Proton Wallet w/ Andy Yen

So I'm excited to have you on. Thank you so much for jumping in.

This announcement of Proton Wallet, I think, really blindsided a lot of people in the space. I'm sure you were working on it with some, some bitcoiner, since especially a lot of language used is very kind of, kind of bitcoiner. But I didn't see a bitcoin wallet being integrated into Proton as something that was on your roadmap at all. So to really kind of get rolling, why did you decide to build a bitcoin wallet, and what's the history that led up to this choice?

Bitcoin has always been something that's been on our radar. And people tend to say that the experiences you go through when you're young color the rest of your life. I think it's the same for businesses as well, the same for companies. A company's early experience with the world tends to actually also color the way that they see the world.

In Proton's case, one of our early experiences was probably two weeks after the launch of our crowdfunding, getting blocked by PayPal, and that could have been it. Had that not gotten resolved, probably Proton, as we remember today and know today wouldn't actually exist. So I would say our viewpoint of the world was really impacted by this early near death experience that really made us think a bit more.

So something that's always been sort of on the back of our minds for, you know, maybe it's reasonable or not reasonable, but, you know, given our past experiences, quite understandable has always been we are in privacy space. We are building something that actually the established powers the world don't like.

Whether it's governments, whether it's Google, whether it's Apple, you know, whether it's the financial sector in general, they're not for privacy because it takes power away from them and returns it to the consumer. It's, in fact, quite easy to kill Proton today. You take us off of PayPal, you take us off of the credit cards, it's game over.

And that has always felt to me, very vulnerable because it fundamentally threatens protons mission and what we want to achieve for privacy and for the world really been a problem that for the past decade we have wanted to address. So proton wallet, first and foremost, is kind of a step in that direction.

What it's trying to do is create an easy way for the vast majority of the proton community, which, to be honest, isn't as tech savvy as it used to be five or even ten years ago, and give them a means to adopt alternative ways of transferring value online, which is not really linked to centralized institutions, which we know, in the long run, are not going to be friendly to proton in our mission.

So this is really, you know, take a step back when you zoom out the high level problem that we're trying to fix. And the reason why Proton, which a lot of people wouldn't expect to be interested in crypto, has decided that this is a step that we need to take. So this is precisely the risk that we want to mitigate. And it's really informed by our historical life experiences from the early days of 2014.

It's providing something that is widely viewed as a human right in privacy. But you want to make sure that people have access to actually paying for that service with money. Bitcoin in this instance, rather than just paying with their data, which is the paradigm that a lot of people are used to. It's a really interesting one. I just viewed it from the broad perspective of the bitcoin ecosystem and not as much an idea of what proton needs it for.

Uh, and if Proton is to be here, you know, 100 years from now, what is going to be very, very important is to begin to remove the single points of failure. And payments today is one of the few remaining single points of failure that exists still in infrastructure. And that's why it's an interesting problem for us to work on. And this is kind of an important step for us to take. So it's not because we're bitcoin maxis or because we think we can make a buck out of crypto.

It's because we think, actually, in the long run, it's something that we need. If you look forward further down the road.

I mean, it's the case when I'm paying for anything, I'm going to pay in the most privacy preserving way, no matter what it is, if it's a sandwich or a coffee or if it's, uh, something that. That is something I truly need to be anonymous it, it deserves the same kind of payment rails, especially ones that are censorship resistant, which is definitely where I can see, see bitcoin fitting in there.

I think one of the things that surprised me the most and a lot of people in the privacy space or in like the, the kind of privacy cryptocurrency space like Monero was just that. I mean, obviously bitcoin is not private. It's not private by default. And it has more than its fair share of issues with tracking and surveillance today.

And I think that was part of why it was so surprising was that the, I mean, obviously the mantra of proton right now is private by default and bitcoin doesnt fit that mantra. So I think theres a lot of confusion around why bitcoin. You touched on a lot of it, I think, in your response to the previous question. But maybe you can just expand on that when viewed in the light of the lack of privacy in bitcoin, why you chose bitcoin specifically and not something we're privacy preserving.

And then do you have plans to address bitcoin privacy in proton wallet in the future?

If you asked me today, or actually even ten years ago to build the most secure communication system, I wouldn't have built email, actually, I would have built signal or something like signal. Why did we build email ten years ago? Because it for sure wasn't the most private way to communicate. The reason we did it is because our approach to this problem is actually a little bit different.

What we believed in 2014, and actually what I still believe today, is that email is actually the most successful communication system that has ever been devised. Why is it so good and so hard to displace? Because, well, one is decentralized, it's federated. Anyone can join the network if they want. It is all controlled by centralized organization. So it has these properties that make it actually a very strong network effect. And this is why email tends to be so dominant.

But actually, the privacy of email, it really sucks. It's built on SMTP, which is built in 1980s and is terrible for privacy. It doesn't even have encryption that can be built in very easily. So actually, email was in some ways also a very, very strange place for Proton to start if we were really focused on privacy. So how do you reconcile this? Because it seems like a contradiction. Right. And the way that we thought of a problem is the following.

For a proton to best improve the state of the world, actually building a new version of email, that wasn't the way to do it. And it's not the way to do it because it'd be extremely difficult to get others to adopt our new email and do it in big enough numbers to overcome the network effect of the existing email ecosystem. So it simply isn't going to work. So what is the second best alternative? Well, the second best alternative is actually to improve the state of privacy of email.

So you build on top of email and existing network effects, but you actually make it more private. This is really what protonmail tried to do, and I think in large part has achieved up to the limits in which, which the SMTP protocol is able to address. So it cannot solve all privacy issues, but it does solve, let's say, quite a few of them. And when it comes to fighting for financial freedom, our perspective is pretty similar.

If you were to ask me today to build the most secure digital money, I would not build bitcoin. In fact, what I would build probably would look pretty similar to Monero. Right. But then why bitcoin? Well, bitcoin already has critical mass. It has strong network effects. So if our goal is to go out there and get decentralized money in the hands of millions, well, trying to replace bitcoin could be a bit like trying to replace email. Right?

It's not impossible, but at this stage, most would say that it's probably improbable. So then the approach, if you take the analogy to protonmail, is actually that you don't replace bitcoin. The next best thing that you can do is perhaps to try to improve the privacy of bitcoin as much as possible. So this is the reason why we decided to start this journey with bitcoin. And a lot of people said, oh, it looks so strange.

But the parallel is exactly the same with the early days of proton beginning with the proton mail.

But that connection back to email of saying we're going to take the thing with the biggest reach and the biggest network effect, and we're going to try to make it able to be used by the average person with privacy that, that fits for sure. And that's definitely, it's an ideal goal. It's certainly a hard one in the bitcoin space, since privacy is, is very tricky when the chain is transparent by default.

And we've seen that it can get even more difficult when specific tools are taken down by governments with things like the samurai wallet indictment that happened in April. And there's actually an interesting tie between those two things in that I know some people had noticed on a GitHub repo that y'all had that there was a kind of a work in progress, planned implementation of Samurai wallet whirlpool.

Was that the approach that you were going to take to start building in better privacy into proton wallet? And if so, what's kind of your next steps for privacy on bitcoin now that samurai wallet whirlpool isn't usable pending the trial that they're undergoing?

And actually, for listeners that, you know, maybe know or don't know, there have been some recent developments on the legal front that made that impossible. Right. Basically, everybody that's doing some sort of coin mixing is either, you know, a, in jail or, you know, b, under threat of being in jail or being legally prosecuted in some ways.

And Proton, given the fact that we have 100 million accounts and we're servicing users all around the world, we are not in a position to, let's say, be the test case of whether or not coin mixing is legal or not legal. So when that situation developed, and obviously our lawyers are watching developments in the space very carefully, we get two options.

