Pushing Bitcoin Adoption

and CEO of Lolli. They are pushing bitcoin adoption and awareness by providing bitcoin as a cash back award. We talk about building companies in the bitcoin space. Is experienced building in other spaces, challenges that he's seen building in the bitcoin space, where we're at in the adoption cycle, since he's at the forefront of it, and so many other good topics. It was a great conversation and let's just go ahead and jump right into it. All right, everyone,

Welcome back to another episode of the Market Disruptors podcast. Today, I'm joined by Alex Ailman. He's the CEO and co founder of Lolly and Lolly is a company that's really trying to push adoption, awareness and adoption in the bitcoin cryptocurrency space. And so someone that I'm really interested to talk to. So welcome Alex. Hey, thanks for having me. Yeah great. Um, I know we tried to line this up a couple of times. I'm glad we finally did. Uh. Like I said, I've been excited to talk to you.

So for those that don't know, why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are, the products you worked on the past, how you got here, and and what you're doing. Yeah. So yeah, my name is Alex Um. I'm one of the co founders of lolly and also the CEO of Lolli and uh yeah, what we've created is a really simple way for people to earn bitcoin when they shop online as they normally would. So we have over nine merchants on the platform. People are these are These are companies that you shop at

every day. There's Walmart, there's price Line, Booking, dot Com, safe Way, Grocery UM, places that people where you can go get your essentials. You get your groceries, you take your travel, um, buy your toilet paper, whatever you're looking for. And we make it really easy for everybody to earn bitcoin when you when you do it. So right now, it's a chrome Safari and Firefox extension, and it's sort of like follows you around and you go to different sites and it pops up and it says, hey, do

you want to earn ten percent back in bitcoin? You can also go to lolly dot com and see our nine d plus merchants on the platform and UM earn more bitcoin when you do it. UM. So yeah, so we're we UM started this company after the whole team and I we built a previous company called Cosmic, and we sold into very similar space, UH, into into merchants, and we would go to merchants and we would UM sell the solution to them that let them sell their

products anywhere. With this mission of democratizing commerce. UM. We ended up learning about bitcoin a couple of years into building the company and found it just to be this like fascinating technology. UM. The whole team was really drawn into this idea of giving everyone in the world the ability to have the same asset and be able to trade that asset and send it anywhere in the world a cross border, thus democratizing commerce native to a currency.

So we all got really excited about it. It never made sense for us as like a payments mechanism with our last company, and we talked to merchants about it. They weren't really excited about it because it didn't really solve their real problems at that moment. So that was sort of where we started, like grew in this in this idea of how do you distribute bitcoin to more people? The next phase is, you know, we end up getting acquired by a company called pop Sugar to come into

power one point two billion and retail revenue. A year after that, after we grew quite a bit post acquisition, a bigger company came along, Ebates, which is the largest cash back company in the US. They came along and bought us away from Pop Sugar in a divestiture. So we were there for about a year, got to learn the cashback model, and I was thinking while I was there, like,

you know, pitch this to them. How incredible would it be to use the cash back model as a distribution mechanism for bitcoin to teach people about bitcoin and spread it to more people. And the central thesis of that is that most people are not investors, and even more than that, most people are not minors. So how are you going to get mass bitcoin adoption without attracting a

whole new wave of consumers. So we said, let's take the consumer that shops online that knows rewards, that once rewards, and let's share a bitcoin with them and introduce them to bitcoin in this new way. Um. And so yeah, we we launched about eleven months ago and it's just been incredible. We're bringing new people into bitcoin. We're bringing I think importantly women into bitcoin. Um there's thirty of

our users are female. And and so just shows sort of like early signs of increased adoption by new people that previously did not have bitcoin where we're not um in the space. Yeah, that's awesome. So I think everyone is aware of the system, I suppose, right. So we're earning like actually or rewards back, so whether that's airline miles or target reward points or whatever. And then there's

the cash back. Right So now credit cards companies probably started it, but you know now they'll give you cash back instead. But rather than in earning a cash back or a rewards point, you're given bitcoin exactly right. So we're taking something that people are already familiar with. We're not having to convince them that rewards are good, free things are good. Um, But we're also assigning value and having people pay attention to it, not just around price

and not just around investing, but around passive earning. And when they can go see that their points are deflating um, you know, and and there's this like um or the starry inflating. There's this inflationary nature to two points, whereas bitcoin is like there's only twenty one million of them. You're getting real bitcoin, and that is going up in value because there's scarcity UM and because more people believe in bitcoin and they're learning about the principles of bitcoin.

Then like so far, like our users have seen bitcoin triple and and they haven't seen the reward triple, and they haven't seen their points triple. They've seen their points stay the same or deflate um in value. So I think it's really important. It's almost like a forcing function of teaching somebody about the importance of bitcoin indirectly, then they value it more and then they become more invested in it um and they're choosing us over cash back programs,

which is a really great signal. Yeah, something is uh, something definitely switches in your brain when you start to realize how a deflationary currency works. And so Um, A lot of people do come for the money aspect to make money, but then, like you said, as you see it going up in value, you're like, Wow, what the heck is this? I need to learn more about it.

And it's weird because it even changes the way that you want to spend money, the way you look at spending money, Like I look at spending dollars and I don't really think about it, but like, oh no, I'll never spend my bitcoin. So, um, that's interesting. Now. UM, if I guess your primary market right now though it's people that are already aware of bitcoin, is there like an option where people maybe at first want to earn cash back and then they have an option to choose bitcoin.

Are you only do bitcoin? We only do bitcoin. That's our that's like what we're really focused. And there's plenty of cash back companies out there, and I don't think that there needs to be any more competition on that front. You technically can like you can exchange it for cash, like you can you you get Bitcoin is the default currency, and I think that's really important for our brand to be around bitcoin. Um, but you can get cash and

you can do whatever. Your bitcoin is your bitcoin like you can do it whatever you want with it UM and so some you know, very few people have like cashed out when you know, when their bitcoin triple double whatever, you know, whatever point that they got into UM. But for the most part, people were turning people into holders, you know, hoddlers and and and that's been like our bread and butter. And do you offer a wallet or do you transfer to the wallet of the address of

their choosing so loally is effective a wallet. It's a custodial wallet, and most people are keeping it within the wallet. There's certain like bitcoin maximalists that have earned you know, hundreds of dollars in bitcoin and are you know, feel safer you know, holding their own keys and so you can transfer it out and hold it your own it's really up to you. Um we it's sort of our mission to teach people the importance of self sovereignty and

being their own bank and owning their keys. But there's a lot of people that want other people to manage that for them. And so, you know, we can't come from a payment's background. We come from uh you know, our last company was pc I Level one compliant. We were uh you know, we we had an extreme dedication, you know, partly because we had two in the security,

privacy and all of that good stuff. So I think there a lot of people you know, are trusting us with you know that we're we're taking the same principles and protocols and applying them to the bitcoin space that we did uh in the payments world. Um. But you know, some people don't you know, trust anybody, and they want their own bitcoin, even with like fifteen dollars a bitcoin. So it's really up to the consumer. Their money should

be you know, up to them. And that's the whole thing that we have to teach people, is like you should have control of your money and be able to do it with what you want, and you shouldn't um like if you you know, give a bank cash, like it's debatable if that's really your money. Um, the bank's

doing all these things with it, they're lending. So we like to think about like the future banking system giving these like attraction layers of earning like lending um cash back these sort of things, and giving it back to the consumer. Uh. I think that like one of the most difficult things about bitcoin, which you can probably relate to, is a lot of people just don't understand what money is, and they don't understand how money works. Thus they're like, well,

what what are the issues? Like my cash works, at my you know, at my whole foods, like my credit card works, but they don't understand the back in systems of like how it all works and why and where it breaks down. So bitcoin is like better money. It's more efficient. It's like it functions without needing any any trust in any centralized party is and no data breaches. It's just like this beautiful, incredible piece of code that we all can use, um, you know, hypothetically for this

like new money. Yeah, it's crazy. Ye, you're absolutely right. People have no idea how the financial system works. And um, when I do a lot of uh, I do a lot of digging through history to kind of bring some

of those lessons back. And it's interesting because when you look back all the way to like the founding of the United States, and you see some of the quotes from Thomas Jefferson, but Benjamin Franklin, but even Henry Ford in the early nineteen hundred said that, uh, you know, he said that if if the average, if if the Americans understood how the financial system worked there would be a revolution overnight, and like this is like in the

early nineteen hundreds and they got it back then. Um, numerous quotes of you know how much danger will be in if the central banks take over and all these things. Um, but now you know over you know, the last eighty years, hundred years of education has been completely changed and now nobody is aware of it. But hopefully that changes. I'm curious because now you've built your you're a builder. You've built a couple of companies and and a couple of acquisitions.

