A Little Bit About Nick:

Nick Daze is a Web3 enthusiast, crypto expert, and entrepreneur with a proven track record of building innovative projects in the blockchain space. With a background in both the insurance and funeral industries, Nick transitioned into crypto after a pivotal personal experience, quickly establishing himself as a thought leader and community builder. He is currently working on projects focusing on integrating blockchain technology into real-world applications and empowering nonprofits. Nick is recognized for his ability to bridge Web2 and Web3, advise companies on blockchain adoption, and foster positive impact through technology. His work is driven by a passion for education, community, and creating meaningful change in the digital economy.

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TRANSCRIPTION:

JP McAvoy: Hi, and thanks for joining us on today’s show. We’ve got Nick Daze, a Web3 enthusiast, a Crypto expert who’s building a number of projects. He speaks to those. He’s got Nice Industries. He’s got Centivize. He knows how to get people on chains. He knows what the future of Web3 looks like. And here’s my conversation with Nick Daze. 

Nick, thanks for joining us here on the show today. Really, really fun to have somebody from the area, somebody from Ottawa on the show. We have people from all over, spending time down in Florida and Mexico. But to be with a fellow Canadian and talking from Ottawa, we actually could have done this in person. I usually do this by saying, what’s the weather like today? But I guess I know what’s doing here for you. What are things like in Ottawa for you? Let’s say it that way instead.

Nick Daze: Yeah. Things are great. It is a rare time that I actually am back in Ottawa. I travel in the states and kind of all over the world with the stuff that we’re doing right now, so this is the perfect time to be in Canada. If anybody’s ever asking, what Canada is like? I tell them to come and visit, specifically Montreal, Ottawa area. Specifically this time of year, June, July, August. It is the best time of year that we have here. And there’s really no other place in the world like it that I’ve found, so I’m really enjoying it. I know I think you’ve been up at your cottage quite a bit over the last little while as well. So, yeah, just trying to soak up all the time I can with family and the sun while we still have it before we go back to minus 40. 

JP McAvoy: Yeah, that’s just it. As you say, what brought me back having been away, spending a lot of time in the Bay Area and in other parts, but it’s the cottage season. We spend a lot of time on the lake in the summer, as you say, during the summer months. And all the time, well, Florida or Mexico, a lot now during the wintertime. So happy to be enjoying it here. Happy to be enjoying this time with you here today. The introduction for today is we’re talking web three, and what’s going on in the world of Web3. You’ve been at it for a while, and I’m going to hold you as a guru in the space for those listening to want to learn more. But let’s begin by just talking about what we mean when we’re saying Web3, or somebody listening right now says, hey, I got to know more about this. I got to understand what’s happening in Web3 right now. What we describe it to newbies, to people that don’t know what Web3 actually is.

Nick Daze: I typically like to refer to it by the login experience. When you’re looking at Web2 interactions, you’re always logging in with your email. Sometimes, we’re getting sophisticated with a phone number or something like that. But typically, you log in with your regular traditional email and password, and it’s on their servers now. With Web3, the transition went into custody of funds and self custody of information. So when you’re logging into something, or when you’re logging into something and it’s using your crypto wallet or your Web3 wallet, I would consider that a Web3 product because you’re not relying on an email source. You’re relying only on the wallet that you own and control, and have custody to access that service. So anything that uses a wallet to sign in, I call Web3. Anything that uses an email to sign in is Web2. Now, there is some wallet abstraction, crazy stuff in the middle where Web3 companies are trying to make things super accessible to people to sign in, so they’ll allow them to use a wallet decider to use an email address to sign in, and then create a wallet in the back end. But typically, that’s been the line in the sand. If it’s a wallet login, it’s Web3. If it’s an email login, it’s like a Web2 product.

JP McAvoy: Okay. That’s a very good way to, as you say, draw the line or quickly identify it for some of this question, what or how do you think things will continue to evolve? I’ll ask you, to what extent will Web2 entities transition or attempt to operate in Web3?

Nick Daze: I think that’s when it’s going to come down to the mass adoption is when Web2 companies, with all of the users, start to just embrace the technology. To be a Web3 company doesn’t mean that you have to focus or run on a crypto token that you operate, or you have to speculate, or anything like that. It means that you use the underlying technology. You either use Blockchain for authentication, or you use wallets for login, or anything like that. You use the Web3 technology, so I think what we’re going to see is, and what I advise for a lot of companies right now is that we’re trying to take Web2 customers, and easily bring them into Web3 just by using the technology. So changing the way people log in, changing the way we issue rewards for companies and different milestones, and stuff like that as well.

JP McAvoy: Yeah. That’s a good thought as well. You’ve watched things evolve in this Web3 space. How did you come to it originally? How did you get involved?

Nick Daze: I had dabbled in 2013, 2014 way back in the day in my teenage years. And the Silk Road was playing around. I had a whole bunch of Bitcoin that just got lost at some point. But most recently, in 2021, I was in a really bad motorcycle accident. And by happenstance while I was recovering in the hospital, the guy beside me just wouldn’t stop talking about Crypto. We got talking about ETH, Bitcoin and Litecoin at the time, and just all the stuff. And while I was recovering, I happened to jump on to Reddit. And as we all know, that was around the same time that the WallStreetBets things were going on, and all the AMC boom, and I read a post about a small coin that had just started, and I think it was about a $40 or $50,000 market cap. So really, just getting started up like a brand new, we’ll call them a meme coin. And at that point, I literally didn’t even have BNB, I didn’t have ETH or anything like that. So I had to call the one crypto friend that I knew that had crypto. I had to E transfer him money, which in Canada is the only way we can send money, which is a big pain in the butt. But at E transfer him $300 to get some BNB to be able to go on PancakeSwap and then painstakingly swap over for this token. And luckily, that token got some recognition, as we know in the space that’s pretty much everything in an attention economy, and that token ended up doing very well and turning a $40,000 market cap into, I think, 2 or $3 billion within a couple weeks, making my $300 a very meaningful amount. So it came at the right time. 

I just broke my neck and my collarbone, and messed up my hip. I couldn’t work anymore. I was in the insurance/funeral industry previous to that, and it just gave me an opportunity to start creating and start doing things from a place of comfort, rather than scarcity. And I talk about that a lot when you can actually sit back and have a little bit of money. Think about the things that you really want to do or what really interests you, you get a little bit more creative, rather than being caught up in the rat race. So I sat back, I realized that crypto was an easy way, or a way to make money. At the time. I didn’t know it was necessarily easy or hard. I just had this kind of windfall, and I fell into the clubhouse, which was the early version of Twitter spaces, or X spaces now. And which I actually liked a little bit better, because they had communities that would form. You had followers. You could build up a community around yourself or around a specific topic that this is really fostered. Again, more community than I found when Twitter took over from that space which ended up killing it completely. Clubhouse, I think still does exist. But for Crypto, Twitter, everything is on X now, and that’s the most predominant space. But through my recovery, I was spending 18 hours a day learning Crypto, teaching Crypto as part of a few different groups. 

I’ll give a shout out to FlyingHighCrypto, it was our first group that we had started by a Canadian guy here from Toronto. We had 50 moderators that would run the room 24 hours a day, every day, and it would just be a Crypto AMA 101 space for people to come in and teach and learn. And at that point, I knew a lot about PancakeSwap, Binance coins and stuff like that. And they started calling me the ShitCoin Maxi, because everybody else was holding their Bitcoin, their Eth and stuff that I had no idea about at the time. And all I knew was how to do a swap, and how to make a lot of money in this weird space that nobody else knew. So it was a cool space of learning and teaching, and just really building. And this was peak COVID too. This was 2021. We were locked down. We couldn’t go see our friends, we couldn’t do anything. So we were legit 18 hours a day on Clubhouse just building these amazing relationships, and relationships to this day. I think I’ve met up with probably at least 20 of those 50 people that we had as moderators in those groups from all across the world. So it turned into friendships. It’s turned into relationships in this space, and opportunities in this space as well. And really, the jump off point for everything for me. So now, I know that’s a really long answer to how I got in. If it wasn’t for the accident, I wouldn’t have been talking to that guy to hear about Crypto. I wouldn’t have gone to do the research. And then Clubhouse really gave me the opportunity and platform to build up a community of 10,000 people to teach and learn with. 

And one fateful night, we happen to have some Netflix celebrity just pop into our room. A lot of people have seen the show Tiger King, and we had Carole Baskin come in and say, hey all you cool cats and kittens. I just had somebody donate me a Bitcoin for the Tigers, and I need to know how to make it into cash so I can actually get it out and feed the animals. Because it costs $15,000 a year to feed a tiger. We got the whole spiel, and I offered to help her. So we jumped offline and walked her through the process of getting onto crypto.com, and off boarding, and getting signed up for the credit card and all that. Developed an advisorship relationship with her, and got to know what she was doing. And that kind of happened for a few months before the meme coin altcoin season kind of took off, and we saw the rise of tokenomics and some basic charity coins where people were donating a little bit of money of the community funds into that kind of stuff. That kind of stuff led me to approach her to say, hey, we should make the Carrole Baskin coin, and we shouldn’t make something that gives 3% of all the transactions back to the animals. Because you’re closed down now, because of the television show and because of COVID, you can’t bring in 15 or $20 million you used to bring in every year, why don’t we look at this new digital avenue while we’ve got the attention on you in this attention economy, and do something like that? And she was hesitant. 

I think that was around the same time that all the EMAC stuff was going on with the Kardashian, Mayweather, Jake Paul and all that getting in trouble. So she was hesitant. And then we realized, it’s meme Coin World, and she doesn’t own the name Tiger Queen and all of that stuff as well. So we branded it Tiger Queen and changed the Tokenomics to be a really cool community driven charity fund where people could come in and nominate local charities to distribute the funds to, which led to us donating, I think, almost a quarter million dollars to, I think 20 or 30 different charities all across the world. Which was really cool, because it wasn’t just going to her. It was going to be like a local food bank here in Toronto, or an animal rescue in Florida, or something that was actually going to do something in the individual communities that was close to somebody in our community so they could actually see the impact. And that crazy Web3 world led us into trying to digitize Carole’s cats so that people could digitally adopt them and keep track of the adoption process, and that worked because it turned into a whole company called nice that we now operate, that helps nonprofits connect better with their donors, provide more transparency and have solutions and tools to raise more money and more effectively. So Web3 companies turn into bigger, real world companies that have more effect, just like we were saying earlier. I want to see those Web2 companies start to embrace the technology. And that’s what I like to do on a day to day basis, for sure.

JP McAvoy: As fascinating as you say, because there’s a multiplier effect, right? So even Web2 and Web3, and even as you described your progression to it, things continue to evolve. We could get MetaMask here. To think that you were in a serious accident and recovering, and that in itself took you down this path. And the way you manifested so many of these things that you now see before you, it’s just fascinating. You’re also mentioning a lot of things for those listeners that they might not understand as you talk about the history of things. I agree that Clubhouse was great, and it’s amazing to think that we don’t talk Clubhouse anymore. We’re talking, of course, Twitter spaces more often than not now, and as you see crypto Twitter. But for you, some of the things that you just mentioned, they might be more historical, like PancakeSwap. Not that it can’t still be done, but it’s not the type of thing that people are using now. You did mention crypto.com, which maybe breaks me more to present day for somebody listening. I get this question all the time. I know people listening are going to say, how do I get in that initial entry for you in the time when you learned that sort of niche, that space, and you consulted, and you show us how to do that. Now, in the present day, if someone’s saying, I want to honor it. I want to get some Bitcoin. I want to get some Ethereum. I want to get one of these coins you describe, how do they get on? What’s the way to get on?

Nick Daze: It’s recently become a lot easier. It used to depend on what state you would live in, you could get certain coins and not others. New York State used to be notorious for that. You couldn’t get like USDC, Eth or BNB if you lived in those states. I still have an issue as a Canadian buying BNB because of the ties to Binance in China. So what I have found, and what I recommend people do, is to use a centralized exchange. So in Crypto, there’s two types of exchange. One is decentralized that uses basically decentralized pools of money that people have set up to trade in and out. And then there’s centralized exchanges that kind of operate like a bank. They’re typically, I shouldn’t say FDIC-insured, but I think some of them are FDIC-insured for the bank account portions of them, but they have stuff account recovery. They’ve got Customer Service and Support. I always recommend, and you honestly have to at this point use something like one of those centralized exchanges to onboard. The one I use, and I mentioned most often, is crypto.com because they have really, really good fees. In my opinion, it’s like $0 to get money in and out in your swaps. A lot of the time, they’ve got really high limits for new users as well if you’re trying to bridge in 25 or $100,000 to make a position. Some of the other services will limit you to maybe $500 or $2,000 a week, or something silly like that, which isn’t gonna help you get your money in. So crypto.com has got really easy onboarding good limits to the start. They’ve got a visa, like a crypto.com visa or Visa debit card that will allow you, depending on what tier you have, to collect bonus points in their native token, CRO, which is, I think, up 23% today. It’s like rocking, which is not anything because it’s still under 10 cents, and it was up to 60 last year. So it’s good for us that we have been holding through the whole time here. But yeah, they’ve got their CRO for rewards. They’ve got a decent credit card that you can use. They’ve got access to all of the tokens. They’ve got international access. So if you’re Canadian or American, it’s the same thing.

JP McAvoy: Okay, that’s okay. So it’s interesting. You mentioned crypto.com.

Nick Daze: You can’t see my credit card number there, but they get here.

JP McAvoy: Really cool. Oh, there you go. For those listening agents showing with, I guess, the crypto.com credit card, there are credit cards. Obviously, they issued through that. And I think the key thing that you’re describing is an honor through that, and that’s for Canadians. You’re not getting a reference or anything for this. This is just the way you would advise people trying to honor it, right? 

Nick Daze: Obviously reference codes and stuff like that. So if you wanted to share one, if you have crypto.com, you can share one with your people there thinking they get $25 or something along those lines. That’s not why I’m promoting. I’ve used it so much, I’ve worn out the credit card by this point. It just makes it really easy to load your Crypto onto it off board as well. So if you just want to throw an Eth on there and go out for a night, you can easily do that. But in Canada, the E transfer service, there’s no, I think the limit is like $25,000 a day off, or something along those lines, and then wire up to $700,000 a month. It’s very non restrictive. Obviously, there’s others out there. There’s Coinbase and stuff like that. What I will recommend for people, if they are newbies, if you want to stay away from centralized exchanges that you cannot exchange off of. I know for a long time that forward facing stuff like Robinhood or Wealthsimple stuff like that would allow you to buy Crypto. 

But the biggest thing with a centralized exchange is that you are not, even though it says those numbers on the screen just like a bank says you have numbers on the screen of your money, it says you have a Bitcoin, or it says you have a couple Ether, it says that have all of that money sitting in there. But because they have access to the keys, and those keys are not solely in your possession. If they go, let’s call it tits up. Or if they go out of business, just like we’ve seen Mt. Gox or all of these other big ones in the past that have just quadrigra, they go out of business and they just take your funds. The only way to be fully secure is to have the funds in your possession on a cold wallet, something like a ledger, a treasure or something that only you have, or private key. Exchanges are good for getting money on and off. And generally, the larger ones, crypto.com, Coinbase, Binance, they’re great. Either we probably don’t have any issues there, just like saying that we wouldn’t have any major issues with Royal Bank or TD or Scotia, right? But you never know what’s going to happen. And we never know when something could collapse, or there could be a breach that could affect us. So the best procedure would be to purchase the money or purchase the Crypto on the centralized exchange, and then bring it to a decentralized wallet that only you have access to, and is completely within your control. 

JP McAvoy: Actually, before I ask for decentralization for somebody listening in Asia or the other side of the world, crypto.com or Coinbase still a solution? Or would you point them somewhere else? Do you have knowledge there?

Nick Daze: I don’t have knowledge specifically in Asia. I know I would believe finance would be an option over there, because I know it’s not an option here for a lot of people, so I would assume that would be the major option over there. I can’t speak to centralized exchanges. But for decentralized storage, something like a ledger here, like a Ledger Nano S Plus that just easily plugs into a USBC. And the only way that anything can come off of an account that’s created here is you have to use these tiny little buttons to type in an 8 digit passcode in order for it to release the funds or to sign it. Nobody else can do that, so that’s why this hardware wallet is the most secure. If you have a wallet, let’s say that is a MetaMask or something on your phone that you’ve backed up with your recovery phrase, that wallet is still connected to the internet. It’s not what they call air gapped. So if that phone or that computer that that very secure wallet could be sitting on is compromised, and let’s say it has a key logger on it, or it has some form of remote viewer that could take advantage or take control of it, you can easily still be hacked. So the air gapping rate once a wallet is on a physical device like something like this, the fact that this has no way to connect to the internet rather than being plugged in and then authenticated means that this is the most secure way for this to happen. And people will generally say, oh, my god, it’s a little USB drive. I lose those all the time. What if you lose it? That’s fine. If you lose it, you still have your recovery phrase that’s written down in a few different places and segmented very securely to go over. But the key is this authentication device that you have to have physical code, just like a lot of people have like LastPass devices, like their authentication keys for their works, that changes their hash code over every 30 seconds that they have to type in a different code. Very, very similar to having something like that, like a different level of authentication.

JP McAvoy: Okay, great stuff. So when we’re talking on ramping, we’re talking about security. I mean, it’s so important to be secure, we hear pacts all the time. They happen regularly. There’s all kinds of scams. You need to almost assume that everybody’s trying to scam you, right? And be very careful in that regard, because it’s so common for that to actually be something, which is something that’s unfortunately kept people away from space. I think for some period of time, I think we’re getting safer there. And it’s a conversation like this. The people here show them how to do it first. And then secondly, how to be safe, which is so important. So there can be a future in this space, and some of the projects that are being built can continue to grow and be successful. Would you say that’s fair?

Nick Daze: 100%. The unfortunate part is, no matter how much security we do around this part and self custody, that’s like 5% of the issues, right? Like, we all screw up, we all send money where we’re not supposed to, or we connect to a wallet and or get socially engineered out of our money. That’s one thing. But what’s really, really bad, and I get probably two or three calls a month over, is there are people cold emailing, cold calling and cold texting people out there that are representing themselves as Crypto brokers, or exchanges, or traders that will take a little bit of your money. Let’s say $500 or $1,000, and then they’ll turn it into a crazy amount of money, and make you think that you’re an expert trader just so that you’ll then go into your bank account, you’ll then send them another 50,000 or 100,000, get greedy and buy more. They’re going to show you a million dollars worth of profit. They’re going to make you think that you’ve got all of this money, and you keep sending them the money. But in actuality, they’re not actually buying Bitcoin. They’re showing you fake receipts. They’re showing you fake screens. They’re showing you fake returns. And then when you finally go to ask for the money out, they say, you need a standard 20 or 30% withdrawal fee on that million dollars. And they get you to fork over another 2 or $300,000, and then they just ghost you. That has left such a negative, not connotation, but a negative impact on the crypto space, and a negative association with crypto because people think that they’re getting ripped off by buying Bitcoin, or they’re getting scammed with Bitcoin.

JP McAvoy: It’s just a con artist, but it could be anything else. 

Nick Daze: What I hear is that 9 times out of 10, people have a negative association or reaction around crypto. Oh, my friend thought they made all this money in Crypto, and then they got robbed. I spoke to a lady last week. She literally sold her parents land and put $500,000 in with this Crypto, thinking she had over $2 million in this account. And these people have been social engineering, stealing. I think I’m over a million dollars from her over the last year. And now this 65, 70 year old lady has no house, no pension, nothing. She went bankrupt after working her whole life, and is blaming that on Bitcoin. In actuality, if she would have put that $500,000 in Bitcoin over that last year and a half, she would be sitting pretty right now, and would have made one of the best financial decisions. One of the best Boomer calls I’d call in a long time to go full ape Shit on Bitcoin at that age. That’s the worst part. The technology is so new that it’s being used to prey on people. And people, especially in this economy, are vulnerable. People are looking for ways to make money. People are looking for ways to make easy money because they hear of other people making easy money in Crypto, and it’s just really frustrating to be like, honestly, at least a dozen times that I had to be the person to tell people that they’ve just lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they’re not on Cloud 9 they think they’re on because they’ve just been taken, and then they don’t. Then they think I’m the bad guy. There’s this whole recovery thing where they’ll call you a couple days later being like, hey, I heard you were scammed. We can recover your money. And it’s just the same scammers from the other room calling them again. And it’s just they get caught up in it, because I don’t know, people are inherently trustful. Even me. It happens to everybody. We want to see the best in people. Everybody wants to make money. Everybody wants to make easy money, if that is something that even exists in this world.

JP McAvoy: So yeah, definitely have to be aware of scammers, and that’s a big part of it. Unfortunately, if you go in with that mindset and eyes wide open to scammers still prepared to take the risk involved because there are returns. Where is a good spot to actually participate? Where would you be steering people towards to actually participate?

Nick Daze: So that’s why I say trusted sources. So a trusted centralized exchange like crypto.com. Make sure that you get your money in on something that you can understand. Then you want to take custody of your own funds on something like this ledger here. Or at the worst case, a MetaMask or a trust wallet that is very secure. And then you want to learn. Most of the mistakes and most of the money you will lose in this space is because you’re just not knowledgeable enough. You miss a part of an address when you go to send money, you miss a memo key. If you’re sending something like that, or you just don’t read the instructions and you rush through, there’s always things that you want to make sure of. If you’re sending a large transaction, you’re sending $10,000 to somebody, send them $1 first to make sure that you have the address right. It’s just about being a little bit more careful. Just imagine you have all of your cash, or all of your gold, or all of your possessions squarely in your wallet, right? How secure, or how many times are you going to grab your back pocket to make sure your wallet is still there and still secure? So you want to make sure that your digital wallet has the same kind of gravitas as the others.

JP McAvoy: Just be wise to move some funds on. What kind of projects are you involved in right now? Are there things that you’ve seen, or you can say to people, these might be good ideas to look at.

Nick Daze: Yeah, yeah, for sure. There’s some really cool things that are building on the network. We’re building a project right now called Centivize that is on a brand new network on top of Bitcoin, actually. So you’ve probably heard of the apps, or decentralized applications and their Web3 apps that are built on top of a Blockchain. And traditionally, Ethereum was built to have digital apps built on top of it because it’s called the theory and virtual machine. Solana has that ability with its coding, but Bitcoin is the number one asset. And when what everybody’s holding doesn’t have that ability because it’s like older coded and all of that stuff, so there’s a new network, or what we’re calling a layer two that’s built on top of Bitcoin, that uses Bitcoin and all of its security, and all of the best parts of it to allow that building on top of it, and allow the connection to the Ethereum virtual machine. And that chain is called Botanix. And I was fortunate enough at South by Southwest last year to meet the team from Botanix as they had just received their first funding. And they were looking for trusted developers to build things on their network to make sure that they were going to have a lot of users, to make sure that they were going to be successful. Because at the end of the day, we all know this is an attention economy. And it depends on how many people use the network, and make sure that the funds are coming through, and liquidity providing and all of that. 

So at first, we had a month or two to get going as they were building out. And that month or two turned into, actually, almost a year of building. So what we started out as we wanted to make a meme coin that was focused around community growth, positive actions and stuff like that, we actually had the time to build a full scale application focused around positive impact tasks, marketing and incentivization through Crypto, because we noticed that there’s a lot of platforms out there, like Fiverr, Zeely, Galaxy and stuff like that, where it allows people to do tasks for specific things, but they weren’t being rewarded. They were rewarded in like NFTs and stuff like that, but not something that was monetizable. So we had the idea to make our token, or make a token on this new network that would be widely used, and we have an app called Centivize or Centivize.io that will allow people to either go on there and incentivise people to do positive impact tasks, to do marketing, to do content creation, or anything along those lines that they need done. So let’s say, JP, you own a restaurant, and you want a whole bunch of 5 Star reviews because you’re brand new, and you need a lot of Google attention. You could throw up a $100 reward there for 100 people to go and do that task. And each of those people would receive $1 for taking the minute out of their day to give you the 5 Star Google review, and make that real world impact. 

Or let’s say you’re doing a beach cleanup at your local beach down in Ottawa and you want some helpers, and you want to throw $200 up. Or you’ve got some corporate sponsorship that wants to help out as well, which is a big, big part of what we’re looking at, will allow that corporate sponsorship into those individual events. So you could have 2,000 participants come and help you out where they’re all actually not just getting a participation badge or a t-shirt, but they are actually being rewarded with the real sense that they can turn into money for their actions. So that’s really the kind of circular economy that we’re trying to create. Because Crypto tokens, as we all know, with the attention economy, they are very reliant on people buying, getting new people in, and people speculating. We’ve all played the speculation game, and we all wonder what things are going to do. But if you actually create something, or create a use case, or a utility for a token that makes it usable and required for a service to run, it means automatically, people are going to be buying it. This way, we’ve got $100 coming in, and then $1 or $2 going out, trickling out. 

We’ve created this circular token economy, or Tokenomics, as we call it, to make sure that there’s always going to be that constant buying pressure, even though the rewards will be trickling out. And then the cool part is these people that are doing these real world tasks, or online tasks, are receiving Crypto without having to buy it. So it’s onboarding a brand new user that might not even know that they’re getting into Crypto. And as that token increases in price, the $2 that they made for cleaning up the beach or creating the content might become $100 or $200 as our token goes up in price. So it not only allows people to be rewarded, but allows them to be rewarded in a currency that isn’t deflating. The US or the Canadian dollar is being hit all the time. But something that will possibly inflate and also create financial literacy for them, teach them how to get in and trade it, and get it back out to their wallet to use in real life. We’ve got some really cool roadmap items where we want to eventually connect to debit credit cards so that people can use them in real life. We’ve got some really, really cool ideas for it. 

JP McAvoy: Well, that’s a great way to onboard, as well, as we described it. So that’s centivize.io?

Nick Daze: Yeah, it’s launching. I would say we’re going to be live on the main network of Botanix within a couple weeks. They just came out with their main net release. There’s all the little bits and pieces that have to go in to be launched properly, like swaps and charting, and the proper assets and all of that. So we are very much at the finish line. It’s been a really fun build out. And it’s been really cool to be able to get creative at the end here, as we bring on team members and advisors with different views and opinions. It’s been cool to adjust, so it’s been a lot of fun.

JP McAvoy: Sounds like an excellent project, so we’ll have the details for that in all the show notes there as well. And as you say, it continues to grow now and is advising people to do certain things, which is really interesting. And hadn’t thought about the way that you’re actually even bringing people into Web3 in that regard as well. I guess, one of the things we’ve talked about here today is how to get on board, how to get involved. And obviously, this is one way here. What does the future hold for this project and other projects you’re working on? What do the next sort of six months to a year look like for you?

Nick Daze: The cool part with this is that we’re launching with just the basic Web3 focus at this part. At this point, the feature rollout that we have set up, will last about 6 to 8 months with features rolling out, like community involvement events, community funded, like GoFundMe style campaigns. We’re working on all of that stuff in the background. So we’re going to be pretty heavily rolling out features for the next 6  to 8 months. We want to grow this business to make as much impact as possible. We want to grow this token from the launch price of what the 10 million where it’s at. I’d love to see it in that $100 to $200 million range. Obviously, no financial advice. We don’t have control over that. But with a look at the liquidity pools that we’re going to have and the tokens that are available to be purchased, it’s not going to take a lot to raise those prices. So I’m very excited to get the token launch, to get it trading, to see not only the speculative buyers that are speculating on our success, but to see the buyers that are actually using the platform. Because even in test net mode, we had this running in test net mode and in tune two different variations over the last three or four months, and we had hundreds of tasks being done that had no financial reward, and people were just doing them just for the sake of doing them to get the points that were worth nothing. So once we actually have a monetization feature behind this, the leaderboard, the quest, everything that we’re bringing out is just going to accelerate this so much. And we’ve got some really cool partnerships with very large media agencies. We’re working with some large people over at, I shouldn’t say it yet.

JP McAvoy: Pre announcements are coming together. 

Nick Daze: Got some big announcements that I can’t say. Can’t say quite yet, but we’re working with some big people. We’ve got some great whales supporting us, which is the key on every project to make sure that we’ve got a solid foundation. We’ve got a solid management structure. And honestly, that’s the foundation of a good business leader, right? A lot of people create tokens that have zero business skills, they have zero ideas. They just have a meme or something like this. But the ones that have the long term success are the ones that actually have a long term vision, and they have the ability to pull it off. And I believe I’ve assembled that group of people, and I’m very excited for it. 

JP McAvoy: Great stuff. I look forward to watching the future success of that as well. We’ll obviously have all that in the show notes as well. And as you say, there are people building, and some of these things are going to be yours. A lot of these things will disappear, but some of these projects are very much going to be Web3 developed, and this space evolves will be the next big thing. Again, this is a long shot question. But if you were to look and think like Bitcoin, you played around with Bitcoin way back in the day other than Centivize, obviously, which will be something that gains traction. You can grow like this. This space is not going away. Crypto is not going away, right? What do things look like in 3 to 5 years? We’re from this conversation today saying, again, other than buying Centivize, what should people listen to now, that if we could time travel, and we’re telling him to do in 2012, what should they be doing? What are good steps to be taking for the future?

Nick Daze: For sure, buy bitcoin. Honestly, keep buying Bitcoin. Looking at everything, all of the XRP people have been telling us for the last five years, XRP is going to be integrated into all the banks, and all the credit cards, into the swift and all of that, they haven’t been lying, right? XRP is a great asset. It has. We’ve seen it do, I think, a 3 or 4x in the last 12 months because of that. And now, you look at a lot of the governments integrating it into their banking system, like people were saying. So I think what we really, really need to keep an eye out for, and for early signals, is that integration. And this goes back to, how do we get more people into Web3? It goes into integrating Web3 into the products that we’re using every single day. When we start integrating Web3 into every single visa purchase, we automatically have billions of Crypto users inadvertently. We just maybe need to reframe what we consider a Crypto user. Do we have a million, billions of users going into their computer every day and opening up their MetaMask wallet? Maybe not. But do we have a million people swiping their visa that’s using Blockchain technology that is using USDC to settle? Yes, right? So that is a Crypto user. There’s so many ways that Crypto is going to integrate, and Blockchain is going to integrate. And that’s why when people are like, well, why are there so many different Cryptos? Why do you have Sui? And why do you have Eth and Solana and Dogecoin? Because they all have slightly different purposes. When things are built for utility, they’re built with purpose. And if you think of, why does your lawyer software not run the same as the pizza place down the street? Because they’re designed for different things. They’re both vertical SaaS softwares that were designed by this probably the same designer, but they are built for different purposes. So that’s why there’s different Cryptos. And the early signal is going to be people saying, hey, we’re going to be implementing XRP into this next. Or, hey, we’re going to allow Bitcoin to do all of these things that we couldn’t before, which should positively impact the price. So my advice would be, look for future integrations before they happen. Bet on them early. Have conviction and hold right. Don’t chase trends. Don’t chase meme coins. 

JP McAvoy: There’s opportunity, certainly. But make sure that’s play money, something for fun. Literally, like you described, bet the farm on that. Stay with some of these things and have a certain percentage allocated to it. You’re saying Bitcoin, XRP, and Ethereum. What else? Solana. So you think that’s still sticking around, and you don’t see that fading at all?

Nick Daze: It still sticks around at this current level. I don’t know how much of a pump it’s going to get more this cycle. I can see it regaining that 250, maybe up to 300. But it lost a lot of volume when all the Trump stuff happened that pulled a ton of money out of the ecosystem, and out of a lot of the tokens. And personally, I don’t think everything’s even come close to recovering from that liquidity extraction, quite yet. So I’m really looking forward to an altcoin season. But that’s why when we were building Centivize, I refused to build a token that didn’t have utility. I didn’t want something that was going to be dependent on the entire market. I wanted to build a product that was going to be so useful and so needed in the space that people would use it regardless of the market conditions, which would mean people would have to buy the token, which means the price would go up. When we build things for people to use, this is just one product for sense to use. We’ve got, again, roadmap features, everything else. This is just one thing that the Sense token is going to be used for. There will be more, and it is going to be successful. There’s nothing that’s going to stop me.

JP McAvoy: I love it. I love your mindset. Great. In fact, that takes me to the last question I like to ask as we wrap the shows, because I hear that mindset. It took you from, again,  really dire circumstances. A serious injury to the point where you’ve gained an expertise in this space. You build in the space, and you build inspiring products, obviously, with real use. And so I’d like to ask you, what moves them? What inspires them? Clearly, you’re somebody that is an inspired person, clearly somebody that is building things that will continue to see in the future, what’s a lesson or something you learned along the way, something that has inspired you that has given you that motivation that you could pass along to somebody here listening today as they carry on through the rest of the day, the rest of the week after this show drops?

Nick Daze: I have this talk with a lot of people, and it’s really about motivation. It comes down to motivation. It comes down to accepting that you need to be out of your office. You need to be in rooms with people that can make a difference. You need to be on the road. You need to be sharing. You need to be constantly sharing what you’re doing, refining what you’re doing, and becoming a better person. That’s all they can say. You can’t scream from your office. You can’t scream from a street corner, or you’re just going to sound like a crazy person, right? You need to be out there. You need to be learning. You need to listen. You need to provide more than you get, the more than you expect to receive. I’ve spent four years going to different, at least four years now, going to different crypto events, different parties, different galas, mixers with no expectation of return to learn, to build my network. And now that we’ve got Centivize, and we’ve got everything that we’re doing, I’ve got the opportunities to actuate on all of those connections that I have, and all of those relationships that I’ve built. And I take that direct from Gary V, jab, jab, jab, right hook. It’s provide, provide, provide. And then when you need people, or you need to take that right hook and activate, you’ve got everything you need right there. That’s all I can see. Just get out there. Just constantly be learning. Be willing to pivot. Be willing to fall down on your face a million times and be told you’re crazy. Just have conviction, man. If you really believe in what you’re doing, and you know in your heart that it’s what you want to be doing and it really serves your purpose? Nothing can stop that.

JP McAvoy: I love it. Nick, that’s great. Thanks so much for being here. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for talking about the projects that you’ve worked on, and sharing. I look forward to watching the future success of that as well. Thanks for being here. I look forward to having you next time.

Nick Daze: Thanks so much for having me, man. I appreciate it.