cover of episode $1B of $ETH Disappeared; What Are Special Economic Zones?

$1B of $ETH Disappeared; What Are Special Economic Zones?

2021/9/17
logo of podcast Moon Or Bust

Moon Or Bust
Frequently requested episodes will be transcribed first

Shownotes Transcript

Episode Summary:

On today’s Moon Or Bust:

Guests:

Thibault Serlet Co-Founder and Chief Researcher https://www.adrianoplegroup.com/people/thibault-serlet)

Resources:

**Subscribe to our ****Benzinga Crypto Youtube Channel **)

Today's Cryptocurrency Prices by Market Cap

Meet The Hosts:

Brian Moir

Solidity and React Developer | Blockchain Enthusiast | Decentralized Internet Advocate | Crypto investor since 2012

https://twitter.com/moirbrian )

Logan Ross

Blockchain Analyst @ Benzinga | President @ Wolverine Blockchain | Crypto investor and educator since 2016

https://twitter.com/logannross)

Ryan McNamara

Bought sub $90 ETH during the bear market | Liquidated on ByBit | Was into DeFi before it was cool | Ran ASIC mining operation in 2016 (sorry planet Earth) | $UNI Bag Holder

https://twitter.com/ryan15mcnamara)

Disclaimer: All of the information, material, and/or content contained in this program is for informational purposes only. Investing in stocks, options, and futures is risky and not suitable for all investors. Please consult your own independent financial adviser before making any investment decisions.

Unedited Transcript

Hello, zinger nation. Welcome back to moon or bust your home for all things. All coins and defy. This is flight 47 on the moon or bus rocket ship. If you can believe it. Uh, today's space flight will be hosted by me, Logan Ross, and co-hosted by Brian Moore, defy developer and Ryan McNamara, exit liquidity nation.

How are you guys doing today? Fantastic. Hey, quite the name you came up with today, Logan just pull it right off the top. How was things in Logan's world? You Logan's world is going pretty well. Just keeping it calm, stay in busy, trying to, you know, just, just stay focused. Just do it. Provide the best moon or bust content in the world, uh, that I can possibly come up with coming up with all these crazy names off the top.

So, uh, yeah, so let's, let's talk about a couple of safety procedures that we need to get out of the way before we can start the show. Uh, so first up I need anyone who is willing and able to please activate their. But in, into the on position, uh, I need everyone else to comment down below the crypto projects.

You're looking at this week, drop tickers, whatever it might be, and maybe let us know why you're looking at them, what you're thinking about them. Uh, and if we get time at the end, we'll go through them all. Uh, after that, while you're down there, I want to point out a couple links in the description below.

So first up is the Benzinga crypto YouTube channel. Uh, you do not want to miss out on this content. It's all the highlights from all of our crypto shows here at Benzinga. If you're new, make sure to subscribe to the main channel as well. Also, we have a telegram and merge. If you join the telegram, we'll give you a 25% off discount code so you can get a sick moon or bust a theory about.

Designed by yours truly. Uh, and as always make sure to connect with us on Twitter and check out our helpful money site resources in the description as well. Uh, okay, so let's get right into the news. Ryan, you want to tell us about the sushi swap hack that happened? I think Brian could probably do a little bit better job as the defiant developer, but $3 million were stolen off of sushi.

Swap from the Misa launch pad. Brian, do you want to go over this in detail a little bit more? Um, you let me pull it up and you go ahead and do a little run down and let you pull up. So this happened, was it yesterday, Logan, there was 865 Ethereum stolen off of me. So, which is a product on sushi swap for small tokens.

It's essentially a launch pad where people can invest in a initial Dex offering. So similar to ICO, but it's called the IDEO. Um, so someone was able to inject malicious code into the software. So everybody trying to get these tokens or ended up just giving their ether to this guy's wallet. But luckily there are a lot of nice hackers in crypto.

So this guy already gave back the funds and then some, so he's still. 864.8, Ethereum, which is about $3 million. And today he gave back 865 Ethereum. So maybe it's earning interest on it or something. A rumor has it that he got some miso soup delivered to his house. So maybe he was paying them back for the miso soup delivered to his house.

I that's not confirmed, but that's what I saw on Twitter. So, I mean, if it's on Twitter, it's probably cool guy. I want him to hack me next. If he's going to get back the money, give back the money. It looks like this attack was, uh, called a supply chain attack. And I actually don't know too much, um, about how that kind of works.

I was trying to look into it and get some details, but it's, it's a little bit more, um, involved or complicated than a. The, the flash loan attacks or, you know, that kind of exploit, it's not as straightforward or simple as, you know, you may rise in the price and then taking all out and excellent liquidity or taking everything out of a certain wallet or something.

It's a, uh, a supply chain attack. And so it's, this is a new one to me. I think it's been around, but. Yeah, it's a little different. I have to look into that and report back on what a supply chain attack is. Next time I heard that it was a malicious code, injection attack. Um, and I mean, that one seems more, more common to me.

That's probably the same thing. I mean, maybe it's just another name for. Uh, anyways, let's see. So how about that new, uh, sushi swap NFT. I'm Ryan. Yeah, that's really exciting. It's called show you NFT. And it's coming out this month on sushi swap. Lots of developers are working on this right now and it looks like it's going to be the first real big competitor to open.

See, everybody uses open, see for NFTs right now. And like we've covered on the show. There's been a lot of problems with it. From servers from employees from a lot of different things on open. See it hasn't been a great experience for many users there. So this is going to be really interesting to see how this sushi swap.

