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CRYPTO 101
Ep. 708 Is Bitcoin Losing its Edge: Edge Wallet CEO on Privacy, Self-Custody, and Crypto’s Identity Crisis
00:47:35
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Podcast Host Intro
Welcome to the Crypto 101 podcast presented
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Paul Puey
by Gemini, your bridge to the future of money.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
All right, everyone, welcome back to the Crypto 101 podcast. We hope everyone is having a fantastic day because no matter where you're coming in from in the world, you're certainly in the right place. We've got another great podcast in store for all of you because today we are joined by Paul Puerto Way. He is the CEO and co founder of Edge Wallet. Paul, welcome. And it's great to have you, man.
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Paul Puey
Hey, thanks so much for having me. Glad to be on crypto 101 again. I think it's been a while, but I love what you guys have been doing as far as like the 101 title, right? Getting people the basics of crypto onboarding. Hopefully that next generation of folks, that
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Podcast Host Interviewer
is the goal over here is to bring in leaders and people from all over the. Not just the crypto space, but like anybody who's even interested or related or wants to get involved with the crypto space and trying to bring in some of those leaders and builders like yourself so that you guys, you know, the builders, the experts can say, hey, let's explain this stuff and all the different aspects and give everyone that 101 to crypto that they so much deserve. And you know, for the listeners out there, we are just talking right before this. If you're not watching the video format of this podcast, you can always see it on YouTube. So if you're coming in from Spotify or Apple podcasts or anywhere else, I just had to admire Paul's hat here. It said the anti fiat crypto club and we were bantering a little bit before this and I was like, oh, man, that's a really cool hat. It was some really good merch ideas. So, you know, shout out to that. And I thought it was a really cool name, but a little bit of an icebreaker. Paul. For people who don't know, Paul is a rock climber. He loves rock climbing. And so my question for you to kick us off here was, what's been harder? Your last rock climb or the last month of the crypto market as we've kind of kicked off a bumpy 2026.
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Paul Puey
It's been bumpy, but I think the harder thing is actually remembering my last rock climb. So you say I'm a rock climber. I would call myself a former wannabe rock climber at this point. I mean, it definitely had a significant overlap between me being a climber and I was actually. That was my career I wasn't a professional climber, but, you know, I operate a climbing gym. I did some outdoor guiding and that overlap with crypto. I actually took our team rock climbing on the day that we launched our first iteration of Edge, which was actually called Airbit. We launched it in Vegas in 2014. Go way back. And we took them all on a rock climb in Red Rocks in Vegas. But since then it's been like my climbing frequency has gone downhill. I have a fingerboard at home that I'll use on occasion and that's about it. But if I had to think of my absolute hardest climb that I did, that was definitely harder than the past month. The past month, Especially since I've been in crypto since 2014. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't, wasn't an easy month. Right. It wasn't easy at all. You have to kind of manage funds that you hold in crypto versus not especially as a company. We earn all our revenue in crypto. We pay everybody in crypto. And when I say crypto, it's like 90% Bitcoin and Bitcoin, not just USDC. I barely call that crypto. To me, that's a payment method for Fiat. It's a better payment method for Fiat, but it's still payment method for Fiat. But when you're earning bitcoin and you're paying people in bitcoin, that means it's actually really inconvenient to hold something more stable than bitcoin because you'd have to earn your money, then convert it over into something more stable. Then when you got to pay people, you then got to go convert it out back into bitcoin. So we're, I'd say probably more tied to the price of crypto than most other companies. For better and worse. Right. When market's down, it affects us and markets up obviously over time. And you can think of it as almost like a dollar cost averaging. Right. Overall, I think it's been in our positive, but it could be tough on ones like you mentioned, but definitely not as hard as my hardest climb where I've taken in climbing terms like 40 foot whippers falling off onto my gear, um, and you know, just barely not hitting the ground. But those are some hard climbs.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
Yeah.
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Paul Puey
Last month, walk in the park in comparison. But still nothing fine.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
You know, I've tried it a few times. I can't brag that I was particularly good at it. But something that I think both of us have gotten good at is weathering these, these crypto winners. And man, since 2014 you've been through significantly worse ones than whatever we're experiencing now. You know, we're talking 60, 70, 80 plus percent drawdowns on Bitcoin on some of these moves over much more extended periods of times. You've seen collapses and blow ups and all sorts of other things. And that's, you know, one of the big things about the crypto market right now is, you know, looking back, just a friendly reminder to everyone is like, hey, the crypto market has been through substantially worse, especially once you look at it from a fundamental kind of bird's eye view and you say, well, the fundamentals here really aren't that bad. In fact, it's probably in one of the better fundamental spots that it's been in here in recent years and you see a lot of positive developments over there. But you know, before we even get into Edge Wallet, Paul, I mean you used to work at Nvidia. I mean you've since moved on to doing some other things. And one of those things was co founding Edge Wallet. Just walk us through that journey. Because when people look at the past, I don't know, decade, two decades about there's like man, a couple of really big things came up and like one of the two biggest things that people always like to compare is like, oh well, how did it do versus Nvidia and how did it do against Bitcoin? And you're like, well I have my hands in both.
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Paul Puey
Now I'll say this, for someone that both worked at Nvidia and got into bitcoin, I am not as financially sound as I should be. By like 100x number one, when I left Nvidia, obviously it was a much smaller company still successful public company and whatnot. And you know, I definitely had some gains from having worked there, but I left not because I just wanted to do something else. I loved what I did there. At the time, it was graphics that was the core focus. I left at the very, very start of using GPUs for computing. We called it GPGPU, General Purpose GPU which was in essence used for machine learning primarily, but it was just another cpu, but running on GPU and there's thousands of cores, little tiny cores. But I love graphics, I love games, I love the challenge of making beautiful imagery on a computer and displaying that. So I left actually for health reasons. I broke down, you know, working in front of a computer, you know, repetitive strain, your back, your neck, everything kind of broke down. And that's why I had left. And ironically it's that departure that kind of, I won't use the word woke. Helped me awaken to the reality of our world. When you start to look for healthcare for chronic issues, you start to see how broken that system is. And then you start to see the grander system of both government, big institution and how broken that is. Very financially motivated to be very broken. And so I worked in a completely different industry, non tech. That's where I got into climbing. Climbing was actually my savior. It was my physical therapy for a lot of the things, the ailments, the joint issues and whatnot. So climbing helped me through that. It also introduced me to a lot of people that thought differently about health and wellness than your traditional western medicine. So this could be an incredibly long story, but fast forward, I discovered Bitcoin and I'm like, wow. This also taught me that, hey, the whole financial system is just as corrupt as health, wellness, pharma and whatnot. All just as corrupt. But this is the one rug pull that we have an opportunity to pull on right where we can actually sweep the feed out from underneath large establishment. And so I went full dive into bitcoin, into crypto. I sunk what I had left into it, which I drained everything I had from Nvidia. Because I was unemployed for a good amount of time. I couldn't work, my hand body was wrecked. So I could, I think I calculated out been close to 100 billionaire by now if I had been able to keep some of my, some of my shares. But maybe close to like maybe 50 or so. But yeah, you know, I couldn't. Like I physically couldn't. I had to sell and unload. And I was at least grateful that I had money to weather the storm of many years of being unemployed and what I had left I put into bitcoin. But I was so passionate about it. Like I cared less about the money and I cared more about building in the space that's disruptive to a fault that I sunk everything I had into building in this ecosystem and doing meetups and sponsoring meetups and sinking my time into that. And then of course building this company, originally Arab, it's now Edge. And so I think the principle in me has guided my path and that principle in me has disregarded the financial aspect of that path. Admittedly, as soon as I went full tilt into crypto and founded a company, I ended up having blinders on into building that I forget about the market. It was like, oh shoot, yeah, when I say about forget the market, there's opportunities missed as far as new assets, new chains. They're not just new chains, just to be a new chain. I disregarded the entire space of Bitcoin forks back in 2015, where everything was just a fork of Bitcoin. But when something truly compelling came out, like Ethereum was actually a very compelling technology. My co founder was in the Ethereum ico. He bought at the ico very small amount, but it did well. And I remember saying to myself, yeah, I want to get some of that, that makes sense, programmable Bitcoin. And then I was just too busy with work and I forgot about it. But of course, we eventually supported it. We knew it was compelling. So my journey has been, yeah, I think a very principled journey to a fault. But it's just the way I operate and I'll win or lose on that, on that hill.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
to look back on it in hindsight and be like, oh, well, the pick was so obvious and I could have just held and that's all I had to do. In reality, it's never that easy. I mean, we just had on one of the earliest bitcoin developers. You know, he was working on this in 2010 and everything and he's like, man, I thought I made the best investment of my life. I was getting in this thing at a few cents, a few dollars. It goes up to a couple hundred bucks. He's like, I'm making hundreds and thousands of percent gains on these things. And then you go, wow, that was a really good trade. You know, now I can take some profits on it. You know, no one ever expects that it'll go from a few cents to a few bucks to a hundred thousand dollars. And the same. Can you. The same could be said about Nvidia. You could say, wow, this thing's seen massive success or other things come up in life. And it's so much easier to like, look back on it and be like, oh. And so, like, listeners sometimes try to put her, put themselves in our shoes and they look back at it and they say, oh, well, it was so obvious. And it's like, well, you know, it wasn't quite as easy as people make it, make it out to be, but here we are. I mean, obviously crypto, I think, has surpassed and scaled greater than everyone's expectations, than most people's expectations. Meaning that like, everyone, like a lot of us thought it was going to be big, but the rate at which it has blown up. And now you see it being talked about at the World Economic Forum, you see presidents and leaders of countries talking about it. You see the biggest asset managers and banks, you know, bringing it up. And it's just like, so prevalent.
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Paul Puey
It's prevalent. If you don't mind me, like taking a contrarian view, I think it's failed on most of the facets that I looked for. And I remember, I think about four or six years ago I mentioned that like, bitcoin has about eight years to achieve success by a definition of success that I think is different than what it has today, otherwise it will fail. And that theory was around it being actually used as a currency, because if it isn't used as a currency, many other things can surpass its use as a currency. And it can't be competitive as pure store of value for much longer than approximately eight years is what I was predicting from about, I think, six years ago. So I got a couple years and I think we're starting to see that now where the growth in bitcoin has slowed down. And I think crypto as a whole is still a very compelling industry. Right? I'm like, you guys are crypto 101, you're not Bitcoin 101. But the problem is the whole crypto industry tends to, to follow bitcoin for now because it's the Godfather. And until that dislodges or doesn't follow bitcoin, and maybe because they realize, okay, well, bitcoin is just this one thing, but we have a tremendous amount of value in this other thing, which is the utility side, the defi side, trading, hedging, prediction markets, blah, blah, blah. And we don't just kind of follow the trend of bitcoin until that happens. It's kind of taken down the rest of the market. And that narrative of store of value, I've always said, is not good enough if that's all it is. We've got gold, we've got silver and gold. And silver had their moment and they're having their moment right now. And so fundamentally that utility is what bitcoin has above gold and silver and we haven't exercised it. So us talking about at the World Economic Forum with banks and governments and whatnot, I'm starting to look back as it being one of the biggest double edged swords of adoption because yeah, now it's, everybody's heard of it, right? There's nothing new anymore about it. But there's also a lack of excitement about it because, well, it's just the banks and the governments again and all of the OGs, the cypherpunks that cared about things like privacy and equality, I hate that word. But you know, equal access to a financial ecosystem, financial freedom, those values are long gone from that narrative of government and bank adoption. So how do we bring those back? Because the two can coexist, right? Banks can go and hold bitcoin for people that want to hold it in a hedge fund or an ETF or whatnot. But we could also be using it in its utilitarian sense for financial freedom, transactional freedom. So that balance is just off kilt, you know, and I'm a libra by sign, you know. So to me, like things have to be in balance and it's way the hell off balance right now. I'm still pro, I'm still a bull on this whole ecosystem. I don't have a good clear picture of how to get it back in balance though.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
So do you think that the way forward for bitcoin should be more focused on making it more like a currency and getting it used in that kind of use case as opposed to saying let's look at the institutional side and push it that way?
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Paul Puey
Absolutely. So I'm not into the regulation stuff like you know, genius act, clarity bill, all that stuff. But if there is any one thing I would push for would be like a de minimis exemption so we can actually spend bitcoin and not have to deal with, buy coffee, not to deal with capital gains, capital losses, you know, and if another country, in theory, since there is another country that has adopted bitcoin as their actual official currency with El Salvador, then it should fall under that same de minimis exemption that we have for like the euro and the peso and the Canadian dollar. It should, if it can get to that, well that can alleviate the concerns that a lot of people have of having to track for taxes. Personally, I don't think that is A big concern given there's such great tax software out there now where, alright, you plug in the transaction and when you acquired and you sold and it'll just create a form that says this is your gain or loss. You don't actually have to do the math. And let's be real, that math, so long as the app that you use to make the transactions can export the time you made the transaction, actually the time and the amount of Bitcoin that you made the transaction. This is literally like 7th grade algebra math to then figure out what your gain and loss. It's not hard math, it's just a lot of data. If you're doing a lot of transactions, a lot of data, but you just do the math and boom, there's your gain and loss. Conceptually it's a pain in the ass, but that's what software does for us. It makes conceptually hard things easy. That would be the only thing I'd push for. But then, yes, I think we actually need adoption as a currency. But then also things like defi make it where Bitcoin, the chain itself becomes useful in the defi ecosystem. Like the layer twos have partially launched but haven't quite been pushed, especially not by the bitcoin maxis. They don't push any of the defi layers of Bitcoin.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
That is true. It's funny that you bring this up because I was just talking to a buddy last week about this and he was saying Bitcoin isn't being used as a currency and it'll never work as a currency and all these things like that. We went back and forth on a little debate and I was like, well, what do you mean it's not used? He's like, well, no one uses it. It's never, you know, this. And that just doesn't compare to anything else. And it's funny because I had a stat that I read earlier that week and it was doing a 2025 total transaction volume report and it compared Visa, MasterCard and Bitcoin. MasterCard did about 9.7 trillion in total dollar transactions. Visa did about $16 trillion in transactions and Bitcoin was nearly more than both of them combined at around 25 trillion in total dollars transacted. I said, so what are we measuring value here of? You know, if you're talking about transactions, could it be better, could it be bigger? Absolutely. But when you're looking at almost the same amount that Visa and MasterCard combined and bigger than either one individually, I was like, you know, it's it's being used to some sense. And he goes, well, the thing that I have a gripe about is the volatility. You know, why would we move towards a system like that given how big and volatile Bitcoin has been as of lately? And we went back and forth on that, but that's like one of the most common, I guess, kickbacks that I hear from people that say, well, I don't want it to be used as a currency because of the volatility. What do you say to those people?
