Mike Townsend: Thanksfor tuning into another episode of Around The Coin today's conversation is withEdul Patel, the CEO and co-founder of Mudrex Mudrex has raised about $7 millionmaking it easier, faster, cheaper for everyone to trade into crypto, primarilyfocused on the Indian market where IEL is born and raised.

Mike Townsend:They've seen tremendous traction YC, and Y Combinator has invested into thecompany. And they have a solid team. We talked about the global expansionplans. We talked about industry trends that he's seeing products, pipelines fortheir business, but more so on the Indian scene, what the climate is like andwhat he can give us for what the predictions are for the future.

Mike Townsend: Goingforward. Hope you enjoy this conversation here is Edul Patel.

Mike Townsend: Allright. Edul thanks for hopping on today. I'm excited to chat with you. You'rerunning a really interesting project based in India and Bengaluru. You raisemoney from YC, roughly 7 million in that ballpark, building a crypto exchange.Tell me more, tell me more about what specifically you guys are doing and howthings are going so far.

Edul Patel: Oh,absolutely. So at Mudrex what we are trying to do is we are building a cryptoinvesting platform as. It's not necessarily a route to. In the sense that wethink that for the vast majority of users who are now joining crypto or havebeen coming into crypto over the last year or so are basically retailinvestors, the average retail investor, they don't necessarily have the time,energy, bandwidth, knowledge information, and so on and so forth to make theright trading decisions.

Edul Patel: Right.And, and this is not the first time it's happening in an asset class. This isexactly what we saw was happening in the sixties and seventies in the equitiesmarket. And to help the analyst retail investor, there were index funds andmutual funds and so on and so forth products like those that were created.

Edul Patel: So at ,what we are trying to do is we are trying to create simple, easy to understandinvestment products that help. the average retail investor invest and makelong-term wealth in crypto. That's kind of, sort of the, the goal of what weare doing. Our flagship product is this product called as coin where the ideais that there are different, different, different themes inside of crypto, andyou don't necessarily need to know which coin is doing best inside of thattheme.

Edul Patel: What youcan do is that if you are, let's say generally bullish about crypto, you canbet on or invest in the crypto blue. Coin, which is the top tokens inside ofcrypto. But let's say if you're bullish about NFT, then you invest in the NFTcoin. If you're bullish on Solana ecosystem, you invest in the Solana coin andso on and so forth at

Edul Patel: What wedo is on the back end, we kind of sort of manage that coin. By making sure thatthe coins are rebalanced periodically and the right coins get added and removedfrom time to time to time. So from your perspective, it's a onetime setup,onetime investment and everything post that just happens automatically.

Edul Patel: Justexactly how you would expect to happen in let's say index fund or a mutual fundas such. So that's the idea. The idea is that we wanna make investing easy andaccess easy for the vast majority of people who are coming into crypto now. Andthe way we do it is by simplifying products and the products that we arebuilding are similar to, you know, equity, mutual funds, index mutual funds,and so on and so forth but for Crypto.

Mike Townsend: And isthis similar to wealth front in the sense that it's automated backendrebalancing versus you mentioned mutual funds, which typically I associate amutual fund where there's a human being. Who's making a decision on when to buywhat to buy. Right. And you're paying that person a fee as opposed to an ETF,which is a, a bundle of equities. Is it more the latter?

Edul Patel: Yes, itis more the latter. The products that we have are actually built along thelines of an ETF, just like how in an ETF, there is just a set of rules that theETF fund manager let's say follows to figure out which coins go or which stonesgo from, which to which we actually have a very similar set of rules that we'veset out for each and every coin that we follow.

Edul Patel: And thatexactly does what you said, right? It, it keeps the fees low, but at the sametime, it makes sure that the human biases are. And you are able to create longterm consistent wealth. So there, the, there is expertise in creating therules. There is expertise in creating the ETF as such and, and then theinfrastructure to make sure that all of that gets forward and executedcorrectly.

Mike Townsend: Whatis the expertise in creating the ETF? Is that determining the percentage ofBitcoin versus Ethereum versus other things? And like, how would you thinkabout that?

Edul Patel: Yeah. SoI think it's the expertise over there comes in, in a setting up the rules thatyou can define for this B figuring out proper rebalancing periods and C see atthe end of the it's still crypto, right?

Edul Patel: So eventhough you might set up rules, there might be random gravity tokens that willcome in and kind, sort of make things biased. So there needs to be some humanoversight to make sure that there is some kind of a white list and some kind ofa black. As such of, of things that you do include or don't include in the, inthe setup.

Edul Patel: Andthat's also where the oversight comes in. So there is a whitelist blacklist interms of an asset, and there is rules that get set up before any kind, sort ofinvesting happens on behalf of the user.

Mike Townsend: So whomakes that white, less blacklist?

Edul Patel: Yes. Soall of that is, is done in house at Mudrex. We've got a team of really rockstarof who are managing all of this setup and, and across us, we were expertise inbuilding all of this out. We were forced coming in from different, different,different parts of the ecosystem experts coming in from traditional marketsselector folks who worked at buckles, who worked at , who worked at workedGoldman, et etcetera, as well as people who worked at new age.

Edul Patel: Cryptocompanies like for example, Seba, which is one of those largest banks and, andcoming in from there, and we've managed millions and millions of dollars in, incrypto in the past.

Mike Townsend:Interesting.