And if ti marketplace goes over there adding some really cool features to it. For example, you can place bids on NFTs and that either is usually locked up, say on open sea and you can't use it on sushi swap. You'll be able to earn yield on your. So this is going to be like particularly well for the people who have hundreds of NFTs and a lot of Ethereum.

And, you know, they're going out and going on board apes and putting in 30, 40 eith bids and hoping that they get accepted now, instead of just having that be locked up on the platform, they can actually be earning interest on their Ethereum while these bids are placed on an FTS, which I think is really cool.

There also, they're also fractionalizing NFTs. So you'll be able to get fractionalized NFTs on the platform, which is essentially buying a piece like a share of an NFT. We'll see if the sec comes after sushi for that. I know they're after unit swap right now and fractionalize NFTs are likely to be security.

So there will probably be regulation coming four or five fractionalized NFTs. We haven't seen it yet. I mean, it's such a new space, but I really like what sushi swaps doing. They've been putting so many new products onto their website and I love where they're going. So what do you guys have to say about sushi?

Swap about show you NFTs. What's your take, do you think they can think about sushi? Swap? I found my notes. Um, so the malicious code and the whole hack is somebody went into the get hub and change the wallet address to their own custom wallet address for the IDEO. And so they, uh, you know, everyone depositing funds just put it straight to this.

Person's, you know, Ethereum wallet. Yeah. He was like, okay, well, now that I got that look how easy it is. He returned it, but that's really what happened. So there was malicious code put into the front end to change out the wallets and everything like that. So malicious though, wasn't malicious because he gave it back after a day.

It might've been because they threatened to file with the FBI. But I think a lot of these people who do this in return, the funds are just trying to protect people from these bugs in the code. And they don't want to go to the government. I mean, so many people in crypto are libertarian. They want to deal with the government.

Um, so I mean, this is just another way to do it. And honestly, it seems more effective because they keep the funds safe in their own wallet and they exploit something. It gains a lot of attention and then it gets fixed within a day or so instead of actually try and go to the government to get something done, which would take months or even years to do, it's kind of like hacktivist.

Yeah, you have, there's quite a bit of that. And it's, I think it's a good thing because you don't have people just straight taking everything. Like you said, you have people trying to protect other people's funds, protect a project and make sure things are growing. And I like that. I mean, I don't want $50 million of mine stolen, but I don't have 50 million.

Yeah. I mean, once you discover the bug, it's the classic prisoner's dilemma, whoever you report it to then has the opportunity to just take the money themselves. Right. So he has to lock it up and then hopefully he'll be a good guy. He or she will be a good guy and return the money. Um, okay. Let's see. So yesterday reportedly, uh, $1,000,000,001.2 billion of Eve disappeared from centralized exchanges, uh, glass nodes, reporting, some different things.

Uh, but this one is from, I think it's called into the block. Uh, it was the people, it was the company that reported. Um, we S we haven't confirmed, uh, with glass snowed yet, but we're working on it. So if this is true, we'll just report it, uh, you know, tentatively for now, uh, and talk about what it could mean if it is true.

So, Ryan, you want to take it away. So yeah, if this is true, $1 billion, $1.2 billion of each leaving exchanges should be pretty bullish for the asset. So if people are taking their Ethereum off exchanges, typically they aren't looking for liquidity. If you have your crypto on an exchange, You can easily sell it for FIA and then cash out of your investment.

Whereas people transferring off of exchanges usually do so for enhanced security to hold over the longterm or use with the Phi project. So if you're using Ethereum with DFI projects, there'll be locking it into smart contracts. Maybe you're staking on eith too, with this much money, maybe you're using a different program to earn some passive income, but usually it's a really good scientist.

Ethereum leave exchanges. That's essentially a theory that isn't going to be. At least on centralized exchanges until it's brought back onto these exchanges and sold for Fiat currency. So in my opinion, this is something that's really bullish. And we haven't seen this since. What is that like? No April was, this is a new record all the time, all time record.

That's huge. But the last time you saw anything similar was back in April and you can see that was right before each shot up like 60% or even higher. It looks like it shot up from maybe $2,200 all the way to $4,000. So obviously we don't know if that's going to happen again, but we see when he leaves exchanges, especially in high volumes like this, a lot of times it's a good bullish signal for.

Yep. And they pointed out the last time this happened, as you said, Ryan, if the price of Ethereum increased by 60% within 30 days. Uh, so, um, I got my fingers crossed that this is true. Could be good news. Oh, ready. Got anything else for us today on the agenda? I think we covered the news. Shall we hop right into the interview?

Let's do it. Okay. So today we have with us a very special guest. His name is TiVo and he is a researcher and expert on special economic zones. So I'm going to bring him on to stream. Uh, Hey, TiVo. Welcome. Hello. Nice to meet you. Yeah. Nice to meet you too. How are you doing today? Excellent. Glad to hear it.

Well, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, I'm not particularly an expert on special economic zones, so I'm excited to learn today. Um, so could you tell us a little bit about your background, uh, in various industries about special economic zones and then maybe eventually how you got into crypto? Sure, sure.

So I'm the co-founder of a firm called the Adrian Oakville group where the only business intelligence firm that works with, um, exclusively and the Sez India. We primarily work with investors who want to put their money in the zone who want to invest in building a new zone and sort of do all of the background research necessary to guide them through that process in terms of crypto.

