Show Notes 215: From Scotland Yard to the Blockchain: How Jonathan Benton Is Fighting Back Against the Crypto Fraud Epidemic
What happens when a former Metropolitan Police detective who spent 30 years hunting corrupt politicians, war criminals and money launderers decides to become a tech founder? You get iSanctuary: a Cambridge company quietly building some of the most legally significant blockchain technology in the world, and one of the most compelling founder stories the Cambridge Tech Podcast has featured.
James and Faye sit down with Jonathan Benton, Founder and CEO of iSanctuary, for a conversation that covers financial crime, soulbound tokens, world-first court orders and what it really feels like to go from policing to pitching investors for the very first time.
Key Talking Points
The problem: crypto fraud at epidemic scale
Over 3 million people in the UK report fraud annually, with the true figure far higher given chronic under-reporting
Crypto is now the preferred vehicle for organised crime: fast, borderless and almost impossible to track using traditional enforcement tools
Jonathan pulls no punches on the human cost: victims losing life savings, taking out loans, and in some cases taking their own lives. Romance scams and so-called "pig butchering" schemes are industrialised and growing, often run from fraud factories in Myanmar, Cambodia and Thailand linked to modern slavery networks
Only 1% of reported fraud is investigated. Just 0.1% results in prosecution. Financial institutions and technology are where the real defence has to happen
"It's hitting epidemic proportions. Over 3 million people in the UK report a fraud. And that's just the official reports." — Jonathan Benton
The technology: REKTify
Born from a real case: a $3 million crypto fraud where iSanctuary located 95% of stolen assets within 6 hours using on-chain tracing
The team pioneered the use of soulbound tokens to serve legally binding court orders directly onto blockchain wallets, meaning the order cannot be forwarded on or removed by the wallet holder
A world first: the Singapore High Court sanctioned this approach, accepting NFT-based service of process and granting a worldwide freezing order. The UK High Court has since followed, setting legal precedent
REKTify has now been extended to Bitcoin (a technically more complex challenge given Bitcoin's lack of smart contract functionality), deployed 40 times in a single weekend in response to a UK court order
The next phase: automating REKTify at scale as the blockchain equivalent of a CFAS marker used in traditional banking, flagging tainted wallets across the entire ecosystem in real time and giving exchanges the tools to act independently
The company and team
A team of around 10 people combining traditional investigators, blockchain analysts and developers, working on-chain and off-chain in parallel
Board chaired by Lord Bernard Hogan-Howe, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, who Jonathan credits with keeping the business focused
Backed by investors including Rockmount, who bring a portfolio spanning companies developing everything from artificial skin to deep tech exits
Revenue generating today, with legal firms and fraud victims as primary clients. iSanctuary's fees are a fraction of the legal costs victims would otherwise face
The founder's journey
No business plan. No business school. A law degree, a master's in social sciences, 30 years in law enforcement, and a stint investigating war crimes on behalf of The Sentry (the NGO co-founded by George Clooney)
The pivot to entrepreneurship came from repeatedly seeing the same unsolved problem rather than from a technology looking for a market
"I've always been very driven. If you've done 25 years of public service, it never really leaves your blood." — Jonathan Benton
Find out more: isanctuary.io
Produced by Joe Donaghy of Cambridge TV. Supported by media partner Business Weekly.
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Episode Transcript
Welcome to the Cambridge Tech Podcast. Talking all things technology from the heart of the UK's tech capital. Here are your hosts, Fay Holland and James Parton.
Hi, I'm James. And I'm Faye. So today's episode is with Jonathan Benton, who's founder of iSanctuary, who is a founder with a really unique backstory.
Yeah, this was a great conversation. One of those where you learn a lot about a new problem space. Fintech, cybercrime, blockchain, not the typical kind of startup you find in Cambridge, which hopefully you'll enjoy as much as we did.