So you built it in like the payments based and in like the reward space, cash back space, and now bitcoin space. Um, how similar is it or how much different is it building in the bitcoin crypto space versus like a traditional like points back or cash back space. So yeah, it's a great question. Um. I mean building a company is build a company, and a second time it's just like it's so different like the second time around. UM. And I love to like share my like musings with

they just building companies in general. Um. And so we're like one thing a lot of people don't know is like we're building with the same team as our last company. So we we had an incredible team. We like everyone got the band back together to start this. So having like the trust built into the this next company, we you know, we we built some pretty incredible technology with the last company. We love building together. We all trust each other, We work really well together. And so u

of us built our our last company together. UM, and you know, I've taken a lot of like learnings from that. So our day to day is very similar to building any company. UM. You know, you're hiring people, you're you're you're doing that, everything very similar. The customers are a little bit different. I don't think that a lot of people, UM, because so our last company was mainly like an enterprise company that was like our our primary play. And building

a consumer company, I think is very different. And building a consumer company in the bitcoin space is also very different. UM. I think that you have to be very very transparent. You have to be you have to tell people exactly

what you're doing. You're you have to have you know, we have open source code and like we we we want people to UM, you know, make sure keep us honest about like the things that we're doing, the business practice that we're doing, which be very transparent with our community. Um that said, we get, we get, and we have

this extremely engaged community. Like if you follow us on Twitter, you know, like like people who use Lolly are obsessed with it and they love sacking stacks, they love earning bitcoin and and so when we're building in this like transparent, like I think people love the story when they love to feel like they're building with us, and we because we build so open and we like leverage our community to go get new merchants, which increases the adoption of bitcoin.

Like every like we're all working together, like they're stacking stats, we're you know, we're getting new merchants. Um. We do this game where we're like, oh, who do you want to see next, and like people are like, oh, I want safe Way, I want um, I want like hotels dot com, I want Booking dot com. And then we go show those two like Booking dot Com and we go get them on board because our community demanded it

and they see this like this incredibly engaged community. So building in the bitcoin space, I think it's like really nice because with with with when we were at ebates, one of the things we learned is like the coupon clippers and sort of like this older generation that transition into ebates and was obsessed with cash back is like this rabid customer that like us getting their cash back. And I mean, who doesn't love getting like things for

free and like getting castion. And so people who are like getting stats back and people who are getting bitcoin back are like so excited to like get involved. And every time we land a new merchant, it's like one step, you know, forward for the bitcoin community. Because we've been very transparent about our roadmap. It starts with rewards, and then over time, as we as bitcoin transitions from a store of value to a medium of exchange, we're at

that point of transition with that, like vertex. And that's what gets so excited when we go drive fifty million dollars in sales for Walmart and I go to them and say, hey, you guys are spending five billion dollars in credit card fees. I don't even know how much you're spending in chargebacks. Why don't you use bitcoin? Why don't you use some sort of digitally native currency with immutability to solve your issue around UM fraud, to solve

your issue around like credit card fees. And if we're at that point of purchase, and we have all these consumers that are like you saying, Wally is like the preferred rewards wallet. That gets really exciting. To save people even more money, to bring even more transparency to eat commerce, to purchasing, to commerce in general. Like, that's that's where it gets really exciting. So I personally love building in

the bitcoin space. I think it's really exciting, and I just don't think there's like too many markets that have a consumer that is so passionate about the future and this like new world that we're all creating together. Well, it's a it's a it's a it's a good thing

and a bad thing. I think the reason why the people, the consumers are so passionate is because we're in such an early stage, and so in the early stage, the early adopters are like the true believers, and so the true believers, the early adopters are going to be super passionate about it and are going to want to share it, which is why it's amazing to work with them. The con to that is that it's a small segment of the population. Uh so, um, you know, as that segment

of the population grows, maybe some of that enthusiasm. Enthusiasm died down a little bit. But that's an interesting insight that you have and I can that. So people are used to getting rewards back. People like getting cash back better, but we have cash everywhere. This is this is bitcoin and so for the true believers, they really want that. I guess, uh, you know, So on the consumer side, I get that. I'm thinking more about like the new

maybe like regulatory side that you have to deal with. So, for example, you're a wallet provider, so now you have like a bitcoin custody to deal with. I would imagine that's more challenging than just sending points back or cash back or is that not much different? Um? I mean