Um, it's been more of a personal hobby of mine. I first got into crypto in 2013, uh, due to a conference. So I've been seeing sort of the, the, the different booms and busts over the years and all of that, the, the case. Um, but recently it's intersected with my professional career because it turns out that a lot of special economic zones are now trying to adopt regulatory frameworks to promote cryptocurrency, to legalize it in countries that are otherwise illegal.

So it's this very fascinating trend on the regulatory. Okay. So for anyone out there who hasn't heard of special economic zones before, uh, could you just tell us what they are and what the purpose of them is? Sure. So especially economic zones are a part of a country that has its own rules and regulations separate from the rest of the country.

Think like a native American reservation that is exempt from federal laws and can have a casino. If you're an American and legal cannabis. Well, sometimes governments that have a lot of very complicated rules for doing business. We'll do this with a business park or they'll do this sometimes with the whole city.

Um, you've probably heard of them Hong Kong, wouldn't left Britain and rejoins China rejoined as a special economic zone with a lot of legal autonomy. Uh, Dubai is a city that has, I think 46, 47 SEZs it's just a city state of city states. Um, this is about 7,500 STDs in the world, 12,000 total, they're in 70 countries and they account for this huge percentage of the world economy, and nobody's ever heard of them, which is why they're so fascinating.

Yeah, that is crazy. I had no clue that. I mean, it's, there's so many in Dubai. What would be the purpose of having so many in one small location? Sure. So in the case of Dubai, um, this is a common misconception. Dubai did not have any. So what happened is that you have this, you have this, this desert country in the middle of nowhere and all of their neighbors were politically unstable and had oil.

So instead of selling oil, what they decided to do was to settle legal stability, and they outsourced the legal system to the best lawyers from the UK to the best lawyers from Singapore, they created these special economic zones for different entities. Uh, DMCC Dubai, uh, multi commodity center, uh, Dubai international financial center for different industries that had different legal systems.

And because all of their neighbors were trying to pump the oil sort of during the gold rush, you know, the people who made the money, weren't the, the, the schmucks who are out there panning for gold. It was the people selling the pancakes and selling the shovels. So that's basically what Dubai did. Hmm.

Fascinating. I don't know if you have an estimate, but what, uh, like what portion of the global economy or what effect, uh, of the total global economy desk Easy's play. Are you ready to be somewhat terrified? I'm ready. Okay. You're going down. Walmart. You're looking all of the plastic crap that they have.

What percentage of it was made in a special economic. According to world bank figures. Uh, I'll let Ryan gets 10% about 50%. So if you're, if you're looking at the largest Sez is a special economic zone in Saudi Arabia, $1 trillion of money from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, you know, invested in this thing.

Um, the population of the special economic. You have cities with populations, 40, 50, 60 million people living in China, uh, millions of people in India, living in them. And many of the people who live in Denmark only at most vaguely aware. So what this means is that. When governments want to try some new legal sort of legal system.

And I have some very interesting examples of this, uh, with something like cryptocurrency, which is highly controversial, the moment they start putting it in SEZs, it's almost like they're testing something to implement on a more widespread national level. So it was very interesting applications. So what have we seen with crypto?

And Sez so far. So in 20 12, 1 of the first jurisdictions to start regulating cryptocurrencies was the Cayman enterprise city and became an islands. Now came in Ireland, already sort of top rated jurisdictions. Maybe a tax Haven has its own issues, but it's sort of like the top rated jurisdiction within the top rated jurisdiction already.

Right. And they decided to start regulating crypto code. And instead of actually reducing regulation on crypto, they actually increased it. But because they did this before anyone else, it meant that all of the investors who had regulatory concerns started investing there. So, um, a lot of these, the like the browser brave and a whole bunch of these, these, these, I think coin from, uh, are all based and came in.

Um, other interesting examples. It turns out that a lot of these special economic zones. Have electrical generation. So during downtime, when you know, nobody's using electricity at 3:00 AM, right? So, and if you're have a coal plant, all of that electricity is just wasted. So in the past, what they've done is literal mining, where they actually will smell to metals with the excess electricity and like literally have the metal refineries and smelter.

Is there any Iran, a country or cryptocurrency is legal. We had this guy on my podcast. Um, Iran has legalized Bitcoin and its special economic zones has hold a mining. Operations is actually working with all sorts of investors and what's even crazier. They're going to start legalizing it for retail investors for companies registered on the, on the Kish island, uh, just a few weeks ago.

So we're going to see a lot more of that. That's cool. So it seems like SEZs are almost like a pilot program before it goes out to the entire country. Yes. Yes. So when, when China reformed from, from socialism to capitalism in the 1980s, um, they had just had this mass famine from rapidly changing everything to communism.

Where about 50 million people died of famine in China due to economic mismanagement in the fifties, for a sense of scale, the entire death toll of all of world war II, including the whole. Is 80 million. So 50 million people starving China, 80 million people die in all of world war II. Right? So worst disaster in human history, maybe second, worst after world war II.

So they really did not want to just like adopt capitalism on the national level when the switch to socialism was so disruptive. So they tested it in these special economic zones. And, uh, within the first year, 60% of all foreign investors. Coming to China was coming through the SEZs. Wow. So SES, these have been around for a long time, then it's not like they're a new phenomenon non, when did they start coming about?

So I've actually been doing a lot of research to this. Um, if, if that's sort of an interesting rabbit hole, but, uh, the Roman empire to give you a sense of scale, one of their enemies was the city state of roads. Um, roads is like, you know, sort of the island that's right next to Turkey. Roads had all of this massive navies and the Romans had to attack by sea, but they're Navy.