Welcome, Jonathan. Appreciate you taking the time to come on today. We always like to start by getting to know our guest, and you've got a really interesting path to entrepreneurship. Why don't you give us a little flavor of your background?
Hi, James. Thank you. Well, it started off probably 25 plus years ago. I studied law initially and I had this ambition of sort of going off and doing family law and protecting people and all sorts of things and then ended up in Metropolitan Police. I was very lucky to accelerate through the ranks quite quickly, but I spent most of my time working in financial services. Crime and in the organized crime space. In the end, I was investigating corrupt politicians from all over the world, effectively, as anti-corruption agency who laundered money through the UK. And it may or may not be known by the listeners, but it's a fairly common fact that the UK is a huge money laundering pit really for, because we're such a big financial center. A lot of money comes into the City of London, it comes into, but there's also with all that a lot of dirty money unfortunately comes in as well, so somebody's got to deal with it. Interesting. And how, you say you were there for 25 years?
I served in the military and in police for a total of 25 years, and then I left and went to work in America for a little while. I guess you've been out of that world for a while now, but what's the kind of current climate of that kind of side of things in London and the UK?
The problem's getting worse. It's almost, particularly the fraud, and we'll go on to a bit later, I'm sure, the technology that we've developed to try and just help people, help victims. It's getting, it's almost, I'd use the word in like sadly epidemic portions, you know, there's over 3 million people in the UK who report a fraud. And you and we will all know people, the listeners will all know people We'll know family members that get a WhatsApp message asking them to do something or something else and we ignore it or we don't do anything or we don't report it. That's just the official reports. So it's a huge problem.
So back to your point, James, I think I would say crime's not going away and it's only getting worse. And with the, with AI and technology and the ability to work at lightning speed from anywhere in the world, it's enabled it to grow.
Yeah, and that leap to entrepreneurship then, was that a fire that always burned inside you or was it just this kind of mission-driven thing that there was this problem and you felt you had to try and tackle it?
I think it's slightly more nuanced. Initially went off and did some really exciting work investigating war crimes in South Sudan and Sudan and places like that on behalf of George Clooney and Brad Pitt's NGO The Century. Very rewarding work, very demanding, very interesting, very challenging. And then moved more into sort of the private sector and fights and boards of banks and things like that. And kept seeing the same problem, the same issues, just talking about the same challenges around, particularly around fraud and thought, can do something here. So I would say my drive to entrepreneurship was more like there's a way of fixing this to some extent. And I often say this, I think if you've done that sort of 25 years public service, it never really leaves your blood.
Yes, it's great. I love running a, I run a small company here in Cambridge. I've got the most amazing team. We've done some really cool stuff. I love it. I want to do so much more. We've gone on an interesting journey, raised, done all sorts of things that I never thought I would do. Never. I'd never written a business plan before. I didn't go to business school. I studied law and then I did a master's degree in social sciences. It was presentations to, to investors and all of that was like day one back at school type journey, to be honest. But it was exciting and it is still exciting and it's, and that's actually now the drive. I've always been very driven. I'd be, Frank's, his is just a drive to make this work and I think having approached it from identifying and really understanding a problem, particularly now in the digital assets, crypto space, and then go in thinking about the solution rather than doing it the other way around sometimes. Sometimes lots of stuff I've read and people think of a really magic solution and think, but actually this was very much the other way around and then go in, what do we do? And I'm sure we'll explain in a little while some of the interesting things we did with the blockchain to go, actually, we can make a difference here.
Hello, Jonathan. What a fantastic introduction. And it's true to Cambridge, the entrepreneurship comes in all different shapes and forms and sizes. Thank you definitely for sharing that story with us. So we are going to come on and talk like some of the things you just said about setting up the business and the things you've learned. We're definitely going to come back to that and also what it is that you're developing. But actually, what would be really useful first is is to understand what that problem is. So you saw a problem and you wanted to address it. So it would be interesting just to uncover that a little bit. And then more specifically, it's your view on the general crypto landscape. So we were talking before we started recording about crypto. It seems to have dipped out of the headlines a little bit. It doesn't have that same moment. There's always something new that comes up that's the latest thing everyone wants to talk about. And James was saying that NFTs were really big a couple of years ago. And so we're in this little bit of a cycle. So it's still an issue. How much of an issue is it? And why do you think people are not talking about it?
