And like today, if you were a business that is excepting a payment in
a volatile asset, it's a ton of work because it's like, what are
you My favorite problem with this is like how do you handle refunds? So
like I buy I buy a thousand dollars laptop at bitcoint and then four weeks
later I return it. Do I get back bitcoint And it's like, was
that business then forced to hold bitcoin this full time and take that exposure on
their balance sheet? Like or are they paying you know, high fees to
hedg you against it? It's like you've just created Like I believe that crypto
has the opportunity to actually simplify a ton for businesses, Like that's why they
shouldn't they should be excepting payment in crypto, But forcing them to then take
on a bunch of additional complexity to do it kind of defeats the purpose.
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more about bitco, please visit bitgo dot com link in the description. Welcome
to the Thinking Crypto Podcasts. You're home for cryptocurrency news and interviews. With
me. Today is Ben Mills, who is the CEO and co founder of
Meso. Ben, great to have you on the podcast. Great to be
here, Thanks for having me, Tony so Ben, I'm excited to learn
about Miso and talk about all the great things you're doing that. I definitely
want to learn about your background because you spend some time at Venmo and Salona
Labs. So tell us where you're from and your professional journey. Yeah,
sounds great. I've been building in fintech and payments for most of my career.
I started out at a company called Braintree, which is like a B
to B payments company similar to Stripe, and then I went on to lead
product at Venmo. Honestly, I didn't expect to get into payments. Like
the when I remember when I was interviewing at Braintree and brain Tree at the
time was like, you know, an early stage, pre funded startup and
basically like an apartment in Chicago. I remember asking them, I'm like,
so, like what's left to build? Like you have like credit card processing,
Like isn't that it? And it's like little did I know how much
more you could go into payments? But I'm I'm an engineer, like by
the like background, like that's where I started from. And what I love
about fintech and payments is it's like this perfect intersection of like technology and engineering,
design and UX and business. It's just fascinating to me. But Venmo
really is where I fell in love with like consumer financial products. Like the
other thing I really like about payments is like you can really directly impact people's
lives, Like helping people with their money is like crucial. It also means
you can when you screw up, it can be very very bad. But
there's just was nothing like being able to do that directly with consumers through Venmo
and a big, big part of my time at Venmo is trying to figure
out, like how do we turn this into a business. P to B
payments has a bunch of properties that are super exciting, but it costs a
lot of money to run, and so like Venmo was basically burning money offering
their existing products, and like the thing that really started to click it is
when we started to offer things like a debit card or banking like products.
But through that journey, I came kind of like like face to face with
tradify, like the banking system, the legacy payment systems, and it just
became clear to me that there really isn't like a future here, Like what
we're really all doing is like putting lipstick on a pig, and like maybe
we can temporarily be better, but like we're going to get dragged down to
the mean, which is like the banking banks of today. So it kind
of made me a bit jaded on fintech overall, and so I totally went
into something different for a while, worked in education technology, and then after
we sold that startup, was trying to figure out what to do and my
now co founder was like, you have to take another look at crypto and
blockchain, and that pulled down the rabbit hole and that's where we are today.
Wow. And how did you end up at Solona Labs. Yeah,
I in like twenty twenties when I was like, Okay, I want to
go full time crypto. I was very kind of convinced of the overall like
vision of a blockchain and crypto, but I still felt like there was like
a ton of like open space of like how is this all going to develop?
And so I really wanted to join something that was more like a foundation's
or a labs would let me get that kind of like ten thousands of a
view. And it just ended up working out perfect because Solana Labs at the
time was trying to make a big push into merchant based payments with Salana pay,
and so I joined up with that team and helped them kind of like
get that off the ground and get a bunch of experiments going there. Now,
I have a follow up question about what you mentioned at your time at
Venmo. If I heard you correctly, do you say that peer to peer
payments when Venmo is actually not profitable for the company. Yeah, I mean
P to P payments general, Like one of the big things that Venmo did,
is it it pushed all p topps to be free, which just makes
sense. It's like it's really odd that users would have to pay money to
move their own money, Like that just doesn't make any sense. But on
the back end of that, like Venmo is still processing debit card payments,
making bank transfers, all of those things in curve fees and costs that they're
not passing on to douce or they're just absorbing. And so like ven we'll
makes you know, some amount of revenue off interest of the funds will help
on the platform. You know, over the last couple of years, that's
actually become very meaningful, but like who knows what happens with that long term.
And then they make some amount of money getting fees from like value ed
services, Like if you want to instantly move money out of Venom back into
your bank, you're you're paying a small fy on that. But like neither
of those things come close to covering the full cost of the payments involving P
two P do you believe? And I know we're gonna talk about Messo,
but obviously I'm just very fascinated with PayPal and Vedmon what they're doing, especially
with the introduction of their stable coin p y u s D. Do you
think introduction of that stable coin and using it for settlement and all these things
would help them to be more profitable where absolutely? Yeah, absolutely, I
mean like that's to me, like in some ways I look at a lot
of fintech as just like band aids over like the root problem, where the
root problem is just like money does not move instantly, and like there and
like, because it doesn't move instantly, if you want it to feel instant,
you just start layering on like counter party, at the counterparty, at
the counterparty, and so in a world where things are all moving on chain,
you don't have that fee anymore. So that like, yes, you
can absolutely do that. Yeah. I guess that's one of the big killer
apps of crypto, right, stable coins and instant settlement. Everything is instance
instantaneous and verifiable versus like you were saying, the band aid on these different
things trying to duct tape at different things behind the scenes, and obviously the
consumer doesn't know what's happening, but the businesses have to go through all these
processes and all these extra layers of work. Absolutely, yeah, I mean,
it's just the whatever you can do to kind of like minimizer dependencies is
a good thing. It just is going to make the like the product and
the experience faster and more consistent cheaper. So yeah, I think that's huge,
And I just generally think PayPal is smart to lean into crypto, Like
I think that I generally expect that if blockchain really does kind of break through
to the next level of adoption, there's this big open question of like what
happens to the fintech landscape, because I do think like a lot of the
existing market structure of fintech is based on the foundation of like money movement is
not instant and like and is highly controlled and not open, and so like
in a world where that changes, the kind of stack of what you need
to like build finance products, et cetera is just going to change. And
so I think that you know, teams like a Visa, PayPal now recently
Stripe leaning in I think makes a lot of sense because it's like it gives
those teams the opportunity to kind of figure out how to navigate that as it
happens. I guess that's part of the macro battle that we're seeing with the
incumbents, the banking folks who are getting disrupted, who have controlled the payment
gateways and all these high fees and whether it be crossboarder payments or what it.
Maybe you know, Crypto is a disruptor of that, a big threat
to their business model. But that's the nature of disruptive tech. So I
guess that's part of why we're seeing a lot of the battle from the trat
FI as well. Absolutely, but I mean it is like I when I
was I spent time with Visa as part of Salona early on, and it
was one of the first big surprises for me when I was kind of on
the inside of the industry was how optimistic and open they were. Like I
was expecting that, like best case, like a lot of the big incumbents
would just be like ambivalent, like we were like yeah, I don't care
either way. But I also expected a lot of them to be hostile.
But I've honestly found the opposite, Like there's definitely another side to that,
and like this gets a little bit more into Mezzo, but I think if
you want to actually build like interceptions between crypto and and FIAT, that is
becoming increasingly harder and like that. You know, some of that is the
fallout from last cycle with FTX and Terra, and then some of it is
frankly fallout of just bank as a service in general. It's like what,
you know, Like what I think a lot of people in crypto probably don't
see is like during that period last year that a lot of us interpreted as
like choke point and like the government coming after crypto was actually the government coming
after a lot of fintech overall, because like you know, the low indust
rate environment created a bunch of like neo banks and like different type of crypto
apps that in some ways kind of mirror what we saw on the inside with
like Seafi, like Celsius, et cetera. It's just like that was happening
in tradi Fi two and a lot of those companies either like went out of
business, laws us or funds just generally did things that were were not above
board. And as a result of that, a lot of the underlying infrastructure
that has been built over the least couple of years to enable these kind of
like new financial products is coming into questions. It's just like, hey,
wait a second, you're you're trying to say that you're you're going to act
as kind of like a layer between banks and these these tech teams, and
that like you'll be able to, you know, uphold the same compliance and
risk insecurity standards. But like that's not proving to be true, and so
like what should we do about that now? And so that that to build
in the intersection of fintech in payments, it's definitely getting a lot harder.
