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Feb. 29, 2024 - Health Ranger - Mike Adams
01:00:51
Episode 34, Feb 29, 2024 - LODE project tokenizes physical gold and silver in new cryptocurrency...
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Music. Music. Music. Music. Music. Music. Music. Music. Music. Thank you.
Welcome to today's episode of Decentralized TV. I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.
That's the network that carries Decentralized TV, the website being decentralized.tv.
And of course, we discuss decentralization strategies and technologies that can empower you and also protect your liberty.
And we've got a great guest with a great project today.
But let me bring in my co-host, Todd Pitner.
Welcome back, Todd.
It's always great to be with you here on the show.
Great seeing you, Mike.
Really looking forward to today's guest and the topic.
You had me at hello when you booked this one, Mike.
I know.
This is such a great project.
Now, look, I've been sort of following this project for a few years and kind of watching what it's doing.
I didn't really understand it at first, but fortunately we have one of the key people who's going to explain everything to us today.
But the project is called LODE, L-O-D-E, like a load of gold or silver, and that's no coincidence.
The website is load.one, as in O-N-E. So L-O-D-E dot O-N-E gets you to the website, and LODE is a cryptocurrency digital representation of real physical gold and silver that's vaulted.
So this is a gold and silver backed crypto, which is pretty darn amazing.
So let's bring in Ian Tabes here from The Load Project.
Welcome, Ian.
Thanks for joining us today.
Yeah, thanks for having me, Mike.
Big fan.
Really appreciate it.
And Todd, very nice to meet you.
Nice meeting you, Ian.
Well, Ian, I've spoken with you a couple of times over the last couple of years.
I'm a big fan of your concept and what you've done.
I understand you've had some major milestone breakthroughs in the last six months, and you've got some pretty big things to announce.
So go ahead.
Give our audience the breakdown.
What is load?
What's it all about?
Well, first of all, Mike, thank you for having me.
And, you know, on behalf of the 347 founders that started the LOAD project back in 2017, we're very grateful for the opportunity to present the use case for the centralized silver and gold money and the system that enables its creation by the people for the people.
And so, you know, one of the Quests and ambitions of the load community and the project itself is that, you know, we collectively believe that silver and gold should be restored to the monetary system, that they should play an important role in the money of the future.
That there's no reason, given the fact that modern technology enables us to deploy silver and gold on the blockchain and keep track of it to infinity and beyond, meaning that each digital representation of the physical silver and gold that's vaulted in the system can be utilized by people without permission Globally,
to restore itself as a store of value, a medium of exchange, and the ultimate unit of account to make it fungible, exchangeable, and redeemable back to the physical assets.
And so the ambitions of the load community started from a drawing back in 2016, which I just showed you guys.
And I am happy to report that what was conceived as an idea Or in abstract, back in 2016-17, has actually finally been accomplished, to your point.
We have accomplished a lot.
And so what LOAD is today?
It is a decentralized, peer-to-peer, permissionless, silver and gold money oracle, powered by the LOAD protocol token.
So that's a bit of a But essentially...
Critically, I mean, it's backed by physical silver and gold that's vaulted and audited and no one can just create AGX or AUX tokens out of thin air because they have to have the metal to back them, correct?
That's right.
So the protocol token enables the Oracle to mint and burn and redeem physical silver and gold and As digital representations.
And so the system, the load system enables the creation of AGX coin, which is one gram of pure investment grade silver, and the AUX coin, which is one pure milligram of investment grade gold.
And so these are pegged and priced in mechanisms using pricing oracles, spot values, and decentralized trading mechanisms to restore silver to the people in a permissionless framework where you don't need permission of your government to start using silver and gold as money.
And you can, in the next quarter, Load that silver money onto your own Visa card, or you can acquire a card through one of the associated services or alliances.
Wait a second.
Sorry to interrupt, but what you said is major.
So you're saying I could purchase the AGX... Coins through the load ecosystem.
And that's a silver coin.
You said one coin represents one ounce of silver, I believe.
One gram.
I'm sorry.
One gram.
Okay.
And in gold, it's a milligram.
Correct?
Yeah.
Okay.
Got it.
One gram.
Okay.
So then I could load that.
I could connect that to my credit card so that when I'm spending on my credit card, it's actually sort of Yes, it's a bit of a mind buster.
Visa Direct, Simplex, MetaMask, and Transact are all sort of coming together in different ways.
We'll be working with Simplex, which is one of the largest processors of digital assets in the world to make it possible for you to swap your AGX coins and load them directly onto your own personal Visa.
Wow.
Because, see, if I'm going to spend on a Visa, I would much rather sort of hold my assets in Lode Silver, which is AGX. I'd much rather have it there than sitting in an account of a bank that might fail tomorrow.
I'll bust your brain just a little bit further if you guys like, because this is heady stuff.
But it's getting easier to explain and even myself who am not a technologist, I'm a business person and a project developer, I get it now.
So it's getting easier.
