¶ Intro
People really misunderstand crypto because it's treated like a vertical category when it's really a horizontal category. And what I mean by that is going back to my time in media, TV or broadcast or radio. Those are vertical categories. You're either linear television or terrestrial radio or you're not.
When you get to digital, digital.
Is a horizontal platform. Anything that can be digitized ultimately will be digitized. So now take that step one step further into the crypto space. What is crypto really right? Crypto is tokenization, right, so if it can be digitized, once it's digitized, it could be tokenized. So what does that make crypto. It makes crypto a horizontal platform as well, not a vertical category.
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check that out as well. So once again, I'm a big fan of this hardware wallet. So if you'd like to learn more, visit the link in the description. Hey, folks, welcome into the Thinking Crypto podcast. I'm your host Tony Edward, and today we're recording at Station three in New York's Financial District and my guest is Keith Grossman, who is the president at Moonpay.
Keith.
Great to have you.
Thank you, Leally. This is Thinking Crypto. This is between two ferns. That's right.
I'll be Zach Galafanakis.
So sweet, Okay, thank you, Okay, like I was, I just didn't want to take that role on Okay, good, So Tony, thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, I'm so excited to learn all the details around what Moonpay is doing. But also your background fascinates me
¶ Keith's background
and I have a lot of question with your time at a Time and even Wired and much more. But let's kick it off with your background. Tell us about where you're from and growing up in professional background.
So I mean I'm boring Tony like I grew up in New York City on the Upper East Side. I now live on the Upper West Side. I grew up in an apartment nine F. I now live in apartment nine F. I went to school upstate, and outside of Moonpay being downtown, my entire career has been midtown New York. Right, So I'm like, as as mentioning to you like a two mile bubble boy, right. And I started my career out of college. I was a government major in you know, at Cornell. And I started my career at Wired as
an allociate on the business side. And I rose up at Conde Nasts from intern up to associate publisher and then went over to Bloomberg and I rose to become global chief revenue Officer and then from their time where I was president for four years, and then came over to Moonpey, and I've been at Moonpey for the past three years.
It's been a lot of fun.
So what a transition? How did you discover blockchain and krypton? What made you want to come work in the industry?
Well, well, so I was never a journalist, right, so I was always on the business technology innovation side, right, so I get Wired. If you saw, like in twenty ten the tablet edition, like when the iPad came out that Steve Jobs held up, I was part of the team that did that with Scott Dadag and Maya Dresen and Harardmittman. And when we took over Ours Technica, we launched a predictive algorithm called the rs Accelerator that won
a Project ISAAC Award for Best Digital Invention. And at Boomberg, it was really about bringing all these disparate pieces together to launch Boomberg Media. And then ultimately, like we launched the events, we launched Boomberg Quick Take, which was social mobile video and time was about modernizing this brand, right, which explains like why we took.
It into web three.
But for me, like I fell in love with crypto back in twenty ten, and the editors of Wired came to me. I was the associate publisher at the time, and they said, will you write a check for us to mind bitcoin in our offices? And I said, what's that? And they explained it to me and I was like whatever, okay, And like the check was I think it was like sixty eight hundred dollars and it was when you could mine bitcoin with the CPU, like you can't do that.
Today, right.
Maya Dresen was actually in the office when this happened, which I love because like I have like a like I have a validator for this story, like this moment, and and like from there they wrote the article and like I kind of was fascinated with the space. If you ever curious, like why Bloomberg has at crypto as a handle, right, Like, like I was part of the team that secured that and then ultimately we launched the Crypto vertical within Bloomberg, right, you know. But it's always
been a topic that I loved. It wasn't It was really COVID that made me realize and understand what the technology could do in terms of connecting people, communities, what digital ownership really meant, what the what was actually happening, you know, and I think the big epiphany for me over that time was that the Internet was absorbing value and the movement of value, similar to like back in the day when the Internet absorbed telephany, right, like very
few people remember, there used to be these ads on AT and T that were like call call Paris for two dollars and fourteen cents a minute, called Japan, or for like two dollars and ninety nine cents a minute. Those ads don't exist anymore, and it's because the Internet absorbed telephany with voice over IP and like drove the price down to zero. The phone company still exists, but
they had to find new ways of making money. I saw the same thing happening with blockchain technologies, like value was all of being absorbed, and like the movement and the distillation of value, all of a sudden was going to be democratized, and I thought that that was just one of the biggest evolutions you could possibly imagine.
So, Keith, you are an og I mean twenty ten.
Look like in media, I was the youngest person almost every job I ever took in crypto, I am a cryptogeriatric.
I think I'm fifteen years older than the median age at Moonpay.
So what's it like looking back now? You know, crypto has grown significantly, we got legislation, all of wall streets here, all the banks and so forth. What's it like looking back and seeing that growth?
Look, it's fun, right, it's awesome with any technology, Like in the beginning, it's always it's always beautiful in the beginning, because in the beginning it's really pure, right, and it's always sort of set forth by technological purists, and like that, that purity is what sort of attracts, you know, a lot of the thinkers to come in and build within it.
To me, like, I'm.
Always intrigued by the purity of that moment, right like the Internet saw it like the cyber of punks. What I love, though, is the moment where it is in now, where it's like we're no longer these crazy people streaming from the hill top, but like the wind is in the sails of the of the ecosystem.
