#111: Estate Planning in a Crypto World with Michael Pearl

Guest Introduction (0:00)

Sean Weisbrot:

Welcome back to another episode of The We Live to Build of a Podcast. I’m here today with Michael Pearl, the COO of Kirobo. Michael, thank you for taking the time to join me. Why don’t you tell everyone about Kirobo, and we’ll start from there.

What is Kirobo (0:16)

Michael Pearl:

Kirobo is a blockchain technology company in the realms of Web3. We actually started off with building a solution for backup and inheritance. And like all good ideas, on our way to build this solution, we stumbled upon an amazing technology which is called smart transactions. In essence, it’s a much easier way to build on the blockchain. And the idea is to allow every user not only developer but every user with a great idea to build customized solutions for handling their assets, whether it’s their crypto or, metaverse assets, and to allow them, basically, to manage their assets in the best way, in the most optimized ways.

Sean Weisbrot:

Is this like a smart, smart contract?

Michael Pearl:

Okay, so it’s a very good question. The whole world of Web3 metaphors, all the stuff that you guys hear in the news and in the tech outlets, basically is based on smart contracts. This is the language; this is the gateway to Web3. And smart contracts have done a very good job. But the problem with them is the fact that they haven’t changed much since 2014, more or less, when they were invented. And this technology has a lot of benefits, but the problem is that it’s very costly and very time consuming to build. So, that’s why we see a lot of different protocols.

Protocols are basically companies in the Web3 lingo that are built. And most of those companies, they do one single thing. So, let’s take UniSwap, which is one of the biggest giants of peer-to-peer swaps. Basically, what they do, not peer versus pool. But that’s another talk. Basically, what they do is allow you to swap crypto for crypto. And that’s the problem with the smart contract, that you have to develop one single thing, because developing several solutions that are interconnected with different systems is very hard. It is something that for fintech guy is very ubiquitous. But when it comes to crypto in this very nascent stage the development is very hard. So, that’s why we came up with smart transactions, which basically allows you to create, to have the abilities, the capabilities of smart contracts, which are essentially algorithms on the blockchain, but on the level of a single transaction.

So, if you, Sean, want to, for instance, create a limit order on the blockchain, which is something that now you have to lock your funds. And you had to create, you had to find a solidity developer, which is very hard to find. You had to pay him a lot of money. You had to create the smart contracts, audit it, deploy it and so on and so forth. I don’t want to bore your listeners, but bottom line, it would cost you around $250,000 in about four months of development. And then you would develop a one single solution. That’s obviously something that is very much not scalable. And that’s where we are right now.

What we offer is to do that in basically five minutes. I know it sounds mind boggling, but when we go more in depth, I can explain how it works. And basically, you don’t have to find the solidity developer. You can do this at the convenience of your home or your mobile, only with having a good idea on how to make money, how to preserve your money. And you can do it very easily and in a very straightforward manner.

How Kirobo was founded (3:57)

Sean Weisbrot:

So, before we go deeper into the technical side and these kinds of things, I’m curious when you and your partner got the idea to do this, because this is something that I was thinking about in 2016, 2017, and I was baffled by how horrible the solutions were, or the lack of solutions. So, yeah, why don’t you tell us a little bit about that story?

Michael Pearl:

Yeah. So, the company was co-founded by two co-founders. One, the COO, Asaf name, and the CTO, the genius, the brain behind the technology Tal-asa. So, Asaf is an accountant, nobody’s perfect. And he actually has a specialty in taxation. So, he was called to have a department of taxation that dealt with crypto in a boutique firm, and yet a lot of clients who held crypto. And in the balance sheet, he started seeing a lot of losses that originated from funds that were lost, which is something that you don’t see much in the traditional finance world. And he started tracking the reasons for losing your funds, and then he stumbled upon sending it to the wrong address, which is one of the biggest problems, you know, people unfortunately dying because life happens. And then no one and I can explain why, but no one can help you with that. Because if you have your private keys and you haven’t communicated them with your partner, with your kids, no one can inherit your funds.

And another problem, which is also something that is in the news people losing access to their wallets, either losing their physical wallets or losing access to their cloud wallets. And basically, that’s another way of that money is being lost. And he was mind boggled by it.

