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Web3 Payments Going Global? 🌍 The Aggregated Ep. 141
Recorded: Dec. 5, 2025 Duration: 3:02:24Space Recording
Short Summary
The conversation delves into the evolving landscape of Web3 payments, highlighting trends in user adoption, strategic partnerships, and the upcoming token launch for Handle, which aims to integrate crypto payments into social media platforms. With significant growth indicators and a focus on grants and yield opportunities, the discussion underscores the potential for crypto to revolutionize payment systems globally.
Full Transcription
Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Rock's here. Handel's here. A few listeners here. People are going
to be rolling in over the next few minutes. So, yeah, we'll just give everyone a few minutes
to show up. Rock, do you want to say anything or address the group while we wait?
No. Just wait for people to roll in I'm just waking up
okay sounds good to me yeah let's just give it a few minutes uh yeah hang on patiently everyone we'll be uh we're getting started shortly
okay We'll be getting started shortly. Thank you. so
two more minutes we're just going to give two more minutes for a few more people to roll in, and then
we'll get started with introductions and jump right into the subject matter of payments. Thank you. . All right, we're at the five minute mark, so I guess that means it's time.
So good morning or good afternoon or good evening or good night, depending on where you are in the world.
Thanks so much for joining us.
Yeah, so today we're going to be talking about Web3 payments, going global.
web3 payments going global um i want to i would before we get started with an icebreaker
introduction i just want to ask um can you raise your hand if you've actually sent crypto
to anyone this week using a web3 tool yeah dash has mace has anybody else i have actually i should
raise my hand from my personal account.
In the audience.
Sorry, what do you mean by Web3 tool?
Like, actually use Scented Onchain, right?
Not like, um...
Probably 30 minutes ago, something from Home Depot I bought.
So yes. Yes, of course you have. Yeah. So funnily enough, I sent Dash to Dash Italia for helping me
So, yes.
Yes, of course you have.
Yeah.
do a translation just a couple of days ago. And it was super easy. And I was like, cool,
this is awesome. Yeah. It's awesome to hear. I love when everything kind of starts moving
together. Obviously, I like when people are friendly across crypto communities and just purely like
talking kind of ways but then when i see like the business start to happen the
the actual blockchain being used between i think that's it's always awesome yeah he was great
actually i asked him to help me translate something that i had written into italian
and then i said you know let me know if i I can ever repay the favor. And he's like, buy me a coffee.
So I did it.
Yeah.
Okay.
So, okay.
So now that we've, so, all right.
So, you know, payments may be starting to pick up.
There are people getting into it, right?
But it's still not making up a huge portion of crypto.
So let's talk about like what some of the solutions for that are.
But first let's do, okay, so let's do everybody introduce yourself, say who you are, what you do,
and then like one sentence. What's the single biggest reason that normal people don't send
crypto to friends in the way that they use like Venmo or Cash App or other centralized services.
Rock, you want to go first?
Someone lost the mute button.
Someone lost the mute button.
Hey, Rock, can you hear us?
Do you want to unmute and go first, or do you want someone else to intro first?
He's become a listener.
You should add him back as a host.
Okay, yeah, i've got him as
he hurt his feelings his rage he raged quit yeah he raged quit okay well i'll i'll get him back
so i'll get rock back up here while we wait um can we have handle introduce i know we
we don't have handle for a long time and And yeah, Handel, can you go first?
Who you are, what you do, and in one sentence,
why don't normal people send crypto in the way that they use Venmo or Cash App?
Great. Hello, everyone.
First off, can you hear me?
We can hear you.
Excellent.
I've been on so many spaces and every other one seems to glitch, but great.
So I'm Greg Orr.
I'm the co-founder of Handle, on HandlePay.
Essentially, what we are doing is we're enabling people to receive stable points with their
social media handles like Instagram, LinkedIn, and so on, including WhatsApp numbers, Telegram
names, and so on and so forth.
We're really building for the non-crypto natives.
And to answer your question, I think that's pretty much one of the main reasons that the people right now in the space in crypto, they love to a great degree the tech.
But the people outside who simply want to receive a payment like
with a venmo or with a grab in asia by a phone number they just can't be bothered it's too much
work and when we speak to people as well that's what i hear right it's like what are all the
different stable coins and and what are gas fees what is cross-chain it's just too cumbersome to
receive 20 so um that's to answer your question but glad
to be on the space and uh thanks for the invite yeah thanks for making it okay i think we've got
rock back up as the co-host now so rock can you go first with your intro and answering the icebreaker
um yeah i got uh i don't know rugged or something but but what was the icebreaker? Yeah, so the question is like one sentence.
What's the biggest reason that people don't send crypto for payments,
even to friends in the way that they like Venmo or Cash App or PayPal?
That's a really good question.
question. We sort of discussed this yesterday on the Dash Space. I mean, for me,
We sort of discussed this yesterday on the Dash Space.
well, we were talking about Bitcoin. And for me, I basically said, I don't really send Bitcoin
because I'm just hauling my Bitcoin. I send other things. But even the other things, I don't really
send crypto to friends so much. I use Venmo or Zelle. I think mostly just because most people don't have or are not
using crypto. So it's kind of a network effect thing, I guess. I mean, all of my assets are
in crypto, but at the point of using them, I convert them to dollars and then just use dollars for things.
I guess I would just say network effect.
But for introduction, I'm Rock Zacharias.
I'm the CEO of Lunar Digital Assets.
I'm co-founder of Quickswap, Lunar Digital Assets Incubatedated QuickSwap and Incubated Polygon and others.
I'm on the Polygon Community Treasury Board, which manages the billion-dollar grant and
investment fund.
I'm a mentor for Tim Draper's Bitcoin Fly Accelerator, and I'm head of Global Leadership
Council for Michael Turpin's BitAngels.
And then most recently, it came out of kind of founder, not retirement, but the first time I've
been a founder in the last six years is now LitVM, the Litecoin layer two. So pretty excited about that.
So pretty excited about that.
Awesome.
Okay, so next, how about Dash?
Dash, can you intro and then do you remember the question?
Yes.
I go to bed at night when I close my eyes.
That's all I hear in my brain is that question.
He might be the best person on the planet to answer this question.
I may or may not have tailored this question for Joel.
Yes.
So my name is Joel, and I run business development and marketing for Dash,
which is an almost 12-year-old cryptocurrency right now
focused on being the best money and payment system in the world
with instant transactions, very low fees, privacy, which is fantastic, and high scalability, and usability features like usernames and
contactless built into the actual protocol.
Oh, and I see Zano's here too.
Hi, Zano.
I haven't seen you in like, you know, 16 hours.
Anyway, to answer the actual question, why don't people do it?
I would say there's two big things.
One is a lot of crypto is just so crappy to use.
And if you're going to get anyone to do it, it's just much more difficult.
There's very few that do actually work well.
Obviously, Dash is one of them.
And in my opinion the best but
it's not like it's the only one that you can kind of easily enough send and receive to um i did by
the way find that in my own personal life i've been doing a lot more of this paying people back
with dash because of the username system where now i can just look at my contact list and send
a private payment to
someone with a face that I know rather than saying, Hey, I owe you for lunch. How much was it? Can you
send me an address? Send it over signal. I don't like the, you know, Facebook, like snooping on it
and all that other crap. I just go into their profile, hit them, send payment and you're done.
So that's number one. Number two is just kind of what rock was alluding to, which is, um, people don't necessarily have like a use for the crypto yet. So in my personal world, um, uh, probably, I would say 70 to 80% of the people in my life, I can just send crypto to. In fact, it is easier to send crypto to than anything else like the Venmo's and PayPal's
because it's always someone who has one that doesn't have the other. Someone got locked out
of their PayPal because their name changed when they got married and they thought it was fraudulent.
Like there's always crap that prevents that. Because of my circle, it tends to be very easy
that I can just send to people. For the people who I can't,
they just haven't started using crypto in their life.
So for me, if I were to send them that,
they would just be like, now what do I do with it?
It doesn't do anything for me.
So I think that the number one thing is if people can treat crypto as actual like liquid capital for whatever they need,
I think that that's going to make things a lot better.
So two things that will impact this.
Number one would be being able to just directly spend crypto for a lot of different things
to where when you have it, it's not like hot potato.
What do I do with it?
It's like, well, I can just spend it just like real money because it is real money.
That's number one, maybe a little bit of a longer term thing
or much more conditional on situations.
The other one though is when you have things like PayPal
and Venmo and Cash App and stuff like that,
that do accept crypto into them
or to where if you need a money in your bank account you can
send crypto and it ends up in your bank account or you can get move it very seamlessly that's
what's going to change it much quicker i remember a couple years ago and a year ago or so in
amsterdam with a friend he had cash app and i was experimenting sending him lightning payments
and it you know it's clunky and weird and stuff but it because it's lightning but it you can like
send crypto to a cash app account and so um i think that when we have like venmo and cash app
and things like that once crypto becomes a little bit more universal to where you can do in any crypto to anything much more easily without extra steps, then you'd be able to say, hey,
give me your Venmo. I'll send you some crypto. Or if they don't have Venmo, just say, send me
some crypto. And then you're like, how do I get into my bank account? Click this one button and
you're there. So I think we're very close to being able to do that as a much broader thing than just my circle of friends and colleagues, crypto weirdos, etc.
So Joel, can you actually doesn't Venmo?
It definitely supports crypto for purchases.
I often tell people they can use it for purchases, but does it?
And I think you can send and receive their PayPal or whatever it is, stablecoin.
Can you send other things?
Wait, no.
PayPal.
Let me go to Venmo real quick.
Yeah, they do use PayPal.
Yeah, right, because Venmo is owned by PayPal.
Can you send and receive Bitcoin or other assets, Litecoin, et cetera, on Venmo?
I think so. I don't have any actual experience with this because I've been out of the fiat world
for 10 years. My only experience with this is because I had a friend who was actually one of
the key railgun people who had cash app. i did actually send lightning to his cash app and he
sent bitcoin via lightning out of his cash app to my phoenix wallet so i do know that that is
possible at least venmo does support crypto i don't know how real it is i do know a friend or
someone i know i should say um has crypto in their Revolut, but Revolut will not let you withdraw it.
It's like paper crypto. It's not real.
So you have to check exactly which one of these does which thing.
Cool. Hey, should we move on? Try to get through the intros?
No, I'm good. Let's keep doing this.
Yeah, you went way over one sentence.
Way to ignore all the directions, Joelle.
All right.
How about...
All decentralization.
Censorship resistance, lady.
Come on.
All right.
How about Xano next?
Hey, everyone.
Can you hear me all right?
Had some connection.
You are audible.
All right. Well, hey, You are audible. All right.
Well, everyone, I'm Gonzalo.
Help community at Xeno.
Xeno is a layer one ecosystem for private apps and private assets.
And in one sentence, I'd say the biggest friction is interprobability.
And beyond that sentence or that single word um i was actually
thinking that two days ago i bought a pizza with my friend and he had to send me some money but he
didn't have on his ban account so we had to use cash and it didn't have change so we bought those
crypto so why didn't i even think about he just sending me crypto and i think the
issue was that well yes we both are in crypto and we use it very regularly there's no
interoperability because i use like apart from zanon stuff i mostly use usdc on Optimus and he uses USDT on Binance Chain.
So like there's no easy way to convert it on the fly.
Like you need to get like my address and put it in an exchange platform,
take on the fees. It's just not smooth.
So I think that's the biggest issue, interoperability,
because even if there is crypto option, it's very fragmented. Yeah, that's a great point. All right, let's go to Mace.
Hey, everybody. Pedro Mace here. I should say I used to be part of the BRZ Transfero team at
Transfero, responsible for all their Web3 operations.
But now I take care of the DeFi for six different stablecoins.
I'm a DFB network.
Basically, we're based in Brazil.
We operate Great British Town, Indonesian Rupiah, Singapore dollars,
Brazilian Reais, Mexican Pesos, and hopefully so on with time. I have an interesting thing to say
here when it comes to payments because it really depends on who you're talking
about when it comes to payments. Some people want the ease of a international
transfer. I have a lot of OTC friends here in Brazil because the flow for OTC
in Brazil is massive to the tunnel of let's say a couple of billion dollars a day.
It's insane.
And it's always out, right?
So it's always people buying USDT to send back to 99% of the time,
back to mainland China to buy back more produce to bring to Brazil. So I would even hedge a bet that that flow, BRL to USDT, specifically Chon,
is around 20% to 30% of Brazil's whole Forex market at this point.
Why? Because it has a price cheat.
So when it comes to professional money movers, let's just say,
no matter how gray zone they are,
and trust me, these guys are very gray zone.
They have a lot of people between them and the actual FYC that they provide.
The price is the priority.
And in Brazil, it's possible for you to have an exception if you have an international forex fund and a couple of taxes.
So a lot of crypto companies, or I'd say every single serious one,
has now become also an international forex fund. So it would be able to buy USDs and therefore
USDTs without paying tax, without wavering that tax. And selling that dollar back to Brazil at
very, very, very high volumes at low, low, low prices, like prices that should be low enough for it to be impossible.
In theory, for a Brazilian to buy dollars for less than 35 bps,
which is a percent of a percent.
But it is.
I buy dollars for like 18 bps at a good price,
12 bps at an excellent price when I do my rebalance here in Brazil.
But there are two factors that are going towards payments in cryptocurrency.
It's that, championed by China and Tron, and I'm not going to lie, gambling websites,
most of anything, because Justin Sun is the owner of the world's largest gambling software
company. No one knows about that. And uses Tron and USDT to settle back with China. And
everyone else is just being part of the flow. So all the people that sell vapes in Brazil,
which is illegal,
but they all are Chinese importance
that go through Paraguay.
They all use USDT, Tron.
On the other side of that flip
is a lot of people that work
in the financial markets here in Brazil.
And I can tell you from experience
that they nowadays all have stables,
all have Bitcoin and all have Ethereum.
So it's become easier and easier over time,
also because of my own influence on the people around me,
to send them crypto as a means of payment.
So whenever I'm owning my friend money or whatever,
if we're not together and I can pay with my credit card,
which is an American credit card and has nothing to do with Brazil.
So I kind of do Forex payments in stable coins as well.
I will pay them
in USDC, USDT, or
whatever else hell token
they would like to be paid in.
It's a mix, but I feel like this mix is going to
join in the middle where the professionals and the retails
are going to be happy as soon as it is, I agree,
easy to operate on chain.
We're slowly but surely getting there.
All right. Thank you so much. Okay okay we've got two more introductions to get through and then we can go into the body of the questions for today uh let's go to two cent timmy gm how is everyone
today uh i am two cent timmy i am on the Polygon marketing team and do a few other things in Web3.
But really, when thinking about payment, I would say kind of like what Rock said, they're not that network effect.
I mean, you could go into a whole bunch of different retailers where you would want to pay in crypto and they just don't accept it.
I will say too, one thing that, and I'm sure Joel and Dash have seen this is,
there's a lot of companies that are starting to accept stable coins and integrating it,
especially digital companies, online companies.
I know Stripe is really making a big push.
Stripe is really making a big push.
I mean, PayPal is coming out with their own chain.
So I would say right now, like the explosion of payments in Web3 over the last year, it's
been pretty dramatic and it's not anywhere near like ubiquitous across like everyone
and people who aren't into crypto.
But I will say there's definitely traction that we can see happening when you're paying attention to payments and how much,
especially in countries that they don't have a U S dollar natively, you're seeing payments. So
like Latin America, Southeast Asia countries where they don't have a stable currency and they're
basically wrecked by inflation. They're actually using US dollar stablecoins and other, I would say,
like gold stablecoins, things like that to send their payments. So I would say that's encouraging.
