The Financial System Is Moving to Bitcoin | David Marcus

How do you actually use all of the technologies that are available today to move value on the internet to deliver money where people want it? Now you can have the best product and it turns out it's built on an open network and it unlocks instantly the ability to move money, not only just, you know, within Spark and cross-chain and on Lightning and on Bitcoin L1, but also across all of the traditional, you know, payment networks and Visa.

That's how all roads actually go to Bitcoin, is actually by leveraging the ability to offer an account that's both dollars and Bitcoin. Then gradually, you'll use more and more Bitcoin. It's a cost center that's in the billions of dollars, and now you can flip that and make it a profit center net margin of billions of dollars, and also not be captive to a bunch of other networks that are leeching on your data. And so the incentive is massive for these platforms to do this.

We think this will win. Thank you. I just saw, well, I was actually doing an interview when you made your announcement, but I caught it on the live stream afterwards. It's pretty big. This is, I think this is a real game changer for Bitcoin in some ways. But I want to start from the start with you.

Why did you decide to sort of focus your entire career on payments? I think that, first of all, great to be back. Thank you. I think that the reason I've been so maniacally obsessed with money movement and payments is because it's just not right. And it feels utterly broken. And it feels that many people have tried to fix the way that money moves around the world. And everyone has failed, including myself previously.

and so I developed this kind of obsession with figuring out a way to make money move on the internet like any other type of content and that's it, it's been my focus So when you say you failed before I imagine you're talking about Libra and PayPal well PayPal clearly is not a failure in terms of the company but what do you mean by you failed?

I feel like, I mean look if you were to actually stop someone we're in vegas like if you're stopping someone on the strip right now and they're from another country and you wanted to send them money um it wouldn't be an easy thing you would see a brazilian person and they would be like okay i can give you my pix key and you wouldn't know what to do with it yeah or you could find a european and they would

give you an iban and you wouldn't know what to do with it uh if you're here in america um i deal with this personally on the in the business side because i live in australia and uh the sponsors i think all the sponsors have a base in the us and so i obviously will invoice them with an option to pay in bitcoin but they don't always take that option and i we you can make it work with international routing and all that sort of stuff but i get crushed on sort of fees and exchange

rates like it's not and it takes days yeah and um and so and and you know many people are working in the space are like oh but you can just pay uh everyone and anyone with a stable coin it works fine right then the reality is most people you would meet today uh some of them would say yeah fine just send me a stable coin to my wallet but most people won't right and they wouldn't even know what a stable coin is and so the question is how do you actually use all of the technologies

that are available today to move value on the internet to deliver money where people want it.

And that's what we did today. I think with this announcement of Grid Global Accounts, we've basically put together and stitched together all of the work that we've been focused on obsessively over the last four years to move money around the world on a platform that enables you to input and output any kind of money, whether it's a fiat currency on a banking system, Bitcoin, of course, or a stable coin, and just make it work for people and businesses.

So for anyone that didn't catch the announcement, what is GridGlobal Accounts?

So let's take a step back, right? So today, when you think about all of the different types of content we have on the internet you have images you have text messages you have emails you have all these things um and there's an app for every single one of those like if i need to send you a photo there's like 15 different ways i can send you a photo yeah and i don't even need to ask you if i have your phone number i can just send it it'll work um there's just no such thing for money

Right. And today, if you're a platform, if you look at where the money originates and where people and businesses earn money, they earn money in a variety of different ways, but increasingly so they get paid by platforms.

and you can be a host on airbnb you can be a driver on uber you can be a creator on instagram or tiktok you are youtube uh and you get paid by those platforms and this becomes kind of your financial nexus right like and so and and the way that those platforms today move money around is you accumulate a bunch of money you have to wait until you get to a certain threshold for most

people. And then you get paid much later, not that the time you earn that money. And when you get paid, the platform loses and you kind of lose too, because the platform basically pays you to your bank account. And so the interest on that yield doesn't accrue to you or to the platform and goes back to the bank. The bank typically provides a pretty average service and everyone loses. And so we wanted to go to the core of that problem and figure it out.

And so what we built, and this couldn't have happened even a year ago, because you have to have a perfect alignment of stars to actually do this, which we now have, is basically a global dollar account product that lives on Spark.

and spark is our bitcoin l2 yep that supports stable coins natively and moves stable coins virtually for free um and so it's an account that you can have that's branded to your platform and your users your stakeholders can use that get paid in dollars and we'll soon add many other currencies to make it a multi-currency account and then the minute you got money from one of these platforms or you fund it yourself you can spend it in more ways than any account before its

time. So the first thing is we announced this morning a partnership with Visa to become a Visa principal member, which is not a small deal. And that will allow us to issue great global accounts based cards in 100 countries. So you receive money in this account. It's a new kind of embedded wallet. So you can log in with Google, with like, you know, Apple, with the pass key. You don't need to worry about losing your seed phrase or your private key. That's a thing of the past.

