashes anything, then, all our clients and userswill still get, relevant.

Mike Townsend: And this be, was thisan evolved concept or this was the idea that you initially had upfront when youstarted the project?  

Tom Tirman: It's evolved a bit. Westarted with, like real time monitoring. So you could put any address, anysmart contract under monitoring. You can monitor millions of addresses or justa single one.

Tom Tirman: And, you put infilters and conditions. What exactly you're interested. Like, incomingtransfers, outgoing transfers, smart, smart contract calls, amounts, above acertain threshold below a certain threshold specific asset sets. And you canmonitor and get that data to, any, we, we had direct integrations with thingslike, Google spreadsheets, telegram discord.

Tom Tirman: So in real time youwould be, you would know of certain events and you can feed them into anybusiness tools like, accounting software. I know QuickBooks mm-hmm , zero CRMs,anything. And it was kind of like Zier for a blockchain. If this than that, ifsomething happens on the blockchain, then do. So bridging like these two, twosides, the web fee side and, and the legacy centralized systems.

Tom Tirman: And, we managed to getquite a lot of traction, but it wasn't enough to solve some of the use casesthat, a lot of like enterprise great clients wanted. And that's why we, did thedeveloper API. We indexed, chain. So we, couldn't not only provide. realtimedata, but also historically you can go back in time and collect any data youwant, and we even provide storage a storage layer.

Tom Tirman: So you can store thatdata on our side to maintain state and run calculations. So pretty much a fullbackend for your web fee app.  

Mike Townsend: Interesting. And so doyou still consider it a pseudo, like Zappier web three type experience?  

Tom Tirman: Yeah, we, we stillhave that product and it has a front end, not only for developers, but like awizards and templates, this whi wig, non code solution, but, developer teamswant more robust things.

Tom Tirman: That's why they prefercoding. And for them, we have the API and SDK and the individual traders, usethe, the front end, the Z API solution. To be able to arbitrage get theearliest possible. Even at the me level, notifications about some kind of whaletransfers, large deposits to exchanges, anything that, would give them an edge.

Mike Townsend: Gotcha and who's usingpars now? Like what, what type of companies, or what projects in particular?

Tom Tirman: Mainly all are, themajority are crypto native. So we are talking about web fee applications. Thisis DeFi protocols. the, anything from, from decentralized exchanges, lendingservices, decentralized investment services, NFT marketplaces, the list islong, and, and of course, some centralized services like, wallet providers,even hardware, wallets, exchanges, custodians, peer-to-peer marketplace.

Mike Townsend: Interesting.Interesting. And, and how's the project going? I know you guys have raised somemoney. What's the revenue like and how do you guys specifically price theproduct?

Tom Tirman: So with the, when westarted in 2018, we bootstrapped the company was self-funded by us, thefounders, and, in, in a. in 2019, the money started running out. So, we thoughtnow it's time to fundraise. And, we went to, we went to some traditional webtwo equity VCs just to get some feedback, but it was 19 the depths of the bearmarket.

Tom Tirman: And whenever theyheard the word blockchain crypto, they say. It's, it's not for us. some saidit's an it's crypto is a scam and so on and so forth. So we modeled, we found agroup of private, investors and angels who, were willing to invest. it wasaround 1.5 million. And, for this, we, we made a token and, we created a tokenfor, for par.

Tom Tirman: And we fundraisedusing the token, which is a utility token of the platform. And, a year later in2020, when, when, everything picked up, we had users coming in. We had clientscoming in, we have over 200, corporate clients right now and almost 60,000registered users on the platform. And, we did another fundraising round, whichwas backed by, Binance some the salon foundation.

Tom Tirman: MindWorks VC. And EvanChang, who was, the head of engineering of Facebook and, and the head ofresearch at no V DM Libra at, at that time. and, yeah, the, with the pricingmodel is a pretty much a free medium subscription model. So you have a freetier free plan and you have the paid plans up to the enterprise level, andthere is also a role for the token.

Tom Tirman: So the token is anaccess token. So if you hold Baric tokens, you can use, a certain amount of APIcalls, requests for free. And the more you hold, the more you can use.  

Mike Townsend: Interesting. and what,so total, how much did you guys raise?  

Tom Tirman: The total was 4.5million.  

Mike Townsend: And so second roundfirst round was like, Hey, we're run down cash second round. It was, you wantedto raise money to grow, you know, spend money in marketing, hire moredevelopers, that sort of thing.  

