A lot of things that get talked about in the crypto space, you know, it's things that will
eventually happen. We are going to do this. Well, the things that are being built on Hedera are
actually happening. There's really no network out there that has more potential when it comes to
actual utility than H-Bar. It's the oil to maybe Bitcoin's gold. Hi, this is Mike Maloney with
Brandon Hargraves of H-Bar Bull. He's the H-Bar Bull. And Brandon, it's been a while
since we talked. How are you doing? I'm doing great. We're having so much fun in the crypto space
in general, but Hedera specifically is really starting to heat up. Yes. You know, it went up
basically 828% from November 2nd to December 2nd. So in one month, 828% rise. And it was pretty
spectacular. And so I am so glad that I had the opportunity to load up on some H-Bar very early
on. It was quite a bit after we made episode 8 of Hidden Secrets of Money. It's really been a
wonderful thing. And when it has risen up quite a bit, I have to rebalance my portfolio
because everything gets out of whack. So I actually sell some crypto and I buy silver with the proceeds.
And that protects me from the downside volatility. So anyway, there is a lot happening in this space.
So just to remind all of the viewers, can you sort of describe what H-Bar is because
Hashgraph has just taken off like a rocket. For a while, you could buy out of the penny.
Take us through. Let the viewers know what it is first. Sure. Now, that great place to start.
And we call those one centers, the people that were buying the very bottom back in January of 2020.
But Hedera is a layer one network. It uses something called Hashgraph, which was invented
by Dr. Lehman Baird. He's one of the founders of Hedera. And it has a lot of attributes that make it
pretty special in the crypto space. And they created this public network around it. But not
just that, they also wanted to have the proper governance. So to layer on top of incredible
speed so we can process 10,000 transactions per second, but it's throttled down to that,
we can actually handle many tens of thousands of transactions per second. And with sharding,
which is already designed to do as soon as we get to state proofs, it's going to be able to
unlimited scale. Yeah, it's infinitely scalable. Exactly. And then it has the gold standard of
security, asynchronous Byzantine fault tolerance. It also has fair ordering. So you don't have
to worry about front running, which we see an awful lot of in the rest of the crypto space.
They call it MEV Maximum Extractable Value. But they also wanted to have proper governance. So they
didn't just want a group of developers or just on chain governance or something like that. They
wanted to have the biggest users of the network governing the network. So they wanted to establish
something called the Hedera Governing Council. And when Manson Lehman, the two founders were
dreaming this up, they said, well, we want to have, we want to make this network fit for purpose for
enterprise use cases, mission critical enterprise use cases. And if we can meet the needs of them,
we can meet the needs of everyone. So let's go find some enterprises to help us govern this
network. And so they wanted Fortune 500 level entities throughout the world on different
continents and in different industries to be able to govern the network. So when they first
said this, people thought they were a little bit crazy, but now we're down the line and we have 32
of these council members. They include Google, Deutsche Telecom, IBM, Nomura, you can go pretty
much all around the world. We have 32 of them all on that level of different enterprises that
have expertise in different fields from law to tech to banking and so forth.
You left out Boeing and there's some other really big names in here globally.
So yeah, we'll mention a few as we go through here as I talk about some of the use cases.
How many spots are left open on the Governing Council?
So I believe we are up to 32, so it's going to be 39 total.
I hope that either Tesla or SpaceX gets on that list. I'm really hoping.
I'm hoping as well. We all are. But we'll touch on some of that as well.
Elon Musk, if you're out there, investigate it.
Go ahead. And this network has different services that you can do on top of it.
It's similar to Ethereum. It's very versatile. It can do a lot of different things,
but we have a few services. We have just the cryptocurrency service, which allows you to
send the native cryptocurrency H bar back and forth. We also have a smart contract service,
which is really versatile, but it's not quite as efficient as some of the other things.
We have a consensus service, which is like an online notary.
And then we also have a token service. So with a lot of these other networks,
when they create tokens and that can represent anything from just loyalty points or
a stable coin, so a currency or it could be a security like a stock or a bond,
when you create these tokens, if you create them with a smart contract like on other networks,
you reduce the efficiency by like 99%. But if you do it at the base layer,
you get all the efficiency of the base layer network. So you can get that 10,000 transactions
per second. You can send transactions in just a few seconds to finality on our network.
