Jamiel Sheikh is the founder of three different companies all serving the crypto space: Chainhaus, CBDC Think Tank, and most recently, Instamint, which he says will do for tokens what Stripe did for payments, i.e. make it super easy. In this episode we talk about the “unsexy” problems Instamint is solving for enterprises that want to leverage the blockchain, what it takes to build a great API-first company, and why he only sees demand for crypto solutions growing, despite the recent turmoil in the markets.  Our interview with Jamiel comes from a special Artium event that we hosted at Rise, Created by Barclays, an incubator for fintech startups. 

Here’s Jamiel Sheikh on Crafted, Artium’s new podcast.

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Jamiel Sheikh: We’re focused on being this kind of iceberg, where you have at the tip of the iceberg, it’s very, very simple to understand, looks pretty easy. But then all this complexity underneath is taken care of for you. My job is to constantly push and drive up that water level up, so all you really see is the tip.

Dan Blumberg: That’s Instamint founder and all around blockchain expert, Jamiel Sheikh, sharing why he’s building a company to enable enterprises to mint, distribute, and store crypto tokens as easily as Stripe makes it to process payments. Jamiel joined me on stage recently for a live event in New York at Rise, created by Barclays. On this episode of Crafted, you’ll hear Jamiel explain why after a decade of exploration in the blockchain and crypto world, he’s decided to found Instamint, and why he thinks it’s positioned well for the next decades.

Two quick notes before we dive in, we spoke to Jamiel in December during a wild week in the crypto world. FTX was collapsing and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was accused of fraud. Even normies were aware of the crazier than usual week in crypto, and so we started there. Also, our conversation is mostly jargon free, so I promise you don’t have to know about crypto to enjoy it. One financial term that would be helpful to know though is factoring. You’ll hear Jamiel talk about this. Factoring is basically when a company raises money today by selling the revenue it expects to receive in the future. Okay, here’s my conversation with Jamiel Sheikh, recorded live in December at a special Artium fintech event at Rise in New York.

So Jamiel Sheikh is up to a lot in the world of crypto. He is the founder of three different companies, Chain House, CBDC Think Tank. Chain House is a software development and advisory company in the crypto space and artificial intelligence and decentralized finance. CBDC Think Tank advises central banks on what they should be doing in digital assets. And he has recently founded Instamint, which he describes by saying it is what Stripe is for payments, Instamint will be for tokens. In other words, it will enable enterprises to distribute and manage crypto assets seamlessly and securely. Jamiel, thank you so much for joining us.

So I want to start with a really intelligent question, but I think the only question that most people have around crypto right now is: What the hell is going on? So maybe we could just start there. So crypto is dead, right? SBF killed it.

Jamiel Sheikh: Crypto is not dead. I used to work at Lehman. And I remember my last day at Lehman, I got a package, and the HR person that was giving me the package, this is 2008, was saying, “Hey, this is the end of the world.” This is how they were feeling it. And I remember people saying it was the end of capitalism, and that was kind of the mood at Lehman at that time. I was at Lehman for four years, and I was literally and the mortgage area. I started off with mortgage trading, then I went off into securitization.

And so crypto is not dead. I think what’s happening with FTX is small, relatively speaking. It’s a couple billion dollars of potential fraud, and it’s emblematic of an industry that’s very, very pro risk. You have a guy named Sam, who ran FTX, and he’s still out in the media talking to people. So how much of risk do you want to take? He’s continuing to take more risks, even though he’s been advised not to really speak. Right? So you have a culture of risk that now is getting kind of whipped up and beat up. But the underlying technology and underlying problems that it solves, that doesn’t go away. So what it’s solving, basically digital double spend problem, the ability to move value through borders rapidly, those problems and the solutions are not going to go away.

So I think what’s going to happen, I think it’s a good thing what’s happening with the crypto is a good thing. We’re going to have this kind of cleaning out process. We’re continuing to build. We don’t see a slow-down in demand in the things that we’re building. We don’t see a slow-down. I run a very large community in New York City. We’re about 35,000 people, Blockchain NYC. We don’t see a slow-down in the desire to continue to build.

Dan Blumberg: So you’ve chosen to build a new startup pretty recently. You’ve chosen to build Instamint. You’ve been in this space for a long time. There are a lot of startups that you could’ve founded, and I’d love if you could tell us why you decided to found Instamint. What problem are you trying to solve? And why this one, among all the other opportunities that you could’ve pursued?

Jamiel Sheikh: Right. So I started mining bitcoin in 2012. And I was like, “What is this thing?” And I was sitting there with a laptop, a Sony Vaio, and it was humming away. The fan was whirring. And I was like, “What is this thing people are talking about?” There was some news articles about it. And then 2017 and 2018, I was like, “Let me get into this space.” But I didn’t know what to do in the space. It took really until the middle of last year to say, “Okay, now I understand the space.” It took five years or six years to really understand what’s happening in the space, who’s doing what. What was the real value? Who’s really building anything? And where is the real demand? What’s going to be the demand that the market wants? And so I projected myself out 10 years.

