Invest in Real Estate from $1,000 and make 12% per annum in passive income!

Happy Tuesday, everyone. How is the world doing? Good to see you, Funny Turo. Good to see you, Denver Bill. If you are in the audience, go ahead and say hello. I've actually not heard back from the Pledge team yet. Sometimes we get differences in time changes and things like that and holidays and all that. So what I might do, just hang out for a little bit. We won't take too much of your time. I will talk through Pledge Protocol and what it is because I think it's kind of exciting and we'll try to reschedule with the team to get them back on another time. If you guys have any questions or anything you want me to talk about right now, and who knows, if we waste some time, perhaps the team might show up. So let's go ahead. Also, stay tuned. I'm about to launch a video, hopefully this afternoon, if Cass, I think it's like three in the morning his time. Okay, the Pledge Protocol guy is getting on. Okay, thank you, Tycho, for reaching out to him. So we'll talk about that. I'm reviewing the website for Pledge Protocol. Seems interesting. Yes, I'm excited to just kind of talk through it and just see what it is and see if it fits onto my spreadsheet, perhaps. What's the latest from Paraguay? You're talking about AlphaShares, I assume. I'm actually gonna have the Alpha team on here pretty soon. So we'll get an update from the AlphaShares team here before too long. So, all right, we got David. Hello, David. Thank you for joining here today. How are you? I am doing just great. How are you doing? I'm good as well. I apologize, I was in the Google Meet, so. Oh, oh, yep, nope, that happens. No, I'm glad we got you in the right spot. So let's go ahead. Let's start out with introductions. Can you tell us a little bit just about yourself, a little bit about your background, who you are, and how you found your way to Pledge Protocol? Absolutely. Yeah, so I'm David Gallo. I'm a Canadian, I'm in Toronto. I know you're just a little bit south. I think we have the same weather. Nebraska and Toronto are about the same, but yeah, I'm a real estate guy. I've been in real estate for over 20 years. I started out as a commercial real estate person. The evolution of my career got into financing and then development. And then probably around late 2016, 2017, found the crypto space. Not necessarily since then, but I would say in the shorter term from right now, I've tried to figure out a way to merge the two. And I guess, you know, going back to last year, which I'm sure we'll talk about all of the developments of crypto last year, but just, I guess, sort of, you know, fast-tracked everything, really had an idea of tokenizing real estate. And that was more of a long-term goal for myself and the company was to, let's name, I don't know, 2025, 2026, really start to tokenize buildings and offer those up to folks who wanted to own actual property and then certainly some revenue from those, as I know you can talk about quite a bit, passive income, and how to figure out how that was actually gonna work. Last year, and, you know, I'd like to say to a big fan of the channel, not to fanboy too much, but certainly learned a lot from what you do and from a lot of the guests that you've had. And I think some of what happened last year, certainly to the, probably about a year ago exactly, the real-life funds of the world, the circulate monies that were offering this compound-to-infinity-type strategy and didn't do any of us any good, that triggered a lot of ideas for me to, I guess, figure out how to build a trustworthy system with real estate, certainly what I do, and to offer it up to people, folks who were interested in making actual returns that weren't necessarily going to infinity, but more realistic, more sustainable, and certainly more provable with the idea that a corporate entity such as ourselves would be more responsible with your money. Our goal is to build some trust with folks who do decide to participate, and within that participation, you know, we're here for the long-term. This is not necessarily today a pre-sale, anything like that. This is really a promotion of an idea, and the hope, obviously, is that folks entrust us with some of their deposits, and even if it's a small portion, we would really like to prove over time that we are going to be an entity that can provide passive income for the long-term. Okay, yeah, absolutely, and it piqued my interest because, like you said, what we're needing in crypto is real assets. So much in crypto is just pretend, and it's just Ponzi, and just nothing actually happening, and so I've been really waiting for crypto and the real world to merge together, and so I think projects like this are going to be what kind of help us do that. So you kind of talked a little bit about it, but can you kind of elevate or pitch us what is it that Pledge Protocol is looking to be, and what do you do? So what we do, if you can imagine driving down into any urban center, pick a city, you drive down a highway, you see a building going up. If you've ever thought about it, you might not realize that there's money that needs to be invested pre-construction for all of those projects. Now, if you've ever purchased a house that hasn't been built or a condo, you know you go into it, you probably get asked to put 20% down, and then you wait one, two, three, four years, whatever it might be for that project. Now, that makes