Government inflation data versus blockchain-based alternatives

Transcript

GM. Good morning. Welcome to the Milk Road Show, the daily crypto show where we've retired number go up as a strategy and replaced it with actually read the charts. I'm your host Jay Hamilton. It's Monday, May the 5th. Today we are joined by Stefan Rust, formerly CEO of Bitcoin.com, now the founder and CEO of Truflation, one of my favorite companies in the economic data space that provides real time transparent blockchain cryptographybacked data to actually give us finally accurate economic metrics which we desperately need more of. Today we're going to discuss the current strong economic data in the US. Is this

a mirage? Are we headed towards a recession? What's Stefan's thoughts on what the real economic data is versus what we're getting from the Fed? We're going to talk about CPI and what the difference is between CPI and the trueflation data that they provide on a daily basis where CPI only comes out every month and it always comes out six weeks late, which is ridiculous. We're going to talk about Truth Token. This is Truthflation's token. It's up 100% in the last 30 days. What's going on there? Is this a token you should be considering allocating to? And also, we're going to get Stefan's outlook on macroeconomics, the current setup, what's going on in the US, the trade wars, tariffs, the broken data system, and so much more. Going to be an

absolute fantastic episode. Before we jump in, if you guys are swapping during these times, you should check out Milkroad Swap. You can do so at swap.mmillroad.com. Why should you check it out? Because we got some of the lowest fees in the space. We set up this deck so that you could swap low fees, not so we could make money, really just to help everybody out, to have a place where you can swap cheaper than Coinbase and a lot of the centralized exchanges. So don't swap there. Check out swap.mmillgrow.com. Today's episode is brought to you by Letin Get Cash without selling your Bitcoin. It's also brought to you by Coin Shift, powering top crypto treasuries with their yield varian stablecoin, CSUSDL. Without further ado, Stefan, welcome to the Milk Road Show. Thank you, Jay. Great to be here. Yeah, glad to learn about the milk road show and

and see that a lot of people love Truflation over here and we've been we've had a very popular community in Canada as well. So, uh really excited to see love it. Okay, let's start with uh your what's your base case for the current macroeconomic environment and you can take that any way you want. You can talk about inflation, you can talk about growth, recession, you can talk about the tariff, the trade war, you know, how do you frame all of this noise right now? Um, yeah. No, I mean, the e economic situation is pretty exciting, I'd call it, right? I think for the first time, we're actually really seeing a population, you know, sort of a market shift. We're seeing it's really the US or China, right? I mean, which camp are

you in? And I think, you know, Trump is asking the world, whose camp and which side are you on? Pick a side. And if you're on our side, great. And if you're not, then that's clear, too, right? And and it will go the way that's the way it's going to go. Um, so that's the way we look at it. We see huge innovation taking place right now with AI, with crypto, with DNA, you know, sort of lots of innovation in a lot of fronts right now. Unlock of regulatory hurdles that have been there. So, a great time to be an entrepreneur. There's never a greater time. Number one, you've got all these new technologies. Number two, you've got

a lot of the hurdles that were set and put in place beyond just a startup itself, but actually all these regulatory burdens, compliance, filings, re, you know, legal documentation that you needed to submit. All of those are sort of waning and and going to hopefully become a bare minimum of the hurdles that a startup has anyway. hiring new people, breaking new grounds, proving out the concept, validating a a product market fit, etc., etc. Um, worrying about re money, funding, etc.

Uh, so those are all the challenges you already have and then you now don't have you can just focus on those versus on the the regulatory um hurdles that you have. So, I think it's it's a great time. We'll see a lot of innovation. We will we actually see inflation pick up a little over the course of the rest of this year and then come down uh once we see productivity gains once we see the benefits of new energy supply in the market, new factories be having being built out and deployed, the improvements of the railroad infrastructure, etc. All of that investment will then bear fruit towards 2026.

