Deciphered # 4 - Interview with Jack Mallers from the Lightning Network Wallet Zap

I'm good man. I'm a big fan of yours. I love coming on, so thank you for having me back. It's been a minute.

Yeah, so I guess from a super high level, Zap is about helping people use the Lightning Network. And the Lightning Network comes with characteristics that are appealing to a large, vast, diversified group of audience. So we're talking about general consumers now. We've delved into the merchant space a little bit, talked to some exchanges and some institutions about their interest in Lightning Network, and then trying to really feel out how we can be most helpful and impactful and push this stuff forward. So we've expanded our product set a little bit. Our contributors are growing, and you know, we're starting to bleed into other projects as well like BTCPay Server. So I've just been trying to organize our direction and see where we can make the most impact and be the most helpful.

Yeah, so actually I can address the team thing because I would love to give a shout-out to my contributors and my guys. Absolutely. This Zap community, it's a Bitcoin community in general, is awesome. So generous, so giving the bug reports and the help testing. And then my family, so the Bitcoin Mom and my father. This has been largely a secret, but I think people know at this point, but we've been now supporting Bitcoin Core contributors and people innovating in the Lightning space and funding their development for some time now. That doesn't necessarily mean that they're working on Zap. So again, you can be contributing to Core, doing stuff on the protocol with Lightning, or actually working on Zap-related technologies that'll help push this stuff forward. So as a family, we're very proud of that, to be using our hot links to hopefully contribute some good to this space. So it is not just me. I'm trying to get more people involved. The real scarce resource in this industry is competent developers. So as soon as you find them, we would like to fund them. But yeah, I've been very happy to see the growth rate of development behind a lot of this stuff. It's really exciting.

If you have anything, go for it. I know I'll wait till you're done. Go ahead.

So yeah, as far as the iOS app goes with Zap, or just more in general, my approach to product is a very Chicago-esque approach. And that is, I get it from Jason Fried, the CEO of Basecamp, is a close mentor of mine. And the idea is that building a product that is helpful, or really doing anything in life well, like being a good son, waking up in the morning on time, is really, really hard. So what I knew was that is minimize our amounts of guessing, minimize our scope, minimize our general ambition for every single release, and really try and ship quickly and iterate on designs, iterate on ideas, iterate on features. And we try and understand the user as best as possible with frequent communication and frequent releases so that we can actually build stuff that you guys want and that you guys actually find valuable. So as far as the iOS app goes, it is early, you know, because you have to scan a QR code to a remote node to actually use it and have some fundamental knowledge of the protocol itself and understand how all this stuff works. But we thought the sooner we can get this stuff in the hands of the people, the better. Because no product guesses everything correct on their first try. Building a successful product is actually iterating continuously, almost floating on water. So we wanted to get this in the hands of as many people that were capable and start to learn about why people like Lightning, what they don't, what makes sense, what doesn't. And you can start to see from these screenshots on the screen that we're actually iterating and we're learning and we're understanding what's appealing to folks and what they would enjoy. And our app is already making significant progress. So yeah, that's where iOS is at. One day soon, with the help of a lot of the work Lightning Labs is doing, we hope to have LND on the phone so that there is no remote node setup. Even with Autopilot and things like AMP, there won't even have to be channels at all. The node will do all of that for you, and routing will be super efficient, and it'll look more like a Venmo. But early days, we're getting there.