And so you get all those benefits of having that token service. So you can use the smart contract
service and the token service together to really create some pretty amazing things.
Yeah, you know, I just moved some from a wallet that I had to Coinbase,
and it took about a second to a second and a half to have
credible tokens on Coinbase from a private wallet. And so the speed
is absolutely amazing. Is there any crypto out there where Hashgraph can't do the same function
faster and more secure?
I can't think of anything, Mike. Pretty much every vertical you can think of
from gaming to real-world asset tokenization, decentralized physical infrastructure,
Hedera is making strides in every single one of these verticals.
That's one of the things that, you know, we go through these four-year crypto cycles and
there's always, you know, a new thing coming along each time. But a lot of times,
some of these really interesting use cases get left by the side of the road. And what
Hedera has been doing is kind of picking them up, shining them up and making them special
again. What we've seen, we've had these four-year cycles where we'll see this huge
run-up in this new technology as far as the prices go and then it'll kind of drop off.
And each one kind of has its own narrative. We had one in 2013 going into 2014, 2017,
2021. And it looks like we're just entering a new one now. And they all have their own,
you know, tweak. In 2017, retail was kind of entering the space. In 2020, going into 21,
it was, we have now enterprises that are actually buying Bitcoin and buying crypto.
We had micro strategies. We had Tesla, or yeah, it was Tesla. Yeah. And then we had Square. They
weren't kind of entering the space. And we also had, going back to 2017, I was kind of crossing
my wires there. We also had the ICO boom. This one, it's a little bit different. So now we
have ETFs. So it's a lot easier to get involved with these different products. We have Bitcoin
had their ETFs in the very beginning of this year and several of them launched.
And then we also had an ETF for Ethereum. So the native cryptocurrency for the Ethereum network.
Now we're starting to see some other ones get filed. And H-Bar is included in that.
And we can talk about that a little bit later. But I think the big impetus for the run-up
that we've seen lately has been the regulatory environment or the perceived change in the
regulatory environment. It's been pretty hostile over the past few years under the past administration.
But the administration that's going to be coming in under Trump,
it seems like it's going to be much more conducive to growth in the crypto industry.
And also during the past four years, there's been a bunch of different crackdowns on
cryptocurrencies. Most of them have been the ones that actually have use, can actually do something.
And that's allowed Bitcoin to kind of had a free pass, Ethereum a little bit less so,
but kind of had a free pass. And then the meme coins, because they served absolutely no purpose,
they also kind of got a free pass. Well, since the election and people know that
there's going to be at least some clear sailing ahead of us, it's allowed us to,
we'll say shift back over, or the focus of the market has shifted over to the tokens that have
utility, can actually do something. And that's the real promise of crypto. And there's really
no network out there that has more potential when it comes to actual utility than H-Bar.
All of these utility tokens, as we call them, have seen a pretty good run-up,
but H-Bar has been outperforming. I know when we were at the bottom of the market,
we'll say we are at about 50 on coin market cap. So that's the list of tokens and how much
they're worth. We're already up into the team. So we've pretty much outperformed fairly well.
And I think that comes down to people realizing that Hadera has utility,
there's a good chance that it's going to be in the clear from a regulatory standpoint.
And then once they jump into Hadera, and we're going to go through some of these rabbit
holes, now they go down these rabbit holes and really realize how much potential is there.
Yeah. I think you hit something like 16 or 15. It's 18th biggest market cap right now.
One of the things that we were talking about the functioning of it,
when I look at this, it's a distributed ledger. This is the big thing, a full consensus
distributed ledger. And you can protect things from hacking on a distributed ledger,
because you're making whatever it is that you're putting into this network,
you're making it much, much more secure. Right now, we're practically on the verge of World War
III. World War III is going to look very different than any other wars. We have a very
vulnerable power grid right now. We have a very vulnerable water system in the United States.