So what's about to be launched is the world's first self-funded smart contract funding system which makes it possible for you to take your digital gold and silver Hold onto it until the moment that you want to spend it and load it onto the balance of your Visa card.
Wow.
So you're holding silver until you tap your card.
Uh-huh.
Wow.
Wow.
Todd, what do you think so far?
Well, I'm amazed.
You know, I did my research leading up to this interview, and everything about this I just love.
I would like...
Ian, for you to let me know, in my perfect world, okay, I got a $10,000 bonus, let's say.
And I want to be able to get it into, I'm a fan of asset-backed digital currencies, if I can trust that said assets are truly backing the digital currency.
So I have some questions around that.
Great to talk about that.
Yeah, yeah.
But if your ecosystem can make it easy for me to take my $10,000 of crappy fiat that I want to get rid of quickly, On-ramp it, somehow, someway, to, I presume, get either the AGX or AUX coins, not the load tokens, or maybe you can educate me that you have to go through tokens first.
I don't know.
But if I can do that easily from my bank account, just send it out, and boom, my wallet has...
AGX coins that I can then, you say, connect to my Visa to be able to pay bills to where at the point of transaction it will take from my AGX or AUX holdings and I can redeem them for products and services.
And then, if you're telling me, because I read on your website that these coins are redeemable, so to me, redeemable means at some point in time, if I raise my hand, I can say I'd like to take self-custody of the gold, because my big question is, when you say each coin is 100% backed by...
dot, dot, dot, I want to know where and by whom, because that inserts a level of trust into the total equation.
So if you can kind of shine that for me, I would really be intrigued, because this is a project, Mike, I'd probably go all in on, because I love everything about it.
Yeah, you're flying our airline, Todd.
You nailed it.
And that's exactly what we're going to roll out for you today.
But you can essentially de-fiat yourself and swap into digital gold using a number of different onboarding methodologies.
Then you can self-custody the digital representations of the silver and the gold, AGX, AOX coins.
And then when you're ready and if you have enough of them, you need about $2,500 worth of these to get to a bar.
But there's so many different ways to spend them.
You can spend them through your card or you can send them to a bullion dealer and the bullion dealer will send you some small material.
Or then you can redeem through the redeem button in the wallet and you can literally tap out and have a bar sent to you.
It's at that point you need to identify yourself because the vault is not going to send gold to somebody that doesn't identify themselves.
So that's where you need to sort of touch down back to reality and say, I want to go back to physical.
Here is my digital representations of that.
I'll send them to your hot wallet.
You acknowledge that you got them.
Then you...
I will identify myself.
Here's my ID. And here's where I want it shipped.
Ship my bar.
And they'll ship your bar.
That's amazing.
Sorry, Mike.
When you ship that bar, are you also shipping a document to the IRS, perchance?
So that's...
Every country is specific to this.
And this is really sort of at the bullion dealer level.
Okay.
That makes sense.
The load...
Protocol is a decentralized framework.
And so everything within the load protocol is decentralized, meaning that the stakeholders and the users of the AGX AOX coins are wrapped into a sort of an orbit together.
Enabling the sending and spending and settlement of transactions and trade and commerce using digital framework.
It's when you want to step off the platform and go back into fiat or step into bullion that you have to re-enter the universe of the permissioned platform.
Sure, which makes sense because with private crypto, if you need to get back into fiat or somehow a different asset, you have to get into the real world as well.
Right, right.
Well, that makes sense.
The on-ramps and the off-ramps are all sort of KYC because you're going back into that system.
But talk about, Ian, talk about the proof of vaulting.
And I think you mentioned to me in a previous conversation we had, there's a vault in Idaho, I think you said.
Talk to us about where the vaulting takes place and how a user can know And trust the vaulting.
Because, you know, the issue with Tether, for example, the stablecoin, is that they've never really had what most of us would consider to be a rigorous internal audit of their holdings, right?
So that's going to be key.
Their leverage, too, so not all their assets are U.S. dollars.
Their assets are reflected in U.S. dollars, but they may be real estate.
True, yeah, exactly.
Evergrande.
Yeah, Evergrande.
That's a little bit scary, you know?
Okay, so let me take you guys through this because this is a really neat part of the protocol.
It's new and it's going to be rolled out this quarter.
It's the culmination of five or six years of work with bullion dealers and vaults and doing a deep dive on how they work, how they price themselves, and how they monetize everything that's in their system We have come together and brought a consortium together with an attestation group in the U.S.,
which are CPAs that have made an API that connects to the bullion dealer itself.
The bullion dealer attests to the material that has been sent into Brinks.
Brinks reports directly to the CPA and the bullion dealer reports to the CPA. Every hour of every day.
If there's no change in the material change then the report remains the same.
It's only when new material is acquired or taken out of the vault to redeem an individual that the numbers would change.
And so you guys are with me on the attestation piece?
Yes, but so you mentioned Brinks.
So Brinks is...
They vaulted.
They're vaulting it, and they're attesting to what they're physically vaulting.