10 years from now, what will enterprises want? If this is true, so if blockchain solves these kinds of problems, what will enterprises want in 10 years from today? And I reversed back into a product that I’m going to build today. And so in 10 years, the thesis is, in 10 years, lots of assets will be tokenized because tokens offer this frictionless movement of value. I can settle things and move an asset, equity, I can settle it rapidly, or a fix income instrument can settle rapidly.

So an enterprise that has all these things, assets are tokenized, how can that enterprise manage all of it? You have an accounting department that might tokenize invoices. You might have, let’s say an art department that’s tokenizing art. How does that enterprise, how does that organization manage all of that? And Instamint is that solution. And so we do see, I think you’ve seen the pitch deck, basically 30 slides, we’ll get to slide six and seven, and then a potential customer like, “Okay, we like it. We’re interested and we want to get into a conversation.”

Dan Blumberg: And so just if you could tease it out some more, why should enterprises care about crypto tokens and cryptocurrency? What is an example if you’re Nike, or Disney, or FedEx, why do you care?

Jamiel Sheikh: There’s lots of different reasons. From a financial side, you get liquidity. There may be more liquidity, the ability to get a broader audience. If you’re an artist and you’re tokenizing your art, you can put it out to a broader audience. If you’re on the finance side, there’s potential for more liquidity. Movement of liquidity’s quicker globally. That’s true for payments. I move payments through crypto, it’ll move more quickly, lower fees. And I think the fees are going to continue to come down over time as we become more and more efficient. So the ability to do more globally, basically what the internet did for information. I don’t need to go to a post office to send you a mail anymore. I can send you an email. What the internet did for information, the blockchain world will do for value. I can move value across.

And then a token is just simply a representation of something of value, whatever, whether we can decide if that thing is of value or not is really up to the community and the public. But if we decide it’s valuable, then I can move it around far more rapidly than I could with current systems. And that’s where we talk to enterprises about, say, “Do you feel like you have an invoice that you want to tokenize and put onto a public auction and have the factoring companies bid down on their interest rate?” Is that of value to you, and not double spend? So invoice could be factored twice, so I can take an invoice and get money from you, and then go take it to somebody else and can … If blockchain solves that and makes it less fraudulent, is that of interest? And I think lots of organizations are saying yes, but it’s early days.

Dan Blumberg: Can you talk more about the tagline that you gave me that I said a second ago? Maybe you could repeat it so you get it right, precisely. But then how you’ve used Stripe as an analogy, can you paint that picture a little bit more of that API first company that you’re building?

Jamiel Sheikh: Yeah. So Stripe initially was just APIs. Payments is a complex thing, and so what Stripe does is makes it very, very easy for the developer to go in and have payments in their applications. So I have an application, it needs to accept money. I want to accept a credit card. A long time ago, 15 years ago, I would use something called authorize.net. They had an API. It was brutal to use. It was cumbersome and things didn’t work right. And then if I moved to another merchant, API was a whole other thing. And Stripe just made it very, very easy. Right?

And then now Stripe is all these other tools. Once I’m plugged into the API and I have a business and doing payments, I need analytics. I need fraud detection. I need all these other pieces. I need KYC. And I get that all out of the box. And so we’re leading in for token management with APIs. We make it very, very easy. You don’t have to hire people. You don’t have to hire a smart contractor or blockchain developer, which are relatively expensive, maybe a little bit cheaper now, but a few more of them, but relatively expensive, you don’t have to do that. You hit an API and then we’re adding in all this other value. So I want to tokenize my invoices. I want to tokenize my office space. You can do it within a day.

Dan Blumberg: What’s a use case that you’d be using the API to do?

Jamiel Sheikh: Right now, we’re working with one large German conglomerate, early days. So they factor for Amazon. Actually, Amazon’s their client. They do a lot of factoring for Amazon. And they want to see if they can get more liquidity, so let’s say they factor. So they’d need to borrow money, or they have a limited supply and they want to scale up their factoring. Can they go out to the public markets and bring money in to do factoring? Obviously, there’s security laws that apply to this, but that’s what they’re looking at.

How do we take something as simple as an invoice and make it such that somebody in the public can buy that invoice, or a fraction of the invoice? So I can put up $100 and buy a million dollar invoice, and get a return on that. And so we’re exploring those right now.

Dan Blumberg: And as you’re building an API first company, like a Stripe or a Twilio, what’s important to you as a developer in building an API that people really want to use, the developers want to use?

Jamiel Sheikh: The most important thing that we focus on is the customer experience. That’s the number one. How does the customer, and whether they’re the developer or they’re the whatever department that’s involved in assessing whatever transactions are occurring, are they able to use the tools that we provide in a very simple and easy way? Can they understand it very, very quickly? I log in. Do I understand what the dashboard is telling me? Do I understand the API very quickly if I’m a developer? Can I build something within an hour? And so we’re focused on being this kind of iceberg, where you have at the tip of the iceberg, it’s very, very simple to understand. It looks pretty easy. But then all this complexity underneath is taken care of for you. And my job is to constantly push that water level up, so all you really see is the tip, and you’re able just to use all of that. And then the rest is just all this value that we’re pushing in. And that’s really what we focus on. Doing tokens is complex. It’s complex work. It’s expensive. We just are focused on making it super easy.