sense. Now, if you're building apartment buildings, for instance, there's no money up front. There's nobody who's going to commit to living in a space two or three years down the road as a rentable space. So buildings like that need investment up front. And part of what we do anyway is finance those types of developments. And with that, there is an interest paid back to investors, depending on the time of year, depending on the time of cycles and all that kind of thing. Interest rates vary, but certainly they are very well-provided interest rates, let's call them. If you go to a bank, you might be getting 0.1%. Typically, what is offered on the development side is between eight and 12, maybe eight and 14, depending again on what kind of project it is. But there's certainly some incentive to having access to those types of projects and developments. What is typically the need or the use case or the opportunity, let's call it, for investors is you might need to go in with 50,000, 100,000, maybe even a million. And that doesn't necessarily apply to most of the people who live in the world. Part of the idea of this project is, for lack of a better word, we want to use it as a crowdfunding platform. So we want to allow for folks to be able to invest a smaller amount of money, pool it together, and Pledge Protocol can be the entity to then go out to the market and invest those monies and then still have access to the higher returns. And then as it comes back to us, pay it out to all the so-called participants. Okay, very good. I love that. Now, so you did real estate before. Is Pledge a real estate company before and then you're just adding crypto on or how does that kind of work? Pledge is completely brand new. It is meant to be part of the real estate community. But as you said, it's sort of the off ramp, let's call it, for crypto. It's the bridge, let's call it. We can figure out what the proper term of what that will be as we continue to move and grow forward. But it is really the crowd sourcing, crowdfunding platform that can then be turned into real. So part of the idea also goes into BlockFi. If you remember what BlockFi was last year? Yeah. It was an idea around getting interest based off of your crypto. But I think what that platform was really doing was just hoping that all of the coins were always just going to continue to go up and up and up and then they could, I don't know if Ponzi's the right word, but they could just sort of sell off and pay all of their investors 8% and then make the rest of their money on their own. So with that in mind, if really the idea was people who have crypto just kind of sitting passively in their wallets, not doing anything for them, certainly they can expect some growth. We can all expect some growth with crypto in the next bull run, as we like to call it. But with that said, there's also the opportunity with Pledge to have your crypto keep growing for you out of your wallet, let's say, as it continues to go and grow on the quarterly basis and yearly basis for the terms that we offer. You get 12% a year. And with that, you can grow much like a savings account. And it won't compound to infinity, but it will certainly provide a sustainable yield for as long as you stay within the project. Okay, yeah. And then can we talk about, so deposits are in 1% a month. Does that start paying out like first month that people deposit? Is there a lag there? How does that work? There'll be a lag. So our goal is the 15th. So we start today on the 16th. So essentially we will collect deposits for a month and then they will start on the 15th of every month following your deposit. So if you deposit tomorrow, your interest will start to grow on the 15th of February. If you deposit on the 14th of February, same will be applicable. Once the 15th hits, then the new cycle begins for all future deposits. Okay. And then, so do you just have kind of a queue of projects that need funding or is there always gonna be a building or a real estate project that is needing funding for this to work out? Well, both, I would say. So there is always the need for funding. There are a couple of quick stats for you. The mortgage market in North America is worth about $13 trillion. So that's ever expiring, ever renewing. And so certainly there's big banks that hold a lot of that money, but a lot of that money also is being funded by private mortgages. This is the other side of what's like protocol. With that said, there's 1.6 million. This is the most recent stat that I could find. I think it was from October of last year. There's 1.6 million units, apartment units going up in North America. So ever evolving, ever changing, yes, but always the need for investment dollars from different types of investors all over the world. And certainly we like to focus more on North American markets, and that's the commitment to all of our participants. That will be the commitment. We don't do business outside of North America. But with that said, I guess to answer your question, there is a long slate of open projects that are always looking for investment. Okay, very good. And then do you have any more info on the real estate company associated with this? Or is it completely separate? Or how does that kind of work with the real estate company? Yeah, so it will be completely separate for a variety of reasons. And I guess the best description of that, if you've ever heard of a MIC or a mortgage investment