And so it's a self-custodial Spark-based grid global account. You have dollars. Now you can get a debit card and spend it at 175 million Visa merchants globally. And when you spend that, can you spend in dollars in Bitcoin? Yes. Anything that has a balance in your account, whether it's Bitcoin or dollars or any other currency, you can pull from any of these to actually use your debit card. But that's not it.

That's not enough. The other thing we did is we also made those accounts compatible with LightSpark Grid, which is the product that we've been building for years, connecting into domestic payment systems in 65 countries. So to take the example I gave you earlier, if you're a Brazilian here, you can give your PixKey to someone who has one of these accounts and that person can pay you in real time in your Brazilian bank account in Brazilian reais. And that's true in 65 countries.

So now you have a balance. You can move that balance to your local bank account in your local country, in your local currency. You can pay anyone in the world instantly in real time. And then, because we didn't think it was enough, we also added cross-chain support. So if you want to pay someone using USDT on Tron or USDC on Solana, you can do that too, because we wanted

to make sure that a dollar in a great global account can be a dollar anywhere. And so if you combine all of these capabilities, it's really, truly the most powerful global dollar account. And it so happens to live on top of Bitcoin via Spark. And so it makes it an address that's both Bitcoin enabled with real Bitcoin, not wrapped Bitcoin, and dollars. And you can buy and sell

Bitcoin, of course. And then the last part of it is that we feel that agents are going to change the way that interfaces are built and that you're not going to interact with apps and websites as much. And so we made it agent ready, which means that I can actually delegate my accounts to an agent that can now do all of those things on my behalf. And I have one running on my phone. I can show you later if you want.

Yeah, definitely. And I'll be able to just say, hey, you know, text, get your contact details, your bank details, and it'll settle in real time, right? And it'll contact you via WhatsApp and get your details and pay you. If you already self-custody Bitcoin, you know the deal with hardware wallets. Complex setups, clumsy interfaces, and a seed phrase that can be lost, stolen, or forgotten. Well, BitKey fixes that. BitKey is a multi-sig hardware wallet built by the team behind Square

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you said this wasn't possible a year ago. Stars had to align. What had to happen to allow you to do this? So it's really four things. The first thing is the regulation. So if you want any of these big platforms, those global platforms, to be able to launch these things, they have to do it from a place of certainty from a regulatory standpoint. And we didn't have that. And now we do. Like we have the Genius Act in the US. We have MICA in Europe. We have similar legislation almost everywhere.

So now you can actually launch your own stablecoin or use stablecoins and not worry about that. So it basically made stablecoin real money. I've got a question on that, actually, because like you say, these were really stablecoin tokenization bills that passed rather than anything to do with Bitcoin. Do you think Bitcoin's out of the woods in terms of regulatory clarity as well? Yeah, I do think so.

And we can talk about that after, but I had this whole schizophrenic relationship with stablecoins until it clicked that actually stablecoins was the best thing ever for Bitcoin adoption. And we can go down that rabbit hole in a bit. But anyways, so now stablecoins can be used.

So that part one And I think Bitcoin regulation is clear as well Part two is embedded wallets like really good embedded wallets And we seen that like you know companies whether it like you know turnkey or privy, they've done a really, really amazing job at making those accounts, those wallets actually usable by anyone without fearing losing your funds, which I think is like a massive

step, which is absolutely a prerequisite. The third step was we needed a network, in this case, on top of Bitcoin that could support stablecoins natively, which Spark does really, really well and now has massive reach. It's in the Thether wallet, it's in WDK, it's in all of the Bitcoin wallets you use now. And that's really, really also a prerequisite. And then the fourth aspect is really the rise of stablecoin backed debit cards, which the networks and the banks have now been leaning

on a lot more, which again, wasn't possible before. So if you combine all of these capabilities, plus the work that we've done over the last four years connecting to 65 countries, domestic real time payment systems, and you bring it all together in a product, that's great global accounts.

So this is not an actual app that people are going to download from the app store, right? This is like the infrastructure, the plumbing behind the scenes. Is that right? So it's basically, it's not an app because, I mean, I have an app, but that's, you know, it's a wallet that's called Bread that's built on top of this thing. That's like, you know, the first wallet that will hit the app store, I think, this week.

And that team did a really good job at like building a best-in-class dual pocket dollar Bitcoin wallet. And then they were kind enough to share the source code with us So we can add agent delegation and all of these things and play with that in a real product rather than a prototype. And so you will experience this in an app or on a website. But we're not consumer facing. So we're like, we could have done it, by the way.