Dan Blumberg: Instamint is not an NFT marketplace, but it does enable companies to create an NFT marketplace. Can you just talk about why a company would want to do that?

Jamiel Sheikh: Well, we leave it to them to figure out why they want to do that. What infrastructure? So if they’ve decided that they want to do that, for whatever reason, they’ve got a business case, we’re there to make it very easy for them. Just like on the payments, if somebody’s selling some widget on an online eCommerce store, Stripe is not going to ask, “Well, why are you selling that? There’s no market for it.” Whatever, they’re not really going to care. If a transaction comes through, Stripe will take care of that transaction and handle the transaction, handle chargebacks. Right?

So our approach is we’re going to give you the tools. You decide if it’s the right business case, and we’ll make it a lot more cost effective and we’ll make it a lot easier. So what takes six months to build, if you hired your own people, that’s half a million dollars, you could do for one hundredth, and maybe in two weeks.

Dan Blumberg: Can you take us back to the moment you said you were looking 10 years into the future, and what’s going to be a need that people are going to have for a long time? Was there an ah-ha moment when you said, “This is the company that I should found”? If there’s a story there, I’d love to hear it.

Jamiel Sheikh: There are a lot of stories there, some painful. But by and large, it’s been this constant listening to people. Since 2017, I’ve probably held 200 events, a lot of them in this location. And you get to meet a lot of people and listen to a lot of ideas. And some of the ideas you filter. You’re like, “That might not really work out.” But you listen to a lot of companies talk about their pain points. I’m listening for pain. What’s the pain in the market? And what’s a big pain? And what’s a pain that’s not going to go away? And what’s a pain that has a low hanging, clearly obvious solution that somebody’s like, “Hey, this is a solution”? I’ll take it now.

So I figured this was something I have to look for. And the middle of last year is when I kind of have this … I wouldn’t say it was an ah-ha moment. It’s the moment like, “Wait a minute, I think this is something I need to build.” And so I set up the company in Delaware in September. October, we started filing for trademarks. November, I had a proof of concept ready. December 1st, we had a customer.

Dan Blumberg: And what did that proof of concept look like?

Jamiel Sheikh: It was very simple. You could mint images. And we had a customer, live customer, deliver Christmas NFT drops by last year, Christmas. So within three, four months, I was able to rapidly build it and get all the paperwork done and raise some capital. By January of this year, we raised some capital. We raised about 450 K in grant money from a bunch of different blockchain companies. It was a pretty rapid discussion with them. They go, “Okay, we like it. Here’s money.” And then I knew by March, April that I had to reduce my burn rate. In the past five months, I went to Vietnam four times and I bought a development company there and renamed it Chain House. We’ve got 100 developers there, so reduced by burn rate by a fifth. So pushing up value and then driving down cost has been effective for us.

Dan Blumberg: I know in the early days, you were thinking about, or one of the primary use, because I think you were thinking about minting NFTs from Instagram. And it’s grown from that. Can you talk about that?

Jamiel Sheikh: Yeah. That was the first idea. All this content on Instagram, why don’t we mint it? And then I heard that Instagram’s going to do that. And so I’m like, “All right. I can’t do that anymore.” I have to pivot away. I’m not going to compete with Instagram. Just doesn’t make sense. Maybe later we’ll come back to that. But in the meantime, while we were talking, while we were working on that, we were meeting with potential customers and like, “Can you do this? Can you do that?” And we were like, “We’re already organically start pivoting away and start addressing additional features.”

So we were building something that you could mint an Instagram photo through an API anyway, and so we just said, “Let’s shift it to this. Let’s now add in analytics and let’s add in the SLAs that enterprises need.” They need to be able … So let’s say I have an accounting department with 500 people. How do you provision the ability for these people to tokenize stuff? How do you manage all the users? How do you get analytics? How do you do KYC? How do you do forensics and all that? So if enterprise wants to pay its employees using wallets, and they set up 10,000 wallets, how do they manage all of that? They kind of helicopter money across the board. And 10 years from now, will we be using crypto to pay payroll? Potentially true. So what tools do I need to be able to manage that?

Dan Blumberg: How do you prioritize? There’s a lot of ideas that you just mentioned that you could be working on. How do you pick what’s next?

Jamiel Sheikh: It’s just whatever the customer wants first. So the customer says, “This is really interesting.” And my response is, “Is this something legitimate that you want to use now or the next year?” And if the answer’s yes, then that’s where our priority … Whatever the customer wants is our priority. We don’t really need to worry about what we think the future looks like. We have an idea on a macro level. This is what the future looks like. That kind of guides us. But then the customers are telling us, “Put this in, put that in.” Obviously, there’s a whole list of things that they want, and some of the stuff we say, “That’s not what we do. We don’t do that.” So we’re very focused on certain things, and we make sure that there are things that we don’t get involved with because then we can get too diluted.