These were crap. Worst of all that the fighting Carthage at this point, this is 1 66 BC. They'd been fighting Carthage at to this point for 30 years. So their manpower was totally exhausted and roads were there could have been an alternate timeline where roads unseated, Rome, and wiped out the Roman empire before it had a chance to be born.

But Rhodes had one critical. It's entire government budget, which is funded by a 2% tariff on all goods going through their parts. So the Rogan's created a special economic zone with a 0% tariff, right next to roads. And in five years roads with so bankrupt that they voluntarily begged to join the Roman empire.

Wow. That's a cool story. So, uh, moving back to crypto TiVo, have you consulted for any cryptocurrency projects? Um, no. Okay. So what's the typical role? Like, do you see blockchain playing a role in these STCs for the, for the companies that you do consult for? Yeah. So, um, one of the companies that we consult for, have you heard of Kronos?

It sounds familiar, but I'm not familiar with the audience anyway. So most is a VC fund. The anchor investor is Peter TLF PayPal. Okay. My wife works there and you should talk to Patri Friedman. I could give you an intro. He's the guy who runs the fund is actually investing. Uh, and they have a whole bunch of famous LPs, but I don't want to get in trouble, but less well-known well-known figures.

I, I think Balaji is public. So I'll, I'll say him, but what they're doing is they're actually going out and they're actually investing in sort of like the really futuristic projects that are going through. Make the cryptocurrency regulation happens. So it's sort of the invisible underpinning and you have some servers, you know, you have a registered company in the zone, you have the servers in that zone.

And as long as you're not dealing with us investors, you have to deal with sec. Um, you can bring in investors from anywhere in the world and there'll be a, there'll be exempt. So they're looking at projects and in Honduras, uh, Nigeria, they've already invested in, uh, looking at other projects in Africa.

Yeah, don't want to get in trouble, but a very interesting stuff. So cool. And then I saw that one of your services is information assurance where you help companies verify and secure data. What are your thoughts on the intersection between information assurance and crypto and blockchain technology? So I can't really comment too much about that, but it's actually not information assurance or I guess that's part of it.

That's really the big use for blockchain, right? But it's for online company registries. Um, because if you, if you just have like some random dude who just starts like a blockchain registry, right? You, you, you, you release the software online and get a bunch of users. It's not actually tied to any legal system.

So it doesn't the U S government doesn't recognize this in contract law. But if you're tied to say the government. I don't know, let's, let's just make up a country, say Nigeria or something like that. And you're all Cayman islands. Right. And you're tied indirectly because the SEZs are. Can act as a metaphorical user interface between you and the government.

So you actually registering your company with the zone and the zone itself is on the blockchain. That actually creates a situation where you can implement these technologies legally in a way that normally kind of bypasses having to like change legislation, to have blockchain company registration recognized by the U S government.

So very interesting ways you can hack and bypass the legal system. Hm. So turning back to regulation for a second, uh, how should the U S and I, and other sovereign countries, and maybe how, how will Sez is playing this as well? How should they handle crypto regulation? Um, I can't really speak to that simply because I'm not a, an expert on crypto regulation, but my, my own perspective is that, and this is just sort of a personal opinion, not a professional.

Is that the government should create sort of sandbox environments where people can, Hey, you signed this document, you know, maybe I'm going to lose everything and you, you, you acknowledge and you just try whatever. And maybe it turns out to be stupid, but I really think that's sort of the, the approach that, um, is going to generate the most innovation.

Interesting. It's like we saw that Bitcoin beach in El Salvador. Like a little test city. Uh, yeah, that makes sense. I don't know anything about it yet, but, uh, interesting project. So TiVo, you guys also provide cyber security audits to your companies who are in SEZs. Why is this particularly necessary for companies that are in special economic zones?

Um, you know, it's just sort of a standard package of it services. Uh, one of our co-founders Herzon on Flores just used to be doing cybersecurity. He did cybersecurity for Virginia police. So it's just like, Hey, let's just toss that in as sort of a service we offer, but really, you know, our, the, the bulk of our services right.

Is mostly due diligence. It's mostly, Hey, I want to invest in X, Y, Z zone. Um, and working with investors on that front to get into the zone. I have some interesting sort of actually examples that are quite relevant right now. Um, right now, one of the big things that's, that's, that's, that's that's going on is Belarus.

The Belarus industrial park, right. Has announced this complete cryptocurrency sandbox, but you know, people, I'm sure your, your listeners, or at least a good percentage of them will know that there are massive. Uh, protests against the Bella Russian government, right? There are massive situations where the government was almost basically overthrown because it was so corrupt by the people and massive, you know, horrible police, crackdowns, horrible treatment of protestors.

Right. So we're kind of like the guys you'd hire before you go to Belarus to figure it out. Hey, if you go here or if you go to some other country, um, you're going to get in trouble and all sorts of weird.

so my, my next question for you TiVo is about the types of blockchain implementation that you've seen in SEZs. Is it mostly like say payment processing where you can send payments like cross borders for very cheap, or is it more adoption of private blockchains within a company? We're an investment or is it more like blockchain platforms, like a theory or Solano where you can interact with programs on a blockchain?

Um, so it's, it's, it's kind of disappointing. You don't really see that many. So w if you're talking about the well established special economic zones that are already in existence, you don't actually see that many real day-to-day applications of blockchain yet. However, to the extent that it is arriving, Uh, it's much more on the payment processing side.

