A Better Way to Fund Cities with Crypto & CityCoins - Patrick Stanley 'CEO of Freehold'

Jake: Patrick, thanks for coming on the show. How are you doing day? My friend.

Patrick Stanley: I'm good. I'm good. Thanks for having me.

Jake: I appreciate it. I want to start with the most important question, which is, are you Satoshi Nakamoto?

Patrick Stanley: No, Satoshi was a genius. Probably no one will ever know who they are.

Jake: Yeah. I asked a couple people if I should ask that and they were like, no, man, he's too young. It can't be him. And I'm like, we're putting it in age brackets now. Like he has to be past 19, whatever. So I've got some questions and I want to start [00:02:00] on your LinkedIn page, I saw that you went to Johns Hopkins studying economics and psychology, which seems like a pretty deadly combo for understanding the incentive structures and the game theory that makes crypto really, really work. How did you get exposed to crypto? What was the thing that sent you down the rabbit hole?

Patrick Stanley: Yeah. And I would just say to preface, college just gives you a menu of course options. It doesn't necessarily teach you the most critical things that are going to be useful in the real world. I'd say, you know, my focus was, psychology and economics, both. Both are like pretty dismal sciences. So, you know, to use the pun that term rather. And, I've learned so much more by working on crypto directly.

So like, , kind of have sour grapes on the whole college experience didn't really feel like I learned a lot. Um, not, not very bullish in Johns Hopkins, but, in terms of like, when I got into crypto got into crypto, like a year or two [00:03:00] after college, so 2012, and I first heard about Bitcoin and, you know, it was trading at, gosh, I forget who it was under $90.

I'm almost positive might've been a low double digits some time when a crash had happened, but all I remember my sort of foggy memory there is like, this seems cool. I wonder if it'll last, and me and my brother like bought a bunch and, you know, we like buy a bunch.

I mean like a handful and, you know, we like sold it at some point in time and that was a huge mistake but yeah kinda got in through that and it was funny cause I don't know which came first. Whether I was asking the question of what is money? Or whether Bitcoin prompted that question but around that time I started diving down that rabbit hole deeper and,, it's a good one to explore and it kind of gives you an appreciation for what Bitcoin is.

Jake: Yeah, I know. I feel like that's the first question that once you kinda get the first inkling of what crypto is, is you start to ask like, well, why does it even have value then?

And then you're like, well, why does anything have value? Why does my [00:04:00] paper in my wallet have value? And. He started to kind of go down that rabbit hole of like narrative and we're all kind of like connected by that. So as long as our counterparty agrees, then it does have value.

Patrick Stanley: It's pretty wild that we didn't have 24 7. tradeable markets for essentially anything you could imagine being valued before Satoshi came along.

Jake: That's a great point. Yeah. I realized that cause I'm like, oh yeah, I'll just hop in here and buy this, buy that. And you realize that it almost feels like you're cheating when you do it at first, because it's so against the norm when you missed your window to buy Tesla because the stock exchange closed. Yeah. Went to number one to see the price move.

Patrick Stanley: I'm sure. That's how feudal serfs, felt when they were becoming a part of the mercantile class this feels like we shouldn't be doing this. It's like, well, actually, you know markets are essentially just going to eat everything and everyone's going to become an investor and you're either going to be in a small minority of people not participating in that, or you're going to [00:05:00] participate in it and I think it's going to essentially make the whole world wealthier.

It's like everyone essentially is agreeing to opt into various coins. It doesn't have to be Bitcoin. It can be other coins too. No people can decide their value. If people decide Ethereum is worth X you'll decide doge coin is worth Y. And, I think we're gonna break that feeling pretty soon. I feel like we're definitely also sort of crossing the chasm into more mainstream with NFT's. Essentially the whole crypto, I think NFT's definitely helped crossing the chasm into public discourse. El Salvador, buying Bitcoin as a nation state that is understanding that they need to HODL for their own self sovereignty. It's only gonna continue from here.

Jake: A hundred percent. Yeah. I think that the earliest movers, just like you buying Bitcoin at $90, uh, are gonna reap the most rewards. And we're already kind of seeing kind of like with the Brian Armstrong tweet thread last night, where we're [00:06:00] seeing the institutions and the powers that be start to push back and not really be not really be fair participants in trying to make it a fair game or even understand it. but I agree like the, it seems like the energy is already too far gone, even though to the average person would just, they have no idea.

