Oh welcome to gossip about gossip. Powered by Hedera Hashgraph. And each episode will cut through the hype of blockchain promises and explore real world examples of organizations creating the next generation of decentralized applications, which will bring trust back to the internet for us all. Hello, and welcome to the latest episode of gossip about gossip. The podcast where we talk about real world applications of distributed ledger technology. My name is Zenobia Gods talk and I am the SVP of communications here at swirl labs, helping to grow the Hedera network. I am joined by Joe Arthur, who is the CEO of Mingo. Hi, Joe, how are you? Zenobia, it's great to be talking to you today. How are you? Good good. It has been a while since we caught up. I think for those who have been longtime followers of the Hedera community, they first heard about Mingo around the time of the Hedera network public launch. So can you catch us up very quickly on what you all have been up to in the intervening years? Well, yeah, we've been around a long time. We were in New York the day that Saul's Hedera came out of the new path from Hashgraph and so forth. We were there that day. We launched our own ICO the following day in New York, and we met with Mance and Lehman, and we met with quite a few of the team at the time, and we then set about getting ourselves prepared to come to market with our core initial product, which was a chat app with a cryptocurrency wallet attached. The idea being we wanted to simplify the process for onboarding the average person today, that still hasn't changed in that we see onboarding as being a major part. And so we were using a chat app with the wallet and sharing that process with the average person and simplifying it. At the time we had a contract in place 2018 start. 2018 was good. It was looking fairly good. At the time we had a contract in place for a heavy amount of funding and unfortunately the absolute crash of crypto in 2018 happened and the fund group that were funding us kind of ran for cover like a lot of companies at the time. And so it left us in a very bad spot and we had to try and regroup and regather and see what we could do. And we had to go back to the drawing board and see what we could raise in terms of funds to bring this product back to market. And so that's what we've done. And for the last year and 18 months, we've been building again coming back into the marketplace. We have made quite a bit of progress in the interim in that we've now got the chat app live to download on iOS and Android. We have a mobile wallet live to download today. That's also iOS and Android. It's a mobile wallet that supports HTTPS and NFTs built on the Hedera network. And we've also partnered with some very interesting characters, including the World Heavyweight Champion of the world, Mr Tyson Fury. And so we lit up Times Square in December of last year. We took over the largest billboard in Times Square. You guys copied us in June for the NFT New York event. But we've been there in December of last year and we took it over with. Tyson announced the launch of our NFT sale with him. So we've been working with Tyson for quite a while and we have some very exciting things coming over the next kind of 4 to six months with him. Also, we've also some very interesting things happening with a few other kind of influencers in the space in terms of getting this product to market. And we're very excited to be working closely with adara now to make some of these announcements and to share with the community what we have. And so tell us a little bit about what you have coming down the pipeline. I mean, I think that there's the space has evolved so much, right. And you have been working to sort of bridge as many projects have been to sort of bridge traditional entertainment and traditional stars and athletes with sort of this new world. How has that process been? Yeah, I suppose quite a bit of the challenge still is there for the average person. They're looking at this with trepidation. Still, Citigroup earlier this year brought out a report and in it they stated that less than 4% of the world's population are actively involved in crypto today. And I think. Being realistic. We nailed our colors to the Hedera flag pole four or five years ago. Now at this stage, and we still believe that they have the best technology in this space. And what we are looking at is how you guys using your technology in our wallet, we can simplify the process for the average person of getting their hands in an NFT to work with tokens because your speeds are so fast, it doesn't interfere with their user experience. Our wireless supports, as I said, all the tokens and NFTS, but the chat app, we've built a structure in there that's coming, which we'll be launching probably early Q1 next year where our chat app and wallet talk together. And it means I can literally send a text to you and in the text send Zenobia one Tyson Fury NFT in the background. The wallet carries out that functionality. So the user sees I've received an NFT from Joe and it falls into the wallet in the background. And so we have the option to send a text or send an assist. And I think that's an important part that this project brings is that simplicity and onboarding. The second thing we have built right now is that people can purchase an NFT directly with a credit card in our app and the NFT falls straight into the wallet. There is no need to go to third party platforms to go out to pancakeswap or some of these other swapping platforms to swap things in and move them. And because that's confusing, but if there's a place where you can just press, click, buy and then pay with your credit card. And so it sounds like I think there's a sort of a theme coming around this year right in the midst of crypto winter, everybody is sort of saying we get to reassess. And we also understand that we need to make things much easier and more seamless for our users. So it sounds like that's a key part of your experience, right? Yes when we started this project six years ago, that was our tagline, making