When we enabled our customers on PayPal and Venmo to buy hold slid spend cryptocurrency on the platform. We extended that to a couple of other countries a little bit later on, and we use that as a real opportunity to bring that asset class to our customers and also internally to get some more visibility and experience with the technology.
This content is brought to you by bitco, which is one of the top crypto custodians in the crypto industry. Bitco works with many big companies and brands such as Pantera Capital, Bitstam, and bitcoin Ira. Nike also selected Bitgo to power its wallets for its NFTs and bitco has many great services such as hot wallets, custodial wallets, self
managed cold wallets, and NFT wallets. Many institutions trust bitgo with its top level security and incredible services such as being able to deploy your capital while it's in custody, which includes lending, borrowing, trading, staking, DeFi access and more. If you'd like to learn more about bitco, please visit bitgo dot com link in a description. Welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony Edward and my guest today is Edwin Aoki, who's the CTEO of PayPal's Blockchain,
Crypto and Digital Currencies unit. Edwin, great to have you on.
It's great to be here, Edwin.
I am very excited to speak with you. PayPal is doing some amazing things as it relates to crypto, and of course you have a stable coin py USC. I have a lot of questions for you around these things, but before we get there, tell us a bit about yourself, where you're from, and what's your professional background.
Sure, I've been here at PayPal for a little over fourteen years now, which seems like forever. Been in this role for about four coming on five years of that. Prior to that, I was PayPal's chief architect, looking over architecture and prize technology across all of our divisions and business units. Before that, had a lot of fun times at Netscape, which was acquired by AOL, was there for a while into it Apple, a few startups here in
Silicon Valley. Got to be sort of in and around a lot of fun pivotal moments in the dawn of the consumer Internet.
So it seems you've always had a passion for tech. You were in Web one point zero into Web two and now Web three.
Yeah, that's right. We didn't think of it as Web one point you know, back then, but yeah, I sort of fell into that. And I've been really fortunate to be with a number of really smart people, and I'm number of really what turned out to be influential companies in the space.
You know, I've interviewed quite a few alumni from Netscape, and of course, you know, you have Mark and Dreesen and these folks have a sixteen Z. But it's amazing how many people from Netscape are here building Mike Belshi and the name goes on Bill Bill from Abra and much more.
Yeah, you know, I think that a lot of that stems from some of the idealism that a lot of us had in those early days around really being able to democratize what was at the time communications and publishing, and that sort of extends naturally into you know, ultimately democratizing financial services and identity and other areas that I think blockchain and crypto really touch on.
So do you see that, you know, this space, this technology of blockchain is indeed Web three, that this is what Web three will be about, you know, things being tokenized, value being token ouised on the blockchain, the ability to transact with blockchain, and so forth.
Yeah, you know, I think actually we're still probably pretty early on in the evolution of Web three, and these kind of the kinds of things that often aren't really apparent until after you get a little bit further out. You know, I don't think that we saw thought Web two was Web two until Web three came along. Yes, So you know, clearly I think there's a trend there in terms of decentralization, distribution, you know, really also looking at sort of where technology and innovation comes from in
terms of the north South divide. But I don't know that we'll really know exactly what sort of the heart of Web three h is until we're a little bit maybe even until we're a little bit further out of it and we get to look back with a little bit more perspective.
Yeah, that's true, because oftentimes you don't know what's going to stick and what's going to get adoption. Right, there were so many ideas in these in Web one and Web two point zero, but it's kind of you have to look back in hindsight and say, oh, I see this is what worked and what consumers wanted.
Yeah, that's right. I mean I think that, you know, for a while, there are a couple of years ago NFTs were supposed to be the big thing Web three. Those might come back because certainly being able to have individual sort of digital goods is important, but that seems to have died down a little bit at the moment for obvious reasons. A lot of the talk is around bitcoin, but whether or not that ends up being the defining
aspect of Web three or there's something else. I think that we'll know a little bit more in the in the rear of your mirror.
What was your first encounter with bitcoin or crypto and what was your aha moment?
Yeah, you know, actually I think it was my husband that introduced me to bitcoin a long time ago. I will admit that at the time, I saw it really as a store of value, a commodity, much like gold or other kinds of assets, and you know, I thought it was interesting, but nothing particularly revolutionary at the time.
In my previous role as PayPal's chief architect, I had the privilege of overseeing our sort of horizon to research and innovation unit, and there we started looking at blockchain sort of as a core technology really around that distributed data and decentralized computing model, and we started getting really excited about that, not just for value exchange and crypto,
but really around a number of different axes. And I think it was there when it really started to come together that it addition to the ethos of decentralization that the speed, the lower cost, the transparency, the programmability of this could have real dramatic implications for payments. And obviously PayPal is a payments company. We're really interested in being able to understand what's coming next in this space and
being able to lead that space. And I think that sort of those two things together really sort of brought it home that hey, here was a foundational technology that was sort of interesting in itself, but there were also some really important use cases that could enable that suddenly made it real.
Now PayPal has been ramping up your efforts around crypto and blockchain and so forth. Can you give us an overview of all the different initiatives you guys have running. I know there's crypto trading, stable coins, and if there's anything else you want to highlight.
Yeah, sure. So you know, we started to get into this space in the retail context in twenty twenty when we enabled our customers on PayPal and Venmo to buy, hold, sell,
and spend cryptocurrency on the platform. We extended that to a couple of other countries a little bit later on, and we used that as a real opportunity to bring that asset class to our customers and also internally to get some more visibility and experience with the technology, and that really led up, i think, to twenty twenty three when we launched PayPal USD, our stable coin that you mentioned, which we call p y u s D, which really sort of culminates the thinking around our view that digital
assets and digital currencies can be a real game changer in the payments space, and since then we've been really i think proving that out through a number of use cases and applications. In April, we added that as a funding source to our remittance platform Zoom that allowed for customers on the pay Pal platform to make their international remittance transfers with zero transaction fees when they fund with p y u s D. We added the Salona blockchain as a base protocol to p y u s D
back in May. That brings sort of a different set of runtime characteristics around speed and cost and scale to the platform. And then most recently in the last few months, we've really ramped that up by making our first business payments. You mentioned I think in the pre show that we settled an invoice with Ernst and Young e Y using p y U s D thanks to our friends over
at SAP and coin based prime. That really starts to show, I think, how business to business payments can work, you know, with twenty four to seven settlement and instant finality or near instant finality. In a broader context, we added E
and S support. I think also in September it was we launched the bisell Hold product for our merchant base in the US, and then just this week we have started to use p y U s D with our distribution partners on Zoom, starting with Subuana and yellow Card, to allow for you know, that behind the scenes leg of funding those in sorry, those international remittances to operate on these more efficient, more cost effective uh uh settlement rails.
Now, I know some people are going to listen to this and they're gonna say, wait a minute, I've used PayPal over the years, why do I need a stable coin. What is the purpose and why does PayPal even need that?
They have so many customers, they're doing so many millions of transactions with merchants and users, And I know the answer to that, but I want to make sure folks who are new today's asset class, uh, you know, they understand that the behind the scenes, how the sausage is made that what's the problem being solved with with with digital assets and stable coins?
Yeah, I mean, I think it's a great question, Tony. And you know, if you think about folks that use PayPal, particularly in a lot of the developed world, you already experienced the benefits of having what appears to you to be instantaneous settlement, you know, a digital wallet that that works most of the places that you want to be able to transact and to have the speed and safety and convenience of something that just works with a smartphone
in your pocket. When we think about p y U, s D, we think of it in some sense as sort of taking that balance that people really know and love about PayPal and being able to tokenize that and externalize that outside of the PayPal platform. So even though we may want PayPal to be available to every single
person on the planet. The reality is that at the moment, not yet, what we can do with p y U s D though, is that we can start to bring some of the convenience, some of the the form factor and the ability to be able to move funds quickly and easily across different sets of payment rails around the world to a larger group of individuals, people who either may not have access to PayPal, people may who may not choose to use PayPal, or entire industries and verticals
which today might not think of PayPal as their first choice. So I mentioned the business to business payment that we made with e Y. Typically today, you know, a huge amount of the commerce transactions that happened between enterprises don't use PayPal. They don't, in fact use digital settlement rails for the most part at all. They're still using wire transfers or bank payments or invoices and money payment orders in order to transact sort of in day to day business.
