Final Settlement E005: Federated Systems with Tony & Ben from Mutiny

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That's why we're proud to introduce on RAMP Heritage, a suite of private client services dedicated to ensuring your Bitcoin legacy is preserved and passed on, embodying the true essence of wealth that goes beyond mere numbers. If you would like to learn more, please schedule a consultation. 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 goal. 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 God. The one thing that's missing, but that will soon be developed is a reliable E cash. And we're live welcome back to final settlements, very excited for today's conversation. Today on the show we have Ben Carmen and Tony Giorgio from Mutiny Wallet as mentioned super excited for this conversation. I think you know final settlement as a show, we've really tried to help our audience go beyond sort of Bitcoin as a purely a store of value asset, digital gold thesis and really think about Bitcoin as a piece of technology, as an open source protocol that people are building on top of. And and I genuinely view these two individuals as sort of the tip of the spear in terms of catalyzing bitcoins usage and utility as a medium of exchange as opposed to just purely a store of value. So very excited to have them on the show. Tony and Ben welcome. Appreciate it Good to be here. Yeah, some guys. Good to see you again. Very excited to have you guys on being multiple kind of builders and founders in the space. I think you guys have a very unique lens in what you're building and a lot of kind of, I guess, battle wounds or scars and I think that's healthy as you kind of grow. It's like I picked up on this notion of the first people through the Bitcoin door, probably the people that got shot and it's people behind them that are going to be the the winners or leaders in building the right products. And so it's always bullish when somebody has unique experiences from a different firm or building and they can go out and branch out to build something that new. So excited for the conversation. Yeah, awesome. Maybe just likewise too. Let's dive right in and and maybe it'd be helpful. Just a little bit of sort of brief background on on you know what you guys have contributed to the Bitcoin space prior to to Mutiny and then what brought both of you to to found Mutiny and focus on Bitcoin wallets and Bitcoin payments? Yeah, I can start on my side. I kind of got into Bitcoin and 2017 or so when I like had my first job and 2016 or so and started mining with the GPU, my gaming computer and then just like it didn't take too long to go to all the meet ups and kind of see what was going on. I think it was hearing about lightning at at A at a crypto meet up and then just getting hooked and like you know going Bitcoin only shortly after that. I joined a company called learning Machine where we were doing like digital credentials on top of Bitcoin. We were working with MIT and Malta and the Bahamas and a lot of different, you know, certificates or graduation record kind of places after that that got acquired by Highland in like 2020 or so, like literally February 2020. It was wild times, perfect time for them to get acquired. They did, They timed the market really well. But yeah, shortly after that went to bottle pay to build out their Lightning infrastructure and Bitcoin infrastructure there. It's a, it's an exchange and it was an exchange in the UK very similar to a strike like experience but for Europe. They ended up getting acquired by NYDIG a little few years back. I've done Impervious building out some of their Lightning infrastructure and then kind of did some contracting for a little bit. And that kind of just led me to I was doing contracting for voltage, kind of building out their out new LSP that they were building. And that, you know there was kind of like a fork on the road where we're like, OK, you know, me and my one of our Co founders, Paul, it's me, Paul and Ben. And we kind of just like, hey, should we should we build this mutiny thing? Like, it started out as like a little hackathon project that we kind of we won second place out of like 80 participants. And then we were like, hey, do we want to do this? Do we want to go, you know, fall asleep with this. And yeah, brought Ben on along to help with the hackathon. And we all kind of just said, yeah, let's let's quit our jobs and do this. So we've been to company since April first of last year. So it's only been one year in and it's been a wild ride already. But yeah, that's mostly my history. I'll let let Ben say his as well. Yeah, I mean me and Tony got around in the around the same time. Like I got in the Bitcoin around like 2017 and you know bought the top like everyone else, but then you know bought some shit coins and then found the Bitcoin only life. It took me about like a year and I I got a job at shirt bits. Basically we're working on like a Bitcoin Scala library and doing a lot of research on DLCS and stuff there. And then after that it kind of like you know it's just like drudgery of like research and like you know open source work and wanted to go and like try to like you know make a product for users. So me and Ben Price did the Bitcoin company and I was there for about a year and a half, basically just doing like selling gift cards for Bitcoin over lightning. And that basically got me the other side of where like oh, getting all these users, like, you know, actually like, you know, competing with the market. This is fun. But then in the universe it was like all day I was spending my time just like integrating like Fiat payments and I hated my life. So I feel like Mutiny is kind of the unison of both these companies where I had to do like, you know, the fun open source hard Bitcoin stuff while also like trying to get users and like you know, solve real world problems. So yeah, we've just been out grinding for the last year on this now and you know, starting to hit some real headway. So it's been a lot of fun. You need to think about that aspect. There is something very powerful about not having to deal with the Fiat world. Like I know Tony you brought this idea notion of you know non custodials very beneficial from a regulatory perspective and you know the idea of not having you know a lot of real control and being able to effect control. But then the other idea of not having to touch dollars is important right from a just pure like game theory and self preservation perspective. You can provide tools that are independent of any system and just it's a it's very empowering and I didn't think about like you guys have kind of like structure that way with the web wallet or you know the app obviously exists within Apple's framework but doesn't have to be if you don't need it. Yeah, we both had experience touching Fiat from our last jobs. I also had to do some of the, I did all integrations have auto pay. So Bitcoin, Lightning and all the Fiat rails, SEPA and their other one that they have over there in Europe. And that was yeah, the Bitcoin part would like took a month of the lightning part like took a month and then you know it took like a year probably you know six months to a year to really flesh out all the edge cases in the Fiat system. And I know Ben probably has the same experience dealing with like Visa cards and and all of that. So yeah, it's it's just so much simpler building on Bitcoin. And so it's like kind of a a Bitcoin developer's dream. And honestly from a company perspective like we don't have to do all them a speed paperwork, we don't have to get MTL, so we don't have to do any of those things. Like you said, you know our primary focus is being more focused on the, you know, not custodial or even Federated and we can get into federates too in a little bit. But just this whole idea like you said where we don't have unilateral control, we're shipping software. It is everything, you know, most all the key, all the keys and all that you know, Bitcoin payments, all that happens on the user's device. So like that's very important from from both regulatory and also from a privacy perspective for the user as well. Yeah, Maybe I think it'd be helpful. Sorry, sorry. It might be helpful to just take a bit of a step back and and talk a bit about sort of the state of Lightning today. Both of you have worked intimately with Lightning over the past several years. And I'm curious if you could just describe sort of at a high level what some of the limitations of Lightning are and and why that has effectively driven much of Lightning usage to be custodial and why you know really what you know the 2nd order of that is you know your vision for mutiny and focusing on on self custody and and non custodial solutions, why that's important to sort of the long term trajectory of Bitcoin one. And then also just you know from a user perspective why that might be a a more optimal solution than just trusting a few centralized providers. Yeah, but you can take that. You've been talking and writing about limitations for a while. Yeah, I mean, so and there's like 2 limitations. One is just like straight up like the UX of, you know, if I want to tell my mom like what a lightning channel is and what HTLCS are and like all these words, she's just like no thanks and won't use it. So like that this first upfront, like you know, knowledge, cost of like figuring out like liquidity and stuff makes Lightning really hard for a lot of people. And you know a lot of apps like, you know Phoenix and you know we've tried to do this in mutiny as well as like kind of distract away all of that Channel management stuff. But the problem is when you do that, you kind of like the fees become a little high because you're just like opening channels on chain and doing this stuff. And this comes in kind of the other limitation is like lighting doesn't scale to 8 billion users. Self custodial at least. Like you know, there's only so much room in the blockchain to create channels. And then you know when fees get to a certain level, channels need to be like a certain size to make like economically feasible. Like I think like today this transaction like fee rates on in the mump or like 300 SaaS per V byte, it's like OK, so like any channel under like $1000 might not be really viable for alias opening today. You know, maybe fees will go down and you know you just hopefully had your channels open already. But like you know having that like variable cost makes it really hard to like economically calculate when to do it. And you know if we expect Bitcoin to go to, you know, 8 billion users