The supply chain aspect of blockchain may not be the sexiest of them all, but it might be the most memorable one. Stephan Nilsson acknowledges this rarely discussed fact, serving as the main driver for him to start his company, UNISOT. He joins Jeff Kelley, Eathan Janney, and Josh Kriger to talk about the story behind the first enterprise public blockchain solution in the world. Stephan explains how they help make supply chains more transparent, efficient, and sustainable through a centralized data system with zero barrier to entry. For this episode’s Hot Topics, they talk about Moonbirds partnership with Hollywood talent agent UTA and Logan Paul’s recent mess with CryptoZoo NFT project, which allegedly turned out to be a scam.
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Stephan Nilsson Of UNISOT - The Supply Chain Sustainability Company Utilizing Blockchain, Plus: Moonbirds Signs With Hollywood Talent Agents UTA, Logan Paul's Cryptozoo Mess, And More...
Hi. This is Stephan Nilsson of UNISOT, the revolutionary Web3 supply chain sustainability platform. I'm on the show that brings you all the best intel of the blockchain revolution. Keep reading.
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Stay tuned to this episode to learn why the supply chain on the blockchain may not be sexy, but it might be the most memorable element of blockchain out there now.
Also, how our guest knows for certain who Satoshi Nakamoto is.
How Moonbirds is going Hollywood by signing with a world-class talent agency. All this and more on this episode.
Finally, NFT LA 2022 was a blast. It was also a blast off in a giant plume of bright burning rocket fuel Web3, NFTs, blockchain, decentralization, and a sweet of immersive new tech developments that have exploded onto the canvas of life. Outer Edge is the theme of this year's event dedicated to those of you building with us at the outer edges, making the future happen.
The community-centric gathering returns to Los Angeles from March 20th to the 23rd, 2024 to uplift creators and technologists through interactive experiences. There will be a wide variety of discussions and presentations and entertaining surprises that transport participants to the outer edge of what's possible when we co-create a new paradigm. Embracing the decentralized web, artificial intelligence, extended reality, and more. To register to attend or learn how to co-create an experience on the outer edge, head over to OuterEdge.live. The event is being organized by the Edge Of company and us founders of the Edge of NFT show.
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This episode features Stephan Nilsson, Cofounder and CEO of UNISOT, the first enterprise public blockchain solution that makes supply chains more transparent, efficient, and sustainable through global traceability. Stephan has 30 years of professional and international IT experience, 20 years of technical SAP experience, and 5 years of experience as a Mechanical Automation Engineer and Technical Instructor.
UNISOT is a revolutionary Web3 supply chain sustainability platform, built on over 30 years of experience from enterprise business integrations aiming to change the way global supply chains operate. It emerged from the well-established business processes in enterprise resource planning systems like SAP and is revolutionizing the field. Stephan, it's a pleasure to have you here on the show for this special sponsored episode. Welcome.
Thank you very much. Looking forward to having a chat with you guys and talking about NFTs.
You guys are helping leverage these P2P blockchain benefits and making services more traceable. Can you explain exactly how that works and how it came into being?
I don't have 30-plus, 20-plus, or 5. I think I started working in the ‘80s, so I have many years of experience. I'm not 100 years old yet. For the last several years, I’ve been working as an SAP Integration Architect. SAP is the biggest ERP backend system that all big companies are using. I was then working on building interfaces between companies that have SAP for their customers and clients and suppliers and other partners in the supply chain.
I have always been working with this integration one way or another and I realized that after a couple of years in that profession, I came back to the same customers over and over again to rebuild the interface because they have changed the supplier or they have changed the distribution partner or something. I have to go in there again, design a new interface, test firewalls, permissions, and all of this. That could take from a couple of weeks to a couple of months, very expensive, time-consuming, and unsecured.
What that leads to is that companies now are not exchanging as much information as they could. It's not like we humans. We can use Facebook, Twitter, Google, and all of that and exchange tons of information back and forth. Companies do that. They need secure communication. I thought that there must be a better way than to build point-to-point interfaces between systems.
I read this white paper from a strange guy called Satoshi Nakamoto about Bitcoin and blockchain and I got this blow-my-mind event that what if we could use this decentralized blockchain as a global data layer for every company in global supply chains where they can connect without having to ask permission to anyone but connect to this data layer and exchange information on that?
Back in 2014, I got an opportunity for a new job in Norway. I'm from Sweden myself and got this opportunity for a job in Norway. When I went to an interview for this job here, I was talking a lot about how I wanted to integrate this SAP system with the public blockchain and they had no idea what blockchain was and needed this SAP or anyone else more or less.
I got a job. I took the family, moved to Norway, and started working on a proof of concept where I built a vending machine home in my garage here, a wooden box with a Raspberry Pi computer on it, a touchscreen, and two servers so I could pay with Bitcoin to that machine. I got a box of sweets out. The interesting thing was I had also built a module inside of SAP that was connecting to the blockchain and monitoring.
