BTC Sessions - Bitcoin Proof Of Reserves and Demanding Industry Accountability with Mauricio from Ledn EP013

Episode Date: January 31, 2020

Today I sat down with Ledn’s Mauricio Di Bartolomeo to discuss the idea of proof of reserves, building financial products on Bitcoin, and the implications of some companies carrying over bad practices of traditional finance to a world with no lender of last resort. Ledn on Twitter: https://twitter.com/hodlwithledn Mauricio on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cryptonomista Mauricio’s proof of reserves article from Bitcoin Magazine: https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/why-proof-of-reserves-is-important-to-bitcoin Visit LEDN and learn about their services: https://platform.ledn.io/join/0a00cca3dd61dea5909c95cd41f41685 SUPPORT THE SHOW: Visit LEDN to check out getting a bitcoin-backed loan https://platform.ledn.io/join/0a00cca3dd61dea5909c95cd41f41685 Get Wasabi wallet and enjoy your privacy https://wasabiwallet.io/ Wasabi Tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECQHAzSckK0 Check out Rise Wallet – the easiest way to onboard your pre-coiner friends to Bitcoin! https://www.risewallet.com/ Rise tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2VUjj6wPM0 Get NORDVPN to protect your online privacy. 75% off a 3 year https://nordvpn.org/btcsessions Check out my website for private bookings: http://btcsessions.ca/ Looking for an audio-only version of the show? https://anchor.fm/btcsessions Join my Telegram channel! https://t.me/btc_sessions If you value my work and would like to send me a tip, they are always appreciated! LIGHTNING tips: https://tippin.me/@BTCsessions

Wasabi wallet. I'm fairly private. What's up everyone? I'm Ben with the BTC Sessions and this is your daily session. Hodel their Bitcoin. Before we dive in, of course, shout out to sponsors of the show, Ledin.io. Of course, this is who I'm interviewing today, but besides the point, Leiden, they have a variety of different services for which you can utilize your Bitcoin. They've got Bitcoin savings. They have their... Bitcoin-backed loans where if you need to get your hands on dollars, you can do so using your Bitcoin as collateral.

And of course, they've got their B2X offering where you get double the exposure to the price of Bitcoin. Now, we'll get into this during the interview near the end as well, but worth mentioning here. And secondly, we have Rise Wallet. Rise Wallet is a physical gift card that you can pick up near you to gift anybody Bitcoin. The way it works is you pick it up, gift it to somebody. They are instructed on the back of the card to download the paired app and scratch and scan a code. This code then creates them a brand new Bitcoin wallet on their phone and then sends them an on-chain transaction for the face value of the card. It's super idiot proof and it's great for onboarding new users.

I've gifted it to a bunch of my friends and they've all had a pretty easy time using it. So if you want to check them out, head over to risewollet.com. Click on locations and see where you can pick one up. It's only in Canada right now, but keep your eyes open because they're looking. at expanding and if he can't get one right near you you can always get it delivered via coin cards.ca. With that let's dive into the show. So today I get to sit down with Maricio de Bartolomeo. I've talked to him a bunch of different times on the show we've talked about of course his company Ledden and then we've also

talked about his experiences growing up and having family in Venezuela and the implications of what is going on down there as it relates to I mean just to everybody involved but also kind of the roots of why he decided to start leaden well today we get to chat a little bit about building financial infrastructure on Bitcoin and the implications of having a finite digital resource like that and the necessity for something like proof of reserves where financial entities should be held to account and take up the practices of proving their reserves when offering services like this to people.

It's a fun interview. I had a great time talking with Maricio, and I was very glad to have them back. So I hope you guys enjoy. Hello, everyone. Welcome to the BTC sessions. I've got, I think, my most frequently returning guest, Maricio di Bartolomeo from Leden here. Marisa, it's good to see you again, man. It's been way, way too long. It certainly has. It's always a pleasure.