Patrick Stanley: If people in Congress hold crypto ,more and more of their kids and their kids' kids. they hold them themselves. What you're seeing with we always see with Brian Armstrong by the way, is, is, um, maybe this will age poorly, but for the time being, I think it looks genius because what he's doing is he's creating an inhospitable court of public opinion prior to any potential move that the SEC could make.

Essentially he's questioned the SEC legitimacy publicly and to great fanfare. And, essentially the waters is that they have the SEC has to climb into now would further ruin their legitimacy if they [00:07:00] were to prosecute Coinbase additionally, Or sue Coinbase rather. And additionally, they send a signal that crypto is not welcome in the U S. The fastest growing industry that could be, you know, the multi, like the, the, the tens of trillions of dollar, if not hundreds of trillions of dollar you know, cash cow and sort of like new economy, if you're going to push the out of America. Crypto founders are way, way, way more mobile than tech founders. Not all of them are going to leave the U S but many of them will or they'll go Psedonomous, you know? So it's really kind of an own goal, in my opinion.

It does draw it. It does like, um, I'm not a conspiracy theorist. I never, I try not to jump to conclusions that are unfounded or not empirical, but it does call into question like, who benefits from this? Is it customers? Doesn't, it's not clear that the customer has benefited from it seems like, it seems like everyone's pretty much loving, these types of products and they're willing participants.

So [00:08:00] who does it benefit? You know, banks have really low APY, below 0.4%. Sometimes banks have like 1.1% APY, 10 basis points of APY does not compete. 400 basis points of APY in a cryptocurrency, you know, in cryptocurrencies that have the potential to go up in value, which they have a pretty consistently over the dollar.

So when people are not, people are investing in saving, um in crypto and not, on Fiat rails anymore. Like I know a lot of people that don't even own stock, so like I'm not messing with stocks. That's, you know, stocks are just, are just like, are just like crypto on, on less good tech. Like that's how they're viewing it.

Sort of.

Jake: Yeah, no, I think I, yes. Spot on because if you look at what they're targeting, they're targeting the lending program of it, where you can park your assets and then gain a yield on it. And the yields that you can get from crypto are so astronomically [00:09:00] higher than what you can get in the traditional markets that they can't even compete.

So the only real option is to block it or to jump on ship. And because they probably already feel like it's too late or they can't control it.

Patrick Stanley: They leapfrogged and went for Coinbase. Talking to any of the prior, um, , providers that have been doing the exact same thing for years now.

Jake: Yeah. And they're doing it and they're doing it.

I mean, the way that he phrased it too, it was about just tell us what to do. It was like, we want to play ball with you. We're trying to be as legal and legitimate as possible.

Patrick Stanley: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And he's saying, tell us what to do. And the SEC was leaving enough. Um, leaving him. Sort of like vagueness so that they have the right to prosecute anytime and keep the book open and essentially, uh, scare, Coinbase. This is very similar to, to like, Just put it this way.

[00:10:00] Like they're trying to bully Coinbase. They're not trying to work with Coinbase and that is drawing into question their legitimacy. And, my fear is that because we've like crossed the sort of Rubicon here, the SEC just like the, WHO have gotten to a point, at least on crypto Twitter, which might be the court of public opinion, the only court of public opinion that ultimately matters, or maybe one, one of the, one of the two or three.

But significant nonetheless, they've crossed the Rubicon. they're being seen as not legitimate in the eyes of too many people online and people are gonna have a hard time unseeing what they did to Coinbase. Unless the SEC can respond with some guidance or, or essentially, um, you know, close the book and move on from that particular incident with Coinbase.

But, so if they do either of those things, they can likely preserve some of the reputation in my opinion, and continue doing those scare tactics until they cross the line but some other company [00:11:00] that does the same thing. So my fear is that, uh, at some point in time, when the legitimacy is damaged enough, people are essentially going to, like, there will be people that, that don't respond to them the way they're used to being responded to lets put it that way. Like, and I think that could cause them to become more draconian and more, um, seemingly unreasonable and threatening to one of America's biggest potential, you know, economies of growth.