But generally, I think from a consumer perspective, it feels like more and
more we're seeing institutional adoption. Yeah, I certainly. I think everybody thinks
of Jamie Diamond when they think about someone who's a critic and kind of hates
what's happening. But to your point, I've seen Visa, I've seen some
of these different companies start to embrace it. And it makes sense, right
because adapt or to it or die right disruptions here, So talk about MESO
and tell us about the history the services, why you decided to start this
company. Yeah, I think we've seen pretty consistently that every time there's a
massive like platform disruption, you know, let's say like the Internet and mobile
is the two most recent examples, it creates an opportunity for like one or
a few platforms to really win when it comes to payments, and so,
like I think you could argue that like PayPal and Lisa really want at the
internet, and then like with with mobile, you have Apple, Google,
Stripe, a few others that are really growing and dominated. But the way
we look at it on the inside is it's how do you figure out the
right abstraction of like the legacy payment system to this new paradigm, Like that's
really the job to do, and like whoever figures out that right abstraction,
like the way to make it flexible for this kind of like next generation into
platforms, like they are most likely the winner. And so when we looked
at the space, like when I when I was working at Salona Labs,
like one of the things we spent some time thinking through is like should we
build the consumer product? Should we build a walllet? Like the the idea
of like commerce or like you know, e commerce, like in person commerce
via crypto rails is super obvious, But the problem is it's like a chicken
and egg problem, Like to get a business to adopt a new payment method,
there needs to be consumers already using that and like to get consumers to
use it, there needs to be places for them to buy with it,
so you need to figure out how to crack that in some way. Generally,
I think it's gonna we're going to have a better strit at cracking the
consumer side, which led us to starting to explore this stuff and as we
dug in to being like, okay, well, what infrastructure exists if we
want the user to be able to, you know, do what they do
if they're using Venmo or cash app or coinbase where they can just connect a
card or a bank account and then like over the course of using that app,
they can just instantly move money in and out. How can we do
that too? And we were surprised that, like there just wasn't an answer.
Like the closest thing were the like on and off ramp providers, But
in many ways like that, they're building a product that feels like Web one
point zero, where like we're the payments worked pre strip in Braintree was like
you redirected the user to some page. They get to this checkout page,
the enter their credit cor information, they get redirected back to like where they
were, and they like go on with their day. There's a reason that
didn't stick around. It's just because it's it's a submar experience. It like
it it just adds a bunch of friction for not a good benefit. So
yeah, that I think that was like the the initial insight that led to
meso was, hey, if you you know, if you're building a wall
at a decentralized app, really any kind of crypto app, you need to
have the same level of kind of conducted with Fiat that web two companies have,
but you like you also need to do that in a way that's like
even more abstracted because it's the core challenge of like FIAT on an off rampion
or just moving money between crypto and fiat generally is it is classified as money
transmission. So like Stripe, Braintree, you know, all these companies have
solved payments, is you know generally what people think, but in reality they
solved e commerce. And so like that's why you'll see, you know,
there's some awesome experiences involving using like a credit card to buy an NFT.
Like one of the reasons those experiences are possible is because that is classified as
e commerce, not money transmission, and so like, when you're doing money
transmission, there's a bunch of work that has to go into compliance, risk,
et cetera. And asking teams to take that on when they are like
a small, scrappy crypto team just makes no sense. And so at a
lot of our vision is is like, how do we actually abstract this stuff
while still giving those devs the same level of control that they have they were
using something like a stripe. So let's do like a mock scenario here for
the folks who are listening, because this is very much behind the scenes,
right. And so let's say I'm an app developer. Let's say my app
I don't know allows you to mint NFTs or something like that, right,
and I can use messo to connect to different banks. So let's say JP
Morgan Chase, Bank of America, whatever it is, so users can fund
their wallet. Is that kind of just of it? Yeah, Like,
let me give you a more concrete example. So there's a team on Salana
called Movement that they've built this fantastic app that makes like buying and selling meme
coins basically as easy as robin Hood. And it's like it's a beautiful,
like progressive web app it's just like great US And what they're doing behind the
scenes is they're using you know, like an improved wallet infrastructure to kind of
build create walts for users that are still self custodial but have you know,
more traditional off factors like email or social log in, and then through meso
integrating with Meso, the user can also then link their bank via their debit
card and so like once they do that, you can just be using movement,
you know, see a mean plumbing you like instantly like load your wallet
with however much USCC you need and then just go buy that meaning plane and
it all just works seamlessly. Now you mentioned USDC, so is it is
the cash converted to the u SEC stable cooin. It's not like a fiat
too cryptodirectly, there's that conversions. This is another price where where we were
really kind of going a different direction from what we've seen with like on and
off French generally, is we really have no interest in being in exchange.