Yeah, so Neutrino is a light client implementation done by Laolu and Lightning Labs. So as always, shout-out Lightning Labs, Stark, Laolu, and the whole team there. Fantastic. All this stuff I do is on top of their software, so shout-out to them as always. So Neutrino is an implementation of a few BIPs, BIP 158 in particular. And this takes the Mike Hearn SPV implementation from years ago and it's a new SPV implementation with Lightning clients in mind. It kind of reverses roles. It's a lot more resource-intensive on the client itself and less so on the full node. But the idea is that the client now, if we want consumer-facing applications with smart contract capability, quote-unquote, whatever smart contract means nowadays, but Lightning for example, is you're constantly having to watch the chain and perform actions based on chain events. Like if someone's trying to cheat a channel state or opening a channel with you, etc., you need to fetch chain data from a full node to your phone and perform and act accordingly. So Neutrino is an implementation, excuse me, of this new idea by Laolu. And btcd is the only full node implementation that actually supports the BIP at the moment. There is an open pull request on Bitcoin Core by Jim Poole of Coinbase, shout-out Jim Poole. And so all of it is coming together right now. Actually, I believe this is kind of like the final phase of testing before maintenance and a lot of testing and architecture changes and such. And assuming that things like Zap 0.2.1, I know Lightning Labs is going to release their app soon, assuming that goes well and nothing catastrophic blows up, then we'll start to see mainnet consumer apps. And then as far as the opening channels, Autopilot will see some improvements soon. So Autopilot is the automatic channel manager that is built inside of LND. And then AMP will be a huge deal because AMP will improve the efficiency and routing. So right now, if I have a $10 channel, I can't make a $20... if I have two $10 channels, I can't make one $20 payment, right? Because of this liquidity issue. And a lot of the BCHers like to point out like, good luck trying to make a $50 T-shirt purchase with Lightning because no one has a $50 channel open. But with AMP, you can actually leverage separate channels and combine different paths to make one total payment. So then all of a sudden, the resources involved in successfully routing a payment through the network are reduced, and I bet routing efficiency and such will go through the roof. So all of that, I would assume, we get sooner than later. And that will be when we moon, as far as not speculating on the price, as far as Lightning goes. When you see people walking around with Zap in their pocket and scanning QR codes at bars, that'll be the day. You don't even have to know what a channel is. That'll be the day where I'll shed a tear and smile for sure.

Yeah, so I generally only like to build products where I'm a user of, just because I again, I don't like guessing and making assumptions. I really like to understand the problem the software is trying to solve. And turns out some friends and I will actually be merchants soon, and we want to accept Lightning for various reasons that I went through in the blog post. So it's going well. The first thing in building a product for me, at least, is learning, understanding, could be using this, why it's important, what the value propositions are, where the trade-offs are, what needs to be in there, what would be nice to have, what an MVP looks like. And all of this, Nicolas, Rockstar Dev, some Zap contributors, we're all kind of just having open conversation and really exploring. Because coding is what takes the time and the expertise, but you can very quickly iterate on ideas and concepts over conversation. So we've got a little bit of code, we've got some ideas. Obviously the BTCPay infrastructure is there on the back end, and it's now just about implementing the ideal experience for merchants. One of the main things I spent a ton of time on is talking to exchanges. I've talked to banks, I've talked to compliance officers to make sure that we're fully compliant and going from the US dollar to Bitcoin and vice versa. So that these merchants can accept Bitcoin at their own risk level, which is very important to them, so that you're not exposing yourself to a super volatile asset and basically opening a long position. If you have bills to pay, you can hedge accordingly. And so I know that as soon as I get a working product, which I think will be much sooner rather than later depending on the priorities set for other Zap stuff, I will have huge Lightning parties in Chicago. And I'm down to do it anywhere else. There's some bars in Chicago that would love to accept the Lightning Network. And now that we have some consumer wallets like Zap, I'm going to just have everyone come to a bar in Chicago. Rockstar Dev and I will be there and we'll throw down with some merchant services and celebrate. So yeah, that's where I'm at really.

Um, I can go back in chat logs, probably a couple months, maybe a little bit more. So I reached out, Nicolas and I have been in open communication for a super long time. I love Nicolas. And so we've been chatting forever. And recently kind of came to the same realization like, hey, we need to leverage each other. We can make a huge impact in the space. It doesn't seem like BitPay is getting their head out of their ass anytime soon, so let's do this dance. And that was probably a few months ago where it was starting to get super serious, where I was starting to talk about, okay, yeah, in theory this would be great, but you know, the actual change is made in the execution. So what are the details look like? What needs to be done? What code needs to be written? And that probably started a few months ago, early summer I would bet is when I would dig up chat logs with Nicolas or not.