So the customer says, “Hey, can you add in the ability to create a decentralized exchange?” Well, that’s not our thing. We can refer you to other people that can do that, but we don’t do that. So we stay focused, but we prioritize based on what the customer demand is.

Dan Blumberg: Are there other examples of … You gave an example of something you said, “We don’t do that.” Can you give an example of where a customer asked for something or gave you feedback, and you iterated on that?

Jamiel Sheikh: Yeah. With a customer [inaudible 00:16:56], they want delegated administrative capabilities. Boring subject, right? So you’ve got a bunch of admins in a company and they’re delegating the ability for other people to be able to log in to the system. And so you need tools to be able to do that. You need structure. The crypto world doesn’t have any of that. So you have your own wallet and that’s it. I can’t create a wallet for you, and I can’t create a wallet for 10,000 to her people. So a customer will come in, says, “Hey, we want to create 10,000 wallets. How do we do that?” I’m like, “Okay, that is within our scope and within our domain. And that is a problem that we need to solve.”

And so we had conversations with organizations like The World Bank and the IMF. The IMF is a client of ours, the CBDC Think Tank. And they’re looking at: Well, how do we deploy $100 million to a million people through crypto? And so we want to be part of that solution, so that is within the scope. And so when they’re talking about those kind of things, then we’re like, “Is this within the scope?” If it is, we start to do some research around it. What would be the challenges, the technical business, and all that? If there was a business case, there’s some money down the road to be made on this, we will then move towards implementing it.

Dan Blumberg: Again on the why question, so the IMF wants to distribute it, that massive amount of money. Why through crypto?

Jamiel Sheikh: So the World Bank actually had a contest, and we placed pretty well in that contest. We would’ve placed first place had we been open source. We were not open source on the project. What they want is providence and movement of the money, they want it to be traceable. So let’s say there’s a country that is going to get $100 million to use for changing their plumbing, the water system. Right? And they get $100 million. How much of that actually goes to that project? In general, not a lot. You can figure out all the reasons where money goes in the wrong places. Right?

And one of the things, I won’t say crypto, one of the things that blockchain allows you to do is you can approve and preapprove who can and can’t get money. And you can see, you can trace where that money goes and who’s getting it. Right? And so we built, that time we called it flow ledger. It was this ability where I can authorize who can get the money across multiple hops of that money. And now we’ve kind of folded that into Instamint. So we see that. If the World Bank is interested in something like that today, they will probably be more interested in it five years from now as that use case gets more and more viable.

There are some challenges, but blockchain can solve the ability to create transparency around public movement of money, so money that the public needs to see, anti corruption, make sure the right people are getting the money, the right subcontractor is getting that money. Blockchain can help with that.

Dan Blumberg: Got it. In 10 years, what does Instamint look like?

Jamiel Sheikh: I don’t know. We want it to be infrastructure. We don’t want anybody talking about it. It’s not going to be people we … People won’t talk about it like, “Do you use Instamint on the moon?” Nobody’s going to talk about it. It’s kind of going to be like infrastructure in the sense that Wall Street uses infrastructure that people don’t really talk about, like fixed protocol. TIBCO is a product used for messaging that’s heavily in Wall Street, but people don’t talk about it. Right? And I think we will eventually be … Our goal is to be infrastructure that nobody really talks about. It’s boring. It’s not exciting, sexy, oh, we’re going to tokenize photos of apes and things like that. We’re just doing boring stuff. It may be not great margins. It’s low to medium margins, but high volume, and very strong moats and barriers to entry. Right? So we just want to kind of dig in and build that infrastructure.

Dan Blumberg: I love it, solving the non sexy problems. And you kind of stepped on my last question here, which you didn’t know was coming. The question is: In what ways do you expect regular people to be using crypto every day in 10 years without even thinking about it? So in the early days of the web, there was always this question of: Will people put their credit card on a website? And nobody asks that question anymore. And I’m curious, and that’s totally boring and it just happens every day. What are some examples that you see in the near future involving blockchain?

Jamiel Sheikh: If we do hit critical mass, which I think we will in 10 years, people will start to use cryptos. They’ll use it for everyday kind of things. I don’t know if it will be bitcoin or if it’s something, there’s another stable coin called DAI, or you see what these other stable coins are, what it will be. But as soon as vendors and retailers start to accept it, which they’re starting to now, you see that announcement with Circle and Apple. As soon as merchants start accepting that, people will start using it. And that scares a lot of people. That scares a lot of central banks and things like that. But I think we’re far from that, but 10 years from now, I can see myself walking into a restaurant and having lunch and paying for that lunch using crypto. Why not? And possibly getting my salary in crypto, I wouldn’t mind that either.

Dan Blumberg: Jamiel, thank you so much. Jamiel Sheikh is the founder of three companies, Instamint, Chain House, and CBDC Think Tank. So much fun to have you, thank you.

Jamiel Sheikh: Thank you so much.

Dan Blumberg: That’s Jamiel Sheikh speaking to me in New York at Artium’s special fintech event at Rise, created by Barclays. And this is Crafted from Artium. At Artium, we build incredible products, recruit high performing teams, and help you achieve the culture of craft you need to build great software long after we’re gone. We artisans love partnering with creative people to build their visions of the future. If you’ve got an opportunity you’d like to discuss, or just want to learn more about us, check us out at thisisartium.com or drop us a line at hello@thisisartium.com.

