Around the Block With Jefferson Nunn – Interview With Bill Decker of Next Chain Ventures

Jefferson Nunn  0:09   

Today I’m excited to introduce Bill Decker with Next Chain Ventures. Bill Decker has been in crypto for the last several years. He’s converted firms from web 2.0 to web3.0. He’s been involved in four different token launches, and he served as a CMO for several new companies that are entering the crypto space. And he sits on the board of NextChainVentures.com, which is a venture advisory firm for Crypto, Blockchain and NFT projects. So, let’s tune in and listen to our interview with Bill Decker, NextChainVentures.com. Welcome to another exciting episode of crypto.news and I’m here today with Bill Decker of NextChainVentures.com. Welcome to the show.   

Bill Decker  0:53   

Thank you so much.  

Jefferson Nunn  0:55   

Hey, so yeah, we were just talking a little bit and I mean, right, right. This moment crypto is a little bit down. It’s almost like it’s got a cold. Yes. So, tell me more. What are you writing? Why do you think crypto is just freaking out right now Bitcoin it down to like 30? What’s that all about? 

Bill Decker  1:13   

Well, that’s going to happen. Anytime you have a tech, you’re going to have an anti tech movement. So we saw with Internet stocks where they shot up and then they went down and then they came back up and leveled off. We saw it in 3D printing, where these companies suddenly have these enormous valuations. And then they dropped and then now they’ve gone back up and leveled off. We’ve seen it in broadcast media. So, this is a very common pattern. We’ve seen it over and over and over and over again, I quite frankly, don’t think there’s anything to worry about. I think we are looking at a new echo system, a whole new currency, a whole new way of doing business, which is only going to explode because of all the advantages it has. So short term dips, to me are buying opportunities, not freakout opportunities.

Jefferson Nunn  1:58   

Yeah, so do you think that could I write about the same time that all of this was happening? You know, Bitcoin going down and all that? It seemed like every new source for putting out these articles saying that, you know, Bitcoin is terrible or something where what are they afraid of Bitcoin? 

Bill Decker  2:17   

Well, a lot of people are afraid of Bitcoin, because Bitcoin is one of the truly, and crypto in general is one of the truly disruptive technologies. The example I like to use, is my daughter is up at college in Canada, I’m in the States. And for me to pay her tuition and room and board. over the four years, the transaction cost will be about $4,000. If her school took Bitcoin, the transaction cost would be $30. So what’s the bank going to do? Losing those 3700 bucks. So rather than sit there and say, why don’t we adapt to this and incorporate it, they’re doing what I’ve seen happen over and over again, they’re fighting it, they’re telling us it’s snake oil, and it’s never gonna work, and there’s nothing behind it. It’s very interesting hearing that from a bank, because it wasn’t long ago, we had to bail out every one of them. So while they’re telling us this wonderful central authority, my tax bill went up to help bail out their bad decisions. 

Jefferson Nunn  3:20   

Yeah, I think one of the most informative YouTube videos I’ve watched, and I’ll see if I can find it and put it up on here. It was from the strike CEO, where he described the life of a transaction of say, like, you know, even $1,000. You know, if you do it through the banks, it literally will pass through, you know, eight 910 different people, before it finally reaches the destination. Compare that to crypto, you know, it’s point to point you can move and I’ve seen it, you know, the equivalent of $30 billion for, you know, just a little bit of money. So, tell me more about that point-to-point transaction, I guess?  

Bill Decker  4:07   

Well, it isn’t quite point to point. It will go from one place to the other, but it hits various servers, which we call nodes to verify the transaction. So, think of a cash machine. When you go to a cash machine and you take out $100, it’s going to a server somewhere to validate that cash machine to say, okay, this is Joe, he’s got the money, it’s 100 bucks, it’s coming out, we’ll let it go. And that always happens in a couple of seconds. When you buy bitcoin, it might hit 100 or 500 of these servers. And because it hits so many servers, and because the servers are random, we can actually trust them a little more. As opposed to a cash machine. It’s going to various server they’re getting this overwhelming fee, sometimes $3 at $100 this it’s completely random and that’s what people mean when they say, they are mining Bitcoin, when they say a mining, they’re not actually out there with a shovel. They’re getting a node out there that verifies and validates a transaction. So, the more of those nodes you have, the more mining you’ve done. But it’s completely random. And that’s what makes it true. Of course, this all happens in a matter of a few seconds. 

Jefferson Nunn  5:20   

All right, but still, there’s only just one transaction ticket that ended it happens in just a few minutes, as opposed to the hours that the banks take, right? So 

Bill Decker  5:32   

And no humans. 

Jefferson Nunn  5:34   

And no humans. Yeah, that’s great.

Bill Decker  5:36   

That’s what we mean by when they say a smart contract. There’s no human. 

Jefferson Nunn  5:41   

Decentralized. But let me ask you this with Ethereum. What’s the difference between Bitcoin and Ethereum? I mean, it’s the Ethereum really superior or inferior? 

