# Interview│Steef Peters - Monflo│ETHDam III - 2025 - Channel: [CryptoCanal](https://streameth.org/cryptocanal) - Date: 2025-10-07 - Duration: 12:51 - Watch: https://streameth.org/watch/yt-glqk5WpqXqY - YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glqk5WpqXqY ## Description Interview with Steef Peters from Monflo at ETHDam III - 2025. Welcome to the 3rd Edition of ETHDam, hosted May 9–11, 2025 in Amsterdam. This year, we brought together the brightest minds in privacy, security, and AI for a unique 48-hour hackathon + conference combo. 🌷 https://www.ethdam.com// 🌷 ------------------ 🎤 About the Speaker: After a study mathematics and physics at the University of Amsterdam and a PhD in elementary particle physics he made a new step designing and implementation of new technology like electronic payment systems and artificial intelligence in the financial sector. This resulted in a professorship at the Free University of Amsterdam, visiting researcher position at the Henley Business School and visiting professor position at the Beijing Institute of Technology. Next to this he started companies in the Netherlands and the Philippines directed to the design and implementation of decentral personal information systems. To apply this knowledge he joined a company in the social domain as director resulting in ways of scoring, which is now being developed in a new company, wallet79 in the Netherlands and wallet79Cambodia. He was teacher at the Hague University of Applied Sciences in the field of risk management, cybersecurity, blockchain and GDPR before staring a new company Monflo, bridging the traditional fiat currency world to the digital currency world. At the moment he is the Chief Risk Officer at Monflo and CEO at wallet79 in the Netherlands. https://www.linkedin.com/in/steef-peters-7928487/ https://x.com/MonfloFinance https://www.monflo.com/ ------------------ About ETHDam & CryptoCanal ETHDam is powered by CryptoCanal, an education and events platform rooted in Amsterdam, expanding into Rotterdam and Zürich. Keep up with us to see updates on future events: https://www.cryptocanal.org/ Follow CryptoCanal on X: https://twitter.com/CryptoCanal Join CryptoCanal TG Community: https://t.me/CryptoCanalCommunity Join CryptoCanal Discord: https://discord.com/invite/XJVjpCqQBz CryptoCanal unites crypto enthusiasts committed to making a positive impact. Unapologetically political, we prioritize education, events, and services while championing cypherpunk values like privacy, sovereignty, and censorship resistance. ------------------ 🎥 Credits: babyPRO - https://babypro.art/ ------------------ Special thanks to our partners who made ETHDam possible: 🌹 Hackathon – Bouquet: Oasis Network https://oasisprotocol.org/ 🌷 Hackathon – Petal: Circles https://aboutcircles.com 💛 Conference – Gold: Zano https://zano.org/ Dash https://www.dash.org/ Bitvavo https://bitvavo.com/en 🩶 Conference – Silver: Igra Labs https://igralabs.com/hero 💛 Conference – Copper: Lido https://lido.fi/ DeTrip https://detrip.travel/ Cake Wallet https://cakewallet.com/ The Grid https://thegrid.id/ Calimero Network https://calimero.network/ 0xbow https://0xbow.io/ Mina https://minaprotocol.com/ JobStash https://jobstash.xyz/ Cyber Capital https://www.cyber.capital/ POAP https://poap.xyz/ Acronym Foundation (Supported our Top 10 Hackers) https://acronymfoundation.org/ 🌱 Sponsor: EF Ecosystem Support Program https://esp.ethereum.foundation ## Transcript Hi, I'm Steve Peters. I'm retired professor in informatics and organizational science and at the moment I'm risk officer of Monflow. My key message today is that I really want to disrupt existing institutes like in the banking environment and education environment to get more individual freedom and control that everybody will have. again self-s sovereignty identity having control over his own assets only way to change is from inside explain the conjecture well organized country like United States like the western France all that kind of stuff those institutes are so strong that whatever you do to get a kind of revolt going on it won't work either you have to do something completely new which doesn't exist if you look at the quantum theory because my origin I have a PhD in physics in elementary particle physics so I'm a quantum physicist so I know exactly what the impact of quantum is going to be on it that's something which is not regulated it's completely unknown if you look at biomedics at the moment it's completely unregulated area the whole research and cell structure building DNA, RNA and that kind of stuff is still completely new. Governments don't know about it. So that's still possible. But banking, finance, economics, that's against every leg, every possible politicians economic institute in a country. So you cannot change that from the outside or you have to move to Mars or completely outside the system. So therefore I said to implement complete freedom it means that the existing institute has to be hollowed out has to be eaten from inside. Now one of the major points is that the banks for your salary is now always put onto the bank account and you use that bank account for your mortgage and use that bank account for making payments elsewhere, for parking your car, for paying your tickets, all that kind of stuff. Which meant that these banks know everything about you and they have your lock in because they give you the loan. they give you the mortgage, you cannot go anywhere anymore. So they it's for them very easy to block crypto because the only thing they have to do is they say, "Okay, crypto, Bitcoin, that's an investment." So it falls under the rules for investments. So there you go. Binance, you're not accepted in the Netherlands. That's how they work. Institutes now. So you have to I I had these discussions internally in the development group. You have to adopt to the normal people that you get volume in such a way that you are acting at the let's say border of what's possible and allowed and then when you get volume there then suddenly people are getting interested. So I had a very nice discussion with the minister of economic affairs of the European Union and uh this was in [Music] 2011. This was just after the big crisis of 2008 2009 the banking crisis all the stuff everybody was losing money and I was working for a company and we were making still profit like hell. So she was asking me how how are you making profit? How is this possible? I said oh ma'am there are still so many gray areas where you can work where