Could our water distribution and power grid be, I mean, you can use Hashgraph for tracking inventory,
correct? Oh, absolutely. There's a lot of supply chain use cases out there, but you talked about
water. One of the things that was experimented with early on, and we don't know which one
of these use cases is going to catch the most fire, but one of the things that was being done was they
had sensors that were hooked up to the internet that were pinging water or air quality and things like
that, and putting that on the ledger using the Hedera Consensus Service so anybody can check it.
And once it's on the ledger, we know that's accurate and that's the online notary. We're
making sure that the provenance of that information is valid. So it certainly has a lot
of applications there. Yeah. Can Bitcoin do any of this?
Certainly not the way Hedera can. There's certain things that you could certainly put on there,
but as far as the efficiency, the difference is many orders of magnitude as far as the efficiency
between the two networks. They serve just different purposes. Bitcoin might be a store of
value, not as good as gold and silver in my view, but Hedera does a completely different
thing. It's the utility. It does that real world asset tokenization to facilitate exchanges.
It's that provenance of data. It can be decentralized physical infrastructure,
things along those lines. It's the oil to maybe Bitcoin's gold.
Okay. Good description. You were talking about some real world physical assets being able to
put on the hash graph. People want to say blockchain and it's not a blockchain. It's
the graph of hashes. That's it. So yeah, real world asset tokenization. Now we're talking
about all kinds of things. So it could be stocks and bonds. It could be currencies.
They're all going to be tokenized. I have no doubt in my mind when you have something
that is this much more efficient, we'll say with payments, you're transferring money.
Hedera is a thousand times more efficient than the legacy system. So Visa, it's a thousand times
more efficient. So there's no question that we're going to see things being tokenized.
And we're seeing that happening continuously on Hedera. So Red Swan is doing that with real
estate. We have teams like Diamond Standard, which is doing it with diamonds. We've had
a couple of exchanges launched. So they're starting off small. We had a couple commodities
exchanges. So it was digital commodities exchange and Virto are two of the exchanges that started
to do this with commodities. But now we're kind of moving up the ladder. The next one that we had,
and this is one of the governing council members that just came online. It's the Nairobi
securities exchange. So this is a national level stock exchange out of Kenya. And the
representative that's been coming to the Hedera meetings has actually been the CEO himself. A
lower level executive. It's somebody from upper management, something like that. But we actually
have the CEO and he's committed to wanting to build his exchange on top of Hedera. And of course,
that's where it's going to start. We're going to have Nairobi stock exchange, maybe some other
smaller exchanges to start off. And then it's just going to move up the line. You're going to
have Texas stock exchange, which is going to be launching soon. They're going to start
to focus on how is this being done? Where does the efficiencies come from? How fast is
the finality? All that kind of stuff. And then it's going to be New York stock exchange,
Comax, FTSE. It's just going to go down the line. It's exciting to see. We know that this
stuff is going to happen. And when we first had some of those traditional exchanges with
Virto and digital commodities exchange come online, we're like, we see where this is going.
And it's following exactly how I expected. And now we have one of the governing council
members that's running an exchange that wants to put Hedera at the core of their tech stack.
Awesome. So you talked about a thousand times more efficiency. So it's a thousand times more
efficient in what aspect? Because it's even far greater than that when it comes to energy consumption.
Like compared to Bitcoin, the energy consumption is so infinitesimally small
when it comes to transaction fees. It's one one hundredth of a penny to transfer any amount,
a trillion bucks. The fee is one one hundredth of a penny. So what aspect do you have any other
measurements of efficiency when you're talking about fees, the speed, the energy efficiency,
and so on? Now, I don't have them all memorized off the top of my head, but I was actually when
it's a thousand times more efficient than the centralized system of Visa, right?
Visa. Okay. So you're talking about like Bitcoin power consumption compared to Hashgraph.