You may not know this, but Brinks Global has a new division called Brinks Digital, and they're going all in.
On real world assets.
Wow.
Real world assets can be precious art, playing cards or memorabilia, Elvis' white shoes, anything that's of value.
And you may have heard other thought leaders like Mark Cuban.
Don't know him and I'm not necessarily a fan, but he says everything will be tokenized.
Everything in the future will be tokenized.
Anything that can be serialized, weight measured, photo captured will be tokenized.
Alright, so Brinks is doing the vaulting.
Brinks is reporting back to load of what the vault status is.
And we have 100% redeemability, correct?
So every AGX coin or AUX coin for gold, every coin that is created is tied to a physical gram or milligram of the metal.
Yes.
Another way to say it is that every AGX and AOX coin is minted from a bar of silver and gold.
Ah.
Wow.
Not the other way around.
That makes sense.
AGX and AOX coins cannot be minted until the bar first exists.
Wow.
And they are tied to the serialized bar in the system.
So, the way it works is that the...
Wait, I'm sorry.
Hold on.
I'm sorry to interrupt.
You just said something that I'm processing now.
So, you're saying that every token is tied to the serial number of the bar to which it was originated.
So there's a metadata field with every token that has the original serial number of the bar?
Yeah.
This is out of design and is now in production.
So Brinks, the attestation agent, the network firm, the bullion dealers that are registered and authorized bullion dealers to attest to the material.
Chainlink, you may have heard of them.
They are a blockchain oracle.
They will supply the data that comes from the attestation agent, the bullion dealer, and Brinks.
They will feed it into a dashboard, and the dashboard will report globally to the community of AGX and AUX coin holders.
I have so many questions, and I'm sorry to interrupt, but if I'm holding AGX coins, can I see the serial number of the underlying silver bar?
You'll be able to see it from the dashboard.
Wow.
Wow.
I've got to remind our audience why this is such a big deal, because so many services out there work on unallocated silver or gold.
Where there's a mass of silver in the back room somewhere.
We have 10 million ounces of silver, whatever, let's say.
But your ownership is not tied to any particular piece of that.
It's just kind of you have a claim to a portion of that giant block of silver.
That's unallocated.
Which protects us from what?
Fractional reserve and rehypothecation.
Well, right, but what I'm saying is that that's not fulfilling to me as a customer if it's unallocated.
Like, I don't know that there's a particular piece that's tied to my asset, but what Ian is saying is that under load, it is specifically allocated to a specific bar.
Yep, it can be tracked back through the smart contract metadata to a bar.
That's awesome.
Okay, which means that that bar has a certain mass, let's say it's a It's a 10-ounce bar, so there can only be a certain number of 1-gram coins minted out of a 10-ounce bar, obviously.
So that way you can track that there's no counterfeiting even possible.
So there's an intermediary step there that's important for us to share with the community.
So when the material arrives at the vault, it is tokenized as an NFT into the Lode's Boolean engine.
And from that NFT, which could be representing a 100-ounce bar, 31,110 AGX coins can be created.
Perfect.
That makes perfect sense.
That's the inventory control system.
And that's what will be reported by the dashboard to the community.
Okay.
Wow.
So you could say that Every AGX coin isn't necessarily attached to that serial number, but it was created from that serial number.
And if you want to get back to that bar, you've got to bring back to the vault the ability to buy an NFT to get to that bar.
There's a two-step redemption process.
Okay.
Kind of sharing this family secret soup sauce with you guys, but all of this will be disclosed.
We're just trying to understand it because I've always thought that the number one problem with crypto is that it wasn't backed by anything real and thus the price fluctuations could be, of course, rather volatile or you could lose everything like FTX. And then the number one problem with gold and silver is that you can't send it digitally.
Okay.
So load cancels out both of those problems and combines the best features of crypto and metals.
Yeah.
The other thing that might bust your brain a little bit here, guys, and I say that with kindness because it certainly did mine, but the possibilities become...
Infinite when you're using this powerful ledger technology and, you know, the Ethereum virtual machine, EVM and Web3 wallets to connect.
It's just getting a lot easier and all these really complex operations are now starting to sort of come into scope.
In the load system, the AGX coin holder owns the corresponding gram of silver in the system.
And they have a direct relationship with the vaulted material.
So nobody other than the AGX coin holder owns the silver that's in the system, number one.
So there's an operation called the continuity of operations or the fail-safe built into the terms of use, which means that the The fees that are collected from the global circulating supply of the digital silver and digital gold are paid into decentralized pools and are allocated first to pay the vaulting fee each
month to Brinks.
If the pool runs out of value, then the continuity of operations protocol kicks in.
And all the AGX coin users will be notified that they are to mitigate risk and redeem the silver out of the vault immediately.
Or otherwise, some of that silver might be sold to pay brinks.
Does this make sense?
Yes.
Yes.
We're getting pretty deep down the rabbit hole here at the moment.
But think about your responsibility.