you can earn money. It's only that you have to be you have to know from inside as well where to find those gray areas and how to operate it without annoying government without annoying tax people and that kind of stuff. That's that's the story. That's why why by for this type of for money, financial capital and human capital, education, you have to eat from inside. So they kicked me out as a professor because I was not publishing the right papers and things like that. So talking about corruption, you said that uh corruption is good because politics and economics. No, no, no. That's not what I said. No, corruption in the end is always bad because it increases inequality. Uh and it's well people should not get rich over the back of others. That's something I don't like. Uh so in fact corruption is bad. The thing is uh you were well he was especially asking me why is corruption good for this case? I said corruption is good for this case because it gives you space to introduce the innovation and to bring it to a level that it's been accepted and then of course the corruption will go away because then it will you cannot keep it that way because then it's too much into the open in the beginning I so and it's certainly not all corruption not the corruption I was mentioning regarding this car leasing in Indonesia I don't mean the corrupt the corruption. Okay, if you want to sell that, I want to have 10 10%. That's not the type of corruption I I mean the type of corrupt corruption I mean is uh which is good is that politicians sees some personal win for them when this innovation advantage uh this really really comes from the ground and is being implemented either because they have some shares or because they are interested to invest in it or they have some other stuff. Uh so it's always happening. I'm sorry to say I had a project here in Amsterdam regarding uh payments for parking and I worked with people and we made a proposal to the government of this city and they said no no no you have to make the proposal to this consultancy firm and then the consultancy firm says you have to pay€ 10,000 euro in advance otherwise we will not read your proposal. I don't know how you call that, but so it's everywhere and that's the that's the wrong type of correction because that's against innovation. So what's next for you? What's uh what's the next thing you're going to disrupt the whole uh labor and in effect the whole labor market. Uh at the moment it's like this. you have an HR department and when you have a vacancy, the HR department determines what kind of person, what function description there is, what kind of certifications you need, blah blah. Uh they publish it on LinkedIn or Monster Board or whatever. And then you as a poor individual, you have to apply for the function, right? You have to give them all the information about yourself, which is of course more and more fake at the moment because it's very easy to make your own diploma and and all that kind of stuff. So, but this is crazy. What we see happening now is that in fact there's a huge mismatch between the real skills and competences of people and what companies are asking for through HR. Because of that, we get a lot of information exchange and central systems around the labor market, including the control on labor with when do you get unemployed? How are unemployed people being treated? Let me give you an example. municipality, one one municipality in the Netherlands, there was a factory who was asking for welders because these old welders, the people who weld metal together, right, for the big trucks and things like that, they had very old ones. They got they got their pension, so they were looking for new young ones. They couldn't find them because there's no education anymore in welding. You get no certificate anymore in the Netherlands. It's very difficult. So they went to the municipality and said, "Well, you have 42,000 unemployed people, right, in your database and you are paying every month unemployment money to them?" Yes. So out of the 42,000, are there not seven who could come to my company for welding? So the people from the city municipality made an analysis on the database, zero result. Reason is that in that area there were mostly administrative companies like insurance companies, banks who fired in the 80s, '90s a lot of people and continue to become smaller and smaller. So unemployment was mostly administrative people. So I said why don't we analyze their resume in a different way. So we will not ask them for the resume but we will ask them whether they have hobbies. What kind of hobby do you have? And then we found out that there were about 45 elderly well let's say above 45 years old people who had a hobby in in football, soccer, uh field hockey, that kind of stuff. So we invited them and said what do you do for the club? Well I do volunteer work. I said, "But what kind of volunteer work now?" "Well, when, for example, a goalpost is rotten. I weld it and I repair it and everything." I said, "But it's not in your resume. You don't have a certificate." "No, because I just learned it it myself." He said, "Do you have a machine in the garage then?" "Yeah, yeah, yeah, I've got a machine." Said, "If you get a training for 3 weeks and we give you a certificate, would you like to get a job?" Yeah, that would be great because this is one of my hobbies. We had seven people working in that company in three months. That's a completely different way of looking at labor market. So labor market looking at your personal freedom. What is my what are my talents? Right? What are my real talents? Is this your real talent? making pictures, photos, things like that or are you an artist? I'm an artist. Exactly. But you don't make enough money out of artist, right? So, you have to do something else. And but that's a pity that's limiting you. In fact, the older you get, the more problem you will get with it because you will be more and more limited when you get children and things like that. You feel responsible. You start to fit in in society and then it's gone. I hate that. And it's it's I I'm also making I well I'm making a lot of photographs and all the and I'm spending time and money on it and people are telling me why are you doing that? I said I I love it beauty. I mean it's wonderful. I will not earn a scent by it. I know I'm so lucky that I'm also a professor in informatics that I can earn my money in another way. But you see my freedom question coming up there. That's my next disruption.