Jake: That makes perfect sense. It's one of those things where even if you were just to say, like, we're not sure, but we're not sure of just inviting people to the table and having discussions is going to give you the fastest education and like the actual, uh, like at the base level learning to not make mistakes going forward from crypto policy to [00:12:00] transparency.

Any of those things,

Patrick Stanley: they didn't expect anyone to blow up their spot.

Jake: Yeah. I think when you're, when you're the top dog in the ivory castle, it's kind of hard to feel like you have anybody that can come at you,

Patrick Stanley: but people are going to do this more and more. They're going to tell their stories of bullying.

That's going to be a thing now, like Armstrong broke that seal. That's that's going to be something that people do.

Um, should we talk about another topic though?

Jake: Yeah, let's move on. Before we go to CityCoins, I want to talk about your time at Blockstack and you were the Head of Growth there. First. Can you place me? When did you join them? Uh, and what was your, what was your kind of day to day activities at the, at the

Patrick Stanley: project?

Sure. So, um, I found out I was taking some time off to just like travel, read books, you know, figure out what I want to do next in life in 2016. And I found Blockstack and I was like, oh my God, [00:13:00] this is great. Um, cause it really lined up with a lot of my thinking on essentially Bitcoin being this like foundation for you know, essentially like new civilization or for at least the financial internet. And to me, it had to be Bitcoin. There's a lot of things going into it beyond the first mover, you know, the security, the kind of like hardness of it. Um, and while I think that people will invest in other coins and that's great, I think Bitcoin will be the category winner for such a long time that people will begin to develop applications on top.

Like, you know, applications that protect your data applications that, um, you know, leverage Bitcoin for a new financial rails like DeFI and, interviewed them. I was in. I was in Zurich at the time, for some reason. And, um, interview with the founders, there was like one other full-time employee and then like one contractor working there.

And, [00:14:00] you know, I, I prepped for the interview by creating a 22 page, I think was like 20, a 22 page slide deck that took me to, that took me two weeks to create. And part of the reason I've prepped so hard is just Blockstack really fell very neatly into kind of what I was betting on in the future. So like I had to get this job, like these were, you know, PhDs from Princeton who you know.

Have already built a lot of the sort of rails for success, and so when I started working, you know, they accepted me, thankfully when I started working there, I essentially was just like growth community, essentially. It was like community and, quickly like hired folks and I became a Head of Growth within, I think it was like under a year and was their Head of Growth for a few years.

that was great. We got like hundreds of applications built. Um, you know, we came up with the new proof of transfer consensus mechanism while I was there, I got on the white paper and, you know, I think there was [00:15:00] a publicly held, uh, sort of patent around that, um, that was like a really exciting, exciting, exciting time, and even more confident, even more excited honestly now.

Ive never been this confident , never been this excited. And I think there's a lot of hard to ignore factors about Stacks that matter, you know, making me optimistic about its future and the future. Glad I joined the team. I can't imagine otherwise.

Jake: And there was one video that they released.

So when you go to their Stacks YouTube, they have like 6 million views, but almost all of them are on one video that explains what Blockstack is. Did you have a hand in creating that video?

Patrick Stanley: Um, yes. I had a hand in creating that video.

Jake: It's a, it's a brilliant, brilliant, uh, video that's super well done. Uh, I was just curious, like about the timing.

Patrick Stanley: And that, that actually you, it's funny, like Blockstack kinda built the last pieces first. And then the first piece is last [00:16:00] leading up to the stack 2.0 network upgrade and essentially where they started with was data privacy using a specific Bitcoin anchored user ID.

That can be used to like sign into applications that were ultra private, ultra secure. It's like we have all this really high performance, privacy tech that's like already exists. And, we worked on the sort of like smart contracts for Bitcoin and stuff next which is like popping off right now.

And, Yeah. So like that video is a little dated, but I think it'll become more relevant probably in like your 20, 28 or something.

Jake: Interesting. Yeah. I think Muneeb said one time that when everyone else zigs, Stacks zags, and like

Patrick Stanley: Not on purpose not on purpose by accident, it just

Jake: makes sense. You guys are just going full steam and you just happen to go against whatever the rest of the market's currently doing.

Patrick Stanley: That's a very kind way of putting it.