in the future, pricing to be, you know, $100 million. Well on chain fees are not going to be $3 like they're going to be a lot higher. So you know, we're not going to have everyone onboarding into on chain, light onto like on chain and then thus lightning because that just doesn't scale. So and that's why we're seeing, that's why we kind of see like a lot of custodial solutions take off because they don't have, they can extract away all that you know, hard channel management stuff And then all this fee stuff that we're talking about of like scaling and stuff, it's like kind of just gone because you just have one lightning note that serves you know 10,000 users, 100,000 users and you know so now instead of having one on chain transaction per user, it's you know 100 thousandth of a transaction per user. So it's way cheaper and then you can use to amortize that across transaction fees and stuff. So it makes it a lot easier to do. But you know it does you know breakdown bitcoins you know whole thesis of like self estodial privacy, all this stuff. But you know, thankfully things like E Cash is kind of breaking this model where we can have like a lot of those privacy stuff still valid in SO solutions and you can kind of make the trust assumptions better with like Fetty Mins. I think one important things that that's important to you know me, Ben and and Paul and a lot of bit corners too is that Bitcoin is used as a currency. Like I have no doubt like yeah Bitcoin is a great you know medium, sorry, store value you know the digital go perhaps you know that's why you know we all stay in right. But I think it's important to us that we, you know, keep the original vision of Bitcoin as being used as a currency. And you know, if it's not just, if it's not being used as a currency, then its usefulness is just to collect and then sit there and then never touch it and never use it. I think, I think there's a lot of important pillars in, you know, Bitcoin usage across the industry. You know, I have Bitcoin that's like locked up in multi sig. I have Bitcoin that's like on a single hardware wall and I have Bitcoin that's on my munity wallet and across all the walls that I test. And so like there's definitely a purpose for, for your net worth, right. And and a portion of that should be used for currency, as a currency and for payments itself. And one of the you know, as as we talk about custodians one of the things that we're trying to get away from over the last, you know decade or two really is just this idea that you know PayPal and Venmo and cash app they can shut down your account at will. You know and and some people are using them for just you know transactions or paying their merchant or or you know paying a tattoo artist or a haircut you know salon person. Like all these things that we're using payments for in the daily basis like people are using those accounts and then those are getting shut down with with almost no no support or customer support that you get. It's like no questions asked. It's just like OK something went internally wrong with that account. We flagged it and then now you're all of a sudden banned even though there's nothing even illegal about what you're doing. It's just these policies and regulations and and you know all the things that that financial institutions kind of like, you know have have started adopting and pushing for. So it's it's one of those things that if we're going back and we're using Bitcoin again as payments but we're only going through custodians, we're only going through and you know I'm not throwing any shit at any particular ones. I love Strike, but if we're only using Strike, which is just say you know Fenmo on top of Bitcoin, then they can shut down anyone's account at will and and take their funds and and stop the payments from even going through at all. So I want to just get back to the world of like OK, can we build something that can mimic these apps like Venmo, PayPal, Strike you know, River. But on the Bitcoin side for digital payments because the digital payments, you know, market is very high. And if it is just going through like OK you have to sign up and you have to KYC yourself and upload a 3D image of your face and and your ID in order to participate in Bitcoin like than that even we've lost the plot along the way. I think it's important that we can go to these financial institutions to swap you know digital like digital dollars or or something or a digital Fiat in any way for for Bitcoin. But we still need to be able to participate in this Bitcoin, you know, currency market without being stopped or censored. Yeah, I think there's a lot of things you guys touched on are important there. I think like this whole notion, it needs to be said out loud about whether it's self custody or lightning channels. Just the the idea that it does not scale to the amount of people. If everybody's going to participate in the future state global economy settling back to Bitcoin and then recognizing if that's to be true, then not bitching about it but then figuring out well how do you actually get it done within the the the the design space that exists. And you actually hit the nail on the head Tony. And something like we talk about a little bit you called out strike but just in the in the sense of like it. I think it's just a proxy for because we've been so early that the existing firms for the past 15 years look exact exactly like the old whether it's Wall Street or traditional finance firms. Like you took Bitcoin and then you just like you have a soccer bond and you just custody at Coinbase or you create a brokerage just like you buy a sock or anything and then you just like park it at strike. And it's like a 2D version of a world where this asset is 3D. And so this is how I think about like multi institution isn't dynamic of like no single entity holds it or similar to what you guys are talking about whether it's through mutiny and not having to do all this or the E cash dynamic. It's like almost even lightning channels or a derivative of like a payment, a payment rail like a Visa or MasterCard and you can get shut off, but then when you throw an E cash that kind of like throws it for a loop and now starts to use the asset in a 3D way. And I think this like next 15 years we're going to just see more and more of this for the 1st 15 years we're just like the the extensions of the old Fiat world and it got us to where we're at. But now as we need to scale and build trustless or trust minimized versions, this is like you can start to squint and see how it plays out. Yeah, No, I I 100% agree. I mean there is a lot to be said where take existing business. I mean, I think we all kind of agree like take existing businesses that exist in the Fiat world and let's you know make the Bitcoin version of that. There's a lot of value in that. But but like you said, like we don't have to limit ourselves to just those kind of institutions and we can kind of you know, grow bigger ones that like aren't confined to the same constraints just because of those facts. And yeah, like you said, like E Cash can kind of like play in this kind of realm where you know, it could do both things. It can do. You can have this E cash bare asset basically and you can do lightning payments with it. You can do on chain payments with it. You kind of you know the way we're kind of thinking about it with with 20 minutes we have this Federated Ed cash where not a single custodian takes control of it. You have it distributed across multiple key holders and so not a single key holder can stop your transactions or get in the way of it. It's like a majority, you know, it's like a majority multi sig and so you can kind of do these things where it's like you know you have gateways that are attached to these federations and you can do payments across different currency types like Lightning. You know, if there's another Bitcoin layer too, and you know, we we can talk about as well like alternatives to Lightning. But, you know, if there's another layer two like Arc or, you know, I feel like there's like a new layer 2 on Bitcoin popping up every day. Like whatever one comes on board. If you can have an E cash token that represents, you know, if you have one sat of an E cash token, if you can have one sat of Bitcoin, right. And you can send it across to any layer that you want, just kind of going through these service providers that their whole functionality is just to swap E cash for whatever native currency, whatever digital currency you're trying to transact with. So from a from like a layer perspective, you know Feniment kind of like Feniment and Lightning too kind of are the glue to the financial transactions on top of Bitcoin that you can, that you can partake in. And maybe just drilling down a bit more on that, like can you elaborate on what Feniment and you know different E Cash solutions solve for in terms of those limitations that we are referring to with Lightning earlier? So whether it's the channel liquidity or you know offline receives like what can these other interoperable protocols offer when you're sort of combining them as you mentioned, what can they offer in terms of solving for some of those hurdles that exist today? Yeah, in my opinion it's it's less that self custody is hard, that there's there's a certain threshold, right, Like if you're trying to secure a ton of money versus you're trying to secure a little bit amount of money, you know you can get into different degrees. But you know, the degree we're talking about here is like, you know, we're trying to create a Bitcoin spending law. And so we're talking about like whatever you carry around in your cash, maybe it's a few 100 bucks worth of Bitcoin at a time that you're walking around with quote UN quote. So it's not that custody is hard. It's not that writing down 12 words and keeping them mostly secure, you know, maybe, you know, maybe you're just writing them down on a piece of paper. It doesn't make sense to get a steel plate, you know, and etch 12 words on it if you're just talking about like a few 100 bucks, like that steel plate might be worth more than that. So it's not that self custody at this scale is hard or difficult that people can't or people aren't capable of comprehending to write down 12 words. It's it's mostly about you know, opening up payment channels to end users. It's the liquidity involved in that from both an operation perspective and the user perspective. There's you know when when you open up a payment channel with a user, there's all of these hurdles that get in the way. It's like OK, well that payment channel has to