And yeah, I mean, 2020 is, it's been a very interesting year. Very good Bitcoin price-wise. So hoping it continues. Yeah, absolutely. So it's good to have you back on. I guess those that are unfamiliar with Maricio, I've done lots of interviews with him in the past. I partnered with Ledin on the show. So for quite some time now, we were just discussing before we started recording.

It was early 2019 that we kind of met and then started working together. A lot has happened since then. But Maricio, for those unfamiliar with you, could you just give a quick kind of summary of who you are, what you're doing, all of that good stuff? Yeah, definitely. So my name is Maricio. I originally our company is based in Canada and I am as well now. However, originally I am from Venezuela.

That's where I was born and raised. Most of my family is still down there. So I got into Bitcoin. I think it was late 2014 mining down there. And from then on, I kind of became obsessed about building products that made Bitcoin easier to use and easier to hold for longer for people. and we founded Lennon in 2018. So Lennon is a company that provides tools

to help people make the most of their Bitcoin. So we have a savings account where people can earn an interest under Bitcoin. We have Bitcoin-back loans that give you dollar loans with real-time reserves custody on your Bitcoin. If you need cash, don't want to sell your Bitcoin.

And the last product that we launched is B2X, which is essentially a loan that lets you buy more. Bitcoin and essentially lets you own double the Bitcoin that you have. Awesome, awesome. So we're going to get into some of the Liddon stuff. One of the things I wanted to chat with you about that pertains to you and Lennon in particular, but it was actually an article you wrote for Bitcoin Magazine and you're talking about

proof of reserves. And so, you know, like proof of reserves, you use. for the Bitcoin back loans and everything. And you kind of got into why you think proof of reserves is so important, namely with something like Bitcoin. So maybe I'll let you touch a little bit on what the article was about. Yeah, no, happy to chat more about it. It's a topic that I'm very passionate about.

And I think it's something that we as industry participants need to be talking more about. which is this, the concept of proof of reserves around custody. The whole theme around custody has been a heated debate around the Bitcoin community since the very beginnings. Understanding that this process or movement has its roots in this idea of you being able to verify where your funds are at all times. And there's a public blockchain now that everyone can use to attest these things. I think that it's a huge breakthrough and I think that transparency is a native trait to Bitcoin. It is inherent in the protocol. So I find it a bit concerning that it has taken so long for service providers in the industry

to basically incorporate that transparency that is built into the protocol and allow users to verify their own reserves. So this whole concept of not your keys, not your Bitcoin, really has been reinforced by this concept of, you know, financial institutions today are these black boxes. That there's just no way for you to attest or check that they're following what they said that would be doing. I think that this Bitcoin is a huge paradigm shift in that it gives way more visibility for people. It can. It can. It's not doing so today because. people, most industry participants aren't, you know, putting these features to practice.

And they're not basically delivering all that benefit to the end user. We took a very hard, you know, almost obsessive approach to proof of reserves. And we give our users real-time, unchained proof of reserves. And that, you know, to us, technologically, it's a challenge. And yes, from a business standpoint, there are things that you need to do differently in order to provide that. But I think as members of the Bitcoin community, our newcomers would be better served if rather than us discarding this concept of custody altogether, instead, nudge them into the right questions to ask for custodial services, the right things that they should be looking at work for. because I think custodial services are our reality. And I think people are going to choose,

some people are going to choose to use these services and another reality that we shouldn't, you know, discredit is the fact that custodial services allow different value at services to be created on top of Bitcoin, like our loans. And so it's interesting that, or to me, I think the conversation needs to be reframed from don't put your keys in custody to

most custodians are not doing things right let's make sure that you're going to the ones that we're doing things right and let's make sure that you know which questions to ask as you're evaluating your options that that's really the you know in a nutshell what I was trying to say in the article yeah and and so I there's a lot of people that bring up things around custody of course there's the proof of keys movement not your keys not your

