#CommunityAMA recap, August 10th 2022

Read the transcript of the third installment of our Community AMA, with CTO Jorge Pereira and Community Manager and Business Development lead Alvaro Nadal, hosted on Aug 10, 2022.

Date: August 10th, 2022 | 4:00pm UTC

Hosted by: Public Mint / Nuno Venda (host)

Speakers: Jorge Pereira, Alvaro Nadal

NOTE: edited for brevity and readability.

Nuno Venda: Hello everyone, thank you so much for being here. Thank you for all the questions you sent us, that really helped us make this AMA more meaningful. Let me start by introducing who will enlighten us on all the questions: Jorge, who is Public Mint’s CTO, and Alvaro, responsible for Community and Business Development. So, hi guys!

Jorge Pereira: Hello, you!

Alvaro Nadal: Hello, great to be here and thank you all for joining us!

Nuno Venda: There’s a ton of questions and a lot of matters to cover, so we’ll start with the topic that’s been more discussed over the last two months: the EARN program and the impact that the Celsius situation had on it. I don’t know, Jorge, if you want to address the subject and then we’ll jump onto the questions, or if we’ll just start with the questions and go from there.

Jorge Pereira: Just start with the questions and go from there, then I’ll build on top of it.

Nuno Venda: We tried to curate the questions to the best of our abilities, some questions will overlap so we won’t go through every question, but all subjects will be addressed.

EARN and the Celsius situation

Nuno Venda: We’ll start with a comment from drshumrani, a Discord user:

“Correct me if I’m wrong. I have noticed a change in your strategy regarding the EARN program in the last AMA. You don’t want to focus more regarding your strategy in EARN but you want to emphasize more in Public Mint as a general network, especially after the problem with Celsius .”

Jorge Pereira: First, thanks for asking questions. I’m not sure if I said that or if that’s how it came across, and If so, I’m sorry. We have not changed our strategy — EARN is still a very important component — even more so now given the Celsius situation. But of course EARN is built on the Public Mint network, so there is always a part of our focus that goes onto looking for ways to help people learn about Public Mint and bring funds onto the network. Because as the total value on the network grows, that’s more value that can potentially move into EARN and that’s more people that can potentially find that EARN is a solution that allows them to reduce their risk and earn some yield. So, it’s not as if we’re de-emphasizing EARN and emphasizing

Public Mint as a network, it’s just that the focus on Public Mint as a general network has always been there, and this is all part of creating an ecosystem that allows you to use Dollars in similar ways that those you use crypto for. So, expect that as we develop EARN, we’ll also make other advancements in other things. Hope that that helps

Nuno Venda: Makes sense. From the same user: quoting a Public Mint announcement, about the funds allocated in Celsius: “the best possible outcome would obviously be having all those funds available for withdrawal but we do have several backup plans in case that scenario does not come to fruition.” And the question is: what backup plans do we have?

Jorge Pereira: One of the things is, of course, to continue to follow what happens with Celsius’ bankruptcy proceedings and ultimately what happens with the funds that our users have there. So, we’ll focus on that and continue to advance that. There’s not a lot a lot one can do if suddenly a company with five billions in assets goes under. No one is going to magically bring those Dollars back up if they’re all fully gone, fully spent. The expectation is that there’ll be a partial repayment to creditors and to Celsius users. Whenever those funds arrive, we’ll return them to the users.

The other thing is there aren’t a lot of backup plans, but we do have some ideas that could help. For instance, right now we have locked those funds, and if you now go into the EARN section you can see the allocation of funds to the various partners. In the future we have considered creating a way for people to trade those positions. Let’s say you have a thousand Dollars that are yours and are locked in Celsius. You could be able to sell that at a discount for someone that is willing to take on that risk and buy your debt for a fraction of its price. This isn’t complex to do, it could be something as easy as adding another token, or it could be something simpler, like offering this on the app UI itself. So, it’s not as if we have actual backup plans — if we used that term, I don’t think that’s very accurate — it’s more like we are willing to be creative and look for ways to minimize this impact, to an extent within our ability, of course.

FDIC insurance

Nuno Venda: Picking on this matter, I’ll change the planned direction, since it makes sense to talk about FDIC insurance, seeing as our community has been talking a lot about it. We a question from the same user — drshumrani: “we need comment regarding these news about FDIC’s message to crypto investors that digital assets aren’t insured.”

