David Hoffman (5:01)

Yeah, I think like if you go onto crypto Twitter and you kind of, you know, pay attention to the zeitgeist of the moment, it's like, you know, perp Dexs, meme, coin, launch pads, all of this very exciting stuff that produce, you know, billion dollar size venture outcomes for like brief moments of time and then the fad kind of goes away, you know. And I'm never going to fault anyone, any founder for ever pivoting, trying to find product market fit. You know, like, I think there's like a, I think crypto, Twitter especially is very harsh to founders that, that pivot when pivoting is actually just a part of the regular startup experience. Something about Celo is that Celo seemed to like identify P2P. P2P payments and kind of like also like developing economies and has stayed just locked in on that focus since the get go. And like I, I think when, when I'm going to ask you, not right now, but I'm gonna ask you in a second to like kind of share some usage metrics and I think maybe people who are like kind of following the crypto Twitter zeitgeist of what it means to be in crypto will might be surprised about like what actually Celo is doing over in the world of P2P payments and developing economies. But talk to me a little bit about the whole P2P strategy. You identified it early, locked in on it, and has been laser focused on it ever since. Put me in your shoes maybe all the way back in 2013 when Celo got started or maybe that maybe that's 2018. Yeah, 2018. Okay. Just off by five years. Put me in your pre Ethereum, pre EVM. So put me back into your shoes in like in like 2018 and what it's been like just to be laser focused on this part of the crypto economy.

Marek Olshefski (6:47)

Yeah. And you know what, actually, you know, 2013 is an interesting year. It's the year that, you know, I sold my first startup and literally a week later I was at a music festival where I bumped into Brian Armstrong who sent me.

David Hoffman (7:02)

I knew there was something there. I knew there was something in 2013.

Ryan Sean Adams (7:05)

It's a podcast instinct. David could feel it as a host. That's why he went to 2013. Tell us the Brian Armstrong story. Wait, what music festival were you at? Yeah, where music does Brian like?

Marek Olshefski (7:16)

Yeah, it was outside lands. It's kind of like outside of San Francisco. Right, that San Francisco has.

Ryan Sean Adams (7:22)

Yeah.

Marek Olshefski (7:22)

And yeah, we were both just invited by actually by svb and this was back when svb, I guess, banked crypto exchanges super early on and, and yeah, and he was very excited obviously about Coinbase and Sent me some bitcoin, which I've kept to this day. And, you know, the experience is really lovely and in, in a way you can think of that as being actually inspiration for what we wanted to do, but we just wanted to do it in a trustless, decentralized way. Right.

Ryan Sean Adams (7:55)

Wait, but you got, you got pilled into crypto by Brian Armstrong.

David Hoffman (7:59)

That's, that's kind of cool. At a music festival.

Ryan Sean Adams (8:01)

Yeah, that's kind of cool.

David Hoffman (8:03)

That's a good story.

Ryan Sean Adams (8:03)

That's a good, that's a good way to come in this phase.

Marek Olshefski (8:05)

If only I went straight into crypto right then instead, you know, we had just sold our first company. I had to stay at the acquiring company for a while, and it took a while before I was ready to do my next thing, but in hindsight, maybe we should have done it right there and then.

David Hoffman (8:21)

But, okay, so yeah, Ethereum gets it created, the EVM gets created, and then you leave the company that put golden handcuffs on you for a while, and then you're like, okay, let me apply the EVM to consumer use cases. Was that kind of the, the, the flow?

Marek Olshefski (8:35)

Exactly. I mean, I think back then it's funny that, you know, suddenly payments is, is kind of in vogue again. I mean, back then everyone was talking about, you know, how crypto can advance financial inclusion, how, you know, it's, it's just going to change the world for everyone who, who lives in a place where, you know, they have inflation or they have kind of an unstable government. And that was really what excited a lot of people, and it certainly excited us. And the way we thought that we could have a big mark on the whole world is by creating global Venmo. I think, you know, there was a time before you could send a text message to anyone in the world for basically free. And that, if you think about it, wasn't that long ago, right? It's really only when WhatsApp kind of created massive network effects that suddenly, you know, you could pretty much reliably send like a text message for free, globally to anyone in the world. And, and that moment just happened, you know, just really suddenly. And the same thing is going to happen with payments. You will very soon, I'm pretty certain of it, be able to send value, stable value to anyone in the world and have that value be immediately useful for the recipient in a way that works for pretty much everyone, even normies. And, you know, obviously we're there for people who are crypto savvy, but to get there for everyone in the world we're still, we're still working towards it. This is ultimately the mission and the vision behind what we started eight years ago, and we're still relentlessly working towards that.

David Hoffman (10:15)

Euphoria brings one Tap trading to the palm of your hand Built on Mega Eth, Euphoria takes real time price charts and projects it over a grid of squares. You tap the squares that you think the price will enter in just 5 to 30 seconds in the future. If the price goes into that quadrant, you can pocket anywhere between 2 and 100x your trade. No other application helps you trade faster and with more leverage on market driving events like FOMC meetings, presidential speeches or global macro events. Thanks to Mega ETH's real time blockchain, Euphoria is the way to get real time price interactions with the market. On Euphoria, you'll be able to compete with friends using Euphoria's real time social trading experience, allowing you to go head to head with your friends. A great party trick. If you project the app on a tv, it'll be like the Mario party of derivatives. To trade on Euphoria, people can deposit stablecoins from any chain or do direct fiat transfers and everything gets converted into Mega Eats native Stablecoin USDM in the background. Sign up for the Euphoria waitlist at Euphoria Finance and follow them on X at Euphoria Underscore fi what if you could trade gold, forex and global markets with the same tools and speed that you use for crypto? That's exactly what Bitget Tradfi unlocks after strong beta demand, including over $100 million in single day gold trading volume. Bitget Tradfi is now live for all users inside of your existing Bitget account. You can trade 79 instruments across forex, precious metals, indices and commodities all settled directly in usdt. No platform switching, no fiat conversions. This is Bitget's universal exchange vision in action. Crypto and traditional finance side by side. You get deep liquidity, low slippage and leverage up to 500x letting you apply crypto strategies to macro markets new to Tradfi. Start with gold. The Gold USD pair is liquid macro driven and a familiar natural bridge between crypto and traditional markets. Try trading gold on bitget now@bitget.com. click the link in the show notes for more information. This is not financial advice.

Ryan Sean Adams (12:07)

It's so fascinating because back in 2013 in fact I think this is part of like the Coinbase founding vision. It was more about the payments use. Case you even look at the first lines of, was it a peer to peer payment network? Isn't this in the, you know, Satoshi white paper? It was all about payments. It was like, when are we going to get to the day where you can buy your cup of coffee with bitcoin at your local Starbucks? Right. That was always the dream. I maybe you said payments is very much in vogue and we'll talk about that. I'm wondering from your perspective, being in the space for so long, observing it and actually working on this project, the payments project in crypto for 8 years, why now? Because to some people this will look like an overnight success. Maybe they'll go and they'll be like, oh, the genius, the genius act did this or something like that. From my perspective, it feels like a tech tree that crypto has been building out. I always, I always get in my mind the tech trees and like civilization, you ever play that game where you sort of, you know, your civilization discovers mathematics and then they can branch off to physics and then they can get, you know, nukes or something like that? Well, it's like crypto had to have cheap block space, I think, because that was really expensive the whole time on bitcoin, on Ethereum, and then also had to have some sort of a payment type of asset because for all that bitcoiners have talked about bitcoin for Starbucks, that there's a trade off there between like using your bitcoin at Starbucks and it being a store of value asset that you don't actually want to spend it. And so stablecoins were the other unlock. I see cheapbox block space and stablecoins as the tech tree reason that crypto is now really focused on the payments use case and everything's kind of fallen out from that. What's your take?

Marek Olshefski (13:56)

Yeah, so I think back in 2018, I think we were looking at this exactly the same way. We're like, what do we need? We need scalability, we need ease of use, we need stable coins. Obviously stable coins you can't transact with a, you know, volatile asset, especially not a store of value. Like you want to borrow against that store value and transact with that. You don't want to spend your, you know, your precious eth or bitcoin. And and so we built Celo with all of these things in mind. We made was probably the first EVM proof of stake network with really high scalability from day one. We even built our own stablecoin protocol into the platform, which we have now since spun out through a pretty cool dao Spin out, which I don't know if it's the first of its kind, but certainly we were pretty stoked to kind of pull that off. And I think actually that stablecoin doing it ourselves in hindsight was maybe a mistake because we weren't credibly neutral and it took longer. We were incredibly neutral on the stablecoin front and it took longer for folks like USDC and USDT to come to sell. Since that spin out, USCC and us have come to sell out, we've become fully credibly neutral when it comes to stable coins. There's now tons of people deploying stablecoins on, on Celo. And, and I think that probably, you know, in hindsight maybe slowed us down a little bit. But the thing that ultimately I think is needed beyond those things is bootstrapping network effects. It's very difficult to get everyone in the world to agree on what they want to use to transact. You need to start in smaller markets, grow those, get really dense network effects and then use those to pull more and more people in. And you know, this is what certainly Venmo did with kind of this focus on college markets that they started with. And this is what minipay is doing with a focus on very key set of emerging markets where really the utility of having something like this just is 10x better than what they have available. Right. Nobody needs global Venmo in the US right now because they have Venmo. And so you need to start somewhere where people don't have something as good as Venmo. And so that's been a big focus and it's just taken a while to really bootstrap those network effects.

David Hoffman (16:24)

Can we get a cross section of the usage of Celo? I want to, I want to learn about the qualitative and the quantitative usage of Celo. So how many people are using the chain? Whatever your metric preferred preferred metric is monthly active users, daily active users, whatever. And then what's just the typical cross section of what that usage actually is?

Marek Olshefski (16:45)

There are on the order of 700k daily active users. Is that wallets daily active addresses? Yes. Okay. However, because minipay uses this phone number based identifier system that requires you to verify your phone number, I think we have a lot of conviction that those are, I think the majority of those users are likely mini pay users. And, and we know that those users tend not to sibyl because you need to have a Google account, an app phone number to onboard. And so I think there's a lot of It's a lot. It's certainly a lot harder to sybil than if you just use addresses.

Ryan Sean Adams (17:28)

Wait, this will actually shock people. So you think you have around 700,000 daily active users on.

Marek Olshefski (17:36)

So if you go to Grow the Pie and you look at active addresses across the Ethereum ecosystem, you'll see that we are the number one L2. We overtook base late last year. We are ahead of Polygon even and most of the time we're also ahead of Ethereum Mainnet as well.

David Hoffman (17:54)

In terms of active users.

Marek Olshefski (17:56)

Exactly. Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams (17:58)

Okay. This is on Grow the Pie. Where would I find this? On chains. Chains. Let's see.

Marek Olshefski (18:04)

Since you go to Grow the PI fundamentals, maybe.

Ryan Sean Adams (18:09)

Okay, okay, I see it.

Marek Olshefski (18:13)

Wow.

Ryan Sean Adams (18:13)

Okay.

David Hoffman (18:14)

And then what's it. What's the typical profile of what people are doing? Is it all stablecoin payments?

Marek Olshefski (18:20)

Yeah. So I'd say there's three big use cases now on Celo. So there's P2P payments driven primarily by Mini Pay. There's on Chain Effects driven primarily by Mentos stablecoins and increasingly there's decentralized identity through Self Protocol, Self xyz. So these are the big ones. I think when it comes to users, P2P payments are certainly driving the most users. When it comes to volume, I think P2P payments and on Chain Effects is driving a lot of volume. But when it comes to kind of new and exciting ZK use cases, you know, Self is really leading the way.

David Hoffman (18:59)

So this is kind of what perks my interest in Solo in the first place because we have a splattering of chains around that have different kind of brands with them. Tron is the Tether Payments chain. We have a newer startup called Codex doing the Forex trying to penetrate into the forex markets. We have Worldcoin doing the Proof of Personhood Utility value. What else do we got? There's other, other things like this Celo's got a toe in all of those things, but like it doesn't really have the brand of any of those things. Like, like payments, for example. Why, why do you think Tron has the Payments brand instead of Cello? I don't know how your metrics stack up to Tron. I know, I know. Tron's metrics are like, you know, impressive. Not to say Tron does. Hasn't deserved it. But like, to what degree do you think like, for example, Tron has the payments chain brand and not Celo?

Marek Olshefski (19:51)

Yeah, so actually if you go to Tether's stats page, you actually can see that when it comes to weekly active users. Stella is actually ahead of Tron now with we peaked at 3.3 million weekly active addresses that are transacting in USDT. So certainly, I mean Celo is like Ethereum's answer to TRON 100%. You know, I think Tron certainly had an earlier start and has done well. But you know, I think we're coming right. You know, we're nipping at their heels and in some, for some metrics even overtaking them. And so yeah, really, really excited about a lot of these stats like now finally pushing us into, into the lead. It's been, it's been a pretty long and arduous effort to, to, to competing in strong because they do have a lot of mindshare and they are quite globally recognized.