So the problem and this sort of scale of the problem and how we then ended up getting involved, everybody knows fraud's a problem, right? Everybody knows about crime. And I think sometimes we adopt in society maybe a little bit, it doesn't happen to me, so it's not my, it's not my problem, but... Even those, you know, statistics I was saying at the beginning will say to you that sort of one in 30 of us will be a victim of fraud at some stage in over the next year. And that's really conservative. Worse still, it is hitting our most vulnerable in society sometimes, our elderly, and that's, I talk about crypto cases where People in their 70s, a guy in his 70s who had life savings, met somebody online who was talking him through investments. There'll be many very tech-savvy people, I'm sure, that will listen to this and will go like, how on earth can that happen? But that that they allow them to click a link take over control of their computer access all the bank accounts show them how to move the money to coinbase or another crypto exchange and then show them where it's going and then they show them a fake investment platform show them how their money's done then they go and borrow money and this this guy did he took out loans he borrowed money he took his wife's savings he did everything and before that point he then realized it was And this is rinse and repeat. This is happening a hundreds and hundreds of times every single. So that problem it's the same with, and it's an awful word. I really don't like this, but this is the word that's used, called pig butchering. It's the romance type scams. I had a lawyer the other week, really lovely lady met somebody on a dating website. He was some sort of Singaporean investment, great investment guy. Long and short of it, her life savings. Over months and months, totally socially engineered. A friend of mine asked me if I'd speak to her when I sat her down and I said to her, what did he look like? She burst out crying because she knew she's a lawyer. She's an intelligent woman. She's smart, but she knew the question I was asking, she couldn't answer because she'd never seen him yet. She'd given this guy her life savings. And that's the social engineering part. That's the pernicious. I don't want to be too down on this, but it, this, the sad, the impact of this is not just people losing their life savings and everything. This is people committing suicide because some things happen like this is they just can't cope with it. It's they live with long-term trauma.
So, Jonathan, what makes crypto fraud so much harder to stop than traditional financial crime?
I would say the first thing is the whole law enforcement system. Industry, everybody is, we're at the early learning center. It's the beginnings. It's a bit like finance before it was all regulated, banking before all the... So we're at that stage. It's very immature, very little expertise and not really much capability. Most of the exchanges adopt the frameworks that would, that will come with regulation. Because they want to operate in that safe space, but we're at such an early stage. I think the second thing is the challenge, crypto and crypto-related crime, so easy to do. And it's so easy to operate from anywhere in the world. And therefore, from an enforcement perspective, that makes it really difficult.
