Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Jamal Raees & Yanni Giannaros: Wyre – Using Blockchain for Cross-Border Payments

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

Wyre is a leading fiat-to-cryptocurrency and payment infrastructure company for the cryptocurrency ecosystem. In blockchain time, Wyre has been around forever -- it was founded in 2013. Wyre leverages blockchain to facilitate cross-border payments, bridging the gap between traditional payment processing and digital assets. Focusing on developers, the company provides easy-to-integrate APIs which enable thousands of developers to bring cryptocurrency to the masses. The company has “on-ramped” over 15 million end users to their partners and has processed over $10B in payments since inception.We were joined by Co-founder and CEO Yanni Giannaros, and Director of Crypto Strategy Jamal Raees, to chat about payments applications in general and in web3, how Wyre works on a technical and business level including regulatory constraints, their recent acquisition by Bolt, and the roadmap for the platform.Topics covered in this episode:The history of Wyre and the changes they have seen in the space over the past 10 yearsYanni and Jamal's backgrounds and how they metA technical overview of WyreThe challenges of running an onrampBolt's recent acquisition of WyrePayments applications in web 3 - what works and what doesn'tThe Wyre business model and feesThe jurisdictional restrictions for using Wyre and Yanni and Jamal's thoughts on the current regulatory environmentThe future of crypto interfacesThe Wyre roadmapEpisode links: WyreWyre on TwitterYanni on TwitterJamal on TwitterSponsors: ParaSwap: ParaSwap aggregates all major DEXs and makes sure you beat the market price at every single swap and with the lowest slippage - paraswap.io/epicenterChorus One: Chorus One runs validators on cutting edge Proof of Stake networks such as Cosmos, Solana, Celo, Polkadot and Oasis. - https://epicenter.rocks/chorusoneThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/449

This is Epicenter, Episode 449 with guests, Yanni Janaros and Jamal Reyes. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies, projects, and people driving decentralization, the blockchain revolution. I'm Frederica Ernst, and today I'm speaking with Yani, the founder and CEO and Jamal, the director of crypto strategy, from Wire. Wire is a fiat on ramp to various blockchains, and we will talk about this in detail in just the but just before I would like to tell you about our sponsors this week, our first sponsor is Paraswap. Paraswap is a multi-chain DAX aggregator. This means that through paraswap, you can easily access the liquidity of various different decentralized exchanges.

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And this means that Paraswop Stakers get up to 100% gas refund on their trades on top of their auto-compounding yield. Visit Parasop to learn more at parisop.io slash epicenter. Epicenter is also brought to you by Corse 1. Securing blockchains and earning rewards need not be energy-intensive or complicated. And by staking your assets with Corus 1, you contribute to network security and earn rewards too. Corus 1 has been a pioneer in the space since 2018 and secures billions of dollars in

assets and on over 25 decentralized networks, including Solana, Cosmos and Ethereum. If you're an institution or want to run your own branded note, you can use Corse 1's wide label service and their battle-proven infrastructure to participate in proof of state networks in an easy and direct manner. Head over to Corus.1 and start your staking journey today. Yanni and Jamal, it's a pleasure to have you on. Thank you so much for having us.

Thank you for having us. So I actually read up on wire, before this episode, as I do. And it struck me how incredibly old wires for a crypto company. So wire was founded in 2013. So you are up there with the oldest companies we've ever had on. Tell me about what wire was about initially. Because you pivoted a couple of times, right?

Yeah, the wire story is like much of a story of like wire, like a pivoting. It's a, it's like a very standard pivot startup story, which is really, really awesome. But yeah, we're an ancient dinosaur in the space. So we started in 2012, 2013, you know, both my co-founder and I at the time were fascinated by crypto. We were big into Reddit, big into like 4chan and like all the different communities. And we fell in love with the Bitcoin community, which was like the original community, you know, that was very similar to kind of like the web through.

community as it is today where everyone got together and started building projects. And it was like a big group group project essentially, right? So we fell in love with this community and wanted to build some products into it. And the first thing where we noticed was like, hey, all these people have Bitcoins, but they can't do anything with them. This is like 2012, 2013. It's like everyone had all their Bitcoins. They couldn't spend it.

BitPay wasn't like everywhere yet. You know, they were starting to get some merchants. But, you know, people have Bitcoins that couldn't spend them. And we're like, hey, wouldn't it be cool if we made an application to make it super easy for people to use their Bitcoin to buy anything on the internet? So we released something, we were called Snapcard there, then, and released a product in the space that enabled anybody on the internet to buy anything using their Bitcoins. And it was kind of like magic how it worked. It just overlaid on your browser, went on a shopping cart. You pay in Bitcoins, we converted it into US dollars and bought it with kind of our credit card.

So that's the beginning story of wire. And that led us down a journey to where we are today and through bear markets, bull markets. And it's pretty fascinating to see where it's come to. But we absolutely fell in love in 2012, 2013. The culture in crypto has changed substantially in the last 10 years, right? So a lot of the people who join the ecosystem early, they've left. How have you experienced the last decade? Yeah, I mean, like a lot of people have left, a tremendous amount of people have come in, right?

So, um, oh, yeah, absolutely. And, and, you know, the thing that, um, the thing that really kept us around was really, you know, we, we saw that there was something really unique being built here, right? And this is like pretty early on, we realized that there was, um, it quite looked like the beginning of the internet era, right? Where every, there was a lot of excitement. People are in it to win it type situation. and that people are coming here, leaving high-quality jobs to come build on this incredible technology.

And that was, you know, you say the same conversation to today, but that was the same conversation in 2013 where people were leaving their jobs at Google, people were leaving their jobs at Facebook. And they're like, this is fascinating. I need to get mine. Some of the brightest minds are coming in space. So that trend's been there since day one. And I think that in couple with that, we, you know, we were directly dealing with financial services. Like we were helping people use user Bitcoins and try to make it easier to spend anywhere.

And when we started kind of lifting every single curtain in the space, right? We started lifting like, okay, well, how does ACH work? Well, how do wires work? How do cross-border payments work? How does like money transfer work and all this sort of elements? We realize how broken every single financial system was. And how big of an opportunity Bitcoin and another cryptocurrencies could really play in the space. So pretty early on, that's what kept us around.

And in addition to the community being fascinating and the rapid pace of just change that's happening in the space. So I think that's like what got us addicted to it. And to be honest, like there isn't any other exciting industry that's happening today. Like in comparison to crypto, I think this is the most fascinating ecosystem. And I think the biggest change is happening here in the world. So I probably, my excitement that I had in 2012 is probably if not more today, but very similar to what it was in 10 years ago.