And I definitely think that.
And you mentioned this between legislative clarity, regulatory clarity, banking clarity, accounting clarity, the industries seeing sort of like this Golden age emerge, whereas for the past fifteen years, it's had to sort of build and sort of like the fog of grayness.
¶ Crypto internet vs crypto
If we were to make the analogy comparing the Internet, are we at the broadband phase or the mobile phone phase?
Okay, so the analogy I would actually give is, do you remember, like back in like the early nineties, like there were three eighty six chips for eighty six chips, pentium chips. People would talk about their modems they had fourteen point four bps motives, you remember, Okay, Like, do you remember what was the number one ad campaign at that time?
Do you remember that?
Was it around AOL?
No? It was Intel inside right on tell in side.
Yeah, was the biggest ad campaign you could imagine everyone would talk about when the pentium chip came out. It was the only thing people talk about. Then all of a sudden, Steve Jobs comes out with an iPod, right, and he says, thousand songs in your pocket. I realized, since we're going to be on YouTube, this is not
an iPod, this is an iPhone. It was the closest thing I have to it, right, right, But he says thousand songs in your pocket, and all of a sudden, everyone says, I want that, right, it's they don't want they don't care about the upset anymore.
They care about the experiences. Right.
Where I genuinely think we're at right now is that moment where we are in between the chips and the experiences, right. And what I mean by that is is when people are talking about the blockchains that they're using or that things are built on, that's still a chip. That's still the technology.
Right.
And two years ago I wrote this up ed and it's on Nasdaq.
It's funny. It's called nobody Cares how your toilet works? Right?
And like what's funny is like, think about do you care how your toilet works?
That just work? Right?
If you go onto Wikipedia and you type in how does my toilet work? You get a ten thousand word article with eighty two reference points. Yeah, right, and like nobody cares, right. And so what we're going to start to see is these adoptions in the crypto space, with these technologies that are going to be more like the
thousand songs in your pocket emerging. You are also the same way that like high definition emerged, right where you got a high definition TV and all of a sudden, you go, this is just a better experience, And like, what does a better experience look like? I mean, it looks like a cheaper money movement, It looks like twenty
four to seven money movement. It looks like money movement to your phone as opposed to having to go to a physical location, right, right, And so I think that like a lot of this evolution that's going to occur with tokenization and cryptotechnologies is going to work against the bigger backdrop of what's happening, which is this trend line towards a world that's getting faster, more efficient, cheaper.
Absolutely, And you know, with your background for example at
¶ Tech Web3 companies moving to Web3
Time and Wired and so forth, how do you feel in Bloomberg these companies will transition to web three? Is it using the blockchain for content verification, weeding out deep fakes and things like that?
Yeah, So, like I think that there's gonna be a lot. I don't think any of them are going to consciously do it, right, Like, I think it's going to be an adoption based on how technology evolves.
Right.
So you bring up verification right.
First?
Like in information in the information age, I feel like I'd have to sort of ask you.
It's like like.
The problem that people are having with verification today is they're trying to verify truth. And I would argue we are in a and this is on content right, right, And I would argue, we're in a post truth era of content. And what I mean is is not that truth doesn't exist, but we're more in a trust era, right. And it's evolved because of the way in which information is now disseminated and accessed.
Right.
It used to be that there were three news sources in America. You could have a Walter Cronkite who was
the most trusted person on the planet. And distribution, the means of distribution we're controlled right Today, you know, consumers have infinite choice to get any type of information, and then you weigher that on with paywalls, which gate information and access right to certain certain areas, and you start to realize, like people are getting their information in bubbles, right, And the infinite information is actually creating an opportunity for
brands that are trusted by certain constituencies because the consumer would probably think, I want infinite, but infinite is paralyzing, right. You have a read Berry Schwartz's book The Paradox of Choice right, right, And so the consumer ultimately wants to go back to Time or to the Wall Street Journal, or to Fox News or to CNN. It doesn't matter, right, and to them what those really are. And I used
to say this all the time of time. It's like that red border was a trusted filter, right, It's not necessarily truth, it's trust that the consumer is coming for.
Right.
So like where I think blockchain technology will come in in that space is by saying Time actually verified this picture, right, like that this originated here, right, not this is true or not that you're trusting that if it came from this place, it's true. The other area that I think that a lot of brands are going to really jump
into is prediction markets. And it's a weird way of saying it, but like why wouldn't Bloomberg or CNBC start to highlight prediction markets or use prediction markets on their sites?
Right?
Like, if you think about information, like information is really just in three forms. It's you know, you're informing someone, you're providing insights, or you're entertaining.
Right.
If you're informing or providing insights, why not give the consumer the chance to be entertained right within a manner in which they can now you know, use their knowledge as a form of sort of like advantaging themselves or disadvantaging themselves.
Right.
So I think there's just like all these small things. And then the final area I would say is is I do think that, you know, a lot of media brands will move towards evolved subscription models, right, And I think that the ability to start to use a token as a sort of like a CRM mechanism to gather information around the consumer horizontally to be able to get a better picture of who they are, will will enable them to create better communities and monetize differently.