When I paid for this machine with a Bitcoin, I got the box of sweets out, but then SAP created a sales order and SAP also kept track of the magazine level in that vending machine. When the magazine went to empty, SAP created a replenishment order. By doing that, I proved to myself that I could integrate this super-decentralized SAP system with this super-decentralized blockchain.
I worked on that for a couple of years in my free time and holidays and so on. After a while, I realized that I have a solution here. I have something I can go to market with. I quit my job at Ernst & Young and got some funding and built a team and then we built this platform that is then called UNISOT. UNISOT is short for Universal Source Of Truth. It's a grand name, but we see this public blockchain as the universal source of truth that every company can use.
We work like you have an internet service provider where you can connect to the internet. We are more like a blockchain service provider where we can connect companies, business systems, production systems, or accounting systems to this public blockchain. This is how we started and that's now what we are providing in this. I can keep it short here and then you have more questions.
It's impressive. I can imagine your neighbors coming over and saying, “You built the machine. You can get it out. You don't have to pay Bitcoin for your thing.” Meanwhile, you're revolutionizing supply chain management. I'm also curious from the perspective of fun with the project. Did you have raspberry pies in there as the actual sweet that you can eat?
I get that misunderstanding sometimes. No, it was a Raspberry Pi computer. It was a small box of sweets.
That is impressive and fun. I wish you were my neighbor.
The first time I was able to, I was sitting on my desk having all this Raspberry Pi computer connected to some smaller servers and stuff. When I then made a Bitcoin payment, waited two seconds, and then suddenly, my server was moving and like, “It works.” Connecting that, building the module in SAP, and getting that to get work together. Now I had this SAP, I had a vending machine that I called an autonomous machine and a blockchain and to get all of that work was mind-blowing time for me, which now has resulted in the three companies that you see there.
This is one of those use cases we like to talk about where we say, “There are so many cool things happening on the blockchain,” and it's not a sexy one. It's not the one that's going to get the glitz and glamor.
I think it's sexy.
It's not the one that they're going to cover in the press normally, but it's one of the best use cases.
It's a little bit, not my problem, but you get so much press for all of these Bored Monkeys and that stuff. Here I'm working and I have the world-revolutionizing thing that is helping the world to make a supply chain more sufficient or efficient and nobody talks about it.
We do it on the show here or there. We do appreciate that. We did try to elevate and of course, we're happy to talk to you. There's one part of your vision here that we want to dive into a little bit more. That's the idea of this being a zero barrier to entry. What does that mean to you and how will that impact the future of your work?
Since I worked as this integration architect helping the company to integrate, I realized that we have to make a system that is very easy and cost-efficient to connect to. Normal companies are not interested in putting up a node, running a node, or putting together a consortium with other companies, and trying to decide about a consensus mechanism. They don't care about that. They have a problem that they need to solve their efficiency in the supply chain or the food or product security. They don't care about that.
What we mean by this zero barrier of entry is that it should be super simple, quick, and cheap to start connecting your system to the blockchain. We have a plugin for SAP. Since I started building this in SAP, now I have taken out the main system. That's now a system by itself. I still have this module in SAP. When we come to a customer who has an SAP system, we say, “Here's a plugin. Plug it into your system. Now you're connected to the blockchain. Done.” It's done in a couple of hours and then we can extend on what functionality and so they want to use and how they want to exchange information with other companies.
Making it easy. The easy button.
A plugin. Here you are. You're done.
What tools does UNISOT use to offer access to a reliable and secure universal source of truth so that all parties can tap into that and handle the challenges?
As I said, regarding the plugin that we have for SAP, we also started working on a plugin for Microsoft and we realized that we cannot build a plugin for all systems. That's our goal to have plugins for every single system out there, but that's going to take too long. We are looking for consulting partners who are already working with Oracle or some other system that our customers are using and build these plugins together with them.
We have an API so a company can connect with the API. We are selling the services either as software as a service or a platform as a service, whether they connect to the backend API. We also have an SDK the company can use to connect our system to the blockchain. We have an IPA with a number of blockchain functionalities where we then can create what we call smart digital twins, which is NFT technology but maybe a more advanced way.
Let's talk about that a little bit. We've heard the phrase digital twins used here or there in lieu of NFTs. How does that impact your work?
The digital twin is an old term that has been used in SAP and other big systems before in the construction industry and everything. You create a digital twin in a database or in our case with we create a digital twin of a physical object in the blockchain. We are using the public blockchain where we can use smart contracts. We call it smart digital twin because we can put some scripting in there. I don't like the term smart contract because they're not smart and they are not contracts. They're a script that executes some payments or you can run whole programs here.