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Paul Puey
So when you say don't want to be used as a currency, the one piece that a lot of other currencies snagged from Bitcoin is being able to use something that is more stable than Bitcoin. But on the chain of Bitcoin where you now need Bitcoin as like the gas token, the way Ethereum is used as the gas token. And it inherently has value from that point of view. So you can mix and match its utility. The utility of, for some people I want to hold Bitcoin because I believe that it will go up in value and it will get adopted. And if I hold it, it's actually easier for me to transact it. And then for other people the utility is, oh, I can use the chain with some programmability to be able to hold, hopefully not a government bank backed stablecoin, but maybe an algorithmic stablecoin like DAI and be able to transact that and especially be able to transact that privately. And so for some people the volatility won't matter as much if I'm transacting privately because I can't do that with a traditional financial system and I cannot do that with basic Bitcoin. So these are the layers that it didn't have. And you're right, if it's from the viewpoint of just raw pure L1 Bitcoin, you don't really have a huge competitive advantage because of its volatility. But you know what I also tell them is guess what actually gives something? Stability is use, is actual use. And so if you look at the stability of the dollar and what causes it to become stable, it's what our long term contracts denoted in dollars. There are 30 year contracts denoted in the dollar. Guess what one of those are? A mortgage. So mortgage is a 30 year contract that's denoted in the dollar. We have roughly 15 minute contracts denoted in Bitcoin. And that is basically a payment invoice that you might see when you buy something with BitPay. They'll lock the rate for 15 minutes. And so they're going to have to hedge against that, making sure that, okay, if the price goes up and down, they're going to be okay. So that actually that hedging to keep the price, to keep it stable for them helps stabilize the price. You grow that further. An hour contract, a day contract, a month contract in Bitcoin, and if you're starting to quote even shorter term amounts that aren't 30 years, that starts to stabilize the price. Because both sides of the, both sides of the equation want to, want to have that price stable to be able to predict what they owe and what they're going to receive. Like I know what I'm going to owe. I want to make sure that I can earn enough money to be able to pay that thing I owe. Well, I'm going to receive this amount. I want to make sure that that amount is usable in the future as well. So until you start adopting that, you're not going to get really good stability. And note that nothing is truly stable. The dollar is not truly stable. We all thought gold was stable. I mean it crashed by like 20, 30% in a day. And that's relative to the dollar. So you define dollar stability. And so yes, when you're pegging the dollar and you've only grown up in a dollar based economy, it seems pretty darn stable. And fiat is stable until it's not.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
Yes.
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Paul Puey
And when it's not, it is only stable downward, unstable downward. That's the thing. Fiat is stable downward until it's not. And when it's not, it becomes unstable downward, whereas everything else is unstable in both directions. So pick your poison in that regard. But yes, utility will give it stability. And I'll kind of give one example of what has been relatively stable are the coins that are used for utility, I. E. Monero. Yeah, right. Monero has been hugely stable since 2018. Right. It's been like, you know, and when I say hugely stable, a few personal say that's crazy. Like 150 to 300 peak, $400. Ish. Right? Yeah, sure, it hit almost 700. That's kind of a rarity. But since 2018, 150 to 200, 250 has basically been its range. You know, in the crypto landscape that is solid as rock relative to crypto as a whole. It's not great as an investment unless you're just trading it between this window. But it's relatively stable for, for like payments.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
Yeah. And when you look at other countries, inflation and stuff as well like that this is going to add another level of complexity to it. But it's so easy to judge like the highest tier of fiat standards, which one could argue is the dollar and say oh well, we're comparing it against this. Well let's compare it to like to other people's native fiats where it's not as good, where it is significantly more inflationary, where it is equally if not more volatile. I mean you talk about oh well, Bitcoin was down 10 last year or was double digit moves here and there guys, that can be a normal thing for some of these other fiat countries that are inflating at rapid rates. So for them they're gonna.
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Paul Puey
Yeah, that's a month. That's a, that's like every month for some of them.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
Yeah, spot on. And so you know, using perspective here is, is important and there are so many workarounds and then that's what you know, I think the big takeaway from this is Paul, is that like hey, there are options, there are workarounds and this stuff's happening. Would you still hold the original thesis that you had true of saying hey we have this time horizon to start doing these things. If not there could be issues like where do you stand all that in the current, current day?
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Paul Puey
Yeah, I think we will still have and we are starting to see those issues. I think those issues will continue until bitcoin achieves utility. And I'm already seeing and hearing a lot of the original bitcoin. I don't call them maxis, but the people promoted bitcoin very heavily and supported bitcoin very heavily, backing out because of its defocus on utility still being pro crypto as a whole. Meaning that they haven't left the crypto ecosystem because the crypto ecosystem does have strong utility potential. But they're backing off on supporting bitcoin. They're probably slowly offloading their stash and no question about it, that has contributed to some of the sell off or I'd call it the inability for bitcoin to even hit like a mild exponential gain in this cycle. It went from 69 to 126. We didn't even 2x. So that's relatively unheard of. Which is this is now the first time? Actually no, it's the second time where our, if you believe the four year cycle exists, the thing that needs to happen in the four year cycle is for bitcoin's price to at least double every four years. Right?
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Podcast Host Interviewer
Yeah.
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Paul Puey
And it didn't double this time, which Means that our security budget for Bitcoin is going down, right? How much money is being put to secure the bitcoin blockchain is going down. And so is it because of all the things I said and the concerns of utility. I'm sure it's contributed to it. I don't know if it's the reason, but I'm sure that has contributed to it. And a lot of the, the OG whales, you know, are, are offloading some and looking elsewhere.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
One of the other things that I think you could throw in here, you know, it's one of the things that we've seen is the argument of dilution through altcoin projects, right? You could say, hey, you know, maybe in 2018, I don't have the exact number off the top of my head, but you know, there's a few hundred, maybe a few thousand. And you look today and just the ones that are listed on coin market cap is over 30 million. And you could say, well now what you have done is you have fractionalized the liquidity and you fractionalize the focus and you divvied up and you've continued to dilute that and dilute that by adding more and more altcoin projects. Granted, I would assume that most of those are probably meme coins and stuff, but still the same concept goes on. You know, you start with Bitcoin as the main layer one, then you add Ethereum, then you add, you know, other ones and it continues. And then more layer ones get built and then more layer twos get built and then different projects are being built on top of these to do these hyper specific functions and then you kind of dilute. So the people who are saying, hey, I wanted to invest my money into Bitcoin or Ethereum because of all these reasons, now I have specific projects that I can put them into that is now not going into Bitcoin and then you have that essentially compounding over a decade of time, let's say. And I've seen that be an argument as well as to say, hey, you know, that's a contributing factor to this, is that liquidity is getting fractionalized. Where would you stand on that?
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Paul Puey
That's absolutely right. That's no question about it. There's no way that just having like a million other projects creates a million more people or a million times as much money coming into the space. But where did that all start from? I mean, it started from bitcoin not wanting to adopt. And so Vitalik Buterin wanted Ethereum as a Bitcoin 2.0 feature and he pressed the core developers to include programmability into Bitcoin. There was a narrative in 2014 and 15 and they called it Bitcoin 2.0. That was a term in 2014 and 15. You heard it all the time. It was all about the programmability of Bitcoin. Right. They didn't use their term defi yet, but, oh my God, we can do this, we can do that. With Bitcoin, it's not just, you know, it's not just payments. Ironically now it's not even payments. But then it was, oh, it's not even payment. It's not just payments. We can do all this programmability. And Vitalik had really pushed for it and he got shot down and so he launched Ethereum. Same thing for zcash. Right? Privacy was one of the biggest pushes to get into Bitcoin. Give it a privacy layer, let us transact with zero knowledge proofs. That was shot down and out came zcash. And once you open the floodgates and those things basically open the floodgates because prior to that, bitcoin had like 90% of the market cap of all of crypto and everything else was a clone. It was just copy pasta, take the code, copy it, launch another coin. Mazda coin, this coin, Aurora coin, and
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Podcast Host Interviewer
then the forks, you name it, all the forks too.
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Paul Puey
Those are all forks. Oh, you mean the forks of bitcoin.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
Bitcoin, diamond, bitcoin diamond, Bitcoin gold.
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Paul Puey
Those were not the code forks, but the chain forks starting with bitcoin cash. Correct, but the chain fork actually happened. The chain forks happened after Ethereum. Ethereum already came about. The chain forks were an attempt to make Bitcoin competitive against all of the code fork, against all of the newer cryptos such as Ethereum. But once it was seen that bitcoin would not adopt to some of this new utility, the forks came out. And now the forks actually were compelling. They weren't just like some random really. These were meme coins before that, right? The Aurora coin, Masa coin, blah, blah, blah. They were just meme coins. I hate to throw it under the bus like Dogecoin was in that era, Litecoin was in that era. They've survived some meme coins survive, right? But they were basically all meme coins. Then Ethereum came out. It's like, oh, we can actually launch a chain that has some true additional utility that Bitcoin doesn't have. And then you start seeing some other chains that also build upon that and Then the privacy layers start to come out. And then, then because you've kind of opened up the floodgates of forks, then you start forking Ethereum itself or creating competitors to Ethereum that are faster and cheaper, such as Solana. But it all started with bitcoin not wanting to adopt. Now is it too late for bitcoin to adopt all of those? This is where all the entrepreneurs trying to build the L2 ecosystem of Bitcoin are trying to get that back, get all that attention, drive it back into bitcoin, get that market cap percentage, the bitcoin dominance back up by pulling all of this inertia away from it. But unfortunately it's a bit of a battle within the bitcoiner ecosystem where I say, I don't want that stuff in. We have to put that in. And I'm not sure who's going to win yet, but we're already hearing talks of yet another hard fork in bitcoin with two camps that don't agree, which I'd also predicted back in the original bitcoin cash fork. You know, I saw that the camps that did not want to fork already disagreed with each other. Right. But they just happened to be at least on a different side than bitcoin cash.
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Podcast Host Interviewer
Yeah, I mean, so much going on, so much to think about and you know, I think, listen, you know, crypto evolves. It has, I think it'll be okay at the end of the day and. But it's always good to like. Yeah, I mean we both agree on that. And, and regardless, like, you know, it's always good to talk about this and hear about this and just bring awareness. Like, hey guys, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on and we love to stay in the loop on it, but when it comes to Edge Wallet here, you know, where does Edge Wallet fit into the picture and what are you working on at Edge Wallet?
- [32:48]
Paul Puey
Yeah, so ironically, let's say do, do I do as I say, not as I do. Right. And so Edge Edge pivoted in 2018. Well, the company is actually AirBitz Inc. That is the company that we founded in 2014 with my original co founders and half of us are still here. But that was focused on utility of bitcoin payments. And when we a realized that that wasn't really getting broadly adopted for bitcoin and that chains like Ethereum had a really compelling use case, we pivoted to becoming a trading app. You can still pay with Edge. And that's when Edge launched, sorry, 2018. We launched Edge. And so our focus has been being more of a trading app for people, which admittedly is not the utility that I necessarily want to see, but I know that that's the utility of crypto today. So what are we focused on? Well, there's like that inherent nugget inside of us that even though trading is the utility of crypto today, we're going to support the projects that bring the true utility for the future, which are the privacy projects. So we've long been one of the only multi asset wallets to support a myriad of privacy chains. And so we were the first multi asset app to support Monero back in 2018, you know, when the only way you could get Monero support is, you know, downloading and selling, building your own Monero app for from GitHub, if there was one in the app Store, it only supported Monero, nothing else. There was no buy functionality, no swap, no nothing. It was this bare bones Monero only. But we launched it with support for Monero, Ethereum, Bitcoin, Litecoin, you name it, xrp, blah blah blah and swapping between all of them. And then I've worked closely with Zuko and his team back when he was still with the original ECC zcash company to get zcash in. And not just to get zcash in so you could trade it. Because if we wanted that, well we did, because we're a trading app. But the principle in me, like I said, principle to a fault, is that I wanted it in full privacy mode because that was the promise of Zcash. So we held off on Zcash integration until I think 2021, early 2022. That whole time working on the software with Zuko's team so that we can support full privacy mode on a mobile wallet. And then we launched that. I think we're one of the first two to support zcash in a full private mode. And then we've added since then, piratechain. I'm a big fan of them, right, they're a fork of zcash but removing the transparency. So things that we've done along that side, we support Zano, which is by the original developers of the initial code of Monero, lets you support private tokens and so you can send a private version of Bitcoin on a Xeno blockchain, super cheap and fast and fully private. Those are the things that we're working on. We haven't really announced this publicly, but we're working on a layer to give IP address level privacy inside of edge. Similar to Tor, but better than Tor, unfortunately also slower than Tor. But this one isn't, to the best of our knowledge, not co opted by the government the way Tor is because it actually has a financial incentive and requirement for people to run these nodes. Since this is crypto101, what does this even mean? Like Tor for those listeners? Tor is a network of computers around the world that was actually launched by the US government so that you can send Internet traffic that gets bounced between different servers and so you can't tell who originally sent it. The recipient server can't tell who sent it, and neither can these nodes so long as it hops between actually different people. But those nodes could. A lot of them could be run by the same entity, such as the CIA. And the Tor network allows you to pretend you're running a bunch of nodes even if it's just one computer. So this mix nets improve on that. That's where we're looking at integrating an edge as well. So yeah, privacy, which begets utility, has been our focus. That's my long winded five plus minute answer to your question.
- [37:03]
Podcast Host Interviewer
No, I think it's good. And privacy has been on the up and up. I mean you look at the last, I'd say at least six months, if not longer than that. It's been on the up and up. You know, privacy has been doing really well. I think part of it is just looking at it from a regulatory standpoint. People are saying, hey, this stuff isn't getting just face value blacklisted and there's going to be more crypto, more crypto friendly stance towards this. And uh, it's okay having privacy and it's not all bad. Like that's the big common misconception that I see is it's only ever bad things, it's only illegal purposes, it's only this and that. And it's like, all right, well you know, do a little study, see how much is illegally laundered, laundered in crypto and then go and compare that to how much is being done in the US dollar or another fiat. And it's like not even close. Not even close, not even close. I mean it's. I used to have the number on my side because I used to hear that argument so much and I would just have it as like a notepad so I could just spit the number out. But I've since gotten rid of it. I've moved on away from the haters. But it's true. And so when we're going back to Edge Wallet. You guys are saying, hey, we want to support privacy, we want to be a wallet, we want to be a place for people to be able to transact there in a multi chain way.
- [38:16]
Paul Puey
Right, Exactly. And we realize that we can't just stop supporting the transparent chains like Bitcoin, L1 and whatnot. But supporting the privacy chains is a differentiator because number one, they're harder to support. So people don't realize that we don't just throw in Monero and zcash, Pirate chain and Xano like we could, you know, Sui and Solana, Ethereum and the next Ethereum, L2, Optimism, Zksync and whatnot. Those are what I call simple standard code that you can integrate or sometimes it's just as simple as a config file. You don't even have to add any code. The privacy chains are hard. They implement very hard cryptography. That cryptography is written in what I call very low level languages to the metal because they're slow. So you have to write them in a language that runs very fast. They don't typically run in the same language that you write your application in. So for you crypto 101 developers out there, a lot of people Write apps in JavaScript or Swift for iOS, Kotlin for Android. Well, these cryptography libraries aren't written in those languages so you have to deal with talking from one language to another. So they're hard. But it is a differentiator for us. And that has been our user base since day one. We've preached privacy for quite some time. And so that's what they look for, that's what they want. And that's what we want as well. Like we want to transact with that. And so hence, you know, we put it, we put in the effort.
- [39:48]
Podcast Host Interviewer
Can you talk about the setup, recovery and custody side of Edge Wallet? Because I think that's all, I mean all parts of that process are really unique. Makes it a little bit different from what I think people are used to when they hear the term wallet.
- [40:03]
Paul Puey
So it's funny you say that because you're right, it's different than what people are used to. If you're a crypto person, if you're not a crypto person, it's actually what you're used to. It's actually normal, right? It actually feels, I call it 90% normal. And so that has been our goal is we want to build by cypherpunks but for everyone else. So the onboarding into Edge feels like now we call it Web2 kind of feels like a Web2 process, except that there's no email. The traditional cloud based app that you will create an account on asks you for an email login, credentials email and password, and they see your email so they know who you are and they have access to everything inside of that account. So when you create an account on Google, on Facebook, on Twitter, they know your email and they see everything about your account. In Edge, you create just a username and that is not even seen by Edge. That is kind of encrypted in a way. It's hashed. So only we just see a jumble of letters and numbers. We don't see the actual username you chose. Same thing with a password, it's hashed. Client side, we don't see the original. Most services actually do see the original password you typed in. They just then encrypt it before they store it. We don't even see the original password you type in. And then the combination of both of those encrypt your actual real private keys and all the data in the app, all the data in the app is encrypted. So know that Edge doesn't see anything that you know you would normally see inside of the app. Like even your settings. Like say one of the settings in the app. What's a basic setting you would have in the app is oh, what, what fiat currency do I use? Right? Like I want to make everything, the dollars or Canadian dollar. That setting is encrypted and backed up onto our servers and then synchronize between your devices. We don't know what that setting is. You can also tag transactions like, all right, I sent some Money over to Crypto101 podcast. I'll tag it. That's encrypted, backed up. Edge never sees it. You can fill it in with your address book. A lot of people say, why is Edge asking for access to my address book? And that is easily. I get it. You should be concerned when an app asks you for access to your address book. But we're open source to prove that. When we do, that's just to give you a little auto complete. Like when you tap payee, like who did I send money to? Or who sent me money? It'll show your address book and you search through people you know in your address book. You choose someone, it tags it. That's encrypted on your device. It's backed up, it's synchronized. But Edge never sees it. We never see your address book. It's literally only on your device. So that is the onboarding. Right. It just feels like a Web 2.0 onboarding. You know, everything is encrypted, backed up. You lose your phone, you can go log in on another device. You can even set a password recovery with a couple personal questions and answers, which we also don't see, those are encrypted. Two factor authentication. Enable that at the touch of a button that extra protects your account. So it does feel like a Custodial Wallet account, but it's absolutely not like you have control over those keys. The keys are on your device. We can go out of business. As long as you have edge logged in, you could still access your keys. Biometric or password can decrypt the keys on your phone and be able to send out funds, or you just take the keys off, put it into another wallet app. Note that we are your backup, though. So you are the primary and edge is your backup. You can't lose both. So if we disappeared, as long as you've got that device with edge logged in. But if you don't actively have edge logged in, not logged in, but you've at least logged in on a device, if you don't actively have edge on your phone with your account that you've logged into at least once, then you're relying on us. Some people say that we're custody in that sense. No, we're your backup. Just like that piece of paper backup that you have somewhere. If you lose your trezor, that paper is your backup. We're the backup as well. So if you're an edge user, always have edge installed on your phone and have your account logged in at least once. And you don't ever rely on us.
- [44:13]
Podcast Host Interviewer
And I thought the duress mode was pretty cool as well. That was something that stood out to me, I guess. Real quick, walk us through that. I think everyone deserves to hear about. It's a nice little.
- [44:23]
Paul Puey
Cool. Yeah, I think it's one of the most important features that I think every crypto app should have, whether it be Custodial Wallet or whatnot. And how you implement it could be different. But our implementation of duress allows you to set up a second PIN that you can use to unlock your account. So normally you can unlock your account that you've already logged into with your password, PIN or biometric. This allows you to have a second PIN that when you enter it unlocks a sub account, let's call it a sub account. And that sub account can have real wallets with real keys and real money in it but ideally that could be your kind of small spending money, not your larger funds that you would hold an edge. The wallets that you create in that duress sub account actually show up in your main account. So you can do your regular activity from your main account. If you wanted to spend crypto, which I encourage people to actually use crypto, go find merchants in your neighborhood that take crypto and go and spend with them. And then if you're ever under duress, which is someone's wanting you, forcing you to unlock your account, you enter your address PIN and what shows up is just your little spending wallet. And it looks like a real wallet because it actually has real spends coming from it. But your larger funds are at least hidden. And so I'll be just honest, this doesn't protect you from physical attacks. Don't want to hurt you. They can hurt you, but it can protect your funds at least. And it gives you a plausible deniability that, hey, that's all I hold inside edge. These little funds are all I hold. For a lot of people that might realistically be the most that they would hold in a mobile app. But for those that were concerned about. So for some people holding a large amount of funds in a mobile app, their concern was exactly this, the physical threat. And now that physical threat is mitigated with duress mode. So at least there may be other reasons why people feel uncomfortable. At least the physical threat can be partially mitigated with this feature.
- [46:16]
Podcast Host Interviewer
Absolutely. Well, Paul, we really appreciate your time just getting to talk about the markets and everything and especially what you're doing at Edge Wallet. Again, really cool stuff, really cool take on wallets, which is again, you make a good point. It's different in the crypto sense, but it's normal if you're coming from a more traditional sense. So if you are one of those, you know, people who's maybe a little bit newer to crypto and you are looking for something a little bit more traditional, definitely go ahead and give Paul and Edge Wallet a check out. Paul, where can everyone find you? You know, they want to go, they want to find Edge Wallet, they want to follow what you you're doing as well. Where can they find website socials? Whatever you prefer.
- [46:55]
Paul Puey
They can find everything on our website Edge app. Right? So we've got a simple, nice, clean domain edge app. You'll find our socials on there. You'll even find my contact information on there, my socials. One thing you might not see on there right now, which is a more immediate where can you find us. I'm not sure when this is going to air if we're live right now, but we are going to be over at Monerotopia starting literally tomorrow, which is the 11th. Today's the 10th.
- [47:21]
Podcast Host Interviewer
Yeah, this will definitely be out after, afterwards.
- [47:25]
Paul Puey
Okay. So anyway, here's where we were. If this is catching you guys late. Monerotopia from February 11, 12, 13, 14 and then Anarchapulco the 15th through I think about the 20th of February. If this happens to air in the middle of that, you can catch us there. It's all in Mexico. Mexico City for Monerotopia, Puerto Vallarta for an Acapulco. If you can't make it, maybe try to catch those events next year. It's a great set of events for a lot of the privacy, freedom loving crypto fans. They talk about a whole lot of things in Anarchapolco, but crypto is a big topic of discussion as well. So catch us at some of those events if you're able to hear about
- [48:07]
Podcast Host Interviewer
it soon enough for sure. Well, Paul, thank you once again for joining us. We appreciate your time.
- [48:14]
Paul Puey
Thanks a whole lot for having me.
- [48:27]
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