Jake: Okay. So one of the, yeah, one of the brilliant things that [00:17:00] Stacks brings to life is the proof of transfer mechanism. And it's one of those things where trying to describe crypto to an average, Joe, it's already somewhat difficult. There's like eight layers of abstraction.

You've got to go through. And the proof of transfer mechanism and stacking is just 10 levels deeper. But once you get it, it's genius. It's absolute genius. And yeah. The CityCoins use of that. I think the more I look into city coins and do research on it, the more, I think it's also genius because when you look at how change happens For these kind of like polarizing topics.

It usually happens local first and then as they become like a proof of concept and then it expands from there. So I can see how, like it started with marriage rights and then it was legal marijuana. And I can, I can see in a future CityCoins and MiamiCoin being the kind of Trojan [00:18:00] horse that like becomes the catalyst that goes across the country.

Patrick Stanley: What you want is, you know, elected governments like the governance model we have to elect our politicians, I think is directionally good. Like we don't need to they probably don't need to change that very much, except for like maybe like ranked order voting, being more popular. But I think. by and large, some of our institutions are worth saving.

You know, I don't really believe in like crypto anarchy. I think if you can equip, you know, old institutions that are you going equip old institutions that, you know have to do a job. Like someone's got to do it. They're doing that with new technology that keeps them accountable. That adds a new point of leverage for them to use.

It's like a new opportunity to be, to be competed with. I essentially think you can upgrade them. Yeah. Preserve some of the kind of good elements of what we have in local government and also enhance with some of the tools that we have with crypto.

And so, you know, 200 [00:19:00] years from now, It's not like, do you really think we're going to be organizing the exact same way we are today? With like same technology, same voting systems, you know, same, same everything, like probably not. And, I think what's really interesting about this whole CityCoins model is the alignment of incentives.

So like the city is aligned because they earn more the more the protocol is used, the coin holders are aligned because they also earn more as the protocol is used and they have like, um, they have an incentive for the success of both the city, but also the protocol, maybe you could just call them one in the same.

And I think that's pretty great. Like, I look at a city like San Francisco. Like that's a beautiful act. That's actually a beautiful city. Location is beautiful. Um, a lot of the parts of beautiful, a lot of rich history, great architecture, good food, but it's got all sorts of issues with that.

You know, I think just living there or whatever, I feel like people have their day-to-day jobs. They're like, you know, a lot of the population is like [00:20:00] so exhausted by the time the day's over. They're not going to like town hall meetings. They're not moving around their community, papering fliering and I think in some, some part.

Getting elected. If you won, you end up getting elected officials who don't truly represent what the community is actually asking for. That's one thing just as a, as like a side note, but two, sometimes you get a negative bias toward change coming from the people who have the most time on their hands or the people who have the biggest meme allergy to the thing, you know, like for example, if you have a meeting on like, should we preserve outdoor dining, you're going to get a bunch of people showing up to that thing that have weren't experiencing outdoor dining that.

They live next to a place that does outdoor dining and they all show up and they're just enraged. And you think, oh, the whole time, the whole town doesn't want this. You know with CityCoins, you can vote with your coins effectively, directionally. So like, if you're holding the coin, you're committed to the city.

If you buy the coin, you're bullish on [00:21:00] city leadership and the capital allocation of that, of how that city is handling their capital. If you sell the coin, you're bearish on city leadership and you're bearish on how the capital is being allocated. And you can always program apps for the coin if you want to.

There's always that option. But I think the voting aspect in that sense is very, very interesting. Maybe in the future, it will get more granular and people can vote on like civic items, directionally voting, I think is like really cool.

Jake: I think it's brilliant that you can, it gives you a much faster feedback loop that doesn't exist currently.

Patrick Stanley: Big time. My friend Jay, well, new acquaintance, uh, more so Jack butcher, who is like phenomenal at design simply he, um, he had this really good tweet. The tweet was, it was very concise. It was, "it used to be big if true. Now it's true. If big." And when I was reading that quote, maybe markets where in my mind, but I was thinking [00:22:00] like, you know, the market, the market is, is kind of like the voting system.

Or the wet, you know, the, the weighing system in terms of like what the truth of the matter of something he has, if enough, people want a truth to be a thing, they'll put their money where their mouth is, and that'll be reflected in the market. And I just think that quote is like a that's like a under appreciated quote from crypto Twitter that relates to this.