it is. But it's like, you know, we work with some like, you know, incredible third parties that like like are you know, they have um like the regulatory licenses that we need, so we can off board a lot of the um the that side of the house to other parties that specialize in custodial solutions and we can really focus on the part of the business that we are uniquely great at. And it's it's it's just as uh,

it's I mean, it's hard to build anything. But like I mean, building our last company was really hard and has our last company has so many challenges that we had to deal with that we don't have to deal with this company. So there's like given, you know, sort of a give and take in pros and cons to building any business. And I think, you know, I mean, I think a lot of people, including myself, are maybe

concerned or at least aware of of It's. See, it seems to be very difficult to do crypto based businesses, bitcoin based businesses in the United States. Um we saw I think just this week even Goldman Sachs Company Circle announced they're moving most of Poloniacs offshore because they just can't deal with US regulations. UM. So we see this happening over and over and over. Um US people being blocked from participating in different different exchanges and things like

that as well. So I was just curious if you experienced any roadblocks. But as far as you're concerned, you're saying, it's kind of about the same for what you're doing. Yeah, it's pretty much it's a lot of the same. And there I mean, like I guess it's you know, you only know what you don't know. Oh, and like when

we started this business. There's so many things that we learned and we had to learn and we've gotten good at so and like also, you know, we've been in the bitcoin space for five years, so it's not like these are new things to us. We we know the regulations, we know how to like we've built in the space

for a long time. Uh. And I actually think that payments, the payments space, which is what we're doing, previously had way more regulations and was way more I mean, like our claim to fame in the payments world, which you know doesn't get a lot of press or credit or whatever, is like we survived the Target breach. Um, you know

five six years ago. Uh, Target had like the biggest breach of all time, and we had just landed them, and we had to survive all of these penetration tests as like this four person company, and and so that was like a really scared moment. But you you know, we've built an incredibly secure platform. What does that mean?

You had to survive the penetration tests, so without disposing too much information from targets And basically like when Target got breached, when anyone gets breached, you they have to go test all of their vendors to make sure that everyone is compliant and and then they do advance like security screenings on all the different technologies, and like third parties come in UM to reevaluate which which parties they can keep, which parties they have to get rid of

UM because they have revamped security to never have a breach again into like you know, really like lockdown. And as the smallest vendor by far that they had, we were able to survive that breach. And so we only did that because we built the best technology and the most secure technology in the space. And we did that

from day one. And there's a lot of things that I think my team, like our principles are around where we like we will not compromise on privacy, we will not compromise on security, and doesn't matter if it takes longer to build and ship because of that, we just we're we're not willing to give that up. So we took we took those principles with Cosmic. We were rewarded

with like by them. And I mean think about like your incentives as a new startup, Like if you get hacked, if you get reached like that, you lose credibility, You lose trust, and so you're incentivized to look out for those sort of things and and to like do what you do what you have to do to like be the most secure company and to not get breached and to not get packed. It seems like most people really

today don't don't even really think about their privacy. I think some of these hacks are starting to bring some of that to the forefront. I think it's still a long way off. Um, would you agree with that? Yeah? I mean, if I could like snap my fingers and do just about anything, I I one of the one of my first initiatives would be to like have everyone understand why like the importance of privacy and the importance

of like their identity. Um. I think that credit card companies and credit companies in general have There's been so many breaches and people just don't understand like all the information that's out there, and it's really it's it's a scary world to live in the dystopian world when all your information is digitized and that information is protected quote unquote protected by third party these like centralized institutions, and there's no trust in like if you're trusting this like

institution to like protect you and there's no sort of like um, like, there's no way to protect yourself. It's like a very scary world. So, uh, companies that have done the best I think has been like Apple, Like I trust Apple with my data because even when they're subpoenaed by the you know, the Supreme Court, they you know, their stance was like, we don't even have access to our own customers data like and and they even if

they wanted to, they couldn't like pull the data. Thus, if they got hacked, you can't find data that doesn't exist on it on an individual, whereas other companies like Facebook have made and Google have made businesses off of controlling people's data. It's it's interesting to see how that will evolve and how companies will like look at over time, how how much they're incentivized to protect data and then

arguably like not store certain data or tokenize certain data. Um, because the biggest companies in the world are the biggest honey pots in the world are data like companies that have lots of data. Yeah, and I think I think the bar has been raised. So I mean, if you're if you're Google and you're tracking my Internet usage and what I'm looking at online. I mean, that's that's a lot that obviously what I'm looking at good, you know, incriminate me or could tell a lot about me or whatever.