This podcast is new and we’d love your support. If you liked today’s episode and, hey, you’ve made it this far, maybe text a few craft minded friends a link to the show. And please subscribe and join us as we highlight more great products and the people who make them. I’m Dan Blumberg. This is Crafted. See you next time.

Jamiel Sheikh: We’re focused on being this kind of iceberg, where you have at the tip of the iceberg, it’s very, very simple to understand, looks pretty easy. But then all this complexity underneath is taken care of for you. My job is to constantly push and drive up that water level up, so all you really see is the tip.

Dan Blumberg: That’s Instamint founder and all around blockchain expert, Jamiel Sheikh, sharing why he’s building a company to enable enterprises to mint, distribute, and store crypto tokens as easily as Stripe makes it to process payments. Jamiel joined me on stage recently for a live event in New York at Rise, created by Barclays. On this episode of Crafted, you’ll hear Jamiel explain why after a decade of exploration in the blockchain and crypto world, he’s decided to found Instamint, and why he thinks it’s positioned well for the next decades.

Two quick notes before we dive in, we spoke to Jamiel in December during a wild week in the crypto world. FTX was collapsing and its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, was accused of fraud. Even normies were aware of the crazier than usual week in crypto, and so we started there. Also, our conversation is mostly jargon free, so I promise you don’t have to know about crypto to enjoy it. One financial term that would be helpful to know though is factoring. You’ll hear Jamiel talk about this. Factoring is basically when a company raises money today by selling the revenue it expects to receive in the future. Okay, here’s my conversation with Jamiel Sheikh, recorded live in December at a special Artium fintech event at Rise in New York.

So Jamiel Sheikh is up to a lot in the world of crypto. He is the founder of three different companies, Chain House, CBDC Think Tank. Chain House is a software development and advisory company in the crypto space and artificial intelligence and decentralized finance. CBDC Think Tank advises central banks on what they should be doing in digital assets. And he has recently founded Instamint, which he describes by saying it is what Stripe is for payments, Instamint will be for tokens. In other words, it will enable enterprises to distribute and manage crypto assets seamlessly and securely. Jamiel, thank you so much for joining us.

So I want to start with a really intelligent question, but I think the only question that most people have around crypto right now is: What the hell is going on? So maybe we could just start there. So crypto is dead, right? SBF killed it.

Jamiel Sheikh: Crypto is not dead. I used to work at Lehman. And I remember my last day at Lehman, I got a package, and the HR person that was giving me the package, this is 2008, was saying, “Hey, this is the end of the world.” This is how they were feeling it. And I remember people saying it was the end of capitalism, and that was kind of the mood at Lehman at that time. I was at Lehman for four years, and I was literally and the mortgage area. I started off with mortgage trading, then I went off into securitization.

And so crypto is not dead. I think what’s happening with FTX is small, relatively speaking. It’s a couple billion dollars of potential fraud, and it’s emblematic of an industry that’s very, very pro risk. You have a guy named Sam, who ran FTX, and he’s still out in the media talking to people. So how much of risk do you want to take? He’s continuing to take more risks, even though he’s been advised not to really speak. Right? So you have a culture of risk that now is getting kind of whipped up and beat up. But the underlying technology and underlying problems that it solves, that doesn’t go away. So what it’s solving, basically digital double spend problem, the ability to move value through borders rapidly, those problems and the solutions are not going to go away.

So I think what’s going to happen, I think it’s a good thing what’s happening with the crypto is a good thing. We’re going to have this kind of cleaning out process. We’re continuing to build. We don’t see a slow-down in demand in the things that we’re building. We don’t see a slow-down. I run a very large community in New York City. We’re about 35,000 people, Blockchain NYC. We don’t see a slow-down in the desire to continue to build.

Dan Blumberg: So you’ve chosen to build a new startup pretty recently. You’ve chosen to build Instamint. You’ve been in this space for a long time. There are a lot of startups that you could’ve founded, and I’d love if you could tell us why you decided to found Instamint. What problem are you trying to solve? And why this one, among all the other opportunities that you could’ve pursued?

Jamiel Sheikh: Right. So I started mining bitcoin in 2012. And I was like, “What is this thing?” And I was sitting there with a laptop, a Sony Vaio, and it was humming away. The fan was whirring. And I was like, “What is this thing people are talking about?” There was some news articles about it. And then 2017 and 2018, I was like, “Let me get into this space.” But I didn’t know what to do in the space. It took really until the middle of last year to say, “Okay, now I understand the space.” It took five years or six years to really understand what’s happening in the space, who’s doing what. What was the real value? Who’s really building anything? And where is the real demand? What’s going to be the demand that the market wants? And so I projected myself out 10 years.

10 years from now, what will enterprises want? If this is true, so if blockchain solves these kinds of problems, what will enterprises want in 10 years from today? And I reversed back into a product that I’m going to build today. And so in 10 years, the thesis is, in 10 years, lots of assets will be tokenized because tokens offer this frictionless movement of value. I can settle things and move an asset, equity, I can settle it rapidly, or a fix income instrument can settle rapidly.