Option one was to scrap the wallet project entirely and not release it, and option two was to actually release it, but without the coin joint support on it, and then maybe wait and see if the environment around that could change in the coming months or years as those court cases work their way through the courts. And obviously, we opted for the latter approach.

It wasn't our preferred approach, it wasn't the approach that we wanted to do at the beginning, but it was actually the only legal possibility. Given that all that has happened now, do I think it's the right choice? Well, the future is hard to predict, but if you read between the lines and look at what's going on with the SEC and also DOJ in the US, actually, this whole environment could just be one election away from changing and having this be viable again.

It's hard to predict, but given the choice of not releasing the wallet versus releasing it, I still think releasing it was the right move. But for obvious reasons, we had to disable some of these features that currently are under legal attack.

But then when people did unearth that kind of work in progress, plan support for Whirlpool, and now hearing from you that that was planned for the initial release, that makes it makes it a lot clearer, because I think that was the other most confusing part, is there are some ways to gain privacy on bitcoin, but none of those were baked into proton.

But, I mean, that happening three months ago, I'm sure, was a wild pivot for y'all, having to decide what to do, how to handle it, and ultimately still to release, even if you weren't able to ship the privacy features that you wanted.

We'll see what happens in November. We'll see what happens next year. Everything could be completely different. But, yeah, I think for now, it would have been too irresponsible to go forward, given all that has happened.

Some people I know well are kind of helping to fund the defense and ensure that they get the best possible legal care both for themselves and to hopefully set a positive precedent in this case that can enable things like samurai wallet, whirlpool in Proton wallet. Expanding on that, take just a little bit more. Are there any other kind of future privacy improvements in proton wallet or in the bitcoin space that excite you?

Maybe things like silent payments for on chain payments or bolt twelve with lightning support, which I know that you have some plans for lightning support that, that we'll probably touch on later, but anything on kind of the privacy front in bitcoin that, that you're excited to see and maybe to integrate into proton wallet in the near future.

In fact, you'll see the emails so you'll know who sends you coins and then you can do coin control a lot better. That is coming pretty quickly. What we also want to do, of course, is lightning. But lightning, as a lot of people know, it's extremely difficult today to do, let's say, a good user experience on lightning in a non custodial way. If you want to do it in a custodial way, that's banking licenses, that's money transmitting licenses, that's a whole other ballgame.

I do believe that lightning is eventually going to come. It's inevitable. It's something that we believe in and we want to support it. But it's probably not a matter of how fast can devs code. It's more a question of how fast consumption licenses and legal developments and legal clarity be achieved. That is definitely also planned. I think you also mentioned, I think the silent payments, you said, right? Yeah, yeah, silent payments. We of course have followed that quite closely.

We've been looking into that, uh, as of the last time I checked, and maybe it's changed in the past few months and someone will correct me, you know, in the comments of this podcast later. But I don't believe it's been merged into a bitcoin core yet. So, uh, until it actually gets merged and it becomes a bit more stable. Uh, you know, it's not something that we can immediately adopt. And protons philosophy is never, let's say, to be the first to implement in new technology per se.

It's a bit like us getting into a bitcoin wallet. We made a joke on Reddit the other day that actually we got to bitcoin later than Blackrock, which is amazing. We think about Proton in our position, but we tend to be very conservative because there are still risk in selling payments because it hasn't been merged and fully tested. There are things that could go wrong by implementing that now. It's a bit like Alpha or maybe even beta software in a sense. It needs time to mature.

Once it's, let's say, mature and the community has been more comfortable and confident about it, then you could see us implementing that as well. We won't be the first, we won't be the last either, but we'll do it when we consider it to be, let's say, fully stable and safe.