company, not necessarily has to do with mortgages, but that's what the companies are called. What happens is, again, it's very much of a crowdfunding type platform. And what they do is then they go out to the developers, real estate people, whoever it might be, who are looking for the funds to then grow whatever type of development they're working on. And I guess part of the reason for that is the developers don't wanna really be hand-holding the retail investors that they have. They don't wanna be getting phone calls. That's what my role or our team's role will be here, is to take the phone calls and ensure that everybody who does participate in the project can rest assured that their money is safe and their money is working for them. So that's one. I will say that as you go through the website, if it comes up today or if it comes up in the future for anybody, the website will be a very fluid, active piece of our company. As projects get completed, as we pay out or withdrawals, like withdrawals instead of payouts, but as folks get to withdraw some of their crypto coins, that will be added to some of the reports and some of the YouTube videos and things that we will do to ensure that anyone who participates in the project can have full confidence. Okay, and is there a certain amount that you need to raise for this to work or is it kinda just as much as you're able to get, you'll use and, or how does that work? Well, we, you know, certainly the, you know, there's always unlimited amounts of money that can be put out. Now, that said, we're not interested in that. We don't wanna have to manage that type of strategy, let's call it. But certainly the goal as we continue to grow will be between five and 10 million a month. That's something that's very easily manageable for us. And with that said, you know, somebody somewhere out there has something that they wanna talk to us on the private side to get your investment or a different type of management investment. We're happy to do that as well, but there's certainly a lot of opportunity in terms of what the developments that are offered are within North America and so in terms of what we can handle, we certainly wanna be around the five to $10 million mark, not only for the profit of the customer, but certainly for the projects that we wanna be helping to grow. Okay, very good. We got a question from Twitter. Adams from the Bahamas is asking in Twitter, is it possible to dollar cost average in for the time you're locked into? You, so if you pick a term, for instance, you can dollar cost average in if you like. Now, my definition of dollar cost averaging is that you're gonna get a better price as the market fluctuates. So I don't know that that's actually relevant, but certainly you can, every month, you can absolutely contribute to a new term. And so the answer would be yes, you can certainly contribute every month as you see fit or as you get more investment dollars or if you sell something and you wanna contribute to it. A larger version of a participant. So you don't necessarily need to limit yourself to one phase or one cycle. You can come in as many times as you want as long as you get in before every 15th of the month and on and on and on. And certainly as your term expires, you will be paid back out if you like. We do have a rollover option at the end of every term. If you just wanna continue to take your passive income on the quarterly payouts, you can just leave it in. Okay, yep, nope, that answers it. So technically not dollar cost averaging, but it's the principle just of putting in more money each month, because kind of what it seems like you're trying to do is make this like a savings account, kind of, that's just providing 1% a month. So it's not crazy, normal, DeFi, crypto returns, but it's way better than your actual savings account will get. Yeah, I wanted to put as the slogan that we are not DeFi because we wanna have that whole thing of trust, but we certainly wanna make it incentivized as possible so that people do see a value in it and at least build some sort of crypto savings account via the 1%. Gotcha, nope, that makes sense. So as for people getting involved, so talk us a little bit through this process. Do they have to KYC and then you're not using a smart contract, correct? You're just, you're sending crypto. You wanna just talk about the process here? Sure, yeah, yeah. So the smart contract, we went down that avenue and it just, again, back to all of the things last year, and I think there's, until people who are smarter than me figure that out, we decided cold wallets are the way to go. I know there's maybe some people I've, yeah, I think it's called Quopee or whatever that thing might be called. That even, I think, who knows if that's coming back, but the idea of that, that even the site got hacked, we wanna stay completely off of all of that. If somebody wants to hack this site, go for it. None of your money will be saved on the site. It will be stored in a cold wallet and then it will be transferred into fiat dollars, so you will not have anything to worry about on that end, but the KYC is not necessarily important outside of the idea that we wanna know who we're doing business with. We're giving you the opportunity to know who you're doing business with, which is myself and my team. We're working on bios for the website, so there will be a little bit more information added in that regard, but KYC, all