Ryan Sean Adams (20:47)

Mar, can we get into the qualitative for a moment? So some really impressive metrics particular da daily actives. Right. So this implies that some of the type of user obviously Tron is, is by far a leader among sort of stablecoin payment chains in terms of total value locked. Right. There's so much USDT on top of Tron. But you just said when it comes to daily actives, these would be like kind of smaller payments, weekly actives. Okay. That Celo is actually taking a, taking a lead. So this sort of implies that you're not dealing with whales so much as you're dealing with ordinary people and ordinary wallets. Can you take us through more the qualitative? Tell us a story about a user of Celo. What are they doing and how are they using it? Where do they live? Maybe what's their daily active usage of Celo actually like right now a lot.

Marek Olshefski (21:46)

Of those users Mini pay and minipay has historically focused on the African continent in large part because they have onboarded a lot of users who are using Opera Mini, which is their like high speed light browser targeting emerging markets. I think they have something like 1 billion installs, a hundred million monthly active users of Opera Mini. And they embedded minipay into, into that browser. It's also available standalone but I think to get a lot of those users onboarded, they embedded into the browser and so now they're focusing primarily on, on other emerging markets. Latam in Asia, but initially there was a lot of focus on on Africa. And so one really I think compelling story that, that I've heard of a Minipe user is this yoga instructor in Malawi. So this yoga instructor in Malawi, when Covid hit, he had to close down his yoga studio and he, he took his business online And I think just because the time zones lined up, he somehow started getting customers in Europe and then he ended up getting, I think towards the end, like the majority of his customers and I think something like Norway in markets around Scandinavia. And he, for the longest Time was using MoneyGram to have these people pay for, you know, their lessons. And then he came across minipay and realized that it was even with the users having to on ramp and pay on ramping fees in Europe and even with him having to pay off ramping fees in Malawi, it was still, I think, 40% cheaper than MoneyGram. Since then, Minipay has also removed these on and off ramping fees. So it's even more advantageous. And so this was a big unlock for this person. He got to keep more of the money that he was, you know, earning. And the other thing that he was very happy about was he could keep it in dollars when he received it and only needed to convert it to local currency when he wanted to spend it. And so he was actually able to hedge currency risk and inflation and all of that basically without any additional effort. So that's one interesting use case is people who, you know, the workforce is becoming increasingly global, but it's still hard to pay people globally. Like if you want to, you know, hire, say, I don't know, a software engineer in Nigeria, it's being quite difficult without crypto to pay pay. These folks, software engineers, you know, they, I think they're, they can be relatively crypto savvy. But if you want to hire, I don't know, some sort of other freelancer that maybe is, you know, more of a normie type person, then mini pay is increasingly becoming a really great way for these people to, to earn money overseas. And minipay launched something pretty cool recently. They added the ability to, for anyone in the world to create either a US dollar or European bank account that's tied to their self custodial wallet. And so they don't even need to explain to their potential employer that they're using crypto as long as they can receive a bank transfer, or as long as the employer can or a client can send money to one of these bank accounts either in Europe or the US Then suddenly anyone in the world can start getting paid, regardless of where they live, regardless of how difficult it's been historically to send money to those places. And so we're just seeing a lot of examples of that. So there's, you know, I think four different use cases we touched upon the freelancer use case. There's Obviously, remittance use case. You're sending money to family members. You can do that with mini pay really easily. There's a saving use case. You just want to hedge inflation and local currency risk. And so you want to have some dollars and earn some yield on those dollars. And then finally there's this new use case that Mini pages launched called Pay as Local. And that is another really interesting and exciting one. And to give you another kind of story, there's this community member, Nico in the solar ecosystem who was at eatsafari recently. And he, he was using a tuk tuk to get around as one does in that area. And he actually had a bit of an accident. So the tuk Tu flipped over while he was in it. Luckily he was fine, but all of his belongings went flying everywhere. And in the end he actually lost his wallet and he.

David Hoffman (26:36)

Sorry, his physical wallet or his crypto wallet?

Marek Olshefski (26:39)

No, no, his physical wallet. Sorry.

David Hoffman (26:41)

Yeah, it's a relevant question on this podcast.

Marek Olshefski (26:44)

Absolutely. And I mean, you can imagine you're traveling, you're. You're in a country that you, you know, maybe you haven't visited before and you lose your physical wallet. Normally, you know, that's like a pretty big emergency. You need to, I don't know, find ways to, to get a new credit card, maybe even like, you change your plans. He instead proceeded to do every transaction in Kenya and then later Nigeria because he didn't cut his trip short. He actually flew to Nigeria and continued. He did everything with minipay. Minipay now lets you pay with M. Pesa anyone in Kenya. In Nigeria you can pay using the local Rails there in Argentina for DEP Connect, they launched Mercado Pago support. You can pay anywhere. Mercado Pago is supported in Brazil. You can pay with pics, you know, et cetera. And so, you know, this is kind of probably a more useful use case for maybe some folks in, in this, in your audience, you know, who might travel to crypto conferences and might find themselves in situations where, you know, credit cards might not be accepted. Increasingly, I think Mini Pay will, will have folks like that covered. But I think the primary use cases still continue to be kind of the freelancer, the remittance use cases and the savings use cases. And for those, maybe your listeners, you know, have friends and family who, who might be in those boats. And if so, you know, I'd highly recommend just directing, you know, those friends and family members to minipay to. Because it's just, it just does a wonderful job with these use Cases.

David Hoffman (28:23)

Yeah, the Mercado Pago example just rings true for me. It's, and probably for many listeners who just went down to, to DevConnect in Buenos Aires in Argentina. Mercado Pago is just kind of like the last mile payments provider across Argentina. It's, it's like our stripe. It's like our stripe. If you go and like find that little square, a little tap to pay thing inside of any merchant in America they have the Mercado Pago down there. And like I like prior to Malay getting elected it was impossible, it wasn't impossible to use credit cards, but you would just wouldn't do that because they would do a 40 to 70% markup because it would run through the banking, commercial banking layer of Argentina which would, you know, be very heavily managed by the government which would just give you a terrible exchange rate because they're using the credit card networks. You have these in the intermediate intermediary commercial banking layers who have this like control from the government to give you a pretty terrible exchange rate which is like a source of revenue for both the banks and also the government. That exchange rate has gone down since Melee got into office. It went from like 40% exchange to like 5 to 6%. So you know, it's not, it's not anything we would ever tolerate in America but still people just kind of tolerate it now is so much more low, low using their credit cards in Argentina. But that's because like I didn't, I didn't have mini pay on my phone. I wish I'd known. But had I had stablecoins that fee would have been zero and it would have been a P2P payment between me and the merchant. And stablecoins are getting adopted very heavily in Argentina because merchants found out that if they don't do, if they take stable coins instead of credit cards, they get instant settlement, which means they get access to that capital immediately as opposed to like a bi weekly settlement period of the credit card networks which then are accruing float as part of their business model. But instead of giving it to the businesses, they're accruing the yield on the float that they have. And then the businesses don't actually see that money for like one to two weeks later. And so this is why stablecoins in Argentina are being adopted so heavily is because they get that access to that capital immediately upon the actual transaction going through and then they can actually just use that to invest in their business. And it's, to me it's like a very bankless aligned ethos. It's like you know, merchant and consumer, consumer pays merchant directly with stablecoins and you cut out the commercial banks, you cut out the government, which is great. And, and it's a, just a more efficient use of capital. And, and I want to connect this back to minipay. This is a mini pay this organization that I have a few questions on that's kind of facilitating this on the CELO blockchain, you know, crypto economic decentralized protocol on the Internet. But also it seems that Celo Pay has really done the hard thing of solving the last mile problem by integrating local merchants in a bunch of different regions. You talked about this, but I really want to highlight this just one more time. The virtual bank account where like if you need to be paid by your employer or by someone, they will spin up a virtual bank account. They'll just give you, here's your deposit number. Kind of in the same way that like if somebody is trying to pay me stablecoins and I'll go find an address and I'll share them the address and they can send it to me. Minipay spins up a virtual bank account for your local jurisdiction. I'm. I don't know if they're integrated all over the world, but you just have like the deposit and routing number and then they map that to your stablecoin wallet and when the hundred or $1,000 bank transfer comes in, it converts to stablecoins on the back end and then deposit it into your account as Stable Coins in minipay on Celo. And I don't know how much of the globe that they've integrated, but from my conversations with you Mark, it seems to be a decent amount of the world of the globe. Is there anything react to anything I just said?

Marek Olshefski (32:12)

Totally. And they do it one for one which is pretty amazing. So they subsidize the exchange fees and the on ramp fees for the virtual accounts. It's currently only European in US bank accounts. Okay, but for, but still the goal.

David Hoffman (32:25)

Of minipay is to do is to solve the last mile problem. Right?

Marek Olshefski (32:30)

So yeah. And I think, you know, maybe coming back to Ryan's question earlier, like why now? You know, we have spent, you know, again, we've just been grinding on this for, for so long. We spent so much time working to nurture on and off ramps in emerging markets. We started an ecosystem fund way back when we started a incubator program with you know, some ecosystem folks doing wonderful work over at CELO campus. And it took years for companies to form, for companies to raise capital and to launch successful on and off ramping companies throughout a lot of these emerging markets. And only now can people easily on and off ramp in a lot of these markets. And so I think that certainly helped. And minipay has, I don't know, I think probably like 20 to 30 on and off ramp partners that have integrated globally, maybe even more at this point. And they allow you to on an off ramp not necessarily as easily as having a virtual bank account. You know, it's still more like kind of a Moonpay type of experience in some cases. But more and more now they're offering these really seamless experiences where for places where money tends to originate, like you know, the US and Europe, it's really easy to send money in using one of these bank accounts. And for places where you want to spend that money, they're now making it really easy for you to spend. Without that on and off experience, you just scan the Mercado Powder QR code and then it just, it just gets paid directly and it's, it's finally happening. It just took forever to, to get all of these companies to form and to start offering these services. And I think that's ultimately why also why crypto will win in this category, right? Because sometimes people ask me like, why can't Venmo just become global, right? Why does global Venmo have to be on crypto rails? And I think the answer is you need just a crap ton of companies with a crap ton of licenses in each of these markets to row in the same direction, work together to create this amazing experience. And it's just for various reasons too difficult for any one company to do that well. But if you want to have multiple companies doing it well and delivering this amazing experience well, then it turns out that crypto is actually the perfect way to incentivize a lot of folks to grow in the same direction. And so it's working really nicely in that regard with Stella.

David Hoffman (35:09)

Yeah, it kind of reminds me of Andreas Antonopoulos idea of the Festival of the Commons of just like when we all, when you know, company A with license A operates on the same blockchain as company B with license B. Well, those two things can talk to each other and coordinate together. And there's like a growing of the pie that when we all add all these together with the experience that comes out of it. We've talked about this, this thing Mini Pay a lot. I want to dive into that and just kind of like touch on that Directly. What is this organization? What is this? Is this. I think maybe people think that this is a sello thing. It's, as I understand it, it's not, but there is a partnership there. Talk to me and fill me in about what minipay actually is.

Marek Olshefski (35:48)

Yeah, so Minipay is a product. It's by Opera, the browser company. They've been around for 30 years now. They're a public company, traded on NASDAQ. They were, you know, very popular on desktop before Chrome came out. And then Chrome, I think, really decimated the desktop market. Opera has had a lot of success on mobile since then and now actually increasingly back on desktop, which is cool to see. And so Minipay is their kind of entry into kind of the fintech world, so to speak. And just by virtue of them having a lot of customers, I think they have on the order of 500 million monthly active users across all of their products. They are just an amazing. They're in an amazing position to basically win at global event law. They have the customers, you know, they have close to, you know, 10% of the world population as a monthly active user today. And many of those users are in markets where financial Rails are lacking and it's difficult for people to receive money from overseas. And so it's just a perfect starting point for them to kind of create the network effects needed to take over the world here. So that's, that's Opera, you know, Celo, the Celo Foundation, I'm over at C Labs, but the Solo foundation has a partnership with Opera. I think just last month they announced the renewal of that partnership through, I think, the end of the decade. So we're. Yeah, we've been working really, really closely with them. I think both parties are just very aligned having, you know, each other succeed.

David Hoffman (37:28)

What's the nature of that agreement? Like what. What did you guys agree to?

Marek Olshefski (37:32)

It's an exclusive agreement.

David Hoffman (37:36)

Why? I mean, I would guess why Cella would want them to be exclusive if they're such a powerhouse. Why would they agree to be exclusive to you guys?

Marek Olshefski (37:46)

Yeah, and again, I'm not at the Cell foundation, but, you know, there's financial terms, of course, that that makes that appealing. Okay, okay.

Ryan Sean Adams (37:54)

One of the things, Marik, you were talking about is on ramps and the kind of the last mile problem that's being solved and how that's been a impediment, but now we're setting those up on ramps, of course, and off ramps. I'm sort of wondering if there's a world where those become less necessary over time. So yeah, it's kind of like where we're going. We don't need on ramps any longer because everyone is just on minipay and they're in the defi open finance ecosystem. And once everybody has crossed that chasm, they've on ramped, they feel less and less of a need to off ramp. Why? Because everyone else that they want to interact with is already on ramped. I'm wondering how long you think that will take to play out. Basically how long until we can actually go much more bankless here and build the network effect such that on ramps and on off ramps become like almost like minorly important.

Marek Olshefski (38:55)

Really, really great question. I would have thought it would have happened by now when we started eight years ago. I'm very bullish on this future, obviously, and we've been working towards it for a long time. And we think that for this to really work, you also need local currency stablecoins. So that's why we've also worked with the Mento protocol to help nurture.

Ryan Sean Adams (39:19)

That's still a ways away, right? All we have is dollars right now.

Marek Olshefski (39:22)

Mentor has 15 stable coins on cello.

Ryan Sean Adams (39:25)

They do, okay, they're just very small. Small in terms of amounts.

Marek Olshefski (39:31)

Yeah. But it turns out that, you know, the amounts that they have already are sufficient to do on chain effects on seller. And we should talk about on chain effects as well because it's a quadrillion annual, like I think 3.2 quadrillion market annually. So it's like a huge market. FX is of course. But you know, I think increasingly more and more of that is coming on on chain and maybe eventually everything will be on chain. But coming back to making everyone bankless, I think it will take a while. And I think it will take a while because you need effectively everyone to have a self custodial wallet. And only then, well, it just makes sense. From then on you can just continue to pay the next person or the next vendor or the next employee on chain. And until we get there, we effectively need it to be very easy. There should be no friction going from fiat to stablecoins in the back for everyone in the world, regardless of where they live. And that's something that is difficult to accomplish obviously globally, but increasingly we're seeing that this is happening. And so there will be this transition period. I think it's probably going to be a fairly long transition period, but who knows, right? I think the thing with network effects is that things start slow and then suddenly smoke turns into fire and then suddenly overnight everyone's using a self custodial wallet. So perhaps, perhaps it'll happen soon I think. But I think this experience building working on Celo for eight years has made me think that it will take still a while. But that doesn't mean that you can't get very significant percentage of the world's population acting this way. And I think that is certainly increasingly just happening today.

Ryan Sean Adams (41:33)

Already talk about that on chain fx because when you said quadrillions, like that's kind of an interesting number to me. That feels like a lot. So when, when you say fx right, are you just talking about like for this type of use case currency conversion from one fiat to another, Is that what FX effectively means? And so when and when you say on chain fx, what are you talking about?

Marek Olshefski (41:56)

So the FX market today is I think the biggest financial market in the world. There's now on the order of $9 trillion exchanged every day. So across the year. Yeah, that's in the quadrillion, 3.2 quadrillions.

Ryan Sean Adams (42:16)

And this is people going from dollars to yen to yuan to euros, back and forth to all the local currencies in Africa and in Asia and all over the world.

Marek Olshefski (42:26)

Absolutely. So individuals, people traveling, but I think more than that, commerce, companies, institutions, banks, all transacting with each other through the corresponding banking system and then everyone looking to hedge as well. And so that is a massive, massive market. But it's not very accessible to a lot of people. Quite inefficient working still through the corresponding banking system and it doesn't work 24, 7. And so there is just so many reasons why bringing this on chain will just deliver so much value to everyone. And increasingly we're seeing that activity happening on Celo in large part because Mento has 15 stable coins on Celo. So if you take away the dollar and a euro, that's you know, 13 local currency stable coins. There's also a lot of other local currency stablecoins on Celo as well. Maybe not quite as big as Mento, but you know, focused on like the Swiss Franc or, or the pound or the Brazilian real and increasing. We're just seeing, you know, on Uniswap, on Velodrome, on a lot of these exchanges, just more and more volume, which is pretty, pretty cool to see. But I think the real exciting thing that's about to happen is there's a perp dex that perhaps by the time that this airs will be live up down that XYZ and their focus really is on just being a perp dex for on Chain fx and so down.

David Hoffman (44:04)

XYZ as a name for a perp text is just a great name.

Ryan Sean Adams (44:07)

Well done.

Marek Olshefski (44:08)

I love it as well. Yeah, it's genius in many ways. And you know, I think the thesis there is, you know, one, if you want to hedge currency risk, you know, you need something like a perp dex and so that will enable that. But also arguably, you know, if you're interested in just day trading or you know, kind of investing in crypto, I would postulate that you probably have a better sense of how your local currency will perform relative to other currencies than you might have. Well, when you, you know, think about how some meme coin might, might perform, right? Like when it comes to meme coins, it's usually kind of insiders cabals that are deciding the direction of these things. If when it comes to on chain effects, you know, it's, I think it's more the economic market forces driving trade between countries and you probably have a fairly good sense of how that's going. And so arguably, you know, especially if you add leverage because obviously these swings are relatively small. But if you add leverage through a pertaxis, suddenly this becomes interesting for perhaps the degen crowd who, you know, might have again, a little bit more alpha than they would on some of these other kind of especially meme coin type assets. So I'm really excited for this. It's going to run 24 7. It's going to be accessible to everyone in the world. Hopefully it'll be more efficient for bespoke pairs of assets. Right? Like if you want to go from the Nigerian naira to the Brazilian real through the correspondent banking system, I think you're going to end up paying a lot of fees. I think on chain can be a lot, lot more efficient for that. And then if you add a per tax then you can start doing some really interesting things as well. So yeah, I'm, I'm really excited. And yeah, increasingly we're seeing a bigger percentage of stablecoin volume on, on celo coming from these swaps between these dushing stable coins.

Ryan Sean Adams (46:14)

I guess this makes me think of two things. One is if your thesis, which I think is part of the bankless thesis, is all finance goes on chain, right? Crypto's not done yet, guys. It's like barely even started. If you think of the quadrillions in onchain fx, if you believe all of that is going to end up on chain, why? Because on chain is lower transaction fee, better liquidity over time. We are 0.00001% of the way in the on chain FX market. Like we're just getting started. There's no way this crypto thing is done. All right. That's one thing I was thinking of. The other thing I was thinking of is like, okay, but like have we heard the last of the incumbents here? And when I say incumbents, I'm talking about countries. A lot of countries in emerging markets that have weak local currencies and governments that maybe they're not as excited about this whole defi open finance thing as we are and as excited as their people are. Why is because they have to. And they want to lock their people into a currency system in order to tax them. Right. There's this whole, you know, Gresham's law thing, which is bad money tends to drive out good money. And so when you have a good money in circulation, a better money than your local unit of exchange, say you have dollars, which is like, for a lot of countries, it's like an apex predator currency asset. Okay. Because it's just so damn liquid and it's relatively stable relative to your own local currency. When you have access to dollars and it's just a tap away. Why would you even use your local currency unless you absolutely had to? And open finance makes it such that you don't have to. You could just use dollars. And so we're seeing some early signs of some countries and some governments and some banking system and oftentimes they're one in the same. Try to push this out. Try to restrict it. Okay. And that runs at odds obviously with an open free society where all citizens have access to the Internet and they could download everything they want. I'm wondering if you see that as a battle to fight in the future. Maybe you're fighting it in pockets already. And what you think about that, like at some level, this crypto vision that we have of everyone has the ability to go bankless and have their own wallet and use whatever currency they want.

Marek Olshefski (48:51)

Yeah.

Ryan Sean Adams (48:51)

But will governments around the world stop them from doing that?

Marek Olshefski (48:55)

Yeah. I think this is where local stablecoins will play a really big role. I think there still is value to having a unit of account that just matches your day to day expenses. And the way you think about the world is unless you live in a country that's fully dollarized, it is always a chore for a lot of people to have to constantly try to convert between these two currencies, especially if the exchange rate keeps changing. So I think for some types of transactions, I think People will happily stay in their local currencies. Maybe they won't save in those currencies.

Ryan Sean Adams (49:35)

That's what I mean. That's what I mean. Okay, so that's the Gresham's law thing, which is bad money tends to drive out good money out of circulation, which means the good money they store and they keep, the bad money, they're happy to spend that. They'll spend that all day. I'll save in stablecoins, but then I'll go to the grocery store and spend those stablecoins, convert it to my local currency and spend that. That's not necessarily what governments want. That's not what banks want. They need the wealth to stay in their local currency in order to inflate it away in order to tax it, essentially. And that runs contrary to what an individual wants. You see what I mean? There's this trade off in places.

Marek Olshefski (50:15)

Totally. And I think Brian Armstrong actually addressed this in Davos recently and he's been getting a lot of credit about one of the quotes he made. Now he's talking about how crypto almost is a. Like a check and balance on central banks globally. Right. Like if a central bank misbehaves, then that only pushes individuals into crypto more. But if they don't, then, you know, I think it's fine. And so I think my sincere hope is that, you know, everyone will go on chain. There will still be local, stable coins for people to think in their own unit of account. It's useful for commerce to have local currencies because you can adjust to trade deficits easily with them. And I think as long as central banks aren't printing insane amounts of money, then, then I think everything can still coexist. And if they do, then ultimately, for the first time ever, people will have a choice and will be able to actually do something about that. And I think that to me, is just really what crypto is all about.

Ryan Sean Adams (51:28)

It really is. And it's an untold story, it's an undertold story of what crypto is about. It's a freedom, technology, I think sometimes in the west, like, people don't see it.

Marek Olshefski (51:36)

You know what I mean?

Ryan Sean Adams (51:37)

Like what, you know, Celo is doing what stablecoins are doing around the world to export this choice and this freedom and to hold government officials and central banks accountable by having an alternative. It's the right to exit. It's a beautiful thing and it's definitely why we're excited about this space and why we're in it. I want to ask you a question about, you know, something that you've referred to earlier, which is it seems like crypto has really started to focus on the stablecoin stack, let's call it. And so we talked about Tron earlier on. There's some other competitors here. So there's a. Polygon has done something recently where they have sort of a stablecoin blockchain as well at some level. And now they've gone and they've acquired some on ramp type companies. And you could see they're kind of verticalizing, let's say, and like expanding up the stack. And then of course, on the other side, you get projects like Tempo from Stripe. Now Stripe already has the Fiat on ramps, of course, and the dev tools for that. And what are they doing? They're missing the blockchain, so they're building their own blockchain. They're building Tempo, and that's kind of their stack. And now I see Celo competing against this, which is. Celo started with the blockchain, is now partnering for the On Ramp and the Wallet app with. With minipay. But at some level, all of these stacks are somewhat similar. There's some convergence here. One comes from one direction, another from another, but it's kind of a building out of the stack. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that. Like some of the other plays that we've seen recently, the Tempo and Stripe thing, the Polygon with. With On Ramps, do you think? Or even even Circle with Ark. So they're a stablecoin issuer and now they're trying to get into the blockchain game as well. What do you think's going to work here? Do you think there's. Are you seeing the convergence that I'm seeing here?

Marek Olshefski (53:28)

Yeah, I mean, I think Tempo is definitely something that, you know, I was surprised to see they didn't go the L2 route. I think that will probably hurt them. As a chain that transitioned from an L1 to an L2. I'm just surprised when anyone launches an EVM compatible Alt L1. I think those days, you know, should be long behind us. I think if you're launching an EVM chain, you should launch it as an L2. I think if Tempo is successful, it will transition to become an L2. I suspect that it will be successful, but probably only in the US initially.

David Hoffman (54:02)

Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium Bankless RSS feed. The Premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry. Questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor, both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the Premium feed instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support Bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it if you signed up for Bankless Premium and there is a link in the Show Notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026 few people in crypto put real skin in the game when they make public top or bottom calls. The Defi Report is one of them. The week before the October 10th flash crash, Michael from the Defi Report emailed his entire newsletter saying he's going aggressively risk off and sold the majority of his book from crypto into cash. This is when eth was about $4,000 and Bitcoin was 110. Michael runs the Defi Report, an industry leading research platform built on data cycle awareness, risk management, transparency and most important importantly, skin in the game. We like Michael at Bankless. We like his analysis and that's why you hear him on the Bankless podcast.

Ryan Sean Adams (55:17)

About once a month.

David Hoffman (55:18)

And the Defi Report is giving Bankless listeners one free month of access to the Defi Report. So if you're looking for some sharp data driven analysis to make better informed decisions around your portfolio, you can learn why and how Michael called the top and what he's doing next all in the D5 Report Pro. Check it out. There is a link in the Show Notes.

Ryan Sean Adams (55:35)

Can we camp on that for a second? Like why an L2? Like why are you why, why not Nel1? Like why do you say that so emphatically?

Marek Olshefski (55:43)

I mean Ethereum is continuing to be, you know, just a place for Defi, right? It's they just doesn't matter how much any other kind of alto one is trying to compete. You know, Liquidity continues to go to Ethereum and with the LT scaling centric roadmap now there is just a way for any chain. You don't have to be EVM compatible, but if you're EVM compatible it's even more of a no brainer to tap into both liquidity but also into the network effects that Ethereum has formed around all of the L2s that have been created. And I think maybe right now it doesn't feel like being an L2 gives you that much because we don't yet have incredible interoperability between L2s or between mainnet and L2s. But that's going to be solved in the next year or two, right? I think increasingly all of the effort on lowering block times, on reducing finality on Ethereum, coupled with all of the amazing ZK tech innovation, will effectively be mean that all L2s will be able to fully validate their chains on Ethereum and have six second finality. And that means that you'll be able to send messages between ethereum and these L2s and between L2s and other L2s. And that means you'll be able to send a lot of this liquidity that exists today in the ecosystem. So to me it just seems such a no brainer. I mean, it's one reason why we worked so hard on adding ZKD to Celo last month. I think you guys talked about this in one of your shows. Celo had its fourth hard fork of the year. We really had quite an incredible year last year. The first hard fork being of course the transition to becoming NL2. Then we had two more pretty meaty ones and then the third one was super meaty where we added succinct support. And now you can do fault proofs using ZK proofs. So we have a ZK fault proof system very similar to Mega Eth. We also use Eigenva, similar to Mega east. But unlike Mega east, the we're cheaper than them and we're rated on L2 beat. And they, you know, they put us at the top of the Optimian and Delirium tab as of last month as of December. So yeah, if you like something like Mega Eth, you know, you're definitely going to like Celo I think even more, more secure as per L2 beat, cheaper and I think equally scalable.

Ryan Sean Adams (58:24)

Really like the architecture choices you're incorporating kind of the best of, I think that Ethereum offers here. But I want to push you on something, Merrick, because you just said it was a no brainer. Okay, so no brainer. And yet the people making the decision to launch EVM L1s, I know they've got brains.

David Hoffman (58:42)

These are some smart people of which you were one.

Ryan Sean Adams (58:46)

It's stripe, okay? And it's not just stripe. The paradigm folks, they're smart they're crypto native. They know what they're doing. It's Circle, a crypto native company and they're doing an L1 EVM. And sometimes I think, okay, like, sometimes I think like you. And I'm like, okay, like, why could they be doing this? Oh, it must be the L1 token premium that still exists. That would just what a rational actor would do. You get this kind of token, you can kind of inflate and there's like sort of a premium associated with that and it's just like, worth more to do it. You can always become an L2 later, and so why not milk the L1 Premium while you can? And then, and then other times I'm like, well, you know, these are smart people. And they, they keep giving me technical answers for this. You know, Ethereum can't do XYZ or. We don't want to be dependent on Ethereum speed or something like this. Anyway, I just want to push back because these are smart people. They have brains.

Marek Olshefski (59:36)

Obviously, the Tempo team got a lot of pushback when they announced DL One Direction. Matt, I think, publicly came out and said, you know, finality is a big reason we're payments focused. We need to have fast finality. And, you know, there's some truth to that. Celo had one block finality as an L1, and then we transitioned to becoming L2. And now we have to wait for Ethereum finality, which, as you know, can take quite a bit longer. And, and so I think you could argue the finality reason. Of course, Ethereum is working to add, you know, one or two block finality. It's working towards shortening its block time so that problem will go away soon. And so either they didn't want to wait for that, or they didn't believe that that would happen, or, you know, they're using this as, you know, a technical reason. But really it's, it's something else. Maybe it's just, you know, the excitement of having, you know, working on an L1. Right. I think for a lot of people, you know, there's still this idea that, you know, it's easier to compete against, you know, Ethereum if you're, if you're. An L1 or not, not an L tier. But I think that's ultimately maybe just ego. And as Ethereum improves its finality, as the benefits of all of those network effects that are being created just become so obvious to everyone, I think Ethereum will just pull everyone in. I have just a lot of conviction that Ethereum will Become the settlement layer of the whole Internet, not just web3. And it'll take a while, but network effects are powerful and it's gonna happen. Yeah, but you know, on our end for example, you know, we've been grappling with this finality question for a while and so now we're actually working with Espresso to add 2 second finality back, you know, using the espresso system. And so that's, you know, using espresso economic guarantees which obviously are, you know, nothing compared to Ethereum. Nothing can touch Ethereum on that front. But for smaller transactions you can have, you can have these guarantees and then if you really, you know, are moving a billion dollars, you can, you can wait for Ethereum finality on Celo as well.

David Hoffman (61:53)

Let's talk about this last piece of the puzzle here, Self xyz. What puzzle pieces this represent for Celo and how are you guys leveraging it?

Marek Olshefski (62:02)

Yeah, so for us this is all about onboarding everyone into crypto. You know, we, we're not going to stop until Global Venmo is here and it's on Celo. And to do that we need to onboard everyone in the world. We can't just onboard, you know, crypto savvy or degens or you know, people who, you know, excited about, you know, what crypto is today. And the only way we'll be able to onboard them is through incentives. Right. I think you're gonna need to use incentives. Incentives have primarily been the mechanism that have, you know, companies have used to, to onboard folks. But when you offer incentives in a Web3 world, you know, your ability for people to game you is just so much higher. It's just really, really hard. And so we need really good civil protection. And it's ironic that, you know, bitcoin obviously started with kind of a civil resistance, you know, mechanism and proof of stake was another really good one. But that only works for people with basically money either to run a, you know, mining nodes or to stake capital that they have. If you want to onboard everyone, you need to be able to have a civil resistant mechanism that works for everyone. And you know, I think you can argue that world has an interesting design for, for say onboarding the whole world. And so when we thought about self, we wanted to do something that I think was equally compelling but maybe took a slightly different approach and maybe that addressed some of the shortcomings of the hardware based approach. At the end of the day to onboard everyone in the world, world needs to get people in front of physical hardware and that means they have to travel, that means that you have to. There's just a lot of friction, there's.