Yeah, I mean, so I'm in a Starbucks currently because I actually was coming from a meeting. I have been speaking to large institutional, either trading firms, high-frequency trading firms, institutional investors, OTC desks, all involved in the crypto space. And I'm walking around with some slide decks to give context, you know, whenever they have questions. And one of the things I talked about today is that the idea of payment channels and trying to scale Satoshi's solution to the double-spend problem, which is this global decentralized network where we have this distributed timestamp server that we all have a copy of, which we call the blockchain. So payment channels and trying to scale that out in an efficient way with layers is actually an idea as old as Satoshi and his/her emails themselves. Satoshi used to talk about this idea years ago. I think in 2010 was the latest before the disappearing. So anyway, point being is that this has been a long time coming. Not just like I started half a year ago and we're almost home. This has been a long time coming. I think the first implementation by Matt Corallo and Mike Hearn was in 2011 maybe. So this has been a super long time coming. And point being is it's really unclear. Like I can speculate on it, which I will because I know that's what people want, but don't take it home and make any bets on it. This stuff is super complicated. Decentralized FOSS development comes with its pros and its cons. The pros obviously outweigh the cons, but one of the cons is it's just not as efficient as a CEO walking in the room and pointing at a developer and telling them what to do. So it does take time. It is a collaborative effort between tons of teams and tons of people with different incentives. So 18 months, I love that timeframe. That's plenty of time. That's actually probably generous. When I think we see consumer app wallets where you click a button to download it and all of a sudden you're on the Lightning Network on mainnet, I would definitely say before the year's over. I would say, I mean, if I'm being ambitious and confident, I'd say well before the year is over. But you know, I don't want the mob outside my house, so we'll go with the year's over. There's still tons of infrastructure. Like ideally we want exchanges involved here, which would be a huge deal. Someone can buy Bitcoin and withdraw from an exchange already on the Lightning Network, already having liquidity on their wallets. And that really makes the onboarding process more efficient. That infrastructure should be built. A lot of compliant work needs to go in. So I would love if someone could deposit $20 from their debit card in their Zap wallet and then we give them liquidity in channels. So you go straight from your bank account into being able to scan QR codes on Lightning. That would be dope. There's a lot of infrastructure stuff to make this seamless. I mean, throughout technological evolution, when we look at the car, when we look at the computer, things that really reshaped the way that we live our lives, these things end up becoming nearly invisible. Like the engine, which was a huge deal, now doesn't even exist in the newest Tesla that kind of drives itself. And these things conform to our lives. The computer used to be the size of a building, now it fits in our pocket. This technology tends to become invisible, become efficient, become optimized to the way that it benefits us and helps our lives and changes the way we do a lot. And I assume the same with Lightning. Channels will start to evaporate, liquidity issues will evaporate, routing nodes won't be seen. The whole UX will be tailored to however it benefits us best. And that stuff will take time. 18 months, I like that. I think we'll be in a good place in 18 months. But a more short term, you can expect to see consumer-facing mainnet Zap and Lightning Labs and other projects hopefully before the year's over. That'll be production ready with no #reckless attached to it.

Yeah, so I know that this is a more technical show, so I can actually go into some stuff if that's what the crowd wants.