we're really asking for is a piece of government ID that can match up with, and what we will provide is not necessarily a contract, but we call it a promissory note. So again, trying to ensure people have as much trust as possible within the system, and so you're never gonna have to worry about this. I can say this fully and completely, but again, we know trust is established over the long term, and so you will get a document with all of our company information. Pledge Protocol is an incorporation, and so you will get that information. So again, rest assured that if anything was to happen, you can find us. Okay, and that was gonna be my next question, which you kind of answered, but I was gonna say, so people send money, how do they know that they're gonna get something? But you put together a promissory note for people once they sign up? So that page you were just on, you submit some, just a brief piece of information, which is how much you want to deposit, what your term is, and then your wallet address. We will put together a document that goes back to you, that you have everything that you need, and then from there, you can send your USDC, by the way, if we haven't said this enough, USDC on Matic, that's the only one we're gonna take for now, and then you send it to us, and then that's the transaction. So you will have your, the crypto part of it will be safeguarded via the chain. You'll have your transaction hash, and then you will also have a document from us that commits to you the terms of the agreement. Okay, all right. And the idea, too, of, eventually, we may build out a dashboard, but at the same time, with this note, you will have all of your payouts per quarter. So in terms of following, and I know a lot of the DeFi projects, you can go on and you can put a click every day and see where you're at and how much you've made. In this instance, you can get this all up front, and you'll know exactly what's available to you on certain dates. Okay, yep, and so this is, again, so the audience understands, this is how normal investments work, usually, is you get a permissory note of some kind. They don't, there's not dashboards for normal investments. So this is kind of normal investments start to meet crypto a little bit. So exciting to see how you guys build that. On the regulation side of things, is there, do you have any concerns, or have you worked through that, or what are your thoughts on that side of things? Yeah, we've gone through a lot of it. The idea of USDC is where we, that's where we've eliminated a little bit of that. So USDC is, we all know, US dollar coin. We, if we were to take Bitcoin, for instance, and then convert it to a fiat dollar, that's a taxable event. We want to stay away from those types of things. Part of your deposit fee is going towards an accumulation of tax dollars, because we do know, as a corporation, we will pay taxes on some of the money we do make. Now, the idea is that the company is not going to make a whole lot of money. We have, if you pull the website back up and go all the way to the bottom, we also have a commitment to a charitable giving initiative, and that is to eliminate all of the tax repercussions that we might have. So any net profits that we have will go back into Habitat for Humanity. And that, again, is to eliminate all of these types of regulation red tape that we might come across. Part, again, as I mentioned, part of your deposit fee is going to just stay in the system, and it will be used if and when there are future regulations, future tax implications, all those types of things. So we're trying to prep for the future. For now, we're doing what we need to do to be a net neutral profit type company. We, as a company, will get paid when we fund investments, but all of that interest will be going back. Okay, very good. And then is there any tax benefit for people getting in? I know usually when you get into real estate, you get depreciation and things like that. Is there, does any of that apply doing it this way? So that's a good question. Not necessarily like that, and we certainly don't want to tell anybody about how to do their taxes. Big thing in crypto is to say we're not financial advisors, which we are not financial advisors, except as you grow your crypto via pledge protocol, if you were to do it through, if you've ever heard of Fundrise, companies like that, you can invest in real estate, and then at the end of the year, you get a 1099 for them. And so if they promise you, whatever it might be, eight, 10, whatever percent, at the end of the year, you pay whatever your tax bracket is for whatever state you live in. In crypto, you don't necessarily need to pay that tax until you cash out. So as you would accumulate in the so-called real world, again, we just use generic numbers. If you have $10,000, you make 10%. You get $1,000, then you pay 40% tax on that, which is fake up numbers. Now you've only made $600. In crypto, you will continue to gain that 10% every year until, of course, you cash out and be able to pay the tax man all of those dollars. But you get to grow your crypto a little bit faster than you can grow via the same type of platform. Okay, gotcha, yeah, and I like what you said. Not financial advice. Do not take, if you're getting your tax advice from YouTubers, don't do that, okay? Talk to a tax person. If you have serious tax issues, then talk to a tax person. Don't listen to us. But that is the tax