And he said, listen, this cannot be the way things work. If we want to build something that is going to be robust and widespread, we need to create a more sustainable system. And that’s when he met the other co-founder. And they started going on this journey of creating solutions for all three problems. And as I said on the way there, first of all, they found a solution. And we managed to create an undo button that basically allows you to cancel transactions sent in error, a fully decentralized backup that allows you to back up not only your funds, but also your identity. Because now, in the world of Web3, your wallet is your identity. And finally, we managed to find a fully decentralized solution for inheritance. And after we ticked all the boxes, we also discovered this technology that I just mentioned.

Risks of custodial platforms in crypto (6:46)

Sean Weisbrot:

It’s very fascinating origin. I know a lot of people that probably could have benefited. I mean, they’re still alive, but who would have benefited from it years ago. I guess the main concern, since I’m not aware of how it works, so I have to ask, is this a custodial system? And what I mean by custodial, if you don’t understand, if you’re not familiar with blockchain, this is obviously for the audience, not for you, Michael. Custodial is when you have access to the coins or the tokens, but they’re not physically in your presence. They’re stored on some other company’s servers.

So, for example, if you use a company like Binance or Coinbase, and you do trading there actively, the coins or tokens are not in a wallet that you actually have full control over. So technically, they’re in control of them, and therefore, it’s in their custody. And we call this a wallet or custodial system. So, with that clarification in mind, the system that you’ve created, is it custodial.

Michael Pearl:

So, the quick answer is no. And if you allow me, I would like to elaborate on why does it matter? Right? I mean, you did a very good job in explaining what’s a custodial. So, you did a good job in explaining what’s a custodian, and I want to explain why is it a problem?

So, first of all, luckily, quote unquote, we have plenty of use cases right now during the downfall of the crypto market that can help us explain that. We also have several companies that basically were kind of like hedge funds. They manage their clients’ funds without the clients even knowing that they are essentially hedge funds, because they have the clients’ assets in their possession, and they were trading with the client’s funds. And unfortunately, once the market took a downturn, we saw that they didn’t really do this in a very successful way.

And the problem with that is, people were depositing money in custodial venues, whether it’s an exchange or a lender or however you want to call it. And they were receiving basically interest in many different forms. The interest was usually much higher than most of your listeners know, in the traditional finance, and obviously, that was very lucrative. But the price for that, and most of them weren’t really aware of that, is the risk factor. And the fact that it’s some of them didn’t even know that their funds were traded with. Because some of those lenders were telling stories about taking your bitcoin and lending it to a poor farmer in Pakistan or something like that. But in essence, this money was utilized to trade in very risky markets. And again, when the market took a downturn, the money just evaporated. So, that’s one of the dangers with the custodian.

But another peril with respect to custodians is the fact that you don’t control your money. So even if your money is not lost in some instances, you can lose access to your money or not being able to get a hold of your money unless you do this or that. And a very good example of that is what happened in Canada about six months ago with the truckers’ strike.

I don’t know if you guys remember that, but there was a big uprising of truckers that were trafficking goods to the states and backwards. And basically, the funding for that was cut off through traditional financing. And then they turned to crypto. So, what did the Canadian authorities do? They instructed the various exchanges, like Coinbase, for instance to basically freeze the assets of the Canadians that had the accounts there. And in an industry that it’s something that is maybe acceptable with banks, right? But when we’re talking about crypto, with the whole vision of democratization and decentralization, that is unthinkable.

How Kirobo works (11:03)

Michael Pearl:

So, that leads us to the conclusion that not your keys, not your money, right? If you’re not in full possession of your assets, the money is not yours. So, going back to our system, our system is fully noncustodial. The money is stored on the blockchain and uh what is essentially an on-chain wallet I don’t want to go too deep into the technology, but it’s a wallet that is fully on the blockchain and basically the user has access to that wallet with some preconditions that Kirobo designed, but Kirobo cannot affect the funds, what the user does with the funds, and so on. So, we designed the system, threw it into the ether, pun intended. And basically, the user can go and access their funds and do whatever they want with them within the realms of the capabilities that the system allows you to do.

