Web3 and the Future of Real Estate Investing with New Silver’s Kirill Bensonoff

Episode Overview

Our Guest: Kirill Bensonoff – on the Rise of Fractional Real Estate Investing.

Kirill Bensonoff is a distinguished entrepreneur and investor, currently serving as the co-founder and CEO of New Silver, a fintech company specializing in providing innovative financing solutions for real estate investors. With a strong background in technology and finance, Bensonoff has successfully integrated advanced technologies like blockchain to streamline real estate investment processes. His expertise is not confined to real estate; he has made significant contributions to the fields of enterprise IT, managed IT services, and cloud computing through various successful ventures.

Bensonoff’s entrepreneurial journey began early, with his first notable venture, US Web Hosting, launched while he was still in college. This venture was successfully sold, marking the start of a prolific career in tech and investment. He later co-founded ComputerSupport.com, an IT services company, and Unigma, a cloud management tool, which was acquired by Kaseya. His ventures reflect a consistent pattern of innovation and foresight, leveraging cutting-edge technologies to solve real-world problems. Bensonoff also serves as an advisor and angel investor, guiding numerous startups towards success with his wealth of experience and strategic insights.

Kirill Bensonoff’s educational background includes a Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology from Central Connecticut State University and an Entrepreneurial Masters from MIT. His professional achievements are complemented by his active role in the tech community, including hosting the Boston Crypto Meetup and his podcast, “The Exchange with KB,” where he interviews leaders in technology, entrepreneurship, and blockchain. Bensonoff’s unique blend of technical acumen, entrepreneurial spirit, and dedication to fostering innovation makes him a prominent figure in the fintech and real estate sectors​.

Episode Transcript

Kevin Rosenquist: It is. Okay. That’s great. That’s great news. We’ll get it. We’ll get further into New Silver in a little bit. But just in your experience of dealing with people who are looking to flip houses, or rent houses and stuff, are you seeing a decline or have you seen a decline, or are people still pretty willing to take out loans and do fix and flips? Hey, welcome to PayPod, where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for listening. Kirill Bensonoff is the co-founder and CEO of New Silver, a company that provides financing solutions for real estate investors. They offer loans for various types of real estate projects, such as fix and flip rental properties and new construction. Their claim to fame, using advanced technology to get real estate investors funding quickly. I’m talking in as little as five minutes and all from a computer or even a mobile device. We chat about real estate as well as Web3 and blockchain technology, which Kiril is extremely bullish on. Joining me now, Kirill Bensonoff. My wife is a realtor and I have a very important question for you. I need to know an answer to. When are the interest rates coming back down?

Kirill Bensonoff: Well, let me ask the man upstairs. I don’t know. I don’t know. I think probably everybody was ready for it this year. I have always had my doubts, and I’m not so sure anymore that it’ll be this year. Well, if it is, it’ll be very small I think next year potentially. But it could be higher for longer. I think it’s really going to depend on if they still have the 2% inflation in mind. As soon as we can get into twos, at least I think we’re going to start seeing some momentum.

Kevin Rosenquist: How far do you think in your opinion and your experience? Do you think it’ll even come back down? Will we ever see 3%, or 4% again?

Kirill Bensonoff: I think that’s where it’ll probably end up unless there’s a black swan event, which we’ve had too many of. But we may continue to have them. In that case, if they see a threat to the economy, they may take it down or near zero, again, or zero as they’ve done not too long ago, but I think three or four is realistic.

Kevin Rosenquist: It is. Okay. That’s great. That’s great news. We’ll get it. We’ll get further into New Silver in a little bit. But just in your experience of dealing with people who are looking to flip houses, or rent houses and stuff, are you seeing a decline or have you seen a decline, or are people still pretty willing to take out loans and do fix and flips?

