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It all comes down to computers communicating. The information superhighway can be a confusing mix of on ramps and off ramps. Bitcoin is worthless artificial gold. Is it still rat poison? Probably rat poison squared. We need to get into the world of OK, this is actually foundational technology. What the Internet of Money does is it creates a single network which can do a microtransaction to a giga transaction. The Internet is going to be one of the major forces for reducing the role of gun. The one thing that's missing that that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. All righty, welcome back to Final Settlement. Today is Tuesday, April 8th, 2025. Super excited for today's Rep. We've got a great episode for you guys. 2 special guests today. So alongside me as my Co host, Liam Nelson and our two guests today, Pierre Corbin, founder and CEO of Flash Payments and Graham Kresic, founder and CEO of Voltage Payments. So you know, lots to talk about today that the high level theme is going to be really, you know, what we've talked about a lot on this show historically is Bitcoin is more than just a store of value. It's more than digital gold. I think that's, you know, the the primary thesis that a lot of allocators are wrapping their heads around today. Even if you think about something like, you know, the United States adopting Bitcoin in some sense and creating a strategic Bitcoin reserve, that's very much the store of value use case. That's how they're thinking about it. That's how most allocators are thinking about it. But the reality is that, you know, digital gold doesn't really do Bitcoin justice. It can be much more than that and propelling forward that sort of next leg of the thesis, if you is, if you will, is, you know, things like the lightning network, other protocols that are interoperable with bitcoins base layer that are getting enable all these different payments, use cases, micro payments, things that you know, Pierre and Flash are doing with Nostril wallet connect are fascinating. And Graham and his team also just put out a report with Fidelity around the Lightning Network. So we'll we'll get into that as well and some some announcements from the voltage team in addition to that. So very excited to have you both on the show today. How are we doing, fellas? Doing great, Yeah, excited to be here. I think that I love the topic because this is something that we talked quite a bit about of just if Bitcoin is only a store of value, then, you know, we kind of lost, lost some of the point. So yeah, excited to dive in. Yeah, that's it was actually, I think there was a clip or a quote from from Jack Dorsey going around the past week or so that said something to the effect of that. Like, you know, if it's just a store of value, Bitcoin has failed. Would would you guys agree? Let's just maybe start there. Would you guys agree with that that sentiment from from Jack a week or so ago I. Mean I think generally speaking, I guess not I mean the story of value is still people using it right? I think it it will mean, you know, Bitcoins full potential won't have been reached I think, but but yeah, I think you know, there's still 1st just as a, you know, hedge against his faith and store of value number go up. I think there's already like a lot of value in Bitcoin just just with that. But but yeah, 100% I mean that's why we're working on at flash as well. It's, you know, Bitcoin, you know, before being peer-to-peer, sorry, before being sort of value. I mean, the title of the the white paper is that it's, you know, peer-to-peer electronic calf, right? So that's, it's supposed to be the first use case before store of value. Store of value is just a result of all of the fundamental mechanisms that were built into Bitcoin. So yeah, but I don't think it would have failed, right? People would still use it, even if it's just to stay in their hand. Graham, do you agree with that or different? I mean like like, yes, I think that ultimately if Bitcoin is only a store value as it failed, like I think failed is like a strong word there. I do think that it has not reached its full potential that it could. And I completely agree on, you know, the Satoshi's I think original vision for it is for a payments mechanism. I mean he put that in the paper of like here's how you can, you know, send these electronic, you know, digital cash payments. So I think there is a huge amount of potential inside of Bitcoin for the payments use case. I think that's been one of the challenges that we've seen at the start of this year is, you know, everyone's excited or was excited about all the things going on in the federal government in the United States of like the whole like the Bitcoin bill and like the crypto stockpile, like all those things that were kind of happening at the administration level. The thing is all those things were for a store of value use case. They're all talking about the government's going to hold this like all those things. I'm not saying that those are all bad things necessarily. We can, you know, debate all those different things independently, but like overall, I think the focus has been on the store value for so long that people really lost sight of the payment side of it. And so that's what I think, you know, but both of our companies are really trying to, to, to bring up is just more of, you know, it is not only, not only can Bitcoin do payments and it can do payments well, but it is actually the most superior way of doing payments in the entire crypto ecosystem. That's what we kind of highlighted in our report with Fidelity is it's not only like, oh, Bitcoin can also do this thing too. It's like, no, it can actually do it and it can do it much better than other systems that have been created to try and solve that problem too. So I think that it it doesn't, you know, it doesn't fail if it's only a store value, but it definitely doesn't reach it's full potential. Yeah, I think that's, that's very well said by both of you. And I I sort of land in a a similar camp of yeah, it's, it's sort of like the next extension of the thesis And it's, you know, it's full potential is being, you know, serving all the needs of a of a form of money, right, which would include a medium of exchange type use case. And it's also just fascinating because like you pointed out, you know, the white paper obviously calls it peer-to-peer cash. And then like, you know, it, the first real usage of Bitcoin, you know, whether you're talking about Silk Road or otherwise, like that was medium exchange. So it's like we've seen this evolution from that to then digital gold. And now it's like, well, you know, into the future will probably be some combination of both of those things. And the other thing that comes to mind is we had Bitstein on the show many months ago and he had a, an interesting way of thinking about, you know, all of this in the sense that I think a lot of people get there, you know, get stuck in the mode of thinking like, well, it needs to be a store of value 1st. And then then it becomes a medium of exchange. And he had a very interesting insight around that in the sense that he was like, it's kind of everything all at once. It's just, you know, you're delaying the spend, right? Like if you as a person who understands the value profit Bitcoin, you understand that you're in a, you know, very small minority that actually understands what it is, then the price is going to go up over time, probably pretty aggressively over the next like decade or two. So you're not incentivized to spend your Bitcoin. And so that's just a reality. But at the same time, money is, is money for a reason, right? Like you're eventually going to use it for something. And so even if you're delaying that eventual meeting of exchange use case, like, one, we still need to like plan for it. And two, there are going