The bitcoin improvement proposal itself has been merged in and it's BIP 352. But you're right that the, the index functionality in bitcoin core has yet to be merged and a lot of the upstream libraries and SDKs are still a work in progress for silent payments. Definitely early, but I think could be a really good fit for you all down the line.

That will allow us to colonize this space over time. And not just proton, but the space as a whole will do better because of this.

That's one of the things that I really, really appreciate that y'all have stuck to, is making sure that everything you do is open sourced, eventually, at least, and that ensures that those contributions help a lot of other people, and not just Proton, which is a huge win. Something I'm really, really happy about. The question that I'm sure thousands of people on Twitter are waiting to hear from you. Will Proton wallet have things other than bitcoin in the future?

And I don't ask this to get into, like the. Like, will x random altcoin be a part of Proton wallet? But just the way some of the responses were handled on Twitter and on Reddit, I think left people a little bit confused. Specifically, my question would be around Monero, but I know that there's a lot of people wondering, like, will this be bitcoin only? Is bitcoin just the start of this? Uh, kind of. What are your thoughts around that?

And it's an interesting thing, because let's take out the 99% of crypto that is scam, because if we're being honest, most of it is scams a percent, which is quite a few products that I think are doing good things, but they're all trying to solve different problems. And the problem that you solve versus the tool that you use, it can be different. So I can think of some use cases for bitcoin is probably a terrible solution. In that sense, bitcoin maybe a ******.

If we talk about the question of Nero or these other things, it really has to come out of the question of what is it that we want to solve? And for that, you can't go look at bitcoin or even protons interest in bitcoin. You have to go back a step further and look at protons long term vision. And our vision actually is to compete with Google and Apple. Sounds crazy, but that's what we've been doing for the last ten years and what we'll continue to do for the next ten years and beyond. Right.

And if you look at Google Pay, Apple Pay and all that that has been done there, it is almost inevitable, if we are to build a competing ecosystem, that some sort of proton pay integrated in a proton wallet becomes developed. And for that reason, I would say that Fiat is likely inevitable. And this is also somewhat evident if you look at the community reactions.

There's, of course, the reaction among the crypto and bitcoin community, but there's also the reaction among the broader proton community, the vast majority of them who actually don't use crypto or bitcoin. And one of the most vocal requests among our broader community of 100 million people. A lot of these people are not on x, they're not on Reddit, they're not on social media. They're reaching out to us in other ways. Right.

What they're saying is we love the concept of a proton wallet, but we like it to work the way that a Google wallet or an Apple wallet would work. And this is something that we need to take into account as we look at the broader community and how we developed. So most likely, we may go to fiat first before we come back to look at the other cryptocurrencies that may make sense, uh, because it's simply what the broader community of proton users is requesting.

Now, uh, if I go to specifically the question of Monero. Right. Um, we, of course, will look at the market situation, uh, because the market situation actually dictates what users are asking for. And because we're not, you know, vC financed, uh, in fact, we're a user, community financed.

Uh, what the community wants is, you know, what we have to build a. So let's say, hypothetically, someday, Monero displaces bitcoin someday as the largest network with the most adoption and is the most widely used cryptocurrency out there. There are some people in the mineral community who believe that it's inevitable and going to happen and we don't know. But let's take hypothetically that to be the case.

And if that were the case, of course we as a company that's transfer, the community would have to then add Monero because it would be at that point the biggest community. So that's how I will look at it. It's a bit like if someday signal protocol displaced SMTP as the main means of communication in a network way, then of course proton mill you can expect, would also maybe update from using open BGP to using double ratchet instead.

So these are all things that are possible, but it really has to depend on how the space evolves and that's really how we look at it and how we make the decisions around product.

And the network effect argument is a legitimate one, and the same one that I made in a blog post that I wrote when I decided to go work for a bitcoin company. I mean, it does matter that you actually have broad reach with a tool. I think the common concern is just, is that broad reach worth the loss of privacy for the individual user and then pairing that with just the way that some of the language was. I think there was a tweet that said no shitcoins in proton wallet or something like that.