But when you're looking at what I'm spending my money on, that's even deeper. That's like even a more uh kind of a more invasion of privacy because now it's not just what I'm thinking about, is what I'm actually doing and so um the bar has been raised, and hopefully that that brings awareness. But I think just the average person wouldn't even think about, like what information is Lolly keeping on me? It's all I keeping information on my purchases,

Like where where is that information going? What happens if that gets out? How are you going to use that against me? Etcetera. Yeah, So I mean something that we like hold like the utmost important to We don't know what you're buying. We don't want to know what you're buying.

We we just need to know the amount you spend at each merchant and like and that's how we we fulfill like the bitcoint back, so we we actually we take a stance and we want to colle collect the least amount of information and we do our own audits of like could we collect less information? Could we like to fulfill the same purpose which is ultimately getting bitcoin back on your purchases. So, um, that's the approach we take.

I think it's we've been rewarded for it so far. Um. I think that it's it's scary too, Like I think users should always ask what's being collected? How is it being uh, you know secured? Are people selling data like we have? We have no business and in selling data? We like, we are not incentivized to sell data. We

don't want to sell data. We make money when you make purchases online, and like that's the way that we make money and that is a great business We it's a proven business model with ebates, Like we don't need to reinvent the wheel on there. We like, we want to be a company that like makes money when you earn bitcoin. That's it. And we don't need a lot of data to to do that. We just need people to use Lolly and shop online as they normally would.

What these like micro amounts that people are getting back, Um is their key C requirements on that No k y C only onboarding. It's only a minimal k y C on the off ramp um, and all we need is first name, last name, and email email to do on the off ramp to to transfer to U S dollars or to transfer to your own bitcoin address because the amounts are so low. Yeah, exactly, Okay, got it.

So there's not like a big issue with like in our business, people are buying the people are buying like millions of dollars a bitcoin that they can potentially use for like you know, let's just say in a worst case scenario, terrorism or or some sort of like black connectivity, Like people have to go buy like they're buying like toilet paper from Walmart or like flights and for like hotels dot com, and they're getting good point back. There's like not a lot of like fraud that you can commit.

There's not there's not a lot of incentives for like paying a lot of money for something and getting you know, let's just say like like our average is like seven percent back. So the k y C is actually extremely minimal, and we actually don't have to do it on the on ramp because we're basically just creating somebody a wallet and and then they can start earning. So our our whole goal in building Lolly was to create the easiest

on ramp into bitcoin. And all you need to do is like like sign up with your email and you can start earning like you just it's it's like takes thirty seconds. Yeah. Yeah, so seven percent is the average. That's a good that's a good number. I was gonna ask you about that. Yeah, And I think our highest back right now is like, so you can earn a lot of what's the harmony, Yeah, some of the digital products of like really high bitcoin back. Wow, that's awesome.

And then you can sort that and figure out which ones get the highest percentage back and then try to frequent those if that if that fits in your buying schedule. M exactly. So, um, you talked about finding merchants before you talked about how um you know, you look at the community. The community you know it's really voting someone up or asking about them, and you kind of go to them and use that. I'm curious, you know, when you're going to merchants or finding merchants, how is that

process work out? Like are you going to these merchants and saying, hey, we're doing this thing where we pay bitcoin back and they're like, what the heck is that? Or is it like you just say we're doing a rewards point and you don't really get into the whole bitcoin thing. Yeah, that's a that's a great question. I think it's changed over the since we launched UM about a year and a half ago. When I first started talking with merchants, UH, the conversation was mainly about points.

It was like, we're doing a reward system. Doesn't like they don't really care what you're giving them points. It could be like you know, magical Unicorn points or whatever, like they don't really care. It's like there's so many point systems out there that as long as you're like rewarding somebody in something with something that someone wants, they don't really care. So we took that approach because it's like, if I were to go convince all these people on

bitcoin to start, that's a really difficult sales process. UM. If I were to convince people on rewards, it's just another rewards platform. So we were able to get over five hundred merchants on board UM directly on board because we're like, look, there's a big market with bitcoin, doesn't you don't need to know what bitcoin is other than it is a point system. And that's how we positioned it,

were like bitcoin is just points that's decentralized. It's determined by the world, but like like buy buyers, by sellers, by investors of what bitcoin is worth at any time, whereas points are determined by the institution that is giving rewarding the points. And and so they that was like a great way to get the first wave, the next wave that that came. That's like the next four or and fifty that we've gotten over the last year that

have been sort of the slow removers um. They came on board because they saw that bitcoin was able as a as a marketing tool, was able to attract so many new users to their new shoppers to their their platforms. So they saw the success with Walmart with overstock, with price line, and that's how we got all this, like this new wave of merchants that came on a platform.