Kirill Bensonoff: I think what we’ve seen is a shift, a shift in our customer base, a shift towards people who are more experienced and who tend to do real estate investing for a living. Whereas two years or so ago we saw a lot more people that were kind of new newcomers into the space where we’re doing it part-time and had another job, which I personally love. That’s one of the aspects of our business that I really enjoy is that we can support entrepreneurs who are just trying to kind of get into a new space or just regular people who have a job and want to make extra money on the side. We were there to support the financing of those projects and things that we’re doing. There’s been a decline in transactional volume. Of course, I think things have shifted. We’re seeing larger loan sizes. People are doing more construction like ground-up construction type of projects versus fix and flip where they would buy a property, fix it, and try to resell it.

Kirill Bensonoff: Now they’ll try to buy a property in an area where perhaps land is more, more valuable and just completely demolish the structure, build a Mansion or whatever on top of it, write a five, seven-bedroom house that they can then sell for lots more money. So we’ve seen a trend toward a trend towards that., yes, I think certainly it had an effect. I still think the main driver in this space is the lack of supply. While demand has certainly fallen, the supply has fallen even further. People aren’t I talk to people all the time and they just say like, hey, I’d like to move. I have this dream of, I don’t know, moving down to North Carolina. But I’m not going to do it now because I’ve locked in a 2.5% mortgage for 30 years, and it just doesn’t make financial sense. So there are a lot of people are are kind of sitting on their hands waiting for something to happen.

Kevin Rosenquist: And who can blame them?

Kirill Bensonoff: Right, exactly.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. It’s interesting that you’re seeing more people going for the bigger payday, or at least the bigger house, the bigger sale. Is that does that mean that what we’re seeing is that people that have maybe a higher income are more willing to buy?

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes, I still think there are people either who have some cash they’re sitting on or folks who have had and continue to have higher incomes. It seems that. It takes more to buy a property these days. It’s kind of unfortunate, I think, for a lot of folks. Because it is still the American dream, the older property. And I’d like to kind of see people succeed in that dream. I think it’s a great way for people to build their nest egg and their retirement nest egg and be able to sort of move up in the world. A lot of folks have been able to get in and buy homes when they’re relatively inexpensive. Real estate’s always expensive, There’s never a time when it’s like, hey, your homes are cheap right now. If you go back 100 years and ask somebody, it’ll probably say the same thing, right?

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. It’s all relative.

Kirill Bensonoff: It’s relative. But I don’t think that I’m not an economist so I haven’t studied this specifically but just things that I’ve read it doesn’t feel like and it doesn’t seem like the income of the average of the median income has caught up to what the real estate has done in the last half a decade or so.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, I agree. I would agree with that. I live in Colorado and we had a boom right around the time that we lived here and, or we moved here and we got kind of lucky. We bought it right before the boom went crazy. But when it was going nuts, I had friends who were putting in five offers a day and getting beat handily by people with cash. It was wild.

Kirill Bensonoff: No, absolutely. I think what we’ve seen is when that was free or almost free, we’ve seen companies that would help with cash offers pop up. Right. So you could go even if you don’t have the cash, you could sort of get approved by a company and then make a cash offer knowing that like this, they’ll back you until you get a mortgage and then pay it off. We’ve just seen institutional buying to a scale that I don’t believe has ever been out there before. It seems that now that has subsided. So, yes, I think things have shifted. I mean I worry a little bit if they continue to keep the rates where they are today, what’s going to happen to the housing market with all the other changes too, like think about the, the lawsuit. That was recently you know I guess I can’t remember the state, but against the National Realtor Association, that they lost. Now the commissions are going to be shifting. I don’t think we’ve seen that quite yet, but that’s going to happen. So all these changes taking place and then the property values are still we’re still seeing appreciation year over year, whether it’s single digits or in some cases, it’s still double low double digits. That’s kind of unbelievable. But if they keep the rates up for a long time, I just worry that this is a big part of the economy in the country, so that may get a road a little bit.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, that’s a good point. That lawsuit was a big topic of conversation in my house. Having a lawyer or a realtor in the family. So it was something that was discussed. So interesting to see what happens with that.

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes, yes.

