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 within Spark and crosschain and on Lightning and on Bitcoin L1 but also across all of the traditional 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 while 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 and 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 or 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. 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. Or you could find a European and they would give you an IBAN if you're here in America.
I deal with this personally on the business side because I live in Australia and the sponsors I think all the sponsors are based 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 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 an easy.
And it takes days. And so and you know many people who are working in the space are like oh but you can just pay everyone and anyone with a stablecoin, it works fine, right? And the reality is most people you would meet today some of them would say, 'Yeah, fine. Just send me a stablecoin to my wallet.' But most people won't, right? And they wouldn't even know what a stablecoin 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, you know, 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 stablecoin, and just make it work for people and businesses.
So for anyone that didn't catch the announcement, what is Grid Global 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. 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. And I don't even need to ask you if I have your phone number. I can just send it. It'll work. There's just no such thing for money. 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, or YouTube. And you get paid by those platforms. And this becomes kind of your financial nexus, right? And so 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 at 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. It 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 that supports stablecoins natively and moves stablecoins virtually for free. 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 multicurrency 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 Grid 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 login with Google with Apple with the passkey. 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 and Bitcoin?
Anything that has a balance in your account, whether it's Bitcoin or dollars or any other currency 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 Pix key 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 crosschain 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 Grid 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 account 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.
And I'll be able to just say, hey, 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.
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I mean there's so much there that I want to ask you about but let's start with 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 like tokenization sort of 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 like 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's part one. And I think Bitcoin regulation is clear as well. Part two is embedded wallets, like really good embedded wallets. And we've seen that companies, whether it's 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 on top of in this case on top of Bitcoin that could support stablecoins natively which Spark does really really well and now has massive reach like it's in the Tether wallet it's in WDK it's in all of the Bitcoin wallets you use now and that's like 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 Grid 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 not an app because I mean I have an app but that's a wallet that's called Bread that's built on top of this thing that's like the first wallet that will hit the app store I think this week. And that team did a really good job at 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 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 could have done it by the way and I said this on stage earlier because like I'm tempted it's such a good product. So I'm really tempted to launch it myself, right? And it's like hey the world needs an account like this.
I absolutely would use it. Like everyone would use it and so it's really tempting but like I feel really passionate about 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. Like, how do you beat them?
Well, I mean, PayPal's network is closed.
But everyone knows of PayPal. Everyone has probably interacted with it at some point. Like, they've got a big user base. Like, how do you catch them? I think, you know, you just have to build a better product, right? And I think, you know, I have to give a lot of kudos to the Block people, you know, building Cash App and building Square because they have their own proprietary product, but they're making it ultra open. Right. It's like the Bread app that I was telling you about or Tether Wallet can now if you have one of these, you will 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 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. And they don't have to be anymore. And you know, Grid Global Accounts is a great example of that is much better than any dollar account 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, you know, 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 the merchant piece is completely outside of our view, right? Visa is now building merchant settlements for debit card and credit card payments and stablecoins. But that's on their side with the acquirer. What we do on our side is deliver the dollar so to speak at the issuer like as an issuer. And then whatever the arrangement is between the merchant and the acquirer that's 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 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 crosschain 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 YouTubes TikToks and one of the issues you said in there was that the platform aren't collecting interest like this money's kind of in limbo. Is interest something that you'll 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 stablecoins 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 stablecoin is a bad idea because you couldn't use it anywhere. And so then it's like useless. And because we've made the account fungible and compatible with all of the other stablecoins and all of the other wallets and all of the other chains, it doesn't matter now because if you're receiving your own coin, your own stablecoin in 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 Act. Sorry. Yeah. Too many. But yeah so in the US it'll be more difficult to do that but internationally you can definitely do that. And typically I mean of course this is a much more powerful account than a normal bank account for payments in the US. So we expect a lot of US people and businesses to use it just for the purpose of sending and receiving money. 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, right? But at least they keep it versus I'm pushing it to I don't know a Spanish bank. And then it's a black hole for me the platform and for my user. And more than a black hole 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 wallet.
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 after which one which one do you use? What's your favorite?
I tend to use Phoenix the most. 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. Like where does this fit? Like how big do you think accounts should or could be on this?
It doesn't matter. So like this is the beauty with Spark and we spent so much time doing that, right? It's like if you opened a Tether wallet, which they've done a really good job. It's like 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 doesn't matter where you hold it as a user. It's just taken care of for you. So, you 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 mass market adoption because mass market is not going to think about where should I keep stuff and how balancing channels and so you have a fat 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 that it's actually safe like 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 traditional 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 so let's say that YouTube were to do that. I just 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?
Yeah, 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 an era where Bitcoin is actually going to be used as money properly. Because for so long the narrative has been store of value, but Bitcoin was always destined to be money as well. 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? Makes no sense. Yeah, 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 you know bitcoin is not as valuable but like 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 stable coin 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 seeing what it can do learning about it.
Exactly. Interesting because do you see any problem with like the stable coin takeover of the like any person living in a high inflation country is going to choose the stable coin 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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I saw a couple of months ago you wrote like an open letter to the CEO of PayPal.
It wasn't an open letter. It was like my rant. I woke up in that morning and I was like pissed seeing all of those news and so I was just like it was an open rent. It wasn't an open letter.
Okay. But so you were there for quite a long time. Does part of you wish that PayPal had have 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, you know, 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. And so it's untenable for many people unless you have like a founder CEO who has total power over the company. It's never going to happen. And so I just think it's 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 like your existing revenue and like you know, I mean, look, they did the PYUSD thing like the PayPal USD, I don't know how you say it. And like the obvious thing to do if you want this thing to actually really succeed is like swap every balance that you have in dollars across the entire network, whether it's on Venmo, on PayPal, on merchant balances to PYUSD, right?
And the reason they didn't do that is because like 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 like you know bad decisions for different reasons to optimize your bottom line which you have to do because you're responsible to 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 100% use. The difficulty of running a business in Australia with all my sponsors and clients in the US is real. But in throughout history, we'll set you up after this 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 you know drivers or hosts or whatever it is, 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 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.