And I said this on stage earlier because like I'm tempted, like, you know, it's such a good product. So I'm really tempted to launch it myself. Right. And it's like, hey, the world needs like an account like this. You would use it. Yeah, I absolutely would use it. Like everyone would use it. And so it's really tempting. But like, you know, I feel really passionate about like this idea of building the best network for money.

And if you want to do that, then you need to empower the platforms that have the reach to actually go and build on their own. And so that's the route we've chosen. So obviously you've experienced at PayPal and then at Facebook with Libra. And we talked about why you think you maybe failed there. This is obviously a better solution, but PayPal has a huge network effect. How do you beat them? Well, I mean, PayPal's network is closed. Yes. But everyone knows of PayPal.

Everyone has probably interacted with it at some point. They've got a big user base. How do you catch them? I think you just have to build a better product, right? And I think I have to give a lot of kudos to the block people building Cash App and building Square because they have their own proprietary product, but they're making it ultra open.

It's like the bread app that I was telling you about or Tether Wallet can now, if you have one of these, you'll be able to go to a square coffee shop and tap to pay. It's wild when you think about it, right? It's a totally open network because it lives on top of Bitcoin. And we think this will win Because ultimately, when you build on open standards like the internet, like, you know, AOL or CompuServe didn't win because it was closed.

And so the problem and why it didn't happen yet is because those products that were open were far worse than the closed products. Yeah. And they don't have to be anymore. And, you know, Grid Global Accounts is a great example of that. It's much better than any dollar account you can ever have. Like, you know, you could ever have until now. And so now you can have the best product.

And it turns out it's built on an open network that enables all builders to actually add value to the overall value that the network provides to every endpoint on it. So it's just great time. The really cool thing about this is I've been waiting for a Bitcoin-friendly bank to try and offer me a product like this, where I could have my Australian dollar account, maybe a US dollar account, and a Bitcoin account in there.

But this has gone, you've completely circumvented the banks and just built it, which is awesome. Tell me how it works a little bit. Because if I choose to pay in Bitcoin and I take my Visa card in and I tap to pay, what's happening behind the scenes there? Are you doing a swap for like Bitcoin, stablecoin, and then paying the merchant? Yeah. So basically, I mean, the merchant piece is completely outside of our view, right?

It's like Visa is now building merchant settlement for debit card and credit card payments and stable coins, but that's on their side, the acquirer. What we do on our side is deliver the dollar, so to speak, at the issuer, like as an issuer. And then like whatever the arrangement is between the merchant and the acquirer, that's like their business. So if they are receiving money in their local currency, that's what's going to happen.

And so the merchant always gets paid in whatever currency they want. And the way that it works is basically that you have this wallet that you authorize a card to pull from with limits that you can set. And then whenever you make a payment, it can pull from either your Bitcoin balance or your dollar balance or your other currencies soon. And when you say this product's sort of entirely built on Bitcoin, can you just walk through what you mean by that?

It's all built on Spark. So basically, a grid global account is a Spark wallet. And it comes with a bunch of bells and whistles on top of just being a Spark wallet, which is like the debit card rails, the integration with the grid capabilities to move money around locally and globally on traditional payment networks. That's the difference, right?

And so what it needs from having just a Spark wallet is like the ability for people to, like if they want to interact with a debit card or with traditional payment rails, they can KYB or KYC, depending if they're a business or a person. And from that point on, it unlocks instantly the ability to move money, not only just within Spark and cross-chain and on Lightning and on Bitcoin L1, but also across all of the traditional payment networks and Visa.

Okay. I want to dig into something you mentioned just briefly a little earlier. You were talking about this kind of like gig economy that's cropped up where people are getting paid from YouTube's TikToks. And one of the issues you said in there was that like the platform aren't collecting interest that you're not, like this money's kind of like in limbo. Is interest something that you will be able to do at some point? So the way that this works is, and the way we

recommend it to platforms is they can issue their own stable coins. And I'll expand on why this is actually possible because that's also a thing right we used to be in a world where if you don't have enough liquidity or network effects actually doing your own stable coin was a bad idea because you couldn't use it anywhere yeah um and so then it's like you know useless yeah and because we've made the account fungible and and compatible with all of the other stable coins

and all of the other wallets and all of the other chains, it doesn't matter now. Because if you're receiving like your own coin, your own stable coin in, you know, I don't know, Nigeria, and you want to pay someone who has a Tron wallet and is using USDT, you can do that. So the liquidity problem we've basically erased by making those balances fungible and enabling bridges and other atomic swap platforms to actually exist on top of Spark. So what we advise

platforms is launch your own stablecoin. We'll help you do that. And you'll earn interest because it's yours. And then in the US, there's a lot of debate whether you can actually pay interest to holders or not. But outside of the US, that's not a problem in many countries. So you can do that if you want. Because in the Genius Act, they said no interest on stablecoins, right? I mean, that's more the clarity of clarity. Sorry. Yeah. Uh, too many, but, but yeah, so, so in the U S it'll be

more difficult to do that, but internationally you can definitely do that. Yeah. And typically like, I mean, of course this is a much more powerful accounts than a normal bank account for payments in the U S. So we expect a lot of U S people and businesses to use it just for the purpose of sending and receiving money. Um, but typically if a platform is paying someone in the US, and it's a US-based platform, that's where they have the least friction.