Tom Tirman: Yeah. It was time toscale. And also since, at, in the first round, we really, I mean, these wereall private individuals, mostly not even from the industry are not closely,related to the industry.

Tom Tirman: So we thought we needto get some strategic backers who could help us in other ways than moneybecause, our runway was good actually. and, we didn't necessarily need thesecond round, but, we. Symbolic 3 million around just to get these, strategicbackers who could help us open some doors and, and get us into biggerecosystems.

Mike Townsend: To what degree hasthat played out? Have they been exceptionally useful? moderately, somewhat, notvery much.  

Tom Tirman: Well, as always withthe investors it's, it's hit and miss. But, but for, but, I, I can't complain,because, a number of them really have been helpful in different ways. Mm-hmm,each in their old ways. So, so they, we are still in close contact and, I I'm,I'm pretty happy with, with our cap table. Yeah.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. Interesting.Well, thanks for sharing. How do you feel just generally about the space now?So you guys are in, in a very specific application layer, you know, connectingthe back end smart contracts or the front end web three developers and like aB2B space. Do you more broad, do you pay attention to the market? actively? Howdo you sort of. narrate your thoughts and maybe anything contrarian on where weare today. Given that August 18th, market's been down for what? A few months atthis point. it's the major hacks are not that far in the rear view, mirror orcollapses with Celsius and Luna.

Mike Townsend: Do you have a generalgestalt or view of, of the landscape today?

Tom Tirman: Well, we. we've beenthrough now. It's now the second bear market for us. So we built for 18, 19,and, as hard and bleak as that was, I, I feel like now the whole industry is ina much better position back then. There was, there was no, guarantee that theindustry will and survived.

Tom Tirman: If crypto livingsurvived winter right now, no one is questioning. No one is questioning that,everyone left during the last, market downturn in 18 and 19, most, developers,builders, founder, they just left web free and they did, something else. Andthere were really no applications built at that time.

Tom Tirman: Most were speculative,bets and, and layer one blockchain platforms. Now we have. Actually some degreeof adoption and seems the rest of the world took notice. And I see a lot of,despite the market conditions, I see a lot of capital and flow and inflow oftalent into the industry even now, from the traditional tech world.

Tom Tirman: And I think this willcontinue and accelerate in, in the long term. So I think, everyone is in amuch, much better.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. Yeah. I heard anumber recently that was about 6,000 people total working in crypto, which wasstrikingly small. If you consider like a, like a midsize, mid to large sizecompany, like Google might be what, 30,000 people, you know, there's, there's ahun, there's a lot of companies that are well above 6,000.

Mike Townsend: And I think of thenoise that crypto makes across the world is certainly much larger than 6,000.So the number of. Participating talking tweeting, blogging about. Is is ordersof magnitude higher than the people actually contributing building things on aday to day? I, I would imagine that that's the key number to grow.

Mike Townsend: You know, if you, ifyou don't have people actively building, then we're not actively, we're notactually doing anything. how have you seen other projects or, or you guys thinkabout scaling? Are you remote first, all day? And that's what everybody'sdoing. Are you guys trying to be local to some.

Tom Tirman: Well, lo luckily thisindustry, really promotes this remote, distributed, team mm-hmm building.

Tom Tirman: This is why we'requite comfortable. It's it's really pretty much impossible for a growingcompany in web free. To source older talent, you know, somewhere locally. So weare heavily distributed. We have, over 40 people in our team across precontinents, Canada, UK, us, Singapore, ston, Lavia, Denmark, Russia, and so onand so forth.

Tom Tirman: And, I, I think mostweb pre projects are the. and, I actually think this is the future, you know,especially in, in it in tech and in web free. you cannot source the rightpeople, locally. It's, it's, it's impossible if you want to grow.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. I agreed. Whathave been some of the challenges through it through growing remotely?

Mike Townsend: I mean, we take it forgranted at web three. Everybody's doing it, but it is. Still, especially ifyou're talking about remote outside of your country, outside of your time zoneor your continent, and, and also having it be like, you know, five differentcontinents, multiple dozens of different countries, it's much different than atraditional company, which would have a home base in a, in a city.

Mike Townsend: And then they mightopen up a remote office or the people in the city are working remote, but youknow, there's a. Cultural language, geographic time zone, proximity that theyall share. Are there regulatory payment, logistical, cultural, technical, likewhat stands out to you is like, what are the biggest headaches, in building orMo team?