benefit around, and I would imagine anybody who does dabble in the crypto space, that is part of the reason that that would be a way to grow your dollars, your finances in a way that is sort of tax-free until you cash out. Yeah, absolutely. Adams from the Bahamas says, any important info for international investors to know? So is this U.S., Canada only, or can you invest from anywhere? How does that work? You can invest from anywhere, and again, this is the beauty of crypto. Your dollars, again, we'll call them dollars, but we know it's crypto. Your USDC will be coming into a cold wallet that is a crypto wallet. So we can take your investments from anywhere. We certainly have a plan to, you know, again, wherever you're in the Bahamas, if there is enough of a reason to do it, we have that, you know, you can open up a branch of Pledge Protocol in all relevant companies, again, in all relevant countries to where our participants would be significant enough. And then from there, we can, again, be ready for any regulation that comes. We're somewhere ready to do that. We have partnered with a law firm, we have partnered with an accounting firm, and they're sort of advising us on how to do that as we go forward. But for the first little bit, you can absolutely invest from anywhere in the world. And again, like I said, that's the beauty of what crypto offers right now. Okay, gotcha. And then good to see you, Mountain Brothers. Do they already have a portfolio of properties? We do have a portfolio of properties. Again, that is separate from Pledge Protocol, but you notice on the website, there is sort of a, I guess, very generalized list of what we've done over the last 20 years. But one of our developers specifically has about 100 million in assets. And from there, there's a variety of others that we have agreements with, let's call them, a whole variety of other assets. So those are not necessarily the ones that we will be dealing with. Again, this is on the development side, what we're trying to fund, make the most for our participants. Anything that's currently owned is more of a validation of folks who are currently building. So building up their portfolio right now at 100 million, they're looking to get to a billion. Some of the other ones are funding hundreds of millions of mortgages a month. So there's lots of movement within the industry. What we, certainly as a real estate person, sometimes funny to see, as you see on the news, don't invest in anything right now, interest rates are high. But as a real estate person, that's really the best time to invest. I always say, keep that in mind. Again, not as a financial advisor, but certainly as an operator. Okay, very good. Let's see, how will capital appreciation benefit be passed down to the investor? Is that anything that the investor gets a part of? So if, again, if you go back to the website, we have an idea in here that we'd like to offer. There's obviously some incentives to keep your dollars in the longer. We have three terms that are available, one, two, and three years. There's different deposit fees on that, all very low, right? One and a half, two, two and a half. And that's really to maintain the admin, to do some transferring back and forth with our exchange. But those who choose the 36-month term, there will be a bonus withdrawal after 84 months. I guess back to your question from about five minutes ago, what are the, I guess, regulatory disincentives of what this might be? Those could change in the next seven years. And so some of those deposit fees will be held onto just to ensure that we are abiding by all of the rules and regulations in case we need to pay more taxes, fines, whatever that might be. Fines, sort of laughably, we're not going to be fined. But anything left over after 84 months, as I just mentioned, we are going to be a profit-free company. So that will be an additional withdrawal to anybody who keeps their money in the system for three years. Certainly we get all of your dollars back after three years. You would just maybe wait and forget. And after 84 months, you'll just happen to see an additional withdrawal within your wallet after that time period. That extra withdrawal will be based on how many people have stayed within the system and, of course, how much money is made and all that. But it will be based and relevant to what you put in at the start. Okay, good, good, that makes sense. Let's see, is the real estate company registered in the US? It is not yet, but as we go, we do have plans to open in Wyoming. So we will have a corporate side or an LLP in Wyoming. Okay, so there's no NFTs or any tokens. It's Web2 companies seeking Web3 money through permissory notes. Yes, that is correct. That's correct. Now, I will say, I did watch one of your episodes a while back that I think it was a Car Wash person. Yes. And they were talking about funding through NFTs. So that's an idea that we are very much open to. Certainly it's something that you ever want to team up with and offering something like that. That is certainly the future of how this would go. And as I mentioned, the initial idea of what Pledge Protocol could be is the tokenization of buildings. NFTs are absolutely the way of the future. Certainly something that we will be investigating very aggressively in the near future. Okay, so stay tuned because there might be NFT partnerships in the future. So, okay, all good info. Does anyone else have any