Dust AMA With a Special Guest

Okay, so I think we can get this going guys, but Aaron you want to just hop on the mic real quick and just see if Everything's okay Mike check Aaron. Hey guys hear me okay. I can hear you perfectly fine How's it going Aaron? Doing well doing well great to be here Great to have you So guys, thank you once again so much for showing up. I know it's quite late for some of you guys I see a lot of familiar faces and some new ones and Thank you guys for all of our international listeners I'm based in North America's and Aaron himself is based in Brazil. So We're pretty much on EST time. So we'll try to do these a little bit earlier next time So we can have one of you guys joined in on you know, an appropriate time for you guys but I guess we'll we have a lot packed for today and I'll let Aaron kick it off You can sort of intro itself and then we'll keep going Yeah sounds good Thank you so much for the invitation to be here and thanks to everyone for being here as well Hopefully it's gonna be a good conversation and You know super excited to have you all here Yeah, we're gonna dive into a number of things tonight talking about stock tokens rw ways And investing with dust so relearning about a bit more about the product Bit more about how it works So myself I'll give a quick intro to myself my name's Aaron Stanley I've covered crypto for a long time actually as a journalist as a podcaster um with like coin desk I used to executive proves consensus the the big conference back in the day I was with financial times for all before that kind of before crypto life And then now I actually have my own podcast my own platform that I'm Forbes contributors well on digital assets And I think this is really interesting this conversation we're gonna have today because You guys probably agree with me when I say that there's there's something that's Really changed over the last six months in the conversation around rw ways and stock tokens Um, I know there's lots of different words people use for these things But like kind of this idea of a you know an on-chain version of a of a stock or an equity right and I think we've hit this point where we're not having these Like 2018 or 21 21 conversations that are more like theoretical about like who what's gonna happen if stocks come on chain, right? People have been talking about this stuff for a long time There's been a lot of these like security token platforms and things that have popped up over the years And you know, I think a lot of these things were maybe too early didn't really gain the traction They were hoping and the idea was on point they were just being able to early But now we're at this interesting point where These assets are actually coming on chain, right? Like we don't have to talk about it as a hypothetical thing Uh, it's live these are live. They're growing. There's interesting use cases popping up like dust which we'll be talking about And I think they're starting to generate some controversy as well, right? We're gonna hopefully go into some of that a bit later Um, and I think controversy is kind of a good thing in this context because it means that incumbents are starting to pay attention And they see that there's some disruption. There's some innovation going on and um, you know if there was no controversy then that doesn't You know, that would probably be a bad thing for us like it's maybe this isn't really a serious a serious thing quite yet so Dust is a super interesting interesting example of this just because It's a product that really only becomes possible once you have stocks uh showing up in in tokenized form so It's live on robberhood chain now and um, you know It's basically, you know, I guess the way I've been thinking of it is it's almost like an acorns For for de-jems right where anytime you make a transaction Uh or trade You're rounding up Or the protocol rounds up on your behalf and it allows you to invest in a basket of different tokenized equities Uh or stock tokens on robberhood and just same way that the acorns app if any of you're familiar with that it's kind of it's popular in the u.s But it's basically like you can round up your your purchases and You know, you make a 50 cent transaction like the dollar 50 transaction then like the other 50 cents would go toward investing into A basket or whatever um, you know, whatever vehicle you choose And there's also a lot of these kind of Bitcoin type products too or you know, uh, you can round up You round up your purchases into to Bitcoin right so um We're gonna spend some time here learning about dust specifically uh, then we're gonna be broad in the conversation I was talking a bit more about developments with rwa's and stock tokens and robberhood chain And uh, no, at the end we're gonna be opening it up for some questions from you guys Uh, I'm sure you guys have have quite a few things to add here. So we want to make sure we have some time for that Um, with that I'd like to turn the floor back over uh to mac and I know you're the you're the kind of the mastermind behind dust So maybe tell us a bit about uh yourself and uh what inspired this project Sure, thank you so much for that introduction. I couldn't have said it better myself to be honest um Yeah, so I go by mac A little bit behind me before I get into the sort of inspiration for dust uh, I've been a dev I've been working in development for many different uh, fintech corporations in the past and I just want to really point out that i'm more like a regular trader than anything else So i'm not coming from the standpoint of a dev um I'm very much like you guys uh in the sense that i've been trading for six plus years I was very heavy into the stock market at one point and then once crypto came around once a lot of came around Uh, I was pretty much I was in there for eight hours a day, you know, so i'm very much like you guys Uh, I come from the same places as you guys i come from the same inspiration as you guys So that's something about me, but a little bit more of my background um yeah, I've been in development for the past probably eight years now And uh, I really got into crypto development probably around three to four years ago um And in one of my past jobs, I was actually introduced to crypto and in that job I realized that that person will introduce me to crypto pretty much change my life because uh, if not I don't know where it would have taken me and uh Yeah, so like pretty much a little bit about dust right now uh, we're actually the ones who built this out Us in the main team. We didn't really send the development to anyone else. We ran the infra I'm the one who put the first real money through it. They called this public and um Yeah, so i'm more of a builder a trader not that good of a not that good of a trader, but I try so yeah, so that's a little bit about me um, I guess I can get into the story of dust Like just