Building the World’s Largest IoT Network | Peter Saddington, Co-Founder of Emrit (FTC 6)

FinTech Chat (FTC) is a series of educational & informative interviews with world professionals in the FinTech / Crypto / Blockchain communities. We aim to provide content that is digestible in multiple mediums such as video, audio (podcast), and written (blog) form!

 

FTC Episode 6

In this first episode, Wayne interviews Peter Saddington, the Co-Founder of Emrit, whose ambition is to build the world’s largest IoT network collectively by inviting everyone to become a host using Emrit’s free CoolSpot. We will know a new term “hardware drop“, an innovative way that Peter has given a free source of income for people around the world, especially in poor countries. When people are free from the struggle of making ends meet, that is when innovation and entrepreneurship come to build a better world.  

 

Note: This transcript was automatically generated by artificial intelligence (AI) and therefore typos and grammatical errors may be present.

 

00:00

Intro: Interviews on Crypto, Blockchain with your host, Wayne on FTC.

Wayne: Hey and welcome back! Today we are joined by Mr. Peter Saddington. Now Peter is the co-founder of Emrit. Peter, first of all, thank you for taking the time to talk today a little bit about cryptocurrency, your background and just history, man. 

Peter Saddington: Awesome! Well, thanks so much for giving me the opportunity to join you, Wayne. 

Wayne: All right, pleasure pleasure, so first of all, you know, before we jump into I do want to share with everyone listening or watching what Emrit is but before we get to that, I’m always curious to find… find out about people’s history in the space, so… you know, not necessarily just your time in cryptocurrency, but what road led you to getting involved in the cryptocurrency space? 

Peter Saddington: Awesome! Well, I was… I’ve always been a kind of a bleeding edge entrepreneur, always looking at the metagame of markets, looking at changes in markets. I have a lot of… maybe actually I haven’t talked about this a lot, but I have a ton of Google alerts as well as other mechanisms to get news and feeds into… into my email box and one of the things that I’m always looking at are these bleeding edge technologies where especially around VR, Virtual Reality, obviously cryptocurrency, IoTs, the Internet of Things and so things like this. And so how I got into cryptocurrency, well, it was pretty easy. In October of 2011, I read an rs technical article about this idea of cryptocurrency and it intrigued me so much that I ended up spending 30 days going down the hole and learning a ton about blockchain and bitcoin and ended up buying my first bitcoin in November of 2011. And so this was bitcoin and blockchain was always just part of… part of that idea of looking at the future and seeing what technologies are out there. And it really grabbed a hold of my heart. And I’ve been in bitcoin and blockchain for nearly a decade now. 

Wayne: Nice nice. So quick questions real quick. I’m sure everybody’s curious what was the price of that… that first bitcoin you bought. 

Peter Saddington: It was a dollar and 52 cents when I bought my first bitcoin. I believe it was November 10th of 2011.

02:14

Wayne: Wow, it’s always amazing to hear that. Now I know most people along the way have sold and bought and sold and bought so, but it’s always curious to find that first price for everybody. For me, it was right under a thousand, so… 

Peter Saddington: Still good… still good price, man. 

Wayne: We’re good, yeah so, all right, so what… tell us a little bit about Emrit? You know, what… what does Emrit have to offer in… in this space? 

Peter Saddington: Great question! So Emrit.io, so for everyone out there listening and watching, you guys can go to Emrit.io and check it out, but essentially Emrit.io is the world’s first hashtag #hardwaredrop. Now if you’ve been in the cryptocurrency space for a while, you’ve certainly heard of airdrops which can often be maybe a little bit scammy or vaporware-ish and sometimes it requires a little bit of sophistication to make sure that you can get those coins. And so you have to be pretty careful about how you do that. But one of the things that we wanted to solve at our company and one of the problems we wanted to solve is lowering the barrier to entry. And certainly, Wayne, you’re doing this with your education and educating people around bitcoin and blockchain and cryptocurrencies. But one of the things that we found is that we wanted to get cryptocurrency into people’s hands without them actually understanding or fully understanding bitcoin or blockchain, cryptocurrencies, digital wallets, hashing, mining, like exchanges, there’s so much that you… that is required in terms of education to be sophisticated and using bitcoin or cryptocurrencies effectively. And so this has been something that I’ve been noodling on for years ever since I started getting into cryptocurrency content back in 2016. And so we’ve… we figured what better way to get cryptocurrency in people’s hands then to actually give them a hardware device. This one right here. A hardware device for free and so this hardware device will send it to you for free. If you go to Emrit.io, sign up, we’ll send it to you. It will allow you to mine cryptocurrencies and immediately get in the game. It has a digital wallet that you can download on the Helium app and you get to make money while also helping us provide wireless coverage for the iot network of the future internet of things. And so essentially Emrit is three things. Number one, we are here to grow the global iot network of the future, so that everything that can be connected is connected. Secondly, we want to lower that barrier to entry and get people into cryptocurrency without actually having to know everything about it. And third we wanted to make sure that it was free. One of the… this is one of the value propositions that we have figured out within our company of how to make sure that we can get this into people’s hands, without them actually having to do anything, without any friction, even if we priced it at a dollar that creates friction. And so we wanted to make sure that we get into people’s hands free to get into cryptocurrency and start mining and helping us grow this network of the future. 

Wayne: Very nice, very nice, so does that device also then act as a node on any kind of a blockchain or is that mainly for a network for iot? 

Peter Saddington: It… so what is this? This is a hotspot miner and so it works on the Helium network, the Helium token. So you guys can check that out but Helium has been around for about seven years now. It was founded by a game… by a guy named Amir Haleem, who is the CEO and founder of Helium. And what their… what they wanted to do if you… if you ever watch his south by southwest talk a couple years back, what he wanted to do is he wanted to disrupt the telecom industry and that struck a chord with us that was something that we thought would be a great platform and a great infrastructure to leverage. And so this… this hotspot miner will mind you Helium tokens. I believe it’s currently trading at about a buck 0.60$ right now. But it’s not a store of value token nor is it a security token. It’s a work slash utility token. And so what’s great about that is we leverage that token to be able to send data throughout the network and allow people to leverage that data, so that they can create applications for the future iot, iot applications of the future. And so you guys can check that out. You can go to check out Helium tokens so you can get more information on what they’re all about.

06:34

Wayne: Yeah, familiar with Helium, heard of them in the past, so that’s… that’s an interesting project. Here you mentioned content, you said you’ve been creating content since 2016. Are any of those content channels still up or active? 

Peter Saddington: Unfortunately no, and so I started creating content back in 2016 with a Youtube channel called bite size bitcoin and like yourself Wayne, I was doing educational videos on cryptocurrency and helping people understand the fundamentals around cryptocurrency and these types of things. I grew… I grew the channel to about 60,000 subscribers then Youtube completely demonetized me and banned me and deleted all 27 or 2800 of my videos. And so after that happened in 2017, I started another channel called Decentralized TV in which over the next two years we posted I think about 3,500 videos, averaging 6.2 videos per day. And so we’re a huge content engine doing news and making sure that everyone out there pretty much posts every other hour, we’re posting videos on what’s going on in the cryptocurrency market. That youtube channel we grew to about 90,000 subscribers and then Youtube decided to demonetize that and ban that as well. And that in a lot of ways kind of stifled our ability to grow and I stopped creating content daily for the cryptocurrency world through Decentralized TV in about 2018 period. But also during that time, I was building venture funded cryptocurrency applications, so I didn’t have that much time to work on it either and so right now, I’m mostly creating content on Emrit.io and our Emrit youtube channel talking about this product that we’re releasing to the world.

08:16

Wayne: Gotcha man, I hear that all too often about Youtube as far as demonetizing and banning channels. It’s just… it’s happening more and more, and it’s… you know, it’s a work of art people like you, like yourself, like you put a lot of hours, and I’m sure blood, sweat, and tears into those… those videos, and that content to be taken away. You know, luckily now we’ve got… we’ve got options. Still youtube is the biggest draw for people, that’s still where your everyday person congregates, so we have to use it but… you know, I teach people about some of the decentralized options there to… to get content out. 

Peter Saddington: Yeah, there’s… there’s right now we post to others… other channels like bitshoot and these types of things as redundancy efforts. But again, we’re in this weird, weird place, right now where youtube still is the primary mechanism video, mechanism for getting information out there until these other decentralized versions like bitshoot and bittube and these types of things, until they start growing a larger audience. It’s a tough thing because you uploaded it to those sites but you’re not going to get as much traffic, because the saturation in the… in those particular sites isn’t very high right now. And so what I’m seeing at least in my perspective is the best way to get information out to the cryptocurrency world is youtube number one, and certainly twitter number two. 

Wayne: Yeah yeah, absolutely! I tell people all the time. I mean Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, those are three that I think I’d like to do without but with… I’m trying to attract and educate new people into the space so they’re not going to be on any of those decentralized platforms, so it’s kind of a catch 22 right now. It’s just the game we’ve got to play. 

Peter Saddington: Yeah, it really really is. I would… I wish that these types of decentralized video platforms would be more prolific in their advertising and their marketing out to the world. But they’re just not doing that and so it’s… it’s going to be one of those slow bakes in my opinion. I don’t know how far… you know, how long they’re gonna last, who knows when the cryptocurrency world… these projects, but I hope they survive. And if they continue to survive, then hopefully they’ll get to a point where they get to a tipping point and people start moving over to these decentralized applications, in these decentralized video platforms more and more. 

Wayne: Yes definitely possible, so as far as Emrit, what… back to Emrit, what… what are some things… I mean you’ve got… you have the hot spots, definitely something I’m going to check out as soon as we’re done with this recording, but what is there a roadmap to more in the future? 

Peter Saddington: Absolutely! If you go to Emrit.io, one of the first links that you can find is our business plan. And I highly recommend that yourself Wayne as well as all of your listeners and viewers check that out. One of the… one of the core values that we have at our company is what we call radical transparency. We want to be different from any other cryptocurrency project out there. Actually we want to be different from any project out there which is why we’ve shown the insides of what we’re doing. If you look… if you look at our Youtube channel, our Emrit Youtube channel, you’ll find our last week’s all hands summit, our global summit where our entire company flew into Atlanta, Georgia as well as our partners Semtech, cow chip, smart mimic companies that are working with us to help our project. And we videotaped all of the events of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday. And so we’re giving the people in the world an inside view of what we’re doing. Too many projects as you well know Wayne, especially in the cryptocurrency space are too… there’s… there’s too much opaqueness, there’s… there’s not enough transparency. You don’t know if it’s going to be a scam coin or whether it’s some sort of… you know, you know, bait and hook type of… type of project. You just don’t know and I’ve been around since 2011, so I could tell you a million stories of these companies where they’re using other people’s faces as the leadership even myself as a cryptocurrency application developer. I’ve been put on websites as a supporter or… or an evangelist of these projects when I didn’t even know that I would… you know, I don’t even know who they are. And so we wanted to do something different. And so if you… if you go over to Emrit.io, check out our business plan, we lay out not only what we’re doing now, but we also lay out the future and the functions and the features of our enterprise application as well as our business platform for our hosts and people that are leveraging our technology, so that they know where we’re going and what our intentions are.

13:00

Wayne: Wow, nice nice, yeah I mean when you talk about a lot of scams out there, I know you’ve seen it all, I kind of like to pivot a little bit. I do like to talk about recent events and what’s hot in space just for an education piece because people hear buzz words and they flock to it, right? 2017 it was icos, right, this year, it’s actually… you know, DeFi. What are your… What are your feelings on that space? I know you… you know, you may not be involved directly in it, but what are your feelings around the DeFi space? 

Peter Saddington: Oh well, we are directly involved in it. One of our big… one of our big partners is Algorand which is huge on DeFi and banking services for the unbanked. And so we’re partnering with Algorand. We’ve already partnered with Algorand and we’re going to be working with them to help us build a financial application layer to… to Helium’s blockchain, and to our… to our product. And so that way when you get our product, you’ll not only have the ability to mine Helium for free which is really just less than a dollar a month in terms of electricity costs, so you’re getting… we’re going to pay you 25 bucks a month and only cost you a buck a month to run. So you just… it’s a free product. You might as well get it but also we’ve partnered with Algorand to help build a financial application layer on top of that, so that people will have access to banking services in the future and so huge into DeFi, huge huge into decentralized wireless or DeWi as well. And so we’re… we’re big on those bleeding… bleeding edge technologies. We think that decentralized finance is going to be a huge part of the future and certainly in terms of access, when you’re… when it comes to emerging countries and emerging cultures and emerging people groups who don’t have the credit necessary or don’t have the requirements necessary to open a bank… banking account or get loans. We want to make sure that we can give them that opportunity by not only giving them a free hardware that can mine them money but also leverage that, and with the mining rewards to be able to spend that out in the real world as well. 

15:07

Wayne: Yeah nice. I mean, yeah, you said that… you kind of hit the nail on the head, I know when I talk to people out… out in the space about DeFi, you get the good and the bad and… and the… the good thing is anybody can create a DeFi project, the bad thing is everybody can create a DeFi project. So that’s right they’re going to be good, there’s going to be bad, but the underlying… The underlying principles behind it are revolutionary. You mentioned… you know third world countries, emerging countries that may not have access to it, and that’s one thing I always talk about. This is not just about trying to just move people away from traditional banking, but there’s so many people in the world that are excluded completely from the financial markets that this is… this is a… this is a technology around inclusion. And that’s what cryptocurrency continues to develop and evolve to… to provide those solutions that people need. 

Peter Saddington: Absolutely! And that’s one of the things that I… is really close to my heart, so we have our product and this is really unique, but with our product we’ve solved three problems. First off, we’ve solved the… the mining at home problem. Let’s be honest, mining at home, let’s say bitcoin is just cost ineffective. It’s inefficient. It’s too expensive to mine at home, so we solved that problem. We’re going to give you a free hardware miner for free and you can immediately begin mining for less than a dollar a month. Number two, we’ve solved in a lot of ways universal basic income for 50% of the world’s population now. For you and I and maybe North America and first world countries, we might not care about a 25$ a month… you know, system or hardware… you know, hardware mining system but for 50% of the world, 25 usd is life-changing money and so what’s so powerful about that is… is that you can get our hardware miner, be able to mine 25 usd and be able to self-fund, which is number three, self-fund your own ideas. I think we’re going to be part of a huge revolution of enabling entrepreneurs, startup people in independence and individuals who want to do something that could potentially change the world. The problem is… is that we… we don’t know who they are right now, because right now they’re just trying to figure out how to make ends meet, and get food on their table today. If we can liberate them from… from trying just the hustle of trying to make sure that there’s food on the table today and give them the opportunity and margin to be creative, then who knows what people will create. And so that’s one of the really exciting things about our project, Wayne, is that once we can get this into people’s hands, especially in emerging countries, then they no longer have to worry about basic needs. Because it’s… it’s they’re being fed through a hardware minor now with all that margin, they can leverage their creativity, their imagination, maybe their engineering prowess to begin building something for this world. And that’s something that’s really close to my heart and something I’m really excited about, because we’re enabling, equipping and tooling entrepreneurs who in other ways would never have been able to do it, but now that they’re… they have a mechanism of self-funding now we might start seeing some really really really cool ideas pop out of third world countries.

18:18 

Wayne: Yeah, those are great points, Peter. You… you would think, you and I probably talked already from hearing some of the points because I say that all the time, too. I’m like… you know, there’s so many different great… probably millions of great ideas that die in the mind because people don’t have the means. (yes!) You bring them to fruition and having… having that ability that… that can… you know, that can give them a bit of inclusion. We don’t know what’s possible and… you know, and you’re talking about multi-layer inventions. You don’t know what’s possible until something else, we didn’t know most of this was possible until bitcoin was created, right? And then once bitcoin was created, we’re like hey, what’s this new infrastructure we can build on. (absolutely!) You know, it’s… it’s definitely… definitely can… can be wide reaching. I… you know, I definitely admire what you… what you guys are doing with Emrit, what you’ve done in the past for… for education, man. I wish there was some way to get back some of those Youtube videos. I’d love to watch them from… from your… when you started out 

Peter Saddington: Yeah, there’s… I mean I have a… a pretty significant legion of followers who followed me through my multiple projects in the cryptocurrency space, but it really… I’ll tell you… I tell you, Wayne, it did take me at least a day or so to kind of recoup… recoup my sanity after all of those thousands of videos were banned and deleted. It’s one of those things where you… you can get mad but who are you gonna get mad at? You know, you get mad at Youtube, but you’re just a peon, you’re… you’re a pleb, you’re… you’re a nobody, and so yes it would be great to be able to resurrect those videos, because… ah man, I made some really good ones, too. I think one of my… I’ll tell you a story here. One of my favorite ones is when this one I think was back in 2017 with the… with Conor McGregor versus what’s this… what’s his face, the boxer, do you remember that fight Conor Mcgregor versus… I forget it. I keep… I always forget his name, because he’s… 

Wayne: I’ve got his picture in my head like I just can’t… 

Peter Saddington: Yeah so I was doing a live stream during Conor Mcgregor or whatever his face, the title fight and that video I think had like 750,000 views and so like things like that, I wish I could… I could get back, because there were such awesome events for me and… and there was so much fun in that experience. I’d love to be able to relive it, but those types of videos are all gone now unfortunately.

20:50

Wayne: Yeah yeah, all right, Peter, so looking ahead, man, what… what and this is kind of your own opinion, but what do you think’s in store in the cryptocurrency space for 2021? 

Peter Saddington: Wow, what a great question! Well I can… I can remember if we harken back to 2016, 2017 and maybe even into the doldrums of 2018 period, everyone was talking about 2020. 2020 to 25 is going to be mass adoption. 2020 to 25 is gonna be when… you know, things take over. 2020 to 25 is going to be the… the time for bitcoin and cryptocurrency. And so I take all that with a grain of salt. Now that we’re actually in 2020. We’re moving very closely into 2021. In the 2016-17 period, it was all about the ICOs as we moved into the doldrums of 2018 and 2019, we matured a little bit and moved into STOs and different types of… different types of vehicles for investment. We saw finally like your Coinbase is beginning to create opportunities for investors to invest in the whole lot of cryptocurrencies. And so as we move to 2020 and beyond, one of the things that I’m really intrigued is about not only did we talk about this in the 2016 to 2018 period or so, but enterprise adoption now during the 18 period the doldrums of 18, and even moving into 2019, there was a lot of talk about your big companies, your IBM’s your Deloittes, your Microsoft’s, your… your Googles, your Squares getting into cryptocurrency and enterprise level. And if you remember they were all trumpeting… you know, blockchain not bitcoin or DLT, distributed ledger technology instead of actual cryptocurrency. And what we’ve seen since 18-19 is we’ve seen them continue to grow in that regard and grow in DLT, distributed ledger… ledger tech and lots of experimentation, but at scale we’re still waiting for opportunities to see whether that’s it’s going to really really work. And so at the end of the day in my opinion, there’s only two great reasons to use blockchain and any type of distributed or decentralized ledger, it’s for security and it’s for oversight security and for oversight or another way… another way to look at that… what’s the word, not oversight but… not consensus…

Wayne: Censorship persistent? 

Peter Saddington: Censorship resistance for sure. I’m thinking of another word here. It’s not coming to mind right now. 

Wayne: Transparency? 

Peter Saddington: Certainly, transparency is one of the important ones. I’ll think of it in a second but what I’m looking for again into this next five years is whether we’re actually going to be able to scale. I mean I remember in the 2017-18 period we saw Ethereum with Crypto Kitties and in many ways it’s kind of a meme but that was one of the first opportunities to see Ethereum work at scale, one of the interesting parts about Ethereum, for example here is that Ethereum was supposed to be more of a utilitarian token of sorts, but it’s migrated into more of a store of value negating the effectiveness of the smart… smart contracts in a lot of ways and negating the value of using it as some sort of utility token. And so it’s going to be interesting to see which type of projects emerge or evolve in the next couple years or so, and see whether they really have answered and can answer the issue of scale. And so that would be my guess for the 2020 to 2025 is we’re going to start seeing a lot more experiments of DLT, blockchain and cryptocurrencies at scale. It’s going to be interesting to see which companies, big companies are going to be finally getting on board. I think we finally won a lot of those companies over the Jamie Dimon of the world… are kind of dying away, because it’s hard to argue that… you know, bitcoin and blockchain is here to stay. And so the question is what businesses are going to be leveraging it and how is it going to affect their current business models and how is it going to affect us as consumers.

24:50 

Wayne: Yeah it’s you mentioned Jamie Dimon, too. It’s funny to watch their stance change, I mean… you… you were around, so you know in 2016, 2017, what he was saying about bitcoin to where just this past week… you know, they came out with a bullish stance on bitcoin and of course, I pointed out last week, when the PayPal news broke. (yeah) You know, the former CEO had basically said that in essence bitcoin was worthless and useless and now… you know, they’re embracing it and… you know, I love getting in debates with people about whether it’s a good thing that PayPal got in the crypto or not. And I tell everybody it’s… you’ve got to look at the bigger picture. Is it the best place to hold your crypto? No, but is it going to open up a lot more people to it and maybe provide some more validity to people that were maybe skeptical of it, absolutely. 

Peter Saddington: Oh, I have always been on the… the side of any company that’s going to be experimenting or looking at cryptocurrencies. It’s a good thing. I got a lot of heat. I think it was in late 2018, maybe early 2019, I got a lot of heat when I was supporting Facebook’s Libra coin and people were all like oh man, I mean this is crazy and this is… this is terrible… you know, this centralized entity facebook is getting into the crypto game. And my answer is no. Why wouldn’t you want such a behemoth like Facebook to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, maybe even more experimenting on this? And we’re gonna be able to reap the benefits of those learnings. You still have optionality, you still have choice, you don’t have to use the Libra coin, you don’t have to use Ethereum or Bitcoin or Litecoin or whatever. You want to choose. You don’t… no one’s forcing you to use these systems. And so my perspective looking at the meta level is yeah, more entrants into the game. Are they going to spend millions of dollars experimenting on cryptocurrency? Good, wonderful, do it! You don’t have to use their system. You don’t have to use their blockchain or their cryptocurrency in the future, but it will give opportunity to those who aren’t in cryptocurrency. It will give opportunity to people who just that… that might be ignorant of that you shouldn’t maybe use Libra coin. You should use something more decentralized like bitcoin, etc, but are people learning about cryptocurrency absolutely, I think that’s a huge win overall.

27:15 

Wayne: Yeah, absolutely, great points, Peter. So as we wrap it up, man. What… I know you mentioned Emrit.io is… are there some social channels people should look to follow Emrit and keep what… what’s going on there? 

Peter Saddington: Certainly, well obviously, all of you guys can check out Emrit.io E-M-R-I-T dot I-O. You can also find us on Twitter at Emritio, or you can follow me on Twitter at agilepeter. And so those would be some of the social links that you can check out. Obviously you can check out our Youtube channel. Just type in… in Youtube Emrit and you’ll find us. 

Wayne: All right, Peter. Again appreciate the time you took today. Always great talking to people in the crypto space, especially someone like yourself with tons of experience, lots of background and someone else that’s also… you know, focused on really continuing that education piece. And… and you guys are doing it in multiple facets, so definitely appreciate that. So that’s it… you know, everyone, thanks for listening. Thanks for watching. Peter, again it’s been a pleasure. And we will see you all in the next episode. Take care everybody. 

Peter Saddington: See you guys. Thank you. 

Wayne: All right.

— — — — —

 

About Wayne (Host)

Wayne has been managing, teaching, and coaching high performing teams for over 20 years. He has a passion for helping and teaching people and a passion for cryptocurrency and blockchain projects. He has created various coaching programs and partnerships with select education platforms and cryptocurrency program tools.

 

You can learn more on his website: https://www.blockchainwayne.com/