SLP269 Jack Mallers Bitcoin Wins Because It Is Open

Jack Mallers of Strike rejoins me on the show to talk about what he’s working on and how Bitcoin wins. We chat:

• Visiting El Salvador and financial access
• Bitcoin remittance market
• Why fiat fintech can’t compete 
• Bitcoin and Lightning as an open network
• Strike expansion

Jack Mallers links:

• Twitter: @jackmallers
• Strike: @ln_strike
• Site: Strike.me

Sponsors: 

• Swan Bitcoin
• Hodl Hodl Lend
• Compass Mining
• Unchained Capital (code LIVERA)
• CypherSafe (code LIVERA)
• CoinKite.com (code LIVERA)

Stephan Livera links:

• Show notes and website
• Follow me on twitter @stephanlivera
• Subscribe to the podcast
• Patreon @stephanlivera

Podcast Transcript:

Stephan Livera:

Well, Jack, welcome back to the show. It’s great to chat with you. It’s been a while since we spoke.

Jack Mallers:

Yeah. Stephan, thank you for having me. Big fan of the show. Of course. Congratulations on all the success since I’ve been on the show. I’m an avid listener and I’m pumped, man. Good to see you, buddy.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, dude, you’ve been really busy, so we’ve got to get into what you’ve been doing lately. I know you were down in El Salvador, so maybe we should start there. Tell us a little bit about your trip there.

Jack Mallers:

Okay. One of the big initiatives that we’re most excited about at Strike is our ability to deliver financial tools to emerging and developing markets. We think that Bitcoin as a monetary network is the most inclusive, accessible monetary network of all time. We view that as just an empirical fact. And so El Salvador’s our first non-US market was very purposeful and it was a market that is dollarized. They’re exposed to the asset inflation. That’s developing here in the United States, although they’re not getting any stimulus checks, right. They don’t have the financial access to buy a lot of the stocks and bonds. They’re just swimming a bit naked when the US raises rates they’re in a lot of trouble. They’re the sixth ranked inbound remittance destination from the United States over 20% of their GDP. Well, over 20% now bordering 25%.

Jack Mallers:

The country’s GDP is inbound remittance. And so we view it as an awesome place that has already taken a keen interest in Bitcoin to explore how we can use Bitcoin, the asset, and Bitcoin, the network, to just improve the quality of life and financial access and inclusivity in the country. And then hopefully learn a lot and be able to replicate that to about two and a half to four and a half billion people that lack the financial access that maybe you and I grew up with. And so from a super high level that was the initiative and it was a blast, a ton of fun, something I’ll never forget. And I’m more than happy to talk about.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, man, that’s really cool. I mean, so you’re saying sixth inbound in terms of like, so essentially the point is there’s like a big diaspora, right? So I guess there’s a lot of people overseas who are sending money home to their family, let’s say back home. And this is where they’re, currently using some more fiat kind of processing ways of doing that. And you’re looking at ways to actually go, Hey, we can use Bitcoin and Lightning here. That’s what you’re seeing, right?

Jack Mallers:

So you’re talking about a country that the flight from Miami to El Salvador is two hours. El Salvador is closer to Miami than New York. And so you’re talking about a country that really borders the United States. They’re dollarized. They’ve been dollarized since I believe 2003. And so you have a lot of family that migrates to the United States and sends money back home. The best way I like to describe it is comparing what Robinhood did for retail brokerage. And give me a sec, this may turn into a rant, but I think it’s really important in the early days of Robinhood, the concept of commission-free trading, wasn’t very appealing because they were talking to really rich investors that are trading and trading 500,000 or $5 million at a time. And they’re like, if you’re saving us 1 to 2% on that brokerage fee, we don’t really care because we’re trading millions of dollars.

Jack Mallers:

That’s not very appealing, but the point of Robinhood is they’re actually people that want to trade $10 lots, or $15 lots. And because the fixed costs associated with traditional financial brokers, there’s no such thing as trading $10 at a time because the minimum fee is like 30 bucks. Right? And so you, what Robinhood ended up doing is offering a new financial market, which allowed retail investors to invest any size commission free. And that was the novel concept that a lot of early bigger investors totally whiffed on is that there was a market that wanted to exist, but couldn’t because of the fixed costs associated. And so we like to think of the remittance market to, and from El Salvador, the same way is that these are people that are remitting a hundred dollars a week, $20 a week. And because of the fixed costs associated with the Swift network and with the Fiat legacy system, you’re talking about fees that are upwards of 35, 40, 45, 50%.

Jack Mallers:

And so the town I was living in these people bus about six hours to the local Western union. They wait in about a four hour line, it’s a full day’s worth of chores to pick up your remittance money. And on a hundred dollars remittance payment, they ended up collecting around like 50, 60 bucks. And so that is a terrible experience. It’s not a way to live. And when you learn that it’s a lot of these families working capital and income, you realize like, Oh my goodness, this surely is a problem that we can solve and why can we solve it now? It’s because we have an open monetary network that can achieve cash finality, financial clearance, it’s global, it’s 24/7. There is no middleman, and there is no fixed associated cost to execute and achieve final clearance. And so we can physically escrow real value in real time from the United States to El Salvador at virtually no cost and instantly. And so then it’s about learning in the environment there and crafting and building an amazing user experience to allow for them to switch over remittance. And so that was the initial use case that we really wanted to learn more about. And on my trip, there’s a plethora of ways now that we plan on being helpful to El Salvador, but that’s kind of the introductory mental model that I came into the country with is if that makes any sense. Yeah.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. That’s cool. And so obviously I’m a Bitcoin and Lightning promoter myself, right? But when I talk to people, sometimes they’ll say things like, well, why don’t you just use TransferWise? Or why don’t you just use one of these, and, maybe they could come back to us and say, well, hang on, you guys are big on Bitcoin and Lightning, but why don’t we just have more FinTech or some of the FinUI maybe and some of these companies, why don’t we just have more competition there? And then that’s how people can just get those fees down from 40% down to more reasonable levels. Why rapid andcan’t we just do that?

Jack Mallers:

It’s because you have to zoom out a little bit and understand why Lightning is such a monumental advancement for money as a technology it’s because Bitcoin itself is physical value. It’s a bare instrument. That’s natively digital. We’ve never had that before. And so firstly, there’s no sense of credit within the Bitcoin or Lightning network. There’s no sense of balance sheet float. It’s that a transaction actually completes the full vertical length of initiation to finality in one second. And it’s usually effectively free when compared to other monetary networks. And so when you have that insight, yes. Can we use something like TransferWise at a relatively small scale? Sure. But at a tremendous scale, you take on a lot of balance sheet bloat and float credit risk, counterparty risk, where you, now you have a monetary network that can move and escrow physical value anywhere in the world, 24 seven, 365 and carries the liquidity profile in any currency that you can just get in and out of it, it’s now well over a trillion dollar asset and carries the necessary volumes that other commodities require for sufficient liquidity for financial institutions interact with.

Jack Mallers:

And so that is just plain innovation in money as a technology, just plain and simple. And so when you think about our offering and cross border payments, we have no fixed associated costs. We have no counterparty risks with any financial institution that we interface with. There’s no sense of credit and our working capital is tiny. We only need working capital to make and receive Lightning payments. We don’t need to post euros somewhere post dollars in El Salvador because as soon as the physical value of a Bitcoin gets to these places, we can interface with any financial counterparty that trades Bitcoin, and then just swap it in for local currency and dispatch it to the user. And so it’s tremendously scalable. It’s efficient, there’s no fixed costs, it’s cheaper, it’s faster. And then the last thing with this monetary network is it’s open, which is huge throughout human history, open networks, defeat closed networks.

Jack Mallers:

And this is exclusive of monetary. This is just generally the internet beat the intranet. Open networks, carry default, inherent economies of scale and network effects that just make them absolute monsters and dematerialize the closed competitors. And the way I like to describe this is cash app does not like Venmo and Venmo does not like cashapp in a closed network, a competitor or another participant is subtractive. If they’re not using cash app, they’re using Venmo. And so you cannot share users. In an open system that’s not true. Every new network participant is additive to the network, it’s strengthens the network. And so for example, now these people are receiving remittance payments where they’re natively interoperable with this new open system. And there’s already merchants that accept Lightning payments for groceries for your phone bill. I paid my hotel bill with Lightning network.

Jack Mallers:

And so we also have the added benefit of this open monetary network that gets stronger and stronger and stronger. And so for all of those reasons Lightning based cross border payments, but just, using an exclusive of Lightning and Bitcoin, if you don’t like Bitcoin, I’m not here to convince you of that right now. But an open monetary network versus closed monetary networks in theory, should re author a tremendous amount of disruption and innovation. And that’s really one of the high level thesis we carry at Strike is there’s going to be a lot of winners in this transition over to open monetary systems. And we think Bitcoin and Lightning is the best monetary network of all time. So there’s end-my-rant there.

Stephan Livera:

That’s really cool. And when we think about, I guess, one way to put it is being interoperable is important, right? It’s like this idea that I can pay you without worrying. I can be on, zap wallet and you can be on a different wallet and I can still pay you. And we don’t have to try and be on the same exact wallet and same exact setup. Whereas in the fiat world, there’s a little bit more of that. Where if you try to cross into some, if you try to pay into somebody else’s, little walled garden, you’re going to pay fees, doing that. And I think in some way, that’s what Lightning is helping us do is we’re making this open interoperable network that anyone can pay anyone. And you don’t have to sort of worry about those fees that you end up are like, cause someone in there is clipping the ticket on you. I mean, look, of course, there’s lots of things where someone is clipping the ticket, but it dramatically lowers the fee is probably the point, right?

Jack Mallers:

That’s exactly correct. And the way we think about it at Strike is in an open system, it’s a race to the bottom. You, you cannot possibly justify like 2.9% plus 30 cents a swipe like the Visa network does because you cannot protect an open network. We don’t have a safeguard on who gets to transact on lightning. It’s an open system, the specification is public and you can join the network and leave the network as you leave. And so with that level of understanding, you understand it’s a race to the bottom. You understand that performing on the network, there’s no justifiable cost and revenue stream you can push onto users. It’s a commoditized business. And so we believe that Strike that the winners, there will be many that the winners will deliver the best experience and the best brand. And so we constantly are optimizing to the best experience to where we believe that these interoperable QR codes that you’re describing are going to pop up more and more in our lives to pay for coffee, to make a cross-border payment, to have a subscription to a podcast.

Jack Mallers:

And we want Strike to be one of the many popular ways to scan it and Strike allows you to not spend the Bitcoin that you HODL to pay it, Strike avoids taxes and accounting liabilities Strike, avoids any volatility issues, Strike, abstracts, all the technical stuff. And we’re over invest in customer support. We’re constantly optimizing for the best experience. And you’re exactly correct. And we think that that an open system will remove intermediaries, middlemen, unnecessary charges and that in an open system, it’s a race to the bottom that it’ll cost what it costs to execute. And no one else will have a justification to charge more than that. And the winners will be those that have the best experience and the best brand, and the best stewards of Bitcoin and the open source software that enables all this stuff.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. Awesome. So let’s go back to the El Salvador example. So current world in the fiat world that is, they’re paying 35, 40, 50% fees. What’s the opportunity, what’s the experience look like when they’re trying to use Strike, for example, I guess, can you talk a little bit about what’s the current model being used?

Jack Mallers:

Yeah and so we launched, I believe like a week ago and our numbers are explosive. We’re saying 50 to 100% day over day growth in all the important metrics. It’s been tremendously fascinating and I’m actually going back in three weeks because I have some unfinished business that hopefully I can talk about on the podcast at a later date. But here’s the experience, that we have a very rapidly growing user base and a large user base now here in the United States. And we use Lightning to connect independent financial institutions, regulatory parties, and such. And so we have a certain entity that is domiciled outside the US and we have certain counterparties trading institutions, regulatory and compliance institutions that we interface with for non-US customers. And we’re able to, if someone in the United States wants to send $100 to El Salvador, what we’re doing today is we’re debiting the $100 from their US checking account.

Jack Mallers:

So at Strike you link a US checking account, and you can make any Bitcoin enLightning payment with your dollars, which is a mind-bending experience and how that happens because we debit the dollars from your checking account. We live convert it programmatically into Bitcoin on the Lightning network. We send the Bitcoin over the Lightning network to another financial institution, to an entity we own elsewhere to another bank, to another service and that physical settlement between us in the United States and the Non-US entities that are the counterpart to El Salvador users happens instantly and at no cost. And then right now we’re converting that back into stablecoin for them. Although we just established some relationships with some local banking partners in El Salvador and we’ll be able to convert and that’s, we can convert to Euros British pounds, Australian dollars. And for El Salvador, they are now holding this USDT stable coin, which is the synthetic digital dollar for them.

Jack Mallers:

The reason that this is so cool is you would think, well, that’s kind of unfortunate once they get the dollars that they’re effectively US dollars, like it’s volatility, and it’s backed by dollars and such, but they’re not spendable over the Visa network. How do you go grocery shopping and such? What’s amazing is there’s already all these, ATM’s all over the country. There’s all these off and on-ramp manual services of people buying and selling Bitcoin and like local meetups and such. And there’s already over 25 merchants in the town I staying at that, except for groceries, living bill payments. And so people are actually receiving their remittance and able to cash out into local currency or able to just spend it and live off of them. And so our remittance to El Salvador users, they’re instant and they’re free, not only so, but they’re the convenience to your mobile phone.

Jack Mallers:

So you don’t have to take a bus. You don’t have to collect it physically. It’s not a 10 hour chore. It’s at the convenience of your cell phone, comfort of your home, costs nothing. It’s instantaneous. And then it’s a more convenient way to spend money. It’s a balance that lives on their phone for all of us that are really familiar with the experience of linking your bank account to your phone and having a debit card in your pocket. A lot of these people aren’t, and just watching them experience that for the first time was pretty tremendous. And so that’s what it is today. And yeah, we’re establishing relationships, banking partners and a lot of different institutions and merchants to try and mirror. I think, with Bitcoin and Lightning network, we can give a developing world experience to an emerging market, and that’s kind of our ultimate goal.

Stephan Livera:

That’s cool. So they are receiving USDT. And so is that into their own? Like they have a, so I guess walk me through the flow here. So as an example, there might be someone from El Salvador, who’s living in the US and they want to send money to their family back in El Salvador. And so that person in the US, they linked their bank account with Strike, and then they’re paying QR of their family member back home in El Salvador. And then that person back in El Salvador, they’ve got it on the Strike app also, or are they taking it to another wallet app or how are they then paying?

Jack Mallers:

Could be either or, they like a lot of people now have Strike, but if you have another Lightning wallet that you want, obviously we’re natively interoperable with it, right. We’re all built on the same open standard, but yeah, we work with a partner to be clear. We have no interest in doing, having anything to do with Tether at all. We don’t run ethereum nodes. So we outsource that at the end of the day, we’re trying to solve a problem here. And I would love to integrate with Blockstream and liquid and do some more innovative things there. But I’m only one guy and only so much at a time. So we outsource our relationships, so are interfacing and swapping into USDT is with a partner of ours. And so that’s what happens, they custody on behalf of the user. But yeah, that’s how it works. It’s actually deathly simple. And it’s really cool because the integration is public. The specifications aren’t get hub. Right. But that’s how it works.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And then, so for that person in El Salvador now to spend, are they just basically going to an ATM to get cash out or how do they then actually spend that money?

Jack Mallers:

So let’s say I remit $100 from the United States and that becomes 100 synthetic digital dollars to user in El Salvador. What’s really cool about Strike is those dollars are spendable over the Bitcoin and Lightning network. So I can pay any Lightning QR code or Bitcoin address with that dollar balance. And so a lot of users will walk up to an ATM or will walk up to a local Bitcoin broker and say, Hey, I have $100 on Strike. I’m going to scan this QR code. Can you get me 100 US dollars in like physical cash? And they say, yeah, of course. And what’s happening is Strike’s debiting stablecoin, paying the Lightning invoice or the Bitcoin address, and that’s converting to Bitcoin. And then the people that are giving them cash in return. And so the user experience at the ATM is very native.

Jack Mallers:

It’s like the ATM is like, okay, you want to give us Bitcoin and we’ll pay you cash out for you. Here’s the address? The user scans, the address we debit the stable coin Bitcoin goes to the ATM, the ATM pukes out a local currency. And it’s really an amazing, fascinating experience. We’re actually in a growing beta in the Philippines as well with the same experience. And they’re not dollarized at all right. They’re interfacing with localized currency. And what’s amazing. There is that we didn’t coordinate with the ATM company. We don’t know where they are, who they are, how they work, how is this possible? Because it’s an open system because it’s an open network and open networks have these network effects that are so apparent and so powerful for PayPal to duplicate this experience, they’d have to get the banking relationships local in El Salvador, they’d have to change the law a little bit. They would have to implement all their own ATM’s and get their own merchants. We didn’t do any of that. We didn’t pitch Bitcoin to anyone. We didn’t set up any of these merchants. We didn’t set up any of these ATM’s. We just showed up with an interoperable service on an open network and it, and it solved like a problem that’s been going for like 250 years.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. That’s very cool. And so in that way, you are leveraging the infrastructure that is already out there, but doing it somewhat, obviously there’s regulation. And I’m not a fan of regulation, obviously, but to some extent you can sort of inter operate in a way where you’re not having to be as permission seeking in some sense. So I guess in some sense, you are relying on there being, let’s say a Bitcoin ATM’s in that local country and perhaps local Bitcoin traders who are doing, cash for sats, ways for the local people in that country to be able to then actually, because unless they can spend Bitcoin natively, they will need to get the local cash. And that’s where they’re relying on these points. Right?

Jack Mallers:

Yeah. And so our experience in El Salvador was so powerful because we saw a massive uptick in downloads, massive uptake in user volume and just general signups and interest. We’re all over the media locally there. And then all of a sudden we got contacted by banks. We found an issuing partner that was willing to issue Visa cards to all of our users. And all of a sudden, overnight, we became potentially one of the more powerful financial experiences in the entire country. And so that’s a very awesome case study of what we plan to replicate all over the place. But one interesting insight quickly is you’d be surprised there are on and off ramps everywhere in the world for Bitcoin. And again, we didn’t do any work for that. That’s just part of the network effect where we’re built on top of a system in an asset class that’s growing in popularity, growing in its ability to impact and change lives and improve the quality of people’s lives.

Jack Mallers:

It’s the best savings technology of all time. It’s the best monetary network of all time. And we benefit greatly from all the work that’s continuously poured on day in and day out from others. If you think that we’re built on the Bitcoin network and PayPal is built on the PayPal network, we technically have people working on our network than any other monetary network in the world, and it’s not particularly close. So Strike gets materially better every single day. And we don’t have to do anything. If I told everyone at Strike to take the rest of the year off Strike would be a much better product by the end of the year than it is today. Paypal, can’t say that, Square can’t say that Visa can’t say that. And so that’s just the inherent network effect is we can pretty much launch in any country and know that there’s local liquidity and local interoperability because the Bitcoin network has reached that level of scale, which is just, it’s fascinating.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. It’s really fascinating. When you think of all those people out there developing in Bitcoin and Lightning, let’s say some Lightning protocol developer is doing some advancements on the Lightning network. And then that shows up later in, improvements in the way we route our transactions or the way we use Lightning wallets. It just improves the experience for everybody. And you’re just kind of plugging into that network, right?

Jack Mallers:

Absolutely. One of the fun examples is Bitrefill. They traditionally sell mobile top-Ups now now sell gift cards, but we have users in Florida that are using Bitrefill to remit, and they’re using mobile top-ups to do remittance and someone who’s very new to what we’re doing, what Bitcoin is, how open networks work and the network effects and economies of scale associated would be like, Oh, that’s a competitor. Aren’t you upset that they’re not using Strike as their full length remittance? And our answer is absolutely not. Absolutely not. In fact, Bitrefill as a new network participant that’s natively interoperable to us is additive. Instead of subtractive, we don’t view them as a competitor, nor do we view anyone within the Lightning and Bitcoin ecosystem as a competitor, we’re all natively interoperable with each other. And at the end of the day, people are going to navigate towards the best brand and the best experience. And we’re confident in our ability to continue to deliver on that. But that’s another really fascinating thing is that people are carrying out their own form of remittance with other interoperable services. We don’t have an MSA with Bitrefill. I didn’t ask them permission. We didn’t like spec out our own interoperability within our internal database or anything, it just works out of the box. It’s crazy.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. That’s really cool. And so what was the experience like when you were down there in terms of people there learning about Bitcoin? Because obviously there’s a lot here to learn, but I guess you can chunk it down and put it into an app and make it some parts of the experience a bit easier so that people can use Bitcoin without necessarily knowing the technical details of how the channel open and close and all that stuff works.

Jack Mallers:

Yeah. there’s a few things that were very apparent. One people understand deeply how valuable Bitcoin is as an asset and as a savings technology and no one’s incentivized to spend it right. Nobody wants to get rid of their Bitcoin or UTXOs, their sats. And so Strike providing you a way to be interoperable with this network with a Fiat cash collateral, which is a feature we take pride in. And that I think is very valuable, was very important. Another is volatility. I was staying in a town, the average income is $300 per month. And so Bitcoin has a bad day. You’re talking about wiping months and months and months of living wage away from someone. And so that is very scary to merchants. And so a lot of the assumptions that I was making in a privileged chair here in Chicago, being able to experience that and verify them and greatly understand the ideal experience for a user there was really valuable, but I can tell you that my biggest takeaway is how it’s impacting the way they view themselves and think of themselves.

Jack Mallers:

And I hope I do this justice and I’m able to articulate, but I built a relationship with this local town in this local community. And there’s one gentleman in particular where we sat down over lunch and he began to describe to me that his grandfather was efficient. His dad was a fisherman and thereby he was going to be a fisherman. He didn’t have access to generate yield on savings and build wealth. He didn’t have access to Robinhood account. He didn’t have access to the financial tooling that I had, and he didn’t view himself similarly to someone like me. And he viewed himself as nothing more or less than a fishermen until Bitcoin. All of a sudden when Bitcoin rallies, 10%, Michael Saylor makes money. And so does he, when Bitcoin goes a hundred percent year over year, average yield and HODLers rejoice. So does he, the QR codes that I scan here in Chicago with Strike? He’s interoperable and can scan the same ones. The instant cash finality benefits of the Lightning network he benefits from as well.

Jack Mallers:

And it was the inherent financial inclusivity. How accessible this monetary system really is to giving people a chance to build wealth and protect, purchasing power, protect wealth, and protect themselves against a nation state inflation asset inflation. And a lot of the nonsense that is authored by the Fiat world, but then also the financial inclusivity where these people are not natively interoperable with the United States and with Europe and with a lot of budding services that they’ve never had access to before. And it was just the way that they thought about themselves and the way they valued themselves and the way they now value their country. They feel included and it’s a new sense of hope. And so this person in particular had been HODLing Bitcoin for the last few years and now started their own business. And that just small snapshot was such a powerful concept.

Jack Mallers:

And it’s one thing for me to sit in Chicago in this like very privileged position that I’m learning. I’m now learning how privileged I was growing up. And some of the, having access to Venmo and PayPal and cash app is something that I took for granted. And it’s one thing to, read online how open systems are important and how open protocols and open monetary networks like Lightning are going to be really valuable and how Bitcoin is a savings technology. That’s accessible to people in El Salvador and people in London and New York is really cool. It’s another though to have feet on the ground and shake that guy’s hand and look at the emotion in his eyes when he’s like, now I’m a business owner and before I was a fisherman and that’s just a mindset that Bitcoin enabled and the financial access is provided as something that’s going to end up changing my country, my community, my family. And that to me, was like, it was a perspective that I gathered from YouTube videos and reading Wikipedia and it’s just entirely different thing experiencing it. So that’s the biggest takeaway.

Stephan Livera:

That’s cool. And so how was the level of learning about Bitcoin? Like, were most people like savvy with Bitcoin where they, most of them had a Bitcoin wallet or what was the, what was the feeling like?

Jack Mallers:

Yeah. All the above. We actually now employ two people in El Salvador and I’ll tell you why. Obviously we want a local presence. Obviously their local expertise is very valuable to us, but the other is these people are overqualified to work at Bitcoin companies. They understand what Lightning is, how to scan QR codes. They have all the wallets downloaded. They’ve been HODLing for years. They understand cold storage versus hot wallets. I mean, they really are very sophisticated Bitcoiners, and I can tell you what, they care more than anyone I’ve ever met, and it should be for obvious reasons. And so it’s really tremendous. It’s really tremendous, and it should not be underestimated. The impact that Bitcoin can have on the developing world and emerging markets, just how empowered and driven these people are and using Bitcoin to improve the quality of their lives. And they’re equally as incentivized to help others because of the impact Bitcoin’s had on them. And it’s amazing. They’re as fluent as anyone I’ve met and so much so that we employed them. So I’m not just talking out of my ass here. I mean, I pay these people to be Bitcoiners now. And they’re that good.

Stephan Livera:

That’s awesome, man. So in terms of the interactions and like I know at, at the Bitcoin beach town, there is like, there’s actually more of a drive towards natively transacting just directly in the Lightning network. And so is that something you’re seeing more and more merchants there in the town who are fully going full Lightning and not even doing like as much of the Fiat or, I mean, in the sense that there are people who might be earning in sats and then buying things for sats, just seeing people like that?

Jack Mallers:

Yeah, absolutely. And here’s the thing in an open system, people are going to be able to elect their user experience. Like if you can imagine walking into a Starbucks soon, and there’s this natively interoperable open standard QR code, people can pay that with Coinbase. People could pay that with Strike. People could pay that from the command line. People could build their own wallet that has their own privacy features and remain interoperable on their own terms. And so of course, there’s people that want to earn and spend sats and they believe in a circular economy, they don’t really believe in HODLing as much as supporting, like using Bitcoin as their unit of account and their transactional currency. There’s a lot of people that don’t. There’s a lot of people that think Bitcoin has a lot of upside left and they’re protective of their purchasing power and an ability to grow their savings.

Jack Mallers:

And they only interface with the open monetary network that has Bitcoin and Lightning with Strike. And so there’s a mix of it. All which I think is foreshadowing to the future world. We’ll live in where the power is within the individual, the powers within the consumer. You can remain interoperable with a monetary system on your own terms. You can elect your own privacy tools, your own UI, your own color, set your own project. And that’s why at Strike. We are constantly optimizing for the best experience. and we think we can help deliver an experience that a lot of people will elect to use to remain an interoperable, but we don’t think it will be the only one and we don’t encourage ourselves to be either. So it was really fascinating people. Some people like Wallet of Satoshi, some people liked a Bitcoin beach wallet that they developed locally.

Jack Mallers:

And a lot of people like Stripe but they all talk to each other and there’s no wrong answer there. So one of the really cool stats I’m, out here live, pulling up our internal dashboard. I think of all of the transactions that Strike users have made since our launch, which has been a lot only three have been on chain to give you context we’re like already thousands, thousands of users and like tons of money transferred. And this market is the only market that is that sophisticated and interoperable with Lightning. That is not the case in the United States, in the United States we see an absolutely massive amount of on chain volume. And in this market they’re already like predominantly Lightning and on chain transactions and less justifiably so it’s kind of like a foreign citizen. Doesn’t make a ton of sense, which is awesome. I couldn’t believe it.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, that’s wild. And because if the average income is 300 USD per month paying even one on chain transaction, I mean, if you’re paying four or five bucks for an on chain transaction, that’s a huge percentage of your income. So being able to do it on Lightning is imperative in that context. And so I think that’s also an interesting one because at low income levels, some people have to go custodial because just sadly, you’re not going to be able to do your own open and channel close because if each open is three, four or five bucks, that’s very quickly going to start eating into your income. But I suppose as you rise in income or in wealth, then you can start having accessibility to the more sovereign non-custodial experience. Right?

Jack Mallers:

Yeah. And I think a lot of the innovation that’s been done by some of the Lightning projects and wallets like Muun, Phoenix and Breez has been tremendous and they’re driving a lot of that cost down and they’re driving a lot of the UX up. And those are the trends that as Bitcoiners and just fans of all of the work that’s going on in this industry, we love to see that. But at the end of the day, trade offs are going to be made by the market. It’s a free market. There are no rules, there’s no one judging or gatekeeping any of this. And so these people are going to understand the associated costs, risks, and make these decisions themselves. And yeah, there are people there that use non-custodial wallets, but you’re very accurate that the majority are using some form of custodial or some custodial service.

Jack Mallers:

And when they do want to take an outsized portion and put it into savings, they do understand what cold storage is and it works for them. And I think all of our hopes is that the non-custodial more sovereign experience will be justifiable both economically and from a user experience standpoint at some point in the future. But like I said before in an open system, I’m a Muun user and a Strike user. And I think both of them make sense for me, depending on the use case and what I’m doing. And so I think people will have the luxury of choice, which is not typical that’s that doesn’t exist in the world before.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And as over time, as number goes up, as people start saving, they can potentially have maybe even if they’re custodial in a Lightning context, just for spending day-to-day spending money, but then they could periodically flush that out into a hardware wallet or some kind of non-custodial Bitcoin on chain, even a phone wallet. Right. And so you’re custodial, but only for a small percentage of your overall stack, if you will.

Jack Mallers:

100%. Yeah, absolutely. And you’re already seeing that locally in El Salvador. And I think you’re already seeing that broadly through the Bitcoin community. You’ve got a lot of people on cash app that buy Bitcoin and hold some there, they use a lot, or they store majority of their savings and their holdings in cold storage. They have Strike to be able to allow their checking account to be interoperable with this new monetary network. And they even enjoy breez and stream sats to you. And it’s totally justifiable to have all four. And there’s a chance that you use all four in a given day or given hour. And so, yeah.

Stephan Livera:

And it also, I mean, you were touching on this as well because there’s different schools of thought or different philosophies, right? There are some people who are, who are literally all in Bitcoin have zero Fiat only earn Bitcoin and only spend Bitcoin. And then there are other strategies where let’s say you’re doing more like maybe like a Michael Saylor style you have some Bitcoin, but you borrow against those coins to get some fiat. And then you use Fiat rails to just pay fiat. And then I guess, yeah, that’s, I guess that’s another strategy. And then maybe some other people might do a strategy where they have they have mostly Bitcoin, but they have like some fiat buffer, right. Just to kind of do the Fiat stuff that they can’t they don’t want to do with Bitcoin.

Stephan Livera:

But I guess, where I’m going with this is sometimes people have this thought in their mind of, Oh, only HODL, like never spend at all, but the reality is in order for you to even get some Bitcoin, somebody else had to either sell or spend some coins or you mined those coins, but I mean, most people don’t mine. So you had to, someone else either had to sell or spend some coins and I think that’s an important point that sometimes we miss in the HODLing, obviously I’m, I’m big about HODLing, but I think that’s one point cause sometimes we miss in the kind of only HODL conversation.

Jack Mallers:

Yeah. Well, I’d be a little careful in that example because if you extend it very literally there’s a lot less people that are spending and selling because if you look at a chart, you’d notice that there’s a lot more buyers nowadays and there are people willing to spend and sell. Which of course we understand as like a property of the system and a design of the asset itself and we all were expecting it, but no, you’re absolutely correct. And people can do as they please. One of the things that’s apparent for $300 a month in income is it’s economically irresponsible to have 100% of your working capital in an asset class that’s gone down 80%, three times in its lifetime. Did you just don’t want to expose your family to not being able to live. And so, but like I keep repeating, it’s an open system.