So it's very exciting time for sure. I mean, this was a super long time ago, but what did you actually do before you got into crypto? Yeah, so for me personally, I was, I worked at a data encryption company called SafeNet. So they encrypt like most of the world's data. So like the phone that's sitting on the president's test right now is encrypted by SafeNet technology.

It's like custom encryption that's used for very obscure government purposes. It was out of Belkamp, Maryland. They ended up selling to Jamalto, which is another large encryption company. So I worked there. I was more, I wasn't on the encrypt. They hire more cryptographers than any other company in the world, more than the government as well. Safenet did. But I wasn't in that department at all.

But I was in kind of like the webmaster managing websites and doing a lot of different stuff there for that entire organization. So that's actually how I found out about Bitcoin. So in the intranet, these cryptographers posted this Bitcoin white paper in 2011. I think early 2012, late 2011, and they're like, this is fascinating. And in the intranet, nobody ever responded to anything. It was like the internal board of like some large company. And there was like a few people that ever abvoted in the, it was like a Microsoft

Actus, I believe. And they posted this. And there was like, 100 comments on there. I'm like, all right, I got to read about this. I read half the white paper and I didn't understand anything. But what I did do is go to Bitcoin.org, which was on the white paper and instantly fall in love with just like this crazy community that was sending like these bitcoins back and forth. There's almost like, it's like, yeah, I definitely want some bitcoins.

Like, hey, can I, yeah, I'll write a post and like get 100 bitcoins or whatever it was back then. But that's how that's how I fell in love with the community and got into it. Oh, super interesting. Yeah, that's that's a super long time ago. So when you were just talking about the first offering that buyer actually had, kind of being an overlay for other websites to kind of create this bridge between crypto and like the usual credit card forms that people have to fill out to actually buy stuff. From a regulatory point of view, was this easier back then?

Or I mean, because now, I mean, this sounds like, you know, it would sound all kinds of AML bells and I mean, it sounds like a nightmare. So basically, was this an issue back then? I mean, like, we were very, I mean, in 2013, we were very naive about that sort of stuff. I think like most people in the crypto space were, right? Like, we were just starting out. You know, hey, we have this problem. We're trying to help people buy items and whatnot.

And it was very much a stopgap solution, right? It was like, kind of like, hey, you give us Bitcoin. we converted into Fiat and we drop ship it over to you. And you had to set up an account so we understood who you were. But it was like money transfer. Like now we're a regulatory financial institution like that. That's like anywhere you go in the space, there's like red flags all across the board. But as a like weekend project that we started and like back in 2012, 2013, people buying

$50 worth of like Amazon goods. It was like we didn't really think about it in that way. Right. And it wasn't until, you know, this was like the first iteration. And then we got bigger and the volume started increasing. And then we started realizing that, hey, this is a stop gap solution. If we're really serious about crypto, we need to go all in and build a Bitcoin payment processor. Because why would people use all? Once people start accepting crypto on their website, why would people use us anymore? And we went all in into merchant payment processing, which is very similar to like the bit pay business model early on. And that was like right before the first bear market. And then we just like hit a massive wall. nobody wanted to spend their Bitcoin. But that was the evolution out of that product. And Jamal probably has a lot of stories because his background is in BitPay back in a similar time period as well. But that's that the to answer your question, no, AML concerns were not an issue. Although we did get regulated with FinCEN pretty quickly after we went into Bitcoin payment processing. Cool. Jamal, you joined, why I only recently, like last year or so.

What did you do before and how did you meet me, and meet Yanni? Yeah, I'm somewhat needed a wire. I joined about a year and change, a year and less than a quarter ago. Feels like a couple of years now, but that's just normal in the crypto space. But no, I've been here a while. I've been in crypto for a good amount of time to you. So prior to being at Wire, I looked after partnerships for Square.

I was inadvertently kind of put into the crypto space, but mainly on main platform partnerships, but I did dabble a little bit with the cash app ecosystems and the folk there. Not too many crypto products there, but did get my feet wet there. Prior to Square, I was there just about a year. Prior to Square, I led BD globally for BitPay for about four years from 2016 to about 2020. Prior to that, I'd put my foot in the ring with a couple of crypto startups that were smaller in the Atlanta area where I'm based. and there's never actually turned out to be anything.

But that's where I kind of got my start late 2016, or sorry, early 2016, late 2015, kind of learning about Ethereum and what that was and what smart contracts are and how that will be revolutionary in the coming years. But yeah, that's kind of what got me into it. I had a lot of experience with payments, really saw crypto's the future of the payments ecosystem

and the new financial mechanism to do that. So that's just really what drew me more than anything else. Cool. And how did you guys meet? actually through so my cousin my cousin actually is a big crypto guy as well got me into crypto in the early days

also worked at bid pay with me kind of early on he actually left to lead the product team here at Wire and just like loved it was raving about it ever since he got there I was hitting some balls in some of the earlier parts of my career at Square just you know really want to get back

into the crypto reigns and that's how I met Yanni and it was like two minutes of a conversation and I was like, I'm on board, dude, let's do this. So you are formerly the director of crypto strategy. What does the director of crypto strategy actually do? So our team really focuses primarily on all of our strategy behind our crypto integrations. So why would we integrate a particular asset, what we do with non-asset crypto integrations as well. So some of the work we do with smart contracts, some of the work we do with NFT,

just kind of the strategy and also the external relationshiping that goes into managing some of these new asset integrations and non-asset integrations as well. Yeah. Just to add to that, there's like, it's so fascinating. We have like, you know, teams build a lot of partnerships around payments. Like, how do we work with banks? How do we work with different payment providers? But very few teams actually have good strategies around like how do we work with protocols?

Like if we're going to integrate a protocol, it's not a done, a set and forget it type situation. So Jamal really thinks strategically on a lot of those partnerships. It's like, okay, well, what's a, you know, what's a long-term vision of like working with Polygon? What's a long-term vision of working with seller? And how do we, how do we help that ecosystem grow? Because we're a very integral part to these like protocols. And I think it's like Jamal does incredible work on just like really putting a win-win relationship between kind of our street, our crypto partnerships, which is really awesome. It's definitely a new role in the space that I bet we're going to start seeing a lot more over the next couple of years.