Theres some tribalism going on here, and thats going to be a problem in implementing the best tool or instead of just implementing bitcoin no matter what. But youve already touched on a lot of the fact that your focus is network effect, your focus is reach.

And then if that tool that you choose to use because of the reach that it has does not have the best privacy, finding ways to actually iterate on that privacy and improve it until hopefully something with better privacy comes along and makes that simpler. And I think that answers a lot of the question there.

It's not by any means the only way to do it, but I do think it's consistent with Peron's philosophy, because to be honest, most of the people who are privacy conscious and privacy focused, they don't need us, they don't need what we're doing. They know how to get access to all these things and they know how to protect themselves and stay private. How we really change the world is by making that a bit more accessible to the other 99.9% of the world.

And this is a huge challenge, but I think it's also the one that truly moves the needle. And this is why we focus the way that we have focused. And it's controversial sometimes. Right.

Not everybody subscribes to this approach, but I do think if you look at the results that we have achieved in the past decade and the amount of penetration that we were able to get that past privacy companies were not able to achieve, it does show that there's some merit to this approach, despite of the fact that a compromise is being made. Because there's always a compromise that has to be made.

I think, obviously, not to give you marketing tips, but I think leaning into that concept of building a bitcoin wallet that will become more and more private over time is something that didn't seem clear to the people I talked about and wasn't clear to me. And I think that was the biggest concern was with just the drop of samurai wallet whirlpool integration and then dropping a wallet that seemed to not have privacy features upfront.

Well, it doesn't have privacy features right now, but knowing a little bit more of that kind of road map of privacy that you all have planned out and how you want to approach that is very, very important. And even coin control, like you mentioned, being a next step is one thats vital and one that should be the first step for everyones bitcoin privacy journey. That is the core of what people should be doing as a reason in envoy, our mobile wallet foundation.

Thats a big focus for us and we spent months and months building out a really intuitive coin control feature because thats the simplest and most approachable aspect to bitcoin privacy that you need. Even if you're doing coin join or something like that, you still need coin control. So I'm excited to see, to see how you all approach that, because honestly, y'all do a very, very good job with the actual user experience and the accessibility.

And making bitcoin privacy actually accessible is not an easy task. So I'm fascinated to see how you'll actually take a stab at that.

That is the thing that breaks down the entry barrier and makes it possible in a few months time for 100 million people to in one click have access to bitcoin. And that, by the way, is also something that in my belief is game changing for coin control. Because the fact that you can see all the addresses and easy associate identity to a transaction, at least within your own wallet, that changes things, because it actually makes coin control usable for the first time for a mainstream audience.

I do think there's a lot of potential here, but of course we're still early. We've been out for less than a week, and it will take some time to fully explore and find the best way to get that potential and to really increase the audience of people in the world who are, if not crypto aware, maybe becoming a bit more crypto savvy.

It can make it really simple for someone to send to a user readable name, but that still requires that the person on the other end already has that all set up. Whereas with the proton send to email approach, that's not required. Right. Like even sending to somebody that's not a current proton user can create a proton wallet and claim those funds. How exactly does that work for a non proton user?

I don't know what the actual number is, but assuming that is true, we could be increasing this number by 20% overnight. And I think that's incredibly powerful. So that is why we pioneered this approach, because actually it ties in very well with the work that we've done on email. And it's early to say we don't know if it's going to work or not, but I do think it has massive potential because you know how to fill the DNS, you know how they configure anything.

You just get an account and it's done, and then you're part of a network of 100 million people that you can seamlessly transact with. And it doesn't get easier than that, honestly. Right?

But when you're leveraging the send email feature and you're a recipient, you enable this for a proton email address. What does Proton get insight into as far as the actual bitcoin on chain activity, like the address pool? That's GPG sign that I mentioned briefly earlier. And how does that pair with your email address? What kind of visibility does proton as an entity have into that? Because I think that's another bit of a concern with the proton wallet integration into proton services.