And I think to this day we have more merchant adoption than any other bitcoin company in the world because we took a very different approach and we gave them an incentive to work with a bitcoin company. And now I've got like I mean, my friends at Walmart. My friends at Sam's Club like there, they like love bitcoin because they now have have had almost as forcing function to learn about bitcoin because it makes sense for their

business because we're driving sales with their business. Then they start to ask the real questions, the good questions about what is bitcoin? Why do people want it? It's generating real sales for me and my business. Do we need to think about more applications. That's when we played this like long game wherein five years I come back to Walmart and I say, hey, we've generated fifty million dollars

in sales for you all. What do you think about doing pay rally pay with bitcoin and have that that go down the purchase funnel and give people the ability to actually spend their bitcoin, use the Lightning network, reduce reduced fees and reduced Walmarts, um you know, credit card fees and um the fees that you know for for chargebacks. So then you're saying, when you first started the first five merchants, it was kind of like, hey, we're giving

magical Unico points. But now you're leading with bitcoin and they're pretty receptive to that. So you've seen like maybe

you've seen a little shift. Yeah, we now we have real data around like around what um what drive sales and why people are like interested, and we have so many users that have dropped Amazon and started shopping at Walmart because they want bitcoin back and then only that, like most merchants are have like great return policies, they have great shipping policies, and like they don't need overnight

with everything. They would either have bitcoin back and wait an extra day or have bitcoin back and have the same selection. And so they're like, how how can I earn more bitcoin at every moment? And we're giving them a way to earn more bitcoin in more places. You're kind of burning the candle from both ends, so to speak, because you you're pushing consumer adoption, but really and maybe the longer term gain, you're also pushing the merchant adoption,

which as those two converge together, now we have mass adoption. Exactly, you need both in order to have the macro effects of driving mass adoption. You can't just have consumer adoption. You have to have merchant adoption and consumer adoption at

the same time. And so I think a lot of people thought that it would come with payments because they're like, oh, people pay and and Bitcoin is a in a lot of case, especially with second layer solutions, a more efficient way to pay um and and you know, reduces fraud and all these things. But I think a lot of people that built these, like early bitcoin payment companies, they thought about payments is the wrong the wrong way. They thought they just come in and sell it like an

enterprise tool. But people don't want to spend a currency that's going up in value, and you know, historically, how do you get someone to pay with bitcoin and use it? For one it's got a stable out, So we're I think we're far away from that. I think it's like, I mean, I you know, don't give financial advice, but I think we're far away from like bitcoin stabling out. I think, say how long you're going to say how long? I think we're I think we're like five years out

from any sort of stabilization. I'm like pretty long bitcoin um I think it's pretty incredible, and I think like the world is just starting to adopt it, and and institutional investors are deploying massive amounts of capital um and and are going to deploy massive amounts of capital. And it's a great usset that everybody in the world can hypothetically own um and then over time it will become

a better medium of exchange. The more second layer tools that that come out and the more um uh you know companies like Lolli that that grow and continue to to build great businesses around the bitcoin space. Yeah. So um, this was unplanned because we've been trying to do this

interview for weeks now. But just yesterday I dropped a video on YouTube talking about this exact topic, and I said almost the exact same things you did, which is like, uh, this the the evolution of money, and and really I believe we're still in a in a in a collectible stage and it was being driven by speculation, and eventually we'll get to the store of value stage, and once we go to the store value stage, we'll see the volatility narrowed down, and then eventually we'll move to the

medium of exchange and then eventually unit of acout, etcetera. And I put about the same timetable. I said, maybe in the next two three years we see this more stable uh store value, but the media exchange could be seven eight years out. It's kind of is what I put. So I put that I guess because the kind of the kind of recene eyed eye on that. Yeah, and it's tough to perdict. Like we've never seen anything like

bitcoin before. And it's just like, I mean, I I won't pretend like I'm not I'm not like you know, I don't have a finance background. I don't know, uh, you know, I studied economics. But we've never seen anything

like bitcoin. So anyone who like pretends to have like a definitive answer of it, it's it's like it will stable out when when like it stables out in the in the world yourself, Like think about the amount of things that have to happen in order for its stable out, Like governments are going to adopt it as a reserve currency or reserves a store of reserve. We no, I don't.