Cool. Can you tell us about, can you walk me through how wire works on a technical level? I can walk you through some of our product stack, kind of the value prop behind it. You know, there's a suite of APIs and that can get pretty complex. But, you know, I can walk you through kind of like the vision behind some of those products. When you think about wire and what value we deliver, it really is two major value propositions. Number one is the sexy side, which is what I consider to be all the Fiat payment network and the crypto acid integrations that we've had. So we just have a very

robust network of payment methods, compliant payment methods, compliance payment operations, and then just a number of integrations across multiple different blockchains. And these APIs are designed to allow developers to come in and very easily build on these APIs to allow interoperability within their own environments, right? So whether that's taking a fiat payment, turning that into crypto, providing infrastructure to holding crypto in the app, moving crypto into crypto or off-ramping crypto back into cash and delivering that cash across multiple jurisdictions to different bank accounts. All of those integrations require an incredible amount of individual work, negotiation, management, and compliance as well. So Wire actually goes out and does the work

of pre-connecting to all of these traditional systems as well as these new blockchain systems to allow developers to come in and build on top of those without having to worry about individualizing each one of these connections. That's value prop number one. The behind the scenes, the not so sexy value prop that's probably more important in my eyes, which is the regulatory and the compliance work that goes into providing this service to customers. So there's an incredible amount of licensing, an incredible amount of compliance, AML, due diligence work that needs to be done, delivering these systems to developers, delivering these systems to end users, right so wire is a registered money service business here in the in the states where we're based but we're

also internationally regulated we have licenses across the world we're registered with different financial and governing bodies across the entire globe we also have money transmitter licenses throughout the entire united states each one of those individual licenses requires an incredible amount of work an incredible amount of capital an incredible amount of maintenance right so wire goes out and actually does the work maintaining the compliance and maintaining the regulatory satisfaction with all these regulators to make sure that any developer that comes and builds on wire actually gets to take advantage of our regulatory umbrella and not have to worry about that licensing regime themselves, right? The products are kind of distributed very much so underneath that, but those are the two major value props. If you want

to get into the products a little bit more and stop me if we want to double click it to any one of these at any point in time, but there are three major areas of how we really transfer value is the way I think about it or provide value or hold value. Number one is getting money from external sources onto the platform or onto the app or onto some sort of environment for a developer. And that includes being able to process a card, process an Apple Pay Pay Pay Pay payment, process a bank payment on a banking network in the United States or internationally as well, right?

So being able to support multiple pay-in methods to be able to take external funding sources from your customers and then be able to transfer value into your app. And again, it doesn't have to be able to support. to be a conversion like fiat to crypto. It could be fiat to fiat. It could be crypto to crypto. It could be any variety or any combination of those as well. But it's just transferring value from external sources onto the platform. And that in the more traditional sense is called fiat onramping. The second piece is, you know, beyond that fiat on ramp or beyond that on ramp into crypto, what infrastructure do we provide for an app to actually integrate crypto infrastructure as a

holding mechanism within their app itself? And that's where we actually have our custodial Wallets API as well. So we have the ability to spin up user infrastructure, user objects on the API that allow users to create custodial balances on the app tied to their original user credentials. So for example, if I'm a bank or something like NeoBank trying to build an app or whatever it is, I can take my regular user's username and password and create a user object on WIRE's API to allow people to custody a variety of assets through Wire. directly in the app. So it looks and feels like I'm just holding money directly in that app, but ultimately what's happening is wire is taking possession in a secure and compliant environment

and custody those assets for the end user and providing them basically the look and feel and execution of a real normal wallet without actually having to worry about what are private keys and what is the liability of self-custody and what is it like to hold money on the blockchain itself. Without having to worry about those things, a user can take advantage of blockchain assets and hold things on a platform. The cool thing about this, too, is we can also attach KYC to it and attach different payment methods to it as well. So it's a really versatile, just raw user object.

We can take KYC data and attach that to maintain compliance, but also make it really easy for them to, you know, attach a debit card or attach a bank payment so that they can go in and out of Fiat into crypto, from crypto to crypto, and then back to Fiat out. So again, stack number two or area number two of our products and services are the infrastructure around what we do with crypto, what we do with fiat, what we do with assets while they're on the platform and being held.

The third area is getting money off the platform. So we have a number of products, suites, APIs, whatever you want to call them, that allow people to take non-custodial or custodial assets, whether they're held by wire or not, and be able to transfer value on a payout mechanism as well. So that could mean off-ramping. That could mean taking one Bitcoin and paying out a thousand consultants a certain amount of value in fiat in a variety of fiats. That could be taking crypto, converting crypto, and doing mass payments out directly on the blockchain to multiple blockchain addresses. Basically,

our ability to automate payouts and conversions within those payouts to be able to get money off platforms directly to where users want them, whether it be in their wallet, whether it be in their bank account or not. How many networks are you guys on? It's so, it's a, it's a, the, the beautiful thing about our suite, it's actually not that many APIs. The value props in what you can build are vast. So like, there are actually just a few. It's like transfer as wallets and users. There's just three, right? So transfers enables people to transfer money in and out, but just the value prop on ramps and off ramps is a little bit different. But the design of the APIs are super beautiful. So a lot of developers come to our API docs and

they're like, wow, these are like, just like if I understand transfers, I understand everything about the API dogs, right? So it's a and then so like transfers allow people to move money in and out and convert the currency on what API call. Wallets allow enables people to actually store funds on the wallet. And the user allows people to actually provide KYC information and attach payment methods to that user object. So it's just like really three APIs, but the possibilities of what you can build is you can build a coin base in less than a few hours with the whole set of APIs.

So it's quite cool. Which networks do you guys run on? So are you talking about like crypto blockchains? Yeah, crypto blockchain networks. We have more than a handful. Obviously, you know, Bitcoin and Ethereum are two really kind of old age-old classics for us, and a lot of traction and volume comes from those two networks. We're also exploring a lot of other layer ones and layer two protocols as well.

So we're integrated with Polygon. We're integrated with Stellar, two major partners for us as well. We also have support for Avalanche, Algarand, a couple other layer twos like Palm and Loopring as well. And then exploring, you know, more than, more than 10 plus different protocols in the hopper right now to get across the finish line, hopefully in the next six months to 12 months here. What are the criteria for unramping new protocols? And I think, Jamar, this is probably a question for you. It varies. It depends on the situation where, you know, crypto is so fast growing and the landscape is changing so much that we have to be agile on our feet.

