1:02Kamal HubbardYeah, clearly reparations has been a topic in the news and states are trying to figure out how to best implement their reparations program. So that being said, what inspired you to create this project?
1:24RJ McDowellHmm, okay, so this is a -- it’s going to be a long answer, but not a boring one. So ironically, during the pandemic, when it first began, on social media, there was a woman that I was following. She was very into fashion, and each day she would post, you know, very expensive high-fashion items with designers, Gucci, YSL, Louis Vuitton, you name it. And you know, our community is big on, you know, name brand items. So she ironically lived in Switzerland. I think she worked for the embassy and she was married to her husband that was also in Switzerland. And I asked her, I went into her DM and I said, can I ask you a question without offending you?
1:24RJ McDowellI said, I noticed that you have over 500,000 followers. and you post these brands. I said, those brands don’t need any help, because this woman, if I didn’t mention, she was African descent. I said, you don’t, you don’t post any, any Black brands, no African brands, no African Americans. And she said, I’m not offended at all. She said, I would gladly do that if I knew of any brands. So her and I began a friendship of sorts, and I started sending her African American brands or just brands that I knew of that were Black-owned that were in Nordstrom, that were in Macy’s, or just brands that I was familiar with.
1:24RJ McDowellSo I started sending them to her, and she was, you know, shocked that these brands even existed. So fast forward, There was a company that, that I was part of, and I had a partner. He and I had a conversation, and we were talking about what if we created a platform similar to Amazon, but all of the products and brands were Black-owned? You know, what if we did that? What if we gave them the opportunity to do that? That way we could help keep, you know, dollars circulating in the community. So that’s one way that it started. And in addition to that, creating that platform, we also talked about crypto and how if we created our own cryptocurrency, we could also issue cryptocurrency rebates to those who shopped on the platform and then also gave referral crypto rebates to the vendors.
1:24RJ McDowellSo that way you have an ecosystem of Black brands that are using the cryptocurrency, uh, and then it just becomes a global, a global thing. So that was the concept. That was back in, um, 2020 initially, uh, when we started having these conversations. However, the crypto conversation started back in 2017. It was just an idea, didn’t do anything with it. Um, personally, I wasn’t really that interested in crypto like many people who, who aren’t familiar with it. It’s something new, it’s something terrifying. Um, with our community, there’s a healthy amount of skepticism, right? So, um, that’s how I felt in 2017, you know. Then I started doing some research, and then I said, okay, I’ll buy some -- what’s this, XRP, right?
1:24RJ McDowellUm, at the time, I didn’t buy any, any Bitcoin. I just ignored it. I assumed like many, that crypto was part of the black market, the dark web. I didn’t want to have anything to do with it. But once we started down this path, um, it was difficult because we had a very difficult time finding developers, uh, in this space, finding an attorney that was in this space. And we had read so many terrifying things about you know, what was happening in the crypto space, and we wanted to do it the right way. So we took our time. Um, we, you know, we got the Mellon e-commerce site up initially, trying to find Black-owned brands that wanted to be part of, you know, uh, the pilot testing.
1:24RJ McDowellAnd then it took us even longer to find an attorney, which we were successful of finally doing that, uh, last year before we ended up, um, going live with the crypto on Juneteenth. So I hope, I hope that answered the question in a roundabout way.
6:02Kamal HubbardOh yeah, it definitely did. I mean, this is -- that’s really the story of the project, so I appreciate you sharing that with me. And you know, something else I want to ask you is what makes your project unique compared to all the others out there? I mean, there’s a lot of Black-focused projects But what makes yours unique? And I think you kind of touched on it, but, uh, you could --
6:28RJ McDowellokay, tell me a little bit more.
6:30Kamal HubbardThat’d be great.
6:31RJ McDowellAnd I want to say, you, you’ve heard, uh, Kamal introduce us as Repar Global Coin. Let me explain where the name came from, okay? Um, Repar, we’re abbreviating the name Repar for reparations, right? That is where we came up with the name of the token. So initially when we came up with the idea, we had so many different names. We wanted to call it Melanin Global Coin. Um, we just went through like a list of names, and then we found out that there was a Melanin Global Coin that someone created a few years back. They just never did anything with it. Uh, then we talked to our trademark attorney and we had to change the name twice.
6:31RJ McDowellAnd then one night, you know how they say something -- God downloads something to you. I went to bed, I woke up in the middle of the night, and that’s where reparations came from. And then everything flowed after that. And what I mean by that is everything in our project, from the name to the amount of tokens that we created to the amount of tokens that we have available for an airdrop, all of those things center around the year 1865. And for those who are not familiar with 1865 or Juneteenth, that is when slavery was abolished in the year of 1865. But many people know, okay, Juneteenth is when it happened.
6:31RJ McDowellIn all actuality, Juneteenth was the first date, but the official date was actually December 18th of 1865, when the 13th Amendment was adopted by the Constitution. So on our platform, we created 18 billion -- that’s 18 billion with a B -- 650 million tokens. That is our supply. We are airdropping, and we do it twice a year on Juneteenth and December 18th. We airdrop 1,865 tokens to the first 50,000 people. Now, we launched last year. We didn’t get 50,000 people. We were optimistic and overly excited about our project, and we just thought that the masses were going to flood and shut our website down. That didn’t happen.
