Talking DeFi with COO of FCF Pay Joe Parkin
33m | May 25, 2022Episode Summary:
In this episode of the Crypto Breakdown, I talk to COO of FCF Pay Joe Parkin about:
- Revenue Sharing Tokens
- Crypto Poker
- How to do your own due diligence
Guest:
Joe Parkin
COO of FCF Pay
Telegram: @joeeoj
Host:
Joe Dewitt Follow at: https://twitter.com/metabitz
Subscribe to our Benzinga Crypto Youtube Channel
Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.
Questions? Ask at joedewitt@benzinga.com and we will answer!
Hey there everybody happy Wednesday. And welcome back to another episode of the crypto breakdown. My name is Joe Dewitt, and today with me, I have a COO over at FCF pay, Joe Parkin, Joe, how are we doing to start things off? For some listeners out there who may not be familiar with the platform, if you want to just go ahead and talk about what FCF pay actually is.
So fcf pay is a crypto payment gateway. In the case of e-commerce we take the. We work in a similar kind of way to pay panel Stripe. However, we're slightly different in that we can be integrated with point of sale terminals in brick and mortar stores, or also, and do you do crypto payments and Fiat payments, or are you sticking with crypto payments at the moment?
Or how does that work? The core products CFP is crypto. However as FCFA is built with an API that can connect to anything We have a crypto on-ramp at the beginning and off-ramp at the other end. So although we are processing crypto, we do offer integrated systems for people to be able to use their credit cards, to buy crypto and send it directly to the merchant.
Okay, cool. And for the merchant to off-ramp directly to their. Bank account. We're currently doing this with . We have a partnership with them. They're one of the biggest players in the feared cryptocurrency space, working this with the larger exchanges. And I'm not too familiar with the FCF token. So how does that work?
Is there any like unique utility with it, or if you wanna talk about the dividends or how those come into play? So the unique thing about our token is that it's a revenue sharing. It's not a utility token as such, because it doesn't actually do anything within the system. Its sole function is to distribute dividends to its holders.
So we have 10% to economics on buys and sells. Half of that is distributed as BNB dividends amongst holders. And then also two thirds of every transaction fee through. MTFP also goes back to the community to hold it. FCF token in the form of one third, directly as evidence and one third as a, an automated buy back in burn.
Cool. Is it available on other trading platforms or is it strictly through MTFA? They're actually. It's on pancake swap so you can buy it by its own pancreas. Awesome. Exactly. But also on L bang can hot bits as well. We're our roadmap includes larger exchanges further down the line.
However, not very much further down the line. However, to be perfectly honest, the sensible thing to do is to hold a in, in a wallet, in a defy wallet, because that way you get your. Exactly. It would be a shame to probably on a, an exchange. Yeah, exactly. And then you're not receiving that that, that dividend payment.
Exactly. Moving down the road, does FCF have any sort of plans to pivot or move into a sort of an NFT project or any sort of NFT utility down the road? Are you just sticking with the way things are now? Or has that been in the talks a little bit? We actually don't really have.
Really? Yes. We have a project called French fellas. They are 2000 hand drawn French bulldogs and they. They actually have a utility, which is coming in into play within a few weeks at most, which is, which ties into another project that we have, which is FCF poker soon to become FCF casino.
So a full web three poker room, which is life. You can go to FCF, polka.com right now and play we process the payments through FEFP in order to buy you. To buy your poker chips which by the way, I didn't mention the fact that FCF pay is multi chain where we can process payments from just about every 10 you can imagine and tokens they're off.
So yeah part of the rake from FCF poker goes to French filler, French fillers. Awesome. And the French fellows. Are they on the Ethereum network or Selana or which networks? Yeah, the tokens on BSC. Okay. However we opted to we opted to launch the because that's where the majority of exactly.
Yeah. Yeah. I see the investors and the good projects over on the Ethereum. No. For now, at least for the time being yeah. Moving forward to onboarding kind of new investors into crypto and getting away from traditional finance into defy. Is there anything that comes to your head when thinking about how maybe some best ways for people like us to onboard new people into crypto or defy?