So an enterprise that has all these things, assets are tokenized, how can that enterprise manage all of it? You have an accounting department that might tokenize invoices. You might have, let’s say an art department that’s tokenizing art. How does that enterprise, how does that organization manage all of that? And Instamint is that solution. And so we do see, I think you’ve seen the pitch deck, basically 30 slides, we’ll get to slide six and seven, and then a potential customer like, “Okay, we like it. We’re interested and we want to get into a conversation.”

Dan Blumberg: And so just if you could tease it out some more, why should enterprises care about crypto tokens and cryptocurrency? What is an example if you’re Nike, or Disney, or FedEx, why do you care?

Jamiel Sheikh: There’s lots of different reasons. From a financial side, you get liquidity. There may be more liquidity, the ability to get a broader audience. If you’re an artist and you’re tokenizing your art, you can put it out to a broader audience. If you’re on the finance side, there’s potential for more liquidity. Movement of liquidity’s quicker globally. That’s true for payments. I move payments through crypto, it’ll move more quickly, lower fees. And I think the fees are going to continue to come down over time as we become more and more efficient. So the ability to do more globally, basically what the internet did for information. I don’t need to go to a post office to send you a mail anymore. I can send you an email. What the internet did for information, the blockchain world will do for value. I can move value across.

And then a token is just simply a representation of something of value, whatever, whether we can decide if that thing is of value or not is really up to the community and the public. But if we decide it’s valuable, then I can move it around far more rapidly than I could with current systems. And that’s where we talk to enterprises about, say, “Do you feel like you have an invoice that you want to tokenize and put onto a public auction and have the factoring companies bid down on their interest rate?” Is that of value to you, and not double spend? So invoice could be factored twice, so I can take an invoice and get money from you, and then go take it to somebody else and can … If blockchain solves that and makes it less fraudulent, is that of interest? And I think lots of organizations are saying yes, but it’s early days.

Dan Blumberg: Can you talk more about the tagline that you gave me that I said a second ago? Maybe you could repeat it so you get it right, precisely. But then how you’ve used Stripe as an analogy, can you paint that picture a little bit more of that API first company that you’re building?

Jamiel Sheikh: Yeah. So Stripe initially was just APIs. Payments is a complex thing, and so what Stripe does is makes it very, very easy for the developer to go in and have payments in their applications. So I have an application, it needs to accept money. I want to accept a credit card. A long time ago, 15 years ago, I would use something called authorize.net. They had an API. It was brutal to use. It was cumbersome and things didn’t work right. And then if I moved to another merchant, API was a whole other thing. And Stripe just made it very, very easy. Right?

And then now Stripe is all these other tools. Once I’m plugged into the API and I have a business and doing payments, I need analytics. I need fraud detection. I need all these other pieces. I need KYC. And I get that all out of the box. And so we’re leading in for token management with APIs. We make it very, very easy. You don’t have to hire people. You don’t have to hire a smart contractor or blockchain developer, which are relatively expensive, maybe a little bit cheaper now, but a few more of them, but relatively expensive, you don’t have to do that. You hit an API and then we’re adding in all this other value. So I want to tokenize my invoices. I want to tokenize my office space. You can do it within a day.

Dan Blumberg: What’s a use case that you’d be using the API to do?

Jamiel Sheikh: Right now, we’re working with one large German conglomerate, early days. So they factor for Amazon. Actually, Amazon’s their client. They do a lot of factoring for Amazon. And they want to see if they can get more liquidity, so let’s say they factor. So they’d need to borrow money, or they have a limited supply and they want to scale up their factoring. Can they go out to the public markets and bring money in to do factoring? Obviously, there’s security laws that apply to this, but that’s what they’re looking at.

How do we take something as simple as an invoice and make it such that somebody in the public can buy that invoice, or a fraction of the invoice? So I can put up $100 and buy a million dollar invoice, and get a return on that. And so we’re exploring those right now.

Dan Blumberg: And as you’re building an API first company, like a Stripe or a Twilio, what’s important to you as a developer in building an API that people really want to use, the developers want to use?

Jamiel Sheikh: The most important thing that we focus on is the customer experience. That’s the number one. How does the customer, and whether they’re the developer or they’re the whatever department that’s involved in assessing whatever transactions are occurring, are they able to use the tools that we provide in a very simple and easy way? Can they understand it very, very quickly? I log in. Do I understand what the dashboard is telling me? Do I understand the API very quickly if I’m a developer? Can I build something within an hour? And so we’re focused on being this kind of iceberg, where you have at the tip of the iceberg, it’s very, very simple to understand. It looks pretty easy. But then all this complexity underneath is taken care of for you. And my job is to constantly push that water level up, so all you really see is the tip, and you’re able just to use all of that. And then the rest is just all this value that we’re pushing in. And that’s really what we focus on. Doing tokens is complex. It’s complex work. It’s expensive. We just are focused on making it super easy.