6:31RJ McDowellWe came across lots of obstacles within our community, and we’ll get to that in a minute. Uh, but anyhow, that is what’s unique about our prod -- our, our project. The name of our project, our, our maximum supply of our project of, you know, 18,650,000,000, uh, the 1,865 that we released for the airdrops, um, and just basically everything that our token, uh, encompasses. Um, our focus -- we focus on 3 things. Uh, we focus on giving back and helping to reduce the wealth gap, the technology gap, and recidivism, right? So for those who are not familiar with the term recidivism, it just basically means that it’s a revolving door for those that go into the prison system.
6:31RJ McDowellAnd unfortunately, although we’re only 12 to 14% of the population in the United States, we are the largest community in the prison system. So what our platform wants to do, we want to partner with nonprofits in each of those areas. So Black Girls Who Code, Brown Girls Who Code, I think LA has South LA Tech, those organizations that, that teach former enslaved or even students about technology, they want to learn about crypto. We want to say, okay, here’s 1,865 tokens for you to learn about crypto, to learn about a crypto wallet, to learn what a public key is, what a private key is. These are the basic necessities to understanding crypto, and we want to be that bridge for our community to get the conversation started.
6:31RJ McDowellThere are, you know, people in our community that are you know, they may be Bitcoin millionaires. The average person is not a Bitcoin millionaire. I always say to people, if you have money to invest, if you -- let’s use numbers, for example, $500. If you’re wanting to take that $500 and you hear Bitcoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin, I don’t like to focus on Bitcoin because it’s not a stable currency. in my humble opinion, I think that the train has already taken off for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is approximately $28,000 or $30,000 to date. Buying tokens that are less than a dollar that have utility, that’s what you want to pay attention to, is the utility of a token, not a meme coin, but a utility of a token.
6:31RJ McDowellAnd we’ll talk about that a little later. But again, Um, that’s what makes us unique. I don’t know of any other crypto that’s out there where they’re offering to give away 1,865 tokens for an airdrop. I don’t know anyone who is making sure they’re doing, you know, education. We’re doing conferences, we’re going to libraries, um, anywhere where someone will have us on their, their platform to speak like this one. Um, we’re trying to get out in the community to teach people about crypto, those who want to learn and know the message.
12:17Kamal HubbardYeah, well, once again, that’s why I’m glad you’re here. And, uh, a lot of things that we do sound like they, they align. So, you know, I’m definitely hoping to work with you in the future on this and other things because it’s so important in our community.
12:34RJ McDowellI’ve got plans for you, Kamal. Oh, okay.
12:37Kamal HubbardWell, hey, we’ll talk about that.
12:39RJ McDowellWe’ll have to talk about that.
12:41Kamal HubbardYeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So once again, that just -- I’m really glad that we had a chance to talk more about your project first, you know, and we could talk about me another time because this is very, very important what both of us are really trying to do here. And so once again, I appreciate the collaboration and Looking forward to more of it. And, you know, this is once again one thing that, you know, its time has come in terms of reparations, and how this project lends itself to that movement is something people need to know about, because it -- closing the racial wealth gap, closing the digital divide, especially in our community, and reducing recidivism. I mean, those are very high on my list in terms of what I’m trying to accomplish too. And so, yeah, there’s a lot of synergy there. And, but that being said, you know, you talked about healthy skepticism within our community, and that leads me to my next question in terms of how do you ensure security and privacy of users’ information and transactions? with your project?
14:03RJ McDowellOkay, so one of the things that’s important to note, and we’ll get -- this ties into the technical aspects of our project. Okay, so our project was developed on the Stellar platform, which is ran by the Stellar Foundation. I encourage all of you listening that hear this commentary to take a look at the Stellar Foundation. Stellar has been around since about 2013, 2014. The co-founder of XRP, which is also Ripple -- that is, that’s a whole nother topic of discussion -- but if you’re familiar with XRP and Ripple, the co-founder of XRP founded Stellar, which is the Stellar Foundation, and they have a native token called Lumens. Okay, we created a token, but we did not create a blockchain. Why recreate the wheel when there’s something that’s already out there that’s so massive and so large? Um, the Stellar Foundation is huge. Um, they have, uh, contracts and partnerships with every bank globally. They’re side by side with Ripple in the, in the new phase of what’s going to be coming with digital tech and digital currency. So we have, because we’re part of their blockchain, we’ve adopted their technology and their security protocols by default. So I hope that answers your question.
15:47Kamal HubbardYeah, absolutely. I mean, you know, Stellar is a very well-known network, and I think you’re right. Nowadays, we’re moving past the whole thing of, oh, have your own blockchain, right? It’s more about community and getting the groundswell within a community, getting liquidity as well on -- and you can only You can only do that one network at a time, right?
16:20RJ McDowellAbsolutely.
