Pav Gill talks to Super Satang!

hello can you hear us yes hello how's it going thank you so much for making time to come today we are all very excited to hear from you thank you pleasure to be here if we got everyone ready yet or you need a few more minutes i think uh we got most of the people here today and uh few people would just be like dropping in uh as like okay so how's everyone today i heard this is

like the best school in thailand yeah that's fast i don't know is that true yes okay great it's worth my time anyway my name is path i'm the chief legal officer of symmex which hopefully is a company you guys are aware and familiar with so just a brief intro um as chief legal officer like my job is to

make sure that everything the company is doing works and complies and wouldn't get us fined or into any kind of trouble anywhere that we operate so we currently operate in a few countries uh singapore thailand australia as well as indonesia and we also do accept through the singapore platform like customers from a lot of different countries uh around the world so basically anything that the company wants to do whether it's roll out a new product or it's

you know deal with a customer dispute or a hr issue get into contractual agreements with partners vendors marketing type like influencers anything that comes to the people and compliance department to look at to make sure that whatever we're doing is okay yeah so that's the brief introduction from my hand thank you so much so i think uh what we discussed is like you could just have like a free flow casual

q a so if you have any questions you would like to ask mr pavgo please go ahead does anyone have any questions now yes so what i'm getting here you may see mostly like uh deal with like other customers and like do you view yourself like also deal like with crypto and you also like trade crypto yeah so it's quite interesting because

um i mean i've been working for about i don't know 13 14 years now i'm only like i'm actually only 39 years old but in may this year just by my wife here so started off doing you know capital markets work that was way back in 2009 to 2015 at that point of time uh fintech was only just just like just starting so it's like 2013 14 15 this financial technology scheme was starting

up so you had a lot of uh small startups look at banks and realize that you know they are very slow and poor in what they're doing and also expensive so these startups started attacking banks from those angles right so whatever the banks were not able to offer customers these startups decided to focus on them and that's how the fintech scene kind of started up and so that's fintech as a whole right using

financial products but yet throwing in a tech element and the reason why they were successful is because if you're in a bank and you want to change anything it takes forever uh you know because it's just a whole school kind of setup like so many processes so many things people's permission to navigate whereas as a startup you have just a few decision makers wanting to do something and they can do it right away so financial technology then moved into the

payment space and payments was when people talk about payments they always think it's associated with banking and and stuff but it's not true like payments is actually a wall of its own you have payments covering card issuers like a credit card debit card that's a payment scheme you have visa mastercard some random ones like diners club which i don't know anyone that uses it amex you also have what you call merchant acquiring so how do for example how you

purchase something online or if you go to the shop right how does that transaction happen this is so it's a very complicated universe called payments and then what happened is from payments um crypto came about and and it's also a funny story because three years ago when i was doing your payments and i used to look at the crypto guys and everyone used to get upset with them they're like who are these weird guys like forever trying to be cool working asking all the silly questions with

their bitcoin and whatever but what no one realized is three years from that point of time until today those are the sexiest guys in the room like everyone wants to be in the scene and i was lucky enough to make that lead into crypto and it was a crazy learning process so it involves understanding blockchain technology understanding the differences between stable coins uh utility tokens cryptocurrencies per se for example bitcoin

are these currencies because a currency is actually something which is recognized as a form of money right that you can use to purchase goods and what is bitcoin actually that or is it like an investment tool um so yeah just to to answer that kind of question like do i invest yes i do but i think in terms of what coins to invest in

there's no way to say unless you yourself make that investment decision it's the same for buying a stock or anything right if you want to buy a car you want to buy a phone you would do the basic research to see like what the underlying aspects of it is i mean are and it's the same for coins um so that's how i think all investment decisions should be made thank you for that wonderful answer so do we have any more questions just how do you think blockchain technology will develop and

how will regulations and laws be adjusted to adapt to that development and blockchain technology do you think they'll sanction the blockchain technology or do you think they'll try and like adjust it so it accommodates the blockchain technology so could could the question be repeated chris maybe yeah okay so first i said how do you think um

blockchain technology will develop in the future and how will laws and regulations be adjusted to adapt to that development in blockchain technology okay yeah so this is a classic example of um how you know technology is the one that's leading the way and regulations is kind of playing catch up uh in the traditional finance world what used to happen is you would have like