close at a certain point, right, to be able to so both parties can get their funds on chain eventually. And so there's like channel reserves that get in the way if channel fees spike up really high like they have been. You know we had some users with lighting channels that like the fees would have eat eaten the entire capacity of the channel. So they couldn't send or receive because if they did so the potential to incur an on chain transaction from the result of a forced closure would have taken up the entirety of the channel. They would have no money left if they closed the channel at those fee rates. So you know when you talk about like you know if you open up a channel in low fee environments and all of a sudden spikes up really high, now you can't use your channel and it's like what's the point? And then also the onboarding, onboarding perspective. If if to use lightning, you have to invest at least 50 to $100 worth of Bitcoin to open a channel to yourself for the LSP to open a channel to you, you're talking about like making users pay 50 to 100 bucks to use your app before they even know what it is or how to use it or anything like that. Like the cost of user acquisition is really high from the from the user's perspective. And when you get, when you're competing with apps like Venmo or Strike or or or cash app or some of these other payment apps where they you know, kind of say like hey get 5 free dollars to start up. You know, we, you know we're not a multi billion dollar institution. We can't, we can't give out $5 Willy nilly for one. But for two it's the opposite. You need to, you need to give, you need to have 50 to 100 bucks a Bitcoin to even get started with this wallet. And so like you know when we're talking about things that like Fettyman can kind of solve this or you, you know, you have some liquidity provider do the swaps between you know in and out of lightning and the federation you choose and you just hold E cash. In the end when you get enough E cash and you have enough Bitcoin to open a channel, you can do that. But until then you know it's not it's not reasonable to open a channel to you. So then you can't use the app. So Fedement kind of solves that for us where you can get, you can get started with like a single SAT in Mutiny wallet right now by adding a federation and it creates a lightning invoice in the end. So it's not this, I know there's, you know, a lot of distinction between like Feni Man and lightning and Liquid and all of these, but what comes together in the end is, is it all goes over lightning. And so the fact that I can show this, I can show my Mutiny wallet with the federation added. I can show that invoice to, you know, someone that's using Aqua, which is using Liquid to do a similar, you know, federation thing. Behind the scenes. They're both interoperable because they go through lightning and it's just like this, you know, on the Fettima side, it's just this E Cash layer that does it. On the Liquid side, you know, they have another federation that doesn't use E cash. It uses like a Bitcoin based blockchain to do it. But it's the same concept. It's like using alternative layers to do these swaps because it's just unfeasible to do these swaps or you know, or small transactions on top of Bitcoin today. Yeah, I think something important to highlight is like before Fettyman, like the kind of default flow of people to do with something like Wallace Atosi where it's just like fully custodial wallet and like the there is no like E Cash. It's just like a database that these people that we don't know are running and like it worked. It's it's almost the exact same experience as like a federation. But the problem is it's a single signer that can rug pull everyone and there's absolutely no privacy and Fettyman is basically like the exact same experience but perfect privacy as well as it's a federation. So you have like you know a three or four multi sig instead of a single person that can rug pull you. So it makes that trust trade off like a million times better. And you know, it's kind of solves that. Like, you know, it goes back to the Bitcoin ethos of like we're now we're we're doing this Walter to Toshi, but the right way kind of thing Instead of like, you know, just getting it to work now we're doing it with strong principles that, you know, we can actually like confidently launched without, you know, like risking users to launch as well as it makes us like regulatory way easier. Like while Satoshi shut down in America and it's like, you know, federations won't be shut down in America because they're not custodial. You know, a single user or single guardian, the federation doesn't have custody of funds the same way, like Liquid has been running for six years. They're not being targeted by the government because, you know, they don't have custody of the funds. If if you go after a single person, they can't steal the money. So it makes it like that much easier. Yeah, I think this is all like really important landscape, you know our audience not to generalize, but I think is on the, not on the most technical side. And so like explaining the existing landscape with like custodial offerings, how you reference you know the wall of Satoshi had a user experience, but then it leaves you with this thing that it works until it doesn't. Similarly with like a single custodian holding your assets, it's good until it's FTX and you don't know what the next FTX block by and So what you guys like using the design space. I think super savvy. And you guys talked a little about with Matt about like looking at well what worked in the existing world like PayPal, famous for the 1010 model. And you guys had the opposite problem. It's like I want people to use this and we got to get virality, but they need to pay us to start. That's like fucking crazy. So then how do we actually do this? And it's like this idea of counter position. It's like you guys are startups, So what do you do in your startup? You have to use the leverage of it's like thinking about innovation. And E cash is a great example. If it's interoperable, it's not something that like somebody that's been backed with a lot of money is going to go do because they just aren't incentivized to do it. But it's actually a better experience across the board. And you can let people start to play in this economy and then they can start to figure out, you know, learn more and there's probably digital native apps that will be coming in different ways. That technology will start to adopt E cash that will just like further kind of mutinies like you know, adoption in itself. And so I just thought it was very like elegant of the way that anybody like you said once SAT to whatever they want to come in and they can leave as quickly as they can come in. And then you don't have to deal from a company perspective of all that like regulatory burden of like having to give the user experience in a seamless way, but also have to manage like you know, millions of dollars for MTLS and compliance and all those things if you're going to manage all those channels. Yeah, One thing that's interesting there you brought up is the idea that, you know, the existing players aren't going to switch their entire infrastructure to do something like, you know, Federated E Cash. And I think that's interesting because I mean you're exactly right. Like if someone existing has already got their MTLS and you know, I'm just going to say general exchange and exchange would greatly benefit from switching to something like Federated E Cash, especially if it's a Bitcoin only exchange anyways. And you know there's a few out there, but they've already got their MTLS, they've already got, you know, they're already operating as a money service business. They're already doing all the compliance thing. They have a whole compliance team. They have everything already there. I mean they would still benefit from the, the users would still benefit from the privacy gains if they switch to something like Federated E Cash and their users would still benefit. I mean I think that's, I think that's the biggest one. This is the privacy gains for the users and then yeah, no account login tracking or anything like that. It's just like the seed words that the user controls that back, you know, that secures the E cash behind that federation. So they're they're not, they're not going to switch their entire infrastructure to go to something like Federated E Cash just so the user has better privacy. You know, most when you ask general users, I mean we started out very, very privacy focused and and that's still ingrained into our ideals and our tech. But when you ask people if they care about privacy though, maybe they'll say yes, but nine times out of 10, like they don't care. So from that perspective it's like no one is going to, no one's going to change their whole infrastructure, switch to Federated cash just to provide something to the user that the users aren't asking for. So that's another model where it's like you know we can kind of come in and as as as a brand new startup with you know with just a dev team of three and no money for MTLS or you know you know any of the any of those regulations because we don't, you know, we don't have to anyways. And then also on top of that, you know there's there's with the Fedement movement, you know Fede has done a great job of of Spearing up a lot of adoption for Fedeiment across the world. You know, their whole, their whole pitch is like, you know, this is Federated custody for communities. So they're going boots on the ground trying to get fetamine adoption, trying to get more fetamine spun up that benefits us as well. So, you know, we're not even, you know, we're not even operating in this area where like oh, OK, it's it's technically legally, you know, not custodial because the, you know, one of the members is not considered a custodian. It's like we're not running the myth at all. So, you know, we're in this operation, we're in this perspective that we can interoperate with this open, you know, quasi custodial, Federated E Cash, you know, open source software without even having to touch it at all. We just interface it with it directly. It's it's like if if Wallace Satoshi had built up their exchange to be like, you know, a specific API and they got every other custodian to implement the same APIs. It's the same way to interface with it. You know, it's the same thing with the Fedi minutes, like it's this way to do Federated custody. It's got the same APIs. Anyone can plug and play a wallet into any federation that exists without having to do an