Bill Decker  5:53   

Well, Ethereum, isn’t it interesting token, because when Ethereum has done is they have built this huge blockchain. And they have gone to application developers and said you don’t have to knock yourself out building a blockchain. You can bolt onto our blockchain. So unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum has a lot more utility to it. And the transactions that you do on the Ethereum blockchain are done, guess what, in the Ethereum token. So Ethereum is a great aid to all these developers that sit there and say, I want to build something, I want to build something I want to build something. But I don’t have the money for a blockchain. Everyone has followed by the way Cardano Solana polygon. They’ve all followed Ethereum as lead and said, why build your own blockchain bolted on to ours? 

Jefferson Nunn  6:46   

That makes sense. So yeah, I understand that Ethereum is a little bit more programmatic. Which, which is nice. And that’s where the NFTs come in. Right? 

Bill Decker  7:00   

NFTs are now everywhere. This so they’re on Ethereum, they’re on PubMatic. They’re on Solana seems to be where the action is happening on the rust Network is what they build it on. And NFTs are more and more common and available to normal regular people who can mint them or create them very, very easily. 

Bill Decker  7:34   

So, it NextChainVentures.com will do is find young crypto companies and blockchain companies and get them fundable. A lot of them say find us money. But a lot of them really don’t have what they need to get money yet. They don’t really have a cohesive plan. They don’t have a strategy built. They haven’t built their budget in their action plan. So, we have to get them through that process before we can take them to actual funders. And we’ll do that kind of soup to nuts deal. We’ve got a portfolio of about 50 companies now. And those companies have come to us some needed very, very hard-core strategy planning some needed simply introductions to money because they were ready. And ultimately, next chain ventures will build a tokenized VC fund. So, you and me can buy stock in our fund for as little as $5. All on an app.  

Jefferson Nunn  8:26   

Hmm. I see. So yeah, it seems like there’s a lot of interest now. I mean, every time I turn on the news, it seems like there’s another vice president of whatever Morgan Stanley leaving to start some blockchain venture. Right. So, or even I see now there’s, there’s this web3.0. There’s a Metaverse and it seems like all the smart people are gravitating towards those types of projects. So, can you tell me a little bit more about what’s coming next? You know, is the metaverse going to take over? 

Bill Decker  9:04   

Well, the metaverse isn’t going to take over just like internet didn’t stop TV. Just like streaming video didn’t stop movie theaters. So anytime you have tech, you get the anti tech people who find it saying this is not replace what you don’t have to replace, you’re augmenting. So, we now watch more TV than we did in history. Even though we have TV on our phones and we have movies on our computers. And we can download we still watch more TV. So, none of this replaces the metaverses station. As far as all the smart people heading, not all of them. A lot of them are very against the tech particularly in the finance industry. I expression for them. I call them CF nose. So, a CFO who goes around saying no because it’s too risky. And finance people traditionally measure risk. That’s the business they’re in They’re not in money, they’re in risk. And when you don’t understand new technology, it’s often very risky to you, or it seems very risky. To me, it’s more risky not to be involved. 

Jefferson Nunn  10:13   

I see. Yeah. Cuz I had Adam Draper on the show a little while back, talking about the metaverse. He was actually involved in the Oculus development, you know, early on. And it seems like there’s a lot of heavy emphasis on that. And I really think that’s something I think is going to be, you know, five years out type of thing. But just like five years ago, when we had our spike, everybody started coming in. And now those projects are coming to light. Right? So, I think there’s gonna be a lot of exciting, you know, NFT, Metaverse, different kinds of products coming out of these next few years, which kind of leads to the next question and buying a young enterprising developer, and I want to try to make something that’d be valuable. Which direction should I go in? 

Bill Decker  11:04   

Well, you know, there’s no one answer to that. First of all, if you see Adam Draper tell him he owes me five bucks from the last conference, but there is no one area to go in. To me, the easiest way to head in is NFTs. Because NFTs can be minted from a computer from a phone and NFTs are more than just pieces of art. NFTs or something? There’s a term called a nested NFT. Think of it like a cup sitting up on the internet. And what can you put into that cup? Right? Can you put in digital rights? Can you put it in music? Can you put in videos, can you put in stock certificates? And that’s where that industry is headed. So ultimately, one day I’ll be able to have an NFT. And that NFT will have my entire stock portfolio, which can be a different brokerage accounts and have different owners and different trustees and different stocks. But it’s all in one place in this vessel sitting on the internet, where my heirs can access it. 

Jefferson Nunn  12:10   

Yeah, that makes sense. And I’ll be sure to pass your message along. Yeah, awesome stuff. I mean, I’ve seen some of the like on your Next Chain Ventures website, I see some printing incubators and so forth, do you think and I actually been seeing a lot more the if you have NFT will help you monetize it type of thing. So, do you think some of that ownership within NFTs and everything is going to be popular? 

