Blockchain Beach, CA and Internet 3.0 with Sensay co-founder Crystal Rose

Coloring Crypto podcast episode 21: Blockchain Renaissance

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Hailing from Blockchain Beach, in Venice, California, where crytpo-tech companies are exploding, Crystal Rose is a a lifelong entrepreneur. She started coding at an early age, has a bold vision and understanding of blockchain Internet 3.0 possibilities, and is the co-founder and CEO of Sensay makers of the AI messaging blockchain platform SENSE.

G: Do you recall the very first time you heard of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency? Where were you and what were you doing?

Crystal: I was in my office in 2009, at a company I had started here in Los Angeles. I had developers that worked with me, this was in the early 2000s, and through 2009–2010 my developer would run his computer overnight. I thought that he was pirating music. Confronted, he told me “actually, no I’m mining Bitcoin” and explained it. He was getting one Bitcoin with frequency.

It was at $40 at that time. He was saying drop everything, put everything that you have into this, get rid of all of your stocks and and participate. I was like oh, man. I remember when it was like two dollars. It’s so expensive now. I think 2014 is when I started making another meaningful move into it as my now co-founder, and I, created a hack at the Launch Hackathon in San Francisco where we built an anonymous file-sharing application that allowed you to unlock files with Bitcoin.

That was where we learned a lot about building on top of blockchain technology. It was the spark moment for me — I realized that the underlying technology was going to radically transform everything — beyond just the financial institutions.

G: That’s kind of a visionary statement, not a lot of people were thinking what you just said at that time.

Crystal: I had a lot of different stocks, and I had mutual funds and all of the traditional investment methods. I had a 401k. I’ve since cashed out literally everything involved with that.

It was when we started to play with the blockchain and understand that the underlying technology is the new internet — the way that data is transferred is radically going to transform everything from deeds to houses, to education systems, and Healthcare — it really became apparent once we started coding on the actual technology.

G: When did you get into technology?

Crystal:I’ve been coding since I was 11, so technology is my first passion, then I moved into design. I went to school for design.

G: Our podcast has been covering women in crypto lately. What was it like at 11 years old being a trailblazer for your gender? Were your coding friends mostly boys?

Crystal: You know I’m not sure of the gender of a lot of my friends because they were mostly in anonymous chat rooms.

The first language I learned to code is HTML through an AOL chat room. The internet taught me more than I could have ever possibly gotten with an Institutional education. Once I started getting into actual events when I was 16, and I started my first company — that’s when I learned that I was one of the few girls who been to these events, especially hackathons. I would at some points be the only female entered into a hackathon.

G: Was it interviewers like me asking you this question — “how does it feel to be among the few women?” that pushed you on the contrast of gender? How did you notice for yourself? How did it come into your awareness?

Crystal: It was external observation. I had always looked at everyone is equal. Never really thought about it and no guy ever made me feel weird about being a woman either. I know that a lot of women have had that experience and I think it’s unfortunate, but it didn’t occur to me for a really long time, and it actually occurred to me only when I started getting invited to speak at Women’s only events and I thought it was weird that the women separated themselves and went into their own place, and then you know pushed the boys out.

It was like these two different clubs. I’d love to find a way where we can collaborate a little more and put everyone together and understand that you know there is no gender when it comes to digital and technology.

[00:06:00]

G: You said earlier that the blockchain is the new internet, can you give an example to illustrate that?

Crystal:All broken incumbent systems include some sort of middle-man, which becomes a gatekeeper of information. Information is the most valuable thing that we have as humans. The most valuable thing that we have is our connection to each other and our ability to exchange stories. On a very root fundamental level, information is really like gold. Data is the new goldmine and when you have an intermediary stepping in between the information transfer, that’s where things get complicated.

So as an example, in Healthcare Systems every institution holds your data in a centralized database without talking to the other Institutions. You don’t have one place where your health data exist nor do you even have control over how it’s used. And because of that, it causes and efficiencies in the system. You’ll go to one hospital and do a blood test, and then if you are transferred to another hospital they’ll do the same blood test because the two hospitals don’t talk and it costs a lot of money. These inefficiencies can be 100% mitigated by doing pure data transfer through the blockchain.

That’s important too if you look at money. Money is the original illusion. Money is the biggest illusion ever told to humans. Currently the way that money works digitally, we’re understanding more that it’s about numbers in a database. And so we have the same issue with the intermediary.

[00:08:00]

G: Give me your assessment of how well existing blockchain solutions are doing with that vision in mind.

Crystal: I think that we’re doing a good job. We’re moving very quickly. I think it’s very attractive to build products that service the financial industry because those are the ones that clearly make the most money.

Blockchain represents an entire restructuring of the core of the internet. It’s internet 3.0.

The biggest challenge that we have are the devices that we have today. As an example from winning that original hackathon in 2012 I had on my phone 200 Bitcoin in a wallet. And when I lost my phone, I lost those Bitcoin and so I think that there is a bit of a flaw in the devices that we have today. The best backup method for storage of a wallet is a paper wallet that goes into a safe, so we’re kind of going a little bit archaic here.

Blockchain represents an entire restructuring of the core of the internet. It’s internet 3.0. And I think that people have yet to really wrap their heads around where the potential is today. It’s still very very early. It’s infinitely small. I think we have five billion mobile devices on the planet today. And according to estimates from Cambridge and MIT, the number of devices with crypto wallets is 5 million. So that represents 0.1 percent of the total amount of devices that there are on the planet. You know until we hit that trillion dollar market cap we’re probably not even close to a Tipping Point. The entire blockchain space has the potential to expand into literally every industry until the entire Global GDP is in cryptocurrency. We’re not done.

[00:10:00]

G: Tell us tell us about your company Sensay. I’m particularly interested in the origin idea and what problem you are solving.

Crystal:We started Sensay about three and half years ago. The core mission of Sensay was to connect everyone together to exchange value on a basic level. We wanted to do that directly without intermediaries. When we started, the best format that we had for that was SMS.

We wanted to take those billions of devices that are out there and essentially decentralize your contact list to connect people together based on what they know rather than who they know. What kind of value can you provide rather than who you’re circumstantial social network happens to be — based on the school you went to or the friends that you currently have.

Sensay has a foundation of AI, there’s a machine learning layer that allows it to get smarter as you use. It’s inter-operable between any major messenger: Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Slack… Anything that you use including SMS, and you basically just text Sensay anytime.

If you need to chat with someone, it will connect you to the right person based on the conversation you want to have. At the end of the chat you can give a tip with what we called Sensay coins, and this was really a value system kind of like Reddit Karma points where it only works within its own system.
As people built up to millions of these coins that were earned, they kept asking us, “what are these coins worth”? What is the value that I’m really getting?

We tested a bunch of different methods, we put in things like PayPal and Stripe, we tried to see if people would exchange fiat currency in a tipping format, but the microchipping is too difficult with normal payment systems like your bank account and credit cards.

We decided that it would be better to give everyone a value exchange where they can just take this digital currency they already have an exchange it for other digital value. So we created Sense. Sense is the value for your human intelligence.

[00:14:00]

G: Jackson Palmer, who you know, the creator of Dogecoin, talks in Episode 18 of Coloring Crypto about how he was disappointed because in 2013 he really thought cryptocurrency was supposed to be what Venmo has become today. Why isn’t there a blockchain cryptocurrency App that all the twenty-year-old kids are using?

Crystal: I was recently in Mexico, and I went pretty far into the Mayan ruins and saw the Visa and MasterCard logos on these little shops that are selling these beautiful handcrafted items. They were hand-painted logos and I was thinking to myself, you know at some point in time these are going to be hand-painted crypto logos. I think that there’s still a huge barrier based on how complicated the wallets are.

Sensay has crypto in chat. More people use messenger Apps than any other apps on their phone. We think of every human like a wallet address, so we look at everybody anonymously. And we connect them together more based on the value that they can exchange together.

G: Does Sensay work on every messaging platform or are there still some you’ve got to tackle?

Crystal: It’s everything that we have a relationship with. We have betas in WeChat, Line, Kakao for the Asian markets. I was just in Asia for over a month visiting eight countries in 35 days 20 stages. I was really fortunate to to be invited to different countries to speak on crypto. Every market has a different messenger platform, so we’re looking to put a Sense now inside of each one.

We have shifted from a product company to platform company. We had three million users who were transacting twenty-plus million coins. What we realized was that the underlying technology that we built was far more powerful than a single application, so now we’re allowing anyone to build a product like Sensay on top of any messenger using the Sense platform, to provide the API that lets you do that. We have 1,200 developers signed up. Of those, four hundred of them have purchased a million-and-a-half dollars worth of Sense tokens to use on the network. Our big goal is to allow you to own your data.

This is where the user earns money, so unlike Facebook where you’re giving all your data, and then Facebook takes that data sells it to the advertiser, earns eight and a half billion dollars per quarter on it, and you earn nothing. This is different.

G: Not only does Facebook make me into a product, they get all my data, and I can’t even see their special algorithm to understand how my data is analyzed.

For Sensay, now being around for over 3 years, you are the old players on the playground. What is your perspective when you look at current ICOs out there?

** Crystal:**I think there are two kinds of companies. There’s BC, before crypto and AC, after crypto. The first ICO happened in 2013 with Master coin, and if you think about it even a Ethereum was an ICO. We’ve offered to pay our whole team encrypted currency instead of Fiat, and we’re expanding very rapidly globally and that’s the other beautiful part about crypto. it’s a global economy.

I think an ICO is the best of all the worlds because it really does let a community member put in as much money, or as little money as they want to be a participant it gives them somewhat of an upside, so it’s it’s not the same as Equity, but it is an upside because you get a value that increases with the overall Network, and you’re instantly liquid.

G: I also like that in an ICO environment, assuming you’ve got a good idea, that the effort matches the reward to a greater degree than in traditional fundraising. With traditional fundraising you can knock on 80 doors and get denied and that can be demoralizing. With an ICO you reach a much broader audience.

Crystal: That’s the other really beautiful part about it. I recently went to the Taiwan Blockchain Summit. They generously offered to have me speak and when I was there we had a group of people who were really excited about Sense and what the project was. I had developers who came up to me and said they had already bought tokens. It was amazing and I was even asked me to sign autographs on our whitepaper. We are a globally connected society, and the only things that are inhibiting us from being better and faster are these incumbent centralized institutions that are keeping us locked to geography, and specifically money. It’s changing the way that people can vote and operate with their value.

[00:27:00]

G: Did you notice a difference in each of these countries as far a unique blockchain culture. I moved recently to Los Angeles and was struck by how open and inviting the Los Angeles crypto community was.

Crystal:In LA we are definitely living at Blockchain Beach. We were previously called Silicon Beach, and I think that Blockchain Beach is a lot more appropriate — the amount of saturation of founders here working in the crypto space and working on blockchain based products. It’s a natural for the market.

[00:30:00]

G: Last question. Tell me about Mojo the head of Happiness on your team.

Crystal: Haha, Mojo the dog. He’s a seven-year-old Dogo Argentino and American Bulldog mix. He’s a rescue from a place called Recycled Pets when he was a puppy. Mojo has been with me through all these experiences. He comes to the office every day. We actually have a second bulldog in our office named Butch who was recently dropped off on the doorstep of our office manager’s house, and I think it’s the biggest blessing in the world because Mojo has a comrade. We really love and embrace having family, having our pets with us, we see our whole team as family.