Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the Crypto News podcast. We are buzzing as always, still in Dubai, still freezing my, you know what, off. It is so bloody cold in this apartment. It is literally 19° normally. That's nice, but it's again, it's a weird contrast. You go outside, it's like 39° C, feels like 50 for my American friends. I'm sorry. I don't quite know what that is in your language, but it's hot as hell outside and it's cold as hell inside. Sort of nice, sort of not nice. But enough about me. Super pumped to have the one and only Ian Rogers on the show for round two. Chief experience officer at Ledger, leading the consumer-facing arm of the business. He was previously the chief digital officer at Louis Vuitton. Well, LVMH, working with a portfolio of nearly 100 brands across luxury, including of course Louis V, Dior, Sephora, and Hennessy. Episode one was an absolute electric factory. We had some great stories about Tony Fadell, the godfather of the iPod, and we went into a deep dive with Ledger Stacks and Ledger Flex. Ian, welcome to the show, my friend. Pumped to have you on for round two. How you doing?
Thanks. I'm good. Thanks for having me back. I know exactly what you mean about that air conditioning, the shock. And for the Americans, you're talking about like 100 degrees outside and like 63 degrees inside. Like, what is up with that? No, I agree. First thing I do when I get in one of those hotel rooms is I turn the air conditioning either off or up to like 22. I don't know why they keep it at like 18, 19. It's too cold.
No, my Argentinian girlfriend is having a connection right now. She's used to some nice hot rooms and climates, and that is definitely not it. Look, last time I had you on just over a year ago, give or take, you had some hot takes that came true. We talked about stable coins. You nailed that. And you talked about again, you hinted at Ledger recovery key but you couldn't give me any gold there and just said we're moving and grooving on the Ledger recovery key space. We'll get into that later but let's just start with overall market here Ian. Ledger aside, cold wallets aside, hot wallets aside, storage aside, anything that gets you really excited present day in the crypto market.
Oh man, I think we should be incredibly excited. I mean, crypto is legal at this point. I feel like we have news every week that, you know, four years ago, we all would have our eyeballs popped out of our head if the SEC came and said that basically it was clear what crypto exchanges were allowed to do with digital assets without this ambiguity and looming threat that exchanges were living with a few years ago. And today things are becoming clearer and clearer week after week whether that's stable coin legislation or the guidance that we got this week. So I think that's the main thing. And through that, I think what you're getting obviously is this complete merger of crypto and tradi. And that makes sense. I always look at it through I'm kind of the old guy that lived through the internet and that's my lens, that's my pattern matching that I always do. But I think you always have this when a technology is new you get kind of haters, not only haters but also just plain old denial like 'ah we don't know' which is healthy to be honest.
It's part of, yeah, part of the cycle.
Yeah. Well, and also you can't just shift your business with every new hype thing that comes. These things have to prove themselves over time, but we're 16 years into this crypto world now. And that's long enough for the technology to have proven itself and for us to clearly see what it is and isn't. And I think you have a very broad recognition by the financial community that not only is Bitcoin what it is, which is digital gold and a hedge against inflation, but that these rails of permissionless money are useful and that we don't necessarily need credit rails to do digital payment. We can build ecosystems where we can do permissionless digital payment with instant settlement and that has a variety of utilities. So I think we're finally getting that integration that we've all been calling for for 10 years.
Very well said there. Very well said. Last last epic, stable coins. I'd love to jump into that, Dean, because again, you nailed this right now. Financial institutions are moving in, retail's moving in, brands are moving in. You're one of the few guys in crypto who actually has like all world experience working for the best companies that have ever existed. Do you think these guys are all going to adopt stable coins? Are we going to see, you know, with Stripe and with Google getting into the blockchain space, like is every luxury brand and then furthermore every sort of consumer-facing brand, B2B brand, just any powerful brand in general, are they all going to jump into the stable coin to blockchain space? Or do you think they're going to give it a try, they're going to fail and then we're going to go back to just building on Ethereum, building on Solana, building on Hyperledger, building on Bitcoin, building on whatever. How do you think that all plays out?