One of the things that comes hand-in-hand with doing what we're doing, which is. Forming a bridge between traditional commerce and the crypto sphere is education. By speaking to companies about, so business owners about using FCF pay to process crypto payments we also educate them about crypto as a whole, and they very often end up getting interested in investing in.
In encrypt. So once they realize that it's not as scary and underground as they think it's because often mainstream media does tend to push it one way or the other. Yeah. It makes it look bad. In fact I just got off a call four minutes before I got something with you, but it was about local economic redevelopment and things like this.
And. The conversation went from not really understanding what crypto is to asking how they can invest. Once they start to understand it better. They realize that it's just digital money and it's the blockchain is a way of having it's as simple as a way of having one copy of a disallowed asset.
Exactly. And then you transfer it from one person to another, and then that list is shared on lots of computers in the same way as. As in web servers have multiple copies of the same all around the world to make it work better. Yeah. And what you said earlier, like taking, getting rid of that fear or that that's scary aspect of crypto where if you don't necessarily have that knowledge and you're not quite aware of, these assets and what they really do, it seems really scary at first.
And it's hard to think about investing in it. And once you have someone, break it down in a simplistic way, it's. It becomes a lot more user-friendly because like you said, it's simplicity and it's in its most simple form. It is a single ownership of a digital asset and it's, once people start to understand it, it's oh, you know what?
That makes sense. I can get behind that exactly. Start to, they start to even understand some of the more. What could be seen as more complex ideas of using FTEs for like the deeds of property or something? It sounds insane. Oh, hang on. No, that's much easier than going down to an office and signing and stamping a piece of paper and filing.
Yup. Yup. And Mo a lot of the people that I interviewed too, they say a lot of the same thing, like a lot of the CEOs or CEOs, and they're talking about all these different dynamic aspects of NFTs and how we can use them in the future. And any other person who's not really in this space, you couldn't really comprehend using an NFT or, nonrefundable token in that.
But, we're looking at it. We're just scratching the surface at this utility and it's yeah. It's going to be around for quite some time. Crazy. Th these people, I was just speaking to that after a while they said speaking about FCF token, they said they were like, so basically it's stocks.
I said no, it's not stock. It's better than stocks because you get your dividends every 24 hours. You can decide to increase or decrease your position at any time of the day, any day of the year any time own, you can see aspect, you don't get that with stocks, but we kind of form a w in our cases, the FCF family, and it's a genuine community and whatever everybody gets behind this, and you can information flows.
More freely. You can find out about what's going on in real time, which you don't get when you're investing in the stock market. Yeah. That is absolutely one of the best things in crypto too. Is the community just no matter where you are, where wherever you're investing, if you're in the space, you are going to be a part of some community and it's for the most part.
It's usually pretty awesome. Yeah. That's the thing that today, what I'm most excited today was the most excited about is. Something that we're planning to do with our donation widget because using the community aspect of cretae our slogan is empowering cripsy, and we want to bring the whole crypto sphere together to, to take crypto into the mainstream.
And one of the ways we're going to be doing that is by trying to get everybody gets everybody together to back good causes. How we're not just our community, we're an amazing community and makes them, do some good in the world. And we've got brilliant project going on which I'll send you information about as soon as I can.
I would love to. Yeah. I'd love to look into that a little bit. It's going to be a big one. That's awesome. Finally, this is my last question. This is one I like to ask everyone at the end of our interviews. So my favorite one to ask personally for you, I just want to know how you got introduced or how you started into the world.
Yeah, I'm just a general purpose nerd. I'm a nerd about everything, everything I learned about, then I have to dive into it as deeply as possible. Weirdly I learned about blockchain many years ago. But I didn't invest. I I found it interesting. I started up, started off by thinking about these kinds of deeper uses for it about.
Now how you could use it for tracking complex data flows and things like this. I was thinking about it and for such a long time, I'm thinking about what it could mean for the world economy. If we were to create a blockchain based economy with peer to peer. Transactions, et cetera, but I was so busy thinking about it and doing other things.
I know I didn't invest. I only started investing like two, three about two and a half years ago. But when I do something, I go all in. So then obviously, then I quite quickly I found that I had a knack for it. And also that I'm quite good at finding good projects and actually starting FCF as an investor.
And then. It goes on very well with John the founder and you know what, come on board. And here I am, because one of the things is that both John and myself, we were business people we've both run businesses before this. John didn't. John had never had any another crypto project before he got into into starting.
Partly because apart from his vision to take her to payments to the mainstream, it was also because he was fed up for getting rubbed.
He was going in. If I make a project, I can't run myself as exactly. In a way he has shrugged himself because he's invested a lot of his own money into it. That's how that works w we can work on rewriting. Yeah, so going forward. So the concept of re drugging or something, which I find funny, but that's one of the things that people that scares people about crypto is getting bragged.
And so everybody should remember, that's only going to happen to you if you're being greedy. Exactly.
Oh. And people do not do their research. They really do not. It's. As we like to say here, as we like to say here on crypto breakdown, never financial advice, always do your own research, but actually do your own research, doing your own research. Isn't saying, do you have a, do you have an audit?
Yes. Are you yes. I'm going to buy. That's what they do, honestly, but then on the other hand, there'll be. There are projects which do end up setting out to be a scam or just having nothing behind them whatsoever beyond the logo and the promise of a staking platform, for example, or the promise of a swap, the promise of community.
Yeah. But then but then they're getting hundreds of millions of dollars, mark. Yeah. Whereas our project and other projects that are actually doing something remarkable often take a lot longer to get going. I have to say our project had a huge hype run-up before products were built. And now we're coasting along at the moment while we're finishing product development and everything else and waiting to announce some of the big names that we've got.
We've got some board. It's amazing that before we proved that we can do what we've done. There was more excitement than having actually done it. There's some certain things that are somewhat confusing. Yep. I swear that is a big thing in crypto. When you have promises or you it's before a project launches or a project is being built.
People always like it more than when a project actually delivers on the utility that they say they will. That's when, people were kinda like. I'll go find something else. And also you have that aspect of culture to really, you could build a project with so much utility that does so much good.
If it doesn't gain traction amongst, the right investors or it doesn't sit right with the, crypto traders or NFT traders. It's not going to get that traction that these other projects will. And it's, that's the crazy part is that it's so much culture involved in these trading of NFTs.
Absolutely. I've got to the stage that I can look at a chart and kind of almost here. Yeah. Oh, and then it's got this group psychology of it's fascinating. It's fascinating to watch, but but th the long-term way to wait to make money and critters to do your research. That's how you make money. You find a good sort of project and you just, or some good sort of projects, and then you stick to them and you keep up to date.
It's not, if you're lazy about. Like with anything, if you're not going to make a good living, if you're lazy, let's say, Hey man, you might get lucky. You might win a lottery. But generally speaking, your chances of success are much higher. If you actually put the hours in, go and listen to the AMS, go read the white paper and the news and the updates, the roadmap, if it gets.
I'm going to back off of that and say, it's not even enough to just do your own research. You have to continue doing your own research. You have to, you have to look at what's happening currently in the project and how they're integrating with other things and whatnot. Yeah. It doesn't stop.
That's the thing that is hard to understand is it's always got to keep we've we, we finished our 2022 roadmap and we just. We're nearly finished. So we focused a new one, which covers the next 12 to 18 months. And we've already in the first week or two weeks of publishing that we've already announced a couple of things with, for example Zapier, let's say we've got Zapier and make.com integrations.
Already done the roadmap. Wow. That's just me. And there's something else coming out, which isn't on the roadmap as well. Not yet. Not yet. It's something related to the charity thing. Okay. All right. Fair enough. Fair enough. It was however, a lot of this people that keep up to date with ni. Would have seen some rumblings on social media.
She knew in one hand and Some things that I've said I'm really bad at keeping my mouth closed. John, the CEO is even worse than me. He'll just be like, in fact that's why one of the reasons we publish a roadmap for the next 18 months just to get it out there. We're all rubbish keeping secrets. So let's just but I've already let loose some information on the telegram group about some of the public figures involved with. With the charity thing. Hint, hint, if you want to hear here's some more FCF news, go join their community, get on their telegram you on their discord came from you. I've said it sounds a lot more credible.
We're always in there. We're always active. We're always happy to answer questions, but not just the team, but the community are incredibly well-informed we have we have a thing called the panic filter on the telegram group. If people say the word panic, then it brings up a message reminding people to keep calm that cryptos.