to be people around the world who have different use cases and different needs at different times. And so, yeah, I think that's, that's well said. I, I certainly wouldn't say it's failed if, you know, if we don't succeed, you know, to the full extent on the median exchange side. But I think it's just going to be, I think we're early days and I think it's going to be a process. And different people have different needs at different times for, for money, generally speaking. But I did want to maybe just taking a step step back a bit. Pierre, you've been on the show before. People are somewhat familiar with Flash, a portfolio company of of early riders. But maybe each of you could give sort of just a high level brief background on yourselves how you got into Bitcoin and and what each of your companies does. Well, so I can go first, it'll be further. So I'm Pierre Corbin and CEO and Co founder of Flash and yeah, it's nice to be provides software solutions for businesses that want to be able to monetize in Bitcoin and soft custody. No intermediaries, just unlocking peer-to-peer payments for businesses. Awesome. Yes, My name is Graham. I'm, so I'm founder and CEO of Voltage and I got into Bitcoin about 2012, very fascinated about it from like the tech perspective of man. How can you create this like globally decentralized, like payment network that no one can like, you know, stop payments and like all the things that kind of go along inside of Bitcoin from the tech perspective. And then, you know, kept it as a hobby for a long time and worked in software and then ultimately started Voltage basically to solve my own problem of as you, as I was building things inside of Bitcoin, it was just really starting from scratch over and over and over again. And everyone was like building everything from scratch, like from, from, you know, for every single project, building Bitcoin core from source, like all these different things, there's like, man, there's got to be a better way. And so that's why I created voltage. And what it ultimately is today is a, a method of just being able to integrate Bitcoin in the lightning Network is what we do the majority of our business to make it much easier, faster to integrate the technology into your business. And so instead of hiring out a team of, you know, four or five people and again, starting it all from scratch, you can really just kind of hit our AP is and plug in to be able to process payments or, you know, both Bitcoin and then stable coins are coming soon, which we'll probably touch on soon. And being able to do that much easier and faster than you would kind of starting it all from zero. Yeah, that's, that's a super helpful overview. Maybe like Graham on your side, it'd be helpful to walk through maybe like a few examples that are like tangible of like how, you know, either projects or, you know, different use cases are using voltage today. You know, we, we mentioned, we are, we alluded to the, the partnership with Bitco on the stablecoin side, but maybe even before stablecoins like just on the sort of Bitcoin native side some can you walk through some sort of tangible, tangible examples of of how voltage helps companies? Yeah, definitely. I mean, so we so some examples of customers that we work with, they're like exchanges. So if they want to, if an exchange wants to add in Lightning to do, you know, deposits and withdrawals inside of their platform, they're able to hook into voltage really quickly and easily and add in that capability without having to again, hire a team and, and do a lot of the complexity themselves. We also work with like payment processors. So people that are doing historically has been very much like if anyone is moving any kind of Bitcoin on chain, you can do it faster and cheaper via lightning. So that's a better user experience and that's saving potentially millions of dollars a year, depending on your volumes of on chain fees that you can save into moving into lightning. And so we work with a lot of like crypto or Bitcoin specific on payment processors and being able to move, create better, better cogs as well as faster, you know, better experiences by moving that volume into lightning. And then we're also working on, you know, some newer use cases of, you know, getting more traditional finance into into Bitcoin and being able to have kind of like the the dollars to Bitcoin kind of solve for them and, and all those different things. So ultimately we really Lightning is made to be a faster, cheaper way of moving Bitcoin and that's basically what we enable for people like exchanges, payment processors, neo banks, wallets, any of those kinds of folks. Got you. And maybe we can, we can touch on the, the partnership with Bitco now, because I found it very interesting just in the sense that, you know, I think to announce and launch something like this, I'll pull up the, the presser now. But you know, to, to go about this, I would imagine that there was, you know, a significant demand, like there were people, you know, institutions in particular asking for this type of thing. And, and I'm curious 1 is that true? And was that sort of the impetus for doing this that there was, you know, clear demand from institutional folks that wanted to, you know, move dollars in a more efficient way effectively? And then beyond that, I guess, you know, secondary question in in your mind at this stage is that where the majority of demand is for using something like Lightning is moving dollars as opposed to, you know, institutions moving around Bitcoin on Lightning? Yeah. So like with so with this integration with Bitco, we're doing it. I mean we're starting off with doing Bitcoin payments over Lightning. And so stablecoins are kind of a coming soon thing as soon as like Tappered assets is has launched and we have people like Tether that have publicly announced that they're going to support in the coming months. So the stablecoins over Lightning is a coming soon thing in which we do see a huge amount of demand for with this as well for specifically on this Titco integration. Yes, I mean, there has been a lot of folks that we talked to that are very interested in Lightning. They want to enable it for all of the the benefits that I've kind of mentioned before. But they already use people like a bit Go or some kind of a custodian to, to manage all of their other asset movements, asset management. And so instead of having kind of a, an additional provider that would be like voltage, if they work directly, we're able to hook into the bit Go network and they're ultimately customers are able to kind of hit a single source that they've already integrated their business and be able to get the benefits of lightning. So ultimately it makes it much a better user experience for these companies that are wanting to integrate Lightning because they still use the same kind of provider, the same interface that they always have been, but can really enable it much quicker and faster than they would have previously. So ultimately this should we're anticipating having a big jump in adoption by leveraging the Bitco network. They're they're fairly large set of customers and being able to bring Lightning into that, that group. So we are really excited about what this is going to, how this is going to catapult adoption over this coming year. Nice. That's, that's super helpful and really fascinating. I guess before we go into the stable coin side of this a little bit further, I just, you know, reread the Voltage and Fidelity report from earlier this year. And one of the things that really stuck out to me was the average channel capacity really growing significantly, whereas the average number of channels per node has has not really grown quite as much. And you mentioned a ton of integration with, you know, custodians, neo banks. We're seeing a ton of demand from, you know, peer-to-peer custodians in terms