You're saying that you want to own a digital representation of silver and gold that is vaulted on your behalf, and you want to use it in your life to store value, to fight inflation, to hedge devaluation, to get out of fiat, or to fight corruption, whatever it is.
You need to take responsibility for the fact that that representation is created from a bar of silver that is vaulted with a partner that is responsible for protecting it.
And they don't work for free.
That's right.
Okay?
So, you know, you run a big warehouse of products there with Health Ranger.
If nobody pays the bill, Then something needs to get sold so that the bill can get paid.
Otherwise, the whole warehouse goes to shit, goes down.
Right.
So a small amount of silver would be sold off just to pay the vaulting fees.
Yeah.
Well, that seems perfectly reasonable to me.
I mean, yeah, vaulting is not free.
I mean, they have to have security and physical space and audits and regulations and employees and, I mean, lights, you know?
Yeah.
The dashboard reports that.
So it's like...
The dashboard is like the board in a train station.
It shows you where all the tokens are, what they're doing, how many of them are collecting transactions, how much of the transaction fees are in the pool, what the cost of the vaulting is.
All this stuff is going to be added to the dashboard.
You're going to be blown away.
It's going to be like the dashboard in your car Notifies you of the well-being of your vehicle at all times.
And you count on that to make sure that the kid that's sitting behind, your son that's sitting behind you in the left seat has got his seatbelt on.
You know that.
You can see it as a driver.
Yeah, you're making me drool.
I love complex dashboards, but I'm getting all geeked out.
I mean, the more information, the better.
That's the vision.
That's what this drawing was all about, you know?
And would you mind, for our audience, holding up that drawing?
Do you guys want to see a really cool white paper?
If you can share it.
I mean, it's up to you if you want to make it public.
I can try to show it here.
Oh, okay.
That was the genesis of LOAD, everyone, and AGX and AUX. Amazing.
That's removing all the middlemen, providing the assurance to the users of the system, making access to silver and gold affordable and globally accessible, By all people, everywhere.
Okay, Ian, one last question.
Do you mind me asking who pinned that drawing?
Was that you, or was that, is there a founder?
Again, the ideas were collected.
Okay.
And then one night, it started to make sense, and I grabbed my wife's cooking dishes, and I started drawing.
Okay, great.
Okay, so Ian.
The community liked it, and you know that we hang around with David Morgan.
Yes.
He's been our oldest fan.
He was at the original meeting when this drawing was presented, and you know what he said to me?
He said, Ian, if not now, when?
Nice.
Let's do this.
Well, we're fans of David Morgan.
He's been a guest on our show as well, and he gets this.
He got it early on.
So let me ask you some really practical questions, because we could talk in depth about how it works all day, but...
I think a lot of our audience, they just want to get started and dive in and try some things.
So two questions right up front.
Number one, what's the easiest way for someone to get started?
And secondly, for someone who already has crypto, let's say Bitcoin or Monero, how do they swap out that crypto for AGX and AUX? They can use MetaMask, which is actually really super user-friendly on mobile devices today.
They can use LoadWallet.com.
Trust Wallet has agreed to add the tokens and we're working on a few others.
You can also go to Trader Joe, which is a decentralized exchange.
That's probably the cheapest price.
Go there with your USDC, your Monero, whatever your crypto is, and swap it for AGX coin.
Okay, so you said loadwallet.com is one of them, and you said Metamask, which I think is metamask.io, if I recall.
Yeah.
And so they're just setting up a Web 3.0 wallet in that case, and there's no KYC necessary in that process if they already own crypto, right?
Great.
You create yourself an EVM wallet, which starts with a 0x.
They're all the same.
And I'd like to explain this sometimes to people because it's actually not as complicated as we make it.
Thankfully, the blockchain community is sensitive to the users and they have figured out how to make extremely complex blockchain operations simpler.
And so think of it this way.
You all have a home address.
And people that know your home address can send you mail.
And the mail gets to you using your home address.
Whether it's a P.O. box or it's a physical home address or it's, you know, down the street and it's not actually your home address, but it's box number two on this street.
Whatever it is, the mail gets to you.
Your utility bills get to you.
Your mobile phone bill gets to you.
The flyer from your favorite grocery store gets to you.
They all get to you because you have one address.
That's what EVM is.
You've got one address for your USDC, your Ethereum, your Avalanche tokens, your Solana tokens, your Syscoin tokens, your AOX load token, All the same actors.
Okay, and importantly then, for me to go to metamask.io, I've got that up on my screen, I don't need to go through KYC to create that wallet and start using it.
But what if someone...
What's that?
There's 80 million people over there already.
Yeah, right.
What about if somebody has fiat, And they want to go, what's the easiest way for someone to go from money in a bank account to load AGX or AUX? Yeah, fiat is loadwallet.com.
Okay.
And you can do fiat there.
So with like what, wire transfers, credit cards, or how do people?
You go into the portal and you select wire transfers.
or select pay with crypto, or you can go into the trade function and you can swap USDC directly through Trader Joe.
I see.
You can use your Visa card if you want to.
