Dignity Coin (DIG) creator Arbitrade officially announces receipt of gold to back cryptocurrency

Arbitrade, which bills itself as the highest standard of an all-in-one merchant banking platform for the cryptocurrency sector, held a news conference this morning to officially announce it will be headquartered on the island of Bermuda. Arbitrade has created several cryptocurrencies backed by precious metals, including the Dignity Coin (DIG), which is backed by gold.

Following is a transcript of the press conference:

Len Schutzman:

I am the Chairman and CEO of Arbitrade. Just a couple of opening remarks, and then turn it over to our company’s founder, Troy Hogg. But just a little bit about background and where we’ve come from. I spent more than 30 years in senior leadership positions at PepsiCo, but in running a number of their businesses and handling their world-wide finance of business development.

I retired in 2011, and a close friend of mine, Paul [May 00:30:21], said, “What are you up to now that you keep …?” He knew I had flunked retirement. I was not doing a good job in retirement. So, basically he said, “I’m involved in the most exciting, interesting venture that a friend of mine started in this whole area of blockchain and cryptocurrency.” I said, “Look. I don’t know anything about it. B, I’ve been involved in running multi-billion-dollar global businesses. I don’t do startups. That’s not my thing.” He said, “Do me a favor.” He said, “Talk to Troy Hogg, because when you hear what he’s doing, and what’s involved in transforming the whole financial services area, I think you’ll be very interested.”

So I, out of respect for Jamie, although I was really not all that interested, I said, “I’ll talk to Troy.” Troy got on the phone with me, took me through his vision, and the strategy, and what he thought it would be, and I said, “This is unbelievable.” You don’t get many opportunities in life that transform and disrupt an entire industry, and I’ve been involved in the financial industry my whole life. I said, “But Troy, remember, I’m really a big company guy.” He said, “But that’s why I want you. We’re going be a multi-billion-dollar global business, and I need somebody that’s been there.” He said, “The first thing I want you to do is to put together a world-class team, because it’s all about the team, and the biggest accomplishment,” he said, “I’m going to run through some of the accomplishments.”

This company is off to a very quick start. We’ve put together the best management team in the industry. Everybody recognizes, in terms of the data mining piece of the business, it’s one of the heart of the business. Hayden Gill is the recognized expert. Everyone knows that he’s captaining our efforts there in terms of the drilling effort. And in the payments area, a pioneer of the whole telephone credit card payments area, Mohammad Markatia, is heading that area up.

So we have a great, in terms of the two functional areas, and we’re going to bring people on and, I don’t know, our financial people on our team are ex-Pepsi people, which obviously … There’s a discipline that Pepsi had, and you don’t see this philosophy around. We under-promise and over-deliver. So you’re not going to find a lot of grandiose statements. We just do what we need to do to make it happen, and added to that, a world-class board of directors. I put that up against almost any Fortune 50 company, no less any crypto company. We’ve got some unbelievable people, and they’re really involved.

We just completed yesterday our first board meeting with great support from the board. These are established with great track records, great careers, who have terrific international contacts, and contacts in business that are going to be very helpful as we expand globally, so I’m really proud of the group we have put together, and we’re going to bring on a few more people to fill in the other key functional areas.

We’ve been spending the best part of this year so far building our infrastructure, which is important. We’ve invested over $15 million year-to-date in mining assets and facilities and servers, so that that’s the asset permits us to develop the tokens and the coins. We have now one of the biggest … We have capacity in that mining that’s really going to allow us to get going. We’re in the process of finishing the exchange software.

Of course, we’ve registered a domicile in Bermuda, which has the most progressive legislation in terms of digital asset and business image, a place where there’s not only a very progressive regulatory history with insurance and all that, they’re also very interested and knowledgeable about the industry and where it’s going, and so we’ve met with a number of people here. Trout Exchange is going to be headquartered here, and the exchange will be run out of Bermuda.
So, that’s kind of what we’re doing. We have a lot of momentum. We have a lot of plans. I think certainly one of those elements is we’ll be doing an ICO at some point in the relatively near future. Depends, there’s all sorts of document … You know, they have to do this right. The regulations are very tight, and Bermuda has good regulations and is serious, so we have to file for the paperwork, and we’ve got to be ready. But I can tell you the management team that we have behind the systems we put in place are first class and that’s the foundation for where to grow.

But in every emerging growth company, there’s a visionary that started it, that had the idea and the concept. In our case, it’s Troy Hogg. I want to turn it over to Troy, because he’ll give you a little more flavor as well as address some issues that have come up that we want to sort of deal with head on. Troy?

Troy Hogg:

Thanks, Len. I really appreciate it. Welcome everybody, this morning. I am happy to have you here today. It’s been a long road for me. We’ve been on this project for many, many years. As Len had mentioned, we have built a world-class team behind the whole infrastructure of Arbitrade. Our plans are very aggressive, and we’ve been moving forward as planned.
I know social media can take a life of its own in a lot of aspects, and I want to clear up a couple things through the airwaves prior to giving the official announcements of the big news that we would like to release today. Now, social media has a presence, and it has a purpose. Being from the marketing industry for the past 25 years, I’ve experienced all the highs and the lows involved around social media and what it has to bring.

That being said, there is a website that does not like me out there, it was created by a group of individuals, and I have to say this. You cannot be an entrepreneur online and have 100% success all the time. Now, that being said, I called some individuals out that were working with me on projects, and called them out for their bad doings, and it became on online battle. Right? That is what is being said online. I don’t have time to fight and argue online to defend myself. We passed through the KYC/AML process with Bermuda and the other countries and the other partners that we’re working with, and I wouldn’t have built this board of directors if I didn’t have knowledge, experience, and the ability to pull through with this. I have hundreds of people counting on me about this, and I really don’t want to have to listen about my credibility or my experience ever again.