I mean maybe some countries have done it in like small scale, but we have not even seen like institutions like start to invest their money in the bitcoin in the masses, and institutions are gonna come first, and then it's gonna be countries and then the countries, like whoever is the last country is to like adopt it as a partial reserve. It's like that's where it gets more exciting. If we like look at really like a macroeconomic trend.

The thing I get really excited about is countries that are like, okay, like I'm tired of using the US dollar as a store of reserve, which is a lot of people realize that, but like most countries reserved, it's not gold. They don't have access to gold. They have access to US dollars, and that's the most like liquid best store of value is the U S dollars. Like we this, the biggest stable coin in the world is the US dollar and it's not backed by anything but

the FED. So and like you know g d P. So if if like we have that is our is the world store of value? If when countries start to get smart and they're like, wait a second, I can't own gold because there's only a limited quantity and all the countries have accounted for it. But I can earn bitcoin or I can't own bitcoin. And they start to say, I'm gonna take five percent of my reserve and I'm gonna put in a bitcoin and that's going to be

a store of value for me and my country. And then other countries start to see other countries doing it and they're like, well, I don't want to get you know, far behind. I need to put it in. We haven't even hit that yet. Like when that happens, like we like the bitcoin, a tank is gonna look really really fucking cheap when to put the money in, because I only people realize like how much money is out there

in these in these like reserves. And you know the countries that wait, you know, like China, the US that are sort of they have their own reserve, they have the most stable currency. If they wait and they don't adopt it, and they get left behind and they say, oh, I'm only gonna put one percent in or I'm gonna put like point point one percent, and they're gonna get left behind because the whole world is going to start

to go to a new reserve system, being bitcoin. And unless something comes along that is a better Bitcoin, which I have not seen yet, like then I I just I don't see Bitcoin be getting replaced um in that

in that regard. So in the early days, and I want to align myself with bitcoin, and I think we need to you know, give our consumers bitcoin, and we need to teach them and we need you know, more people like you that are like you know, doing like really high quality like teachings on money, educational services on money, and teaching people the importance a bitcoin, the importance of products like Lolly to educate people about how to earn bitcoin, how to own bitcoin, and and why that's so important

for the world. Yeah, that's great. I love that that whole thing that you just said there, and I agree with all of that. I think, um, it's it's uh, it's kind of refreshing to hear your perspective because, as you said, right, you're not really trying to push the payment narrative because it's too early. It's too soon to push the human narrative. And so really what you're doing with Lolly is really pushing a store of value narrative and helping people earn um to save, not to spend um.

So that's that's a big piece, and I appreciate that perspective. I think that's good, um, because we're just not there and it's not it's not the time to be spending your bitcoin, but it's definitely the time to be stacking the stats. Right, So that's the game. Yeah, Yeah, that's the game. So yeah, I like that. I like that whole the whole thing that you said I I was gonna talk more about the payments at merchants, but I think I'm just gonna stop there because is such a

great place to end it. But yeah, I think everyone just needs to be patient. Um, we're seeing the biggest shift that the world has ever seen. And it's not just like the information. We're talking about money, right, the most important thing that we have. UM, And we have this game of musical chairs, this game theory. As you say, UM, it is gonna be interesting. We have seen I think I tweeted about UM. I think it was Hungary did like a massive like confiscation of bitcoin in some dark

market and they have more bitcoin reserves now than gold reserves. Interesting, and they didn't acquire it, they seized it. But what's gonna happen with it is is going to be the answer. But it's just interesting. They have more bitcoin now than they have they have gold reserves. We did see last year the central banks UM acquired more gold last year than any time in history since nine one, which was the year that we got off the gold standard, and

they all started buying buying it back that year. So we are seeing a massive amount of gold being purchased and I agree with you. Right, it's just a matter of time. And still we start to see the sovereigns start to stack it. But it's time. It's patients and uh just curious. Uh people lose time perspective and so UM being a builder such as yourself, UM, to build a company, I mean you're looking at years right, like you look at this long term perspective, Like what's your

perspective on building a company? Yeah, I mean I think that I was very fortunate. I think to have an incredible team that with my last company, and we UM, we very much built with this like twenty year time frame and we got acquired early and you know we have we it made sense to get acquired with the last company very early. UM, now we have like lower time preference because we already have an acquisition under our belt.