Kevin Rosenquist: So by my count, you’ve founded five companies. Is that correct?

Kirill Bensonoff: Oh, God. I lost count myself. You dropped me to the job than me. That sounds about right. I think my first company, which was a real company that I sold was back in college.

Kevin Rosenquist: Was that US web hosting?

Kirill Bensonoff: Correct. Exactly correct. I have to dig back and remember the stuff, but yes, it must have been around five. You’re right.

Kevin Rosenquist: You’re officially in my serial founder category, by the way.

Kirill Bensonoff: Thank you.

Kevin Rosenquist: Welcome.

Kirill Bensonoff: I guess that’s a good thing. I think it keeps me agile and that keeps life interesting.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, I’m sure it does. What is it about starting a company from scratch that entices you so much?

Kirill Bensonoff: I don’t know. I think I always I’ve always had a bit of AGG mentality personally, and could never really keep my focus for too long of a time. I think I’m good at generating an idea that could be a revenue producer, that could whether it solves a problem makes things easier, more convenient, etc. I think I’m good at the initial stages of building a company, but it gets to be a certain size. I tend to get a little bit bored. Management, the day-to-day management of an organization is not my favorite thing to do, in all honesty, so I’m probably good at going from like 0 to 10 million in revenue somewhere in that neighborhood, and then ideally I’d want to have either sell the business or have somebody else take over it.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s funny. We talk a lot about entrepreneurship on this show and mostly about how difficult it is. Did you always see yourself being a founding company or a company, or did you have other ambitions early on?

Kirill Bensonoff: No, I never saw myself that, never thought about it that deeply.

Kevin Rosenquist: This seems to be the case with most people. They kind of just end up doing it.

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes. I think I’m kind of trying to think back to US web hosting. I was in school. So it was like just something fun to do. It brought in some extra cash, and kind of one thing led to another. I had no idea what I was doing but ended up selling the company. It was a small web hosting company. It was kind of fun. Then I never kind of thought of the business . I started afterward was an IT services company, computersupport.com. It’s now called, Stratus Point IT. I met my future business partner at a company that was working full-time, and we kind of, again, just one thing led to another. It was not well thought out, to be honest. I wish some things, we thought out a little bit more.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, if you could. I’m sure things would have been done slightly differently if you had known what you’d know now then.

Kirill Bensonoff: Absolutely. But while I was a little bit younger and then going into the unknown, that was exciting in itself. It’s certainly a risk. So I think I was lucky that most of the companies turned out well, so from a financial side of things, it’s certainly a risk to start a business. If you’re not successful, I had failings, I think most founders would probably say the same. Kind of just making sure that you can stay afloat financially is important. Before I had a family, I think it was a little bit easier. So it was just myself that would drown if something happened.

Kevin Rosenquist: But yes, you can just eat ramen noodles or whatever, right?

Kirill Bensonoff: Right. Exactly. So it was been a fun journey.

Kevin Rosenquist: We’re about the same age, judging by your LinkedIn page. So we remember a world where cordless phones were considered impressive technology. When did you first become interested in tech?

Kirill Bensonoff: Very early on, I think. I’m an immigrant. I moved to us when I was in my early teen years. I was born in what was then the Soviet Union, now Belarus, as I said, I moved here in my early teens. So I’m trying to think back, but I believe even before I came here, my father was a computer engineer back in Belarus, and I remember he worked at like a university and he would take me there. Technology was far behind over there. So he would work on like, perfect cards, I think they’re called which were like cards with holes cut out in them. That’s how you could program a computer. I would help him load these cards.

Kevin Rosenquist: No kidding. I’ve never actually seen one of those in real life. That’s wild.

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes. It’s pretty crazy. I haven’t seen one since then.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a technology that’s probably not coming back.