Jack Mallers:

You do whatever you want. And if you want to do that, you have every right to do that. And that’s a very beautiful thing. That’s a human right, to be able to make that decision on behalf of yourself and behalf of your family and whoever else you’re solely responsible for. and so, yeah, we see it a lot and I think it’s a great and beautiful thing, but as much as, it requires people to sell the coin and to spend Bitcoin for HODLers to add to their stack and so on and so forth. I think we’re seeing it less and less, which is why Bitcoin’s gone from 3000 to 60,000 plus a little over 12 months.

Stephan Livera:

That’s right. And so I guess the other question people might have is how are you able to do it for no fee? Like, is it that there’s some fee elsewhere in the system that you’re able to kind of cut through that? And then that’s where you’re kind of getting a margin out of it, I guess. And I understand, obviously there’s some things you can say, some things you can’t say, but I guess it’s more just like people might have a concern of like, how do I know this is going to be like a long-term sustainable thing if there’s no profit for you guys?

Jack Mallers:

Yeah. So we have a lot of different revenue streams it is interesting. There’s a lot that I’ll definitely be super public about. But a lot of these ideas I authored and I think they’re really interesting and I’d like the chance to execute on them. So here’s the thing. and again, I’ll repeat myself in an open system, it’s a race to the bottom and the best experience wins. So I wholeheartedly believe that when you walk into a coffee shop and there’s a QR code that thousands of different products can scan being the best experience is a highly competitive field. And if you’re charging me 1% to scan that QR code, I’m going to do the one that’s 0.9% or the one that’s free. And so I think native interoperability to this open monetary network, which is the core value product that we offer should be free period.

Jack Mallers:

There’s just no way I ever plan on charging anyone that is the base level service. Like what is Strike? Why is it cool? It’s the best way to remain interoperable with this new open monetary network in my humble opinion. And I think millions of people will soon share that opinion. And so that’s why I’m so hard set on native interoperability being free. How do we do it? Our trading partners right now actually don’t charge us. They value the flow. We do enough volume. There will be a day though, like just to be clear where they have to buffer in, or we have to buffer in five basis points, 10 basis points, 15 basis points, but it will never get larger than that. And we will only offer a fee that it costs us to execute so that it remains economically feasible. And I’ve already modeled out like, Hey, if these lines of business continue to go extremely well, we’d subsidize and I’d pay for those 15 basis points to ensure that interoperability with this system is free.

Jack Mallers:

But I mean, we have relationships with Visa where we’re going to be offering a card where we collect all the interchange. We have big, big plans that are going to be announced soon on the acquiring and merchant side, where we have relationships or recharge them for certain services. We have a lot of different plans, but I think what’s really unique about this is it’s the first time we’ve had an open monetary network. And in traditional monetary networks, you charge by blasting acquirers and merchants with interchange and Visa makes all their money by just robbing merchants, 2.9% plus 30 cents, or they charge cash app and Venmo to be interoperable with the Visa direct network. And we not only don’t have that opportunity because in an open system, you can’t justify that pricing, but we wholeheartedly believe that that’s nonsense that the world should move on from that and be better than that.

Jack Mallers:

And so we’ve been really innovative in the way we think about generating revenue for a financial vertical service that operates on an open monetary system. And so the reason I’m not like overly transparent and public about it is these are things I plan on coming out with in the next 30, 60, 90 days. And I think it’ll be interesting. I think it’ll be fun, but no, I mean, everyone knows we’re venture capital back that we’ve got our start from initial funding we’re able to offer and grow the team and build these services because of that. We’re not cashflow positive right now. But also you can look in our terms, we don’t sell user information. I’d never in a million years would do that, but you can see that I’m legally binded to those words because it’s in our terms of service you can look at the quotes that we stream users, they are market rate, we don’t charge anything. And I will be the utmost transparent once we roll out some of these services and products and how I see the company being profitable and sustainable for the next hundred years.

Stephan Livera:

Awesome. Yeah, that sounds well. I’m looking forward to seeing that. And I think probably the other big question people have is regulatory burdens right now. I’m libertarian I’m anti-regulation, but we still live in this world and there’s all this KYC, AML sanctions laws, blah, blah, blah, money, service license, whatever MSB, licensing, money, transmission, whatever laws, there’s thousands of them. So how are you thinking about that stuff? Do you think that makes it more difficult to provide this kind of service? Just because of all the AML KYC know your customer requirements and things?

Jack Mallers:

Yes. I personally am not a fan of existing legal frameworks and regulations. I think it’s not scalable either to deliver a global product, to have to comply with the various jurisdictions and independent opinions on different jurisdictions on what Bitcoin is, how it should be taxed, how it should be treated different licensing structures and so on and so forth. I also though think it’s not only on behalf of the company, but on the better half of humanity that we go through the process of understanding, and you have to understand that and get acquiring these licenses in establishing relationships with institutions in places like El Salvador, what happens behind the scenes is a tremendous amount of education. And we’re actually taking progressive steps forward in allowing people to understand what is Lightning, what is an HTLC, what is Bitcoin? How should it be treated?

Jack Mallers:

How are people thinking about it? And we’re making progressive steps forward, you have to start somewhere. And we don’t as a company hold the opinion that because we are in general disagreements of the existing frameworks and how policy makers and lawmakers think about Bitcoin that we just shouldn’t innovate financially and do our best to move humanity forward. In fact, we overinvest in legal. I think one of the principles we hold internally as a team is that great feature can do one thing. A great team can do anything. And so we overinvest in our engineering team and our product team and in our legal team and to enable them to deliver the best experience ever. And yeah, it sucks. It’s really shitty. We also view it though as an opportunity to educate and hopefully push the world forward. And forward-thinking progressive laws especially in emerging markets that have an opportunity to be a little bit more nimble and forward thinking where the United States is not really in an incentivized position to be changing laws and like making Bitcoin legal tender or anything like potentially in other places in the world, that’s not so much the case.

Jack Mallers:

And so a lot of education and doing what we can to deliver a financial service. So we believe in it is what it is.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. And so I guess the current level of KYC with the app is that it does, obviously there is KYC involved with the app. And I guess once you kind of go beyond certain thresholds, you’re going to have to go ask for more info and do all of those typical things. But so long as people are comfortable with that, then they are able to use Bitcoin in a very tax efficient way because they’re not having to spend their own coins, they’re spending somebody else’s coins. So I think that’s probably the, trade-off there for listeners to think about. And probably for many people that make sense.

Jack Mallers:

We don’t, I don’t want to brand us as some like cypherpunk, privacy oriented service. I think there are a lot of privacy benefits compared to other custodial services. I think that as a company, as an individual, I’m more cypherpunk than other CEOs of exchanges and such. But with all that being said it’s a KYC service we’re highly regulated. We also aren’t, we don’t think of ourselves as bigger as like having non-custodial Strike someday as well and having a version of Strike where Bitcoin is held on the phone and that we can greatly lessen the KYC or general relationship we have with a user from a compliance standpoint, we’re very open towards optimizing and working towards the best financial experience possible. And that’s just what we do, period. It’s what we wake up and try and achieve every single day. And so, yeah, right now we think that the service is very valuable. It does require KYC, AML. We hope in the lessen it over time we hope to do a lot of innovative things, but yeah, it’s just like another exchange, unfortunately right now, but with some pretty interesting value propositions.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, For sure. When Australia?

Jack Mallers:

We actually have a few users testing in Australia. The way we think about I’ve been pretty transparent online. Our next major Fiat currency will be the Euro and then like very tightly followed by or in conjunction with the British pound. And then Australia is right up there Australia, Canada’s up there as well. And so we have seen a lot of success within the company, our growth, the ability to grow the team. And I think we will have a lot of major Fiat currency support within the next quarter or two. And that’s dead honest, transparent answer. I hate giving dates because the real answer is I have no idea and I don’t want holding me accountable for that. My relationship with this community, I’ve been in Bitcoin for almost a decade now, eight, nine years. And I’m an honest guy very transparent organic, authentic dude. And I’m not going to try and salesmen anybody or give a date that I don’t wholeheartedly believe in. So that’s the honest answer is we’re actively testing, actively working on it and the Euro will come first that’s for sure. But AUD is something that we are very focused on and intend to deliver as soon as possible.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah and I think one other interesting thing with Strike just generally is part of Bitcoin’s adoption story is going to be people teaching other people, right Bitcoin, and the way it often is, or at least historically has been like, Oh, do you want some Bitcoin? I’ll sell you some, but now it’s the other way around. If you’re a merchant, you can tell your customer, Hey, I want you to pay me with Bitcoin. And then if Strike provides an easy enough way for the total newbie customer to then learn and then say, Oh yeah, I want to buy this thing off you. And I just have to download this app and pay you with that. Then that’s like another whole way to start doing almost merchant adoption the right way and not the 2013, 2014 way.

Jack Mallers:

We’ve seen this a lot. There’s a really famed burger shop in California run by Bitcoiners. They have a BTCPay server and they tell everyone to download Strike. And if you pay with Strike, they’ll give you a little discount or reward or a large soda or something. And what they’re doing is they’re taking the Bitcoins that Strike is sending and they’re HODLing them. But the consumer’s like, Oh, this is just a different version of Venmo. This is cool. I just think my checking account scan the QR code and my burger’s half off. Wow. That’s great. And so we’re already starting to see that, which is awesome. And we’ve been taking a lot of input from users, and again, we want to deliver the best experience. So we’re launching a product that allows you to get paid in Bitcoin or Strike and act as your bank.

Jack Mallers:

You can line your direct deposit and paycheck up to it and you can divide it into Bitcoin will offer the ability to, our card is coming out, which we’re more than happy to turn on Bitcoin rewards. Even entertaining the idea of offering people buy Bitcoin experience within the app for free and allowing someone like a merchant to split how much of the incoming money is split into Bitcoin or dollars. So we’re not against or opposed to any of that. And we’re already starting to see a lot of it. Which is pretty cool.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah, I like this idea of it’s just like how, in the earlier days, people of the internet, people were a bit more scared about doing online commerce because, Oh, I don’t want to put my credit card details online. I’m going to get stolen from, and now, now almost every day, people are doing online transactions. And so I think it’s a similar kind of thing because sometimes you’ll see people say, Oh, look, they’re going to ban Bitcoin, or they’re going to regulate it out of existence and okay. Yeah, they’re going to regulate it, but that doesn’t mean they’re going to regulate it out of existence. And I think services like yours allow a more mainstream level of adoption for people to start earning Bitcoin, holding Bitcoin, spending Bitcoin, such that it is essentially going to reach a point where it’s just too intertwined into all of society that you just can’t shut this thing down.

Jack Mallers:

That’s already there. Maybe not until like magnitude in which people like rule it as binary of being one, but I think it’s already at that point. And these announcements will trickle over the coming weeks or months, but there’s some huge sports teams or athletes or pop stars, or even sports leagues that we’re working with that they have various interests, pay their players in it. They want to have their record label associated with it, or there’s even teams that are like, we want to be interoperable. We want Bitcoiners to be able to come and pay us in Bitcoin, but we unfortunately due to the league’s rules, can’t touch Bitcoin, can’t hold it on our balance sheet, but because of Strike, we can remain natively interoperable with the service just from our bank account. And that’s a beautiful thing.

Jack Mallers:

And that way we’re to your point, we’re inching closer to mainstream having some direct association, some net benefit, some incentive to seeing Bitcoin succeed. And maybe one day they’ll be HODLers. But with our service, they can remain interoperable on a beautiful way. That’s very easy for them. And it’s been proven to be Strikes, been like an entry-level starting point. And as the founder and CEO of the company, I actually would be very happy if people start with Strike and then end up having a full non-custodial Lightning and Bitcoin node running in their basement that they’re connecting to from open source wallet via lnd connect or something I guess from the business standpoint we don’t want to lose users, but as an individual, I would love that. And so, yeah, it’d be a stretch in that way.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. So it’s like really, we’re just growing this overall pie. I’m also curious just to get your views on is there anything you’re excited to see in the Bitcoin and Lightning world from a more technical perspective? Is there anything you’re excited about that you would like to see come in?

Jack Mallers:

Well, taproot, I obviously am watching closely. I think what’s been interesting for me there, there isn’t much debate on the technicals. There isn’t like an opposing party or sub-sector of the industry that violently is opposing things like taproot, or a lot of the base level Lightning protocol enhancements. I think what’s been interesting is the political landscape or out of, I don’t know the correct way to articulate, but just how do we enable and activate and come to general consensus. I can say in the Lightning community, one of the things that I would like to see improve is there’s now specifications that live outside of the protocol specifications. So there’s like some specification to stream money to podcasts. There’s, some LN URL specification. There’s a specification for zero sat invoices that’s inherently insecure and that no one should be using.

Jack Mallers:

And what you don’t want to see in an open system is independent specs that live separately of each other. And that, like in order to be interoperable with everything, you have to implement like 25 different specs. But what also is deeply frustrating for people building products is that the protocol to getting general consensus and buy-in from a developer community and doing things the right way, and the responsible way is usually slow, it’s usually painful. And it’s not the most efficient process of all time, and it doesn’t necessarily respect the timeline that you want to operate on. Bitcoin operates on its own time. We operate on Bitcoin’s time. Bitcoin doesn’t operate on our time. And so it’s been something pretty interesting to watch Tropic Quinn’s entire history. That’s arguably why SegWit2X happened and Bitcoin cash happened is that people want it advancements that we’re seeing today three, four years ago.

Jack Mallers:

And I that’s just kind of part of an open monetary system and open source money is going to have this property. And I find it pretty interesting. So as far as the tech goes, I’m excited about all the tech. I’m excited about taproot. I’m excited about there’s various Lightning developments which are really interesting Lightning doesn’t need this level of consensus. So all the independent implementations can go off and do creative things on their own time. I would like to see like community consensus and some of the like politics improve, but maybe they never do. And maybe that’s just a property of the system, but that’s kinda my overall take. Yeah.

Stephan Livera:

That’s just how it is. Yeah. So what would you like to see from a Lightning technical perspective? Like, would you be interested to, I don’t know ANYPREVOUT or trampoline routing or any, any other things like that that you do, you’re kind of interested in that idea

Jack Mallers:

That’s specific to Strike, I would like to see probing be greatly improved and implemented on the specific implementation, or even be like specced out in, in some formal fashion. Probing for us is tremendously important. And I think it’s going to be even more and more important for services to know how much a financial transaction or activity is going to cost them upfront. Typically, and we’ve been frustrated a little bit and like multipath probing for example, like that is something that nobody has sat done down and specced out and said, Hey, this is the right way to do it. We’ve had their, our own approach. But then our approach leaves us with interoperability issues with Muun Wallet, with Phoenix and with Breez, and how to probe, how to responsibly forward along HTLCs that are responsible for probing, I think is something we would like to see reach the implementation level or even the protocol level at some point. So maybe that’s not the most popular answer. But for someone who’s running a business, that’s growing very fast on top of Lightning. That’s something I would love to see and wake up to tomorrow.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. No, well, that’s precisely what I was interested to hear, just to kind of get some ideas around what you’re thinking about. And in terms of Lightning growing, are you seeing things like from a, how are things from a reliability perspective? Are yoUStill able to route things through correctly? I guess also in your case, you’ve probably got large private channels and things, but just because there’ll be times where you’re routing a payment, not just inside your private kind of channels network, but out to the broader because there’s some merchant who wants to take Lightning and then how are you finding that kind of thing in terms of payment success and failure and things like that?

Jack Mallers:

Yeah. We keep a lot of really interesting internal metrics to try and measure and keep a pulse on these types of things. The health of the network and our ability to route payments and have payments routed for us is growing and getting better and better and more stable as time goes on. We have this internal metric called missed opportunities where a user wants to make a payment. And it’s, we call it a missed opportunity that we weren’t able to fulfill the payment on their behalf. And our missed opportunities are going down very drastically. And it’s super interesting. We get to learn user behaviors and like the average size payment for us for example, is a really useful metric that informs how big our channels should be. That informs how we think about HTLCs being forwarded, HTLCs being stuck on there’s a lot of data that is not accessible, like in the infancy of Lightning that now we’re starting to be able to understand that informs decisions on how we implement certain features, how we think about channel management and liquidity, but all in all I have no doubts or fears about the overall health of the network, and I think it’s more than ready to scale to millions of people.

Jack Mallers:

And so, and the sophistication of other peers has been fantastic. You know, you are reliant other peers remaining healthy relationships with other peers, right? Like connectivity and overall health of the network is only as good as its weakest link. Not actually, but like, I’m sure people can understand what I mean by that. And I think peers on the network are like acting in good faith and the network’s generally healthy, so pretty pleased.

Stephan Livera:

And so in terms of as obviously as number has gone up, that means capacity in all of our channels has risen too. Right. So have you found that it’s much easier to route through multi hundred dollar payments or thousand dollar payments or even bigger payments on Lightning because of that?

Jack Mallers:

Yeah, of course, of course. That’s just logical. But also I think that that metric is deeply misleading. You’ve got private channels all of these non-custodial like Breez, Phoenix and Muun, all very private channels. And so we’ve never really had an issue routing extremely large payments, but no, of course, like as number goes up, passing increases, but also as you’re well familiar with, Stephan as number goes up, everything goes up, interest goes up, participants goes up, routing performance goes up, companies that want to donate and fund developers to build things goes up. And so Bitcoin has this very vicious self-rewarding cycle that we’re all well familiar with. And so number go up has been great for Lightning because everything’s good for Bitcoin.

Stephan Livera:

That’s cool, man. That’s awesome. Yeah, so it’s probably a good point to close up here. Where can people find you online and what do you kind of want to leave the listeners with just as a final message for them?

Jack Mallers:

I close out usually the same way on all of my media appearances. Jack Mallers is my real name, not John, not Joe it’s Jack. If I could go back in time, maybe I’d be an anon, but I can’t. And so you know my name, I’m Jack Mallers on Twitter, @JackMallers. Everywhere. And I love interfacing with the community. I greatly deeply and appreciate the support. I was raised on Bitcoin. Twitter got into Bitcoin and started interfacing with the community when I was 18 years old. So I love all of the support and the value of that relationship I have with everyone and all the listeners, like very deeply. So you hit me up at any time. my DM is wide open. I read every DM. I read every email, it’s getting to a scale in which I struggle a little bit. So don’t hold me too accountable, but I just appreciate the support. You contact me, ask me any question at any time and yeah. Thanks for everything. Thanks for having me on, man.

Stephan Livera:

Yeah. Thank you. I think you’re doing a great job. I’m really excited to see what’s coming next from you and very excited about the things that you’re continually building. So thanks for joining me.