We call them smart digital twins because we also trying to stay away from the NFT craze with the crypto industry. That's exactly a big problem for us when we go out to companies and we are describing it. Here, you have a system that can make your supply chain much more efficient. We are cost-efficient and so on. When they start asking us how we do this and we talk about blockchain and then it comes up directly, crypto, blockchain, NFT, and all these. We have to spend some time explaining what all of this is. It's not crypto, it's not NFTs, it's something else. That's why we call it smart digital twins instead of NFT because it raises so many questions.
It's fascinating and it's useful to have perspectives like this, whether we think it's sexy or not. I also find it exciting. I could imagine myself. I'm building this thing in my garage. They got the Raspberry Pi and everybody's like, “What's that?” The thing about it is that despite the controversies around blockchain, the reason you're selling this to people is not because of this blockchain, it's in spite of it. It’s because there's a business use case. People would not be paying for this unless it was saving them money, making their business more efficient, or generating their money.
For our customers, it doesn't matter if it's a blockchain or whatever we are using in the backend, but it's the characteristics and the functionality that this global public blockchain can provide. That was my dream. Before I thought about blockchain or so, I thought the dream scenario in an enterprise world with supply chains should be to have one central global database to that everybody is connected to. Everybody had the same data in this central database, but a lot of company has been trying to do that.
SAP, Microsoft, Oracle, IBM, everybody has been trying to build this centralized data system or database that everybody connects up to, but probably it hasn't worked for the last ten years. They did the same mistake with trying to implement private blockchains. Specifically, IBM now with TradeLens and their system as they're trying to put in a private blockchain.
I used to say that there is no such thing as a private blockchain. If you have a private blockchain, it is a replicated database with a fancy replication mechanism. It's replicated database point. A blockchain, per definition, has to be public. That was the invention that Satoshi Nakamoto presented to us to have this distributed database. It is public and that is the security that it is public that nobody can go back and change anything. There we are.
You're calling it a universal source of truth. That's why you can have that via the public nature of it. We have this term supply chain sustainability. I know about supply chains and sustainability, but what does this full term entail and how are you making use of it?
Often people think supply chain is some truck driving around, but supply chain is everything. It's everything you own. Your clothes, your electronics, your computer, your food, everything that you haven't grown in your garden or built in your garage comes from a supply chain. Someone produced it, someone transported, someone changed it, someone stored it, and someone sold it. There's always this huge supply chain of different companies working together.
Chain is also a bad word because it's not like one chain, it's a whole network, just like blockchain is a whole network. Every supply chain nowadays where we think from seed to plate or from fish to plate or the whole line has a global efficiency of less than 20%. Eighty percent is waste in any supply chain now. The best country in this is China. They are the best. They are on 20%. Second best countries, of course, Germany on 17%. The rest of the world's supply chains have less efficiency than 17%, which means 80%, 85%, 90% is waste in any supply chain. As we know with food, 50% of all food that is created is destroyed or not used.
Can we break this down a little bit? All of the places where you lose that efficiency, I'm thinking of that, but I'd love for you with more expertise in this. I'm thinking there's the packaging. I’ve got packaging and gas. I’ve got even the time and energy of someone putting it in the packaging and unloading it for the packaging. I shipped this head of broccoli and nobody's going to eat that stem. They're going to cut it off and throw it in the compost or whatever. Am I coming up with all the right ingredients there or are there others that I'm missing when we think about the number that goes into that efficiency?
If we're talking food, there is a lot of waste. As you said, in fruit, vegetables, and everything, the bad part is cut away or the whole thing is too bad, so they throw it away. We produce so much food that it's crazy. The biggest problem is that every company nowadays is very efficient by itself. Every company now is working with blinders. They only get information from their immediate customer supplier and they give information to the immediate customer.
Outside of that, they have no idea what's happening. It's a black universe out there. I can be a producer and I don't know what's going to hit me because I only get information from my immediate supplier. I don't have information from his suppliers. The same thing, if I can make a product that has super good quality, but I only have control of this quality until it leaves my warehouse when comes onto a truck and so on. I have no idea what happens there.
This is exactly where we can help with the global public blockchain. With this system, I can now, as a producer of a product, subscribe to information from a supplier and I can follow my product through this distribution and supply chain and so on. A good example is since we are based in Norway, we built this solution called Seafood Chain for the seafood industry. Let's say you can be a very good producer of Norwegian salmon. It can be the top quality in your warehouse. However, if you send it out with an airplane to Asia or somewhere in Japan or so maybe this cargo is standing in a hot airport for four hours and you have no idea and half of it is rotten when it comes to the destination.
By using our system, you can integrate an IOT sensor. We put the IOT sensors on the fish boxes, for example, which register the temperature all the way. Now a producer can have control of the temperature on the cargo the whole way, even when it has left their physical control. They still have digital control of that. What's missing now is communication between companies. That does not exist or it's very little. Blockchain can help with that.