And just after we had this big hype runoff and then the, correction afterwards, people made ridiculous amounts of profit. It went from the token was launched on the 20 on the 19th of August last year. It went from 20 K up to over 70 million. You can imagine the amount of profit people we've made.
So obviously it has to correct. We're currently sitting around five, okay. Five, 5 million, but even twins to 5 million, which is one another thing. Advice to people that get into crypto don't look at what the peak was, look at where you were and where you are now. If you've gone up 50 times and then you're sitting at 20.
You didn't lose 30 times you meet people and unrealized gains on not gains unrealized losses, not losses people. Don't get this one either. Anyhow, what am I talking about? That's the beauty of the podcast, the panic filter. We haven't yet. I realized the other day that has been exactly no panic during this.
You know what people call crypto crash. Yeah. Start of the bear market or whatever. Yeah, everyone's fine. Everyone's pretty. I think for most people, I think for a lot of traders, especially myself included, it did start to feel a little unnatural at a point. When you're talking, soup, when staple center is getting bought out by, crypto.com and we got crypto.com arena and Sophie arena and everything, like it's kinda, it kinda felt like we were getting into a place where crypto was just everywhere.
It was every Superbowl commercial. We were reaching a point of, so I think for a lot of traders or people that have been around for awhile felt a little natural to be where we are right now. But that doesn't mean it's not scary, but yeah, I definitely agree. I don't think there's as much panic as you would expect.
Really? No, I think like back in 2017, I feel like a lot worse or even the COVID I think assuming that potentially there are certain people that may not have, sorry. There are some conspiracy theories out there that there's market manipulation is what I'm trying to say. Now, if that would be true, then that could be triggered by having a crypto com and things up on sports stadiums.
And they could say, oh, this is getting a bit hard. I think I might sell off a load of this. Definitely could potentially just, I don't want to get into that kind of thing. I think there's always there's always an element. There's a grain of truth in any, anything. However, the crypto community now has the confidence that this is the time to buy more.
It's fine. Just normal. Normal folks are just happy to keep growing the bucks because everybody knows where we're going well, and it's that aspect of, the technology isn't going anywhere. It's not that developers are gonna stop building, it just because the, these present price of crypto is going down, it doesn't mean that any of these projects are gonna stagnate or we're not going to start building even more.
So that's the aspect you got to look at. It is there's gonna be more building probably in a time like this, and you'll have that rebound and, however long. Your average traders starts being like all this building was here the whole time. I'm glad at the moment that things are quiet because it means we can get on with our work without the tokens not pumping.
It means that we're, we can get on with building stuff a little bit, because otherwise all the adrenaline's going and know, but this is what, this is much more productive at the moment. We're just good. Fun. There's no way, like another indication that things are not going anywhere is that we in the payment space, we are nonstop this morning.
And I finished finished up a proposal for a huge real estate development company in Dubai. This afternoon I've been speaking to people in the public's fear regarding past, past. Speaking about was regarding regulatory conditions in order to allow blockchain based businesses to flourish.
We are in contact with huge payment service providers. So there's so much is unbelievable. And that's. No before, before the start of the next boardroom. Now, once that starts picking up the it's just going to, it's going to be the absolute ridiculous, which is why we're busy building.
Yes. You've got to build now. You got to build now while you can. Absolutely. Now you can't think that the crypto is going anywhere when the news is like right now, if. Literally, this is a real news story I saw on the BBC news was pub in Birmingham, except stowage going for payment. This is only about three months ago.
I saw this news story. Yeah, that's one company, one small business, small local business accepting one cryptocurrency. And it's on the BBC news. What are the most famous news outlets on the planet? Now it's gone up a little bit in terms of, it will be news about Gucci or what was said. There was another one and I could have a fashion brand now accepts it's serum, crate, Ethereum, and Bitcoin as payment in there because people like hanging out for half an hour until your payments cleared in order to back.
But it's all over the news, but mainstream news. I'm talking to household. I'm really watching my word sometimes, but I took it to household brand companies about rolling out critic payments. And they want to do it for marketing purposes to start with, which tells you exactly that crypto payment is in the zeitgeists as part of the fabric of society.