Like what we want to excel and what I already think we are the best
at is like getting funds on chain as fast and as cheaply as possible.
We would love eventually to be stable point only because in our mind, like
that is literally like the purest thing we're trying to do is just get funds
on chain, like it's going to be in fiat. So let's translated as
simply as we can. The reality is like we're just not there yet in
terms of like gas abstraction and other things. So our policy is we support
whatever token is used to pay for gas and a stable point like per network,
and then a lot of what we've built is designed to your point to
be in the background. So if you want to give users that experience of
you know, I want to go for my bank account to buy some very
specific token, you can easily achieve that it's a developer because you can prompt
the user to on ramp. And then one of the other properties about meso
that's pretty unique compared to others is we are incredibly fast. Like almost every
ramp or when you withdraw funds from an exchange, it's like a multi minute
process at best. Not much much slower are our process of on ramping.
We're adding like the most minimal amount of overhead over like however long it takes
for the blockchain to just process a transaction, and so like you know,
it went fast. L two's like Arbitram and optimism. Like Arbitram. We
had someone on ramp in six seconds recently, which means like they clicked by
and six seconds later the funds were confirmed in a block explorer in their wallet
and they can do things with and so like when we're that fast, like
just swak with the decks if you want a simple token, and like it's
it's better for everyone. Yeah, that's great. And speed is certainly a
big driver for adoption for consumers. No one wants slow stuff. They don't
want high fees, right it sure as crypto early crypto adopters may not care,
you know, with gas fees and so forth, but the average consumer
in the next billion pieceople, they want things that are fast, less friction
and so forth. You mentioned arbitrum and optimism are there, you know,
are you guys kind of agnostic? You know, what which block pritains do
you support and all that? Yeah, I think that generally, like right
now we support Ethereum, arbitrim, optimism, Polygon, and Solana, but
are generally we're building to be chain at goostic and what we're what we're working
on right now is a number of upbridges that will allow us to basically bridge
to any chain, which I think will be be great because I mean,
it's it's been really interesting to watch the debate over the last couple of months
between you know, like modular versus integrated and all that. But like,
no matter what you believe, there's going to be a lot more chains that
launch, and there's a lot of really exciting ecosystems that we're looking at,
like bear Chain, monad movement, Like there's just so much out there,
and we want to be we want to be set up where the moment a
chain like bearra goes live, we can be live day one. Like.
That's another problem that we've seen with new ecosystems is like on ramp and exchange,
like centralized exchange adoption lags significantly, which just like effectively like completely cuts
off your ability to even attempt to grow into kind of new users. So
tell us about the type of institutions you're working with, because obviously developers can
use this, I guess any type of app, wallet, service, exchanges.
