Mortgage NFTs and the Bacon Protocol with Karl Jacob

Published: April 26, 2022, 11 a.m.

Today, my guest is Karl Jacob, the co-founder, and CEO of LoanSnap. Karl is a serial entrepreneur who has been building, advising, and investing in companies for the last 20 years. LoanSnap invented the world\u2019s first smart loan technology that uses AI and machine learning to analyze a person\u2019s entire financial picture and show them how to benefit from a smart home loan. LoanSnap is the parent company that built the Bacon Protocol, a decentralized mortgage lending protocol created using smart contract technology on the Ethereum blockchain. Anyone with a Web3 wallet can lend money and earn interest, all while seeing exactly which homes they\u2019re lending against. Moreover, anyone with a home that meets the protocol\u2019s criteria can create an NFT and use it as collateral to borrow money. Karl\u2019s career has been focused on founding companies that solve big problems, and those companies have helped tens of millions of consumers. He has raised 23 rounds of financing from investors, including True Ventures, Baseline Ventures, Richard Branson\u2019s Virgin Group, Microsoft, eBay, Integral Partners, Norwest Ventures, Greylock, Benchmark Capital, FT Ventures, Ignition Partners, and Vulcan Ventures. Many of his companies have had successful acquisitions, including; Dimension X, acquired by Microsoft, Keen/Ingenio, acquired by AT&T, Cloudmark, acquired by ProofPoint, and Coveroo, acquired by Zazzle. While CEO, Jacob has generated hundreds of millions in returns to investors and over $150 million in revenue per year. He holds a B.S. in Computer Science from the University of Southern California Engineering School, where he sits on the board of counselors. We discuss a wide range of topics, including LoanSnap, Bacon Protocol, the real estate industry, the benefits of blockchain, and much more. We begin our discussion by delving into why the banking/loan industry has been tough to disrupt. Our conversation leads us to how he and his team have finally found a way to disrupt their value chain. Karl explains how the Bacon Protocol works and what makes it unique. Karl elaborates why they decided to build the bacon protocol on blockchain/crypto rails instead of building on the traditional financial stack. He illustrates this by explaining how blockchain removes the barriers and overhead that plague the conventional loan and real estate industry. Karl discusses the fallacies that persist throughout the loan industry and how the Bacon Protocol democratizes access to affordable housing and the loan industry. We also discuss the socioeconomic impact of foreclosures on neighborhoods and how blockchain technology can be used to solve the misalignment between individuals and corporations. Karl also addresses the impediments that currently make it challenging to tokenize real-world assets and how they\u2019ve optimized the Bacon Protocol to avoid these issues. We finish our conversation by discussing how Karl envisions the entire loan industry to be disrupted by blockchain technology. Please enjoy my conversation with Karl Jacob.\n--\nThis podcast is powered by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at https://blockworks.co