of, you know, ways to settle balances that are exchanged between the two custodians. I guess where, where do you see most of the demand for Lightning at least in your seat and based on kind of the public data that you have could be interesting just to see if this is kind of match what you thought voltage was, was going to be in, in the Lightning network exactly when you launched or or where we are today. Yeah. I mean, I guess like touching on the the kind of the the the way that I was thinking about when I started the company versus today, like touching on that first. I mean, when I definitely started voltage, it was very much like consumer like retail focus, like, you know, everyone in the world is going to have a node and everyone is going to need like really easy access and all those things. I think that's definitely shifted as we've seen the Lightning network mature over the years where it's definitely less, less people operating like a, a, a node in like the full-fledged node. We've seen a lot of advancements in things like LDK that help make it much more like you can still do self custodial lightning without like the full on node that we think about in like the start nines or umbrellas or like a full node on voltage. And so we've seen much more of like these kinds of, you know, people like us moving much more onto the business end of things where we work with again, like exchanges, payment processors, all those things that I mentioned and being able to really optimize on creating better experiences for them and then ultimately their users as well. And so in that shift, you know, we in that shift of at least us focusing a lot more on the business side of things, we've seen the metrics inside of Lightning kind of shift towards that as well. As we've highlighted the average channel is getting much, much larger. That's because, you know, businesses are just doing more than, you know, they're trying to facilitate, you know, thousands of payments across their, their customer base, not just like, hey, a couple payments a day maybe for an individual. So that requires more capacity. And it's just that the, the mature, the maturation of the network itself to realize that, OK, it's better to have like 5 really large channels than have like 100 small channels for both from like, from a management perspective, from like your, the, the, the effectiveness of payments going through the likelihood of success, all those things. And so the, this data, as we've kind of highlighted in the report, really show that this is, this is maturity in the network as we've learned what is working and not working. And so that's kind of like what we the the public data is kind of validating what we're seeing on the business side. Yeah, that makes, that makes a ton of sense. I think, you know, just just thinking about the past few years in terms of the Lightning Network, it's adoption, it's growth, it's development, I think, you know, generally speaking, people are just way too impatient. Like, I think there's, you know, been a lot of rhetoric and, and talk on Bitcoin Twitter, etcetera, you know, in terms of just the frictions of lightning which do exist and the ways in which it needs to improve. I'm curious from both of you, you know, how would you sort of handicap the past, call it 12 to 24 months of lightning development and how it's gotten better, more efficient, more usable with, you know, and, and maybe that's even related to like folks like Light Spark and David Marcus entering the fray. How does that sort of relate to again, just this ongoing development that's just going to take time and, and again, I think people are just very impatient and, and, you know, wanting things to just work seamlessly and perfectly overnight. And that's just not the reality of building on an open protocol. But curious any of your either of your thoughts on that? Yeah. So I think, you know, The thing is, it's kind of general question. We could go all over the place, but yeah, I'll start somewhere and we'll see. We'll see where you can go. So generally speaking, when it comes to already building beyond just user experience, but already the building experience, the developer experience, it's pretty tricky to build on Lightning. And it's kind of like what Graham said earlier, you want to start a Bitcoin business, you have to start from scratch. You have to you have a use case. Well, you first have to like build a wallet as anything which which is complicated. That's you know what we stumbled upon a flash that you know, thought. But this is where there's a big differences with nostril wallet connect and the fact that, you know, you can just connect to a share with library of APIs and any wallet can become compatible and all of a sudden you're in confusion can work for all of these wallets right now. That's that's how we developed flaff in the 1st place. We then, of course, created our own wallet generated to be able to just scale this right. But even when it comes to building the wallet itself, you know, how do you make Bitcoin easy over the lighting network? Is not is is not a simple answer because you know, if you want to start lightning wallet in self custody, well, then well, you need to download the wallet and then you need to fund the wallet because you need to open channels, you need to add liquidity to this channel. And so it's kind of, you know, if you're a first time user that is just curious and just wants to try this out and start in our case, accepting Bitcoin payments. Well then to do this in full self custody, which is of course what we recommend to get to get started. Well then in in that case you need to pretty much do. Three payments 4 payments before you can actually get there because you need to buy Bitcoin or to be able to like do this stuff. So for for a new person, it's it's impossible. And now there are other tools out there that exist, but it's not exactly lightning in that case, just like, but but the last two things much more just faster while doing compatible with lightning network, which is how we built our wallets, which is using the liquid network, right. So the funds are liquid and you can do automatic swaps that that just allowed to do, yeah, a bunch of things, right. And so of course it is self custodial because you own your keys. But you do rely on the liquid network, which is less sovereign perhaps compared to Bitcoin or even the lighting network in self custody. So it's, it's a matter of trade-offs, right? But then we managed to make user experience of Flash that if you're a business that is just furious about accepting Bitcoin payments, well then you can get set up in literally just a couple minutes because you download the wallet, it's got a balance of 0 and you don't need any balance to start accepting Bitcoin. So it's automatically connected to Flash and you can accept those payments. So it's very easy and it simplifies such things where where the Lightning Network makes this more more complicated and then involve different use cases that the Lightning Network makes also a bit more complicated like offline payments and stuff like that. You know, we manage to solve with Liquid, but you get into that later. But also one of the great things with the Lightning network that other networks don't have, including the Liquid network is micro payments that are, you know, instant currently. You know, with the fat wallets, there's a limit minimum amount of 1000 set of things because that's the requirement that both swaps have 1000 satoshi transaction now. I mean, word on the street is that they're going to lower it to the minimum amount that they have for the amount of fees that they want, which would be about I think 43 satoshi. So you know, we're already getting into the micro transaction territory, but but still still not quite the price between going up. I think, you know, because this number will have to to be revised. And