so my name is Pat Lowry I’m the CEO and
Managing Partner of iconic holding which
is a germany-based digital asset
management firm and decentralized
venture capital group we also have
offices in London and New York and I’m
here today to talk to you guys about how
this new digital asset class is
completely redefining our financial
infrastructure as well as touching and
will be changing each and every aspect
of our modern society now before we get
started can anybody tell me first what
an digital asset is is anyone familiar
with any now a Bitcoin everybody has
heard of Bitcoin before Bitcoin is a
piece of blockchain technology that is
distributed across thousands of
computers all over the world and
leveraging this technology we can create
a new financial asset class now there
isn’t just Bitcoin there are thousands
of other crypto currencies digital
assets and blockchain protocols that
earlier this year had a valuation of
over 800 billion dollars and the
emergence of this technology has led to
a fascinating new piece of technology
called a smart contract and leveraging a
smart contract a new alternative
financing method for early-stage
companies has come into existence known
as an IC o—-
and the IC o—- has led to 21 billion
dollars being raised by startups and
this is having a profound impact on not
just the modern economy but also the
natures of companies themselves where
entrepreneurs do no longer build
companies but rather they build
communities and no longer is the value
for those companies distributed to the
shareholders the financial backers of
those companies but rather it’s
distributed amongst the communities
themselves amongst the stakeholders and
those that are the actual users of the
platforms themselves and large
corporates are starting to notice and
they are starting to work on building
digital asset mechanisms within their
own business infrastructure and I know
this because I’m advising multiple of
them in Germany and this is leading to a
profound impact on the financial
institutional market because no longer
are stocks and bonds
typical investments done through paper
no longer will stock certificates be
held in Iron Mountain with the custodian
Bank such as Bank of New York Mellon or
State Street Bank but they will be
secured leveraging blockchain technology
and its cryptographic language and
distributed amongst the communities that
engage with these platforms and this
will lead to very profound societal
effects most importantly it will
decentralize wealth generation we’re no
longer will accredited investors a term
of the United States in Europe it’s
known as a professional or
semi-professional investor have
exclusive opportunity to invest into
what has been historically the largest
generator of wealth early-stage
companies but communities and
individuals will participate in this
growth and this will lead to a rebirth
of the middle class in addition to
unprecedented growth in emerging
economies as these emerging economies
will be able to build their own
communities leveraging the technology
itself and most importantly it will
solve one of the biggest issues of our
time it will create a non-governmental
and completely private industrial based
universal basic income for every single
member that participates in these
communities through the solicitation of
their own private data to the community
for the monetization effect of their own
data but first we’re going to go back to
the beginning and I’m gonna tell you how
I first started to get into blockchain
and how it’s going to be impacting your
life as well too because it impacted
mine in a very profound way that I did
not foresee coming so this was me on my
very very first day in private equity
and I was on top of the world I had just
come out of PricewaterhouseCoopers PwC
and was working at a private equity firm
based in Philadelphia but I did a very
very dumb thing I met a very lovely
young German girl fell in love and much
to the chagrin of my mother got married
and I found out at a very very young age
or not a young age but very early in my
marriage
there is only one acceptable answer when
your wife wants something and that’s yes
so when my wife asked me if I would be
willing to move to Germany with her of
course the answer was well yes dear and
me being the arrogant American that I am
I moved off to Germany thinking I would
be able to get a job in private equity
there as it turns out getting a job in a
very specialized financial field in a
different country specifically Germany
is very difficult to do when you don’t
know German so I had to pivot my career
a little bit and I started working in a
venture capital space and actually got a
job with the deutsche bosom venture
capital team at deutsche boza
of course being the german stock
exchange and leveraging blockchain
technology at a stock market operator is
very very valuable it processes
transactions at what will inevitably be
very scalable speeds so we started
looking at investing in the early
blockchain companies but what happened
was very very interesting in about mid
to late 2016 some of these companies
rejected our offers they wouldn’t take
our money we couldn’t give our money to
these companies which is just absolutely
baffling why was this happening well
they told us it’s because we’re going to
do an IC o—- an initial coin offering
what now so we did our own research
looked into the space and determined
that an IC o—-
which is effectively the issuance of a
