Ex Libra Boss David Marcus on Meta Stablecoin Payouts and Global Dollar Accounts

Let me just first make a very very important key distinction. Everyone that's building right now is trying to build their own accounts that they're trying to sell to all of these platforms, right? And that's true for all of the companies that you mentioned which are really great companies that we respect. But what we've built is basically infrastructure for those platforms to build their own accounts with their own brand. The accounts are self-custodial wallets with the best technology of embedded wallets, meaning you'll never lose your funds. You can log in with a passkey, a Google login, or whatever login you want and never lose your keys. And I think that's an important distinction because it completely changes the dynamic of who owns the customer relationship and what data you leak to other platforms that then go on and build products off your back, right? And I think that's an important distinction.

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me, guys.

Yeah, let me just unpack a little bit because this has been long in the making and there's a lot of thought and work that has gone into this. I think the key point that we want to try to solve is really putting the power back in the hands of people, businesses, and platforms. And I feel like forever all of those platforms have been tenants on someone else's payments rails and networks. And I feel like especially on the account side, that's true. Like if you're a large platform that is the financial nexus of millions or tens of millions of people, when you pay out money, the minute you pay that money out to an edge bank in a random country, you lose all of the economic value of those deposits and everything that comes next. And what Grid Global Accounts actually solve is the ability for these platforms to offer global accounts to all of their stakeholders. So, you're a marketplace. You have a bunch of sellers and buyers on the marketplace. You're a creator platform and you have a bunch of creators earning revenue on your platform. You have a gig economy platform like Uber or Airbnb. You have hosts and drivers that earn money from your platform. And so what if you could actually give them your own branded account that has a dollar balance that has a Visa debit card that they can use at 175 million merchants on the Visa network and that connects to Lightspark Grid. So you can actually move that dollar balance to your own bank account in your local currency in real time 24/7. But not only local rails, also global rails because Grid covers the 65 countries that we've connected domestic payment systems to. And so that's what Grid is. Grid Global Accounts is really a platform and a product to enable those platforms to take control over their own endpoint accounts. And at the same time give a much better product to their stakeholders than what people have today. And I think of it as the most powerful global dollar account. I say dollar but it's going to be multicurrency. And then the last point of it is in a world where all of the interfaces are changing, we're basically all of the websites and apps were designed for clumsy humans to interact with compute, right? That's not what agents need. And so as we change the interfaces to agents and we communicate to agents and they do things on our behalf. What is the ideal account that an agent needs to have? It's definitely one that has a dollar balance, maybe Bitcoin, too. That has the ability to actually use a Visa token to spend that money. That has access to global payment rails. And how do you delegate that control without losing control, the humans not losing control of what the agents can do with your money? And so that's also part of Grid Global Accounts that we launched earlier this week.

Yeah, I mean look, I think the key insight and Kai, you and I have shared the Libra journey together. So we have a lot of buddy scar tissue. And I think the key learning from that whole epic adventure was that if you're actually really going to build an open internet for money and it's a closed controlled network, no matter how hard you try to devolve power, that thing is going to be killed with fire. And so the key here is really how can you build on top of a network that's truly neutral, truly open, that doesn't belong to us, that doesn't belong to anyone, that behaves like the internet. And that was the insight coming off of Libra. And that's why we decided to build on Bitcoin, which is without any doubt the most neutral money network ever created. And so the first step on that journey was actually trying to make Bitcoin move fast and cheap and Lightning was the first step. And I think Kai to your question I think there's Bitcoin the asset but then there's Bitcoin the technology and as far as we're concerned we're really more interested in the latter and how can we actually turn Bitcoin into TCP/IP packets for money that can actually be used to interoperate domestic payment systems and other edge networks that can connect onto this open network. And this has taken shape in the way that we're providing cross-border payments for large banks like SoFi. So if you're a SoFi customer and you're sending dollars to someone in Mexico or in India receiving local currency, actually what happens is it goes dollar, bitcoin, rupees on the other side and the customer doesn't even know or hear the word Bitcoin. It's just TCP/IP packets for money. So that's kind of where we started. And then to your question around how it interacts with stablecoins. So I had my own schizophrenic journey with stablecoins and I think that's also because of what happened at Libra which is we tried so hard to build on the most open and neutral network and so then if all of the transactions would actually happen on a large centralized stablecoin because stablecoins are fully centralized things, it would have kind of defeated the purpose. So, I kind of was in this mode of like, this is not right. And then I'm like, wait a minute. We're connecting to fiat payment rails in 65 countries. Why not connect to all the networks? Why not connect to Solana and to Tempo and to Base and to everything and support all the stablecoins and make sure that the Grid Global Accounts that we actually launched is actually compatible with all of these networks because then if you make a balance more fungible by making it spendable on the Visa network but also on Solana and also on PIX in Brazil, then you have more utility for that account and then more people and businesses want to use that account and it actually solidifies the whole thing. But the account lives on Spark, our Bitcoin L2 that lives on top of Bitcoin and so the network is not ours and is not anyone else's. So the premise of building on something truly open and neutral remains valid.