Where they have the most friction is actually sending money internationally. And for those, they can actually distribute yield if that's what they want to do. And if they want to keep it, they can keep it. That's their choice and let the market play out. But at least they keep it versus I'm pushing it to, I don't know, a Spanish bank, and then it's black hole for me, the platform, and for my user.

And more than Blackhold from a revenue standpoint, one of the things that no one talks about is the fact that if you're connecting and if you're basically a tenant of someone else's network and you're pushing to all of the banks at the edges, you also share all of the data,

all of your data. And the data was maybe kind of a cost of doing business, sharing all of the data that will enable those businesses to actually build businesses off the back of the work that you've done to spin up that platform and generate product market fit and economic impact. But in the age of AI, it's like negligence to let everyone leech on your data and build products. And if you do that, then you control your own data

and you control your own economics. And it changes the game completely. So you're not collecting data on any of this? No, because it's a self-custodial watt. That's awesome. Like in the stack of Bitcoin wallets that I use, I have like my spending wallet, my Lightning wallet, which, you know, I might have like up to $1,000, something in it. And then- Which one do you use? What's your favorite? I tend to use Phoenix the most. Okay. I like Phoenix.

And then on top of that, like then I really go to like proper cold storage Bitcoin. And again, even levels in that. And I think really the way people have looked at Bitcoin wallets so far is that your Lightning wallet should only have a little bit of money in. You don't want to maybe put tens of thousands of dollars in a Lightning wallet that's on your phone. Where does this fit? How big do you think accounts should or could be on this? It doesn't matter. So this is the beauty with Spark.

And we spent so much time doing that. It's like if you opened a Tether wallet, which they've done a really good job. It's so clean and so easy to use. And you have USDT on a variety of different chains. And you have Bitcoin on L1, on Lightning, and on Spark. and all of the Bitcoin piece is on Spark, basically. It's running on Spark. And it doesn't matter. It's like, it doesn't matter where you hold it as a user. It's just taken care of for you.

So you'd never have to actually open channels and park liquidity and do all of these things. It'll just work.

And I think ultimately that was something that was needed for a mass market adoption because like, you know, mass market is not going to think about where should I keep stuff and how should I keep. They're never going to be balancing channels. So you have a fad balance in an account that's actually safe. And you cannot lose the seed phrase or any of that. And you just use it for everyday purchases and payments. I want to dig into that a bit more.

When you say it's actually safe, how is it secured? So today, there are two different models. But if you look at the way Turnkey does it, so they basically split the secrets in, I think, three parts and trusted execution environments, basically. So secure enclaves. And the beauty is basically that you can use a more traditional login, which means that it's mass market. So you can use Google to log in or you can use a passkey, which I would recommend.

And so then you have a passkey that's securely stored either on your device in a secure element and then the secrets that are in three different parts that can only be reassembled when you log in with a passkey, which is super secure and easy. And to the extent that you don't put your passkey in a hardware key that you lose, then you're fine. And most people will actually just use a password manager and use a passkey that they store in their password manager or log in with Google or

with Apple or with their phone number. The nice thing with this is that the platforms themselves can offer their own login that you're already using for the platform and extend the capabilities of your account. Like, let's say that YouTube were to do that. I'm riffing. You could have a YouTube money account. And basically your Google account that you use to publish your videos on YouTube

becomes like your login to your YouTube money account or Google money account. And you would receive that money and you would have a debit card and you can move that money in real time to your bank account in Australia 24-7, even on a Sunday at 2 a.m., if that's what you need, or move it to a stablecoin on any chain, and you would totally use that, right?

I think it's really exciting. And one of the things I love about this, alongside the stuff that Cash App and Square have been doing and Strike have been pushing this, is that it feels like we're moving into the era where Bitcoin is actually going to be used as money properly.

Yes Because for so long the narrative has been store of value but Bitcoin was always destined to be money as well Yes Do you think this is the starting point Yes And actually, now let me close the full loop of the stablecoin stuff. I think the interesting thing with the stablecoin piece, it's actually a pretty profound realization that I had.

and I was with Miles Sutter earlier from Cash App and I gave him credit for that because when they announced that Cash App was actually going to do USDC on Solana I'm like what in the world what like you're the most Bitcoin forward company what are you doing and I was in the middle of my own like schizophrenic journey with stable coins and then I'm like, no, wait a minute. He's right. They're right. They need to consider that stable coins on other chains are like fiat payment networks.