I think that they all will, but I'm not sure that they will even necessarily know or need to know what they're doing, right? What they, if you look at companies like Louis Vuitton, etc., they buy solutions. They don't necessarily build technological platforms. They buy their solutions from some technology provider. So if you walk into a Louis Vuitton store and you scan your credit card, you're using a solution that Louis Vuitton bought from a payment provider. And what'll happen is that those payment providers will use crypto rails because it's what the consumers use. How does a consumer want to pay? You need to be able to accept, for example, in China 10 years ago, we were taking WeChat pay in LVMH stores. Why? Because that's how the consumers wanted to pay. You need to take money from consumers the way that they want to pay. And so I think that if you look at the US, the saturation of Venmo is, between my friends 100%. I don't know what it is across the whole country, but every single person that I know is shocked that I don't have Venmo because I'm a European. They're like, 'Wait, it's like saying you don't breathe oxygen.' So I think that, is Venmo crypto under the hood? Probably not, but if that's the right technology, it will be. And so I think that what you have with stable coins is a new technology that's fully backed by hard assets that we can all trade in. And then I think what that does, it really just unlocks developers to build great solutions that will be more affordable. Right now a retailer in the US is paying 3% tax to accept credit cards and they don't need to. That consumer who's coming in isn't asking for credit, they're asking for digital payment. And when digital payment is possible immediately, and then if there are a whole bunch of other challenges for costs for the retailer, which is, I take the credit card payment but I don't actually receive that payment for some period of time. That money is not liquid for me for some period of time. I've got this whole chargeback process because there's actually a lot of fraud in that system. If I could accept digital dollars that are treasury-backed stable coins that can be transferred to me for a fraction of a penny and settle instantly, isn't that simply a better solution for me as a retailer? And if that's the case, you can bet that it'll happen. We just need good, and there are really good, you just scan a QR code and pay like WeChat Pay or Satis Pay or Venmo.
Yeah, it's I agree with you. It's tough though with the with tapping like I mean this is so bad to say Ian and and my dad, for example, he and you know, dad, if you're listening to this, you have every right to give me for this. But we'll be I don't know, go golfing or whatever and you know, the car girl will come by and I won't even have cash on me, you know? I'm just like when I tip, I'm tipping with just tapping my phone, paying a credit card, and then giving the tip, right? I don't even carry cash half the time and I'm in Canada unless I go to a different country and I need it. But you know what I mean? So, and what are you using to do that? Kind of Apple Pay. Exactly. Yeah. You know, Amex, Mastercard, Visa, whatever the case may be, right? Canada, we have know the mechanics of that. I'd love to know the mechanics of that because my guess is that there's a higher than need to be a higher than say with stable coins charge for using those crypto rails for that payment.
Yeah. But I don't know the answer in that country. You know, it's also just frankly not my specialty. But of course, you're using the wrong rails for that task, right? Because what you want is immediate inexpensive peer-to-peer transfer, right? That's not what credit rails were built for. No credit card company would claim they were. That's why PayPal exists. That's why Venmo exists. And so, ultimately those rails will be retrofitted for a better technology. Imagine WhatsApp. And again, it's crazy. In North America, no one uses WhatsApp. Everywhere around the world, everyone uses WhatsApp, right? I mean, you know how it works. Imagine I could just meet you in person, tap our phones together, and then we just click like boom. Imagine sending whatever kind of crypto, stable coin, whatever it is, via WhatsApp. Oh my goodness, that would melt faces. I mean, you can. And that's the thing is there hasn't been a technical barrier to doing that for a long time. There have been regulatory barriers. Regulatory barriers that were so big that Meta, the company that owns WhatsApp, tried to go down this route and create stable coin and they got stopped. I remember a venture capitalist at the time telling me, 'This is the greatest idea that's being pursued by the worst company to do it.' That was a great quote. And that's not because they were a bad company. It was because nobody wanted them to own the internet. Like absolutely no one, no tech company, no congressman, not even a consumer wanted Meta to own the internet of value. You know what I mean? So it was exactly the right idea maybe done by the company that people didn't want to do it, but there wasn't a technical barrier to do it, there was a regulatory barrier to do it. Well now just a couple months ago that regulatory barrier has been removed and we know that these things don't happen overnight but when they happen once the light's green, people look around to see if other cars are going and then everybody goes. So that's what I think goes on now. I think that dream you just said will be right around the corner.