It's just that this will be an added potential avenue for proton surveillance or for a three letter agency, et cetera, to force proton to surveil. And that concerns people a little bit, I think.

If you take that concept and you apply it to the pool of addresses that are linked to bitcoin via email, it's the same thing. Of course, if we wanted to, we could record everything in that pool and keep a record. But now, as soon as an address is used, we throw it away. That's not being logged, that's not being saved. And there's also, under current swiss law, no legal way to compel us to log that information.

There's no other way that it can work because obviously, if you're, let's say, coordinating the transaction, you will have that information and it is inevitable. But we don't log it.

But I'm sure that I'll be keeping an eye on that. To, to obviously just confirm via third party means that that policy is abided by.

But, you know, in our case, there's been, you know, a big enough history of cases in the past for, I think people can pretty credibly understand what we have and what we don't have because you don't go through thousands of cases over ten years and have that still be a mystery.

Was there anything else that you wanted to touch on about what you're excited to add in or improve within proton wallet?

So I would say if you go to our user voice where there's a bunch of suggestions, it's not one I'm ready to mark as in progress yet, but it's definitely something that is being thought about a lot within proton today, not just from a technical standpoint, but also from a legal team thinking about this. So that's one that's out there.

And obviously the other features that we mentioned, point control coming very quickly, whether coin join and other things like this can happen, this is going to depend on the cases that are currently pending in us court. I think there was also a case that was pending in a dutch court as well, and that one actually ended quite badly for the defendant. So we're watching this and I do think that anybody that has an interest in this space should be supporting these cases.

Yeah, actually we actually are reading every single filing in those cases right now. That's how close you are following it because it's really going to decide in many ways the future of the freedom to transact and freedom to solve custody.

And I feel like that's a little bit happened with the samurai case and the Tornado cash case, just the one you mentioned in the Netherlands, which also has an accompanying case in the US that I think is up for trial or for the next meeting for the trial in December. I believe there's a lot of work to be done on both of those. And I would say on the samurai wallet side, if you haven't already gotten connected with the P two P rights fund guys, I would love to connect you.

If there's any interest in either just talking about it publicly or any kind of donation. I know them well, and they're doing fantastic work, work to both support the actual defense of samurai wallet and to put in a lot of effort towards amicus briefs, which can go a long way there as well. So that's definitely something that we can chat more about offline, but I would love to get you plugged in there if at all possible.

And I'm, of course, supportive of, let's say, the overall principle that these people are trying to uphold. But I do think sometimes the messenger that is upholding these principles is not the right one. And what I mean by that is, in these cases, they do what is called legal discovery. So they go back through, they look at old tweets, look at old chats, and look at things people have written.

And the problem here is there's so much other stuff that unfortunately was said that can be used to muddy the waters. So, you know, they found old tweets and old emails, you know, where people, even if it's not direct evidence of facilitation of money laundering, it's, you know, certain statements are not helpful. Right. That seemed like compliance was an afterthought as opposed to something that, you know, was paid attention to from the very beginning.

And ultimately these are bits, you know, kind of fly by night operations, a lot of these. And that's actually the problem is that the values here, the principles are correct, but the messenger oftentimes, unfortunately, are deeply flawed in various ways and it makes it very difficult to win these cases. So I do believe if there was another case with somebody that maybe did compliance a bit more carefully, the outcome could be different.

And then this is also why I, the DOJ is smart, so they pick the specific cases for deal with these vulnerabilities. But unfortunately, this might set a precedent for the whole industry. So as much as people like to say, oh, you know, forget about compliance, we don't care about compliance. We're libertarians and we're for anything goes. Yeah, but that doesn't really correlate to the real world. So at a certain point, we do need to have a balance between compliance and not compliant at all.

And I think, unfortunately, a lot of people in this space dont quite strike the right balance.

Definitely not the least, but I know that at Proton, obviously youll always have a ton of things in the works. Ive had some symbiote acquisitions lately with things like standard notes. Obviously you dropped the proton wallet without a lot of us being prepared for that. Are there any other tidbits you can share with us that you have planned for Proton in the future that you want to maybe end off on a good note here?

It's a bit like Apple, who is also very good at not letting people know what they're up to. So what can I confirm? Well, what I can confirm is actually we're not going to be, let's say, launching any other major products this, let's say, in the next couple months. And that's because we've done a lot actually. People saw the proton AI for businesses. They saw docs and they saw wallet all landing in July and they thought, oh, okay, protons gone crazy.

These people have lost their minds and they're stupid and not caring about the community, et cetera. Right. It's not like that. Right. It was obviously development is hard to predict. These things were not all supposed to land within a span of two, three weeks, but they happen to get to the finish line sort of at the same time and that's why they all came out. So I would say July is probably an anomaly. This is not the youthful situation. We're not spending every month launching three products.

This is not what we do. We do have a lot of focused attention and effort on existing products. There's roadmaps that we'll be sharing pretty soon. There's a lot of exciting things are coming for things already that exist in our ecosystem. We're improving the VPN. There's a lot of work that's happening on calendar. I know calendar people are unhappy with it. In fact, I think there's some serious issues there that we need to improve and we're going to do that.

I think even on the mail products there's some longstanding features that, that we're very close to getting out. So we haven't lost, let's say, our focus on what is our core mission. This will still be ongoing and you won't hear any product announcements from us for new things, at least for a couple of months. And we're going to spend the rest of the summer quite focused on the core things the community cares about. And on that note, we work for you. Ultimately.

We work for the community and for the users. We don't work for VC's, we don't work for investors. We don't work for governments. We work for the people. So come on Twitter, go on Reddit, just email us, get in touch with our support team, let us know what you want. And it's our obligation actually to meet the needs of the community and we will do that.

And generally because, you know, because Proton is a, let's say, a bigger company that is, let's say, more credible in many ways, we try to go with one of the big four accounting firms. Right. So actually, it's public information because it's on the Geneva registered commerce. But actually, you know, we use PwC as our auditor. And the thing about big four auditing firms is they are pretty wary of crypto in general.

And to pass your audit, you need to have very good revenue recognition because it's something that you have to do properly. Already, the fact that we accept bitcoin has made it so that certain auditors refuse to work with us. And the worry that we have is, if we do Monero, that may further limit the auditors that are willing and able to work with us.

And at some point, that poses a problem for us from a legal standpoint, because we're required to get an audit, and we want to get an audit from a repeatable form. So it's. I hate to say it, right, but Monero has a reputational problem that needs to be, let's say, separately addressed first, before it can gain more widespread acceptance. Because for a lot of companies, there are real business reasons why they are simply unable to do it.

And I think the Monero community, above all, understands that the easiest way to prevent its usage, and thus prevent access to easier financial privacy than something like bitcoin is to just make it harder to use in the above board legit world. And that has been their approach for a long time to make sure that exchanges cant list it. Banks wont handle anything that has to do with Monero, et cetera. So im not too surprised by the answer, obviously.

Sad. But im grateful that you were willing to get into the details a little bit there because I know that there hasnt been really any public statement on that.

I know I've eaten up a lot of your time. You're very busy, man, so I don't want to keep you any longer. I just want to say thank you so much for coming on. I know there are a ton of questions here that we got through. We kind of went rapid fire through them. But a lot of things that the community really wanted to hear more on, and you did a great job answering them. So thank you so much, Andy, for coming on today.

So, you know, also happy to have the opportunity to clarify these points, not just for you, but also for the community that follows you and looking forward to continuing the conversation and continuing to engage with everybody in this space. And hopefully we can make this wallets a good one.