so, yeah, so that's just some some general thoughts. Yeah. And Graham, on your side, I'm curious as well. Just, you know, I think that was, correct me if I'm wrong, like a lot of the impetus of UN Fidelity putting out that report was just to say like, hey, here's the state of things, here's how things are progressing, here's how development is moving forward. So curious your thoughts on like where are we today relative to a year or two years ago and how do you see this playing out? Yeah. I mean, definitely that was one of the reasons why we put out the report is, I mean, it's one of the really challenging parts about Lightning is that it's, it's inherently a very private network. And given it's peer-to-peer, you can't, you don't have the same metrics that you do with other chains, Bitcoin or Ethereum or slot. When you name the chain, almost all, any kind of public blockchain, you can see exactly how much is being transacted, how frequently the fee rates, all those things. With lightning, it's all private because it's peer-to-peer. So it's, it's easy. That's one of the reasons why you see so much like FUD and light in like on Twitter and things like that for lighting is there is no public data that you can point to. So that's kind of one of the reasons why we want to do a report with Fidelity is to highlight, OK, here's like really what's happening behind the scenes that you can only really get by being in the and being able to facilitate transactions and those kinds of things. And so that was one of the reasons almost everyone that is kind of throwing shade at lighting usually has some kind of motive of their own. It's like they're trying to push side chains or their other layer two or something else that is kind of competing. And so it's something that should basically just be ignored for like from those kinds of folks. And then there's also like inside of crypto in general, there's always like the the desire to have these these solutions very, very quickly. Well, to your point, like building an open protocol and doing it in a correct way where people actually get self custody the entire time is a very challenging thing. And that's a very hard thing to do. Other chains are able to move faster because they're sacrificing on a lot of those things. And so sure, if lighting wanted to sacrifice on all of like the properties that like the Bitcoin started with, yeah, we could move a lot faster, We could make things a lot easier in a UX or whatever. But we would be sacrificing on the whole reason why Bitcoin was created in the 1st place. And obviously the community doesn't want to do that. And so we're very intentional with the way that the lighting has been built out. But then going into more of like from what we see it like, you know, from a couple years ago today to today, vastly different in terms of like what it takes like get started and get, you know, ramped up and lightning. You know what we, our product has come a huge, a very long way in that, that time. We also have a new product that we're releasing in, in next week that should do a lot in terms of boosting that even to another level. And so ultimately the experience has been, it is definitely started challenging and it's been gradually being reduced over over time to the point where you know, it's, it's really as simple as any other payment scheme or blockchain or whatever you want to whatever you want to equate it to via people like, you know, like a voltage or a flash or something. If you're going to try and start and like do it all yourself, like again from scratch, then like there's definitely still some edge cases there. There's still some things that you know, some gotchas that you can run into. But if you're working with a provider that has basically run into every single one of those gotchas and figured out a way to solve for it, it makes the experience far, far better. So we've come a huge way in the last couple of years of accessible and not only accessible, but being able to, to, to process payments quick, faster and cheaper than any other blockchain out in the crypto ecosystem. And that was something else that we highlighted in the Fidelity report is, you know, comparing it to the global like crypto networks, there's nothing that can beat it in terms of speed and reliability and, and cost. Then, then, then what, then what you can do on Lightning. So that was another thing that we wanted to highlight and show that, you know, it's not only working, but it's working really, really well. Yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm glad you, you pointed out a few really important points there. One just being the distinct difference in architectures of, you know, the broader crypto space and, and people building on Bitcoin. I think, you know, there's obviously trade-offs associated, but to your point, like they are, they are sacrificing on certain things in order to move fast and and not really care about some of these fundamental things that are important to Bitcoin. The other component there I think is, you know, I'm curious your views on, well, you know, if I'm being generous about it, I think like the broader crypto space has found some product market fit in stable coins generally. So if you just look at stable coin volumes, vast, vast majority of them are not on Bitcoin, right. But as you are alluding to, you know, they they should be on Bitcoin because, you know, it's cheaper faster than these block chains. But I guess why, why the disconnect up until now? Is it just because the development on Bitcoin tends to move slower almost purposefully so than these other block chains and that's why they've gotten sort of the initial adoption of stablecoins? And do you do you think sort of medium to long term that percentage split shifts over time, so where you know more stablecoin volumes are happening on Lightning or other Bitcoin adjacent? Protocols, yeah. I mean, I think, I think like, like, yes, I think that the the percentages shift overtime. I think why like, you know why it's taking a little bit longer on Bitcoin is 1. I mean, the the protocol for actually being able to like issue a stable point on lightning didn't exist until the recent like, I don't know, a year and a half two years ago or something. And then even then it takes a while to build it out and have it like, you know, very, very reliable. You compare it to people like like the Solana Foundation or something that raises like hundreds of millions of dollars to go and like just throw at the problem. You know, we don't really have that inside of Bitcoin like Lightning Labs is kind of the lead developer on like the Tappert s s protocol, which enables stable coins to be issued on Lightning, But that's there still have like no near the funding of like the Solana Foundation or anything like that. And so it's kind of like, you know, the other other folks solve it by just throwing a bunch of money at the problem, which like is Bitcoin and Lightning is just so grassroots that we don't have that same ability. And I think that that leads us to build it in a much, much better way ultimately. But I do think that we're, we're, we're kind of at the point where that is like now possible. And we're looking, we're seeing people like Tether publicly announced they are going to be issuing on top of lightning. And so I think that once you create like combine that, there's, there's no denying that stablecoins generally have a product market fit inside of the crypto ecosystem. It's what's the majority of crypto in general is used for is stablecoin movement. And so when you couple that the a strong use case with Bitcoin and Lightning being the best way of moving value, I think that's a big recipe success. And that's going to overtime really take a lot of market share from these other chains, especially like, you know, Tron was one of the most popular ways of moving Tether. It still still probably is, but