Yeah. I want to I want to touch on your your outlook for inflation, but before we get there, uh you're you're you're an active investor. When you look at markets right now, h how do how do you how are you playing them? Are you sitting on the sidelines? Are you moving all your your money into gold and Bitcoin? Do you think we're still in a bull cycle? Are we going into a bare market and this recession is going to actually come to fruition and we're going to see the recession? What do you think? So I'm fully invested. I have pretty much 99 95% of my wealth is in crypto across a large pool of of assets.

You know, the obviously the stables, the big top ones. Um not only Bitcoin, but also you have Salana, you have some ETH, you have some the usual sort of big big ticket items and then some old coins, right? Really old coins that we think are actually really going to grow. I don't see a recession coming. I think that's fear-mongering. Watch what the big banks do, not what they say. They're all going to say recession, recession because of tariffs. Because of tariffs. Why? Because they're not earning their billion dollar profits and being able to pay those highly paid, you know, bank, you know, um, you know, employees their bonuses because but in theory, you they should be loving this market. It's

volatile. There's lots of ups and downs. it's movements but actually I think now is a good time to get in as any you know continue DCAing I think that there is only going to be upside anybody in big tech is going to be earning significant returns and I think the we're going to see in big tech at least the sort of layer twos so it's not only going to be the mag seven it's going to be the next set of companies who are they who are innovating in what categories right we think we all know defense is going to be a big area of spending. Who are the big defensive companies? Can we invest in them? You know what I hate about and what I loved about crypto was anybody

can invest at any time. So if you did your research, you could actually partake in early stage companies and reap the rewards on the upside. In an AI game, in a traditional industry game, it's the VCs that benefit and capture the early gains. and they then get to offload onto the capital markets where generally retail can only then participate when a large portion of the value has already been captured. Okay. Uh I I completely agree with what you're saying. I want to I want to shift to the the economic data that we're seeing right now and your your conviction for this economic data. So,

if we were to look at uh unemployment numbers came out recently, uh I can pull up a tweet from True Inflation. So, you guys last week tweeted, you know, unemployment came out 4.2%. April payrolls was actually up 177,000 new jobs compared to the expectation was 138,000. You know, this also makes it seem like the recession is fear-mongering and not true. But then I wonder it's it's tough to balance the the timing here because so much of this economic data is so lagging, right? So do you is this economic data true like or is and then also they you know these payroll numbers it feels like over the past year they past several years they

change it a few months later and you realize that the number was inaccurate to begin with. So I can we trust this economic data do you think? So the payroll data I mean we we have a lot of issues with the payroll data. We track and have a number of suppliers for the payroll data ADP uh job cuts and we actually think that the market is still pretty strong employment still strong. I mean I don't know that exact number that we haven't studied that but Oliver and the team at Trufacia are really all the data scientists they're working on a new employment metric so we can actually provide maybe a more accurate insight

into what that number looks like but all indications imply that the economy is still strong employment still pretty strong and you know can we you know the market does not anticipate a drop in rates coming up right uh I two days right this week on Wednesday and you know the contrarian upside is if you go to poly market or you go to koshi and you bet on an interest rate drop your upside is going to be really big so with a very small allocation you could actually you know possibly make significant gains if you have some funds set aside and willing to put $10 20 into that do you think they might do you

think they might cut rates this this week I've I've put that bet in. Yes. I think there might be a surprise. We never expected it. When was it? In November when he dropped 50 bas. Nobody expected 50. Yeah. And and could we see another 50? Surprise the market. Turn it around. He's got a lot of pressure from Trump and Bessant to drop it. There's a whole new refinancing needed for the US economy. you know, uh, yeah, six trillion or nine trillion depending what number you believe, that needs to be refinanced this year. And so that's a significant check size. And to do that, if you think about it, 10 years ago, we were in the Zerp days, right, where interest rates were half a percent

or 0.25, right? And now we're at a spot where interest rates are nearly four and a half, 5%. And so with that number, that has a significant impact on P&L if that needs to be refinanced. And I think going from finance from, you know, one, two year bills, three year bills to actually 10-year bills and locking that in for a longer period of time. Yeah. Is is you want a lower interest rate in order to do that. Mhm. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. And so, and you don't want to bring it all down in one go. He's got to gradually drop it over the course of the year.