It's just, I would say, first world countries and people that benefit from a already built out and
robust payment network, they're going to be the last to adopt Web3 and crypto payments.
they're going to be the last to adopt Web3 and crypto payment.
Yeah, that's a great point.
All right, let's go.
Woof!
Woof, woof.
Hi, everyone.
My name is Alex.
I work for Woof.
We are a high agency firm building exceptional crypto products.
So, let's talk about um adopting payment uh we are crypto we have
like super hands-on experience we recently built an app for uh one of the most iconic new york
events that is happening right now but unfortunately I cannot talk like in fully here I was talking code but we are like on hands with uh you know solving all these micro issues
that help uh that uh that can help actually people to adopt crypto payments uh and the most obvious one is habit uh second one is network effect as rock said and
third one is like issues that uh payment system have that's all speaker have talked about like
gas uh different chains and some other friction that I hope will be resolved in the nearest time.
And we're, as Wolf, doing our best to resolve it right now on the land as we talk.
Awesome. Thank you. Thank you so much.
So I want to dive into questions.
So I know that Wolf has really, or sorry, not Wolf, Handel has really limited time today.
So I want to, like, first ask Handle a really direct question.
And then we're going to like open that question up to the rest of our panel to ask further questions or to help, you know, break it apart a little bit.
So Handle, can you like paint the vision?
Say a user with zero crypto knowledge sees their friend's X Handle and wants to send them $20.
Can you explain step by step how that actually works and try to keep it as jargon free as you can,
as if you were explaining it to your mom? Yeah, absolutely. Great question. So what we envision, conceptually speaking,
it's actually very similar to what we have seen with name services,
like in DNS or something else,
but you have a domain name that is also to a destination address, right?
Name services are typically on a single chain.
And one of the complexities in the space now,
specifically for people new or open to try out stable coins,
is the sheer amount of different chains
and all the different US dollar-packed stable coins.
That leads to an extreme fragmentation.
And people are just super confused about this.
So what we are doing is a combination from a name service,
where we use instead of a domain, they're using a WhatsApp number,
a Telegram, an Instagram name, a TikTok name,
that resolves to a destination address.
But then at the same time,
it's kind of an inbound aggregation routing system.
Similar to think about an email catch-all type of address.
So if the receiver has, like, let's say,
receives payments to his WhatsApp number,
you can send it from different blockchains.
You can send it from EMm chains and i mean right
now we're only on envm but you can will be able to send it from different chains uh you can even
send it from your cart from your you can apple pay the whatsapp number basically and then behind
the scenes we are just stitching together the different routing elements so with a whatsapp
with a part pain you have the own step and then
you're out into the destination chain but the owner of the whatsapp number basically wants to
receive so yeah i think um in in a very um non-deachin um language i would say um we are
translating whatsapp numbers and you know social media usernames into a payment address
that works cross-chain.
Okay. All right. Great. Interesting. So I want the panel, I think, Josh, you were already about
to speak, Joelle. Sorry about that. So I want to ask just the panel to react. So is like pay to at username a killer feature that finally beats, you know, Venmo, PayPal, etc.
Or is that still coping?
And if so, where does it fall short compared to TradFi?
Yeah, so my opinion is, first of all, I would say like a 90, 80, 90% yes on that as far as that is the missing feature.
We're dealing with all the different addresses, and it used to just be copy-paste address or scanning QR code, and now you have all this Connect-A-Wallet nonsense.
And so it's just a lot of places don't even let you do a QR code, send or
like raw dog it to the address. It's just, it's a mess. I do think that having a username and
contact system conveniently such as Dash has, but many others have something semi-similar,
is that encapsulates more than just that one isolated token if you are using other ones, right?
So a universal username system
that actually like works,
I think is a big necessity.
There's another thing,
which is we do need cross-chain interoperability
as far as this is concerned.
And all you really need for that is
some integrated swap services slash DEXs that let you go from whatever token to whatever token in
case someone doesn't. Like if someone says, hey, I got Litecoin in my Venmo. I want it.
And you're like, well, I only have Bitcoin Cash. You should be able to send them Bitcoin Cash and
it ends up as Litecoin in their Venmo.
And all you need is a simple swap service there
and all you need is a simple username service there.
Once we have that, I think it's going to be super simple
to just go all back and forth to anything,
especially when you have stablecoin rails
because I do think stablecoins in the next five years
will be, I wouldn't say a full replacement,
but a decent replacement for digital fiat where it's not going to be so much
that there's this isolated ecosystem of,
of crypto, but stable coins.
It's like banks are going to be able to pay you in stable coins and stuff.
And you can just deposit stables to your bank, for example.
It's so that's kind of what i think we need to do to recap username and contact list that works for
all cryptos and also swap services slash whatever else built in dex rails that let you go to
whatever coin the person actually wants to receive people call this like chain abstraction and stuff
like that but like i think i think that that's a
crap term personally all right so let's okay okay xano has their hand up we try to do open forum
here where people just cut in when they can but that can be really difficult so
handle do you have anything to say in response to joel before we let xano take over
no like 100 agreed on that.
Like one of the things that, you know, like we see happening also, which in a way is a
bit of a roadblock, right?
Like so all these wallets, like the ones you mentioned, the Wynmos and also the others
all over the world, they are very, they're still operating in a very, in a silo kind of environment.
They're mostly domestic.
Many of them obviously are regulated, so they have some type of restrictions.
But if you look at markets that are not necessarily in Europe or US only, you have a whole different
level of complexity when it comes to these peer-to-peer payments with a user mean or a number, because you are essentially starting to transact in US dollars.
So you're, to some degree, even undermining the whole local monetary policy.
So there is a lot of complexity with the silo wallets that we have.
And I think what really needs to happen, and it is happening at a certain space, like every development happens, but we kind of need to make this leap from this silo wallets that work in a domestic market only to a real global type of setup and stablecoin in my view will be um the conduit to that so um the question is just
like at what place and in which markets but it's it has to be it's not it will also be related to
like use cases that are kind of new right and and that are not just the usual domestic money payback
for a coffee uh for your friends kind of what we had with the ICOs in the early days.
There was a whole new use case that you could go to global people.
But yes, I'll pause here.
I'm curious to hear that.
Awesome.
So Gustavo.
Actually, I want to respond to Joel joelle and handle here so yeah joelle when you talk about how it would be nice
if you you know just there's some decks uh swap in the background or these different things
you could basically you really could abstract all of that away um
in and i think you could do it with both centralized and decentralized wallets but you could
you could make it even go a step further where you don't even care which crypto you're sending
you just maybe the the person uh who's receiving or maybe either one could choose i'm just trying
to think what the what the user experience or UI would look like.
But you could just say, hey, I want $20.
You send the person requests.
Maybe that's how it starts.
Or maybe it's the sender.
That's probably easier because lightning invoices with the request is kind of annoying, actually.
So maybe you just say, I want to send $20. I scan someone's QR code and then they, your wallet and their wallet do some kind of handshake and say, here, I'm going to send you this.
And the other person receives,
it could be receiving something else.
But in the background, maybe there's a DEX action happening.
Maybe there's a bridge action happening.
I'm trying to think of how you would do this without one wallet telling the other wallet what you have and violating privacy.
What's that?
So Ethereum and Uniswap has been working on this for a while now, where you can start
to do cross-chain intents, where you can tell someone, let's say a market maker like
me, that, hey, I have USDC on Avalanche and I would like to pay off WVTC on Polygon.
And then I can give you quotes that
actually deliver cross-chain, guaranteeing both of the endpoints are closed. If both endpoints
are closed, the money reverts. That's already being worked on. The only issue is that if you
want to make this all seem very nice and happy and automated, we start getting away from the
trustless world and more to the trust minimized world,
which is, you know, a solution and a problem.
But there are technical solutions to make this all feel very, very seamless.
It's just a matter of having enough demand within those technical solutions
so that the suppliers of that liquidity, let's call it me and a bunch of others,
especially in Asia, are able to better compete for lower prices.
So it's already possible in the dollar world.
I'm working towards making it possible in the real
and the Singaporean dollar world, etc.
Yeah, which is just going to mention intents
because that's already a thing.
It is, exactly.
So it solves 80% of this issue.
The only issue is that we have to trust the people
solving the intents at the end of the day. The only issue is that we have to trust the people solving
the intent in the end of the day. There's no way around that. Do you? Aren't there ways? I don't.
Well, I mean, I don't think so. It won't work. It won't work. So it will be stopgapped, right?
The money won't leave your wallet in the end of the day because it sort of acts atomically,
where if it doesn't happen on the other side, it reverts the initiation of the day because it sort of acts atomically. Where if it doesn't happen on the other side,
it reverts the initiation on the original blockchain.
But it can be, let's say, add problems, right?
Where, oh, this guy has a nice quote.
And then I go process the quote and the guy's like,
I'm not down for that quote anymore and the transaction reverts.
That type of thing can happen.
Yeah, but that can be solved
by more liquidity
and having more solvers
competing with each other.
Although you might run
into some censorship issues
because you might have,
like, there might not be
a solver willing
to do that transaction
because of regulations and stuff.
Maybe because, you know, one side of it is in a sanctioned country or something. solver willing to do that transaction because of regulations and stuff maybe because that's you
know one side of it is in a sanctioned country or something but then you may get other solvers that
will do it um yeah yeah so if it's a truly permissionless network then theoretically
one solver in north korea just processes
and that but then you might be in trouble
because now you just interacted with North Korea.
But I think at some point,
I don't know,
I think at some point, though,
sanctions start to become less relevant
for multiple reasons.
I mean, one,
they're hurting the dollar.
I mean, they're killing the dollar slowly.
The U.S. weaponizing the dollar has only made the dollar weaker.
It's accomplished other goals, sure.
It's like messed with the enemies of the U.S. a little bit and made their lives a little annoying.
It's hurt a lot of their citizens who aren't even involved in the politics of it.
But the most important effect as an American that I've seen is it's
just hurt our dollar.
It's weakened it.
So I don't know how long they'll last, but not for that
reason, but because crypto also just
kind of gets around these things.
Genius
access to save us all, though.
I mean,
welcome to how everyone else feels.
So the strategy...
Go ahead.
Sorry.
Donald Trump's strategy of incentivizing all the banks that currently hold a bunch of bonds
that are illiquid and have to be hold so that they are, you know, collateral for the amount
of leverage that the bank can effectively have with their clients.
Now all of those bonds that were stuck since 2000 in every single American bank can become stable coins.
Effectively relaunching a bunch of liquidity
without repaying a bunch of debt.
So that strategy makes a shit ton of sense in my hand.
Oh yeah.
I mean, I think we're probably going to see a wave.
And we've already seen this with the traditional dollar
to some extent some countries
you know try to ban it or you know try to have currency controls like argentina just actually
finally opened up their currency controls but for a long time they you know it was illegal to convert
to dollars basically there was a blue market and whatever but um there still is it's still a
fuck show but it's better it's a
better function they closed uh they closed it right really no yeah i'm not i'm updated wow
no good i'm argentinian so explain it's less relevant less relevant but it's still there
and it's good to be there because i think we should still have alternative in case things
don't grow wait so explain what is still there because they closed, they got rid of the controls that
the blue market and the white market, I guess you might call it, converged, right?
That's the whole point of why he took the IMF loan or the IMF line of credit.
And there was a day where it happened.
And on that day the the peso dropped a
bit but it didn't drop very much because i don't know people had confidence in mille or uh because
he had that credit line to defend the peg but yeah i'm not what am i missing or is there still
some other kind of control but because the the blue market gap closed it's gone you can see it
on charts yeah it's it's pretty much gone.
It's not gone.
It's like minimal now, but still there.
So you can still do some arbitrage.
But I think the main reason it hasn't gone away,
it's because of taxes.
Because it's basically like Cuevas are a way to send money
to the other side of the world with no KYC.
Like you can walk into a cueva with unlimited cash
have the cueva converted to usdt and then send it to china and there is no record of it
other than on the blockchain but for now we don't care that much about it i think in the future we
will but uh it's still there there's still demand way less demand that's for sure but
It's still there. There's still demand. Way less demand, that's for sure.
I'm not talking about stablecoins, I'm talking about the blue market of peso,
the official conversion rate. There's a free market conversion rate of pesos to dollars,
and then there's the official rate. But that official rate's gone, I thought.
Yeah, but hear this. Most of the Argentina economy, it's still off the books. So you can have income,
you can have cash,
and you can out-deposit it to a bank.
So if you want dollars,
then you have to go to the blue market.
Hey, Rock, welcome to LATAM, man.
It's a bit different.
Rules mean like 50% as much
as they do outside of Latin America.
It's kind of crazy.
Rules are suggestions.
Yeah, that's why it was called a blue market,
not a black market.
Because it was like...
It used to be a black market,
but they changed it because of PR reasons.
Yeah.
And they also have like eight other currencies,
types of the peso in Argentina, right?
Like they had one for the Olympics or something.
They had like an Olympic peso and they have one for, I think, agriculture.
We have dollar Qatar.
So two dollars for people that went to see the World Cup.
Yeah, that's what it was.
One thing I know is that Argentinians use Brazilian financial infrastructure, Pix,
instant payments, to settle between each other in Argentina via Brazilian banks.
It's kind of a crazy market nowadays.
They do. I know we use Pix, but I don't think it's that popular.
Maybe not on my circle, but yeah.
I agree.
I have a Bix account, so I can't believe it.
See, proof is in the pudding.
So, yeah, back to the dollars, though, and the stable coins and bonds thing.
What do you guys think that the world's answer to this will be?
Because already Europe has presented bills banning stablecoins, either US stablecoins or stablecoins in general, or said they're going to limit, you know, you can't buy more than like $500 of stablecoins or these weird like laws but if the u.s bond market starts getting really strong because uh everybody in the
world just is using stable coins like if crypto becomes the rails of the future and just purely
maybe because you know u.s dollar it has its normal network effects but then it has a crypto
network effect because stable coins are the you know there's no like euro stable coins and these aren't, they have like no traction or,
well, not a lot of traction yet. They're growing, but what do you think other countries do if all
the whole world starts doing all their digital payments and all their digital DeFi and gaming
and everything in the world is using stable coins, will other countries start banning U.S. stable coins
and try to force people to use their own China coin and stuff?
I mean, Argentina and plenty of other countries have banned the U.S. dollar
precisely because of this.
But we'll still use it because, I mean, I think the U.S., just like they have no incentive to ban USDT because it benefits them, they also have no incentive to ban cash.
Because if they do, I mean, there are entire countries that run their economy off the books using U.S. dollars in cash.
that run their economy off the books using US dollars in cash.
So if the US suddenly invalidated them,
they will lose control over those countries.
They will lose influence and they will weaken the dollar.
So the US government is interested in having somewhat censorship-resistant ways
of using the dollar because you're basically sneaking the dollar
into every economy and you're strengthening and you know it's their military does half of that job for them
by the way which is interesting so it's you it's normal for american army to go into
war zones with bags of cash to pay off people and dollars
so they're part of the incentive structure for this. It's interesting.
When they got Osama bin Laden, didn't he have like pallets of US cash and US weapons?
I think the US is so incentivized and so benefited by this that when I think that when chain
analysis online, even governments like Venezuela started using chain analysis online even governments like venezuela start using chain analysis because
usd is very popular there i think the us will even allow usd on private rails like a private
private ecosystem because it benefits them well if they don't people will use other things like
bitcoin litecoin polygon that's not what they want. So they have incentive.