very quickly. I did post an x-tweet about that um a couple days ago But the inspiration for dust really came from my trading days and um when I was trading penny stocks Not so long ago about three years ago I Pretty much gambled all my money away and lost it all so In that moment, I had a realization that when I pretty much lost my entire portfolio gambling on these penny stocks Which is very relevant to today's traders as well when they're you know, they're trenching or they're They're gambling into different mean coins every single day once I lost all I I realized that You know, I really wanted to see how much I really lost and if I had just put maybe five to ten percent of that into blue chip stocks It would have been a much better you know much better investment for me now Um, and that's sort of where the inspiration came I just like Aaron's had mentioned before I heard of acorns and I wanted to try it out and then once stock tokens really came into the crypto space And it wasn't really like an idea that it might come in ten years or stocks are gonna be tokenized Um, then I said hey, this is the perfect option to create dust And let's bring it on chain nice Yeah, I love that inspiration and I think what I like about this is that it There's an applicability to like everybody whether you're you know, I really serious like degen trader like in the trenches Eight hours a day like you like you were describing or if you're just more of you know, somebody who's You know, you make a few trades a week or or you're a bit more of a hobbyist right? It's not necessarily your full-time hustle But this is something that like anybody can use and benefit from right and and your point about the You know The exposure to the blue chip stocks. I mean we're all sitting here probably kicking ourselves for like why didn't I buy just in the video back You know five years ago, right? Like if I just had some exposure to that I'd be much better off than Then I am now right Or Tesla some other things so it's like it is important to just You know like we're always trying to you know look for bargains look for value and whatnot But sometimes just having allocation to just the blue chip things is just the safest way to go at times So it's at least really he's having some allocation to that so um So maybe it might if maybe this type into like how this the product actually works So you know for someone who's just just joining just connecting their wallet um, you know, how does how does the actual like process work like You know, I guess who can actually use this because I know I know it's on Robinhood chain So do I need to have like a Robinhood account or like how does that actually work? Like how who's actually what do you have to go ahead and do to have to use this and then you know Once I'm using it how does the mechanics actually work? Sure great question um So we built this originally we built it for Robinhood But we also added integration to Solana users as well We're constantly pushing updates every single day and I'll get into this sort of specifics But uh if I get a little complicated along the way just cut me off Once again like I might get a little technical but just Let me know if I need to re-explain something. I'll try to be as simple as possible So uh for let's say if someone is not technical It's very very simple So you need a Robinhood enabled wallet. So your typical Metamask wallet Even your fan's a wallet these days can be used and so you just opt in once Uh every swap you make on Robinhood chain gets rounded up to the next dollar doesn't matter what you do You can literally just send an e-transaction and even that transaction will get rounded up And then the change buys a basket of stock tokens that you picked beforehand And it sits in a vault only you control So uh I know a lot of people on x-ray asking questions about ownership custody So this is non-custodial. This is full ownership to the user and you can widget at any time So let's say it's been three months you forgot about dust and you came back to the platform And then you see that you have three hundred dollars worth of stock tokens now um We don't own that in any way that's completely yours You can withdraw that from the dust platform or technically your vault into your wallet at any time So nobody a dust can touch it change your basket or even pull more than the weekly cap that you set So these are permissions that you set with your wallet So for example like last week I swapped Use I swapped on my main wallet. I swapped a little bit of ether and video And this was on a regular deck So you do not need to swap on our platform itself You can just trade the way that you do And then about like a minute or two later on 97 cents of that change had actually bought Tesla and video Apple Amazon and whatever I had said in my portfolio. So Yes, so every step is public. It's a public transaction Every roundup post-live to our telegram feed as well. So you can check that out for yourself and uh Yeah, so that's pretty much the simple Simplified version of how dust really does work. I hope I kept it clear iron Yeah, it was great and and the what what stocks uh can people access like what's what's the what's available Or what can they choose from? Yeah, so currently we have Nvidia we have Tesla we have Apple Amazon and we also have the spy index so That's what we have set for now, but we make updates on you know pretty much on a daily basis at this point And during this week we're probably going to add another 10 stocks to the dust platform stock tokens Okay, and then um and then I guess how are you determining like which stocks get added? Is it is it kind of based on just what people are requesting or demanding or What's your process for like adding new stocks? Yes, a great question um currently we're just going by you know The the stock that have the most you know market capital currently the ones that have the most liquidity um That's what we're adding to the platform right now But we actually want to get more feedback from the community as the usage picks up And soon enough you guys can get to vote which stocks you'd like to see on the platform So that's a new update that's going to be coming soon as well Okay, very cool And then you know for like Hypothetically here like if somebody's see listening to this they're thinking like well You know if I get like you know 32 cents of like a Tesla stock or something like that's not really a significant You know amount of money or like Well, like maybe talking about just like how like why a tool like this is powerful in the sense of like if you're trading With any kind of frequency like these these volumes can like really the they can add up pretty quickly to a substantial amount It's maybe you know what are some kind of like you know success stories you've seen or what are some of the numbers you've run on like how much can somebody actually