Yeah. It would be it would definitely be a shock if if rates got cut this week because it's not the it's not what Powell has been telling us in the past FOMC meetings, but as you said, it wouldn't be unlike unlike they have shocked us in the past, so we could see that happen. Let's let's take a look at uh at inflation data because this is where Truflation really got its start and what Truflation is most known for. And every time there's a CPI print, we show this. And let me let me just show this so everybody can see the the difference in the inflation data. So true inflation provides a daily metric for inflation. Right now it's saying it's at 1.45%. Okay. If we go over to CPI, which

is what the US provides as their inflation data, they they they're saying it's 2.4%. This is March inflation data, though. the April inflation data comes out in like a week in miday. Um so there's always a delay on on the data coming out whereas trueflation does it always in real time which is fantastic. Why is there such a difference between these data? Like why are you saying that there's one trueflation saying 1.45%. But CPI is saying 2.4%. You can actually if you log into truflation.com we now have listed the BLS number and you can do a compare um to the two. You might have to be a premium subscriber to be able to do

that. Well, you got to hook me up there, Stefan. I will hook you up right after this. I should have done it before this, but I will definitely provide you and we'll give you a referral link so any of your customers that want to sign up, they can also get a discount and um also participate in getting information. What we will do by the way 40 you know sort of two days in advance of next week or three days we publish our prediction and forecast in terms of where interest rate uh not interest rates inflation will come out at. But why are we different um was the question and and the main reason is when we first launched it looked at how the BLS was aggregating number. I mean they are so

old they were doing it manually. they were, you know, they were only tracking some, you know, 50,000 items manually and they were so bad at it that they'd had to go back and edit the data afterwards. And so what we said is, man, this is so old school. Why don't we just take API feeds, take a developer mindset to this, and then put it on the blockchain so everybody can see how it's calculated? And so, yeah, that's that's sort of what we did. We track a for the US we track about 30 million items right now. For every item we have three price feeds and all of that is visible and um um accounted for on the truth network.

So we actually today have permissionless cryptographically verifiable source of truth for realworld events in real time. And so I think that's something that nobody else did and that's why we're different. We're basically 45 days ahead of the Bureau of Lagging Statistics. [Laughter] I was going I was going to ask what BLS stood for. I was like keep saying BLS. Is that is that what we're calling it? The Bureau of Lag? That's what that's what I called it something else, but then I got told off for saying that it was too hard. Well, that's that's the PG version. Uh it's but it's actually the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. They're the guys that do the employment numbers

and again they do it manually and they do it so inaccurate they have to go back and edit the data all the time. And so let's regardless of okay so we're getting different data but the main thing that we're seeing is inflation is coming down. Both both data sources are saying that your true inflation is saying inflation is is lower about 1% lower than what CPI is showing but both are showing a downwards trend. Uh what's what's the story that inflation has been telling us over the past years and what do you expect to see moving forward? Are we going to go into there's a real it's really difficult to figure out where inflation is going because I think two things are happening right now. One is you're hearing a lot of people saying on

the day-to-day cost of living, yeah, like there's inflation and my am my groceries are more expensive and whatnot. But then the data shows that inflation is coming down. Then on the tariff side, you're hearing two stories. One is, oh, this is going to cause massive inflation because of all the supply changes that need to happen, new factories need to get built, all that sort of stuff. And other people saying, oh, it's one time transitory inflation. We're not really that worried about it. So there's so much noise around inflation. What's what do you what how do you frame inflation in terms of where he is now and where you think it's going to go from here?

So bear in mind inflation means the increase in cost of living for the pro the basket of goods that people buy on a on a regular basis on a consistent basis. And it what has happened accumulatively over the last five f five years we've seen an increase in costs of 25% across the board. That's huge. That's a quarter of your purchasing power. Fush gone. Right. So the size of the table, the food on the table is a quarter less of what it used to be. So the cake is only, you know, 3/4 uh the size of what it was.