Edul Patel: I think,setting up these, these coins, these, these kinds are the first part where theexpertise is, but people really understand underestimate the infrastructurerequired to actually execute things in near real time offering the right pricesand so on and so forth as well.

Edul Patel: And Ithink that's where is the second major? In case of ETFs, you were large publicmarkets where at the end of the day orders get placed and there is somethingcalled either tracking error in tracking ETFs and so on and so forth. When youinvest in ax, Bitcoin, all of that goes away. And just try to make sure thatyou have the best price available when these orders get executed.

Mike Townsend: Andhow did you decide what the rebalancing frequency should be?

Edul Patel: So Ithink we. We we've done lots of research over the last few years on this. Andit turns out that for crypto across the various baskets that we have monthlyseems to be the best kind, sort of set that balances, risk reward versus fees.

Edul Patel: Both ofthem together. So we do monthly rebalancing inside of, inside of Mudrex.

Mike Townsend: Andwhat, what are the different bundles now? Like how, how do you think, do youput 'em in, in risk classes or do you put 'em in different asset groupings orequities groupings where you have like mainstay, like 80% Bitcoin, 20%Ethereum, and then you have like, talk to me about the different bundlestrategies.

Edul Patel: Correct.So our different, different coin sets are today grouped by categorization. Sothemes. So for example, there is a coin that is based on Solana, which has thetop token inside the Solana ecosystem. Similarly, there is a coin that's basedon category like NFTs. So all of the best NFD projects out there we, we createdlike a rule based on top of that.

Edul Patel: And thenthere is a coin that's like. Generic mass market coin, which is called cryptoblue chip, which is across all tokens in crypto. Apart from that, we also havesome specialized coin. For example, there is a momentum equivalent coin thatsays that we will pick those tokens that grew the most last month.

Edul Patel: And thenthere are newly listed as well as a category inside of that. So tokens that arenewly listed on an exchange last month and so on. And.

Mike Townsend: Hmm.Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. Gotcha. And then do you see this growing in a certainway? Or like, how do you see the evolution? Is it gonna be trial and error? Seewhat works?

Edul Patel: Oh, soabsolutely. So the idea is that the, the, you don't need like a bazillionthemes, right? Like the entire point of creating these structured themes is sothat these are ideas that users can invest in. And there is no point increating hundreds of such. So after lots of working with our users closely,what you realize is that about 20, 30 says different ideas are more than enoughthat gives users a wide variety, but at the same time, the ability to pick andchoose in a particular direction or a particular theme that they believe in sothat they can invest.

Edul Patel: And whatwe are seeing really, Mike, is that. The benefit of these products, is that theentire overhead of decision making as to when do I buy, when do I sell? When doI enter? When do I exit, which is the new next hot coin that I should put mymoney in. All of that just goes away. And, and, and what you're, what you'retrying to do is you're trying to create this long-term wealth.

Edul Patel: Usingcrypto. Right? So, so one of the main learnings that we had over the last year,year and a half is that a majority of users that came in just said that theywanted to create or, or wanted to invest for the longer run, wanted to, wantedto make money in the longer run. And they were not necessarily looking for thenext hundred X spoken.

Edul Patel: And, andthat's the difference. Vast majority of crypto products today are more focusedon the gambling effectively sizes, right? Where the, where the sales pitch iscome by this new next hot token and become a millionaire overnight at Mudrex.We stay away from those kind of communications because, because we know thatthat's not the right way to create long-term wealth.

Edul Patel: The goalis that crypto as an asset class is growing it's, it's an industry that'sgrowing. That's changing how the world works. And, and as it grows, if youwanna create long term generational wealth, you should follow some systems andrules and, and we've created products that help you follow systems and rules.

Edul Patel: And thesesystems and rules are tested since the last hun, since the last 60, 70, 80audios in the equities markets, that's the basic premise that index investingis the best form of investing to create long term. And how do we get indexstyle investing to crypto is, is what we're trying to solve with coin sidecontract.

Mike Townsend: Andwhat, what's your, what's your favorite bundle? Like where would you be? Whereare you in, in this? Are you like 80% Bitcoin? Like what's the breakdown.

Edul Patel: Oh, yeah.So, so I am, I am like a crypto maximalist. So broadly I am investing a vastmajority in our crypto blue chip coin, which generally covers the broadertrends.

Edul Patel: But thenI also have certain specific niches inside of crypto that I really like. So forexample, the DeFi, we have a DeFi concept that tracks the top DeFi project.And, and DeFi is, is like a subsection inside of crypto that I'm reallypassionate about. And I think that's where a lot of the early innovation incrypto will come in.

Edul Patel: So that'sthe, the theme that I am deeply invested in and the same is also true foranother theme called a smart contract. Platforms. I, I think that there is alot of work that's happening on layer ones, layer twos, and layer threes. Andthere are a lot of these layer ones, layer, twos, layer, threes that are beingbuilt out like Ethereum, Cardo, solar, and so on and so forth.

Edul Patel: So that'sthe other concept that I am invested apart from, you know, the mass marketcrypto Bluetooth. And do you see

Mike Townsend: I'mcurious what your thoughts on the DeFi token. So I think of the DeFi tokens asutility token, you mentioned you're interested in them as an investmentvehicle. What's your thoughts on the, the potential rise and value of DeFi tokens?

Mike Townsend: Whywould they go up? I assume just more people using 'em scarcity price drives up.Is it as simple as that?