digital footprint of a company to a
community not to shareholders could be
used as an alternative means of
financing for early-stage companies and
this is what inevitably led me to
founding iconic holding and before we
jump into that we have to first answer
our question what is blotching because
I’m sure there’s a lot of people that
still don’t understand the technology
and a lot is being made of it that it’s
web 3.0 it is industry 4.0 it’s a
decentralized internet effectively it’s
a distributed ledger of transactions
across thousands of computers across the
world at any given time and a lot of
smarter people than I have tried to put
together these crazy diagrams that
obviously nobody understand
to try to portray this to the average
individual and I’m going to try my very
best to make it as simple and sweet as
possible for what blockchain is and the
answer of course is that blockchain is
nothing but data that’s it
sweet simple but it’s a bit more than
that because unlike the Internet where
the data is not secure it’s not safe and
it can be hacked blockchain using
cryptographic languages is 100% secure
100% transparent and completely
distributed and decentralized in its
processing which creates a safe and
secure Internet going back to Bitcoin
Bitcoin itself leverages this technology
as a crypto currency an anonymous
peer-to-peer transacting where
individuals in America can transact with
Japan in seconds leveraging the
technology and it also operates as a
store of value a so called digital gold
but I posit to you that Bitcoin is
actually much simpler than that Bitcoin
is nothing more than the world’s safest
database because it is a distributed
ledger of all these different
transactions that is virtually
unhackable
but there’s more than just Bitcoin
there’s a theory and there’s white coin
there’s been arrow there’s – hundreds if
not thousands of other different crypto
currencies and they all have different
functionalities not just peer-to-peer
transacting for instance there is a new
revelation called a smart contract that
can be built on top of these block
chains that it effectively led to the
institution of an ICO because the smart
contract is nothing more than a complex
and automated if-then statement similar
to what you see in Microsoft Excel and
using this early stage companies in the
blockchain space decided to issue
digital footprints of themselves digital
tokens through what is called an IC
o—- where the community provides
financial capital to the company to be
able to develop its protocol develop its
business operations and solicit it back
to that community it’s very similar to
an IPO except done at an early stage
company level not at a large
corporates and what this does is
incentivizes user engagement with the
platform because now instead of a
Facebook only being there for the sole
benefit of its shareholders individuals
can provide content to the platform and
it be rewarded in doing so in a
monetizable fashion they can provide
their own data to the platform and can
be rewarded for doing so at a
monetizable fashion and this is why
everybody should care because it creates
a fully trust las’ globally inclusive
and distributed financial ecosystem
through these digital financial
instruments and every major player in
the world is getting involved with this
where even the Goldman Sachs CFO just
last week and I hate thing in the US
where I can actually use this term said
it was fake news that they weren’t
getting into Bitcoin and this is leading
to a revolutionary instance in the
evolving of companies so let’s go back
and take a look at how companies have
evolved over the last 30 years in the
80s and 90s cash was king effectively as
long as a company was distributing
dividends it was valued very very highly
you move forward to the early 2000s and
companies were evaluated based on the
perceived use cases of their technology
this led to the tech boom which
inevitably led to the dot-com bubble
that even forward to the late 2000s and
effectively these companies were valued
simply because they weren’t bankrupt at
the time moving forward into today and
you look at Silicon Valley and these
companies are evaluated based on what is
called in the industry a KPI a key
performance indicator which is basically
just a fancy way to say how can I make
money off of the users of that platform
how can Facebook make money off of the
people that provide their own data to
Facebook by selling it to advertisers
what Facebook did was created a
community but monetizes that community
for themselves this is changing through
distributed ledger technology where
today
using the same company building
practices building these communities but
not distributing wealth generated from
that community to the shareholders but
rather to the community itself will lead
to profound societal impacts and now you
can see where we’ve come full circle
back to that new global paradigm where
entrepreneurs will continue to build
these communities not companies the
financial infrastructure will be
changing because stocks and bonds will
be issued leveraging the blockchain
technology not just digital tokens
decentralized wealth generation will
occur which will rebuild a middle class
and allow for emerging economies to
become worldwide global players and
non-governmental Universal basic income
will find its way into the houses of
every single person in the world and
there’s lots of benefits for investors