very old banking laws you know sometimes drafted in late 1800s something every few years they'll be amended because some some wise guy will find a loophole and then a draft bill would be up even you know enacted to fix that loophole so everything was quite stable and then you had new products being invented by big banks like goldman sachs and morgan stanley um and if you have some historical knowledge you will also realize that a

lot of these funky products resulted in a few economic crisis and crashes like the subprime mortgage uh crisis of the 90s i was in 2000 i remember um so with the fintech firms that popped up they actually wanted to be operating in the grade so fintech's original selling point was that because they're taking only small aspects of what the banks are doing

which is a regulated industry the question is should they be regulated as well right and regulators didn't know the answer to the question so of course everyone kept trying to pull them into the whole traditional uh legal system so they were saying yes even though you're doing an aspect of what we are doing what the banks are doing you still somehow need to be regulated because they're dealing with people's money but that took a very long time to think about because you had so many of these

firms popping up doing so many different aspects for example cyber security right or data privacy and protection this is a very new concept uh for example in thailand it's only being implemented now in june so but yet you're talking about all these firms having access to customers personal data so crypto was even more uh to the extreme like with the x with the sudden boom of bitcoin and the adoption of blockchain

technology this was completely new because i think you're talking about a completely new revolutionary product which even which no regulator could foresee like 10 years ago or 20 years ago or even if they did suspect it would happen no one would have expected how it took place like what currently you know it's worth like trillions right no one unders no one could foresee that so now what's happening is regulators are starting to sit down and figure out not only the tech

but how do we first understand the tech and then enact if necessary completely new laws to deal with this and it's okay if you do that but it's not stagnant right like every day something's happening like if you look at the last one two years no one at web 3 no one knew what nfts were it didn't exist no one had a better verse concept so how are regulators constantly going to play catch up with this question and that's what makes being in the industry from a legal

perspective very exciting because you are operating in the gray zone right so many things that you're doing there's no clear answer to from a legal perspective but your job is to be able to confidently tell the company that you can do this you can launch this product even though there's no exact laws governing it because for example you know there's no anti-money laundering there's no money laundering risk here uh customers will benefit from it

and we have all these other protections in place to ensure for example if a regulator asks us like why is this why are you doing this you can be confident enough to explain and deal with their concerns so in terms of how like blockchain would develop i think i i don't know um it's what i can see happening is the fact that countries are trying to adopt it right whether it's through their own digital currency like china's coming up with digital again

thailand's got digital but so i think blockchain as a technology is being adopted banks are adopting it um the whole interesting conflict as to why governments don't like cryptocurrency in my view at least is because when you have crypto you're actually taking away like the power from developments and getting into the people because how does a government know what you are doing is very simple like

any car transaction you're making goes to the bank and the bank has i mean the government has the power to demand to see those transactions so you're actually being monitored from a financial point of view whereas if you have crypto that is not easy to eat then you can't do that so easily like you could be doing whatever you want every government cannot have that visibility unless it is so savvy that it's going to invest in blockchain analytics tools just to spy on people right so you've

got a lot of blockchain analytics tools like chain analysis elliptic all these products that can actually scan the blockchain and see exactly what you're doing but you know that's so that's the exciting and scary thing about it as well so people always say like you know crypto is very anonymous and stuff but it's actually super transparent if you know how to use those tools yeah i think that's like a really really uh interesting thing to understand because like

a lot of us have heard about crypto but actually don't know what it's all about and why it's actually different from that so that's a really good answer to like give us insight so does anyone else have any other questions yes there was a time where a picture was very promising and for example when bitcoin partnered with the mall group and they allowed crypto to be used to

purchase goods and car dealerships were also accepting crypto as payment but um these obviously resulted in rocketing value of crystal coins but however suddenly things changed and all this went up in air so um as a lawyer's point of view could you share with us what happened and why why crypto didn't continue to increase and why it isn't doing as well as the beginning okay so i mean that's a very complicated

question if we go down into it but when bitcoin did using that as an example when bitcoin was first uh created as a currency it was meant to be used as a currency so why is that different because if you look at currencies and bitcoin and investment products they do not they are completely opposite in terms of objectives and why do i say that is because