It is probably more like hundreds of thousands or millions of times. And we'll get you the slide
that shows how much more efficient, even some of the other very efficient DLTs out there,
they're, you know, a hundred X less efficient than Hedera. And this was actually,
there's a couple of different entities that bore this out. The one that I'm quoting right now is
from the University College London, one of the Hedera governing council members. You might
think that they became a council member and then did the study. It was actually the other
way around. They did the study. And then they said, you know what, this is something we want to be
involved with. So they became a Hedera governing council member, but you're absolutely right around
the fees. And what that energy efficiency does is it allows you to have the most headroom
into how low your fees can get. So it doesn't matter if right now there might be some other
DLTs out there that are covering all the costs. So for them, it's free. You don't get a free
lunch. Eventually they're going to have to pay for that. But Hedera, because it is the most
efficient, has the most room to lower their fees. And there's different fees for different services
on Hedera. So if you're spinning up a new account on Hedera, I think it's about two cents for using
Hedera Consensus Service or the cryptocurrency service, like you mentioned, it's one one hundredth
of a cent for transferring tokens. So it might be a security, like I said, or it might be a
currency or it might be a loyalty point. It's one tenth of a cent. If you're using the
smart contract service, now, like I said, that's less efficient. So that's five cents, still cheap,
but not nearly as cheap as the one tenth of a cent for sending a token back and forth.
So the efficiency, even though we talk about the environmental efficiency, the electrical
efficiency, being good for environmental use cases, it really comes down to dollars and cents.
Yeah, I absolutely agree. So once stocks start trading on this, and you've got exchanges going
and everything, this, you know, I said in episode eight of Hidden Secrets of Money that this,
to me, it brought the great hope back. When I went to, in 2014, I went to Bitcoin on the
Beltway. And I, you know, it shows me buying my first Bitcoin. It was just a hundred bucks,
it was a fraction of a Bitcoin. And then I went back and kept on feeding that machine.
I remember that well. Yeah, yeah. And but at that conference, Ethereum had just been introduced.
And there was a great unity among everybody. Everybody felt that they were changing the
world, that they were making a difference, that they were opening up free. The big hope was that
this, everything would be a peer-to-peer payment system like Satoshi Nakamoto had envisioned,
that Bitcoin was going to be used as money and that Ethereum was going to be used for the
smart contracts and such. And then the Bitcoin block size got capped and at about the same
time all of these other cryptos sprang up. Oh, by the way, you were talking about meme cryptos.
When HatchGraph was peaking just recently, H-Bar was peaking at 39 cents. I went and looked at
the top performer in the last hour, the last day, the last week. And it was H-Bar every time,
except when you went to monthly, it was outperformed by Peanut the Squirrel,
which doesn't do anything, right? Sure, sure. But I think a lot of that capital, like I was
saying before, that was in those meme coins because they were crazy to say, but they were
safer from a regulatory standpoint than these tokens that actually do things. And I think
a lot of that capital is going to move into things like H-Bar. Yeah. Well, you know,
when Lehman and Mintz developed H-Bar, they were very careful to try to make everything as
compliant as possible, knowing in the future that this would be necessary if you wanted to
be able to put stocks in the graph of hashes. So it was done with an eye that this would
all be regulated one day. And so they were prepared. I find this all very exciting. Yeah.
Let's remind the viewers, we're up at about 29 cents right now. And it was 10 cents the last time
that you and I had a conversation. I think the time before that, it was about a nickel.
And it had been down, like I said, and you said, at one penny for quite a while.
And so the opportunity that was there. And I think there's still a tremendous amount of opportunity
as all of these things get adopted, as you see H-Bar starting to move in to be.
So H-Bar is the base level platform that all of these other things ride on top of, right?
So that's like the railroad tracks. And what do you call the thing that is the train that's
going to carry on? Yeah. Generally, I mean, we call all these different things use cases that
are built on top of Hedera. Now H-Bar itself is the, like I said, the oil, it's the payment
for all the different services. So all the services cost, I quoted some of the prices
for them. They're paid in H-Bar, but priced in dollars. So they're marking that to market
on a regular basis. So you pay all those fees in H-Bar. And that's where the demand for the H-Bar
comes from. And some of those go to some of the H-Bar that's brought in can be used for
incentivizing additional nodes that could be run. It can be used for incentivizing the token
holders to secure the network. And then it can be used to continue to build out the ecosystem
and build the network. So the H-Bar tokens are required by the people that build these,
do you call them dApps? Yes, they can build a layer on top of it, but it requires those tokens
for this layer to run. There's all kinds of applications that are being launched here.
