Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solano Ripple, they're all blockchains, basically public databases, each powering a whole digital world beneath the surface.
Now crypto may makes some people nervous, mostly over security and often because they're not sure how it works.
But that uncertainty could be missing out.
Blockchain is more than just digital coins.
It powers digital property marketplaces, and even online voting systems.
It's a whole new way to own.
And interact online, all run by code and not necessarily companies.
But joining me to break all of this down here at the New York Stock Exchange are the Kwok brothers who are Phil and Dawn, the co-founders of Easy A.
So gentlemen, thank you so much for joining me.
So, first and foremost, I do want to start out with you.
So tell me about Easy A and how you got started.
Well, first of all, thank you very much for having us on, Rey.
It's a pleasure to be here in the stock exchange.
When we first got started, I wouldn't have imagined that we'd be here when we first got into the space.
That was 2013 through Bitcoin mining, and it was very much the street against crypto and the crypto sort of likewise.
We started EA a couple of years ago now because we believe that blockchain is one of the single most important technologies in the history of humanity, perhaps even the most important.
And so we know that we need to get more and more people into this space.
So what we have is two things.
Number one, the EA app, where we have over a million users who learn about the world's leading blockchains like the XRP Leisure with our amazing partners like Ripple and also other blockchains.
Stella, they're our awesome partners at the Stella Development Foundation.
They learn about it and we are basically on boarding layer onto the world's leading decentralized networks and distributed networks.
And the second thing that we do is, because our mission is to bring a billion people into Web 3 and into crypto and blockchain, we recently started the EZA Labs which is building out some of those core products and primitives which are going to enable people to actually come into this space like nothing we've ever seen before.
And Phil, you brought up a lot of key points there.
First and foremost, both of you are early adopters 2013 getting into Bitcoin mining and looking at how far we have come in terms of the crypto marketplace, and I understand that hackathons are part of your DNA as well.
So tell us about the inspiration for EA.
Definitely.
So Phil and I have been in blockchain for many, many. now and before founding ECA, Phil was actually a lawyer and I myself worked in finance at Blackstone Goldman and a couple of other places, and we really saw through our work at those amazing firms and also through our sort of daily lives that people really need to get educated on crypto.
People need to get educated on blockchain.
This is going to be one of the most transformative technologies of the decade.
And if we don't educate people, they're going to get left behind.
So for us, we wanted to share what we had learned with the public, which is why we built the EasyA app, which is super easy, 100% free for anyone to actually download and use, and then obviously host the amazing hackathons that we host, which really attract a lot of people to the space and actually give them a platform to launch their ideas and to this day over 4 billion. dollars worth of projects have come out of our hackathons, which is super cool.
We invest in those, we nurture those, we mentor those.
We work very closely with our partners to actually make sure they become game changing companies in the blockchain space.
So the ECA app and the ECA labs, I want to know first and foremost, how many unicorns come out of ECAA labs?
Yeah, so we've we've actually had a big one come out recently called Cognition AI.
They are one of the biggest AI companies out there right now.
They recently acquired a couple of other AI companies too.
They were founded by people who learned about, you know, web-free AI through ECA, and then actually went on to go and raise hundreds of millions of dollars from the world's best PCs.
Pels Found the fund.
And many others, so now they're changing the game for both AI but also developers who are building in the blockchain space.
So super cool things that they're doing.
And Dom and Phil, your siblings that makes you very unique as an organization, but also at the same time, when we think about how we use technology, we're constantly on our smartphones or devices, and we're not necessarily in front of our laptops all the time.
So tell me what's going on with the app and your vision for growth.
You're right.
Pretty much about, I think last I checked, about 70 to 80% of all internet traffic goes through a mobile phone.
That's why we designed Easy to be mobile first.
But I think in terms of where the future is headed, what we want to do is we want to make it a lot easier for anybody to use Web 3.
So if you talk about crypto, pretty much the only surface area or touch points that normal people have is essential.
Buying the stuff right and speculating on the price, that's obviously a huge part of it, but what we want to do is we want to make sure that normal people can also access it.
So that's why we've always gone mobile first and in terms of what we're doing with the EA labs as well.
I can't share too much exactly right now, but we have the EasyA white paper which we're working on with some of the world's top leading researchers and academics on.
And that's going to make it a lot easier for anybody to start using crypto and start using the blockchain as opposed to just speculating on it.
So think about anybody using their smartphone to actually access this whole ecosystem of things, and that's really Beginning of what's going to take this industry from essentially a niche of people who are sort of experimenting or using it but very, very technical to just the everyday person.
Anybody can use it as simply as they can go to Starbucks and buy a coffee or use Uber.
And both of you are here at the New York Stock Exchange, the center of traditional finance, or tradI as we like to call it.
So we have come a long way, and the IPO of Circle really brought stablecoin to the forefront when it comes to American retail investors, and I understand that you're looking at XRP here, so tell us why and the use case.
Definitely, so we work very closely together with Ripple.
We work very closely to actually bring our massive community of over 1 million developers onto the XRP ledger.
And so we've been working with them really to actually foster the next generation of companies to launch both in the financial services sector and all the way from.
The biggest institutions, but actually down to startups as well through the hackathons that many people have seen we've posted on social media, etc.
So for us, you know, we're really bullish on Ripple, on XRP in particular because of the inroads they've already made into the tradie sector.
They've been, you know, really, really.
Sort of diligence about getting tons of different licenses all across the world to actually make sure that they are positioned to own the space when the institutions actually come into blockchain, into crypto, which they're already starting to do with stablecoins.
That's obviously a huge use case and Ripple has their own RLUSD stablecoin, which is awesome, and we've already started educating our community on them.
And ultimately for us we're just super bullish on the mission, what they're doing already in terms of bringing all these big institutions.
Hidden road acquisition, for example, is a great example of how they're going to actually be utilizing the XRP ledger in the real world, settling trades, etc. much faster, cheaper than otherwise would be possible, and then obviously also international money payments, all of those different aspects really make it one of the formative companies of the next decade, in our opinion.
And I know a lot of people have been asking for my price targets on XRP, and I think this is the first time I'll say it, but I think XRP is heading to $1000 by 2030.
So for me it's, you know, a super important project and actually probably one of the most important projects out there at the moment.
And finally we have less than 60 seconds here, but here we are about to head into the second half of 2025.
So what are you paying attention to?
You in blockchain as well as crypto, I think I'll kick it off.
I'll take the 1st 30 seconds.
Number one, I think we're talking about XRP if we're talking about XLM as well, stellar Ripple, what they're doing in the space.
Really neither of them have yet had a Defi summer or Dei revolution.
We've seen it with Ethereum, which took its market cap into the hundreds of billions with looking at.
Stellar, we're looking at XRP as well, which really have market caps of around 150 billion still sitting on the 200 billion, and they haven't had that DI moment yet.
So as we come into the second half of this year with what we're doing as well with the EZA labs, we're looking at priming this whole ecosystem to be set up for this DI summer or DI year.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean I think you look at Ethereum.
A lot of stuff has happened in that ecosystem already, and now I think we're going to start to really see it.
And also we're working very hard at Easy 8 to bring all of that onto things like the XRP Ledger, Stella, and other world leading blockchains.
OK, John, Phil, thank you so much for joining me.
Great to have you on.