Jorge Pereira: I always try to remind people that we’re not a crypto company — we work with crypto, we are a fintech company. This is not unique to crypto companies, however. This is the same thing for fintechs: the FDIC is not launching a new message. I’m clarifying, because there seems to be a lot of confusion in the crypto space, but this is something that every fintech out there already knows. I’ll give you an example: when you deposit money from your bank into PayPal, for instance, that money goes to a bank account held by PayPal in a structure that is

FDIC insured. Why does this matter? Because typical FDIC insurance for retail consumers, for the everyday person, works in such a way that in every bank, in every account you are insured up to a maximum of $250.000. And if you’re a company, it’s the same for your main beneficiaries that have at least 10%. So, a company that has 10 partners could get FDIC insurance up to 2.5 million, give or take. What is FDIC insurance? It’s a program created by the US government to give people some reliance on their banks, given that their banks operate the risky business of extending credit to consumers and to people that may not pay off. In case the bank fails, if you have less than $250.000 to your name on that bank, your insurance steps in and covers that. If you had more, you’d lose it. The same thing happens in Europe, in Japan -there’s systems like this everywhere.

Nuno Venda: And that is the best type of insurance we can get? I mean we as individuals.

Jorge Pereira: As an individual or as a company there’s hardly better insurance than that. When you’re a fintech and you are creating accounts on behalf of users, you need a bank to accept doing that for you. Typically what you do is you create accounts on a variety of banks and you spread the money around such that that money remains FDIC insured. In the case of PayPal, for instance — and I’m not suggesting that I know exactly how they have these structured, but I’ve seen this done a number of times — how we do it is we keep those funds on deposit, spread out through a number of banks so that they remain FDIC insured. Now, the important thing here is no company can say that their funds are FDIC insured, only banks. That’s typically what is implied. Insurance always has a limit. There is no insurance in the world that will pay you all the money you have if you lose it. And if there was, you’d be paying for it! You wouldn’t even be making money, you’d be paying to insure your money. So, the assumption is that FDIC insurance covers your funds up to $250.000. Now, the reason most people believe that this kind of insurance is kind of unlimited is because very few people have $250.000 in their bank account.

Nuno Venda: And it depends on if you have the need to even use the FDIC insurance for sure.

Jorge Pereira: Yes, it’s not something that happens frequently. In any case, the point is your money might be FDIC insured, but the company that sits in between you and your money is not. And if that company collapses — in the case of Celsius, their structure was set up such that they claimed the money is theirs. And they claimed that people depositing that money were ceding control of their money to them, which in retrospect seems like a really odd thing to do. So, large companies and fintechs in general are structured in a way where they have a kind of segment of the company that separates customer funds from operational funds, and they don’t ever touch customer funds — which is exactly what we do. And most companies operating in this space — the fintech space — if they are operating properly, they do it. That’s the thing: people may tell you that your funds are FDIC insured — and they are. Because at the end of the day, if they’re in Dollars, they’re sitting in a bank account. There’s no other place for those Dollars to exist. All there is are layers on top of it, that manage those funds differently.

Nuno Venda: Let me add what Source D wrote in the general chat: “FDIC applies to the U.S. dollar, period. Dollars deposited in a bank or financial institution. FDIC insurance does not apply when Dollars are used in speculation.”

Jorge Pereira: Well, if you hand over Dollars to a company like Celsius and that company converts those Dollars to crypto and then speculates with that crypto, that’s not Dollars anymore. Under the hood they might tell you they are, but they’re not. They’re not keeping a one-to-one dollar ratio somewhere. And if they are, what FDIC insurance does is protect you against the failure of a bank, that’s all. It doesn’t protect you against the failure of the company that you are interacting with. That’s not what FDIC insurance is or does. There are companies like Nexo, for instance, that claim to have 250 or 500 million in insurance, I don’t know the number, but it’s a lot of millions. They claim to have over 10 billion in deposits, so that’s what? Like 3%?

Nuno Venda: Yes.