Jake: I like that. that makes a lot of sense. So we're in, I think we're a little over a month since CityCoins launched and there's been mining going on, which people have been going crazy for how much has been raised for the city as of right now?

Patrick Stanley: Yeah. So before the little market dip, a couple of days ago, we as a community contributed to $4 million worth of Stacks reserved for the city.

Jake: That's insane. Yeah.

Patrick Stanley: And this is like people opting into a tax. [00:23:00]

Jake: Yeah, no, exactly. Right. Like the voting mechanism and the most important thing that people vote for or vote with is their dollars because you know what? Most people live paycheck to paycheck. So they're not as mobile as they could be.

But if you spend some of your hard-earned dollars on this thing, it speaks volumes. Um, I heard there's a vote on the 13th. What, what is that vote voting on it?

Patrick Stanley: Exactly. So Miami gov their commission just votes on whether they can accept a sort of protocol, donation or contribution, if you will. That being the 4 million. And all the subsequent earnings it earns.

It's like CityCoins as effectively as a protocol donating directly to the city ongoing.

And the vote is for not, uh,

the the vote is to no, no, no. The vote is to accept the critical contribution. Initially, they're going to [00:24:00] receive all of it in USD. So they'll have a trusted third party that automatically converts automatically converts all their earnings to us.

Jake: Interesting. Okay. That's that's good to know. Cause my next question was if they have to secure the bag of stacks and then convert it, that's a whole different layer of, you know, legal troubles, but you're going straight. You're dipping that in the, but before you even get there to reboot,

Patrick Stanley: They'll eventually be able to hold crypto.

I think like they're there, they're on it. Like they're, they're asking for it. They're trying to do it with the Florida state legislature. But, you know, maybe the community can demand it and like, you know, like speak up. So it's not just them working on it, but they're definitely on it. And once they do that, it'd be very interesting to see if they use their Stacks earnings from what the miners send to mine new Miami coin.

They use the Stacks earnings to mine, their own coins. I think that'd be great.

Jake: Interesting.

Patrick Stanley: That'd be like, I think that would actually [00:25:00] be very healthy.

Jake: Okay. I want to be respectful of your time. So I've got a couple more questions. Uh, you have a hackathon going on right now. What have you seen?

That's coming down the pipeline. Anything you can disclose.

Patrick Stanley: Yeah, for sure. well, I'm, you know this is all viewable in chat.CityCoins.co discord server, everyone just like kind of pushing, pushing things out there and I'm watching them. so one, one app is called Miami voice essentially allows the demo app to demo what voting a specific agenda items would look like using your Miami coin.

I don't know if they're requiring you to spend your money coin or just like stake it or delegate it or something, but they're working on that. Um, and then presumably if you got Miami gov to adopt something like that, and it stopped being a demo, that'd be very interesting because you essentially have the market, you know, kind of like voting on things on a granular level in terms of what they [00:26:00] want the city to spend their funds on.

Um, another thing someone is making is essentially like a visualization dashboard that shows current amounts stacked, and allows you to like mine and stack and all this good stuff. there's a handful of others oh, there's the one that's like a proof of HODL uh, access control to physical spaces, especially if you have like Miami point cafe, you know, like all the coffee is free.

If you, you know, prove you hold some MiamiCoin

Jake: yeah, that one's brilliant. That has so much utility.

Patrick Stanley: Yeah. It's kind of like a whimsical idea in some, in some ways, but it also is kind of fascinating because like imagine if you had proof of HODL access control for Miami coin holders in Berlin. It's like that, you know, that apartment or cafe temporarily becomes like a Miami embassy in a way.

Jake: Oh yeah. Or it can be like a MiamiCoin timeshare where you can kind of like pop in, pop out because you're part of the, you're part of the, [00:27:00] uh,

Patrick Stanley: totally like we like, like WeWork or Soho house.