their fee rates are gradually going up. And so I think that as like these ones that really started in a value prop of moving it fast and cheap are starting to lose that value. And so it's only natural that it starts to move into the, the better way of, of transacting, which is Lightning. And so we're very excited for, you know, the stablecoin movement to come to to come to lightning. We think it'll have a a really big impact. Yeah. Two things that I wanted to hit on there. One that really gets under looked is Bitcoin being in Lightning Network, being able to be the fastest, cheapest way in order to transact across all of crypto, but also having the value accrual narrative behind it of it being a store of value. Because if there is no reason to have a store of value, then you know, paying out of that. It's, it's essentially you need it as a savings technology in order to also use it and want to keep it in as a payments technology, right? Like, you know, I'm sure everybody's seen Jesse Myers chart previously of like where all the assets sit and it's, you know, 110 or $130 trillion with money. And then there's about a $500 trillion use case for storing value over time. And so with Bitcoin, it's kind of just both of it actually can both compete with the money aspect as well as actually saving value. And so, you know, just kind of to solidify it. It doesn't make sense to, you know, really focus on having the best payments technology if there isn't any actual real way to store value in the asset. And then additionally, yeah, I was was curious how you see demand for the stable coins kind of rolling out here in the future. Are you going to be kind of going after the same market as the the tethers of the world? Is it going to be a little bit different in terms of, you know, where voltage kind of plays and it's collaboration with Bitco? I was just kind of curious about, you know, how, how you see that playing out. Yeah. I mean, ultimately I think for for us it's definitely, definitely some overlap in the existing, you know, stable coin world just because of you know, it's a lot of these. I think that overtime like as you look at the inefficiencies that you people are seeing inside of these chains for moving stable coins for us to come in and say, hey, you can do the same thing on Lightning and you can save you again a couple $1,000,000 a year on your transaction fees. Like that's kind of a know brainer. So I think that there is going to be there's a lot of overlap naturally just because it's still stable coin movement. It's just kind of a different chain, so to speak. But it's one that actually it's not just another chain for the sake of, you know, more users or anything like that. It's just a far faster, cheaper, better way of moving value. And so I think that there is a lot of overlap that we'll see between the two. Yeah. And I think also it might. I mean, I'm curious to see how long it'll take to transition because of course, USDT on Tron, on Solana, whatever isn't compatible with USDT on Lightning directly, right? Or on liquid or whatever. They, they're on their chain. So you need to have like some kind of swap solutions there or through exchanges and, and, and all that. So, I mean, you know, I wonder how quickly some of the the the stable coins that are exchanged and these are their blockchains are going to start being transitioning to yeah, to, to Bitcoin to Lightning, I guess is the better way to say, because it's not actually Bitcoin, right? It's just the Lightning network itself that I'm making the payments. So it's the payment network of it that is, that is strong. It's just we're using the best payment network for Bitcoin and found a way to actually reuse it for stable coins as well. I think it's just about the efficiency of the payment network itself. And so I think this this transition might take a bit of time and, and I look forward to the day where it won't be messy when you're trying to send USDT to someone where, you know, it's just a OK, so where do you want this USDT? What chain? What's like, Yeah, none of them are compatible. And yeah, the rise of other, I think atomic swap services would also be maybe very useful for such things supposed to rely on custodium, start us to just, you know, do this swap and hold the city of funds momentarily like like the market is today. Yeah, absolutely. Maybe maybe it's worth taking a bit of a, a step back and just thinking about sort of, you know, the interoperability of open protocols. I think is, is something that's really fascinating to me and, and particularly Pierre on your side, what you guys have done leveraging Noster Wallet Connect. If you could talk a little bit about that and, and sort of just what's that, what that has unlocked for you in terms of, you know, making Bitcoin payments better and more efficient by combining various open protocols? Because I think that's again, it's sort of this, this other side of the spectrum. When you think about the Super centralized Solana foundation building XYZ thing, it's like we'll know we're going to take this different approach. One, it's going to be slower a little bit, you know, more purposeful and in certain in terms of how slow it moves, but also like it's not just going to be this, this centralized monolithic, monolithic thing. There's going to be various open protocols that work together to enable all different types of things. So we'd love to to hear a little bit of that what you guys are doing at Flash and then if that that resonates with anything you guys are working on at Voltage, Graham, that'd be interesting as well. Yeah. So essentially we're using of course multiple technologies, but I think in that sense the one that is the most important one and really the one that we started with because before reaching life, we built a bunch of things with my Co founder and just trying to figure out what's the best way to build things. How do we avoid holding custody of user funds? Because the point is to avoid regulate them as much as possible and solve problems in a bit of a different way. And essentially in doing all this, we found Nostra Walk Connect and we realized that it's the best way for us to build in an interoperable environment without having to build a wallet of our own. And the reason for it is because essentially you can using Nostra Walk Connect, you can connect your wallet to flat and then flash can just use this wallet. So we can, we can figure payments, we can also make payments requests. And, and what's very interesting and all of that is that when I say we can trigger payments, Flash isn't really doing anything. We're just sending a message to your wallet and your wallet will receive this message and can then make the payment, but the wallet can still block that payment, right? Like everything is under the user's control. And you know, if I think today of the the best wallets that work with Flash, we've got so ABI Hub, which is self custodial, but you have to pay for it unless you go the more technical route. But I'm thinking like very simple users, so self custodial, but you have to pay for it. There's a coin OS that is free but custodial. And then there's Flash that is self custodial and free, right. So the point that I'm trying to make here is that there's different wallets with different features, whether it's custodial and S custodial that can, you know, help users manage their funds in whatever way they prefer that these same users can connect their wallet to class. And for them we solve the peer-to-peer payment side of things. So we're solving the payment problem, we're not solving the custody problem. Like that's an entirely different topic. The point is more that the Flash can interact with wallets and automate certain actions on these wallets using this technology. And any wallet that adds nostril WAD connects support to it. All of their users are automatically compatible with Flash. But of