David Hoffman (63:51)

A whole supply chain problem.

Marek Olshefski (63:54)

And so instead what we wanted to do is we wanted to piggyback on the most trusted attestation of humanhood that people have today. And that right now is your biometric id. Either your biometric passport or. Many countries now are issuing biometric national IDs. And these tend to be just, you know, in the meat space, the best attestation of your uniqueness, of your humanity. And what's really cool about this, what makes these things biometric, is that they effectively have a signature through kind of a certificate authority chain leading up to country wide certificate that basically attests by your home country that this ID is valid. And so few people know this. But you know, modern passports today, they have this little biometric passport logo on them. It's a little rectangle with a little circle in it that means that there is a microchip in your, in your ID. You have this also for national IDs increasingly. And that ID can be read by NFC and the data that you read by NFC includes a signature that basically proves the authenticity of your id. And so what self is, is it's a ZK passport protocol effectively that proves on chain that you have a valid id. And what's cool about this is you can take the, like you can take the third party out of ID verification, right? Usually when you verify your id, you're, I don't know, signing up for Coinbase. Coinbase has some third party that they use and you're kind of giving your ID information to some third party. They're looking at it, they're saying, does it look like it's forged or not? If, if not, then, you know, they attest that you have a valid id. Well now with smart contracts you can do that on chain without that third party. You can just verify the correctness of the signatures in a smart contract. And that's pretty cool because you don't have to give your data to someone who might lose it, might get hacked. You know, we've seen just an incredible amount of KYC data hacks lately that honestly truly frightening in many ways. But even better than that, you can do it in zk. So you verify the authenticity of this data into your knowledge and then you can prove statements about yourself in zero knowledge without having to reveal your personal information. And so that's ultimately what self is. It's primarily great for civil resistance, which is primarily amazing for onboarding Billions of people into crypto using rails, using IDs that people have today without requiring to go get, you know, in front of physical hardware. But it's also actually so much more because you can in zero knowledge do verifiable credentials. You can prove statements about yourself without revealing anything else. And so one pretty interesting use case is you can prove you're over a certain age. Right. We're seeing a lot of regulation globally that's, you know, protecting minors either from social media or from adult content sites. But the way that they're enforcing that is through kyc, which is I think probably the wrong move. Something like self allows you to prove that you're over, say 18 without even revealing your birthday to anyone. Another cool use case is proving that you're not on the OFAC list if you're getting an airdrop. Increasingly, you know, more projects are worried about, you know, sanctions law. We can prove that you're not on the OFAC list without revealing, without the individual having to reveal anything about themselves. And so there's a lot of really cool use cases, some very serious, very web three, some more web two. And then there's also just like fun ones like you can prove your hair color in zero knowledge. So if you want to do a true blonde coin, you could actually my.

David Hoffman (67:55)

Hair color is incorrect on my id says it's black.

Marek Olshefski (67:58)

Black. You could, yeah, you could claim an airdrop for, for a hair color for having black hair different than your actual. But I mean, yeah, there's like cool fun things you could do on that front. You know, you could definitely do David Coin. Actually both of you should do, you know, either a David Coin and a Ryan coin and then for free to other Davids and other Ryans.

David Hoffman (68:18)

We do have a Dave Dao of 220 people.

Ryan Sean Adams (68:20)

Yeah, but you don't know that they're Dave.

David Hoffman (68:23)

That's true.

Ryan Sean Adams (68:23)

We don't know that Is ZK verified that they are actually Dave's? You could have some impostor Ryans in there.

David Hoffman (68:30)

So we could make a faucet of coins that only drips out tokens to people with the correct true Daves. True Dave. Yeah.

Marek Olshefski (68:38)

Speaking of faucet, by the time that this airs, Google Cloud will be using stealth for the faucet, which is pretty cool. Cool. So we announced that I think a while ago, but they've been working on it and we'll be finally be live certainly by the time that this airs. And they're also working on a mainnet faucet, which would be a first of its kind. And that's primarily possible because it just provides you such amazing symbol resistance, but also because you can do this OFAC compliance, which obviously is important for a big public company. But yeah, you should definitely do it like a Dave Faucet or Dave Gate. Your Dao Dave Gate.

David Hoffman (69:20)

I love that.

Marek Olshefski (69:21)

I love that.

David Hoffman (69:21)

If there's any Dave's listening, hit me up. I'll add you to Davedao Merrick. This has been great. I think maybe listeners kind of understand like why I wanted to have you on and kind of just do the cross section of Celo because I think it's an underrepresented story, at least in regards to cet, which is no longer the center of crypto anyways. So. Whatever. One last question, mark. I want to put this all together. So you have stable coins, you have enough stablecoin transaction volume to rival Tron. You have the proof of personhood.

Marek Olshefski (69:51)

I wouldn't say volume. We're still working on usage.

David Hoffman (69:54)

Okay.

Marek Olshefski (69:54)

On, I think we had $4.4 billion of stablecoin volume last month. That's a lot. But Tron is, you know, obviously also very big.

Ryan Sean Adams (70:05)

Okay.

David Hoffman (70:06)

So with that corollary or Amendum, you also have the proof of personhood. You're working on Forex. You're fast and cheap like Mega Ether Monad. You have like mini apps kind of like the, the like mini pay has mini apps kind of like Roin. You have a bunch of different stuff that other people have when you put it all together. And you also, you also like look forward for, call it the rest of the decade until 2020, 2030. What are you trying to position seller as? Where are your growth factors?

Marek Olshefski (70:34)

We are very aligned in this belief that everyone will come on chain, that you know, fintechs, finance, everything will just be on on chain. And so we're, we're building the best platform for, for anyone to build a Neo bank on on chain. And the way that we're doing that is again by focused on being really laser focused on this one use case which is P2P payments. And we think that that will suck everyone in the world in. And once they're all on chain, then every builder will just want to cater towards them. And we're seeing that increasingly today with minifigure.

Ryan Sean Adams (71:15)

Marik, thanks so much. I feel like Sell it was very much an underrated project. So appreciate you coming on and very understated about all the progress that you've made over the last eight years. But the way you've stitched it together. And the progress you've made is actually pretty unique story in crypto, so thanks for stopping by and telling us about it.

Marek Olshefski (71:32)

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me.

Ryan Sean Adams (71:34)

Bankless nation. Got to let you know. Of course. You know, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in. But we are headed west. This is the frontier. Not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.