additional work. So one of the things that we've sort of done, one of the problems when we launched some of the fedement integrations is people were asking us like hey, where do I find a federation? Can you can you put one in the app so we can we can find out how to, how to, how to find a federation, how to join a federation, things like that. We built something along with a few players in the whole NOSTR ecosystem to discover federations and to kind of have this web of trust model of you know if if I join a federation and I like it, I I can recommend it and people that you know follow me on roster or follow me and mute you all. It's it's kind of this open source social media software. If they follow me in that way and they see which meant meant, I recommend which meant I use, you know, they might be able to discover that meant and use it and trust it as well. So it's just kind of like a way to signal like you know, almost like a rating system for banks like I use this, it's good and kind of have you know, the open market kind of figure out, you know, which banks are good basically. Yeah, that's a, it's a really fascinating point that you know we've talked with Max Webster in the past around these sort of webs of trust or or market ranking types of systems. I think it's a super interesting and unique way to actually get better outcomes for users and individuals that are, you know, whether it's deciding which federation to use or which LSP to use like having actual, you know, market forces be able to ascribe value to you know, better options out there. I think is a super fascinating way that that these open protocols actually unlock as a possibility. And one thing I want to just go back to was around, you know, the the idea of fetamines. You know when I first heard about fetamines I guess almost two years you know a little over two years ago now, it really it it excited me in the sense that and and correct me if I'm wrong, but I think you know in some sense fetamines present the opportunity to better scale Bitcoin without potential soft forks at least in the interim. And I'm I'm curious you know what your thoughts around effectively you know do you view fediments and things like E Cash as sort of ways to get better scalability you know reach those billions of people using lightning sort of in the absence of soft forks or do you think you know ultimately some some amount of soft forks will be necessary for the usability of Lightning to really flourish? Just sort of trying to determine like what can we build with what exists today versus you know where are the stop gaps in terms of like actual Softworks that might be necessary in the future? And I wouldn't say that vitamins are scaling Bitcoin the same way. Like Coinbase doesn't scale Bitcoin because you can send transactions internally. Like at the end of the day, it's like an alternate kind of thing that you know you're no longer using Bitcoin or using E Cash now. But I do agree that the general idea is the same, though, of like, you know, without, you know, like, like we were saying earlier, lightning does not scale to 8 billion users. So, OK, then what do we do to get Bitcoin and everyone on Bitcoin, like, right now? Yeah, if we got zero soft forks ever, it's basically like fighting mints is kind of the idealized way to get people using, you know, the closest approximation to Bitcoin of, you know, you know, technically there could be inflation inside of a fighting mint, but the incentives are best modeled where it won't likely happen. And if it does, that vitamin will end up like, you know, just getting a bank run and shut it down because of that, at least somewhere like FTX did versus like if we didn't do vitamins, we did something like, you know, a bunch of coin bases. Well now you know those coin bases are going to turn into FTXS and you know, blow up. So I think vitamins are like, you know, if we get absolutely no soft forks, vitamins are probably the ideal ways way to like, you know, get the most like Bitcoin, like payments happening in the world. But you know, even if we did get like every soft work we'd ever want under the sun to like enable all the scaling, it still might not even like actually end up scaling Bitcoin to 8 billion users. Like you know Bitcoin is hyper optimized for verifiability and like you know slow moving transactions that you know happen at the fine intervals. So we can actually predict the system and being able to like skill that the 8 billion users is like kind of like an impossible dream And you know maybe we can get it closer and closer. You know instead of having only 1,000,000 users to be self sovereign, we could have you know 100 million like that's a lot better but that's still you know not 8 billion. So you know getting that I think you know I in my opinion I would I would like to see software so we can you know raise that barrier and get more and more people able to like end up being those like self sovereign people. But you know getting all 8 billion people on earth to be self sovereign I think is probably an unachievable goal on Bitcoin. But fighting mints is like lets you get to that closest approximation where like you know we're not going to hit this idealize you know every single person has you know their multi sig on chain like that's just never going to happen. So for not doing that, fighting mints are probably the best alternative where we can have, you know, people with extremely private payments that are, you know, in this Federated custody. So it's hard to rug pull, hard to inflate all this stuff. And you know, without that, and you know, it'd be a lot harder. Thanks for tuning in. If you're interested in exploring any of these topics further, or want to learn more about how we can help you secure a new or existing Bitcoin allocation, get in touch with our team at on rampbitcoin.com. We look forward to supporting you on your Bitcoin journey. I. Think I think it's also worth just calling out. Then I'll be the guy like we can debate or or just like it's worth throwing out. I think the framing and this whole idea we talked about it on the last trade Marty about like fed speak when people talk about inflation and all these fucked up like terms that just aren't true as I feel like that's how almost like talking about self sovereignty for 8 million people and everybody needs to hold their keys I think is absolute bullshit and just not like based in reality because it's ultimately A bearish take on like society in general. That means that we can't trust anybody which historically that that doesn't make any sense if we're going to like flourish and grow. And so everybody that comes into space generally you know doesn't sit and look at these problems for very long. So they take it at face value and they're like oh this doesn't look at like look like what I thought Bitcoin was going to scale it look like versus just like looking at this notion of trust, minimize and you have the version that's the base lever layer of 12 seed words and you can always take delivery and then you build on top of that and you hold people accountable and if they fuck up then you basically don't trust them and they rug themselves. And so we grow a a version of the world in that way And like it's just like when you're building and you're actually in the reading, you're like, Oh yeah, this is actually how it has to work. Because if I don't, I get to like take the ball. I go home with no money and and shame because I was an idiot and didn't realize that I had to look past like like ideologies and you just have to build what the market will, will take. So anyway, I just think it's important because I think most people thinking like everybody has to hold their own keys and stuff like it's just like it doesn't make sense from like even coordination of economic activity if everybody's have to go in a cave to go figure out how to spend their money. I don't think it's been well, well thought through. Yeah, I mean that's that's definitely something we've internalized at on ramp and and spoken a lot about in terms of you know you do want to live in a world where you can still trust institutions. And you know there's some interesting sort of analogues and similarities between what fetamine provides and what we're doing with multi institution custody in the sense that the user isn't holding any keys, but those keys are distributed to various holders who don't have unilateral control. And that and that becomes the key element that allows you to minimize trust to to the greatest extent possible and makes it an order of magnitude greater than just trusting a single counterparty. And so there's some interesting similarities there in terms of of what can be built with fetamine. And I think you know that's something that we're going to be thinking critically about going forward is you know this is is sort of mapping to the institutional landscape of, OK, you still want to be able to trust institutions, but you don't want to give them enough power to rug you. You want to give them enough power where they actually have to prove themselves in their worth over time. And if if they don't uphold that level of trust, then they're out of the quorum effectively. Well another thing I think it's worth, I was going to just add one thing because I'm curious to get your guys to take because I know you have stuff to add on. This is like I think they even term institution right from like the Bitcoin lens is like you know this like fucked up conglomerate, right. It's just made-up of people and incentives and it's like something that I hadn't had a chance to talk with Justin about on the Fetty side is I'm curious how they're thinking and you guys are thinking about like scale of mints to the point where I think it was you talking about a Tony about like. Putting like a termination or whatever the term is of like so then you know you can consistently move to another one. It's like that doesn't seem like the most scalable or like user friendly approach versus imagine if the holders are people that are held accountable by the proxy of their business. They have a window that you can call like it's not all anonymous, it's basically entities that have to be all accountable and if they don't their business goes under. So the game theory requires them to facilitate doing what they said they're going to do. And then my proxy of that you would get larger amounts of capital, larger amounts of revenue. Because it just feels like a natural thing. And it's why I've been very captivated on what you guys and FETTI means coming. Because it feels like there's just going to be this natural