Kirill Bensonoff: Hopefully not. Hopefully not. Then they had a mainframe computer. I remember like an IBM mainframe, I want to say with these huge magnetic round disk tapes and I was like ten years old carrying these huge disks around. Then but also like they did have I think they at the end towards us leaving. They did get personal computers installed. So I remember the green screen and like I’d have the arrows and I played some games on there and that was a lot of fun. So that was really like my first exposure. Then after moving to the US, we got a computer rather quickly and I was like just kind of became enamored. We set up our own BBS bulletin board system. I don’t know if your listeners would remember these. Maybe some would,

Kevin Rosenquist: Some will, some won’t, I imagine.

Kirill Bensonoff: Right, right. So that was fun. We’d kind of just play around. I guess now, thinking back to it, the BBSes of the day had kind of the same things that now we have apps for like Discord and other things like that. They had a chat room, They had forums where you could post things. It’s all kind of basic, but you could kind of do the same thing, so we chat, we post messages with at the time, the cloud didn’t exist. So you’d have to download software and run software off of your hard disk. So we do that, we download games, play games, and probably do similar things. Not to the scale probably, and not as quickly as people are doing today. I was at a 2400 baud modem when we started.

Kevin Rosenquist: What was your first computer?

Kirill Bensonoff: Oh God. I think we put it together ourselves.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay.

Kirill Bensonoff: I don’t believe we bought any branded computer from what I recall. So I think I remember going to computer fairs and buying parts with my father or friends and later we put it together ourselves.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s cool.

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes, that’s cool.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes. So you were you were programming too early?

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes, I wrote some code. I think I was always. I started programming a little bit later. So early days were probably just more into gaming and stuff like that.

Kevin Rosenquist: I used to program some games on a Commodore 64 with my brother, and that syntax error would drive me nuts. That was like my nightmare. It was so annoying.

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes.

Kevin Rosenquist: So now you ventured into the real estate world with New Silver. How did you come to go down this road and co-found the startup?

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes. That’s interesting. So I invested in a fix and flip fund in sort of post-real estate crisis in the 2020s or early-mid 2020s. A friend of mine ran the spa, and it did fix and flip. That’s kind of how I learned about the industry through, through this, and was always just kind of always found it interesting. I always found fintech interesting, and exciting. It combines the technology and the financial aspects. It’s fast-moving. So I think one of the things that sort of pure play enterprise IT which I was in before, one of the things I didn’t like was the slow movement of the sales process and the development process and all that. So if you’re building B2B software it’s a slow process. It could take 90 days, or 120 days to close a small deal, could take longer to close a larger deal. So I always found that a little bit slow with my AGG brain, I guess. And fintech, with the fast-moving world of finance, I just found that more exciting. So my current partner Alex and myself, we’ve actually and our CTO Alexei, we developed some software to price assets.

Kirill Bensonoff: It wasn’t really specific to do this to price real estate assets. Back in like 2017, or 2018, we had other ideas initially, and then we looked at the software and saw that we had some beta testing going on and essentially what the software could do. It’s a pricing engine for residential real estate. It could potentially use data to price property as is and then using some inputs from a budget price it after repair. That was kind of our initial foray. So we saw that it was working. People liked it. We weren’t sure initially what we were going to do. Like was this going to be a, again, like a SaaS type of venture or not? We didn’t love SaaS for the reason I just mentioned. And there are some other reasons there. But my partner Alex is a lifelong real estate career guy. So we decided to try our hand at becoming an originator. So I kind of run the tech and the business side of things. He oversees all of the things that touch real estate, risk management, underwriting, and things like that. So that’s how we got started.

Kevin Rosenquist: How come you focused on fixes and flips, and because you started with this residential thing, you’re not necessarily geared toward the average person? It’s got to be somebody who wants to fix and flip or rent or build like build from the ground up.