And you're very right in that it stems from a historical distrust of financial entities from the past because there was no way to easily audit as an individual if you actually had your money with that institution. Right. It was like you were saying, it's a black box. And that was inherent with the money given that either it, you know, back in the days of. storing your gold, you know, you had to trust the auditor. You know, then you went, moved to Fiat paper-based. And so even still, with fractional reserve, you weren't quite sure the state of how leverage that bank was and you had bank runs. And there was just no easy way to do that. And now with the advent of a purely digital money,

that is easily trackable online, as you can now in real time audit, but most don't do that. And so I think because of this historical distrust, the knee-jerk reaction is never custody ever. And I would also say to that that people don't, have to custody, but some people are going to. Some people are going to want the services associated with that, whether it just be,

let's face it, some people aren't going to want to hold their own keys. But also, things like loans, things like savings, things like other kind of derivative financial instruments, we need to look at how we're going to approach that. Are we going to just blanket say nobody should do that and just assume that's going to be the case because it's not. Do we disallow it, which, you know, most Bitcoiners tend to be pretty libertarian thinking for the most part. Or do we try to make it so that we demand better practices? And I, you know, stepping back and saying, well, we're not going to stop people from doing it. we're definitely not going to not allow them to do things they want to do with their own money.

Maybe that third option is our best one to try and hold custodians and companies to the utmost highest level of kind of good practices and establish what those practices are. Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. I think it's really a question of what is the lesser of all evils in that. you know, these are realities. And the other thing is, you know, I think it's also, while there are some bad apples in the bunch,

I think it's also a mistake to sort of blanket all custodial services as bad or potentially negative. Like a lot of these custodial services actually allow for more adoption. For example, our loan service allows people that want to hold Bitcoin for longer, but they have a need for cash in that sense. It allows them to put it in custom.

take a loan against it and they don't put cell pressure on the order book. Right? Like that is a huge benefit. And then in addition, a lot of our people end up placing the Bitcoin in custody, taking out a loan and then they go buy more Bitcoin. So that is accretive to the price of Bitcoin. So one of the first things that...

I think it's important to understand that... Yeah. That was one of the first things that I, when I met you and tried out the service. So it was one of the first things I did was getting a dollar loan at a point where I needed to kind of get my hands on a little bit of cash. And I was like, oh, God, like, is this going to be a terrible time to sell Bitcoin? And that was going to be my choice. It was going to be sell Bitcoin, which was, you know, it was luckily enough.

It was still at a gain at the time. But in doing so, that would have been a taxable event. or then I met you and kind of learned what you guys were doing and I said well like I you know I have a job I have income it's just that there was kind of this surprise expense that came up and so I was able to utilize my Bitcoin as collateral to take out a loan and then when I got the dollars it still locked in the Bitcoin that I owned so regardless of what the price did, I still had that Bitcoin sitting there. And yes, it opened me to the risk of if the price of Bitcoin were to drop, then I'd either have to top up my collateral or payback portion of the

loan. But it also prevented what would have happened is the price of Bitcoin shortly after I took out my loan went way up. And had I sold my Bitcoin at that point, I would have likely not been able to reaccumulate the Bitcoin that I had utilized to get the loan if I had sold it. So I definitely see in a world where, or if we're an individual values the total amount of Bitcoin that they're holding and is mostly worried about losing. using Satoshis, then that's a tool that somebody can utilize. And so as a, yes, custodial service, it's a service that many might want to utilize at various times.

Yeah. And so, but just to touch on that, even that service, right? Like we provide dollar liquidity for Bitcoin placed in custody with us. That's a, it was our first service and our main service today, actually, it's the one of people still use the most. We are unique in that when we build this service, I mean, again, on the theme of reserves and don't trust verify, I'm coming at this from the eyes or the advantage of a bifoyer, right? Like, I wanted to have every tool of my disposal to use this service so that I could verify what the service provider was telling me. not very distrust, but I just would like to be able to verify.

I see that as an improvement on status quo financial system. If I'm giving a custodian an asset, they're not really telling me where it is, and they're just going to give me some cash on it. That's really not different, not that different than what we have today. And so we wanted to really bring in all the features that are available in Bitcoin and literally relay them to the end users of the service. And so when you, for example, sent a loan of collateral for your loan, you were able to verify that that Bitcoin sat on that vault address within Bitcoin, covered with insurance. And it hasn't moved.