course, it's not only Flash, it's with the whole ecosystem of nothing WAD connect that is growing and every new wallet that you see coming out like in the past few months, most of them have support for an Oster walk in it because of the use cases that it allows users, users to build. And I can give you, I think one of these example use cases that that I think is, is pretty mind blowing is how we manage our fees at class. So the way Flash works is that it's free to get started, you know, free to use. You can create a store, you can create a point of sale, whatever you want inside of Flash free. And then the moment you receive a payment as a merchant, well then of course, this this happens through our software. So we know when the wallet, the wallet can confirm to us when he's received the payment. And so then we can trigger a payment from the merchant's wallet two hours. So it'll be like, yeah, a micro transaction 1 1/2 percent fee that, that we take. And we know what wallet is connected to flash and we can we have access to methods that allow us to get the information about that wallet. And as part of this response, we can see what network the wallet has access to. So by default, master wallet connect was created only for Lightning and, and a lot of these cases were built with that when we created the platform, as I said earlier, you know, we wanted to go the, the easier route, easier UX to get started, but also easier for us to build. So we went through the Breeze Notice SDK which uses the Liquid network, which which means that essentially for it to be compatible properly with Flash, we added Liquid to an Oster Wall connect. And I know that now on chain is being added to an Oster Wall connector. And so essentially what we can do is when the moment we have to pay the fee to the Flash wallet from the merchants wallet, we can see what networks this user has available. And as I mentioned earlier, the liquid network, in order to do swaps with the Lightning, there's a limit of 1000 Satoshi's. So instead of doing the swap, if the user has a liquid wallet, well then we're going to pay ourselves in liquids. But if he does have Lightning, well then we're going to do the payments as well and Lightning to our Lightning wallet. And so in this interoperable way where we know nothing about the user because we don't need to do any kind of KYC or anything. So we don't know the user. The only thing we have is a connection string from his wallet. With this we can know exactly what networks he has and we can generate back end payments using the network that works the best between the paying and the merchant, right? So this is how it works with our subscriptions as well, where I gave the example of the fees. But subscriptions the same thing. We know the pay your wallet what networks he has. We know the merchant wallet what network he has. If they both have liquid right now, it means they both have a flat wallet. We can make them use liquid instead of use like because they're going to be able to do well, smaller transactions and smaller fees because, you know, liquid to liquid is cheaper than having to do the swaps with bolts and breezed and take their own their own. So so we can we can choose the network based on that. And and I think that's like one of the true powerful things that exists in off the wall. Connect that. Yeah, that just keep discovering, you know, with time. Yeah, no, that's, that's amazing. I think, you know, a goal for all of this is like to make it so the end users, whether it's the payer or the merchant isn't, you know, isn't Privy to like what all, everything you just described in terms of what's going on behind the scenes, which networks each each party A or B is, is operating on. And it can just be as easy as possible for them to click a couple buttons and, you know, send or receive their payment. Like that's where we need to get to. And I think like you know what you guys are building is, is really accelerating that that progression to get there. Yeah. So I think just just to follow up on that, that's that's 100% how we're thinking about this in long term. Imagine just a network of payment, imagine PayPal where you know, you can connect your bank account or something, something like that and hold these funds in PayPal and you can send them between these users. PayPal holds custody of these funds. And of course, the the payments that happen in PayPal happen in the PayPal network, right? But the way we're thinking about this is being able to be a pay ourselves or the network itself. Yeah, that's what Master Wallet Connect is. It's not necessarily what is meant to be, but you know, it's a network where people can just hold their funds in, in whatever it is. You know, as soon as we have stable coin support, we will add stable coins to Master Wallet Connect, right. So whatever kind of funds are as part of Master Wallet Connect and the user's wallet, well, one user should be able to send money to another user, not having to wonder what network it is, right? As long as they have one network that matches whether it's lightning liquid on chain stable coin, whichever one it is that they have in common. This is how the payment should go, right? And the users wouldn't even need to like, yeah, choose which I think is, yeah, pretty, pretty exciting and all in, you know, from from Flash's perspective, non custody, I guess, because the wallets might be self custodial or custodial. From Flash's perspective, it doesn't matter, right? Because we're anyway facilitating in this. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think overall like I think that the nostril wall connect is like, you know, very interesting for the fact of like trying to obfuscate as much of like the complexity of of the the experience that we can. I think that that's something that is going to be very important as we look at more like of the kind of like merchant level, like point of sale type experiences. Because I think that's something like, you know, we remember Strike announcing like integration with like NCR and all those things which like ended up like kind of not panning out. But I think that that was, I don't know all the details of that specifically, but I think that was one of the challenges of the experience was like the, the complexity that exists inside of actually like paying at that time with Bitcoin and kind of a point of sale method. I think if there's a lot more that has been solved today versus that, then and then also more that can be solved to really just make it a very, very seamless experience. And just that's one thing that I will admit is one of the great things about credit cards is it's a pretty easy experience to pay. I can even just like tap my phone and it just works. And so we need that's, that's what that's our competition. That's what we need to be striving for and so that's what we need to be, you know, building towards. I think that, you know, nostril wall connect is one of those things that kind of is helping us get there. 