And and so if you imagine from that perspective, inflation has really hurt everybody significantly. Yeah. Over the last years. However, if you look at it on a year-by-year basis, the cost increase in cost has significantly dropped. So, we're now down at what we think is 1.4% inflation over the same period for that basket of items as last year. So, same time last year. And so, that is largely that's sort of what we where we're at today.

Where is this going in the future? Right? So, everybody's saying ah ah cost, you know, it it tariffs is going to drive up the costs, right? And we actually don't think that's going to happen. And what we're actually seeing and is that the costs are being pushed down the supply chain. So look, I'm hit. I can't the consumer will not cover and carry any more costs. We seeing decline in Walmart purchases. You know, they can't raise the rates. People won't go shopping anymore and they won't be spending more. They'll spend less. And we don't want to see that happen. And so what's happening is the supply chain is trying to push it down everybody on the in that supply chain, right? So I'm I'm

an importer of goods or I I'm a a retail outlet. I want to make sure I can pass the cost of tariffs back to the supply chain and all the way down to the raw material. Critical raw material is got tax exempt, right? so critical to specific industries to specific items to specific goods they are doing and changing that and in fact all the tariff negotiation has really about resetting a hook laying out we're going to put the hook all the way over there but we'll see where we end up we won't end up all the way over there but it's shocked everybody and it's done it in one fail swoop so everybody's impacted

everybody's at the table and you're driving negotiations really fast to come to a resolution. Will it be that fast? I don't know. But will it be the ones that actually engage quicker? I think will be a will benefit earlier. Um, so you're not you're not worried about inflation right now? Not from tariffs. I'm worried about inflation from investments that are going to be coming. We saw all these announcements associated with investments from all the different uh multinationals that have coming or even domestic Apple, Nvidia, you know, everybody announcing new investments. So number one, that's going to be a tight demand on skilled resources. Where do I

find those resources? They're going to go up in costs resource because there is a strong demand for strong talent. We have to see new infrastructure rolled out. We are going to see new data centers being built out. So in you know real buildings, construction workers, I need material for that. I'm going to need electricity. I'm going to upgrade my grid because energy is what powers number one an economy full stop. But also more importantly this AI technology how do we start investing in that? Who's going to be the beneficiary around that?

Oil companies are going to benefit from that. Um you know the people supplying all the the conductivity materials, AC/DC supplied converters etc etc. Right? So I think there's going to be a cost in infrastructure that will drive inflation. Okay. Uh I want to talk about um how we solve this problem with our current economic data and how Truflation is solving that. And then I want to talk about Truth token. But before we do, we just need to take one minute to hear from our sponsors who make the show possible. Selling your Bitcoin should be a last resort when you need cash. That's why there's Letin, the trusted platform for Bitcoin backed loans. You can unlock

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by our friends at Stakehouse Financial. Put your treasury cash to work, earning native yield and protocol rewards. Built by the team behind Coin Shift, which is trusted to manage over 1 billion in business treasuries on chain, including a Gitcoin, and hundreds of leading institutions, cycusl is gaining traction at milkroad.com/coinshift. Okay, we're back, Stefan. So if you're an investor, one of the most important things is to have strong data to make your decisions based on. Right now we rely on a lot of data that as you have pointed out is archaic. It's the way it's calculated is very archaic. Uh it is not real time

data. Let's just talk about I want to let's talk about this problem with our current economic data. But more importantly, let's talk about how do we solve that. Yeah. I mean it's it's GDP. I mean we've looked at we want to tackle a whole bunch of of data sets. So one product that we will be launching pretty soon is the PCE price index which is so what we do is the CPI tracks the consumer goods and the price movement of the consumer goods and what the PCE does is track where people are spending their money and how those goods or or how that spending is changing. So, are there habits within, you know, are you are you

not buying steak, you're buying sausages, you're buying hamburgers instead of of a ribeye or whatever it is, right? Or you're swipping swapping chicken out for maybe chicken's not a good example. Um, but maybe you're swapping out Yeah. chicken or you're swapping something in for eggs for the protein, for example, because the eggs are too expensive. But that's sort of one index. And what we just want to do is track more unemployment data. We talked about that earlier. How do we start doing that? We already work with big providers like ADP, Challenger, daily job cuts and the government statistics to then be able to blend those out and identify what there what what is there. How do we get into GDP?

