Bankless - The Most Underrated Chain: Celo’s Surprising Traction Around the World | Marek Olszewski

Episode Date: January 29, 2026

Celo is quietly powering real-world payments at global scale. In this episode, David and Ryan sit down with Marek Olszewski, CEO of cLabs, to unpack how Celo became a fast, low-cost payments layer used for remittances, savings, onchain FX, and identity across emerging markets. They explore why Celo stayed focused on peer-to-peer payments while others chased trends, how Opera’s MiniPay onboarded hundreds of thousands of daily users, and why stablecoins are reshaping global finance from the ground up. The conversation spans onchain FX, proof of personhood with Self.xyz, Ethereum’s L2 future, and why fast, cheap payments, not hype, may be crypto’s real unlock. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- 🔮POLYMARKET | #1 PREDICTION MARKET https://bankless.cc/polymarket-podcast ⚡ EUPHORIA | REAL-TIME ONE-TAP TRADING https://bankless.cc/euphoria 🏅BITGET TRADFI | TRADE GOLD WITH USDT https://bankless.cc/bitget 👑BANKLESS PREMIUM | AD-FREE & BONUS EPISODES https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://bankless.cc/TDR-pro 💰ICO WATCH | UPCOMING PUBLIC TOKEN SALES https://bankless.cc/ico-watch --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Celo’s Origin Story and Design Philosophy 5:18 The Long Bet on P2P Payments 17:19 700,000 Daily Users: The Data Behind the Narrative 22:11 MiniPay: Global Venmo Built on Celo 30:28 Solving the Last-Mile Banking Problem 37:36 Celo x Opera partnership 40:37 Stablecoins, FX, and the Rise of Onchain Forex 46:53 Perpetuals for FX: UpDown.xyz 49:37 Open Finance vs. Governments and the Battle for the Payments Stack 59:13 Why Celo Chose Ethereum L2 Over an L1 Path 1:06:02 Self.xyz and Proof of Personhood 1:14:06 Putting It All Together: Celo’s Endgame --- RESOURCES Marek Olszewski https://x.com/marek_ Celo https://celo.org/ --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Bankless Nation, we are here with Merrick Olshefs, the CEO of C-Labs. That's the organization behind SELO. Merrick, welcome to the show. Hello, thanks for having me. Merrick, I think there's just a lack of education about SELO in the ecosystem, about what SELO is, how it's positioned. I think people probably know it as that chain that transitioned into Ethereum Layer 2, not terribly long ago, always been kind of proximate to the Ethereum ecosystem,

at least in spirit, now formerly part of the Ethereum superstructure. So welcome. That's not really the subject that I want to kind of cover on today's show. I kind of wanted to cover like how actually Selo is being adopted and used. Because I think it's a little bit of an undertold story. Before we get into that, maybe you can kind of just educate us on Sello's origins and some of the thoughts behind it. It's been around for a long time. Get us up to speed with where Sello came from and what it is today. Yeah, absolutely. So Sello's been around for eight years. We've been working on it, I guess, for eight years now. launched six years ago now. And we are very laser focused on the PDP payment use case. That was really the origin story. We started by looking to build a mobile wallet on top of Ethereum. That was back in the days of CryptoKitties, if you remember. And it was very obvious back then that we couldn't build something that was normie friendly and could scale to billions of people on Ethereum back And so that's ultimately what took us down the path of building our own L1.

But because we started in Ethereum, of course, we picked the EVM and we focused heavily on making it as EVM compatible as possible, but with some bonus features to make it work better for that PDP use case. And so that's the origin story. We started building it with the mobile wallet at the same time, almost taking an Apple-like approach. So Apple builds a software and hardware at the same time. So we built the kind of flagship application and the platform at the same time,

and that made us build certain things that I think are different than other L1s and L2s. We definitely took different design choices. You can pay for gas with stable coins on cello natively without a kind of traction. This is one example of one of those things that came out of that way of working. We wanted to just be really easy for Normies to be able to transact right from the get-go. assume if someone sends them a stable coin, they need to go and buy something else to be able to continue transacting. And then we also realize that address-based identifiers are just too complicated for most normies. And so that took us down the path of developing a protocol that

allowed you to use phone numbers as your identifier. And that's something that now is widely adopted throughout the cellar ecosystem. And it just makes it just so much easier for people. for Normies, you know, they can effectively bootstrap what I like to call is the biggest social network in the world, which is the amalgamation of everyone's contact lists on, on their phones in their pocket, bigger even than Facebook social graph. And so features like this ultimately made cello or make it, you know, to this day, you know, almost this kind of consumer-friendly part of Ethereum, right? So I think a lot of people talk about how a lot of people are in consumer apps in Solana, because if it's kind of low costs and kind of, you know, maybe even

mobile focus, you can think of Salo now as really kind of becoming the Ethereum kind of alternative to that. And, you know, we're actually cheaper even than Solana when it comes to the transaction fees. And so that's one example of how, you know, we can compete there. But the other way that we've been able to compete is primarily by the realization of that, that P2P payments focus through this partnership of Opera. That's come about in the last few years. Opera of the company that you may be familiar with, primarily known for browsers, they launched Minipay, which is this just amazing, super easy to use at P2P payments wallet

now on cello, which leverages all of those features that I just talked about. And it just makes it super easy for anyone to effectively have a Venlo-like experience, regardless of where they live. They don't have to be in the U.S. They can be anywhere in the world. And so that's the kind of the journey along the way we transitioned to become an L2 and I'm happy to chat more about that as well. But, you know, I think the biggest TLDR is that we've just been grinding on this use case for eight years now. And it's finally, finally kind of working. Finally taking off. We're really just excited about it. Yeah. I think like if you go into crypto Twitter and you kind of, you know, pay attention to the zeitgeist of the moment. It's like, you know,

Purp Dex's, meme coin launch pads, all of this very exciting stuff that produce, you know, billion-dollar-sized venture outcomes for like brief moments of time and then the fad kind of goes away. You know, and I'm never going to fault anyone, any founder forever pivoting,

trying to find product market fit, you know, like that I think there's like a, I think crypto Twitter especially is very harsh to founders that pivoting when pivoting is actually just a part of the regular startup experience. Something about Sello is that Sello seemed to like, identify P2P, P2P payments, and kind of like also developing economies and has stayed just locked in on that focus since the get-go.

And like I think when I'm going to ask you, not right now, but I'm going to ask you in a second to like kind of share some usage metrics. And I think maybe people who are like kind of following the crypto Twitter zeitgeist of what it means to be in crypto will might be surprised about like what actually Selo is doing over in the world of P2P payments and developing economies. economies, but talk to me a little bit about the whole P-to-P strategy. You identified it early, locked in on it, and has been laser-focused on it ever since. Put me in your shoes, maybe all the way back in 2013 when Selo got started, or maybe that's

2018, yeah. 2018, excuse me. Yeah, okay, just off by five years. Put me in your, pre-ETHERAM. Pre-EVM, yeah. Pre-EVM, yeah. So put me back into your shoes in like 2018 and what has been like just to be laser focus on this part of the crypto economy.