Let's double click on that last one, sure, where you
¶ Companies creating tokens
know you mentioned the token being used to kind of build brand resonance, keep the community going engaged. Do you see the different companies out there to Amazon's the apples creating their own token, rewarding you for holding it and allow there may be interoperability with other companies and brands that you can take that token and spend it there and things like that.
I think that that's a real use case that could exist. I don't think that we're there yet, right. I feel like that that's the thing that everyone wants to do right like, or that's the promise that it goes towards. You know, there's a lot of things that you have to think about when it comes to blockchain technologies.
Right.
One of the best aspects of blockchain technology, right is it's transparency, right right, you could see where someone goes like but you know when you read the press around like Amazon launching like its own token, the question you have to ask is is, like, until there's a privacy factor right associated with the token, why would Amazon ever do that?
Because if I.
Was Walmart, I would literally just be looking at Amazon's token and I would see what all their customers are doing, right r and so like this is where you start to see a lot of the tokens out there push for privacy features right like and and so like when you start to think about stuff like that, like you're seeing an emergence of like privacy or or like regulated privacy.
Emerge. And the one challenge.
That people have is full privacy right will violate a lot of the regulated money transmitter rules. And so you do need some sort of privacy initiative that allows for it to be private, but if needed, unzipped to be able to be accessed by regulators.
Sure, so if they weren't to launch a coin, they have to have some sort of ZK technology and you can't see everything, you know, the supply maybe to token and it's interoppable with different blockchains. But that's it.
And like, and the way to think about it though, is is people really misunderstand crypto if we were to step back, because we've gone down a rabbit home one area, right, but like but you know, like let's let's step back, Like why is crypto misunderstood? It's misunderstood because it's treated like a vertical category when it's really a horizontal category, right. And what I mean by that is like going back
to my time in media, print, Print is a vertical category. Right, You're either a magazine or a newspaper, or you're not right, right. TV or broadcast or radio, terrestrial radio, those are vertical categories. You're either linear television or terrestrial radio, or you're not right. So you're following me so far, right? These are analog vertical categories. When you get to digital, digital is a horizontal platform. Anything that can be digitized ultimately will be digitized.
So you could have digital text, you could have digital audio, you could have digital video, you could also share digital. You could target digital differently. You could do things with digital that you cannot do in verticals that are analog. Right, So people understand that, right when it comes to media, that digital is a horizontal correct, right. Okay, So now take that step one step further into the crypto space.
What is crypto really? Right?
Crypto is tokenization, right, so if it could be digitized, once it's digitized, it could be tokenized, right, So what does that make crypto? It makes crypto a horizontal platform as well, not a vertical category. And why is it covered by vertical as a vertical category, because it's just misunderstood by the media. And what does the media like to cover? They like to cover really three things, right.
They like to cover bitcoin, they like to cover fart coin, and they like to cover stable coins, right, And like why do they like to cover bitcoin and part coin? I told you I could make the cameramen smile, right,
Why they like to cover bitcoin and part cooin? Let's start there, right, Like, Bitcoin's the largest asset class in crypto and fartcoin's the most ridiculous set class in crypto, right, and everyone looks at it and goes, how could you have something called farkcoin the is three hundred million market cap at this time and day, and then stable coins they're just covering because there's so much commotion about institutional adoption.
Let's unpack this for a second. Right, Bitcoin is its own vertical, right.
I can argue.
That the usp, the unique selling proposition of bitcoin is that it's just an alternative asset class. You can argue with me whether or not that is a valid statement, but like that's the usp of bitcoin. Really at the end of the day, the ETFs, that's their own vertical
in crypto. Right, what are the ETFs really? The ETFs are really a container for traditional financial institutions to be able to hold these new asset classes in a manner that is highly regulated and compliant to their existing infrastructure.
Right.
What are stable coins? Stable Coins are you know, tokens that are pegged to a currency at a one to one ratio, primarily the US dollar.
Right now, Right, that's the unique proposition of it. Right, you have.
Stability and that you can digitally move money in the internet. What is real world US It's it's just the tokenization of these commodities, right, So they could be traded differently.
What are mean coins.
Gambling?
Right?
Like, so like what is like what is Maybe that's the wrong term, but like what is fart coin really? It's the ability Like if you really wanted to distill this down to like, how could you justifiably with a straight face talk about parkcoin, Like it's you have an entire society that, over the past, you know, twenty years, has fixated on attention, and now you have a technology, with blockchain technology that allows you to monetize attention. And
so what is farkcoin really? It's the monetization of attention by groups of people, right, Yes, And like when you step back and you're like, what can a blockchain really do that you can't do without a blockchain, it's really
just three things. It's authentication, digital ownership, and the removal of intermediaries, right and and so like when you look at it from that angle or that vantage point, you're like, oh, that's so interesting that for the first time ever, if the only way to monetize attention historically has been through influencers and that's been siloed to individuals, this is almost like the democratization of that. Whether you buy that or not.
Like it's an easier mental model to understand why can that have value?
And it's offline activity, human behavior and networks. We form
¶ Human Behavior onchain
groups around things, offline ridiculous things, whether it be politics, religion, any type of movement. But it's now, like you said, online, tokenized on the blockchain and financialize.
And so like here's a really interesting mental model just going back to media and then bringing it back to crypto. People used to ask me all the time because I have Time magazine, you know, Bloomberg, BusinessWeek, Wired magazine. They would say, is print dead?