Um, it's less that the blockchains themselves are using the, the, the, the, sorry, the special economic zones themselves are using blockchain technology and cryptocurrency. What it is is that it's more that the, uh, the, the, the, the people. Are setting up these companies in order to operate in a given region are relocating to the zones and the zones are basically bending over backwards, going really, you know, all out, uh, in order to sort of help make that happen.

Hmm. Interesting, interesting example. Right. So in may of this year, two of Dubai's most longstanding special economic centers. These SEZs have been around for, you know, 40. Uh, DMCC and the IFC Dubai international financial center. Um, these zones typically stayed away from crypto. These zones very much, uh, headquarters of site, Blackstone, Warburg, Pincus type old school wall street, private equity firms, middle Eastern headquarters for these companies.

And typically the zones that have done crypto, you know, the zones that have gone for. I have been kind of like the zones in Iran or the zones in Belarus. And they've been kind of the SEZs in weird place as of the last six months, the big trend that you're seeing with kind of this, this, you know, third, big bubble in the last like six years sort of coming to an end is that the zones have realized, Hey, crypto may crash and rise or whatever, but it's going to be here to stay.

And if they're not sort of on the bandwidth, Uh, they're going to get left behind. So they're adopting regulatory frameworks, which on paper look like they're imposing all of these sanctions on crypto, but by actually creating this environment, um, are actually able to sort of reassure investors that these are going to be stable places to invest in.

So have you seen that special economic zones that have made regulation for cryptocurrency? Have an influx of investors come to them over the past year with blockchain exploding and crypto going up. So. Yes, not only do they have an N so Cayman enterprise city has, I think it's either 200 or 250 spots.

All 200 and 250 are full with a huge waiting list for any office space. Um, I spoke to a guy who ran a random textile park company in El Salvador. He rans El Salvador's biggest textile, special economic zones. You know, all they do is like make t-shirts and white rubber gloves too, and good, useful stuff.

And he wakes up one day reads the news. Huh? Cool. El Salvador's, you know, adopting. It doesn't think much of it opens his inbox and has, you know, 900 emails from random people, cold emailing him to relocate to his own. And he's like, what in the world is going on? You know? And you're hearing the most crazy stuff as soon as one of these zones even announced its crypto.

Um, it, th th th they get bombarded, but the problem is that these zones have no ability to identify, say, Ponzi schemes from, you know, legitimate projects. So it's, it's, they're also terrified. Uh, a lot of the ones are, are full of Ponzi scheme. It's a total, it's a total mess right now. So it sounds like countries and their citizens have a lot to gain from introducing these crypto special economic zones attracting lots of innovation.

Uh, but they do have to, you know, start small work their way up, learn the valuable lessons about the Ponzis and the real projects. Um, that's cool. What would you say the most important role that crypto or blockchain plays in these special economic zone? So in one, one really interesting trend is that a lot of these zones there's like every possible imaginable industry has a zone and the level of specificity, the level of granularity think of zones.

It's like a tailored legal system to target a very granular, specific industry. Right. And I'll give you an idea. I was talking to a guy who does nonwoven fabrics, things like wool or rubber gloves, plastic, blue tarp, all of that's non-woven fabrics. And I'm like, so tell me more about the textiles industry.

And he got really pissed off and he's like, I'm not textiles and non-woven fabric totally different industry. And like, that's sort of the level of meekness. Right. And a lot of these zones. We're office parks, a lot of these special economic zones where like, like, you know, rows of computers, cubicles, whatever, uh, in the Philippines, all over the world.

And the workers are just never coming back to the offices. It's not a two-week lockdown. It's not a six month lockdown. They're all working from home. None of them want to go back to the Cuba. Um, and now all of these zones have this infrastructure for office space, which could be adopted for crypto, could become, you know, startup incubators, and they're suddenly left scratching their heads.

So I kinda think that the, these governments are slow moving. Um, I'd say that they're trying to use cryptocurrency and blockchain as sort of a replacement in half the cases. It's a replacement for anchor tenants who disappeared. And then the other half of cases, they're kind of late to the bandwagon and they're desperately trying to find their way to get in.

So it's, it's generally one of two things and occasionally you have some really forward-thinking, you know, jurisdiction. You have three or four. That I actually are, but yeah, that, that, that actually sort of our foreign thing, but usually it's fear and a fear of missing out. Yeah. I can see that. Well, how big are special economic zones?

W w what's the range or how can you tell where it's located? All right. So I have two sort of extreme stories. Um, there, the us has something called foreign trade zones. There's about 250 300. All they are. Is that good? The enter and exit the foreign trade zone legally haven't entered the U S so the idea is that you're building a car, you import the tires from, you know, Germany or whatever you put them onto the car and they don't have to pay the tariffs.

So the us has like the most basic lowest level of Sez. They barely even count. I, I read online that in San Jose, California, when I was visiting there, then the special economic zone. So I messaged the guy and I'm like, Hey, can I visit the zone? And he's like, oh, sure. And the first bad sinus, he says, nobody's visited me in years.

So he takes me to this, you know, 40 story building. Right. And I go into this building and I go up this elevator and there's this dusty little office that is, um, you know, three meters by two meters like this, like dusty, tiny one extreme. And that was the foreign trade zone. That, that, that was. Um, uh, so on the, on the largest and, um, you, you have in El Salvador the same within a few months of, of, of, uh, El Salvador announcing that they were going to Bitcoin.