What we provide with our solution with the public blockchain are two things. I mentioned this. The global data layer that blockchain is. The second thing we provide is the monetization of information. We can allow a company now to start selling and buying micro information for a microtransaction. They can start selling one temperature or one location or one weight for tenths of a cent or $0.01 or hundreds of a cent to anyone else in the supply chain who could benefit from that information.
Now we have both the data layer and the economic incentive to start exchanging information. By doing that, we can make the supply chain much more efficient. A dream should be to make the supply chain 5% or 10% more efficient with this technology. That would save so much money and energy and exhaust and everything for the world that it's incredible.
That's so much waste. I had no idea.
Me neither before. It's incredible.
One of these things, and we've been circling it, is we're talking about blockchain and one of the core tenets here is transparency, accessibility, and immutability. By the same token, we're talking about a space where in some instances privacy matters. Of course, accuracy matters. How do you balance these needs with the underlying nature of blockchain?
Good question because there's a lot of misunderstanding here. A lot of people think that if we are using a public blockchain, they think all information is public, not correct. It’s just like we are all right now we are using the internet. The internet is public, but the stream we have now can only be seen by us. We have an encrypted communication here.
We do exactly the same thing. We are using the public blockchain because it's the most secure. It has been online up and running for years. It's the most cost-efficient system. On top of that, we are building a permission business system, a business layer on top of that. All communication is controlled by the actor who put the information out there. Every actor in the supply chain now owns and controls their own data.
They can decide, they can share some information with the end customer, they can share some information with their logistic distributor, they can share some information with the government or some controlling instance and they can put a price on that information. They can give some for free for the consumer, but the distributor has to pay a couple of cents for something.
As we talked through about the efficiency of the chain, it goes in both directions I would assume from what you said. If you have a product and you're sending it out, you can have a handle on what's happening to it before it gets to the consumer and how it represents your brand to be honest. There's the reverse. If I have a product that I'm building and I'm sourcing components from various places and I want to know exactly where they came from and what that process was like. I can see that can help with accountability.
In Europe, they have the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act. Every company in EU must have this traceability. That fits us very well because we have the solution for this. We got it in law here in Norway in June, and July 2022. It's already in Germany, France, the Netherlands, and some other countries. Every country in Europe must have this traceability.
There also comes a new law now about something called a Digital Product Passport. Every product must have a QR code that you can scan and you can get this digital product passport where you get all the history, the ingredients, the sustainability, how much CO2 it has submitted, and all of these things. That's exactly what we are providing.
We are talking about NFTs here and we had our smart digital twin technology. We are creating this smart digital twin in the blockchain for a batch of a product from raw material. We can add information to this smart digital twin. What kind of product? Where was it created? What was the energy consumption? What's the quality? Who did it? Pictures, videos, certificates, and all of that.
When this product is physically sold to another actor in the supply chain, the small digital twin has also transferred ownership to this new owner. Now this new actor in the supply chain, when they're processing this product, they now continue adding information on what they did. How much energy, how much diesel or fertilizer they used, or whatever they did? We do this in every step in the supply chain.
In the end, or let's say at the consumer state, they can scan a QR code and then we trace back all these digital twins. All this information comes out as a digital product passport where you can prove legally from. We are using the blockchain, so all this data is digitally signed by every actor that puts the in there. It's reliable information. What comes out as a digital product passport is a reliable information.
You mentioned the seafood chain. That's something you've been building and working on, continuing to develop. Any other projects you have in the pipeline or anything more you could tell us about Seafood Chain and how that's growing?
We created UNISOT, the platform. We call it an enterprise blockchain platform then. We realized that every industry needs this functionality. I decided we have to focus on one industry to prove that this system is working. Since we were in Norway and seafood, I thought at the time that seafood is a little Norwegian market here. That's a small little market I could test. Little did I know that it's not a small little Norwegian market. It's a multi-billion-dollar global seafood market. It's gigantic. I was luckily a blue-eyed entrepreneur diving into this gigantic market. We implemented this with a couple of seafood companies and prove that we can trace everything. Now we split or divide it out to other industries.
We mostly are still in the food industry because food is there and close to our hearts because food is everything. If we don't have healthy food, nothing else is working. We have clients now that are tracing agriculture, so local to local. Locally produced food to local customers in a reversed marketplace way. Customers can buy products from the farmer before they have created the food, but still proving quality, proving sustainability, and all of that.
We have some other customers who are tracing physical art like paintings and sculptures by putting on a small crypto anchor. That's nothing with cryptocurrency to do, but it's a small drop of epoxy with diamond dust and magnetic dust in there. When this drop of epoxy hardens, the diamond dust and the magnetic dust hardens in a unique formation. When you read that with the camera, you get a unique code from that.
You can now trace like a painting through the whole supply chain. Who made it? Who was the artist who ordered it, what kind of paint, what kind of frame, and everything around that and follow without through the ateliers and museums and even out on the digital side because now they digitize the picture as well. Not like the Bored Ape, but a real one-piece digital information that people then can buy and sell and have the digital rights to. It’s super interesting there.
We are then continuing with measuring addendum here. It is a third company that we have started up now where we are working with something called Triple Entry Accounting. This is one of the first thing that Satoshi patented. Triple entry accounting is for auditing. It’s like it sounds. It's like when you do accounting in a company now, you use double enter accounting because you have debit and credit.
Two parties who exchange or buy something with they shop put in their different accounting system, debit and credit, and credit and debit. In the middle, we put the blockchain as a third ledger. They book debit credit and a third ledger and they book credit and debit and the third ledger. Now we have this third ledger where we can now verify that if I send an invoice on $1,000 to you, it says also in the blockchain that it is $1,000. You cannot manipulate or say it was $900 or $1,100. We have a centralized decentralized store where we now have the common value here.
Now we are building a system around this where we can do auditing. Every big company has to do audit every year where an auditor comes in, goes through manually through your accounting to verify and they're calling to your customers and your suppliers to verify, “Did you send this and did you pay this?” Instead of doing that manually, now we can automate that thanks to the blockchain. We can do auditing in real-time and automatic thanks to the blockchain.
We are the only one in the world doing this at the moment. There are some companies are trying to do triplet accounting in other ways, but we are the first one who have an implementation that uses the public blockchain to do this. In 2021, we were in the Norwegian financial authorities. They had a FinTech sandbox. This is like the SEC for America. It’s Norway’s SEC. We were there for a year and what we did there was to present our solution for triple entry accounting. We had a discussion for a year. We got a lot of good feedback back there, which resulted in that we made from our first version MVP, we now have the second version with the input from the authorities.
We got verified that yes, we can use this public blockchain for audit evidence. That's a super important thing that Norwegian Financial Authority has approved that we can use the blockchain as audit evidence. That means that now the accountants and auditors can start using it. When it's approved in Norway, these audit rules are international. Now it can be used everywhere. We have a lot of CPAs from America calling us because they're super interested in this.
It's another super exciting industry. This is the stuff that is the foundation of everything that we do. As NFTs are to Web3 and the metaverse, fundamental accounting and supply chain management is to everything that we consume in the world, every service we offer, every product we create. There's so much foundational stuff to it.
It doesn't get that much attention because it's not as sexy as some of these other projects happening. This is so interesting and it's one that's been on our radar for a long time. We talk about it, as I said, very frequently, we appreciate you breaking down all the details here for us. That's very important work that you're doing. We want to ask this last question for this segment. When you look around the space blockchain in general, Web3, everything that's happening right now, what projects inspire you?
There is so much misinformation and so much misunderstanding about what blockchain is, how it works, and there are so many implementations, all these alt coins, as it's called. I would say there are not many other system out there that can inspire more than the original protocol from Satoshi Nakamoto, which did work from stocks, can do smart contracts, can do tokens, is scalable, cost-efficient, and all of that.
I see all of this other blockchain as noise and as marketing stunts and pump-and-dump schemes. Unfortunately, there is not much out there to look at. What I'm looking at is other companies in the space that we are that are using this blockchain, the original blockchain from Satoshi Nakamoto. There is a lot of interesting projects going on with social media, music industry. All different gaming is very big because a lot of gaming companies have come from the material because it doesn't scale to this blockchain. The biggest one we have now is crypto fight, making millions of transactions per day. I'm mostly looking into that space.
Gaming's interesting. There are lots of moving pieces there. We have some gaming partners that we do some collaborations with, so it’s near and dear to our hearts.
I will shoot out to them that if they need a blockchain that is scaling, that's secure and very cost-efficient, there is a blockchain doing that and that's one we are using.
We appreciate all the ins and outs of UNISOT and everything you're working on. Thanks for explaining to our readers all the details there because it's again, not something that's easily understood and I think you conveyed it very simply. Also, something that people don't talk about enough. We do appreciate that. We do want to shift gears a little bit and learn some more about you personally. It's a segment that we call our Edge Quick Hitters. It's a fun and quick way to get to know you a little better. We're looking for short and straightforward answers, but we may dive a little bit deeper here or there. Are you ready to go?
Yes.
Question number one, what's the first thing you remember ever purchasing in your life?
It's a Commodore 64. That dates me a little bit.
No, but that's awesome. Is there any chance you got that thing sitting around somewhere still?
I have it in my garage. I'm never getting rid of that. That's such a wonderful thing. I have the cassette deck, disc drive, a printer, and all of that. It has been standing on in my garage in the attic for many years now. I have no idea if it still works, but I still have it. Also, some manuals and all of that.