And you know, you and I know Tony that behind the scenes, those things take time. Wire transfers take a while to settle, they can be expensive, particularly with small businesses.
They can lead to cash flow and sort of money movement challenges as they work their way through the financial system, and we think that stable coins really offer an alternative that streamlines that ability and really makes it easier for businesses and individuals of all sizes to be able to have greater control over their assets and really experience the benefits of something like PayPal in a much wider realm.
So in addition to the ability to obviously settle faster, it is a more twenty four to seven asset class and technology where you know, these scenes can be sent settled instantly through these stable coins. Are you planning to offer other services with these stable coins like yield or anything like that.
Yeah, you know, Tony, I mean, we always are listening to what our customers are are asking us to do.
We obviously start with, you know, a view that is really coming back from those customer needs, and you know, for that, we've really or we really use that to focus on some of the key things that we've introduced in the last year around commerce, being able to move to a faster transaction settlement time with lower network fees on Salana, creating greater utility around you know, payment based interactions, really streamlining a lot of these things behind the scenes
so that we can make payments easier for customers. You know, as we uh hear more from our customers, as we get greater clarity in the regulatory markets, h and as we look to you know, all the innovation that's happening in the industry. You know, we'll obviously look at new features that are going to bring new kinds of benefits and new kinds of opportunities to the market.
And you mentioned moving to Solana. Are there plans to add other blockchains? Given that it seems we're headed to a multichain world, there won't be one blockchain to rule them all, so to speak.
Yeah, I mean, we started py usd with the intention of being multichain. Obviously, we love the Ethereum community in the Arc twenties. We started there because of the distribution and the wide developer support and the innovation that happens there. We knew at the time that we also wanted to be able to bring in alternatives that had lower network fees and higher throughput that would be needed for settlements.
We were also really enamored with the work the Salona Foundation did on token extensions, which we think are really important technical aspects that help bring features like greater privacy and greater program ability for payments, which we think will
be important. And as we hear from our developer communities, from our customers around the other environments and ecosystems that they want to use p y U s D and obviously we'll consider that we're in conversations all the time with pretty much everybody in the ecosystem, as you might imagine, and you know, we'll see what comes out of that.
M Now, in regards to market share, Edwin, I mean, I think it's all secret. There is a race now with stable coin issu ins, and everyone is trying to launch your own stable coin. Yeah, and you know, obviously the leader so to speak, if you want to call that right now is us d T has been for a long time. Then there's us d C. How are you planning to get more of steel market share from those folks?
You know, it's actually really great to see I think the validation of stable coins, and I think really the industry really coming to the same kinds of conclusions that we came to a while back around the utility of this and the ability to really start thinking about payments use cases, because again you know, a lot of the stable coins that and the conversations that are happening now have been around the utility of stable coins rather than the store of value that you know, a lot of
the discussion was a couple of years ago. Even in the space, it might surprise you that market cap and market share is not the primary thing that we're going for with p y U s D. Really, we slipped out to do this as a token for payments, as a way to move value around, so we're much more interested in being able to drive movement of the token. We're much more interested in the use cases like around the euy or sebuanna and yellow card, where folks are using p y U s D to solve real problems
in the payments and commerce space. Naturally, we think that as that picks up, that the market share will come from that. But our primary focus is really around these utility uh uh, these utility applications and being able to bring this into the movement of real world value, and then market share we think will come secondarily from that. Yeah.
Absolutely, I love what you said about solving you know, a real world problem, and obviously you have a large customer base already and are are you talking to other enterprises like e Y and looking to do pilots and things like that.