We have to be regularly, you know, willing to rethink how we add new assets and prioritize them. In the present time, we have three categories that we really fall to. Number one and probably our preference to add is just strong ecosystem assets, right? So this could be an asset like Polygon or Stellar, where there's a really robust ecosystem of developers and applications that are building on that asset or that blockchain. And by supporting assets on the blockchain and supporting traditional, you know, traditional fiat on ramps and off ramps into that asset, we can support that developer ecosystem better. So that would be, again, like an asset like Polygon or Stellar or Solana or one of these

other strong ecosystems where there's a very strong network of developers already building on it. Again, that's our priority and our preference to start supporting the strongest ecosystems of developers so we can start providing those developers, the toolkits that they need to build apps. The second category is there are strategic channels that we just want to go after by listing certain assets. So this could be like us supporting the loopering layer two protocol for us to be able to support GameStop's new NFT marketplace that is going to be built on loop ring ZK rollup. So we would want to list loop ring not only because it's a very strong ecosystem, but most importantly because there's a strategic channel with GameStop and a few other strategic partners that are building on this asset. and we want to be able to support that particular ecosystem because we see it as very strategic and aligned to what we're trying to provide at wire.

So that's the second category is being able to provide a new asset or support a new protocol based on the strategic channel that we're bringing to the table, whether it's a brand value, a particular channel of volume, a particular marketing value, whatever it is. The third and least interesting to us is the pay-to-list category. Obviously, there are certain ecosystems that are really budding and flush with cash that may not be strong and robust yet, and they just might want to fuel the growth of their ecosystem by providing a fiat on-ramp to their developers and attracting developers by providing a fiat on-ramp, right? So some people actually use us as a developer acquisition tool to be able to go out

and get an ecosystem and get a market of their own because we provide that developer tool get that's necessary for these developers to actually be attracted to the ecosystem as a whole, right? So in those situations, we work out a strategic arrangement with a particular partner to say, we're willing to provide this upfront legwork and resource to provide an integration to your ecosystem, but we want a commitment of this much volume, this much capital or whatever it is, to be able to make sure it's a strategic play for all of us. Yeah, that makes complete sense. You were talking about the three legs of the business, so basically the on-ramp, the off-ramp,

and the custodianship. I assume all three of these come with different challenges. What are the challenges that come with running and? on ramp. Yeah, yeah, happy, happy to. So, I mean, like, where do you start? So the, just to recap on the three, it's on ramps, like, well, custodian and then off ramps, right?

So you got three main pillars of like what we are our main business. With both on ramps and off ramps, like, you know, I think the big, the devil's in the details on a lot of these flows, because people are building unique products. And, you know, how do you productize everything to make it easy for? people to build and get them in, you know, because when you release APIs, like, people could take the APIs and build anything, really. But how do you streamline it into flows that are compliant, flows that are easy to understand for developers that have no idea what compliance is or K.YC or AML and build it in a way that

it's like, hey, it's super easy to build, get API keys and start doing it, but it needs to follow this sort of flow. So I think that, you know, that's a lifelong journey type situation for our company. Like the easier that we make it, the faster it will be for innovation to happen in the space, right? Because people will build products into faster scale and more users will come to the ecosystem. And that's the whole vision of wire, right? Make it easy for developers to really build and bring end users into the space. So, you know, that's been a big challenge.

And I'd say that, you know, it's a life. We're getting better at it. And the ways that we're getting better at it is making sure that we have like really crystal clear API docs, right? Have preferred use cases. So our solutions engineering team like has like all these like playbooks or cookbooks of like what to do. Oh, I'm building an NFT marketplace. But like, hey, we highly advise you build it this way or hey, here's like a playbook on how to do it. And people prefer to like we're almost like giving people playbooks on how to run their business.

But people prefer it. Because it's the first time in there. So in the way that we got there is like there's a lot of regulatory. work that needs to happen, right? Because we can't move, you know, one flow needs to go a specific way and we need to work with regulators and have a specific flow of funds. So we know this because of trial and error. And we know this because we work with all the regulators in the jurisdiction that we operate. And so I'd say that that's been a, like when I think about the business, I think about like how do we simplify that process. And that's a big limiting factor to our success.

if we make that easier. I think that's like the throttle on how we can get more business. Jamal, do you have any comments on that? I think on ramping is an interesting space. I'm not, you know, he's probably going to slap my wrist for saying this. I'm not like ultra bullish on it in the long run. I think it's an important space. It's extremely, extremely important.

Don't get me wrong. But it's becoming increasingly saturated because there's just so much heat around that. I mean, the real value that we're bringing to the crypto ecosystem is that we're people like us, wire, other people involved in the Fiaton ramp space, we're ushering the next billion people into crypto, right? So ultimately, that space has so much heat and so much importance tied to it, that it's becoming an increasingly saturated market. So for us, we're not very, you know, bullish on double-downing on that commoditized space. We think that the real value is going to come from expanding the infrastructure more onto the blockchain side, right? So there's, there's,

like a feature that we just launched called SmartRamps, which is us differentiating ourselves from the traditional Fiaton Ramps by just providing the humdrum, here let me take your card and deliver you an asset. That's pretty easy and not too difficult and becoming, again, increasingly saturated, to let me actually take that asset for you and actually execute on-chain calls and transactions on your behalf, right,

so that you don't need to have or need to understand what private keys and wallets and what that liability looks like, we can actually execute smart contract functions directly on your behalf. We're launching this feature actually in a couple weeks with Skyweaver, which is like a really, really popular game on the Polygon ecosystem with over 100,000 active users every single day, most importantly, which 30%, 30, 40, 50% of which are first-time crypto users. People have never really created a crypto wallet before.

And that's just such an exciting market for us because this is such a ripe, ripe target market to usher into the crypto ecosystem to help people understand, you know, I, I'm interested in crypto. I'm a little savvy with technology, but I'm not, you know, not in the crypto space. How do I get there? Right. And ushering these folks into the crypto ecosystem with a set of tools that's designed to take advantage to all the benefits of cryptocurrency and blockchain without having to push them out of their comfort zone and into the deep end and having to understand the depths of crypto. I think solutions like this are incredibly important. And I'm, happy to dive into that a little bit more, but I don't want to take away from what you wanted to

ask with this question. Can I add something in there? Just a, yeah, so what Jamal said is, is it, I definitely am not going to slap you on the wrist off for saying that. It's something to be, we wrote this out. You know, we really believe that the on-ramp business is a race to the bottom. Like I think in our 2022 strategy doc that we don't share outside of the wire, but I think it's like already like I think it's like very important that everyone knows like we do believe that it's

it's a race at bottom right so on ramping is going to be a highly commoditized business and you're already starting to see that stripe coin base every single player everybody mom and dog is basically creating an on ramp right if you're a payment processor you're like oh well I get on ramp too margins are high and where you're going to see it's going to be margin compression and which we already saw we have been seeing and then it's going to be it's going to go it's going to go it's going to go straight to where card processing is today. And we've seen that in many other industries. So how do we build unique experiences to connect Web3 payment experiences

to traditional financial systems is like our key thesis. And how do we do that in a way that is customizable and really, really awesome is like something that we're really prioritizing. And SmartRamps is just the beginning of that. So we have a whole slew of products coming out to really get us to build these unique experiences that will really shape the way that the next billion people get into crypto. A favorite ecosystem mantra is not your keys, not your coins. How do you guys feel about this?

