← TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast
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- [00:07]
Harsha Goli
You've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free. If you talk about a Fed just gone nuts. All. All the central banks going nuts. So it's all acting like safe haven. I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency, Bitcoin wins. In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor. I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Probably should be. Probably should be.
- [00:36]
Podcast Host
Get that warm cup on your hands.
- [00:39]
Harsha Goli
I am, I am using it. This is my current source of warmth. All right. And it's working well.
- [00:45]
Podcast Host
Oh, my gosh, we got the deep freeze. It's good for focused work. I've found that over the last three days, I've had a lot of focused work because I've been forced to stay in the house.
- [00:54]
Harsha Goli
It's very punishing if you go outside. Yes. It's like the roads are icy. If I go visit a friend, I'm risking life and limb. I might as well get work done, you know?
- [01:03]
Podcast Host
Yeah. Why? Why risk it? You can just sit at the computer, you can play with all these AI tools, You can push towards a goal you may have. But I think the idea of focus work is apropos for this discussion because I know that you've had a lot of focus work building out Magnolia relatively under the radar behind the scenes for the last couple of years. And as we were discussing before we hit record, I'm sitting down with Harsha Goli. And for those of you who are not familiar with Harsha, he's been in the industry for quite a while and worked on many impactful projects and companies. And so I think instead of me giving your background, it probably makes sense for you to do that. Harsha, sort of explain your journey within the bitcoin industry industry over the last. Better part of a decade. Over a decade now, I think.
- [02:01]
Harsha Goli
Dude, thank you for the incredibly warm intro. Yeah, we're over a decade now. I started working in the space back in 2015. I was just like a sophomore in college and back then was really into open source anything. So me and my friends, we would just go to hackathons and just work on whatever GitHub projects we could find, make them better or create something completely new and ship stuff. And one of them, someone was telling me about bitcoin. And to me, the best part about bitcoin was that it was a financial thing that was open source. And I'm like, okay, neat. I can mess with this. Of course, I didn't know C. I only knew Python and JavaScript. So I would try to find whatever clobbered together libraries other people would put together. If anyone else is listening, who was a deverer on the time. The state of bitcoin tooling back then was abysmal, which was pretty awesome for me to work in. Um, and yeah, like, from there I decided, like, okay, this stuff is pretty cool. I'd like to work on this stuff a little bit more. So at the time I had like, you know, a junior, you know, like, job at a company called ge. They. GE Power, specifically that division. And I was like, okay, well, you know, I'd like to work on bitcoin stuff that they work on turbines. So that's not really the same thing. So I got a job at BitPay, which was in Atlanta. And yeah, they just like, had me working on effectively. This is very. This was very controversial. Now we're way past it, but they had me working on like, a bunch of SegWit2.x tooling, right? So I was like, the guy who, like, spun up the initial segwit2.x test. Net. I remember, like, getting a bunch of, like, USV miners, all right, and like, sticking with a bunch of Raspberry PIs. We had like 50 of them, you know, in a room just buzzing away. And I wasn't there for the actual activation. But I can imagine what. What day that was because the whole thing just fell over immediately.
- [03:47]
Podcast Host
Off by one, off by one.
- [03:49]
Harsha Goli
So that was pretty cool. But it was cool, like setting up a test net from scratch. And yeah, after that, my friends and I, we realized, okay, there's a lot of work in this space and there's a lot of tools we can work on. So we started our own startup, basically, like, consulting firm that had some internal products and that did really well until eventually I met some folks from Fold who were looking for a backend engineer and they wanted to work on some really, really cool stuff. So I was like, okay, well, you know, I know I have this startup, but it's doing pretty well. It can probably chug along without me for a while. Let me. Let me just hop on this team and see what we can do here. And I still remember, like, the job that I ended up applying for was like, it was. It was a Clojure dev, right? I don't know if any of you guys know about Clojure, but it's a crazy language. And I didn't Know any Clojure still still got the job, got hired and ended up working on their backend wallet infrastructure for a minute, which is how I started getting familiar with how enterprise wallets really, really worked. And yeah, from there we shipped Lightning and Bitcoin for Fold and eventually launched the actual Fold debit card, which actually is what got traction. Fold did not have too much traction on the gift card stuff. The debit card really took off, even though gift cards never really stopped being part of the bottom line. And then, yeah, like, so from Fold then, you know, I worked in a bunch of different places. I think Fold was a place where I kind of decided like, okay, this stuff is better than like college, you know, this stuff is better than like working on anything else. Just the energy of like, you know, Thesis and like Will and Tom and all the guys there was just awesome. So after I left there, I went to work at a couple different places, including Lightning Labs, just to work more on lighting stuff. That was really, really cool. Met some of the smartest people in my life there and then worked at Voltage as well. Got my, like, Chops and like product management, and then worked at Swan, another like, company I'm sure all you guys know, again, doing product management stuff specifically for their data team and their Lightning teams. And all this was kind of like going in a very specific direction because I wanted to learn how to run teams effectively on a myriad of different problems. Because there's been like this problem that I've been kind of seeing in the space, which is like, you know, the tech. Even though I've been working on Lightning for a long time and trying to get it implemented with more people, I noticed that most people don't use the new and shiny in Bitcoin. That's never really been a thing about bitcoin like tech enthusiasts like myself do, sure, but the masses do not. And the more I looked at it, the more I realized, like, the problem is it isn't like, you know, bitcoin necessarily needs a new functionality in order to, like get mainstream. It already was. The problem always was that in order to actually get Bitcoin, you could only go to reliably a couple of the big exchanges. And if you were a small company, smaller than, you know, Coinbase, in order to get that same functionality integrated into your application the exact same way Coinbase would, you had to do so much right, and you had to rely on sometimes really sketchy partners. And it was, it was a huge burden. While it was one of those things where the payoff was Immense, but the costs were, were somehow even more immense. Right. I remember at Swan we had like five different migrations between like all these different providers. It was nonsense. You know, especially when like 80% of your, 80% of your like entering budget goes toward this one specific problem. That, that's nonsense. But anyway, that's like my background in a nutshell. I've been working in bitcoin for, I think, yeah, over 10 years now. It's the thing I love. I think I'll be working in bitcoin for the rest of my life. But why not at this point?
- [07:41]
Podcast Host
Yeah. And so this brings us to Magnolia, which is a company that you found and have been working on for a couple years now. And again highlighting the end of your introduction there, which is this problem that exists for many companies in the space who basically just want to interact with bitcoin and make it easy for their customers, most importantly to interact with Bitcoin. The third party dependencies that have existed in the industry throughout the years have stood on, for lack of a better term, shaky foundation. And through my conversations with you in what you're doing at Magnolia, that's exactly what you're trying to solve, is providing a sound foundation for companies trying to build in the space.
- [08:29]
Harsha Goli
Yeah, it's quite surprising actually. I got to empathize with all these builders. I feel like if you're a builder in bitcoin, you've got a pretty tough task ahead of you and everyone seems to solve it. But you spend all this time and energy cultivating an audience online, you know, getting them to use the application that you're trying to like get them to use, whether it's, you know, a wallet or a bitcoin lending app or even a white glove service. Right. That, that takes a lot of effort, a lot of energy. And I kind of sucks because after you've done all this effort, all this work, you try to, you try to make it as easy as possible to onboard your customers and you realize like getting these kind of integrations in your application isn't like you know, signing up for a credit card, right. Where it's like one form or going to a bank and you know, like signing a couple of papers and then, you know, getting access to the financial system. When you try and do this as a business, specifically like you know, in bitcoin and you know, stablecoins or anything else, it's, it's so tedious, it's so expensive and it's really just out of, out of reach. Right. You basically have two options One is just get like state licenses to get money transmitter, like, you know, like access. Right. And it's state by state. It's not like if, if I go to a bank and I sign up for a bank account, I can use that bank account anywhere in the US that's not how it works if you're a business, you know, and then alternatively you, you set up an account with someone else who runs the infrastructure for you. And that process is incredibly tedious, I think. Like for us it can go over like three months when we were doing this, you know, ourselves. And then on top of it, they charge incredibly high minimums. I like in the, in the neighborhood of like 20 to 30k a month. You know, it's like this is for a massive business like polymarket, not for someone who's got a pretty effective retail audience, but not, I've dominated the world effective. And that's just kind of wild to me. But yeah. So what we're trying to do I've really kind of identified as a huge problem in Bitcoin is I'm trying to turn every single one of these applications, like big ones for sure, but also smaller ones as well, into bridges where you can just go with, you know, your credit card, your bank details, whatever, and be able to convert yourself from a pre coiner to like a bitcoiner. That, that's the, that's the idea here. All these applications should be able to take someone's money and give them Bitcoin. Right. Instead of shoving them off to Coinbase or something.
- [11:03]
Podcast Host
And so what was the process of building this out like? Let's get a landscape of the technical architecture that exists and then I guess the compliance architecture necessary to facilitate this as well.
- [11:15]
Harsha Goli
Yeah. So, you know, from a technical point of view, it's actually like, I guess for me it's not that hard because it's something I built like three or four times in my career. Right. But it's like having an enterprise wallet system having what's called a, like a double entry accounting ledger. So it's just a, it's just a well built like accounting system. And then on top of that having a robust API, that is not overwhelming. That part's, you know, honestly not the most complicated part. I've done that multiple times. Most people have some version of that in their systems, you know, and then of course like a connection to your banking partner and that's, that's where things get hard. The hard part is interacting with the banking providers. The hard part is like. Yeah. Being able to Talk to them, really. Step one, that, that was actually kind of wild when I realized just how hard that was going to be. At the time, I think, like I had really long hair, you know, I just done like, you know, a huge hippie dive. It was awesome. You know, I lived in the van for a couple of years and I realized like, okay, I'm going to these conferences, you know, I've got my hair tied up all nice and stuff in order to meet like a lot of these bakers. But I've got to like, you know, make some changes to my appearance here. You know, I've got to like, pick up a different kind of like, repertoire. I've got to like, cut my hair. I've got to stop referring to ourselves as crypto to try and explain myself to them. Just be like, no, we do bitcoin. You know, bitcoin is the thing we do. You know, we don't get involved with anything else. And after, like, honestly, a large number of, of conferences and conversations, we managed to like, find a lot of really healthy inroads into the banking world with like, with really good, like, compliance folks at our backs too. There's a whole separate world of bitcoin dedicated just to compliance. And it's like, kind of fascinating, right? Like, Haley Lennon is a great name in this space too. She's like the general counsel of Fold, right? And she was our lawyer at one point. And she was able to intro us to all these people who are on the bitcoin compliance side of things and they know all the right people in the compliance world to get you past all the big roadblocks that exist for kind of everyone else. That was honestly pretty wild for us to realize, okay, compliance is not that effective. And the way how compliance tends to work is it's all about making sure that who, you know is someone with a lot of like, moral accountability, essentially.
- [13:33]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [13:34]
Harsha Goli
And that does apparently, like, go quite a long way in the compliance world. And I do kind of see it and understand it now.
- [13:40]
Podcast Host
Yeah. And so let's take a step back. A high level view. Who is your ideal customer and how do they interact with you? Going from zero to one.
- [13:51]
Harsha Goli
So right now, like a huge focus for us is we realized that a huge pain point is, okay, so like bitcoin, right? Like, the biggest value of bitcoin is the value it has. And I think like 2026 is turning out into this year where a lot of people are moving their bitcoin into some kind of noncustodial setup. Whatever it may be where they can also take a loan out against it, right, and be able to utilize the value that they've accrued in some kind of way. This has been like kind of a silent explosion over the last like, you know, I think six months to a year and I think it's going to really, really, really get big in 2026. Lennon has like a crazy high, which is wild. L, E D N They're like, I think a leader in the space. I think it's like 100 million or something. And the reason why I bring this up is because all these different bitcoin backed lending like folks, they all issue the loans in a stablecoin. And something I've learned from talking to these folks is the whole like narrative for stablecoins for trading is kind of like dead right? But people are still taking out these loans and that's because they're taking out these loans at decent rates specifically to use them in the real world, you know, for, to pay for their like daughters, you know, college or you know, to upgrade, you know, a property app or whatever. And so what we're plugging into for a lot of these folks is we're plugging into their systems to convert their stablecoins to fiat directly for their end user. That way the end user doesn't have to take a couple more points at Coinbase or something like that. So that's someone that we're really kind of charging headfirst in. But basically our ideal customer is any kind of bitcoin business that's got a high retail audience that they're looking to monetize effectively. We've integrated a couple other wallets as well that are doing just that. And also anyone who's looking to access the US and eu, you know, financial markets essentially. So South American companies and like Asian companies too who would like to onboard folks from the eu. Super, super valuable for us right now.
- [15:55]
Podcast Host
So freaks, if you've been listening for.
- [15:56]
Sponsor Voice
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- [15:59]
Harsha Goli
It's a Bitcoin wallet built for people.
- [16:01]
Podcast Host
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- [16:27]
Harsha Goli
It's bitcoin self custody built for real life.
- [16:29]
Podcast Host
And for February only for you freaks. Okay, February only. You got 28 days. Not a leap year.
- [16:34]
Harsha Goli
I'm pretty sure.
- [16:35]
Podcast Host
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- [16:43]
Harsha Goli
That's B I T K E Y dot world.
- [16:46]
Podcast Host
Use the code TFTC99 and you're going to get a bit key for 99. Sup freaks?
- [16:51]
Harsha Goli
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- [16:52]
Podcast Host
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- [18:42]
Harsha Goli
Yeah, I mean, to your point, I think everyone knows that there is a lot of activity for stablecoins in developing nations, specifically in South America and Central America. But the U.S. now what's happening in the U.S. is actually quite, quite fascinating right now because of the genius bill. The genius bill creates a lot of pressure to implement stablecoins somewhere in the U.S. right? Like in the U.S. like banking system in particular. That's fundamentally what the genius bill does. And if y' all aren't aware of like how the genius bill really works, it basically creates a ton of incentive to buy up T bills and then issue stable coins against these T bills. Right? And so now you have like a lot of like stable coins that are like rolling around like, okay, we need to find a use for these stable coins in order to like justify like our business. Right? Because we're giving most of our, you know, like return from the T bills that are generated back to the end user, which is, you know, a whole conversation in and of itself. But we have these stablecoins and we need to fit them somewhere. And so what we're kind of seeing is we're seeing this like really kind of backwards thing happen where normally if people implement products and stuff after there's some level of demand. But what we're seeing with stablecoins is people are implementing stablecoins everywhere and seeing where they fit, you know, what sticks and what doesn't stick. And one of the things that's sticking quite well is this concept of, okay, everyone's got some amount of like, you know, like bitcoin or maybe even like some other assets as well that they want to take out loans against. Taking out the loans typically ends up being part of this protocol. Either it's a smart contract on AAVE or something like that, or I think gaining more popularity. It's some kind of bitcoin backed loan, right? But either way it doesn't really matter. You're going to get a stablecoin as a result of this loan. And getting a stablecoin is cool, but a lot of these people are not using these loans to gamble more. That's just not what a lot of these folks are doing. They're using it to actually improve their lives in some way. These loans are not that high anymore. I think before it made a lot of sense to gamble on another project or whatever when they were between 15 and 12. But now you see them going kind of low. In some platforms it's as low as 6%. I think a pretty good price you can get in Bitcoin is 10%. And those are low enough to actually justify building real value in the real world. And that's kind of fascinating. So seeing that take off is really kind of interesting. Where else will stablecoins fit? I don't know. You know, I'm a skeptic in general. I like seeing things before I believe it. You know, I, you know, call me crazy, but I don't know where else they'll fit right now. But I see that one really kind of like actually getting use cases right now. I'd be very curious to see if anyone uses them on the day to day elsewhere.
- [21:39]
Podcast Host
Yeah, it's obviously a big topic of discussion right now with the genius act. And again it seems like they're trying to manufacture demand for these treasuries. And that's the one thing the big question in my mind is, is it a be careful what you wish for scenario with the genius act where you have to recognize that stablecoins. The success of stablecoins to date has been driven by this regulatory gray area that's existed, allowed individuals outside the borders of the United States to get access to dollar instruments rather trivially.
- [22:16]
Harsha Goli
Yeah. I mean, to their point, the reason why they're doing it, why they're so interested in doing it, is because if it's not the US dollar, it's the Chinese yen. Right. It's the Russian ruble. And so everyone wants to take advantage of these deteriorating economies and just plant our flag in the first, you know, we've done this with real dollars like in the past, you know, especially like in Africa to stabilize economies. And you know, in Zimbabwe, like, you know, after the currency like went to hyperinflation, people started using the US dollar. You know that that is like, that is what happened. But I do agree that it is quite literally artificial demand. You know, that's what the genius bill is. And I do think it's interesting that we're just trying to like fit it in anywhere we can. I look forward to the day when my Walmart app offers stablecoins as a rewards option. I'm sure that's coming. That's going to be wild.
- [23:17]
Podcast Host
Switching gears a little bit and building on conversations we've had over the years. I think, Magnolia, the impetus for you starting it again, as you alluded to, is that there are companies that try to do something, have tried to do something similar in the Past, I think, most notably Prime Trust, and have failed epically. And so I guess, what are the lessons learned from their failures in how you're trying to improve on that and make sure that Magnolia sound.
- [23:48]
Harsha Goli
Yeah, dude. Yeah, I remember Prime Trust, the first version of Fold built against Prime Trust, you know, and we frankly loved it. It was great. From a tech point of view, it was everything we ever wanted. It's just that it turns out the way how their operating side worked was not everything we wanted. There's this really kind of incredible story with Prime Trust and I think also Forger's Trust, where they ended up just losing a ton of money because they had some really complicated key ceremony, right? And the result of this really complicated key ceremony was they ended up losing the actual private keys that backed the deposit addresses at Prime Trust. And so people were depositing money at Prime Trust, and for, I think, a couple weeks, no one realized that they were putting money into a black hole. They really were. And when it came time to withdraw the money, for typical operation purposes only then did they realize, we don't have this cash. Prime Trust wasn't hacked. They may have been hacked at some point in their history, but this specific instance, they weren't hacked. And that is just baffling to me, really. My career is kind of built on the failures of these entities. And it's not just Prime Trust. There's a couple of them out there because folks like me and myself specifically, we had to deal with these ramifications. So we learned a lot. Some of the big things that we really learned is, like, the compliance folks, the operation folks, and the engineering folks, they have to be in the same room. They cannot operate independently. They need to constantly talk. They need to understand, okay, here's what we're implementing. This is how we're doing it. This is what our own policies say, and here's what needs to get modified. This has been a really, really valuable exercise for us every time it happens specifically, because really often we realize something can get shaved down. Something doesn't have to be complicated, right? Or even, okay, we're implementing something that is actually very dangerous for us, you know, and that is kind of a huge boon from the security side. We made the decision that my computer is just completely segregated away from all of our systems. And, you know, from ensuring that our security is on top, our CTO is he's 100% in charge of that, and that's his focus right alongside, like, building features and stuff. But this separation of concerns makes it so that I'M able to work on my stuff and he's able to work on his stuff. And my job is just ensuring the machine gets to keep going forward. And his job is making sure that the machine is well oiled enough to go forward. The separation of concerns works out, I think a lot better. I know that the prime trust method of doing this stuff was a little bit more democratic where, you know, keys were separated between a bunch of different people. We have separated keys out. It's not one individual. But our keys aren't separated between individuals. They're separated in like, like actual different key servers. You know, there's only one individual who's, you know, like got a shotgun at home and takes security very seriously. Like is in charge of. And I think that's probably like the right way for how we handle things right now.
- [27:04]
Sponsor Voice
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Podcast Host
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- [27:35]
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- [28:13]
Podcast Host
Been seeing a lot of YouTube comments. Marty, your skin looks so good. You're looking fit these days. How are you doing it? Well, number one, I'm going to the gym more, trying to get my swell on. Trying to be a good example for my young sons. A fit, healthy dad. But part of that is having a good regimen, particularly staying hydrated, making sure I have the right electrolytes and salts in my body. That is why I use salt of the earth. I drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt. The earth. I'm liking the pink lemonade right now. It's my flavor of choice. This is their creatine. I've added this to my regimen. They have it in these packets as well. Makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling. You want to work out while you're traveling, but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through tsa. It's very, very nerve wracking at times. You have to explain hates. It's not what you think it is. It's creatine. I'm trying to get my swell on. Make sure you're staying hydrated. I have become addicted to these. It's made my life a lot better. I can supplement this for coffee in the morning and be energized right away. I can supplement. I can bring the creatine wherever I need to. Just put a couple packets in here before I head to the gym. Bring this to the gym. Drinking out of a glass bottle. Make sure I'm not injecting any microplastics into my body. Go to drinksoute.com, use the code TFTC and you'll get 15% off anything in the store. That's drinksoute.com, code TFTC. What is this key setup you mentioned? Multiple different servers. One guy. How do you ensure that there's no key man risk with the setup?
- [29:52]
Harsha Goli
Yeah, so we use multiple different key servers from like different other like custodians specifically. Right. So they're all like watching out. I think like a lot of it is automated, but, you know, for deposit addresses, those go into cold storage directly. But it's not cold storage that's run like by us. It's cold storage run by someone else. That way, you know, like there isn't really a situation where we mess up. Our money that we send out is, you know, completely segregated from money that we receive. So there's just an operations focus to make sure that, you know, we always have enough money to withdraw. Yeah, like we've, we've had to go through kind of a lot of iterations of this design for a compliance program specifically. And so we have this all really well documented in our, in our policies. And whenever regulators or banking partners or even customers ask us for these, we're able to like kind of provide specifications like kind of on hand, which is nice, you know, but it's, it's really, in my opinion, nothing that isn't industry standard, you know. Now this kind of separation of concerns is what everyone should be doing. Right? It's something super crazy or magical.
- [30:54]
Podcast Host
Are the regulators getting smarter on this, on how this technical architecture should be built to.
- [31:01]
Harsha Goli
They're not really on the technical architecture side of things. They're really concerned about over leveraging rehypothecation and making sure that certain individuals are touching it or not touching it. Right. Like that's really what they care about. And they've gotten smarter in the sense that they're not going to allow like fancy diagrams to get in the way of their understanding. Right. So if we send them diagrams and they don't understand it, they'll tell us it's not understandable at the back, you know, make it better. Fair enough. You know, like so which we've done a couple times, we have like a whole project for diagrams specifically for regulators, like for this topic. And they're huge. They're like PowerPoint presentations that are like over 200 pages long. Right. Or 200 slides. But it works, you know, they get the idea.
- [31:53]
Podcast Host
Yeah. And so now, I mean you've got a big announcement coming up. We're recording this on Tuesday the 27th, but I think over the weekend you guys are going to be coming out with some news and this will be published after. So by the time this reaches the audience, the news will be announced. What do we have in store?
- [32:17]
Harsha Goli
So later this past year, I think in December, we launched a price Oracle. We want this. Yeah, do we found some people really liked it and onboarded it. And this Price Oracle works specifically with discrete log contracts. Right. So it's like a much more trustless way of handling these Bitcoin backed loans. And we also announced that, okay, we're supporting. And so instead of stablecoins you can do disbursements for these loans via Fiat so you can get cold hard cash in your bank. And people are really excited about that. The big announcement that will be out by the time you guys hear this is that we are releasing our full fledged banking products for everyone to use in the U.S. and soon the EU. And so when, I mean in the U.S. i mean we can, we can launch this in New York, Florida, California, Texas and all the states in between and what this product is, it's. It's a full bank right over an API. So you can spin up individual accounts, right. Like, you know, routing account number for each of your end users through this system. If that's what you want to do, put fiat into it or have it do an achievement pull, which is like autopay, convert it into Bitcoin and then send it to whoever it is you need to send it to. This is, to my knowledge, the, the, the quickest way to convert someone, like convert someone's fiat to Bitcoin or Lightning. And the most programmatic and like extensive or expendable way or whatever. Oh my gosh, I'm forgetting the term. But yeah, this is the most like programmatic way you can do it. So that's kind of a huge, huge win. So there's no iframes involved in not moonpay or anything like that. Which means that people can create their own custom flows as they'd like. Right. And that also does include with AI. So as long as you're onboarded with us and past kyb, which we've gotten down from six weeks to less than a week now, so it's really easy to get turned around on that. You can just implement our API into existing infrastructure and turn any application into a full fledged bank. That's huge. That's what I wish I had five years ago.
- [34:41]
Podcast Host
How does this work on the licensing side of things? Similar Prime Trust in that way where you guys have licenses and the charter.
- [34:49]
Harsha Goli
So we have some licenses. But really like the big change that we made in 2025 is we realized like what we should do instead is we should really focus on getting like everyone is just saying this is great. Come back. Like we'd love to talk when you have more than a couple of states. Right. We realize people want to go to all these states. So we figured out a way with our banking partners. We have three different banking partners to use their licenses in different states so that we can actually just go to all these states all at once. Right. It turns out some of our banking partners also have locations in the EU as well, so we can do native European transfers. So not swift in the euro. We're working on implementing that right now. That has to come in a month or two after we do the US launch. But this brings our services kind of everywhere right now. In the future, I think it's going to make sense for us to finish up these applications. Unfortunately, these applications normally take a year or two right now because of all the stuff that's going on, everyone is backlogged, so it's actually going to take even longer than that. So we realized we're going to have to come back to the applications whenever the regulators get back to us and just kind of handle it from there. But till then, we can go in all these states and bring our services to just about anyone we can. And that's a pretty big win for us. Right? It's gotten people really excited.
- [36:12]
Podcast Host
You mentioned AI. How do you see AI playing into all this? Because I've been leaning into it as heavily as possible here at TFTC, doing research at 1031, things like that, and is becoming more and more powerful by the day. I was actually playing around with, I had my agent playing around with money dev kit last night and it was pretty cool to see what it can do. So how do you see this intersection of AI and not only what you're doing at Magnolia, but bitcoin more broadly?
- [36:45]
Harsha Goli
Dude, the financial system should not be locked out to people who are building it just should not be. Right. We want to make it as successful as possible. So if people want to utilize like, you know, banking in their like vodka products, we can make sure that they do it safely. Right. But I can actually do the implementation, create incredibly delightful flows for people. And yeah, I agree, we've. We've been leaning into it pretty hard too. It's helped us out kind of tremendously. The different like teams at Magnolia handle it very differently. Right. So our engineering team has a very complex and precise method of handling AI that's very different from how our compliance team handles it. And our compliance team was able to reduce its, you know, like our KYB process, our onboarding process from like six weeks down to like less than one with the help of AI just like, you know, optimizing what it can and reducing flows and trying to get as many like, you know, multiple birds hit with one stone, so to speak. And I use it kind of all the time, specifically with the Ralph Wickham loop, if you're familiar with that. I use that all the time for our docs and our main web page as well. That way I don't have to bother our devs about it and I can make sure our docs are as accurate as possible. I'm actually watching it run right now because I'm going to El Salvador tomorrow and I need this new website out. So I'm just watching it just iterate. But we use it kind of a lot and I do kind of have this belief that I'VE always been against hiring as a growth metric. Right. I do believe AI is going to really be able to supercharge really, really powerful operators at a company and let people go even farther with their seed or pre seed stage. Right. We've come pretty far on precede and at some point we're going to raise our next round. But we don't want to just burn capital here for the sake of burning capital. We want everyone to go as far as they can. And AI really does supercharge Fox.
- [38:42]
Podcast Host
It's insane. And to your point, that's, I think if you're a founder out there not leveraging these tools, obviously you got to be careful to an extent. It's easy to on yourself if you're not using it appropriately. But to your point, if you're a sort of high level operator that understands the risk and understands how to use it, if you're not utilizing it, you're going to get, I don't want to say maybe left behind, but I think from a sort of balance sheet management perspective, there's no reason not to lean into it. So you can keep headcount as low as possible, get to revenue profitability and begin stacking sats as quickly as possible.
- [39:22]
Harsha Goli
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Plus with all the Twitter stuff, it's all everyone gets to see. So you have no excuse, you got no excuse. All the tricks are right there. Cloud Bot is big or I think now it's renamed but you know, whatever the next trick will be, I'm sure it'll be very useful.
- [39:37]
Podcast Host
Multipot. Multipot. Now do you think that I wonder if we're in a bubble in Twitter and yes, it's obviously a massive topic of discussion in our Twitter bubble, but like how many people outside of that bubble are actually utilizing these tools or even recognize that they exist and are as powerful as they are?
- [40:00]
Harsha Goli
I, I think like from a retail point of view, most people are already on like ChatGPT specifically because it has a free tier, but using it in this kind of like complex way is definitely in the realm of tech enthusiasts, right? It absolutely is. There's still like a lot of setup, a lot of like stuff you have to do. You have to have like a prerequisite amount of knowledge to understand that code, cloud code exists. Right. For something like cloudbot, you know, maybe like folks buy like the Apple Mini or whatever or they figure out they can just run it locally but as time goes on you're going to see a lot of like products that just spin up the whole thing for You So like one that's already existed before Bloodbot is interaction, if you're familiar with interaction, it's a telegram bot, essentially. Pretty delightful startup flow. But as, as things like this get bigger, you're going to see more full fledged agents that I think are a little bit more appealing to the mass audience. Right. So like, like a good check for me that I always have is my, my little sister, she's, she's a chemical engineer, right? That's what she does. She just wrapped up her education, but she is not in tech, not in the slightest like the way like you know, you and I are. And so I ask her like, you know, what do people think about like AI and stuff like that? And her point of view is, listen, it's cool for like cheating on tests, but as far as like actually doing like chemical engineering work, it's fucking useless, you know. And so there's still a lot of room for this stuff to, to get in the hands of everyday people, you know, people in other sectors. It's really I think focused on, on us right now, people in the tech enthusiast world.
- [41:37]
Podcast Host
Yeah, that's fun I guess saying a lot of focus work with the snowstorm that hit the northeast over the weekend. And I had some downtime on Sunday and spent an hour and a half spinning up claudebot and making sure that was secure behind tailscale, behind a firewall and all of that stuff. And then I've been slowly but surely conversing with it and iterating on sort of how I'm interacting with it over the last two days. And it is insane what this thing can do.
- [42:12]
Harsha Goli
So what's the difference between claudebot and like a, well, friggin Ralph Wiggum loop? Like would you say cloudbot is significantly better than just doing fundamentally the same thing, but in a more narrow context?
- [42:27]
Podcast Host
I'll preface this with I'm not an expert on the intricate differences between RALPH wa, which is essentially you give a, what is it? A product development roadmap with very specific outcomes that you want to complete in sort of a modular fashion. You give a task and it just basically runs and checks if it's actually completing this task as laid out in the pdr and once it's done, it's done. Whereas Claude bought and I tried Ralph Wiggum just to play, play with it for one thing and didn't really, didn't really, I wasn't really able to get it working. So my personal experience, I found a good secure setup for cloudbot on Sunday, was successfully able to set it up. I think the one common thing they have is with Ralph Wiggum you're storing context in the task files so it has context that it can constantly pull from after it clears context. And that's what I think claudebot does as well, just in a different way. And then from what I understand, Clawbot, the open source project, just has a bunch of sort of overlaid integrations that have been built out over the last month. It's still a really nascent project. But I don't know just intuitively for me, if somebody is not highly technical, technical enough to be dangerous and get in the terminal and do some stuff with some direction, it's been a much smoother experience for me personally.
- [44:02]
Harsha Goli
You guys should check it out. I've definitely, I've heard really interesting things about it. I think the biggest interesting thing is like, unlike any other like system, it's, it's not user driven, you know, which is very, very valuable.
- [44:15]
Podcast Host
What do you mean by that?
- [44:17]
Harsha Goli
My understanding. Autonomous. Yeah. Well, it, it lets its loop run, like regardless of what you're doing with it. So it'll always be checking your DMs. It'll, if you ask it to like keep an eye on this or that, you know, it'll constantly just keep an eye on this or that and let you know when things like when you need it, like get surfaced. But alternatively from everything else, you know, for Ralph Wiggum, I have to set the like checklist up and then it executes. And the thing, the task I was running here just like execute like finished iteration 38, you know, and now it's done. Now it's time to check the work and give a feedback and go on. It's just a bigger loop, but it's still a user driven loop. But the difference between cloudbot is it's not user driven. Yeah. This is clearly the direction that development is going in. Right. I think people are going to rely on this stuff to a crazy degree. Especially like five years from now. Some narrative loop like this. Yeah.
- [45:11]
Podcast Host
Like I said, know enough to be dangerous, which means know enough to know that I shouldn't just give claudebot everything. So I've been very sort of restrained on the access that I've gained. I have access to Claude code and I can interact with it via telegram.
- [45:26]
Harsha Goli
Yeah, we are. It's, it's actually kind of funny. We had like a long conversation in the Magnolia, like All Hands yesterday about like the security concerns of like a lot of these AI tools. Right. Because like, you know, we handle pii right like, we definitely do. We. We can't be like, turning on. I think it was like the bypass permissions on, like, you know, you know, we can't be piping this stuff in. And that's just. That's for the folks who don't have production access, you know, and so we have to add to our compliance documents, like, okay, we're going to use AI, but this is how we use it. We're going to use it in these specific environments where it doesn't have access to all this other stuff. It's actually kind of interesting because we're on the side, I think, of. We care about security a lot. We care about making sure that this data isn't going to go in the wrong direction. And I can only imagine how other companies or other places that lack of security. And I'm just really looking forward to. Is 2026 going to be the year of just a lot more hacks across the whole industry? Because most people are just leaving their credentials and just white text, plain text. It's going to be a great year for hackers, for black cats.
- [46:35]
Podcast Host
Yeah. Getting familiar with ENV files is very important, I think, for a lot of people out there.
- [46:43]
Harsha Goli
Oh, yeah.
- [46:48]
Podcast Host
How do you think this changes? Like, company building, right. Like we mentioned, like, headcount and all that. Like, how. I guess to phrase this another way, like, how far do you think you can go with a headcount under 20 at Magnolia?
- [47:10]
Harsha Goli
Very far. But when I moved to New York last year, I moved into this hacker house called the Residency in Chinatown. It was awesome. It was my first time living with a lot of deep Silicon Valley tech folks who are really just in the grind and genuinely a great time. And I remember something that they always pointed out about me that I'd never heard anyone refer to me about. They always said that I was a very agentic person. And I asked them, what does that mean? Is this an AI thing? They're like, no, no, no. It just means that when you see a problem, you do something about it. And I've noticed that in all my founder friends, that's very much who they are. When they see a problem, they do something about it. And I think fundamentally what this is going to allow in the long run is it's going to allow that barrier to entry. So if you just want to do something, you can do it. You know, you see these tweets online where, you know, being an idea guy is like, now the alpha, you know, And I do kind of agree with that. I think things have changed now to the point where it's really just a battle of willpower, you know, like how much willpower do you have? It's always been a question of willpower, but sometimes, you know, like people are able to go really, really far in the wrong direction, you know, and that's detrimental to them. That's part of the risk, you know, are you going, are you waiting until the right moment for your thing or are you being boneheaded in whatever direction you're going in? And I think with the advent of these tools it's going to specifically make it a lot easier for people to iterate and get to the stage that they want to get to. Being able to launch the product and then being able to test the thesis out while also being able to maybe get more information on what it is they're trying to do. It's never been so easy to get feedback on like the greater like context of your space than asking, you know, like a research bot, hey, spend like three hours researching anything that has to do with this space here and give me like a competitive analysis of these different like companies and how they're doing and you know, what flaws might be. It's never been so easy. And I think, I think that does change like the landscape of business quite a lot in the sense that it just, we're reducing information asymmetry and that lets people make more well informed decisions while also allowing them to get more done before. I think the things that limited founders were very much in the resource division, like how much money you have obviously, but also what your talent pool is, what connections you have. But with modern AI, if you're simply creative enough, you can overcome a lot of these problems. I've been for this launch here. We're fundamentally a B2B product. I have to talk to people in order to get them to be aware of our product. I've just had Claude just running against Twitter and Chrome and saying, hey, look at everyone who follows me, you know, are they working on something that makes sense for like integrating with us, you know, and create like a leads list here and then rank it in terms of like how well I probably know them, you know, and that is something that wasn't possible, you know, before. That's reducing information asymmetry here. There's a lot of things you can do with that. But really that's not like, it's not a question of like how smart is Harsha, it's just a question of how bad does Harsha want it? And I think now more than ever that barrier is lowered and I think that's fantastic, frankly, for innovation as a whole.
- [50:54]
Podcast Host
I completely agree. I think you put that beautifully. People with agency are going to thrive in this world. And I'm not so sure that I'm convinced that it's going to be the job killer apocalypse that it's being marketed as. Certainly it's going to have an effect on the jobs market and will displace a lot of jobs. But I think on the other side of things, I think it was Aaron Levy or Aaron Levy. Aaron Levy, the guy from box.com, he put out an article basically saying, like Jevons Paradox, compute is upon us. You think just because you're becoming more efficient with these resources, in this case compute, you're going to use less of it. But we'll actually find is that we just use more and more. And by extension, one could, one could speculate that that that means that the potential jobs that exist in the future are way more bountiful than they currently are. If, and I do think to your point, we do need some sort of social resurgence of individual agency and creativity to emerge to, to make that a reality. And there will obviously be a period of time where we're sort of reacting and getting comfortable with this change. But I think people begin to realize, like, okay, this is what these tools can do. If I just start thinking in a different way and thinking more creatively and actually getting off my ass and typing into these LLMs, maybe something will happen. And I think that'll be, have a net positive effect on the job market. Maybe that's naive, maybe that's too optimistic. Maybe it's a pipe dream, but I could see it playing out that way.
- [52:42]
Harsha Goli
No, I, I, I am. Let me ask you a question, Let me ask you a question. Before the power drill, right? How did people fasten like two pieces of wood together? Right. Like before, before we were able to drill things in. How, how do we screw drills in or screw. Yeah, screws in. Do you know the engine this, that.
- [53:04]
Podcast Host
Did screws even exist was just like hammer. Yeah.
- [53:08]
Harsha Goli
But there were, there were screws. It's like this like tool. It's like a rod that comes out with a crank handle. Right. And there's two, there's two parts of it. One is you have to drill the hole first. Right. Because it just, you know, it was too high torque to go through the wood. And then you had to put the long screw all the way in, you know, and this is only really feasible for long screws. Right. For Anything smaller, you use a nail. But it was a pretty tedious job, frankly. And this was like a specialized part of construction as a whole. And whenever my friends mentioned they're worried about AI taking everyone's job to make everyone homeless, I bring this up because we're long past that era and no one even remembers that tool anymore. Everyone only thinks about how easy it is to take your drill and screw it in. And I ask people, do people still have homes? Do we still build houses? Is there a lack of construction jobs right now? No, there's actually a huge boom of construction jobs because these tools allow people to build more, faster. It just increases the economic output of them. And yes, when electric tools, especially the corded ones and the cordless ones came out, people who specialize in doing this, they, they got displaced. Absolutely. You know, and that probably sucked for them. You know, genuinely, I, I like my family and the things that my family, like my, my mom and dad have done over the years, they've been displaced multiple times. I've been displaced. But economic displacement is a very normal part of any kind of healthy economy. You know, all it means is you got to switch gears, you got to do something else. You know, it doesn't mean you lose your job forever. People oftentimes learn a lot of skills that are, you know, you can use somewhere else. That, that's a very normal, healthy part of the economy. But the part everyone seems to forget is like the economic output of an individual does compound. Think about all the, all the hand cranks that are saved now every time you screw in a drill. And I think the exact same thing happens with AI right now. Building all these products and all these simple SaaS implementations are hundreds of million dollar enterprises that don't necessarily have to be, they don't have to charge such massive amounts. Now people can spin up their own competitors to all these massive SaaS products. And now that's a good thing for everyone. The costs go down for everyone as a result. And I do think that not even long term, short to midterm, we're going to see a lot of economic boom that comes out of this. Now that comes with a caveat. And everyone's waiting for this in the AI world, will enterprise actually pick up tooling that reflects a lot of these AI things, right? That's what everyone's waiting for in the meta of the AI world. And if enterprise is not able to pick up direct AI tooling to fund the AI bubble, then the bubble does pop and we're have to wait for Our electric drills a little bit longer, but building.
- [56:04]
Podcast Host
Right, well dig into that a little further. What do you mean by enterprise figuring this out and getting the tooling right?
- [56:11]
Harsha Goli
Yeah. Okay, so right now the AI world's in a very specific spot. We put a lot of money in to a lot of these, like you know, data farms and a lot of these server farms, you know, ramp prices through the roof and you know, GPUs are pretty much hard, like impossible to find all that stuff. The thing is, you know, Microsoft and you know, OpenAI and all these folks only have so much cash to burn on this stuff. And so they've been utilizing a lot of really interesting, like economic tools to fund a lot of these like projects. A lot of these tools. I think the term I've heard from the economist is they are economic innovations, which is always a great thing to hear. And so everyone's pretty sure that if these data farms don't, if these server farms don't work out, it's going to be a relatively big pop. Right? And we've already seen a big pop in these huge hype driven investments like EVs are a huge one. Right. Regardless of how you feel about EVs, that project is kind of dead right now. Right. Mostly due to the death of government subsidies. And some companies, some manufacturers spent billions of dollars building battery plants in the U.S. billions of dollars that they're not going to get a good return on. Those same lenders are the ones backing the AI bubble as well, building a lot of these data farms. And so everyone's just kind of like waiting with bated breath. In 2026, does Enterprise actually pick up the bill and start paying significant amounts for a lot of these AI tools? You know, people kind of feel like retail is tapped out for, for, for AI and people are trying to figure out ways to monetize retail, you know, more. So I think like the tech enthusiasts are happy to pay the $200 a month, but most retailers just happy with free ChatGPT. And if not free ChatGPT, free deep seek, you know, so ChatGPT is going to have to stay free. And so yeah, right now everyone's looking for what the next thing is. And the initial reports are frankly, enterprise isn't getting that much value out of AI tooling. If anything, they're actually losing money because AI tooling is kind of expensive for them. So we're going to have to see what can a lot of the big guys do to actually change this. And if some decisions that they do don't make that much sense, like implementing ads in ChatGPT or making it harder to use cloud code outside of cloud code. It's due to this large scale macroeconomics thing. They do need the enterprise angle to pay off. And so that's what I mean by that. Spart. There's a lot going on over there. I hope the bubble doesn't pop, but it could.
- [58:49]
Podcast Host
No, I mean, as somebody who's been using Claude pretty heavily over the last six months, I look at my usage, look at my bill, and I'm like, dang. Just like knowing how hard I've hammered it. And some days I'm like, I'm definitely not paying enough for this as being subsidized to some extent. And it's like, how long can that subsidization persist before the reality sets in and you don't have a deeper sort of investor pockets to dig into? Which is interesting. It's like, are we going to see a dot com bubble like pop and sort of valley of despair for a few years and the market eventually figures it out between now and 2030, like, okay, here's how to do it. And not only do it, but do it in a way where you can make money and actually makes economic sense and consumers are paying for what they're consuming and the producers of that product are actually making money because that's all it comes down to. You have to make money at the end of the day. But then you also have this existential geopolitical angle to it where it has been deemed existentially critical to the future of freedom in the digital age. America versus China. So you do have Daddy Uncle Sam who seems pretty motivated to step in and back it up as well.
- [60:11]
Harsha Goli
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. There's the only thing I know is that technology advancements always come in waves. Right? There's always a big one and then it crashes. That's the same thing happened with EVs. We're on, I think the third or fourth waves of EVs. People forget there was a wave in the 80s during the oil crisis, and there was a wave in the mid 2010s and there was a recent wave that just crashed there. And now, you know, the Ford Lightning is going to go and throw in a gas generator, you know, so that, that's about how that's going. And I might buy it in the complete transparency. I think that's awesome. But. But will I like, have a crash? It would follow the pattern of every other technological advancement if it did.
- [60:57]
Podcast Host
Yeah, just using pure heuristics it would make sense that it should at some point. Bringing us back to bitcoin, what are your thoughts on the current state of bitcoin, both from a economic technical adoption standpoint and then the industry. The state of the bitcoin industry, where it is right now, where it could be 12 months from now, particularly if Magnolia takes off.
- [61:26]
Harsha Goli
We're changing. I don't know if you saw, but Optx hash has a BIP now, right. Which is interesting. I think it came out like an hour or two before I hopped on, so that's interesting. Basically, at the high level of bitcoin, right, you zoom out as much as possible. There's where is bitcoin going at an enterprise level? Where's bitcoin going at a legal level? And then where's bitcoin going at a tech level? Right. And when it comes to the enterprise plays, there have been some interesting plays over 2025, but by and large, the value of bitcoin has always been the actual buy, sell price of bitcoin. People are trying to take advantage of that in really interesting ways. Like MSTR has always been, how do we acquire more of this on the bet that it's going to go up and we're going to use all these different devices to get that, you know, to get that going. Right. And I think bitcoin treasury companies are always some version of that. Right. It's, you know, I'm not trying to say if it's good or bad, but that that's. They're playing on the price of bitcoin and that seems to be like more of the enterprise play when it comes to bitcoin. When it comes to the legal aspect of bitcoin, it's pretty much just riding the coattails of the Genius Bill and the Clarity Act. You know, I think all those conversations are about stablecoins, but bitcoin just kind of follows along. It's just hanging out in the same conversation, but not the part that everyone's fighting this way or that way over. People are fighting over the stable coins and the yield from the stable coins and what to do with that. And then when it comes to the tech side of bitcoin, the thing is, bitcoin has had a lot of tech improvements over the years. Almost none of them getting serious adoption. Right. I mean, not just lightning. Lightning when I mean serious, I mean serious compared to bitcoin. Right. Lightning is there and has been awesome for a while, but now we've got spark and arc and a lot of other layer Twos that are coming up and those are all fine and do interesting things. But then there's all these like other upgrades to bitcoin coming along. Like you know, whether or not covenants come to bitcoin, all these different questions. But the thing is, compared to the other two things I described, the enterprise and the legal changes that are in the bitcoin space, all these tech innovations, they do seem smaller, right? Significantly. And as a developer, that's my entire background, I would like to see those innovations be bigger and make more of a splash. But that is not the part of bitcoin people are really interested in. So for Magnolia I want to follow the things that like have much bigger splashes, you know, which to us seems to be tooling and services that have to do regarding what the price of bitcoin. You know, like pragmatically that's just the direction that everything is in. So if there's a way we can use the price of bitcoin to make other people money or to you know, like convert pre coiners in that, that's where I think Magnolia wants to be for these other projects. I want to support them the best I can because there might be some way to have a really cool lending protocol related to some of these things or a really cool way to bridge gaps here with lightning. We support lightning at Magnolia and that lets us plug in things like ARC and maybe even spark and that's fantastic. But I think the future for 2026 is going to be a lot like really focused on these bigger folks right now. I think the thing that people haven't really talked about is that retail isn't pumping in bitcoin and not even AI. So I think people are feeling squeezed right now, but enterprises are out here and they're doing things. That's where Magnolia's got to be.