for instance it creates transparent and
incentivized KPIs that are going to be
able to make money of course the world
works around money and it allows for
investment growth through
incentivization for users to engage with
the platform it also creates immediate
liquidity of the assets because like an
IPO for a stock the assets are tradable
right away unlike a traditional startup
where the equity is locked away for
about seven years and lastly it creates
a trustless investment security
environment where stock certificates no
longer have to be held at a bank of New
York Mellon but rather they’re stored on
a unhackable
digital network and the global benefits
are profound this will allow for
individuals like yourselves to
participate in the highest generating
wealth asset class of the world has ever
seen
early-stage companies and it will be the
ones that you believe in not the ones
that Silicon Valley investors decide you
should believe in it allows for emerging
economies to build themselves around
their own communities and allows for
financial inclusion through seamless
transactions to reach them from Western
money to build those communities and
through the solicitation of your own
private data to these communities to
these platforms you’ll be able to
monetize it yourself which is estimated
to be worth a few
thousand dollars per year creating a
universal basic income for every single
individual but with everything as
revolutionary as I’m saying right now
there are hurdles and of course the most
predominant one is regulation because
the SEC has determined that a lot of
these instruments are securities and
should be regulated as such thus
allowing them to be only participated in
by the accredited investors this is
going to be changing as we start to
develop a modern definition of a
security awareness needs to occur people
like me need to be reaching out to
people like you to dust discuss what the
overall benefits of these types of new
financial instruments are and what the
profound impact on our society they will
have and of course the infrastructure
needs to be built blockchain itself as a
technology is in its very very early
stages and it needs to be scalable
before it can have mass adoption and
before I leave I wanted to leave you
with one final thought we look back
today 25 years ago and find it very hard
to fathom a world where every single
company that we engage with on a daily
basis didn’t have a website on what was
known as the Internet at that time and I
posit to you that 25 years now this very
day we will look back and completely
beef and fathom why companies did not
have a tokenize –ml blockchain layer
that incentivize their users engagements with these platforms thank you very much
Managing Partner of iconic holding which
is a germany-based digital asset
management firm and decentralized
venture capital group we also have
offices in London and New York and I’m
here today to talk to you guys about how
this new digital asset class is
completely redefining our financial
infrastructure as well as touching and
will be changing each and every aspect
of our modern society now before we get
started can anybody tell me first what
an digital asset is is anyone familiar
with any now a Bitcoin everybody has
heard of Bitcoin before Bitcoin is a
piece of blockchain technology that is
distributed across thousands of
computers all over the world and
leveraging this technology we can create
a new financial asset class now there
isn’t just Bitcoin there are thousands
of other crypto currencies digital
assets and blockchain protocols that
earlier this year had a valuation of
over 800 billion dollars and the
emergence of this technology has led to
a fascinating new piece of technology
called a smart contract and leveraging a
smart contract a new alternative
financing method for early-stage
companies has come into existence known
as an IC o—-
and the IC o—- has led to 21 billion
dollars being raised by startups and
this is having a profound impact on not
just the modern economy but also the
natures of companies themselves where
entrepreneurs do no longer build
companies but rather they build
communities and no longer is the value
for those companies distributed to the
shareholders the financial backers of
those companies but rather it’s
distributed amongst the communities
themselves amongst the stakeholders and
those that are the actual users of the
platforms themselves and large
corporates are starting to notice and
they are starting to work on building
digital asset mechanisms within their
own business infrastructure and I know
this because I’m advising multiple of
them in Germany and this is leading to a
profound impact on the financial
institutional market because no longer
are stocks and bonds
typical investments done through paper
no longer will stock certificates be
held in Iron Mountain with the custodian
Bank such as Bank of New York Mellon or
State Street Bank but they will be
secured leveraging blockchain technology
and its cryptographic language and
distributed amongst the communities that
engage with these platforms and this
will lead to very profound societal
effects most importantly it will
decentralize wealth generation we’re no
longer will accredited investors a term
of the United States in Europe it’s
known as a professional or
semi-professional investor have
exclusive opportunity to invest into
what has been historically the largest
generator of wealth early-stage