Visa cards, you know, the Visa card people are sensitive about stolen Visa cards.
Yes.
They don't want to have a charge back because once you have a digital asset, you can't get it back.
That's right.
And so anyone that wants to buy digital assets, USDC, Avalanche, AGX, AOX, or low tokens, they need to do a mini KYC.
Okay.
And even on MetaMask, if you want to buy with your Visa card, you have to do mini KYC.
So there's companies called Transact, OnRamper, Banked, Singularity, and there's more.
But, you know, Simplex, they're all processors of digital assets.
And, you know, I do have to warn you that the banks are putting up an affront against digital assets because they're trying to protect us.
They're trying to circle the wagons and protect themselves, I think.
Yeah, so, you know, 70% of credit card transactions fail.
Visa debit that's connected to your bank account has about a 90% success rate.
Wire transfer takes a few days, but you supply your Avalanche or your EVM address either from the load wallet or from MetaMask.
You can add AGX and AMX coins to your MetaMask.
So it's very easy to do, super user-friendly, and you can convert.
Cool.
Okay.
Talk to us about the function of the load token, which, I mean, my understanding is this is the token that powers the ecosystem.
Yeah.
Go ahead.
Governance token.
Yeah.
So it's the governance token.
So, again, because it's an ecosystem that has extreme responsibility to help create the framework to protect over the silver and gold that's in the system, On behalf of the token holders, the load token community has come together around a governance protocol token which does a number of things.
It unlocks utility benefits and it collects rewards from the circulating supply of the global supply of AGX and AOX coins and the resources and all the values that come off of the ecosystem and there are four different centers of profit within the load system.
One is the material acquisition engine, the minting engine, the payment Engine, and then the transaction engine.
All those four values are paid into a decentralized pool framework and then distributed first to the vaulting partner, second to the service providers alliance, and there's 70 service providers in the load ecosystem, and then the load token holders.
A summary would be that for people who want to Sort of, I don't know, I don't want to use the word invest, but they want to support the load ecosystem and then get a share of some of the rewards, then they would buy load tokens.
Yeah, similar to the way a node operator would connect to Ethereum and they would help power the network.
And would that be the area where somebody who is wanting to be in that speculation mode, we don't suggest speculation, but I'm just trying to wrap my mind around this, to where if I buy a load token, and I think this is going to be a big deal, that maybe that load token is going to go up in value over time because we're early at this stage of the game?
First of all, load token holders are sort of locked around the mandate that Restoring silver and gold to the monetary system is a good idea and it needs to happen.
And it needs to happen at the hands of courageous people that believe that in the historic prominence of silver and gold is money.
They also believe that no one person should own a system like this.
Right.
Collectively, the system should be powered by a protocol enabling the creation of the silver and the gold and the money.
And so that's not a central bank.
It's actually the opposite of that.
It's the people have the power.
And so the low token holders get to vote on the governance of the platform and help steer and direct and shepherd the movements of the protocol.
And to add to the concept of decentralization, as I understand it, then most of the logic functions in your ecosystem are smart contracts, right?
Which means it's not some computer code that you run that you can tweak or that somebody could hack.
I mean, it's a smart contract run on...
The protocol consists of five smart contracts at this time.
The load token is a smart contract.
The pool rewards smart contract, which is connected to the values that are pooled off of the system and operates the splits that we just discussed.
And there's the Goodwill self-funding smart contract, which enables you to take your digital silver and digital gold and fund that onto your Visa card.
That's a smart contract.
Gives you access to funding your Visa card.
And then the third and...
Sorry, the fourth...
Is that the third?
One, two, three...
Oh, that was three, yeah.
Yeah, the fourth and the fifth is AGX coin and AUX coin.
Five smart contracts working in unison to bring the protocol to life.
Now, this smart contract blockchain, is this Avalanche or is it Ethereum or what is it?
Well, they're Ethereum smart contracts...
On EVM, so the Ethereum Virtual Machine.
The network that has helped us to seize on the objective is Avalanche.
And think of it in these terms.
We all know that in order to power a transaction to get across the network on Ethereum costs you what they call gas.
And the gas goes to the people that keep the network running.
Yeah, and gas is really expensive on Ethereum for this.
Gas is very expensive.
So if you were to, say, buy a $1 coffee at Starbucks with your AGX coin, it better not cost you 50 cents in gas to get that transaction.
So you've got to find a network that can get you across for 2 or 3 cents.
That's Avalanche.
Yeah.
Okay.
Is it equivalent to saying, like, for Bitcoin, you have Lightning Network?
Is that a fair comparison of what Avalanche is for Ethereum?
It is, yeah.
It is a fair comparison, yeah.
Okay.
And Bitcoin is solving these problems that are preventing them from becoming money, you know?
Okay.
And most people don't spend their Bitcoin.
That's the other problem.
They're almost philosophically opposed to that idea at this point.
They don't want to spend it, right?
They're speculators, and so they think differently.
So this is the role for silver.
This is silver's moment to say, you know what?