intersection between like trust of entities holding keys coupled with the skill layer that is bound to like Intersect or like Integrated at some point. The the cool thing is that we it it almost feels like you know I know Unchained was like you know they were they were really early you know years ago pushing multi sig especially you know then institutional perspective and you know we're trying to we're almost kind of get into that middle ground where we're seeing this experimentation between alternative forms of multi sig. You know I I think there's going to be some federations that operate anonymously. I think there's going to be federations that operate you know just for their local community. I think there's going to be federations for digital community as well where you just know someone based on their reputation online and then there's and then there's the multi institution based federations and and you know think you know on ramp fits in there as well where you kind of see you know 100% agree like you don't want to have to trust a single federation or sorry a single custodian. But if you get into this especially if it's a single institution custodian, right, like you know you get in the whole FTX scenario but you know imagine if it was something like you know your Coinbase is basically custody and every ETF that exists right. You know that's that's a big problem. I'm surprised every single ETF folder is, is, is OK with that. But you get into, you can get into a scenario where it's like, Oh, well, it's like it's the top 10, you know, biggest companies in the United States. Like they're, you know, competing with each other and on one hand so, but, you know, on another hand, they're just, you know, they're also providing the reputation to provide a service for their users, right. Like imagine if Starbucks and Coca-Cola started a federation together with a bunch of other companies like, you know, Starbucks is doing it to the benefit of their, their customers and their consumers. But they also don't want that liability and they don't want that negative perception that they could just completely rug all the users, right. Like they're, they have other institutions keeping them accountable just like they are to the other institutions. So it kind of, you know this, it's almost like, you know, a tug of war in a way where OK, we we can't do anything because we're all as stalemate here. But we all win, win. It's almost a win win scenario for the institutions that could be in competition to each other to some degree and then also the consumers that now don't have to trust a single entity they get to. You know, it'd be it'd be a complete suicide mission if like the top ten companies in the United States all decided, OK, we're going to, we're going to rug all of our users all at the same time. Like that would be like a disaster story of a lifetime. I mean, it could happen. Anything can happen in this world, but it's just like you're not going to see billions and billions of dollars, trillions even just thrown away in the blink of an eye just for like a short monetary gain. So yeah, it's it's interesting to see. I do think there's going to be the multiple layers that we, we get to now experiment with. You know, I'm even excited for like the Anonymous and like digital community, one where you know, you can kind of keep them small, you can kind of keep them close knit, You know, they they shouldn't grow to be like huge ones, right. But But if it's just something that like, oh hey, like, you know, me and my family can join the Federation and I can keep it to just that and it would still be better than, you know, putting them all on while Satoshi today. I do want to push it back against Tanguma's original point. Like I think like fettiment. Like we have to settle for fettiment. Like if if we could feasibly scale self custodial to the entire world, like, you know, get rid of all the X hurdles and do it, that's the ideal solution. Like we don't. Ideally we remove all forms of trust because you know, like we're having this communication right now over the Internet using a like you know encrypted like our browser's encrypting all this communication. Like we don't do that because we like don't think it's a good idea. It's just like OK, that's just the default because it's better to do that because why trust our ISP with our Internet traffic? Why trust all this data when it's, you know, easily to just encrypt it and not have to do with that? If we could just, you know, have self constilled everywhere, don't need to trust institutions, that's a better world. It's just we don't live in that world because there's, you know, physical limits of what we can do and you know, that's why we have to do feta mints. I think if we could actually scale it, it would be a lot better. But you know, we sadly can't. Yeah, but that's not true because we could do that with gold and we didn't do that with gold. We parked it in institutions because we had to coordinate from an economic perspective. Well, you can't scale gold like self custodially like at least like, you know, sending gold across the world is like, you know, extremely costly. You can't give, I can't give you like $5 worth of gold. Like, that's why we use silver. But I mean for like capital formation, like for building to be built and for to go to Mars and like for projects and capital markets to form, like that's natural for like a civilization to grow. So like you have to have central firms. It's just like it's the idea of trust minimized, where the thesis, at least on our end is. It looks more like this whole notion. I think you guys are stumbling on this. It's like the world actually early. I won't put this in you. You tell me if I'm right. Directionally is everybody thought we were going to recreate the wheel in Bitcoin and I'm convinced we're repurposing it. And so it looks more like the old world with the trust, minimize the function IE like if you look at the ETFs, you called it out like one of our first things was like the honor Bitcoin Trust, Three different institutions hold a key. You can take delivery of the Bitcoin, right. Like in your kneecapping bitcoin's properties. You can't actually take it. So it's built into the fabric. But it kind of looks similarly like the GBTC. It's just a better product from like somebody that would want that security like exposure and then they get caught up on why you want the underline and be able to take delivery. I'm convinced that's what large pools of capital long term and the key sits in the UAE and Singapore and all these geopolitical things like farm out. But it doesn't take away the fact that like people for the next 10 plus years are going to want large pools of Bitcoin like set endowments institutions. And so similarly like with a big bank or financial intermediary that has to like move around large scale capital and build you know the fucking roads or whatever from the large scale settle, settle. Like they're going to need somebody to facilitate that and lock it in and lend it out and do all of these things. And so you have to be able to manifest that it's like doesn't exist in somebody going in back to their self consorted wallet sending it like it just doesn't equate. So I think that's like the angle where I I don't think it's scales like even if it did scale, it wouldn't make sense in my mind for everybody to hold. It, yeah. I mean you'd still have like companies and stuff, but it's like ideally like you know this company has their own self custodial stack versus like this company, you know, it's not big enough. So it's using like a federation or something like. I guess that's more what I'm getting at. Yeah, the the federation that Tony, Tony brought up and this is where I I I was in, I fell off and I'm curious where it went Tony or been to pick up and I don't know if Brian you heard it, were you referenced merchants? I thought it was like fascinating. I hadn't been able to think through how it would be. But I know it like just like instinctually makes complete sense for a merchant to be able to launch or you leverage E cash to take goods and services from a privacy perspective. And it's literally like, you know, the idea is like you couldn't tell him, you wouldn't even know if they were accepting it because you would just send some goods and then you would get paid and then you can swap out for whatever you know, in the lightning or the, you know, BTC. But it just makes too much sense. It's obviously what we know with interchange too. And I'm curious how far you guys have thought through that or if you got on that pile with Matt on like why would somebody adopt something like that? Yeah. No, it's a great question and just a good timing too. Like just today we launched our integration with Zaprite. So you know, starting today you could SAP, right? It's like a merchant solution, you know, invoicing solution for merchants basically mostly targeting for like online, you know, digital sales or you know, contracting or things like that. So essentially you know, Muni can be the recipient of someone's SAP, right, invoice terminal. So you go, you pay the invoice, you see how much it costs, you select, OK, I'm going to pay over lightning and the user pays for the service and it will go straight into the mutiny wallet of the of the recipient of the of the merchant itself. So it's kind of cool to see because you know, there there's a few solutions that exist out there today for for, for users, for merchants itself that you know, there's the open node approach where like they're basically the custodian. I know light sparks trying to get into that realm as well. They are operating basically as the Wausatoshi for merchants. It's pretty much the exact same model and they'll charge their 1% fee. It starts to turn into something that's almost exactly like the Visa network, it's just Bitcoin, right? And so like we can do so much better than that. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have you know like BTC pay server where it's like OK, you you've run your own node and you manage your own channels and you know you're you're telling merchants to do the exact same thing that like general bitcoiners like don't want to do in the first place manage channels and liquidity and like requesting inbound and all of those things. And merchants have bigger you know they have liquidity constraints way more than average bitcoiner does today on lightning. An average bitcoiner that's using lightning. Maybe they have a Raspberry Pi at home or something. They're opening some channels with their Bitcoin stack and they have some inbound outbound they make a few payments a month and then and that's it. But for a merchant, like they need to be receiving payments all day, every day, They can't have a payment failure happen. If if you're ever at a grocery store, like when was the last time you had a payment failure? If it happens once a year that you know, I'm embarrassed. Like what? What did I do wrong? Like, am I broke? Like, what's going on? Like it's a very embarrassing situation to be in for both the merchant and and the person paying because you don't know where the problem is. And and in the Bitcoin war, you don't, you don't know if it's if it's the person sending or the person receiving if they have enough inbound. All that to say like now we're starting to get this middle ground where we can have Federation's power merchant payments and they don't have to worry about the inbound outbound. And at the end of the day, you know at any point in the day they can swap that E cash for you know, they can do an on chain withdrawal. I mean that's kind of the beauty of Feniman. It's like you have the E cash. It's basically a single balance, and if you decide to send it over Lightning or you decide to send it on chain, it's your choice. So if you're talking about a merchant that's receiving a lot of white payments on Lightning because maybe they're 5 or 10 bucks, but at the end of the day you have thousands and thousands of dollars worth worth of, you know, Bitcoin. Now you're not going to want to just send that back through Lightning to your bank account, right? Like you're going to have, you're probably going to have payment payment problems sending that large amount on over Lightning, but you can just like take all that money that you received via Lightning on E Cash and then do a non chain deposit to your wallet or to your cold storage at the end of the day and then you're done. So like it's kind of cool. I mean and then there's a privacy perspective as well. But at the end of the day, like you know, the merchant can not have to worry about any of the inbound outbound channel stuff. And now with this integration with ZAP, right, you can use Mutiny wallet and all of that gets converted, all of that, the inbound that happens on the merchant side with this integration that goes into the federation. So like again, they don't have to, they don't have to sit there and manage channels in the mutiny wallet and like do these swap in swap outs all the time. It's just like whenever they feel like it, they open Mutiny wallet, they make one payment out to their cold storage and then they're done. So you know this kind of scenario where merchants can start using infediments as well, like I think I think it'll be huge for that adoption. We can kind of get that middle ground between you know something like Open node and light Spark and and BTC pay server. That's really slick. And just to confirm. So the two things are happening there. Like somebody could be a merchant, small mom and pop and set up like a mutiny wallet first to open up with a large enough balance and then they could you set up ZAP, right? And Lightning could go directly into that Channel that's been opened by you guys from Mutiny or the self custodial wallet? So this bypasses, I mean you can even bypass so Mutiny. I don't know if we talked too much about it but we we've sort of built this hybrid approach where you you know at the beginning we had non Custodial channels and that's that was it and on chain payments but so you had to have a channel open to use Mutiny on at all. Over the last few months we've like done a deeper integration with Fetti Mint. So now we can get that scenario where a user can open up Muniwal for the first time at a federation start receiving and sending without having an opening channel at all. So in this merchant scenario they open up Muniwal, they like, they sign up for a lightning address and then they link that into Zaprite. All they have to do is like paste what their lighting, address name is and then all of a sudden they can start receiving payments through ZAP writes invoice screen and that goes into the Immuniwal and then they don't have to open a channel at all. But, you know, one of the cool things is like after, let's say that they've gone a week or a month and they've accrued a lot of payments into their Muniwal. If it's like, you know, if it's like a million SATS or something, they can open up a channel right there in the app and then take custody of that whenever they're ready. So it kind of like flips A narrative a little bit where taking this hybrid approach, it's like, hey, if you're just starting out with a wallet and like, you don't want to do anything you don't like, you don't even know if you're going to stick around, you know, add the federation. And once you get enough Sats, like take custody into the same app, it's the same user experience you can send and receive. It looks exactly the same whether it's a federation or it's a lightning channel. It's just like we try to move the user towards the lightning channel after they, you know, accrued enough stats, but they never accrued enough stats and it's like was never made sense to open a lightning channel in the first place. Yeah, that's that's super fascinating because it it, that sort of arrangement just drastically reduces the barrier to entry to to using all of this, right. Like you don't need that initial balance in order to to participate this in this and then you know if it is useful for you, you naturally accrue enough balance to ultimately settle that. So I think that's a super super elegant approach. One thing I I maybe just switching gears slightly, I think you know we're in a very, in my mind at least a very interesting spot currently in terms of sort of the Bitcoin development zeitgeist if you will. And I'm curious to get both of your thoughts on just generally you know I think we've seen as you mentioned Tony like you know a new L2 being launched every day. Is it really an L2, is it an L3? What is it really? I'm curious to get your thoughts on, on all of the different sort of scaling proposals being put forth today. And then sort of secondary to that, we mentioned you know potential soft forks like thinking through the different covenant proposals, what in your mind you know is realistic over the next call it three to five years in terms of potential soft forks being implemented? And then also just sort of comment on what we've seen over the past, call it 12 to 18 months of what seems like to me more people getting involved in terms of thinking through different potential solutions. But then that also raises like the sort of interesting dynamic of people's incentives in terms of you know, whether it's flooding lightning because that enables them to get support for what they're building or thing things along those lines. I think it's in one sense it's very good that there's been a bit of a Cambrian explosion in terms of Bitcoin development. But at the same time you have to question sort of everyone's incentives and maybe that's just the paranoid Bitcoin are in me, but curious your thoughts on any of that? Yeah, I mean there's I I guess the, the first one was like all the L twos, like basically all of them aren't really L twos, they're just multi sigs. And it's like if you're doing an L2, that's a multi sig, like just use Fediment, you get all the nice privacy properties and you know interoperability with Lightning on chain like it's basically like, you know, fediment is almost like a platform for building L twos or like you know, fake L twos. I guess it's probably the the better word there but yeah yeah, I I think like you know it's going to the future with Softworks and stuff like timelines are weird because like you know we activated Taproot in like 2021 and like L&D released like recently like Taproot lightning channels and it's like the simple version of them not like the all seeing eye version that we wanted to eventually like all the nice things like PTLCS and stuff. So like you know we could activate every cool software tomorrow and like it could still be like 10 years until we actually get like the the benefits at least on Lightning. I do think like there are you know Lightning is in the end all be all like Arc is a one of the proposals that's been working on a lot lately. They're currently building it like without with no soft forks. But you know if they do get a couple soft forks it's like you know a pretty small code change for them and it makes the system a lot better. So and you know since it's like not a, you know, Lightning is like multi $1,000,000 network with like lots of after participants. So upgrading it is you know, incrues a lot of capital costs and mental costs and all this stuff versus like if you're starting a whole new network you can just, you know, throw out the old code and ship the new version because you don't need to worry about you know backwards compatibility and shipping costs because there are no users yet. So I do think like if we're activating like new software because it's probably going to end up helping things like Arc and you know other competing L2's the Lightning first just because they don't exist yet so they can ship a lot faster. But you know, I do think like you know it would be nice to get some things like CTV or TX Hash. I mean even Opcat would be great. So we can just like have all this new functionality and to try at least experiment and have like a real competitor to Lightning that's not just a multi sig, but you know is that you know we have to go through the software process which everyone seems to hate. So that makes it a lot harder. I think the interesting I think. That makes a lot of sense. Alternative and you guys have mentioned various sort of things that you're working on integrating into the Mutiny app. I'm curious what's on sort of the road map. I know you have have started to dabble in in the world of Noster and and integrating that into sort of those those market ranking systems that we mentioned earlier. But curious, you know, what's on the road map, what's what, what are you excited about in terms of building out the functionality of Mutiny Wallet? We've we've gotten things into a really great place right now. So as you kind of mentioned we're we integrate a lot of Noster integrations. We have have the Feniment integrations as well. We've we're getting to the point right now where we can kind of where we can really show the point as much as we can and kind of demonstrate like what would a open source, you know, Venmo style payments application look like. So right now we're just focused on that and just like we