Kirill Bensonoff: Correct. We have three different types of loans, fix and flip, as you mentioned. That’s people who buy a property and they don’t want to demolish it. They want to fix up whatever is on the inside, whether it’s light construction or heavy construction type of deal. The guts are stay the same, usually. Then we have a ground-up product, which is basically for people who buy a piece of land and want to build or want to demolish an existing structure and rebuild. Then we have more, more, more akin to traditional mortgages. We have a DSR-based 30-year mortgage for rental properties. I think we just saw that we could make a bigger impact in this space. This is a competitive space as well, but in the traditional mortgage space, the digitization of mortgage was already well on the way in the consumer lending space, and it wasn’t in private lending or fix-and-flip construction lending. So we thought we could make a bigger difference in this subspace.

Kevin Rosenquist: So you just felt there was a good opportunity there.

Kirill Bensonoff: Correct? Yes. I think we felt like our technology expertise could be a differentiator for our clients.

Kevin Rosenquist: Was there anything in particular that you saw in the space where you were We could do this, we could do better than this?

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes. We started out with this instant approval idea, So we used our pricing engine to value the property today and then after the construction. Then we we provide an instant term sheet. So today if our clients go to our website they have a new property they’re looking for a loan on. They put in an address, and answer a couple of questions in under five minutes. They have them if they’re approved, and they have their proof of funds so they can go out and make an offer. They have a term sheet with everything with all the terms and conditions, all the costs, etc. So they have conditional approval and handed under five minutes. So that’s, that’s our biggest differentiator now. That’s kind of the idea that we started. We’ve done a ton more stuff. We kind of brought everything online. Our North Star is convenience, We want to make our differentiator is just being more convenient. So coming in and getting approved in under five minutes requesting your construction draws online, your your inspections online, you’re requesting payoffs online communicating with the underwriting team, doing that. You’re just doing everything online, seeing the whole process online as you kind of go through the pre-approval, the approval, the service thing, like the whole life cycle of a loan we want to be able to for folks to, to do everything on their phones or on their computers.

Kevin Rosenquist: Wow. That’s incredible to do all that in five minutes from a phone.

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes. Yes, we think it’s pretty cool. I think especially in the hotter markets as you’re alluding to earlier, people were making lots of offers. It was really difficult to secure that property. Because they’re just getting so many offers. So that in the hotter markets, our software does even better. We’ve, we’ve got we’ve got a ton of people using our software and never getting along with us. Right. We don’t mind. That’s okay. They go through, they get the conditional approval, they go out, make an offer. Maybe they’ve got their own cash, or maybe they’ve got another lender they want to use. That’s fine. You know we understand okay? Okay. Yes. We don’t we don’t require we don’t require that they that they use us as their lender. We hope they will I think the majority does. But some don’t. We’ve seen many cases when people are they even they just tell us like, hey, we just needed the letter and we got approved. That’s awesome. But we’ve got our own money or something like that.

Kevin Rosenquist: Thanks for the help. We’re going to go to these guys though.

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes, exactly. That’s okay.

Kevin Rosenquist: Whatever, right?

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes, yes.

Kevin Rosenquist: Tell me about Flip Scout. That seems like a pretty impressive product for finding potential investments.

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes, that’s the idea. It was kind of a proof of concept. It’s still not fully developed, honesty, but it works pretty well. It just looks at the properties on market scours, the on-market properties, and then we’ve got some algorithms, again in line with our pricing engine, kind of trying to figure out it’s not that it’s not fully granular, right? It kind of looks at let’s say you put in the zip code or the name of a town. It looks at all the residential properties in that town, and then it tries to figure out where the highest ROI is. So we’ve got quite it’s free software so folks can go out and just sign up and use it immediately. and we’ve got we never really like, promoted it. It’s just a value add for whoever wants to use it. and we’ve got quite a few people using it. There are hundreds if not thousands daily that use it. We don’t we’re not involved. We don’t make money off of this in any way, shape or form. We’re not a realtor, and we’re not involved in any of the sale of the property or anything else. We’re just kind of helping them with the analytics part of it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Do you find do you think that there are a lot of realtors out there who have stumbled upon the product and use it just for their own information?

