Stephen: This is your host, Stephen Sargeant, the Around The Coin podcast. Today's guest made such a powerful statement. We don't need more blockchains. We need better applications, more purpose-filled, built applications, more ways to get people to move and contribute to society. And I'm excited to speak to a amazing content creator himself.

Anthony Day, who's the Marketing Director at VeChain, you've probably seen Vechain all over the UFC partnerships. You've probably seen Vechain as they've been sponsoring and partnered with the UFC. We talked today all about impact, the infrastructure that is moving the future of real world asset tokenization, and how the V better platform is giving you over 50 different applications that you can do better to include sustainability, blockchain, growth, and incentives to your community. This is the best way to build community, build sustainability, and have the more purpose filled blockchain. And there I say the U word, actually have utility.

This is such an exciting podcast. Anthony is huge in the space and has been around since 2012, so he is gonna teach us a lot of things. None of the hype and the fluff. All about infrastructure and all about what we need to see mass adoption in the web. Three. Stay tuned. Reach out to me Anthony Day. He loves LinkedIn too.

Reach out to us and I hope you enjoy the episode.

Stephen: This is your host, Steven Sargent, and maybe in Around The Coin podcast history. The first time we get a celebrity from their car, we had to pull them out. You know, the conference scene in London, uh, we have Anthony Day, the marketing director of Vechain. Anthony. I think most people probably already know who you are more than they know who I am, but give them a little bit of a background.

Anthony: Hey Steven, thank you so much. This is the carpool karaoke version of a, Around The Coin. So, uh, thank you very much for the kind invitation. Sorry I couldn't be in a slightly more settled, um, background while I'm here. We've got the cars going past, we've got the lights coming up on my face, but hopefully the content still sounds good.

Stephen: Awesome. Anthony, it's, I'm curious, you spent seven years at Deloitte Ireland, uh, with your content creation, your marketing skills, that doesn't actually seem like a place where more, most of the creative origin stories of professionals, but you were working in their blockchain lab. I would love to know what kind of projects you were working on.

This was back in 2012, so very early for a company like Deloitte to be involved in blockchain. I would love to know what were some of the things that you were working on?

Anthony: Yeah, nobody ever kind of was born into Web3. Maybe we're starting to get that now, but certainly at the times when I started working in and around Web3 and blockchain technology, everybody had come from somewhere. So from my background, I started working with Michael Porter and his consulting companies, my first ever job.

So I got a chance to learn a little bit about strategy, growth, marketing, how some of the biggest organizations in the world worked. And then gradually Consulting started blending with technology. I found my way from Monitor into Deloitte. Deloitte is for those people who don't know, kind of a multidisciplinary firm, but they were doing a lot of technology consulting, a lot of systems integration, and in and around that space and around the early two thousands when everybody was looking at buildings. I guess intimacy with customers and trying to create new channels to engage with customers and I guess monetize them. We were starting to create new propositions around digital wallets, payments, um, new banking experiences and FinTech broadly. And that's how eventually you get in from FinTech and finance and strategy and growth into Web3 and technology.

And at that time, Deloitte in 2016 was spinning up its global capability around blockchain in Ireland by fortune or misfortune. I found myself there working with an Antonio Re, who is now the CTO of Vechain, so he was my CTO then he's my CTO now, or I'm his C-O-O-C-M-O, whichever way you get to call it.

The relationship is symbiotic. I. Always had a focus on technology implementation with a business case behind it, or building technology that has a purpose. That's kind of my curiosity around Web3 and what I get into, and also the reason why I enjoy working with Vechain so much is we have incredible tools in Web3, we have amazing capability and infrastructure.

Let's go do something good. Let's go do something for, uh, for good. And so here I.

Stephen: That's such an interesting story. I'm curious, you just were the head of the strategy of marketing at midnight working with the input output company, you know, headed by world renowned Charles Hoskinson. You got to work with Maurizio and others. What was midnight and it appears to be around privacy to blockchain.

How important do you think privacy is in the current blockchain landscape?

Anthony: Yeah, my Web3 journey, I've I've, I was kind of Pokemon collecting Ethereum founders for a while, so I started working for Gavin Wood and Polka Dot, which was a phenomenal place to work and learn about the nuances of very technical elements of Web3 Midnight was a even deeper dive. I think at that point, with zero Knowledge technology, if we're going to see widespread adoption, decentralized infrastructure privacy is a non-negotiable.

And so again, it depends a little bit on the regulatory status of the industries that you're building for, or the applications or the types of data that you are accessing and using. But certainly the domain of Zero knowledge is really exciting right now. The domain of privacy is necessary, and I think we've never had better tooling for people building applications to embed that if they need it.

So that's super important. Also.

Stephen: And I am curious because you have your own podcast, which is actually extremely interesting. You have your own podcast. But you named it that blockchain won't save the world, usually not the best podcast if you're a marketing executive or promoting crypto. Uh, but funny, very unique in this way. What is your thoughts?

So you've been in the industry for over a decade. How has the industry evolved over the last 10 years? Especially you work with some of the early entrepreneurs, as you said, Gavin and others. How has this industry evolved and has it evolved in the way you thought it would from those early conversations that you're having with some of the pioneers in the blockchain space?

Anthony: That's a very broad question. There's a lot in that. So let me, let me try and deal with that in the most, um, concise way possible. So this, this question doesn't end up being the entire podcast. Um, blockchain won't save the world started as, I guess, a sort of anti podcast in terms of let's take some of the hype and the misset expectations around a particular type of technology out, and let's just talk about what's being built, about the experience of building. Showcasing what it takes to be a founder of the space. That was always the intent with my show, is to help people have an objective perspective on what's useful in blockchain and crypto. We've tried to maintain that. I guess it also helps people realize that if you're listening to me, you're probably going to get some British sarcasm.

You're going to get a, an irreverent view of the world to some extent. But also, I genuinely believe that no one technology in an isolation will save the world. We build applications for humans. Humans build applications, and so blockchain won't save the world. We will, but even in isolation, you can't be a maxi of any one technology at this point in time.