It's like, why do I integrate with like SEPA in Europe and I'm fine with that and I don't integrate with Solana for stable coins? It makes no sense. It was like an ideological mental trap.

and so I'm like no they're actually totally right and then we went full tilt so with Grid we went like really full tilt like we support all the chains and all the stable coins and then we went even deeper with Grid Global Accounts because we made it compatible with all of the networks and so now what that does is it gives you an account and a platform that you want to use because you can actually make your money move to wherever you

want it to move. And the account that is the most connected ends up being a Bitcoin account, right? Because it's a Spark wallet. And so that's how all roads actually go to Bitcoin, is actually by leveraging the ability to offer an account that's both dollars and Bitcoin. And if you don't have the dollar, then Bitcoin is not as valuable. But if you have dollar and Bitcoin, then gradually you'll use more and more Bitcoin. And if it lives on the same address,

then... So that's the reason that you think that stablecoin proliferation will increase Bitcoin adoption, just because just from almost proximity, like they're in the same account. And at some point people might start playing around with Bitcoin and seeing what it could do, learning about it. Exactly. Interesting. Because do you see any problem with like the stablecoin takeover of the, like any person living in a high inflation country is going to choose the stablecoin over

their local fiat currency. Like it makes sense. Yeah. I mean, or Bitcoin, like, you know, it's kind of interesting. And let me get there in a sec, but like, you know, just back to the square thing, like, you know, so now you have an account and you have a stable coin that could be on any chain. Yeah. But now we can swap it and pay at a square merchant and the rails are Bitcoin. So the open network that moves like the TCP IP packets for money behind the scenes here is Bitcoin.

And so that's amazing. Like it's like at both the level of, like now I'm exposed to it because it's in my wallet and I can buy it, I can sell it and I can use it. But also when I'm paying on a network for my coffee at a store, the rails are Bitcoin. And that's like a, you know, it's a pretty profound thing that's happening right now. And, you know, not many people are actually really

paying attention to that shift. But the fact that we're building on an open network that has that kind of reach right now is, I think, a profound turning point for Bitcoin.

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Does part of you wish that PayPal had done something like this? Yeah, but like the problem. So here's the problem, right? It's like the innovator's dilemma. It's like you're a company and you're doing, I think, $11 billion of net cash flow a year with your business. And you need to accept the fact that you're going to cannibalize yourself to actually build in the open.

and you need to go and tell all of the investors that hold your stock because you're a public company that they need to understand why in the world you're doing that. Yeah. And so it's untenable for many people, unless you have like a founder or CEO who has total power over the company, it's never going to happen. And so I just think it was just the wrong place to do this. And it just needs to start from the bottom, right?

and then propagate. Because otherwise, there's just too much tension between your existing revenue. I mean, look, they did the PYUSD thing, like the PayPal USD. PayUSD, I don't know how you say it. And the obvious thing to do if you want this thing to actually really succeed is swap every balance that you have in dollars across the entire network, whether it's on Venmo, on PayPal, on merchant balances to PYUSD. And the reason they didn't do that is because

the unit economics were not the same. And so they would have to cannibalize themselves. And so it's like you make all of these small bad decisions for the reason for different reasons to optimize your bottom line, which you have to do because you're responsible to you know, delivering results to your shareholders. And so it's just the wrong place. Yeah. I see. I think this product's awesome. I think it's really cool. And it's something I

would a hundred percent use. The difficulty of running a business in Australia with all my sponsors and clients in the U S is real. But in throughout history, we'll set you up after this. I would love to. For real. We can set you up. Awesome. But in history, there's like lots of examples of a better product losing to a more centralized product that might already have sort of market share. What is it that makes you think this is going to win? Because I think that there's

a deep economic incentive for the platforms to offer this to their stakeholders. And since it's also a better product for the stakeholders, then you get the flywheel to go. And the economic incentive is not small. Like if you're a big platform and you're paying out to 10 million like creators or drivers or hosts or whatever it is. It's a cost center that's into billions of

dollars. And now you can flip that and make it a profit center net margin of billions of dollars if you actually adopt this and also not be captive to a bunch of other networks that are leeching on your data. And so the incentive is massive for these platforms to do this. So are you going to be pounding the pavement, trying to talk to the YouTube of the world? Yes, definitely. For sure. Yeah. But you've not had any of those conversations yet?

No, we've had some. Yeah. We've started. But like, you know, recently because we just launched a product today. So it's in the last few weeks. That's awesome. When you look at stable coins on Bitcoin, obviously you can use stable coins on Spark now. But traditionally over the last, you know, five years or whatever, it's largely been on things like Tron and Solana. 100%. How important is it to bring that back to Bitcoin?