Tell us a bit about that. Yeah, I think we've seen Our
thesis initially was there was going to be kind of like two big groups of
users like wallets and DAPs and like specifically within depths, we were looking at
like decentralized exchanges, perfe exchanges, et cetera. What as we've you know,
developed and started to work with a number of teams, we've kind of
refined our thinking, which is like really we think we like on an offerensis
most sense when like when you are a wallet. But what's been really interesting
is like what is a wallet has become started to get very like very diverse,
so like telegram bots are wallets, like more and more we're seeing you
know, like interesting apps like like perfet exchanges and others where there's like a
concept of been a wallet or account that's like unique to that app, and
so situations like that that's where like we shine Like we've been exploring a few
like we've been talking with a few different perpet changes about how they all have
you know, the concept of like a deposit account, like we can onorect
directly into that and don't even have to go through the user's wallet. So
it really can open up some really clean and beautiful ux when we have that
like direct connection with the user's wallet. So so yeah, right, now,
like I think wallets, and then the other thing we're seeing is,
you know, a booming set of like what we're just generally playing like crypto
apps, where like these are not exactly like the apps, these are like
apps that are powered by crypto. So like a great example of this,
who we're not working with right now, but what we really love them is
sling Sling dot Money. It's like a it's a fantastic global P two P
app and you go to their website and like you can't see anything about crypto
and that's because like they're doing everything in the background, and we're we're working
with the number of teams that are doing something similar and we're just a great
solution for it because it's like you don't want the user to understand, you
know, all the complexity of networks and blockchains and all this stuff, and
like we can abstract all that and give the user, you know that like
web two venmo cash app experience for sure. And I'm assuming because you're a
platform, you're available globally, like any any developer from any country maybe can
participate. Any developer from me in country absolutely where Yeah, we work with
teams from all over the world. On the user side, right now,
we only support us, which is like a you know, a big departure
from the way Crypto normally operates. Our thought process around that is we,
you know, we want to offer the best experience possible, like obviously for
the end user, but also for the developer and the apps building on us,
and we think the only way to do that is actually to take it
slow, going international and like, rather than rush to try to get everywhere
and dilute the experience, what's what's build a great experience and expand over time.
And then the other thing that that we we've found in research is,
you know, there's obviously a lack of on ramp infrastructure, especially in emerging
markets, but a lot of those markets, the issue is not that there
isn't on ramp, it's that users don't want to use like local institutions period.
And if if that is the persona of the user, frankly, nothing
we're going to be able to do is going to help them. So,
like, our our belief is like you should be thinking about on and off
rant from the perspective of established markets, which like the reality is like there's
a huge amount of user growth in emerging markets. But when we went talk
about like users that are actually doing high volume, those are more often than
not coming from established markets. So it's like that's where we shine. If
you're going after emerging markets, you really should be leaning into how can I
make it easier to do P to P based or OTC based on an off
ramping, because like that is the way those users want to work. And
I think the other thing too, in those emerging markets, many of them
want it seems to be a growing trend. They want US dollars or a
US stable stable coin. They don't necessarily want their own fiat currency. I'm
hearing that more and more. It's so that's why there's been more demand for
US back stable coins. Yeah, no, that we've definitely seen that absolutely.
Now, you guys did get a nine point five million dollars seed round.
Can you tell us about that and who participated? Yeah, so that
was led by Rivet and Slant Ventures. We announced that recently, but we
actually closed that round in uh like Lake Q one twenty two. And one
of the things that we we just didn't want to do is like we don't
want to, you know, make a bunch of noise publicly about what we're
doing until it's real. And so the big reason for waiting on that is
we wanted to talk about it when we had a product and we had something,
and you know, when we when we raised money, we were just
getting started, so we kept it pretty pretty quiet. But yeah, it
was great. I mean I think that like so like Rivid especially, we've
loved working with because almost like eighty to ninety percent of what we're building is
fintech, not crypto, and like one interesting thing that we've we've observed is
there's a ton of people that come from the finance world in crypto, but
there's a surprising lack of like payments and fintech experience. Like the reality is
like those worlds of like you know, people involved in like finance and headphones
and things like that like have very little to do with people that are involved
in you know, like PayPal, stripe, like et cetera. And so
Rivit is one of those unique investors who has like a very strong perspective on
both sides, Like they they have been deeply invested in fintech, like I
actually think probably before even Frutto, but at the same time they're one of
the you know, one of the you know, original investors in coinbase,
they've been investing in bitcoinsince twenty thirteen. Like they're they're they're deeply rooted in
the space. So it's like that that perfect blend. Yeah, for sure,
that's awesome. What do you guys have on your roadmap for twenty twenty
four? Yeah, I hinted on a few things, but like the big
the big one that is, uh, like, how do we get more
into like the journey of a crypto user. So, and what I mean
by that is like how do we position meso almost more as like a backup
option to your crypto balance. So like what I would much rather do is
have users be prompted to on our off ramp when they're like making a deck
swap or depositing into a protocol or buying an NFT and so that to do
that, well, we need to follow through on the work. We're doing
it on speed, where like the active on ramping is just a few seconds,
so it doesn't add any like latency or confusion to the users experience,
and they from their perspective then they're just like, hey, I just you
know, I didn't have to think about the fact that I didn't have balance
in my crypto while I'm just using apps. So I think that that's a
big focus for us. And then I think the other other big one is
is bridging and like kind of crosschain compatibility, Like we're we're spending a lot
of time on that right now and hope to see that kind of probably later
this quarter early next quarter. And then the final one is international. So
like I said, like we're taking a conservative approach to it, but we
still are looking to expand almost certainly into like Europe and parts of Asia later
this quarter into Q three. That's exciting. I want to get your perspective
on the future of payments as relates to stable coins. We kind of touched
on it earlier as we were talking about Venmo and PayPal, but I'm curious
as to your thoughts. Let's say timeline horizon next five to eight years or
so, do you see it mainly being stable coins, Because obviously the ethos
of bitcoin and why started, you know, was to be an alternative currency.
It's kind of merged more into a or more and more into a store
of value. There are folks building like a layer two lightning network to help
improve transactions, but I still see people going more to USDC or tether and
p y USD and then here Ripple's going to launch their own stable coin.
So there's gonna be a lot of players in the stable coin market, and
it seems like people want that US back stable coin. Is that, you
know, do you see it that way or do you see other payment options
in the future. I'd say almost certainly that it's how it will play out,
Like I think there is it. There's definitely something interesting in this idea
of like flat coins, but like to me, that's just like a very
like almost an implementation detail. I think like more often than not, users
are going to want to like transact and like use in their daily life something
that is not volatile, and like right now that's the US dollar. And
I also just think that the best way to like transition humanity to like a
new paradigm is like giving them some way to kind of like think about it
from their old perspective and like the you know, a silly example of this
is like the original design of the iPhone, you know, used very skewomorphic
design patterns where you know, it feels like you're literally like turning the page
in a book and stuff like that, and like now we don't have any
of that, But I think that was like a masterful strategy by Apple because
it's like people didn't really get touch screens yet and so like this was a
great way to kind of introduce them to it. And so where this goes,
you know, over a very long time horison, we'll see. But
the idea of starting where people are today, which is like they understand us
dollars, it's just like just a great way to minimize confusion. It's like,
you know, there's so much of like of knowledge and context and like
elements of this new system that we're building that you have to kind of wrap
your head around as a user. It would be great if we can kind
of minimize that to being like you don't need to worry about these like different
forms of money or tokens or things like that. Just start with the ideas
of like self custody blockchains, like like digital assets, period and not let
users kind of graduate into that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that makes
sense. And you know, as you're saying that, I'm thinking of there's
a lot of merchants and businesses that accept bitcoin and different all points you know,
ethereum or whatever it may be. But maybe the answer is an instant
conversion to a US back stable coin, whether it be USDC, and then,
like you're saying, users are more comfortable with that, they may hold
some bitcoin, but to transact fast and to not have to I don't know,
worry about all types of conversions and what it may be with ethereum,
bitcoin disasset. It all just goes to us DC and then it's just easy.
Oh here especially you know, it's when we think about this from the
long term perspective, I think a lot of us are hoping that like assets
like the soul BTC like stabilize the point where you maybe could envision it as
commerce. But like, regardless, like that is far far away. And
like today, if you were business that is accepting a payment in a volatile
asset, it's a ton of work because it's like what are you My favorite
problem with this is like how do you handle refunds? So it's like I
buy, I buy a thousand dollars laptop at bitcoin, and then four weeks
later I return it, do I get back bitcoin? And it's like,
was that business then forced to hold bitcoin? This whole time and take that
exposure on their balance sheet, like or are they paying you know, high
fees to hedge against it. It's like you just created Like I believe that
crypto has the opportunity to actually simplify a ton for businesses, Like that's why
they shouldn't they should be accepting a payment in crypto, But forcing them to
then take on a bunch of additional complexity to do it kind of defeats the
purpose. So that's why I definitely agree that, Like I think, at
least for right now, stable coins are by far the most obvious solution.
Like I know Charas who's the head of payments for for Slana, Like he
that was exactly his insight, which was my too, is like when I
saw stable ons, like oh yeah, obviously, like this is how we
do it, Like if we want to get adoption, like this is this
is the like tip of the spear in the beach, edd is to focus
on this. And like, without fail, every conversation we had with you
know, big businesses and retailers, once they like rocked stable climbs, they're
like, oh, okay, that's awesome. That makes so much more sense
now, like we get it and it helps a lot that you have companies
like Circle US company vary by the books where they're like okay, cool,
Like I can just open a Circle account and I know where my money is
and I know how this all works. Like it's great. Yeah, and
especially like they're doing a great job of having interoperability. They're putting u SEC
on many chains, so that's just going to help boost adoption and just cast
a wider net. So yeah, I think that that's the way and hopefully
you know these different merchant services and so birth can do that where instant cotaneous
conversion to USDC and then it makes it easy for everybody to transact and to
account and to keep track of everything. Absolutely. Now there was a question
and it escaped me. I was thinking about it earlier, but it'll come
back to me anyway. What are your thoughts on the bitcoin ETFs and how
the performance as being in Hong Kong launched there a big one and etherorems bot
ETFs this week, and you know, what do you think about the future
outlook of at least for this cycle. I mean, I think it is
it is clear like validation, like institutional acceptance of the asset class and I
think that's that's huge, Like in I think it's one of the part things.
I think there's a lot of stuff that like once you're on the inside
of crypt you forget about because you're just like in it so deep every day.
But one like really core assumption is like our blockchain is legitimate at all,
Like does it's like this idea of like decentralized money, Like does that
even make sense? And like that in many ways is like the first hurdle
that users have to get over. And like when you see black rock,
you know, big institutions and now Strike then o k Pal, etcetera,
all saying oh, yes, this is super legitimate and we're leaning in,
like you get over that urdle. So I think from that perspective, it's
great in terms of like what it's going to do, you know, to
the market, to the prices all that that I spend just less time on.
Like I mean, I think it's it is, it's it's it's pretty
clearly done well for us, and I hope it continues. But generally,
like we're still I think we're all looking for what's going to take us out
of this like speculative period and into something more concretely valuable like and and and
that's where like you know, things like stable points, empowering developers building new
apps, and like just accelerating the kind of experimentation like those are the things
I get most excited about for sure. And on that note, you know,
we're still waiting for the United States to pass clear crypto legislation balance regulations.
Of course, we don't want anything draconian. We want to protect consumers
when we want to allow innovation to flourish. But there's a lot of regulatory
battles happening with the SEC and much more. What are your thoughts on that
and do you think we might see Congress act by twenty twenty five. I've
I've like I can't say what what's going to happen, like I wish I
could, but it just feels like so much of it that it is up
in the air until we see what happens with the election. But the in
terms of what I'm hoping for is like I would love to see the SEC
stop just like attacking crypto outright as an industry like it. It just one
feels like we're just throwing the baby out of the backwater, Like I just
don't. I just genuinely don't get it. Like, we had a smaller
group of US with rivet at the opportunity to spend some time with one of
the Federal Reserve governors who chairs the Payment Committee, and I was like blown
away. We spent two hours with him, and it's like he deeply understands
the value and the importance of crypto blockchain stable coins, both to just like
the world and people, but also to the US and the government and monetary
policy. And so to me, like, actually, the US has this
huge opportunity to like re cement itself as the like the reserve currency for the
world for the next generation, and like instead they're fighting it, which is
is like very bizarre to me. And then the other thing I just also
worry about is the you know, the Internet grew up in a period where
I think people still were not fully sold on this idea that like people's digital
life was going to matter like this. It still was like a toy,
and like who knows, Now everyone gets how important digital is, and we're
seeing like an increasing amount of regulation just across the board, Like AI is
the best example of this of like a blunch of regulation really quickly, and
like I don't I can't speculate on what's going on with AI, it's way
outside my area of expertise. But generally I worry about like regulation just slowing
down innovation, Like tech is just too flexible, where like it becomes this
really dangerous thing where you regulate it and all you do is you cement the
big players because they know how to navigate and get around it, and like
you leave the small startups basically just cut out of the market. So I
worry a lot about that, And then I think the other thing I also
worry about this is like tangentially related to crypto is just financial crime and consumer
protection laws, Like I think the spirit of the CFPB and like the laws
and regulations around that are incredibly important. Like there's it's it's tragic the stuff
that companies were doing pre the CFPB, CFPB being the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau,
but trying to take trying to create like general regulation that applies to like
every financial product is effectively impossible at this point. And so like recently over
the last five years, we saw this with prepaid cards, so like you
know, you might your audience went not spend a lot of time thinking about
that. But prepaid cards are how a lot of Americans who don't have a
lot of money access the financial system, and there they generally are like almost
predatory with like fees and all that. So it's like a great problem for
the government to crack down on. But the fall out of that was classifying
basically every digital wallet as a prepaid card. And it was like it pushed
PayPal, venot cash advents vision work, like we have to do a bunch
of unnatural things that we know don't actually protect our users. It just makes
their life harder, and like why are we doing this? Why are you
classifying this way? And so it was great to see I forget exactly when
it was the last couple of weeks PayPal actually did win a case against the
CFPB to be like you can't, you should not classify this way, and
so like that's awesome, but like that's PayPal one of like the heavyweights pushing
for that. When that comes to Crypto, it's like, frankly, Crypto
has bigger problems with the SEC. They can't fight this battle on multiple fronts.
So that's something I worry a lot about. And then financial crime,
I mean I think I think most of us in crypto have heard about just
and heard our just very skeptical and worried about KYC, you know, privacy
and all that, and that's something we think a lot about it, Mezzo.
I mean, it's we're in this really top position where if we want
to participate, we need to do things like KYIC data collection, et cetera.
And so what we're trying to do is it's like, how do we
do it in a way that's clear and transparent and right by the user so
that we can all participate, but then push the industry and regulators in a
direction that I think is better because it's like the thing I you know,
there're a certain politician likes to say that like, you know, crypto doesn't
like to follow the rules, And in my mind, like the beauty of
crypto is actually a lot of the rules become irrelevant. It's not that we
don't want to follow them, it's like we shouldn't have to follow them,
and that's actually better for everyone. It's like the like KYC in many ways
is what created like identity theft, Like if you didn't have those regulations,
like we wouldn't have this huge problem that is actually destroying people's lives on a
big scale. And I'm not going to speculate on like what's the like ROI
is KYC really worth it? But I think there is a real argument to
make that it's just not like it doesn't protect us enough and it actually hurts
average people a lot more than it helps them. Great insights, man,
I appreciate that. So I got some wrap up questions here for you.
First, if you could create your own metaverse of what would the theme be?
Oh honestly, I like one of my favorite things Metallica was recently put
out is like, you know, keep the theory in cyber and it's like
to like, that's a half part person. My answer like cyberpunk, like
that, you know, like kind of bleeding after the Internet is what I
love, like a DJing culture all that. It's just like it's just it's
such a fun part about crypto and I'd definitely lean into that for sure.
Rapid fire questions. First, is out favorite food? This is boring,
but pizza. I love pizza. Favorite musician or bad M. I doubt
anyone will know this, but I I love like lo fi electronics, So
zero seven nice favorite movie m I have a bunch of young kids, so
I watch a lot of kid movies. So basically like any studio ghibli movie
is like my favorite because it's something that like I can actually enjoy and they
can enjoy. So out of that probably I'll say and favorite book, Oh
I have. There's a bunch of books I really like. One that I
was actually talking about recently with some people is The Doom, like the video
game biography. It's like phenomenal, like such an interesting book to get the
insight into, like Carmac can help him and his super thinking about things at
the time. Oh, I have to check that out because I I'll send
you the link. I want to figure out exactly what the name of the
book is because I've forgotten. Yeah, that sounds fascinating actually, And you
know, when you're not working at messou, what are you doing for fun?
Spending a lot of time my kids. I have three young kids that
a little bit of photography and some other stuff on the side. But yeah,
between kids and an early stage startup, do not have a lot more
time beyond that. Ben pleasure chatting with you. I love with you guys
for doing a messo and I love to have you back on as things progressed,
but thank you so much for joining me. Yeah, thanks for the
time. It's great to be here.