Kirill Bensonoff: I don’t know. We heard from realtors using it. I don’t know. We don’t keep track of a free product. We provide support if people ask a question. But we don’t we don’t have too much insight into who uses it and for what use case. It’s mostly I’d say it’s probably 90% of people who are kind of new to new to the fix and flip world and are kind of looking around to find a property that is not as as easy to uncover, just using Zillow or something like that.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, Redfin or something like that. That was what I was going to ask. Is it kind of a, I don’t know, does it kind of pull from all the different places? Well, how can it find things that maybe you can’t find on Zillow?

Kirill Bensonoff: It finds properties listed in a few different places. So I wouldn’t say it’s all like if there are places that are kind of for sale by owner we don’t like crawl all of the websites, but it’s more or less like a search engine for residential real estate.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. That makes sense.  That’s cool. That’s very cool.

Kirill Bensonoff: Well. Thank you.

Kevin Rosenquist: Web3, it fascinates me. You have a lot of experience with Web Three, from what I could tell, in blockchain technology. What makes you so bullish on Web3 and blockchain technology?

Kirill Bensonoff: We could talk about this for a long time. I think there’s so much there.

Kevin Rosenquist: But there is, there is, yes. I know I’m ending with this, but I’d love to get your take. I’d love to get some info from you because you seem like someone who knows a lot about it.

Kirill Bensonoff: I think I’m bullish on not specifically on cryptocurrency. We could put that aside because a lot of people conflate the two. Blockchain is the technology and cryptocurrency is the value that you can move or the gas you pay for using that technology. So you may have to use cryptocurrency to transact on the blockchain or you may not. It depends on the blockchain. Right. There’s some, some private chains that you don’t need anything right to transact on and things like that. So I just want to kind of separate the two. Yes. I am bullish on blockchain technology for real estate specifically, and there are a ton of other use cases, I think, but specifically for real estate, because I believe it can disintermediate. I believe it can lower costs by removing complexities and removing middlemen in transactions that we do every day in real estate. Right. Think about and this is maybe somewhat down the line. Right. So today there are some things that happen on the blockchain. There are people that use blockchain for example, for fractionalization. So kind of taking the old or not-so-old, but a little bit older concept of crowdfunding and buying shares in an investment property, for example.

Kirill Bensonoff: Right. So now you could use the blockchain and instead of doing stuff on paper, right, you now can receive your share in the form of an NFT, for example. They could sit in your, in your, wallet, and essentially be proof of your ownership of this share. That’s just one of the many use cases. You can get paid for example, by just having this NFT in your wallet. Let’s say they’re paying out a monthly dividend payment. So essentially, you could get paid in whatever form of cryptocurrency they, the issuer decide to pay you in instantly. They could do it like on a daily basis or an hourly basis if they want. But so that’s one of the use cases. But think about like a larger use case, which would be transacting in real estate. Like if you’re buying and selling a real estate, think about how complex this process is. How many, how many people are involved? Right. You’ve got attorneys crazy. Yes. You’ve got settlement agents’ title insurance. how much cost does that add? Right. That probably adds a percent point to the transactional cost. Aside from from the realtor and everything else the transaction cost itself is probably like 1% roughly the of, roughly of the value of the real estate.

Kirill Bensonoff: So if you think about the fact that now when you’re buying a piece of real estate, you’ve got a take-out title insurance, for example, especially if you’re getting a loan against it. Right. So your, your lender is going to use going to force you to take out a lender’s title policy. Right. Because and this, this goes, this is there to protect the lender and, and other parties as well. But, you know the fact that the title could have an encumbrance, either a lien against it that nobody knows about or maybe a claim somebody will have a claim against the title. So you buy a property and then once a month afterward you get a letter from a law office saying that the property you now own wasn’t yours because the seller didn’t own it because somebody else had a claim on it. Right. So now, like the title insurance should kick in and hopefully cover if you end up having to give up the property the title policy should cover the claim. But that’s certainly an unpleasant thing.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’d be a huge pain in the butt,