Jorge Pereira: What that tells you is that they serve a lot of small investors that in the event of a catastrophic failure — like the company going bankrupt — they would probably make whole those smaller ones, but the large ones they would not, since there’s no insurance in the world that covers that amount. So it’s important to understand that FDIC insurance means that your funds are protected against the failure of the bank that holds them — that’s it! That’s what it does.

Nuno Venda: I think you made it very, very clear.

Jorge Pereira: And the way we solve that is we use partners that spread out the funds across a variety of bank accounts, so that we don’t hit the limit of the FDIC insurance. The funds themselves are FDIC insured because we keep a one-to-one ratio. For instance, Circle has changed their policy recently, to do essentially the same. They don’t necessarily keep money in the bank. There’s another way to do it, called a cash equivalent, which is buying treasury bonds. Treasury bonds are liquid, you can always sell them back, so that is the equivalent of money. And it’s easier to hold large amounts in treasury bonds. So what these companies that operate properly do is once they have, let’s say 10 billion in assets but only one billion is moved frequently, then they will convert a portion of the rest into treasury bonds, so they don’t have to keep that money on a variety of bank accounts. But if there is a run to get money from them, they can liquidate those treasury bonds, get the money back and pay out to the users. It’s a safe way to do it.

Alvaro Nadal: I just wanted to clarify that we have always been very clear on separating our USD and USD+, in that sense. We have always mentioned that EARN is not FDIC insured, because that money is spread across the partners and is generating yield.

Jorge Pereira: Look I’ll say this: if you look at our white paper, you’ll notice that the goal for us is to get to a point where it’s the community making decisions on which partners to use. And I think this Celsius event will start removing the mantle of magic from how these companies operate, and people will dig deeper to learn and understand how they operate. Because if a company is remortgaging your assets and speculating with them, those 8% or 10% that you seem to be getting in return — there’s a lot of risk there. There is a reckoning that came first with Terra and the Anchor protocol, now with Celsius. Before we launched EARN, there was a company called MyCred or Cred that also went down. So, in the future our expectation is that the quality of the partners that the EARN program uses will continue to increase, and those that show that are not as trustworthy, or not operating as safely, the community will vote them out. And in addition to that, I can briefly speak about insurance for the EARN program itself. Reality is that until we have a volume in the tens of millions in that program, any attempt to insure it is extremely expensive. The running costs alone are prohibitive. Once you have significant money there, it generates enough yield that a portion of it can be dedicated to cover for insurance. I hope that handles the insurance topic.

EARN and the Loyalty Program

Nuno Venda: I think so, I think you were very clear. But let me drive this into the Loyalty Program. So we have a question that is more a series of assertions, that I think deserve our attention. I’m going to read this in pieces, because they’re different points that deserve different answers.

Quoting our announcement: “all that has transpired in the past few months has brought about an inevitable review of EARN’s conditions, especially those relating to the Loyalty Program bonuses. However, regardless of any changes actually implemented this is a subject that requires extensive planning and deep reflection, so the process will be not be rushed. For now it will remain as is, and you can expect new information regarding the loyalty program towards the end of September.” And the question: what should we expect regarding the Loyalty Program?

Jorge Pereira: This is a statement we put out a few weeks back. It’s interesting how we’re talking about EARN, the EARN conditions and the Loyalty Program, but the question is only about the Loyalty Program, so I’ll answer both even though it wasn’t exactly what was asked. In terms of the EARN program — and one thing leads to the other — it is clear that the process works. Some people say “oh you know EARN failed!” No. EARN didn’t fail. EARN protected people against loss of 50% of their funds, versus having those funds deposited in Celsius. It shows that distributing funds across a variety of partners is not just a good idea, it’s actually pretty necessary to compensate for the systemic risk of these companies. It’s clear that we need to make more headway in adding partners, and we’re targeting to add 10 partners to the EARN program. Now, what that leads up to is that many of these partners that are worth adding operate on slightly lower margins. Rather than offering 8%, some offer around 5% to 6%. They’re not as well known, they’re more institutional, but they’re ideal because many of them are legitimate, certified and regulated financial institutions. The result of that, however, is that the average APY of EARN will drop a bit. The upside is that it will be far more resilient. So, when we talk about adding partners, for instance, you’ve probably seen that Compound has had times where it was paying out like 12%, 14% APY, but it has had times where it was paying far less, like 4% or 3%. Those things vary, and vary across the industry with time, with liquidity and the amount of Dollars in circulation.