Yeah. So, let me just first make a very very important key distinction. Everyone that's building right now is trying to build their own accounts that they're trying to sell to all of these platforms, right? And that's true for all of the companies that you mentioned which are really great companies that we respect. But what we've built is basically infrastructure for those platforms to build their own accounts with their own brand and the accounts are self-custodial wallets with the best technology of embedded wallets meaning you'll never lose your funds. You can log in with a passkey or Google login or whatever login you want and never lose your keys. And I think that's an important distinction because it completely changes the dynamic of who owns the customer relationship and what data you leak to other platforms that then go on and build products off your back right? And I think that's an important distinction. And on the agent stuff, we wanted to really, there's a world right now where everyone is trying to build competing agent-to-agent payment protocols, agentic commerce stuff and all of that which is great and we're going to need this and one thing might win at some point, but right now that's not the most pressing thing because it's not like there's a lot of agent-to-agent volume yet. And so the key provocation that we put on ourselves is how can we actually create a mass market product for humans but that can safely delegate money movement capabilities, the powerful money movement capabilities of Grid Global Accounts to agents. And so the way we did it is by building what we call bonded scope delegation, which is like you bond basically an agent to a Grid Global Account. And you scope a delegation with clear restrictions of what it can or cannot do. And you can create multiple agent scopes for one account. And the way that I've experienced it myself is by spinning up an OpenClaw, connecting it to a Grid Global Account that I've been playing with for the last month or so. And it's been really wild to see having an OpenClaw with access to global money movement and a Visa card and all these things like what it can do. And I know Kai, you've been playing with this a lot and I've enjoyed really the Visa CLI experience which is like really this is where it's going, right? It's like all of these agents will have CLIs to all of the things and then I'll be able to stitch together really great experiences on behalf of people and businesses and I think what we're trying to do here is just create an account, an all powerful account that agents can use safely.

No idea. Is that a sign of where we are and kind of maybe in a post-Libra world things are a little bit different? And also what do you think about the payout to creator business case? Yeah, I mean look, first of all, I'm really thrilled to see companies and platforms like Meta play with digital assets and stablecoins more and experiment with it, pilot it in all kinds of different ways. I think this is great and two reactions to this. Definitely true that times have changed and I think when we introduced Grid Global Accounts I said the world had changed in ways that wouldn't have made stuff like Grid Global Accounts possible even a year ago. And so the first thing that changed just to answer your question on the conditions that have lined up, the first thing that has changed is regulation clearly. There's the Genius Act here in the US. There's MiCA in Europe. There's similar pieces of legislation all over the world that actually establish rules of the road of how you interact with digital assets and stablecoins. And so that makes platforms like Meta and others actually more comfortable trying it again, which is great. Then there are better wallet technologies. I think if you look at the embedded wallets that have really better modern cryptography that enables you to actually have multiple parts of your keys in different places and completely abstract all of those things to customers like really no seed phrases, no mnemonics, no risk of losing your private keys anymore. So that's a second prerequisite. The third prerequisite and Kai you deserve a lot of credit for that and I say it even when you're not in the room, which is Visa really leaning in hard on stablecoin backed cards and that's a key thing right because if you're a platform and you're actually giving people USDC or USDT on a random wallet to a creator in a country and they can't actually spend that balance and they're stuck in a wallet like okay good luck with that right? No one wants that. And so I think that's a massive unlock and so I think those three things have changed the conditions that make those types of products actually possible today. I think to the specific question here that there's a real question for these platforms right and it's really like do you want to create an ecosystem where your creators are running on your own accounts or do you want to enable third parties to create accounts for them and then use these accounts to actually cross-sell them a gazillion things where you'll never see the economic benefits from that. And I definitely think that most platforms want the former. And so while I think it's great that Meta and others are experimenting with that, I would highly encourage them to take control over their own destiny and create those accounts for their endpoints themselves. And it turns out conveniently we have a really good product for them to do that now since as of this week.

Yeah, I'm grateful for that but the infrastructure didn't exist and so you could take that same use case. I remember talking about creator payouts in 2018, 2019 it was a very obvious problem that needed to be solved and that stablecoins, the concept of a stablecoin seemed like that was a solution. But then at the time it was like, okay, well blockchains aren't fast and cheap enough. You got to build a new blockchain. There wasn't any stablecoin that scaled. You got to build a new stablecoin. There weren't really embedded wallets. You got to build the wallet infrastructure from scratch. So you had to build all of these pieces from the ground up that just hadn't really existed. We didn't have any stablecoin cards in 2018. I remember for the first time talking about we'd love to work with Meta and Libra on having cards there. And so how much work it required to just try and build those core primitives to get to a use case that now it's really interesting that Meta can say all right same use case but they don't have to build anything really to be able to integrate with third parties to do it. Now, I think it is really interesting of how deep that integration goes and when you're in a kind of a pilot mode of let's test a few markets. Let's see if this is one of a number of payout options. I think that's one way that you can look at creator payouts. The other way to look at it is to say we want to build a massive creator neobank and that could be an entirely new business to say we've got all these funds going to creators. Why don't we monetize that and offer them every service they need? Maybe they need loans, maybe they need all sorts of things that if you can control the experience, you can then embed inside of it. And so it seems to me that at some point ideally this is no longer news of creator platform adds stablecoin payouts is just going to be like yes, that is what everybody does. But how deep they go is going to be the interesting thing that sets one creator platform apart from another.

But I think you're exactly right. I feel like when you think about it, if you're name whatever creator platform or gig economy worker platform right then you're paying out all of these endpoints you're really the center of economic life for all of these people and businesses and you have the data right so to your point earlier about the neobank in a box for those creators or drivers or hosts or whatever it is that you have at the end point of your network, you have the best data. So you should be in a position to actually provide advances like credit and all of these services to your customers because you have the best data and leeching that data to the banks at the edges to all kinds of different third parties was actually a cost of doing business pre-AI but in the AI world where you can actually mine that data and build underwriting models like you couldn't do it like 5 years ago or a year ago is actually negligent right? It's like why don't you underwrite with your own treasury that you have and generate a whole new multi-billion dollar business with the data and capabilities you have versus give that to banks at the edges and others that are not really serving those customers well anyways and can't offer tailored product for that customer. And so the opportunity for these platforms in the next 5 years is just massive. And it's really a question of who's going to go in the deep end and really use the tools to Kai's point that are now widely available to actually build this or just give it up, right? Or continue giving it up.

Yeah, couldn't agree more.