Absolutely, I mean I think that, you know, what we showed with SAP is the ability to really start invoicing and thinking in a fully digital realm. You know, it's I think it's really been instructive for us. You know, SAP, I think they have all of the Fortune five hundred if you know, if not all, then then certainly a substantial majority of that. And I think that one of the things that's really interesting for us around that is that we're looking to bring P y U, s D
and digital assets into places where people already are. So if you are a large enterprise, you're already using SAPs ERP system. If you are a retail customer, for example here in the United States, you are probably already using PayPal or Vemo. Our whole aspect here is that, you know, we're not trying to get people to do something radically different from what they've been doing before, because habits die hard.
What we're looking to do is make those experiences better, less expensive, faster, safer through the use of these technologies, some of which will be visible to customers and some of which will be sort of buried in the back end, but we'll just make things more efficient under the covers.
And so you know, for us, what we're looking to do is to work with partners UH, to work across our customer base, and to work across services within the PayPal ecosystem, so that using p y U s D and using digital assets, like I said, is just as easy and convenience is using your balance, or just as easy and convenient as using any other payment method that you use today. Yeah.
Absolutely, talk to us about the relationship or the dynamic between PayPal and Venmo and is there going to be anything unique as it relates to crypto or the use of p y U s E or is just going to be kind of the same strategy.
Yeah, well, I mean obviously, you know, Venmo and PayPal serve slightly different audiences today. You know, Venmo is a much more social experience. It's a it's an area that you know, gets used a lot for personal person transactions. A lot of where crypto in its early days was
used around sort of peer to peer activities. We see a lot of activity there, the ability to actually move funds from PayPal to Venmo and vice versa was facilitated on our platform for the first time through p y u s D. So a lot of people don't know that if you are a PayPal or a Venmo user, you can transfer p y u s D without fees between accounts on those platforms today and it happens instantaneously,
and it happens really seamlessly in that regard. But you know, we look to bring features that are appropriate to those platforms to life. Uh, and we are excited about expanding both the PayPal and the Vemo platforms, you know, with all of the new things that we're working on. And as I said, stay tuned, there's a lot more to come.
Yeah, I'm a user of both platforms and Venmo. To your point, there's more of that social aspect. And I was thinking, I'm just thinking out loud, but you know that it would be amazing if the regulatory laws and all these things in our alignment, but to have some sort of social trading platform that's regulated with crypto and I can send money, but I can also highlight, hey, I bought some bitcoin, or I'm doing this whatever may be,
or I have this NFT. I feel that would be an easy plug into Venmo, but just thinking out loud.
Yeah, well, I mean, look, we'll take that into into consideration. But I mean already today, if you are buying and selling bitcoin or one of the other supported currencies on the platform, you have the option of exposing that as part of your Venmo social feed and starting a conversation around that, just as you can and with any other of the Venmo transactions. And you know, I think that that the crypto demographic is very well matched to the
Vemo demographic. And you know, again we've been really excited about how those things come together. You know, on the Venmo platform, for example, you can if you have the Vemo credit card, you can choose to receive your rewards and crypto off of that. And you know, we've seen a lot of folks really being especially as bitcoin has risen, some of the people that have chosen to receive their Venmo card rewards and bitcoin, you know a year ago, are really I think appreciating head choice today.
Jumping back to p y u s D, tell us a bit about the reserves behind p y u s C because that's of course a big element of stable coins and a lot of people are they have eyeballs on this now because stable coin legislation is being worked on in the US. The has passed a version, So tell us about what the reserves is made of.
Yeah, I mean, you know, I think that you talked a little bit about this with Charles from Paxos a little while ago on your podcast. But you know, our reserves are held entirely of used dollar denominated assets in US bank accounts in a in segregated accounts that are
intended to be bankruptcy remote in trust. So you know, this is pretty much the gold standard in how we manage reserves and how we ensure that we are holding a dollar's worth of funds for every dollar of tokens that get issued, and those reserves, how the costodients hold the reserves, all of that is, you know, as you know, very crucial to maintaining that dollar equivalence. It's overseen by
the New York Department of Financial Services. All the reports are audited and available through the website of our issue or PACSO, and we're very very proud of, I think the level of care and attention that we've put into that process because we think that it's crucial to really helping people to have the confidence that you know, this is this has been built and designed in a way that is worthy of of of their trust and.