Edul Patel: Yeah. SoI think so I am of course, very interested in the entire idea of DeFi and how,how we are essentially attempting to rethink the, the way the financial worldworks. Right. So the underlying pH points over there are definitely veryinteresting.

Edul Patel: Thepremise that, that, or the price behind brands, language I am investing is, isbasically that most of these tokens are utility tokens. And as these protocolsbecome more and more and more. these utility tokens would as a result, drive upin value, but that's not what all such tokens are. A lot of them are alsogovernance tokens.

Edul Patel: So a lotof times you just want to have a say in the protocol or would just want to havethe pride of owning such a protocol, right. So that's the other reason also whyI believe that these will continue to increase in value and in the longer run,be extremely valuable for me as such, but that's a personal choice.

Edul Patel: I reallybelieve in, in DeFi really think that it's gonna change the world. So, so I'mwilling to kind, sort of take that long term view and invest in it.

Mike Townsend: Sowhat, what would you put out as a percentage of what you would invest intocrypto percentage in DeFi

Edul Patel: Yes. Ithink, I think about specifically. 30 to 40% of my overall stack might be setup there. About 50 to 60 would be in the, in like the broader market.

Mike Townsend: Andhow do you make sense of Bitcoin specifically? Do you have any specificunderstanding of how you view the Bitcoin mid to long-term value propositionmaybe as you think in the market?

Edul Patel: Yes. I, Ithink it's very interesting, right. What, what we are basically trying to askis that what is the value that that any token adds? And I think just like howthe value of E is, is basically the ability to provide compute world over thevalue of Bitcoin is literally just trust. So the, the more people that believein Bitcoin, the more valuable.

Edul Patel: It's themore people that are available that, that believe or trust Bitcoin as a, as anability or, or, or, or basically a token or a store in which value can be kept,the more valuable it becomes. Right. And, and I think the, the generalness withwhich Bitcoin as a token itself is created, makes me long term bullish on it.

Edul Patel: So it'llgo through, of course it's intermediary short term cycle. But, but I think thatas time is progressing more and more and more and more people are believingthis idea of, of our digital currency or digital store of value and, and alsostore of values as decentralized democratize does not have a, a single entitycontrolling it.

Edul Patel: And asresult, I, I just think that it's, it is definitely something that's worthkeeping at least some part of your wealth.

Mike Townsend: Yeah.Yeah. A couple thoughts on it. I'm curious to get your, your feedback. So Ithink there. absolutely true. That the more that it's recognized, the morevalue it is, and there's two types of truths, right?

Mike Townsend:There's troops that are independent of human thought and then truths that aredependent of human thought. That would be things like the value of Bitcoinwhere a country's borders are, who is president. It is all those things areonly true because we agree that they're true. And I think of like, if I thinkof gold, gold is actually rooted in physical reality.

Mike Townsend: Unlikethere can only, you know, it's, it's, we have a limited number of elements onthe periodic table and gold is a specifically unique property because it'smutable, you know, you can melt gold, you can put it together. And, and peopletalking about the benefits of gold historically are right, right.

Mike Townsend: Likeit, it had been for a long time throughout human. A fantastic way to storewealth, independent of governments because governments have a tendency to issuetender currency Fiat and just keep printing it. And it becomes inflated, as weknow, and then Bitcoin, while it doesn't have the physical representation, itis immutable it's on chain and we know exactly how much it is.

Mike Townsend: Onerisk I see to it that I, I still am trying to wrap my head around is if therewas just a fork of. You know, is that then somehow a significant threat to thelong and midterm sustainability at Bitcoin. Like I think of a, so you couldmake this argument for social networks, right? Sure. Like when Facebook camearound, everyone uses Facebook and then we can't see a day when somebody movesoff as social network.

Mike Townsend: Wethink of it like a monopoly everyone's on. So why would there be another thing?This is the ultimate social network. And then of course it splinters intoSnapchat and Instagram and TikTok and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay. Idon't know.

Edul Patel: No, so Ithink I, I, I, that, that's a great point, right? Because it's question likethis, that help us understand more what the actual value of Bitcoin is. Thevalue of Bitcoin is not the code of Bitcoin, or it's not just the code ofBitcoin, right? It's the fact that millions of users are doing the compute toensure that the Bitcoin network is, is secure and trustworthy.

Edul Patel: So thevalue of Bitcoin is the network and not just the coin itself. And, and forkscome and go. And I, I think there are already like a bazillion forks of Bitcoinmm-hmm . But the fact is that the fork that has the largest network continuesto remain dominant and continues to accrue value. And the, and, and, and that'swhy I said at the start, the reason why I think Bitcoin is really valuable isbecause of trust and the.

Edul Patel: InBitcoin is basically this network that's created around Bitcoin around securingthat, that token and around securing and making sure that those transactionsare verifiable and so on and so forth. Right. That's why Bitcoin is reallyvaluable. So, so it's not like just forking Bitcoin will create something thatis equal value.

Edul Patel: To createthat value actually to create the entire network around it, which is thenetwork of minors, the network of entities that accept Bitcoin, the network ofpeople who are willing to put in large sums of money inside of it to, and whoagree to the fact that it'll be accepted at some point in the future as well.

Mike Townsend: Do youthink there's a potential social pressure or incentive as we still, well, wehave roughly 9 billion people on the planet, maybe 10, somewhere in that range.I think we're gonna cap out around 12, 13. Is like the prediction and, and manypeople a lot, actually in India and Southeast Asia are coming online for thefirst time.