I mean, contrasting this with, I mean, we all know that the user experience of the, you know, the seed phrases and stuff, this is, it's a horrible user experience. But wallet projects are kind of are working on making this easier, be it via account abstraction or naps or whatever. So how do you see those two universes converge, or not converge, actually? Just some thoughts. Jamal probably has a lot of thoughts on this as well. I definitely, you know, so for us, like, we're, us personally, probably I'm not going to speak for

tomorrow, but for me personally, like, I'm a security freak, right? So like my personal funds, I, I have all my own ledger and like, and, and have like deep security, like, like, have like three ripped up papers across the planet that I have like backups on and I have my, you know, so that's just on my side. I think for WIRE, when I think about it, it's like, hey, we, we're helping a lot of enterprises. We're helping a lot of businesses get into crypto. and we're a fully custodial solution, right? So people are building on top of our wallet infrastructure. There are means of like doing something cool in the future with non-custodial.

And we have like integration methods where you, if you're not custodial wallet, you can interact with our APIs and whatnot. So we build some good bridges there. But we're still in the phase where people are dipping their toes in this ecosystem and we're providing technology for enterprises to really make it as easy as possible for them to get up and running. We talked to businesses, and Jamal probably talks them more than I do, but like we talk to businesses almost every single day and they're like, hey, we recommend them. It's like, you should be thinking about a non-custodial solution or you should be thinking about this integration. They're just like, we don't have the team, we don't have the knowledge know-how.

And there's like such a steep learning curve to get there that, you know, they're just preferred to use RES APIs to actually spin up a wallet, have somebody take care of all the node management, have somebody take care of. have somebody take care of all the security because it's not easy to do. We've seen the opposite though, too, like companies like GameStop really go the non-custodio route and really build it the right way. But it also took them like six to nine months to build something, I think even longer than that, right? So there are pros and cons in both ways, but, you know, personally we believe that non-custodio is a way to future. And it might be interesting with now the acquisition of bowl that we can probably play in that arena that there's a really strong consumer play.

But for the time being, like, we're fully non-custodian. custodial platform that make it easy for enterprises to build. You spoke about Bolt. So you guys were acquired by Bolt recently for a billion and a half. So bring us up to speed on Bolt. What does Bolt do? Yeah. So Bolt is a one click is a leading one click checkout for.

So the leading one click checkout for every single merchant out there. So they make it super. They come in, replace an entire shopping cart experience. shopping cart experience for any single merchant and provide a new way to help merchants get more conversions through their shopping cart. And they do this through a one click checkout. Their technology goes deep. So not only do they just do one click, they have like a whole wallet infrastructure

that they're building out. They have a whole end to end solution for merchants. They have like a fraud mitigation solution. So every single transaction that goes through both is undemified through them. So there are full payments platform that enables. to have the best shopping experience and help them get more conversions through the door. So we get they acquired us earlier this year. We signed the merger agreement with them and we're finalizing the work probably 30 days out, 30 to 45 days out on the full acquisition, which you're really, really excited about.

But you know, crypto, you know, when you're thinking about commerce like crypto is a hundred percent going to be there. Whether it's your settling to your merchants in USC, whether it is, you know, earning interest on your best. balances on the platform, whether it is accepting crypto, whether it is really reaching those consumers and enabling them to have crypto wallets, crypto is going to be a strong play. And I think that there's a massive opportunity for them to really make it a more efficient transaction for all their merchants. But I think there's a really strong play for them to like really go after like a PayPal or a coin base in the next coming year.

So really, really exciting acquisition that we're, it's going to be something that we're going to continue to build on. The most exciting thing is that they built like probably the best shopping card experience. It really is a one-click shopping, like one-cryptop shopping experience. So the coolest thing, it probably a final iteration of our checkout would be one-click crypto. So how do we take that same technology and bring into crypto? So when you're in Metamask, you press one button and you actually buy crypto. Everything's happening behind the scenes, connecting your payment method, and crypto's just delivered.

So we can bring the best experience to crypto. So that's kind of like the iteration number one that we're coming out with. And that's going to be really exciting. We're working on that right now. So, yeah. And I just wanted to add, I mean, we're, everyone's really excited. I think the thing that's most exciting about it is that number one, their vision, their strategy, their philosophy on the way to go about, you know, and handling the payment space

is very aligned with ours, right? They want to democratize the payment space. They want to democratize e-commerce. And they think the proper way of going. about it is building a robust ecosystem that people build on top of and people add value to themselves, which is very aligned with what we think. So that's number one. We're really excited about pairing up and just partnering up with someone who's very strategically aligned to us. And then on top of that, too, there's also a lot of just like synergies across the board.

They're very much so all in on crypto. They really see this as a massive payment mechanism for the future. They think this is the future of e-commerce, the future of payments. And we're a very critical piece of their strategy in exploring and expanding into that field. So we're just really excited to be like the bell of the ball for them, to be honest with you, where they're really excited about this space and they see us as that strategic partner to actually enter in and operate in that space. So we're really excited for the deal to go through and eventually, I guess, we'll operate independently underneath them, but excited to bring value in the crypto ecosystem. There's a lot of synergistic projects like Yanni mentioned.

Basically, zooming out a little bit, payments have always been kind of at the forefront of what people expected to have. happen in the crypto space, right? And now, like, you know, 12 years in or so, we haven't really seen payment applications take off. Why do you think that is? I don't think that's a, there's definitely payment systems working today, right? I definitely don't think that you see, like, there's companies like VIN that's still out there that's doing business to business bank transfers that, that's both on top of the cross-border payments. So it's, It is working in many, many use cases. We have a lot of partners that are built on top of wire.

Airtem is a really good example of this. That's built on top of the stellar USC network that is moving. They're taking, they have a special grant from the U.S. government, and they're using their wallet to actually distribute COVID release directly into Venezuela under a special OFAC license. And that's helping thousands of thousands of people in Venezuela to get funds for COVID relief that they weren't getting from their own government. So I think these real life use cases are happening and they're really, really interesting. And so I wouldn't say it's not working. I definitely, and RTM is doing this.

I think in principle it works, right? So that's the thing. In principle, it works. But if you look at the things that have really taken off in crypto, I would argue that payments is not one of them. I definitely think payments happen. Maybe it's not as vocal, but I think the expansion of USC, more merchants are accepting USC having USC on their balance sheet and using it as like a stable currency. I think that that's really expanded out on just like in paying out merchants.