We have had a 5,000-year history as money of the people, and we're back.
You can spend your silver and store your wealth in gold.
You can do both with load.
You can swap your gold for a little bit of silver, and here's something that we're going to unlock for you that will, I think, help you to realize what we're building and how powerful it is and why it might get picked up and adopted by people worldwide.
You're all familiar with the fact that silver is a commodity, that it has a cost of goods structure, that it can be mined and then put into the spot market and then put in through the bullion dealers into the hands of the people.
And every step of the way, somebody makes some money.
Load has taken and stripped out all the middlemen.
And so Lote can produce an ounce of silver for 90 cents.
So when you as a user, Mike, you spend a dollar worth of AGX coins, the system will notify you that you just earned two cents worth of silver for spending a dollar.
Wait a minute.
Back up.
What do you mean load can produce an ounce of silver for 90 cents?
Load produces an ounce of silver in its system by cutting out all the middlemen for 90 cents.
I'm still not following.
Because it's like a banana business.
There's the grower and then there's the wholesaler and the shipper and the transactor and all.
So if you can bring more efficiency to a system, you can cut costs out of the system.
Yeah, but are you saying that you're working with silver mining companies or something?
And vaulting directly from the mines?
We are, and we're cutting the costs out of the traders and all that stuff.
Give us perspective.
When you say we can do it for $0.90, what would the alternative be if you didn't have load?
What would the cost be?
It's more than $0.10, I presume.
Well, no, I mean, an ounce of silver from a mining company, wouldn't that cost like $25 or something?
If you're buying from a refiner or from a mint, yes.
Yeah?
Yeah.
But you can actually acquire silver for $0.85 on the dollar in Mexico.
We're getting a little complex.
This is sort of part of the bullion engine.
Where can I buy silver for $0.90 an ounce?
Because I want to know that answer.
You can't buy it from traders.
You can buy it from traders.
I don't want to get down the rabbit hole on that because that's a very complex operation.
My point is we are more efficient and we share the efficient savings with the users.
I understand that.
So the users that spend a dollar worth of AGX coins, it only costs them 98 cents.
I have a question.
Load.
On silver, not on the gold.
On silver, okay.
Yes, you want to store your gold, spend your silver.
Makes sense.
So this project is called LOAD, right?
That's the founding project?
Yeah, it's called load because the colloquial mining term called mother load.
Right.
Okay, great, great.
So is this a company or is it a true community-based project?
Is there a board of directors?
Are there controllers?
How was it funded?
There are service providers and the service providers provide service to the load community.
Okay, and there's 70 of those?
Yeah, there's up to 70 individuals that are providing professional services to the load ecosystem.
Okay, so that's where the funding is coming from, from these 70 members, or is it that they are putting their own skin in the game to be part of this based upon the rewards that will come, so that they're leading with their chin versus their hand out?
It's the same for Avalanche and Ethereum.
The Ethereum token, which is the utility token, powers the service providers and the nodes and the tech kids and all that.
That all comes out of that ecosystem.
Okay, because, you know, Mike, with the project I was involved with, everything that required funding, dev work, etc., had to come from the community.
So I'm always really eager to understand how in the heck, when you'd explain all of this, the machinations that have gone into this incredible project over the last seven years, I'm like, where's the money?
Where did the money come from to fund it?
That's where the load project is conventional.
Because the only difference is there's no shareholders.
It's a token ecosystem or a tokenized ecosystem that enables the creation of digital silver and digital gold as a product.
And so the product is AGX AOX coin and the stakeholders that made it happen are separated from the product itself.
So it's like Coca-Cola.
You've got Coca-Cola You've got stakeholders and then you've got the drink itself and the drink lives regardless of the corporate.
Are you concerned that this could be declared a security by the SEC or is it a security?
The community has spent millions of dollars on this and no, it's a protocol token.
That enables the creation of digital silver and digital gold.
It's a utility in its function today and no one person controls it.
It's on blockchain.
So it passes the Howey test?
Yes.
It does because of all the utility features that it unlocks.
And you can tell, Todd, the load operation, you know, they've been at this for years.
This is a detailed and actually well-funded project.
And they overcame many obstacles even that I'm aware of.
Like the first time I looked at load compared to today, it's like night and day where it's gone.
But, you know, I would say, Ian, and even ask you, It's easy today to create something like Bitcoin.
That's simple.
I mean, just a transparent, fully digital blockchain.
You do it in five minutes with all the utilities.
What you're doing is hard.
I mean, it is the most complex task.
Yeah, because you're tying the interests of two different types of users together.
Together around complex operations with physical assets in the middle.
And there's three different tokens.
Wow.
It's very complex.
It is complex.
That's why it's taken so long.
And now, in terms of privacy, because privacy is such a big concern for us here, it seems like privacy is an automatic thing if you're using a MetaMask wallet where you don't have any KYC tied to that wallet, and that wallet is holding your load coins, then the wallet's private, even if the blockchain itself is transparent.
That's right.
Yeah.