Mike Townsend: Andwhen you first come online, the first thing you do is not buy Bitcoin. Right.It's maybe sign up for Facebook or get an email address or something. Okay.Just getting used to it. So there's still, you know, months, years of time forbillions, more people to come online and that that's, that's happening veryquickly.

Mike Townsend: And Ithink that there's a first mover advantage. Like if you're in Bitcoin, Thenyou, you know, you benefit from other people buying in, but then there's alsopressure. There's an incentive for new people to say, Hey wait, like that's,Bitcoin's pretty. What if there was another competing option. So you, so let mejust paint two pictures, then get your, you tell me your feedback.

Mike Townsend: So youhave one is you know, it's like it's like buying into a company, right? Like ifyou're seed investor, you win right. Series a, you win series B, you win allthe way to like IPO. The last one in. Is, you know, who's gonna buy after them.There has to be someone to buy after you, in order for the stock or the equityor the crypto or whatever to go up.

Mike Townsend: So Ithink that's one, one factor. Then the other is compute power. So as computepower decreases in cost, electricity decreases in cost. If we spin up nuclear,solar wind effectively approaching, you know, sliding down towards zero cost ofenergy production, compute, power decrease. Presumably hardware manufacturingand server power decreases.

Mike Townsend: Now,now, instead of the network being, you know, very, very influential, maybe it'ssuper cheap. Maybe it's like cheap and easy to spin up you know, 5,000different node validators on a network. So the, the idea, the, the concept oflike a network is actually inexpensive to reproduce elsewhere. And I throw thatto you to see how, if, if you, if you then reinterpret.

Mike Townsend: Thatthat as a threat to the mid to long term, like one last thing, I kind of viewit as on this, on this point of social networks, there's something that you,you don't want to be part of the same social network as your parents. And thismay be a social dynamic because you're sharing things about you and you don'twant your parents to see because it's embarrassing or something.

Mike Townsend: And sothere tends to be like a generational jump onto new social. Facebook toInstagram, Instagram to, to Snapchat, Snapchat, TikTok, so on. And I thinkthat'll probably keep happening. I wonder if it's similar for currency or ifit's the exact opposite for currency.

Edul Patel: Correct.So, so I think, I think let's, let's just touch upon a bunch of those things,right? The first part is that, yes, you're right. Bitcoin is a network, butit's not really a social network. It's more of an economic network. And socialnetworks go through generational shifts. I because the identity of a generationis deeply rooted in their fashion sense in their behavior, in their memes andtheir, in that sense, in that generation's cultural upbringing, right?

Edul Patel: Like youwent through the sixties and seventies, the eighties and nineties, all of them,very, very, very different, right. So social networks are inherently reliant onthose intermediary social changes economic networks, not so. Economic networksonly go stronger with time as more and more and more participants join in intothe network because as more and more and more participants join in the strengthof the network increases, it becomes more valuable.

Edul Patel: Itbecomes more efficient, more often than not and accepted world over. Right? Soas more people join in Bitcoin network actually becomes stronger. So as morepeople join in the newer people actually have lesser incentive to try somethingnew. Because if you want, if you're early on the internet and you don't know alot of things what's going on, you would rather park your funds or acceptpayment in, in a survey that is much, much, much more widely accepted thansomething that's new, right.

Edul Patel: Becauseit's the economic network that matters more. So that's one part. The secondpart is about compute, right? And, and over there, I believe that, of course,as time progresses in compute gets cheaper. The number of people participatingto secure that network will continue to continue to go on and continue tobecome higher and higher and higher.

Edul Patel: And as aresult, the amount of compute that Bitcoin will go through will become higher.The, the, the system is designed as such to adjust compute requirement based ondemand and. That's inherently a part of, of how Bitcoin works. Right. And Ithink that that will continue to move the needle up and up and that all continueto help make sure the network is secure.

Edul Patel: The otherthought process that with things like lightning network and so and so forththat are being built on top of Bitcoin, maybe the require. Of compute pertransaction actually goes down significantly because now that there are, thereare these layer tools that are being built on Bitcoin that actually settle thetransaction much faster at much lower transaction level compute cost, but thehigher overall compute secure is a network more so, so, so I don't thinkBitcoin is going away anytime soon.

Mike Townsend: Yeah.Like that answer. I'm curious to ask you about why C so you're based inBengaluru. The team I imagine is distributed or is it all located in Bengaluru?

Edul Patel: Yeah. Sowe are a distributed team. Mm-hmm but the vast majority of our folks are inIndia. Okay. We are actually a Delaware sea Corp, like the company's executedin the us.

Edul Patel: And, andwe've got a bunch of subsidiaries around the world to ensure that we areregularly compliant wherever we operate.

Mike Townsend: And sohow did you structure this or where, tell me the details of this. Like you, didyou move to the us? Did you go through YCS program? How did you get connectedwith them? How did you structure the, how did you think about structuring thebusiness?

Edul Patel: Yeah, sowe are we got into IC in winter 2019. So about three and a half years ago nowspent the entire IC patch inf building a product out, getting out of feedback,scaling things up.

Mike Townsend: Didyou guys just apply through the main application process or any?

Edul Patel: Yes, wedid. We did just apply through the main application process. At that point intime, YC was to in our batch, there were like 105 companies that according toIC. Three of them were doing crypto. Eight of them were from India. And, and wewere the ones who were also accepted, participated in that VC batch.