released that just only like a few months ago and so it's really just like cleaning up a few you know things post release and you know listening to users and implementing the feedback based on our new designs we're like re redesigned. The whole home. Screen app to kind of make it mimic a sort of Venmo like experience where you can, you can, you can add new friends in mutiny wallet, you can pay them directly without asking for invoices. Like we're kind of moving towards this direction of like a social, like a human centric Bitcoin wallet where it focuses on like paying humans and not focusing on like settling invoices and requesting invoices. So we're kind of focused on you know, doubling down on that vision. But really you know, we're kind of in that place now of like you know, seeing what's seeing what's working, listen to the user feedback and iterated on that. So we're kind of in the good place where we're we're flexible with like not having a road map just because we really want to focus on like OK, like is this, is this the niche we're like doubling down on? Is this working? Is it something else we need to be doing instead. And you know, so far the traction this month has been great and so we're kind of just like going to be iterating on on on this for now. But yeah, I'm Ben, I'm not sure if I'm missing any obvious the road map items that that we've had. But for for now, my focus is just like, OK, listen to the users and implement what they're asking for basically. Yeah, I mean like our like next of things is like you know, clean up and like we want to like add like push notifications and stuff like that. But it's like, you know, those are all like easy wins, like large scale features. It's like we're just like really nailing down like OK, like what we have is solid. Let's like, you know, just emphasize what you like figure out what the users are like really finding and enjoying and then like even going deeper on that or like finding things that we can aid there as well. Like you know, earlier we were talking about the merchant stuff. It's like maybe we can build APOS system if like the ZAP right integration is taking off a lot and stuff like that. So and we're just like kind of like we kind of like had this road map from when we launched of like one day we'll have lightning fight event, lightning address and it'll be beautiful. And we hit that like basically like 2 weeks ago. So now we're like oh shit, what do we do now? So we're kind of figuring that out and you know, just nailing down the hatches and making sure everything like continues working with, you know, all the stuff we built in the last year. I think, I think it's a really awesome approach in the sense of like having the bookends of what you want to achieve. But then generally it's like it's almost like I don't know if Paradox is the right word, but it's like non. It's not generally like thought of having enough design space to leave open to like what the market pulls forward versus like most people like how very strange like we got to do it this way and then you like miss everything else that's happening around and it feels like leading on the E cash side. And then the the merchant stuff is super fascinating not only from like payments but this whole notion of like being able to have AE form of money from a rewards perspective that is not tied to like SAT's in the way that Lightning is and how you can do. It's just like something that hasn't been seen on like user adoption, client adoption, client acquisition from whether it's media, whether it's publishers, whether it's like a like AD 2C company, right, like how do you like incentivize people or you'd like the wallet can participate or they can get these like tokens and then they can learn about Bitcoin and then they it's like a, it's a flywheel for everybody. It's a fascinating concept when you take out having to like deal with channels and lightning and all of that. And so I think it's just like the very early innings, but as the price appreciates more and more talent and like entrepreneurs are going to Start learning about this and then they're going to be like talking to you guys and like how do I actually get this in there like core product to increase kind of like their user acquisition. Yeah, we've we've talked to a few Bitcoin rewards companies already about you know Fettiment and like hey, this is basically like you can reskin it to look like a rewards points like system that you can provide to the the users of your app that's interoperable. Or you can go to specific merchants saying like hey, this is your specific rewards points for for your users. And you know you can kind of build a rewards platform just like you said on that. So yeah, I mean the whole merchants design space is is huge and I mean you know there's there's a lot of value to be had by focusing on that. So like you know one of our perspectives before diving into that it's like OK let's you know we're we're focusing on like consumer you know payers of you know consumer payments itself. But then at a certain point that turns into like OK now we can now we can solve like the business problems as well and then meet in the middle have a great experience for payers, have a great experience for recipients and be that both ends of the spectrum there. So that could very well be what we end up working on next. But yeah, like Ben said, like we're going to figure that out, see if see if Zaprite merchants, you know, end up using Mutiny Wall and see what we can fix there. If there's any pain points we can solve on both sides, it's kind of great because now we don't have to build the whole invoicing system, right. You know, we can kind of focus on, you know, the recipient payment side and see, you know, if Zaprite can solve their problems and then we can kind of fit in. I mean that's the cool thing about the ecosystem in general. There is so many different companies working on different parts of the world essentially, right. And so like where do we fit in the best? Where can we solve other Bitcoin businesses, pain points, other general businesses, pain points, merchants pains points, user pain points, where do we fit in best? And I think you know before starting Mutiny Wallet, we're like, yeah, we're we're going to make a wallet and it's going to be a great wallet And that you know, we know what makes a great light lightning wallet. We know the features of lightning. We know how to build in general and now we're kind of the point where you know what they don't teach you is like how to how to just build in general, how to how to figure out what the market wants, how to how to move in the right directions, how to do these proof of concepts with you know large gains. So like we're kind of in that you know not not pivot per SE, you know we're not we're not pivoting in any way. But it's it's sort of like how do we, how do we next evolve our application. And you know for all of us being first time founders and and being one year in with like a good, you know good traction, a good proof of concept like the next elevation is, is sort of what we're diving into from from the mutiny perspective. Yeah, I think Tony was highlighting a cool point earlier of like, you know, like we're working on ZAP, right. And just kind of like, you know, they actually did basically did like 0 work to integrate this. They had already done the work with another provider. We're just using the same protocol as everyone else. So like we're kind of getting all this like free value from the ecosystem, just like everything's a protocol. So we just is naturally get free integrations like like Coin Kite, they have this service called Unleash dot chat. It's like ChatGPT but it's like they like uncock the models and do it over Noster and like Mutiny has DMS in it. So like we have a not AI chat inside of Mutiny for free, just on accident and like stuff like that. Just like we get these all these like free integrations from the ecosystem. So you can kind of find these different protocols, how to layer them together to make like, you know, a perfect AD versus like the Fiat system. It's like everyone has a proprietary API. You need to e-mail 13 guys to get, even get access to the API. And you know, it breaks every week and it's not open source. So when it's broken, you have no idea why and you know it's terrible. But here we can just, you know, have this Cambrian explosion of different stuff. Yeah, no, it's it's a beautiful thing. Open open networks interoperability and and basically you know being able to iterate on things and and share each other's growth effectively. And I think that's that's one of the things that, you know, I, I appreciate about what you guys have have built in our building. And Michael sort of alludes to this around, you know, just being very intentional about user feedback and building, you know, the best experience for people that want to send and receive value. Like very simply like if if we're successful, like you know, people don't even shouldn't even need to know that necessarily Bitcoin is being used on the back end. Like if they're using E Cash tokens and they're sending and receive, sending and receiving E Cash tokens like with 0 friction and 0 sign up. Like that should be the goal of basically, you know, incepting Bitcoin adoption into into the into society without even people really knowing. And I also you know sort of see that with things like you know Zaps on Noster or on on you know up votes on Stacker news, it's like it's just a better experience, right. Like you actually get value for the value that you create. Like it's just a a very organic natural thing that if you create a better user experience that is what should create that flywheel of adoption. And it's it's it's interesting that you know or I think it's commendable that you you're you're really focused on just creating the the best user experience and that's that's how that's how bitcoin's going to win ultimately is like it's it's a it's a better money one obviously because of the store value properties but it's also a better money because it's easy to use and you might not even know you're using it. Yeah, I think. I think it's interesting. Looking back, looking back on where we started with with Lightning payments and like hearing everyone's you know we you know we had some good traction early on even even with the you know self custodial like it's it's interested the Noster people you know they're they're very early adopters into this like new social media that exists you know very cipher punk value. So we got a lot of like early adopter type users from all ends of the