companies but communities and
individuals will participate in this
growth and this will lead to a rebirth
of the middle class in addition to
unprecedented growth in emerging
economies as these emerging economies
will be able to build their own
communities leveraging the technology
itself and most importantly it will
solve one of the biggest issues of our
time it will create a non-governmental
and completely private industrial based
universal basic income for every single
member that participates in these
communities through the solicitation of
their own private data to the community
for the monetization effect of their own
data but first we’re going to go back to
the beginning and I’m gonna tell you how
I first started to get into blockchain
and how it’s going to be impacting your
life as well too because it impacted
mine in a very profound way that I did
not foresee coming so this was me on my
very very first day in private equity
and I was on top of the world I had just
come out of PricewaterhouseCoopers PwC
and was working at a private equity firm
based in Philadelphia but I did a very
very dumb thing I met a very lovely
young German girl fell in love and much
to the chagrin of my mother got married
and I found out at a very very young age
or not a young age but very early in my
marriage
there is only one acceptable answer when
your wife wants something and that’s yes
so when my wife asked me if I would be
willing to move to Germany with her of
course the answer was well yes dear and
me being the arrogant American that I am
I moved off to Germany thinking I would
be able to get a job in private equity
there as it turns out getting a job in a
very specialized financial field in a
different country specifically Germany
is very difficult to do when you don’t
know German so I had to pivot my career
a little bit and I started working in a
venture capital space and actually got a
job with the deutsche bosom venture
capital team at deutsche boza
of course being the german stock
exchange and leveraging blockchain
technology at a stock market operator is
very very valuable it processes
transactions at what will inevitably be
very scalable speeds so we started
looking at investing in the early
blockchain companies but what happened
was very very interesting in about mid
to late 2016 some of these companies
rejected our offers they wouldn’t take
our money we couldn’t give our money to
these companies which is just absolutely
baffling why was this happening well
they told us it’s because we’re going to
do an IC o—- an initial coin offering
what now so we did our own research
looked into the space and determined
that an IC o—-
which is effectively the issuance of a
digital footprint of a company to a
community not to shareholders could be
used as an alternative means of
financing for early-stage companies and
this is what inevitably led me to
founding iconic holding and before we
jump into that we have to first answer
our question what is blotching because
I’m sure there’s a lot of people that
still don’t understand the technology
and a lot is being made of it that it’s
web 3.0 it is industry 4.0 it’s a
decentralized internet effectively it’s
a distributed ledger of transactions
across thousands of computers across the
world at any given time and a lot of
smarter people than I have tried to put
together these crazy diagrams that
obviously nobody understand
to try to portray this to the average
individual and I’m going to try my very
best to make it as simple and sweet as
possible for what blockchain is and the
answer of course is that blockchain is
nothing but data that’s it
sweet simple but it’s a bit more than
that because unlike the Internet where
the data is not secure it’s not safe and
it can be hacked blockchain using
cryptographic languages is 100% secure
100% transparent and completely
distributed and decentralized in its
processing which creates a safe and
secure Internet going back to Bitcoin
Bitcoin itself leverages this technology
as a crypto currency an anonymous
peer-to-peer transacting where
individuals in America can transact with
Japan in seconds leveraging the
technology and it also operates as a
store of value a so called digital gold
but I posit to you that Bitcoin is
actually much simpler than that Bitcoin
is nothing more than the world’s safest
database because it is a distributed
ledger of all these different
transactions that is virtually
unhackable
but there’s more than just Bitcoin
there’s a theory and there’s white coin
there’s been arrow there’s – hundreds if
not thousands of other different crypto
currencies and they all have different
functionalities not just peer-to-peer
transacting for instance there is a new
revelation called a smart contract that
can be built on top of these block
chains that it effectively led to the
institution of an ICO because the smart
contract is nothing more than a complex
and automated if-then statement similar
to what you see in Microsoft Excel and
using this early stage companies in the
blockchain space decided to issue
digital footprints of themselves digital
tokens through what is called an IC
o—- where the community provides
financial capital to the company to be
able to develop its protocol develop its
business operations and solicit it back
to that community it’s very similar to
an IPO except done at an early stage
company level not at a large
corporates and what this does is
incentivizes user engagement with the
platform because now instead of a
Facebook only being there for the sole
benefit of its shareholders individuals
can provide content to the platform and
it be rewarded in doing so in a
monetizable fashion they can provide
their own data to the platform and can
be rewarded for doing so at a
monetizable fashion and this is why
everybody should care because it creates
a fully trust las’ globally inclusive
and distributed financial ecosystem
through these digital financial
instruments and every major player in
the world is getting involved with this
where even the Goldman Sachs CFO just
last week and I hate thing in the US
where I can actually use this term said
it was fake news that they weren’t
getting into Bitcoin and this is leading
to a revolutionary instance in the
evolving of companies so let’s go back
and take a look at how companies have
evolved over the last 30 years in the
80s and 90s cash was king effectively as
long as a company was distributing
dividends it was valued very very highly
you move forward to the early 2000s and
companies were evaluated based on the
perceived use cases of their technology
this led to the tech boom which
inevitably led to the dot-com bubble
that even forward to the late 2000s and
effectively these companies were valued
simply because they weren’t bankrupt at
the time moving forward into today and
you look at Silicon Valley and these
companies are evaluated based on what is
called in the industry a KPI a key
performance indicator which is basically
just a fancy way to say how can I make
money off of the users of that platform
how can Facebook make money off of the
people that provide their own data to
Facebook by selling it to advertisers
what Facebook did was created a
community but monetizes that community
for themselves this is changing through
distributed ledger technology where
today
using the same company building
practices building these communities but
not distributing wealth generated from
that community to the shareholders but
rather to the community itself will lead
to profound societal impacts and now you
can see where we’ve come full circle
back to that new global paradigm where
entrepreneurs will continue to build
these communities not companies the
financial infrastructure will be
changing because stocks and bonds will
be issued leveraging the blockchain
technology not just digital tokens
decentralized wealth generation will
occur which will rebuild a middle class
and allow for emerging economies to
become worldwide global players and
non-governmental Universal basic income
will find its way into the houses of
every single person in the world and
there’s lots of benefits for investors
for instance it creates transparent and
incentivized KPIs that are going to be
able to make money of course the world
works around money and it allows for
investment growth through
incentivization for users to engage with
the platform it also creates immediate
liquidity of the assets because like an
IPO for a stock the assets are tradable
right away unlike a traditional startup
where the equity is locked away for
about seven years and lastly it creates
a trustless investment security
environment where stock certificates no
longer have to be held at a bank of New
York Mellon but rather they’re stored on
a unhackable
digital network and the global benefits
are profound this will allow for
individuals like yourselves to
participate in the highest generating
wealth asset class of the world has ever
seen
early-stage companies and it will be the
ones that you believe in not the ones
that Silicon Valley investors decide you
should believe in it allows for emerging
economies to build themselves around
their own communities and allows for
financial inclusion through seamless
transactions to reach them from Western
money to build those communities and
through the solicitation of your own
private data to these communities to
these platforms you’ll be able to
monetize it yourself which is estimated
to be worth a few
thousand dollars per year creating a
universal basic income for every single
individual but with everything as
revolutionary as I’m saying right now
there are hurdles and of course the most
predominant one is regulation because
the SEC has determined that a lot of
these instruments are securities and
should be regulated as such thus
allowing them to be only participated in
by the accredited investors this is
going to be changing as we start to
develop a modern definition of a
security awareness needs to occur people
like me need to be reaching out to
people like you to dust discuss what the
overall benefits of these types of new
financial instruments are and what the
profound impact on our society they will
have and of course the infrastructure
needs to be built blockchain itself as a
technology is in its very very early
stages and it needs to be scalable
before it can have mass adoption and
before I leave I wanted to leave you
with one final thought we look back
today 25 years ago and find it very hard
to fathom a world where every single
company that we engage with on a daily
basis didn’t have a website on what was
known as the Internet at that time and I
posit to you that 25 years now this very
day we will look back and completely
beef and fathom why companies did not
have a tokenize –ml blockchain layer
that incentivize their users engagements with these platforms thank you very much
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