YouSaid · the spoken record

Alex Bornyakov

lines on the record: 70
first: 2022-05-24
most recent: 2022-05-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Booming as well. We have a lot of bright people, very educated, so like the higher education level in Ukraine So we have a lot of educated people. We have a lot of tech people. So we have quite a few strong universities like IT universities. That's why we have a lot of IT personnel. In general, people here are more mathematically inclined. So that's why we have a combination of really fast internet, a lot of clever developers, IT developers, and crypto. So it was booming. We did billions and billions per day in transactions for the whole country because even huge markets worked 100% on crypto. So it was big.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want to make that comparison because, right, these are two big infrastructure projects that, depending on what country you're in, like the relationship of the government to infrastructure like broadband, the relationship of the government to infrastructure like money, very different. And you have experience in both. So it's interesting to draw the contrast to successful internet deployment, perhaps successful crypto deployment. And then just broadly, before we get into crypto in this moment, Ukraine, what was the tech industry in Ukraine like before this?”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At that time, before the government came, a lot of wire was already in the houses. So that's why it's really cheap. It's all gigabit is already there. And there is no monopoly on the internet in Ukraine as well. So there is no Verizon, there is no AT&T. So if you want to be internet provider, just get your own fiber optics from Europe. And here we go. You can sell in wholesale. Same in a crypto. So there is no government to ask to do something. That's why it's so popular.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That was a long time ago, and it was slightly different from what you were saying. But it doesn't matter. It was not the government provider. So basically what you could do back 15 years ago, if you want to set up telecom operator, all you need is to buy some Cisco's, buy a fiber optic cable to your Cisco server. And then basically what you had to do is just do the wiring to all these apartments around you. So you could choose a couple of blocks and you basically just take the Ethernet wire and you drill the holes in the walls and so on and you bring it to the houses and how you that's how you connected your subscribers to the internet. And that's it. You have an internet provider. You didn't have to ask anyone to do that. Now it's basically changed. Now it's more civilized, so you have to get permission to dig on and so on. But anyway.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's not the government. That's the whole point. Government doesn't have a single successful project in Ukraine. No, probably no. One, one project. We have the project which is called DIA. This is an app which enables you to have your online passport for the international travel, for local travel. You have your car driver license. You have the documents for your car. It's all in that app. And that app equals to the physical document. And this project was only launched in 2019. So we're the first country with a digital passport, which is equal to the paper passport. I think that's the only successful project that we have in Ukraine. The rest of the government project just failed. They just steal the money and that's it. So when I say that internet, it's not because the government did something. It's just because the government didn't do anything.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me just put two things into contrast here, which I think is interesting. You mentioned that you worked at the telecom provider, as far as I understand Ukraine only really has one telecom provider, but that telecom provider was really fast to 3G and then on top of it has delivered very fast internet to most people. The median speed for internet in the United States is not a gig. It's barely 200 decoder listeners know I would complain about United States telcos all day and all night. But in one sense, it seems like government's doing a very good job of delivering internet access in Ukraine for whatever reason. I'm curious for your insight there because you have...”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The status was none, and it still is. We have a war, but it's going to go into action at least maybe next year. And no one knows when exactly because of where the ministries are worried about winning the war and not drafting me or implementing the war. So at the moment, the crypto is nothing. It doesn't exist, but it didn't stop us because as I told you, we don't trust the government, so we don't really need any government officials saying that Bitcoin is something or we don't need any documents that will prove that Bitcoin is something. So we just use it. It exists and we use it and we don't care about the government.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You want a smart contract, or you just want to make sure that everything is good with your Bitcoin. So it's amazing system. And that's why per capita usage in Ukraine is huge. That was before the war. And now after the war, well, during the war, I'm thinking it's already finished. But anyway, yeah.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like literally, if you want to do a service, they say, nah, you can't do that. Why? Because national banks said no. Obviously, in this kind of situations, a lot of countries are in similar situations, especially developing ones, where the banking system is so bad, you can't send money abroad, you cannot take out of money, you cannot put money into the bank. If something starts to get happen in the economy, the government decides that your money is now government money, you know, so they did it a few times. So we don't trust. The banking system, we don't trust the government. We don't trust anyone. And now we have like a system which doesn't require you to trust any particular person. It belongs to everyone and to no one at the same time. It's fully decentralized and with a lot of different cryptos you can go like 100% decentralized or you can go fully centralized and you can choose.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In terms of number of crypto users per capita, according to a lot of researches, Ukraine was always, if not the first, definitely among the top five. The reason for that is we have fantastic internet penetration. The average speeds are like getting closer to one gigabit. That's average for the whole country. Then a lot of mobile phones and really bad banking system. This shittiest banking system you can ever imagine. So you can't do anything”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, I want to talk to you about what is happening with blockchain in Ukraine now, where obviously the entire country is under stress, Russia's launched this war. The country is fighting back. It seems to be going well. Right, there's a lot of destabilization. You can see why Bitcoin would be interesting in that context right now. So I want to talk about that. But before we do that, just help me understand the foundation before the war, what was the tech industry in Ukraine like? What was the status of Bitcoin or cryptocurrency adoption Ukraine like before the war?”