That being said, I will be publishing my own website and blog, giving full occurrences of everything that happened through my attorneys, through my publicists, and through our agents that are assisting me with that. That being said, we will be proceeding with some legal actions on the individuals that continue to slander my name, and that will be that on that topic.

Now, moving forward, we’ve really built the most robust system in the entire crypto sector, and we will be revealing that in early September. We are building an infrastructure that allows for payment merchant services. It allows for trading of cryptocurrencies. It allows for interest payments on cryptocurrencies held within our platform. I guess you could call it the all in one merchant banking platform. Mohammad and I work closely together with both of our development teams. Over the past number of years, this consisted of hundreds of individual developers working together on the blockchain technologies that have been presented to the world to build the most robust system ever.

Being in the insurance capital of the world, we are looking to insure the entire platform so that everybody’s protected, including Arbitrade, so that if any occurrences happen with the platform, we are there for the people. If you know me personally, this has always been said about me. I’m not a greedy man. I’m a very generous man, and I like to do what’s right for the people. I like to develop what will eventually become to gold standard of anything that I do.

That being said, we have accomplished that. We saw a full demo of the platform yesterday. It’s going through beta testing and bug testing, and we will reveal that at the end of this summer. We are taking the summer to prepare all legal documentation required to fulfill our licensing with Bermuda for our ICO. We thank Bermuda immensely for accepting us and incorporating us in this beautiful country, and I would like to now get to the actual accomplishments that we’ve done thus far for the company.

With the plans to launch the headquarters, as Len said, in Bermuda, we will be adding several jobs. Head office in our new seven-story office tower called Victoria Hall, which that property is expected to close within the upcoming next two weeks. After that, that building will be renovated over the summer to accommodate everybody with new computers, phone systems, management staff for training. At that point, we have to train all the staff in order to understand the operating system, how to handle support, and how to handle compliance.

This is very key, because what we’ve found in the industry, being traders ourselves and being around crypto since close to the inception, is that no trade exchange and no merchant service in the sector has call-in phone support with all languages, or online support that answers promptly. We have a very experienced gentleman out of Aruba that will be heading up our management of support. He came up with an absolutely brilliant idea that uses hashtags across social media so that our support staff can handle any questions on any of the social media platforms that allow for hashtagging, so you would do #Arbitradehelp, once this is launched in September, and our support staff will be able to answer your questions across any of the social platforms that allow for that. It’s another technologically advanced way that Arbitrade will stand head and shoulders above everybody else in the industry.

Now, most of the people that will be reading this media release are very interested in the cryptocurrencies that we created because we’ve, basically, we recreated a gold standard for the cryptocurrency sector. In partnership with Sion Trading FZE, out of Dubai, which is one of the only licensed gold traders on the Dubai Gold Exchange, we will be granted $10 billion worth of physical gold, which we are receiving title to. Agreements are in place and signed, sitting before me here, and that will be held at Brinks.

The gentleman sitting to the right of me, I would like you to introduce yourself, and can we please confirm who you work with and the situation on that.

(Note: the name of this individual could not be clearly understood, and could not be independently confirmed by the transcriber)

Absolutely, yes sir. … We’re a United Arab Emirates trading firm. … We’re a gold trading facility, in-ground asset facility, mining clone concept 224, and trade on an open market. We’re 100% committed behind and thoroughly ecstatic about what’s been afforded us the opportunity to be a part of Arbitrade.

Thank you, sir.

Troy Hogg:

Thanks. … Furthermore, we would like to extend our gratitude to the people of Bermuda. We’ll be following through with several actions here. We’ve been asked to allow the people of Bermuda the first right of a free ICO position when we launch our ICO. We accept those terms.

We would like to also further offer some things to the people of Bermuda. Today we will be donating $1 million to the government’s new state-of-the-art co-working space, an incubator for the new FinTech sector. The government has purchased a building at Park Place for $4 million, and Arbitrade will be donating $1 million for the refurbishment and launch of that facility in the coming months ahead. That donation will be done early next week.

Next, the government has launched a gang violence reduction proposal with the BDA and the government, and Arbitrade would like to help them in their therapeutic gardening initiative, where five acres have been given to the government where gang members are taught therapeutic farming and plant husbandry. And then, also chicken farming. Gang members will be paid to work on the chicken farms, but this costs money, and Arbitrade would like to assist in that as we help Bermuda develop the most advanced student and young person learning process into the FinTech sector, and to help them get off the streets and into education, Arbitrade will donate $45,000 to that initiative.

Then ALICE. ALICE program is a big program for active shooter preparedness taught by the FBI at schools and local charities. Arbitrade will donate $30,000 to this initiative.

Then the Mears program, which is a very large program in Bermuda, Arbitrade would like to donate $25,000 to that initiative.

Finally, the Family Center, which is a very big part of the community in Bermuda, Arbitrade would like to donate $25,000 to that initiative.

Now, that being said, there will be a lot more news coming out over the next couple months as Arbitrade moves into new countries, new territories, and subsidiary licenses to our home domicile in Bermuda. Together with my board, the management, the staff, and all the people that will be working behind the scenes to launch Arbitrade in the largest way, we thank everybody for coming today, and we will not be taking any questions today, but that will come at a later date, and we will be publishing press releases regarding today’s comments, and we welcome and thank you everybody for attending. Thank you.