The moment people are people generally expected to happen and people that start doing it now are seen as innovators. Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, we're in the right space. I'm trying to think of that for a while that, these bigger companies are going to start to slowly, except a few larger blue-chip cryptos and then all the smaller companies all these big fortune 500 companies and be like, Hey they're accepting crypto and they're making a lot of money. We have to do it too. If it's popular and we're going to stay afloat and whatnot. And then that's kinda how it all starts because you got to adapt in order to survive.
And people love crypto there's two over $2 trillion worth of value increases. And companies can make a choice, whether they want to accept some of it or not.
Why would you not? I know it makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. And then we're doing things to make it as easy as possible as well. So with the on-ramping and off ramping and all of this stuff the, our API connecting to to accounting systems, to billing systems, invoicing. Et cetera, et cetera.
We've even built a system with multiple user types and what it's nearly it's not live yet, but it will be coming out soon. I can talk about everything though, cause it's all on the roadmap. So we're, we've got multiple different user types and Kind of agent accounts and sub-accounts allowing companies to build kind of complex payment flows, like automatic payment of commissions to salespeople or having certain one type of account for somebody that works as a cashier.
And then you'd say you wouldn't say cashier would use a teller at checkout.
So I'm going to check out mine wouldn't have access to withdraw funds, for example. So that's definitely there. So we're building all these things in or another. Another case would be like a marketplace type type website where you have multiple vendors and they sell their things. And then the website takes a commission while we were building things into the platform.
So that, that can all be processed automatically. And then. And then people can choose to transfer the money out individually. Each one of them, wherever they are, they can transfer it out as critique or they can offer amp. But as our off-ramp is through third parties they would offer. Via a local bank.
Okay. If you see what's the mean, and we're even at the moment we have queen of five, but we're speaking to a multitude of other on-ramps and off-ramps players, meaning that people will be able to choose which one works best for where they are. They can get the best deal for them. So know, imagine that, everything just being done, all the money gets sent off everywhere, and then each person just claims their parts of it.
However they choose to claim it. Flowing funds. That's just that's good for the economy as a whole know. That's awesome. That sounds like there's a lot of stuff. A lot of exciting stuff over at FCFA. We're gonna have to check out. Yes, I do. I think you should definitely check it out. Yeah, absolutely.
For any other listeners that want to out there Joe, what is the best way to, to join your guys' community? Would you say for any listeners out there that may want to get involved in any telegram or discord? I would say our Twitter accounts are very active the main ones are FCF pay and the other one is FCF BSC.
If you search for friends, connection, finance, or CF, you'll find it or FCFA hashtag and then we're on telegram. That's where we live on telegram basically. There's that? There's somebody there pretty much 24, 24 7. And I would also say it's a. Try FCF poker. If you have crypto and you like poker, it's the place to go.
We actually have some tournament's going on. We have one this weekend. I might have to check that out myself. I didn't know. That was the part of the gig. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah. It's fun. Let me know. We'll speak. I'll I'll have to get that. What we have this weekend, or we have a bouncy hunt, so we've put a bouncy on our CEO's head.
So whoever eliminates them, gets an extra prize. And we have a pro poker playing streamer called. Who was in our tournament last week and he's also got a bounty on his head because he, oh, that's awesome. Wow. We're going to be doing some great stuff over there. We're going to do into a project tournament.
So like we're going to do FCF versus Crock-Pot who are one of our partners or she, but you were against. Yeah, they can send in a representative into the lonely people. We'll try to make it says only tokens that we have listed on FCFA. That's another thing, if there are other crypto projects out there, get in touch with us because there's always something we can do to collaborate.
So that could be listing on, by listing a token on FCFA that makes you, that makes your token usable currency that people. Used to buy and sell stuff, all services. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's probably all the time we have today, Joe. Thank you so much for coming on the show, man.
I had a great talk with you. Likewise. Thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure speaking to another joke. It is for all the listeners out there you heard Joe, you can go follow them on Twitter at FTF pay or FCF BSE. Was it? Yes. Correct. Joe you have a great day, man. Thanks again, to be on the show quickly. I just want to say that this is not financial advice.
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