Yeah. And you know what? Actually, you know, 2013 is an interesting year. It's a year that, you know, I sold my first startup. And literally a week later, I was at a music festival where I bumped it to Brian Armstrong who sent me. I knew there was something there. I knew there was something in 2013.

It's a podcast instinct. David could feel it as a host. That's why he went to 2030. teen. It tells the Brian Armstrong story. Wait, what music festival were you at? What kind of music does Brian like? There's outside lens.

It's kind of like outside of San Francisco, right? That's San Francisco has. Yeah. And yeah, we were both just invited by, actually, by SVB, the Cabana. And this was back when SVB, I guess, banked crypto exchanges, super early on. And, yeah, he was very excited. obviously by Coinbase and sent me some Bitcoin, which I've kept to this day.

And, you know, the experience is really lovely. And in a way, you can think of that as being actually inspiration for what we wanted to do, but we just wanted to do it in a trustless, decentralized way. Wait, but you got, you got pilled into crypto by Brian Armstrong. That's kind of cool. Had a music festival? Yeah, that's kind of cool. That's a good story.

That's a good way to come in this face. If only I went straight into crypto right then and said, you know, we had just, sold our first company. I had to stay at the acquiring company for a while. It took a while before I was ready to do my next thing. But in hindsight, maybe we should have done it right there and then. But... Okay, so yeah, Ethereum gets it created, the EVM gets created, and then you leave the company that put golden handcuffs on you for a while, and then you're like, okay, let me apply the EVM to consume use cases. Was that kind of the flow? Exactly. I mean, I think back then, it's funny that, you know, suddenly...

payments is kind of in vogue again. I mean, back then, everyone was talking about, you know, how crypto can advance financial inclusion, how, you know, it's just going to change the world for everyone who lives in a place where, you know, they have inflation or they have an unstable government. And that was really what excited a lot of people. And it certainly excited us. and the way we thought that we could have a big mark on the whole world is by creating global Benno. I think, you know, there was a time before you could send a text message to anyone in the world for basically free.

And that, if you think about it, it wasn't that long ago, right? It's really only when WhatsApp kind of created massive network effects that suddenly, you know, you could pretty much reliably send like a text message for. for free globally to anyone in the world. And that moment just happened, you know, just really suddenly. And the same thing is going to happen with payments. You will very soon, I'm pretty certain of it, be able to send value, stable value to anyone in the world and have that value be immediately useful for the recipient in a way that works for pretty much everyone, even normies. And, you know, obviously we're there for people who are crypto-savvy, but to get to,

there for everyone in the world. We're still working towards it. This is ultimately the mission and the vision behind what we started eight years ago and we're still relentlessly working towards that. Euphoria brings one tap trading to the palm of your hand. Built on MegaEath, Euphoria takes

real-time price charts and projects it over a grid of squares. You tap the squares that you think the price will enter in just five to 30 seconds in the future. If the price goes into that quadrant, you can pocket anywhere between 2 and 100x your trade. No other application helps you trade faster and with more leverage on market driving events,

like FOMC meetings, presidential speeches, or global macro events. Thanks to MegaEth's real-time blockchain, Euphoria is the way to get real-time price interactions with the market. On Euphoria, you'll be able to compete with friends using Euphoria's real-time social trading experience, allowing you to go head-to-head with your friends. A great party trick if you project the app on a TV. It'll be like the Mario Party of derivatives.

To trade on Euphoria, people can deposit stable coins from any chain or do direct fiat transfers, and everything gets converted into MegaEath's native stable coin, USDM, in the background. Sign up for the Euphoria waitlist at euphoria.finance and follow them on X at Euphoria underscore FI. What if you could trade gold, 4X, and global markets with the same tools and speed that you use for crypto. That's exactly what BitGet TradFi unlocks. After strong beta demand, including over $100 million in single-day gold trading volume, BitGet Tradify is now live for all users. Inside of your existing BitGet account, you can trade $79. instruments across 4x, precious metals, indices, and commodities all settled directly in

USDT, no platform switching and no fiat conversions. This is BitGET's universal exchange vision in action. Crypto and traditional finance side by side. You get deep liquidity, low slippage, and leverage up to 500x, letting you apply crypto strategies to macro markets. New to tradify? Start with gold. The gold USD pair is liquid, macro driven, and a familiar natural bridge between crypto and traditional markets. Try trading gold on BitGET now at bitGET.com. Click the link in the show notes. For more information, this is not financial advice. It's so fascinating because back in 2013, in fact, I think this is part of like the Coinbase founding vision.

It was more about the payments use case. You even look at the first lines of, what is it, a peer-to-peer payment network? Isn't this in the, you know, Satoshi White Paper? It was all about payments. It was like, when are we going to get to the day where you can buy your cup of coffee with Bitcoin at your local Starbucks? Right. It was always the dream. maybe you said payments is very much in vogue and we'll talk about that.

I'm wondering from your perspective, being the space for so long observing it and actually working on this project and payments project in crypto for eight years, why now? Because to some people, this will look like an overnight success. Maybe they'll go and they'll be like, oh, the genius act did this or something like that. From my perspective, it feels like a tech tree that crypto has been building out. I was getting into my mind, the tech trees and like civilization, you ever play that game where you sort of, you know, your civilization discovers mathematics and then they can branch off to physics and then they can get, you know, nukes or something like that. Well, it's like crypto had to have cheap block space, I think, because that was really expensive the whole time on Bitcoin on Ethereum. And then also had to have some sort of a payment type of asset. Because for all that Bitcoin, have talked about Bitcoin for Starbucks, there's a tradeoff there between like using your Bitcoin at Starbucks and it being a store of value asset that you don't actually want to spend it.

And so staple coins were the other unlock. I see Cheapbox, lock space, and stablecoins as the tech tree reason that crypto is now like really focused on the payments use case and everything's kind of fallen out from that. What's your take? Yeah. So I think, you know, back in 2018, I think we were looking at. that's exactly the same way. We're like, what do we need?

We need scalability. We need ease of use. We need stable coins. Obviously, stable coins. You can't transact with a volatile asset, especially not a store of value. Like, you want to borrow against a store value and transact with that. You don't want to spend your, you know, your precious eth or Bitcoin. And so we built Stella with all of these things in mind.

We made it. It was probably the first EVM proof of stick network with really high scalability from They won. We even built our own stable coin protocol into the platform, which we have now since spun out through a pretty cool Dow spin-out, which I don't know if it's the first of its kind, but certainly we were pretty stoked to kind of pull that off. And I think actually that stable coin doing it ourselves in hindsight was maybe a mistake because we weren't credibly neutral and it took longer, we weren't credibly neutral in the stable coin front and it took longer

for folks like USCC and USCT to come to cello. Since that's been out, USCC and USCT have come to cello, we've become fully credibly neutral when it comes to stable coins. There's now tons of people deploying stable coins on cello. And I think that probably, you know, in hindsight, maybe slow this down a little bit. But the thing that ultimately, I think, is needed

Beyond those things is bootstrapping network effects. It's very difficult to get everyone in the world to agree on what they want to use to transact. You need to start in smaller markets, grow those, get really dense network effects, and then use those to pull more and more people in. And, you know, this is what certainly Venmo did with kind of this focus on college markets that they started with. And this is what MiniPay is doing with a focus on a very key set of emerging markets where really the utility of having something like this just is 10x better than what they have available. Nobody needs global Venmo in the U.S. right now because they have Venmo. And so you need to start somewhere where people don't have something as good as Venmo.

And so that's been a big focus and it's just taking a while to really bootstrap those network effects. Can we get a cross-section of the usage of Sello? I want to learn about the qualitative and the quantitative usage of SELO. So how many people are using the chain, whatever your metric preferred metric is,

monthly active users, daily active users, whatever. And then what's just the typical cross-section of what that usage actually is? There are on the order of 700K daily active users. Is that wallets? Daily active addresses, yes. Okay. However, because Minipay uses this phone number base identifier system that requires you

to verify your phone number, I think we have a lot of conviction that those are. I think the majority of those users are likely many pay users, and we know that those users tend not to Cibble because you need to have a Google account and that phone number to onboard. And so I think there's a lot of, it's a lot of certainly a lot harder to Cibble than if you just use addresses.

Wait, this will actually shock people. So you think you have around 700,000 daily active users on cellar. If you go to grow the pie and you look at active addresses across the Ethereum ecosystem, you'll see that we are the number one, L2. We overtook base late last year. We are ahead of Polygon even.

And most of the time we're also ahead of Ethereum Mainnet as well. In terms of active users. Exactly. Okay, this is on Grow the Pie. Where would I find this? On Chains? Chains, let's see. Since you go to

Grow the Pie fundamentals, maybe. Okay, okay. I see it. Wow, okay. And then what's the typical profile of what people are doing? Is it all stable coin payments? Yeah, so I'd say there's three big use cases now on cello.

So there's P2P payments driven primarily by MiniPay. There's on-chain effects driven primarily by mento-stable coins. And increasingly, there's decentralized identity through self-protacle, self-tux-y-Z. So these are the big ones. I think when it comes to users, P2P payments are certainly driving the most users. When it comes to volume, I think P2P payments and on-chain FX is driving a lot of volume.

But when it comes to new and exciting ZK use cases, self is really leading away. So this is kind of my interest in Selo in the first place, because we have a splattering of chains around that have different kind of brands with them. Tron is the Tether payments chain. We have a newer startup called Codex doing the 4X, trying to penetrate into the 4X markets.

We have WorldCoin doing the proof of personhood, a utility value. What else do we got? There's other things like this. Sellos got a toe in all of those things, but it doesn't really have the brand of any of those things. Like payments, for example, why do you think Tron has the payments brand instead of SELO?

I don't know how your metrics stack up to Tron. I know Tron's metrics are like, you know, impressive not to say Tron doesn't, hasn't deserved it, but like to what degree do you think like, for example, Tron has the payments chain brand and not Selo? Yeah, so actually if you go to Tether's stats page, you actually can see that when it comes to weekly active users, Sello is actually ahead of Tron now. We peaked at 3.3 million weekly active addresses that are transacting in USDT. So certainly, I mean, Sello is like. Ethereum's answer to Tron, 100%.

You know, I think Tron certainly had an earlier start and has done well, but, you know, I think we're coming right, you know, we're nipping at their heels and in some metrics, even overtaking them. And so, yeah, we're really, really excited about a lot of these stats, like now finally pushing us into the lead. It's been a pretty long and a hudduous effort to, to competing and strong because they do have a lot of mindshare

and they are quite globally recognized. Merrick, can we get into the qualitative for a moment? So some really impressive metrics, particularly on the daily actives, right? So this implies that some of the type of user, obviously Tron is by far a leader among sort of stable coin payment chains in terms of total value locked, right?

There's so much USDT on top of Tron. but you just said when it comes to daily actives, these would be like smaller payments, weekly actives, okay, that cello is actually taken a lead. So this sort of implies that you're not dealing with whales so much as you're dealing with

ordinary people and ordinary wallets. Can you take us through more the qualitative? Tell us a story about a user of cello. What are they doing and how are they using it? Where do they live maybe?

what's their daily active usage of SELO actually like? Right now, a lot of those users are MiniPay. And MiniPay is historically focused on the African continent, large part because they have onboarded a lot of users who are using Opera Mini, which is their high-speed light browser targeting emerging markets. I think they have something like 1 billion installs, 100 million monthly active users of Opera Mini, and they embedded Minipay into that browser.

It's also available standalone, but I think to get a lot of those users onboarded, they embedded into the browser. And so now they're focusing primarily on other emerging markets, Latam and Asia, but initially there was a lot of focus on Africa. And so one really, I think, compelling story that I've heard of a mini-paid user is this yoga instructor in Malawi. So this yoga instructor in Malawi, when COVID hit, he had to close down his yoga studio and he took his business online. And I think just because the time zones lined up, he somehow started getting customers in Europe. And he ended up getting, I think towards the end, like the majority of it. customers in, I think, something like Norway in markets around Scandinavia. And he, for the longest

time, was using Moneygram to have these people pay for, you know, their lessons. And then he came across mini-pay and realized that it was even with the users having to on-ramp and pay on-ramping fees in Europe, and even with him having to pay off-ramping fees in Malawi, it was still I think 40% cheaper than money grab. Since then, MiniPay has also removed these on and off ramping piece, so it's even more advantageous. And so

this was a big unlock for this person. He got to keep more of the money that he was earning. And the other thing that he was very happy about was he could keep it in dollars when he received it and only needed to convert it to local currency when he wanted to spend it. And so he was actually able

to hedge currency risk and inflation and all of that. Basically, without any additional effort. So that's one interesting use case, is people who, you know, the workforce is becoming increasingly global, but it's still hard to pay people globally. Like if you want to, you know, hire, say,

I don't know, a software engineer in Nigeria, it's being quite difficult without crypto to pay these folks. Software engineers, you know, I think they can be relatively crypto-savvy, but if you want to hire, I don't know, some sort of other freelancer that maybe is more of a normie type person, then Mipay is increasingly becoming a really great way for these people to earn money overseas.