I think that the key is really to have a single account that works with both dollars and other fiat currency, digital versions of fiat currencies in the same place. I think the single account thing is really, really a fundamental product thing. Because if you have multiple addresses, you start thinking about these things differently. It's like, you know, oh, no, so you want to send me stable coins now, like send it to my, you know, phantom wallet.

And if you want to send me Bitcoin, send it to me and this thing. Or you can have a multi-address wallet and it's like, oh, wait a second, I need to find. And so the ultimate last step of this, and it's kind of interesting because we started with that and probably the order was wrong. But we started with this UMA protocol, this universal money address standard that's used by a bunch of banks. And I think this is where it all ends, right?

It's like the single address becomes like a human-readable address. And then you as a receiver can decide whether you want to receive dollars or you want to receive Bitcoin. And I think there's a very elegant way to do that. But you have a single address that you can give anyone. So back to the example of the street here. You go on the street, you find someone. It's like, can you send me money? And they can give you a thing that looks like an email address that everyone uses.

And you can send them money and they'll receive it. You'll send it in whatever you want. they'll receive it in whatever they want. It'll work 24-7 in real time, and it'll be great. And it makes total sense. This also sounds like it may solve an issue I've had with merchant adoption of Bitcoin, which is there's a chicken and egg problem with it. And I saw this in 2017, where I live, there was a company called Travel by Bit that were trying to make all the merchants accept Bitcoin.

And through that year, I saw all the bars, restaurants, have these, we accept Bitcoin stickers. And it was actually the first time I ever bought something with Bitcoin. Generally, it's one or two guys that are really passionate on pounding the pavements to convince people store by store. Exactly. And in 2017, that was probably quite easy because Bitcoin price was ripping. And then throughout 2018, 2019, you saw those stickers get ripped off Windows. And now none of them take Bitcoin.

But in this dynamic where you can pay in Bitcoin and they receive whatever they want, that's really interesting. But do you think that solves that entire problem? Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, I know we're talking about Block a lot, but I think they deserve a lot of credit for how good they've been at pushing really mass market products with Bitcoin built in, especially in the last 12 months. And the fact that you can now go to a Square merchant, pay using the lightning network underneath.

And then the merchants can decide they want to receive all payments in dollars. They don't care. It's like it's another way for people to pay. So more people can pay. They're happy. They get dollars. Or they can say, I want 10% in Bitcoin. And you'll do that conversion for them? No, so that's Square. That's the Square product. And so they do that. But this is probably the first time that this merchant has been exposed to Bitcoin. And now they start thinking, wait a minute, why not?

And this is how it starts, right? And then they flipped it on the Cash App side, which also works now with any Spark wallet, by the way, which I'm very grateful for, is that you can fund your transaction that's still powered by the Lightning Network from dollars, either through debit card funding or a balance that you have in Cash App. And it'll convert to Bitcoin, pay using Lightning in one second, and convert on the other side to Fiat.

And that model where basically, in this case, Lightning or Spark can be like TCP IP transport layer for money. And it doesn't matter what the recipient or the sender is sending, is the way that you actually drive more Bitcoin adoption because people will be exposed to choices that they didn't have before in apps and capabilities that they didn't have before either. And so I think we're very like-minded in the way that we're thinking about this, which is just give the power of money movement.

And now we did actually the first stablecoin backed payment at a coffee shop using a Spark wallet So it was like you know it was actually more complicated than that I think it was like actually USDC on Solana swapped to BTC on Spark push on Lightning

and received real dollars in a square terminal on the other side. All of that took two seconds. Right. But but it's completely seamless. And and yeah, that's the way that's the way. This is programmable money becoming programmable. Yeah, exactly. And Bitcoin, on Bitcoin, which is like, you know, many people said wasn't possible. I think that's awesome. How do you make money on this? Because obviously the payment providers will charge fees.

I imagine you still charge fees, but like how competitive are you against those? Yeah, we're very competitive. And the way that this works is that like for the platforms, what we want to do is make this their profit center. Yep. And to the extent that they actually generate a lot of new revenue that was previously costs, our ask is we share a little bit of their revenue with them because we make it possible.

And so that takes the shape of if the endpoint person or business is using a Visa debit card to pay, you'll get the bulk of that interchange. We'll take a small piece. If you're moving money to a local payment network. There's FX and real-time settlement fees that are happening. We'll take a small piece. You'll get a bigger piece or you can pass that back on to consumers if that's what you want to do. And so, yeah, that's the business model. I've got loads of like technical questions here.

Like with the foreign exchange swap, how do you do that? Is that using Bitcoin pairs in different countries? So yes, Bitcoin and stable coins. And that's also the beauty of having started with Bitcoin is that we found that Bitcoin liquidity against fiat currencies runs actually way deeper than many of the stable coins. So it gives us a massive advantage in a bunch of different countries where the liquidity of stable coins against the fiat currency in that country is actually quite shallow.

But we can least cost routes because we can swap from Bitcoin to stable coin and back in real time at virtually no cost on Spark natively. It doesn't matter. So it's like if actually using a stable coin in a specific country will give us a better rate. We'll use that. Otherwise, we'll use Bitcoin that gives us the depth of liquidity. And it's instant. That's awesome. Can we get on to the fun stuff? The AI stuff. Yeah. Let's start really from the top.

Like how quickly do you think the world is moving to like an agentic AI world? Quickly, like much faster than people think. And this is from like, I imagine you're playing around with OpenClaw and things like that. Yeah. And what do you think that will change? They don't sleep anymore. It's wild. No, look, I think, so I live with my little open claw thing connected to my Great Global account. So I live in that future that we just shipped today.

And I've been living in that future for the past month or so. And it's been wild. This thing buys stuff for me online. It's sending money to family members in Europe in real time for me. and I just have to say, hey, just contact so-and-so and get their payment details. I don't even want to take care of it. So this is the number of that person. And whatever they give you is good. Just send the money. And it's within the scope, right? And it works in real time. And people are blown away.

When you say it's within the scope, you can set like limits. I'll show you after if you want. I'd love to show it to you because it's like seeing is really believing in this. You can set limits. You can give it permissions. And then it basically gives an agent pairing code and you run a curl on your OpenClaw or whatever that can run bash. And it just pulls the CLI and the pairing code. And then you can send money within the envelope that you've actually

configured for the agent. And with your OpenClaw, has it made any mistakes? Because I've had one set up loads. Yeah, tons. I mean, the funniest one happened actually two weeks ago. And I was really pushing it to try new things because I was trying to make it really work fast on WhatsApp because I wanted demos here. It's real money and I want it to be so fast that people are blown away. I've been working on that late at night and stuff. It's been a lot of fun.

In one of the test runs, it wrote a test suite and then it randomly shot off $20 within the envelope, so fine. it shot off $20 to a random Solana address. And I'm like, dude, what? And then the thing was like, oh, my bad. I can use my debit card to pay you back. And it tells me that. But it's your debit card. And I'm like, but bro, this is my card. It's not your card. And it's like, oh yeah, you're right about that. And so it's like lots of fun stuff like that.

it's been a lot of fun because this is obviously like at the sort of very frontier of AI and it does still make tons of mistakes for me when do you think it's going to be safe to properly use this in the way that you can see the future that's coming but when do you think it'll be safe to use it with no no I mean like right now so the way that we've built this agent delegation protocol you know it's basically scope delegation is totally safe like 100% safe so within the envelope

that you give the AI, it cannot go beyond. Like there's no way that it can break free from the cage that you give it, right? Now, if you tell it to go buy a thing and it goes and buys the wrong thing, that can happen, right? And so that's like a problem for someone else. It's not our problem, right? But our remit is actually, can we build a safe cage and give a lot of capabilities?

So a Visa debit card that the agent can use at 175 million merchants, 65 countries' payments network that it can move money in real time 24-7 to, and then all of the chains and all of the wallets, and of course, buy and sell Bitcoin. I can tell it right now, buy me $10 of Bitcoin, it'll do it in a second. Or I can tell it, actually, buy me Bitcoin every time the price drops below a certain thing, it'll do it.

So all of this comes with a great global account. And so within those things, it has all of the abilities to do all of this within the restrictions that we give it. And so that part is fully safe. And then who builds what product? If you're a marketplace and you're actually building a product for merchants, you're going to build an AI that's going to enable the merchant to give your agent an email address. And you can just send all of the global invoices that you wanted to pay.

and I'll pay them instantly. Just grab like the payment details from the invoice and take care of business for you. And it'll be scoped to that thing. So it'll work really well. So like what we wanted to do is just build the capabilities and then let others, the platforms, build their own AIs that will do things really, really well.

So this is a question that's probably tough because like you said that data is really important in this and you don't want to collect data on your users self-custodial wallet. But if you're using like agents to go out and buy things, they're collecting data. Like, how do you square that? Like, obviously you could use like a Maple or something like that, which is private AI. But I think the majority of people aren't using that yet. Like, how do you kind of square that?

Well, I think in this case, like it'll be the platforms themselves. Like, let's play the counter narrative of this, right? The counter narrative is you're using a random payment processor to move money around the world, right? And it captures data on who you're paying, how much they're earning, et cetera. It totally can build an underwriting model on the fly and can then decide, oh, this guy is making money at this rate, et cetera.

I'm going to start offering that person an advanced product, which is basically credit. And so why is the platform not doing that? Wait a minute. You've created that whole economic opportunity for yourself, for your stakeholders on your platform. And now you're letting a third-party company that you use for payments start extending credit. and actually eating in your margin. No, that's crazy. That's actually negligent. Whereas here, the data between you and your stakeholders stays with you.

You can build AI capabilities that will serve them better and make it more compelling for your stakeholders, those merchants, to actually use your product rather than a competitive product to receive payments from your platform. And then you can build with that data products and services that serve your customers really well and also yourself, right? And so in that world, everyone wins.

Now, like if you're a hobbyist, like, you know, like I am or you are, and you connect your open call to your wallet and like, yes, for sure, the underlying model will in that case, like get your data. But like, that's more like, I don't see. I mean, that's not your problem to solve. Yeah. I mean, it's like, yes, that and that too.

because one of the interesting things is there's been this sort of ongoing debate for years now about like when AI gets to this kind of point when we get agendic AI what money will it pick can you actually let the AI agent be in control of how it holds money at rest so for example if you have a thousand dollars in an account that it totally could yeah what do you think it would pick because obviously my bias is bitcoin is the best money ever yeah do you think that is what the AI

agents will choose. I think we'll have to run an education campaign for AI agents to understand that, but I think they'll figure it out. It's kind of interesting. Because this thing runs on Spark, it has all kinds of different routes to pay for things.

And when it can choose the routes, without me telling it, but when it can choose the route to use native Bitcoin to pay, for instance, in my thing, I have it Like you can, if you have a cash app, cash tag, you can give it and like, it'll pay you there. Yeah. And I'll, I'll use Bitcoin for that because it's just the shortest path, right? It won't like try to convert from my dollar balance to then pay. It'll just use my balance, right? Then I'll just use the shortest path.

And so it'll figure it out. Like the other fun experiments, by the way, that we did, like that's just for the sake of just amusing you and your audience for a sec. is that we basically, I created a fleet of agents for LightSpark employees so we can play with it together and they can demo it as well, which has been a nightmare to maintain because someone always does something, especially with open clause that update all the time and break things. It's just been lots of sleepless nights.

But the nice thing is I wanted to do an experiment. I'm like, okay, I told my agent to pay another, one of my colleagues at the company, and I told it, instead of contacting him directly, just talk to his agent and figure it out. And talk with the agent on WhatsApp. By the way, just don't try to establish a protocol I can't see because I want to see. And so it went off on WhatsApp and then started blabbing in English and having a bunch of conversations, then got confused and whatever.

And then within five minutes, they were like, wait a minute, you're another agent. And the other one was like, yeah, I'm another agent. And then it's like, oh, why do we speak in English? And they decided to switch to exchanging JSON, structured information. And from that point on, like every single transaction, like they started with like their own, like, you know, slash A2A thing. And then they started exchanging JSON and stopping to talk in English. See, this stuff creeps me out.

It was so amazing. It's like so amazing to watch. I was like, holy shit, where did that come from? It was great. Because I'm sure that's more efficient for those like agent to agent conversations. Totally English is like so like, but not being able to see it kind of freaks me out. Yeah, no, it's funny. But like, but it goes to say, like you have all of these companies trying to actually build the perfect protocol for agents to agent payments. This is not a problem for them.

They'll figure it out. The problem is actually, can you build a product that's principally designed for humans that you can safely delegate to agents, which is what we try to do with global accounts. I think it's very, very cool. I've got one personal question on this.

If I set this up, Can I put a bank routing number in there so I can be paid the traditional way as well? Yes, of course. Yeah, yeah. That's the whole point. Oh, this is cool. I need to get this set up. Is this like the final straw? Is this everything you've been building towards and it's like done or is the more you guys It's never done. It's never done. It's never done. But I'll say that this is by far, by far the biggest milestone of the company since we started four years ago.

And it's like really four years of painful work, of connecting to all of these domestic payment systems, of making Bitcoin faster, of building Spark and making it great and making it scalable. And all come together with also this perfect alignment of stars of regulatory, wallet technology, stablecoin back cards, like all of this coming together in one cohesive product that solves a lot of problems. So, yeah, it's a big milestone.

The thing that I'm most excited about, which I said a little earlier, is like Bitcoin as a store of value narrative is kind of one. Like we know Bitcoin is a good store of value. I think that's generally accepted by most people now. Yeah. Most people who have paid attention. The payments has always been a big question mark. And I think this solves the chicken and egg problem, which I think is a huge problem of getting merchants to accept something.

Now you can just choose to pay it and they don't even have to know about it. Yeah. That's awesome. Yeah, totally. It feels like this is a big step on Bitcoin winning. Yeah. time will tell, but I feel pretty good about it. Bullish, open, neutral networks. David, this has been awesome. Thank you so much. I'm sure you've got a very busy day. I've got to go on stage now, but thank you so much. Thank you. It's been cool. Thanks for having me. We've got to set this up as well. We have to. Thank you.