I actually checked it right before we started this interview. I was going to pop on and check that address and make sure the bit. And of course, like it's been sitting the same UTXO has been sitting there since I opened the loan. Yeah, and that, that is very important to us. And we are, this is, again, going to, addressing this point precisely if the questions people don't ask, that is weak. We try to stress as much as possible that we're one of the few companies in the world that do this.

What's happening in most cases is those assets that are being placed under custody are being relent, are being, you know, there's things happen. in the background to maximize, you know, profit. And again, these are not, all of these things that I'm telling you now can be done properly. I'm not trying to say that these are scary things that, you know, every custodial platform that is lending is doing things wrong. That's not the case. There are good players that are being very transparent and showing users where the Bitcoin is at all time.

There are services that aren't. And those services essentially, they don't, they don't try to. to compete on transparency. They try to compete on other types of lures like excessive rates or artificially low rates and people, you know, because they're used to services being very commoditized in the traditional financial system, like a mortgage is a mortgage, credit cards and credit card, like there's very few differences in this in the systems today. So everyone thinks that every Bitcoin back loan is the same. And that could not be further from the truth. you know there are companies that are transparent and that are very much welcoming to people's desires to verify and there are companies that work a little bit more obscurity

we think that transparency is the way to go and that is where we want to go towards the kind of analogy that I tell people is that I like to think of Lenin as a big glass box where people can send their assets see where they're at, feel safe, looking at them, and still access our services with the same clarity as much as we can provide as having their own keys worth. Yeah, 100%. And so I guess to talk about moving into the services of lending and or sorry, away from lending, but rather like the savings and then assets being lent out. So again, these are services that when done in the shadows where people have, you know, placed something in custody and not consented to that and don't realize it's happening, it's something that's outright malicious, I would say. But there are some people that would enter into a contract where they say, hey, you know, like I'm willing to have a, a,

a third party lend out my Bitcoin if I'm going to get a rate of return for that. And so it comes up to the consumer choice. Is the rate of return a justification for some inherent risk as with any type of investment? And so it can be done in a transparent way, right? Yeah. So, you know, there is a little more challenge when you're trying to provide per reserves around the savings product. Because in order to generate the returns of the savings product, you have to generally lend

them out. When you lend them out, they're no longer in your possession. So even if you were to see them on the blockchain, it would almost be misrepresenting where the funds are because you're not controlling those private keys anymore. So when it comes to lending out the Bitcoin as far as the savings side of things, the most important thing is really, and this is probably not going to be the greatest answer, but it is the integrity of the operator.

Because the operator of that pool will essentially have discretion as to how those funds can be deployed. Now, because business, so I think the way we like to do business, the only way we do business is essentially we take collateral from the counterparty that is requiring this Bitcoin. I think that that being said, I think the Bitcoin market is, Bitcoin lending market is evolving very fast. And it is, there are, I guess, some players that are doing things right.

And I think there are some players that, you know, people should be a little more concerned about because, you know, some, you know, there can be shops out there saying, you know, opening up with registrations in some random place with a random website offering 10% yield on Bitcoin, and people will start sending out those Bitcoins. But what happens when those players start to emerge is that they take that Bitcoin and they desperately start trying to place it. And it taints the borough market, right? Because right now, and this is fact.

You can check this online at Loanscan.I.O. There is a low, you actually have to pay a lower rate. Right now, you could get a Bitcoin loan for 2.5% uncollateralized as a Bitcoin borrower. Needless to say, Lennon is not participating in the Bitcoin lending game right now. And that is something that I think we need to be, you know, vocal about because, again, we're saying, that these things are happening. And, you know, I want to be, you know, clear and say that we're not partaking in this high-risk game. We prefer much more to, you know, either not place them out, just keep them under our custody and their customers,

then to essentially, you know, participate and try to play on that race. Like that is a race where we won't go. We're not going to like we won't essentially lend anything if we don't feel comfortable. And right now I'm saying I don't think that the lending, the Bitcoin lending space is necessarily at its healthiest moment. And so I think that it's important that as a user, people are asking these questions and understanding this. Because as a Bitcoiner, you know, I look at, you know, the people that are participating in the, I care, we care about our customers a lot. And we don't want to lose a single sap. That's our main thing.