What we meant by reviewing the EARN conditions is that in many ways we have struggled with communicating an APY because even with two partners it was constantly changing. And we need to make changes to how we represent the EARN program, so that people understand that the APY they’ll get will change over time based on the conditions from partners. Because, again, remember EARN means we are not the ones generating the yield we’re paying out, we’re orchestrating the split of the funds to a number of institutions, orchestrating the governance of that process, and so on. The result of this is that we’ll need to better communicate the APY — for instance by showing some kind of projection based on current conditions, and by showing an all-time average. We are looking deeply into that — that’s why we say it needs a lot of reflection, it can’t be rushed. But we need to do a better job not just at increasing and continuing to grow the EARN program by adding more partners, but also at better explaining and conveying the APY. But because our goal is to make this accessible to everyone, even including people that don’t have a lot of knowledge about this, we need to find ways to communicate that clearly, rather than just throwing numbers onto a screen and letting people figure it out.

The other part is that the EARN program has loyalty tiers that allow you to gain up to, as we say, 22%. But that is based on a portion of which is paid in MINT. What that does is assume a kind of baseline of around 8% from the Dollar side of the EARN program from partners. As that changes, so will our promise of up to 22%. In addition to that, the Loyalty Program over time will stop paying out as many tokens, because paying out as many tokens means we’re introducing more tokens into the market, so there will be a constant reevaluation and a constant adjustment of what the total APY and the conditions of the EARN program are — and we’ll announce them later in September.

That’s what it means, it’s not as if there are huge changes. If you go back and look at what we claim when we talk about the Loyalty Program is that the program is as it is like this, and can be reviewed anytime. Another thing we might have to do to make this even more clear is to maintain some form of communication, where we frequently announce what the conditions are, even if they just remain the same. Again, this is part of what we’re thinking about, part of the things that we are looking into doing to make sure that the EARN program and the Loyalty Program are more transparent, more reliable and that people actually understand what’s going on under the hood.

The MINT token

Nuno Venda: The next question is about the MINT token. “Any changes regarding the MINT token utilities?”

Jorge Pereira: Alvaro will touch that when he talks about business development, but the main goal of the MINT token has always been and continues to be governance. In our white paper we established that in the first year there’ll be no governance, in the second year there’ll be light governance. We launched the mobile app with the EARN program in January, so our expectation is that until the end of the year we can launch a way for people to actually start participating in governance, and as a result also start accruing rewards from participating in governance, as per our white paper. This is not news, because it was planned, but it’s worth reminding people. The most fundamental thing that we can do for the MINT token is to actually fulfill its main utility, not just add more utilities on top of it.

Business Development

Nuno Venda: Good. Let me now change into business development, and ask: what can you share with us about enterprise solutions and integration.

Alvaro Nadal: Jorge I don’t know if you want to start with the enterprise solution, then I can jump into other business developments we’re undertaking.

Jorge Pereira: On the enterprise side — and Alvaro has been increasingly taking ownership of all this, he’s been invaluable, but there are still a few things that I am mainly focused on.

We are working to get some companies to adopt our solution. The strategy isn’t magic, we want value to flow through the network so that it grows and so that some of that value ends up in the EARN program. Enterprise integrations take a lot of time. When you’re working with companies that have boards and a dozen of C-level executives, there’s a lot of people involved, there’s a lot of things that need to happen, you need to get a lot of buy-in. So we’ve had conversations like this over time, after six seven months, kind of fell through — which is normal — but it doesn’t just take a long time for you to actually achieve those integrations because they have to do it on their side.

It also takes a long time for you to figure out that it’s not going to work. Typically because, let’s say it’s January 2022 and we approach the company, they show some interest, we start having conversations and it will be August by the time they say “sure, we want to do it. We’ll start in February next year.” And you’re like “whoa, what?” They already have all their development plans for the year, so it’s not as if these things happen quickly. In any case, we do have two companies that are integrating as we speak, but it can still be many months off and we don’t have any perspective of when that happens because it depends on their internal resources, and whatever other urgencies come through. I do expect we’ll have news that we can share with you guys by the end of the year, but no, we can’t reveal who they are — we have NDAs, don’t ask.