We we have great investors for this company, like we have like you know, people don't like we don't have to sell, we have full control of the company. We don't have to do anything we don't want to do. And we're growing really fast. And so I take just like a way longer term approach or like I could see myself running this company for the next fifty years. Like I don't see anything changing um with how we're

building this company. And I like to think like that long term and because of a lower time preference, it gives me the ability to look at Bitcoin like in a different way. It gives me the ability to look at Lolly in a different way. Um Like I I ultimately I think we need to be building like the visa on top of bitcoin rails. Um Like, that's the sort of scale that I think we can look at, like what is the international um visa? Like what's the rewards network? How do you change money as a whole?

And you take a lot of like good things that the world has built previously and you build them on top of bitcoin in a new way. And like since the Internet, we have not seen something as drastic on the technology front as Bitcoin, and so we have whole who rails to build on top of that. Is this like trust less ecosystem that is gonna just like shape this whole new wave of innovation? Uh? And I just feel like so lucky to be able to like be

a very early company in that space. Um. And we don't need to sell like you know, it's it's something like I think some companies. You know, you feel sort of like the forcing function of having to sell, but like right now, um, you know, I mean I just told you our road, not for the next ten years. Like we got a lot of work to do, and it's like there's so much that can happen and so many things that we can do right and wrong along

that path. But we have a very clear path. I've been saying the same path for the last you know, eleven months since we launched on Like you know, every time I do a podcast, I'm like, I'm very transparent, Like people know where we're going and like, if you want to try to compete with us, go right ahead. But like we're I mean, I feel like we have such a clear path, um, and we know the route to go, and like, you know, maybe we'll be wrong, but um, so far we've been right. Yeah. I love it.

I love it. Um. I just love to hear from someone like yourself, a builder who's done it, and to hear that time preference. You know. I uh, my investments take a long time. I build business take a long time. Um. I've done a lot of real estate developments of those products takes six eight years, Um, you know, warm buffets own Coca Cola since like the nineteen sixties, and uh so you know, real investors, real builders have these long

time preferences. But I I see so many people getting into bitcoin today that are just so impatient and if it doesn't move up in six months or a year, it's not going anywhere. Um And I So I just always love to just like, hey, guys, like get some perspective on this, like your alex is building over you know, fifty year horizon, and so if we're gonna replace this monetary system, I mean, it's gonna take time, but but what a ride it's going to be, exactly, And we've

we've had some really supportive investors that UM. Like one of the things I always make sure is that the investors are are our believers in bitcoin and that they do believe in like the long term play. They're not trying to just get rich quick and and have like a quick return on capital um Like a lot of these investors like they want us to I p O. They want us to like get to this like d mark that we can UM. Like they're not looking for like a quick turnaround on this, and they understand like

the time preference around bitcoin. So we're very much aligned with our investors. We have full control of the company. Um, and we've been really I mean, it's just like it's a great company. So it's also like taking approved in business model like Visa, like ebays, these cash back models

where we don't have to reinvent the wheel. These models work, and like I think there's a lot of companies that get into the bitcoin space and they don't have a real business model and then they have to scramble because they're like, oh, we need to make money off fees. But what if you can't make money off fees anymore? Because we can use decentralized e changes and we can like you know, trade more easily with like next to no fees. Um, how are these companies gonna make money?

Like we make money? Like we we have these partnerships with the merchants. The merchants pay us and it just is like a very straightforward business model that we can build on a long time frame because we're making money. Yeah, I love it all right, Good, Well, we're running out

of time. I have some more questions, but we'll have to save him for another time because I know we're kind of running a long and and I'll keep it short, but I appreciate you taking the time to speak to us, and I recommend everyone to go check out Lolly and help push the cooin adoption. Thank you so much for having me. Hey, if you like this episode of The Market Disruptors Podcast, please help us take this to the top of the podcast charts. Just please do me a

favor and rate, review and subscribe. Taking fifteen seconds to just leave a quick review goes a long way and helping us reach more people and disrupt more markets. I really appreciate you listening and I'll see you next time on The Market Disruptors Podcast.