So you don't have to worry about, like, what you're using with smart contracts and EVMs, I mean, you don't have to worry about, like, ZK-SNARKs and other privacy type of protocols.
No, because everything in the operations of load is on-chain.
Right.
Or is going to show up in the dashboard.
And all the partners are going to be known and they're going to take responsibility for their specific engagement around a certain operation.
And they will earn values from the circulating supply.
So more people that use it, in essence, are supporting it.
And it does have a revenue model attached to it.
So it's not like a dot com from 1999 that could never tell anybody how they were going to ever make money.
But they raised $50 million.
Or more.
This actually has sources of revenue that come from the circulating supply.
And, you know, we're taking...
The load community has taken an asset that sits idle and collects dust and has figured out how to put it to work.
Yeah.
Okay.
Are you putting it to work though through, is there a mobile wallet to where I can actually use it that I could go to a vendor and I could say, hey, look, I'd really like to engage in commerce with you and buy your products, but I want to do it with my AGX coins.
That's my next question too, merchants.
How do merchants accept it?
Well, there's 300 different wallets.
That are at sort of various stages.
And next year, I think there'll be 400 or 500.
And not all of them you can connect AGX and AX coins to today.
But that's sort of the quest and that's the goal.
We're also working with neobanks that want to add digital silver and digital gold.
We're working with credit unions.
There's 20,000 of them in the United States, and there's 1,000 in Canada.
We're working with fintechs that want to offer digital assets to their customers, but Bitcoin might be a little too speculative or misunderstood, and maybe silver and gold is an easy bridge into that.
And so we're working to expand the framework of all the interconnectivity and all the trading mechanisms and the likes of all of that.
But as far as it goes for merchants, what we're working on for you specifically, Mike, we took a look at your website and we're building you a Shopify widget that you can just add to your existing framework.
No kidding.
You're kidding me.
Cool.
Yeah, we're doing that right now.
That's the best news all week.
That's awesome.
I mean, if we could just plug it in and it's done.
And by the way, you know, Shopify powers like most of the e-commerce that happens in the world.
If you release a Shopify widget that other people can use, you're gonna have massive adoption.
Yeah, our devs that came out of Google Pay are building that right now.
Wow.
You'll be one of the first to get access to it.
I can't wait.
Yeah, we've already built WooCommerce.
Oh, that's great.
Yeah.
So if you were on Woo, we would have you set up right now, but Shopify is coming.
That's amazing.
I mean, we've used WooCommerce before as well, but Shopify currently.
But man, that's a game changer.
So that really completes the loop of the entire ecosystem.
Now, okay, so this is amazing, but...
I hate to mention that we're out of time for today.
Obviously, we're going to have to have a part two.
But I think, Todd, you and I have homework now.
Both of us need to get the wallet going, get some AGX, get some AUX, do some swaps.
I think I'll swap some Monero for some AGX, get some load tokens, see the dashboard, see how it works, and then let's get Ian back and talk about everything again.
Yeah, and we'll have support reach out to you guys and help you get through it.
That sounds great.
I love it.
Well, Ian, thank you for not just your time today, but I mean the years of effort and the very difficult learning curve in this fast-changing crypto environment.
You have worked some miracles.
It's worth doing, Mike.
I mean, silver...
Has been the money of the people for thousands of years, and this is the moment to restore it right now.
People need it.
Absolutely.
Wow.
All right.
Well, thank you, Ian.
Todd, good to meet you.
Mike.
Nice meeting you.
Nice meeting you.
This is just music to my ears.
I love this project.
Right on.
Well, thank you.
Thank you for the opportunity.
Thank you, Ian.
All right.
Take care.
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Thanks, Ian.
And Todd, I know we're not going to do an after party right now, but man, I mean, the fact that this is also redeemable, even though there's a minimum requirement, but if you get enough, like, AGX tokens and you just say, I want the silver bars, great.
They can do that.
Beautiful.
Yeah.
Beautiful.
But you can also self-custody the digital representation of those silver bars.
Yeah, of course.
If you want instead.
Yeah, that's one thing that I didn't walk away from really...
Feeling knowledgeable is I want that first wallet.
Like when you say we need to download the wallet, so I presume you're saying go to...
Like Metamask or LoadWallet.com.
Okay, okay.
LoadWallet.com.
Yeah, I think that's where I'll start.
Me too.
I kept waiting for things for him to kind of stumble, and there was just no question that he couldn't answer, you know, to my satisfaction anyway.
Oh, they thought through this thing in such detail.
Yeah.
I imagine that the lineup of supporters and people behind this project is very, very impressive.
And I know that you know lots of them.
Well, I do.
And David Morgan, I think, being the most prominent one.
Yeah.
And you know, Todd, how hard we've worked to try to get wallet integration with our e-commerce system with other coins, and it's always been a stumbling block.
It's been incredibly difficult to try to accept any of the privacy coins or even Bitcoin at this point because I think the merchants are pressured by Visa and MasterCard to not make it easy.
Right.