spectrum people that like don't know Bitcoin very well. The people that like are very experienced and and and know everything about how to operate in Bitcoin and lightning and open channels. So you know just even listening to those users as you know listening to all of their feedback that that they provided and it's like this is just how lightning works. Like there's absolutely no way we can get around that unless we're like not building on light paint. And so that's kind of like evolved into like hey you know what Fettiment fixes this user's problem, this user's problem, all of these user problems that are that are having you know issues. So that's just been the natural progression and like OK cool, we just with with one you know one big integration that we finally completed. We're like cool, we've like check boxed all these user issues that we've had that we can't physically solve on Lightning alone. And so it's it's been beautiful to be able to get to that point where like OK cool, now now what are all the lowest hanging fruits. It's like you know almost like throw away all those issues now those are complete. What's next? With you guys being so close to Noster Lightning, the the E cash stuff and then also just, you know, naturally being engineers like what's the most exciting stuff you guys are seeing right now? Whether it's like Noster related or just like in the Bitcoin ecosystem that has you're kind of like interested because we look at the boring shit. We just talk to like you know people a lot of money and help them understand Bitcoin and just like you just like park the Bitcoin and don't touch it and number goes up, number goes go up works. But you know curious on like you guys being at the very edges, what's the interesting stuff that you think probably in this next like Epoch's going to be Because you think about four years ago a lot of stuff we're talking about would just be insane to to be talking about And so anything you guys are seeing that are is super like compelling. I think something that I hope blows up in this cycle is like, you know, we kind of mentioned earlier if like Vitamin can be this platform for other L twos or like you know quote UN quote L twos. And like basically like Vitamin is not really like Bitcoin is like almost a side project inside of Fediment where it's really just this Federated consensus system. And then there happens to be a Bitcoin module that you know lets you spend and receive Bitcoin, but you can make kind of any system inside of there. So I'm really excited to see, you know, some different modules that people make that could like really blow up and show like the really cool use cases that you can do inside of there. And and you know, The thing is too, it's like you always have this Bitcoin module in there. So any cool thing that someone builds will have like Bitcoin native payments for free, like instantly inside of it. So I think some really cool things could happen. I mean for example, something we talked about was like doing like, you know, gambling inside of a fediment where you could have like a contract that is validated by the Guardian. So like, you could say, like, you know, if I'm betting on the Super Bowl, oh, the Chiefs won and the Guardians all see, the Chiefs won. So then the money goes to me, you could build like a, you know, DraftKings, but it can't be shut down by the government. There's no KYC, There's nothing like that. And you know, it's that much better. But, you know, and that's just like, you know, one example we had, you know, I'm sure you know this, you could release it on 10,000 developers. Some, like absolutely crazy stuff can happen as well. Ben's been trying to put gambling on the blockchain since I it seems I've been shared, shared, shared Vince days and in DLCS and so that does not surprise me that creating a chief Super Bowl over a Fetty that is the natural, most exciting thing for Epoch 5. You got to get them, DJ. That's great. Yeah, we tried that. Even on Oscar we tried to do like a DLC based system on top of Noster where there is no monetary gain at all. We just use the same cryptography that creates Noster notes to just say like, hey, I won or he won and like the Oracle would come in and prove which one won. But you know, that was DLCS, man, those. It gets all the hype, but like it is incredibly difficult to work with and we have one of the top, you know, minds in the DLC space and it's just like still too difficult. And that's another thing where it's like oh, but we could do it in the Feniman and you have the same like Federated, you know, trust, minimize, model. It's like, let's just let's just do it that way. Yeah I think where this is like so compelling personally is this whole idea of E cash is like it's a positive sum game in the sense of like it's it's a bank, right. And a bank used to be where everybody net benefited until they started rugging everyone right and they fucked up the money And because of that like positive sum games mean that the person that's parking their capital or leveraging it or the the bank and you know in this case the federman is also making money. These are providing a good in service. You can actually see how this actually scales and works and has the game theory behind it. Because again whether it's you know in a funny Mitt three O 5 or or whatever, the way it like manifests from game theory and keeping everybody honest, it's a better version of what exists and you can actually squint and see how it looks like what it historically has existed. But you put better like governance around it because that's how I think about multi sig. It's just effectively governance at the protocol level. When you put institutions or people with faces across or non faces which is a different conversation we'll have a theory on. It's like I'm convinced there there's going to be, it looks more like the old world than the Aenon world from a commercial perspective. Because most people don't not want to trust person they don't know as much as we want as like you know matter Dell and people will want to believe that it's going to be the Anons that run this stuff. It's like the realities, commercial and consumer behavior. Really likes to know who the fucks messing with their money because they know who to go and show up to the house or call them or e-mail them. And that's a hard pill to swallow because we historically have looked at this space and wanted to not, you know, be that. And I I recognize that can be wrong there. But I think directionally just by playing this space and similar to what you guys say is you're just taking like the market. The market kind of like sends these signals and they just want to be able to trust people at the end of the day because that's like how we, you know, you want to wake up and know that Anon isn't going to rub you. So anyway, I think that's like what's super compelling is it's a positive sum game in in all of this and everybody gets to like win and benefit. Yeah. One of the interesting things with FEDI, Mint and just like cashew mints in general is the idea that you know there are going to be like competing mints as well. And so you really get into like some old time bank you know bank era dynamics where you know you have other banks that are trying to collapse a bank that they suspect is running a fractional reserve and they come in with like huge deposits and then late later come in with huge withdrawals like banks basically creating bank runs on top of other banks. And umm you know just the fact that like you know Bitcoin and lightning and you know all these like mints can move so fast and like information can move instantaneously across the entire world. You kind of get into the scenario where like if there's any hints of fucker going on at all, like we can find out instantly. And you have other banks keeping accountable other you know other banks in this way because of like if they go down, like if there's a suspected run on the bank and they're not going to be fully collateralized. All it takes is like 1 user to finally go oh I just tried to do a withdrawal and it wasn't going through what the hell is going on. And you can have another bank basically enact that to happen and and if they're fully reserved then boom, there's no problem. Everyone does withdrawals out of the out of the Femi Mint, out of the mint and there's no issues and and guess what we just proved OK that that mint was fully reserved. We can go back and trust it again. So I don't know. It's just like there's a lot of game theory that can like kind of happen now that would have been much more difficult to do, you know hundreds of years ago with banks itself. I mean now we just live in a world where there's no fractional, where there's just no reserve at all and and it's all 0% reserved every single bank across America. And we then there's no fucker going around because like if one pin drops, everyone falls and no one wants to live it. It's almost like a nuke scenario for banks. So you know, there's not much of that going on anymore. But yeah, it's just, it's just an interesting era to kind of live through like how how would we redo banks if we could and you know, kind of. We'll have to pick this up. I know, I know we're running up on time, but you literally just hit the nail on the head where we think multi institution plays out long term. Because if you think about it bit goes a $10 billion, roughly $10 billion business in the sense of like if they don't sign their whole business starts to look a lot weirder. You know in the sense of like everybody's leveraging it. And so that game theory starts to play out as you have larger larger institutions participated in that. And so if they do not keep their contractual, you know, engagement, then you still aren't rugged, you just move the assets and they just rug their whole business and that's how you can actually start to build trust from a larger scale perspective. It it effectively brings better game theory dynamics to accountability, full stop, Right. Like in order to gain and maintain trust, you got to go prove it right. Like whether it's providing a signature or just not wrecking your users, Like you have to actually earn that credibility in the market. So yeah, it's a beautiful thing. I know, I know Michael, I think has to run, but really want to thank both Ben and Tony for for joining today. It's an awesome conversation and we'll have to do it again because there's there's more on the bone here, but great conversation. Yeah, you guys pressure. Thank you both. Appreciate you joining. Yeah. Thanks anytime guys. All right. Love it. Take care, boys.