Who were you before you found crypto or crypto found you? And why did you choose to follow crypto as a career?

Yes, I was an investment banker.

I mean, I've been in finance before crypto for almost 20 years back then.

And I've had a chance to, you know, mostly investment banking around mergers and acquisitions.

project finance, and also invested in techs for quite a while.

I was with AFC World Bank, and after that, I joined GE in charge of investment and project finance for all the subsidiaries of the group, power, water, mining, oil and gas, transportation, healthcare, aviation.

But along my career as an investment banker, I had a chance to work on transformative projects, right? So I was at the very dawn of, you know, scaling GSM to Africa at the time when I was in Paris, which transformed, we leapfrogged fixed line.

So what were the things that really clicked for you at a personal level that you were like, oh, I need to do this? This is a calling.

How did you get involved in this space?

yes uh you know at the time i was uh i spent more than years in banking right and uh i realized uh especially being uh from africa that For almost 20 years, you know, I invested in the first GSM projects in Africa, uploading mobile telecommunications, made the first investment in the world in mobile payments.

Even before M-Pesa, I was also involved in the early days of M-Pesa.

also understanding very, you know, not that early, but earlier than many, the space of blockchain.

And I thought, wait a minute, you know, Africa has 48% of the global gold deposit, almost, you know, 70% of the gold and 80% of the platinum.

And since it got decoupled from the dollar in uh in 1971 but at the same time our currencies have lost so much values and not just in africa i mean it was the same for india for latin america if you think of uh one kilo of gold in 1971 it was a thousand naira which is the nigerian currency now it's close to 200 million now right and that for me was a shock and i said what if we totalize the gold and democratize access to it so that people could buy gold from as low as international fungible token um available which was equivalent which is equivalent to one milligram of gold and accessible to anyone's mobile phone so that regardless people can control uh how their leaders manage their countries right they can't control um the global or local risk.

And it's the best performing asset in history anyway, and has always had values regardless of civilization or geographics.

that's that's fantastic that's that's great um you know there is a lot happening in the whole like financial system and then um what is like would you say is like that the broader shift that's happening in the whole financial system it's a very big question