Edul Patel: And ofcourse loved the experience, right? Like VC is always great in terms ofaligning values of, of what it takes to build a long term of wealth creation,entity as such. And then that's what I think YC helped us a lot. If we go backand talk about our team, we are a team of four founders. All of us are thesecond time entre.

Edul Patel: And and,and for us, all the basic stuff was actually already well covered for, but justgoing through the vice experience, reinforced a lot of the things that welearned in our first venture that we did wrong. And we just wanted to make surethat we did all of those things. Right. Right. So, so, you know, focusing onthe long term, focusing on creating genuine user value talking to your users,understanding their problems have helped us go out in our, in our journey till.

Edul Patel: And Iimagine IC definitely was incredible.

Mike Townsend: Okay.So what was the application process? What do you think made your, made yourproject stand out?

Edul Patel: I thinkthe application process was basically submitting a fill up questionnaire doingvideo then an in person conversation. And then of course, like a finalinterview round.

Edul Patel: Right. Idefinitely think what. Us or what I believe what made us stand out was the factthat as a team, we clearly knew the problem that we were working. And there wasactually really high passion and really high sort of motivation to solve theproblem that we are working on in a very, very fast moving technology space.

Edul Patel: Right.So, so I think it's a, it's a bunch of those teams. It's a bunch of thosethings that got together to, to make sure that, that we got through. Gotcha.It's a passion that the team had, the, the large market and the large problemand, and can sort of the intent to just deeply focus and, and it creativelysolve it through the course.

Mike Townsend: Anddid they fly you out there for an in person interview in 2019? This is prepandemic. So I, yes, they did. You guys were the last, yeah, this was thepandemic. So they, they buy your tickets, fly you guys out, interview, you flyhome, then they say, Hey, you're in. And then you come back out again for threemonths. Is that right?

Edul Patel: Correct.Yes. That, that's how it was. So we actually, they, they flew us there twice.The first time they flew us for the interview. And then the second time we ofcourse went there to spend three. In the YC course itself. And I think just,just being there is way, way, way more valuable than doing things remote.

Edul Patel: I'vespoken to a lot of companies who are doing the entire YC course remote. Ofcourse that helps it reinforces a lot of things, but just being therephysically the level of energy and the level of enthusiasm and, and just, youknow, in person speaking to all your, you know, group companies, understandingwhat are they doing well, what are they not doing well?

Edul Patel: Is, isjust phenomenal. If we met a bunch of friends that, that are, that I think arenot friends, were like, that's awesome.

Mike Townsend: That'sawesome. Interesting. Any particular lessons that you learned from otherprojects or other people throughout that experience?

Edul Patel: Yeah. SoI think I am actually learning more as time progresses than we did while wewere there. Right. And, and the one particular lesson that is, that has just,you know, just clearly been visible is that. What I've seen is that teams thathave been just persistently trying to solve a problem eventually get there andeventually become incredibly valuable. And I think not enough people payattention to this.

Edul Patel: A lot ofpeople say that you want to do smart work, or you, you would want to, you know,do things at speed and so on and so forth. But, or you going to have, you know,a kick as rockstar sales team, or a kick as rockstar tech team. So, and so.Like, of course all of those things help, but I think what I realized over timeis that the things that are non-negotiable is persistence and you know, justthat constant application at the problem, just going at it one after the other,after the other and doing at it in a way where you are able to make businesssense where you're able to solve your users' problems and understand theirvalue.

Edul Patel: And Ithink these are things that you only learn in the longer run, right? Like whileyou're going through a three. Can sort of boot camp. These are all just goodthings to hear, but over the course of three years, that's when you actuallyrealize what persistence means and what hard work means. And, and, and justlooking at your batchmates and also looking at your own journey, seeing howthings have progressed across the world, you are able to can sort of in, in thelonger run, filter out the signal from the noise as such.

Edul Patel: So to, soto speak.

Mike Townsend:Interesting. I like that that's a really articulate, good way of describingwhat you, what you get out of the experience. And what's your general take onthe land? Oh, first I wanna ask you, I didn't quite ask you directly, but whereis the company now in terms of either revenue users, however you measure KPIs.

Edul Patel: Yeah, So,so Coin Sets is today the world's largest crypto investing platform. We gotover 300,000 investors. Investing in these different, different baskets. Ourlargest basket crypto blue chip has close to 150,000 investors who've put intheir own money. And this is not one time investment. We see people doingrecurring investments in these Bitcoin.

Edul Patel: So it'sbasically actually working to create long-term intent or long-term value forour. So from a scale perspective, we've scaled immensely. Our vast majority ofour users today are in India, but we are scaling up rapidly. We've just we arejust in the last leg of getting our European license. So we will be launchingin Europe over the course of this quarter and hopefully coming to us prettysoon.

Mike Townsend: Andhow. I there's two things I kind of wanna ask you, but one is, is, are people,can people just go on the site and see what the baskets are composed of? Or isthere some proprietary nature to which you try to keep that as a valuable partof the business?

Edul Patel: No. So Ithink trust and transparency is really critical to the business and.