Tom Tirman: Well, obviously timezones are an issue. Yeah. because we have to time everything. yeah. When, whenEurope is ending, the working day and north America is, is waking up. So that'slike, maybe a free hour, range where everyone can meet and, and discuss things.So, yeah, this is not, not, not easy, but, we manage, we manage everyone is,motivated.

Tom Tirman: Everyone is focused.Everyone tries to be as flexible as they can. Because working in a startup isnever nine to five. you, yeah, you have to make, you have to be, flexible. And,obviously there are cultural differences, no cultural problems, but thecultural differences, if you compare like, we have, team members from, fromAsia, from north America and from Europe.

Tom Tirman: And, there are, thereare certain differences, but it's never really. A blocker. Mm-hmm reallybecause everyone gets along, it just takes a little while to get used, to, tothese cultural, differences.  

Mike Townsend: And do you guys paypeople in the token or do you pay 'em everyone's different and it just like a,like, how do you, how do you guys structure that?  

Tom Tirman: No, the salary isusually, paid in wire transfer or stable coin. And, and then some long termemployees, who are key to, to the success of PARSIQ have, token allocations aswell.  

Mike Townsend: I'm curious about thistoken. I would imagine you would agree that it's possible to build PARSIQwithout the token.

Mike Townsend: And I would imagineyou started there, what was the conversation like on debating building thistoken versus not building it? How did you sort of think through thatconversation?  

Tom Tirman: Well, obviously,tokens have, I mean, it's an nascent industry and they're not everyone whoissues a token. Issues a successful token, right?

Tom Tirman: there is the majorityare actually fail and gain. No, no, no community, no volume, no traction and,and so on. But, tokens actually let you fundraise on a global level. Much moreeasily. And, and some investors even prefer tokens to equity because, liquidityand, and the upside potential since we are in a very, very early industry.

Tom Tirman: So I think, I thinkthat, issuing the token as a means to just fundraise is not enough becausetoken needs to have some utility. Now, does it. Does the project necessarilyneed to have a token? No, but you can say the same for over 90% of, of theproject in this space. The majority, the vast majority could have been builtwithout a token.

Tom Tirman: yet I think, tokensgive lots of advantages and it's not just liquidity and ease of fundraising. itcan actually give back to the community in terms of. For the utility and valuecruel that a token model can have. And it, it just incentivizes, participation,easier access on, on a global level in, in the project success, because if thetoken is modeled in a way that the demand for the technology will affect thedemand for the token and the value accrual of the token, then everyone benefit.

Mike Townsend: Yeah, everyone who hasthe token would benefit as you build the company. Presumably the token is howdo you think of the correlation there? So if PARSIQ were to raise 20 million, ahundred million dollars, you guys are thousand people, you know, crushing it.The token doesn't necessarily changed in price, but it probably does becausemore people are using it.

Mike Townsend: How did, how aboutthe, the economics or tokens? How did, how did you structure. Either discountfor people investing up front or for you and the other founder, appreciating ordepreciating, what are, what are some of the most important aspects that youhad to decide when designing the tokens?

Tom Tirman: To be honest, when wefirst, in 2019, issued the token, it, That it was a simple, pay with, with thepars token and get services for a discount model at that time.

Tom Tirman: Very, very common, Buteventually we figured out that this, there isn't much utility really beyond thepayments, that there isn't much of a use case and everyone still preferred topay for the services in, in, with a credit card or stable coins. So we, werevamped the whole model. and, made it into an access token.

Tom Tirman: So pretty much,holding a certain amount of tokens, give you a certain amount of usage of thesoftware and, the more, the more you, use. The more you need to hold. But, the,the challenge with that was that we have companies who, monitor 10 millionaddresses on the blockchain for them to hold like 10 million par tokens mightnot be viable to have, volatile asset on the balance sheet, to lock out thatmuch capital.

Tom Tirman: And, so what we builtthe system around it, where you can rent the tokens for a. From a decentralizedliquidity pool, we call a renting pool. and what that means, that means that,these companies can pay a fee to rent it a necessary amount of tokens for amonth or for a year, just like a SAS subscription, monthly annual.

Tom Tirman: And, and, and underthe hood, they actually rent the token. From token holders who have providedliquidity into the pool. So that way, the token holders get incentivized. Theyget passive income yield by providing this rental liquidity team. And thecompanies can simply, can simply pay a fee just like they would any SAS subs.