cryptocurrency as simple as sending a text message. So it's not. It's not a new thing for us. This is what we've been planning all along is that we want the onboarding process for the average person. Up until now, we have all the crypto. And I'm not a crypto head, by the way. I hold my hand up, I'm not. But there are loads of people out there who have been involved in the crypto space much longer than I have been and understand it a lot more. I've been looking at it from another point of view. How does the average person get involved in this space? Because we all know and you guys know more than anyone that. The future for NFTs forget about the art component, but the actual future for tokenizing everything in our lives and Web3 and the metaverse is an absolutely monstrous space. And as the average people could begin to get more comfortable and more confident in entering this space, that's where the future is. And what we are trying to do is make it simpler for them. And like being real, Hedera offers us the technology to allow someone send an NFT and send a token like a text message. Because we all know, like, we no longer will sit down in front of the television and watch. We are all streaming. I want to watch the entire box set right now. It's the same. If I want to send you an NFT or an asset, it's now you want it. No, you don't want to be waiting for 30 minutes for it to arrive and you don't want to be paying exorbitant fees. So that's the way we look. Right and I think in order to expand beyond sort of those early adopters and the people who love it for the technology itself, you have to make it that easy, right? If you want that mass adoption. I mean, I always talk about how we use the internet without having to understand the ins and outs of TCP IP, right? Yes I was just going to ask, as you look at the next six to nine months, how do you see that evolution happening for you guys? And what do you feel like that next phase of growth. And excuse me and user engagement will look like God bless you. Obviously, when you're working with someone like Tyson and I'm not sure how many of you guys know his backstory. This guy is an amazing athlete. He was born prematurely. He weighed 1 pound at birth and today he's 6 foot 9 and weighs in at 20 stone weight. He's he's the World Heavyweight Champion and he's never been beaten. And he has, in his own words, battled mental health through all of this. And why I'm saying all of this is because of that. He has a huge following. He has people can how would I say resonate and kind of merge up with him because he doesn't come out all ripped and everything. He comes out and says, look at me, I'm a fat boxer. And that's his kind of attitude. It's very upfront and open. And with that in mind, all his fanbase are the average people. And so when we started working with them, we had to look at being able to onboard those people. And so that's how our goal is to continue to work with people who like Tyson, who will bring a lot of users to our platform. We'll be able to integrate with the games that we have coming as well. We have a couple of NFT based games in the pipeline over the next six months. That's part of our process that some of the NFTs that we're bringing to the market, those are actual in-game game ready play wearing characters for our games. And so that's part of us, the ability for other projects then to drop their NFTs into our app to sell. So we become kind of a marketplace in app for people to purchase NFTs from other projects. Very cool. You know, I think before we wrap up here, is there anything else you'd like to share with the community or is there any place you'd encourage them to go, things you'd like to have them do to engage more with the Mongo set of apps, as I'll call them now. First, please download our wallet, check it out. Download the mango wallet from the Play Store from the app store, go to mango to check out the links are there for us and information and some of the upcoming stuff. We'll be updating that over the coming weeks as we come to launch quite a few. We have a lot of exciting things happen between now and January and we were sharing them on Mango and so that's the one thing please go there. And if you are thinking about launching a token on hedera, get in contact with us. If you're thinking about launching an NFT, get in contact with us because we'd love to support your project in any way we can with wallet integrations and with anything we can do to make your user onboarding experience easier. That's fantastic. And I think we have seen, you know, despite the fact that the overall NFT market is dropping in terms of activity and value and the NFT market on Hedera is going up and to the right during that same time period. So I think it's a great time to be building all that infrastructure, supporting the growth of those NFTs on Hedera. And of course, as a creator, never a better time, never, never. And it's a bit like I suppose you go back 4 and 1/2 years ago or five years ago, you had ICOs coming out of the woodwork everywhere. How many of those projects are still alive? And it's much the same, in my opinion. Please don't attack me on this. But a lot of the NFTs that are out there right now, they came to market in a bull run and they have very little utility other than what they are. And they're collectibles and all of that. But the future is actually in utility. What can this NFT do? And it's that tokenization of different things in the future. And this is where I believe Hedera. They're low fees. The speed is key. And I think that's why we're here. That's why we're building the wallet. That's why we're doing all we're doing to operate within this ecosystem. Fantastic well, Joe, Thank you so much for joining us. We hope that you'll continue to keep everyone updated on your progress and let us know. Certainly engage with the community, share with them. And I hope other folks will go and visit. Mingo, please. That would be great. Contact us. We'll help in any way we can. All right. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thanks, Zenobia.