other questions they'd like to clarify before we let David go here? I did see, too, if you want more in-depth, if you're thinking about putting a significant amount in, I would recommend booking a call and talking through, get all your questions answered. This isn't something where I would just say, oh, go put in a million bucks and wait to see the details. That's right. And I'll tell you, if we just get a million dollars in a cold wallet somewhere, then we're going to have some questions. So we absolutely want to be transparent. We want to have personal relationships with certainly everybody. But if this is something that you just want to kind of jump into quickly and offer up the minimum, you can throw it in and do it through the forums. But certainly to your point, we want to have anybody who has some significant dollars, who is interested in participating in the project and earning this interest rate, book a video call. We want to have you as confident as possible with our team. Do you want to talk a little bit about marketing too and how that's going so far and how you're looking to expand? Some people are checking out the Twitter page and they're like, hey, there's not many followers there. And I would say, guys, that's one way you can help out is go follow on Twitter. Like just start getting that moving, but tell us about your marketing efforts and how that's going so far. Yeah, so, well, I'll be honest. Today is literally, we wanted to launch in November and then we had some difficulty with what we were planning to do with the smart contract and all of that. So as you and I started to discuss things, we were like, today's going to be the day. So we're sort of onward and upward from here. We're going to be doing a full push within our YouTube channel, just again, talking about the projects, talking about what you can do, talking about how you can get involved, talking about what real estate is all about. And we don't necessarily want to teach you how the development of real estate that world works, but certainly about how Pledge Protocol plans to use any kind of deposit, going into the future, how we want to tokenize buildings and certainly paying people out when they tokenize. I think if you think about tokenization of real estate, I think a lot of folks who participate in that own real estate now, except I don't really know how they make money online. I think that's the real bridge of crypto to the real world is having people who rent space, pay their rent with crypto, and then that way you can invest a little bit better. So that's down the road, but our marketing efforts will certainly be propped up via Twitter, YouTube, and our YouTube channel. Okay, very good. All right, so I'm a marketing guy, so calls to action. I'm going to say, I start with the free ones. Hit like on the video. Easy way to get some exposure to Pledge Protocol. Second, go follow them on Twitter. Just hit follow. That's helpful. It helps just start building the community a little bit. If you have more questions, do go to their website, and I'll leave a link again for it here. Book a video call. Shoot them an email. Their email address is right there. Get all your questions answered. And if you're ready to get started, you can go here. You can fill out this information. They'll get back in touch with you. So this is not actually putting any money in right here. It's just giving them info, so they'll contact you. They'll have a permissory note available for you. You can decide how long you want to deposit for. You can probably, at that point, if you have other questions, you can get those answered as well. So those are your calls to action. David, anything I missed there? Anything you want to highlight more? Yeah, you know, there's lots to talk about always. I would suggest, if you're interested, book a video call. And if you've got something important that you want to ask, book a video call, and in the message, put that you want to talk to me. I'm quite happy to make sure that I'm the one who's going to respond to all of the things that you might need to hear. And just, you know, keep tabs on us. We certainly are, you know, the quicker we can grow, we're going to be the more excited for, but this is long-term. So we also know that we need to build some trust. Giving your money to somebody on a YouTube channel is always random. But we are here for the long-term, and we've got a lot of good opportunities for folks who are trying, or looking to grow their passive crypto portfolio, let's call it. So, you know, keep us in mind, whether it's now, whether it's next year, after you make a million dollars in Bitcoin, after it halves in the next couple of months, we're here to help you grow your dollars. So that's our pitch, and we look forward to hearing from you. Awesome. Well, and I look forward to watching you grow and helping you as I can. So feel free to reach out if there's anything I can do in the future as we're going, and maybe we'll talk about getting some NFTs going, or something like that. Yeah, let's talk about that, because that's your expertise. You can teach me about that. Yeah, there you go. Okay. Awesome. This has been great, very informative. I want to thank the audience. You guys are amazing. Thank you for joining in each and every day. David, thank you for hopping on and sharing your project with us, and we look forward to hearing more from you. Absolutely. Thanks, Jason. All right, take care.