We'll talk about one here. We already talked about real-world asset tokenization.
The next one we'll get into is decentralized physical infrastructure. So we've touched on
some of these things. One of the things that I've noticed is a lot of things that
get talked about in the crypto space, it's things that will eventually happen. We are
going to do this. Well, the things that are being built on Hedera are actually happening.
So in this decentralized physical infrastructure space, one of the teams
is YSAT and CLSQ. They're both founded by the same person. They're sending these
satellites up into space to facilitate transactional internet of things. And CLSQ
is going to have this seal coin. Or actually, I think I'm not sure where the token itself is
going to reside, but that's going to be the medium of exchange for these different objects that are
out there, whether it's smart cities or autonomous vehicles, smart homes, whatever it may be,
to be able to transact between those different objects. Of course, we want to onboard the
next billion users, but we also need to onboard the next trillion objects. That's one
of the things that Carlos, the founder of these two entities says all the time,
we're going to onboard those. And he's creating with CLSQ the chips that are going into all these
different objects. Since the last time we talked, they've made some traction with potential
customers. They have the Swiss army that's interested in what they're doing. They're also
building the hardware. So they're building these chips and they're going to go into these
different objects. And they're also going to be building a phone. It's going to be a
Web3 crypto enabled phone. We're trying to get a lot of the dApps. Like you said,
that Hedera has, whether it's Hashpack or Twigital or Earthlings, that's a game karate combat.
We're going to try to get all these dApps on the phone so people could use them
as soon as it comes out of the box. But then it's also designed to be post-quantum resistant.
That's what the chips are. To be able to make this Web3 world so much easier for people to
use. But it's not going to stop there. That's going to be the start. They're putting these
satellites into space, ready for these transactional internet of things. So all the infrastructure
is getting to the point where it's in place and ready to go. So the next layer is getting that
token to be able to transfer between one another. And that's supposed to be coming next year.
And that token is going to be built on Hedera. Another deep-in decentralized physical
infrastructure use case is Neuron. And Neuron is, there's another network that's similar
out there called Helium. But Neuron did it a little bit differently. They said, well,
what's the one use case we know that what we want to do is perfect for? And it was actually
drones and aviation, making sure to track these objects as they're going through
and doing what they need to do. They knew that there was going to be the need for
delivery using drones. There's no point in having a 4,000-pound vehicle delivering an object
that's only a few ounces. So you can do all of that with drones. So they said, well, what is the
best sensors we would need to put out to be able to do that? They determined what those sensors were
and then they went about and made sure that they had customers. They're in deep talks with,
well, three of the four. James, the founder of this team, hasn't told me which three.
But the big four drone delivery services are Google Wing, Amazon Prime, ZipLine and
Mana. And they're in deep talks with three of those four. So they have the customers.
Then they needed to go out and put the sensors out. So they started a beta program.
They had these sensors already throughout the world. Now they're going to be moving on to the
next step. They need to incentivize all the people that are running these different sensors.
And they're starting off with that beta program, but they're going to need a token
because these transactions have to be done on a very regular basis. So they're going to be launching
a token again on Hedera going into next year. And then it's going to be all about scaling.
Once they've gotten that layer on board, they're going to scale. They'll start off with that aviation
use case, tracking drones and incentivizing all of the sensor operators. But those sensors are
very useful for a lot of other things as well. So they're going to move directly from that
into autonomous vehicles into smart cities. These things take years. Even though you can
dream things up, that doesn't mean it's going to come to fruition. And the difference I see with
what's happening on Hedera and a lot of other networks is the teams that are attracted to
and building on Hedera are actually making these things come to fruition.
Are there any other topics that you wanted to touch on?
Well, certainly the gaming space is an interesting one to talk about. And this
is being done in a lot of different ways. We've talked about karate combat in the past. So they
spun up a token called karate and they do something called up only gaming. So you can acquire these
tokens several different ways. They have air drops of them. You can go and buy them on the open
market. And then they have these big events on a regular basis. The next one's going to be
coming out on December 19th down in Miami. And whichever fighters you think are going to
win, you can put your tokens on those. If you get it right, you get more tokens.