So we see a lot of use cases with merchants coming to us and hey, I can't pay out these people in these certain areas. Can I use your crypto payouts API to actually pay them out? So I think that payments in this general sense, I think it is a massive use case. And, you know, we started out as a business that try to find real life use cases for, we're trying to solve real problems. Like we're not trying to just build a new, put this on a pay type situation and create, like, try to solve a problem that's not there. Like, you know, we went into merchant payment process and then we went into crypto wallet.

Then we went into cross-border payments, all because we believe that, and then we started leveraging our API infrastructure to help developers build these sort of applications. That's like the evolution of wire. But, you know, we, payments has been a massive use case. And there are companies that really building on top of payments ecosystem. Maybe they're not at scale yet, but it's going to take. time. It definitely, it's not going to happen overnight, but visa going in and accepting USC is a big move forward. You see MasterCard accepting USC as well. So I think it's like, you know, first they'll come very slowly, then they'll come all at once type situation. So that's, I think the evolution is going to

happen. I mean, I agree 100%. I think there's a significant amount of traction. And it might be a little bit behind the scenes today, but there's definitely a significant amount of traction. I think we're We're a little bit spoiled sometimes in how fast the crypto ecosystem has grown, and we expect that kind of value to grow everywhere else. There's been a tremendous amount of focus on the trading use cases of crypto, and a lot of institutional money has flown in. So because of that, you're seeing really, really high volume numbers. But, I mean, it took people 50 years to get comfortable with putting money on a debit card

and getting to the point that we're at today. And, you know, obviously I don't think it'll take 50 years for us, but innovation takes time, especially at the most foundational level. So I think we're still early when it comes to. that adoption curve and I still think we have time compared to some of the other adoptions that have kind of grown out there. But to Yanni's point, I still think that there's a significant amount of traction already happening in the space. I mean, you have significant companies like BitPay where I was, you know, first started getting my feet wet with crypto, open node, coin payments,

other crypto payment processors. I mean, BitPay back in 2017 was operating with over a hundred, or sorry, over a billion dollars in crypto payments every year. I think there's a even bigger, massive market of behind the scenes, B-to-B transactions within the crypto space that actually has volumes that does kind of, you know, compare to some of the traditional fiat systems that you see today. You have people, you know, even Fortune Top 50 type companies that use crypto as a payment mechanism to move money across borders because it can be actually cheaper and faster than a bank wire in certain situations, or it can shield them from volatility and FX conversions in certain situations as well. So those are real pain points that are actually delivering millions of dollars

of changes onto a balance sheet. And that's, you know, not the sexiest of taglines. And on top of that, that it's also not, you know, it's, it's not something that these companies want to publicly talk about because they're very cautious about how the crypto ecosystem is kind of viewed and stigmatized in the current space. So a lot of this is happening behind the scenes and has been happening behind the scenes for several years. I think it's been growing.

It's been growing tremendously, tremendously, tremendously. And I think people are getting like every day people are getting more comfortable with crypto and that spills down from the retail level all the way up. to the institutional, the massive multinational conglomerate level as well. And you're seeing some innovation at all levels in that. I think to your earlier question, you probably were focusing more on like, where's the retail use case? Why am I not buying coffee with crypto?

Why am I not buying my shoes with crypto? And I think that's happening also to a certain extent. It is happening also. But you're right, it's not happening at the scale that we're used to. Like the rest of the space is growing so dramatically fast because I think people are just really interested in pouring money into the ecosystem to see where it goes. They think that it's too early to pull money out and actually use that to buy things. So I think that's just kind of where the phase that we're in right now.

I mean, at bid pay, we onboarded several, several merchants that would be, you know, in the Fortune Top 100 category merchants that do a ridiculous amount of volume in traditional systems. But even they didn't see traction when it came to accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment. Why? Because it's just, it's number one, I think the volatility makes it really difficult. And number two, the availability of crypto is just not where we want it yet. It's not outrageously easy for you to go earn crypto and replenish whatever you spent, right? So if I spend $100 on a t-shirt today with Bitcoin and next week that $100 t-shirt's worth $150, I don't feel like the best investor, right?

And that's because I take so long, I wait so long to get availability of crypto. If I got a weekly paycheck in crypto, that wouldn't be the same level of volatility. It wouldn't be that much of an issue for me, right? So I think we're just not at that phase yet. And, you know, like solutions like Fiat on RAMs, solutions like new exchanges that are getting close to making this a very, very seamless experience for users will change that and usher in that new availability of liquidity, which then will spill over to a payment mechanism. So I just think we're too early in that little curve. Super interesting. Bitcoin is not built to be, you know, a lot of people think of it or as a payment system.

Like, it's not yet, right? Like it will be one day, but like there's a lot of regulatory infrastructure needs to happen. Like I'm not going to calculate capital gains taxes every time I buy a T-shirt, right? Like it's like, hey, that's going to be just insane, right? So I think that USC and stable coins will be the first for A. And I think that a lot of neo-banks are reaching out the wire and they're like, hey, how do we get USC in into our neobanks? And leveraging the whole USC network outside of the banking ecosystem to actually move value and create businesses. I think that's like almost every single.

large neobank is starting to have a strategy around that and wire is a perfect tool toolkit for them to build that I think the other thing is that that you know we're starting to see some of these massive companies like we just partnered with just last week or you know Friday and then we announced it on Monday we just partnered with money gram on helping every single money gram user be able to on ramp directly cash directly into USC and deposit directly into one of our digital wallets like airtm or that's built on top of wire so I think we're starting to see a lot of these huge use cases come to life. And it's going to extend out into people to do cross-border payments or pay goods. And we're going to have much more innovation happening in the payments ecosystem, which is going to be very awesome. Super interesting take. Let's talk about your business model. So you guys take fees in several different places, right? So let's talk about

the on-ramp fees. So basically, if I come with the credit card and I want to, buy ether with it, what are the fees that I would pay? So depending on your payment method, but if you're trying to buy, let's say with your debit card or maybe an Apple Pay transaction, depending on where you are, we'll charge like a card fee. So that fee would be in the United States, 2.9% plus 30 cents. Internationally outside of the United States, we charge 3.9% plus 30 cents. How does it compare to traditional payment providers? That's around 2%, right?

I think it's almost the exact same, if not the exact same. You know, like major providers in the space, traditional e-commerce giants or whatever it is, traditional payment processors operating in a similar flat fee, card fee regardless of card type payment model, I think they're exactly the same fees. And do these fees cover your costs? So, I mean, we talked about the regulatory back office infrastructure that you guys, kind of have to have in place, that doesn't sound cheap. So do you operate at cost or are you currently still in the red?