Kirill Bensonoff: A huge pain. Think about all the losses you have to pay again. So blockchain could be simplified a lot similar to what I just mentioned for Fractionalization. Right. In the transactions, the owner of that real estate could have a token in their wallet. That, like that token itself, would signify their ownership. So if they control that token, that means that they have title to the to the policy. I think there’s a lot of things through I’m kind of I’m kind of simplifying this. Right. Then selling it they send the token to a smart contract, which is a a piece of code that decides what to do in certain situations. So let’s say the sellers send over their title in the form of a token to the smart contract. The buyer says their currency to the same smart contract. Now the smart contract. maybe there’s like a legal component, right? The lawyer has their smart contract, which oversees this whole transaction. Then it tells it when the law smart contract says, hey, all the conditions have been met.

Kirill Bensonoff: You know, it happens programmatically, so it tells the settlement smart contract to release the value in the title to the buyer and the seller. Right. now the transaction is done. So not only have we saved tons of time and these service providers that had to, like do this all by hand potentially this could remove them altogether, right, because a lot of this could be coded. Then now we know this works perfectly, code code isn’t perfect, but over time, it gets better and better, but and so at some point, we could say, hey, this this works. If it doesn’t work, there’s a mechanism to unwind the transaction, So that has to be thought through as well. So there’s a lot there. this industry is hundreds of years old processes are so set in stone. and obviously, there are businesses making money in all, in all of these steps. So changing it is a huge deal. But I think there are people thinking about this and working on this already.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yes, that’s an interesting point about all the people making money in the middle who don’t want this to happen. I think, too, as you mentioned earlier about that, you’re simplifying what you’re what your description and how you how you presented that. That kind of brings me to the question of how can we make this technology more palatable for the average person. Because I feel like when I decided I wanted to learn, I was like, I got to learn what this stuff is. I had to sit down and learn what it was. It wasn’t like something that you just like, oh, that makes sense. Like, right away I had to like I had to kind of dig into it and ask ChatGPT some questions and kind of figure out How exactly it works, and what needs to happen in order for it to move forward. So the general public understands it and in is comfortable with it.

Kirill Bensonoff: Yes. I think what needs to happen is that we need to obfuscate the technology as much as possible from a regular user. We don’t want we don’t want a a person with really doesn’t is not interested in the technology and doesn’t know how to use it using web three wallets, for example, and sending their title across in the form of a token. Because as it is today the majority of blockchain transactions are irreversible, So once you send something, unless there is a smart contract or some other way to reverse, like if you’re sending crypto from one wallet to another today once you’ve sent it, you click the send button, that value has left your wallet. Yes, it’s done right unless the other person wants to send it back to you, you know? So there are ways to work around it. But they haven’t been fully built out yet. So I think the main thing to do is build sort of user-facing applications. Right. It’s just like with banking or mortgage. We don’t know or we don’t care what happens behind the scenes when we go to Zelle or Venmo, when we click send, we have no idea what happens, but the other person gets their money somehow.

Kevin Rosenquist: So yes, that’s a good point. We don’t care, do we? We just know that it works. So then we move on with our day.

Kirill Bensonoff: Exactly. So we want the same thing here, We want the transaction to happen in the most seamless possible way where if it’s whether it’s the end-user or again, some kind of intermediaries involved, but they click a couple of buttons, and things just happen.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a good point. I guess I kind of didn’t think about that. There needs to be something on the front end that’s very, very simple and with a great user experience, and that so that because yes, as it is right now. Yes, I have a wallet. When I first got it, it was a little confusing. You had that crazy code that you have to get and like save somewhere and like there’s, there’s a lot of steps involved. So yes, that makes sense. Got to figure out a way for an easy front-end app. That’s hey, you got to get working on that, Kirill.

