Auctus Team Member Interview — Vinicius Melo
Next up for our team member interview is our Head of Strategy, Vinicius. In the interview he touches upon his past experiences with sending money abroad as well as investing in foreign assets. He also goes into how our platform and in a broader sense, cryptocurrencies, will ease the transfer of funds and make investing accessible to everyone, no matter the financial developmental stage of a country.
How did you get into tech?
In the early 90’s, my parents bought our first computer, an Intel 386. I was fascinated instantly, and even more so when my father installed a game and taught me how to play it. This may not sound very impressive, but here in Brazil during the 1990’s it was rare for kids to have access to computers.
Computer games were fun, but it wasn’t until I had an internet connection that I really found my passion, the web. Access was via dial-up connection, but my use was limited on weekdays since it was pay per minute, but on weekends access was unlimited. I would wait for midnight on Friday to connect to the internet, and sometimes I had to keep redialing for hours until I was connected. I spent every weekend surfing the internet, mostly to communicate via IRC and ICQ. As technology advanced so did my fascination and desire to learn more.
When did you learn to code?
My first contact with programming was when I had the idea of creating a gossip site for my college, probably in 1998, it was a message board that allowed students to post anonymously where the messages were displayed in a text box on the page. I spread the link across the school and it went viral, though I never told anyone that I was the creator.
When did you start doing business on the web?
I created several websites during the 2000’s. They were mainly gaming forums, fun flash games, and uploading websites. My websites had users so I started to receive Google Adsense checks. I found out quickly what a headache it was to cash the checks since the banks in Brazil would charge me a fixed rate of $100 USD. I was sometimes paying $100 to process a $300 Adsense check!
Later on I sold an uploading website to an American using escrow. I spent several months trying to figure out how to receive the international wire here in Brazil. Most of the bank managers had no idea how to deal with this type of situation. I’m talking about big banks. I’m saying this to stress that there are a lot of services that people in developed countries take for granted while it’s still inaccessible to most of the world’s population.
When did you learn about Bitcoin?
By the end of 2016, I wanted to invest in US equities, however, investing through BDRs (Brazilian Depositary Receipts) was limited to qualified investors with equity in excess of R$1,000,000 (today about $247,000 USD). This was way more than what I had, but I really wanted to invest in US tech stocks such as Amazon and Google. So I searched for an American broker that would allow non US residents to open accounts. With my past experience with Adsense checks, I knew that here in Brazil it was expensive and difficult to transfer money to foreign accounts.
I was able to find one broker that worked with non US residents and specifically accepted Bitcoin to make it easier. So I opened an account and used Bitcoin to fund and invest in some tech stocks. After that, I started to read more about crypto in Reddit, and this was my introduction to the crypto world. So I found Bitcoin not because I was looking to invest in it, but because I needed a better way to transfer money overseas.
What is your favorite place to travel to and why?
I prefer beach destinations, preferably cheap. I think inexpensive beach destinations have the best vibe allowing me to relax and enjoy the natural surroundings while being able to choose the best services without having to pay absurd prices.
From my last travels, I really enjoyed Southeast Asia destinations like Vietnam and Cambodia. In Cambodia I specifically really liked Koh Rong. Also here in Brazil, I love destinations like Jericoacoara in Brazil’s Northeast.
Since you’re head of strategy, can you share with us an overview of your strategy for Auctus and bringing it to market?
Auctus aims to give access to diversified portfolios to anyone in the world. For that to work, we need to have big players start offering tokenized securities. This is much closer than many people think but I also think that it’s importance isn’t clear to people living in developed countries. In countries like Brazil, we don’t have access to low-cost ETFs, global stocks, etc. The few funds that offer these investment products for retail investors charge high administration fees making them less attractive. Big players are starting to realize that they could target a huge market across the world by providing tokenized securities that are currently inaccessible in many places due to high administration fees and red tape bureaucracy.
Since there currently aren’t enough tokenized assets to offer on a global scale, we’ll start off by building another product that will help bring adoption, revenue and brand exposure to Auctus, a crypto analyst platform. We will offer a platform where users can gain access to analyst recommendations, analytical trading data and insight tools, all allowing users to make informed decisions and choose the right investment strategy.
The next step will be to enable users to execute orders on investments strategies directly on the platform. Our last step is to offer an automated investing platform powered by Robo-Advisors, but for that we need to see more tokenized traditional assets, since we need to have less volatile assets included in the portfolio to have a predictable long term result, allowing users to have an optimized retirement plan across the world.
Which industry do you see is ripe for disruption from blockchain?
Financial Services. We are still far from having a borderless economy, where anyone in the world can have simple and inexpensive access to investments. Most places have difficulty sending payments to another country, let alone investing in a foreign investment. Usually, these types of things are filled with bureaucracy which makes it expensive or even inaccessible for people that live in countries with developing banking systems.
We’re still at the beginning stages of adoption for cryptocurrencies and there will be different factors/events that’ll introduce more people to them, for instance:
1. Anyone in crypto right now: The early adopters that are here for the tech with the mission to create a global financial structure.
2. People needing it: Each year different developing countries go through inflation crisis, and it’s not uncommon to see three-digit inflations. The last few years we saw this in Iran, Venezuela, Turkey and Argentina. The population of those countries will start transacting using crypto because they’ll need to.
3. Once this becomes meaningful, merchants and financial service providers across the world will start to realize they could have a much bigger audience by accepting crypto.
4. Mass adoption will start to take place because everyone will be accepting crypto and anyone will be able to invest and pay anywhere in the world by using the same technology without the need for currency exchange stores or the use of credit cards with currency spreads.
Thank you Vinicius for a really insightful interview on the cryptocurrency market and how we’re trying to connect investors to assets all over the world.
Remember that our Beta is on schedule to be released the last week of September and you can apply to be an expert HERE!
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