Right?
And I would say to people, I don't know if print is dead, but I do know that every day someone is born and every day someone dies, Like talk about the most morbid.
Example I could possibly give and go from fart point to death.
So I apologize, right, but every day someone is born and every day someone dies, a new print reader is not replaced at a one to one ratio, right, Like if you think about it from a replacement theory perspective, like print is on a downward trend.
I don't know if that trend is like.
This, if it's like this microphone like thing right right, it's like even deeper, but it is downward right, based on that, and if you'd agree with me on that, now flip it around. Every day someone dies, and every day someone's born, someone who feels comfortable being a digital native and by extension, having digital ownership, Yes, and understanding digital ownership is born at a higher than one to
one ratio. So like, now you're looking at a trend line that's actually going up right, and so like, when you think about that against the ridiculousness of something like fart coin, against the ridiculousness of the fact that we've become an attention based society, it all of a sudden makes sense why that area of sort of the ecosystem would exist.
When people look at.
Crypto as a vertical and you try to combine all of those different sort of verticals that I had just said, the only sensical way that you can describe or explain crypto is through gambling and speculation. When people look at it through a horizontal and you look at each individual vertical in it, then you start to understand the unique value proposition of each.
So Keith with that said, right, with this horizontal landscape, and you have all these new use cases and utility with the tookenization. Tell us a bit about moonpay and
¶ MoonPay overview
what your mission is and how you're helping to facilitate the use of cryptocurrencies.
Sure, so, like what moon Pay's ultimately building is the membrane, right, It's the highly compliant membrane that allows people to move from the world that they know to this new sort
of like DeFi you know world, these decentralized world. And you know, when moonpay was originally founded back in twenty nineteen, like Ivan's big vision was, you know, how do I take what I have in my pocket, my credit card, my debit card, and just to fix it to be able to access sort of this really cool crypto thing that's happening out here to buy things like bitcoin and others right today, Like what we've looked at is is like how do you expand our payment stack? Right, So
it's like how do you expand trading? How do you expand the infrastructure for stable coin money movement? And the easiest way to sort of think about it from a mental model is it's essentially the PayPal of crypto, right, And that's and we work very closely with PayPal. They're amazing partners for us. But what is our partnership with them.
It's a compliance partnership, right, Right. And when you think about like, think about this table for instance, right if this table was all the people in the world, right and out here outside the table was all of the really cool decentralized applications that are available, whether it's poly market, whether it's exodus wallet or you know, trust swallet or metamsk,
or whether it's anything that is in the decentralized space. Right, Moonpey is essentially the membrane around the outside of the table that allows you to move from being in the world that you're in to access this world.
And what do we do.
We ultimately manage the you know PII of the consumer right,
the personal information. We make sure that we have all the licenses necessary to be able to move between sort of the ecosystems in a highly compliant way where you're not sort of money wandering or doing something illicit, right, and we provide access right And you know, ultimately, you know, the thesis that we're building against is what I had mentioned earlier, which is the world is going faster, it's getting more efficient, it's getting cheaper, right, and you know, ultimately,
you know, as that's occurring, like value, the movement of value is changing, and Moonpay wants to ultimately allow you to take any sort of payment method and access anything tokenized in that new world.
And that's such a critical component for adoption, right A building those on and off rams totally. So tell us about the type of folks that are using Is it both retail and institutionals?
Yeah?
So you have to remember on one end we have thirty five million customers, right, that's retail. These are people who are saying I want to buy this tokenized asset, right, and they don't do it solely in the moonpay app, like where sort of decentralized. And the reason I say PayPal off cryptos is it's actually a good mental model right right, Like if you go to any of the top major decentralized apps out there, right, like moonpay is most likely there as you're.
On ramp or your off ramp.
Right, people don't go to eBay and think PayPal, right. They go to eBay because they want to experience eBay and then PayPal enables them to transact on eBay. Right, That's how they started started to get going the Moonpay app. Right, Like, as you have to think about that is more like how do you get a complete vision of all of your access points into this network that you've now sort
of accessed. Because the original thesis of you know, like decentralized world was that you'd only want one wallet, right, and you'd go very deep in that one wallet. And like what we've seen is that based on people's moon pay accounts, about fifty five percent have three or more wallets, right,
nine percent. I think I have something like twenty five wallets, right, So you're like, huh, Like what we need to do is we need to just give you a holistic vision of what you have out here, but like we want to empower you however you want to go out and experience this world.
So when you're pitching or talking to institutions about adopting crypto,
¶ Institutions adopting crypto
are they more open minded now given the regulatory landscape has changed.
Yeah.
So look like I would say, and I'd mentioned this earlier, like we've gone through this golden age. We're entering into this golden age. We've not gone through it. Sorry, we're entering into it. And it really is based on like right, and most industries flourish if they can get just a little bit of clarity, right, yes, but crypto is going through massive clarity. Right, It's going through clarity from a regulatory perspective.
And what does that mean.
It means that, for the first time ever, the SEC and the CFTC are actually defining what does an asset mean?
What is this? What is that?
It's not it's not irrational definitions. It's just clarifications of this is this, this is that? So you could start to build. Right, We're going through legislative clarity, like what is genius? What was so important about the Genius Act? It all of a sudden defined what is.