Let's do it. Let's do it. So, the idea there will actually be separate routing software. So nodes that intend on providing liquidity to the network and routing payments, there will be separate software. And the way that you use the software will be different. So let me explain. For example, for consumer-facing clients like Zap, like Lightning App, what we will start doing is not announcing the channels being opened as public. Why is because we don't want the network to think that these nodes that are opening these channels are reliable for routing. For example, if all of the channels that are open on my cell phone right here are public channels, no one would be able to route through right now because it's not online. I'm just chatting with Vortex on the show. We don't want that. We want to really improve routing and the efficiency of routes. So consumers will now flag the channels they open to be private so that the network doesn't route through them. Autopilot will open private channels for you for consumer stuff. And then there'll be totally separate routing software and software more geared towards people that want to come onto the network with a lot of Bitcoin, provide a lot of liquidity, and with their main intention not to make a few payments at Starbucks but to help the growth of the network and route payments. So that I know is just on the cusp. Laolu spoke briefly, I forget where, but Roastbeef spoke briefly about his plans with that. And Brian Ballou of Lightning Labs had a fantastic blog post on routing and what that may look like over the next foreseeable future, which was fantastic. So yeah, routing it has ways to go. Autopilot has ways to go. It's actually insane how much traction things have gotten and how well things actually work. Getting something to work is really hard and things actually work with not a lot of attention. Routing is very low level, not sophisticated at all. There's no AMP. A lot of the stuff you have to do is manual. It takes time. There's a learning curve is still fairly steep. I mean, things like Zap lessen it, but I don't... we're not nearly as close as to where I wanted to be. So far I'm very impressed that it actually works. But you're spot-on in that no one is even paying attention to optimizing this stuff yet just based on priorities. And as soon as AMP and Autopilot and routing software gets implemented and we start to aim for ideal topology of the network, which would be make routing efficient and be ideal, we're really going to moon man as far as Lightning goes. Price, price, price will be price. It's so fun because you know, people are like, routing is just, it's not figured out, they have no idea what's going to happen. You know, some of the BCHers out there, they're like, routing is just unknown, it's just a huge unknown. And it's like, no guys, they literally barely even scratched the surface of attempting to optimize that yet. First it was just getting everything working. I mean, this was only, the beta was only live on mainnet early this year, like February, March.

Yeah, I'm a fan of all the work you just mentioned. I obviously don't have the time, I wish today was longer than it is, but I don't have the time to work on it myself. But it's funny though, I was in a meeting today and an institutional investor was like, so how do I report my routing? Like let's say Ross Ulbricht or some dealer sells something that the feds don't like and my node happens to route it, how do I put my hands up and be like, no, I don't want that, and tell everyone and report that to the IRS? Like, oh sure, you can. Everything is encrypted. There's no data leaks. You can't do the equivalent of chain analysis on the Lightning Network. It is touted as a scaling solution, but it very much enhances privacy because the relationship between nodes is not global. You don't have to announce your coffee transaction to the entire world. It is link-to-link. So it was a very funny conversation to be had because privacy enhancements seem to benefit and get a lot of people giddy, and there's a lot of people that it scares the out of. And that's just the nature of where finance is today and regulators and how comfortable they are with this stuff. But that's okay.

I thought it was fascinating though because I obviously was very excited and I was like, 'No, do you check this out? You can't tell anything like routing nodes can't report who the sender and receiver was. They're just forwarding HTLCs.' And the guy was like, 'Wait, what? That scares me. Show me.' And I was cracking up. I was like, 'Oh my god, I've never heard that opinion before,' but obviously I understand where he's coming from for the job he performs. But it was very funny to hear that perspective. Anywho, my privacy-related stuff and where most literate is obviously Lightning, but I'm a big fan of all of the stuff going on with CoinJoin and Wasabi Wallet and all the works. As a holder of Bitcoin, I think privacy, scaling, adding utility to this asset is good for me.