Tom Tirman: and, and, get theservice without having to buy the token. And that way, demand for the token istied, to the demand for the, for the platform.

Mike Townsend: Interesting. so if thetoken price were to increase, would that mean the cost to your customers wouldincrease to rent the tokens and thus use the service?

Tom Tirman: Yeah, we have tomanage this manually because of the volatility. Of course, if, if, if itdoubles triples in price or, or vice versa, then, obviously becomes not viablefor, for customers to pay, as, as a service becomes expensive. So we have tomanually managed that.  

Mike Townsend: So in hindsight, liketake away extract the lessons from PARSIQ like, you know, I'm, I'm.

Mike Townsend: I recognize that theseare early days and I love when people say, oh, I wish I could have structuredit this way. Do you feel like maybe not having a token, having a tokenconnected or, a peg to the us dollar using, using a stable coin? Are there, ifyou were to redesign the system today, are there, is there another structureyou would employ to accomplish what you're trying to accomplish.

Tom Tirman: Definitely wouldexperiment more. We will still experiment more and add additional use case inutility for the token, because really most of the token models in the space areexperimental. And if, I mean really, if someone says like, Hey, this, thisproject, this company's token model is so great that, this is why, you know, itwill appreciate in, in price if the project is successful, then no.

Tom Tirman: I don't believe it isso because to this day, even for the projects whose tokens are extremely welldesigned, speculation remains the, I don't 97% of, of, the token volatility upor down is because of speculation, not because of, of the tokens. UnfortunatelyI think it will, it will take years for, for the industry to mature for our Mothese models to be polished and, and validated before, something really, reallygood comes along that, where it's really, really viable to have, a valueoccurring token without the specul speculatory

Mike Townsend: Component?

Tom Tirman: Let's say component.

Mike Townsend: Yeah. So in your case,the, the customers don't necessarily extract any value from the token itself.It's like, this is just the way you have to use PARSIQ you have to pay to renttokens, and then you also pay to use the. the, you pay for the API. So you'reis it two separate bills that they're, that a customer would typically be?

Tom Tirman: Yeah, it it'sstructured differently because we have not one product, but multiple mm-hmm .so one does utilize the token. The other one yet does not. although we plan toimplement some, some use cases there, as I said, that S for a, for a project,even a four year, company like us is always, A work in progress.

Tom Tirman: So we have, we haveideas how to improve and, and, really build a circular economy around both, youknow, the token and the product.  

Mike Townsend: What other projectshave you seen? I'm fascinated by tokens, generally speaking. And I love to hearyou're, you know, founder's perception on the effectiveness of the token today,how to think about it, the pros and cons going forward.

Mike Townsend: Are there otherprojects that you. Like, or you, you appreciate how they structure the token.That seems to be more successful. yeah. What, what are your takeaways  

Tom Tirman: Honestly? in myopinion, the only, really let's say viable tokens is for layer one change likeEthereum. So there, the token makes sense.

Tom Tirman: Everything else it's.It's like, 50 50 here and there. Everyone was, heavily, heavily praising theosof Terra Luna for a long, long time, how genius those were and how demand isguaranteed. But, we all saw how that  

Mike Townsend: that's crazy. What,what do you feel is the, the actual impact of that collapse? Like I, I knowit's just, you know, it's massive. I forget the numbers. Exactly.  

Tom Tirman: I think it's like 50billion, completely gone from the market of value gone. So, so 50 billion is a,is a big number if you think about, yeah.

Mike Townsend: Yeah, not just, it'snot just 50 billion. It's 50 billion of. Of people's savings that they index onlow risk. So if you have a, you know, portfolio, you say, okay, 30% is superlow risk.

Mike Townsend: 30% is medium. 30% ishigh risk, 10%, whatever. Like if you have a low risk category and youcompletely lose that, that's like, that's, that's way different than if youhave a high risk category, go to zero. Cause at least you can, you, you planfor that. Yeah. But this is like,  

Tom Tirman: That's the worst thingthat people who are buying Luna, they, I mean, they had to know at least sometake some kind of risk, a lot of risk because it is an alt coin it's, it can goup and down and value in multiples, but the people who actually held theirfunds in S T a decentralized stable coin, pretty much, one of the lower.