A stable coin? Right?
And you know that creates an underpinning sort of foundational base for so many applications to be built on top of it? Is what is market structure really like? When you think about it, because everyone's like, oh, market structure, this market structure that it's really about what is the definition of DeFi?
Right? How do you access DeFi?
And really, if you want to step one step further, it's about how do you ensure that innovation can continue to flourish in America so that way there's American jobs right.
Right.
When you look at banking.
Clarity, like when the occ all of a sudden says banks are allowed to do this, banks are not allowed to do this, It all of a sudden allows businesses to feel more comfortable about these assets and like what
is actually happening with these tokenized sort of products. And then when you look at at accounting clarity, right, Like, one of the reasons you're seeing like this rise in these you know, digital asset treasury companies is because for the first time ever it's clear as to what it means to hold crypto in your books or not from a definition perspective. All of that is getting sort of institutions more comfortable with how can they participate in this evolution in value and the movement of value?
Right?
And I think like we're just going to continue to see it take place. Right, Like I always use this really good example of sorry I'm so long winded today, but it is like I feel like I'm like, just
like so absolutely aloviated. Abboviated today have a lot of knowledge between eighteen seventy nine and nineteen oh four, right, in a twenty five year period between eighteen seventy nine nineteen oh four, the airplane, the automobile, the light bulb, the telephone, All of those inventions we came to market, right, So like pictures twenty five year period eighteen seventy nine to nineteen oh four, the airplane, the light bulb, the automobile, and the telephone. Right So, if you were born in
nineteen oh five, you only know this world. If you died in eighteen seventy eight, you don't know this world at all.
Right, where are we today?
We're like nineteen ten, right, Like, we don't know what the third level, fourth level, fifth level order of magnitudes are of having the airplane or the light bulb, or the telephone or the automobile. We are is we have a group of people who are like, this is cool,
Like I'm going to adopt this early. And there's also a bunch of people who are like that automobile thing is really interesting, but I'm gonna stick with my horse for a little bit, right right, And there's nothing wrong with that, right, Like, but that's kind of where we are in this evolution of like blockchain and AI and like and these changes in the world.
I read one in these institutions you're a partner with is MasterCard. Tell us a bit about that? How how they are viewing this and how you're helping them.
Yeah, I mean, look like I think I think MasterCard and Visa have both been really uh you know, front and center in a lot of what they have been thinking about. Right, Like, the reality is and we're talking about this in the beginning, right, like the purity of movements. The reality of decentralization is is it cannot and it will not replace centralization.
Right.
There will always be some sort of centralization, right, And the reason is is someone always has to be held acount uptable somewhere, right, And so like the real way to actually evolve your mental model about what's happening is that decentralized technologies are going to remove inefficiencies in centralized processes and create better experiences holistically, right, like even moon pay right like, and we are all about the promotion
and success of this decentralized ecosystem. We are that throat to choke for regulators if something goes wrong, because we have all the licenses and hold all the compliance and
we hold all the information. Right, So like, you're always going to need some sort of centralization, and so like what's interesting about Visa and MasterCard and the likes is you have these beautiful membranes around the world, right with access points on ramps and off ramps or off ramps really into consumers, right and on ramps into sort of like the movement of value into this ecosystem at the
point of purchase, right. And so so you start to look at this and you go, huh, where can these technologies help, Like they'll help when it comes to like unnecessary costs taking place on MasterCards end. Where are on visa's end, Like where will it help? It will help from an information perspective on moving and identifying, you know, individuals across a cross border. I think that you're going to see these technologies adopted by these these two players
increasingly also by like the Paypals of the world. Like I don't know if you know my or if you've if you've spoken with the PayPal crypto team. They're unbelievable in terms of some of the stuff that they're working on. But I think you're going to see these technologies adopted by all the big players because they're going to increase the sort of value proposition that that that they can provide their consumers and are going to also be able to remove costs from the equation on their back end.
Right, There's something I've been thinking about. You know, this
¶ Disrupting payment incumbents
technology brings you highlight a lot of benefits, right, it eliminates costs and makes things more efficient. But these traditional companies like your master cards and the banks, they are used to the world being a certain way and collecting revenues and certain things. How do you think they adapt to this? It is they lose some revenue, but yeah, there's some new avenues that didn't make money.
You know, tokenization is going to do to the financial industry what digitization did to the media industry. Right, So, like when one thing that like I never really talked about, which is really interesting, was like back in two thousand and nine twenty ten, I think it was Howard Mittman, Mayadres and myself when we were leading Wired. We were the first brand a Conde Nast to digitize what like the brand, like we had over fifty percent digital revenue.
That sounds so stupid.
And silly today, right, but in twenty ten, it was like a really big deal, right that, like we were commanding more revenue from digital revenue than from print revenue. And guess what, like there were a ton of people who like were like, how could you do that? That is such a silly approach because print revenue is a high CPM business, right, and they were driving all of their profit off of that. Digital revenue is a scale game. You have to play a speed game. You have to
quickly go up. The same way that you know the phone companies didn't go away when they lost a long distance right, the same way that you know that you know a lot of media brands did go away, but like some are still thriving and doing well because of digital. I think that the financial industry is going to go through a reckoning, and you shouldn't look at blockchain technologies in a silo, like you should look at blockchain technologies and AI technologies as two sides of the same coin.