Edul Patel: And andas a result, you can just download our app. You can look at each basket, wehave a very retail description that also elaborates our methodology in choosingthe tokens. And you also show the S at that point in time and the percentagesacross those S and so on and so forth. Because I think what's valuable tounderstand is that the idea of index investing is not just investing one timein a given set of constitutes it's the ability to rebalance to hold that totalagain and again and again for the longer run that coin again and again andagain for the longer run and making it just very, very easy for someone toinvest in.

Edul Patel: And webelieve that all of that is where the actual value the. Proprietary of ourproduct is making the entire product experience seamless. That's what's morevaluable, not just the basket itself.

Mike Townsend:Gotcha. Gotcha. And how, how are you structuring the fees on and the business?

Edul Patel: Yes. Soas such today, we don't charge any service fee.

Edul Patel: There islike, anyways, most CDs are very low cost products, so there is no service feeservice fee, but there is a transaction fee that users you to pay whenever atransaction happens. And that's how we monitor. Apart from that whenever usersgo from Fiat to crypto. So, so from your own local currency to crypto and fromcrypto to your local currency back, also facilitates that.

Edul Patel: Andthat's the other part of, of the fee that we monetize in the near future. Weactually want to add more services on top of coin sites and services, likewhich could only be enabled in crypto. Right? So, so an interesting idea thatwe are working on today is that see the reality is that let's say if youinvested in an et.

Edul Patel: you couldin theory purchase a bunch of options to offset your downside on an ETF rightnow, doing this in practice in the equities world is immensely complicated.And, and for an average user getting access to those kind of services becomesreally, really difficult. And the reality is that the super rich actually dohave access to these products, right?

Edul Patel: Likefolks who are investing millions in and, and equity do get advised by theirinvestment bankers to buy options, to product their downside. And that's like avery obvious thing to do. What we think is that we can enable these servicesthat actually meaningfully help the user create wrong term value.

Edul Patel: So theidea is to, let's say, sell an insurance equivalent set up where you pay asmall premium to buy to, to, to essentially limit your downside. And the wayMudrex works is that it goes and corresponding. Buys a structured set ofoptions to prevent your downside at that point. So in the near future, we, weplan to add more and more and more such offerings that for the user are simple.

Edul Patel: At theend of the day for the user, they just do the job of preventing downside at,for, at the cost of, or at the price of given fee. But in the, in the backend,we structure it in a way that it executes seamlessly from a financial productper. And these are things that are only possible in crypto simply becausecrypto is so open accessible and available to use users one lower.

Mike Townsend: Andare what backend tools are you guys using? Are you using like a custodyprovider? People are leaving their crypto with you? I would imagine. So. You'reyou're using what, what other, what tools make your business possible?

Edul Patel: Yes. So Ithink it took us about two and a half, three years to build out our entireinfrastructure stack in a way that is secure, reliable, and just worksseamlessly.

Edul Patel: So, soit's, it's actually difficult to elaborate everything quickly, but the essencethat, that yes, users do leave custody with us. We are all our custody is toldreally secure. And then when orders need to get executed, some part of fundsmove away from that custody orders get placed, orders get settled, and it getsall stored cud daily back again in a cold wallet, we are in last stageconversations to also get like an insurance layer on top of that custody.

Edul Patel: So thatuser's funds are actually really, really secure. And even in the last edge caseof, of, you know, some security reasons on and so happening, those funds don'tgo away as such as well.

Mike Townsend: So whynot use a custody provider like bit go. Coinbase, I think as one or others.

Edul Patel: Yes. Sothe custody is actually stored with custody providers who do provide suchcustody services to us.

Edul Patel: But itdepends on what amount of custody gets stored over there. What amount does not,because it's not all funds never get sold with the custody provider. You have acold wallet, a hot wallet, a warm wallet, and that kind of a system. So thecustody orchestration happens with us, but at the end of the day, we do useservice providers to store custody at, at the end for our users.

Mike Townsend:Gotcha. Gotcha. And interesting. It's a good way to structure it. What else,what else do you find most compelling about the, the market? Do you, do youthink, do you have any opinions about the direction we're going? We're kind ofin a, a slump of which is probably a good thing, but do you have any areaswhere you're particularly more excited about than you think other people are,or, or less so than other people?

Edul Patel: Yeah,absolutely. So, so I think two, two parts, and I would rather not talk aboutprice, but talk about the market in general. And, and two parts over there. Thefirst part is is kind acceptance, right? So we've been in group over the lastfive years or now and in an industry that's 10 years long, five years is, isbasically eons.

Edul Patel: And overthe last five years, what we've now seen is that from BC around 2018, To 2021,a vast majority of users that came into crypto were just traders. And, andwe've gone from maybe five, 6 million really active traders to 10, 12 millionreally active traders in 2021. Right. And, and what's happening is that nowthat trader curve basically started to plate in 2021 because whoever wanted tocreate crypto actively was already into.

Edul Patel: but from2021 was that this entire new wave of users started coming in, which werebasically the average retail investors, right. Who wanted to create wealth whocame into crypto in 2017, got shoot away because of all the, of, of all thechaos and hysteria that happened. And then over time just saw the industry growagain and again, and again, their beliefs being reinforced by large investorsand so on and so forth.

Edul Patel: And nowyou and now genuinely believe that, okay, this is a, this is going to be a partof their. This is not something that's gonna go away. So 20, 21 to now, we,we've kind of, sort of seen about 15, 20 million retail investors come in. Sowe went from almost 10 million traders and maybe like a couple of millionretail investors to 12 million traders and now 15, 16 million retail investors.