That is the real metric that we really want to track. How is the economy performing outside of government spending? So if I'm giving go, you know, and I think we've that's what happened. That's what happened the past, you know, during the Biden administration in the US, right, is like we we showed GDP growth, but we didn't really have GDP growth. We just had government spending. Exactly. And it's it's I'm giving to And then as as Doge highlighted, it it's going nowhere, right? I think 10 cents on the dollar is actually going to the cause that it was meant to go out to. In the UK, we found that 35 to 45% of GDP is government spending. So you look at those net

numbers and it's like why what is the productivity in government spending that I'm getting? Okay, if it's going towards building a a um you know a hospital then good, great, right? But is it actually doing that or is it just going into more administrative cost to managing and doing paper flow associated with administering that hospital? Right? And that's what unfortunately we've seen a lot of government spending go towards and and that is what has really held back the growth of these economies. And then whereby on the flip side you look at China, you look I just got back from Dubai. I mean the infrastructure roll out, the roads, the buildings, the

highrises, the hospitals, the hotels, the I mean the the undergrounds, the trains, you name it. It's just really amazing power plants. It's like amazing infrastructure roll out that we we've we've sort of fallen behind in the west if you will um and tried to justify it through oh we're much more efficient in tracking how the money is being spent or not or yeah we're just allocating it to things that don't really add productivity in the market.

Yeah. I mean, it's a it's a difficult problem to solve because as you uh as you start talking about it, you realize that it's a systemic problem from the government all the way down through these massive organizations that are not going to be simple to solve. But what what is so impressive to me is Truflation is taking a shot at solving a somewhat impossible problem, right? A very complex problem. Uh I want to talk about Truflation token which you launched uh about a a year ago. Am I correct in saying that? Uh believe yeah we launched exactly April 9th last year 20. Okay. So so just over a year ago. Uh token started off really well. Got up to

almost 70 million in market cap uh and then dipped a lot of the a lot of the crypto market dipped. So uh you're certainly not the only one that dipped. really you you launched at a time when a everything was good post you know Bitcoin ETF into into March was so good last year and then we went into a bit of a a pullback sustained um I would say maybe not bare market but a a flat period through the summer may go away is what everyone did last year we'll see if I don't know if they'll do the same thing this year but give us the story of Truflation token is and and then in the past 30 days actually I should point out this the past 30 days you're up 2x and back on the rise again. Again, markets

are doing better. So, uh is is the true inflation token just following the market right now or is there anything that is impacting these these dips and the recent rise? Yeah. Um I think we're outperforming the market right now. Um and our goal is to outperform the infrastructure category on Coin Gecko and Coin Market Cap. So, our team is wholly incentivized based on on those metrics. So we we did a TGE. So first of all we went out and raised money some we started some four years ago. We tried to raise money in the market. We were very lucky to immediately have Bellagi and Chainlink and Fundamental Labs and CS squared and others support us at the launch. That

got us off the ground. So we actually built out something a bit better than an MVP and we started aggregating more and more data sets into the market and really tried to spend a lot in in in growing awareness and educating the market on what is inflation. We launched a calculator. We did the aggregate trueflation metric so people could actually really see what and how it was impacting and where it was impacting them. With the calculator, we built out bigger partnerships and decided to do all of this with a token. Why? Because ultimately, this is the new form of of venture capital. We wanted the people to have more and more influence in getting access to cryptographically verifiable

real-time events. And how do we make that possible? We really wanted to put that on the blockchain, which we did. We worked very closely with Chainlink. We made all of this available through the chain league oracle and ultimately any chain that was subscribing to it could get access to um this data. So that was what we did number one. We then decided to list uh before the having that was a key metric that we wanted to beat. Uh we went out despite some hiccups with some of the exchanges that didn't want to they wanted us to push it out. Uh but we wanted to go out for me it was just essential to get out before the having.