Yeah, so I can help answer this. So right now, the way that we make money is a few ways. So we have our fees that we charge are on the payment side. Every time you move money, we charge some sort of fee. And then we have a fee every time you want to move money off. So like if you're like doing global payouts and we have a fee there. So for for us like it we're doing it at cost basically. There's some fees in like exchanging.

Like if I want to go from US dollars to Bitcoin, there's like a small fee that we charge there to. But they're we're basically doing at cost. We're moving to a model right now where it's going to be a self-service model where you'll be able to just get access to our APIs and pay us a monthly SaaS fee. So a lot of developers just come on and don't pay. anything. And so we're going to be moving a model that we're going to be, uh, it's going to be like, hey, get access to our APIs. It's going to be 59.99 a month or something like that. So that, that that's going to be like our, our main revenue model going forward that we're moving to within the next like couple months. And the custody use case, do you do that for free?

Would you, right, right now, we're like allergic to charging for money. For some reason, like, we're just like alert. We don't charge anything for a while of custody and for, We don't charge anything for our users API. It's like the best tool. If anyone's listening to this, that's like looking to build a wallet or a KYC product, it's like completely free right now. So definitely come in before we start charging for it.

We are. Like it doesn't make sense for us to like build all this node infrastructure, manager servers, like do all the security around the wallet custody. Like we are going to be charging for that within the next two months. So it's going to be in this like monthly SaaS fee that we're building in. So like if you want to have like a thousand wallets like that you're building on top of, it's going to be something.

fee and us a higher fee if you want to go more. And then also if you want enhanced due diligence or KIC information, we'll start charging per user basis. So that's like we're not charging right now for that, but it is something that we're expecting to charge over the next like coming months. It doesn't make sense not to. And everyone, all our partners are like, what do you mean it's free? Federique, you're putting us on the spot a little bit.

But I appreciate it. It's a good, it's a good thing to be put on this spot for though. So it's like, yeah. What are the jurisdictional restrictions? So basically, I am based in Germany. So I have credit card. Can I use wire? For some products, yeah.

For some products, yeah, absolutely. So you could take your debit card, credit card, buy Ethereum, buy a number of assets, have us deliver it non-custodally to your wallet throughout EU. There's a variety of other products here and there that we have support for. But yeah, we do have support throughout Europe. We actually recently just acquired a VASP license as well.

So we're in the process of building custodial solutions to be able to custody digital assets for European merchants as well. It's a, you know, it's a strange regulatory environment in Europe. So we have to be very careful about how we, you know, dance around these nuances and roll out products. But we have a really, really, really strong legal and compliance team with like over, you know, five decades of experience at some of the biggest traditional financial institutions. and also the biggest crypto institutions as well. So these are like the best in class people that are really rolling out the best regulatory framework for us. But yeah, with that in mind, we are rolling out products throughout Europe, and more to come even more so in the next coming months, too.

What do you make of the current regulatory environment? Yeah, and what sense? You can take it so many different directions. So there's a lot happening right now in the regulatory environment. There's a lot of stuff happening with SEC here in the U.S. So just focusing on the U.S. a little bit more so where we're mostly focusing. Like we have like most regulatory jurisdictions of the U.S. But there's obviously it's a global, there's every single country has gone through different variations of something similar.

So there's a lot going on with the SEC, right, all securities base regulation. Right now, I think that over the next coming years, I mean, they weren't not, they're tripling the size of the SEC's Department for Enforcement for securities directly. related to crypto. We're starting to see a lot more, how should I say this? We're starting to see a lot more requests coming in from enforcement action on that sort of side of the world, just internally and then also externally as well, what's available in public, but we're just, you know, we, why is receiving a lot of requests on that sort of front. So, and we, we comply with everything that we receive, but there, you know, there's, there's a lot going on on that side. And I think there's going to it's going to be something that's going to be more prevalent and I think there's

going to but you know I view that as almost a good thing because like it's going to be terrible for the first companies I get dinged but hopefully that provides a little bit more you know the strategy that SEC has come out with was like you know action by enforcement right so like we'll give you clarity as we enforce people and you know which is a terrible way of doing things right you probably want to you you'd hope that people give you some guidance and then you'd have some guidance like in kind of operating. My opinion was very terrible how the whole block five stuff went down. I don't know if you're familiar, but like they basically, yeah, they went in and they basically

gave them fine. It's like, well, here's the way that you're supposed to be operating. You know, if you could have told us that before, we could have maybe given us a grace period of like changing our business model. It's brand new technology. This hasn't been done before. But it's unfortunate how people are coming to those firms. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that.

the SEC side. You know, FinC's generally had like kind of the money transmission, generally had like good guidance around money transmission and custodial assets. Like there are that that really hasn't changed in the in and other side. The tricky part is kind of like how to deal with USC and stable coins, right? And that's come to light over the past couple of months. But every state has different views on like, hey, is USC a fiat based asset or is it kind with crypto asset and there's different ways that you can interact with different um those different assets but we'll we'll see a lot more clarification on a state by state level over the next coming

years which is going to be good because like there's all sorts of like PI permissible investment requirements that you need because if you have like a lot of crypto and you don't have it on your balance it just makes it the whole um the the the description of what the classification of asset very very tricky in that sort of sense so hopefully we'll get more clarity around that so I think regulation overall is good for their environment. It's just like enforcement, action by enforcement is not, which is basically how many of these regulatory bodies are handling this. So it's going to be tricky here in the U.S. at least. I can't speak for Germany, but I know Germany has been very proactive in kind of like giving kind of like guidance on companies.

Although it's taken a long time, and I know a few companies have gone to Germany to get their e-money license or whatever it might be. I think they've given good guidance on what to do up front, which is good. Some commentary on regulation, how we view it here. But in general, like we're very pro-regulation and pro-enforcement. And it's needed to really move the ecosystem forward. It feels like there's a lot of pretty aggressive rhetoric going on from the regulatory arena in the states. but also in Europe. Where do you think this public and regulatory backlash against Web3 technologies kind of

come from? I think it's just a lack of understanding, to be honest with you. It's a very new technology that came out incredibly, incredibly quickly. And, you know, to be frank with you, regulators and traditional incumbents are not used to the speed that Web3 kind of really evolved with. or whatever the right terminology is there. So I think the regulators are just kind of, you know, shell-shocked a little bit or caught off guard a little bit

in the sense that they don't really understand this. They need some time to understand this. And I think we're starting to get to the beginning of that right now. I think in the beginning of the space, there was like little to no guidance, and the space was just not really big enough to make any big traction or big moves with the regulators. The space is obviously big enough now

where it is on the radar of every regulator. And I think now the regulators are starting to get to the point where they're, you know, costically reacting in the beginning, and now they're starting to understand and providing proper regulatory framework and regulatory guidance for people. So I think honestly a majority of it stems from just like a lack of understanding.