China announced the zone several hundred square kilometers. That's going to encompass 20% of El Salvador's coastline. So. So, if you look at these zones into the in desert countries like Saudi Arabia, or even the UAE or Oman, right. You have zones that are hundreds of square kilometers. So it's really the whole gamut in terms of population.

Once again, dusty closet, uh, Chinese Ken's in population. How do you delegate, uh, especially getting an exam, like H how do you just say, like, Hey, this is the zone, this is what we're doing. So there's two ways that special economic zones, uh, come about. Um, the first is sort of, application-based think a government official with a Sharpie drawing on a map from now on this area over here will be the special economic zone.

That's kind of like the China model. You know, it's the pointing at the map, the tapping, we will have economic development. Um, the other model is application-based. So that's like Columbia, where if you own say two or three square kilometers of land and meet this long checklist of requirements, you file an application and you get, um, you get special economic zone status on their land.

So sometimes they're started by the government. Sometimes just started by business. Uh, we got stats that our company. One third are, are purely government. One third are purely private and one third public private partnerships. So it's almost exactly evenly divided. Um, but the extent of the private designation is pretty incredible because you have the city of Google, uh, Gurgaon and India, and they switched the names about 10 years ago.

And the entire zone has private water system, private police, private fire department, private electricity, primary management, nothing is done by the government at all. And you have zones that are taking this even further in Honduras. You can even apply to have entirely privatized legal systems for all civil law.

So anything that's not criminal law that's in these Honduras is Adams. That's going to be special economic. It goes to a fully privatized legal system within the zone. And it's scaring a lot of people and you know, whether or not it works out, I think is still up for debate, but they go pretty far sometimes by the way, constellation 1 million.

So, wow. That's incredible. And that's super interesting. I'm really surprised. I haven't heard of that. And I'm sure that's a super interesting case study to research about, uh, have you done some research on this? Like how is it really playing out? Because I haven't heard. Okay. How how's what playing outside privatization in, in these SEZs that are doing this.

Um, as far as I can tell, it's a roll of the dice. Most of the time, you're going to get a two to five and not much will happen either way. Sometimes you get a six and you get the city of Shenzen, you know, which goes from a fishing village of 60,000 to a mega city of 60 million. And like 40 years and accounts for 60% of China's investment than 70% of their things.

You know, you get retarded, crazy results. One way. Sometimes you get golden triangle Sez in Myanmar. The legal autonomy for some zones enables the worst in humanity. So the triads have their own special economic zone in Laos, on the border with me and mark and they have a casino, but it's known for human trafficking.

Uh, 245 women were abducted and forced into prostitution recently freed by ocean authorities in this zone, you have wildlife smuggling, um, and there's actually YouTube videos. If you look up, uh, golden triangle, uh, special economic zone on YouTube, they, they, they, they, they map mass manufacture methamphetamines.

Um, they, they have, they have like lions that they like make fight and cages with each other. And. Uh, they have like all sorts of animals that they take apart for traditional medicine. So you have the worst possible and humanity and the best possible. And it's, you know, you're kind of gambling as a country in this.

There's not really much of a way to predict what the results were. These are wild. One last thing from, from me is can, uh, we saw you talking about a start-up society. Can you just tell us a brief example? We don't have to go too deep into it, but what a start-up society is and how they correlate to SEZs.

Sure. So I started in 2015, a nonprofit think tank called the startups and studies foundation. I left in 2017. Um, a startup society is just. Anybody who's trying to create a society to Nova. So say the country of Catalonia before it becomes a country while it's still like an independence movement is a start-up society or a special economic zone could be another type of.

Gotcha. Interesting. So I have a question for you. You say the us government, uh, contracts, you to create a crypto sandbox in the country. What would you pitch to them? Ooh, good question. Um, You know, w what I would do probably, and there's just sort of, the way I am is I would do a crap ton of research, and I would find a ton of people.

Who've done a lot of research. Um, and I'd go about it by interviewing about two or 300. And I know I'm not just giving you an answer like plastics, but I go back, I try to interview two or 300 business people who do cryptocurrency, um, at all sides. It's very new people, people who are sort of on the very high end of companies, very well.

And I get, you know, all of their top five regulatory pain points, uh, get all the interviews for the top five regulatory pain points for 200 people. And, uh, based off of that, I try to come up with like the three D I wouldn't try to do too much. I'd just try to fix the three biggest, most common pain points to all of the interviews.

And really, I think that the, the best results for these kinds of things is. You know, really ask the people involved and not try to do it in the abstract, although I'm sure that if I was like a crypto lawyer, I could just say, you know, plastics or whatever. Very cool. And those location matter when it comes to Cristo.

Yes. Yes it does. And I'd say that it matters for three reasons. One, you probably are actually going to be doing to take advantage of a lot of the incentives. You actually have to be physically. So you want to be in a nice location where there's not corruption. That's really beautiful. Um, I live in Switzerland, uh, actually live 20 minutes from Lichtenstein, which is one of the, the crypto capitals of the world and maybe 30 minutes to the other direction from zoo.

Right. It's such a beautiful country that that's totally white. People are coming. Even if the regulations aren't say as good as the next reason why location matters is because the regulation can change. The voters of the country can just say overnight new election comes as a coup you know, um, okay.

We're just getting rid of the special economic zones and by the way, Uh, we want you to either go to jail for 15 years, we're turning all of your keys and we're taking all of your crypto, you know, so that totally can happen. And in fact, I'm sure it will happen. I'm sure. At some point the government takes there's enough crypto rich people that are there for a conference we'll just like start arresting people and demanding keys on trumped up stuff.