100% agreed. And one of the things that you mentioned, Pierre, I think you listed off like 5 or 6 interoperable open networks during that, including nostril wall connect, you know, liquid lightning, Bitcoin on chain, then, you know, being able to use old swaps and can freeze SDK. It's just really amazing the progress. It's kind of happening behind the scenes at the moment. And I guess in person too. But you know, at least, you know, you're obfuscating that for the consumer. So it's just the easiest process it can be. 111 thing you guys didn't mention, I'm just curious to get your thoughts on is the world of of E cash curious, you know, what are your thoughts on on, you know, the development there? I know there's a few different efforts, whether it's Fetty or cashew that are, are sort of pushing that forward, but where do you see that sort of sort of fitting into the landscape of Bitcoin payments generally speaking? Is it just another sort of cog in this, this overall system? And, and you know, the other, the other sort of component of all of this is like, you know, I don't necessarily view lightning as like winner take all. Like I, I think over the medium to long term, there's going to be many different layers on top of Bitcoin. And so, you know, maybe you have, you know, various different sort of things that are progressing simultaneously and and sort of interop as well, but curious if you guys have any thoughts on E cash in particular. Go ahead, Pierre. Yeah, sure. So so I have some I think you know, and I'm planning to dig a bit deeper because the E cash community they are embracing Austin Wall Connect. So, you know, that's that's why I'm to follow this much cost line on the and so on. I think the developer community there and how it's growing is super impressive. And I think that some of the use cases that they've been locked are Yeah, very, just really, really good to see. I remember the one thing that made me, I think start to kind of looked a bit more discovered E cash a bit more was when Doctor Kelly on Twitter shared a video of him making an E cash transaction on an airplane without Internet access, which like, because that's, I think, you know, that's one big difficulty. I think that exists in lightning, in self custodial lightning, which is that the lightning node needs to be, well, it needs to be online, but it also needs to be reachable, right. So, you know, if you think of mobile lightning wallets, well, the node is in the cloud, but you access the nodes from the device. And that's kind of how we were working with flash originally. And that's how we work it. In fact, just with not the word connect typically, but we've added extra features through the flash wallet that allows us to create offline, so create lightning invoices while the phone is offline. And that's because we can leverage the liquid network for that. And so, you know, we can know if if a wallet is offline, we can't wake it up with a notification, Well, then we're going to use the the liquid address that we saved and we're going to do a swap directly this way. And and I think that's one of the things that, and it would be very interesting to see how E cash can kind of scale this, make this more more usable and how, how we could also try and implement something like that. So the merchants would be able to accept offline payments completely. I don't market at this stage, to be honest, how we could potentially integrate, but I think it's pretty good. I do also have some not necessarily doubts, but it is a mint that needs to be created. There is a certain Gray area when it comes to the custody of it, just like there is with the liquid network. I'm not saying right? Yep, But I think that's just when it comes to regulate and that's that's where, you know, I like, I think I have because it's from the perspective of flaff. Again, we want to be always non custodial. So we've got to be able to like figure out what technology is, what technology do we exactly provide to our users to avoid the situation where, you know, six months down the road, all of a sudden we get a, you know, a warning and we have to start KYC and all of our users because we're again, we're, we're fixing the the payment side of things and it's like it's just peer-to-peer comments. There's no need for KYC knowing who our users are. None of that then you know, that's really, if you manage to solve this properly, well, we will never need to KYC our users for, for this. And that's, that's what we'd want to yeah, keep us just a direction for flash. So, so you know, that's that's where I still don't exactly grasp what would be implications when it comes to to regulations there. Just my $0.02. Yeah, I think that's that's super fair, Graham. Yeah. I mean, I think it's interesting. I think that it'll be, it'll be interesting to see how it kind of continues to play out. I think that it it makes sense. It's just like I agree with a Pierce kind of evaluation of like it's, it's similar to a liquid or any of these other side chains. And so I think that they all have unique trade-offs for what they, you know, you kind of have some, some things you give up while you're using it, but then you also gain some some other things. And so it'll just be, I think interesting just to see where the adoption lands. I do think that, you know, lightning is obviously still the most prominent L2 or site like what just not a side chain, but it's the most prominent off chain scaling mechanism that has existed inside of Bitcoin. And that's still like from like, you know, you think about the exchanges that have adopted lightning over the last year, there's been a lot, there's been far less adopting liquid or E cash or fetti mint or whatever it is. And so I think it's still, that's why we focus so hard on lightning is because we still see it as not only what's in demand today, but also where will be the ultimate biggest value accrual inside of Bitcoin scaling in the long term. But it will be interesting to see how some of these newer protocols and and, you know, methods like this play out and see where the adoption ultimately lands. Absolutely. Maybe we could turn to, you know what both of you are excited for for the rest of the year here. Maybe talk a little bit about the road map at each of your, your companies, what's what your, what your heads down focused on right now in terms of building out and offering to your customers. I think. Yeah, I mean we, yeah, we got quite a few things in the works. You know, we'll have a new product out, you know, in the next week or two that we're really excited about. That I think is probably just best to read all the announcements when that happens. But really just simplifying the experience of integrating and using Lightning and just continuing to push the envelope and how how simple we can make it and how quick and easy it can be. So we're doing a lot with that. But then also the big thing that I'm excited for in this year is the stable coins on Lightning. So, you know, we've talked about it for a while and now that we're, it seems like it's, you know, possible, it's here, people are doing it. And so it's really still yet to be seen. What impact does that have on the network and adoption and all those things. So I think that it'll be a pretty big deal both from, you know, the efficiencies that the companies gain from doing stable coins on lightning like we talked about, but also the the boost in the network itself of, you know, more liquidity in the network or whatever it is. And so I think that it'll help both the users of stablecoins, but then also the just the general Bitcoin Lightning network in itself. So we're really excited. We're working on the products in that realm too. So we're excited to see that be finally possible. And then, you know, look, working with customers to enable that inside of their application. So we think that'll be a big a big opportunity this year. Yeah, but also on on fashion side where it's we're, we're about to release the new version of our web application that has much nicer user interface, but also this user experience. You know, we gathered a lot of feedback from the users in the past six months. And so we're, yeah, hoping this version will be when that's puts all of this feedback together. And after watching how users use flats, the first things they do when they get on the application, what kind of issues they they they see the, the Bitcoin of crowd there. They can be a bit, a bit difficult when it comes to, to some things like, you know, in our onboarding currently, when you, when you create the account, you have to provide some, I mean, you can provide some information if as a business, you want to be able to receive invoices in order to justify, well, the expenses that you had, which are the flash fees that we take. It's completely optional. You can click on the little skip button, but the skip button is too small. And Bitcoin is considered this KYC process, even though it can be like fake information. So you know, that's the kind of like stuff that's a, but the, the, the, the, the answer here. And I think it's, it's, it's true for every product that, that you build is how quickly can you get the user to actually using your, your platform and like actually having something that allows them to. And so that that's, you know, what, what we were trying to, to work on on this new, new version. So we're also going to be releasing our, our wallet that is currently on test flight. We're going to be releasing it in app stores and with, yeah, packed up functionalities, including subscription management directly. So you'll be able to manage all of your flash subscriptions from the wallet, but also we'll be adding the possibility of having these offline payments, as I mentioned, and it'll be offline payments in any kind of network. You know, what we want to do is every single one of our checkouts by default will show the lightning network and show a lightning invoice. But you can pay otherwise you can pay in liquids, you can pay on chain USDT. So, you know, kind of pack all of these payment solutions using lightning as the default, but you know, giving more options when, when paying, which of course will make it easier for for merchants that want to get into because we get, we get this, it's about, first of all, most people, they don't understand, you know, Bitcoin versus crypto. And so oftentimes is, oh, you only have Bitcoin now, OK, and, and I understand then, right. So then, of course, you know, the majority of anyway, the, the, the conversations I have like this are education and explaining kind of why we, we make this difference. But also being able to add USDT and just stable coins in general is the kind of thing that will make this, it'll make it easier to answer when someone has these kind of remarks. But then, you know, the next thing that we want to be able to do is of course, scale all of this, make sure everything works nicely. But then adding your self custodial lightning is kind of, you know, a priority for us here because, you know, first of all, I think self custodial lightning is kind of the way to go and it's become so much easier than what it used to be. So I think there's just, yeah, depending on some use case, you know, of course we're looking at voltage about we've of course had many conversation with Graham as well and his team simply because of the, you know, the quality of their product, the of course, the reputation that it has and just how easy it is to get started on that. Right. So because one thing we need to be able to do is, you know, building the flat vault is one thing and it's it's great because we can unlock use cases and we didn't throw them. But in the end, our business model comes from our business tools. Therefore, we need to be able to make sure that we bring more people over. So other wallets that already have a user base help them get onto Noster Wallet Connect. And so we're going to be open sourcing a bunch of our work as well to make it easier for them to be able to reach out and say, look, here it is. It's the exact same technology you're using the exact same wallet Olympics to be able to simplify that, then grow this network because we will grow with it. Brilliant. Very exciting boys. Maybe before we wrap here, I started the the convo by mentioning a report that that Liam had written called Bitcoin is the true fintech. And I think we've enumerated a lot of reasons why that is. And, and, you know, part of that report and part of what Liam put out there was like, if you think about quote, UN quote fintech, what that really has looked like over the past couple decades, It's really like, you know, lipstick on a pig of the traditional finance system, all these slow, old archaic rails, the SWIFT system, what have you. And it's, you know, it's not something fundamentally different and new and better and more efficient. Whereas if you look at everything that you can enable via Bitcoin and all these interoperable, interoperable protocols that work together like that is that is really financial technology, IE Fintech more so than just, you know, mapping sort of like, you know, Venmo on top of these old slow rails where like the payment isn't actually settling, IE, you know, name of the show final settlement. Like these are better native sort of infrastructure for everything you could possibly do in in finance. So Liam, I don't know if you had anything else to share on that or just generally on on what we've talked about today. I yeah, no, just would recommend anybody check out the piece if they haven't already. I mean, we touched on most of it, but a lot of there are three main pillars of why Bitcoin is the real Fintech, I would say, which is, you know, it's elite savings technology just being completely finite. It is, you know, the custodial properties that are built into it, whether it's self custody, multi sig or collaborative custody. It just allows for better escrow payments, you know, holding Bitcoin and more self sovereign ways in in ways where there's reduced custodial risk. And then the last one is primarily talking about how it's interoperable nature is just allows it to be the best fintech ever, you know, allowing for, you know, everything like consumer rewards, payroll payments, different escrow natures. It's just significantly better than the existing systems. So I and I think just based on the conversation today, you guys are, are really pushing the ball forward on, you know, really bringing this, especially on the payment side just to to the broader audience. But it would, yeah, I mean, unless yeah, that's, I would just recommend everybody check out the report if they haven't already. Yeah, we'll, we'll put that in the show notes. We'll also put Voltage and Fidelity's recent report in the show notes as well. And Pierre and Graham, where can, where can folks learn more about flash and voltage and, and yourselves as well? Yeah. So you can just go on pay with flash.com. That's our website directly that we redid recently, actually last year. So go go check it out. We also have, of course on X. You can find me Kirk organ. So for me you'll find me and you can find all the information about about flash directly. And you know all the other stuff that I do if I can plug actually, if ever there's anyone in Europe next month, May 23rd to 25th, there's the Bitcoin film fest happening in Warsaw. I'm the Co founder of that. I I'm not so much involved in the organization, but anymore because I just don't have much time, but it is happening. It's going to be a blast. So it's just a small so you can also find that on on my ex. Beautiful, Awesome. Yeah, you can find voltage at our websites. voltage.cloud. Yeah, hit us up, send us an e-mail. My name, my e-mail is graham@voltage.cloud. You can also find me on like Twitter at at GKRIZEK. Yeah, definitely. Hit us up if you're interested in Lightning payments. Beautiful, well really appreciate the time follows. This is a great combo and look forward to speaking again soon. Thanks a lot there boys. Thanks for listening to this week's episode of the show. If you found the information valuable, please share the episode with a friend or leave a rating on your favorite podcast app. All the links we discussed in today's show will be in the show notes inside your podcast app. Before we finish, a quick reminder that on Rat Media is for informational and entertainment purposes only, and nothing should be construed as investment or legal advice. Regardless of where you are in your Bitcoin journey, we'd love to hear from you. Visit onrampbitcoin.com contact to schedule a consultation with one of our private client advisors.
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