PayPal absolutely, And what are your thoughts on possibly the legislation coming in very soon in the United States, which I think would be very good for the market, protect consumers, but allow innovators and builders to you know, be able to do their thing without having to look over your shoulder.
Yeah. I mean, we've always had a compliance and regulatory first approach to the work that we've done here. You know, we have we're the recipients of New York's first conditional bit license. We were the first company then convert that into a full bit license, and so, you know, being able to have a strong regulatory foundation and clear regulatory guidelines have always been important to us. You know, I think that it remains to be seen exactly what the
shape of that is. There's a number of bills moving through Congress here in the United States, and you know, we're committed to following that process and and uh sharing our learning as where appropriate and then hopefully seeing something that, like you said, encourages that innovation but manages to protect consumers and and provide clarity for US as an industry.
Now, I know maybe is too early to probably think about this, but are you planning to launch a p Y E U R you know the euro?
You know, we get that a lot tony and I think that you know, as I said before, we're going to follow where our customers go and what they're asking for. But I think it's important to just sort of recognize that today. You know, if you think about stable coins, they're really used as the other side in many cases of crypto transactions, whether in the DeFi space or in trading, and our ambition is to really use stable coins as
part of global commerce. And today both of those use cases are primarily denominated in dollars, So the liquidity is deepest on crypto between for example, bitcoin and US D versus bitcoin and euro, or bitcoin and EN. So most of the trading happens in dollar denominating exchanges in dollar
denominated pairs. And if you look at sort of where you know, global commodities are priced, if you look at sort of how global trade works, the dollar is the US sorry, the dollar is the world's reserve currency, but
it's also primarily the world's transaction currency. When you think about cross border and so you know, the and and the need for dollar denominated assets and dollar denominated digital goods I think is still largely outweighs you know, some of the work that's happening inside of even very large trading blocks like the EU or or other parts of Asia. And so I think that you know, we will you know,
continue to serve that space. And uh, as the need and as the desire for more regional or local currencies comes on board, we will absolutely respond to that. But right now, I think that the biggest area of opportunity and the biggest area of demand is in dollars.
Yeah. Absolutely, And I think in d C there's a lot of talks now of you know, how the United States can preserve the world reserve currency status, and stable coins will play a big part of that. Because the world wants dollars and you can give it to them in a faster, cheaper, instant settlement format that that that's a win.
So absolutely absolutely.
Now, uh a question I'm really curious about. Yeah, Elon Musk, one of the founders of PayPal, and even Peter Thiel, one of the founders of PayPal, Uh, are you in talks with them to use p y u s D in any way. Most mostly this question is about Elon because he has X, he has UH, he has enterprises like Tesla and and and space X and so forth. Are there any conversations happening.
You know, I'm on the technology side, Tony, so I don't know if I don't know of any of those conversations that are happening. You know, I think that we welcome, as I said, p y U s D is really designed for commerce, whether that is from you know, UH, consumers to small businesses, whether that's between large enterprises you know, or or other sort of larger payments that that happened in the larger global supply chain. I'm sure we would welcome sort of any opportunity to you know, make those
more efficient, whether that's for Elon or anybody else. But I'm not aware of anything specific that we're having a conversation with them about. Well.
As a user of PayPal, Venmo and X, if I could tip someone in p y U s D on X, hey, great tweeter, great information, or send somebody some money instantly with p y U s E, I would be using that product, so.
Fair enough, you know, it's really interesting that you mentioned that, Tony, because we had a p y u s D hakathon a little while ago and one of the finalists and I was sort of lucky enough to be one of the judges, and one of the things that we were seeing was the ability for on the Forecaster platform, which some of your listeners may know that is sort of a decent centralized social network built on Web three principles.
One of the finalists has a tipping platform on that using p y u s D, and so, you know, I think it shows that there is a real opportunity to use these open source mechanisms and you know, these open protocols that p y u s D is built on, and start to bring whether that's tipping, whether that's commerce, whether that's some of these other sorts of use cases into places like social networks that you know, maybe we weren't necessarily thinking about or isn't really our core business,
but that everybody needs payments, right, and so if we're able to make payments easier, easier to use, easier to integrate, faster, and cheaper to settle, that's going to be a win for everybody.