Bill Decker  12:42   

Well, you know, the idea of 3D printing, and NFTs, comes to digital rights management. So, what you can do now is I can take a picture of a drawing a picture of a coffee cup, and I can print it. Well, what happened to the artist designer who built the coffee cup, how is he or she getting paid. And when you start to look at blockchain, think of it like a puzzle that you can put together a whole bunch of different ways. So, each time we put the puzzle together, it would be unique. And that way, when I spend my dollar to get the CAD drawings, I can print it. That’s where blockchain comes in. Okay, I’ve got a sequence of numbers that put together the blockchain and printed that cup. If you, did it, you get a different sequence of numbers. So that’s where digital rights management comes in. And that’s why it dovetails so well, with NFTs. I can create a song and I can try to hook it to a label, or I can put it up on YouTube. Or I can send it around the world or I can put it into an NFT where my rights are protected. So that’s the intersection of 3D printing in NFTs. 

Jefferson Nunn  13:51   

I think that 3D printing is something that over time, it’s gonna be very exciting to read them I say that I just had Tony with Reality Gaming Group on my show a little bit ago. And he has the Doctor Who IT for NFTs and I was just thinking it’d be really cool if somebody owned a particular look or style or whatever, Doctor Who that that could then offer 3D printing services for that particular object. So, I know there’s a lot of emphasis now on, you know, even Pokémon you know, being able to 3D print and print Pokémon characters in different styles and poses, right. So, do you think that’d be up and coming that people would be able to 3D print different toys that they now have the race too? 

Bill Decker  14:49   

Well, it’s not up and coming it’s here now. Wow, we’ve had here for many years. Prior to this, we ran the largest media company in 3D printing. So, this is a language I speak and, like, there are 3D printers available to print pretty much anything you can imagine. From Legos to airplane wings, the wing on the 787 is 3D printed, houses are printed, kidneys, corneas, so the idea Pokémon, that’s, that’s child’s play. That’s, that’s, that’s early, early days of 3D printing. 

Jefferson Nunn  15:29   

That’s awesome. Because, you know, even games like destiny two, or even property, like I said, Doctor Who and so on, a lot of times, they’ll have these, if you will, 3D toys, you know, things that you know, they want to monetize. And like you say, I think that you could have been an excellent way to monetize it. So that’s, that’s amazing. If somebody wanted to find out more about that, how do they get in touch with your, your project? 

Bill Decker  15:57   

Well, if they’re interested in 3D printing, they can go to the 3D printing channel. So, it’s 3Dprintingchannel.com. And they can take a look and see videos that we’ve done, and you know, they can connect with us there at in blockchain, they can find us at NextChainVentures.com. 

Jefferson Nunn  16:15   

Awesome. And if they want to reach out to you, because they have an exciting idea, how can they do that? 

Bill Decker  16:20   

They can do it at [email protected]. 

Jefferson Nunn  16:25   

Awesome. Well, this has been really informative. And, you know, there’s a 3D printer now and the space station and they were even 3D printing replacement parts. It’s really, really amazing stuff. So, I think over time, this is going to be one of those exciting things where people can 3D print and not have to wait for Amazon to ship you something, right? 

Bill Decker  16:52   

That’s absolutely correct. That’s absolutely correct. You, you can you can print a lot of stuff at home, or you can use a service bureau. There are people out there with 3D printers that they’ll rent your time on. So, you don’t have to buy a machine. 

Jefferson Nunn  17:06   

Just down the street. We have been and they’ve been saying they keep printing all the 3D Pokémon stuff. It’s amazing. So, a lot of kids like Pokémon these days. So alright, well, I like it, that it’s been very informative. Is there anything else you’d like to share with our audience? 

Bill Decker  17:26   

You know, I think everyone should look at the three or four tenets of what’s going on now with cryptocurrency. The first is the tokens themselves everyone’s looking at, and panicking about. The second is this idea that NFTs are more than artwork. The third is this whole idea of decentralized finance, DeFi, we call it and that’s the idea of investing in a project without a major person or bank or institution involved. And you’ve done these DeFi deals, whether you know it or not, if you want a friend go out and share a feature $10 on the table. That’s decentralized finance. Well, with technology today, I can turn on my iPhone and buy five bucks within the hospital in Akron, Ohio, all decentralized. And we can do that on another episode. 

Jefferson Nunn  18:21   

That’s, that’s awesome. I had it with the other DeFi. It’s been really blowing up. But I think a lot of people have been distracted by that yield farming, which in some ways it’s a scam. Right?  

Bill Decker  18:35   

Yes.  

Jefferson Nunn  18:50   

So, I think like you say, I think we’ll see a lot more that, especially now that there are real true stable coins. USDC, for example, has been solid for all this time. And I think as people start to get paid in that, they’ll find that there’s a lot of financial freedom that they haven’t had before. So, yeah, it’s exciting stuff. All right, Bill. Well, it’s been great to have you on the show. And if possible, I like to follow up with you in just a few months. Just to see how things are going if there’s anything exciting, new How did that sound?  

Jefferson Nunn  19:34   

All right. Thanks, Bill. Thanks so much for your time.  

Jefferson Nunn  19:37   

Yeah.