Hiro Capital just launched a metaverse fund in the UK. I think they raised £250mn. And that has a really broad mandate. So investors become invested in that.
FTA: These assets are risky. Is it even possible to assess the risk?
DG: It's really individual to the person, and that's where regulation needs to go, actually empowering the user to make their own assessment of risk.
Whether we're investing in going and buying a shop on the High Street and setting up a business selling coffee, or buying Vodafone shares or buying Aetherium. We need to do our risk assessment on every single one of those.
The difference is, with buying a coffee shop we know about Swot (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, we know about business metrics with Vodafone, we know about all these listed company metrics.
With crypto, it's still a little bit early stage, and we don't know how to really measure those metrics.
The metrics are there, it's possible to assess risk. Education is really the building block, we need to know what to do with those numbers.
FTA: Speaking about education, how does the process of exchanging digital money work?
DG: Let's look at Visa as an example. Visa is a network chain, so when you go into a shop and you give your debit card, they give you a Mars bar.
Visa is in effect doing a proof of stake to say 'okay in your bank account there is 99p', the merchant ends up transferring that money across. That's just one network processing.
Cryptocurrency is lots and lots of people becoming Visa or Mastercard. So they're using the community to prove these network transactions. And that might be an NFT, for example, changing hands, or someone buying bitcoin from another person, or someone registering their details on a Web-3-enabled website.
Nodes in effect will prove every single transaction. And there might be a kind of an infinite number of people that approves the transaction, it really depends on all the chains.
FTA: How is this process paid for?
DG: The gas fee when you're transacting on cryptocurrency is that cost of processing. And that goes back into the chain of the people doing this proof of concept, it is super fractional.