Yeah, and I can't wait for today where there's more interoperability between these platforms and they all into grate blockchain, and I can easily, like I said, just maybe I just do a simple command and it sends you add when five p y USD on Twitter or somebody once again that I like their content or whatever it is, or buy something from them, and it's that easy. I don't have to Okay, I need to log into this app, I need to give me your wallet address. I don't have to do all those things.
Yeah, and you know, I think that the fact is that when we think about things like micro payments or streaming payments, that's where digital currencies can really come into its own. You don't have a lot of the fixed overhead that comes from you know, traditional payments methods. Like you said, it can be instantaneous and so you can really get that feedback loop going much more readily. You don't necessarily have to have accounts and subscriptions set up
in advance. And so, yeah, we really do see that there's an opportunity, I think, particularly in the creator space, particularly in social uh that digital currencies can really start to move value in a much more effective way that's matched to sort of the Internet and matched to the distribution of media and content today, and we're starting to see some of that happen'd love to see more of it.
It would be great to start to be able to have tips coming into your podcast, Tony with T Y U s D. Maybe sometimes soon.
That'd be great. If you're if you guys are working on something that's you know, you're in the beta format. I would love to help test it out for you, So keep me in mind.
All right, all right, we'll do that.
Now, a more macro view question here, what does the future payments look like? For PayPal? And you touch a bit on it, right, and web monetization, micro payments and things like that, but with stable coins, with digital assets and so forth. You know, what do you I guess let's put a timeline. How do you see this market in five years?
Yeah? I mean, you know, I think, Tony, if you'd asked us five years ago whether or not we'd be looking at bitcoin pushing one hundred K today, I don't know that we would have predicted that. So that's a pretty long time frame in this business, as you know, you know, we've been always about being able to offer our consumers and merchants choice and so we want to have the maximum amount of flexibility in how people choose
to pay for things. We want to have our merchants have the ultimate flexibility and how they choose to get paid, and PayPal acts as the sort of universal translation layer that removes all the friction between those two choices, so you know, whether that is across borders, whether that is
across currencies, whether that across payment types. You know, PayPal is really in the business of really making it easy for those senders of value and receivers of value to come together and take all that complexity out of the middle of that. We see the p y U s d A is a really important enabler for that because, as we've talked about, it enables for that connection to
happen faster, cheaper, safe, more transparently. It allows for greater programmability along the way so that you can really see cause and effect and and and and really interesting use cases that are maybe triggered by supply chains or triggered by other sort of events that are happening outside UH payments, but insights or a greater commerce sphere, and you know, we see that that that PayPal can be that enabler for more chants for consumers as we've always done, just
sort of eliminated all that complexity along the way. So, you know, one thing that you might imagine, you know today when you think about you know, you get an Amazon package at your door, and the way that you know that you've got that package is because you get an email with a with a photo of the package.
You could imagine actually that you know, through greater integration with blockchain based supply chains, that you know that full logistics path can be tracked all the way to your door and you are not really relying on the delivery drivers sort of being able to take a photo and send it to you. But when that package is delivered, your payment can instantly be transmitted and that can actually flow all the way back through the supply chain to
the original producer of the good. And because that happens instantaneously or near instantaneously, you remove a lot of the inefficiencies around you know, you're able to get to a much more just in time payments, add just in time manufacturing and chain and just in time economy. That removes a lot of the inefficiencies around capital capture, around cost of payments, and around these delays that sort of happen and are built into the way that payments works today.
And I think that when we can get there, we have better cash flow for small businesses, we have much more predictability and visibility for consumers, and the payment system just works better for everyone. And that's what we're in the businesses for.
What are your thoughts and this is another macro question, but it's you know, AI and robotics and so forth. In this more digital world where headed in and more technological world where things are going to be automated, it seems the perfect time. It is a perfect timing here because you have blockchain, you have stable coins in crypto which can help facilitate payments maybe between AI agents or robots, and you know what Elon's doing with all these things.
Do you see crypto, you know, playing a big role in that economy so to speak?
Absolutely, I mean, I think we're really bullish on AI here at PayPal. But to your point, you can't give a chap bought a credit card, right and even if you could, sort of how you're able to really tie payments at the speed of the internet with the activities that you know, those autonomous agents are starting to perform on your behalf. There's a mismatch, there's an impedious mismatch there between sort of the speed and the and the mediums that are used for payments today and what we
need in a truly connected, sort of autonomous world. And so you know, there are a number of companies out there that are starting to look at crypto for agent based payments. If you go tell your LLM based agent to go make a purchase for you or to book a trip, how are they going to pay for that right? And how are they going to be able to carry out your instructions to the extent that commerce is involved.
And so those are the kinds of things that I do think that the programmability of these tools really starts to enable. They're much more easier to integrate. Like I said, settlement happens instantaneously, and so you don't have to worry about a lot of the sort of forward on delays and other sorts of things that the payment systems traditionally have to think about. And that just makes it a much more seamless and natural environment for these agents and
the developers of these agents to work in. So yeah, we absolutely see a lot of potential there, and we're committed to working with the ecosystem to flesh out these use cases when they come in. You know, we'd love to see traditional PayPal partners like Uber or or door Dash or others as they start to go more into these areas around autonomy, to see how that how that plays out.
What's on your room map for the remainder of twenty twenty four and maybe early twenty twenty five.
Yeah, well, again, we're going to continue to build out these use cases around both business and retail aspects. We're going to you know, build out the capabilities that we think and that we're hearing from our customers that they're looking for. And you know, our goal is going to be to continue to make py usd the best possible stable coin for payments and value exchange across the global economy. Mm hmm.
And when I got some wrap up questions here for you. First, if you could your own metaverse, what would the theme be? Where would you put.
Your should know that, yeah, you should know that metaverse is my second least favorite word. My least favorite word is glamping, by the way, But yeah, you know, I my other passion really is around wildlife conservation and really
around specifically around big cats. So I think my metaverse would be focused on really trying to get into sort of the the world of conservation and trying to figure out how do we bring more awareness and visibility to some of the conflicts that are happening in that space, with an eye towards generating more sort of crowdsource solutions in that area.
Got some rapid fire questions for you. First is favorite food?
Oh, I love a good steak.
Favorite musician or band.
I gotta go with the classics. Let me go with Elton John.
I think favorite movie.
You know, I'm not sure this is my favorite, but I'm gonna say Toy Story, both because it's a great it's a great story, but also just a really amazing technology demonstration of the time as the first animated feature film, and I think it represents a really pivotal moment in the way that we think about filmmaking animation.
It was way ahead of the time, and it's absolutely absolutely as an adult, like my daughter watches sometime and I'm like, I sit down, I'm like, man, this is so good because I could relate.
To it so much. Yeah, Yeah, and you kind of forget that it's animated or sorry that it's computer animated, but then when you go back and think about sort of what that took at the time, just a just an amazing technical tour de force and a good movie to boot.
Absolutely favorite book.
Uh you know, I'm I've just started a book that I'm actually pretty fascinated called Recoding America Jennifer Paulka I think it is, and it's about sort of how digital technology, not specifically blockchain, but you know, really how do we apply technology into some of the problems that we're seeing across society and government and what are the opportunities and responsibilities that we have as technologists in that space.
I'll check that out. And when you're not working a papal, what are you doing for fun?
Like I said, my my other passion is big cats, and so I actually volunteer up at a retirement home for big cats where we look after folks that animals that come out of the entertainment industry or other sorts of performance arts and give them a good life after they're done with that, to live out their golden years.
I love that. I'm jealous because I'm a big animal fan. I love cats, so that's really amazing.
Come on buy some time. I'll give you a tour.
I will definitely take give on that offer. Edwin, absolute pleasure chatting with you. Thank you so much. I really love what PayPal is doing and I have to have you back on because you guys are certainly doing a lot of cutting edge things. Thank you so much for joining me.
Thanks for the opportunity. It was great to be here.
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