Yeah, well, I guess throughout the... the one thing I would stress again is like timelines with Lightning and trying to give dates and stuff is really hard and borderline irresponsible on my part. So but I would like to caution that and say that similar to Bitcoin, so back in Bitcoin's history, and we think when did this protocol really arrive? When did the lights turn on and get bright and now it's here and everyone's gonna be rich and everyone in the world is gonna change? It's like unclear, right? There was a point in time where Bitcoin was valuable and interesting and the characteristics and value propositions of the system were appealing to a small group, and then it kind of improved and it matured and the group and audience interested grew and grew. And there was never a certain date and time where it kind of just arrived. It slowly matured and adapted and has grown. And similar will be for Lightning, similar to how the internet kind of arrived. So I would say that, you know, if you're waiting for Lightning to be this Venmo, just walk into Starbucks, scan a QR code, don't even have to worry about channels or liquidity or anything, that may take a little bit of time. But there's also solutions that impact people today. Like if we can set up the infrastructure necessary on exchanges so that traders can arbitrage efficiently, high-frequency trading, slippage, like that type of stuff is super valuable and available today. So with Lightning in general, I would say public perception is funny. I don't think Lightning will ever arrive according to mainstream media and such. It'll just forever be knocking on the door. But yeah, I would just caution, I always feel guilty leaving shows being like, 'Yeah, before the year's over, like, okay, we're gonna be outdoing Square and that.' And that's a dangerous thing to claim. So that would be my thing is today Lightning can really benefit a lot, like remittance, exchanges, it can make markets extremely efficient. All of a sudden, tactical high-frequency trading can be possible if the right infrastructure is in place. And this is what the Lightning Network we currently have today. And then the more consumer-facing Lightning Network where we've got services and on-ramps for fiat and abstracting a lot of the complexity and reducing the learning curve, that's gonna take a little bit more time, but it's coming. So that, I guess, that would be my last word of clarity before I prepare to sign off.

Well, let's do it.

Yeah, so I actually have two things. First, I think last night there was a pull request submitted to LND that implements CoinJoin within LND. So I know that it wasn't with the intention that it'll be production-ready tomorrow, but it was more to get code out in the public, generate discussion so the devs can start to talk about it. But as far as like tracing, you know, closing transactions of channels and trying to tax them, it's actually funny timing because I know that I think it was Adam Gibson submitted a PR that is a low-level CoinJoin implementation within LND for Roastbeef to take a peek at. I saw over IRC someone mentioned it, so that's funny timing of that thought. I would mention it there. And then also, a thing there's a semi-related with ETF talks. And there's been talks of, I know Andreas made a pretty public statement stating on one side that he's not for ETFs or a lot of these financial products that have custodians behind them. I know Peter Todd shared a similar sentiment of what I'm going to say. I don't think Bitcoin arrived to dictate how anyone should act in their own financial right, however much private they'd like to be, however self-sovereign they would like to act. Bitcoin is here to make sure that all of your rights are guaranteed to you. And if you would like to run a full node and verify everything yourself and CoinJoin your transactions and efficiently, you know, pay micropayments off-chain, that you can. But of course, you can opt to diversify a portfolio or hedge into a new asset through an ETF or through a brokerage as well. I don't think as Bitcoiners, I think it's a dangerous line to walk to start to dictate exactly how people can act in their own financial right. If someone wants to own an ETF and has no problem trusting, you know, the CBOE to hold their Bitcoins for them and would take a certificate instead of private keys to access it, that's in their right. And I think that's totally okay. So I think as Bitcoiners, we're very protective of these characteristics of the system that Satoshi gave us and that we've fought hard to protect and develop, things like UASF, and we hold our own ground and we run our own full nodes and we're very protective. And that's what makes this community and this asset great, gives it value. But I am a fan of a lot of the traditional finance getting into this asset. It's very important for the growth of it, for it to mature. And as long as a user can act self-sovereignly and choose like a sliding scale the amount of trust and risk that they are exposed to, then that is within their right. And I think that these products are all great and doing good justice to this asset that is not Bitcoin. So I'd like to say that.

Yeah, so I think traditional finance in their use case and the demand coming from them for Bitcoin is entirely different than some of like the libertarian-focused early adopters and such. So these people see a new asset class that is very binary, has asymmetric upside. You're either in or you're out. You can't really dip your toe in the water and no one wants to be in a position to chase a new asset class that works and that's here to stay. So all these people want is exposure. It's a very different use case than wanting to make transactions in private or to validate their own full nodes. And some of these people do so at their own home. Some of these people are Bitcoin maximalists when they take the suit off. But when you're talking about, you know, billions of dollars under management, when you're talking about managing a portfolio, when you're talking about wanting to reduce risk when you have the general market hitting all-time highs, the Dow hitting all-time highs, and you would like to diversify into uncorrelated assets, into new assets like Bitcoin, I mean, the use case is entirely different. So these products are not meant for the cypherpunk, decentralized, you know, kind of aura that we reap throughout the world nowadays. These are meant for an entirely different class of individuals that now that Bitcoin is an established new asset, allow them to get exposure accordingly. And they can do so however they want. They can buy the underlying and they can go through an OTC desk and hold their private keys in a vault in their basement, or they can buy the CME future. It's all up to them. So that would be my general response. And then as far as fractional reserve banking on top of an ETF, I don't know about that. I mean, I know that learning from history, we know that gold ran into some issues when banks controlled majority of the supply and they were able to divorce paper notes from the backing of gold. Bitcoin, I don't see that happening anytime soon, at least. So I don't see real threats here. I think the Bitcoiners are over-paranoid from its inevitable fate with traditional finance because it is a real asset class. We do want it to be the world reserve currency. We want it to be here to stay and really uproot a lot of the evils that come with traditional finance today. So I think it's inevitable. I think it's a good thing as long as we don't bend at the knees and break to things like block size increases and further centralization and such. And that anyone can download the blockchain, run a full node, and validate their own transactions. You can build centralized systems on top of the decentralized one. You cannot build a decentralized system on top of a centralized one. So I see no harm, no foul in my opinion. It's all good for the asset.

I also laugh. So my dad and I have some finance background in my family, obviously, and we love to like screenshot on Twitter and laugh just because a lot of the stuff like literally makes no sense. They're gonna buy it all and short it. They're gonna buy an asset and then bet on it going down. So they're just gonna lose themselves money. That's fine. Hey, CME, if you would like to buy Bitcoin from me at 6,500, then force the price down, lose all your money, and sell it back to me at 2,000, I'll be here and I'll be a buyer, no problem. Like, what are you guys talking about? It doesn't make any sense at all. So I love to laugh at that stuff. And I don't think that these people are trying to spread misinformation or being malicious or whatever. It's just overprotective Bitcoiners, and I love us all for that. We stand our ground. This is the money that is dictated and validated by the people and not vice versa, and that's what gives it value. So I don't criticize for that opinion, but I don't think that there's a lot of meat behind some of these accusations. They don't really tend to make a lot of sense when you dissect them.

Um, that one I would be a bit more cautious only because it's just a matter of like what's priority, right? There's only a handful of people that are capable and willing to work on this stuff. And which one do we want first? Do we want general infrastructure and consumer-facing wallets or do we want to be able to swap Bitcoin for Lightning atomically? I mean, like, excuse me. So it's a matter of priority. So I would be a bit cautious with atomic swap timelines. However, I know Spark Swap is a command-line tool that allows you to do atomic swaps today with Bitcoin and Litecoin. I just got a note that they are looking for market makers and liquidity providers to their service, and that could be really cool. Spark Swap, if we can land a UI on top of that and we can get some liquidity providers and market makers to their service, we can start to play with that today. So I do like the idea. I think that Lightning in general can reduce a lot of the custodian risks that investors and traders encounter. Maybe not so much atomic swaps right away. Atomic swaps one day, but even today, right now, if I want to trade a million dollars on Bitfinex, I have to deposit a million dollars worth of Bitcoin and trust that they don't explode and lose it all. What I can do instead, as long as they support the Lightning Network, is I can open a channel with however much funds I want. That way, if Bitfinex explodes, it's in a 2-of-2 multi-sig and I can close the channel out and take my funds back. And if I ever want to execute a trade on Bitfinex, I'll zip it over the Lightning Network. It'll be deposited within a second, no fees, and I can execute trades on that market while keeping ownership of my own coins. And even that isn't as far as a decentralized exchange, but the improvement of not handing your coins over to a centralized authority and encountering such risk just by using the Lightning Network is a vast improvement that I would expect much sooner than per se a fully decentralized exchange with atomic swaps where market making is magic and stuff like that. That may take a little bit.

Yeah, so Bitcoin is big enough now where any demand will be met, right? So this is an ecosystem, there's plenty of money, and entrepreneurs are now rewarded. So if there's sufficient demand for anything, there will be something that is built for it. Even so, with like ICOs, there was a sufficient demand to diversify into this asset class, to risk money, to become a speculator, and ICOs fit the bill and entrepreneurs went out and shipped a ton of pile and sold it because there was demand for it. This industry is now big enough and resources and money are there where if there's sufficient demand for a decentralized exchange, it will exist. And I have no doubt about that. So it is just a matter of time, a matter of priority, and a matter of resources as far as devs go.

Yeah, well, so I think an important note here is that exchanges actually aren't all bad and evil. They provide a super important service, and that is providing you an order book, liquidity, inviting market makers and such to facilitate, you know, deeply liquid trading so that you can buy and sell Bitcoin. What we don't like about exchanges is that they seem to be this central point of failure where if they combust or get hacked or explode or whatever the case is, that all funds go down with them. The whole building is burned down. And we can actually improve on that today without any type of huge overhaul or protocol enhancements or bits or anything of the sort. If we implement Lightning where everyone just trades on exchanges like Bitfinex or Coinbase GDAX or, you know, BitMEX just using Lightning channels so that they are in ownership of that said funds, and anytime they would like to trade, they zip it over a channel to the exchange and execute on market there. Well, then all of a sudden, you know, exchanges aren't the central point of failure. They aren't a custodian of everyone's funds, and they get to do what they're good at, and that's make book, provide a liquid market, which is seriously a valuable service. We need that. So I wouldn't even tout them as such bad guys. I really think that the whole story on exchanges is going to change as soon as they start to implement Lightning and the necessary infrastructure is in place because they won't be custodians. If they get hacked, an exchange gets hacked, they can't steal the money that's in a Lightning channel with me. I've got my keys. So I think that Lightning will really, really make our market more efficient, more secure, and really change the perspective of traders and exchanges. It won't just be consumer-facing stuff. This is a big deal for them.

No, you're correct, and vice versa. The idea... so that's Alex Bosworth. I don't think it's his idea. I don't know, there's many people that claim various ideas, but Alex has definitely taken the baton. So shout out to Alex. And yeah, so the idea is that you can swap on-chain, so you can send from on-chain to preimage, basically. So you can swap from on-chain to within Lightning and vice versa. And this greatly enhances the user experience and it's very, very, very ideal. So I can basically buy liquidity on the Lightning Network without having to open channels and such. And this is just stuff that needs to be implemented in wallets and, you know, the end-user experience just has to be crafted. So at Zap, we 100% intend on making this successful, at least to our desktop wallet. Our mobile wallet we really want to keep tailored towards mainstream consumer, but our desktop wallet we definitely want to offer this type of stuff. It will greatly enhance user experience and the onboarding and off-ramp of getting in and out of the Lightning Network. So that we really want channels to live forever. We don't want them to close. If they close, they close, but it's obviously not ideal. So to be able to move funds on and off without closing channels is a big deal.

I don't... I'm not a dad, thank God I'm not a dad. Yeah, I don't know, man. I don't know if I have an answer for you. If Danny wants to drop his Twitter handle and let me sleep on it, I'll be happy to tweet out a dad joke once I get one. I'll call my dad and ask if he has a Lightning joke. Yeah, I can't speak out of turn. I'm not a dad yet. I don't plan to be for a little bit.

Yeah, so I spend majority of my time on the internet. Just Jack Mallers on Twitter. I'm in every Slack that I'm aware of, and I'm usually Jimmy Mao on there. Jimmy Mao on Xbox, so that's my online handle. And yeah, dude, I love coming on these shows. I used to watch them faithfully years ago. Every Sunday I would go make sure I got lunch in time to sit and watch the Bitcoin News Show. So the fact that I'm a guest now, I love it so much. So every time is a pleasure. I appreciate you guys having me on.