And Mipay launched something pretty cool recently. They added the ability for anyone in the world to create either US dollar or European bank account that's tied to their self-custodial wallet. And so they don't even need to explain to their potential employees. that they're using crypto, as long as they can receive a bank transfer, or as long as the employer or a client can send money to one of these bank accounts, either in Europe or the US, then suddenly anyone in the world can start getting paid regardless of where they live, regardless of how difficult it's been historically to send money to those places. And so we're just seeing a lot of

examples of that. So there's, you know, I think four different use cases. We touched upon the freelancer use case. There's obviously remittance use case. You're sending money to family members. You can do that with MiniPay really easily. There's a saving use case. You just want to hedge inflation and local currency risk. And so you want to have some dollars and earn some yield on those dollars.

And then finally, there's this new use case that many pay just launched called Pay as a local. And that is another really interesting and exciting one. And to give you another kind of story, there's this community member, Nico, in the solar ecosystem, who was at Eat Safari recently. And he was using a Tootok Toe to get around, as one does in that area. And he actually had a bit of an accident, so the Tock Tock flipped over while he was in it. Luckily, he was fine, but all of his belongings went flying everywhere. and in the end he actually lost his wallet.

And he was... Sorry, his physical wallet or his crypto wallet. No, no, his physical wallet. Sorry. Yeah, it's a relevant question on this podcast. Absolutely. And I mean, you can imagine you're traveling, you're in a country that you, you know,

maybe you haven't visited before and you lose your physical wallet. Normally, you know, that's like a pretty big emergency. You need to, I don't know, find ways to get a new credit card, maybe even like you change your plans. He instead proceeded to do every transaction in Kenya and then later Nigeria because he didn't cut his trip short. He actually flew to Nigeria and continued.

He did everything with Mnipay. The Mipay now lets you pay with Mepesa, and he went in Kenya. In Nigeria, you can pay using the local rails there in Argentina. for DepKinect, they launched Mercado Pago support. You can pay anywhere Mercado Pago is supported in Brazil. You can pay with picks, you know, et cetera. And so, you know, this is kind of probably a more useful use case for maybe some folks in your audience, you know,

who might travel to crypto conferences and might find themselves in situations where, you know, credit cards might not be accepted. Increasingly, I think MiniPay will have folks like that covered. But I think the primary use cases still continue to be kind of the freelancer, the remittance use cases, and the savings use cases. And for those, maybe your listeners, you know, have friends and family who might be in those boats. And if so, you know, I'd highly recommend just directing, you know, those friends with downy members to minipaid.com. Because it's just, it just does a wonderful job with these use cases. Yeah.

Their Mercado-Pago example just rings true for me. and probably for many listeners who just went down to DevConnect in Buenos Aires in Argentina. Mercado Pago is just kind of like the last mile payments provider across Argentina. It's like our stripe. It's like our stripe. If you go and find out a little square, a little tap to pay thing inside of any merchant in America, they have the Mercado Pago down there. And like I, prior to Malay getting elected, it was impossible.

It wasn't impossible to use credit cards, but you would just wouldn't do that because they would do a 40 to, 70% markup because it would run through the banking commercial banking layer of Argentina, which would be very heavily managed by the government, which would just give you a terrible exchange rate because they're using the credit card networks. You have the intermediary commercial banking layers who have this like control from the government to give you a pretty terrible exchange rate, which is like a source of revenue for both the banks and also the government. that exchange rate has gone down since Malay got into office. So it went from like 40% exchange to like 5 to 6%.

So, you know, it's not anything we would ever tolerate in America, but still people just kind of tolerate it now is so much more low using their credit cards in Argentina. But that's because, like, I didn't have mini pay on my phone. I wish I'd known. But had I had stable coins, that fee would have been zero. And it would have been a P to P payment between me and the merchant. and stable coins are getting adopted very heavily in Argentina

because merchants found out that if they don't do, if they take stable coins instead of credit cards, they get instant settlement, which means they get access to that capital immediately as opposed to like a biweekly settlement period of the credit card networks, which then are accruing flow as part of their business model, but instead of giving it to the businesses, they're accruing the yield on the float that they have.

And then the businesses don't actually see that money for like one to two weeks later. And so this is why stable coins in Argentina are being adopted so heavily is because they get that access to that capital immediately upon the actual transaction going through. And then they can actually just use that to invest in their business. And to me, it's like a very bankless-aligned ethos. It's like, you know, merchant and consumer. Consumer pays merchant directly with stable coins. And you cut out the commercial banks.

You cut out the government, which is great. and it's just a more efficient use of capital. And I want to connect this back to MiniPay. This is MiniPay, this organization that I have a few questions on, that's kind of facilitating this on the Cello blockchain, you know, crypto-economic decentralized protocol on the internet. But also it seems that Cello Pay has really done the hard thing of solving the last mile problem by integrating local merchants

in a bunch of different regions. You talked about this, but I really want to highlight this just one more time, the virtual bank account, where like if you need to be paid by your employer or by someone, they will spin up a virtual bank account. They'll just give you, here's your deposit number, kind of in the same way that like if somebody is trying to pay me stable coins,

and I'll go find an address and I'll share them the address and they can send it to me. MiniPay spends up a virtual bank account for your local jurisdiction. I don't know if they're integrated all over the world, but you just have like the deposit and routing number and then they map that to your stable coin wallet and when the $100 or $1,000 bank transfer comes in, it converses to stable coins on the back end

and then deposit it into your account as stable coins in Mipay on Selo. And I don't know how much of the globe that they've integrated, but for my conversations with you, Mark, it seems to be a decent amount of the world, of the globe. Do you react to anything I just said? Totally. And they do it one for one,

which is pretty amazing. So they subsidize the exchange fees and the online entities. For the virtual accounts, it's currently only European and U.S. bank accounts. But still, the goal of mini pay is to do, is to solve the last mile problem, right? So, yeah, and I think, you know, maybe coming back to Ryan's question earlier, like, why now, you know, we have spent, you know, again, we've just been grinding on this for so long. We spent so much time working to nurture on and off ramps in emerging markets. we started an ecosystem fund way back when we started a incubator program with, you know,

some ecosystem folks doing wonderful work over at Solo Camp. And it took years for companies to form, for companies to raise capital and to launch successful on and off-ramping companies throughout a lot of these emerging markets. And only now can people easily on and off-ramp in a lot of these markets. And so I think that that certainly helped. And MiniPay has, I don't know, I think probably like 20 to 30 on an off-round partners that have integrated globally, maybe even more at this point. And they allow you to on an off-ram not necessarily as easily as having a virtual bank account. You know, it's still more like kind of a moon pay type of experience in some cases.