(All laugh)

The minute we can talk about it, we will. You’ll be the firsts to know.

Nuno Venda: I think it’s important to say that the story you lined out has no correspondence with reality — it’s just an example that you carved out. So, maybe Alvaro wants to jump in…

Alvaro Nadal: Yeah, definitely! On the business development side we have been having conversations with a variety of projects in the crypto space, different solutions. We want to grow the ecosystem inside the Public Mint blockchain, which at the end will also benefit the EARN program. The more funds come into the network and all that, it benefits EARN too. I want to give a shout out to Source D, who is a community member that has also been connecting us to several projects.

Just wanted to share with you that we are pursuing connections with a couple of DEXs to bring them into our network. We have plans to also potentially bring a launch pad to incentivize projects being built on Public Mint. We also have other projects that I can’t mention right now, but they’re looking into our blockchain for our solution of handling USD on chain. They’re very interested in that and they’re projects that will bring a lot of value to the chain. This is also very much tied to the MINT token, because the idea is to bring governance to MINT token, not only for EARN, but also to bring some type of governance to all these other Apps or DApps living in our ecosystem. Think about maybe MINT holders voting for new projects being built on our network — especially if we’re giving them a grant as an incentive, then our token holders can vote on which of these projects will be the ones receiving it, which will be the one launching with the grant. And they could also be benefited by these ideas of airdrops of these new projects, which helps decentralizing the new products too. We have a lot in mind and being planned for the MINT token and the ecosystem — and we are building towards that. It takes time, we’re building relationships, we’re looking for options, brainstorming new products too.

Also, if you know of a project that’s looking to deploy on a new chain and you think our blockchain is a good option, you can send it our way and we’ll contact them, we’ll see how we can create this synergy.

Jorge Pereira: You mentioned something interesting: this community member, Source D, is a good example — and he’s not the only one, we’ve had a few other people that have pointed us to partners. He’s just doing a lot of it, but it’s a good example of taking responsibility for helping the project that you care about and that you’ve invested in. So, if you are part of the community and you know of a company that could make use of Public Mint services, get us in touch and maybe in a few months from now we’ll have a lot more to talk about. But the way this works in the crypto community is by people in the middle making connections. I’m not putting the responsibility on anyone, but it does help if the community contributes to those efforts.

Alvaro Nadal: Definitely. Because outside projects are more interested when there’s an active community. When they see there’s a good response, a good community that’s gonna jump into any new project, they will be more excited to deploy on our network. That’s important.

Nuno Venda: That’s half a victory, yeah. The next question, I think Alvaro just answered it: “what is being done to bring in developers to build on Public Mint?”

Alvaro Nadal: As I mentioned, we are looking into grants. Right now we’re doing it in a case by case basis. But we do want to establish some kind of program, most likely to be done via the launchpad platform that we are looking into having built on the blockchain. That will definitely help to bring new projects into the ecosystem. Also, something that has been discussed internally is integrating this new platform somehow into the wallet or just having a closer relationship with these projects, if they’re already supported by us in a sense. Those are things that will help them decide to deploy in our network, seeing as it’ll give them exposure to our community directly on our platform, and not just leaving it out there. It creates a closer relationship.

Nuno Venda: I’m not sure how to address the next question, but I think it’s for Jorge: “what’s the source of Public Mint’s revenue and how are you able to fund the development?”

Jorge Pereira: Well, we did do a fund raise of around 6 million a little over one year and a half ago, and we are funded to continue operating at different rates. The longer we go, there will be a point where we need to enter a somewhat reduced pace of development, but we are funded to continue operating in that manner until the end of the next year. But obviously, if we’re going to continue growing, continue development, we will be doing further rounds of investment. Right now we are in an investment round and talking to investors. I can reveal we have one investor that has already made some commitments, but this is not a crypto play. It’s a play for, as a fintech, selling shares of the company — which we haven’t done insofar! It is not common for a company to launch in 2018 and it’s 2023 and we have not had the need to raise funds because we funded it ourselves, Halsey and I (mainly Halsey), and then we did a fund raise for the EARN program.