So they are incentivized to launder the Chinese money.
That's the collateral for Tether.
I find that beautiful.
So you're telling me, this is the same conclusion I take every single time.
The Tether IPO is effectively laundering billions of dollars of Chinese money laundering towards America.
That's effectively what's going to happen.
And no one talks about it, but I love it.
It's, I mean, the US, yeah, I mean, let's be real.
And this is not like legal advice or anything, but if you're the US...
Not at all, guys. I'm not a lawyer.
Of course you want people to be able to use some tool
to move their money from China to the US, right?
The China is blocking that.
The China doesn't allow you to withdraw.
I think the last I looked at the rule, it was like 50,000 a year.
Chinese citizens can take out to invest or do things.
So if you want to take your money out, I mean, I've talked to people who were involved in
like crazy ways of moving money from China.
And they said they used to do
like they would buy you know 50 Rolexes and take them out or stupid crap like that that's inefficient
um or there's a pretty crazy one gambling in Macau yeah yeah is it is it Macau like a big portion of
it just money laundering to move money out of China?
So people will buy gambling chips and then they will sell gambling chips.
Therefore, money is laundered.
Therefore, its dollars go out.
It's crazy.
All right.
We're way off topic.
We're way off topic.
So let me just try to steer it back.
That's natural.
It happens.
That's what we're known for and what we love to do.
But let me just try to put it a little bit back onto the rails.
So this is an open question. I did tailor the question specifically for Handle, but it is open-ended. So anybody do have tried doing this like .eth, .sol,
.lens, Telegram usernames, and all of that like barely moved the needle. So my question to handle
is what is handle doing differently that actually makes payments stick? And then open-ended question
to anyone after that is like, what are the, and also to handle, what are the security or privacy
trade-offs that like, I think, Rock, you kind of briefly touched on this in a question that then
went off the rails, that people don't talk about.
We go handle first.
Looks like they can't handle that question got it let's handle it um yes so i i'd say like the
main difference um you know first of all there's time right like in in how these things evolve but
also um like what you've like the the examples you mentioned, the target users that are crypto people.
And I mean, I haven't seen anyone else using like an ENS or any of these things unless they're already in crypto.
But I think it comes back to the point of network effect distribution.
It's rather critical mass.
And I think one of the key differences
is that we are building on those handles or tags
or whatever you want to call it
that already have a massive use case and volume out there.
I would say that's maybe the main difference.
Will it be better, successful?
Will we be able to achieve what we envision?
That's a whole other story.
We're still early in our journey.
But yeah, I'd say we're building on top of what's already there.
I feel like that's true for every single thing that relies on network effects.
It's slowly, slowly, slowly.
Then all of a sudden, everyone is collapsing into one option and using everything in synchronicity kind of thing.
It's a matter of time.
And not choosing one, but doing all of the above is usually the answer.
Yeah, we are always, like, for us, like like the vision from a payments experience for a consumer
is actually pretty simple.
The benchmark for payments are card payments, right?
You swipe or you tap and you can literally do this with one brain cell because you don't
have to think.
Money gets routed through the networks, through the merchant, all the things happens behind the scenes.
But the peer-to-peer payment method
is a whole different animal
because it shifts the whole burden
of responsibility to the sender.
You are responsible to identify recipients.
You need to figure out routing.
If it's cross-international,
it's complicated,
you need to be an expert.
And especially if it involves stablecoins or conversions and all that.
So I think, yeah, taking the benchmarks on card payments and seeing what has been developed
in the industry already, there's great products out there.
It's a matter of stitching them together in a different way than it's usable for
for the normies uh out on the street amen
i also think that one thing for payments too i mean we we talk all the time about pewter peer payments and like that makes sense in crypto for natives when you're, I mean, that was Bitcoin's white paper.
But I think there's part of what makes payments stick is that like businesses, I mean, that's
really where the market is.
People using it for commerce is where payments are going to go.
And I think what's happening is like vendors credit card companies charge vendors three percent
plus uh on transactions which is insane uh remittance services like a western union charges
insane uh taxes and fees where crypto payments that way are a fraction of the cost i mean you're
talking about you can reduce costs i don't know% plus across the board for these vendors. And I think that as there becomes more distribution,
it's actually going to be preferred by everyone. And I could easily see companies, like, especially
starting with your small mom and pop shop saying like, hey, we'll save, you'll save 2% on your
purchase if you pay in stable coins, because they don't have to pay that credit card fee.
I mean, we see it now with cash.
I think it's a little bit more common
when people say like, oh, you have a cash discount
or they say we charge X percent more for credit cards.
I think we'll actually see stable coins
start to get more and more market share.
And then as it starts being swapped,
like for those digital dollars,
we'll actually get the distribution we need.
I think like thinking bigger,
the entire payments really boils down
to the big companies accepting it.
Like, and I'm just thinking
your major, major retailers,
once they start accepting stable coins for payments,
I think that's when we'll get huge distributions.
And I also don't know why they wouldn't, because it's so much easier to take your stablecoins
and start earning yield on it as a company.
And I think that's a big part of the payments that gets overlooked and really isn't sold
as much as it should be for why people should have stable coins and accept them
is because you can just easily take it and deposit it
into some very, very low risk lending protocols
or something like that and earn yield
versus assets just kind of sitting natively in a bank account
and checking account for these companies.
Can I just briefly expand on
that like uh just 100 agree uh the event that that we are doing event for right now like we had the
same issues with the vendors like they didn't understand why they should allow payments in
crypto what's the process like so once we and the company that helped us to do it
uh made everything frictionless they covered their gas fees uh they you know do all these
background things together with us it it really doesn't matter right so money is green uh but
there was this issue okay so you get this payment
in stable coins what should you do with them you cannot buy your groceries with it you cannot pay
uh salary to your employees so you know the event we're doing why i'll keep on talking because it's
just like a mini world that everything is happening at once you have all these crypto newbies you have crypto natives you
have vendors and all have different levers levels of adoption so in in order for it to work you need
to get everyone you know uh to get this understanding okay this is useful this is
fast I can do it I can save money is it was it this should be like a killer feature you know
that's also placed it's like basic you know human instincts like everyone is lazy they don't want to get uh change their habits and you know they just want to okay i will get more money i will do
something easier once i adopt it so once we we solve this, then we can move forward.
That's a really good point.
I mean, we have done a lot of different user acquisition
experiments in Latin and in Southeast Asia.
And the number one comment or question
from everyone is always the same.
How can I use it or how can I withdraw it
to my bank or my local wallet?
That's the first thing that comes to people's minds.
Yeah.
And I think another interesting point
that I heard earlier was also,
that's something I struggle with.
Curious what you guys think.
But I believe one of the issues
why global peer-to-peer payments
and amic LinkedIn is so complicated is because the entire payments industry has been focusing for decades on merchant payments.
So it's the business angle.
All the cards that have filled out, the whole infra and everyone in that space, because that's also where the volume obviously is.
But that has created a tech stack that facilitates payments from consumers to merchants.
And unless you are a business and you can have merchant status, you cannot accept the
card.
So the only other alternative out there is, you know, stitching together all the different
players to move money to the destination.
And I think at that point, the price sensibility becomes a very different one.
And you use one of those Remittance apps out there,
and you fill out all these details and then something is missing at the end,
and you start all over.
So at some point, you just don't care if you pay a few bips more or less as a consumer
because you waste your time hey so going back to handle a bit um what do you think about because when you're saying that people could pay to um
to say a twitter handle the um the xqcd comic came to mind about a competing standards and nothing
you guys know about it it's a meme on this topic but basically basically, there are a bunch of, I mean, if I want to send money to someone through a Twitter handle, I have a bunch of options.
And I think the problem here is that maybe me and my friend have different alternatives, right?
Maybe he uses unstoppable domains.
uses unstoppable domains i use cake pay like how do we connect each other like
I use KegPay.
Like, how do we connect each other?
is there a what's the main differential factor that would push everyone to use the single
standard or is that even feasible like isn't there a way to be cross compatible with other
standards because otherwise we're running into the same fermentation that also happens
at the lower level that everyone's using different cryptos and different chains
and then we're going to need another ins on top of that to simplify it i see yes
and there will be 15 competing standards
Hey, IPv6 is coming next year.
hey ipv6 is coming next year
Well, let me mention something on that, if I might,
because I'm kind of in the middle of a lot of this.
I think that there will be relatively few universally accepted
username type standards out there.
And I think that what will have to happen,
the way we get there, though, is, first of all, username type stat standards out there. And I think that what will have to happen
the way we get there though, is first of all,
everyone will have their own username system.
Just it's going to happen.
And then in five to 10 years,
95% of those will just die out.
And 85% of the underlying blockchains
of which those were native to are also going to die out.
So just process elimination is going to make things easier.
But so what do we do in the meantime?
Well, in the meantime, we have to do the annoying task of ensuring cross username system interoperability, which is going to be annoying.
And this is actually something I'm working on right now. So the Dash ecosystem has its own usernames, its own usernames, contact lists,
encrypted metadata, all that kind of stuff that works for Dash, obviously. And that I'm working
on a couple of things. Number one, making this interoperable with multiple different cryptocurrencies
for multi-coin wallets. We're talking to a couple right now that we're trying to work this out with
so that hopefully the Dash standard goes far beyond the actual Dash ecosystem and starts to
apply to many other things. On the other side, what we're doing is we're working with a few other
competing standards. The one that comes immediately to mind
that we've had the most conversations with
is Matterfy slash American Fortress.
And they have a very,
actually one of the better username systems
we've seen out there.
And basically it doesn't work for them
just to use their system necessarily
because it's closed source proprietary.
There's some other stuff that we don't,
it doesn't necessarily work for us,
but we're working in ways that a Matterfy,
American Fortress user could register a Dash username
along with it and then vice versa
so that you could potentially send to each other
to where not only mutual registration,
but also in the actual wallet
to where if you put in a, a American fortress username in the dash pay wallet, you can actually
just send right to them without having to be like, well, let's get on the same exact standard.
And there will be some annoying overlap like this for a long time. And hopefully it doesn't get horrendously confusing,
but there just will have to be a bunch of different options. Much of the chagrin of
people like Bernie Sanders with all the deodorant choices, if you remember that joke from back in
the day. But eventually you will have to have enough interoperability where everything works well enough.
And things that can't be interoperable just won't work out.
And a lot of things that are interoperable will also just not work out.
And eventually, we'll have fewer things to contend with.
In the interest of solving a similar issue, it's become clear to my team, developers,
they found it out for me that some sub in Coinbase are working heavily together with the Ethereum Foundation
on developing what they're calling Ethereum attestations,
so that services like them can attest that a wallet is KYC'd and therefore should be able to participate in permissions DeFi.
Yes, this is happening. No way around it.
It's going to happen anyhow.
A bunch of institutions, Aspera and Coinbase and SubSub are here to oblige.
But I'm asking myself the same, let's call it endpoints, the same EIP,
could it be used to kind of centralize, basically asking,
hey, is this guy this username?
And he can be several, but you can check if he
is this username and therefore it will turn a yes. And then you can, you know, sort of trust minimize
centralized different usernames of one wallet, like they are going to centralize the information on, which is ZKP by the way, on their KYC customers.
Just a food for thought, but the endpoint should work for both solutions as the same
technical solution in the Ethereum side.
I need to check the IP, but it's definitely happening fast and being done by some sub and Coinbase and Ethereum
foundation. Have you guys ever heard of Ethereum attestations? It's very interesting.
They're going to solve a lot of KYC problems on chain.
Yeah, I heard about CK Passports and CK KYC.
I'm not a fan of it because I'm interested in permissionless Defi.
But it's still way better than just keeping all KYC information in an exploitable database.
But what if it isn't KYC, it's username information, almost like it's a domain name service,
but using the same endpoints as the KYC is using.
It's just not ZKP'd.
Need a check.
Just food for thought.
I got disconnected for a second,
but I heard most of that last part.
So what's the problem with using ZK for identity solutions?
I mean, you could have different attestations.
You don't have to.
It doesn't even have to be a government ID.
It could be your video game name, right?
Pseudonym.
Exactly.
That's what I'm saying.
So we could use the same endpoint, Ethereum Auto
Stations, to provide this username list service, if it were, and check if that wallet belongs
to such and such username. So it would be an interesting way to centralize this information
over wallets in a single place that it can check on chain. Basically, that's what I'm
saying.
Yeah, but then what's the system used to register the username? Don't you run into the same issue
of multiple standards? Oh yeah, yeah, but at least you're putting them all in one place. You can just check instead of having to check different places, right? So standardizing the standards, if it were. But yeah, just food for
thought. With a new standard. That can be used by just copy and pasting. So everyone can just check
one door instead of checking seven. I see what you mean. It's an edge solution, but if it were
done the same way by all the standards, which sounds
circular, it would be a lot easier to integrate.
It's better than nothing.
It's an interesting thought. I think like, so from where we're coming from, the challenge is more
how do you prevent that I go and take your LinkedIn username
and connect it to my wallet?
So you also have the other piece right there,
especially when you use existing usernames or tags
or whatever it is called.
You also need to authenticate that side.
If it's an existing consumer app,
then you need to either integrate or figure
out a way of how you make sure the users um that actual use of them but yeah it's a it's a very
interesting interesting thought i think there's a lot of overlap if we could use the same points for
sure
what was that that's one thing like how do you prevent squatting
yeah that's one thing like how do you prevent squatting especially without kyc um like i think
the only way to to do that is going by reputation so you want to talk to sound the project your best
bet is the sound project uh twitter handle like that's your best bet at you're possibly talking
to the real sound project because you're going by reputation but
then if xano creates an alias on some other service like on call of duty then you know that
it's that real xano project so you have to go by reputation you could have multiple badges right
you could have a thing proving that you own the
Zano Twitter handle. You could have one proving that you hold the Zano Reddit. Or you could have
all these attached to your digital identity. Or you can do it socially. Much like Polymarket,
the size of something won or something lost. That could be very interesting as well,
because I keep defining the the what an objective reality is as the intersection between a bunch of
subjective realities. If everyone agrees you're Xano, you're Xano kind of thing. So that can be
an interesting way to do it too. True, but yeah, this is a problem i run into using decentralized social media
that in order for people to find me and realize i'm actually that person i basically needed to
post my decentralized social media handle on my twitter account so that's kind of circular as well yes the human
trust problem we'll get there someday i think this is where on-chain aliasis are pretty useful
because i mean xano for example has audiences on chain and the specific use of it is that whenever you're trading with the xano user generally like
you can make sure that the alias you're talking to it's the same one that you will send the
address because you can just send to the alias so there's no way that if you're talking to
gonzalo and which is alias at Gonzalo,
then there's no way to send the money to anyone else.
I know this answer, actually.
Is there a function in the contract on chain that I need to pull,
like send this username, such and such address token, and that's the amount?
It's on chain then. Awesome. Yes, that makes it good.
Makes a lot of sense.
Because I think in that specific case, it's specifically tied to an address.
So you're sure you're talking to that address.
So yeah, basically the alias needs to be tied to the data point you care about.
So if you want to message me on Twitter,
then you search for my Twitter handle.
It becomes harder when you only got my Discord handle.
Then how do you find my Twitter handle from it?
Because it's not necessarily the same.
Maybe someone squatted my Twitter handle.
So interprobability between analysis, that's the key.
But what if you want, like you have to be private on Discord
and be public on Twitter?
And you just don't link it.
And it might not be private or public.
It might be public, private, different private.
You know, I have different personalities online
or different pseudonyms online.
You know, for example, on Reddit, I have two accounts.
I use one for stuff that's not so controversial,
and I use another if I'm going to be posting anything too controversial.
Well, I'm going to be a bit of an ass and you should grow a pair of balls and join those
two accounts and be controversial.
That's so much easier to say when you're not the head of a company and the founder
and co-founder of projects.
Well, I do actually manage more than a million dollars of his Polygon treasury money.
So, you know, we are a bit in the same boat.
And you just like kind of hate posting on the competitor Reddit or something?
For the most part, I'm pretty damn open about my beliefs online.
But there are some things that maybe are...
You have to understand in business, and I violate this regularly.
And especially because my plan is to go into politics.
But if you, there's certain things that if you say it, I mean, half your audience, you know, hates you now.
Not just your audience, but your friends and family.
I mean, it's crazy how many of my own friends and family,
we are just kind of distant now
because we just have different political views.
And I'm pretty fucking, I'm pretty in the middle,
which is like, you know, I see both sides pretty damn well.
That means you're a far-right extremist now, Rock.
Being a centrist makes you a far-right extremist now.
I suppose so.
I mean, for most of my life, I considered myself not just liberal, but ultra-liberal.
And now I think some people might think I'm, you know, an extremist. I think people completely lost the definition of liberalism.
But that's another story for another day.
Yeah, see, this is the kind of stuff we're supposed to see on our second account.
Hey, real quick, real quick.
Handel has 15 more minutes.
So I want to make sure that we ask them, what have we not asked you today
that we should ask you that you'd like
for the audience here?
I got one.
Okay, there, yeah.
Tell us about your quick launch token sale coming up.
Oh, that hasn't even been announced.
Oh, shit.
You heard it here first, first everybody always spilling the beans
no but i think really it's not public no no not yet but it's it's gonna happen uh
i guess they you just um sped up the timeline a little bit so
yeah now so we're gonna do um uh a small uh pre-sale on on the quick launch uh launch pad um
i think it's next week um should be announced shortly and um yeah it's for for our uh token
pre-sale we're launching our token um as a matter of fact it has already launched um it's available
only inside the app though so we have kind of a little bit of a different launch approach
than the typical token launchers,
where the token is available on Polygon inside the app.
So basically every user who signs up,
that's a default Polygon address,
and they start to buy a handle from a swap contract at a fixed price.
So it's not a market price in that sense.
So it's fixed price, and what we're trying to achieve with this
before the token starts, it gets listed,
is to really build pre-listing demand, let's put it that way,
and show people what the utility actually is that the token has.
And yeah, so people buying it and they experience the utility actually is that the token has right so and yeah so people buying
it and they experience the utility and that's that's that's really um that's been a really
a great success they've signed up i think over 30 000 people now in the last three days um so
that has really so so how can i buy this uh right now you have to you so there's two things so if
you want it right now and experience uh one of the utilities then you have to... So, there's two things. So, if you want it right now and experience one of the utilities,
then you have to go to the app and you have to buy it inside the app
at a price of one cent.
But if you want to, you know, get involved as part from an investment perspective,
to put it this way, then yes, then it will be the quick swap uh launch
pad um although that's a that's a typical pre-sale right so those tokens will only be released when
it starts trading and from then onwards it's obviously a market price right now it's a fixed
price it's just it's to demonstrate the utility of the token before it starts trading. Yeah, and I think it's worth noting that you're receiving a grant
indirectly from Polygon.
So QuickSwap and TrustSwap together with this QuickLaunch launchpad
received a grant allocator grant or allocation
to distribute to projects that QuickSwap and TrustSwap
thought were really strong.
So we've been pretty picky about that.
We've actually been holding onto those funds
for many months, waiting for some really top tier launches.
And so I'm not personally endorsing Handel here,
but I think the fact that you guys made it through these,
made the cut and made it through these multiple rounds
of projects we've been looking at says good things.
Great market timing to buy yourself a token
and wait for the next round of bull market.
We could get into that actually after, maybe after this,
we finish here with like handle details.
But yeah, interesting to hear everyone's opinions on where we're at in the cycle.
Are we going to the next cycle?
Our cycle's dead.
That's always a fun one.
A lot of crazy strong opinions on both sides.
You know, you see some of the smartest people in the world saying they're like 90% sure the cycle is not over.
And then you have other people like my good friend Michael Turpin, a bid angels who says he thinks 80% the cycle is over.
And we have at least this year of kind of just downwards and sideways.
Well, thankfully, there's polymarket right you can actually say where is the bull top going
to be and then you can get wrecked if you're an idiot and like some people who are extremely
intelligent can what does it say i haven't seen that let me market i'm gonna actually look it up
right now but the point is then you have um you get people who are very intelligent can learn
firsthand by losing money,
that they just aren't good at predicting this one thing,
and they should shut up about it. And then the people who are good at it, we can just see.
Yeah, I'm one of those people that's not good at it.
And I never have tried to.
That's why I've never timed it.
I always just hodl.
I've been hodling for almost 11 years now,
and I just keep accumulating, and I never try to time the market.
It's too hard to do.
I'm too optimistic also.
I always guess the top way too high.
I would have thought we'd be at a million by now.
And I would, I mean.
I think, I'm pretty bitcoin one bitcoin's still worth
one bitcoin and that's really what matters there you go now that's a classic one from back in 2017
right there yeah price does matter we'll say i'll say that um it matters psychology does
it matters for adoption it matters for belief uh and it matters for adoption. It matters for belief.
And it matters for me personally.
Why do I see people...
That's fair. Me too.
I like money.
Money is freedom.
Pretty much, yes.
It buys yourself what you need.
Because it buys you other people's time and efforts
and therefore your ability to open and close doors all over the place.
I entirely agree.
But I'd say to
the public here that I'd stop trying to
choose the bottom and choose the top and
start trying to find ways to yield money in
this market.
There are many, many, many things to be done
to make money with the money
you already have without putting it at risk.
So I'm a big proponent of yielding using...
I'm assuming you mean without putting it at too much risk
or risk adjusted.
Too much risk, of course.
But almost everything comes with some risk.
Otherwise, you wouldn't have yield.
I agree.
Well, let's go back to anything else, Handel,
that we should know about with your
either launch coming up, with your product, anything cool while you have the stage here?
Yeah, so.
Shameless promotion.
Yeah, so, no, so, lots is happening, obviously.
So, we just launched our new rewards program that I've mentioned
that has really gotten us an influx of a lot of users in the last 48 hours.
And yeah, so the launchpad next week,
that's actually one of our, that's going to be the last launchpad.
We've done three smaller ones.
And the plan is then to get the token listed at the end of the year, launchpad. We've done three smaller ones. And
plan is then to get the token listed
at the end of the year, early next year.
Timing PBD a little bit right now.
It's also becoming the market, of course.
And some negotiations
going on with the exchanges.
The marketplace is in our favor right now
on that front.
You guys have been getting a good amount of traction.
I think you guys have a lot of users, right?
Yeah, we've onboarded
over 300,000 users over the
last
15 months or so.
Social media accounts.
Many of them are not active anymore.
But that's
okay. It was also part of...
You said 300,000 social media
accounts?
Yeah, 320,000. but it's across the board so it's like instagram users it's whatsapp numbers and telegrams
and even google email addresses for us the tricky part is always you know how do i how do you
authenticate ownership right and every especially the meta platforms that a bit because they don't have like the apis that you would have like on a twitter or you know with like an auth or type of approach
so you kind of have to use the um the dm kind of the otp old standard uh confirmation thing um where
people have to confirm that they have access to the account. But yeah, so that number is really a result
of different user acquisition experiments,
different campaigns in Web 2, in Web 3, and, you know,
that's the board.
So right now with the token, we're getting into the phase
where, you know, a big part of it
is also to reactivate these people now.
And we've seen now that this is like,
actually has led to more exposure debate these people now. And we've seen now that this actually
has led to more
exposure in the last
48 hours, I would say, than we
have in the past months
with making the token
already available in Central.
Yeah, so it's an exciting
time for us and looking forward
to what's next and also connecting
within the Polygon ecosystem. It's also great for us with the whole payment and SaberCur narrative
yeah Polygon is definitely a good place to be if you're doing payments this is I mean they've
shifted not entirely but the vast majority of their focus right now is on the payments segment.
And they've been going hard on this now for a while.
And it's really starting to get some momentum, starting to get a lot of excitement.
I think people are starting to see it.
The stablecoin growth on the chain is strong.
The FX, different currencies and stablecoins of other currencies are growing on the chain.
Yeah, it's getting really strong.
There's been multiple announcements from big players,
like, I forget the other day,
it was Visa or MasterCard or both?
It was MasterCard and Revolut in the same day.
Yeah, I mean, for those who are American, it was mastercard and revolute in the same day. So like, yeah,
I mean,
like for those who are American revolute,
if like the,
it is the largest neobank in the EU.
So that was a huge one.
I know they're not big in the States,
but when you talk about like,
when you talk about global borderless payments,
that was a huge one.
And then MasterCard is pretty much that the top of the line.
And I know that there's more coming down the line.
I can't actually share, but there's a lot of really exciting payment stuff.
And you touched on it, Rock.
The non-US dollar stablecoins, Polygon has a huge, huge market share there, which is really interesting
when you think about like Brazilian stable coins and all of these other countries that the Japanese
yen is on Polygon. So you have all of these currencies that countries are using. And I think
that's really driving a lot of the adoption uh and if you just
i mean looking at the statistics we have a whole bunch of filled blocks which is something that is
uh i don't know if it i mean maybe it happened during peak bull runs but in a period like this
to fill blocks in and of itself is kind of kind of incredible because you look at everyone
across the board don't have completely full blocks so the activity is very well and considering the
capacity polygon has a massive capacity so having full blocks on a chain with that much capacity is
definitely uh something to be paying attention to
yeah and also like you know like for for us for us, still a small kind of early stage
project.
For us, it does make a difference
if a chain or a ecosystem has a narrow focus,
because you can really benefit from other projects that
are building in the same space.
So it amplifies. So you have, you know, like it amplifies, right?
So that has been a really welcoming thing to see
that shift towards payments in stablecoins.
So, yeah, I have to jump off here.
Unfortunately, I'd love to stay on.
And it's been interesting to hear all your thoughts.
But yeah, like we'll be announcing a couple more updates
in the next few days, and then I guess we'll do
the official announcement about the quick swap launchpad.
And yeah, so looking forward to the next conversations,
and thanks a lot for having us.
Awesome.
Yeah, people follow the handle.
And yeah, get ready for that token launch.
I'm excited about it.
I mean, we must have...
I know, you know,
I'm not involved in every single conversation,
but I know between myself,
Darren, Alexi, Ivan from TrustSwap, all the different people involved,
I mean, we must have, I don't even know how many projects we turned down, but it was a lot
before finally giving this grant to you guys.
So we were very, very picky about this and wanted to make sure that we chose a really good project.
So excited to see it. Hope the launch goes amazing i think it will you guys also such so much traction pretty cool to
see you know you build this much traction before doing a token launch you know very few projects in the world have 300,000 signed up accounts.
That's pretty rare to do before token launch.
So it's good to see.
Great to be here.
And yeah, thanks again for all the feedbacks and the flowers.
Now let's go back to work and make the best out of it.
Have a great rest of the day
or morning,
wherever you are,
and we'll be in touch soon.
Thanks a lot for having us.
Cheers.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Joel said something.
It sounded like he might have been saying
he was leaving,
but it looks like he's gone.
See you, Joel,
if you're listening i guess uh two cent timmy any anything else we could say about payments on polygon
um i know that i wrote an hour and a half what's that i said yeah the space goes for another an
hour and a half i I think I could.
I know that I've written from the grants board,
multiple grants to like different FX projects and swaps.
I know that's a big, big focus.
I know that every time I talk to Sandeep,
I can't really like expose all details of what he says, but he's always talking to some big government or some big bank about,
you know, integration.
Like yesterday he missed a call we were supposed to have because he was,
he was, he had just landed on a plane to talk to a bank.
He actually didn't even tell me much about that one, but yeah,
I know I've heard him in the past
talking to different governments about their stable coins
and like directly talking to the governments.
Yeah, I know that this is a huge, huge focus.
And I think it's a good one.
I think, you know, it's been, I think,
a little controversial in the Polygon ecosystem,
this narrow focus that Handel mentioned.
But I think it's probably the right bet.
I think the industry is figuring out still so many chains are still general purpose.
And I mean, Polygon still has more of every kind of application than almost any other chain, right?
We still have more gaming, more NFTs, more all this stuff.
RWAs is like a secondary focus.
But I think chains, you know, Mark's thesis, and I agree with him is that chains will become um purpose you know purpose built or
either purpose built or they'll they'll adopt a niche and um i don't know the timing on that
i'm almost sure it's correct but i don't know the timing um but, it, it feels like it's, it's pretty soon.
So this focus on payments, instead of trying to be, you know, uh, kind of Swiss army knife
or a, a Jack of all trades, master of none, this focus on, uh, payments.
And, uh, then with, uh, also some focus on, uh, you know, prediction market applications.
So there's, I know it at CTB and at Labs,
so just so everyone understands,
us at the Grants Board,
we are not employees of Polygon.
So there's kind of two different heads
working two different hands.
But I know when discussing,
hey, how much do we want to focus on, you know,
Polymarket and Polymarket applications or applications building on Polymarket,
both labs and the CTB are talking about ways to keep growing that ecosystem so that Polymarket
keeps kind of taking over the world. You know, Polymarket, you know, Born on Polygon raised $2 billion recently.
That was pretty insane.
That's one of the largest raises in crypto history.
I think it might be the second largest raise in crypto history.
And that was just recently.
Pretty incredible.
But yeah, I think the focus on payments is,
it's a bold move and we'll see if it pays off.
But so far, they are gaining massive traction in this area.
And some would argue in the world that payments is the most important aspect of crypto.
We actually discussed this quite a bit.
We discussed this quite a bit yesterday on the Dash spaces.
When I'm arguing for Bitcoin more as a store of value value and others are arguing for it as a payment mechanism.
But payments, both payments and store value are massive volume in the world.
Both of them are massive.
But yeah.
Yeah, no, I think, I mean, I agree with Mark and you. I think we are going to have a lot of specialized chains.
And I actually think while Polygon POS is focused on the payments, and I mean, that's what people do.
I mean, you look at people's day-to-day lives, and I think a lot of people probably agree that people should save more money and invest more money in general.
think a lot of people probably agree that people should save more money and invest more money in
general. But the simple fact of the matter is that's not happening and people spend all the
time. But also I think what Polygon Labs is doing is yes, POS is the payment. And then we're going
to use AgLayer for all of these other applications and all these niches so that you can kind of touch on this interoperability layer
because I forget to was speaking earlier about like we want to earn yield on your money you want
to earn yield on your assets that's absolutely true and you might not do that on Polygon POS
I mean you certainly can but there are I mean we incubatedana, which is a DeFi focused chain, and then you earn
your yield and then you spend your money elsewhere. And when you have this interoperability and get
rid of the fragmentation, I think that's huge. But I think as far, we also think that stable
coins are going to be absolutely massive. When you look at just kind of the way that, and technology
is accelerating faster and faster, but people had physical money for a very long time.
And then they, I would say like had, it was physical money and then I'm including cash dollars in that.
And then I kind of went to this weird form of physical money where people started writing checks for everything.
And that was like the first transition into something digitally represented and you don't
have to hold it.
And then, I mean, I'm 34 years old and I don't know anyone my age or younger that actually
has cash or anything.
We spend money digitally all the time, whether it's with our credit cards or it's through
or it's through Venmo, Zelle, Cash App, all of those things.
Venmo, Zelle, Cash App, all of those things.
And I think you're going to see more and more stable coins just come as a result.
We've seen it with Circle and OnChain.
So Circle had their stable coin and then they said,
hey, we want to actually own our own chain.
And you see it with PayPal and PayPal USD and you're having having JP Morgan is doing a stable coin.
And all of these major,
major financial players are coming out with their own stable coins,
which is really interesting.
But I think everyone kind of wants a slice of that stable coin pie.
And I don't know.
I think we will have somewhat of a fragmentation problem in another five to
10 years that hopefully can be solved because
each stable coin will have different risk profiles, which is really interesting.
And how do you actually settle it to a bank account?
But that's a different problem.
And I would say it doesn't negate the fact that we're going to have so many stable coins
and we really just at Polygon want to own that sector.
I know it was just announced that India is launching their own stable coin on Polygon, which is super cool.
Um, it's an interesting industry because it started off as this like cypherpunk, uh,
libertarian or anarchist.
Like we don't need the government.
We don't like the government.
We don't like these big industries.
Um, and that did not sit well with a lot of major banks.
And I think it actually stalled adoption because so many people, for better or for worse, trusted
banks and they trusted government and they didn't like this idea of something going straight
up against it. And with Polygon, what we say, we're not trying to put banks out of business.
We're trying to level up banks because level up banks and then also touch on the unbanked.
So there's no reason why you need to exclude people from the system.
It's just, hey, we want to make life easier and better for everyone.
And it's really interesting because I think there's this weird tribalism that sometimes exists in crypto where it's always us versus them.
And the us is the people who want everything on chain,
no banks, be your own bank.
And I think there's value in that
for people who want to pursue the value,
but I also don't think it's the best idea
for 100% of people.
And if we're being honest,
we need to come up with solutions
for people who the be your own bank
does not appeal to,
but they can still
benefit in ways from the technology that we're building and developing.
If I may just add, I don't see payments as a niche, I see it as a first step to get anywhere
else because if you're going to do anything in DeFi, the first thing you know is that
you need to solve liquidity and price and after solving liquidity and price you can start doing other types of
abstractions that are more or less you know complex, just tendals of the world,
lending markets of the world, leverage yielding in RWAs. I'm currently
working with Polygon to this GILTS which is Etherfuse, RWA token for the
British bond together with TGVP which is afuse, RWA token for the British bond, together with
TGVP, which is a tokenized British bond
in fluids, DEX, so that
we can leverage yield. That type of product
is what actually will
end up interesting the clients
at the end of the day.
But this client's interest
is not there only because
he's going to make a yield on it.
It's there because the liquidity that he's providing is also useful
for other people to build other things on top.
I would say it's the other way around completely.
I don't see payments as a niche.
I see payments as a stepping stone to get anywhere else.
And anyone that isn't doing payments is going the wrong direction
and thinking that, well, the people that hold Ethereum
in my chain already have enough money.
No, they don't.
Trust me, retail that is not in crypto is 10,000 times bigger than crypto.
And they're headed this way.
We just need to make it easy and call a dollar a dollar and a Singaporean dollar a Singaporean dollar,
no matter which one it is or something.
Dark Matter wants to speak as well. I hope your name is dark matter because dark m has to be
dark matter yes it is sir what's up everybody out there yes good evening and thank you so much
yes thank you um thank you so much for letting me speak i do want to add to the conversation
it's very interesting topic but also um thank you so much to all of the speakers for creating and providing your time and your energy and yourself being out here and also leading the conversation, which is us guiding the infrastructure, which will be utilized by the whole, which I think is kind of the main underlying thing of the topic here.
Just for a second, I'm Fox and 32. I'm from London and I've been here for six years. I cut my teeth in the entrepreneurial world in event and entertainment management.
I run teams of up to 50 people for corporate, private festivals and stuff like this,
and I'm building a DeFi conference in London in around two years' time to be able to create a space for us to have these conversations together.
But I would like to add to that.
But I would also like to say every listener down there, thank you so much for choosing to take a risk in your life by coming into this ecosystem and deciding to make change for yourself wherever you're from
in the world this is a global borderless community of people that all come together to be able to
turn their imagination into reality so i don't mind if you are like a blockchain a project a
platform a trader you are the people that create actual use cases utilities and ways for us to
move around this space like the internet.
And that's what we need to be. We need to build that infrastructure. We need to create
this realism and then actually make it something that can be more than empty layer two tokenization.
Because that's why I came here six years ago. I bought Shiba Inu, but then I knew that this was
the next start business frontier where we could create global solutions and platforms. And that's
why you guys are here
every day right you say good morning and you turn up and you just listen to us so thank you so much
to the speakers for providing something for these people to be here for thank you listeners for
being here otherwise we just be talking to ourselves right now it would still be a great
conversation but you guys chose to change your life and i really appreciate that in regards to
the payment first solution i've heard talks that polymarket has actually been more accurate in predicting some events happening right now than a lot of other things which is
absolutely amazing attracting global recognition awareness i do build on polygon and that's kind
of why i'm here i mean it was more accurate than the the all the political polls it's been very
accurate but exactly that's because they're based on bubbles.
This is based on actual calculated data selected by the user that have ground reference and information, which is amazing because it actually allows people
to get more information like X kind of did when Elon started doing the thing.
And I think the payments first thing is.
It also includes, before you go back to payments, it also includes a bunch of
data points that you wouldn't normally have in
a poll. I mean, one is when you poll someone, it's just one person is one vote, right? In a poll,
in a normal poll. But with Polymarket, one person might be a half of a vote, or it might be a million
votes if they want to put their money
where their mouth is right so they can put strength behind their vote if they're confident
in the result in a poll uh when when you're pulling people on the street they have no there's
no sweat to them whether they're right or wrong doesn't matter um so it's it adds that element
and it also adds adds another interesting element,
which is controversial. And that's that there's insider information being traded.
And should there be, or should there not be is a good question. I think the argument for
there shouldn't be is that it gives some people an unfair advantage. So if you are, you know,
that it gives some people an unfair advantage. So if you are, you know, the chief of staff for
someone and you know, they're about to drop out of the race because, you know, they've run out
of money or whatever it is, they just decided to throw in the towel. Well, you could go on,
you know, they tell you that and the next morning they're going to announce it. Well,
you could go make a million dollar bet on Polymarket and you know cash out and you had insider information now the some people would say
that's bad i think in some ways it's good though because it makes these markets more accurate they
have the most information you actually almost want the inside on the market the market prices
it in you're right i never thought exactly yeah yeah, exactly. So like, you know, for, you know, a lot of these markets, they're not just for
us to have fun and bet on. Some of these markets and some of the ways these markets can be built
moving forward have real meaningful consequences in the world. You know, like the chance of,
you know, there being a bad season in the corn industry.
It's like futures, right?
Futures are a very valuable tool.
They were built originally, I think, for the corn industry or potato industry.
But now futures are used in all kinds of things.
And so Polymarket acts as, in my opinion, kind of a more accurate futures platform.
And if you ban any insider information it gets a little
it gets less accurate right it gets more fair i guess everybody's playing on the same field but
um if you allow people to trade with you know special information might not be even inside
information because that's a specific term for stocks and applies to uh the actual executives
and and people at the company, not
people outside of the company. But anyways, if you have special information, you can make the
markets more efficient. And in some ways, that's the main, some people would argue, I think Vitalik
might argue that in prediction markets, the main goal of a prediction market is to get the closest
to the truth of the outcome. It's not a betting, like the main purpose of a prediction market is to get the closest to the truth of the outcome.
It's not a betting like the main purpose of Polymarket or these other predictions markets is not for gamblers to make money or to gamblers to have a good time.
It's to actually predict events.
Yes, and the glass ceiling is something that most people probably wouldn't put in place. And if anybody doesn't know that term, it's basically where if you have this information, you agree to not use it in that way.
But at the same time, like you create the platform and provide it for the people which should be used and open.
And you don't have any sway on what people decide to do and use it.
You just create that. And I think it's amazing because it actually creates a more accurate form of data which people could then adhere to and information instead of not being included in that bubble, which we always are, which is why we usually make incorrect decisions depending on what it is, especially if it's geopolitical.
But I don't want to get into that necessarily because like one thing I do want to quickly add to this, as I'm from the UK, we recently had the royal assent for the crypto being talked to as property is now considered property so what that
means to me immediately looking at it is that if you have an inheritance tax that will also now
then go into someone's crypto holdings and then you're going to need payments and stuff like this
and wills and i think there's a lot of space for blockchains to be able to then come into like
the long-standing part of the end of life which is quite a difficult thing but if you make it easy you set it up it's protected it's secured you have ways of doing it
that's a free idea by the way it's not something i want to do but like there are so many different
innovations happening right now in regulation and i mean a lot of people are upset as you said
earlier like we used to be very wild west and we still are in a lot of ways and people use
information and have done recently but we don't need to talk about that the fact is we are becoming adopted and that's the most important
thing because as you said every chain will have its own original thing which it will be used for
we don't need to have a one of jack of all trades that doesn't really smash one that's why I love
seeing this development and the fact that you guys are providing something which is being
recognized by the world which then brings more eyes tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of
eyes which will then come here and see more than empty layer 2 tokenization so i really really do
hope the polygon manages to secure that niche in the market but there is also so much room to grow
that's why i build across all chains and um yeah it's my pleasure to be in this conversation with
you because we need my
friend Papa just joined the stage what's up Papa we need to create the utilities and uses that will
actually make us better than the internet we reduce steps we help people pay their bills pay
their finances and we create a global borderless community that helps each other and creates
opportunities and finance to be able to bear everybody's lives together.
That's why it shouldn't be political in anything else, and I stay away from those topics.
But I really, really appreciate you giving me a chance to speak as well.
Everybody, please like, share, retweet the room, comment, support Polygon, follow the hosts.
And also, just thank you so much for being here and choosing to be a part of this new world that we're all building at once.
Yeah, let's go.
Hey, Dark Matter, someone needs to give you a radio show, Ben. You would be a part of this new world that we're all building at once. Yeah, let's go. Hey, Dark Matter, someone needs to give you
a radio show, man. You would be a great
presenter. That was exciting.
Bringing the energy to the show.
So on the point, by the way,
I don't know if it was you, Dark Matter,
you continued on the point. I think someone might have said it before
you, but basically that
should we kind of embrace governments or should he be like, you know, what some might call,
and I don't always agree with like the way people present the definition, but should we be like
these hardcore, you know, punks or cyber punks or libertarians, which I am a hardcore libertarian. But and I think I don't know why everybody sees it as we can't talk to the government.
We can't work with governments.
We can't work with big corporations because if we do, we're like bootlickers or something
and we're like giving in to them.
into them. I just don't see it that way at all. I really don't. I think if we are building
I just don't see it that way at all.
I really don't.
forms of open systems and private systems and censorship resistant systems and digital money
and digital, all these digital systems, the DeFi, everything that we're doing,
do you want it to be us versus them? And them is the government with all the nukes and the tanks and helicopters.
Do we want it to be us versus them?
Or do we want to, would it not be maybe smarter to Trojan horse them?
I mean, like for me, I'm a weird kind of, I guess, paradox in that I'm a libertarian.
And I really hate the government.
I wish we had a very small government. I do want some government, but I am also going into politics. So I'm going into,
but see, a lot of libertarians would say, don't do that. Don't even vote. You shouldn't even
participate. And I just don't, I don't see it that way. I think if you want to affect change
and if you disagree with the people in power, well,
maybe you should try to get in their circle and then you could influence them from within the
circle or you can influence policy or you could reduce the size of government from within the
government. I mean, that's the ultimate kind of win is you go into government as a libertarian,
you make the government smaller, you get rid of, slash things like hobby or melee, right? You get rid of, you know, the waste in the government, you get rid of the bureaucracy.
And it's the same thing with crypto and government and ETFs and banks and BlackRock is,
I got, I don't want them to try to take over and they certainly will. But I think our industry is
resilient enough. And we've been,
I mean, we've been building this from the ground up for state level, you know, actor,
like game theory, right? We've built this so that they can't stop us. And the best way to get them
to not stop us, in my opinion, is to get them to use us, right? Get the politicians holding some
Bitcoin so that when someone tries to make a law that
bans crypto or bans bitcoin or does something bad they're like well i don't know i i kind of like
bitcoin i i hold some bitcoin i've made a lot of money from it i don't want to ban bitcoin you know
get their families holding it get the corporations holding it make make it in their eyes and i i don't
like how the government looks at too big to fail.
I don't think we should be bailing out big banks and stuff that make mistakes.
Too big it should fail. I like that phrase better.
Yeah. I think you should just let, if a company is not viable or a bank is not viable, let it fail.
But we want to be in their eyes too big to fail, right? We want them to go, well, if we ban this Bitcoin thing,
we're going to hurt a lot of people and we can't do that.
It's just too big now.
Too many people hold it.
Too many of our political friends or whatever hold it.
Too many banks are relying on it and the stablecoin rails and all these things.
So I just don't see why people hate so much that we're getting the governments
and presidents and banks
to use our technology. That's the win right there, right? The best part of this is the fact that it
doesn't matter because no matter how much maximalists hit their foot on the ground and shout,
this is absurd, you guys are joining the enemy. It's permissionless. So Honey Badger doesn't care as long as A is sending money.
To B, someone's using Bitcoin.
Wow, look at that.
We're back at square one.
It doesn't matter.
It's crazy.
So in my mind, it's going to be a, hey, they can't beat us,
so they will join us because it's a facade that people think,
well, assume that the Fed, for example,
is bigger than the rest of the market.
Sure, it's the biggest player,
but trust me, retail users
and the day-to-day lives of payments
is 10 times bigger than any single player.
So it's a matter of if they don't join us,
they will, well, be left behind
and we will do it anyhow,
my eyes.
And the best part of it is they will join us by doing it their way
within the same systems so we're all in the same club yeah i just um sent a quote in because i may
be speaking at the bitcoin uh conference uh for 2026 and i sent a quote in and and this discussion
just made me want to add a piece to the quote.
And the quote I sent was, Bitcoin doesn't care who you are, which side you're on.
A Russian can send money to family in Ukraine.
An Israeli can support relatives in Gaza.
Chinese companies can still trade with Americans.
American ones, despite sanctions. By the way, someone mentioned that today, the Brazil and China trading with crypto.
And I'll continue on.
When Canadian truckers had their bank accounts frozen,
Bitcoiners from around the world like myself kept them going.
When Hong Kong protesters were cut off Bitcoin,
when they cut off donations through banks and they cut their banks off,
Bitcoin got through.
Bitcoin is truly the money of friends and enemies,
borderless, unstoppable, and open to everyone.
And it's a long quote, but i may replace one of those lines with it doesn't care
if you're a government or a peasant right it doesn't matter bitcoin and crypto we it should
there shouldn't be a race involved it shouldn't care your gender or your any of this stuff it
shouldn't care what country you are and it also shouldn't care and doesn't care if you're a government or a peasant. It doesn't matter. That's a beautiful thing. Now, if we
start saying, no, we're going to cut off certain classes of people. Like if you're a government
employee, we don't want you to use it. Or if you're a banker, we don't want you to use it.
Doesn't that seem kind of hypocritical to the whole point of open money?
You watched a lot of Andreas and Tonopoulos in the last couple of years, haven't you?
A lot. I couldn't hear you. What was that?
Andreas Antonopoulos.
Parts of your speech came directly from Batman.
I'm actually going to urge the people of the live.
Dude, he's amazing.
I've thanked him personally once, getting starstruck when I saw him live. It changed the life. Dude, he's amazing. I've thanked him personally once
of getting starstruck when I saw him live.
It changed my life.
He really did.
And there's this video called
The Courage to Innovate Without Permission.
Guys, YouTube, everyone.
The Courage to Innovate Without Permission.
He starts the video by saying,
you know me as someone that talks about Bitcoin,
but today I want to talk about trust.
And the way that he disconstructs this notion
that Bitcoin is money.
I went to YouTube to type that in.
Oh, it's beautiful, dude.
It's amazing.
It cut me off.
I couldn't hear your finish there
because for some reason when I went to YouTube,
it turned off audio.
Don't worry.
So one of the things he says...
What is it?
The courage to...
Say it again. I'm just going to write it down.
The courage to innovate without permission
is one of the best speeches he ever does.
And he starts by saying,
I'm not going to talk about Bitcoin.
I'm going to talk about trust
and how human society builds itself upon trust
and how trust has been scaling
until the Industrial Revolution.
And now it isn't scaling anymore
because the people on top
of the pyramids have too much power and not enough information. Therefore, Bitcoin is proposing a
counter-argument where you divide the responsibilities into a flat network where everyone
has the same power and the same strength to do whatever is needed to be done by the network,
basically reorganizing human society into blockchains.
It's an amazing speech.
And one thing he says in there that you basically got from
is the fact that these things, race, nationality, language,
are but things that confuse our communication.
How beautiful is that concept?
Honestly, this guy deserves an Oscar one day.
I love him to bits.
He was my original inspiration to really get into Bitcoin. It was a combination of him
and Eric Borges, who is also one of my heroes. You're a libertarian like Eric, I can tell.
Yeah, I love Eric. I mean, Eric's debate with Peter Schiff about gold was one of the greatest
debates of all time, of any topic.
And luckily, I…
I even like Max Keiser from back then.
Honestly, crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
So funny.
So Eric Voorhees, I actually have gotten to know him now over the years.
He actually gave some great advice early on when we were considering
how to deal with, like, building a foundation for quick swap and things and um during around that time um both on private phone calls and then over twitter he's
he's told me a couple times when i told him i wanted to go into politics he told me you know
don't do that it's gonna be bad for your family. And or from the private sector,
building things like your Bitcoin, Polygon, QuickSwap,
because, you know, he knew, you know,
the stuff we were doing with Polygon and QuickSwap, et cetera.
But he said, build these parallel systems.
And I basically told him publicly, you know, with all due respect,
and I so respect this man, but I think someone has to do it.
Or if we don't, we're just going to get bad politicians that are going to do bad things
and make the system better for certain people and worse for others.
But now, interestingly, I'm exploring other parallel systems.
Maybe in lieu of going into American politics, I'm considering Balaji, the network state. I flew out to Malaysia for a city
like two months ago and got to meet Balaji a couple of times, got to talk to him,
got to actually ask him a question on stage, which was pretty cool. But yeah, the network state is
maybe a parallel form of politics where we build new countries around the world or new cities, states, countries,
societies, virtual states, etc. And maybe those countries force other countries to behave.
Similar to Bitcoin, Bitcoin's lack of inflation kind of forces other countries to start behaving
over time because if they don't, people will use Bitcoin as a life raft.
So it creates competition with the governments.
And I think that's what network state can do too.
But yeah, I've gotten to meet Max Keiser a few times too.
He's great.
You're in New York, I understand.
He's a Maxie, but he's fucking smart as shit.
He's smart as shit.
He likes to sound crazy.
That's the thing about Max Keiser.
You're a New Yorker by any chance? No, I'm
from California, but I live in Puerto Rico
now. Oh, okay. Oh, good.
No, I'm headed to New York on Monday. That's why I asked.
Nice.
By the way, you mentioned that
talk by Andreas Antonopoulos. Another
one is infrastructure
inversion. That's a really good
talk he does. Yes.
And that one is kind of talking about how over time technologies run on the rails of the old technologies,
but then it flips and the old technologies run on top of the new technologies.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, then all of a sudden.
I quoted him earlier exactly on that talk when we were speaking.
Slowly, slowly, slowly, then all of a sudden. Exactly.
Yeah, so some examples he uses
like internet and phone lines.
So the internet ran on top of phone lines,
which were made for phone calls.
But then over time,
now phone calls run on top of the internet.
It's an infrastructure inversion.
The old technologies start running
on the better new technologies,
you know, hardware and rails and software.
And similar with like horses and roads
and then cars and roads.
But another really good one of it is,
which if you search it,
it might look unappealing
because it looks like it's almost in black and white.
It's old and it's crusty,
but it's fucking incredible. And it's Andreas
Antonopoulos talking to the Canadian Senate in like 2000 and I don't know, 10 or 11 or something.
I don't know why. Maybe the government just had shitty cameras. It's long. It's a few hours long,
but it is incredible to see these politicians in the beginning of Bitcoin, in early days of Bitcoin,
these politicians so curious about this Bitcoin thing and asking all these questions.
And I think that probably led to why Canada was one of the first countries to do Bitcoin and crypto ETFs and other things is I think he introduced it to them very early on.
Something like that. The interesting thing about these people that are kind of tradfying and interested in Bitcoin,
and it's a problem that I currently have with the people from Banco Bradesco here in Brazil.
Every time they ask me for a meeting so they can understand more about cryptocurrency,
and honestly, the last time I even got mad, I'm like, guys, you need to come up with new questions
because I've been answering what the fuck is the New York City 20 since 2016,
and it needs to be the next one now.
So I don't know what's going on.
There's a phrase that says,
anyone who's paid not to understand something never will.
I think it's sort of that, what goes on,
especially in these public large banks,
where they sort of stupidify themselves to satisfy their pay role.
See what I mean?
Well, that's why we got to get them to,
instead of being paid not to understand it or being paid to fight it,
we got to pay them to embrace it.
And so this is another thing where some people might think it was dirty
that we got involved in the political campaign donations, and I did.
I donated.
But the fact is, we were drug dealers and, I don't know what, child pornographers.
Monulanderers.
Traffickers.
Yeah, traffickers.
I always love how Andreas Antonopoulos actually would say pornographers.
But, you know, actually, these are kind of quotes from him.
It's funny.
A lot of the stuff we probably say comes from,
I mean, he was one of the first people I learned about Bitcoin and crypto from.
But anyways.
One of the first people to abstract this problem, right?
But it took us donating more money combined
or equal to, I should say. it was 48% of all donations.
So basically half of all political donations for the last presidential election came from the crypto industry.
That means we donated as much combined as all other industries combined.
So that's agriculture, military industrial complex, pharmaceuticals, right?
Every single industry, internet, big tech, every industry combined, we donated that much.
And that was all it took for us to get a seat at the table and for them to remove our drug dealer and pornographer classification
and make us from being criminals to entrepreneurs finally.
Hallelujah.
I can see now you are pursuing politics. It sounds inspiring.
Thank you. We've got a couple hands up.
What's the name of the Kraken CEO again?
Oh, sorry, I don't want to get in front of the hands.
Kraken.
Is that Jesse?
I forgot his name.
Yes, Jesse.
Jesse was giving a speech and things have changed since then, by the way.
So it's a good thing.
My little cousin was studying at the University of California.
Top student, by the way.
100% discount.
All of that shit.
Love him.
Which University of California?
South. University university of California? South.
University of South California.
USC.
It's already...
Yes, sir.
Probably.
Yes, sir. That's the one.
So he was the number one student for his class,
IT. Smart man.
Jesse did a speech there
like two years ago, and my cousin
called me up quite scared after the speech because Jesse two years ago was forced to admit to a class full of students that want to work with cryptocurrency that two years ago, not now, if they wanted to work with cryptocurrency, it best be somewhere else, not America.
That's a quote from Jesse to a class of a bunch of 20-year-olds.
It's sad, but things have changed, thank God.
Yeah, I mean, so we run a venture studio.
I mean, we incubated Polygon and a bunch of others.
And for a long time, all of the kind of portcos we work with,
anyone we were kind of advising,
and all of our various lawyers across all of our projects no one ever
recommended to build stuff in america i mean it's been a while um you know even polygon was starting
to try to have a presence in america um but that was gosh i want to say like four or five years ago
um but once gensler started getting so aggressive and other politicians did, everyone had to stop being involved in America.
I mean, myself, from California, I was basically like at Quickswap and other entities.
I just couldn't even be on any legal documents.
I couldn't own crypto companies.
And it was a huge hassle.
And so for the most part, I would guess 99% of crypto projects incorporated
or created their foundations or their labs in these intricate, by the way, stupid structures of,
you know, all these different entities that are like basically legal protections for the most part
and partially decentralization mechanisms, but more legal arbitrage stuff. But yeah,
nobody wanted to build companies in America. And finally, we have companies like someone mentioned,
Matterfy or American Fortress earlier, Dash, Joel mentioned.
And that's one of our clients that we've been incubating now
for almost a year.
And they had created, they were going to be Swiss Fortress
because America was not friendly to crypto.
So they got Swiss, they had a Swiss
foundation and Swiss bank accounts and all this stuff. And then they decided, let's, okay,
US is embracing crypto. Let's build American fortress and ride the wave of American,
you know, American crypto exceptionalism. And now we're seeing that.
A lot of companies are now moving parts of their businesses.
They're being cautious because who knows what will happen
if new administrations change their tune.
But for now, America seems like a very friendly place
to build crypto companies.
Papa and Dark Matter have had their hand up for a while.
Go ahead, Papa.
Hey, what's going on guys um you know this is definitely a subject that we should be talking about a lot more um you know web3 payments going global is something that's going to happen no
matter what you know and you know you kind of touched on it basically right now,
it's either adopt, adopt now or adapt later. So these countries, these institutions,
they're going to have to adapt if they're not adopting already. And, you know, as far as the
U.S. goes, you know, I think the Genius Act actually put into place a lot more opportunity for the crypto space in general.
You know, with the regulation on stables, you know, institutions and people are going to look at it as a more safer asset to really transact in.
And what's going to come with that, what's going to drive them to that is the privacy
and speed that they'll have so you know there's plenty of utilities out there but I think you
know having the cross-chain interoperability and the speed and ease of use for transactions
is going to be major for those that't know, I think you guys all know
Shiptoshi and I work for SilentSwap and SquidGrow. So SilentSwap is a cross-chain aggregator,
fully self-custody that completely obfuscates your transactions. And why is that important? You know, on the institutional
side, you know, it's definitely important for regulations. You know, if you look at the healthcare
industry, payments would have to be private due to HIPAA laws. You know, the banking industry,
you don't, you don't, you know, have your transactions out there
on a billboard in your banks. So you shouldn't as far as you know, your crypto payments go as well.
And having the ability to just flip that toggle to, you know, completely make your transactions
private is huge. When you go down to the retail side,
you've got people, you know, like Shib Toshi himself, obviously, you know, he doesn't want to
dox his wallets when he's got billions of dollars in there. So sending somebody, you know,
$100 or 5,000 or even 5 million, you don't want them to see, you know, where, where it came from.
Um, and that's just for safety reasons. We've all seen the kidnappings and everything that
have happened in the space, uh, and people doxing themselves and also their assets,
uh, which is never good guys. Um, you know, even if you have a thousand dollars or $10 million, whatever you,
you want to stay private. Um, and that I think is going to really drive the adoption of the payments,
um, worldwide, you know, having the ability for that speed and also, you know, and that's been
the big argument for XRPL, you know, over the years. And it'srpl you know over the years and it's true you know
the speed is there the the liquidity is there um and that's another thing touch on you know as far
as countries and governments that have been anti-crypto basically you know they might have
acted like they didn't know anything about it but what they did know was it was bringing light to the faulty
fiat systems that they have and so it looks at it as a competitor um and by any means there's
no competition crypto is better than the fiat system and a hundred percent of the countries globally. So, you know, they don't want their fake Ponzi money
being brought to light.
And this is what's happening now.
So a lot more people are, you know,
transferring over into the digital assets
where there is actual liquidity to be backing up your assets.
And I don't wanna take too much time.
Oh, yeah, by the way,
the futures market started with rice.
Was it in China?
Where did it start, the futures market?
It makes sense.
It had to be in Asia, right?
It makes sense.
Japanese rice.
I love the rice, man.
They actually do good rice. I love the rice, man. I think that should do good rice.
Wild grain, wild grain, I don't care. Just give me that rice.
Hey, real quick, I want to jump in because we are
at 2 hours and 15 minutes. Rock, happy to keep this going for
and way off the topic of payments. So happy to keep this going
for as long as you want. I just wanted to make sure that you were aware because at some point you said you
wanted to cut back the length of the space so happy to go for as long as you want just just uh
letting you know where we're at we can go a few more minutes maybe maybe five ten fifteen minutes
if we have if we have some exciting stuff.
Yeah, sounds like the conversation's flowing,
so I just wanted to make sure you were aware.
Yeah.
By the way, guys, I haven't mentioned this in a while,
but these spaces are a really good time to walk.
Get your walk in.
You know, I easily walk on most business days where I'm taking business calls or especially if I'm doing Twitter spaces.
I can easily get 8 to 10 miles of walking in a day.
So if you're just sitting on your couch listening to this, don't.
Get out, walk, get some sunshine.
It's good for you.
You need that vitamin D.
And you can burn, you know, easily 500 to 1,000 calories.
I swear I've worn a path in my hardwood floors in my house.
Thank you, Pop.
Me too.
I'm on spaces.
I'm on spaces and VCs all day long.
And I'm constantly pacing and walking around my house.
Exactly the same, brother.
I just sat, as soon as Rock said that, I sat down for the first time, I think.
I was walking in circles around the table since then, until then.
Yeah, I have a dog that follows me around the whole time as well.
So, you know, we both get our steps in for sure.
Oh, that's funny.
How much does the dog follow you around?
Oh, he does not stop unless right now.
Right now he's barking at the cat.
So that's the only thing that stopped him from following me.
So the whole time you're walking, your dog is following you in your house?
That's very true.
Yes.
Normally with a toy that he's trying to get me to play with
um and throw oh that's so yeah i've tripped over this dog multiple times um you know you go to turn
around and boom there he is that's so funny your your dog is following you for hours of walking in the house how cute yeah yeah it's it is kind of cute I guess um if you're looking
at it but if you're the one that's being followed for those hours and trying to concentrate on what
you're talking about while you've got a slobbered on ball being rubbed on your foot or your leg it's it definitely kind of annoying
cool uh dark matter hand yes sir um a couple of comments that i wanted to add on to the conversation as um really really passionate quite a few of them uh mainly like if you pick a side for example
there's been a couple of like things about this, what you said about like governments and everything and like the starting frontier of cryptocurrency, blockchain technology and the, you know, the kind of thoughts and feelings behind it.
I think some things still remain like anonymity, your right to anonymity, whether it's your money, it's your keys, your crypto is your life you've come here to try and change your life because this it wasn't working
for you in those ways so you took a risk to change it and that's why i always thank people and um you
know if you're a part of the fight what are you really doing that's why i also agreed with the
fact that you said about why you complain about governments because if you have a problem with
them then well for me you can do a micro and a macro scale.
You can, for me, I ask people, what would you do with your time if money was no object?
Not what would you buy, but how would you truly like to spend your time?
Because if you're just thinking about this imaginary number in your head all of the time,
but when you get there, you've got nothing, you've got no purpose, no passion, no hobby,
nothing that keeps you going, no one around you that really, really appreciates you,
then you're just going to be lost and lonely with extra steps. So that's why I always ask that question. So listeners, just as a quick one,
if like, please rest well, eat well, exercise, be surrounded by people that build you up and
actually support you and your dreams. Otherwise, you'll just be building alone and you can build
alone. And once you get there, you'll realize that a lot of the people in your previous life
were probably probably trying to hold you back. That's how you can affect people on the micro level.
On the macro level, there is something even bigger
because I come from the entertainment, the events industry world.
I came here, I run this Web3 development agency.
We build on Polygon.
We have a trading suite, project management, all of this,
removing steps to bring users here.
From the baseline, we need to build stuff that actually brings people here.
But if you can't make enough finances and network and reputation to be able to actually create these global borderless communities where you try and plant the seed, you don't need to watch grow because this is bigger than all of us.
This will continue and it will be adopted, which is why we need to leave our stuff at the door.
That's why I instead of like fighting or having these opinions, I don't mind.
Politics is theater for me with extra steps.
Like I wouldn't pay to watch that show. Not at all. What I am doing here is I'm joining the conversation
with you. I'm building networks of, and also resources to be able to support my networks
and people, and then try and get them to feel better at home so they can set their foundations
and we grow together. This isn't buzzwords to me. It's not just all wag me, la, la, la, la,
la, like a lot of the moon boys and a lot of spaces do and they just
carry on and it doesn't get anywhere there's no actual realness which is why these conversations
are important and i'd love to invite you to come speak at my conference in two years but that's not
something that i necessarily want to bring up right now it's just important that we actually
create tangibility and we stand up and we say we're here and we help people along the way we
need to be better than the old manifestation of the financial market.
We need to create solutions.
You run a grant board that you're on.
Therefore, you support and build projects that then support so many people that support and believe in them.
This is how we turn the small pebbles into rock slides, which change the landscape.
And that is why we need to do it on a micro on a macro level
borderlessly we need to support everybody i don't care where you're from what your skin color is
how you identify i care that you're feeling okay in yourself your mental your physical your
emotional health and you're able to turn up for yourself every single day so you can get those
opportunities because i promise you even if you lose all of your money you never truly lose as
long as you stay here that's why we need to be more than empty layer two tokenization, facilitate them like QuickSwap does, like Polygon does, providing a network like you do, providing grants to people that actually allow them to build and grow.
Like Papa here in the conversation, supporting people and keeping communities going and working with awesome groundbreaking level two and level one DeFi solutions.
Like this is more and bigger than all
of us and we can't be selfish in this we're all here to make money but we need to work together
to create a future that we can build ourselves without the need of governance and that's why
I'm so passionate and I'm still here it's not just about the money this is about us bringing people
together and changing lives which we need to do every day and the work starts at home with you
because if your foundations are rocked,
you can't help anybody else.
So listeners,
even if you're having the worst day of my last thing before I shut up,
if you're having your worst day,
lock in exercise,
eat well,
rest well,
and come back and say,
good morning.
Cause we need you.
And every single day that you do that,
I promise you,
you will make it.
That's it.
That's my message.
Thank you for letting me say it.
Hey,
Polygon,
give this man a podcast.
Polygon Dark Matter podcast, 2026.
Thank you for that, sir.
I love these runs.
Seriously, though, you're a great speaker.
You're a great speaker.
You should look into doing something like that in crypto.
I'm not joking.
I would listen to you, and I know what you're saying.
Fox is the mouth of the UK, this guy can definitely talk I've known him for
years and it's always nice hearing his voice thank you Papa and thank you
everybody up there that's speaking thank you for everything that you've done for
your communities and thank you listeners for being here with us yeah appreciate
it happy to be here all right i think in a second but i'm i'll go ahead if someone was going to say
something i was uh i just added someone so i couldn't hear for a second but um we'll also let
this uh mediment uh jump in not sure who it is um but they just requested also i see mace requested oh yeah here okay i can have them and
we'll even add uh god saint i don't know who any of uh i don't know who two of these people are
we'll let you guys come up and uh either ask a question or make a comment uh before we wrap it
up if anyone else in the audience wants to ask a question or say something um you can do it uh
either in the comments or you could do it uh you can come
up on stage so go ahead and request um but was someone saying something this is gonna go
oh no join the conversation let's go more opinions
yeah hey friend thanks for having me up here wow the topic up there is really interesting bro
um crypto has been helping us here in our country it has been helping a lot of youths here in our
country even when government is not helping us in our, but crypto is doing a lot over here, bro.
Sorry, you said government.
Did you say government's not doing a lot, but crypto is?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Government is not doing much.
I'm from Nigeria.
Yeah, tell us more.
Yeah, I'm from Nigeria.
So crypto is doing a lot here.
We have sheets that crypto is helping a lot of nigerian shoots out there in making a living in setting up a family as in a big shout
out to crypto and people behind it really appreciate crypto so we're looking more from the
crypto company if we can get more a company here in nigeria that can tell more youth
about crypto enlightening them about crypto because it is not something that has been shared out in
nigeria so we can if we can just get some more ends that can make this be known to many youths
so it can help them maybe paying off some hospital bills because um people
die based on lack of money here in this country or if you are maybe doing a crypto or you are into
something you won't like have issue in paying hospital bill feeding yourself everything will
get sought out but i'm hoping if anyone can just assist us here
in this country tell us organize a program that will make people know more about crypto and that
will make many of Nigerians benefit from it brother I will really appreciate that and also I'm a web developer. I'm also a shield leader.
I help in reading a lot of projects.
I've read a lot of projects just like Deep AI.
And a lot of AI projects, I've helped them in shielding it.
And I've helped in reading, even making their boost.
making their boost. Thanks for having me up here.
Thanks for having me up here.
I really appreciate it, bro.
I really appreciate it, bro.
Yeah, thanks.
What I can add to that, man, is the fact that Brazil has the same issue.
And I can attest to the fact that as soon as we cross the English barrier
into any non-English speaking language or country,
the filter of information is obscene, guys, all the UK, US guys in this call.
And the level of lack of information or even misinformation goes up so dramatically.
As someone that's a professional in this industry and operates on chain and actually deals with
signing transactions and how things actually work, When you jump from English to Portuguese,
it feels like everyone went stupid
and someone needs to do a proper translation of information
because it's crap.
And I'm not sure if it's because of the level of the reader
or if it's because of the level of the writer or both,
but it needs to be fixed.
It's impossible to teach non-English speakers how to use cryptocurrency just by sending them the internet for
research it's impossible there's not enough information translated unfortunately
I would definitely agree with that and even just using something like Google
Translate isn't going to be the best. You know, there's a lot of information in there.
There's a lot and everything, like you said, everything is written in English.
And, you know, in some languages, there isn't a compatible word for certain terms or just getting it across.
So I completely agree.
I don't know.
That would actually have to be coming from the human side
because I haven't seen really any AI translators
that can fully translate what you want to get across.
I'm a little bit skeptical of AI
is getting everything 100% correct.
They never do. They get it 99% correct.
And what happens to the 1% gets lost as fact.
I don't know. It freaks me out a little bit still.
But also video...
But they'll keep getting better. They'll keep getting better, right?
Yes, of course.
And I think at some point they'll be better than the best human translator.
Oh, for sure.
But it's not to the point that we can put an AI to generate a video that teaches
Brazilians how exactly to operate stablecoins on chain. See what I mean? No way I would be able
to do it. I've tried to do DeFi financial mathematics using AI systems. And if you don't
do the step by step with them, they will get lost because of the type of stuff that isn't even
correctly written about in terms of operational terms, right?
In terms of the theoretical, lots of information out there.
Unfortunately, we need to deal in the practice, in my case, of course,
when it comes to these markets.
But yeah, it's more of a, someone needs to make it easy to translate information
in an manner that it's easy to ingest.
So I don't know, more YouTubers that actually talk about tech in Brazil it easy to translate information in an manner that it's easy to ingest so I
don't know more youtubers that actually talk about tech in Brazil or in
Nigeria I have no idea it has to be organic what the solution is AI will fix
this you can you're not wrong I think I think it will I mean you could just
have eventually it doesn't matter what YouTube video you're watching.
You'll just click, you know, translate.
And it'll dub it and or sub it.
And it'll even probably change their mouths to match the voice.
I mean, AI is just...
It's going to be such a powerful tool.
It's still so early. I mean, think is just, it's going to be such a powerful tool. It's still so early.
I mean, think about it, guys.
We just had, you know, OpenAI come out with ChatGPT, what?
It's only been, what, three years, four years at most?
Look, I manage a million dollars of Polygon money currently
in BRL and IDR markets on chain.
Would you trust that money to an AI that's automated?
I wouldn't yet. Not yet, no. Not yet.
But consider that even early versions of AI, which were not even, I mean, those were like
cavemen compared to current AI. But AI has been being used to trade the public markets now for 50 years, 40 years, right?
And AI outtrades humans pretty well.
And there's like funds that use algorithms and old style of AI.
I'm not saying humans.
I'm saying AI versus, let's say, quantum mechanics.
Quantum mechanics still win, right?
Like the probability of it
going up and down given the recent history. The quantum mechanics still kind of win versus
an AI just considering all possibilities. Currently, that can change the next couple
of years, so I'm open. I'm not sure what you mean by quantum mechanics,
beating AI. Quant, quantitative. Quantitative mechanics. Yeah, quantitative in general, meaning numbers and mechanical rules making you trade according to those numbers.
I mean, in some ways that is AI, right? It's not LLN.
AI definitely utilizes quantum mechanics in part of their research, I would say. Yes, for sure.
For sure.
But I don't trust, just like you can't trust a simulation
because a simulation never considers itself
kind of a problem.
See what I mean?
Market makers have a lot of problems to solve
when it comes to theorizing about future performance.
It's an interesting subject.
God's sake, you have your hand up, don't you?
We aren't ignoring you.
Yeah, bro.
Concerning the AI, AI can also help in the crypto space.
It can help push a lot of things in the crypto space.
Because those projects I told you have helped SHIELD.
It's just talking about how I can contribute to this
crypto space so I think with a lot of more with a lot of effort and research we should be able to
get it out how maybe I can help you treat maybe I will I can maybe. Maybe AI can just maybe what you have in mind.
AI can just bring it out.
I hope with a lot of research, we can get to that brief.
All right, so we had a couple others.
MediMint, is my connection being weird?
MediMint, did you have something you wanted to say
about all this topic is my connection out or is mediment not responding no no they definitely came up here and
they're getting some engagement i wonder how many followers they got um okay who else just came we got mace back up
oh we got uh crypto decks did you have something you wanted to say
yeah um i'm just still letting and um um i'm just learning from my friend. So it's my first time learning crypto.
I started yesterday with a friend. So I'm still learning. Everything is just new to me.
So that's it. That's all I have to say.
Hey Cryptodex, Andreas Antonopoulos on YouTube. A. Antonop, that's your source.
Start from there.
I should start from where?
Yeah, seriously.
I should start from where?
I'll post the link to the comments on this event.
One second.
Okay, okay, okay.
He's telling you a really good early crypto person.
He wrote a book, Mastering Bitcoin, and then he
wrote a book, Mastering Ethereum, and some other books. And he's just really good on YouTube.
Some really incredible talks that will give you a good foundation. I think one of the problems in
this industry is a lot of people come in and they're not starting with a firm foundation i think one of the problems in this industry is a lot of people come in and they're not they're not starting with a firm foundation they're starting with like here you
can make money really fast buy this coin or you know buy this whatever meme coin or whatever
whatever it is uh that's like very high risk stuff and that that's really not, I don't think, a good foundation. If you want to play those games, fine, play those games.
But get a good foundation first.
Understand why.
Why is this industry important?
Why is this technology important?
Why does decentralization matter?
Why does censorship resistance matter?
Why does confiscation resistance matter?
And all these things.
And then once you understand that, you get the
why and you find
your why. Like, why is this important
to you? And
how is this going to affect your life?
Then I think you can start playing
more of the gambling games if you
so desire.
But I would normally recommend people for the most
part um you should probably just hold you know bitcoin and some blue chips um for your probably
first years of crypto until you really start to understand then you can branch out to the higher risk stuff. Because a lot of this stuff is complicated.
It's very complicated.
And a lot of people buy a lot of this stuff
before they understand what it is
or what's being built.
Exactly.
And people need to learn the difference
between trading and investing.
Yes.
You can trade certain assets.
Those assets might be a good investment, but you still need to actually trade them to make it worthwhile.
And that's the thing people don't understand.
When they're first coming in at crypto, 90% of the people are coming in because their friends said,
Oh, look, I just made 10x my money in two days.
10x my money in two days and they're like oh let me try um obviously it doesn't work out for 99
And they're like, Oh, let me try.
percent of those people that do that but they do need to definitely learn about what they're holding
and why they're holding it uh you know my main investment is in usdc that's what i invest in is
stable for the most part you know i do hold a lot of other, you know, fluctuating assets,
but my actual investment is in stables.
And what do you do?
And then I yield.
Yeah.
Farm, farm liquidity.
So, you know, I provide, provide liquidity.
So I'm, you know, um, uh, helping the ecosystem,
but at the same time, you you know i'm creating that passive income
and just compounding it it's much better than holding any money in the bank or in any bonds
or anything like that um careful with impermanent loss but yes well it's stables. So it's an impromatible. It might have an issue. It's dollar-dollar. No, it's USDC, USDT. But is it a concentrated liquidity providing situation or a proper algorithmic market maker situation? Because you can actually lose money in the concentrated liquidity on stable-stable pairs if it goes off peg and you need to rebalance at above a dollar effectively
yeah no they're full range positions um there's no need for me to concentrate at 0.99
0.998 or whatever if it's curved and those you're good to go just press play yeah no 100 um and
that's you know my my actual goal is you, to have at least 100 million in stable liquidity.
That's my goal.
Hey, the Curve's largest pool in Polygon is now ours, by the way, and Rockets, partly the Treasury's money that's in there.
We are listing Tesoro as a Brazilian bond RWA versus the Brazilian stable coins that have the most volume in Polygon.
It's quite a nice position.
If you ever want to be exposed to Brazilian reais,
I recommend we do both a 8 plus APY a year over there,
which is nice to see.
But a friend of mine is the head of Latam Por Solana,
and he has a phrase I love to tell everybody about,
everyone that wants to trade,
where I asked him two years ago or more,
hey, this day trading thing you love to do, does it pay the bills? And his answer was genius,
because you'll see. It does. It pays the bill. The only issue is that now I have way fewer
Bitcoin than I used to, which effectively means he lost money. So guys, don't be stupid. Buy
Bitcoin and hold Bitcoin. Buy dollars and
yield dollars. Don't just hold dollars.
That's stupid. You need to yield, otherwise you're losing money.
But accumulate
and press play. Tomorrow's a new day.
Make more money. Buy more Bitcoin.
Yeah, most people shouldn't trade.
Most people are going to lose money trading.
Okay, we have
ActiveScientist.
How are you doing? Good to see you.
Hey, Jim, Jim. Can you hear me?
Yeah, can hear you.
It seems like I'm wrong. Can you hear me? We can hear you. can you hear us yeah yeah i can hear you now jm everyone i am
tm i overheard someone talking about crypto innovation and onboarding in nigeria so i
couldn't catch his name so i'll tag him in the comment section.
So I just decided to come up and, you know, drop a few points about that. So I will start from the
crypto payment sector because he was talking as if he wasn't aware of any particular product particular products built around crypto payments in Nigeria.
But there are also quite a few. And I mentioned a couple of
them in the comment session. So there's use as a and there is
joy. And I'm sorry, this sounds like I'm making a pitch or
anything. I just want to you know, in case they are not aware.
So there is
useAza and there is JeroiMG.
UseAza is a
crypto payment infrastructure
which is built in on WhatsApp.
So it's just like a
WhatsApp bot that you can use
to make crypto payments.
There is transfer to buy and sell crypto currencies
to make payments in real life.
And I just, I pinned the, I tagged the product,
the project so to say in the comment section.
So maybe I'll just pin it in the jumbotron.
But then moving on to the issue of onboarding i don't know the
speaker's name so i would have mentioned him moving on to the issue of onboarding right
there are lots of you know crypto communities right now in nigeria and the onboarding dc
the progress have been incredible i mean there, there is Sioux community, there is Bayes community, Solana community.
They're all in Nigeria.
A Flair community too.
I would have tagged them, but due to the time to create all the names.
So I just wanted to point out these things because it seemed like the guy wasn't really aware of the
existence of these products and the communities was talking about the
difficulty in getting on board with the whole crypto narrative the drawback in
innovation you know how we are far behind in product building and all that so hopefully it gets this and
get up to date on what's going on thank you
yeah good information scientists um yeah and it's great to see products being built in Africa. You know, interestingly,
in a way, QuickSwap started as almost like a Nigerian product. A big percentage of our users
in the early days of QuickSwap were from Nigeria specifically and different parts of Africa and also Latin America.
So we noticed very early on, we had at the bottom of the QuickSwap website,
it was kind of like an active real-time block explorer thing that showed all the transactions coming in.
And I was always amazed that when I would be watching these,
there were like 50-cent transactions, $5 transactions.
And I was wondering, what the hell are these transactions?
Who's doing a 50 cent transaction?
And this was before bots were prevalent.
This was six years ago or something.
And there were some bots like on Ethereum, but on Polygon, they weren't very prevalent yet.
There was very few.
But there were all these small payments.
So we started looking at, you know, could we tell where they were coming from, IP address
and stuff.
We saw that a ton of them were coming from Africa and from Latin America.
And that was really cool to see that, you know, QuickSwap having its low fees, that's
what got QuickSwap its, you know, big traction early was when Uniswap on Ethereum had fees of, you know, anywhere from a couple dollars up to peaking at, you know, a couple hundred dollars or even higher, thousands of dollars in some cases during the token launches and stuff when people were bidding to get in.
But when those fees were too high, QuickSwap, you could trade for under a penny.
And so if you're someone in Nigeria
and you're trying to trade,
well, you don't have a bank account.
You don't have a Charles Schwab brokerage account.
You don't have these things,
but you can use QuickSwap.
You can use Polygon.
And that was pretty cool to see that's what crypto does it opens up finance it opens up trading and it
opens up investing and all these other things for a lot of people around the world and all you need
is an internet connection and most of the world has an internet connection or at least an
intermittent internet connection at this point it's the same story in Brazil. That's why Polygon has, I keep telling the Polygon Foundation that they need, they can't let go of their, let's call it first, emerging market first mover advantage, right?
Where when Polygon was launching was exactly when all the emerging markets were starting to have their own wallets and their own stablecoins in 2021, effectively,
when Polygon became big. And it still has most, I'd say over 50% of the emerging market
retails in Polygon and not elsewhere. So yeah, we should maintain that for sure. We'll work
for that. It's a great market. And they pay expensive, so it's profitable. Yeah, we definitely have a focus from Polygon on that,
on remittances, on just generally on Latin America.
We're looking at doing stuff with network states in Latin America.
We just had an event in Argentina.
So definitely a focus for Polygon.
Cool.
Okay, Dark Matter, you have your hand.
And then we have one more person we brought up, Web3 Checkmate.
So yeah, go ahead, Dark Matter, and then we'll do Web3 Checkmate,
and then we'll call it after that.
I'll read some audience comments too, though appreciate you and uh one more energy reset for the room what's up
everybody down there in the listener section please like comment reshare the room follow
quick swap rock polygon mace papa and if you appreciate any of the speakers please support
them as they give you their time at the same time.
And Mace, I appreciate you. And besides that, I just want to leave with one more thing in case you're listening now or in the future.
Thank you to like all of you people that come up and offer. And I appreciate rock.
You can't you're very humanized, like you listen to people very, very actively and actually then reply to them,
listen to people very, very actively and actually then reply to them,
which I appreciate in this space where we have these conversations,
because it can be very difficult for people to be able to present their words,
their thoughts, which are all valid, everybody's opinion.
You know, we're all here to share them.
We all build from the ground up.
So thank you so much for everybody that comes up.
And if English isn't your first language and you're being brave,
like appreciate you, you know, whether you're a veteran
or whether you're a new starter, we appreciate you. And I just want you all to keep,
keep getting up every single day and swinging, even if you lose it all, like you can always
make it back, but you only lose if you give up. That's the one thing that I want every trader
here to know, because there is a difference as papa said between trading and investing and as somebody that came here and bought shiba inu
baby dodge and all these these risks to reward things i still stay here on the layer two because
i do believe it's where we grow it's where we build the layer one the layer two so rock can i
open a separate conversation with you privately outside of this to continue our discussion as an
event and other stuff i would like to do that but also just please support the people that are giving you their time
up here everybody and keep giving your time to yourself because your best ROI is when you invest
in yourself and that means you will always keep getting there even if it's just one percent a day
never give up on you never give up on your dreams we will all get there together we need to build
the future and make it real so I just need to keep doing that.
But yeah, really, really happy, great conversation,
passion, innovation, and just the start
of what is a long frontier of us turning this
into a global reality.
So thank you.
Yeah, sure. Send me a DM.
I'll respond.
Cool. And Web3 Checkmate, did you have something to say before we wrap this up?
Cool. And Web3 Checkmate,
did you have something to say before we wrap this up?
Okay. Shout out to everyone on the speaker role and the listeners section. I've been on this
space for quite a while, and I think this is the first time I'm joining this particular conversation and let me just drop one or two cents about the whole
conversation that is going on which is web3 payments going global so personally i feel like
when it comes to web3 payments i don't necessarily see an issue with people using you know crypto as a means of payment
all over the world but I just think the perception that we have towards crypto because I'm in Africa
the perception that most people have towards crypto is a very negative one. People assume that crypto is, you know, used for negative things,
not specifically for things that could make life easier and better. And I feel like most people
don't really understand the basic concepts of what we are building in the web 3 space so i think i think if speaker mentioned
it earlier on about educating using ai to you know explain most of the concept we have in crypto
because when i got on boarded in the crypto space I was like in a ghost town.
You know, so many terminologies, so many words that were being used.
I was, you know, trying to very, I was finding it so very difficult to understand some certain things.
But here in Africa, specifically in Nigeria, we have people that, you know, that teach other people, you know, because I think
activists, you know, active scientists mentioned Nigeria having specific communities and all
of that.
So I specifically got on boarded in a community and from there I started learning and understanding
some basic things which, you know, making my own personal research on how your space operates.
So I personally, I feel like we need to, you know, educate people more about the benefit
of using crypto as a means of payment because there are so
many benefits for crying out loud is decentralization nobody's having access to our you know our data
and every other thing we have we own our asset and everything so if we can educate people more on this and you know get the um get older people to understand what we are building
in the crypto space i think would go far beyond because if you're checking critically there are
so many web2 people that are very much interested in crypto but they don't just understand they
don't just know the benefits of what or the kind of perception that some people have painted crypto as is what some people are
driving with so i think that is what we should work on more and um thank you very much for
giving giving me the mic and shout out to everyone and i really appreciate being here. Thank you very much.
Yeah, thanks for that Web3 checkmate and appreciate
you coming up here and
explaining that to everyone.
We do need to wrap up here guys. We're a little
bit over time. I want to
quickly read some comments from the audience.
We have, Bern says
hire, win security for those
payments.
I'm not sure what he's referring to.
Jared says, quick swap is all you need.
Thanks, Jared.
Appreciate you.
Rainbow says, to be honest, stable coins will push mainstream adoption faster than Bitcoin ever could.
Not everyone wants to hodl.
Some of us want to swipe.
Red says, hello, people.
May says, someone give Dark Matter Build a podcast god saint says never give up guys active
scientist says very profound question most people get the money they want and realize they have no
zeal for it nothing else uh then they try to get more money mace posted the link to the andreas
antinopolis uh channel um definitely guys check that out out. It's really a wealth of knowledge.
Way smarter than
myself, at least. I won't speak for everyone else.
Both of us.
The guy is amazing.
He really
made me passionate about this industry.
Active Scientist
says Cash App should definitely have that option
by now. I think he's talking about
sending and receiving crypto.
Kenneth says been listening for a while.
It's fun.
Kingdank Kush says good morning, everyone.
And by the way, I'm following anyone here who I'm not already following.
I'm following a lot of you guys already.
Victor Brown says Web3 Payments going global.
Leroy J says, all right, guys, I'm in.
PapaStonx posted a link to a tweet that says,
speed and privacy are most important things in DeFi.
Here's why silent swap is the solution.
Check out their view below and take a peek at an audit from Halberd and Security.
Vision says, it's great to see different networks and projects
discussing the future of Web3 payments together.
Diversity of solutions shows that global adoption will come from collaboration,
not competition for vision we chose polygon because it provides the performance across cost structure we need uh glad you guys chose polygon code pratham says for web3 payments to
go global the gas fee should be at least as low as cards charge uh yeah definitely i think this
should be lower and in most cases they are by the. A lot of people don't know that credit cards are charging in some cases up to like 3% or 4%, sometimes even higher if you're doing like foreign transactions and stuff.
Some credit card payments, when I look at the price of the dollar,
I use an American credit card in Brazil,
and there's like an 8% surcharge on the price of the dollar hidden in the price.
It's kind of insane, and that's a lot of money for them.
But just adding to your comment, credit cards are expensive as fuck.
Yeah, I was just in Asia for a couple months,
and sometimes the conversion
fees are hidden and sometimes they're not.
But when I was looking at my statements and stuff, I was like, man, some of those transactions
I was paying over 10% on.
Okay, so Kevi Hasith says it's going to revolutionize the way we think about money
on a global scale.
Constantine says,
the era of predictive analysis is coming.
Make sure you get on that train.
I think he's talking about the prediction markets.
Someone says,
pull losers.
His name is Pull Sui.
Okay.
Someone says, are there any chance to ask questions about quick swap decks?
Certainly there would.
Unfortunately, we're kind of out of time here.
If you can reply quickly and ask a question here or request to come up,
you can definitely come up.
But we are going to end here any second.
TechRev says, yes, our lingo and jargon is way too much.
Degenation, baby.
Emma says,
how can Web3 payments provide effectively,
providers effectively scale cross-border services
while navigating the drastically different regulatory environments
across regions like the US and EU and emerging markets?
Yeah, that's a hard one.
It's really hard as a business to, even just like an American business,
this is something they're talking about with AI right now,
is if one state chooses to have very harsh AI regulations,
then if you're a small business building an AI company, then you have to now
abide by that state's rules. Another state might have different rules. Those rules could contradict
each other. And you have to deal with all these different states. Now, imagine you start taking
that across nations. So now you're having to abide by all the states of the United States, all the countries in the EU.
And the EU has some consistency in their rules, but not completely.
There's different countries have different rules for different things.
Yeah, it's very difficult.
Very difficult.
Nazmal says, what role will stable coins play in making web3 payments mainstream um i think stable coins are probably the gateway drug for payments crypto payments mainstream in
the world i think and then eventually um just trying to answer these quickly just to respect
the people who ask them but we are way out of time um i think the way i see it working is stable
coins will be used initially.
And then once Bitcoin and other cryptos have more stability and less volatility,
I think stablecoins will become obsolete because stablecoins have inflation
and Bitcoin and other crypto assets have either less or no inflation.
So I think it's like coins are a medium path.
They're wrapped dollars.
Aren't an amazing currency.
They're better than most.
But when you compare them to something like Bitcoin,
why would you want to make payments with stable coins
if Bitcoin was stable enough in the future?
That might be 10 or 20 years away, though.
So I actually think Bitcoin will be the ultimate stable coin someday.
And even things like Litecoincoin uh pole eth um mcrib pick says the mcrib is back
and this time it's immortal um man that's like the most important thing said on this show today
uh i i'm a i'm a low class person i love the mcrib so i gotta get one um okay that's enough for today guys uh i'm tired this has been a long
spaces um i walked four miles uh during the spaces so that's that's fun i hope you guys also got a
lot of uh steps you could by the way if you want to know how far you walked you don't even need an
apple watch just if you have a an iphone you could use the fitness app if you want to know how far you walked, you don't even need an Apple watch. Just if you have an iPhone, you could use the fitness app.
If you have an Android, there's other apps on Android for this.
And it just uses the GPS on your phone.
So you don't need a watch to know how much you've walked.
All right, guys.
Anything you guys want to say while we wrap up?
No, sir.
Just that it also uses a gyroscope to count the steps, but yes you're correct
about the GPS, but no, no sir, nothing else to add.
This was a good one.
Yeah, thanks for staying so long Mace, it was great talking to you and also you Papa.
Yeah, this was a great basis.
Go ahead Papa.
Hey, it's Friday and everything else in the world is good, so let's do it.
Hey, I've got about six more hours of spaces left today.
So I'm going to get some more steps in.
But I just want to say to everybody, you know, with these payment solutions, be safe out there.
You know, look for self-pesticity options.
And, you know, be careful with these centralized exchanges out there.
Just stay safe, guys.
That's it.
Cool, cool.
Mediment, we never got to hear from you, but come back next time.
Next time we can talk about, I'll ask you, I don't know what your health stuff is,
but we've done a lot of desi on this show and medical stuff.
And I finally got on something we've talked about on the show.
Peptides for my shoulder.
We could talk about that next time maybe.
I don't know when our next desai show is.
But we do a desai show every two or three months.
We have room in two weeks.
We were debating internally whether we do aliens again or DSi again
and my
you know I always wanted to do DSi
I could do DSi every week
but you know
uapedia.ai
is a website that has indexed
all the official government
documents on
aliens and EUAPs
into one place with an AI
you can ask stuff.
It's my father's project.
He's very involved with aliens.
So if you guys want to talk about that,
I know more than I should.
So we need you either way.
All right.
Noted.
Yeah, let's write down.
Mace is a good person to come for that.
Yeah. Yeah, so basically, so Mace as a good person to come for that. Yeah.
Yeah, so basically, so everyone knows, every once in a while, maybe, what would you say, Nicole?
Once every month or every two months, we do like a really off topic that has nothing to do with crypto.
Yeah, we try for once a month, but it ends up being about once every two months.
Cool.
All right, guys.
Thank you so much thanks Nicole for all the
co-hosting and organizing and everything
Darren also
who wasn't able to make it today he had a family
thing unfortunately
but yeah thanks everyone
and thanks Polygon for being here
looks like Two Cent Timmy had to run
thank you Two Cent Timmy though for your support thanks to Polygon for being here. It looks like two cent Timmy had to run. Thank you two cent Timmy though,
for your support. Thanks to Polygon account and thanks to the speakers and all
the listeners, especially. Thank you guys.
It's the audience that makes this whole thing work.
Cheers guys.
Bye everyone.
Cheers everyone.
Bye bye.
Later.