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To avoid government sanctions. And I'm like, this could be interesting. So that's the minute when I started doing Bitcoin full-time. So April 2013, which means it's exactly 10 years and one month. Interesting.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A lot of institutions. That was like a small Bitcoin that couldn't fit into any of the bubbles that we drew. I asked my guys, what the hell is Bitcoin? And they said, this is digital currency fully decentralized. It has nothing to do to the Fiat system. What's the fiat system? You know that car system. So all these typical questions that all of us know now. To be honest, I didn't believe at Bitcoin in 2011. As I can remember now, it was dropping to from $30 to $3. I didn't quite spend that much time on studying what's a Bitcoin. The next time I shook hands with the Bitcoin was in 2013 when the April banking system happened and a lot of investors, as it turned out to be later, tried to save their money from the government and they were buying Bitcoin. And I'm like, well, so you can use Bitcoin.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I couldn't answer that question. You know, why? So ask myself, why am I not doing it if considering that I have a telecom background? I see the traffic is growing. So it's quite obvious that the mobile is going to take over the world. So that's what I did. I started my own digital marketing and web studio. So basically we were doing like simple stuff, creating pages for the companies, creating websites, mobile apps, all that stuff. And then at the time when I actually found out about the Bitcoin, one of the projects we were developing was about the digital banks at the time didn't exist in Ukraine. There were only a few examples in the world. So we were doing the marketing research on what's happening with the money in the world. And that was 2011. And that was the time when I was first introduced to Bitcoin. So it was like the global financial system with a lot of banks, with the electronic money.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To the digital world. Let's go it that way. Then I went to Columbia London Business School and Hong Kong University to do my executive MBA degree. And during that time, I was socializing with a lot of people, a lot of diversity from different countries, nations. One of the guys said, what's happening with the digital marketing in your country? And I said, it's booming. And he asked me valid questions. So are you in it? And I said, no. And he said, why?”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I was working in the telecom company. I was in charge of business development, like a CBDO. Now it's called We were the first company to launch 3G in Ukraine. It was based on CDMA standard, that's like American standard. Then Europe is OGSM. So anyway, at that time, we launched the first 3G in Ukraine, and that was quite amazing. a couple of months later, I saw that the mobile traffic is growing really fast and I had data to the fiber optic, the fixed line internet. And I saw that the traffic is not going as fast. So for me, it was quite obvious that everything is going to go mobile, especially after the iPhone was released. So that's when I was starting to get interested in everything mobile. So using mobile as the universal”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm very appreciative that you've made the time to come be on the show. I know things in Ukraine are quite tense and quite complex, but I think it's important to talk about what you have been doing there. So you graduated from Colombia here in the United States. You lived in London. You worked in tech in Ukraine. We mostly talk to Americans and American companies on the show. Can you just give me a brief description? What were you working on in Ukraine in the tech industry and how did you make the move into crypto?”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“One ratio $1 per tether coin. Now there are lots of questions about how stable stable coins really are. Right now, stable coin called Terra is currently crashing in value, and there's a lot of controversy about whether Tether has the financial reserves to back up its stablecoin. You'll hear, Michael, express his reservations about USDT. But what I came back to several times is my main question about cryptocurrency, which is whether people only care about it because they care about dollars. We went back and forth on that. It's a good conversation. Now we've done previous episodes of decoder on Bitcoin and stablecoins if you want to know more. And of course, Verge Reporter Liz Lapato has done a ton of reporting on what she calls weird internet money, especially the recent stablecoin crash. We'll have links to all of that in the show notes if you want to learn more. Okay, Michael Chabanian. Here we go.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In April, Bloomberg reported that the Ukrainian government had received over $60 million in crypto donations. What's more, earlier this year, Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky also signed a virtual assets bill into law, which will recognize cryptocurrency as an asset in Ukraine when the war is over. As president of the Blockchain Association, Michael lobbied for this law, which you'll hear him talk about, especially in the context of how little faith he has in the Ukrainian banking system. He says several times that even before the war, the banking system couldn't be trusted, and that for large transactions, people were already using a combination of crypto and dollars instead of Ukraine's actual currency, which is called the Rifnia. Now that's interesting because throughout the course of this conversation, you'll hear dollars come up a lot. Michael says the most popular cryptocurrency in Ukraine is Tether, or USDT. That's a stable coin that's backed by the US dollar in what's supposed to be a one-to-one.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hello and welcome to Decoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today's episode is a little different. I'm talking to Michael Chobanian, the president of the blockchain association of Ukraine. The terrible unprovoked war in Ukraine has destabilized the country's economy and banking system, leading both Ukrainian politicians and citizens to more seriously consider cryptocurrency. Now, as decoder listeners know, I am pretty skeptical of crypto, but I want to come by that skepticism honestly, and I really wanted to understand more about what was happening with cryptocurrency in Ukraine. In addition to being the president of the Blockchain Association of Ukraine, Michael is also the founder of the Kuna Exchange, which lets people buy cryptocurrencies and swap between them. Earlier this year, the Ukrainian government set up wallets on Kuna and other exchanges to accept donations to the war effort in crypto.”
2022-05-24 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · How Ukraine’s wide use of cryptocurrency is playing out during the war · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT