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- [00:03]
David
How do you actually use all of the technologies that are available today to move value on the Internet to deliver money where people want it? Now you can have the best product. And it turns out it's built on an open network, and it unlocks instantly the ability to move money not only just, you know, within Spark and Cross Chain and on Lightning and on Bitcoin L1, but also across all of the traditional, you know, payment networks and Visa. That's how all roads actually go to Bitcoin is actually by leveraging the ability to offer an account that's both dollars and Bitcoin, then gradually, you'll use more and more Bitcoin. It's a cost center that's in the billions of dollars. And now you can flip that and make it a profit center, net margin of billions of dollars, and also not be captive to a bunch of other networks that are leeching on your data. And so the incentive is massive for these platforms to do this. We think this will win.
- [01:00]
Host / Interviewer
Thank you. I just saw. Well, I was actually doing an interview when you made your announcement, but I caught it on the live stream afterwards.
- [01:07]
David
It's pretty big.
- [01:08]
Host / Interviewer
This is. I think this is a real game changer for Bitcoin in some ways. But I want to start from the start with you. Why did you decide to sort of focus your entire career on payments?
- [01:19]
David
I think that, first of all, great to be back. Thank you. I think that the reason I've been so maniacally obsessed with money movement and payments is because it's just not right. And it feels utterly broken. And it feels that many people have tried to fix the way that money moves around the world. And everyone has failed, including myself previously. And so I developed this kind of obsession with figuring out a way to make money move on the Internet, like any other type of content. And that's it. It's been my focus.
- [02:03]
Host / Interviewer
So when you say you failed before, I imagine you're talking about Libra and PayPal. Well, PayPal clearly is not a failure in terms of the company.
- [02:12]
Sponsor / Advertiser
But what do you mean by you failed?
- [02:15]
David
I feel like. I mean, look, if you were to actually stop someone, we're in Vegas. Like, if you're stopping someone on the strip right now and they're from another country and you wanted to send them money, it wouldn't be an easy thing. You would see a Brazilian person and they would be like, okay, I can give you my pix key, and you wouldn't know what to do with it. Or you could find a European and they would give Give you an iban and you wouldn't know what to do with it if you're here in America,
- [02:47]
Host / Interviewer
I deal with the business side because I live in Australia. And the sponsors, I think all the sponsors have a base in the us and so I obviously will invoice them with an option to pay in Bitcoin, but they don't always take that option. And you can make it work with international routing and all that sort of stuff, but I get crushed on sort of fees and exchange rates. Like, it's not an easy.
- [03:08]
David
And it takes days and. And so. And, you know, many people who are working in the space are like, oh, but you can just pay everyone and anyone with a stablecoin, it works fine, right? And the reality is, most people you would meet today, some of them would say, yeah, fine, just send me a stablecoin to my wallet. But most people won't, right? And they wouldn't even know what a stablecoin is. And so the question is, how do you actually use all of the technologies that are available today to move value on the Internet to deliver money where people want it? And that's what we did today. I think, with this announcement of Grid Global Accounts, we've basically put together and stitched together all of the work that we've been focused on obsessively over the last four years to move money around the world on a platform that enables you to input and output any kind of money, whether it's a fiat currency on a banking system, Bitcoin, of course, or stablecoin, and just make it work for people and businesses.
- [04:11]
Host / Interviewer
So for anyone that didn't catch the announcement, what is Grid Global Accounts?
- [04:16]
David
So let's take a step back, right? So today, when you think about all of the different types of content we have on the Internet, you have images, you have text messages, you have emails, you have all of these things, and there's an app for every single one of those. Like, if I need to send you a photo, there's like 15 different ways I can send you a photo. And I don't even need to ask you if I have your phone number. I can just send it. It'll work. There's just no such thing for money. And today, if you're a platform, if you look at where the money originates and where people and businesses earn money, they earn money in a variety of different ways, but increasingly, so they get paid by platforms. And you can be a host on Airbnb, you can be a driver on Uber, you can be a creator on Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. And you get paid by those platforms and this becomes kind of your financial nexus, right? And the way that those platforms today move money around is you accumulate a bunch of money. You have to wait until you get to a certain threshold for most people and then you get paid much later, not that the time you earn that money. And when you get paid, the platform loses. And you kind of lose too, because the platform basically pays you to your bank account. And so the interest on that yield doesn't accrue to you or to the platform and goes back to the bank. The bank typically provides a pretty average service and everyone loses. And so we wanted to go to the core of that problem and figure it out. And so what we built and this couldn't have happened even a year ago because you have to have a perfect alignment of stars to actually do this. Which we now have is basically a global dollar account product that lives on Spark. And Spark is our Bitcoin L2 that supports stablecoins natively and moves stablecoins virtually for free. And so it's an account that you can have that's branded to your platform and your users, your stakeholders can use that, get paid in dollars. And we'll soon add many other currencies to make it a multi currency account. And then the minute you got money from one of these platforms or you fund it yourself, you can spend it in more ways than any account before it's time. So the first thing is we announced this morning a partnership with Visa to become a Visa principal member, which is not a small deal. And that will allow us to issue Grid Global accounts based cards in 100 countries. So you receive money in this account. It's a new kind of embedded wallet, so you can log in with Google, with Apple, with the Passkey. You don't need to worry about losing your seed phrase or your private key. That's the thing of the past. And so it's a self custodial, Spark based Grid Global account. You have dollars now. You can get a debit card and spend it at 175 million visa merchants globally.
- [07:34]
Host / Interviewer
And when you spend that, can you spend in dollars in Bitcoin, anything that
- [07:39]
David
has a balance in your account, whether it's Bitcoin or dollars or any other currency, you can pull from any of these to actually use your debit card. But that's not it. That's not enough. The other thing we did is we also made those accounts compatible with LightSpark Grid, which is the product that we've Been building for years, connecting into domestic payment systems in 65 countries. So to take the example I gave you earlier, if you're a Brazilian here, you can give your pics key to someone who has one of these accounts and that person can pay you in real time in your Brazilian bank account in Brazilian reais. And that's true in 65 countries. So now you have a balance, you can move that balance to your local banking account in your local country, in your local currency. You can pay anyone in the world instantly in real time. And then because we didn't think it was enough, we also added cross chain support. So if you want to pay someone using USDT on Tron or USDC on Solana, you can do that too. Because we wanted to make sure that a dollar in a great global account can be a dollar anywhere. And so if you combine all of these capabilities, it's really truly the most powerful global dollar account. And it so happens to live on top of Bitcoin via Spark. And so it makes it an address that's both Bitcoin enabled with real Bitcoin, not wrapped Bitcoin and dollars. And you can buy and sell Bitcoin, of course. And then the last part of it is that we feel that agents are going to change the way that interfaces are built and that you're not going to interact with apps and websites as much. And so we made it agent ready, which means that I can actually delegate my account to an agent that can now do all of those things on my behalf. And I have one running on my phone, I can show you later if you want.
- [09:29]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah, definitely.
- [09:31]
David
And I'll be able to just say hey text, get your contact details, your bank details and it'll settle in real time, right? And I'll contact you via WhatsApp and get your details and pay you if
- [09:44]
Sponsor / Advertiser
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- [12:50]
Host / Interviewer
I mean, there's so much there that I want to ask you about. But let's start with. You said this wasn't possible a year ago. Stars had to align. What had to happen to allow you to do this?
- [12:58]
David
So it's really four things. The first thing is the regulation. So if you want any of these big platforms, those global platforms, to be able to launch these things, they have to do it from a place of certainty, from a regulatory standpoint. And we didn't have that. And now we do. We have the Genius act in the US we have MICA in Europe. We have similar legislation almost everywhere. So, so now you can actually launch your own stablecoin or use stablecoins and not worry about that. So it basically made Stablecoin real money.
- [13:35]
Host / Interviewer
I've got a question on that actually, because like, like you say these were really stablecoin like tokenization sort of bills that passed rather than anything to do with bitcoin. Do you think bitcoin's out of the woods in terms of regulatory clarity as well?
- [13:48]
David
Yeah, I think I do think so. And we can talk about that after. But I had this whole schizophrenic relationship with stablecoins until it clicked that actually stablecoins was the best thing ever for bitcoin adoption. And we can go down that rabbit hole in a bit. But anyways, so now stablecoins can be used. So that's part one and I think bitcoin regulation is clear as well. Part two is embedded wallets, like really good embedded wallets. And we've seen that companies, whether it's like turnkey or privy, they've done a really, really amazing job at making those accounts, those wallets actually usable by anyone without fearing losing your funds. Which I think is like a massive step, which is absolutely a prerequisite. The third step was we needed a network, in this case on top of bitcoin that could support stablecoins natively, which Spark does really, really well and now has massive reach. Like it's in the tether wallet, it's in wdk, it's in all of the bitcoin wallets you use now. And that's really also a prerequisite. And then the fourth aspect is really the rise of stablecoin backed debit cards, which the networks and the banks have now been leaning on a lot more, which again, wasn't possible before. So if you combine all of these capabilities plus the work that we've done over the last four years, connecting to 65 countries, domestic real time payment systems and you bring it all together in a product that's great global accounts.
- [15:35]
Host / Interviewer
So, so this is not an actual app that people are going to download from the App Store, right? This is like the infrastructure, the plumbing behind the scenes. Is that right?
- [15:44]
David
So it's basically, it's not an app because I mean I have an app, it's a wallet that's called Bread that's built on top of this thing. That's like the first wallet that will hit the App Store I think this week. And that team did a really good job at building a best in class dual pockets, that dollar bitcoin wallet. And then they were kind enough to share the source code with us so we can add agent, delegation and all of these things and play with that in a real product rather than a prototype. And, and so you, you will experience this in an app or on a website. But it, we are not consumer facing, so we're like, we could have done it by the way. And I said this on stage earlier because I'm tempted. It's such a good product, so I'm really tempted to launch it myself. And it's like, hey, the world needs an account like this. You would use it? Yeah, I absolutely would use it. Everyone would use it. And so it's really tempting. But I feel really passionate about this idea of building the best network for money. And if you want to do that, then you need to empower the platforms that have the reach to actually go and build on their own. And so that's the route we've chosen.
- [17:00]
Host / Interviewer
So obviously you've experienced at PayPal and then at Facebook with Libra and we talked about why you think you maybe failed there. This is obviously a better solution, but PayPal has a huge network effect. Like, how do you beat them?
- [17:15]
David
Well, I mean PayPal's network is closed.
- [17:18]
Host / Interviewer
Yes, but everyone knows a PayPal. Everyone has like, has probably interacted with it at some point. Like they've got a big user base. Like how do you, how do you catch them?
- [17:25]
David
I think, you know, you just have to build a better product. Right. And I think, you know, I have to give a lot of kudos to the, the block people, you know, building Cash app and building Square because they have their own proprietary product, but they're making it ultra open. Yeah, right. It's like the Bread app that I was telling you about or Tether Wallet can. Now, if you have one of these, you'll be able to go to a square coffee shop and tap to pay. It's wild when you think about it, right? It's a totally open network because it lives on top of Bitcoin. And we think this will win because ultimately when you build on open standards like the Internet, like, you know, AOL or CompuServe didn't win because it was closed. And so the problem and why it didn't happen yet is because those products that were open were far worse than the closed products and they don't have to be anymore. And you know, Grid Global Accounts is a great example of that is much better than any dollar account you can ever have, like, you know, you could ever have until now. And so now you can have the best product. And it turns out it's built on an open network that enables all builders to actually add value to the overall value that the network provides to every endpoint on it. So it's just great time.
- [18:46]
Host / Interviewer
The really cool thing about this is I've been waiting for a bitcoin friendly bank to try and offer me a product like this where I could have my Australian dollar account, maybe a US dollar account and a bitcoin account in there. But this has gone. You've completely circumvented the banks and just built it, which is awesome. Tell me how it works a little bit. Because if I choose to pay in bitcoin and I take my Visa card in and I tap to pay, what's happening behind the scenes there? Are you doing a swap for like bitcoin, Stablecoin and then paying the merchant?
- [19:16]
David
Yeah. So basically, I mean, the merchant piece like is like completely outside of our view. Right? It's like Visa is now building merchant settlement for debit card and credit card payments and Stablecoins. But that's, that's on their side, the acquirer. What we do on our side is deliver the dollar, so to speak, at the issuer, like as an issuer. And then whatever the arrangement is between the merchant and the acquirer, that's like their business. So if they are receiving money in their local currency, that's what's going to happen. And so the merchant always gets paid in whatever currency they want. And the way that it works is basically that you have this wallet that you authorize a card to pull from with limits that you can set. And then whenever you make a payment, it can pull from either your Bitcoin balance or your dollar balance or your other currencies.
- [20:09]
Host / Interviewer
Soon and when you say this product's sort of entirely built on Bitcoin, can you just walk through what you mean by that?
- [20:16]
David
It's all built on Spark. So basically a grid global account is a Spark wallet and it comes with a bunch of bells and whistles on top of just being a Spark wallet, which is like the debit card Rails, the integration with the grid capabilities to move money around locally and globally on traditional payment networks. That's the difference. Right? And so what it needs from having just a Spark wallet is like the ability for people to like, if they want to interact with a debit card or with traditional payment Rails, they can KYB or KYC depending if a business or a person. And from that point on, it unlocks instantly the ability to move money not only just within Spark and Cross Chain and on Lightning and on Bitcoin L1, but also across all of the traditional payment networks and Visa.
- [21:09]
Host / Interviewer
Okay, I want to dig into something you mentioned just briefly a little earlier. You were talking about this kind of gig economy that's cropped up where people are getting paid from YouTube's TikToks. And one of the issues you said in there was that like, the platform aren't collecting interest, that you're not like this money's kind of like in limbo. Is interest something that you'll be able to do at some point?
- [21:29]
David
So the way that this works is, and the way we recommend it to platforms is they can issue their own stablecoins. And I'll expand on why this is actually possible. Because that's also a thing. Right? We used to be in a world where if you don't have enough liquidity or network effects, actually doing your own stablecoin is a bad idea because you couldn't use it anywhere. And so then it's like useless. And because we've made the account fungible and compatible with all of the other stablecoins and all of the other wallets and all of the other chains, it doesn't matter now because if you're receiving your own coin, your own stablecoin in, you know, I don't know, Nigeria, and you want to pay someone who has a Tron wallet and is using usdt, you can do that. So the liquidity problem we've basically erased by making those balances fungible and enabling bridges and other atomic swap platforms to actually exist on top of Spark. So what we advise platforms is launch your own stablecoin will help you do that and you'll earn interest because it's yours. And then in the US there's a lot of debate whether you can actually pay interest to holders or not. But outside of the US that's not a problem in many countries. So you can do that if you want.
- [22:58]
Host / Interviewer
Because in the genius act they said no interest on stablecoins. Right.
- [23:00]
David
I mean that's more the clarity. The clarity act. Sorry, yeah, too many. But, but yeah, so, so in the US it'll be more difficult to do that, but internationally you can definitely do that. Yeah. And typically like, I mean of course this is a much more powerful account than a normal bank account for payments in the us so we expect a lot of US people and businesses to use it just for the purpose of sending and receiving money. But typically if a platform is paying someone in the US and it's a US based platform, that's where they have the least friction. Where they have the most friction is actually sending money internationally. And for those, they can actually distribute yield if that's what they want to do. And if they want to keep it, they can keep it. That's their choice. And let the market play out. Right. But at least they keep it versus I'm pushing it to, I don't know, a Spanish bank and then it's black holed for me, the platform and for my user. And you know, more than black hold from a revenue standpoint, one of the things that no one talks about is the fact that like if you're connecting and if you're basically a tenant of someone else's network and you're pushing to all of the banks at the edges, you also share all of the data, all of your data. And the data was maybe kind of a cost of doing business. Sharing all of the data that will enable those businesses to actually build businesses off the back of the work that you've done to spin up that platform and generate, you know, product market fit and economic impact. But in the age of AI, it's like negligence to let everyone leech on your data and build products. And you know, if you do that then you control your own data and you control your own economics. And it's a, you know, it changes the game completely.
- [24:50]
Host / Interviewer
So you're not collecting data on any of this?
- [24:52]
David
No, because it's a self custodial wat.
- [24:54]
Host / Interviewer
That's awesome. Yeah, like in the stack of bitcoin wallets that I use, I have like my spending wallet, my lightning wallet, which you know, I might have like up to a thousand dollars something in it and then which one, which one do you use? What's your favorite I tend to use Phoenix the most. Okay, I like Phoenix. And then on top of that, like, then I really go to like proper cold storage Bitcoin and again, even levels in that. And I think really the way people have looked at bitcoin wallets so far is that your Lightning wallet should only have a little bit of money in. You don't want to maybe put tens of thousands of dollars in a Lightning wallet that's on your phone. Like, where does, where does this fit? Like how big do you think accounts should or could be on this?
- [25:31]
David
It doesn't matter. So like this is the beauty with Spark and we spent so much time doing that, right? It's like if you opened a tether wallet, which they've done a really good job, it's like so clean and so easy to use. And you've have USDT on a variety of different chains and you have Bitcoin on L1, on Lightning and on Spark. And all of the Bitcoin piece is on Spark. Basically it's running on Spark and it doesn't matter. It's like it doesn't matter where you hold it as a user. It's just taken care of for you. So you'd never have to actually open channels and park liquidity and do all of these things. It'll just work. And I think ultimately that was something that was needed for mass market adoption because like, you know, mass market is not going to think about where should I keep stuff and how should I.
- [26:20]
Host / Interviewer
They're never going to be balancing channels.
- [26:21]
David
So you have a fad balance in an account that's actually safe and you cannot lose the seed phrase or any of that. And you just use it for everyday purchases and payments.
- [26:35]
Host / Interviewer
I want to dig into that a bit more. When you say that it's actually safe, how is it secured?
- [26:40]
David
So today there are two different models, but if you look at the way turnkey does it, so they basically split the secrets in I think three parts and trusted execution environments, basically, so secure enclaves. And the beauty is basically that you can use a more traditional login, which means that it's mass market, so you can use Google to log in, or you can use a passkey, which I would recommend. And so then you have a passkey that's securely stored either on your device in a secure element. And then the secrets that are in three different parts that can only be reassembled when you log in with a passkey, which is super secure and easy. And to the extent that you don't put your passkey in a hardware key that you lose, then you're fine. And most people will actually just use like a password manager and like use a passkey that they store in their password manager or log in with Google or with Apple or with their phone number. The nice thing with this is that the platforms themselves can offer their own login that you're already using for the platform and extend the capabilities of your account. Like let's say that YouTube were to do that. I just, I'm riffing. You could have a YouTube money account and basically your Google account that you use to publish Your videos on YouTube becomes like your login to your YouTube Money account or Google Money account. And you would receive that money and you would have a debit card and you can move that money in real time to your bank account in Australia 24 7, even on a Sunday at 2am if that's what you need. Or move it to a Stable coin on any chain. And you would totally use that. Right? Yeah.
- [28:24]
Host / Interviewer
I think it's really exciting. And one of the things I love about this, alongside the stuff that Cash App and Square have been doing and Strike have been pushing, this, is that it feels like we're moving into the era where Bitcoin is actually going to be used as money properly.
- [28:36]
David
Yes.
- [28:38]
Host / Interviewer
Because for so long the narrative has been store of value, but bitcoin was always destined to be money as well. Yes, yes, yes. Do you. Do you think this is the starting point?
- [28:46]
David
Yes. And actually now let me close the full loop of the stablecoin stuff. I think the interesting thing with the stablecoin piece, it's actually a pretty profound realization that I had. And I was with Miles Sutter earlier from Cash App and I gave him credit for that because when they announced that Cash App was actually going to do USDC on Solana, I'm like, what in the world? What? Like, you're the most bitcoin forward company. What are you doing? And I was in the middle of my own, like, schizophrenic journey with stablecoins. And then I'm like, no, wait a minute, he's right. They're right. They need to consider that stablecoins on other chains are like fiat payment networks. It's like, why do I integrate with SEPA in Europe? And I'm fine with that. And I don't integrate with Solana for stablecoins. Makes no sense. Yeah, it was like an ideological mental trap. And so I'm like, no, they're actually totally right. And then we went full tilt. So with Grid, we went like really full tilt, like we support all the chains and all the stablecoins. And then we went even deeper with Grid Global accounts because we made it compatible with all of the networks. And so now what that does is it gives you an account and a platform that you want to use because you can actually make your money move to wherever you want it to move. And the account that is the most connected ends up being a Bitcoin account. Right. Because it's a spark wallet. And so that's how all roads actually go to Bitcoin is actually by leveraging the ability to offer an account that's both dollars and, and Bitcoin. And if you don't have the dollar, then Bitcoin is not as valuable. But if you have dollar and Bitcoin, then gradually you'll use more and more Bitcoin. If it lives on the same address, then.
- [30:49]
Host / Interviewer
So that's the reason that you think that stablecoin proliferation will increase Bitcoin adoption. Just because, just from almost proximity, like they're in the same account. And at some point people might start playing around with bitcoin, seeing what it could do, learning about it.
- [31:01]
David
Exactly.
- [31:02]
Host / Interviewer
Interesting. Because do you, do you see any problem with like the stablecoin takeover of the, like any person living in a high inflation country is going to choose the stablecoin over their local fiat currency. Like it makes sense.
- [31:15]
David
Yeah. I mean, or Bitcoin. Like, you know, it's kind of interesting and. Let me get there in a sec. But like, you know, just back to the square thing. Like, you know, so now you have an account and you have a stablecoin that could be on any chain. Yeah. But now we can swap it and pay at a square merchant. And the Rails are Bitcoin. So the open network that moves the TCP IP packets for money behind the scenes here is Bitcoin. And so that's amazing. It's like at both the level of like now I'm exposed to it because it's in my wallet and I can buy it, I can sell it and I can use it, but also when I'm paying on a network for my coffee at a store, the Rails are Bitcoin. And that's like a, you know, it's a pretty profound thing that's happening right now. And you know, not many people are actually really paying attention to that shift. But the fact that we're building on an open network that has that kind of reach right now is, I think, a profound turning point for Bitcoin.
- [32:17]
Sponsor / Advertiser
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- [34:42]
Host / Interviewer
ago you wrote like an open letter to the CEO of PayPal.
- [34:46]
David
It wasn't an open letter. It was like my rant. I woke up that morning and I was like, pissed seeing all of those news. And so I was just like. It was an open rant, it wasn't an open letter.
- [34:56]
Host / Interviewer
Okay, but so you were there for quite a long time. Does part of you wish that PayPal had have done something like this?
- [35:04]
David
Yeah, but like the problem. So here's the problem, right? It's like the innovator's dilemma. It's like you're a company and you're doing, I think, $11 billion of net cash flow a year with your business, and you need to accept the fact that you're going to cannibalize yourself to actually build in the open. And you need to go and tell all of the investors that hold your stock because you're a public company that they need to understand why in the world you're doing that. And so it's untenable for many people, unless you have a founder CEO who has total power over the company, it's never going to happen. And so I just think it was just the wrong place to do this. And it just needs to start from the bottom, right? And then propagate because otherwise there's just too much tension between your existing revenue and I mean, look, they did the PYUSD thing, like the PayPal USD. Pay USD. I don't know how you say it. And the obvious thing to do if you want this thing to actually, really succeed, is swap every balance that you have in dollars across the entire network, whether it's on Venmo, on PayPal, on merchant balances, to PySD. Right? And the reason they didn't do that is because the unit economics were not the same. And so they would have to cannibalize themselves. And so it's like you make all of these small, bad decisions for different reasons to optimize your bottom line, which you have to do because you're responsible to Delivering results to your shareholders. And so it's just the wrong place.
- [36:52]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah, See, I think this product's awesome. I think it's really cool and it's something I would 100% use. The difficulty of running a business in Australia with all my sponsors and clients in the US is real. But in throughout history.
- [37:04]
David
We'll set you up after this. I would love. For real. Yeah, we can set you up.
- [37:07]
Host / Interviewer
Awesome. But in history there's like lots of examples of a better product losing to a more centralized product that might already have sort of market share. What is it that makes you think this is going to win?
- [37:18]
David
Because I think that there's a deep economic incentive for the platforms to offer this to their stakeholders. And since it's also a better product for the stakeholders, then you get the flywheel to go. And the economic incentive is not small. Like if you're a big platform and you're paying out to 10 million creators or drivers or hosts or whatever it is, it's a cost center that's in the billions of dollars. And now you can flip that and make it a profit center. Net margin of billions of dollars if you actually adopt this and also not be captive to a bunch of other networks that are leeching on your data. And so the incentive is massive for these platforms to do this.
- [38:04]
Host / Interviewer
So are you going to be pounding the pavement trying to Talk to the YouTube of the world and.
- [38:09]
David
Yes, definitely. For sure. Yeah.
- [38:10]
Host / Interviewer
But you've not had any of those conversations yet.
- [38:12]
David
We've had some, yeah, we've started but like, you know, recently because we just launched a product today, so it's in the last few weeks.
- [38:19]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah. That's awesome. When you look at stablecoins on Bitcoin, obviously you can use stablecoins on Spark now, but traditionally over the last five years or whatever, it's largely been on things like Tron and Solana. How important is it to bring that back to Bitcoin?
- [38:35]
David
I think the key is really to have a single account that works with both dollars and other fiat currency digital versions of fiat currencies in the same place. I think the single account thing is really, really a fundamental product thing because if you have multiple addresses, you start thinking about these things differently. It's like, oh no, so you want to send me stablecoins now? Send it to my phantom wallet and if you want to send me bitcoin, send it to me and this thing. Or you can have a multi address wallet and it's like, oh, wait a second, I need to find. And so the ultimate last step of this. And it's kind of interesting because we started with that and probably the order was wrong, but we started with this UMA protocol, this universal money address standard that's used by a bunch of banks. And I think this is where it all ends, Right. It's like the single address becomes like a human readable address. And then you as a receiver can decide whether you want to receive dollars or you want to receive bitcoin. And I think there's a very elegant way to do that. But you have a single address that you can give anyone. So back to the example of, you know, the, the street. Here you go on the street, you find someone, it's like, can you send me money? And they can give you a thing that looks like an email address that everyone uses. And, and you can send them money and they'll receive it. You'll send it in whatever you want, they'll receive it in whatever they want. It'll work 24, 7 in real time, and it'll be great.
- [40:03]
Host / Interviewer
And it makes total sense. This also sounds like it may solve an issue I've had with like, merchant adoption of bitcoin, which is there's a chicken and egg problem with it. And I saw this, like, in 2017, where I live, there was a company called Travel by Bit that make all the merchants accept bitcoin. And through that year, we saw, I saw all the bars, restaurants have these. We accept bitcoin stickers. And it was actually the first time I ever bought something with bitcoin.
- [40:27]
David
Generally, it's one or two guys that are really passionate on like, you know, pounding the pavements to convince people store by store.
- [40:34]
Host / Interviewer
Right, exactly. And like in 2017, that was probably quite easy because bitcoin price was ripping. And then throughout, like 2018, 2019, you saw those stickers get ripped off windows and, and now none of them take bitcoin. But in this dynamic where you can pay in bitcoin and they receive whatever they want, that's really interesting. But do you think that solves that entire problem?
- [40:56]
David
Yeah, I mean, look, I know we're talking about block a lot, but I think they deserve a lot of credit for how good they've been at pushing really mass market products.
- [41:10]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah.
- [41:11]
David
With bitcoin built in, especially in the last 12 months, and the, the fact that you can now go to a square merchant pay using the lightning network underneath, and then the merchants can decide they want to receive all payments in dollars. They don't care. It's like, it's another way for people to pay. So more people can pay, they're happy, they get dollars. Yeah. Or they can say I want 10%
- [41:40]
Host / Interviewer
in Bitcoin and you'll do that conversion for them.
- [41:43]
David
No, so that's square, that's a square product. And so they do that. But this is probably the first time that this merchant has been exposed to bitcoin and now they start thinking, wait a minute, why not? And this is how it starts. Right. And then they flipped it on the Cash app side, which also works now with any Spark wallet by the way, which I'm very grateful for, is that you can fund your transaction that's still powered by the Lightning network from dollars either through debit card funding or a balance that you have in Cash app. And it'll convert to bitcoin pay using Lightning in one second, convert on the other side to fiat. And that model where basically in this case Lightning or Spark can be like TCPIP transport layer for money and it doesn't matter what the recipient or the sender is sending is the way that you actually drive more bitcoin adoption. Because people will be exposed to choices that they didn't have before in apps and capabilities that they didn't have before either. And so I think we're very like minded in the way that we're thinking about this, which is just give the power of money movement. And now we did actually the first stablecoin backed payment at a coffee shop using a Spark wallet. So it was like, you know, it was actually more complicated than that. I think it was like actually USDC on Solana, swapped to BTC on Spark, push on Lightning and received real dollars in a square terminal on the other side. All of that took two seconds. Right. But, but it's completely seamless. And yeah, that's the way this is.
- [43:27]
Host / Interviewer
Programmable money becoming programmable.
- [43:29]
David
Yeah, exactly. And bitcoin on bitcoin, which is like many people said was impossible.
- [43:34]
Host / Interviewer
I think that's awesome. How do you make money on this? Because obviously the payment providers will charge fees. I imagine you still charge fees, but how competitive are you against those?
- [43:43]
David
Yeah, we're very competitive. And the way that this works is that for the platforms what we want to do is make this their profit center Y and to the extent that they actually generate a lot of new revenue that was previously costs, our ask is we share a little bit of their revenue with them because we make it possible. And so that takes the shape of if you're using, if the endpoint person or business is using a Visa debit card to pay, you'll get the bulk of that interchange. We'll take a small piece. If you're moving money to a local payment network, there's effects and real time settlement fees that are happening. We'll take a small piece, you'll get a bigger piece, or you can pass that back on to consumers if that's what you want to do. And so, yeah, that's the business model.
- [44:34]
Host / Interviewer
I've got loads of like technical questions here. Like with the foreign exchange swap, how do you do that? Is that using bitcoin pairs in different countries?
- [44:41]
David
So yes, Bitcoin and stablecoins. So. And that's also the beauty of having started with Bitcoin is that we found that bitcoin liquidity against fiat currencies runs actually way deeper than many of the stablecoins. So it gives us a massive advantage in a bunch of different countries where the liquidity of stable coins against the fiat currency in that country is actually quite shallow. But we can least cost routes because we can swap from bitcoin to stablecoin and back in real time at virtually no cost on Spark. Natively, it doesn't matter. So it's like if actually using a stablecoin in a specific country will give us a better rate, we'll use that. Otherwise we'll use Bitcoin. That gives us the depth of liquidity and it's instant.
- [45:24]
Host / Interviewer
That's awesome. Can we get onto the fun stuff, the AI stuff?
- [45:28]
Sponsor / Advertiser
Let's start really from the top.
- [45:32]
Host / Interviewer
How quickly do you think the world is moving to an agentic AI world?
- [45:35]
David
Quickly. Much faster than people think. Mm.
- [45:38]
Host / Interviewer
And this is from like, I imagine you're playing around with OpenClore and things like that.
- [45:42]
David
Everything.
- [45:43]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah. And what do you think that will change?
- [45:45]
David
They don't sleep anymore. It's wild. No, look, I think so. I live with my little open claw thing connected to my great global account. So I live in that future that we just shipped today. And I've been living in that future for the past month or so. And it's been wild. This thing buys stuff for me online. It's sending money to family members in Europe in real time for me. And I just have to say, hey, just contact so and so and get their payment details. I don't even want to take care of it. So this is the number of that person and whatever they give you is good. Just send the money. And it's within the scope. Right. And it works in real time. And people are blown away when you
- [46:31]
Host / Interviewer
say it's within the scope you can set like limits on.
- [46:33]
David
I'll show you after if you want. Or, you know, I mean, I'd love to show it to you because it's like seeing is really believing in this game. You can set limits, you can give it permissions, and then it basically gives an agent pairing code and you run a curl on your openclaw or whatever that can run bash and it just pulls the CLI and the parent code. And then you can send money within the envelope that you've actually configured for the agent.
- [46:59]
Host / Interviewer
And with your open claw. Has it made any mistakes? Because I've had one set up loads
- [47:03]
David
and it is tons. I mean, the funniest one was like, happened actually two weeks ago and I was really pushing it to try new things because I was trying to make it really work fast on WhatsApp because I wanted demos here. It's real money and I want it to be so fast that people are blown away. And so I've been working on that late at night and stuff. It's been a lot of fun. And in one of the test runs, it wrote a test suite and then it randomly shot off like $20 within the envelope. So, yeah, fine. It shot off $20 to a random Solana address. And I'm like, dude, what? What? Like, and then. And then the thing was like, oh, my bad. I can use my debit card to pay you back. And it tells me that it's your debit card. And I'm like, but, bro, this is my card, it's not your card. And it's like, oh, yeah, you're right about that. And so it's. So it's like lots of fun st like that. It's been a lot of fun, actually.
- [48:08]
Host / Interviewer
This is obviously like at the very frontier of AI and it does still make tons of mistakes for me. When do you think it's going to be safe to properly use this in the way that you can see the future that's coming? But when do you think it'll be safe to use it with?
- [48:20]
David
No, no, I mean, right now. So the way that we've built this agent delegation protocol, it's basically scope delegation is totally safe, like 100% safe. So within the envelope that you give the AI, it cannot go beyond. Like, there's no way that it can break free from the cage that you give it right now. If you tell it to go buy a thing and it goes and buys the wrong thing, that can happen, right? And so that's like a problem for someone else. It's not our problem. Right. But our remit is actually can we build a safe cage and give a lot of capabilities. So a Visa debit card that the agent can use at 175 million merchants, 65 countries, payments network that it can move money in real time 24, 7 to. And then like all of the chains and all of the wallets. And of course buy and sell Bitcoin. I can tell it right now buy me $10 of Bitcoin, I'll do it in a second. Or I can tell it like actually buy me Bitcoin. Every time the price drops below a certain thing, it'll do it. So all of this comes with a great global account, right. And so within those things it has all of the abilities to do all of this within the restrictions that we give it. And so that part is fully safe. And then who builds what product? Like if you're a marketplace and you're actually building a product for merchants, you're going to build an AI that's going to enable that merchant to give your agent an email address and you can just send all of the global invoices that you wanted to pay and I'll pay them instantly. Just grab the payment details from the invoice and take care of business for you. And it'll be scoped to that thing. So it'll work really well. So what we wanted to do is just build the capabilities and then let others, the platforms build their own AIs that will do things really, really well.
- [50:14]
Host / Interviewer
So this is a question that's probably tough because you said that data is really important in this and you don't want to collect data on users self custodial wallet. But if you're using agents to go out and buy things they're collecting, like how do you square that? Like obviously you could use like a Maple or something like that, which is private AI, but I think the majority of people aren't using that yet. Like how do you kind of square that?
- [50:35]
David
Well I think in this case like it'll be the platforms themselves. Like let's, let's play the counter narrative of this, right? The counter narrative is you're using a random payment processor to move money around the world, right? And it captures data on who you're paying, how much they're earning, et cetera. Yeah, it totally can build an underwriting model on the fly and can then decide, oh, you know, this guy is making money at this rate, etc. I'm going to start offering it, offering that person an advanced product which is basically credit. Yeah. And so why is the platform not doing that? Like, wait a minute, like, you've created that whole economic opportunity for yourself, for your stakeholders on your platform, and now you're letting a third party company that you use for payments, like, start extending credit and actually eating in your margin? No, that's crazy. Like, that's actually negligent. Whereas here, the data between you and your stakeholders stays with you. You can build AI capabilities that will serve them better and make it more compelling for your stakeholders, those merchants, to actually use your product, rather than a competitive product to receive payments from your platform. And then you can build with that data products and services that serve your customers really well and also yourself. Right. And so in that world, everyone wins. Now, like, if you're a hobbyist, like, you know, like I am or you are, and you connect your openclaw to your wallet and like, yes, for sure, the underlying model will in that case, like, get your data. But like, that's more like, I don't see.
- [52:10]
Host / Interviewer
I mean, that's not your problem to solve.
- [52:12]
David
Yeah, I mean, it's like, yes, and that too, yes.
- [52:16]
Host / Interviewer
Because one of the interesting things is there's been this sort of ongoing debate for years now about, like, when AI gets to this kind of point, when we get agentic AI, what money will it pick? Can you actually let the AI agent be in control of how it holds money at rest? So, for example, if you have $1,000 in an account that it totally could.
- [52:33]
David
Yeah.
- [52:34]
Host / Interviewer
What do you think it would pick? Because obviously my bias is Bitcoin is the best money ever. Do you think that is what the AI agents will choose?
- [52:41]
David
I think we'll have to run an education campaign for AI agents to understand that, but I think they'll figure it out. It's kind of interesting because this thing runs on spark. It has all kinds of different routes to pay for things. And when it can choose the routes without me telling it, but when it can choose the route to use native bitcoin to pay, for instance, in my thing, I have it. If you have a cash app, cash tag, you can give it and it'll pay you there.
- [53:13]
Host / Interviewer
Yeah.
- [53:13]
David
And I'll. I'll use bitcoin for that. Because it's just the shortest path. Right. It won't like, try to convert from my dollar balance to then pay. It'll just use my balance. Right. Then I'll just use the shortest path. And so it'll figure it out. Like the other fun experiments, by the way, that we did, like, that's Just for the sake of just amusing you and your audience for a sec, is that we. We basically, I created a fleet of agents for LightSpark employees so we can play with it, like, you know, together, and they can demo it as well, which has been a nightmare to maintain because someone always does something like, especially with open claws that update all the time and break things. It's just been lots of sleepless nights. But the nice thing is I wanted to do an experiment. I'm like, okay, I told my agent to pay another one of my colleagues at the company. And I told it, like, instead of contacting him directly, just talk to his agent and figure it out and talk with the agent on WhatsApp. Right. By the way, just don't try to establish a protocol I can't see because I want to see. And so it went off on WhatsApp and then started blabbing in English and having a bunch of conversations, then got confused and whatever. And then within five minutes, they were like, wait a minute, you're another agent? And the other one was like, yeah, I'm another agent. And then it's like, oh, why do we speak in English? And they. They decided to switch to exchange. Exchanging JSON structured information. And from that point on, like, every single transaction, like, they started with like, their own, like, you know, slash a 2A thing. And then they started exchanging JSON and stopping to talk in English.
- [54:51]
Host / Interviewer
See this stuff, it was so amazing.
- [54:54]
David
It's like, so amazing to watch. I was like, holy shit, where did that come from? It was great.
- [54:58]
Host / Interviewer
Because I'm sure that's more efficient for those, like, agents. For agent conversations.
- [55:02]
David
Totally English.
- [55:02]
Host / Interviewer
Not being able to. But not being able to see, it kind of freaks me out.
- [55:06]
David
It's funny, but it goes to say you have all of these companies trying to actually build the perfect protocol for agents to agent payments. This is not a problem for them. They'll figure it out. The problem is actually, can you build a product that's principally designed for humans that you can safely delegate to agents, which is what we try to do with real global accounts?
- [55:25]
Host / Interviewer
I think it's very, very cool. I've got one personal question on this. If I set this up, can I put a bank routing number in there so I can be paid the traditional way as well?
- [55:35]
David
Yes, of course. Yeah. Yeah. That's the whole point.
- [55:37]
Host / Interviewer
This is cool. I need to get this set up. Is this like the final straw? Is this everything you've been building towards and it's like, done? Or is the more you guys want to.
- [55:45]
David
It's never done. It's never done. It's never done. But I'll say that this is by far, by far the biggest milestone of the company since we started four years ago. And it's like really four years of painful work of connecting to all of these domestic payment systems, of making bitcoin faster, of building spark and making it great and making it scalable. And all come together with also this perfect alignment of stars of regulatory wallet technology, stablecoin backed cards. All of this coming together in one cohesive product that solves a lot of problems. So yeah, it's a big milestone.
- [56:23]
Host / Interviewer
The thing that I'm most excited about, which I said a little earlier, is bitcoin as a store of value. Narrative is kind of one like we know bitcoin is a good store of value. I think that's generally accepted by most people now. Most people who paid attention the payments has always been a big question mark. And I think this solves the chicken and egg problem, which I think is a huge problem of getting merchants to accept something. Now you can just choose to pay it and they don't even have to know about it. That's awesome.
- [56:46]
David
Totally.
- [56:47]
Host / Interviewer
It feels like this is a big step on bitcoin winning.
- [56:50]
David
Yeah, well, time will tell, but I feel pretty good about it.
- [56:54]
Host / Interviewer
Bullish open neutral networks. David, this has been awesome.
- [56:58]
David
Thank you so much.
- [56:58]
Host / Interviewer
I'm sure you've got a very busy day. I've got to go on stage now, but thank you so much.
- [57:02]
David
Thank you. Thanks for having me set this up as well. We have to.