International boundaries. I can't pick up the phone to the police in Myanmar and say, look, we've tracked an IP address to a, what's effectively a fraud factory that are doing scamming people on romance scams. Can you, it just doesn't work like that. It's it does in a very small number. It's been totally exploited the whole international aspect of it. And I think I would say sort of this is not face to face old fashioned fraud. It can be conducted from anywhere and you might be logging on to what you think is what's quite often a cloned website. So they'll clone a legitimate business. And you think you're logging, but you're really logging onto a bunch of fraudsters that really could be working in, I said Myanmar earlier, and it's not just Myanmar, but Myanmar has a big problem. Cambodia does, Thailand and that part of the world. It's all mixed with slavery, modern slavery, it's people put into fraud and it's, that's the, and that then becomes really difficult to investigate. It's really interesting your comments about being so early in the kind of industry, in the market. And when we were talking before we started to record, it might be useful just to walk us through some of the for good and the legal use cases of blockchain and crypto in parallel to the kind of fraudulent examples you've been talking to us about. Because I'm really trying to understand where the kind of pull comes because it's unregulated, because it's international by design. Where's the pull coming from for the industry to clean up, if that's the right expression? The industry wants to become clean because it wants to make money. This is a massive industry now. And the whole decentralized finance space, and not necessarily now at this point, because we've been a long time talking about the The whole thing of why there's a generation that are a bit sick of banking and authority. There is all part of that is part of the journey, but the it's not going to go away. Right. I think sometimes the statistics that are taught about the volume of digital assets that are involved in crime, I don't think they're necessarily correct. I'm not entirely sure we really do know. But from a social good perspective, and this is the use of technology and us digitizing our finances and our ability to move money. I was seeing it as a really good example in Kenya years and years ago. In development terms, they worked out one of the biggest problems was cash and people even in really rural places having cash. And as people started to have mobile phones and even the old sort of analog, the old phones, as people started phones, they realized that you could have a credit system. It's called M-Pesa, which allowed you to put credit on your phone and pay for things, which effectively gave a whole massive part of the society in that part of the world, in Kenya, it gave them access to finance that previously would not have had access to finance and wouldn't have access to bank any sort of, so other than a cash-based economy. And you'd go to, I've been to Kenya many times, you'd go to tiny little places, tiny little shops, and you can pay with M-Pay, so you can pay in Really, I think we're on that same journey that we are, it's an ability to move funds really quickly to, I run a business, our clients are international. I'm constantly looking at how much fee, what fees I pay. The blockchain, smart contracts are going to be used for, we were just talking before we started about tokenization. Places like Jersey and the Channel Islands, very conservative financial center, very traditional, is moving at a huge pace now to tokenized assets. It's a big McKenzie report has just come out and all the politicians have signed up to it about how they've recognized that to be a leading offshore financial center, I'm guessing in 2030, 2035, 2040, they've got to move with the blockchain. So everything that traditionally might have been held on paper is going to be held on the blockchain. And actually the security around that is amazing because it's far better. You can see every change on the contract. You can see every transaction. So from a compliance, from an understanding source of wealth, from an understanding of where some things come from, it's so much better. The technology is such an enabler in that regard. So it's inevitable that the change is going to happen. It's then just a question of building trust and combating the fraudulent side of the industry.
Yeah, and I think that we'll forget the times of silly coins named, you know, after maybe heads of state and stuff like that. And things like that and whatever it is, but the coins are things like Bitcoin is back up again to, I think yesterday it was at $67,000 a coin. There are only so many Bitcoin. There'll be a core that will stick around and will be here and will be here to stay.
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So I think that's a good segue then to talk in more detail about Rectify, the actual product. You've done a really good job there of describing the problem space and the need. Walk us through the technology you've developed, how that came about and the kind of use cases that you're directly tackling with Rectify. So we started off and the initial response was, I mentioned earlier, the £3 million fraud. We could see the money on chain. We could see half of it on chain. We could see half of it sitting in centralized exchanges. We tried, we notified the exchanges, but... Anybody will know who's been involved in any legal action. The law doesn't move particularly quickly. And it can do, but it is historically quite slow. However, we happen to be in High Court Singapore there, and they've developed a court, a sort of court within a court that just deals with blockchain because it's such an important, it's a growing sector for them. You've got judges in senior judges who are very savvy. And we'd said, look, what we want to do is we want to, because we don't know where these sources are, we want to serve. When you're in legal process, you have to serve all the papers on somebody. You have to serve notice on them. We know the wallets they control because we can see them using it. So we want to put all the core information into a smart contract and serve it on chain.
Second thing we want to be able to do is we want to be able to hatch a court order saying this money's stolen and it's to be frozen to the wallets that are unchained. Now, if you...
When I say we took the monkey off an NFT and repurposed it for illegal purposes, the thing about it was the normal NFT, you send to a wallet, you can send to address, and I can just send it on to the next one. So if I've got a court order on there, what I really needed to do was I needed the court order to be attached to that wallet and nobody could remove it. So...
This is a Jonathan word. I'm definitely not using the text base or by the crypto bros type thing. But there's a thing called soulbound tokens, which do stick. And I said, we can change the protocol behind this and tweak it and make it so that we stick it on, but actually we can take it off as well. And the whole idea there was that if I get it wrong and put it on the wrong wallet and suddenly I've got a lot of money that somebody can't use because it's got this taint on it. Then I'm going to face pretty heavy legal action and consequences of that. I need to be able to remove it. We've never got it wrong, ever. The other important bit of this is, ultimately, if you imagine it goes two or three hops through different wallets and ends up in an exchange, What I'd needed the exchange to be able to do was to look back down the blockchain and go, we can see that this is stolen money. And actually, there's a court order. It's really easy to see because the image of the court order is embedded in the NFT. And that, that again gives clarity and helps the exchange. So the exchange can freeze it. So we've got a chance of getting our victim's money back. That was the whole, that was the genesis of it. And that was the, of how, what we developed and why we developed it. But it was to just try and put something in place that gave us a chance of trying to get our victim's money back. I'm trying to couple the technology with the kind of the business side of what you're doing. So you're placing that court documentation into the wallet. Are you doing that as your company? Are you doing that on behalf of the court or the enforcement agency? I guess I'm trying to figure out who the customer is of the technology. The customer started off initially with the legal profession. So it's lawyers, lawyers, Acting on behalf of clients, we've got court authority. We started off and we've now had got this in High Court of the UK. We went to the High Court and explained the technology and got sanctioned by High Court judges to be able to do this. We've actually set case law now as well. It's set effectively a precedent. Commercial side of it is much broader now, much broader to this, much bigger problem. That was again, like back to our kind of journey entrepreneurship and technology. That was a, we have a problem. I think there's a solution here. Let's play around with it. Let's work on it. And wow, actually it works. Let's get on and build it really fast. Yeah. And I'll be honest, that was the journey. That was it. The problem space is really clear. The solution's really clear. I guess in the most bluntest possible way, it's like who pays you for the technology? So the moment, the legal, the fact is that if you've been hacked and you're a gaming company and you've just lost 8 million, you're going to spend in the first week, quarter of a million pound on legal fees. So it's the victim of the fraud. Yeah, you are literally going to spend a quarter of a million pounds if you're going to get a worldwide prison order, etc. Yeah. Our fees are a fraction. Yeah. Our costs are really... So that's the revenue bit on our side. Gotcha. But the scaling of it now and the journey we're going on is... There's a thing called a CFAS marker in the normal financial space. You won't know it probably, but if your bank account has received stolen money, the bank can put a marker on it so other banks, when there's a transaction, you can see it. And it just helps raise the alertness and the checks that should be done. Or even if there's suspicion, we're going to use Rectify as the equivalent on the blockchain now. So that is hundreds and hundreds of thousands of tokens. And we've developed it in such a way the gas fee is really low. We can do this. We've automated it. We've built the software to be able to automate it. So that's the whole journey to your point, James. And the point that I get asked at board meetings and by my investors is, How's this going to make money? I've presented a clear plan. Yeah, it's a good answer. But I guess it's back to that point you made at the beginning. That sense of public service never leaves you. It feels like it's global infrastructure that's necessary to level the industry up. It is. And it's if we can get to a point where It's much easier for exchanges, because the critical thing here is it is a journey. Think of the exchanges as banks. That's all they are, but they're banks for digital assets. If we can get to a point with where our technology is automating, operating so fast and it's so well-known, this particular marker that we add, it gives them safety to be able to then take action themselves. Because often it'll end up, it's called a mule account, so it's an account which has just been created with the fictitious name and all the rest. The exchange may never know that until some form of suspicion allows them to put a bit of a spotlight and look at it through a bit more forensically. And then they realize it's actually being used for money laundering for human trafficking or it's being used for terrorist financing or something like that. They can then act because actually most of the designing out, most of the action, most of the ways of reducing fraud is not by locking people up. It's not the police. I think it's 1% of fraud gets investigated. 0.1% gets prosecuted, right? So it's the financial institutions that fight 90% of it. They do it. They do it with technology and they do it with just being part of that journey now in the digital asset space.
I've learned so much, Jonathan. Thank you. It's kind of my mind's blown a little bit because it's such a complicated area to be working in. But thank you for certainly giving us that overview.
Now, I want to go back to what you mentioned earlier on when you started talking about the company and when you were introducing yourself and you were saying there are so many things that I've learned that were never in your sweet spot before. But you talked specifically about the team and what a brilliant team. It is that you have here in Cambridge. So tell us a little bit about them. What are they building? What are their roles like? So we have analysts, we've got developers, we've got traditional investigators, people who've done this for many years. And because we call it on and off chain, so the on chain is all the trace of the crypto, but there's a load of off chain stuff as well. You need to work out who the people are behind all this. And I think that hybrid approach of the team, we're a small team, we're like 10 people. And we've got some people like me that have been around the block a little bit and have been doing this for many years. And then we've got the young'uns as we call them. They're really smart ones. And to your point, over the weekend, we had a problem with a load of stolen Bitcoin. And we've developed, we've been working on a way to now send these because Bitcoin doesn't have smart contracts. It's different. It's on a different chain. It's a much more basic chain, actually, because it was the kind of the founding one. But we've developed a way now of attaching pretty much the same to the wallets using Bitcoin. So we spent all weekend working on that. And then deployed it 40 times in response to a court order. That's what they're working on. It is a hybrid because we're not a company that's pure technical people working, solving complicated problems. And just design, we're very often dealing with the problem and then applying the technology at the same time, if that makes sense. So it's, you've got to be able to understand the problem to unpick it as well, because it's quite a high risk space. If you get things wrong, the consequences can be huge. It's quite an evolutionary thing then, isn't it? I think lots of items are changing constantly, so you've got to be very adaptable.
Okay, and then the next bit I was going to ask you, and we had Amelia Armour on from Amadeus last week, and she was talking about the two things that they look for in an investment. They start with the team, first of all, so we've covered that. And then the second is having really serious people advising you. So I believe that you've got a couple of advisors as well. Our directors and board are chaired by Lord Bernard Hogan Howe, the former commissioner of the Met. He's leading the biggest reform in policing at the moment that we'll ever see in 100 years. And Bernard, by his own admission, he's a career policeman, very senior, one of the most senior in the world, but he's dealt with lots of complex problems. So he's very good at keeping me focused. And in addition to that, I've got Patrick who's developed a whole, taken a whole bunch of companies from seed to exit. And worked in consulting. So that whole journey of years ago, I remember sitting down with him with my pricing and he went, you just got this all wrong. This is not how you run a business. So learning all of that, we now have our investors rock mount that are working with companies that are developing artificial skin all the way through to, I think, Certainly I found what happens is you almost join a family, if that makes sense, to help guide and grow us and get us to a point where maybe there's an exit or whatever there is. But they've also, they've got a huge network that I don't have. That can help me solve problems, which is so important. So, cause it can be such a lonely place as I'm the sole founder, I'm the CEO and it can be quite a lonely place when you're sat on your own in your kitchen thinking, right, how do we, how do we deal with that? Yeah, we've heard that many a time on this podcast. So yeah, I think most founders would accept that. So having the right group of people around you, and they also give you that focus because just from the conversation we've had in this podcast, there are so many different routes that you could take. Actually making sure that you're picking the right ones. It is hard to pick that if you're just in your own little bubble, isn't it, as the sole founder. So it's good to have the advisors helping you there. Hugely. I've seen boards at banks, I've seen boards at all sorts of different. A board for a startup is absolutely vital. Without them, I still think we'd be swimming around in the middle of the Atlantic, not really focused on which part of land we're trying to get to. To some extent, I mean, without them, they are amazing. They are, it is such an important part of the business, really important. And really important to get the right people.
You triggered so many questions, I'm struggling on which ones to pick next, but as we kind of wrap the conversation up, maybe you could share kind of what the milestones look like for the company in the short, medium term. And I guess I'm curious around, you talked about building your brand. Is it a kind of first mover advantage situation? Do you think the company that demonstrates that they can solve this will get the traction and build the momentum and grab that opportunity? Is there room for multiple players in the space? If you have any competitors, I don't know if you do. And then I guess you must stay awake at night thinking, how do you scale the company fast enough to tackle the problem?
You're right, James. Pulling some of those out, I'd say, first of all, thinking about the first move a bit, I fundamentally believe we are in that space. I don't know of actually any competitors. I don't know of anybody. It's such a niche area, but... There's lots of thinking going on in the background. The more we deploy, the faster we deploy. We're getting, we're going through the Google startup program at the moment. If we're lucky enough to get onto that, it's going to give us access to AI engineers who can advise us on the volume of the type of data and the use, how we can smartly use that data because Don't forget, as we're doing this, that data becomes very usable then in building the defenses for the exchanges. So we as a company have got to slightly pivot in that and use that. We definitely can. We can use Rectify in a number of ways. The biggest challenge now is just we have money. We have enough. We're actually making decent revenue. Which can sometimes be a distraction as well because it's a bit of a rock and a hard place. It's great to have that money and it's great to be able to pay for your staff, pay for your office, and you're not just using investment money all the time and using the investment money to grow and get the product market. But the challenge is then that gives you a whole load of clients you've got to look after and a business you have to run as well as trying to grow the technology side. And that's the truth of it. That's where I'll be. But now we've, there is a plan. We've got to accelerate really fast and things like giving the token away for free to, for, for law enforcement is I'm trying to get that moving at the moment because there's, I talked about the number of these frauds. If we can just every single fraud, if we can just put the police reference and the police crime reference on the wallet, which we can do with smart, we can deploy in seconds. Then the company can make money from that through Alternative Pathway, but it gets the token. I want to be able to say we've done 15,000 this month. We've done 30,000 next month. We've done, we just hit our first hundred thousand tokens on chain. We just hit our first million tokens. We built the ability to do that at that scale. I want to be able to tell that story soon. Lovely. Find me back maybe in a year's time. We've got 2 million tokens on chain. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess that I think the final one for me, at least, why Cambridge? If you worked in the Met for all those years, are you local or was it?
I live fairly local. Because it's exciting at a company like this building this kind of technologies in Cambridge. We live fairly local. We're very closely affiliated with... There's a big economic crime symposium that takes place every year at Jesus College. It's the biggest in the world. It's been going on for 41 years. It's next year. We're very engaged in that. Another important part of any business is its network and its ability to, I think Cambridge as a city, I was born down the road. I left when I was six months old and I came back when I was 50. That's the truth. And it's just a great place to run a company. I think you can recruit the smart, bright, young people. They want to work here. It's a lovely city.
Yes, we had a small office in London for a little while, but everybody's got to travel in and very few people. It's, I think Cambridge has got so much going for it. And it's kind of like this mini London, isn't it?
Almost. London is Cambridge South, as I often say. That's brilliant. Thank you so much. We're definitely interested to find out more. So you're very welcome to come back on the podcast in the future. But for now, thank you, Jonathan. Thank you. Thank you, Faye. Thank you, James. Today's show was produced by Joe Donaghy of Cambridge TV and supported by our media partner, Business Weekly. The Cambridge Tech Podcast is available on all major podcast platforms and on cambridgetechpodcast.com. If you've enjoyed this podcast, please give it a five-star review. It'll really help others discover the show.
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