Jake: Yep. Yep. That's smart. Okay. What do you have on the roadmap for, I won't say next city, but I'm curious in the next. Year, what is, what are you guys working on? And

Patrick Stanley: I mean, you're, you're, you're, you should ask yourself, like, we're, we're all a part of one big community. And I think we collectively have to figure that out, but if it, you know, if it was so something I'm going to like mention to the community as something to like discuss and decide if it's a good idea, is. You know, right now we're on first base with Miami and, you know, we recorded this prior to September 13th. So people are listening to this. Now, now Miami will have either picked up their political contribution on the 13th or not, but if they do, that's like fully on first base, second, like third base looks like,

you know, there's a lot of qualified cities that can just activate themselves. , you know, like maybe the mayor [00:28:00] like puts laser beams in their eyes and like, boom the codes of begin mining that coin just initiates like that's, that's like third base, second base. I think second base, I think is like we as a community come together and say, "Hey, Miami deserves good company."

We're not going to go from like Miami to, you know Small town USA, because that would actually hurt Miami's brand for one. And secondly I mean, you're just hurt Miami's Brand and it hurt the whole ecosystems brand. we should just keep our expectations very high and continue on with awesome cities,, but maybe keep the focus on just a few in the early days.

So people's attention isn't so diffused or. distracted. And if I were, you know, you, you could think of like some, you know, some things that community members have like posted that actually turned into a survey was New York, Singapore, Seoul. Those are like two worlds. Those are three world-class cities that all have their, their like major pluses to them and very few minuses.

I think that would make sense to like [00:29:00] move forward with a really great cities. No. Then you have more optionality. It's like, okay, you have Miami. Imagine if you got all four imagine you have Miami, New York, Singapore, Seoul, and you then expand. It's like anything could be next to that point.

You can do like London or Paris or whatever. But, you know, your chances of getting London and Paris and all and other big cities like Hong Kong or whatever, you know, are probably less likely if you just open it up completely to any city in the world that wants to do it. I think you get, I think it makes sense to have a very measured approach, but you know, fast growing when the time comes to grow.

Jake: Yeah, I can see that. And I can also see, timeframe or kind of like a tidal wave where as it grows and grows, you kind of see how cities compete for an Amazon HQ, where a city will be doing its own kind of like grassroots efforts to wow. Patrick to come to our city and

Patrick Stanley: I know again, they don't have to wow me. They have to wow the CityCoins community, like the CityCoins community has to be like yes, you know, we're [00:30:00] gonna start mining that coin. And like, I just think there's way, way, way more of a dance that's happening between the city and the community, then you're kind of describing.

And I think it's really important because. If you don't have the city opted in, that's not great. And if you don't have the community opted in, there's no kind of no coin, you know, so they both kind of. They both kind of make that agreement with each other before proceeding sort of thing.

Jake: That, that makes sense. I think, um, I'm newer to crypto and I'm even more new to open source. And I think it's almost like a, there's like a brain rewiring that happens when you go from the traditional world of top-down leadership and clear directives to open source, build whatever you want. And people will hop in and out as they please, because they like the idea and the better the idea, the stronger the community.

Patrick Stanley: Yeah, definitely. And there are very few [00:31:00] things that like truly don't have a leader. Like Bitcoin is one of those things. It's like the meme is the message. People will spread the message and spread the meme. And do do the only work they have to kind of thing.

Jake: Last question. And this is from someone in the community they want to know.

Are you guys going to have a presence at Bitcoin, Miami 2022? And if CityCoins are being planned on use in any capacity?

Patrick Stanley: Hmm. I mean, like for sure there's any members of the community that, that drop dropped down. And, you know I'm sure there'll be people speaking about it. There'll be like, you know new heroes in the CityCoins arise from building, you know, applications or, um, you know, being known for a thing within the community and be worth listening to I think that'll that'll exist.

And, yeah. I wonder if I should do something like someone should do like a pop-up [00:32:00] cafe or that, or like just something cool. Like some art.

Jake: Uh, well, this has been great. where can people learn more about the project?

Patrick Stanley: Yeah. So you can go to CityCoins.co C I T Y C O I N S.co and you can follow on Twitter @MineCityCoins. So that's M I N E CityCoins. And, uh, I'm Patrick W. Stanley on Twitter, if you want to follow.

Jake: Perfect.

Uh, Patrick, thank you for taking the time and being the first guest on the built-on Bitcoin podcast.

Patrick Stanley: My pleasure. You're off to a great, a great start with what you're interested in, and I'm excited that you're so excited aboutCityCoins and I think your podcast is going to be a great success.