Question number two. What's the first thing you remember ever selling in your life?
To buy my Commodore 64, I sold my electric guitar. I was playing guitar and getting bored of that and I was like, “I want that computer. That sounds interesting.” I sold that one and I bought the Commodore 64.
There's this movie of your life, this alternate history where you've become like Jimi Hendrix and you didn't sell the guitar.
Yes. I still can play one short thing on guitar and that's Smoke on the Water. That's all I can play.
Next time, we'll break out the guitar. Question number three. What's the most recent thing you purchased?
I purchased a sunset sensor. For my home automation, I moved to a new house. I need my lamps to go on and off when the lights goes up and down. It’s this small thing that I connect to my home automation system.
Let me ask you a question because you're taking all of this stuff so seriously. I don't do the home automation stuff right now and part of it is because I'm paranoid about like the Google things listening to me.
I have no Google things at all.
What do you use? Is there a standard system?
Yeah, it's in Nordic country. It's some home automation system but not connected to Google. I'm never going to do that. I have my phone standing here all the time, but I don't want to have a Google microphone listening to everything single thing I'm doing. I’m not doing that
Question number four. What is the most recent thing you sold?
If we move, we were sending a lot of things and the last thing I sold was a laminate cutter. It's a tool where you could laminate for your flooring.
First laminate cutter to make it into Edge Quick Hitters.
Not very sexy either. I'm trying to sell my car as well, so electric car, but I haven't sold it yet.
The laminate cutter is clearly in high demand. Question five, what's your most prized possession?
That would be my Tesla Model S that I bought when I moved to Norway because electric cars here are very common and you get a very good price. It's almost cheaper to buy an electric car here than a gasoline car. I bought a Tesla and it's the best car I ever had and I love it.
Do you experiment with like autopilot?
Yeah, it works wonderfully. It's incredible.
I haven't had the pleasure yet of driving a Tesla, but it's on my list soon.
It's wonderful. My wife is from Belgium, so we are driving down to Belgium rather often and that's wonderful when you're driving along highways and auto barn and so on to put in the autopilot and you can relax a little bit more than normal. You have to be there. You have control of the car, but you don't have to be super concentrated all the time.
You're not smoking anything while you're doing that?
No. I'm smoking cigars. I'm not smoking anything else.
Next question, question six. If you could buy anything in the world, like digital, physical service, an experience that's for sale, what would that be?
That's a super hard question. I have no idea. For efficiency, maybe a helicopter or a private jet. That should be nice. If I could buy anything, I should think of something more grandiose thing to help the world. Let's say a helicopter. That should be very fun. That could take me quicker to different places.
Question seven, if you could pass on one of your personality traits to the next generation, what would it be?
My stubbornness and honesty. Honesty is super important and that's what our whole company line. Work on transparency and honesty in products and everything.
I don't believe you. I think you're lying.
Question eight, if you could eliminate one of your personality traits from the next generation, what would that be?
Procrastination. Sometimes I have a tendency to procrastinate things. Instead of doing it directly, I wait a little bit and that could go away.
It's a hard one.
I would say that can be very inspirational to myself and our readers. If somebody like you who's accomplished as much has issues with procrastination, then anybody can achieve anything.
Question number nine. What did you do before joining us on the show?
I’ve been listening both yesterday and the whole day now to Bitcoin Masterclass with the creator of Bitcoin.
Who's the creator? Satoshi Nakamoto?
Yes.
Somebody's speaking? He's speaking in this? Tell us more.
Yeah. He had the class the whole day. You don't know who it is?
We don't know who it's. We have to dive in there.
It's public information. It has been out there since 2015.
Is there another name that we should know?
His name is Craig Steven Wright. He’s an Australian guy living in UK right now. He has been an auditor. That's very controversial, but I'm 110% sure that he's Satoshi Nakamoto.
That is a controversial position, but very confident. That's amazing.
I'm very pragmatic. I'm building an enterprise system. I need a blockchain that works. I don't care which blockchain we are using. I need scalability, security, cost efficiency that is legal, and so on. The only blockchain I can find out there, and I looked at all of them, is the original blockchain, the Bitcoin blockchain from Satoshi Nakamoto and I'm not talking about BTC. BTC is a pre-copy of that.
The original protocol with unlimited block size, we are now doing four-gigabyte blocks and so on. If you are listening to what he's saying, you're reading his papers and you are testing the technology, you see it works. He's the only guy who can present this and can explain how things are working. I don't care if he is the Satoshi pseudonym or not but he's the guy who invented Bitcoin. I’m 110% sure.
I got to ask, is his in-depth understanding of the inner workings of Bitcoin that convince you of that?