16:21Kamal HubbardSo that’s to me is the biggest thing. Rather than creating your own blockchain, why not create a community, create liquidity, and then you could take that to any network? ’Cause really things are looking, moving towards interoperability, you know, being able to have a project on one blockchain but then move it to another or any other blockchain as necessary when the, uh, occasion calls for it. So, um, absolutely.
16:55RJ McDowellAnd I will say, I will say, when we started down the path of creating the actual token, um, myself and a couple of developers, we got into some heated discussions about which blockchain we were going to utilize. We actually lost a person on our team because he wasn’t happy that we didn’t go with Ethereum. Now, at the time, if you recall, and I know I’m speaking a different language for those who are not well-versed in crypto, but I will just say this. There was a time, it was last year, Ethereum is, is one of the famous tokens right after Bitcoin. They were built on a proof of work, right?
16:55RJ McDowellAnd the only thing I will say about proof of work, just to sum it up, it’s more expensive, it uses more electricity, it just was not something that we wanted to do. Now, since then, Ethereum has changed from proof of work to proof of stake. But even still, their gas fees to utilize their network is still more expensive. So we’re talking about introducing this to our community. We want to use something that’s not only efficient, fast, but has value that doesn’t cost that much money. You’re talking about a transaction fee of possibly 3 cents Versus transaction fees that cost thousands of dollars. So that’s one of the main reasons why we took a long time in looking at the blockchains that were available, and we decided to go with the Stellar Foundation and their protocol.
18:49Kamal HubbardYeah, that makes sense. Like, when I first got into DeFi, um, you know, I, I found myself spending $250 in gas fees just to do smart contract, uh, interactions. And even the last couple weeks, I think I spent, yeah, another couple hundred dollars just on gas fees to kind of, you know, do DEX trades. And, um, I think I did -- I just moved, I moved coins and it cost $8 on Ethereum. And this is yesterday. Yeah, I don’t --
19:25RJ McDowellhuh? How much did you say it cost? $8.
19:30Kamal Hubbardor $8 just to move coins from one wallet to another.
19:34RJ McDowellYeah.
19:34Kamal HubbardSo, I mean, you know, it really -- when you’re talking about adoption and new people coming to crypto, you have to have fast transactions. You have to have cheap transactions because like if you make a mistake and you lose $20 on like a DEX trade, right? That’s gonna be a turnoff for people.
19:57RJ McDowellAbsolutely.
19:59Kamal HubbardAnd I know the folks at Ethereum have tried to tackle this in terms of a scalability issue and the trilemma, but it’s just not working right now. And, you know, Ethereum is looking more towards becoming like the enterprise blockchain out there, right? Where companies like JP Morgan who don’t care about paying a couple hundred dollars to, you know, do certain things, or $200 in network fees for a transaction, that may be the case. But for, you know, people like me who just, you know, want to do DeFi, work on DeFi projects, and, you know, uh, it’s, it’s not cost effective because what you’re earning in your yield farming, you’re losing in, in once again just trying to do basic functions. So, um, Yeah, I think Stellar in that regard is, is great. And like you said, they, they have the partnerships in place and they’re doing, from what I understand, really good work. And, you know, they do support a lot of Black-led and Black-founded projects. I haven’t done all the research on that, but from what I’ve seen, there is the support. But, you know, what, what has your been your, your experience with the Stellar Foundation when it comes to that?
21:22RJ McDowellOne of the things that the Stellar Foundation does, I want to say they do it 4 times a year. It might be 3 times. I’m not really sure, but I know they do it more than, more than 2 times a year where they actually hold a pitch competition, if you will, where you submit your project to them. And they have a panel of individuals. It’s done through their Discord that they vote on the project, right? We did do it initially in our very, very early stages. I mean, I don’t even know if we had our website up yet, but we, we made an attempt and we got some, some feedback on things to do in that space.
21:22RJ McDowellBecause some of the projects that won, I was thinking, what? Trash recycling trash? What? We’re trying to impact an entire global community of people that are underserved. But, um, they do give back. Um, the Stellar Foundation is a nonprofit, um, and they give back in a very, very big way. One of the things that Stellar does that I just know, I found out was phenomenal. They partnered with MoneyGram, right? So, you know, the unbanked -- we talk about the unbanked, and you can’t talk about crypto and blockchain without, um, discussing the unbanked. What they did is they partnered with MoneyGram, and MoneyGram, um, between Canada, the Philippines, and Ghana -- I want to say Ghana is the only African country right now but they’re rolling it out to other countries in Africa where they are basically partnering with them for zero fees.
21:22RJ McDowellPeople can do transactions on MoneyGram between MoneyGram and Stellar. So if you have a Stellar wallet, you can do 3 to 5 second transactions to take cash. You can go to -- like if you have cash, whatever denomination you have and you want to transfer it into digital, you can do that or vice versa. So this is something that went into effect, I want to say June of 2022. So I thought that was great. They’re focusing on the unbanked. Oh, Latin America is also -- where is the Canada, the Philippines, Ghana, and some countries in Latin America. So they’re going to be rolling that out so it’s even bigger, so the unbanked doesn’t get left behind.