Sean Weisbrot:

So, let’s say, for example, I want to set up the system so that if I were to die, my whoever, parents, brother, future, potential wife that doesn’t exist, you know, can get it, right? So, it’s kind of like in the past, you trust a lawyer to execute your will, but in essence, with crypto, you really shouldn’t trust asked anyone to execute a will, because if they have the information, they can steal it.

So, obviously, your system is designed to be self-managed. But if Kirobo can’t do some of those things that a custodial system can do, how do I know that at my death, it will be executed? How does Kirobo know that I’m dead? Is there some sort of you have to check in once a month, uh, and if you don’t check in, we assume you’re dead, and then we send it off. How does this work so that there’s no human from Kirobo touching it, but it still works?

Michael Pearl:

So basically, it’s two questions. One is, what’s the difference between the original way that people were doing their will and testament, and how does curable operate? So, let’s start from the end.

Kirobo has a very straightforward system where the funds that are stored on that on-chain wallet, on the smart contract-based wallet, you can decide that they will be distributed at a certain time to predefined destinations with predefined distribution.

So, for instance, if you’re holding, let’s say, five Ethereum tokens, and you’re holding, let’s say, Mana, and you’re holding, I don’t know, USDC, you can decide that 50% of your Ether goes to your wife, 50% of Mana goes to your son. Whichever cocktail that you want to brew here, you can do that. And eventually, once you have your errors and you have the distribution, what you do is you sign the transaction. It’s a smart transaction, and it is smart in the sense that it will be executed in the future upon certain conditions met.

Now, the condition now, you would ask, how does the system, the robot, know that the person is deceased, right? That’s the big question here. So currently, the system is time based. So basically, you define that if in the course of the next two years or, sorry, after the next two years, if you don’t use the wallet at all, you don’t plug in, you’re inactive. In essence, the system will know that basically something has happened, and it will start distributing the funds as per your predesigned destinations, and decision of distribution. That’s the way it works. So obviously, it’s a very big question because the blockchain is a bubble, and we need to connect real world and the blockchain to know when the condition was met.

So right now, it’s time-based. But I’m fully aware that it’s not perfect. Right. We would want to have something that is more accurate. One of the things that the smart transaction allows us to do is to condition something based on NFTs. Now I want your audience and maybe yourself, Sean, to forget everything you know about NFTs, okay? Because in my humble opinion, the applications of NFTs as Bored Apes and cool JPEGs that you would sell for a million dollars are sub optimal, let’s put it mildly. Okay?

NFTs is an amazing technology, and I think that it will design the way that we handle our finance and many different things in the future. So, to give you a very specific example, I know that several companies are working with a few US states and obviously outside of the US and with some public organizations as well, like colleges and Ivy League universities on NFT-ing their diplomas, their certificates, and so on. And that’s not something that will happen in the far future. That’s something that will happen in the course of the next couple of years. So, we can expect that, for instance, the state of Pennsylvania will start issuing death certificates as NFTs. Maybe you’ll have to pay more, maybe you’ll have to opt in in some way. But it’s technologically, it’s possible. And I know that some states are already on their way of doing that.

Now, you can easily define in our system that once a person shows up and chose an NFT that was issued by a certain issuer which in this case would be, let’s say, a certain US State or certain European government. And once we see that the serial number of that NFT matches the Social Security number, then we’re releasing the money as per what the person has decided, the deceased person has decided, let’s say, years ago, and it will be fully automated. So, what a person has to do is to get the certificate, to send it to a specific address, or to present it in some way to the system. And once he does that, the money is released and basically, his loved ones will be able to get what they deserve.

Sean Weisbrot:

You were talking about this undo button in case it goes to the wrong wallet. I’ll give you an example. Let’s say, I want to give my brother some coins upon my death. But let’s say my brother dies at the same time with me. Let’s say we’re in a car crash together and the money to get sent to his wallet erroneously because he’s not alive to receive it. Is it possible to undo that?

Michael Pearl:

Just have to give a disclaimer, right? The system is at a very nascent point. And we realized that once you proceed and once you have more use cases, then those peculiar use cases and somewhat niche use cases arise. Those things happen. We realize that, and we understand that we’ll have to optimize the system to address more and more questions of that sort. But that’s not something that we’re doing at this point.

Now, it’s a very good question. First of all, if your brother not yours, let’s use a theoretical person. If the brother of the deceased basically is using our system, then the brother can also define an inheritance mechanism. And then if the money lands there, then he also can basically redistribute the money to his loved ones. And then the money will not be lost or will not be stuck. That’s one thing.

Second thing, yes, we can combine the undo button with the inheritance. But again, we have to, technologically, it’s possible, that’s something that we need to think through and need to figure out who will undo that and what will happen with the money. Because once you undo with the current system, once you undo a transaction, what happens is that the money goes back to the original sender, okay? Now, if the original sender is the deceased, and nobody has the private keys for his wallet because obviously he didn’t want to submit his private keys while he was alive. He just wanted to distribute the funds when he died. So basically, we’re going to square one, because the money will be stuck or lost or whatever.

So, again, there will be some more peculiar use cases where we’ll have to address them. By the way, I’m also not canceling the idea of combining this with the real-world tools, such as lawyers. I’m a lawyer myself. Again, nobody’s perfect. So, I realized that some people need to rely on lawyers still, even if we are in a decentralized environment. So, to give you an example, you can give an NFT to a lawyer whom you trust. Let’s say the deceased person has trusted, and the family trusts, someone who is a trustee, essentially. And then he can come and present the safety and basically say in this manner that the person has died and the money should be distributed. Again, the technology allows us to do many different things, and in the course of the next year, we will see how we facilitate that and how we allow our users to have more customizability. So, if they want to connect their lawyer or maybe some family member, that will be kind of the arbitrary, then definitely it is doable.

Sean Weisbrot:

I just thought of another interesting edge case. Let’s say someone names their spouse, and let’s say they see the will has somebody in there that they don’t like. So, maybe they decide to undo a transaction to them because they would rather nobody get that money, then that person gets some of the money. Is there a way to prevent them from, like, ignoring your last will and testament in that regard?

Michael Pearl:

The way that the system is designed right now is we want to give the deceased person, again, while it’s alive, obviously, 100% of control over what happens with this fund after he’s gone. So, with that respect, no, we will not give the trustee, the beneficiary, or however you want to call it the ability to intervene, because then basically, we’re nullifying the will of the deceased person.

Again, if someone wants that, if someone wants to have someone that will manage their estate, then it’s something that the technology allows. And if we see that there are enough usage for that, maybe we’ll create, like, a separate subproduct that will facilitate that. Again, it’s doable, the whole idea behind all the services that we’re working on is the possibility to fully customize the way that you handle your money while you’re alive, after you’re dead, to have full control over your money. So, it’s your call. If someone wants to trust a specific person and want that person to distribute their funds, then definitely we can allow that. It’s just a matter of the company deciding need to pursue that path, if there’s a market fit for us.

How Kirobo allows for easier transactions (23:03)

Sean Weisbrot:

So, you were talking earlier about making it so that someone could very easily set up one of these smart transaction systems in a few minutes. How exactly does that work? I do know that there’s, like, NFT generation engines, there’s smart contract generation engines. Obviously, people have come along and thought about how to make it easier, especially the layer-one user experience for blockchain has continued to be horrific for the last decade. So how does your system tackle that and make it easy for someone like my mom, who doesn’t know how to attach an image to an email to be able to handle something like this?

Michael Pearl:

So, first of all, I think that you raise some very good questions. So, we should start from differentiating us from different services that are maybe very good at what they do, but that’s not what we address. So, there are a bunch of solutions that allow you to create smart contracts in a more streamlined way. And first of all, for very specific and very simple use cases, you can pursue that path and you can use those services to create smart contracts and that will save you some time and some money. But eventually a smart contract, because of the complexity of it, because smart contract is not like, you cannot update it, like Web2 versions, okay?

For instance, the website that we’re now talking on podcast, I’m sure that if the product manager wants to do a small tweak to that system, he can do it in five minutes. Whereas with smart contracts, if you want to upgrade a smart contract, you need to do it all over again. You need to write the code, and you need to audit it. Audit is basically to see that there are no vulnerabilities in the code, and that you have the logic sustained, and you have to deploy it, meaning to upload this to the blockchain. So even if you save, like, at 10%, you still need to pay the remaining 90% in time and money and so on. So that’s not what we do. We understood that simplifying smart contract development is not something that will help us because it’s a lost war. Because smart contracts are what they are. Okay?

So, what we rated, we created another layer on top of smart contract, smart contracts that are taking existing smart contracts and enhancing them and combining different smart contracts in what? Brace yourself, the buzzword right now is composability. So that’s what the system allows you to do, to have composability in the way of money Legos, for instance. So, you can connect different protocols and you can do more with one single protocol, and you can do more by connecting different protocols.

Now let me give you a very specific example. Let’s say five years ago, crypto, or maybe a little bit more crypto, was all about buying-hold, people were, let’s say, buying bitcoin, holding to it. HODL-ing, yeah, and basically, saying this will go to the moon and I will sell it and we’ll become rich. While during the life cycle, the name of the game wasn’t just buying and holding or trading, it was about if you have five Ether, how do I make seven Ether out of it? And the way that you do that is you go and you go through some more or less sophisticated financial mechanisms and you basically do yield farming, which is basically gaining from interest from many different yield bearing mechanisms. Now, the guys that are doing, the guys and girls that are doing that are super sophisticated and trust me, those people are much younger than me and you. They have amazing ideas on how they do a flash loan here and they deposited the money there and they do Staking and they take the LP token, which is kind of like the IOU that the Staking contract gives you, and they put it elsewhere and they get interest from all the above. And eventually a bigger chunk of money lands in their wallet, safe and sound. Okay?

Obviously not always this works well, but the ones that know how to do it manage to make a lot of money during the life cycle. Now what they have to do is, first of all, they have to be hands on, they have to be in front of a computer. And 90% of them were not doing this for a living, they were doing other things. And they had to be in front of the computer and responding to the market and moving money from here to there. Everything in a manual way. So, we solved that problem by automating the process. But not only that, what happens if you go to sleep and the market changes and you’re not responding on time. So, we manage to automate the process. So basically, when you combine all those things, very easy and scalable development process, it’s not even development, it’s just putting Legos together and I’ll explain how it works in a second.

So, very simple building process, composability, meaning that you can connect several protocols, several services together and automation that you don’t even have to be in front of the computer. That gives you the full range of control over your funds. So, if you want to hedge against market fluctuations and you want to create a stop loss, you can do that. If you are tracking a specific NFT that you want to buy when it reaches a certain threshold, you can do that. And you can even limit this on time. You can limit this on gas price. Let’s say you want to do a transaction, but you want to do it only when the gas price is low. So, you can even do that. Full customization.

Now, just to rewind for a second the way that it will look, and we’re actually launching the beta closer to the end of September, very soon. The way that it would look is a very simple drag and drop a tool where you create if done conditions. So, you can say if Ether goes below 1000, then go on Uniswap and swap the Ether for USDC. Or you can turn it up a notch. You can say go to Uniswap, sushi swap, and don’t know some other decks, deck is decentralized exchange, and see where you get the best quote. So, you can even do like on spot or arbitrage to see where you get the best quote and basically to make more with your money. And again, this will be in a very simple drag and drop tool that once you compose the right mixture, you just set up a smart transaction and use it. Now if you have a great idea and this idea makes sense and it makes money, you can even publish this use case on our marketplace for other users that maybe are not that savvy. They can go and they can use your solution, and they will profit from it. And you will get royalties every time somebody uses the solution.

Future plans of Kirobo (30:29)

Sean Weisbrot:

And all of the things you’ve just described are going to be in this September launch?

Michael Pearl:

So, in this September launch, we’re launching the builders’ platform. This drag and drop tool that will allow people to customize their solutions. What we intend to do then, and we’re saying this humbly because we have what I believe is great tech, right? But there are a lot of smart people out there and again, most of them are much younger than me and they have great ideas. So, what we want to do is we want to go to this marketplace of ideas and to use crowd wisdom to create many different use cases. We’re going to do hackathons; we’re going to do face to face meetings with savvy traders and NFT people and get some ideas from them. And once we get enough ideas, we’re going to create several smart transactions and publish them on the marketplace. And then we’ll will launch the marketplace that will have a bevy of different opportunities and solutions for the end user. That’s basically the roadmap that we have right now.

Later on, we, God willing, when there’s traction and we gain a lot of users, we would want to open the floor for protocols to build on top of. So, if, for instance, Uniswap wants to opt in and wants to create a solution based on our technology, they will be able to do that, and then our community will benefit from that, and their community will benefit, and basically everyone’s happy. That’s the roadmap in a nutshell.

Sean Weisbrot:

I love partnerships and integrations. It’s very important, as you’re saying earlier, cross compatibility, this is the name of the game for making blockchain more relevant. Not just blockchain, but blockchains with each other, which has been an ongoing issue for a long time. So, I’m curious then. It sounds like you could say, hey, come here, because maybe you want to do the inheritance thing, but by the way, while you’re here, maybe you

don’t have time to trade, but you think you have some ideas. Why don’t you set up something so that you can actually grow the money in your wallet that you’re going to give away while you’re busy living life? Is that right?

Michael Pearl:

Yeah, you’re totally right. The idea and the vision is to have a very robust and a very comprehensive asset management system. Asset management sounds very boring, but in essence, it’s not for the rich people and for institutional bodies. It’s for every single person, moms and pops that want to manage their digital assets. And statistics show that a lot of people are holding crypto, especially in the States right now. And we just came back from Korea, and it’s an amazing market. There are so many users, so many crypto users there, and this thing will only continue to grow. So, we want to provide people with the ability to control their money. Whether it’s in the realms of keeping their money safe and secure inheritance, backup, the undo button and so on, or in the realms of making money and growing their money. And there are plenty of other ideas. And again, once we open the floor, we are meeting with people all day long.

And for instance, people from the gaming industry that have met with us told us, listen, this technology is amazing. We have so many use cases for Web3 gaming. Now, I don’t know anything about Web3 gaming, so once we open the floor, they will be able to come and to build on top of us and to create more use cases. And basically, then they will enhance the range of possibilities that our users will have. So, if someone opts in because of inheritance, as you said, but he also wants to hedge against the market fluctuations, so he uses the stop loss. But he also is a gamer, and he wants to have some sort of a solution for gaming, or maybe for the gaming economy. Everything can be combined in one single system that will help them do that.

Sean Weisbrot:

How do you, guys, plan on making money? Because I think one of the biggest problems, problems with a lot of businesses in Blockchain is that they generally don’t have a plan for how to make money. I have a sense of what you could be doing. I’m just curious. I want to hear from you guys how you plan on making money. Because if you do it right, it could be a huge money maker.

Michael Pearl:

The idea is to take a small fee from every transaction. Okay? Now, more elaborately, I will explain how it works. Okay? Once you create a transaction on the blockchain right now, let’s say, Sean, I want to send you, uh, $1,000 in USDC. I signed the transaction, and then I transmit it to the blockchain, meaning I execute it and make it happen, okay? Whereas we’re talking about future transactions, all the things that I mentioned, whether it’s inheritance that can happen in, I don’t know, 10, 5, 15, 20 years, or a stop loss that can be triggered in five days. All those transactions are future transactions, meaning that they are signed right now by the user, but they are not transmitted to the blockchain. So once the condition is met, once the stop loss has been triggered, once, unfortunately, the person died, and the inheritance mechanism understands that the person is no longer here, someone needs to execute this transaction, right? Only logical. So, this someone can be curable, but we don’t want you to take part in that, because, as you said, we can decide not to do that, right? Or a court can order us not to do that, and then we’re not fully decentralized.

So, the idea is that all those different transactions will be put in a log that will be open to the public. Obviously not the details of the transactions, but just the mere fact that there is a transaction that is waiting the condition to be met. And when the condition is met, then, boom, you can trigger the transaction. And then every person can go and can trigger this transaction. But this person will not do that for free, because, first of all, he will bear the gas fee, because he’s activating the transaction. And also, this person is doing the work of sitting in front of a computer and activating those transactions. So, we had to find a mechanism that will incentivize and basically will also reimburse those nice and shiny armor that are helping you out when you need them. So, what you do is, as a user, when you create a smart transaction, it doesn’t matter which one is it stop loss, inheritance, and so on. You pay a certain amount in our token in Kiboro, you deposit that amount, and this amount is preserved as the reward mechanism to that person that will activate the transaction.

Now, once the transaction is activated, this activator, which is, if you think of it, it’s kind of like a blockchain inside the blockchain. It’s kind of like a minor, okay? This person receives the reward and the reimbursement, and a small portion of the money that you deposited goes to Kirobo. And if it was built by, as I told you earlier, a builder, a person that had a great idea and published this on the marketplace, he also got a cut as royalty.

Sean Weisbrot:

Why not just have a SaaS model? Why not just have people pay you every month to be allowed to use the service and not have a blockchain with a coin? Why do you need to have the coin?

Michael Pearl:

We want to have a system that is fully decentralized, and someone needs to work here, someone needs to activate those transactions. And God willing, once the system scales, we will have thousands of transactions per day with many different use cases. So, this someone, first of all, is paying a price. He is bearing the price of the gas fee, and he needs to be reimbursed. Second, he needs to be incentivized. And also, we want to incentivize the other players in the ecosystem, right? The builders and the developers and so on. So, everyone needs to get a cut. And as you said, we need to have a business model that Kirobo will also benefit from. So, in order to create this internal economy, we need to have a token that will basically be the fuel that will power the engine, okay? Because there needs to be if you pay a certain fee, I have no way to know of knowing which transactions you will have, how many transactions, how complex they will be, when they will be activated. So, I cannot even calculate the gas fee. These things need to be on a per transaction basis, and they need to be calculated right, so that everyone is, first of all, happy, and second, that everyone is not losing money, but earning money from the process. Hence, the idea of a token.

As I told you earlier, it’s kind of a blockchain inside the blockchain. It’s not just a simple depth. It’s a whole ecosystem with activators, with builders, with developers, with a platform that will allow the end user to use it. So, you need to have an internal economy, by the same token, pun intended, as you need to have a coin on Ethereum or on Polygon.

Sean Weisbrot:

Is you’re talking economics stable, inflationary, or deflationary. I know I’m going really technical here, but, like I said, I’ve spoken to so many companies and so many projects over the years, and often times their economics don’t make sense. So, I’m just curious how you guys think about it.

Michael Pearl:

The tokens have already been minted, so we don’t do, and I don’t think that we will do, maybe something will change in the future. Again, we also intend to have some sort of a hybrid DAO mechanism that will allow the users to decide what they want to do with the token and with the system. But at the time, we don’t have a burning mechanism and we’re not minting any more coins, so we’re not playing the inflationary deflationary game. Okay?

Now, the token is intended to fuel the system and we’re very cautious and very responsible with the Token, okay? Meaning that we’re not doing any sudden moves and we’re not putting too much power in hands of specific people that can affect the price of the token. Having said all that, it is a token, right? So, nobody knows what’s going to happen to it. It’s a market affected. And by the way, just as a technical mechanism, we’re also internalizing this fact into the system. Because let’s say if you paid a certain amount with the token, and then the token went up or down, then obviously, we need to address that as well, because you want your transaction, your smart transaction to be executed and we want everyone to be incentivized and reimbursed, and we need to make sure that it happened. It’s a very complex mechanism, but we’re making sure that it will work. But it is a challenge. You’re right.

Follow up with Michael (42:08)

Sean Weisbrot:

All right, great, thank you, Michael. How can people follow up with you?

Michael Pearl:

Okay, so, first of all, just to let you know, we have an internal video team who’s doing a tremendous job. We have a lot of tutorials, funny commercials, educational videos. So, look us up on YouTube. We have a very big community on Discord, which is probably the best place to go and ask questions. We have very professional mods there that can follow up with us.

We have AMAs every couple of weeks. We have one this Sunday. I don’t know if this will be broadcasted, but we have one coming up soon. They can go to our website, Kirobo.io, Twitter, Telegram, whatever. LinkedIn.

Sean Weisbrot:

All right. Thank you, Michael. So, I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you know anyone that’s interested in this kind of technology, especially around the inheritance side, which is what I’m personally curious in, then definitely let other people know, so they can listen to this episode and follow up with Michael and his team to know more. Don’t forget that entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint. And it doesn’t matter how much money you make because you can’t take it with you when you’re you die. So make sure that you protect it and protect your family at the same time. Thank you, Michael.