So there will come a point where we need to do another round of investment. We’re starting ahead, so that we can do it,but over time there is a business model where Public Mint gains revenue from the EARN program, as is outlined in the white paper. And there’s other ways for us to generate revenue with additional products that we’ll be launching on top of it, but right now we are just focused on building. We have a ton of things that we still need to do, we are not just working for partnerships but we need to continue to build a few key components, like adding more on-ramps and adding more partners to the EARN program. I hope that answers the question.

Nuno Venda: the basis is to keep on developing Public Mint as a network, and by itself, the life that will come from there will solve the problem naturally.

Jorge Pereira: As any other company, we’ll need to do rounds of investment. I think we’ve gone far enough without doing that. We are in the process of doing that right now, but essentially that’s something that every company has to do to continue operating and continue to grow. You know the famous stories of Amazon and Uber going for over 10 years without making money, right? And that’s because you need to spend money to build something that can then generate revenue. So, right now we’re on the building part of it.

Nuno Venda: A more down-to-earth question: “when can we expect ACH to be back?”

Jorge Pereira: Right now we are offering ACH to institutions, because we can do a level of KYC that we just can’t for individuals. For individuals there is a lot of fraud that happens with ACH. I’m not going into the depths of it but if you look it up and you start reading it’s crazy. If you’re interested about it, just ask in the Discord channel and I’ll send you some links. But long story short, as it is, we have to build additional layers of protection against that fraud. So we have disabled it because we were starting to see it happen and we said “no, let’s pause it here”. Once we’ve done that, we’ll re-enable it. As it is, we have other priorities. We need to address the remaining issues that I’ve spoken about today with EARN, with governance, and then focus on that. The point is that to integrate the necessary systems we’re talking about also taking on a significant monthly expense in the tens of thousands of Dollars just to operate ACH safely. So we thought those resources would be better used elsewhere. But in the meantime, if you are an institution, we can selectively enable ACH for you, given that we will go through a process of compliance.

Future developments, CBDC and new funding rails

Nuno Venda: We have like 12 minutes until the end of the session, and we have a few more questions, so we’re going to make it very quick: any expected implementation date for the Euro stablecoin issued by Circle?

Jorge Pereira: No.

Nuno Venda: About the new app Rum says “I like the updated app. The current UI looks tightly integrated for the tiered reward system. In the long run how do you envision the app will transition?”

Jorge Pereira: I assume by transition you mean evolve?

Nuno Venda: I believe so, yeah.

Jorge Pereira: As we bring more assets into the platform, those will be usable on the app. We’ll continue to add onboarding mechanisms, like additional options depending on the country when adding funds, to facilitate bringing funds on. By the way, whenever I say “soon”, I mean within the next three to four months. We’re looking to add a section where we highlight apps that are operating in our system that people can use. One example is NFTSmasher that has earned a place in that list, or Novelswap, which has also been launched. Those should be accessible from within the mobile app. Or at least linking to it. But it’s always a little bit more complex than that, because they need to access the wallet on mobile, and right now that implies some syntaxic complexities to make these integrations. Otherwise this app section will just be a fancy place for banners. and we would like to work on something a little bit more integrated so you don’t have to re-authenticate or do a number of those things.

Nuno Venda: Make it functional.

Jorge Pereira: Yeah, making it more functional. That is part of the future which is starting to show and bring up to the surface other apps that are operating in the public ecosystem, so that people have other things they can do with their funds and with their money on Public Mint.

Nuno Venda: OK, I think it’s a good picture of the future. Now, to finalize we have a battery of questions about the central bank digital coin, the CBDC. “How can CBDC leverage on Public Mint protocol?”

Jorge Pereira: OK, so I’ll answer it in a way you can probably skip the other questions, because I’ll try to paint a more complete picture.

First and foremost, Public Mint is currently focused on Dollars. If there was a functional CBDC out there that was already in the hands of retail consumers, normal people and not large institutions or banks — in the US it’s still not clear how that will operate, particularly because the Dollars that people use are not the Dollars that the Federal Reserve issues. They are commercial bank Dollars, which means they carry the risk because out of those Dollars only 17% actually exist in actual Dollars. The rest is built out by banks. When you deposit $1.000, they have the right to loan that out about five times. So, when you deposit $1.000 the bank may get to a point where they have $6.000 in their balance sheet, so those Dollars end up operating on the economy and it’s unclear how the central bank will issue a CBDC. Likely it will have to be done through banks, so the banks would be the ones actually issuing that — and that’s incredibly complex!