Tom Tirman: Risk, assets on, onthe blockchain. And I know personally a lot of, teams, project teams who hadtheir treasuries there. Wow. You know, just because, they thought, you know,we, we cannot keep them in volatile crypto. This is risky. Rather keep it in,in, in stable coins and even stable coins. Like we saw recently with thetornado cash thing, how SDC can be, frozen, blacklisted and so on, but adecentralized stable coin is probably the safest option.

Tom Tirman: And that's, yeah,that's, that's really terrible because you, you. To place your assets into thelowest, one of the lowest risk categories to stay safe from market down, trends,volatility, and you end up losing everything every, every last time of that. Soit's, it's a big blow to the industry and I think it will invite more fasterregulation among other things.

Mike Townsend: Yeah. Are there anyprojects that, I would imagine those projects are just unrecoverable. If youlose your treasury, I don't see how. You know, is that the general, is thatthat's what happened in folks that you know, is of the projects who put theirtreasury in? They just,  

Tom Tirman: Luckily not becausenot all, not all of them had had the full treasury there. They kind ofdiversify so they can keep going some, kind. Have managed or will manage toraise more funds. but, some might, might close. Yeah. Close the doors.  

Mike Townsend: Wow. so on regulation,Estonia is, is famous for if I remember correctly early on, like in 2018, whenI was running my crypto project, I was looking to Estonia because they wouldoffer like this. Or, like E passport, concept where you in your residency.Yeah. Can you talk a little bit about that and, and other influential cryptopolicies or just regulatory policies in Estonia that have helped shapedthings?  

Tom Tirman: Even residency ispretty much a. What it is, you become an digital resident, not a physicalresident, but a digital resident, which means you have an Estonia ID card.

Tom Tirman: And with, with theEstonia ID card you can, online, being in any other place. on the globe. usethe same services as Estonian citizens do online, which means you can buy or sellyour car online without having to do any going anywhere physically. you can, goto a notary to, to buy real estate online.

Tom Tirman: You can, Pretty much,pretty much anything. you can incorporate an Estonia and LLC and Estoniacompany online and, and you can do everything that, that citizens do online.That was, the idea and was very popular among like, digital nomads and, and,single entrepreneurs who, who were working with a team.

Tom Tirman: and, and it reallytook off, it, it. The, the residency put Estonia on the map. I would say,although before that we'd had Skype and, and Playtech, which are unicorns come,come from here, around here. But like I said, in, in, in Estonia with a smallpopulations, just easier to implement these digital advance.

Mike Townsend: Yeah. Yeah, I wouldimagine. And then what's the effect of that. So you have E residency, which isdifferent than a citizenship. So your, your personal documentation, wouldn't bean be, wouldn't be a resident, right? You'd be, you'd have a different statusthan that.  

Tom Tirman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Youwouldn't be a physical resident.

Tom Tirman: So your residencypretty much means that, you can more easily transact with Estonia companieswith Estonia. you can, incorporate a company there to run your remote. Businessthrough an Estonia company because we have very favorable taxation. We don'thave any corporate tax whatsoever. one of the few companies in, in fewjurisdictions in Europe, which is very good for like, all kinds of, NOMAS who,who don't have a team and they have a one man business.

Tom Tirman: and, and it's pretty muchto, to get people and talent here, here, even digitally to interact with, withthe whole, startup ecosystem.  

Mike Townsend: What's the benefit toEstonia? Are they, are they pulling in some taxes? Are they requiring people togo to Estonia occasionally? Or what what's the, what do you think the upside isfor regulators?  

Tom Tirman: No. Yeah, they don'trequire, people to go there, but, but if, if, if people, incorporate companiesLLCs, which, has been very popular among, among remote workers and remoteentrepreneurs, you usually have to pay like at least a minimum salary toyourself, which, which does, bring in some taxes to the government.

Mike Townsend: Interesting. So, isthat their primary motivation? Do you think the politicians in Estonia weresitting around saying, how can we. Grow tax revenue. And then let's launch thisE residency here. What do you, what I mean, they're so small. Have you met thepresident? Do you, or the whoever whoever's in charge of this policy? and doyou know what motivates them?  

Tom Tirman: Yeah, it's small. Soyou, you meet, pretty much all kinds of, people here, in Estonia it's, it'svery, very common. I, I think it, it was more to showcase, to the world what'spossible and, and, kind of, be, the innovators who. Scale it across, you know,the EU other countries and help implement it into larger countries. So it wouldbecome one interconnected digital system.

Mike Townsend: And how do you thinkthey're doing? Are they successful in that mission? Partially on the waystruggling?  