So number one, location actually matters. Number two is, uh, you don't want, you know, to have a corruption and number three has electricity. The average cost per kilowatt hour globally as 14 cents. Um, you can get half that in some places. So if you're especially doing mining, uh, that's very valuable. However, like those zones I mentioned in Iran, you know, it's, it's, it's, they, they in fact will subsidize your electricity in some cases.

Interesting. So earlier this year we saw China banned Bitcoin mining. They've basically taken control over it and issued their own central bank, digital currency. Instead, are we seeing China do any experiments in their special economic zones with crypto? Okay. Want to know something LR. This is going to blow your minds again.

Are you ready please? Do. I was in 500 special economic zones in China, right? Oh, how many Chinese special economic zones are there? Run by Chinese corporations outside of. Oh, I, I it's either going to be a really high number or I'm imagining a really high number is going to be a high number. But could you say that question one more time?

How many companies are they're run by the Chinese government and Chinese state run companies, Chinese special economic sounds outside of China? Well, there's about 10,000 of them worldwide and 2,500 are in China already. So that leaves about 7,500. I have no clue, maybe 2000, if it's a high number. Well, you're, you're over it, but there's 500 Chinese SEZs outside of China.

And so what qualifies it as a Chinese SCC? Like a special economic zone, that's run by any Chinese company. That definition is if the usually zones have an operator, which is kind of like the country that owns the land, builds the buildings, cleans the law and whatever, if that company is Chinese, we have a, by the way, we're about to publish the world's first map of every single special economic zone on earth and took us two years of work.

Um, but, but one of the data we collected was to see where all the Chinese. And it's terrifying because in some of the most extreme cases, we found Chinese SEZs outside of us military basis. So the U S has all of these overseas bases and the like, like a bunch of idiots, the U S government is, you know, Hey, we're going to go in through military imperialism, spend $2 trillion and then leave Afghanistan 20 years later, the Chinese.

No we're going to do, we're going to build a happy mall right next to the U S military base and invite TGI Fridays to the shopping mall. So all the off duty soldiers will spend money on us, government money in our shopping, bubbles find like Chinese shopping miles outside of any military base in Africa, you find that there's military basis.

The only connection they have to the outside world are Chinese freeways and Chinese railroads. You know, I don't think it's actually that the trends are going to shut it off. I just think it's that they're like taking all the money from the U S government basically indirectly, um, in terms of, uh, cryptocurrency, um, you know, the Chinese are always up to, uh, they really want to promote, you know, Th th the digitization of the, of, of the Yuan and promoting sort of the digital one as the one world currency that's running administered by China.

So, you know, I think you're going to just see that be implemented. Um, and all of the zones, I have kind of an interesting little anecdote of this, and I don't want to mention the zone cause they're good people. I don't want to embarrass them, but one of the largest special economic zones in Africa, our team is about to do it.

And we emailed them and we're like, Hey, we heard your zone splint by the Chinese and villain. No, no Chinese people here, you know, it's all Chinese characters, it's all a, we chat, pay every single star, um, uh, you know, giant Chinese flag that says, uh, uh, sort of, you know, welcome home. And, um, you have zones with names like qualling special economic zone in Georgia, you know, the country of Georgia.

Hm. So I'm guessing that these countries let China have these special economic zones just for the purpose of developing their own economies as well. Yes. And you know, to be fair, I think the reason why China has done so well with the SCCs is because it's actually pretty good for, you know, the, the, the locals peaceful.

Yeah. There's there's problems there. Chicanery, there are corruptions, but many of the time it's. All the men in your town suddenly get jobs that pay twice as much working for the Chinese factory, where there's been no development in a war torn country for 20 years, you know, you're going to be very supportive of China, right?

They're doing what sort of, uh, America wishes it did during the cold war, but a zillion times better. And I think they learned that from the U S. Very interesting. Do you, uh, do any, like personally, do you invest in cryptos? Do you follow any projects or are you into that space at all? No comment. No, I got it.

Yeah. That makes sense. Are you interested in the, in NFL? Um, okay. I think NFTs are totally stupid. The reason why is because I think intellectual property is like an outdated sort of institution. We need to be moving towards, you know, open source, copyright free. So, uh, to the extent the NFTs are, are, are.

For people claiming ownership of like digital assets. I think that's like really the wrong direction. Um, however, I imagine that there's a ton of other non-trivial applications out there, so I'm not hating on those, but I am hating on, uh, what is it? Crypto kitties or whatever has.

It's interesting to see that these digital assets are the first type of NFT to really get put into the mainstream, though. We did see it's real a use NFTs in a pilot program for, I think it was land deeds and Carla. And so it's really cool to see governments like catching an eye for NFTs. And it's going to be really interesting to see where it goes, because like you said, TiVo, it's not just about these digital assets or verifying like digital IP.

There's a million different use cases for them. And we're only scratching the surface right now. So you said land needs and Carla. Yes, that's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. That's that's like exactly what it should be used for, right? Yeah. Yeah. I imagine it is going to be your whole identity, like in the future where you're going to have, you know, your, um, your, it is going to be tokenized, whatever your social, everything.

Maybe hidden, but you know what I mean? I think that's how you can verify everything and never get lost and all that other stuff, like you said, there's a ton of, um, different use cases for entities, not just profile pictures or images like you, you know? Cause I understand the, uh, kind of thing about. But at the same time, I feel like there is a need to, uh, essentially show off on the internet flex, if you will.