Dan Blumberg: Instamint is not an NFT marketplace, but it does enable companies to create an NFT marketplace. Can you just talk about why a company would want to do that?

Jamiel Sheikh: Well, we leave it to them to figure out why they want to do that. What infrastructure? So if they’ve decided that they want to do that, for whatever reason, they’ve got a business case, we’re there to make it very easy for them. Just like on the payments, if somebody’s selling some widget on an online eCommerce store, Stripe is not going to ask, “Well, why are you selling that? There’s no market for it.” Whatever, they’re not really going to care. If a transaction comes through, Stripe will take care of that transaction and handle the transaction, handle chargebacks. Right?

So our approach is we’re going to give you the tools. You decide if it’s the right business case, and we’ll make it a lot more cost effective and we’ll make it a lot easier. So what takes six months to build, if you hired your own people, that’s half a million dollars, you could do for one hundredth, and maybe in two weeks.

Dan Blumberg: Can you take us back to the moment you said you were looking 10 years into the future, and what’s going to be a need that people are going to have for a long time? Was there an ah-ha moment when you said, “This is the company that I should found”? If there’s a story there, I’d love to hear it.

Jamiel Sheikh: There are a lot of stories there, some painful. But by and large, it’s been this constant listening to people. Since 2017, I’ve probably held 200 events, a lot of them in this location. And you get to meet a lot of people and listen to a lot of ideas. And some of the ideas you filter. You’re like, “That might not really work out.” But you listen to a lot of companies talk about their pain points. I’m listening for pain. What’s the pain in the market? And what’s a big pain? And what’s a pain that’s not going to go away? And what’s a pain that has a low hanging, clearly obvious solution that somebody’s like, “Hey, this is a solution”? I’ll take it now.

So I figured this was something I have to look for. And the middle of last year is when I kind of have this … I wouldn’t say it was an ah-ha moment. It’s the moment like, “Wait a minute, I think this is something I need to build.” And so I set up the company in Delaware in September. October, we started filing for trademarks. November, I had a proof of concept ready. December 1st, we had a customer.

Dan Blumberg: And what did that proof of concept look like?

Jamiel Sheikh: It was very simple. You could mint images. And we had a customer, live customer, deliver Christmas NFT drops by last year, Christmas. So within three, four months, I was able to rapidly build it and get all the paperwork done and raise some capital. By January of this year, we raised some capital. We raised about 450 K in grant money from a bunch of different blockchain companies. It was a pretty rapid discussion with them. They go, “Okay, we like it. Here’s money.” And then I knew by March, April that I had to reduce my burn rate. In the past five months, I went to Vietnam four times and I bought a development company there and renamed it Chain House. We’ve got 100 developers there, so reduced by burn rate by a fifth. So pushing up value and then driving down cost has been effective for us.

Dan Blumberg: I know in the early days, you were thinking about, or one of the primary use, because I think you were thinking about minting NFTs from Instagram. And it’s grown from that. Can you talk about that?

Jamiel Sheikh: Yeah. That was the first idea. All this content on Instagram, why don’t we mint it? And then I heard that Instagram’s going to do that. And so I’m like, “All right. I can’t do that anymore.” I have to pivot away. I’m not going to compete with Instagram. Just doesn’t make sense. Maybe later we’ll come back to that. But in the meantime, while we were talking, while we were working on that, we were meeting with potential customers and like, “Can you do this? Can you do that?” And we were like, “We’re already organically start pivoting away and start addressing additional features.”

So we were building something that you could mint an Instagram photo through an API anyway, and so we just said, “Let’s shift it to this. Let’s now add in analytics and let’s add in the SLAs that enterprises need.” They need to be able … So let’s say I have an accounting department with 500 people. How do you provision the ability for these people to tokenize stuff? How do you manage all the users? How do you get analytics? How do you do KYC? How do you do forensics and all that? So if enterprise wants to pay its employees using wallets, and they set up 10,000 wallets, how do they manage all of that? They kind of helicopter money across the board. And 10 years from now, will we be using crypto to pay payroll? Potentially true. So what tools do I need to be able to manage that?

Dan Blumberg: How do you prioritize? There’s a lot of ideas that you just mentioned that you could be working on. How do you pick what’s next?

Jamiel Sheikh: It’s just whatever the customer wants first. So the customer says, “This is really interesting.” And my response is, “Is this something legitimate that you want to use now or the next year?” And if the answer’s yes, then that’s where our priority … Whatever the customer wants is our priority. We don’t really need to worry about what we think the future looks like. We have an idea on a macro level. This is what the future looks like. That kind of guides us. But then the customers are telling us, “Put this in, put that in.” Obviously, there’s a whole list of things that they want, and some of the stuff we say, “That’s not what we do. We don’t do that.” So we’re very focused on certain things, and we make sure that there are things that we don’t get involved with because then we can get too diluted.

So the customer says, “Hey, can you add in the ability to create a decentralized exchange?” Well, that’s not our thing. We can refer you to other people that can do that, but we don’t do that. So we stay focused, but we prioritize based on what the customer demand is.