Yes. I encourage people to go to YouTube and look for the Theory of Bitcoin. It's 40 or 50 hours of different YouTube where a guy Ryan X. Charles is interviewing Craig Steven Wright, but every single sentence in the white paper. Every single question about everything about Bitcoin. He answers every single quest with facts of the facts. There is no other person in the world that comes even close to describing the things that he described.
In 2015, he came out at a conference saying that Bitcoin is touring complete, which means that you can do smart contracts on the token on it. Everybody was laughing at him and said, “You’re crazy. Everybody knows that Bitcoin is not touring completely. You cannot do smart contracts on Bitcoin because you have to use Ethereum for that.”
Now it is proven that Bitcoin, the original Bitcoin called BSV Bitcoin Satoshi Vision, is touring, completing four different ways. He was right in 2015 and that thing after the thing that he explains that you don't understand it the first day, but after 1 year or 2 years, when you listen back to it, it says, “He was right back then.”
Jeff and I are out of our depth on any of this. We are not touring complete but we will look into it.
Check it. Check the website. Check the Bitcoin white paper and the functionality with how BTC is working and BTCs is not working. It's not scaling. It's very expensive. The only thing you can use is for speculation. Now you're going to get a lot of comments. It's going to explode now.
It’s good to understand the thinking there. The last question is a pretty easy one. Stephan, what are you going to do next after the show?
I will continue working now to do everything I missed before. Follow up on emails, write contracts, meetings, and presentations I have to do, and so on. We have a number of customer prospects that are super interested in start using our system.
Not a surprise, but we appreciate you sharing all those insights and that's Edge Quick Hitters for now. What do you say we hit a Hot Topic or two?
Let's hit the first one here. Hot Topic. Blue chip NFT project Moonbirds signs with Hollywood Talent Agents UTA, the NFT-focused company was founded by early-stage Facebook and Twitter investor Kevin Rose and designer Justin Mezzell in February '22. The company also has the PROOF Collective and Oddities NFT collections in its catalog. They're doing well. We'll put it that way. I heard a little chuckle from Stephan over there. Have you been following Moonbirds? What are your thoughts? What does Satoshi think of Moonbirds?
I'm not following them. It’s just the name Moonbirds. For me, it's a big scam, sorry to say, but it's nothing else. It’s a pyramid scheme trying to find a more stupid buyer. Sorry, but it's a speculation game.
Though there are some interesting things happening there where there's been a lot of moves into entertainment, whether it's music or film, these projects bridge the gap there, the animated series and things of that nature. It's interesting to see where it will go once Hollywood has its arms around some of these projects, whether it's like Gary Vee’s VeeFriends and what he's trying to do there or the projects from Yuga Labs.
I'm curious to see where it goes. They can take things because there's a lot of motivation there to try to bring things to the masses, which creates value for these very large companies and agencies. If there's value there, these guys may be able to ultimately unearth it for the most legitimate projects. I guess time will tell on those. An interesting move on their part, though.
I have this measure stock that if you create a token and you want people to buy this token because you're going to do a project from music or Bored Apes or whatever, then it's a speculation vehicle and a pump-and-dump scheme. As I said, there are a lot of projects and companies in BSV that is building with the music industry, bloggers, vloggers, and all of that, and building system, but they're not selling a token to anyone to invest in. They're building the technology for the users. When they buy music, they get a token and they can now pay directly to the artists or to everybody involved in that.
Using it in the right way, but not as an investment vehicle. I had advisors who wanted me to do that with UNISOT a couple of years ago to create this token and you get millions of billions into your company and you can build whatever you like. Luckily, I didn't do that because SEC will come to you like we see now with Binance and everybody. SEC is slow, but they're coming 3 or 4 years later. They will come to knock on your door because you have no unsecured unregistered securities and that's not allowed for a reason. Sorry to bang down on the Moonbird. I don't know Moonbirds, so I shouldn't say anything about them. In general, NFT.
Time will tell. We don’t know that for sure.
We got another one for Stephan to rip apart. YouTuber Logan Paul's CryptoZoo NFT project is a total mess. Given Logan Paul's dubious history on YouTube, it probably doesn't come as a surprise. CryptoZoo NFT project has allegedly turned out to be a scam allegedly. Some investors end up losing $500,000 according to an independent YouTube reporter, Coffeezilla. The development of CryptoZoo has been stalled due to the alleged non-payment of coders.
It’s definitely a mess. One thing that's good, at least, for the folks that are involved in a lot of folks are talking about including Logan Paul and he will answer questions about and explain what was going on there and where mistakes were made on a bunch of different accounts. He seems to be transparent and open about what was happening there. Now the perspective on what did the developers do or not do, what were they owed or not owed, there's a lot of subjectivity there. You have to take all sides into account when trying to figure out what happened there.