If you don't, you don't lose anything. And they have that all built into the tokenomics.
They can work on having revenue in their token, which is called karate.
And this is another example of we're seeing the usage go up when they first launched the
first up only gaming event. They had about 1500 users. Few events later, they were up to
11,000. Few events later, it was 38,000. Now they're at 120,000. And all of these
use cases on Hedera are going through that same kind of curve. It might start slow,
but it goes much faster over time as not only are we getting new use cases online,
but each individual use case is starting to ramp up. And that's all revenue for the Hedera
network. While we're on gaming, one of my favorite is Earthlings. A lot of these teams
that get attracted to the Hedera ecosystem, they are grinders. And they've already launched
a mini game. It's called steam runner. It's just a simple sidekick game. They're trying to put these
things out because they're completely bootstrapped on a regular basis. They want to have three of these
sidekick games every year. And the main way they use web three, they use Hedera is they
spin up tokens for in-game assets. That could be the in-game currency. It's called steam.
You can use that to trade back and forth in the game because a lot of times in games,
you need those in-game currencies, but also other kinds of assets. So they have avatars,
so the different types of people, and they have different attributes. So one might run faster,
one might be able to jump further or slide further, all kinds of different things.
And once you've gotten one of these avatars, you can use it in all the different games.
So everything that they come up with, even other games that are done by different teams,
they might be able to work with other teams and allow those assets, which become bearer assets.
As long as you have it in your wallet, you can use it wherever. And that's where I really started
to feel the power of these NFTs because they are non-fungible tokens. Because as soon as I
started playing their first game, I was like, you know what? I wanted this different avatar.
And without thinking twice, I dropped a couple thousand H bar, which now is worth a lot more
than when I actually bought it. But I went and I got all the different avatars because I wanted
to try them all out. But I know that not only can I use it for that one small game that I was
playing at the time, but all of these games that are going to be coming out, I'm going to be able
to use it every single time. I don't want to say it's an investment, but you know there's going
to be more things you can do with it over time. And those are their sidekick games,
but they're also going to create this grand scale gaming metaverse to participate in as
well. It's family friendly. I've been having a blast with it so far. And the team seems
really excited about it. Wow. What is your website? How do they find you? What's your YouTube channel?
The best way to find me is just to go to my YouTube channel, the H bar bull. And if you
are curious about any things we talked about today or other things that are going on in the
crypto space that you want to see if anything's happening on Hedera, just search on my site.
Like we talked about Neuron. You can go ahead and search Neuron. I think I have four
different videos from that team. So you can learn about CLSQ or Earthlings or any of the other teams
we have going on. Certainly I want to give a shout out to my company, Twigital. We do an
interesting thing as well. And you can do the same thing. You can go ahead and check out what's
going on on my channel on YouTube to figure out exactly what's going on for that and everything
else that's happening on Hedera. Describe Twigital and the process here. Real quick
before we get out of here. So what Twigital does is it uses photogrammetry. We actually have a few
different ways that you can capture objects. Pretty much any physical object, you take either a video
of it or you can take a series of pictures of it and it renders that into a 3D version of that
that can live in digital immersive environments. And then it tokenizes that on Hedera. And
you can use it for all kinds of things. It could be used for insurance. You can use that
token as the value transfer mechanism if you want to trade those things back and forth. But now
you don't just have to have your display shelf in your basement. But it could be the entire world
because all of these digital immersive environments like Apple Vision Pro or everything that META has
been working on, it's going to be native for all those places. So this is going to be the
web 3 version of that. And it's going to track the provenance of all those physical objects
that you treasure. Okay. Well, this is all awesome news, Brandon. I want to thank you very much for
this interview. And I want to remind everybody to like and subscribe, but not only here,
over on Brandon's channel too. So go there, go to his website, investigate this. It's worth
learning about. I want to thank everybody for watching and we'll see you next time. Thanks,
Brandon. And thank you, Mike. It was my pleasure.