You can be a master of a technology or master of multiple technologies. Uh, but I think it's important now more than ever for people to realize we don't need better blockchains, we need better applications. And so if, if I could comment on where we are in the phases of Web Three's journey, I think we spend a lot of time at the beginning.

Identifying which chain was gonna be the winner. Then we realized that they're all actually very well funded, very significant, and all gathering at least network effect or critical mass. And so none of them are actually gonna die or disappear off the face of the planet. I mean, some have, um, shout out Kadina, but also, you know, there are, there are many, many ecosystems that have continued to thrive for years and years and years.

Look at Vechain, for example. Founded in 2015, famous for B2B applications and supply chain in 2017 and in 2025, still going, still in the top five for shipping code focus and expanded out towards B2C. Sustainability, mass adoption and real world actions are WA type applications. And there are stories for every other chain along the way.

What I think is important to realize in 2025, as I said, we don't need better blockchains. We don't need more infrastructure. Yes, there are some nuances where if you want to use ZK for privacy or if you want to have different components of digital identity primitives, you can use those things. That's cool.

You know, go, go wild. But the, the point is not that we need more infrastructure. The point is that we need to build applications that are actually useful. And so that's the important part of where we are in 2025, is we are starting now to see people focus on applications. Stable coins being maybe one of those where you could say, we are seeing multiple financial institutions using blockchain technology to create a digital store of value or a digital unit of currency that can move borderless 24 7, always on with near to zero cost. That is an application of technology in and of itself. Rather than saying, Hey, I've got a really good blockchain. Let's go sell that to somebody. We don't need any more blockchains, and unfortunately in 2025 for the basic capabilities that we need, there is no real differentiation from one blockchain to the next.

If you put an application on Solana versus Ethereum versus polka dot versus avalanche versus Vechain, the end user experience of what you're trying to create will probably differ Naugh. And so let's stop thinking about which blockchain's the best, and let's start focusing more on which applications have actual utility or value.

I hope that described concisely enough to be useful.

Stephen: It was very well put. And interesting enough, it feels like we're building even more layer ones and layer twos as we speak. It seems like everybody wants a crack at their own blockchain. Uh, so they might be going in reverse. One thing that I find interesting about you, and another guest that we had on here, dio, uh, Diego Borgo, is that you guys are very practical in your approach about blockchain and Web3.

You're not there for the fluff. You, it almost feels like you're trolling the hype on LinkedIn and kind of trolling all the hype that people are getting behind, whether it's NFTs or meme coins. Uh, tell us about this like practical approach where you guys are like, Hey, let's stop focusing on all the hype and all the, the glitter, and let's focus a little bit more on substance.

Which kind of goes back to your point about, you know, less blockchains, more applications.

Anthony: Love that. Shouting out my whole crew today. Shout out Maio Algi. Um, shout out Block drops podcast. Shout out Diego Borgo. Shout out right click won't save the world. I think if you can't approach the industry or the prob that you're working in or the problems you're trying to solve with a sense of humor, you are not going to engage half of the humans on the planet.

There are a very large number of people out there probably who work very closely to the type of stuff you do, right. In terms of A-M-L-K-Y-C regulatory compliance, who professionally don't have a sense of humor, and it is their job to not have a sense of humor. And they are hired exactly such that they don't have a sense of humor.

But if you would like to engage the rest of the world, I think you should do that with, you know, a sense of humility, with a, a sense of humor so people can actually understand and engage. Look, this is not the best and worst thing in the world. It's not life and death every day. Blockchains have no divine right to adoption.

But if we want to catch people's attention, we do that not by writing 50 page white papers. This is the TLDR generation that now has moved on from having a five second, um, window for impression making on digital media to having closer to a one to three second attention span. If you come out there with black, white, vanilla boring corporate content, you are not going to make people feel anything and you're not gonna bring them with you.

And we've tried that with white papers. People aren't gonna read them. We are in the AI generation where people are gonna TLDR them. Or if you're really extravagant, you're gonna take my white paper, you're gonna turn it into a podcast and you might have Steven Sergeant voice it over with the ai, Steven Sergeant voice.

So to that extent. If you are not trying to be creative with your content, if you can't bring a little bit of a sense of humor to the party, it's gonna be harder to change people's minds or bring people along for the ride. So that's why I create the content that I do. That's, I'm assuming why Diego does what he does, uh, and from Mauricio as well.

We just want to make Web3 accessible to more people, and then we get onto building something useful.

Stephen: And I think what you guys have done really well is like you took that side like hey, we're not gonna go too corporate. But you also didn't go too flashy. All about wag me or laser eyes. You actually provide some substance to people where it's not too tick toy where you're not getting the right people to look at what you're working on.

So I think you've started the needle, which is why obviously both of you, your whole crew is very popular on LinkedIn 'cause you've studied the needle of practical application, but also fun enough that people want to get engaged with. You mentioned Vechain and I was even interested to know, you said 2015, I didn't realize that Vechain had been in this space for so long.

And to be quite honest, I didn't really know much about them until the partnership with UFC. So I would love to know, you know, how did you know Vechain's original thesis? Like what was the original thesis around their product and how has it evolved over the last decade?

Anthony: Yeah, Vechain has a very, very long history, and Sunny tells the story much better than I do. But broadly speaking, Vechain evolved from a view of Ethereum. Towards what is going to be accessible for the masses. Vechain has always been focused on mass adoption. We didn't call it mass adoption right Back then, and I'm not sure if I particularly love calling it mass adoption.

Now. Back to my point around, you know, blockchain's not having any divine right to adoption. It's not about adoption. We don't have to, right? Once we get to adoption, then we've succeeded and that then, then all, you know, we can all retire and life is good. I would much rather talk about impact or value or, you know, to use a more contemporary term utility.

Back then we thought about blockchains as being, if we are going to look beyond speculative token hype, we need to focus towards the technology being useful. The cryptocurrency side of things. Were still very sensitive in terms of regulation, in terms of people feeling how people felt about tokens and token economies and, and tokens in general.

And so the earliest applications of what you would call mass adoption in Web3 were distributed ledge. Where we were creating a trusted shared source of the truth for data on applications. Where did we see that At scale, the early use cases were supply chains, traceability B2B. And so Vechain's strength at that point in time was to double down on making distributed ledger technology available in an easy to use SaaS feeling compliant B2B mode.

Right. And so you saw the partnerships with Walmart, B-M-W-B-Y-D-D-H-L, all of the big names, and they're still using the technology today. But that was then, and you know, I guess 5, 6, 7 years later, the team had been building every day, unfortunately, or fortunately, I don't know, the focus has been less on Vechain for the last little while and more on layer twos and scaling Ethereum and you know, improving the infrastructure or creating.

AI type focused decentralization propositions and so on and so forth. And, you know, Vechain who's just been building useful stuff in the background has had less of the limelight than some of the other newer, more interesting stuff. Or as an inverted commas, narratives started developing in and around, uh, Web3 Utility wasn't one of them, right?

Being useful, being used every day wasn't something that for whatever reason the industry decided to value or focus on as there were, you know, exciting new things for people to attract capital towards. And so, you know, fast forward 2025 Vechain continues to focus on mass adoption. We continue to focus on real world usable, usable, and useful technology.

Where that pivot came about two or three years ago, was in the creation of a platform called vbe. Vbe is an app store that makes use of. All of the Web3 primitives now, not just the distributed ledger, right? So it's not just about having a shared database with a source of the truth, but Vbe has used as many of the Web3 primitive as we have available today in now a more regulatory friendly landscape, which has enabled us to be more creative, more innovative, more expansive with blockchain technology.

And so Vbe was created as a decentralized, autonomous organization. A Dao, a platform that has its own token, the better token, it has its own treasury as a result because it has a, a token ons and a, a token that sits behind it to token economy that sits behind it. It is a place where we have now over 5 million users, 50 apps that reward people for doing better for themselves, their community, or the planet every day.

Essentially, customer engagement, fan enga engagements with a purpose focused on sustainable actions or focused on helping people to improve their lot every day. That Vbe platform is more focused in and around B2B or individuals humans, um, in addition to the other B2B type of use cases and, and technology that we've been building in the past.

This is, this is revolutionary from Web3 because we're not saying we're building infrastructure. We didn't have or trying to make a better blockchain. We're at the point where we're saying, yes, we're gonna continue to evolve the blockchain. We're gonna continue to involve staking through the Renaissance cap capability of the Renaissance program and Stargate.

We're gonna improve decentralization with the higher booster program, which is launching in about a month's time. All of the continuous improvements to the blockchain continues under the hood, but we don't need to shout about that 'cause we're much, we would much rather spend the, the Vechain treasury, the initiative of the Vechain Foundation in creating a platform that.

Is a home for useful apps, apps that have purpose, apps that make use of more of the Web3 technology. And we can go into more detail on that. But essentially now you are seeing use of distributed ledgers, decentralized infrastructure, tokens, treasuries, community. So you've got a a 5 million strong community of like-minded people who are engaging with the applications, who are engaging with each other, who are involved in the governance of the platform.

You have the digital identity, you have the wallets, you have smart contracts, you have the tokenization of those individual actions. We're doing something in the order of about a million tokenized actions a week at this point. And depending on your classification, that is rwa real world actions, real world apps, real world assets.

We are creating a new asset class, which is the action of individual humans towards sustainable impact. And that is something that I don't think any ecosystem in Web3 can turn around and say, no, we're doing. We're doing that better. That is Vechain's Secret Source. Today, real world adoption has always been on the menu, but that's the reason I'm here, is that I look at that and say, you know what?

I can stand behind that and say, that's useful, that's impactful, that's meaningful, and no one else is doing that.

Stephen: And can you maybe talk about some of those sustainable actions and apps that people are utilizing for better actions? Like what are the most common ones? What's something that you're like, oh, this is super interesting. When we built the platform, we had no idea that this application would be something that people are trying to do every day to better themselves or their community.

Can you give us some examples? Because I think this is hard for people to wrap their head around that there's a platform with 5 million people trying to improve them themselves, their neighbor and their communities. And you're right. That's not gonna do a lot of selling in Web3 or the traditional media space, but it's obviously very, uh, it's a utility that we need now probably more than ever.

Anthony: Absolutely. So I started talking with the what is it and how has the technology evolved as opposed to what are some useful examples? So let's get into some of those. I think the most universally understood one or the the, also one of the largest used apps is called Mugshots. Mugshot was one of the first apps on bebe, and what it focuses on is reducing plastic or single use paper cups in the world.

It reduces plastic in the ocean, it reduces PLA single use plastic usage. It reduces carbon footprint, reduces use of paper and trees in the coffee and beverage industry more broadly. All we're saying is we will reward you with a number of tokens that's worth a kind of smallish value. You know, you're not gonna become a millionaire with this, but we're gonna reward you a small amount every time.

You take a picture of the coffee or tea that you're drinking using a sustainable mug, a reusable mug or cup, if the AI that sits behind it recognizes that that cup is paper or plastic, you don't get the reward. If you, if you have, if you brought your own mug of you're drinking your morning coffee out of a sustainable reusable mug, you get the reward.

You can have two coffees a day, so you can get two rewarded twice, and then obviously 14 over the course of the week. The, the concept here is that you are giving a small reward. You're giving a small nudge, and you're helping people to remember, no, I should bring my coffee cup with me because I shouldn't be out there using single use plastics.

I shouldn't be throwing away paper unnecessarily because there's resources that have gone behind that, or there's downstream impacts related to that. Right? I don't need to tell you about the sustainability science or the ethics of doing what you're doing. What I'm saying is I'm gonna make it very easy for you people.

We have identified we'll do more if they're rewarded more often. And then also you are creating a digital moment. It's a digital moment that coffee companies or other organizations that work with mugshot can value. So every time a reusable mug is used, a token is created a a, a note on the ledger is created.

A value can be attributed to that. And we start then also creating a bunch of digital content around user-generated moments around social media posts. And that helps other people to look and recognize, oh wow, Anthony just got rewarded for drinking coffee from his reusable mug. Maybe I should do the same.

You start moving human behavior, you know that application mugshots now got over 2 million users, which is phenomenal, you know, considering that's probably from a start about a year ago, maybe less than a year ago. So that's one example. And then there are, as I said, 50 other applications that have different moments in the day where you can make a sustainable choice or a choice that helps you improve your lot for yourself, for your community, or for the planet.

We don't have to start with save the world, right? We talked about that at the start. Blockchain won't save the world. Not everybody wants to get out there and be like, Hey, I'm saving the world today. A lot of people will hear that statement and be like, hell no, I, that's I, that's I the planet's fine, right?

I don't need to get involved. Stop telling me to do things right? You're not the boss of me. There's a very large number of people who have had ESG and climate science Ram down their throat to the point where they wanna push back. And we're not trying to be here for that. We're trying to be here for impacts that resonates with people, which is why they are 50 apps.

Not everything on there is gonna resonate with you, but. Taking your coffee in a reusable mug, that's easy, that's accessible. Um, stepper involves actually just moving, or BYB build your body. An application we built in partnership with the UFC is about helping people to become healthier every day. There's a number of stories of major athletes in the UFC who were 300, 350 pounds overweight, unhealthy, reclaimed their fitness, did something a little bit every day, and they've gone on to become champions of the UFC.

So that story resonates with their audience, and that's something that they can show as a commitment to helping the UFC audience to become healthier and fitter every day. That's part of their core contribution, and they can talk about that impact they have. How many, how many squats, how many calories, how many pounds that the UFC have helped contribute to improving people's health.

Also, you've got rectify an app that rewards you for putting your phone down, helps you think about being mindful. About mental health, about not being connected and always on. Um, green Cart focuses on shopping organically and locally, a number related to green transport. We're talking to a few different organizations about how do we help them create a billion sustainable journeys, get people to use bicycles, public transport, drive their cars less.

Ev earn rewards. You if you have a Tesla, it connects directly into the Tesla API. If you charge up your Tesla and you are using electric power with low emissions to get around on a day-to-day basis, we'll reward you for that 'cause you've made a sustainable choice. So all of these different moments, if you go to vbe.com, you'll get the full smorgasbord of all the different, uh, sustainable actions you can do during the day to be rewarded.

But we've tried to design as many of those that fit into the everyday moments that people do every day. So we can incentivize more people to do more sustainable actions that fit with their lifestyle. And then we get to the agents. And we'll talk about that later.

Stephen: I'm curious, what do you think drives a lot of the attraction from the users? You know, Noval always talks about status, and this is definitely a status play for people that wanna show that they're doing more for the environment. But then there's a token ons where it's like, hey, they may not be a millionaire, but if they're making enough, you know, tokens that might buy them a new reusable cup every month or every other month, it kind of pays for itself and it feels good.

Or is it like a competition thing where they're like, Hey, I kind of wanna be on the leaderboard of some of these apps. What do you think drives a lot of this user activity? Or is it something completely that I'm missing from all three of those categories?

Anthony: I'm an, I'm an and not an all guy, right? So it's all of that. The beauty of Vbe is that it takes the concept of community, right? So you are already creating a peer group of people who are trying to do better, who are. Collaborating who are communicating, who are sharing, who are supporting each other.

Clearly the financial incentive part of this also helps, right? So people will make sustainable choices, but that if the recognition isn't there, that can lapse over time. So that's a part of it. The UX is a massive part of it too, right? So if you can embed that in people's daily journeys, or you can make that, um, sustainable choice digitally or rewardable, or you can nudge people in the applications, that means they're more likely to take those nudges, right?

When you set an alarm on your phone. That's just as way of saying, look, I'm not gonna look at my watch all the time, so I'm gonna outsource the reminders. So the UX is a part of that too. Having governance around be better helps people have a stake in the apps that land on the platform and how those apps take their share of the treasury on a monthly basis that gets into a level of detail around the operations of the platform, but that people feel like they have ownership.

So there's a whole bunch of those different factors along with leaderboards and gamification. makes sustainability and making sustainable choices or doing better for yourself, your community, and the planet easier, more rewarding, and, and will satisfy the human need for easy. You know, good feeling, being part of something bigger without being a struggle or something that you have to Marty yourself for.

These are all powerful capabilities.

Stephen: From like a marketing and growth standpoint, can you talk to me about the partnerships? Like is UFC needed to partner in order to maybe finance some of the token omics, or is it just great to have, you know, a partner that has great distribution that believes in a similar cause that Vechain does, and why not create an app where you can also benefit from both having large communities, active users and doing something good for the environment?

I know you might say, and there, but is there a, you know, is there a strict strategy in regards to bringing on certain partners to expand some of the applications that you're hosting?

Anthony: so you're right. Again, it's an and, right? As with most token economies, the whole thing is about creating flywheels and network effect. And so we started with a small com small community. We started with a small number of apps, but the more users you see on the platform, the more actions you start seeing get token.

Generally speaking, the more the valuation of that community and that platform goes up as you start adding larger partners to the platform, or you start adding larger brands and their communities to the platform, the more users, the more value, the more activities. This is all part of that flywheel that we talk about, right?

The, the exact intricacies of, it's probably too much for this show, but ultimately what we're looking, what we've done up to now, again, with, with, for example, Vechain, uh, Vechain, and UFC or with some of the partners inside the apps. So each of the apps also have their own individual commercial model, which may be about data, which may be about connecting to e-commerce platforms, which might be about, um, creating data assets using iot.

For example, in the case of Noela ai, this is also a part of it, right? So you are bringing value, you are bringing the commercial model, you are bringing revenue into the platform, and the conversations that I'm having today. Around brands, or in a number of cases, sporting entities or sports teams, is that this is not just a tool for social impact or, or sustainable impact.

It's also a tool for fan engagement, for customer engagement. So most organizations today have purpose and purpose statements. And so if you start creating your own challenges or your own daily rewards as a sporting organization or as a company, you start catalyzing your customer base. You start bringing together your fans to create a bigger purpose, right?

The UFC has 900 million fans worldwide. If every fan did one thing every day and made a a difference, sustainable choice every day, that's an enormous, enormous, that's, that's not even an army. That's a matter. Cohort, I dunno what you call something bigger than an army, but that is a global population of individuals who are making one sustainable action every day.

That can have a significant impact. It doesn't get bigger than that. And so when I talk to organizations, sports teams, brands, I start with, there's a number of different levers for you. One is catalyzing your fan base. Two is the fan engagement, bringing them back every day into your application. As we said, this is a digital experience, right?

So typically it's delivered through an application. Most companies, I mean, take insurance at the very worst end of the spectrum, right? You buy insurance at the beginning of the year and you pray. You never have to talk to 'em until the end of the year when you then have to begrudgingly go through the renewal process.

There is zero customer engagement in that industry, but all financial institutions want to support green financing or green initiatives because that's part of their mandate or their purpose. So that customer engagement, fan engagement is you could bring every one of your customers back every day.

That'd be very powerful. It's a top of funnel growth lever. On top of that, if you can imagine, you make your application open and available to anybody, whether they're a customer of yours or not, I'm gonna reward anybody who makes a sustainable action today. That's part of your growth model. Obviously you can run the numbers on the financing of that, how much reward you were choosing to give, but essentially anybody around the world can then see that they can earn rewards for doing something sustainable every day or connecting in with your platform.

And so you can have people in countries that you don't operate in downloading your app and contributing. And so you can magnify your impact, you can magnify your reach, you can increase your fan base. You know, you can have going from a million fans to 10 million fans. Because if you look at Axe Infinity around digital gaming, you had people in the Philippines who were engaging with video games because the, the token rewards were higher than they could earn from doing jobs in the local economy, right?

So the power of. Crypto or the power of digital assets to generate interest and change behaviors is significant. And then you can start talking about, well, now I've got those extra 10 million, a hundred million fans or customers in my application. How do I monetize that? How do I use that for commercial benefit as well as sustainability?

As well as dig digital traffic? Honestly speaking, it is the easiest B2B SaaS tool I have ever had to explain to anybody because there is no way, it doesn't create value if you use it properly. There's no way that you can say that it's not helping people or the planet, and it is incredibly powerful in terms of driving commercial outcomes. That's, that's the pitch. That's what we do.

Stephen: And to be quite honest, if you got one eighth of the world's population that likes UFC to definitely start taking action, you might have to change your podcast name to blockchain. Might save the, might save the world. And you make such a great point with insurance, right? If everyone that they're offering life insurance to is doing some kind of healthy act every single day, that could possibly lower their insurance.

Um, just like they have with, you know, if you wanna have the black box in your car and your car insurance will go down, think of how much, you know, easier, inexpensive insurance would be. But you raised a real good point about all traditional financial institutions really getting into the ESG and real world asset tokenization.

How can your ecosystem, can you give some other examples of how your ecosystem is using tail tokenization to maybe help some of these traditional financial institutions reshape things like loyalty, ESG, and more importantly, user engagement in Web3.

Anthony: So the tokenization part really is being able to create the proof of action, right? I talked about it before. We're tokenizing real world actions from real world applications, from real world humans. And so the tokenization part really is saying we are going to create a unit of human action. This is the powerful part here, right?

Which says, I, I believe that one unit of somebody recycling a plastic bottle is worth something to me in terms of either our annual sustainable or impact goals, or more tangibly our contributions to a green financing initiative. That if you go to most banks or most kinda large capital markets entities, if they're looking to lend to corporates or large organizations, there is the green finance, um, part of the spectrum, which says, we will give you an improved lending rate or an improved yield rate, what, whatever you can call it.

If you, as our customer con, contribute to doing something better in the world, that is exactly what we're talking about here. So every action has been verified in the application, has been tokenized to show that there's a single source that's accessible to everybody, that cannot be double spent, that can be allocated, that can be linked to a degree of automation so that you don't have to do lots of reconciliation and over the course of time that you are using a token is not, is not the important part here, but you are creating verifiable digital tamper proof, let's call it that.

I don't like using the word immutable because that's something that doesn't mean much to most regular, regular, everyday humans. Um, that then can be used as a proof to a financial institution to say, we've contributed to our green funding goals, therefore please help us out. That's also a significant part of this story, particularly for large organizations.

Stephen: To go along with the UFC partnership, you just partnered with Bo Boston Consulting Group around the V founder program, which would probably be interesting to a lot of entrepreneurs that listen to this podcast, especially those that aren't, you know, in traditional grant incentives and programs like that.

Um, but they haven't dabbled into the way to offer Web3 or digital incentives. Can you talk a little bit about the V Founder program?

Anthony: Absolutely. So V Founder is really nice because it flips the traditional accelerator type of model by saying, actually, we've already built a number of applications that are ready for the Vbe platform that we already know have a good likelihood of product market fit. They're already out there, they already exist, and what we're looking for is a founder to take those applications and run with them. All we require is that they reach a certain level of growth in terms of users, in terms of adoption, in terms of, uh, transactions. And the keys are yours. So really we're accelerating the better by building applications that help fit into that. You know, whatever moment in the day is currently not catered for.

We're gonna say, right here we go, we're gonna look at making conscious dietary choices or making reusable, um, bringing you reusable bags, whatever it might be. These particular applications, albeit simple ones, are the ones that we're gonna make available as businesses to founders who can come to be better, who share our view on purpose and using technology for good.

And, you know, if they're successful in growing the business, it's theirs and they get to continue operating it as they see fit. That is the shortest possible path to building in Web3, in my humble opinion, and we're super excited to have anybody out there who's interested in building on bebe. You can build your own thing, right?

If you have already an application that you think is a good fit, we're looking for as many applications as we can. There's grants, there's funding, there's technical support, there's all the usual great stuff that you would expect for the founder experience, but V Founder specifically changes that by really saying, look, here's a ready made product.

It's working, it's built. Take it. Help us grow it.

Stephen: Your CEO Sonny was sitting ringside next to some very notable NBA players at the last, the last UFC fight card, Draymond Green, Jimmy Butler. Do you find that today's athletes are much more aware of digital assets and the opportunities in the space versus maybe 10 years ago when B Chain was first started?

Anthony: That's an interesting question. I don't think I can speak for all athletes, but I think what we can observe as a trend broadly is. More athletes looking at becoming entrepreneurs about looking at their careers and their options for generating wealth or continue to support themselves or just to stay interested after sports in terms of building their own businesses or working with other organizations, whether technology takes their fancy or sport business or finance, or a whole bunch of other things, right?

You see sports people qualifying as lawyers, you can go in a whole bunch of directions, but I, I think certainly the sports entrepreneur archetype is definitely there today. I wasn't there with Sonny, but certainly those conversations went in that direction. These guys have curiosity for anything interesting in emerging technology, you know, and so from a Vechain perspective, what we offer is a sense of purpose.

We often offer an ecosystem that is easy and accessible and easy to understand. Also, as we get into the higher busa era, you can see that there's more opportunities for individuals to become stake pool operators, to become validators, depending on which ecosystem you come from. You know, if you are not just, you are not just investing in the platform, you can actually become a validator on the network.

You can do that in any blockchain at this point in time, but it's something that I think is underappreciated or under realized. So what we may see, um, this is not an alpha alert here yet, but what we may see is the idea of celebrities, sports people, media, content creators call, call them KOLs if you really must.

But more opportunities for those people who choose to invest, investing in what you would traditionally see as infrastructure roles. On networks like Vechain, because you can make it very easy. We work with partners in, um, in technology and institutions like Bit Andino who can provide node operations as a service.

So all you really need to do is bring your own capital. And so rather than just saying, Hey, I'm gonna buy some tokens and sit back, say, well actually you know what, I'm gonna run a pool and I'm gonna ask the vfa m anybody who's holding that to stake their vet to my, to my nodes, to my, to my validator. And maybe we'll make something interesting out of it.

You know, any of the profits or a percentage of the profits go towards particular causes or supporting particular applications on the network. And if you are also interested in those causes. Come join us, come invest with us, and you can become part of the team. I think that creates a really exciting and interesting dynamic to an area of blockchain and decentralized infrastructure that people would traditionally say, oh, that's not for me.

That's complicated. That sounds like mining and technology and nodes and having to set up complicated things that I'm not qualified for. That's nonsense. And with Vechain, we're making that a lot more accessible, so I'm not making any promises right now, but watch this.

Stephen: But I think we both can say, you know, from the early days of crypto, we don't remember seeing any athletes, pro athletes, celebrities, you know, headlining any of the conferences that we used to attend back in 20 15, 20 18 compared to now where you have Tristan Thompson, uh, you know, a blockchain urist conference in Miami, uh, and you know, sunny sitting court side and UFC fight card side with some of the best in the industry.

So it's great to see finally this convergence, uh, of special talent's ability, and to your point, technology and infrastructure. How does

Anthony: percent. And if you look at Dana White as well, Dana White is an advisor to Vechain. He's part of the team. He's taken a view of saying, I'm interested in emerging technology. I'm interested in working with Sonny. This is a group of people that have, as I said, a purpose. They're trying to do something good and he said it publicly.

Vechain is the only crypto that he's invested in. He's all in on helping us to be successful. And when you have Dana White in your corner, to use a sports analogy, honestly speaking, doors open quickly. Progress is made and, and he challenges us in some interesting ways that people who probably spend more of their time in Web3 and not in traditional entrepreneurship may have missed.

And so that's also a really powerful part of the, the collaboration that we have.

Stephen: And to Dana's point, even if something looks hard, as you said, something as challenging as Web3, he's definitely willing to, you know, put in the work it needs in the long term to make it successful. Which is what exactly what he did with the UFC as it was dying. You know, you know, decades ago when we used to watch those, you know, different weight classes, fight it out.

Uh, I'm curious how you're utilizing AI agents, whether it's throughout the protocol, throughout the business, uh, how are you guys using Agen ai?

Anthony: This is a great one because whether you like it or not, we are now in the era of ai. We are fully in there. There is no avoiding it, but I gave a talk in in London in the last couple of days to help people remember that actually first things first, blockchain and AI are not competing technologies. They are complimentary.

They do different things. Blockchain is really good for data infrastructure, for creating and creating concepts around tokenization and digital assets for automation of applications, and for creating unstoppable apps and infrastructure. That's really powerful. AI is about. Inference. It's about automation, of analytics, about proactive analysis or proactive actions acting autonomously as as an application if you want on behalf of humans.

AI and blockchain goes incredibly well together. We're already seeing that every day at scale. Mugshot, the application I mentioned earlier today, what do you think does the analysis of the photograph you take of your coffee cup? Right? It's an artificial intelligence or a large language model, or a model that's trained on what a coffee mug is and isn't and what tea is and isn't, and what sustainable is and isn't, or reusable is and isn't.

So blockchain ai are already alive and well in our ecosystem, um, system. What we have is the opportunity to improve things in a number of different ways as we start seeing humans using agents more. And so in the last couple of weeks, you've seen the Vbe 2.0 white paper. Go to vbe.com, check out the white paper there, which has a number of.

I guess domains, if you wanna call it that, around where the agentic web is going to affect everyday life and where we are starting to focus our energies on making sure we're ready for that. That goes down from the infrastructure and people building apps themselves. We already can see co-pilots or agents that are helping to, helping developers to build their own applications.

Those agents will be interacting directly with protocols. They'll be creating pull requests on GitHub saying, I'd like you to improve this or to deliver this because my application needs it. So you've now got human protocol engineers engaging with agents. Well, guess what? The agents are gonna be coming up with more pull requests at the speed of agents, not at the speed of humans developing stuff.

And so on the protocol side, you're gonna need to be able to have copilots that can. Enhance the protocol at the speed that the other agents are enhancing their applications. And so you have this, I don't wanna call it an arms race, but you have this constant cycle of speed of improvement at an agentic level, which I think is incredibly powerful because those protocols and those teams that can embrace it will move even faster than we're moving today.

Providing also, you can continue to do so at the level of quality with decentralized governance, with all of the usual, you know, um, fun of the fair in Web3, but that's level one. When you get further up the chain or closer to the humans using the applications, I don't think we've yet seen agents at scale for humans on a daily basis.

We're still probably at the chat, GPT, you know, write me a script, write me a cv, give me a summary of information that's more accessible than Google. But when we've got the UX solved for. And humans giving agents access to their wallets and being able to do things across multiple applications, that's gonna have an impact for the Vbe apps.

And so already today, we're starting to prepare the user experience in the V World Wallet for agentic commands. Or if you want to simplify the analogy, Hey Siri, help me plan my sustainable actions today. Right? I've got Siri going on the background here now 'cause I've, because I've, I've summoned it. Um, but ultimately you are going to be

Stephen: finally, someone's talking to me again.

Anthony: it's like, yeah, where were you?

You've been, what have you been doing for the last 45 minutes? So that, that's, that's the use case here, right? Which says, I'm all in on vbe. I love the idea of being rewarded every day for doing sustainable actions. You go check out the 50 apps, or, you know, however many apps there are there. Help me understand where in my daily schedule I can make these things work, given that I am a person of X Age who has this schedule and does these things in the course of the day.

And then over the course of time, we're gonna start creating prompts and nudges and or even auto automated, um, verification of those actions happening. Whether you're using smart devices or whether you are connected into the vehicle that you drive or whatever it could be, you are going to start earning rewards autonomously with less, I guess, of a UX barrier or less clicks or opening of one individual app.

We're already on that journey with the, with the V World Wallet, trying to make the everyday actions and the nudges easier and more agent ready. When we then start getting into kind of the more agentic led activities, you could absolutely see an agent creating a Vbe app, pitching its idea to the community to get funding going through a governance process.

With screenshots and with a white paper or with a, you know, a already working app. 'cause you know, copilots are building apps. Now that's not the comp, that's not overly complicated. Um, and so actually you may see agents as founders, and again, we are ready for that. If there are agents today that can, that can enable or be the agents or the actors for humans who want to create an app and be better, that's technically feasible today.

And so it's less about, you know, us acknowledging that the agentic web is mature today. It clearly isn't, but we understand the areas where we can help, the areas where we have to evolve and learn. And we're starting to work on that today. That's, that's the kind of summary from the Vechain side.

Stephen: You know, I don't wanna dox you, but you said that you were at a couple London blockchain events over the last couple of days. I'm wondering, was there any, like, is there any like key takeaway that you know, that you see a theme through some of the conferences that are happening now in Web3? Or even like someone sticking up their hand and saying, Hey, this is a problem we have, and you're like, well, vi chain kind of solves that.

You need to look more into what we're doing over here. Any key thoughts to be pulled away over the last week or so?

Anthony: So I guess observation one from spending a couple of days in London is that I forgot that people in London dress a little bit more formally than I now do, living in Portugal and spending more of my time working remotely in Web3. So wearing my jeans and hoodies is, is, was definitely, I felt a little bit underdressed compared to, to some of the more sartorially, excellent folks of London town.

Um, that was one observation, but I think. Another observation from the couple events that I went to, ZB Live and London Blockchain conferences. There were a lot of people, and the important part there is also the spectrum. So this is everything from students who are graduating and saying, you know, what should I be doing with my career?

How should I be thinking about emerging technology? How should I be thinking about agents and building something? Some of the questions are more naive guys. Were saying like, should I be on social media? I do some occasional crypto trading, but I'm interested in going beyond that and building a business.

What should I do? Really interesting questions, right? And so, so then you're getting all the way up to executives of financial institutions, people from the House of Lords, politicians from, you know, the House of Parliament and everything in between. So the idea that blockchain technology is useful in the world, I think is much, much more mainstream.

This is not just a, you know, a small gathering insiders anymore. Not that I think it has been for a number of years. But it's certainly these type of events are places people are coming for education. There's much more understanding of some of the use cases. The idea of stable coins, even though I don't love the term, has, has made the digital unit of value suddenly become more accessible and like, okay, well what do we do with this?

What happens if we can operate something that involves finance 24 by seven on a global basis that goes at the speed of the internet, not at the speed of the banking service? What does that mean for our business? What does that mean for our access to funding? What does that mean for our ability to receive payments?

There's a whole bunch of different areas. Um, obviously my interest there was to talk about be better and to help people realize that we have everyday applications on the App Store and Google Play Store that have normal human user experiences that do not require a post doctorate in decentralized computing to be able to use.

And that's being used by millions of people every day. And that bit also still, I was surprised, opened a lot of people's eyes like, oh God, wallets stuff. It really isn't in our corner of Web3, we don't have a UX problem.

Stephen: One thing you've mentioned a couple times is stable coins. I know in the US with the the Genius Act and other stablecoin acts, they're not allowing, you know, stablecoin issuers to charge interest on some of the stablecoin holdings, which in my opinion opens up a huge opportunity for something like Vechain that's based on loyalty and maybe not specifically interest in this traditional form, but allows stablecoin issuers to provide some incentive to using their stablecoin over others.

Am I far away from that thought process? Am I way off there? Or have you thought about ways that you can incentivize things that might not be allowed by regulation specifically for things like interest or even staking deposits, but might allow for in other incentive programs like what Vechain offers.

Anthony: I, I think yield and reward or for, for activity or financial assets is always something that's gonna end up getting baked into people's commercial models 'cause that's your driver for loyalty and engagement. If that's not in stable coins now, so be it. But it's gonna get there eventually. You look at Franklin Templeton's, Benji proposition, right?

That's a, a yield bearing digital asset that, you know, earns you rewards as a peer-to-peer payment in, in, in microseconds of interest, right? Because the, the technology is granular enough and because it's clear that as a financial institution they've identified that that's a feature that people will, will realize that that's useful, okay?

You're not gonna become a millionaire off the yield that you're getting from someone paying you back for, you know, buying the sandwiches. But you could, if you can bake in those sorts of rewards and incentives, that's gonna become the norm, right? Whether it's regulated today or not. Okay. Maybe not, but over the course of time it will be you are taking a slightly different approach to maybe offering people discounts or, you know, other, other alternative, um, marketing or sales tactics that people use for user or customer acquisition or loyalty.

They're still gonna get baked in somewhere, right? Vechain has an approach with Vbe and the Vbe apps. It also includes the concept of purpose. So we're not just buying people's activity and saying, okay, join us now and we'll, you know, we'll pay you some money for it. We'll give you a discount because we want you as a customer, or because we've got targets and we need to hit them.

It's saying that, you know, we'd like you to be part of a community that is doing something better. We're going to incentivize that because the actions you take have value. And also there is the kind of token economics that says that, you know, you are part of something that is, as it grows, whatever you earn is also has the potential to grow.

And so that becomes a powerful story on our side. But I I, I would say, you know, wherever we are today in terms of we, what stable coins do and don't offer in terms of yield, we're gonna get there eventually because that's not a new concept in the world that's been in finance since the dawn of finance.

We'll get there eventually through some model or another.

Stephen: I love it. And you already talked about hi abusa and the exciting announcements coming out of the Vechain team as we end the podcast. Other than maybe you know, your podcast, maybe your friend CIO's podcast that he has in Blackdog. What's one book or podcast or idea that has helped shaped your thinking over the last decade in Web3?

Anthony: That's a really great question. I don't read a lot of books. Uh, I find a format slightly frustrating and slow. I'm not, I've never been a great reader, but I consume a lot of content vociferously. I feel like I'm constantly challenging myself in terms of understanding the, the use cases for technology, the way technology's impacting the world.

My one thing and my one approach to Web3 has always been this is not, this is not the technology as a technology. And so I think the one idea or the one important thing to consider is as, as you are building anything, let's, let's call it building with Web3 or blockchains or smart contracts or tokens, have the business case built for what it is you're building.

And if the business case is the token price goes up, you've undercooked it. I think we've seen a number of different use cases deployed a number of different collaborations where someone says, we're gonna tokenize this, and then it's gonna be fantastic. That that's my not well thought through business case voice.

In case you were wondering, but for the, for the people who are saying, we're gonna use blockchain and we're gonna explore it and we're gonna tokenize stuff, and it's, you know, and, and profit, you've kind of missed the bit in the middle that says, well, who's your audience? How do we generate value? How do we drive revenue?

How do we reduce cost? What are the components of this application? Who is it for? How do we acquire those people? Are there barriers or is there competition to those people's attention? And you start realizing that the mere tokenization of something, moving it from a cloud to a blockchain doesn't materially change anything other than the needs to have a blockchain.

So my one idea for anybody in the space is have a clear view of what value you are trying to create. And if you, if you are not able to build a business, case chat, GPT can help you. But ultimately, if, if you are not creating value with the applications you build. Saying tokenization this and smart contract that and immutable the other, or my personal favorite, which is people saying that it's decentralized as if by default it's better decentralizing some things actually makes them materially worse.

So think less about the technology components and how excited you are to use them. That's a good start and certainly shouldn't stop anybody innovating, but you are not going to be able to get beyond that innovation into breakthrough and material adoption if you don't have a clear case for how you create value.

Some people call that utility, some people call that mass adoption, but ultimately to me it's understand how your thing generates value. And if you can get there, if you can have a clear story like I took you through earlier on with Vbe, if I can help you understand how this grows top of funnel, cross sell sustainable impact, reduced operational cost and helps impact towards gonna contribute to your sustainable goals, that's five ways you can build a business case around be better.

Stephen: I love that and I wish we could have just stopped it and did a mic drop there, but, um, but I think I wanted to highlight

Anthony: the laptop if you like.

Stephen: Yeah, just like throw it out the window. Um, but I think this is the kind of common sense, you know, purpose driven that you've been known for over the last decade.

And this is, you know, for those watching the industry, this is what a lot of the NFT projects should have had, you know, three, four or five years ago when their only way of creating value was just to sell people on more NFTs. That only works while the value of the NFT is going up. But we saw so many NFT projects go to zero because giving more people non valuable NFTs is only gonna work for so long.

And I think you raise a great point, Anthony, where's the best place people can find you? Obviously you're dominant on LinkedIn. I'm assuming you spent a lot of time on crypto Twitter, but I could be wrong there. You're too busy responding to all your comments on LinkedIn. Maybe.

Anthony: So if, if you wanna find out Vechain stuff, go to Vechain.org. Vebetter. It's very simple. vbe.com, vebetter.com. That's where you can find all the applications accessible through V World, which is our kind of main wallet that has all of that kind aggregated experience. Super app type stuff we've talked about.

If you wanna follow me, if you want more of my stuff, I'm a social media minimalist. I have one platform where I produce content. Primarily it is LinkedIn. So Anthony Day, I'm the guy that looks like this. If you put my name into LinkedIn, hopefully you'll find me there. That's where I post most of my content.

Some of funny, some of it's serious, some of it useful. Um, hopefully that's something that you guys get excited by or would like to contribute to, because the goal there really is about education. It's about helping people to engage with this technology in an objective way. Also, you can check out the blockchain won't Save the World Podcast.

That's been going for a number of years. Now, again, that's, that's videos, live streams on LinkedIn and then also the podcast on Apple, Spotify, and all the places you get podcasts. So you can listen in while you're walking your dog and whatever else. And if you are walking your dog, there's also an application on Scoop, cleaning up after your

excuse.

Stephen: Yeah, I could. I would love to contribute to people that do that, to be quite honest. Anthony, thank you. I can see it's getting dark there. Uh, I really appreciate you taking the chance to step away from some of the conferencing to really have this important conversation and an important time. I think we're at a time where there needs to be a lot more purpose, a lot more individual, people doing better for themselves, which impacts the whole community, and I think that speaks to the v better world if I'm, if I'm correct.

Anthony: A hundred percent. You've got it in 45 minutes. I've converted you, at least Steven, so hopefully some of the others listening in will be on the same wavelength. If you wanna reach out, my dms are always open. I appreciate you for giving us the platform to share about what's been going on in Vechain. We need to do more of this.

People remember the 2018 Vechain, we now need them to get involved in the 2025 Vechain, so please go check out. Delighted.

Stephen: Thanks so much, Anthony.

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