In any case, if there is a CBDC operating in a currency that Public Mint is focused on, then we’ll just accept it as a deposit. And we’ll allow people to bring that money in, send that money out, bring that money in with CBDC, send money out as USDC… Now, it’s a little unclear how that will work, because CBDCs are still mostly a mirage, right? I know there’s a few small countries that have launched something that could be called a CBDC, but right now it’s still not a reality that we can address. As soon as it becomes real we’ll incorporate it to the best of our ability into Public Mint, and that’s all I can say right now.

Nuno Venda: OK, thank you. Does anyone wanna give it a last call shot at a question in the #General channel? Maybe we can address it, we have a few more minutes. Or Jorge and Alvaro, if you want to approach any other subject that we might be missing.

Jorge Pereira: Nah, as you so very well know, once I start talking it’s hard for me to shut up.

Nuno Venda: You’re not gonna stop in six minutes, I know.

Jorge Pereira: Exactly. And I have a meeting that I have to attend to in six minutes, so…

Alvaro Nadal: I just want to mention something I think we kind of missed. We are integrating a new funding mechanism, a new partner, with whom we’ll start in Latin America. And that’s going to be happening relatively soon. Maybe sooner than Jorge’s…

(All laugh)

Jorge Pereira: Yeah, exactly, sooner than Jorge’s soon.

Alvaro Nadal: Yeah, I just wanted to mention that.

Nuno Venda: Well, we have one last question: “when Polygon?”. Yeah, this is a good question: when Polygon?

Jorge Pereira: If by when polygon you’re asking when are you able to send Dollars to polygon, as you can now to Algorand and other blockchains, that’s very soon. We’re in the process of adding that.

Nuno Venda: (Comment from Source D in the Discord #General channel) “Last time you said “Less than 4 weeks” hahaha”

Jorge Pereira: It will come out in the next few updates, I believe. We do bi-weekly sprints, so typically we do an update every two weeks. Sometimes you skip, if there’s nothing significant, but there normally is. But before the end of September it will be there. I should also add that the two-week sprint that we have starting next week is going to be in slow motion, because some people are taking a vacation, so it’s going to be a little bit slower in terms of updates. But that will pick back up at the end of August, and we’ll be releasing these things.

Nuno Venda: So don’t expect a lot of news during the rest of August.

Jorge Pereira: Essentially we have around 40% of the team taking vacations during this period. They haven’t taken vacations for a long time, and people need to rest up and enjoy a little bit of the summer. I think it’s fundamental for the quality of work and for mental health, and to actually be able to go back to work having taken a rest.

Nuno Venda: Being more productive.

Jorge Pereira: I know there are different mentalities about it, I think it’s vital. On that note, I wish you all a good rest of the summer — for those that are in summertime, I know this isn’t the same around the world. And we’ll probably do another AMA later in September or in October, so let’s go from there. And I really do have to say goodbye, because I do have to get on this call. Thank you everyone and take care.

Nuno Venda: Thank you so much Jorge, I just want to leave a last note: expect the transcript of this AMA next week. Thank you very much to everyone. See you, guys!

Alvaro Nadal: Thank you, goodbye.

About Public Mint

Public Mint is an open and complete blockchain platform for fiat money, where funds are fully collateralized and held on deposit with regulated, FDIC-insured institutions. Public Mint offers an open, fiat-native blockchain and APIs, ready for anyone to build fiat-based applications and accept credit cards, ACH, wire transfers, stablecoins and more. On top of that, the Public Mint EARN platform offers users automated and diversified returns on USD assets, leveraging the power of blockchain and DeFi.

About EARN

The EARN program is a community-governed earnings aggregation application built on top of Public Mint’s fiat-native blockchain. The program aims to make it easy and safe for the broader public to tap into the high returns available on the crypto space.

About the MINT Token

The MINT token is core to Public Mint EARN, a program that aggregates different sources of high earnings from the crypto space — both CeFi and DeFi — into a simple, intuitive platform.

The MINT token will not only allow users to participate in the governance of EARN, but will also pay a portion of the earnings of the program to active MINT stakeholders. Much like a traditional fund, these crypto-experts are incentivized to pick the best sources of returns, and the best combination of value and security.

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