We did really well. We went up to $1 which put us at a billion in market cap much better than anybody else predicted even ourselves. We never thought we were hoping for maybe a 20 cent price bump but the market really loved what we were doing. So we did really well and then the market tanked. We came down we came down to about a 20 cent market but you know a lot of the investors still holding on to their token. A lot of the investors had lockups anyway. So very few people could actually exit out of the market. So we were all and to be honest, most people that invested believed in the products and want to see true flation exist and surpass the and supplant the actual BLS. And so we were

very fortunate to have strong believers in what we were doing. A lot of investors and I met a lot of them. They didn't want to invest. It's like, why do we need this? We've already got the Bureau of Labor and Statistics. Just predict what the government's going to do. Don't worry. We don't care about your number. And so, the believers held on and are still very strong holding on, which is very nice and and and and encouraging to see. But in Gohead. Yeah. We then had a big we we sort of held around 25 cents 20 cents and then we had a big event occur which totally surprised us. We were hacked by the Lazarus group. So they came after us. I don't know why. I don't know how. But we managed to get two computers infiltrated

with a virus that was tracking a lot of the movements on our computers and took control of the computers. And ultimately they got a hold of some 50 million Truth tokens and in addition to some other funds that they got a hold of. And yeah, that that really that that knocked us off from the 20 cents, brought us all the way down to 1 cent. Um, but we fixed that. So, we turned that around. The team worked tirelessly, relentlessly to convert that, to turn that around, fix the token issuance, work with all the exchanges, work with the FBI, we're working with the Swiss cyber crime unit.

We were working with Tether. Uh, we still are working with Zero Shadow. Amazing organization. I can only speak really highly of the sleuths and the private investigators at zero shadow far better than any of the other institutions we worked with and anyway and so we got to the bottom of it fixed it returned around and now we're sort of coming back and I think the market is being rewarded is rewarding us for this turnaround we've also actually in the same time continued to build we did not stop building we continued to actually build out the truth network and the truth network for which you know all of this data is powered by the truth token.

Anybody can now access the truth network. Can build their own index using verifiable realtime events, real world events, and be able to build out an index, be able to build out a graph, create your own truthlation if you like to. And those are things that we've now made available on the truth network and actually acquired Quill technology which was the underlying um tech which we built on and the team we took over all of the technology from the team and are now running with that on our own. And so ultimately we've become this infrastructure play using SQL. So no developer needs to go and learn a new programming language and learn how solidity works. you can actually just

work. 50% of worldwide developers know how to work with SQL. So ultimately you have, you know, some 15 million software engineers out there that already can build functions and features on the truth network without having to learn anything new using our SQL smart contracts. It's fantastic and it's it's a it kudos to you and your team for how you handled the the hack and the lazerous situation because that's just an awful situation that nobody has ever prepared for. Uh but you've navigated it very well and did so in a uh a transparent way as has been your ethos throughout um the the creation of Truflation. Thank you. Yeah, it was uh definitely it's definitely not a nice

feeling. You have no idea where it's coming from. It comes out of the blue. Um and yeah and then only when you do the inspections and the audits and the yeah but I mean we have learned from that as well. We we've definitely upped our security process and that's and that's the main thing is that is that you know you take it as an opportunity to learn obviously uh when we look at the the true inflation token is let's let's talk a little bit about the the utility of this token because this isn't just a a lot of tokens in crypto don't have utility right uh a lot of them are just you know speculative assets at this point right now utility is coming and regulation definitely slowed down

utility and so we are going to see more but let's just talk a little explain the utility of the truthflation token and the role it plays within the ecosystem. So the truth network is basically has a number of node operators as we call them um that host and maintain a mirrored uh database and that database maintains and has a um we call it the roadrunner which is based off sort of modeled a lot on the bit comet which is the cosmos BFT algorithm so Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm them. And so we've built out this database so that any verified

provider and calculation done on this decentralized database is actually verified through a consensus algorithm. To access to write to this database and to access this database, you need the truth token. We have over 100 million data points now in there. And like any network, you're constrained by the streaming of the data on that network. And so how do we enable that? How do we provide compute so that you can calculate indexes and verify the data on the network? How do we enable the storage? So all of the history is visible in the story in in on the

network, right? So you can actually go and see how the history of that index of that data set performed. And then lastly the frequency. So I need to be able to update this daily by the second depending on the data set or by the month depending on exact again the data set. And so those are three capacity requirements that anybody accessing and reading the data will want to have. In order to do that you need to pay truth tokens to be able to access that data set. We work truthflation. Think of truthflation as an app on top of the truth network consuming data but also writing a lot of the data to the truth network. We have indexf fun. We have

limitless. We have prediction a lot of prediction markets um that will be accessing real world events. Why? Because they're timely. They're different in the crypto world. You don't get access to a lot of this information in crypto world. Nobody else has all of these events that are real world events that we all are emotionally attached to in some way because in the physically physical world we experience all of that and so that's really I think where we really want to spend a lot of our time and attention on over the next sort of 6 months 12 months. Yeah. Fantastic. It's it's very interesting to see more of the crypto projects use their token in this

kind of uh really new experimental way where you need the token in order to use the product. It gives you extra access. I mean in a not to compare your token to Trump token in any way um other than the fact that they both start with the same same three letters. But recently we did see a very interesting experiment with Trump token when they had their token unlock uh was it last weekend or the weekend before and everyone thought hey this token is going to crash there's a big unlock coming there's a lot of investors who are going to you know obviously sell onto the market and then they announced that it the I think it was the top 200 token holders got access to meet Trump at some dinner and the token went up right and you can see these experiments of using a token

within your product and building utility And that's that's I mean again no comparison between your two tokens. Very different and very different business. Trump token is a memecoin. I want to be very clear about that. Uh but it is it is incredible to see you experimenting with how the token can have utility and the usage within the network and that creates a reason for people to hold it and a reason it's not just a speculative asset anymore. It does also have real usage in the network. um for for our our investor for our audience who are investors and who are always looking at new opportunities, what's what's the investment case? What's the investment thesis for Truth Token? Why would they consider holding Truth Token in their

portfolio? So, we we're very much focused around the financialization of real world event data. What does that mean? What we're trying to do is build enable really prediction markets to trade on some of the real world event data that we have. Number one, what's an example of a real world event data? Like are we talking about CPI being an example? Yeah, CPI would be a real world event data, right? I mean it would be um the price of a stock the the price of um um I mean anything the price of eggs right so it's financial data like

financial data being able to okay yeah or weather data right we have shipping data right what's the cost of a container from Hong Kong to um to Los Angeles right what is that what's the cost of you know what's the temperature in you know in Barkadero in San Francisco going to be like tomorrow at 3 pm right and things like that so those are elements that we have on the truth network and why is d why is all of this so important in the cpi calculation not necessarily in the calculation itself but in the prediction of where all of this will go and hence why prediction markets are the new financial source of

news um we really believe that that's where you will see where people really think the market is going to go. And generally the market has a pretty good feel for where things are going to go, especially if you take into account weather data, you have shipping costs, you have tariffs, you have other elements um in terms of cost of goods, cost of raw materials, cost of commodities, cost of oil, etc., etc. So all of those have an impact on the price of goods in terms of where the price of goods are going to go. So future prediction outlook, how do we bet and and take contracts on that? And there's a whole derivatives industry around

that. Sorry, derivatives industry around that just alone in weather. It's a 26 billion dollar derivatives industry. And it's not just betting on the weather. How hot will it be? But it's coupled with futures contracts. So I know that if the weather tomorrow is going to be 40 Fahrenheit, then I need to get heating. I need to buy oil. So I want in the event that that does happen, I want to be able to buy the right to purchase oil at this price at that point in time.

And if that expires, then it's okay. It was an insurance policy. If it doesn't then I can call on it because the weather hit I needed to buy oil because I needed to provide heating etc etc right so all of those are realworld activities that we see or we don't even see that because it's only done by the privileged few that can participate in that and as we democratize more and more of our financial services and financial data how do we allow everybody to be able to participate this so the small farmer in Sri Lanka creating, you know, amazing cinnamon can also partake in such an event when a storm comes. What does that mean? What does that look

like? And how can he hedge that or how can they hedge themselves against that? H fascinating. It's a it's a it's a massive vision and a and a huge mission that you are taking on. Uh shout out to you and your entire team. Uh, I want to come back to what you said earlier. Uh, for everybody who is listening in, if you want to become a paid subscriber of Truflation to get access to some of these data, we'll throw a link in the in the show notes. Uh, well, if you guys are listening on Twitter, you'll have to check out the show uh when it comes out.

Um, it'll come out in a few hours when we publish the actual we'll throw a link in the show notes or if we can get a link from you, Stefan, we'll throw that in. But truly appreciate you joining us today, Stefan, and breaking it all down for us. uh and give high fives to your entire team for trying to solve this massive problem for us because we desperately need true flation. Yeah. And that's why we also want to do more data. I mean we started going into more markets. We worked in the UK. Uh we felt that was similar to the US. We worked with the Argentinian government. So the department of commerce where under the previous administration the department of commerce head you know fudged the numbers for saying it politely so that they wouldn't have to

pay such a high interest rate on the loans from the IMF. He ended up going to jail. But now the new under the new administration with Mille in charge, you know, they invited his tech team invited us to Brazil uh to Argentina to go and actually see how much of government data sets and commerce information we can digitize and put on chain and calculate inflation so that they have a second party that they can reference to providing inflation metrics. India a whole different other market where there's very little technology available for a lot of government statistics however an extremely savvy mobile

application market where people are doing all their purchases and either through WhatsApp or through applications on their mobile phones and so how do we get access to that information how do we capture that and that's what is allowing us to mature and improve the network every single time we go into more complex markets. Wonderful. Uh Stefan, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for your time. Really appreciate it. Thank you very much, Jay. And hope everybody enjoyed it. And yeah, like I said, um yeah, please sign up. You can actually get and take advantage of the data that we provide on Truflation to actually help you protect yourself against losing

27% of your purchasing power. No better no better tagline than that one right there. Thanks for listening in folks. Truly appreciate your time today. Before I let you go, I got to tell you quickly tomorrow, Tuesday, May the 6, Kyle, co-owner of Milk Road and head of research. You guys all know well, he's on the show all the time. He is having a debate, gold verse Bitcoin. Obviously, Kyle is defending the Bitcoin side. He's gonna be debating Peter Groff. Gracop, that's a tough last name to say. Uh, tomorrow 12:00 p.m. Eastern, May the 6. Check it out. Gold verse Bitcoin. Uh, we will link in Twitter if you want to attend that debate. Thanks so much for

listening in, folks. Have yourself a wicked awesome day. We'll see you guys back again tomorrow. As always, if you liked today's episode, please hit subscribe and make sure you follow us so you don't miss out on the next one. There's also a link in the description to our free 5-minute daily newsletter where we simplify crypto for you while making you laugh. And if you're willing to step up your crypto investing game, we're going to also leave a link for Milk Road Pro. You get access to our portfolio where you can see exactly what we are buying. This is your number one resource to help you invest successfully in crypto. One final note, this show is for educational purposes only and nothing we say is financial advice.

Investing in crypto or any asset is risky and you should never invest more than you can afford to lose. Thanks so much for listening in my friends.