Tom Tirman: I'd say partially,partially. There's a long way to go. Do you think it's a, because yeah, goahead. Yeah, because other countries who, want to also implement similar,similar, systems, they, they are very slow to move, bureaucracy, largepopulations, always tougher.

Mike Townsend: Is the Estonian,politicians. outspoken in their support of crypto. Have they pushed back on anypolicies on crypto that make it, like, do you think they're just spot on withregulation or are they, have they made any, errors in your estimation?  

Tom Tirman: They at, at first,when, Estonia was considered a super crypto friendly, country, like in 2018,19, then, they actually made it too easy.

Tom Tirman: And people wereexploiting that. So to get a license, to manage, digital assets for yourclients. So to be in exchange to be a custodian or a wallet, it was so easy.That pretty much half of the world registered their LLCs into Estonia to getthese licenses because then they could operate. And another jurisdiction wasmuch, much harder and they

Tom Tirman: And now, and as aresult, we had tens of thousands of LLCs, who never physically were here. And,and, and just because of this license, so they changed. They changed that. and,and now, you know, you have to have proper AML procedures. You have to have,local, representatives, directors, and, and so on.

Tom Tirman: You have to pay sometaxes. And, it's, it's, it's, much tougher, but I think this is the right movebecause, what was happening then? I mean, I think half of those, So calledexchanges or licenses were scams at some yeah. Or exit scams at somepoint.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah. Yeah. You don'twanna be the, the global attractor for, the lowest hanging fruit. Interesting.and going forward, are there certain people, books, things that you've learnedthe most, over your trajectory that you wanted to share?

Tom Tirman: Well, the people that,I've been on this journey with, I mean, it's really, I can only bring up, my,my, my team, who have been, with me through tougher times and, and, and also,some of our, advisors who. Really took a bet on us and, and helped us a lot.like, like Mike, Ziko from, from coin list, he was tremendous help in, in, inpar becoming from this small unknown, you.

Tom Tirman: project, trying to dosomething, big, into, into a more well known credible, brand that is,integrated into the, space. So, and, and, yeah, big, thank you to that. From toEvan Chang, who, who comes from web two from Facebook, from apple. And, he'sgiven his perspective on, on web fee. And now he has actually left Facebookmeta to, build Mr.

Tom Tirman: Labs, when they'rebuilding, layer one blockchain, at this point. So I I've really been blessedwith, with having, a lot of good, good people, around me on this journey andhave learned a whole lot from them in any, because when we, yeah, no, go ahead.Because when we, started Baric we had no industry connections, no one fromcrypto, no backers from the industry was.

Tom Tirman: Coming into acompletely new world. And, and now we have, advisors, investors, partners,clients, all, a lot of them big names in, in the space.  

Mike Townsend: And so what did youdo? Did you just email them cold, email them, say, Hey, this is what we'rebuilding. And it was like, right timing. Or was it intros or something?

Tom Tirman: A lot ofintroductions, a lot of introductions, from, from some of the people that I'vementioned, and, The rest is like a snowball effect. Mm-hmm you, you talk topeople, you work with people you're in the picture, social media rights aboutyou organically. If, if you do something well, if you provide value and theneverything, the rest just comes mm-hmm, just hard work and, and provide valueto the clients and, and, be in the picture.

Mike Townsend: So true. Well said. I,I like that. Appreciate that, Tom. and are you active writing on social media,on Twitter or blogging anywhere?  

Tom Tirman: Not as active as Iwould like to. I, I do the occasion Twitter thread here and there and, and someLinkedIn, content, which I hope is educational or helpful to, to, founders orjust starting in web free.

Tom Tirman: And, I, I write someop-ed pieces. also here and there last one just dropped on crypto slate and, I,I tried to do, some podcasts and, and, video Intervision, but not as much as,as I probably should, but it's, it's difficult to find the time between,running, yeah. And growing startup.  

Mike Townsend: Yeah, totally.

Mike Townsend: I mean, if you'redoing something that's, that's probably enough. I mean, I think the fact thatyou're writing tweeting, doing podcasts, it's like, there's a certain balanceto it, right? There's always a cost of your time. So speaking of Tom, thanks somuch for hopping on and congrats on all the progress, man.

Mike Townsend: I hope you guys keepcrushing it.  

Tom Tirman: Appreciate it. Andthank you very much for having me here. It's it's been a little pleasure. Seeyou, buddy. Thank you, Mike.

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