But more and more now they're offering these really seamless experiences. where for places where money tends to originate, like the US and Europe, it's really easy to send money in using one of these bank accounts. And for places where you want to spend that money, they're now making it really easy for you to spend without that on-and-offer experience. You just scan a Mercadapada-Pada QR code, and then it just gets paid directly. And it's finally happening. It just took forever to get all of these companies to form.

and to start offering these services. And I think that's ultimately why also why crypto will win in this category, right? Because sometimes people ask me, like, why can Venmo just become global, right? Why does global Venmo have to be on crypto rails? And I think the answer is you need just a crap ton of companies with a crap ton of licenses in each of these markets to row in the same direction, work together to create this amazing experience. And it's just for various reasons too difficult for any one company to do that well. But if you want to have multiple companies doing it well and delivering this amazing experience,

well, then it turns out that crypto is actually the perfect way to incentivize a lot of folks to row in the same direction. And so it's working really nicely in that regard with Stella. Yeah, it kind of reminds me of Andrea Santonopoul's idea of the festival of the commons of just like when we all, when, you know, company A with license A operates on the same blockchain as company B with license B, well, those two things can talk to each other and coordinate together. And there's like a growing of the pie that when we all add all these together with the experience that comes out of it. We've talked about this thing, mini pay a lot. I want to dive into that and just kind of like touch on that directly.

What is this organization? What is this? I think maybe people think that this is a cello thing. As I understand it, it's not. But there is a part. partnership there. Talk to me and fill me in about what MiniPay actually is. Yeah, so MiniPay is a product. It's by Opera. The browser company, they've been around for 30 years now. They're a public company traded on NASDAQ. They were, you know, very popular on desktop before Chrome came out. And then Chrome, I think, really decimated the desktop market. Opera has had a lot of success on mobile since then. and now actually increasingly back on desktop, which is cool to see. And so Minipay is their kind of entry into the fintech world, so to speak.

And just by virtue of them having a lot of customers, I think they have, on the order of 500 million monthly active users across all of their products, they are just an amazing, they're in an amazing position to basically win. at Global Eventlaw. They have the customers, you know, they have close to, you know, 10% of the world population as a monthly active user today. And many of those users are in markets where financial rails are lacking and it's difficult for people to receive money from overseas. And so it's just a perfect starting point for them to kind of create a network effects

needed to take over the world here. So that's opera, you know, the Selo Foundation. I'm over at C-Labs, but the Sala Foundation has a partnership with Alpera. I think just last month they announced the renewal of that partnership through, I think, the end of the decade. So we're, yeah, we've been working really, really closely with them. I think both parties are just very aligned having, you know, each other succeed. What's the nature of that agreement?

Like, what did you guys agree to? It's a list of agreement. Yeah. I mean, I would guess why Sela would want them to be exclusive if they're such a powerhouse. Why would they agree to be exclusive to you guys? Yeah. And again, I'm not at the Sala Foundation, but there's financial terms, of course, that makes that appealing. Okay.

Okay. One of the things, Merrick, you were talking about is on ramps and the kind of the last mile problem that's being solved and how that's been a impediment. but now we're setting those up, on ramps, of course, and off ramps. I'm sort of wondering if there's a world where those become less necessary over time. So it's kind of like where we're going, we don't need on ramps any longer because everyone is just on minipay and they're in the defy open finance ecosystem. And once everybody has crossed that chasm, they've on ramped, they feel less and less of a need to off ramp.

Why? Because everyone else that they want to interact with is already on-ramped. I'm wondering how long you think that will take to play out, basically, how long until we can actually go much more bankless here and build the network effect such that on-ramps and off-ramps become like almost like minorly important. Really, really great question. I would have thought it would have happened by now when we started eight years ago. I'm very bullish on this future, obviously, and we've been working towards it for a long time,

and we think that for this to really work, you also need local currency stable coins. So that's why we've also worked with the Mento Protocol to help nurture an ecosystem. And that's still a ways away, right? All we have is dollars right now. Mentzo has 15 stable coins on Selo. They do, okay.

They're just very small in terms of amounts. Yeah. But it turns out that the amounts that they have already are sufficient to do on-chain FX. We should talk about on-chain effects as well because it's a, it's a, you know, a quadrillion, you know, annual, like, I think 3.2 quadrillion market annually. So it's like a huge market. FX is, of course, but, you know, I think increasingly more and more of that is coming on chain and maybe eventually everything will be on-chain. but coming back to making everyone bankless, I think it will take a while.

And I think it will take a while because you need effectively everyone to have a self-custodial wallet and only then will it just makes sense. From then on, you can just continue to pay the next person or the next vendor or the next employee on chain.

And until we get there, we effectively need it to be very easy. There should be no friction going from fiat to stable coins in the back for everyone in the world regardless of where they live. And that's something that is difficult to accomplish, obviously, globally. But increasingly, we're seeing that this is happening. And so there will be this transition period.

I think it's probably going to be a fairly long transition period. But who knows, right? I think the thing with network effects is that things start slow and then suddenly, you know, smoke turns into fire and then suddenly overnight everyone's, you know, using a self-custodial wallet. So perhaps it'll happen soon, I think. But I think this experience building, working on cello for for eight years has made me think that it will take still a while. But that doesn't mean that you can't get very significant percentage of the world's population.

I think this way. And I think that is certainly increasingly just happening today already. Talk about that on-chain FX, because when you said quadrillions, like, that's kind of an interesting number to me. That feels like a lot. So when you say FX, right, are you just talking about like for this type of use case, currency conversion from one fiat to another? Is that what FX effectively means?

And so when you say on-chain FX, what do you? you talking about? So the FX market today is, I think, the biggest financial market in the world. There's now on the order of $9 trillion exchanged every day. So across the year, yeah, that's in the quadrillions, 3.2 quadrillions. And this is people going from dollars to yen, to one, to euros, back and forth, to all the local currencies in Africa and in Asia. and all over the world. Absolutely. So individuals, people traveling, but I think more than that, you know,

commerce, companies, institutions, banks all transacting with each other through the corresponding, you know, banking system. And then, you know, everyone looking to hedge as well. And so that is, you know, a massive, massive market, but it's not very accessible to a lot of people, quite inefficient, you know, working still through the corresponding. banking system. And it doesn't work 24-7. And so there is just so many reasons why bringing this on-chain will just deliver so much value to everyone. And increasingly, we're seeing that activity happening on cello in large part because Mento has 15 stable coins on cello. So if you take

away the dollar and a euro, that's, you know, 13 local currency stable coins. There's also a lot of other local currency stable coins on cello as well, maybe not quite as big as Mento, but, you know, focused on like this was Frank or the pounds or the Brazilian real. And increasingly, we're just seeing, you know, on Uniswap, on Velodrome, on a lot of these exchanges, it's just more and more volume, which is pretty, pretty cool to see. But I think the real exciting thing that's about to happen is there's a perp-dex that perhaps by the time that this airs will be lost, up down that XYZ, and their focus really is on just being a perptext for on-chain FX.

Up down X, Z as a name for a perp-X is just a great name. Well done. I love it as well. Yeah, it's genius in many ways. And, you know, I think the thesis there is, you know, one, if you want to hedge currency risk, you know, you need something like a perp-ex. And so that will enable that.

But also, arguably, you know, if you're interested in just day trading or, you know, kind of investing in crypto, I would postulate that you probably have a better sense of how your local currency will perform relative to other currencies. Then you might have when you think about how some meme coin might perform, right? Like when it comes to mean coins, it's usually kind of insiders, cabals, that are deciding the direction of these things. If when it comes to engine effects, you know, it's, I think it's more the economic market forces driving trade between countries, and you probably have a fairly good sense of how that's going. And so arguably, you know, especially if you add leverage,

because obviously these swings are relatively small, but if you add leverage through a perplex, suddenly this becomes interesting for perhaps the DGEN crowd who might have, again, a little bit more alpha than they would on some of these other kind of especially meme coin type assets. So I'm really excited for this. It's going to run 24-7. It's going to be accessible to everyone in the world.

Hopefully it will be more efficient for bespoke pairs of assets, right? Like if you want to go from the Nigerian Naira to the Brazilian Rial through the corresponding banking system, I think you're going to end up paying a lot of fees. I think on-chain can be a lot more efficient for that. And then if you add a perp-dex, then you can start doing some really interesting things as well. So, yeah, I'm really excited. And yeah, increasingly we're seeing a bigger percentage of stable coin volume on cello coming from these swaps between these different stable coins. I guess this makes me think of two things.

Like one is if your thesis, which I think is part of the bankless thesis, is all finance goes on chain, right? Crypto is not done yet, guys. It's like barely even started. If you think of the quadrillions in on-chain FX, if you believe all of that is going to end up on-chain. Why? Because on-chain is lower transaction fee, you know, better liquidity over time. we are 0.000,0001% of the way in the on-chain FX market. Like, we're just getting started.

There's no way this crypto thing is done, all right? Like, that's one thing I was thinking of. The other thing I was thinking of is like, okay, but like, have we heard the last of the incumbents here? And when I say incumbents, I'm talking about me like countries, a lot of countries in emerging markets that have weak local currencies. and governments that maybe they're not as excited about this whole defy open finance thing as we are and as excited as their people are.

Why? It's because they have to and they want to lock their people into a currency system in order to tax them, right? There's this whole, you know, Gresham's law thing, which is bad money tends to drive out good money. and so when you have a good money in circulation, a better money than your local unit of exchange, say you have dollars,

which is like for a lot of countries, it's like an apex predator currency asset, okay? Because it's just so damn liquid and it's relatively stable relative to your own local currency. When you have access to dollars and it's just a tap away, why would you even use your local currency

unless you absolutely had to. And open finance makes it such that you don't have to. You could just use dollars. And so we're seeing some early signs of some countries and some governments and some banking system and oftentimes they're one and the same. Try to push this out, try to restrict it. Okay, and that runs at odds, obviously,

with an open free society where all citizens have access to the internet and they can download everything they want. I'm wondering if you see that as a battle, to fight in the future. Maybe you're fighting it in pockets already. And what you think about that? Like, at some level, this crypto vision that we have of everyone has the ability to go bankless and have their own wallet and use whatever currency they want, yeah, but will governments around the world stop them from doing that? Yeah, I think this is where local stable coins will play a really big role. I think there still is value to having a unit of account.

that just matches your day-to-day expenses and the way you think about the world. It is, unless you live in a country that's fully dollarized, it is always a chore for a lot of people to have to constantly try to convert between these two currencies, especially if the exchange rate keeps changing. So I think for some types of transactions, I think people will happily stay in their local currencies. Maybe they won't save in those currencies. That's what I mean.

That's what I mean. Okay, so that's the Gresham's law thing, which is bad money tends to drive out good money out of circulation, which means the good money they store and they keep. The bad money, they're happy to spend that. They'll spend that all day. I'll save in stable coins, but then I'll go to the grocery store and spend those staple coins,

convert it to my local currency, and spend that. That's not necessarily what governments want. That's not all banks want. They need the wealth to stay, in their local currency in order to inflate it away, in order to tax it, essentially. And that runs contrary to, like, what an individual wants. You see what I mean?

There's this trade-off in places. Totally. And I think Brian Armstrong actually addressed this in Davos recently, and he's been getting a lot of credit about one of the quotes he made. You know, he's talking about how crypto almost is a, like a check and balance on central banks globally, right? If a central bank misbehaves, then that only pushes individuals into crypto more.

But if they don't, then, you know, I think it's fine. And so I think my sincere hope is that, you know, everyone will go on chain. There will still be local stable coins for people to think in their own in an account. It's useful for commerce to have local currencies because you can adjust to trade deficits easily, with them. And I think as long as central banks aren't printing insane amounts of money, then I think everything can still coexist. And if they do, then ultimately, for the first time ever, people will have a choice and will be able to actually do something about that. And I think that to me is just really what crypto is all about. It really is. And it's an untold story. It's

an under-told story of what crypto is about. It's a freedom technology. I think sometimes in the West, like people don't see it. You know what I mean? Like what, you know, cello is doing, what stable coins are doing around the world to export this choice and this freedom and to hold government officials and central banks accountable by having an alternative. It's the right to exit. It's a beautiful thing. And it's definitely why we're excited about this space and why we're in it. I want to ask you a question about, you know, something that, yeah, you've referred to earlier, which is, it seems like crypto has really started to focus on the stable coin stack, let's call it. And so we talked about Tron earlier on. There's some other competitors here. So there's a Polygon has done something recently

where they have sort of a stable coin blockchain as well at some level. And now they've gone and they've acquired some on-ramp type companies. You could see they're kind of verticalizing, let's say, and like expanding up the stack. And then of course, on the other side, you get projects like Tempo from Stripe. Now Stripe already has the Fiat OnRamps, of course, and the Dev Tools for that. And what are they doing? They're missing the blockchain.

So they're building their own blockchain. They're building tempo. And that's kind of their stack. And now I see Sellow competing against this, which is Sellow started with the blockchain, is now partnering for the OnRamp and the wallet app with MiniPay. But at some level,

all of these stacks are somewhat similar. There's some convergence here. One comes from one direction, another from another, but it's kind of a building out of the stack. I'm wondering if you have any thoughts on that, like some of the other plays that we've seen recently, the tempo and stripe thing, the polygon with on ramps.

Do you think, or even circle with arc, so they're a stable coin issuer, and now they're trying to get into the blockchain game as well. What do you think is going to work here? Do you think there's, are you seeing the convergence that I'm seeing here? I mean, I think tempo is definitely something that, you know, I'm surprised to see if you didn't go the L2 route.

I think that will probably hurt them. As a chain that transitioned from an L1 to an L2, I'm just surprised when anyone launches an EVM-compatible Alt L1. I think those days, you know, should be long behind us. I think if you're launching an eBin chain, you should launch it as an L2. I think if tempo is successful, it will transition to become an L2. and I suspect that it will be successful,

but probably only in the US initially. Hey, Bankless Nation, it's David. If you're hearing this, that's because you are listening to the free Bankless podcast feed. Did you know that there is a premium bankless RSS feed? The premium feed has extra interviews that I do for my own personal research and just deeper questions that I want answered about the crypto industry, questions that I want to answer so I can be more informed as an investor,

both at Bankless Ventures and also just in my own personal portfolio too. Also, there are no ads, which means if you listen to the premium feed, instead of the free feed, you'll get about 20 hours of your life back every year because you choose to support bankless directly. So if you're interested in getting extra content all while skipping the ads, or you just appreciate what we do here and want us to keep doing it, we'd appreciate it if you signed up for bankless premium. And there is a link in the show notes to get started. Cheers to a good 2026. Few people in crypto put real skin in the game when they make public top or bottom calls. The DeFi report is one of them.

The week before the October 10th flash crash, Michael from the DeFi report emailed his entire newsletter. saying he's going aggressively risk off and sold the majority of his book from crypto into cash. This is when eth was about $4,000 and Bitcoin was 110. Michael runs the Defi Report, an industry-leading research platform built on data, cycle awareness, risk management, transparency, and most importantly, skin in the game. We like Michael at Bankless. We like his analysis, and that's why you hear him on the Bankless podcast about once a month. And the Defi Report is giving Bankless listeners one free month of access to the Defi Report.

So if you're looking for some sharp data-driven analysis to make better informed decisions around your portfolio. You can learn why and how Michael called the top and what he's doing next, all in the Defi Report Pro. Check it out. There is a link in the show notes. Can we camp on that for a second? Like, why an L2?

Like, why not an L1? Like, why do you say that so emphatically? I mean, Ethereum is continuing to be, you know, just a place from Defi. It's, it just doesn't matter how much any other kind of Altil 1 is, is trying. trying to compete, you know, liquidity continues to go to Ethereum. And with the L2 scaling centric roadmap, now there is just a way for any chain. You don't have to be EVM compatible, but if you're EVM compatible, it's even more of a no-brainer to tap into both liquidity, but also into the network effects. The Ethereum is formed around all of the L2s

that have been created. And I think maybe right now it doesn't feel like being an L2 gives you that much because we don't yet have incredible interop between L2s or between mean net and L2s. But that's going to be solved in the next year or two, right? I think increasingly all of the effort on lowering block times on reducing finality on Ethereum, coupled with all of the amazing ZK Tech innovation will effectively be mean that all L2s will be able to, you know, fully validate their chains on Ethereum and have, you know, like six second finality. And that means that you'll be able to send messages between Ethereum and these L2s and between L2s and between L2s and other L2s.

And that means you'll be able to send a lot of this liquidity that exists today in the ecosystem. So to me, it just seems such a no-brainer. I mean, it's one reason why we worked so hard on adding ZK8 to SELO. last month, I think you guys talked about this one of your shows. Sello had its fourth hard fork of the year. We really had quite an incredible year last year. The first hard fork being, of course, the transition to becoming L2. Then we had two more pretty meaty ones.

And then the third one was super meaty where we added succinct support. And now you can do faultproofs using ZK proofs. So we have a ZK faultproof system, very similar to Mega-E. We also use eigenvae, similar to MegaEath. But unlike MegaEath, we're cheaper than them and were rated on L2Bit. And they put us at the top of the Optamine and the Lidium tab as of last month as of December. So, yeah, if you like something like Mega Yeath, you know, you're definitely going to like so, though I think even more secure as per L2Bit, cheaper and, you know, I think equally scalable.

really like the architecture choices. You're incorporating kind of the best of, I think, that Ethereum offers here. But I want to push you on something, Merrick, because you just said it was a no-brainer. Okay, so no-brainer. And yet the people making the decision to launch EVML-1s,

I know they've got brains. These are some smart people. Of which you were one. It's Stripe, okay? And it's not just Stripe. It's the paradigm folks. They're smart. They're crypto-native.

They know what they're doing. it's circle a crypto-native company, and they're doing an L1 EVM. And sometimes I think, okay, like sometimes I think like you, and I'm like, okay, like why could they be doing this? Oh, it must be the L1 token premium that still exists. That would, it's what a rational actor would do. You get this kind of token you can kind of inflate,

and there's like sort of a premium associated with that, and it's just like worth more to do it. You can always become an L2 later. And so why not milk the L1 premium? Well, you can. And then other times I'm like, well, you know, these are smart people, and they keep giving me technical answers for this. You know, Ethereum can't do XYZ or we don't want to be dependent on Ethereum speed or something like this.

Anyway, I'm just want to push back because these are smart people. They have brains. Obviously, the tempo team got a lot of pushback when they announced the L1 direction. Matt, I think, publicly came out and said, you know, finality is a big reason. We're payments focused. We need to have fast finality. And, you know, there's some truth to that. Sello had one block finality as an L1.

we transitioned to becoming 02, and now we have to wait for Ethereum finality, which, as you know, can take quite a bit longer. And so I think you could argue the finality reason. Of course, the theorem is working to add, you know, one or two block finality. It's working towards shortening its block time. So that problem will go away soon. And so either they didn't want to wait for that, or they didn't believe that that would happen, or, you know, they're using this as a technical reason, but really it's something else. Maybe it's just, you know, the excitement of having, you know, working on an L1, right? I think for a lot of people, you know, there's still this idea that, you know,

it's easier to compete against, you know, Ethereum if you're an L1, not an L2. But I think that's ultimately maybe just ego and as Ethereum improves its finality, as the benefits of all of those network effects that are being created just become so obvious to everyone, I think Ethereum will just pull everyone in. I have just a lot of conviction that Ethereum will become the settlement layer of the whole internet, not just Web3, and it'll take a while, but network effects are powerful,

and it's going to happen. Yeah, but on our end, for example, we've been grappling with this finality question for a while. And so now we're actually working with espresso to add to second finality back, you know, using the espresso system. And so that's, you know, using espresso economic guarantees, which obviously are, you know, nothing compared to Ethereum. You can touch Ethereum on that front.

But for smaller transactions, you can have these guarantees and then, If you really, you know, moving a billion dollars, you can wait for your infernality on SELO as well. Let's talk about this last piece of the puzzle here. Self.xy-Z. What puzzle, what puzzle pieces is this represent for Sello and how are you guys leveraging it? Yeah. So for us, this is all about onboarding everyone into crypto.

You know, we're not going to stop until Global Venmo is here and it's on SELO. And to do that, we need to onboard everyone in the world. we can't just onboard, you know, crypto-savvy or DGens or, you know, people who, you know, excited about, you know, what crypto is today. And the only way we'll be able to onboard them is through incentives, right? I think you're going to need to use incentives. Incentives have primarily been the mechanism that have, you know, companies have used to onboard folks. But when you offer incentives in a Web3 world, you know, your ability for people to game you is just so much. higher. It's just really, really hard. And so we need a really good civil protection. And it's ironic that,

you know, Bitcoin obviously started with kind of a civil resistance, you know, mechanism and proof of stake was another really good one. But that only works for people with basically money, either to run out, you know, mining those or to stake capital that they have. If you want to onboard everyone, you need to be able to have a civil resistant mechanism that works for everyone. And, you know, I think you can argue that world has an interesting design for, say, onboarding the whole world. And so when we thought about self, we wanted to do something that I think was equally compelling, but maybe it took a slightly different approach. And maybe that addressed some of the shortcomings of the hardware-based approach.

At the end of the day, to onboard everyone in the world, right, world needs to get people in front of physical hardware. And that means they have to travel. That means that you have to, that's just a lot of friction. There's a whole supply chain problem. And so instead, what we wanted to do is we wanted to piggyback on the most trusted attestation of humanhood that people have today. And that right now is your biometric ID, either your biometric passport or,

or many countries now are issuing biometric national IDs. And these tend to be just, you know, in the meat space, the best attestation of your uniqueness, of your humanity. And what's really cool about this, what makes these things biometric is that they effectively have a signature through kind of a certificate authority chain leading up to a countrywide certificate that basically attests by your home country that this ID is valid. And so a few people know this, but, you know, modern passports today, they have this little

biometric passport logo on them. It's a little rectangle with a little circle in it. That means that there is a microchip in your ID. You have this also for national IDs increasingly, and the ID can be read by NFC. And the data that you read by NFC, including. includes a signature that basically proves the authenticity of your ID. And so what self is is it's a ZK passport protocol effectively that proves on-chain that you have a valid ID.

And what's cool about this is you can take the, like you can take the third party out of ID verification, right? Usually when you verify your ID, you're assigning for Coinbase. Coinbase has some third party that they use and you're kind of, giving your ID information to some third party, they're looking at it, they're saying, does it look like it's forged or not? If not, then, you know, they attest that you have a valid ID. Well, now with smart contracts, you can do that on chain without that third party. You can just verify the correctness of the signatures in a smart contract. And that's pretty cool because

you don't have to give your data to someone who, you know, might lose it, might get hacked. You know, we've seen just an incredible amount of KYC data hacks lately that honestly, frightening in many ways. But even better than that, you can do it in ZK. So you verify the authenticity of this data in zero knowledge. And then you can prove statements about yourself in zero knowledge without having to reveal your personal information. And so that's ultimately what self is. It's primarily great for civil resistance, which is primarily amazing for onboarding billions of people into crypto using rails, using IDs that people have today without requiring to go get in front of physical hardware. But it's also actually so much more because you can,

in zero knowledge, do verifiable credentials, you can prove statements about yourself without revealing anything else. And so one pretty interesting use case is you can prove you're over a certain age. We're seeing a lot of regulation globally. That's, you know, protecting minors, either from social media or from adult content sites. But the way that they're enforcing that is through KYC, which is, I think, probably the wrong move. Something like Self allows you to prove that you're over, say, 18 without even revealing your birthday to anyone. Another cool use case is proving that you're not on the OFAC list. If you're getting an air drop, increasingly, you know, more projects are worried about, you know, sanctions law. We can prove that you're

not on the O-Fact list without revealing, without the individual having to reveal anything about themselves. And so there's a lot of really cool use cases, some very serious, very Web 3, some more Web 2. And then there's also just like fun ones. Like you can prove your hair color in zero knowledge. So if you want to do a true blonde coin, you could. My hair color is incorrect on my ID. ID says it's black.

Black? You could, yeah, you could claim an airdrop for a hair card. For having black hair. different than your actual. But I mean, yeah, there's like cool, fun things you could do on that front. You know, you could definitely do David Coin. Actually, both of you should do, you know, either David coin and a Ryan coin. And then for free to other Davids and other Ryans.

We do have a Dave Dow of 220 people. Yeah, but you don't know that they're Dave. This is true. We don't have a attestation that is ZK verified that they are actually Dave. You could have some imposter Ryans in there. So we could make a faucet of course. coins that only drips out tokens to people with the correct true daves yeah speaking of faucet by the time that this airs google cloud will be using stuff for for the net faucet which is pretty cool

cool so we announced that i think a while ago but you know they've been working on it and will be finally be live certainly by the time that this airs and they're also working on a main net faucet which would be a first of its kind and that's primarily possible because this provides you such amazing civil resistance, but also because you can do this O-Fact compliance, which obviously is important for a big public company. But yeah, you should definitely do it like a Dave Fawcett or, you know, Dave Gate, your Dow. Dave Gate, I love that. I love that. If there's any Dave's listening, hit me up, I'll add you to Dave Dow. Merrick, this has been great. I think maybe listeners kind of understand why I wanted

to have you on and kind of just do the cross section of Sello because I think it's an represented story, at least in regards to CT, which is no longer the center of crypto anyways, so whatever. One last question, Mark, I want to put this all together. So you have stable coins, enough stable coin

transaction volume to rival Tron. You have the proof of personhood like WorldCoy. I wouldn't say volume. We're still working on... Usage, okay. On... I think we had $4.4 billion of stable coin volume last month. That's a lot.

Butron is, you know, obviously, are so very big. Okay. So with that corollary or amendum, you also have the proof of personhood. You're working on Forex. You're fast and cheap, like mega ether monad. You have like mini apps kind of like the, like mini pay has mini apps kind of like WorldCoin.

You have a bunch of different stuff that other people have. When you put it all together and you also look forward for, call it the rest of the decade until 2030, 30. What are you trying to position Sellaz? Where are your growth factors? We are very aligned in this belief that everyone will come on chain, that, you know, fintech, finance, everything will just be on chain. And so we're building the best platform for anyone to build a neobank on chain. And the way that we're doing that is, again, by focused on being really laser focus on this one use case, which is P2P payments. And we think that that will suck everyone

in the world in. And once they're all on chain, then every builder will just want to cater towards them. And we're seeing that increasing today with me. Merrick, thanks so much. I feel like Selt is very much an underrated project. So I appreciate you coming on and very understated about all the progress that you've made over the last eight years. But the way you've stitched it together and the progress you've made is actually a pretty unique story in crypto. So thanks for stopping by and telling us about it.

Yeah, of course. Thanks for having me. Bankless Nation, got to let you know, of course. You know, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier, not for everyone,

but we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.