So whenever we see things going in a direction that we don't like, we're going to call it out. And we're going to, we're going to shift gears. Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about the implications of a, a slu, a slu, of financial, I guess financial services companies coming out and partaking in some of the, you know, services that were used to, but applying the same amount of kind of like willy-nilly risk that the traditional finance crowd is used to under the, I guess under the impression that if the traditional finance guys could get away with it, then so can we.

It's starkly different given that in Bitcoin, there is no lender of last resort. And there's a very real cost to over leveraging yourself and being irresponsible with customer funds. Which leads me to believe that people partaking in those practices in this space, as opposed to the traditional finance space where they just get a pass and they continue business as usual. The riskier players here, I think, are likely to get shaken out over time, but that also applies to people that are utilizing those riskier players and those higher rates of return. So do you have any insight?

Do you think that that's the way this is going to go? some people are going to have to experience that with the less transparent players out there? I mean, I want to believe that that won't be the case. I want us to do as much as we can as a community so that organically customers understand what questions they need to be asking and they discern who can offer this and who isn't. and essentially what is a premium product and where isn't a premium product and and you know are these apples and am i comparing them to apples right i think that's the most important thing because right now it's you know the people that are in the obscure side they're putting out content and

information that makes it very hard for that to do the people at transparency front you know i guess i think it's a battle of two narratives one on the one narrative you have easy service great rates very fast blah blah blah higher problems On the other side, you have ask the right questions, be transparent, you know, check where your Bitcoin is, audit things. Like, it's those voices are very hard to kind of compare and contrast. And I think the voice of reason will win over time. So I don't think it's a coincidence that so many of industry players actually use Lennon. like we work with some of the top companies in Canada and North America and really the world

and we work with some of the employees of top companies that get paid in Bitcoin. And I think that tells us that those guys do their homework and they wind up here. And so I think I would love to keep doing more of that. And I would love to keep hearing more people come and say, hey, I love how you guys do pre-reserves. We get that up. We get that quite a bit. And people keep coming. I wish that people would understand the risk more.

I want to say that this is going to be a slow organic process, but what is likely going to happen is, you know, we saw this year or last year, sorry, when quadrubacks went under. It ended up being the greatest, yeah, it didn't out there. Maybe not so much because they were doing great things, but because the Titanic sank and you had all these people in a raft looking for a new boat and they just, you know, the numbers just went up, right? And so I hope that I'd not see that from Canada anymore. I hope that if things happen, it happens outside. And I would love to see people

proactively look for the right choice rather than, you know, reactively have to look for a new home. And that's why I think it's so important that we talk about this. Yeah, yeah, I agree. It's having experience in the space, most people have begun to recognize that when you see the ones that are making grandiose claims and not encouraging a lot of skepticism and self-verification, they tend to be the riskier directions to go. And when you get somebody saying like, hey, listen, like don't believe, don't take my word for it, look into it yourself telling you, again, don't trust but verify. Those are the people that tend to exude qualities that are going to be better for you as an individual to interact with them over time.

So I guess what I'd like to go to now, given that we've kind of discussed your approach and Lennon's approach in contrast with, you know, some other entities out there, what else have you been able to build? Taking that idea of being careful and conservative and transparent, you're able to. to do some interesting things and build some interesting products. So obviously you've got the loans. You do the savings, but you launched another product as well recently. It's been out for a little while now, but I'll let you chat about it. Yeah, definitely. So on the topic of services that help you hold and accumulate more Bitcoin, what we saw was that many users were coming to our site and they were taking loans out because they wanted to buy more Bitcoin with it. And so, exactly.

And so after seeing that oftentimes and having people, you know, having to wire the funds outside of the platform, then people have to go and buy their Bitcoin and then send them coming back to our platform to get another dollar loan. So what we did is essentially we packaged that up into one new product called B2X. And so what B2X does in a short nutshell is that the Bitcoin that you bring into Lennon, essentially and you want to apply to the B2X service, what it does is that it lets you double the amount of Bitcoin

that you use on the service to one of our loans. So example, let's just say Bitcoin is $10,000 today. You deposit of Bitcoin. You want to use B2X. You click yes. Another Bitcoin gets purchased, and you essentially end state is you have two Bitcoins and a loan for $10,000.

And obviously, that if Bitcoin price goes up, that benefits you. If Bitcoin price goes down, that goes against you. But in essence, if you have a long-term view or even the medium or short-term view, that Bitcoin is going to increase in price, and you'd like to get or feel a larger effect when that happens, then you can use B2X.

So you're essentially doubling kind of your exposure to those price fluctuations, whether it be to the upside or the downside. you get exposed to that. So in the instance of depositing a Bitcoin and essentially obtaining a second Bitcoin with that and then having that loan there, you're on the, you know, you're on the hook for the loan, which there's, you know, you're collateral there as well. Plus, you know, any fees incurred.

But if the, you know, if it goes to the upside, then, you essentially are doubling your perceived like dollar exposure to that. And then so can you outline what happens to the to the downside and at what point there may be a call for additional collateral? Like what are the levels that people should look out for there? Definitely. So on the downside, our first margin call happens at a drop of 28. and a half percent approximately 30 percent from the time you take out the loan when that happens

we reach out and we try to reach out actually even before that and give you the opportunity to deposit additional funds to the vault address if you want to avoid the margin call together before it even happens so once the drop happens and the level gets hit we email you and call you and essentially say hey ben on a bitcoin or repay x-mcum amount of dollars and the first notice we tell you there's 24 hours now we are understanding we're human to we travel to so whenever a user responds and says hey I'm traveling I don't get access to my private key until tomorrow can I get another 24 hours like we're very flexible when it comes to that stuff but

as long as within our means we can extend we will and work with you to kind of get there that's the process so far we've had you know several drills of market call scenario of situations. And we've been nothing but surprised at how smart really are people that use that are, because we contact them and they're already like, oh yeah, I was expecting your call. Don't worry, I'm ready to go.

I didn't want to drink the price. We're good. Don't sell my big point. So are you finding that most people are opting to add collateral versus, okay, yeah, yeah. Overwhelming majority. I mean, our service is here to help you hold. So we kind of anticipated that most people were wanting to,

would act sort of to protect the Bitcoin balance. That's what we see. In fact, one of the neat things about the savings account is that we know if somebody's going to be traveling, because we have some users that, for example, live in, you know, mountainous areas or don't always have access to a computer. So we say to them, listen, if you, if you, You don't, if you want, if you're going to be unable to communicate with us for a known period of time, one option we give you is you can basically put a balance on your savings account.

And if a margin goal happens, we won't bother you. We'll just, you off, you'll preauthorize us, we draw from them, we top you up and off you go. A lot of people use that service. I think it's very, it's a convenience thing more than others and it's more of a peace of mind thing. But our goal is really to give you all the tools so that you don't have. have to sell it. I mean, that's really, or that's the kind of the whole premise is that you can maintain them as long as more. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. So, so you guys have been expanding a bunch. So like obviously, both of us were in Canada, but you've been kind of, I've been seeing you guys

are doing regular visits to Latin America. Like, where are you now? Yeah, so over Christmas, Just before Christmas, we were down at Labit Conf in Uruguay. Obviously, being Venezuelan, we're very much in tune with the crypto movement down there and how people are using Bitcoin to circumvent, not circumvent, but how to essentially protect themselves from inflation and really safe and access. But now more so now, at the beginning, the only thing you could do was buy Bitcoin. Bitcoin and hold Bitcoin. But now we're seeing a lot of these people access to our financial services. Like people are putting money and they're earning, you know, interest on the savings

account. They're taking out loans and, you know, interesting in the places like Venezuela. So I've shared some information recently for some research projects that have reached out to us and want to learn more about, you know, how are people using our services down there and, you know, what kind of usage are they giving it? So to give you some examples, or our average deposit in Venezuela users is $120. Our average loan in Venezuela is $4,000. So what that tells us is that these are real people using, you know, trying to really save some money.

It's not some whale out there, you know, trying to play around with some money. It's people that are actually finding Bitcoin and seeing a big breakthrough. So some of the interesting use cases for our loans down there. We had a person who told us that they had actually used their loan to be able to purchase the medicine for their family because they came into like a tight moment and they didn't want to sell their sats and they took a one and bought the medicine. And they loved the fact that it was same day funding. They're like, can I make sure I can get this? We're like, you know, we'll send it today. We're pretty sure you'll get there today.

The guy was able to do what he needed and that, you know, that's tremendous. And then there's another guy who was expanding his mining operation. So there's left in Mexico used to loan to create a music festival. So there's a lot of, and we have OTC partners in Mexico that use our services. We have exchange companies that use our services. So it's really all over. The use cases are very broad. But it's fascinating.

So Latam is somewhere where as a region we work very closely with. It's where over half of our users are today now. It's been, you know, it's kind of snowballed as far as the growth. And Argentina is a place that we're paying close attention to because of what's happening. We have, we work with Catalina down there, TechCon Catalina, who's an amazing content maker and YouTuber a bit. So for us,

I mean, it's, and that's our focus. We're seeing quite a bit of interest from Europe. And we have some really good opportunities in Asia that we're going to be exploring this year as well. Wow. So you're kind of hitting the globe hard.

Yeah, we try to be as surgical as we can with sort of the, when we go and we make an effort. But a lot of the outreach stuff. we're getting it's just organic now you know a lot of people are just coming to us from very different parts and we're essentially now understanding it's like okay well we were targeting latam we started to get a bunch of clients from europe and just clearly people wanting to use these types of services down there let's do more over there right and so that that's kind of where it's going and uh yeah latam is

big focus in europe and asia are probably going to be a focus points to later in the year well that's Incredible. It's very interesting to watch kind of the growth of the space, the proliferation of services like you guys, building on top of an entirely different monetary base and also like capitalizing on inefficiencies in our current system, our current monetary system around the world. and allowing people to kind of utilize the release valve that is Bitcoin in very different ways. So again, I think you're definitely building something that is integral to this, what I hope to be a push towards, we'll say hyper-bitcoinization in the coming years. And yeah, so I mean, I guess my last thing would be, where can people, go and find yourself, Leiden, everything that they want to look up about, and if you have any other things that you'd like to point people towards. Yeah, I mean, the easiest way is ledden.I.O. That's our

main site. Our Twitter handle is Hoddle with Levin, and my personal handle is Cryptonomist, with an A at the end, so a Cryptonomista. And I'm pretty active and pretty much everywhere. we have a very neat chat feature on the site for people to ask questions. And yeah, I mean, if you hit me up on any one of the channels. Awesome. Well, that was a great conversation. I'm glad we had it. And thanks again for taking the time to chat with me.

Anytime, Ben. Awesome. Thanks, man. Thank you guys so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed that. I hope you enjoyed everything Maricio had to say. Let me know what you thought of the conversation in the comments down to the below. What do you think about proof of reserves? Do you think it should be a standard in this industry?

And let me know what you think of custody as a whole. And financial services built atop a finite asset like Bitcoin. Now, if you want to help out the show, of course, you can hit up the sponsors down below. Of course, there's Ledden and Rise wallet. Those links are in the show notes. You can also check out with Saobu wallet, which is an excellent way to gain some privacy on your Bitcoin. And finally, you can check out NordVPN. This is a program I use regularly on my computer and on my phone. Essentially, what it does is it hides your IP address. It encrypts your browsing data and it has a bunch of other added benefits

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BTC Sessions, all one word, and that will get you the same deal. With that, I will wrap up. Again, thank you guys so much for, don't forget to it, like, subscribe, and share, and I will see you next time for your daily session.