Edul Patel: So theentire broader market can sort of structure has radically changed. It's gonefrom active traders to passive investors. And all the products that are populartoday are built out for traders. And no one is talking about what's being builtfor retail investors. And that's what we are seeing more and more and more andmore being built now as time progresses, right?

Edul Patel: And someearly stage variance of those products were the kind of things that block fivewas building or Celsius was building or Cleo was building, right. You know,simple tools that help you story. Our crypto help you earn on top, help youcreate wealth. All of that didn't pan out. But those were the first generationproducts.

Edul Patel: That'show I, I, I can sort of look at them and as more and more and more retail iscoming in more and more and more products, like what we are building at Mudrexwill get built out over the next couple of years or so. And I'm really, reallyexcited about that because it's a, it's a very large blue ocean kind of, sortof market.

Edul Patel: Whatproducts will work, what will not, is not really clear. And, and all of thiswill evolve and, and entities and companies that end up capturing or winningthis market will be incredibly valuable in the longer run. So one part thatreally excites me is how this market is, is completely shifting and how thatshift has just, you know, been accelerated over the last couple of years or so.

Edul Patel: And theother thing is the phenomenal pace at which the underlying technology isimproving. if, if you go back and look at again over the last four years, allthe ICOs IDOs and so on and so forth that were kind sort of fake promises in 2018, 20 19 started to actually show some real work happening in 20 20, 20 21.

Edul Patel: And, andthat's kind of a gradual pace, which technology evolve, right? It does take acouple of years of really hard work for promises to come at least somewhatcloser to reality. And the rate with those things have moved is justincredible. And over the next few years, I believe that that technological paceat which newer and newer products will get developed on crypto on blockchainis, is just exploding.

Edul Patel: And it'sexploding with a wide variety of core new layer ones coming up like Solanalayer twos coming up, like star wear like polygon and so on and so forth. Andthen just a wide variety of, of kind sort. Applications that are being, beingbuilt on top of these products. So the use cases, the usability, the acceptance,all of that is, is kind of, sort of exploding in battle.

Edul Patel: Soreally, really excited about the technology as well, because what we have todayis really a new way of transferring, sharing, and storing value in the age ofthe internet. And, and it's a completely new paradigm. So completely new usecases, completely new ways in which we interact. With, with people and, and,and completely new ways in which we transfer and pay for services and goodsover the internet are going to come over the next few years.

Edul Patel: Right. Soreally excited about that. So I think the market and the technology are theother two things that I'm really, really excited about. Price is just aconsequence of, of, of demand supply hyper area. So would rather not comment onthat.

Mike Townsend: Yeah.Yeah. Very ephemeral. I agree with you largely.

Mike Townsend: What'sthe biggest, if there's one singular large risk to the call it midterm, I thinklong term, it's hard to, hard to see how it doesn't become, how the, how thecore base technology of blockchain. Conceptually just doesn't become a massive.Utilized worldwide technology, but in the short to midterm, what, what do youthink is the single most risky or, or thing to pay attention to threat to thegrowth of Bitcoin and other cryptos projects?

Edul Patel: Correct.So I think, I, I think the part that. that makes crypto most susceptible isliterally just positioning and, and how people talk about it. Right. And Ithink the key part that needs to change and that we starting to see change ischanging the narrative or, or changing the conversations from price movements,a hundred X growths, 20 X edge road, 30 edge growth in period of over day.

Edul Patel: This, youknow, gambling, lottery equivalent kind of conversations around crypto to.Technology conversations around crypto finance conversations around cryptoinvesting, conversations around crypto. It's a narrative. I think that's,that's more important. And I think that is the one single critical risk thatwill prevent crypto from just literally exploding.

Edul Patel: Thesocial acceptance needs to come in along with the technology and use casegrowth as well. Right. So no out blockchain will be there, but whether it besocially acceptable to, to the world or not whether the use cases will becomeeasy enough or not, whether the UI and the UX of crypto will become simpler ornot, those are the critical risks.

Edul Patel: So, sothe narrative and, and how people end up using it on a day to day basis that Ithink is, is the risk that that's, that's literally today stopping the, fromexploding.

Mike Townsend: Biggerthan regulation, bigger than the government intervention.

Edul Patel: No. So Ithink my. My the way it is. I look at government intervention and regulation isthat see regulators from, from their side are actually just trying to do thejob of protecting the average investor.

Edul Patel: If the,the reasons why harsh regulations come in is because the use cases are actuallytrying to scam people of their money that's reality, right? Yeah. So, so as usecases, To useful use cases, regulations evolve to being adaptable. Yeah. So Ithink regulations will move at their own pace and typically regulations alwaysfollow rather than lead.

Edul Patel: Right?So, so it's not, it's never going to be a breaker. It's not, it's never, it'snever going to be like an existential risk. It'll slow things down, but it'snot going to be an exist. So, and I think the way to, the way I think of it isthat if the narrative improves, if the use cases improved, if people startaccepting crypto for a vast, vast majority of wider, acceptable things, ratherthan just sort of thinking of it as a way to gamble or be, or make 10 returns.

Edul Patel:Regulations follow suit and, and, and the, and the narrative changes and, andwhy people use crypto changes.

Mike Townsend: Ithink I mostly agree. I disagree in part that I, I think you're you're right,that the regulation is incentivized to protect the average retail investor. Ithink that's right. But the caveat is unless the technology threatens thegoverning body itself.