Like, like people will buy Rolex's and fancy cars. And with so much time that people spend on internet these days, I think it only makes sense to have a way for people to show off on the internet. Like they do. Fancy cars or other things that might not really have the tangible value that they're worth. I mean, there, there are a lot of things like that in the physical, tangible world.

And, and I think it to a degree makes sense. Although silly, I don't think that the government should like regulate it or anything, but I just wish that instead of showing you. You know, so in the, in the, in the middle ages, right. Which was like a time when everything was like a special economics, right.

Rights, this age of totally crazy city states. Um, so my, my other hobby outside of STC is medieval history, but in the middle east, there really was this, this, um, this attitude of like, Hey, the rich people are going to show off by like building charts and Publix works and funding the arts and funding sciences.

I, and I really hate seeing Lamborghini's and Rolex's when we could be crowdfunding Elon Musk to go build a colony on the moon, or we could be like, you know, funding, like fishing fleets to get rid of all of that plastic in the ocean. So I just wish it was channeled in that direction. Yeah, no, that totally makes sense.

So I saw on your website, you like to do a lot of book reviews. Uh, could you tell us maybe how you got into that? What you've been reading lately and any recommendations you might have for us here on moon or bust? Sure. So for book reviews, um, this is my personal website, this isn't my, my company, uh, just for fun.

I decided I dropped out of college about five years ago and I decided that instead of going to college, I was going to read a book a week nonfiction and review it. Huh? I've stuck to it on average the last few months, has it been that. But I, I, it, it averages out to like 1.2 books a week or something like that.

Um, and I mostly read and medieval history. So I've been starting in chronological order and going to the present from about 500 BC trying to read like five to 10 books per century. Um, so I met about 1200, so I've got like decades left to reach the prison because it's, but anyways, um, in terms of history books, um, this goes into special economics.

I recommend a book called lost enlightenment. And what this book is about is there was this last Islamic golden civilization, you know, in central Asia during the middle ages, which, uh, basically reached like late 16 hundreds level of technology and like 1800. And they totally get wiped out by the Mongols and the region like loses like a quarter of its population goes back.

So you have this situation where there's a super technologically advanced society that pops up in a place that you haven't heard of, you know, a real loss civilization, they go back. So it also tells you that, you know, technology, it's not just an upward linear line, the, the, the Italians and the Renaissance staff to pick up the torch.

And it declined and it sort of stays low for a long time. Uh, so lost enlightenment is, is a good one. Um, in terms of special economic zones, another good book is on China by Henriquez Henry. Who actually negotiated a lot of the opening up of China. And it's the history of like how China used special economic zones to reform its economy, to, you know, totally change it society.

And it turns out that there's this like four foot, 10, five foot five. I don't know how tall he is, but this little, tiny little guy called dunk shell ping who, everybody who nobody's. Who saved the most human lives of like anybody in the 20th century by building special economic zones and bringing free market to China and like tripling the GDP per capita, you know?

Um, so that's the next one. I really like lost enlightenment, uh, sorry. Lost enlightenment on central Asia, uh, on China by Henry kitchen. And I think that the third good one is seeing like a state by James Scott, which is just a book about how, when you look at things from the perspective of statistics and government planning, it just distorts your view on everything.

So hope that's not too much. I really like, no, I got those written down TiVo. How do you find time to read? So, so many books, I just listened to audio books. So I'm like just always listening to audio books every minute I have. Very cool. Uh, oh, what's that? No, sorry, go ahead. Oh, no, no. I just wanted to mention in the time that we have left a few sort of interesting crypto things, if we had time in SEZs B might be kind of interesting.

So one of them, that's, that's one trend that is quite interesting is remember how earlier I mentioned and my wife, by the way, wrote a paper about this for the world free zones organization. Um, so remember how I mentioned how a lot of STDs have lost business from work from. Typically to take advantage of the regulations in an sec, what you had to do was you had to be like physically based there, like physically doing business there.

And in some cases you even have to pay for the cost of the gut of a government agent to come like inspect, to make sure that you're actually in the zone, not there on paper. Some zones have decided because of work from. To start letting companies take advantage to register as like a work from home company in the zone and start taking advantages of the legal system of the zone working from home.

So you could be at a laptop anywhere in the world. And if you're the right special economic zones, be taking advantage of a legal system that really like benefits your need working for. And I think that that from a legal perspective, It's kind of a loophole and who knows if it will last, but if it does last, it's going to, I think totally changed the game for companies doing all of these things that are very regulatorily difficult from a crypto perspective.

Awesome. Well, if you guys want to find, find out more about T-bones work, we have his website linked in the description below. You can go check that out. Uh Teebo. If you have any closing thoughts or shout outs, you want to give, tell the audience where to connect with you. The Florida. Yes. Well, I add 100% of the people who connect to me on LinkedIn and I eventually respond to 100% of my messages.

So everybody add me. And, um, I'd love to help you with any SEZs are send any books or whatever. Um, so that's the best place to find me. Uh, the company is Adrian Oakville group, um, which you have linked, I imagine. And, uh, yeah, that's. Alrighty that has been this, uh, episode of moon or bust. We hope you enjoyed it.

If you did, please leave us a like, and we can get more of this content for you in the future. Uh, for now we're signing off sticker on for pre market prep. It will be linked in the chat. Uh, but thanks for tuning in. We will see you next. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/moon-or-bust/donations)Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands)Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy)