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REPLACE THE BANKS: STABLECOINS FTW 🏦 The Aggregated Ep. 110
Recorded: April 25, 2025 Duration: 3:03:39Space Recording
Short Summary
The conversation centered around the rapid evolution of crypto payments, highlighting significant project launches, partnerships, and the increasing adoption of stablecoins. Key players like Zipto, Dash, and Polygon are driving innovation and growth in the sector, showcasing the potential of cryptocurrencies to revolutionize traditional financial systems.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Thank you. Good morning.
Just giving a few minutes to let some people trickle in.
I will play the Get Started song. it
okay theory Pumpkin, pumpkin, you gotta pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin, you gotta pumpkin, pumpkin, pumpkin, you gotta pumpkin, pumpkin, you gotta pumpkin, yeah! Thank you. All right, that's the intro song.
So I know that Rock and Aztec, I think that they're both going to join us.
I'm not sure. Maybe they're running a little bit late. Maybe we'll just get started with
some introductions. Well, I'll just have people, I'll just call on people to introduce themselves.
I'll just start at the first person I see in the audience.
So Zipto.
Hey, how are you doing?
Hi, good. How are you?
I'm fine, thank you.
So I don't think we've ever spoken before, which is rare.
So I thought I'd met everybody in the space.
So my name is Joe Parkin.
I'm one of the founders of Zipto,
and what we do is crypto payments.
We let people pay for all their stuff with whichever cryptocurrency
they happen to have.
We have a Zipto app, fully featured DeFi wallet app,
that also includes things such as our cards,
which I've pinned a post about.
We have bill payments.
We have more stuff coming very soon.
So I definitely recommend you check it out.
And yeah, if you have a look on Zipto.com, you'll be able to see all of the different ways that we've got for you to spend your crypto.
Awesome.
Nice to meet you.
Thanks for being here. Next is Dash.
Hey, everyone. Apologies. The sound is not as good as usual. I'm at a conference,
but I couldn't resist the space. One of the best space in space. So my name is Joel. I'm
business development and marketing for Dash, which is their crypto focus on being the very best money and payment system in the world instant transactions privacy very low fees high security
and some great usability features you can actually kind of use it to live entirely
fiat free as i have done for the past about nine ten years, and we're really happy to work with Zipto, of course, because
they offer a broad base, a broad suite of products that really helps our users actually
live on crypto and very branded to them at a space a few months ago, and I'm very glad
to have them here too.
All right.
Thanks, Joel.
And then Zerox Halsey.
Hey, guys. How's it going? Thanks for having me. So I'm Halsey Huth, head of strategic partnerships and ventures for MoonPay. We are the world's most popular way for people to move money in and out of
their favorite crypto apps around the world. So we power a little over 5,000 different applications
across wallets, both custodial, non-custodial,
trading platforms, NFT marketplaces, video games.
We've got a pretty active venture group as well.
So through some acquisitions,
we're now playing a little bit more
on the crypto payment side,
helping on some e-commerce pieces with our Helio acquisition.
And now that we've picked up Iron.xyz, it can be a lot more helpful for businesses and institutions looking to move money via stablecoins.
So we have our hands quite full in many different aspects of the kind of crypto payments side of things.
But yeah, very excited to be here. Good to see a lot of friends
in the room. Hey, Rox here. Morning, Ross. Hey, guys. Sorry about that. I was on a super
important call. Man, I got some crazy information about the stablecoin landscape kind of directly
from some of the people building
some of the stuff for the different countries around the world. And I won't be able to
talk too much about what I heard, but it definitely changed my mental
framework a bit for stable coins for this conversation.
All right. Maybe you can at least inform the conversation if even if you can't tell us
directly yeah definitely cool i think the next step to intro is sam
hey everybody um so sam fagan just joined the the polygon payments team about a month ago. Our core chain POS is very much focused now on payments and RWA
specifically. For those that don't know from a monthly active user perspective right now,
Polygon is the number one USDC wallet and chain, I should say, and number three USDT.
So we're going to be focusing a lot on on payments for for this year
and years to come and really excited to to be connecting with some familiar faces here
um and excited to speak today on behalf of polygons man it's incredible how much progress
you guys uh have made on the payment stuff in such a short time i mean this only became the kind of
have made on the payment stuff in such a short time. I mean, this only became the kind of,
you know, big direction and focus in what the last, I don't know, like, like softly,
maybe like six to nine months, and then more aggressively, I guess, over the last like six
months. But in that short time, I mean, we're crushing it on on the different stats. I'm,
I guess, looking at this, for those who don't know, I serve on the board for the Polygon Grants Program. And so we've been writing a handful of grants to different projects in this area. And it's really cool to see kind of from a sort of internal side, because the grants board is external to labs.
is external to labs. Um, but you know,
we have a little bit more of a view of what's happening because of our
position. Um, but really incredible to see how many moves are being made there.
Yeah, we're very, very excited. Um,
so a third right now of all the transactions on Polygon are for payments
specifically. Um,
and we're working with a lot of enterprise level PSPs and orchestration
partners to, uh, to increase distribution and increase velocity, which is really our number one KPI, that being velocity.
So we're excited for what's to come this year and the years to come.
Cool. I think there's only one more person who has not introduced himself yet, and that is Robin.
Oh, hey, everybody.
Robin O'Connell.
I'm the CEO of Uphold's enterprise unit.
And what we do is we have a robust platform at Uphold where we're regulated and connected to a number of banking systems, payment systems globally,
and then have a really strong liquidity and blockchain stack.
And we kind of meld those things together and offer solutions for companies who are doing B2B cross-border payments,
you know, B2B cross-border payments, also, you know, freelancer payouts, and then have some
interesting pieces attached to that that I could speak to. Thanks for having me.
And it looks like, Mihal, yeah, good to have you, Robin. And it looks like, Mihal, you might have
been on before I just came on. I don't know if you heard what I said, but I just got off of a very interesting call. I think you know who it was with. But yeah, that was, he lives up to the hype that you've been
telling me about him. Great. Well, we'll catch up afterwards because, you know, okay. That's good.
That's great to hear. That's's fantastic we had some pretty incredible conversations about
um about bricks i didn't know he's he's written research papers and presented on on the brick
stuff uh submit some external re like public research papers and then internal research papers
for the countries in bricks uh And yeah, pretty incredible gentlemen.
Yeah, cool.
I'm glad that's connected
because it seems hard to get all of them.
But yeah, just so we're not having
some inside conversation on me.
As a matter of five,
we make a universal stealth address system
where basically you have one name
and then your wallet or the API,
if it's plugged into something like MetaMask
will just generate stealth addresses
for all your counterparties just from knowing their name.
It's completely decentralized.
And it's definitely a huge,
it just makes payments super easy.
Like you wanna send some USDC to somebody, then you say hey what's your you know what's your uh sent to name we literally
call it the sent to name just to make sure everybody understands like what it does you send to a name
it's like zell or paypal or whatever and um it'll just automatically send the crypto um you don't
have to talk to them you don't have to exchange crypto addresses. It just works.
And no one knows how much money that other person has.
So like when you send money to them,
it's not like going to something on the same address over and over.
And you just look at their balance trivially like you can on Stoppable or Friend.Tech or Fireblocks Network
or a million other systems like that.
It's the only decentralized universal stuff addressing system in the world.
And yeah, I mean, we're here to support Polygon.
I finished the Polygon grant like two weeks ago,
waiting nervously to get approved.
But I think that that's going to help the Polygon payments
meta, obviously, because you want to just be able to hit send.
I'm like, it's done.
You don't want people to have to understand all
the stuff, the geeky stuff that we do
in the space. That's the
high level.
We've actually added a couple
more people, too.
I think we've added Ada,
Peter, and
Felix, I think. There might be more people, but if you haven't introduced yourself, please do now.
Hey, guys.
I'm Aida, or Koyuki, the CEO of Aida.
So what Aida does is that we are an AI-powered trading terminal that connects multiple decks and then launch packs for the best trading experience.
We have the AI-powered token launch, building wallet, trading terminals, launch zone, and
many, many other AI-powered features.
Obviously, Stablecoin is at the heart of what we do.
at the heart of what we do.
So yeah, super excited for our conversation today.
So yeah, super excited for our conversation today.
Hey guys, you also have Ben Nadoresky on the phone here.
I represent Solstice Labs as the co-founder and CEO.
Solstice Labs is an institutional DeFi player,
wholly funded by Deus Ex Capital.
I've been in the crypto space since about 2013,
coming from most recent firms like Galaxy Digital.
We will be issuing a
solana stable coin and a associated yield well protocol for the market for both retail and
institutional access coming up we actually have some very exciting announcements coming in as
soon as next week on monday so stay tuned for those thanks for having me here
hi everyone from the fund xyz team i've been at fun since july chief of staff here we do
a point of sale checkout meaning we effectively allow you to use whatever you have in your wallet
or on your exchange we'll do bridging and swapping and routing at the point of purchase
to get you into whatever tokens you need uh we work with the likes of polymarket and ostium
meaning you can turn up to Polymarket
with just Solana in your wallet
and still be able to deposit and use the app.
Prior to Thun was working at Moonpay,
so hi, Halsey, hi, Moonpay team,
and looking forward to getting stuck in today.
Very cool. I'm here to introduce myself, if you guys can hear me.
Yep, we can hear you.
Awesome. Cool. Yeah, I'm Peter, and I'm Polygon's public data contributor. So what I do is that I look at on-chain data analysis and one key team that I'm looking
at is payments.
So I'm super excited to be on this call just to hear what everyone has to say about payments
and also contribute some data insights into what I think about Polygon's payment landscape.
Oh, we lost Nicole, I think.
She dropped down to listener.
Nope, I'm here.
Oh, okay, I'm just glitched.
Twitter stuff.
I've been speaking from the quick swap handle. Ah, okay, cool.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Peter, thank you for all the analytics
you provide for the ecosystem.
It's great.
Welcome, my pleasure.
It's nice to show all the data on the builders,
and without the builders, we are nothing.
So it's my responsibility to just show the rest of the world
what crypto payments and what the builders are doing here.
You're killing it, man.
So I guess let's dive in with a question about the benefits of using cryptocurrencies for payments compared to traditional financial systems.
So what are the benefits in terms of speed, cost, and global accessibility?
Dash, you have your hand up.
Yeah, thank you for Taylor making questions for me.
Obviously, there's so much nuance as far as what is crypto, which crypto, etc.
But for the most part, I can send, and this is a Dash experience,
and this is the experience of a lot of other good cryptos,
I can send something for a fraction of a cent to anyone anywhere in the world and it's instantly permanent and it don't
need any prep work just anyone who has set of private keys anyone who downloads an app anyone
whatever just instantly and it can be instantly respent somewhere else I've actually demoed this
before and funny enough it was because I was making fun of Jack Mahler's and his his Twitter
tipping nonsense they stopped that he did.
It's actually a pretty funny video. Maybe I'll have to find it.
But I actually, from my desk while I was recording, just sent someone some Dash who was in Venezuela at the time.
He immediately bought something at Burger King with the Dash.
And it's just like, I don't know this person's full legal name i don't
you know know their identity i didn't pre-check this or that i just some rando dude who i know
happens to be part of the community that just here's an address that was before the usernames
came out um but here's an address just send it and there you go and that's obviously i i think
that on a more deep level,
like that's just a very surface level of use and it works.
But on the kind of depth level, it's the cash-like experience, but digital.
And where that actually matters is the worst part about fiat is not,
you know, the inflation, not the centralization necessarily,
not all that kind of stuff.
It's for the user, it's the KYC that sucks that's the gatekeeping behind transactions and even if you're a perfectly according to the powers that
be legitimate person it's the gatekeeping adds so much friction just
so much friction so much oh let me put up my documents let me take a selfie let me go through
that oh well who are you do you have a system with this thing all that kind of stuff provides just
absolute so much friction and i know quite a few unbanked and underbanked people including
refugees immigrants people like that and they are it's a lot easier to get them to use crypto because they just use it it's
just like coming here on x you just oh x is a little bit more gate kept that you have to like
pay to get in but uh just that permissionlessness removes friction and that's kind of the heart and
soul of crypto and not trying to wax poetic for too too long on this stuff but every just like
when you're designing UX UI right you're designing an app for the the best user
experience the best user interface every single nanosecond you know shout out to
Nana who was sneakier every single nanosecond you spend your eyes spent
looking for the button you want to press and every bit of latency
every bit of friction that you have causes untold economic inefficiency that then at the end of the
day costs money and makes people poorer and worse off and the friction of a permissioned financial system is catastrophic to where people can't,
people should be able to exchange value as easily as they exchange thoughts just should
flow that easily.
And I think that we're underestimating even in crypto where we buy these ideas.
Even so, I do think the world could be if the free flow of value of money was just as seamless as the free
flow of words on an x space yeah totally agree with with that um and i'm like it's been my mission
or one of my many missions for the last three years to make that even easier, right?
Because if you know crypto, then all those things are true.
And if you don't know crypto and you don't know addressing and you don't know wallet, then it's way more difficult, right?
Can I offer another view?
Miha, your volume's a little low, by the way, just for reference.
Go ahead, Robin.
Thank you. Is this better? No, your volume's a little low by the way uh just for reference but go ahead robin thank you is this better no your volume's good robin i was saying miha's volume
okay good now am i like way annoyingly too loud no um so i agree with everything um dash said and
hi dash they're they're good good part long-term partner of Upholds.
But I also think that to get to mass adoption, it's actually kind of critical that there's a balance there.
Because with every good story of somebody who's underbanked and is a good actor.
There's a story of a bad actor, right? And the bad actors are killing our industry. I've been
at this for 11 years in crypto. And so I think to really take hold, you know, there does need to be a better balance between regulatory rules that are reality with the banking system.
And especially when it comes to really doing big payments with companies that are trying to just move money cross-border.
border. The question you'd ask is like, well, what's the efficiency? Let me explain. And probably
The question you'd ask is, well, what's the efficiency?
a lot of people know this, but just to send money from one bank in, let's say the US to another bank,
let's say in Latin America, it's not a one-to-one bank movement. It goes through sometimes three,
four, five banks through correspondent banks, everybody taking their cut. It could take,
you know, three to five days. People are getting ripped off with the foreign exchange, et cetera,
so it's expensive. It's a bad experience. It's like the trifecta of badness. It's expensive.
badness. It's expensive, it's a bad quality, and it takes too long, right? And with stablecoins,
you can eliminate that. And you can do it in a compliant way, where you know who the sender is,
who the receiver is, and you know that it's a good and fair transaction. So that's the really exciting thing to me, because that means that
the trillions of dollars that are getting sent around the world, it's just a better system.
And so anyhow, that's the point that I wanted to make is kind of the counterbalance of,
yeah, but we're at a stage where I think you
know we have enough companies that can have figured out how to um add in that layer of
of regulatory compliance like us as as an example there's some other folks on the call to do the
same thing um and but but but then that opens up you know possibilities for you know crypto to become you
know globally dominant in terms of how money is being sent around the world i really believe
that's going to happen thanks so yeah let me question sorry um would you mind me jumping a
little bit no yeah go ahead just just to get there, and I apologize for front-line conversation a little bit
because I'm at a conference, you can't stay super long.
But yeah, in principle, I definitely agree with that, that we do,
which everyone who does business does need to know,
needs to feel comfortable with who they're doing business with how they're
doing business um i definitely think that filtering or some kind of those kinds of things work um for
or necessary and useful even it's something that it's probably more between the between the actors
meaning a company should be able to decide who they want to do business with and who they don't want to do business with.
The problem is when we end up with this hierarchical system where people who aren't the parties
involved, who have no involvement at all, start to set the rules that don't work for
anyone involved.
They don't work for the user, they don't work for the companies, and they kind of set
up issues.
And the reason I'm sort of chiming in on this thing is this week, literally, we're having some issues with, unfortunately, Uphold right now in Europe has, we're, according to what we've been told, Dash is still available to be used for Uphold users in Europe.
users in Europe, but according to certain very regional regulators, there's some other kind of
issue that says, well, you can't use it. Our users have been getting conflicting emails,
blowing up the discord, being like, oh my gosh, is it being removed? And then we're saying,
no, no, no, they're telling us we're not removed. And then it's like, well,
according to this jurisdiction, this, according to the lawyers we've talked to, of course,
there's no legal issue with listing or supporting Dash in any part of Europe.
But then certain regulators have different point of views about that.
And then there's certain things that have to do with it.
If it's just between us and the company, for example, everything works out fine.
But then we have this morass of different parties who are involved who get to gatekeep and permission.
And then that causes mass inefficiency and so what I would really
say is I would love to just be able to work with the framework for companies
we're just like alright look users need this protection that protection and then
that's it and we get to work with not having this third party in the room that doesn't care about us,
that doesn't care about Uphold's business, that doesn't care about our network,
that is just causing grief and friction and causing problems for the users and not helping anyone.
And I do think that these kinds of, I guess, reasonable checks on who's sending money
and how they're sending money and which interactions they do are much better handled through technological frameworks that work between
the user and the business etc instead of having a you know a top-down entity that doesn't care
how much revenue is lost how much uh user experience is hampered anything like that
that kind of gets in the way.
And so that's like a super, I think that's going to be a super important distinction moving forward
is kind of getting rid of the old KYC model where some external entity that has no knowledge of the
business, doesn't care about the business, doesn't care about anything that's related to the actual
transactions or the safety of the end user, etc., that still allows criminals to use
financial, to use approved financial institutions, such as banks, until they get caught and then
there's a fine and slap on the wrist or whatever. That doesn't work for anyone involved. I definitely
think that what we do in this space to
try to achieve those goals needs to be radically re-envisioned and yes of course
it can't just you know the wild west can't last forever it doesn't work it sucks but the opposite
where you're in bureaucracy hell from the third party people can't even do the business they want
to that's where we run into issues so apologies for that rant uh zipped us had their hand up for a while i'm sorry guys you can
talk or actually i forgot i'm not even wasting the space i was hosting yesterday's space sorry
sam may also have a super limited amount of time and yeah i need to drop as well i want to put down some points yeah so yeah you can go first uh work that was me yeah
hello okay yeah i think damn you have to go soon is what is that what they said yeah i have to go
probably at the the top of the hour so i oh man i i really wanted to go uh go hard on discussing
all the payment stuff polygon is doing today but yeah we'll try to squeeze it in. As long as I can. I just have some meetings. Okay, great. Go ahead. I think just, I think
about thinking about long term, something that's exciting us and how we're thinking about things
long term. So I think we've all heard leveling the playing field here in this industry for a while.
And when we think about stable coins specifically,
and kind of where things are moving as far as challenging what we call the duopoly of Visa
MasterCard, we're starting to see some interesting traction from companies, let's just say,
Stripe and Bridge and thinking about the long term and where we think things are going.
When we think about small to medium-sized
businesses that might have low ticket values, meaning low transactions per coffee shops,
restaurants, local restaurants, we expect over the next call it 12 to 24 months for
the stripes of the world or some of the PSPs to go directly to these merchants and start
offering stable coins for payments. And then in essence, saving on interchange for
these small to medium sized businesses that have really been feeling the most pain from
Visa MasterCard. So just for context, if someone is buying a $10 coffee and croissant, the merchant
might be getting charged anywhere from 3% to 4% on that transaction. So their margins become
extremely, extremely slim. So when we think about, I think we all think about remittances,
we all think about some of the obvious use cases for stable coins and cross-border payments.
but long term we're starting to see more competition with Visa and MasterCard.
So when we think about things long term, I think those are the things that we're
we're very excited to see as far as SMBs really being able to thrive in this new economy with stablecoins specifically.
So that's just one point I want to bring up,
and we'll continue to talk about the more obvious cases in this conversation.
Yeah, 100% agree.
I mean, I want to echo what Sam just said.
I mean, real-world on-ramps, either with KYC or without KYC,
plus the real-world checkout integration is definitely the key.
I mean, I used to be part of, you know, Avalanche or Avalabs Foundation.
So, you know, they have this card you could use, just like, you know, how you're using, you know, Apple Pay style flows with stables and token payments.
So I think that's going to be very powerful.
The more we make that happen, I want to say two more points. One is that not all stable coins are made equal. Obviously, the likes of USDC, USTT, those are, I guess, the top tier ones. And then
there is the rest of the stable coins. So then the second point is really agentic payments slash, you know, I guess smart routing.
You know, obviously, we're kind of getting into AI agents, agentic AI world, MCP, A2A, etc.
I mean, that's essentially what AIDA, what we're doing.
But the new rail is really about autonomous intent driven agents, making payments to each
other, not humans, but agents. I think that is where the stable coins can actually act as the
as the key element to make that happen. And I think that, you know, I've seen some examples
in essentially a sandbox style, but it's not, you know,
at scale, it's not in production. I do think that is going to be the future. And then at some point this year, you will see a lot of payments going back and forth between a network of agents or
network of the network of the agents doing, you know, very autonomous payments between each other.
Those are the two points I think that we should discuss at some point.
All right, maybe we throw this to Zipto, who has had their hand up forever.
The problem with leaving my hand up is that the length of the rant just grows and grows as I absorb more things to talk about.
I apologize.
No, no, no, no. I apologize for the length of the upcoming rant. So this is what we do all day, every day, payments.
And the vast majority of it is in stable coins, I have to say.
is in stable coins i have to say um people generally spend their stable coins they they
hold volatile let's say assets uh in order to you know they're an investment for them and then what
they spend a lot of the time a lot of the time not always is uh stable coins so i've got a lot to talk
about it um on this subject so one of the main things when we're talking about this,
this whole thing about why stable coins and crypto in general are good
or better than the traditional system
in terms of speed, accessibility,
convenience and so on,
is that people don't think about
how the traditional system works.
It's bonkers.
It's entirely insane.
And I know this because we work between the two.
You know, we have our payments cards we
have our bill payments system and it all involves working with um card issuers with banks with the
card schemes and so on so the reason it's so complex is because all of that is just numbers
on private databases they're people and private systems managing these databases, they've got to have these complex handshakes
and double checks, et cetera.
You know, people talk about cross-border payments.
There's no cross-border payments
because that, it kind of, it tells it wrong.
It sounds like something's moving across a border,
but nothing is moving.
That's the whole point.
In fact, what blockchain does, what crypto does,
is it makes money work the way that people
think it works. People actually think that when you send a bank transfer or when you pay with your
card, some money is moving. And I'm doing air quotes here as loudly as I can, but you probably
can't hear. They think money is moving. Money is not moving because it's not a real thing.
because it's not a real thing. However, with blockchain, we have something that makes it much
more analogous to physical cash. It's a thing that one person's got, they send it to another person,
they no longer have it, the other person does. It's actually very simple. And because of this,
it's inevitable that this system will take preference.
Why do we have the issues with the banks and governments, et cetera?
Because banks and governments are basically the same people.
They don't want to hand over the control of this.
So there'll be a bit of a back and forth. But actually, we've been talking to the really big international payments companies for the years um somebody mentioned
earlier psps payment service providers uh there's massive companies out there helping to air quotes
again move money um and to be perfectly honest they all know that blockchain is the way that
things should work um and the reason they haven't done it yet isn't really because of resistance from them. It's because they're just big, slow, heavy companies. It takes them ages
to do anything. But for those of us that are in here, in this space, that's a good thing,
to be perfectly honest. It leaves space for us. We're faster. We're more agile. We're more in
contact with kind of normal people and um
because of this i i don't see it as a particularly bad thing they'll catch up with us
and um eventually we're but just to just to just to finish um um i was just going to mention
a little story well not really a story but like my brother by coincidence
I didn't realise what he does, he came to visit last week
he works in the traditional banking
system, he works in London
building
software for banks, he's been doing this for decades
now and he's very successful at it
I told him what I do
last week, I didn't really realise
what he does
and vice versa and he's
freaking out he can't believe how simple we can make these things you know and I think that's
going to happen more and more and more over the coming years and um yeah it's inevitable guys
I'm going to stop the rant there I could carry on but I feel like
there's a bunch of hands up.
I don't know whose hand has been up for longer.
Brock, do you want to make a call
on who you want to speak?
So, Michal...
Let's bring Ada since they have to leave soon, I think.
Okay.
Yeah.
100% agree. I think that... I mean, I used to be an investment banker i know that world as
well obviously they're very big they're very slow they don't want to give out um you know their
power that's 100 true um and uh you know i think that they will resist till the end i mean uh
paypal just announced that they are giving out, I think, 3% interest on stables yesterday or the day before. I think that a lot of these institutions
are moving towards that, but I think that the banks are the last to convert, so to speak,
because this essentially is just going to make them obsolete, to be honest. And obviously, and obviously like the likes of JP Morgan and Fargo city, they will not want that.
And I will tell you a story. You know, I had to buy a house a few years ago. You know,
we have a lot of money. We had a lot of money in Canada and we had to use Wise. And then they
ripped us off really badly. And that's essentially how I converted everything to stable.
I'm like, I'm done with banks, right? So anyways, I mean, just the fees are
are very, very stupid. They charge you with the exchange rate and everything.
So we were actually losing sales of 100k just through one transaction. Think about that, right?
So I think that obviously there's a benefit to all of that,
getting rid of the middlemen's, right?
But also just be able to settle.
I mean, we have to wait for two weeks and then, you know,
we'll have to like really sit on our, you know,
butt and not be able to close that house.
I think that, you know, the instant settlement is something
that is very, is going to be very attractive. I think that, Zepto, you mentioned that you're
talking to your brother. I think a lot of folks outside of our realm or this, you know, what three
space, they really don't know the power. They haven't tasted how good this is. And I think that
we just have to, you know, let them know how good
this is, right? And then that that could be through the word of mouth, it could be through,
you know, other things, right? But I just think that they have to experience it to know. And we
can't just tell them with words, we have to, you know, let them, you know, experience it, right?
Whenever there's a huge transaction,
I think that we have to provide alternatives
and then making that easy through UI, UX.
Obviously, everyone is talking about this,
but, you know, I haven't seen the silver bullet,
so to speak, right?
Like the perfect app that anybody can use.
And I think that we're all, you know,
working towards that.
I think that, you know, the goal obviously is that,
you know, the UX is so seamless that it's no different from the existing banking, you know, whatever credit card they're using, whatever, you know, online bank account that you're using. I mean, that's obviously the goal, right? It's like, we're not trying to reinvent that wheel from that perspective. But the back end is not something that they need to worry about. And then they will, you know, they'll see it when they when they see it i think that you know we as an industry we need to work harder towards that really we can't
just be talking talking talking we have to show them right not to say show me the money but show
me the product show me that it works right and then i can skip wise i can skip all these things
i don't have to do ach i don't have to do all these things and then it's almost free and it's
almost instant i mean we'll have to show them these things and then it's almost free and it's almost instant. I mean we have to show them that. I think that it's the onus is on us.
I'm sorry I have to jump in because this is one of my big things I've been going on about for years.
The UI UX of DeFi in general is horrible. A normal person can't figure it out. They just can't. We're
working really hard to do it, but to make it easier, that's it too. But I'd like to see
more of that just in general in the whole space and also less scary speak. People like to speak
in, what I mean by that is less nerdy talk.
Like we don't have, people don't care what's going on under the hood.
They just want to know what it does. And it does great stuff.
So I think it's time for us all collectively to work towards becoming a little bit friendlier.
And let's be honest, it's a bit cliquey, if you get what I mean. There's a bit of a clique.
Like, I don't know if you guys know that word or if I'm inventing it even. I speak several languages
in my day to day. But, you know, it's like I know these people like to speak in their local jargon
or the particular jargon of their group of friends. And we need to stop that in general you know it's it really isn't
that complex crypto um but we can do a lot more to make sure that that we just provide the benefits
without without making people jump through hoops so yeah and i can i can jump in here very quickly
if if that's all right guys guys. Yeah. And when we talk
about these stable coins, much of what's been mentioned so far, then these clear benefits of
stables are on instant settlement, remittance, transparency, ownership. In my mind, a lot of
these are table stakes right now. Stable coins are effectively here to stay. And we're going to
continue to take over payment volumes. We're going to continue to attract new sources of capital from
TradFi. We've cemented stable coins in the industry in a very real way.
The thing I'm most excited about is the new opportunities in which stablecoins open up,
and stablecoins are effectively this gateway drug to DeFi. In that same spirit, Zipto,
this complexity aspect, it needs to be simplified when you talk about everything past the initial
payment sector. There's so many more applications that all of us are on this call and I'm sure are listening or developing that are so exciting.
And as soon as you get your stables in this access point, you suddenly get plugged into all of these borrow, lend protocols, yield protocols and access to all these real world applications.
Think about what stable coins are the killer app for.
Yes, they're the killer app for crypto across the board,
but we're seeing not so much the transparency
or the difference from people having their funds
in high yield savings accounts
and giving high fee access to financial advisors
for S&P 500 returns.
You're starting to see that model change
to allow people that just have stagnant capital
to principally protect their capital
against things like inflation
and start to allocate them into these really exciting forms across DeFi. And simplicity
is going to be a catalyst in order for that transfer to happen in a large scale way.
So one thing I'm most excited about is this is the access from which stablecoins give across the board
by far. So I feel like design keeps coming up across multiple points here, but I feel like design keeps coming up across multiple points here.
But I feel like talking about building products in 2025 is a completely different game,
just because of what you can actually accomplish on behalf of the user.
I'm sure Felix has some notes on this as well.
But with some simple account abstraction, The fact that the builder of the
app can actually go perform a number of actions on behalf of the user, they just have to sign a
single thing. They don't have to keep coming back and go through some of the old design flows that
we've had from OG crypto. The experience that they're seeing is a lot more akin to what they
used before. Ada, I think you said this prior too, the experience is getting to that they're seeing is a lot more akin to what they used before.
And Ada, I think you said this prior to like the experience is getting to what they're used to on the banking side. Banking experience as a whole is awful as well, right? So I think it's interesting
you have now like people actually building a nice design consumer experience that just comes with
everything that they were expecting from the bank side. But the, you know, the complication of DeFi, like telling someone to go sit down, move funds over,
have to learn about different, you know, AMM pools to go and deploy in and start to like actually risk manage that.
That's an insane proposition, right?
We know that wasn't going to happen, but it's probably going to be bundled together as like,
hey, here's your savings rate,
right? You're moving what we'll tell you is cash in, but it's always going to be like USDC into a
non-custodial wallet. They'll be getting some kind of return, but we're not really educating
them with a ton of new stuff. But I feel like now where we sit, you do have the ability to kind of marry and match um the design and the
flow and the experience that you wanted um that is also like regulatorily okay to be doing that
in the geography that you're in now that we finally have some guidance on on that front
um so like a lot of like talk that we did have before, there finally is the products and the Lego blocks to actually bring that to market, if that makes sense.
Yeah, there's also another part of this of bringing these experiences or stablecoins into distribution channels where we're already transacting.
transacting. Like as an example, we're seeing a lot of interest from if you're a contractor on
Fiverr or Upwork and or if you're looking to earn yield in a savings account on Robinhood
or you're looking for crypto or stablecoin cash back for your goods and services as you're paying
with a credit card. So right now we're really seeing a lot of
going from proof of concept to actually going live with real world application
of stable coins where we already are shopping or already transacting.
So when we think about the user experience, I think a lot of it is
we're just going to start seeing distribution through the channels in which
we're already consuming. start seeing distribution through the channels in which we're already uh consuming so um very exciting times
let me jump in yeah i can hop in uh or go on me up yeah because i my my list of points is getting
longer just like zipto was saying so i mean what i want to add to it is just kind of explain where
we're at from a privacy point of view and like what needs that. And I think in this space, we've got the decentralization and the low cost
like down, like those things are solved. Obviously, ease of use is a huge problem. KYC is a huge
problem. Privacy is necessary for these other two things. But a lot of times when you try to solve
ease of use, you get less privacy. If you solve KYC, you get less privacy if you solve kyc you get no privacy and a lot of
times like people um you know confuse like they think that these are unsolvable problems right
and this is like something i'm super passionate about right now because the meta right now is
that we actually have all the things in place in the ecosystem today between the regulation
and the push for privacy tech and the stuff we built that matter fight to like just solve all
these problems at once so one of the things i just just want to talk about is a little bit of education is how like privacy
like defeat KYC and why you need it, right? So like, you know, one of the issues, so say simple
example, right? Unstoppable domains, right? So you have this list of, you know, your addresses
to your name and it's super easy to use. But the reason there's no real KYC there, like who is really the name,
is like the second you would attach an ID to that name and then you transact with that ID or that
person gives you their ID. Now you have the ID of this person plus all their balances and their
entire transaction history and everything they've ever done, right? So like adding sort of, you know,
identity to like an unstoppable or ENS would be pretty crazy, like wouldn't be good at all.
Right. And then you'd have sort of physical assault problems and hackers knowing who they got to go after and whatnot.
And a lot of these things are obviously super sophisticated, like we saw in France, you know, and I can see with Lazarus Group. Right.
So you have to have that ease of use thing. So that's, you know, I don't want to take my own horn too much, but we, we fix that
with this universal sentiment that's got these stealth addresses.
Now, why are stealth addresses actually good for KYC?
Well, what's a stealth address?
Well, stealth address is that, you know, you and your counterparty generate an address
and both of you know that it's the two of you doing it and it can't possibly mathematically
be anyone else.
Yet the only two people in the world that know that the two addresses, one for them sending money to you
and one for you sending money to them, belong to the two of you or just the two of you. So you
actually have a proof right there, but no one else knows about it. So when you do that, you can now
attach identity to that transaction. And no one knows that the two of you
are transacting but the two of you know exactly who the counterparty is and that can be a cryptographic
proof so that's really cool and and the only sort of drawback to that is like okay so in our system
if you know my name is mihao you send money to me how your wallet will automatically generate my
receive address on whatever chain you want to send me money on including stable coins obviously which will be one of probably the biggest use cases for
our tech and um you know you'll send me this money now now the whole world doesn't know what just
happened they just see some transaction on chain but they don't know that it's the two of us
transactions um which is you know the essence of the stealth address um but the only thing i know
is i still see your source address, right?
So it's like I can see, like, you know, say you got, you know,
a thousand ETH in that one particular account, you sent me one.
I'd be like, oh, wow, you know, Rock's got huge bags or whatever, right?
And we don't want that.
And the only way to fix that really is with mixing of some sort, right?
So what we're seeing right now is that last piece is becoming okay.
And it's absolutely necessary because until we have all the properties of Bradfy without all
the drawbacks, we're not going to take over, right? It's like really weird if I'm buying
something from you, but you see my entire account balance, right? Like it's odd. It's an odd feature.
It's not a feature. It's a bug, right? And so what we're seeing now with LTC's Mweb,
Vitalik's vision push for privacy,
Midnight, you know, this is gonna have,
I'd say that native mixer,
is that that last little problem gets solved
where now you can not see the source of funds,
but then you might say, hey man, wait,
but that breaks KYC.
You know, that counterpoint I gave early on
where it's like, we know who's transacting
and does break KYC.
But then the way we solve it is we have off-chain proofs that prove that even if the funds are
mixed, you still got them from this particular person.
And then that is the holy grail.
Like at that point, it's like it literally works like everything any user has ever possibly
expected but you can still comply with all the rules and regs. And so I'm really excited building, you know, being in a place where right now, I mean,
I've been literally waiting for this to happen for five years because like before, you know,
people went to jail for mixing and you actually have to have it for safety.
But what most people don't know is like you don't, it doesn't actually take away from
the KYC.
It still lets the end parties know exactly what's happening. for example if you're using our system even if you have mixed
funds you're in exchange you're going to have a PayPal like log of you know where all the money
came from with all their names all their identities and only you have that the rest of the world
doesn't have it because it's still fully decentralized like I described but anyway it's
just it's a really cool space we're in right now, and I'm super happy to just answer questions about how this works or various ways of implementing this because I'm definitely a privacy and ease of use expert.
This is my sole passion, and it's awesome that we're actually in a place where this might really happen.
Well, not even might, it's really happening.
This is the same way we've uh
or a similar thing we've been thinking with lunar digital assets so in the past we have a lot of
privacy advocates at lda but we were always scared of incubating privacy focused projects because we
while we're huge evangelists of privacy and think it's a fundamental human right, we didn't want to be martyrs for this technology.
You know, we don't want to go to jail.
We don't want to, you know, lose our families.
So we were always a little cautious changes in the way people, you know, governments around the
world, the way the United States are thinking about these things, right? The tornado cash
case got dropped. Ross was freed. And a bunch of other interesting, like human rights things have
happened around the world where I think now is a good time. Not only do I think that governments are
going to be okay with some level of privacy, actually corporations, which fund the governments,
are demanding privacy. So I just was on a call yesterday with a pretty incredible team. I don't
think I can say too much about this, so I won't name the team, but they're building,
I think I can say this part, a privacy chain with Microsoft. And also,
they're working on the Ernst & Young and, you know, originated with Polygon and Ernst & Young,
the Nightfall chain. So there's a lot of institutions that are, you know, demanding
privacy. They don't want to publish their trades publicly. They don't want people to see their
balances before their quarterly reports and these kinds of things. They want to control the flow of
information.
And there's some things they don't want anyone to know, right?
Their secret sauces and what moves they're making.
They don't want their competitors to know.
And so, yeah, I think this is a really pivotal time in the world
where we're going to see a lot of advancements in privacy tech.
And I'm pretty bullish on on
matterfy here uh what niha is doing and yeah the you guys have a bunch of cool stuff going with
brinks digital asset custody and all kinds of stuff so yeah a disclaimer we do have a we do
have a position in matterfy at lunar digital assets which i welcome against you
Which I welcome.
I'm going to do it against you.
What's that?
I do have to jump.
Sorry, I do have to jump off now.
So, sorry for that.
But thanks very much for having me.
All you guys, as far as I'm aware, all you guys are welcome to.
We have a space next Thursday at 1 p.m. Eastern, which is 5 p.m. ETC.
Rocks a fan, so let him show up for me after I leave.
Obviously, you can go. And we
are going to be sponsoring Eat The Dam in Amsterdam,
which is May 9 through 11.
And we do have some extra tickets.
If anyone wants to go,
feel free to hit us up, and we'd be
more than happy to help you get there. So,
if anyone's going to be in Amsterdam during that time,
more than happy. And thanks, everyone.
Have a wonderful weekend.
Don't forget to decentralize all the things goodbye everyone before you go uh our wallet's
gonna support dash by the way we already have all the client codes you're gonna have you know
sent the name with the universal stealth that this is on dash uh it'll be launching cool dm
something like that let's connect on that to the market or whatever
we'll connect you guys cool see you dash see joel i think that was joel right yep that was joel
okay cool uh let's see i think felix has had their hand up for a bit
yeah i just want to hop in on a few points.
The first one I'm stealing at Zipto.
Crypto is how money is supposed to work or how people think it works.
I think that's a great one-liner that I will be using with all family and friends moving forward.
A few points to touch on.
I mean, the first one around the KYC piece and privacy.
I'm always surprised that people don't care more about privacy in their day-to-day lives
post Cambridge Analytica, post the scandals of the past.
But I think it's telling that they don't because the benefits financially that people will
gain from stable coins in terms of typical point of sale transactions or day-to-day goings
on, I don't think will be passed on to the consumers.
And I think it's a shame, but I think businesses will ultimately eat those.
So there has to be another use case for people to get excited about what stable points offer
and how they can be used.
On the KYC piece specifically, we're in an interesting situation now where we work again
with the likes of Polymarket.
And Polymarket will have the most degen of crypto users and people who are just interested in gambling and people who are just wanting to dip
their toe in on what the next prediction market is and so from a demographic side it creates quite an
interesting spread of crypto knowledge and understanding and kyc is is a part of that you
know we don't do a full um like onboarding unless someone is using fiat through our partners with
moonpay and but typically we are checking the source wallets and we're checking where they're pool onboarding unless someone is using fiat through our partners at MoonPay.
But typically, we are checking the source wallets and we're checking where they're sent.
And if users are sending funds to us from pools which have been muddied or have been dirtied by bad actors through no fault of their own, they're now subject to deeper compliance
checks that their money is going to be held until we can verify that they're not an elicit
actor and they're not a sanctioned entity.
This is one of the areas where I feel like crypto slightly shoots itself in the foot,
because again, to your point, Sam, we're kind of in this environment now where people are
almost overzealous about the fear of regulation and being shut down.
And I don't think there has been a clear global response to what that should be.
And again, I think the crypto community are probably the best people to lead what that should look like and how
it should work but it will take time to get there the the second piece is there was a point I think
Sam as well made earlier on uh crypto adoption and and kind of competition to the visas and
master clubs of the world I was at a stripe event a couple of days ago here in New York,
and it was pretty clear what's happening from the largest players in the game at the moment.
Stripe acquired Bridge, allegedly for a billion dollars late last year. Bridge had been founded
11 months before. Again, they do stablecoin settlement. But to put it into perspective,
Stripe is currently managing, in last year, I think they oversaw about 22% of global e-commerce transactions and over 1% of global GDP, which is an incredible amount to think about.
If even 5% of that moves on chain, we are going to see a very, very different digital economy.
And this is not forgetting that Bridge was one of the largest acquisitions Stripe has made.
It was certainly one of the strongest feet forward in terms of moving towards crypto adoption
and stripe still sitting on five billion dollars worth of cash a lot of which will go to crypto
adoption so we're seeing a world where the big players are moving forward in that one of the most
interesting bits from that discussion was the the stripe and the bridge product teams were debating
kind of the dominance
the USDC and USDT have and encouraging people to begin to think what stablecoins they could create
and you know how you could begin to get a more granular stablecoin creation and what use cases
that would unlock and again fundamentally stablecoins are currently dominated by two
tokens which are ultimately run by two companies and fundamentally companies are there to make money so the usdc could wake up when we wake up one day in circles put a tax on that or uh tether
is is deciding how usdt can be used in a different way and i think again this is for us to begin to
decide what type of environment globally that we we could live in uh the final piece i would touch
on is i think ada actually meant this point but there was
some discussion about uh i suppose groupthink and really solving the problems that we're facing front
in front of our eyes this is one thing where if i was running a defy uh application i would be
thinking about first a lot of defy is built in a quite clunky way or in a way that works for a very
small group of people because it's built by builders and for builders it's not built for mass adoption and not necessarily it should be
from the from the get-go but i think people often build with the problems that they see before their
eyes not the problems which are going to be raising in 5 10 15 months um and that often prevents uh i
think a scalability that would allow that kind of Apple moment
to really unlock.
And again, the final piece I would say on that is for me, cross-border payments first
became an issue when I graduated university.
I moved to Ireland.
I was working out there.
I was sending money back to the UK, to my UK bank account.
It was the first time I really had to think about an exchange rate on a monthly basis.
We're talking about cross-border payments. We're in a group of
people, presumably, who are traveling, who are exploring, who are working in crypto and living
in a very global and very digital world. But there are a lot of advantages to stablecoins
from the very, very bottom up. And here I'm thinking about time I've spent in emerging
countries where mobile payments are very common. Everyone has TikTok, but they're all run by mobile
networks, for example, in West Africa,
rather than having some form of stablecoin that they can actually peg their own currency against.
And the result of that is fundamentally people across the world are tied directly to their
currency, which is ultimately influenced by their government and then potentially tied to whatever
macro environments that occur.
Stablecoins, for me, give you the easiest ground up adoption to remove yourself from
whatever domestic troubles your economy may be facing and begin to allow you to create
and generate wealth on a global scale.
And what one of the things and I want to go to Sam next here, but one of the things that
you can do.
So in Africa, they have all these different local regional currencies and not they're
not interoperable they can't like if you have mpesa uh and you're using you know whatever i don't know
one one african country's currency you can't easily swap it for another uh and so i'm talking
to a team right now about coming to polygon uh that has gotten the licensing to be able to issue stablecoins against all of these
different countries in Africa and then make them be able to be interoperable between each other,
which would be a huge step. I think these are the kind of things that the world needs to see,
and these are the things that Web3 opens up. You mentioned Stripe and how they're doing what you said,
1% of all GDP. That's pretty incredible. We think we do a lot of volume in crypto.
And in some cases, it is a lot of volume. But in reality, we're only doing, I mean,
between transfers, trades, and even derivatives, we're only doing, I think, a few hundred billion a day in volume.
And so that's actually kind of peanuts compared to global markets overall.
But that is a good opportunity.
That means if our system is better than all the old archaic systems, which it is, then we have massive amount of room for growth in terms of payments, trade, and derivatives.
Derivatives have started to enter crypto.
They've been growing, but still is a smaller percent compared to in the global trad fi and other markets.
Essentially, you have 10 to 20 times spot volume in derivatives.
So that's interesting.
I think the BIS,
the Bank of International Settlements, I was on a call with a gentleman this morning that does a lot
of financing things for Trump and the Middle East, like sovereign wealth funds. And he was talking
about BIS does anywhere from like 10 to 30 trillion a day in volume settlement. And, you know, there's all
kinds of different markets with Forex and derivatives. And so these numbers are massive
and we can, we can take a piece of all that. I think eventually right now, um, it's, it's kind
of what I mentioned. Andreas Antonopoulos talks about this infrastructure inversion where, you
know, you had the internet running on top of phone lines at first.
Dial up, everyone remembers.
I guess if you're old enough.
And then you had that flip to where now phone lines run on top of the internet.
And so we're going to see that.
We're going to see a lot of, like, equities and foreign exchange and these things, you know, will run kind of on top.
And foreign exchange and these things will run kind of on top.
Crypto will run on top of their rails, the banking rails and the SWIFT system.
And they're getting approvals for these things now.
But I think eventually it flips and it'll all be running on top of Web3 because it's just a better system for this stuff.
I wanted to ask Sam.
Sam, you had your hand up, but I also just wanted to ask you, what is your overall like opinion?
Could you give us a, since I know you have to run soon, a bigger breakdown on, you know,
what Polygon, why Polygon is focusing on payments, what Polygon is doing with payments
and, you know, what should builders be excited about?
What kind of builders should be talking to Polygon?
Builders should be talking to Polygon.
And yeah, give us an update on what you guys are doing there.
And yeah, give us an update on what you guys are doing there.
Also, Sam, if I could jump in and ask a question selfishly.
Are there any payment type systems or rails that can touch everyday users' lives?
I know a lot of people in the audience usually look for how does it affect them.
And I'm just wondering if you can add anything there as well.
Yeah, I'd love to touch upon that last.
I do want to touch upon some of the things that were just discussed and the question,
the previous question.
So when we think about DeFi UI UX and passing on savings to the user. We are working with ecosystem partners on launching a
robo-advisor product, and we're going live within the next month with a T1 or Tier 1 Latin American
fintech company. And those assets or that yield will be backed by assets issued by Agora and VanEck, BlackRock
and Apollo.
So someone on this Latin American fintech can now have exposure to increased yields
in a savings account.
So those are some things that we're really excited about as far as the robo-advisor.
You mentioned FX.
We are in the middle of thinking about how we can launch an FX product
with a few ecosystem partners as well. So that's something exciting. And then when you think about
how this is all tangible long-term to an end user, I always like going back to kind of the Fiverr
Upwork type of use case in which someone in US is hiring someone in Latin America or Africa.
Obviously, a lot of FX exposure if they're accepting dollars and then converting to local
currency. If they were able to just withdraw in USDC, that would be something powerful. Or if we were to have FX on chain and make these settlements near instance and someone were able to use a tokenized fill in the blank, whatever fiat is for goods and services at their local grocery store, that's something that is very powerful as well. So we are thinking long and hard about real world applications
and how we can provide financial services to people
that have really been hemorrhaged by the global system.
So FBECs is something that we're thinking about.
RoboAdvisor, EarnType products, where you're already holding funds
is something that we're thinking about long term.
So there will be some some
exciting announcements to come in the coming months i don't know if i answered everyone's
questions i have to double click though and alex i see your hand up, but I'm really curious. I understand that Polygon is going really hard into payments, and it's very exciting.
I'm wondering with those robo-advisors, is that kind of like DeFi AI, or is that a little different?
DeFi AI or is that a little different?
We will have some more information for you in the next month that we can share.
But I think the AI component will be something that long term that we are building towards.
building towards. I wouldn't, the first version of what the ecosystem partners plan to launch
will not be agentic, but we are thinking about that for sure.
Very cool. Very cool. Hey, Alex.
Hey, just in this idea of like, what does it mean to you?
So I've been talking about like stable coins.
Sorry, I'm making breakfast literally while I'm talking to you because I just got back from wrapping up the kids.
So just in this topic of what does it actually mean to you?
So stable coins are vital, right?
In a couple of different areas. The first thing is,
you know, they provide a non-fiat based stable coin. And I've been talking about this for years
and everybody's like stable coins aren't as important as Bitcoin or assets that are
volatile. Those are important too. But stable coins provide a safety net for economies that are not working.
And they also provide the ability for economies to be more creative than they are.
Right now, all economies are based on the dollar, which is problematic because if something happens with the dollar, we have a huge problem that all economies now fail.
We have a huge problem that all economies now fail.
We don't really have a safety net.
And with stable coins, with non-fiat based stable coins,
we have this really valuable thing
where you can actually alter your store value,
where you can actually put it in something
so that not just do we have this safety net,
but we also have this ability for economies to base their economic
opportunities and values on things that are unique to them. And they can actually be more
creative because really you shouldn't have small economies and economies that are not necessarily
functioning as like large industrial complexes when they're really, you know, small,
maybe knowledge-based or small or, you know, they have different assets, right? You have to look at
countries and look at the assets that they have and create economies based on those assets.
All economies should not be functioning on the same base principles because they are offering different things.
So I think right now we're trying to get all these economies, you know, that are functioning essentially on these same core principles.
It doesn't work that way. And that's why some are falling behind and some are, you know, doing better. And that doesn't really work that well. The other thing is when you think about what does this really do for individuals,
The other thing is when you think about what does this really do for individuals, there's a really great thing that happens when you have an alternative to fiat and banks, which is that they now have to compete for you.
And you have this other big powerful thing, which is that your assets no longer have to remain dormant. So what happens when you keep your money in a bank
is that unless you have either a sufficient amount or you're actively managing it,
most of your assets are lying dormant, right? They're not actually gaining value.
But when people are competing for your money, then they actually have to do something in order to make money into their...
One of the best is that the thing that they'll do to compete for that is competing in terms of providing increased value for your assets.
So your assets are less likely to remain dormant the more that there is a competing system for it.
So if we have a parallel stablecoin system that's vibrant, it'll also have really good financial tools, not tools that are like, put your money in a box and somehow it'll magically create 20% interest or something like that. How is that even going to
happen, right? But something where it's like, well, we're going to lend it out to other, you know,
people, or we're going to do something with this. We're going to make money happen. We're going to,
you know, use this money for something and you'll get a return on your money. And, you know, you can
get a return either on the fiat system or on the stablecoin system,
and both of these will be competing for your money. So these two systems together will
essentially make each other better. And that's the heart of capitalism, right? I mean, I think
that that's fundamentally what we're shooting for. Yeah, really good points. I do want to pause that
thought. And then I want to go back to Sam,
just because I know he has to leave soon. And I really want to, I think the audience is probably
very curious to learn more about this payments direction, payments, RWAs, and some other things
that Polygon is focusing on moving forward. Sam, are you able to talk about, I don't know, I don't even think or know,
I don't know if this is public yet, but we did write a grant to Fluid, and there'll be a big
focus on Forex there. Do you, are you able to talk about that here? Yeah, that's a great question. Can't quite. What I can tell you guys is that the initial launch, we will have five currencies.
We should be scaling that to an additional three to five in the next wave.
Working with ecosystem partners can't really share much more outside of that. We do have some crypto centric banks and some fintechs that will
be participating as users. So we're really excited about it. And we also have a few centralized
exchanges that will be participating as users as well. So we're very excited about the rollout and there should be some announcements pretty soon.
Okay, awesome.
Yeah, when it is ready, I think it sounds like it's going to be a big thing.
So we'd love to have you back, you, maybe Aishwarya, whoever else, and discuss it more in detail.
Yeah, I would love to come back soon.
And I know Aishwari likes participating as well.
So I got to jump in about five minutes, but yeah, I just wanted to thank everybody. I'll stay on for
a few more minutes. So what else can you tell us before you leave? Any other interesting things
happening on the payment side? Like where is it? Yeah. We're going to try to squeeze it out of you.
What other kind of things are happening?
Like all this huge uptick in stable coin, you know, movement, payments, velocity, assets on Polygon.
It's been a huge uptick over the last, I don't know, month, just months, really six months as you guys have been putting a lot of effort into this.
just months, really six months as you guys have been putting a lot of effort into this.
And I know we've written several grants, you know, focusing on this from the grant side.
But yeah, what else can you tell us?
Like, where is all this volume coming from?
What's driving this?
What are some of the key things happening there?
Yeah, I think it's really distribution amongst a lot of key PSPs or aggregators and orchestrators.
And when I say aggregators, I mean a company like Bridge as an example.
We are also seeing a lot of increased volume in Brazil with some of our Latin American merchants that are going live using Polygon within their flows for settlements and payouts.
So I think it's really just, we've really focused on where the key distribution channels are for stablecoins.
And we're really starting to execute and start ramping up.
As far as additional products to look out for, I think long term we're thinking about cards, whether that is working with some ecosystem partners that might have issued cards already, or thinking about how we'd issue our own card.
discovery phase but we want to think about where people are already spending money
and or are holding funds and how can we tap into those channels to make these flows much more
efficient and then pass on savings in the form of any yield that might have
any tokenized assets behind it and or any stable coins that users can earn yield against.
Very cool, Sam. I think you probably got like one minute left. I'm wondering how fast from
your experience and what you're seeing is LATAM i hear a lot of uh good things about uh latim especially
on the payment side and just a lot of opportunities is it is it one of those places that's uh truly
growing faster than many others um globally yeah we're definitely seeing a lot of traction there. And I think when we talk about the FXP specifically, I think a lot of key enterprises and payments companies are working with regulators and starting to get approvals to tokenize the fiat so it's um we're definitely seeing a lot of traction there but i think
uh the entire industry or the space woke up after the stripe and bridge acquisition
um i think in the us we expect can you tell us about those i i don't know about bridge
yeah so bridge is a stablecoin aggregator or orchestrator.
They kind of market themselves as the stripe for stablecoins.
So you can tap into their APIs to ultimately just access stablecoin payments and or issue your own stablecoin.
A lot of this is public, but I know they work with, as an example,
SpaceX and Starlink, and that's really for liquidity management. So using stables on the
back end just to move funds either intercompany or to suppliers globally. So we're starting to
see multinational companies starting to adopt stable coins on
the back end and uh bridge having this now this really great distribution channel of stripe
um is really starting to see a lot of traction and there are similar companies merged or one
acquired the other yeah so stripe acquired bridge um oh wow. Yeah, you can read all about it.
I don't want to speak on their behalf.
Although, I mean, I love the Bridge guys.
I've known Zach for a while and some of the founding team and initial team for a while.
And we've worked with them very closely and they're a great team.
But they're starting to see just a lot of traction.
So, and I think when I think about some of the enterprises
that might be adopting this first, I don't think there are going to be any a lot of public
announcements. But anytime there's an intermediary, so like think of like DoorDash or Uber or
Airbnb, where there's this company taking in funds on behalf of a user and then paying
out, you're going to start seeing a lot of traction
within those types of flows. The end user isn't going to be receiving stablecoins necessarily, but on the back end, a company like Bridge would take X fiat and then just swap to USDC
and then pay out in Y fiat to the user um so so using it as the international rails so you
don't have to deal with the six or seven intermediaries you normally deal with going
from one country to another nailed it yeah yeah pretty incredible let me jump in real quick because
there's one more point i want to add before i get up i gotta bounce like six six minutes and this has to do with you know the
you know how do we get this the exit the c5 and defy and the decentralized stuff all working
together because i think generally like the message that we have to the tradfied community is
that they're bad and they're the bad guys and i think that's actually bad politics and not helpful
to the space i think you know the best
solution is a world where everybody's essentially using you know decentralized tech as a default but
if they want to use a centralized tradify thing they can't and how you make that seamless and
the biggest objection to that well one was the fact that we're like constantly scaring these
people saying hey if you guys use crypto you're going to get hacked and there's going to be you
know money laundering and all this stuff and like that's what the banks believe. And that's what
the regulars believe till like yesterday, because like yesterday, they were just like, actually,
we're going to rescind all this guidance about crypto being scary, right? But the point I want
to make, one of the messages that I'm trying to take to the TradFi market is that actually,
when you use decentralized deposits with a system like ours, you have end-to-end cryptographic proof that the person doing the deposit,
that their ID, that's their private key.
It is stronger than any of the KYC that they have now.
Like if you walk into bank deposit a bunch of cash,
it's like they don't really know that much about where that cash is from or anything.
But like here you got cryptographic proof that no,
these assets were owned by this person, only this particular person can spend it so there is a
you know i think what has to happen in the industry is that we gotta like actually get
to the the message to the cpi people that like the crypto can really help them it can help them
meet the regulations stronger than anything they have brought it less not who's working on is there like any central
entity in crypto that's really i know there's many people fighting that battle uh individually but is
there anyone like working together to make that happen because i fully agree with you i think it's
so important i mean i think ofteninks, we're working on it.
I mean, that's for sure.
Like what we're deploying to Brinks is a custody system that's, you know, going to have, you know, to use it, you're going to have to use our distributed identity system.
But it's, again, it's optional.
Like you can use it, you can not use it.
But to use it, you're going to have to go through that process.
But now we're going to know, you know, there's going to be way less money laundering possible on that interface. And in fact, anybody trying to money launder would be very rapidly
discouraged because it's like cryptographic proof of the deposit. So, and that's the only person
I'm working with on that right now, because that's the only client that's like actually, you know,
but the reason they're a client is I got it through their heads. This is actually better than what they had before, which was Fireblocks.
And so, you know, it is happening.
But again, it's like it's like so esoteric.
That's a big partnership.
Yeah.
Hey, guys, I got it.
I got a jump.
But just wanted to thank everybody.
And if anyone's in Dubai, would love to link up.
Feel free to DM me here or my telegram is at Sam Harrison.
Would love to grab a beer with anyone who's in Dubai.
Yeah.
I'll DM you now, Sam.
Would love to meet there.
Yeah, we'll be there.
Same here.
I got to bounce off too, but yeah, thanks guys for having me.
And if you need the tech or you got questions, just DM me or actually just talk to Rock.
He's been doing a lot of BD for us.
And I just have to say before I go, how great Lunar Digital Assets is.
Like being in this space for the last three and a half years, I basically got to touch every advisor that there is, every sort of venture incubator.
And all I can say is we've been working with rock for
like six weeks and like all of a sudden our sales pipeline is i can't even keep up with them out of
contract like we're getting so much adoption for you know a beta tech it's currently in beta but
the hype around it and you know people just seeing it work is like the adoption is crazy
and you know i attribute that to you know our team and lDA as being sort of a critical factor. And so, you know, I just lots of, you know, lots of praise.
And, you know, it's awesome as a founder to like, you know, actually see your stuff.
It's like, it's going to be used.
Oh, my God.
To me, it's, you know, it's like emotional, really, because it wasn't an easy journey.
And I'm so passionate about this stuff.
So I really appreciate it when like, you know, LDA literally, you know, super came through
for us and like, you know, the best way possible is nothing but great things to say about Rock and Richard and the entire LDH team, which is, you know, I haven't even met them all.
But yeah, just thank you. Lots of gratitude.
I got a bounce to go close more VC customers.
And I love everybody. I love the space.
And I just want to keep building.
I really appreciate the kind words,
Miha.
Yeah.
I mean,
we believe in what you guys are doing,
man.
It's incredible technology.
It's something the space has needed for a long time.
It helps get rid of a lot of the hacks in the industry.
And yeah,
I mean,
just being in some of these meetings with you,
with,
you know,
BitGo and Brinks and all these other partners that are just, when they look
at the technology, they're all kind of glowing about it. So really exciting. So to be honest,
I still can't fully understand the tech. It goes a little over my head, the cryptographic
math behind it, obviously. But that's why LDA had to rely on other, like, you know, the Brinks audit and other audits for us to, like, know that the tech was real before we, you know, started investing in you guys.
But anyways, yeah, I appreciate all the kind words.
Thanks, Rob.
Chat soon.
We'll catch up shortly.
Bye.
Cool.
All right.
So Alex had gone on a nice little rant there
with some interesting stuff.
But we could jump back into that in a bit.
But we also have Peter has his hand up.
I don't think he said much today.
And by the way, guys, feel free to jump in.
If you want to put your hand up because you can't get in,
feel free to put your hand up.
But you don't have to put your hand up.
I was wondering if the show format.
I'm sorry.
Is that it?
Is it no for me?
Someone.
It looks like Darren.
I don't know if he's messing with people.
Or if it's on accident or on purpose,
but muted everyone and then muted everyone.
But me,
I think,
or I don't know what's going on here.
Okay.
Was I speaking or I heard?
Yeah.
You said had the format changed?
the format hasn't changed.
I mean,
we are like incorporating a little more hand raising,
like,
because we often have people on this basis who have a lot to say.
And there's some people who just aren't as rambunctious.
And as we say, you know, they're not, they're not able to throw their elbows in so much.
So if you, the, the, the format of the show guys is jump in.
We want it to be a free flowing conversation.
We don't want it to be at just a hand raising thing.
But if you're someone who is a little shy or, or you're having trouble getting in, if
you put your hand up, we'll go to you.
I say it's like, uh, like we're all about a big table, you know,
somewhere and we're just talking.
We just want a free flowing conversation and jump in. And, uh,
previously I've always said, just throw your elbow in. But yeah, if you,
if you, uh, feel super polite or like, uh,
you just can't find the exact perfect spot, throw your hand up,
we'll call on you. But yeah, please just jump in. The Roman bathhouse is how we're all sitting in
a Roman bathhouse in our robes or I don't know, whatever you want to imagine. And we're drinking
some wine and we're having conversations about the the future of rome
and good to have you aztec i know you haven't been on as much as we'd like lately
uh but good to have you brother yeah i could talk about that the story maybe towards the end of the
show right now um right now i love this conversation and i want to hear what everyone's got to say
but thank you bro and it's good to hear your voice and be talking with yeah okay peter you want to jump in yeah definitely i just wanted
to add a few more data points to what sam was talking about in relation to the on-ramps so
relation to the on-ramps.
So you mentioned something about velocity taking off on Polygon, and I was just looking into
the P2P volumes.
What I've discovered was that a large portion of P2P is coming from the centralized exchange. But the more interesting data point that we can see
across the past six months is that there is a larger portion
of P2P volume amongst people.
So what we are seeing here in Polygon is that
we are starting to see a lot of people or other companies on ramping their money into the centralized exchanges and all those on ramp providers.
And they are using Polygon as a payments layer to transfer money over to the contractors, to the employees.
Yeah, so that is a pretty interesting data point that I came across.
And that's why I'm really excited to see more of these providers coming in and giving more tools for companies to work on to give or rather to transfer stable coins over to their employees.
So that's one of the reasons why I'm pretty bullish on Polygon 2 because they just basically have all the infrastructure and the right sense of builders to make this happen.
I can add a quick note here when you talk about employee pay at Solstice, we have about 30 people globally representing 11 different countries.
And a point that comes up, a good portion of those love to receive payments in US dollars in the crypto stable coins that we're offering for just regular, you know, pay cycles.
But a fair portion as well also want to have the diversification.
And one thing I'm definitely not seeing across the stable coin industry,
which is great to see the Polygon's initiative across the FX expansion,
is obviously we're still 99% domiciled and dominated by the U.S. dollar control of these peg stable coins.
And that has a lot of centralized political risk,
a lot of geopolitical risk, inflation risk, et cetera,
that I think us as stablecoin builders,
stablecoin companies need to start focusing on,
especially over the next course of the next three to five years,
of how do we outsource diversification of the underlying assets
to be pegged to other key currencies around the world,
especially when it comes to the issue of people's pay on a day-to-day basis.
This is an ongoing topic that we have internally at Solstice quite often.
Yeah, it's a very interesting point for me in terms of what the consumer sees
as the advantage for stablecoins, because we chat a lot about how it's good for the chains,
how obviously it's good for the businesses that are covering any interbank fees or remittances but from a user perspective unless you're living
in the digital economy today and you're an active crypto user the advantage of holding stable points
isn't necessarily clear and the world i do see is if the us or any government is able to front run
the adoption of a native stable coin for their own currency, you can begin to see
the impact that it would have in terms of providing discounts or advantages. You know, I could imagine
a world where if people are paid through a US backed stable coin, you're now not having to file
a tax return in the same way, or you're getting discounts because they can see your activity on
chain or how you're being paid. And that might be branching into kind of a scary uh central bank digital currency world but
honestly i think there are very few publicly known user adoption examples uh for stage purely for
stable coins for the average person in the street and the irony of it is if you speak to someone in
the streets and they have concerns
about crypto and you just explain stable coins alone instantly they're in a world where they
begin to understand the advantage of using a stable coin or the advantage of crypto more
generally and i think we haven't done a great job so far of really building a consumer understanding
of what those advantages could be potentially because not enough people are working in a
digital economy for it to be worthwhile but also again because a lot of people don't fundamentally
understand how banking and money is is works today can i double click on that felix what because
from your perspective what do you think's missing like what what does the industry need to do or
what do projects need to do i mean you touched on it lightly right there at the end, but you know, what's missing from an educational standpoint, in your opinion?
Yeah, I would say, I would start globally, and I would start right at the bottom. So I think,
Alex, you made a point that there isn't, you know, not everything works for each country.
I would say at bare minimum, you want people globally in a world
that has to be emancipated for people to have financial freedom. And that begins with knowing
that the value of their assets is tied to something greater than whatever their government
is doing at the time. Again, the US dollars might not be the best case for everyone. It's not
necessarily the best for Europe. It's not necessarily best for the UK. It's not the best case for everyone it's not necessarily the best for europe it's not necessarily best for
the uk it's not the best for china but a lot of the world is spending time where the government
their governments can make a change or can discount their their currency and all of a sudden their
life savings are wiped out the the baseline for me is everyone with a smartphone has access to a
bank account they can peg their finances to something greater than their own government.
So they can immediately have some form of protection
against whatever domestic turmoil might be going on.
That is stage one.
Stage two would then be in the developed countries or kind of the Western world.
What does the world look like where stable coins do have an advantage?
And again, that only really comes where peer-to-peer transactions begin to take place or
people recognize the advantage of moving into a lower friction value exchange world, which is why
I think it's telling. This group today has already spoken about cross-border payments, because again,
I think this isn't a group of international people who have spent time traveling. It's very easy to
see the pain of foreign exchange once you've experienced it.
But if you're someone who has stayed in your country for your whole time, what are the net advantages?
And again, for me, that would be things like remittances potentially, but also beginning to think about are there discounts?
Are there advantages? Are there loyalty systems that you can begin to get?
Are you able to own your currency in a completely different way?
But I think without everyone, it's very difficult to create a world where everyone sees the
advantage of crypto without having to educate people about the advantages of decentralization
and privacy, unless you have either a financial reward or new things unlocked.
And again, we're yet to see that Apple moment of the use case.
Again, I would say the poly markets of the world are doing things that you wouldn't
be able to do with fiat currency, which is exciting.
DeFi is obviously doing things which you wouldn't be able to do.
But I would challenge everyone here to think about what would get the average person they
walk past on the street to begin to think about crypto as something they should actively
be moving towards and adopting.
I 100% agree that this is the missing piece in terms of
people understanding the use of crypto. Because when you think of blockchain, it's really a
back-end product, right? Crypto is not, like blockchain as a whole, is not a front-facing
thing. It's just a back-end rail, right? It's a processing system. It's a ledger.
It's not something that, I mean, most people don't think about internet and internet connectivity
and, you know, and like Ruby on Rails kind of thing. They don't think about back-end, right?
That's not really how people think about it. They thought about crypto and these assets, but without really
understanding the backend product and what it means, it's really difficult to understand the
use and relative value of volatile assets. I think understanding stablecoins is the best entry point in general
because people understand money. I completely agree. I think understanding this thing of like,
look, if you worry about inflation, then understanding stablecoins, like here is an alternative.
Here's something that can counteract inflationary value because it's pegged to something different. It's not pegged to the dollar, so it won't have the same inflationary issues.
It's pegged to something different, right?
It's something that offsets that.
It offsets your risk.
Wait, wait, I'm lost.
But most, did I miss
something? So most stable coins are backed by dollars. Are you saying an alternative? That's
the thing. And they don't have to be stable coins. Like this is the way that you can, I think,
introduce this idea of the system is this idea that, look, we can have an alternative system where we can have these coins that, and incidentally, pegged economies
are the worst economies, right? They always fail. We have a thousand years of history to show us
that they fail. And when they do fail, it's disastrous. Everybody calls it the worst week
they've ever had when this pegged economy fails. And they're not designed to last, you know,
like we usually get, you know, like now they're down to like, you know, 20 years about as,
you know, on average, but they're not designed to last, right? They're designed to form a support
system. They're not designed to last as a, it's designed to help you with your economy. It's not designed to supplant your economy.
But the idea of what if we can develop something that functions as an alternative value system instead of this fiat system, right? Like you could have something because money, like the concept, people understand money and value
better than they understand this idea of,
okay, what's a blockchain?
And things are transferring value on this blockchain.
And then, you know, we're putting them on markets
and then the, you know, there's's this the value of this particular thing.
And people think that NFTs are are these cartoon characters instead of baskets of rights.
They don't really understand the value of these particular different types of tokens and things like that.
It's those are more advanced concepts, right?
Even meme coins are more advanced concepts than this idea of here's money right a stable coin is the same
functional concept as money something that stays within a relatively constant value over time so i
love this idea like goldbacks stable coins i don't know if you can hear me no there's actually
we can hear you.
Zipto, your connection's choppy.
Yeah, Zipto, if you could fix her connection, yeah.
I have some...
Who was about to talk before Zipto?
Was that Kate?
Yeah, I tried to jump in.
Hey, guys.
Thanks for having me.
I'm Kate. I'm a journalist with Blockworks.
I cover all things consumer crypto in a daily newsletter called The Drop.
How's everybody doing? Doing well. Always a pleasure to have you, Kate.
Great to see you. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. Sorry, Zipko.
Are they going to drop them and then bring them back up? Yeah.
Yeah, sounds good.
Great to see you, Kate.
You were asking about gold-backed stablecoins.
What were...
Can you expand on it?
I mean, so people...
I mean, gold has been considered a store of value.
I think gold would be the only thing that a lot of people would go for um in crypto who
maybe aren't open to other types of crypto or stable coins so it's an interesting idea right
i don't know i think that's that's one way to go if we're talking about like beyond just usd and
euro backed stable coins there's actually i mean this is by far to me just real quick this is
by far the biggest thing that could happen to gold since the etf would be gold backed uh stable coins
and we have some they haven't gotten tremendous adoption yet but i think they will and uh actually
was just discussing with someone this morning who's building for uh like some sovereign wealth funds
basically a a stable coin backed by i'm hesitant to say too much but i could just say the surface
which is uh backed by a portion gold uh a portion uh treasuries uh and a portion something else that
i probably won't say but But yeah, really interesting.
I mean, there's going to be all kinds of iterations of these things.
And I would like to get Peter Schiff.
I live in Puerto Rico now, and he apparently is a neighbor of some of my friends out here,
and they go to dinner often.
And I really would like to get Peter Schiff to get on board with some gold-backed stablecoin.
He's mentioned in the past he thinks that's the only thing crypto could be useful for.
Obviously, he's talking to you.
Go ahead, Kate.
I have a...
Can you guys hear me now?
Yeah, we can.
But can you let Kate go first?
Yeah, yeah, of course.
I've been fighting with my PC for the past 10 minutes.
Yeah, we can hear you really clear now that's
that's great man now like it sounded uh super choppy earlier um yeah kate's just finishing
her thought real quick yeah i mean i i really like that idea because that way you don't have to have
a vault in your house you know someone else can handle the vault of it all,
and it's like physical gold.
So, you know, it would be hard to steal it.
And you can't really hack it.
And it's relatively stable.
To me, it's actually much superior to a stable coin.
Yeah, and like North Korea can't hack your gold reserve, you know?
Like, it would be...
They would have to physically get someone to go there.
Well, they could hack the token, though that is a good answer.
They're certainly pretty good at that.
Right.
I just, I think it's a really interesting way
to make crypto more physical,
and it could be a really good supplement
to all these other pieces in the industry.
We have a lot of kind of vaporware and stable coins separately, you know,
and obviously Bitcoin, Ethereum and all the other tokens. But I think this could be a really
exciting play, I think, for people who, you know, maybe, yeah, they just want to own gold,
but in a different way. That's a really cool idea.
I think there's like eight different kinds of stable coins. I covered them in my book and how they work and why they do or don't work.
Most people don't actually build them correctly.
It's all in the build.
Most people don't understand exactly what they're building when they're building a stable coin, mostly because it's built by developers.
So this isn't actually a big, long topic because building a stable coin is not a small thing.
This is actually a big, long topic because building a stablecoin is not a small thing.
And I've been asked to join several stablecoins at this point, but most of them are not built correctly.
And that's why they can't actually do what people think that they want to do.
And they end up saying exactly what Tether said, which is a dollar for a coin.
And then they realize that 3%, it's too expensive
to do that. And then they start adding in, well, short term treasuries, that's what we're going to
do or short term, you know, basically short term cash equivalents, which is basically something
that you trade in that's tradable for at 60 days, like 60 days or less. And then that covers up to,
you know, 42%. And then they're like, oh, crap, that's too expensive. Because if you want to
expand your economy, you realize that essentially buying that market
rate is way too expensive.
And they're like, well, now long-term negotiable instruments, basically things that are
exchangeable up to nine months, right?
Nine months or less.
And so basically, it'll take you up to nine months to cash out everything that's in Tether.
But even that does not come up to a dollar. So, you know,
one Tether, if everybody cashes it out, it's still not worth a dollar. That's an overvalued token.
So they're not designed correctly. But again, this is a very long topic. They're not easy to
design. The tokenomics of these are very complex, and they require a lot of economic
and historical understanding of how economies work, how money flows through systems, how
people act in groups, right? Not understanding this stuff is fatal to these things,
and it causes things like what happened with Terra Luna, right?
I was going to say that, yeah.
Yeah, that's exactly what it is. Not understanding how people act in groups, that's Terra Luna, right? I was going to say that, yeah. Yeah, that's exactly what,
not understanding how people act in groups,
that's Terra Luna, right?
Not understanding people that,
what was the big,
our first big one, not basis,
it's the other, you know,
the big one that the two founders,
one of the founders of Terra,
of Terra Luna and the founder of,
what was the first social network?
I can't believe I'm still drinking my first cup of coffee, but the two of them together were Rick and Morty,
and they were the ones who founded the first stablecoin that failed.
What was that called?
Why can't I not remember it?
I'm going to look it up, actually, because I can i can't i'm not on my computer do you remember but i yeah i remember i remember many stable coins actually
failing i mean over the years to be honest the first one that failed they had a massive backing
and they failed because they didn't understand exactly what they were building was it i remember
but no it wasn't Basis.
I think, was it, it was called, was it Basis?
No, it was called something else.
It was Basis.
Yeah, I can hear you.
Was it Basis?
Basis was the one that had like big backing
from like Bane and a few other banking groups.
That's the one.
Yeah.
And they failed enormously.
And then they came back and said,
we're going to build Basis again.
And that's what they built with Carolina, actually.
That's something that could be a movie, to be honest.
I mean, just the emails alone are pretty funny.
But they got more backing for it, even though it was already totally failed.
But anyway, building this kind
of stuff is very complicated that's absolutely crazy there was like bit shares one as well oh
my gosh so many of them new bits is this the original one 2014 to 2016 that one was another
one that what that's a very good story actually tell us about it
can you write us a movie
we need a new script
we need a new crypto movie
she did write a book about it
you know what's funny
I feel like Alex could
dude Alex I just have to say
sorry I know I'm interrupting
but look you're so brilliant
and you've written so many things
I could totally see you writing like a script for a killer movie.
I don't know. Just saying.
I feel like I want to write the history of blockchain because it is just,
I don't think that people really understand like how dramatic it was
and how much insider stuff actually happens.
But I just want to
say, like, I still find so much promise in it. There's so many great things there that I just
really want people like, I don't want to tell all the crappy stuff that happened because
there's just so many good elements there. I don't want to scare people off of it.
But I just want to point out here about the stablecoins is that there's a really wonderful jewel in this, right? But there's so much garbage that's been made around it that I don't want people to forget that we have to wash all of that off. And there's this like giant gem in this.
giant gem in this. It's just there's a lot of people who are making it with good intentions
and bad intentions, right? We've got both of these, but they're not doing it correctly.
They're not asking the right people. So they're like, I know how to do it because I can program
it. But that's not the same thing as understanding how to build essentially an economic system.
You know, I'd be really curious to hear your,
I'm pretty sure you probably haven't heard of Silk.
It's a stable coin created by the Shade Protocol team.
And essentially they call themselves a reflexive stable coin
and it's back, the kind of economics of it is entirely different
you know it's not like a one for one and um it's not like paper backing and stuff it's basically
based on a bunch of different currencies and they also include gold and like the value is not pegged
to and i might be like going this saying this, but like the value is not exactly a dollar. It's like a dollar and five on the five cents on the way that it's kind of structured. But I've always thought that that it's also one of the only stable coins I know that's private just by itself is just private.
just private um but uh that i would i would be so interested i don't know if you ever had time
to dd that one because i think that's a really interesting stable coin and i think it's kind of
i mean i think it's uh um based on like what you're saying with you know building a stable
coin correctly i think that's what they had in mind you know trying to do something different and uh
yes i don't know maybe someday i'll um i'll send you a message to see if you ever looked at it
but um hey uh zipto let's let's try to touch base with you again brother so the the number of things
that i've wanted to say has just built up to a point i'm i'm somewhat overwhelmed at this point
um it's absolutely fascinating i love that man um it's it's fascinating listening to alex um
felix and the rest of you of course um and i i think probably what i'm going to come back with is probably just a
dumbing down of what the others have been saying um about stable coins and their importance because
i i for myself personally um looking to the future see stable coins as a gateway to defy
um one that kind of explains it more easily to individuals because you you get advantages
but it's still fiat you know and they understand that or they think they understand that um but
then it's also a gateway to um something based on real world assets that could ultimately lead us
all of us away from the lunacy quite frankly, of considering that value is measured in fiat,
something that's entirely illusory.
So we can, and I'd love to speak to Alex, especially more on this subject at some point,
because that's kind of where I think we all need to go ultimately to build a a better economy for everyone that's not so volatile it's not so um subject to political like you know geopolitical issues something that's
based on real stuff and stable coins are genuinely an important step towards that i think um other
stuff i was gonna gonna mention like on the subject of what this space is called,
replace the banks.
Will we replace them?
Well, I don't think so.
The thing is, we talk quite a lot about, are we going to get rid of the banks and those
guys are just going to crash and burn.
But then at the same time, everybody says it's super bullish
when we work with big companies.
They're like, oh, that's amazing.
You're working with MasterCode.
You're working with JP Morgan, etc, etc.
So I think we need to be a little bit,
you know, consistent with the arguments
that we put out there.
These guys have got a huge infrastructure.
They've got the contacts.
They know how to build user interfaces and user experience for normal people.
And we just need to work with them because at the end of the day, they are people.
One of the great things I find about working in crypto is that when I speak to these big companies,
these big international companies i find kind of uh
blockchain moles in there you know they're they're during the day they're uh suit wearing
suit wearing members of the incumbents but then um at night they get home and they're they're
djins on telegram um and they're fully for this movement towards a more...
Don't look at my PFP.
Sorry, man?
Don't look at my PFP.
Rocks a suit.
I'm joking.
I'm one of the suit-wearing moles.
Yeah, no, but the thing is, PFP, but at the end of the day, it's all run by people, you know?
And we tend to kind of overestimate all of these
things we all think that there's like this big evil plot but generally to be perfectly honest
they're just trying to figure it out as they go along the same as the rest of us well what's funny
about that is we've seen recently if i could just jump in interject with the point. We've seen recently many, many congressmen and senators who have come out
talking about, I've owned Bitcoin since 2014. And it's like, wait, where were you all this time?
Why weren't you telling anyone? And it was because they were scared. They were scared of the backlash
of the, what if it goes to zero? You know, I heard someone speaking recently,
I forget who, but they said, you know, there's a lot of people who, I think it was Anthony
Pompliano, he was talking about there's a lot of people in finance and investing who
they're okay with making a wrong bet, you know, and losing a bit of money, you know, maybe it
doesn't perform so well, but they're not very okay with something
going to zero and then they get egg on their face and they look stupid to their co-invest,
you know, their colleagues. But now Bitcoin has shed that go to zero. Like there's the,
it's very close to a 0% chance that Bitcoin goes to zero at this point, right? It's yeah,
maybe it'll slow down. Maybe it won't become, you million like a lot of us think. Who knows? But now that there's enough reputational cover that you can, there's enough smart people who've all admitted they love Bitcoin or they own Bitcoin, that now even if something bad happens, even if it doesn't become world reserve currency or doesn't go to what we hope the logical conclusion is,
they're not going to have egg on their face, right? And so now these senators, congressmen,
and sovereign wealth people, and big finance people, investors, some of the biggest investors in the world are coming out and saying, yeah, I've held that for a long time, or I have a huge
position, or 20% of my portfolio is in this. I mean, there are some huge investors in the world,
huge, some of the most notable investors in the world
who are saying, you know,
50% of their portfolio is in Web3 or Bitcoin.
I mean, that is just, it's incredible to see.
We're in an incredible moment here.
You know, the other thing I'm noticing now
as compared to the previous cycle
is that big companies, big household names,
and I'm struggling not to say them so as you can
probably tell i don't have much of a filter between brain and mouth um and we've got big
international household name companies coming to us asking us for advice um there's one right now
i actually have to send an email to them tomorrow um where they've been asking me, they're like, hey, we've built
this system that's cost millions and millions of dollars, like with another like multinational
finance company, but we don't actually know what to do with it.
Do you know anyone that might want to use it?
The answer so far has actually been no.
So we're speaking to them about how they could potentially like um adapt the technology they've built specifically like uh bringing it
around full circle to to uh work on stablecoin settlement you know to kind of repurpose it
because basically they're like we've built this thing and i said well we've already got that
and they're like oh damn it like what can we do in that case but anyway um my main thing here is
stablecoins and bitcoin and all of these things.
I think they're going to be great for us to be able to get more people in the general public to evaluate how they think of value, you know, because this whole thing of Bitcoin is worth X number of dollars when dollars are essentially imaginary.
At some point, we're going to have to change that you know so i think this is a great stepping uh you know a stepping stone towards
that i think we're moving away from the time where crypto is considered just a speculative
degen investment and now we can focus on using it to pay for stuff you know paying for a pint of milk kind of thing. I agree.
I really like that you're helping teams out,
you know, adaptive technology, iterate.
And I think it's important, you know,
that all teams kind of help each other.
We're like, we're all interconnected.
I'm just wondering, I guess it's more for anyone here on the panel, but
how far along, uh, and in your guys' perspectives, I, you know, I'm, I'm deep into privacy.
Um, but, uh, you know, what's your guys' thoughts on, on, uh, privacy and the,
the importance of it with payment systems is it more of like
something that's kind of on the back burner the you know later road map of payments technology
it should it be something that teams are working on today do you see teams already working on it
you know what's your guys's thoughts well i'm going to jump in mind
because i should i should leave it's quite late i live in spain it's getting quite late my family is
missing me i think um so i'm jumping on this and then i'll i'll say see you later until another
day so i think we've got a problem with people's idea of ideas of privacy and how much people individuals insist on privacy nowadays in general
we've all been programmed to believe that we shouldn't have privacy like but we've got social
media which I'm speaking on a social media platform right now but just so you know I only
use it for work I would never use it for anything else. I think it's poison. And one of those reasons is it desensitizes all of us to the idea of we should keep ourselves to ourselves.
We're used to people watching our thing like governments around the world spy on us using all of these ideas that it's that we're all terrorists and we're all money launderers.
It's that we're all terrorists and we're all money launderers.
Money laundering isn't the same thing as tax evasion,
but they've kind of lumped the two things together.
So right now, honestly and truly, we in the DeFi space,
as we merge with the traditional finance systems,
we're having to comply.
And often we forget about what comply means it means to bend we have to bend to their rules in order to be allowed to play
um and so we're bending to their rules and we're essentially um losing freedoms in my in my opinion
um when that when will that improve i think it will improve when we, all of us as a society, start to really insist on having privacy from everyone.
And that includes from governments, it includes all sorts of government agencies.
Anytime anybody accesses somebody else's information, their private information, there should be a you know record of it there should be justifiable um cause to do so you know
if you're going to be looking at people's bank accounts or looking at anything else that they're
doing um any then it should be obligatory for people for that person to be advised of the fact
assuming that they are found not guilty for example you know of the thing that they thought they'd done so it's
not really a problem in it's not just a it's not just a crypto or finance problem it's a global
problem we've suddenly we're living in a society where it's considered normal for everybody to be
watching everything we do all the time and it's not it's just not we should be allowed to live
our lives in peace without people spying on us
Alex had her hand up first go jump in Alex Hey, we're real quick as if I don't know if you you might have to go right now
So I just want to say thanks for your thoughts and there's probably
Yeah, Joe
I think I'm gonna reach out to you because I think that there are a lot of things that we
Need to work on together and you were a contact through joel
yeah absolutely yeah well i'm easy to find i'm looking forward to speaking to all of you again
soon thank you very much for having me guys yeah thanks have a good one brother thank you yeah
alex go ahead oh i just was gonna absolutely agree agree that definitely privacy is a massive issue in terms of payment systems.
And one of the reasons that I was absolutely against CBDCs, because CBDCs are owned by the government and then you get access to them.
And that's very different from fiat or other payment systems where you own them and the government needs access in order to get access to your records and things like that.
I think privacy is something that we've taken for granted.
you take for granted that privacy exists in transactions that you can conduct any transaction,
and it can be a closed transaction between you and the person that you're exchanging
goods, services, or money with. And I think that the idea that just because it's online,
it doesn't have to be private anymore, I think that that's a false idea. And I think we need to build that construct into every transaction that we build. That is the promise that, you know, blockchain put in because we came from the, you know, the cypherpunks, right? That is the promise that they put into this entire system. And I think
if we give it away simply because the people that are finding the earliest use cases are companies
like Visa, I think that we're doing the entire system a disservice. It's absolutely vital.
Yeah, absolutely. I just want to add on to that point as well. And just as an industry, we need to be really careful. And I think the difference of perceptions across crypto builders right now is really coming out with the stablecoin use case. In the spirit of innovation, we tend to develop towards things that we don't see the end result of immediately. And even now, with a lot of key stablecoin use cases, it is centralized. There are two providers covering 86% of the market with one DPEG that shatters a massive industry across the board that could happen from a number of effects.
You're also giving up your keys and ownership to so many different other institutions and then partnering with the same TradFi systems that we're supposed to get away from.
And then immediately hoping that a lot of these companies will get ultimately acquired, which is what we're seeing by the TradFi institutions.
And in a way, it's just optimized TradFi as opposed to truly DeFi.
And that narrative is something that we all as builders need to be constantly aware of,
no matter what we do.
You know, I was one of my first companies that I had worked at in the crypto space after
working in TradFi.
I'd gotten involved in the Bitcoin scene very heavily
and I saw R3 come out.
And a lot of great individuals
and great projects working at R3,
but quickly moved into the spirit of innovation on payments.
Let's make instant payments.
Let's make instant settlement.
Let's fix remittances.
What did that turn into?
Was Project Jasper, Project LineRock, and Project Ubin,
which were the first central bank
digital currency projects in the world.
And you start to see this effect and immediately you have to take a step back and say, hold on a minute, this is not what we set out to do as an industry. And so the aspect
of permissionlessness is huge. The aspect of owning your own keys is massive. And to answer
your question, ultimately, whoever asked that earlier about the privacy aspect, that is one of
the biggest unknown and answered questions across the board. at solstice we're doing a permissionless access to
a synthetic stable coin which is one derivative away from the core stable coin aspect
and maybe this is where some of those initiatives need to start but i just wanted to highlight those
points of the importance because i saw it firsthand with the central bank digital currency
applications back in 2016.
Yeah, I think I'm asking this question.
You disappeared. I think your connection.
Your connection is pretty choppy, brother.
Also, yeah, it's pretty bad.
Also, I put a post up.
Is that okay?
Of course.
Okay.
It's just that I'm going over the Genius Act or the Genius Bill that's going, it's coming up for a vote soon.
So I'm just going to break that down.
Since Aztex Connection's bad, I mean, can you talk about that?
I'm very interested in this.
Um, sure. I know that there are other people who want to talk, so I don't want to take too much time.
Here, why don't we do this? Felix, do you have something quick to say? And then I'd like to actually dive into that genius bill, uh, and maybe a little, little in depth on this one,
because this is really important for all of us. But yeah, Felix, what do you want to jump in with?
Yeah, I can hop in quickly. So I, on the CBDC on the CBDC point, I would agree, but I would say that ultimately the most difficult
thing in crypto right now is convincing people to swap fiat for digital currencies.
And ultimately fiat is still governed by regulated markets.
This is why the importance of Moonpay as a fiat on-ramp provider is so important and
having a trusted third party that can work through to figure out the compliance i for me there's a question of you know does the sorry i
forget were you with moon pay i was with moon pay before now i'm at a company called fun that does
uh does check out but i mean any any of the we still work together now yeah we still we still
work together yeah we we've used moon pay in the past with quick swap i i don't know if we're still
using them i think so maybe i don't know if anyone on stage would know but yeah we've used MoonPay in the past with Quickswap. I don't know if we're still using them. I think so, maybe.
I don't know if anyone on stage would know.
But yeah, we've worked with you guys extensively in the past with Quickswap.
I mean, specifically, yeah.
Yeah, I think for anyone trying to solve that fiat on-ramp piece, that's the biggest blocker.
That's where regulation can always come in, regardless of what happens once something's on-chain.
If you can't get your fiat into crypto the whole thing begins to fall apart and then you're thinking about handing over bags of cash to people for a usb stick which is the old school way of
getting money in and i think again there's a there's an element of like libertarian anarchism
against the government with a lot of what crypto does which i think is is fundamentally at the core
and we've you know we've heard about the cipher thunks, and I think that's very much aligned. My question is,
how far can you work with the governments or work with the regulators to ensure that the process of
actually onboarding people into crypto remains seamless to unlock the decentralization that
will obviously remove a lot of visibility from these entities that have traditionally had the control, had the power, and had the transparency.
I have an idea for trying to undo that, actually, because you're right, the on and off ramp is the
biggest issue. And I want to try and take banks out of that equation. So I have an idea for that,
but it's an expensive one is the problem. And it requires a lot of cooperation.
But I think it's possible.
Can I jump in with an answer real quick?
Because I want to hear Alex talk about this new reg as well.
But this whole topic of CDBC and then what Aztec was asking me earlier, I had to jump off and close another BC.
It's awesome.
You're a beast, me.
You just jump from one call to the other.
But here's what I'll say.
Like to Aztec to your question,
to your question before.
So not only is decentralized KYC
with sidechain crypto proofs stronger from A to B,
but it's also transitive.
Meaning like, okay, and I'll explain what an off-chain crypto proofs stronger from a to b but it's also transitive meaning like okay and i'll explain what an option crypto proof does and like how we do it just really quickly because even rock was like i
don't understand how it works i love the technical stuff man but but uh yeah yeah i don't know about
everyone here but uh you could be you could be as dry and boring as you want i i love it okay well
i'll i'll tell you you. So first of all,
how does an off-chain crypto proof work? So there was a bunch of different variants of it. We use
it in custody where I would call it like pure off-chain crypto proofs where they really only
touch the blockchain at the deposit and withdrawal phases. And in the middle, everything's done with
off-chain crypto proofs. But the simple example is like, okay, I'm using a privacy system with a
mixer and I'm definitely sending to this other name. So, I'm using a privacy system with a mixer, you know,
and I'm definitely sending to this other name. So in our system, if you send to a name, you're
100% guaranteed that you're sending the private key that's associated with that name. Nothing else
is possible. You just can't, it can't be broken in that way, right? So, but, you know, so who is,
you know, Bravo who I'm sending to? Well, Bravo may be a bank, right? And then I got a KYC proof from that bank,
so I know who I'm sending to. And now there is a, what we have is like a side chain proof of funds,
meaning that there is a extra cryptographic proof that just gets sent by the user through our
encrypted chat system, which is not only just a chat, but it's used to send these proofs
to the bank. And now the second the bank receives that,
now they know for sure, 100%, that the funds came from, you know, if it's me house sending them,
that it came from me. And it's mathematically irreputable, like it came from my private key.
So that's how the sort of one variant of off-chain crypto proof works. Now, obviously, that's really,
really good for KYC, because it's, you know, arguably as strong as anything in TradFi, you know,
it's as strong as, you know, going, you go to a bank and like, you got your ID and you deposit
some cash and they're fairly sure it really came from you. But now the second question is,
which comes up in TradFi all the time, where did the cash come from? You know, show your proof of
funds, right? Which is actually a valid business case. And a lot of times people want to participate in that because say, you know, they want to invest in something and it's very regulated, but they really, really want to do it.
Like the user wants to do it.
And now they're like working around for bank statements.
And ultimately, like, what does the bank get?
Well, they get a bunch of paper, right?
Now, how real is the paper?
You don't know.
It's literally, trust me, bro, accounting.
But what we can do with the off-chain
crypto proofs is we can we can make them transitive so now you can not only prove to the
bank that you're the one that was in the last hop in the money but the money actually came from you
know charlie or it came from denise or whoever and you can now send that crypto proof over to the
bank and now they irrefriably know that the money actually went from charlie's private key to
miha's private key now to the bank's privacy so i could see me how i could see a lot of different
payments primitives actually built on top of that is that do you think that's that's uh like the
next step because like basically yes uh like i could see all kinds i could think of like uh
traditional things that that definitely
would require that you know if they wanted to further integrate into crypto yeah so i mean
that's literally what i'm building right i'm deploying it brings like the basic system uh that
essentially runs the custody into that so our custody systems is i should think of it as a big
wallet that does the centename and it relies a lot on these sidechain cryptographic proofs to operate.
In fact, it operates entirely off of crypto proofs, meaning even like, OK, so simple example, you deposit money to the Brinks custody system.
It'll have a name. So you don't need an address at all. You just deposit the Brinks one or whatever.
It has a KYC proof. You know, you deposited to that system.
The system knows money 100 percent came from me has private key.
It couldn't have come from from anywhere else. We actually use ZK for that, one part of it, because we don't want to reveal the private key, but we want to reveal, we don't reveal my private key, but we want to reveal that, in fact, the money came from an address that's controlled by my private key. So there is no way to fool the system or try to money launder. It would just red flag right away.
money laundry, which is red flag right away. So, and then when, and so obviously that also
stops phishing, by the way, because there's no address for a hacker to give to you, right?
So then what happens is the HSM now talks directly to the wallet via off-chain crypto
proofs. Meaning, say I'm just, simple example, I'm trading Bitcoin for Ethereum, right? So I'll
actually whip out my hardware card or my you know crypto while i enter
the pin and i sign an off-chain transaction with the same key i use for on-chain saying hey trade
my bitcoin for ethereum it's in our system it's just a bit ask instrument and then the hsm is like
oh this is this is mihao and he's you know trying to trade so i'm just going to process the trade
just like a bitcoin miner would normally process transaction why because it's got the entire n10
crypto proof now on the withdrawal it gets even sexier.
I sign a withdrawal off-chain instrument. The HSM automatically knows it's me. Even if there's
multiple HSM, say three out of five, and they're running the MPC protocol, multi-party computation,
each one has a shard. They all say, oh, we all got the same crypto proof. So this is me,
how do I withdraw? So we'll all sign, take out our shards, and we'll all sign and we'll
automatically do the withdrawal. now notice there's another
problem i solved there which is there's no people with shards meaning those people can't be hacked
anymore the system can ask a person hey is this transaction okay um and the person can say yes
or no but that person doesn't have to have the keys to anything so so gone are the days in our
custody system where you got to have guys with keys signing transactions to process withdrawals all day. It just doesn't exist. So that entire
vulnerability doesn't exist. For the user, it's fully custodial then. Well, the custodian still
has their money, but what they do get is the entire time the money's in custody, they get
cryptographic proofs of what's going on with it, which is way stronger than what's happening right now. I got it. Right. And we solve a huge usability problem because you don't need
Web3 at all in this scenario. Right. Like you're literally the same key that's controlling your
money on chain. Yeah. It's controlling all your money off chain. And so to your question of like,
you know, financial premises you can build with this. Yeah. There's all sorts. You know, we have
like 20 right now off chain crypto instruments. And but that transitive property, you know, financial premises you can build with this. Yeah, there's all sorts. You know, we have like 20 right now off-chain crypto instruments. And, but that transitive property,
you know, one of the instruments can say, okay, for this, to gain access to this particular C5
thing, I need to see your proof of funds. And the user can just hit a button and all of a sudden
you got proof of funds. So what does, what does this have to do with CBDC? Well, the properties
of the system are such that if it basically does what
the government wants from a CBDC side, but it doesn't do any of the bad stuff. The government
does not need to be issuing the token anymore. They can have all their KYC and they can, you know,
you can run a central bank with this system and you have better properties of how the money moves than you have in any existing, you know, FinCEN API or Swift API or Fedwire API, right?
Like, we are just vastly superior in terms of transparency and speed and security.
So, like, one of the things I've always been saying is, like, I really think that when the government says CBDC, they don't actually mean CBDC.
They really want something else.
They want their something else. They want
their KYC, but they think that the only way they're going to get the KYC is if they have central
control. And actually, they don't need that. Like, actually, you can have a central bank running with
our custody system and the people can opt into it. But when they choose to opt into it, the bank has
just as much KYC and power, in fact, better than what they have now.
So it's a really, you know, it's a really interesting time that we're in because paradoxically, to make all that work, you need privacy.
If you don't have privacy, none of this works.
Like the only reason any of my stuff works is because of privacy.
I've been saying that forever.
You know, privacy is the final frontier.
And I don't want to like beat this whole privacy thing for too too long but but i i'm a huge proponent i think that
uh if it's not really included you know there's a there's a lot of things that are going to be
missed i i wonder like uh when i was talking about other like payment type primitives or just uh
just things that can be built on top of it with this type of technology we're able to verify
uh you know various things along the way um i think something that
a lot of people in our industry want to see done is credit type systems and i'm wondering am i
missing the point am i wrong here that maybe credit type systems you know loans uh like for
instance you instead of having to go to a bank to, you know, you have all this crypto and
having to go through a bank to get a car or a house with that type of system that you're
developing that maybe some type of credit type system could be built on top of that because of
the verifiability and the privacy and et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. We already have that. That's
already one of our cryptographic instruments, you know, loan. Oh, yeah.
You could sign a loan contract and then, you know, they can be input in various ways.
You might have to, like, put down a little bit of a deposit or it might dip into your savings.
But, like, all the traditional finance stuff that you can think of, I can do with an off-chain crypto proof.
So, and again, that can be controlled with, you know, the wallet directly, which now makes it, you know, just 10X efficient, far more secure.
And because of the name system, it's super easy to use.
I mean, it's like honestly way easier to use than Web3 by a long mile.
So yeah, like absolutely.
I mean, so whoever wants to build something like that, just come talk to me or Rock or
Richard at LDA.
I've got a, you know, I'm a huge fan of LDA.
They've been helping with a ton of our BD, which is getting – I need to hire more people soon.
First, I have to get those.
I guess I'll take – we never shill LDA, but I'll take a moment to let people know.
Something we've kind of been leaning into over the last years is a sort of BD as a service. So,
you know, getting people connected with all the right people in the industry.
I mean, we do this, you know, just for our own good, having built QuickSwap and, you know,
incubated Polygon early on and all this for our own good, we've been connecting thousands of
projects in the Polygon ecosystem. But yeah, just letting people know we do, we, been connecting thousands of projects in the polygon ecosystem but um yeah
just letting people know we do uh we this is one of the things we do do me how i just wanted to
jump in i think uh i i agree that that that vision and the privacy focus in that sense makes a lot of
sense and i think again to to pitch that to governments it would take a lot but it it should
land i suppose my challenge is we still live in a world where your passport is a physical item and that's not on chain and that's not represented in some digital form.
And that's something a government controls end to end.
And for us to convince governments or regulators that the privacy focus is strong enough, they need to understand the technology.
And to do that, I think there needs to be a greater buy-in from those entities or those organizations to wake up and realize it.
And I think until that happens, the idea that they would be happy to take a step back and
give more financial freedom to people within the population is quite a difficult mental
block to begin to get around.
But again, the advantages for them once something like that is unlocked
is a world where you could use privacy first,
like their knowledge proofs,
or begin to use the tech in a way
where you can see how the population has interacted
with the economy, what taxes people are due to pay,
because again, it's all on chain.
There is no hiding from it.
And it's just a question of, again,
how is that presented
and how is that technology used in the correct way
to unlock more efficiencies globally?
Yeah, so we actually have the answer to that, predictably.
So I can tell you in like 30 seconds how it works.
The way our DID, our decentralized ID system works
is like, so you have this name, the name's tied
with the counterparties you transact. they know that it's you. And then a user can opt in to an
ID. And, you know, a government can be a signer on the ID. So for example, you can, you know,
I'm going to just lay out a theoretical scenario that I think works for everybody,
just so you see how it works. So we got a wallet, it's called the brinks wallet right or the american fortress
and you know you you want people to in some cases prove their show their passport to somebody for
a crypto transaction so how would you do that and still keep it decentralized so here's how we do it
we have a government agency that will you know you use or some sub or some whoever right and they
take a look at your passport and. And then there's a centralized system
that comes back with like,
yes, this passport checks out,
you know, the metadata checks out.
It's high probability that this is really
Michal plus Pichalski
and this is really his passport, right?
And then what we do,
we don't do that check.
Like anybody can do that check,
including the government.
What we do on our end is we have,
we turn that metadata into cryptographic proof
that then that
verifier signs digitally. So they take out their little private signing key and they say, hey,
stamp of approval. Yes. You know, the department of, you know, motor vehicles in California
verifies that, you know, this is in fact me house driver's license. And there's a copy of that
driver's license with that cryptographic proof. So all it gets balled up into one giant crypto ball that's signed and irrefutable and third party verifiable.
And that crypto ball goes to the end user.
And now the user has this in their wallet.
Actually, I show this off in a lot of our demos, but they have that crypto ball in their wallet and they can just say, send crypto ball to this other counterparty via the decentralized chat which is also end-to-end
encrypted matterfy nobody none of our wallets can decrypt any of this stuff it's all completely
decentralized and now the user can prove to the counterparty that you know this is their passport
but what the proof does is it just also proves that who you're talking to this is their passport
as long as you trust the signer and if you trust you know the signers like the department of
defense or you know the dmv probably 99.999% of business cases, that's sufficient, right? So that's how we do it.
And so it's not actually that part of the tech is not complicated. It's the same thing that you
have VeriSign, you're signing website certificates. It's that level.
Hey, Michal, I'm going to pause this here. We've gone pretty deep on the Matterfied Tech.
I know Aztec prompted you there because he was interested,
but I'd like to zoom out a little bit and talk more general industry stuff.
But, yeah, appreciate it all.
You're definitely innovating some pretty crazy stuff in this space.
It's my fault.
It's my fault.
In every space I get on, I'm like, oh, so how's, how's privacy fit into this?
Thanks guys.
I super appreciate.
And I, I, I love sharing this stuff.
Super passionate about it.
Cool.
Okay.
Yeah.
I wanted to hear from Alex about the genius bill.
Can you, can you tell us about that?
Yeah.
So I already did the stable bill and that that bill, so one is from the House
and one's from the Senate. And they both regard stable coins. And so that one's, if you go on to
my profile, you'll see the breakdown of that one. And we just didn't see a ton of movement on the
genius bill. But I think that one's finally moving,
so I'm doing the breakdown of the genius bill.
Alex, for people that don't know,
I'm sorry, Alex, but for people that don't know,
can you just explain what the genius bill is?
Because I honestly don't.
I haven't followed it at all.
Heard about it in multiple spaces.
Okay, so, well, they're both roughly the same thing they're basically the
the federal bills that regulate stable coins that are the proposed bills to regulate stable coins
so the stable bill and the genius bill they're like they're like uh they're like counterparties
right and they're they're one is the house version and one is the Senate version. Right. So the the Senate version is the genius bill and the House version is the stable bill. Right. So and they're both about regulating stable coins.
coins. So that's why it's weirdly, whenever I talked about, you know, I'm going to go over
the stable coin bill, everybody was like, oh, the genius bill, the genius bill. And I was like,
no, we're going to do the stable bill first, because the stable bill showed the most movement
originally. And now we're, we're going to do the genius bill. One of these is going to go through. They don't have, you know, massive differences,
like they'll be able to comport, right? Something is going to, they're close enough
that they're able to amend one to be close enough to get through. One of these is going to get through, right? Because you can't have different
versions that are voted on and send that to the president, right? You have to have
the same version approved by both houses to go to the president to get passed, right? That's how
it works in the U.S. So somehow, right, we're going to have to
figure out how to reconcile these two. So what we're going to talk about primarily when we talk
about the genius bill is the genius bill, how it differs from the stable bill. So we did a full
breakdown of the stable bill. And what I'm mostly going to say is, you know, that these are the main terms of the of the genius bill and how they differ from the stable bill. And primarily,
both of these are dealing with dollar backed coins, right? All the government is interested in
are dollar backed coins, right?
That's their deal.
Because what is the U.S. government in the business of producing?
Dollars, right?
So remember that in Congress, who did they bring up?
They brought up only stable coins that were dollar backed.
They are not interested in talking to people that are not producing
dollar-backed anything. And one of the main arguments that got them interested,
and you can see their little puppy ears perk up when they said, oh, it's another use for dollars.
It's another market for dollars. And they're like, oh, dollar go up. So they got really excited.
Their little tail started wagging and everything. So that got their interest
and they're very excited about it. The main difference that we're going to be looking at
here is what happens if you have a stable coin already that is not dollar backed. What happens
with it, right? What if you introduce it before the act is passed?
What if you want to introduce it after the act is passed?
So there's some questions here.
And also, can states regulate them?
And what happens, how big are you allowed to make your coin?
And who is regulating these particular types of things?
What can they have in them backing them? A lot of people have looked at what the SEC has said and said, oh, stable coins aren't
securities looking at these bills because these bills both have these exclusions for securities.
Remember that these bills that exclude securities and the SEC language are for specific types of stablecoins,
not all stablecoins. And remember that Tether and very likely Circle are not excluded from
being securities per this language, right? So the language about securities is very specific.
And we're going to talk about what that language is for all the people who are making stable coins or using stable coins and like, oh, it's a free for all.
It's not. Right. So we're going to talk specifically about that for those people who are trying to use it and stay way out of trouble.
It's really important that you stay out of this stuff. So stable coins right now have a lot of stuff going on around it.
And I just want to make sure that we're all clear that, you know, here are the rules, right?
So this is what we know about them.
And we've got kind of a framework right now of what the government is looking at and what they say
and what is going to relatively shape up to be one way or another.
So you can sort of see if you're developing something,
you can kind of stay if you're developing something, you can kind of
stay within the most conservative guidelines, or you can say, well, you know, here's what the most
liberal of these are going to look like, like the most generous guidelines are going to look like,
and I'm going to try and push it as far out as possible and hope it comes out in my favor.
So right now, the House is the most active in terms of this, which means, and the House bill,
other than a few things, is actually the one that has the most blanks filled in. The Senate bill
has the most problems in it. So we'll talk about that and how that might get filled in if that one
passes. So hopefully that helps.
That does.
And thank you so much in the beginning there for kind of breaking down the two, the difference
between the two bills and yeah, all of that, your insights.
That's what I do I'm also talking economics the same day
on Tuesday I talk about economics
no politics, no spin
just what's going on that week in economics
and what it means to you
that's all I do
that's not all I do is my, like, that's not my job. That's just what I,
had people ask for it. So that's what I, what we talk about on Tuesdays at 4 p.m. Pacific.
I haven't caught up with you in a long time, Alex, because of, you know, everything I've
been going through. And I haven't been able to just until recently, been able to get back on spaces.
And it's a long story.
But what are you, because like, man, I've been out of the loop.
You know, I've only been mainly just focused on my obligations.
So what are you still doing? Because like previously you had, you know,
several different spaces a week. Are you like still doing all of that? And you had like a
pitch space on Sundays or what, what are you still doing? So work has gotten really busy,
but I do a pitch space on Sundays at 11 a.m. Pacific. I bring in investors and VCs.
Anybody who's doing anything that's a product that's scalable is welcome to pitch.
Everybody's welcome to join.
You learn something that I created called Quick Pitch, which is what I did when I had my businesses because I'm an introvert and didn't know anybody.
And it's a relationship building introduction.
And it's a pitch style that's really very, very useful.
It's not the formal pitch because most people don't actually pitch formally in front of
like a bunch of VCs.
Like I got angel in VC investing and never did a formal pitch like that. Like I got money from, you know, these discussions in cafes or like, you know, meeting at parties and stuff like that.
But it was because I built relationships.
So it's all about learning how to build relationships with potential investors and potential, you know, potential co-founders and things like that.
And so, yeah, thank you. That's what we
teach there is how to build these relationships over time, how long you should talk to people
when you're, you know, in these like events where that are target rich events and how to continue
the relationship. It's not easy, especially if you're, you know, you tend to be more introverted, but, you know, having rules
really, I think, helps. And if you don't come like, you know, from a, you know, like a pre-approved
background, you wouldn't know necessarily how any of this stuff works. So basically just trying to
help people understand how this works, where you build these connections and these relationships.
And so that's really what we're doing. We have like people from all over, we got like, you know, understand how this works, where you build these connections and these relationships.
And so that's really what we're doing. We have like people from all over. We got like, you know,
battery companies and, you know, blockchain and e-commerce and it's all sorts of different stuff that we get. And it's really fun. And people get funded, but mostly everybody learns. So we do that
on Sundays at 11 a.m. Pacific. And then Tuesday, this Tuesday, just because I do these periodic breakdowns of major opinions and laws and things like that, this Tuesday at I think it's 10 a.m. Pacific, I've been doing these economic spaces and they get a ton of replays.
But all it is is really talking about what happened, what the economics are, right?
Like what happened?
Like what what is the impact of what happened?