Mike Townsend: Sothen what, what matters to a governing body is the, the people that it'senacted to protect, but what matters more than that is protecting. So if, ifsomething threatens the actual regulatory body or the government itself, then Ithink there's like a prioritization that naturally happens where it's likedeprioritize the actual governing mechanism itself and prioritize institutingregulations that protect itself.

Mike Townsend: Sowhat governments want more than anything is to preserve their existence. And soI, I view it as. It's amazing to me, this whole drama, because it very muchthreatens the, at least it doesn't threaten the existence of centralorganization. You know, everyone needs their, their garbage picked up. You needrunning water, you need electricity.

Mike Townsend: Andthose things need to be provided centrally like roads, you know, everythingelse. But then there's also printing of money, which is similar to theseparation of church and state, you know, prior to that being a core constructin, in modern society. The church and the state were one being, you know, itwas, it was very much intertwined.

Mike Townsend: And soto make that incision and separate, those was a big deal. You know, wars werefought over, revolutions were fought over. Okay. And I tend to think that theseparation of state and money is, is going to be decoupled. And I don't knowhow peaceful or how simple that decoupling will be. So that's.

Edul Patel: So Ithink by no means, will it be simple. Yeah. And, and cons and entities thatpower gets concentrated, tend to protect that power much more often than muchmore strongly China than not, not really China. I wouldn't say countries assuch, but the, the point is being that basically at the end of the day, thesegoverning bodies.

Edul Patel: Are areinstitutions run by individuals. And it's the intent of the individuals thatneed to change first before the entities start changing. And at some point intime, yes, there needs to be a struggle period in between. Now in a lot ofcases, those struggles are peaceful and gradual, but in other cases, thosestruggles are violent and, and not right.

Edul Patel: So, sothose are some choices that we will have to make as time progresses. But, but Ithink that that is a definite eventuality and that does need to. Primarilybecause. Crypto in a lot of cases. And a lot of means just makes things moreefficient. Like the, the technology makes it just easier and simpler totransact over the internet, share value, transfer value, and do all of thatover the internet.

Edul Patel: So ifyou're not a part of it, you are doing something that's fundamentallyinefficient. And we're doing fundamentally something that's inefficient. It'sgoing to be more expensive over time. Yeah. And, and at some point the, thecosts just outweigh the benefits, right? Yeah. How that transition happens is,is, is, is, is up to you and my guessing well, I, the transition should happen.

Mike Townsend: I dothink that China has taken a step in declaring what they view the transitionas, as to be, which is. Don't do it, you know, like, Hey, we don't want cryptobe running wild in society because they view it as an existential threat to themonetary control that the governing body has rightfully so like it does, likewhen I use Bitcoin, I'm not using the dollar.

Mike Townsend: And soif I, the more you can get out of the dollar, the more your, the more thegovernments, the federal reserve, the whole economic engine of the usgovernment. Disempowered. So I think that that's correct that I just, I just, Ijust question how that's gonna go down because that's like when the mostpowerful entity on earth is effectively losing power and they see how they'reusing losing power and they have the ability to influence that loss of power.

Mike Townsend: Thenit's like, it's like, you kind of have to ask you, you say, okay, well, thepurpose of government is to benefit the. But the, the government has its owncollective has, has its own centralized consciousness and self-preservation.And so it's like, it'll be a really interesting social studies example to see Hhow this goes down.

Mike Townsend: Butobviously from your perspective, it's like build valuable shit, you know, make,make things that are respectable and undeniably useful so that there's not so,so that the, the chances of politicians being able. Create some story about howcrypto is destructive decreased, because the only thing that, that, thatempowers governments to make overreaching regulation and is the, is when peopleare scared and people are scared exactly.

Mike Townsend: Whenthey get hacked, when they lose money, you know, I mean effectively, like whathappened, right. So I'm, I'm so curious to see how this Celsius Luna, Tara,like how this whole thing plays out. Because if it's, if it just kinda justkind of goes by, that's great, but it. We'll see. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Lastthing.

Mike Townsend: Whereare you online? Are you, are you personally tweeting? Are you personallywriting? And then tell me who influences you. Are, are you, is there a bookthat you read people? Yeah. Where have you learned the most?

Edul Patel: Yeah, so,so, so of course I, I I'm there on Twitter. I'm there on LinkedIn. A lot of thethings that I, I write do get posted on LinkedIn.

Edul Patel: Thereare, there are a bunch of blogs that I continue to write for our. On like avery, very regular basis. So that comes out via emails to all our users at, at,regarding intervals. And I think I, I, I am for sure, a fairly inclined bookreader. I do spend reading a lot of books all the time.

Edul Patel: And thereare a bunch of books that have really influenced me in the way. I think one ofmy favorite books is is Thinking Fast and Slow by, by Daniel Kahneman. And andthat book has fundamentally changed my outlook as to how the world works. And,but, but there are a bunch of others as well. Right. For example, from, fromlike a people management and how to organize things perspective, there is this,this really great book called High Output Management by Andrew Grove.

Edul Patel:Excellent. And then there is this book called as Principles that I, that I reada few years ago by Ray Dalio and that's phenomenal.

Mike Townsend:Awesome. Well, thanks so much Edul. I appreciate you coming on today. This hasbeen fun and congrats on all the progress.

Edul Patel: Yeah.Same year. Love, love having this conversation. Thanks a lot.

Mike Townsend:Cheers.

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