Dan Blumberg: Are there other examples of … You gave an example of something you said, “We don’t do that.” Can you give an example of where a customer asked for something or gave you feedback, and you iterated on that?

Jamiel Sheikh: Yeah. With a customer [inaudible 00:16:56], they want delegated administrative capabilities. Boring subject, right? So you’ve got a bunch of admins in a company and they’re delegating the ability for other people to be able to log in to the system. And so you need tools to be able to do that. You need structure. The crypto world doesn’t have any of that. So you have your own wallet and that’s it. I can’t create a wallet for you, and I can’t create a wallet for 10,000 to her people. So a customer will come in, says, “Hey, we want to create 10,000 wallets. How do we do that?” I’m like, “Okay, that is within our scope and within our domain. And that is a problem that we need to solve.”

And so we had conversations with organizations like The World Bank and the IMF. The IMF is a client of ours, the CBDC Think Tank. And they’re looking at: Well, how do we deploy $100 million to a million people through crypto? And so we want to be part of that solution, so that is within the scope. And so when they’re talking about those kind of things, then we’re like, “Is this within the scope?” If it is, we start to do some research around it. What would be the challenges, the technical business, and all that? If there was a business case, there’s some money down the road to be made on this, we will then move towards implementing it.

Dan Blumberg: Again on the why question, so the IMF wants to distribute it, that massive amount of money. Why through crypto?

Jamiel Sheikh: So the World Bank actually had a contest, and we placed pretty well in that contest. We would’ve placed first place had we been open source. We were not open source on the project. What they want is providence and movement of the money, they want it to be traceable. So let’s say there’s a country that is going to get $100 million to use for changing their plumbing, the water system. Right? And they get $100 million. How much of that actually goes to that project? In general, not a lot. You can figure out all the reasons where money goes in the wrong places. Right?

And one of the things, I won’t say crypto, one of the things that blockchain allows you to do is you can approve and preapprove who can and can’t get money. And you can see, you can trace where that money goes and who’s getting it. Right? And so we built, that time we called it flow ledger. It was this ability where I can authorize who can get the money across multiple hops of that money. And now we’ve kind of folded that into Instamint. So we see that. If the World Bank is interested in something like that today, they will probably be more interested in it five years from now as that use case gets more and more viable.

There are some challenges, but blockchain can solve the ability to create transparency around public movement of money, so money that the public needs to see, anti corruption, make sure the right people are getting the money, the right subcontractor is getting that money. Blockchain can help with that.

Dan Blumberg: Got it. In 10 years, what does Instamint look like?

Jamiel Sheikh: I don’t know. We want it to be infrastructure. We don’t want anybody talking about it. It’s not going to be people we … People won’t talk about it like, “Do you use Instamint on the moon?” Nobody’s going to talk about it. It’s kind of going to be like infrastructure in the sense that Wall Street uses infrastructure that people don’t really talk about, like fixed protocol. TIBCO is a product used for messaging that’s heavily in Wall Street, but people don’t talk about it. Right? And I think we will eventually be … Our goal is to be infrastructure that nobody really talks about. It’s boring. It’s not exciting, sexy, oh, we’re going to tokenize photos of apes and things like that. We’re just doing boring stuff. It may be not great margins. It’s low to medium margins, but high volume, and very strong moats and barriers to entry. Right? So we just want to kind of dig in and build that infrastructure.

Dan Blumberg: I love it, solving the non sexy problems. And you kind of stepped on my last question here, which you didn’t know was coming. The question is: In what ways do you expect regular people to be using crypto every day in 10 years without even thinking about it? So in the early days of the web, there was always this question of: Will people put their credit card on a website? And nobody asks that question anymore. And I’m curious, and that’s totally boring and it just happens every day. What are some examples that you see in the near future involving blockchain?

Jamiel Sheikh: If we do hit critical mass, which I think we will in 10 years, people will start to use cryptos. They’ll use it for everyday kind of things. I don’t know if it will be bitcoin or if it’s something, there’s another stable coin called DAI, or you see what these other stable coins are, what it will be. But as soon as vendors and retailers start to accept it, which they’re starting to now, you see that announcement with Circle and Apple. As soon as merchants start accepting that, people will start using it. And that scares a lot of people. That scares a lot of central banks and things like that. But I think we’re far from that, but 10 years from now, I can see myself walking into a restaurant and having lunch and paying for that lunch using crypto. Why not? And possibly getting my salary in crypto, I wouldn’t mind that either.

Dan Blumberg: Jamiel, thank you so much. Jamiel Sheikh is the founder of three companies, Instamint, Chain House, and CBDC Think Tank. So much fun to have you, thank you.

Jamiel Sheikh: Thank you so much.

Dan Blumberg: That’s Jamiel Sheikh speaking to me in New York at Artium’s special fintech event at Rise, created by Barclays. And this is Crafted from Artium. At Artium, we build incredible products, recruit high performing teams, and help you achieve the culture of craft you need to build great software long after we’re gone. We artisans love partnering with creative people to build their visions of the future. If you’ve got an opportunity you’d like to discuss, or just want to learn more about us, check us out at thisisartium.com or drop us a line at hello@thisisartium.com.

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