Kirill Bensonoff: I know that. I don’t know if that’s a challenge. I’m willing to undertake it at this moment in time, but it is super interesting, though I think the biggest challenge here is not the technology challenge, It’s a business process incumbent challenge. So it’s as you alluded to earlier, There’s a whole industry around this, and cheap and I hope there is you know what I said earlier about removing your disintermediated. I think I think that could happen. But I hope there is a way for and I think there is a way for service providers to be involved. Right. But being involved in a slightly different way. Right. I think I think the in my, my belief is that any technology and we could think about not just blockchain, I mean any technology, web technology. Right. Like DocuSign. We don’t like it I don’t know, we got maybe it helped us remove fax machines or like, notaries are not as, I don’t know I’m just kind of making this up, yes. Yes. You could. Yes, you could legally sign the document, but and send it across instantly. Right. Think about that. now we kind of take it for granted, but that probably got rid of some folks’ jobs or reduced their income and reduced what they do or changed what they do. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing. Because it lowers the cost of transactions for everybody. With that, people can do more transactions.

Kirill Bensonoff: I think it’s a win-win. Whenever new technology gets introduced, the incumbent industry is always like, whoa, whoa, whoa. We don’t want that. This is going to destroy our small business. Well, yes, but you also can’t put the genie back in the box, Once the technology’s out there. If it works it’s really hard to to regulate that tech and say that, hey, we’re not going to let people use this new technology even though we know it lowers cost. Piece things up, make things easier, whatever. But we’re going to let you know the old way persists. It happens in cases. Certainly does. But I think It’s not as straightforward anymore. But I think I think if people are a little more open-minded and they embrace that technology, they could find a new use case for their business. Things are always changing, and now I am thinking about what that’s going to do. That’s, that’s going to, that’s going to revolutionize, and certainly people will lose their jobs I could see a lot of a lot of jobs at risk, like people are already saying that they reduce their workforce. I just read today, I think it was a small-medium business survey. They people said that some 16%, I believe, of their tasks are moved to just a high level. But I think it’s going to be a lot more than that.

Kevin Rosenquist: I agree, and I think a lot of what I’ve read is because I’ve been in marketing for a long time, and the marketing world was very nervous about AI for a multitude of reasons, and a lot of it was just like, the best thing you can do is, is learn, learn about it learn about AI, learn about what, and then figure out a way to implement it in your day and your day to day, and instead of looking at it as like, I’m going to lose a job, you look at it as, okay, what other opportunities will this provide me? And maybe that’s the same thing that can happen to some of those, those middlemen in the real estate process.

Kirill Bensonoff: Absolutely. I mean that’s key. Lord of the technology and embrace it and be the first to embrace it. and you’ll be that invaluable consultant. You are that resource that people will go to to use the new technologies. So there’s always there’s always a way with with as, as kind of tech, tech changes our lives. There’s always a way to be successful using that.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, one more question for you. I’m curious about whether are there any use cases of blockchain technology that perhaps most of us aren’t thinking about, but you’ve thought about that could make big changes.

Kirill Bensonoff: I’m focused on real estate. So I think I think in real estate these are like huge changes which I think related to transaction related to investing. I think there’s there are use cases that are already in play today. Even the simplest of moving money from internationally like remittance payments. People are already using, institutions are already using private blockchains. maybe public blockchains in some cases to move value, from one country to another. That’s there’s trillions of dollars of value being moved across the border every year. So that and the costs are a fair amount, a fair amount of, of a fair amount of money to move to, to, to perform those moves in some cases. So, even the simplest use cases are, are very valuable. I always like to think of the simple things. I think the simple things are the ones that change industries. I think, I think start there. We haven’t adopted blockchain fully or we’re not even close to that today. So I do think there are going to be some awesome use cases that I haven’t thought of or none of us have thought of. But there are the simple ones that I’m hoping will get implemented into everyday lives as quickly as possible.

Kevin Rosenquist: Well, Kirill Bensonoff with New Silver, thank you very much for joining me. Yes, I could keep talking Web3, but we’ll bring you back on for part two sometime.

Kirill Bensonoff: Awesome. Kevin, it was great. Good talking to you.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. Thanks again for being here. I appreciate it.

Kirill Bensonoff: Thank you.