when you look at currency you want it to be stable right like a buyer and a seller of a good wants to have a stable currency or medium of reference which is like u.s dollars or or thai bud so if you own if you are a sell of cars you want to you want to be certain what the purchase price of the car that you bought you created this and how much you can sell it for and then how much you can as a result earn right and as a buyer you want to have that certainty

that if you put aside x amount of money you can buy that car the problem is that bitcoin is had more from that philosophy as a currency to be more of an investment tool so a lot of people that now buy bitcoin are buying it in the hopes that the value will increase right so that's no longer a currency concept that's an investment product concept because only in an investment product would you put your money in there hope for it to increase

so from a government standpoint or at least this is the policy argument that they're making which is we don't want you to be able to use cryptocurrencies to purchase goods and services because there's no certainty and it's too volatile um i mean that's their argument i don't agree with it because in my view like if i'm a buyer and seller whatever means i want to sell this product is up to me as long as the

customer accepts it right if i want to sell my car for like 20 cows and the customer is willing to give me 20 pounds for it then that's a private contract that's we are both happy but i don't want anyone else telling me like why i can't do that governments also don't like crypto because of tax aspects so they don't know how to earn money of that because in a traditional payment setting you can charge goods and services tax on

on the item very flat like you know maybe seven percent taxes applied everyone knows like what's going to happen whereas in a crypto sense but you can't imagine if you charge like seven percent tax on a purchase of uh one bitcoin and then that bitcoin value increased to like double in the next two months like imagine the tax hit on on the president you know having to declare that it's so it's all these complicated issues uh which are

forming policy arguments in governments to prevent crypto from being used as a means of payment uh yeah so so i i hope that kind of addresses it thank you for that answer that gives us a lot of clarity so i think we have time for one or two more one more one more one more question so um aside from like uh crypto being a medium of exchange but obviously we don't see that too often but uh what do you think is a secondary function or

maybe function function of cryptocurrency i mean it's it's an investment tool like it's they're all investment products the way they're currently being positioned and i think that's why they're very risky as well because if you have investment products they tend to be very regulated right like you're talking about stocks bonds um and all those other traditional like funds they're all regulated by their own

uh you know heavy complicated laws and they're also licensed whereas now you have a situation where anyone can pretty much come up with a white paper um not necessarily disclose who the owners are and then try to list the coin get a few famous people to talk about the coin and hope that you have a lot of initial investment that drives the coin price up and then they just sell out that's what you call like a pump and dumpster or

rocket pool and then those people just disappear uh so i think that's why as an investment product which is one of its uses um governments are very against it and they keep telling everyone to be aware of it i think in terms of other uses it's not crypto per se but more blockchain technology like what can you use it for uh you can use it for all kinds of things like you know it's a it's a it's a ledger at the end of the day

uh which is transparent and a lot of accusations are also being made that cryptocurrencies are being used to facilitate for example drug trades or illicit activity you know that's one of the secondary if you want to consider use cases that people like to talk about but it's not true because again with all these analytical tools only if you look at statistics only 15 of transactions for example last year were used

in crypto for illicit activities um it's it's really not so it's really overkill the way the fears are being generated on that and a lot of this depends again right are you gonna sign up with the license exchange if you are licensed exchange what are your obligations and there's this new thing that's kicking in globally called the travel group and what the travel rule says is it imposes on all license exchanges and what you call vasps which is virtual

asset service providers so anyone that's facilitating moving like storing and moving crypto from one wallet to another the minute the lies what the travel rule says is you need to identify um each part of the way who the sender and the receiver is going to be so that way no matter how many chains you're going through each vest has to report better so there's just no escape like it's as transparent as it gets

and and for your info that trigger to make that reporting requirement is only about a thousand five hundred dollars and it's not like twenty thousand like a traditional thank you one where you need to declare your source of funds and stuff oh yeah i think we should end it here because we're on a time crunch now so thank you so much for giving that valuable insight and i think we all learned something very valuable here and got like at least one or two things that we could like use to be handy uh when

investing like like learning about crypto and blockchain and the future of it and we really like to thank you for giving your time here and giving us this knowledge and just thank you so much for being here let's go everybody