And this is actually where I'm gonna actually give John deu Gastino over at coinbase has any right. I'm so honored, Like, did you know, hold on on a totally random throwout on this and don't edit this out, Okay, I want this piece in this Okay.
So I love Ben Mezrick.
If you read Ben Mezerick books, interviewed Ben as well, you even everyone at this point like, I love this.
It's like Tony between two ferns and you have like all my friends.
And this is so good. Okay.
So Ben Mezick wrote this incredible book and it was it was called Rigged Okay, yes, And it was about the New York Mercantile Exchange and this like twenty four year old phenom in it.
And that was.
It came out afterwards that it was John Degastino. And anyone who's ever met him knows, like, not only is Ben one of the nicest people, but like John is genuinely one of the nicest human beings on the planet. And I was sitting here with John and not here, but like like together, and I was saying to him, I'm like, I know, crypto like blockchain technologies and AI are two sides of the same coin, and I need
I can't place a great mental model for this. And he said to me, And so I said to him, I was always going to credit him, right, So I have to credit him right now. That's why you can't edit this out, I said to him. He said to me, well,
it's actually quite easy. AI is scalable, truth is scalable intelligence, and blockchain is scalable truth, right, And so like what you see is like information is being created and sorted out through AI faster than ever before, but there needs to be a verifying factor, which is where blockchain technology is going to come in, because a human can't keep up with the pace of AI, right, right, So scalable intelligence, scalable truth.
I loved that, right, And.
So against that backdrop, you have to look at sort of like what what are we about to see? Unfortunately, Like I think we're about to see one of the biggest disruptions ever in white collar jobs, and I think that people have to wake up to that, and I think it's going to happen faster than people think. You can go down on this through a very dystopian path
and it gets very dark very quickly. But you have to in your mind recognize that headlines in the news only cover the extremes, and the reality is is that like the world is ultimately defined by optimists, it's not defined by pessimists, right, And Like, if you were to read the news today, you would think the world was ending. But if you stepped back and you look at some of the stats, a life expectancy is better than ever before. Like health care is better, Like like there's so many
things that are actually quite good. What people don't actually ever talk about is like Keith came to Tony to do the you know, between two ferns discussion on crypto and then last and they had a nice conversation. They both drank spin drift. Nobody cares about that, right, and so like like the news is only giving you, you know, extremes in bombarded short term segments.
Yeah, that's a great analogy you mentioned with John Dangs. You know, it gave or I think you called it mindset or.
It's just a mental model.
Mental model moel. So on that note with AI, is Moonpay leveraging AI in different ways?
¶ Using AI
Yeah, I mean look like we across every part of our organization, like we're using the tools that are available to us. I think that you have to think about this moment in time as as AI will not replace doctors, but it will replace doctors who don't use AI, right, Like somebody.
Said that to me once.
I was like, Wow, that is an unbelievably astute sort of way of framing it. And when you take that into account, you're like, Okay, well that means that every person now has in their pocket with whether it is you know, the tools there like vo three or chat, GPT or rock or any of the tools out there you sentially have like supercomputers, like unbelievable powerful tools if you're not using them right, Like, it's a gigantic mistake.
And so like we've not only rolled it out across the work, but it's like everything every department, from compliance to fraud to even you know, the content that we create for our social feeds is generated you know, through AI or touches AI at some point or some tool within the AI arsenal.
Oh, for sure, this is going to be a really far reaching question.
And to prepare myself for this is like, Okay, I don't know where we're going.
It's like futuristic because it's like, look, we got space exploration being worked on. No one's going to use cash and space. Right, Let's say Elon is able to get us to marrow not but you know what I mean, right, it's gonna be digital money. I'm gonna send you. You're into spaceship, I'm in this that type of thing. But also AI agents right now being developed, and we know they're not going to use cash obviously in use stable coins, and then you have robots, humanoid robots that are being
worked on. So eventually maybe by twenty thirty five, I have a humanoid robot in my home. I tell it to go buy me some from home depot. It has a crypto wallet built in. Is moonpay looking at those things and how you will fit into.
The Yeah, so agentic AI is very real, and it's it's sooner than five years out right. I even always talks about it. From the wallet is your new bank account? Like what does that really mean when you think about that? Like, if you're able to hold value in one of these digital wallets, then you can all of a sudden program it to do certain things based on certain interactions. Right, What's funny about what you said is you mentioned like you'll have stable coins, you'll do this. This is where
I actually would challenge your worldview. Right for a second, if you're ten years old today, you know you still use the word TV, sure, right, But if that ten year old speaks to a forty year old, the forty year old also uses the word TV. The forty year old's definition of TV is most likely linear television, which is, you know, cable it's Comcast its spectrum if you're in New York, right, right, the ten year old's definition of TV is video on a screen. They don't care if
it's YouTube, they don't care if it's Comcast. They don't distinguish. Right, in ten years or five years, I think that people will still say us dollar, right, they won't say stable coin, sure, right like, and it will be the stable coin behind the scenes that makes sort of the transaction possible.
Right to do that though, right like?
And this is where the plumbing, that's it's plumbing, right, And that's why I'm saying, like you have to invert sort of like now you've shifted from the technology to
the experience. Right, the world that you defined is actually very real, right, and picture this right like, why wouldn't you then say, if the price of eggs drops below three dollars for a half a dozen, please pick me up you know, x amount of eggs and deliver them to my address, right, Like, You're going to start to see a world where you could program in if then statements on everything, right, and you just speak it in to your wallet, and like you all of a sudden
have now necessarily programmed out sort of like how sort of your AI agent can interact on your behalf sure?
And in addition, well, let me actually back up for a second. So what you're saying is not necessarily that people are going to be running around saying I have this stable coin that save acoin. They may still be using MasterCard, but stable coin rails are powering to pay more time.
I'll tell you what, Like, I don't really bet unless I know I could win the bet, but I'll bet you anything that in five ten years, Visa MasterCard are still here, that city and J P. Morgan and Bank of America are still here. They're not going to go away. What will happen is is they will enable these new interactions to take place. Right And that's a really important distinction.
You know you mentioned, I even mentioned the wallet setup
¶ Future of crypto wallets
will replace the account set up. So let's say I have a wallet with JP Morgan. Will that wallet also allow me to integrate? Is it like a central wallet or I will have multiple wallets?
I mean, it all depends, right Like we think about the moonpay account, right Like, the Moonpay account essentially is your sort of dashboard for all of your wallets, right.
Like, people will.
Have most likely a JPM wallet, right, or a Bank of America wallet or a Morgan Stanley wallet, right.
But they'll probably have like fifty.
Other wallets, right, and you know there will be instances where some of them will be interconnected, and there will be instances.
Where some of them will be silent.
Or someone makes some an app that aggregates all of it.
Maybe they'll call that moon pay.
Right exactly, exactly, yeah, just exactly the problem.
But you know, like it's not it's not the wallet that we want to create for the individual, it's the membrane that connects people to those those applications that's really important.
Right, absolutely. And then with a multi chain world, having interoperability with all these institutions but also the chains and the different crypto assets if they're running on different chains. Wow. You know, going back to the far coin example, Okay, you.
Love park cooin, so everyone loves spark coin. It's like it's like okay, so yes, you.
¶ Support different crypto assets
Know, when you're going through the process of looking at what are the assets we can support or should support, and what is their demand for Let's say fark I mean look right, let's say fark con becomes this massive thing and everybody wants to use it to send value?
Do you intrad So so now you've asked the key question of what's the benefit of decentralization versus centralization? Right, So, like this is where mister Degasino and I have, you know, inherently different sort of ways of operating. If you want to buy partcoin with moonpay, like, I don't censor that, like as long as it's legal, right, Like, my job is not to make rules, right, Like I don't like censor this stuff, right, And so we give access to
anything that's in the decentralized ecosystem. We don't have a listing agent. Right when people at me on x and they're like, will you list our token? If you're on any of these decentralized exchanges, you can access it through moonpay.
Right.
The flip side is is at coinbase, like they have to make a conscious.
Decision to list right.
So like why and this comes back like if you genuinely believe that the world is getting faster, more efficient, cheaper, Like there's nothing fast, efficient, or cheap about having a centralized actor saying you can or cannot access something, right, And so if you look and block works actually does this.
Really great sort of chart on a.
Weekly basis where they do decentralized. Decentralized exchange volume versus centralized exchange volume is a ratio, So dex to sex ratio right on a weekly basis. In January second, twenty twenty two, that number was under two percent. I think it was one point four percent last week. Right, what's today's date? So that way, whoever is it's it's it's nineteenth, It's the nineteenth of November. I was president of Time, but I have no concept of time. Right, Like last
week the number was thirty five percent. Right, So in three years you've seen the dex to sex ratio just go up. Why because people don't want to wait for a centralized player to lists to something. People want to access something with speed. People want like to have that freedom to be able to move into the space as fast as possible at their own sort of volition. And so I think, like what you've seen in the first fifteen years of crypto has been the rise of these
centralized players. But what you're seeing now is the de bundling of these services because they are now technically getting legislated and regulated in a manner where they can exist outside of a centralized structure and that's what moop is really empowering.
And on that note, you know I read recently that you Integrated would pump that fund yes to power instant crypto purchases.
So we're Switzerland.
Yeah, like this is the the you know, like if anyone wants to enter into the crypto space, right, like we are going to help the biggest players, We're going to help the smallest players. Like we're on the side of the developers, and like we are as pro competition as one can get.
Oh for sure, what's on your roadmap that you can share?
I mean, look like we we've been very clear that.
You know, like moon pay is is evolving from just an on ramp, right and I think honestly, I've shared almost everything that we're working on, right like with you and throughout this conversation without bundling it all together like in like this perfect area. But you know, last week we announced you know, a stable coin issuance division. You know, uh, if you look at what we've been doing over the past year. You know, we started the year with the
acquisition of Helio, right. We then in March acquired you know, the stable coin infrastructure company Iron. You know, during the course of the past year and a half, we've brought on a lot of people from the places like BV and K, like Rich Harrison who reads payments and banking for us, or you know Derek you who was like the head of treasury at Paxos is now our treasurer. Zach Qualter, who you know led and was Derek's partner
at Paxos. You know, you know product is now our head of stable Coin and and I think you're going to see you know, us continue to lean into you know that business. You know, we just announced a big partnership with m zero, and you know we're going to continue to make you know, accessing this ecosystem through on ramping and DeFi buys like just easier and easier. Like our goal is just to continuously remove the friction to enter into decentralization.
Oh absolutely, And like I said earlier, such a critical component for adoption to make it easy for people to be able to access this technology and use it in different ways. So that's really great. We talked a bit
¶ CLARITY Act
about the Clarity Act. Are you optimistic that might get passed by early next year?
Look, I was at the was that one of the Senate Banking committees, And I was talking about this this morning. Actually, I think that what people misinterpret is is what the media says first, what's happening on the ground, And like I was taken aback by how deferential and cordial the Republicans and the Democrats both were towards each other. Right, There's a lot of respect from the Republicans towards you know, Warner and Gillibrand as it relates to you know, illicit
finance and you know the definition of DeFi and vice versa. Right, Like I've seen the same respect to you know, Tim Scott and to Bernie Marino and to you know, John Kennedy and to Lumis who've done exceptional jobs when I was there, Right, Like, my biggest sort of comments were like I think, you know, we have to focus on, you know, ensuring strong illicit finance definitions, right, Like that ultimately is our business is like making sure that the
right actors can enter into the ecosystem and exit the ecosystem. And then also the definition of DeFi. That's a really important one, right because depending on how you definite, depending on how you define DeFi, it will either burden one group or another group with the onus of regulation, right, and I advocated and I did this on behalf of
moonpay and hopefully on behalf of the DeFi ecosystem. That DeFi should be regulated at the intermediary level, right, So it should be moonpay, it should be Coinbase, it should be Cracking, right, whether you're centralized or decentralized. It should not be the protocol. It should not be the developer, right because when you start to look at all of our organizations, we spend so much time getting licenses, we spend so much time with compliance teams, we spend so
much time building our fraud models. This would ultimately if you put that burden on the developer or on the protocols like, it would stifle innovation, would make it cost inefficient, right and so like, I think that if you could properly regulate access into the ecosystem, let the ecosystem build for like where they want that to go. And if you could do this correctly, it ultimately fosters innovation in the country and it will foster more jobs.
Absolutely, I'm excited Keith to see post that bill getting signed to law. The innovation and impact on the economy and jobs and all these things that are created.
Yeah, like, I look, I don't normally bet, but I'm not a betting person, but like I feel confident that it will happen, you know, no later than the first half of next year, probably in the first quarter.
It's tough. Keith got some wrap up questions here for you.
¶ Wrap up questions
Here we go first, if you could create your own metaverse, what would the theme be?
Okay, well, like, well like, like I will get metaverses like like horizontals and verticals too. So this this would be a four hour question, but it would be the sleep metaverse, where.
Like I could go in to just go to sleep for a few hours.
Yeah, I mean, like for me, it would be like space or you know, being able to explore a wild West. I don't know.
I think I would just want like a sleep capsule that I just had, like nice music on him.
Everyone left me the fuck alone.
Excuse rapid fire questions.
Favorite food, favorite food?
Oh geez, like that's.
New York question. I got to see what we're you going to answer here.
I mean it's probably shun Lee's on the Upper West Side, Chinese food.
Nice, favorite musician or band.
Bruce Frinksteen hands down, but I was named.
After Keith Richard's favorite movie.
Coming to America or Monty Python The Holy Grail or The Departed, which just takes in a dark, dark, different twist, but like definitely Coming to America or a Monty Python The Holy.
Girl, both both well all through great favorite.
Book, favorite book, best. My favorite book of all time was Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.
My favorite.
The most important book I ever read in my career was Clay Christiansen's Innovator's Dilemma.
M check that one out. And when you're not working, what are you doing for fun?
Working?
Oh?
Come on, you got to be doing nothing you need So I'll.
Tell you what.
Like many years ago, I was at a dinner with a bunch of a therapists. It was a fantastic for it right, and I'm really esteemed psychologists. And I sat next to one of them and I turned to him and I said to him, I have a real problem. And he said to me what, And he said and I said, all of my friends have hobbies and all I do is work, and I feel like I'm missing out on something because I don't have a hobby. I don't I don't paint. I don't you know dance, I
don't you know, do anything? And he goes to me, do you love what you do? And I said, I love what I do so much and he said, and what do you need a hobby for? And that conversation has stuck with me forever, Like I am having so much fun with the team at Moonpay, with Ivan, just building towards this future that we see and which value can be moved freely online and you know, in the Internet, and I think it's so utterly transformative that like there's nothing I want to do more. And so I wake
up and I do it. I you know, on the weekends, I think.
About it and I do it.
You know, like if I had to be forced into a hobby, i'd be reading right or my peloton. But like outside of that, like I just like it's work. Like and I'm sorry, I know it's a crap ass answer, but like genuine hopefully you could hear it in my voice, like I love what we're doing.
I mean that's great. I mean you love what you're doing, so it doesn't feel like work, right, Yeah, Well, Keith, absolute pleasure. Thank you for taking the time and I'm looking forward to having you back on since you are in New York, to give the latest and greatest about Moon pay. Possibly maybe early twenty twenty six. We can do another way.
Well, thank you, thank you so much for having me.
I really appreciate it, and I'm glad I was able to make your guy over here smile a few times.
Sound good stuff. M.