- [65:25]
Podcast Host
Yeah, there's an order of operations to bitcoin's long term success. Something I've long said and I mean expressed in other ways like store value, medium exchange, unit of account, whatever it may be. It seems like we're still squarely in the early phase of adoption where it's monetizing and like it or not, that is where a lot of the money is going to be made at this particular point in time and where a lot of the activity is. But to your point about the second layers too, that that's. I'd be interested to get your thoughts on that. Like how much do you think people in the industry should even market them? Right? So you think of like Spark, Arc, Charming, mints, liquid, the second layers. Like, I think 2025 was the year, at least in my perspective, that people in the industry begin to realize, oh, all these things are interoperable and if we can combine them in creative ways, we can eke out efficiencies and really improve our processes. As a Bitcoin service provider, one thing that comes to mind is like being able to automatically rebalance channels by combining ARK and Lightning. Obviously caveat. At scale, you'll probably need Covenants, but we're not at that point yet. Point being, the point that I'm trying to make is how much of these second layer technologies should even be marketed to the public and should they just be viewed as sort of backend infrastructure that app developers and product developers integrate and don't even really market to the end user, that that's what's happening in the back end?
- [67:02]
Harsha Goli
I think that's the second part. All this stuff is really complicated for even people in this space, all these different protocol schemes. But to your point, it's becoming pretty interoperable and I think it's going to have its moment when there is a killer application somewhere in this whole ecosphere. But all these different ecosystems work together quite effectively. So let's say, you know, we partner with like Ark, for example, and someone else partners with Spark, and both of them are trying to like interact with some application on like some layer two, that is neither of those. Right. But everyone has bridges. We can all interact with that end application just like quite fine. Right. And I think that is a world, like, worth kind of like going for, you know, like if that explosion occurs, everyone wins, especially when it's interoperable. How soon will that, how soon will it take to get there? I have no idea. I think we're firmly past the era where there's a lot of frankly, just scam projects out there. I think that the guys that are left are probably pretty good at this point. I've been paying attention to. I think a couple days ago I checked in on a couple of projects that I was always a little skeptical of, just to see what they were up to. Hadn't heard about them, you know, I don't think they're doing super well, which is good to see that, you know, they're not going to get involved in any of our conversations. But that's a good thing because now I can kind of like generally start to trust like, okay, we've weakened out a lot of folks from 2025. You guys are left, they're still Building, they're launching and they're doing things. Let's. Let's see what they come up with. And if they come up with something good, hopefully there's a way we can all bridge over there with minimal cost. You know, then everyone really wins out on one person's gain. You know, I think that's like, kind of the strategy other projects have really taken when they had, like, you know, a lot of, you know, different projects that needed to interact with each other for whatever reason. I think that's a winning strategy. You know, as long as it's all based on bitcoin, I'm happy.
- [69:01]
Podcast Host
Yeah. And considering where the price is, too, I got actually, I get a. I get a bit of guilty pleasure out of the price consolidating. Like, it has some people freaking out. And I think it's been a trope for at least as long as I've been in bitcoin. Like, building happens in the bear markets. Not to say that this is a bear market like we've experienced in the past, but it feels like that to many, particularly many who are relatively new to Bitcoin. And if you just zoom out and look at all the progress that's been made, whether that's in the business sector industry being built on top of the protocol or the protocol and the second layer protocols being built on top of it, it's been pretty massive from my perspective. It's the signal in the sea of price noise that exists in my mind.
- [69:51]
Harsha Goli
Yeah. I think if you're someone who thinks that this is a bear market, then just don't worry. You'll lose that idea over time. Every now and then I see a tweet, like, the price is down, and it's actually higher than the last time. I knew the price. I'm just like, oh, I don't. Like. Yeah, I've been in bitcoin long enough to. What even is the price right now? I have no idea. Something really, probably. Oh, it's a 88. That's funny. I think the last time I saw it was at 86, so I'm not too upset.
- [70:24]
Podcast Host
88. 88. Lucky. Lucky number 88.
- [70:28]
Harsha Goli
Yeah.
- [70:29]
Podcast Host
This has been awesome. What? Parting thoughts, messages, ideas around Magnolia that we haven't touched on. Do you have for the freaks out there?
- [70:40]
Harsha Goli
Yeah. I mean, really what we're trying to do is just make it easy to get banked, right? Like to get you banked, to get your customers banked so that you can just implement whatever interface you want. Right. Like, you can go as far as creating a Neo bank. If that's what you want to do with Magnolia, if you want just auto pay or even just auto dca, you can do that with Magnolia. Like, what we're trying to do here is just create as much financial tooling as possible for the builders. And if there's something that, you know, that you would like to see that you don't think we have reach out, you know, maybe there's a way we can do it where I'm a very customer first person. Right. If people tell me they want to go to eu, we'll go to eu. We figured out a way to do it. People told us that they wanted to go to all 50 states, you know, and that's what they wanted to focus on. They don't want to focus on geofencing people from, like, Alaska. Right. Or Indiana. So we figured out a way to do that. We're very customer focused, and I think that's really worked out for us. And our launch is kind of based on what people have really wanted. So if you're building something and you've got a customer base that you want to connect to Tradrails for whatever reason, reach out. There's probably some way we can help you. Genuinely. I think all bitcoin apps can utilize something like this. Yeah. And even. Even if you just want to, like, say hi. Also would love to just talk with people. I love chatting with people in bitcoin. Y' all are my people, you know, so I just love to talk.
- [72:05]
Podcast Host
Oh, yeah. Well, thank you for your time today. Congrats on getting this over the line. I know it's been a lot of. A lot of hard work on your end and the. The end of your team there at Magnolia. So looking forward to seeing you guys really get out there. And we'll have to do this at some point again in the future.
- [72:24]
Harsha Goli
Till next time, man. Thank you so much for having me on, and I'll catch you when I see you.
- [72:29]
Podcast Host
Peace and love, freaks. Okay, thank you for listening to this episode of tftc. If you've made it this far, I imagine you got some value out of the episode. If so, please share it far and wide with your friends and family. We're looking to get the word out there also, wherever you're listening, whether that's YouTube, Apple, Spotify, make sure you like and subscribe to the show. And if you can, leave a rating on the podcasting platforms, that goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad free. Make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to Fountain FM to find that $5 a month get you every episode a day early ad free helps. The show gives you incredible value, so please consider subscribing via Fountain as well. Thank you for your time and until next time.