Market news, tariffs, trade, understanding what that even is, what's
in those deficit numbers, what's in, you know, what do the tariffs even mean? How do they function?
What did this trade news mean? What is, you know, what's actually happening with these market
numbers? What does that mean? And then who's winning and who's not? And how did they win
or lose so that you can make better decisions?
That's going to be an interesting one.
Yeah, that's all it is.
So I do that on, because that's kind of what my newsletter is, is really like, here's the news.
And here's what I think how that should impact your decision making.
I'm not giving you advice.
That's it.
Yeah, I love everything you do.
And I listen to your space.
I highly encourage everyone here to follow Alex.
Everyone here, you know, me, how Felix, Ben, you know, on the stage.
Alex is definitely really interesting.
She has really, because of her background, she has a really great insight on, like, a lot of, I think, business stuff, stuff um and and just uh your current events she has a different
perspective that's really interesting so i love your spaces um i i have a question though for
everyone here rock actually is it okay if i ask another question or do you have something
that you've been wanting to ask you know while, while we go ahead. Okay. So this is a payments question.
I'm really wondering about interoperability. So,
and how important it is. I think, you know, for us,
let me say for me, I'm big into the ethereum you know ecosystem i see the the fragmentation i see
uh you know great teams like polygon and all the other teams that are working alongside polygon
building the ag layer uh you know so there's there's uh interoperability solutions and
composability that will be built into some of these things. And, you know, from a payments perspective,
how important is this interoperability and composability
to the future of, you know, this category?
Or is the category more, is it going to kind of be solved more narrowly?
I'm just trying to pick your guys' brain.
How interoperable do things need to be?
And who's kind of solving this?
What's your guys' thoughts on that?
Yeah, happy to hop in here.
I would say vital.
Fund specifically allows you to turn up to a website
and if they have our widget,
effectively spend whatever tokens
you already have. So you're not spending time waiting for bridges, you're not having to go
into liquidity pools and swap your tokens. And for me, this is the same as going to a bodega
or going to a shop and only having cash and them saying, sorry, we only take card.
You have assets, you want to have some form of value exchange. And in an increasingly tokenized
world, any one of those tokens should be able to go to another token. And I actually think stable
coins are an interim jump for us to get into a world where you could imagine more of a bartered
economy. Because again, as long as you can find a way to price whatever tokens you have, one of
those tokens could be swappable for another and i think again in the
world where what we're trying to achieve is that level of interoperability and value exchange where
i get really excited is thinking about chains like polygon or thinking about chains like solana
where you're getting into a world where the technology itself can be what decides who wins
rather than on like unnecessary technological
barriers. And again, for us to be able to say to a company like Polymarket, you don't need to only
take EVM assets. Now you can take assets from basically any chain. We're massively broadening
who those communities they can tap into are. And at this level of the crypto adoption curve,
it makes sense for people to be
tribal about their chains, but also not have that be a friction layer for them to actually be able
to enjoy what DeFi can do or what dApps in general can do. And my hope in that world is
once everything is on a level playing field, it really is a technology that will win. And I think
the chains that will do best are the ones that don't put unnecessary barriers up to make it easy to use but instead have developers
who are solely focused on the beauty of the technology that the, you know, of it being a level playing field and technology really
being able to, because there's so many chains that have some great solutions, but they're
almost like a walled garden currently.
Does anyone else want to piggyback off what Felix said?
Interop is to me the key.
We have to have interoperability for the world to start using this stuff realistically.
And I think there's a lot of people working on this.
My biggest bet is AgLayer with Polygon,
because I think what they're doing that no one else is doing properly
is creating a credibly neutral interop you know all the different clusters can use like
Optimism and Arbitrum etc but also the all the L1s can use so we just wrote some grants recently
to bring this to like Cosmos and other chains so yeah I think that's an interesting one but yeah
someone has to crack it or we just or this whole thing just doesn't work.
The way it works right now is just it's a non-starter. All these bridging and
you got to have all these different chains. They all need to work together like the internet.
Fully agree. Yeah, it seems like everyone's kind of said their part on on this uh particular
question of mine but um is there is there anything that you guys want to leave uh you know everyone
listening today about you know the future of uh replacing the banks or, you know, the evolution of the banks or stable coins,
anything in that category?
I'll say quickly from my end, you know, we play very heavily in the yield bearing space
and the yield bearing protocol space. And I talked a little bit about principles earlier,
especially in the yield bearing side of things. players are approaching this from a very uh we'll call it uh
not sustainable yield model or things that are not too transparent about how that yield is generated
and i think always building with the end in mind and building on the core principles crypt on crypto
it needs to be tenants that all of us all of us continue with no matter what aspect of what
side of the business that we're on to drive adoption and i just wanted to say on my side
thank you guys so much for having me and uh for anybody going to token 2049 uh we'll be hosting
a big event with the solana foundation on tuesday that's uh posted all over socials so definitely
meet up with the solstice team who's going to be out there.
Yeah, we'll be there. We'll have several events. So we'll be doing
a BitAngels event
and Polygon is sponsoring
and Polygon will be there.
We're hoping to get Mark Gerson deep, but they're
hard to get. They have a lot of
stuff going on. I think we'll probably get one
of them. But yeah, some different
people from Polygon will be there. And then we'll also be doing some events with DNA Fund and CJN, Mario's
company. We had DeFi World, but I don't know what happened. They canceled last minute and we had
some pretty big speakers going to that one. I spoke at Eat Denver in between Kevin O'Leary and
Donald Trump Jr. That was a really good one but uh i guess they
something happened there they canceled the last minute but yeah we'll be at a bunch of doing a
lot of events helping with a lot of different events uh in uh dubai it's gonna be a good one
it's gonna be a good one hope to see everyone out there
you got any questions rock asked uh several there for everyone and uh
uh drawn uh drawn a blank i have more like general questions i could ask but i'm not sure
you know it's uh give you a chance maybe to ask something. Oh, I was muted. I was saying we can, uh, read some audience comments. You want
to read some audience comments, Aztec? Am I audible? Oh, sorry. I'm speaking. I'm muted.
Am I audible?
Oh, sorry, I'm speaking.
I can hear you.
I said I can definitely do that.
And it's great to be back on the show and speaking with everyone.
I think what I love about the aggregated is that it's really a great place to come every week, every Friday, and learn.
You know, I've been in this space for, I always lose track,
six, seven years.
And every time I join as a co-host,
I'm learning something, many things actually, every space.
There's so many gigabrines to join and uh share uh whether it's
you know current events or technology the different categories the future of blockchain technology
kind of the synergies between ai and robotics and health and just so much you can learn
robotics and health and just so much you can learn uh on this show so really really great
to be here and uh i'll just read you know some of these i'm gonna go down the list
hopefully i don't do a do a urock where i i read something that's not good but
um let's see so someone says remind uh it's he's web three says reminder set won't be missing this
one for anything glad to hear that read the bad comments too i i read them all all right man all
right get me in trouble here uh trades by real says seems like this would be an interesting topic
reminder set um leroy j says this is a very interesting topic
uh bring it on already uh the crypto canuck hey bro man that's he's he's been in the in the um
part of like various different ecosystems uh he says cool i'll be there shout out crypto canuck
always uh always good to see you in the audience
brother yeah husky t says payments on chain are the future looking forward to this one
uh i know husky t for a long time as well um bro ip says stable coins aren't just stable
ip says stable coins aren't just stable they're shifting the rails catch the alpha
on episode 110 definitely a lot of alpha was dropped today
um let's see uh daniel's saying that uh this is this is going to be a good episode. It definitely has been.
Someone's talking about Quik on Binance.
I think... Well, we can't talk about price,
but if anyone wants to look at the chart today,
we'll allow you to do that.
We can't stop that.
Yeah. It's actually just a lot of people talking about, you know,
excited for the show. Um, there isn't any questions here. So, um,
I just want to, I'll give a quick update, uh, on my health. Uh,
I actually got to hop soon because I have a big call for something we're going
to be building and I have to jump on with,
uh, early contributors, um, top of the hour. So I got to prepare for that, but, um,
yeah, quick update. I haven't been on the show for a long time. Um, the short story is that I was working with a naturopath doctor to get, like, set boundaries in my life because I'm a workaholic and focus on, like, stress and high blood pressure.
I, like, I basically just push myself to the max on anything I do.
And over the first year, everything went really great.
I can attest to that.
Yeah.
I don't, I'd never take time off.
But I'm just too passionate about this space and everything we're building.
I want to see it all come to fruition.
It's one of my biggest goals to be able to see mass adoption and freedom and a lot of these great teams successful.
But basically, towards the end of our relationship with this natural doctor, she put me on some vitamins that basically knock my hormones out.
hormones out. I won't go into too much detail. I don't want to make it boring, but, uh, it, uh,
I won't go into too much detail. I don't want to make it boring.
then, then, uh, I started having side effects and then she started getting me to pay a large
amount of dollars to treat those side effects. And, um, I was basically becoming dependent on her.
And this is the crazy part, guys.
I used Grok to save my life.
Grok saved my life.
So I want to shout out Grok and Elon on this space because basically I took blood results and everything I was on,
and I started itemizing things with Grok.
And with Grok, you can kind of like cross-reference things,
and it uses previous questions as context to answer the next questions you ask.
And I had this really long, several-hour conversation with Grok about my blood results,
what I'm on, the dosagesages how they affect things my symptoms and
ai is able to i used to be in the medical field so i i wasn't able to humanly put everything
together the way grok did but as he took all of my information he actually showed me that the what i
was on was it was had slowly knocked out my hormones.
And it was basically the outcome was that I had very little energy
and that I was dependent on this doctor and the treatments
and that those treatments were actually making it worse.
And so about, I don't know, a week, maybe a week and a half two weeks ago i stopped those things
uh and grok's not a doctor just so everyone knows he makes that very clear but i stopped those
things and i've been bouncing back and your energy this week has been uh totally different man yeah well my life is
uh is changed and i i i just want to say thank you grok i know it's he's just an ai but
he's honestly saved my life i i probably could have died if i would have kept going down this
route and it's uh just something to think about everyone should uh look into their
health uh be an advocate uh for themselves if they're working with doctors um maybe double
check on you know what what results are uh and answers they're being given and uh you never know
uh you know if maybe there's a better way of doing things. Also, I can't, I'm,
I can't give you advice or anything. I'm not giving advice, but, um, I,
I definitely think AI and the synergy between, you know, the,
that access to information it has really can answer a lot of questions.
So I just, so, uh, interesting story, guys,
I've saved my life, but I'm bouncing back.
I want to be more on the show and much love everyone.
I'm happy to be here.
I'm thankful to be here.
And I hope you guys have a really great Friday.
And I really, I got to jump off, but it's been, it's been a great conversation.
I love everything that you guys are building.
All the great people here today.
Yeah, thanks for sharing that with everyone, man.
I've been worried about you for a long time.
And, you know, you were like a lot of the health stuff you were doing seemed to be helping.
And you were taking more time with your family, which I like.
You know, I'm not your boss.
You know, I'm the CEO of LDA, but I've kind of almost
directly ordered you many times, like, you got to have the date nights, you got to do the family
stuff, you got to stop working all day on weekends, you know, I would notice you'd be working 10,
12 hours on weekends. And I'm like, dude, you got to have some time for yourself. I know we want to
conquer the world and change the world. But you know we you can't die on us we can't
do it if you die on us there's so many things i wish i would have listened to you over the years
bro i mean you're you're definitely a very wise man and uh um you've been right about a lot of
things and that's that's definitely one thing um it's funny like through the darkness and the
struggles that i've been going through for the yeah you're right my doctor actually helped me
with a lot of stuff.
So I'm happy about that.
But then towards the end, I don't, you know, there's,
it's very questionable what was going on, but.
Well, doctors are still for-profit businesses, unfortunately,
even though they do take the Hippocratic oath, you know?
Yeah.
Yeah.
I don't want to comment on that, but yes.
Yes.
But through that darkness on your darkness on something you just mentioned, I did grow a lot closer with my family and
I learned a lot about just things that I needed to learn. And, you know, I got humbled through
the period and had to rely on people and never really had to ever rely on anyone in my life.
And so through hard times, it actually made me stronger.
I've actually much more centered and balanced person.
And so I'm thankful for that.
Like, even though it was a horrible situation, I mean, I got honestly probably taken advantage of.
I actually am coming out a lot stronger and better.
So I'm thankful for everything I went through.
Yeah.
I mean,
if you need any stuff on health,
go ahead and me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Actually,
me house,
one of my health experts.
So yeah,
you should talk to,
you should actually schedule a call with just you and me.
How,
and actually I'd love to be there and listen in,
but maybe we should do a spaces on it because Mihaw is like a wealth of knowledge.
I would love a health space.
I'm an anti-aging, et cetera.
Mihaw, do you know anything about mushrooms, bro?
Because that's something I've been diving into.
Yeah, I mean, my wife's a mushroom shamanista, but like...
I've done all the psychedelics, but really like that's not a big part of what I do.
I think that's the topic of our next like off spaces, psychedelics, alternative healing.
Longevity.
I can talk about longevity for hours.
I would love it.
Sound healing.
Do you know anything about sound healing?
I'm really diving down that rabbit hole as well.
Maybe you think that's crazy.
Maybe you don't.
I did.
Back when I lived in LA, I had a sound bath at my house every Monday for four years.
And then sometimes I would play, but mostly I just like got the best guy on earth in LA. And
we just, sounding like is actually really beneficial, but it's like, it's part of,
there's a lot more stuff. Like I found like the best stem cells in the world. I just did a cycle
of that. I've been doing testosterone replacement HRT for like 20 some years. I lift in the world. I just did a cycle of that. I've been doing, you know, testosterone replacement, HRT for like 20 some years. I've left all the time. I've got all the diet stuff
on lock. I got the peptides on lock. I've got like all the different modalities from, you know,
PEMF to HBOT to hyperbaric oxygen, HBOT's hyperbaric oxygen therapy, red light. So like,
I've literally done everything and I'm putting together my own sort of, you know,
beat Brian Johnson protocol. It's kind of like the same version. literally done everything and i'm putting together my own sort of you know beat brian johnson protocol
it's kind of like the same version house space coming up but uh i have doctors like i have three
doctors i work with in south africa in cape town and we're setting up the clinic there um that's
actually kind of like uh where it's basically these are doctors like full-on mds that are just
helping me optimize the protocol because they're just so passionate about it and we have access to
everything and it's like way cheaper than the rest of the world.
So that's one of my side passion projects, because the only way I lasted this
long is honestly like I'd be, I, I wouldn't, you know, I wouldn't make it to
this point, like running, running Matterfy, if it wasn't for like my obsession
with health, like I'd be, I wouldn't, I wouldn't be.
Yeah.
So love to talk about that stuff.
I get super excited about
it that would be awesome brother um but yeah i i gotta hop by and it's actually the top of the
hour so much love everyone rock uh yeah i'm sorry man that i gotta hop this call i usually close the
space when i join but um i gotta hop awesome see ya tech um last thing before we go i do want to shout out some
audience members uh nicole um you're behind the quicksop account can you uh can you go ahead and
just shout out some audience members because audience is what makes us all you know so
important we had a big showing today by the way guys yeah elitza um richard of course, Rainbow, King Dang Kush, German Bombshell, Matterfy, WaltDTCCoin, Devo, Caruso, Nusan, David, John Sharp,
Dale XC, Camargo, B Marjorie, Think DeFi, Jessica de Guzman, Victor Jimenez, Mukta Ancush, Alphonsee, Meliodias.
Some of the names are hard to pronounce
yeah i hope i'm not butchering these they're getting harder as i scroll down the page further
we have i think i don't know if you said uh let's see red-eyed bear
two cent timmy in the house all right guys all right i think that's it for the day this
was a fun space had some really interesting uh professionals on talking about expert experts
talking about different things got to get an update on polygon payments which is really exciting
uh yeah it was a great spaces. Catch y'all later.
Thanks, Rock.
Peace.
Bye-bye.
Thanks, Luke.