Well, I mean, the fact that they proactively are creating a Shopify widget for you, to me, that is such forward thinking.
They're just smart business people.
That's huge.
I mean, can you imagine the day we announce, boom, guess what?
We're taking load AGX and AUX coins, so if you want to shop with us...
I can.
And I remember you and I working on a little project called The Power of Private Money, and we were prepared to do a seven series.
And I predict that we would do something similar to be able to educate people on how to be able to acquire this and use this and ultimately buy goods with this.
Yes, because we want to make...
Crypto spendable.
Yes.
And silver crypto is even better.
And then to be able to go out to other merchants and step and repeat this and be able to point back to, let's say, a seven-episode series and say, hey, before you guys do anything, you might want to watch these and we'll show you how it was done, how easy it is.
We went into great depth.
And we can help these folks get mass adoption.
And wow, this was a wow interview.
You know, there's something else.
Let me just mention this for the audience.
Shopify is rolling out a new feature.
I don't know if it's live yet, but it's about to be live.
I think they call it like a collective.
But basically, you know how Shopify powers hundreds of thousands of online e-commerce?
Yeah.
Every merchant like us, we can choose which of our products to allow other Shopify users to sell on their websites with a defined split revenue share.
And I think that's called the Shopify Collective.
Well, that means that as soon as that feature goes live, and maybe it's already live, that anybody can go to Shopify.com.
They can set up their own store in minutes for dirt cheap.
And then they can go pick and choose what they want to sell and feature in their store.
Stuff that's from our store or 100,000 other stores.
Like they can create their own custom store.
And then if they can plug in this load merchant plug-in, they can start getting paid in gold and silver.
I mean, it's like an instant online store with instant gold and silver coming in.
Yeah.
Instant entrepreneurship.
Yeah.
I'm telling you, I mean, these are game changers, man.
They are.
They are.
This is why you all out there need to watch us.
Watch this show.
We bring you these kind of guests.
Thanks for mentioning that.
Decentralize.tv is the website.
And that's where you want to go, of course, to watch all the other episodes.
Let me plug a couple of sponsors here, Todd, and then we'll wrap this up for today.
As part of your decentralization, make sure you can communicate when the grid goes down, and that's with satellite phones.
So sat123.com is the satellite phone store.
And that's decentralization, in a sense, because, well, you can use it globally anywhere, and it's not easy for them to track you, by the way, versus a cell phone, which is easily tracked.
So sat123.com.
Also, if you want a de-Googled phone, go to abovephone.com slash DTV. And I know you have one, Todd.
I've got one.
We love Above Phone.
Ramiro has been a frequent guest here.
There you go.
Nice.
And there are people in a convoy right now, you know, like a border protest convoy thing going on.
And I told everybody, if you're in the convoy, you should use a de-Googled phone because you don't want your phone spying on where you are.
I was thinking it would be so great if there was a semi that had an above phone ad on the side of it.
You don't want to be, what, geofenced?
Abovephone.com.
Exactly, exactly.
Okay, and then your website, decentralizeddirectory.com, is where people can find solutions and programs and tax protection strategies.
Yeah, the big winner is the tax advantage strategy.
If you kick the tires around the site, you'll be able to find it.
But I'm telling you, Mike, now is the time to where people are starting to get their W-2s and 1099s, and I've made a whole lot of people from last year really happy because they're managing those differently this year and keeping way more of what they earn, myself included.
Excellent.
Okay.
And then, finally, my dog, Rody, here.
He's about ready for the show to wrap up, too.
He's about to jump all over me.
Verifiedgoldbacks.com.
This is off-grid money, and here's...
Here's what it looks like.
If you melt them down and you extract the gold, you get a little gold BB. I did that.
I did the lab testing.
It's real.
They have the gold.
They claim.
They have a little bit more, actually.
And it's greater than 24-karat gold purity.
So just go to verifiedgoldbacks.com, and there, that's our affiliate site.
That does help support our platform as well.
And look, it's Rhodey.
Hey, Rhodey.
How are you doing today?
My man.
He's like, where's DTV, man?
Yeah.
Can you guys show Rhodey?
He's over here.
Now, he's a very dark-furred dog, right?
He's got a black face and a black fur, so it's hard for people to see him.
Instead of a green screen, you need a black screen.
Yeah.
How you doing, Ro?
Hey, Rhodey!
You want to say something?
He's ready to play.
He's like, I'm going to rip these cables apart if you don't...
All right, let's wrap it up, Todd.
But great interview today.
Awesome guest.
Awesome topic.
Thanks for being here.
Have a great weekend.
And until the next time, man, I can't wait, Mike.
Yeah, me too.
Me too.
Always fun doing this with you, Todd.
Thank you for being here today.
All right.
Thanks, everyone, for watching.
Cheers.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Thank you all.
We appreciate your support.
Decentralized.tv is the website.
I'm Mike Adams, the founder of Brighteon.com, which is the platform that hosts this show.
So thank you for watching today.
Thank you for all your support.
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