It's cool at least that the folks involved are like willing to talk about it openly and explain their side of the story. There's somewhere probably in the middle that's the truth there. I did hear that they are trying to continue the project and there are a few things they got to wrap up there, but that it is happening in the background. Time will tell. Is it something he's going to be able to deliver on and make real and create value based on all of his intellectual property for his followers? I don't know. TBD.
The dangerous thing here specifically with a famous person like him is that he has a lot of followers that have no idea what they're investing in and think, “Okay, because it's him, I'm going to invest,” and then they're reinvesting more than they should and now they're effed and lost maybe their whole savings and pension account and everything. For me, it's super obvious that don't do that, don't put your money into this. Everybody wants to be rich quickly. They're very tempted to do this but as in any casino, the house is winning every single time.
House is losing too. Everybody gets consumed.
I'm sure there is. I'm sure there are some guys making money on this. Maybe some consultants and some developers or something like that. I don't know the story exactly.
The interesting point here is that there's a trend of this in some of these NFT projects and crypto projects and there's like a tongue-in-cheek aspect to it. At the same time, it doesn't help from the outside perspective. CryptoZoo is feels like what it's turning out to be in terms of it's a zoo of a bunch of different things going on and it's a bit of a mess. Logan Paul's generating value through what he does. By having all of these viewers, entertaining people, whatever it is that he's doing is generating value for the platforms that he's on, be it YouTube or Twitter.
I so wish that he could do that in a real way. Have some real experts on this. Not some NFT experts, but some real financial experts. There are companies, there are experts in this out in the world, and crypto is new, NFT is new, or not. Crypto is not new. Crypto existed already in the ‘90s. There were thousands of cryptos already then, but most of them were centralized. It's nothing new. The way of doing these scams, as I call them, is not new either. You had the same with stocks. You have the same with everything else before crypto. It's another medium. Now it's crypto and everybody thinks it's new and innovative, but it's the same methodology as always.
That's it for our Hot Topics.
Sorry for ripping them.
I don't think you need to apologize at all. This is one of the benefits of our program. We like to give a voice to all the different sides of what's going on. I'm sure our readers will appreciate reading your opinions.
You are going to get some nice emails after this.
Thank you very much.
I’ve been in other shows as well, and their mailboxes explode specifically when I mentioned Craig Wright and original Bitcoin, what's called Bitcoin SV, and so on.
Our next segment is our shout-out segment, which we have had a little bit of fun with lately. I understand you have a couple of people you'd like to give a shout-out to for that.
I have to give a shout-out to my wife, my cofounder. We started this company as a family company. It's my wife and my daughter as well. Shout out to her as well, but specifically to my wife. She has supported me in this and we are working together on this. We already had a couple of companies together, so we work very fine together. I couldn't have done it without her support because I'm working sixteen hours a day and without her help and approval, it shouldn't work at all.
She's my right hand, my personal assistant, and doing everything I can’t do. Shout out to her, first of all, and then, of course, I have to give a shout-out to Satoshi Nakamoto, Craig Steven Wright, the Inventor of Bitcoin. Without him, we wouldn't be here at all talking about this. For me, he created one of the most important inventions in man’s recent history. It's up there with penicillin, electricity, computers, and everything. It's going to revolutionize the world even more than the internet has done. Everybody's using internet now, but soon everybody will use blockchain as a backend functionality, the piping of everything. That's the two persons.
We appreciate the shout-outs, Stephan. Before we break for this episode, let's make sure folks know where to go to follow you and everything that's happening. Where should we send them?
You can go to our websites. UNISOT.com. Seafood Chain is in Norway, so SeafoodChain.no. The .com was taken. Abendum.com for triple-entry accounting. We are on LinkedIn, Twitter, and all also social media as well. My Twitter handle is @BitcoinDevotee.
Check them out. Stephan, we do appreciate it. That'll be a wrap on now's sponsored Spotlight episode. Lots of good nuggets in there. We've reached the outer limit for now. Thanks for exploring with us. We've got space for more adventures on this Starship. Invite your friends and recruit some cool strangers that will make this journey also much better. How?
Go to Spotify or iTunes right now, rate us and say something awesome. Go to EdgeOfNFT.com to dive further down the rabbit hole. Also, look us up on all major social platforms by typing EdgeOfNFT and start a fun conversation with us online. Lastly, be sure to tune in next time for more great NFT content. Thanks again for sharing this time with us.
Important Links
- Moonbirds
- OuterEdge.live
- UNISOT
- Theory of Bitcoin – YouTube
- SeafoodChain.no
- Abendum.com
- LinkedIn – UNISOT
- Twitter – UNISOT
- @BitcoinDevotee – Stephan Nilsson Twitter
- Spotify – Edge of NFT
- iTunes – Edge of NFT
- Instagram – UNISOT
- Facebook - UNISOT
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