And to be honestly, like poor stigmas that have been built from communities outside of crypto and how they view cryptocurrency and how those communities are a little bit more in direct contact with those regulators. And obviously those regulators listen to those traditional financial systems before they listen to a new crypto system.

So I think it's just, you know, a combination of a lot of little things. But I think we're on the cusp of it, it really changing. I think there's been some trial by fire for sure, but I think we're getting to the point where, like, there's a healthy amount of people that understand and still a healthy amount of people that are scared,

but we're transitioning a large portion of that scared population to the population that understands. Yeah, like, DFI is like the 31st largest bank in the space. So when you look at it like in the entire world, right? So if you look at defy as a total, it's like 31st largest bank. So it's like definitely not a force I can't be reckoned with. And I think it's really important when you have situations like the Celsius situation that's happening right now. And situations like Tara, I think it's really important that consumers know what they're investing in.

Right. Usually you have like a whole regulatory framework around like financial advisors to give you, you have to get your series six license or whatever license you need to get in each jurisdiction. but you have to go get a license to be able to qualify, give an opinion on like a financial asset that you're going to be recommending other retail investors to invest in, right? And that just that framework does not exist in Web 3 and Defi. So that's like a, you know, I think that it's a new concept and people, there needs to be some kind of framework there that can adapt well to help consumers be protected. And I think it's like very terrible that, you know, people don't have these kind of this

education and everyone sees their friend getting rich or everyone sees like people posting on Twitter. I can like do this money giveaway. But it's just like a very terrible situation that's happening right now. And people need to be cautious for sure. But so, but yeah, that's some thoughts. I'm very for having people be educated on what they're investing or having frameworks around that.

How do you see the future of crypto-feat interfaces? Do you think they're going to change fundamentally? Do you think kind of the interfaces are going to blur? Yeah, I definitely think that everything's going to be a digital wallet at one point. It's like bound to happen. Cash is going to be like something that doesn't exist anymore in the next like 30 years. Everything would be a digital asset. So, yeah, 100%.

It would definitely in value. Yeah, so I definitely don't. I think digital wallets will be the largest banks. in the next coming years. And the, that's, that's exchanges will be, in my opinion, I think exchanges will be the largest like NASDAX. Like nobody in the next 30 years, I don't think that anybody, anybody would want to go float their company on NASDAQ or something like that.

People would go to Coinbase and float their company and go public. That's just going to be the new standard of going IPOing. But that, that's just like some personal thoughts there. I agree. I mean, ultimately, I don't know if personally, the like cryptocurrency or Bitcoin. Like I've been asked this question about 500,000 times. Like will Bitcoin replace the dollar?

And I don't think that that will ever happen, to be honest with you. Could it be some sort of like digital currency that's blockchain based one day? For sure. I could 100% see that. I don't see traditional crypto, volatile assets or, you know, commodities or whatever you want to call them replacing the dollar today. I think volatility is just frankly unacceptable for a retail user. But yeah, like I 100% see that the benefits of blockchain and the benefits of these digital assets is constantly overpowering the traditional financial benefits of dollars and digital dollars that we see today like in a bank account or whatnot.

I think there's always going to be a healthy mix of both. And I think it'll take a significant, significant amount of time to phase that one and go towards the other. But I like, I see an overwhelming, overwhelming majority of people who understood traditional financial systems and then learned crypto. over the last years and then actually have like completely converted completely converted and I haven't met people too many people in the other boat right which is that they've learned crypto and then they're like I like the traditional financial system better I mean sure it has its pros and cons but you know under once you understand the technology and what it truly solves and minus a couple pain points here and there which are temporary pain points that that will be solved as the innovation

gets roughed out yeah like I haven't met anyone who's really like learned the depths of crypto and turned around and been like, I'd rather go back to the other side. So what's on your guys' roadmap for the foreseeable future for WIRE? Yeah. So I'm happy to answer then. Jamal, if you have something, maybe you can talk about some of the crypto stuff that you're releasing out there on that side. So there's really three things.

So integration into Bolt is a really big thing, right? So we're going to be focusing on like for the rest of year. Like, hey, what does it make sense? You know, how do we integrate with Bolt? Like, what is a product? This one click checkout. the one click crypto is going to be a really big product that we release that we're really excited about. We're definitely going to be focusing on moving into self-service model,

kind of like the pricing stuff that we chatted about earlier in making sure that we are well-priced, offering the right prices and making sure that we have a really awesome developer dashboard and making it more exciting. And then the kind of the third bucket is really focusing on distribution, right? So distribution means a lot of different things, which I'm going to let Jamal talk about some of the crypto stuff, but really focusing on how do we get our services to every single protocol and make it easier for people to develop onto Wire. But those are kind of like the three main buckets that were for the rest of the 60 months that we're going to be focused on. Jamal, do you have anything you want to talk about on the crypto side? I mean, echo 100% of everything Agiani said. I think wires vision, my personal vision, everyone's vision.

at Wire is to align and make it just tremendously easy for developers to enter into the ecosystem and build. So everything that we're focused on is really how do we provide them the ultimate toolkit, the ultimate suite of APIs where they can start building on wire and actually provide immediate value and take advantage of the blockchain. So a large portion of our initiatives are centered around that. I think SmartRamps is probably the most exciting and the most recent of those initiatives. So with SmartRamps, we are building out a solution that's open architected to be able to take traditional fiat payments, including card payments, bank payments, debit card payments, Apple Pay payments today, but also expanding into bank payments

in the future, and actually being able to take those traditional fiat assets and actually purchase crypto assets and then execute alongside that that API call, a smart contract call to be able to execute some sort of smart contract function on the blockchain itself. Like I mentioned earlier, I think we're iterating the first round of this with Skyweaver, which is a pretty popular blockchain-based game, we're going to allow people to purchase NFTs directly from a smart contract with their debit card. And I think that's really, really powerful, right?

So those initiatives are really just designed around. How do we make it incredibly, incredibly easy for developers to target mainstream, traditional users, but still take advantages of any decentralized technology that they can? So I think that's like a really cool initiative, and we're double-downing in that entire space as well, right? What more infrastructure can we build on the blockchain? itself, what more execution can we actually provide on the actual blockchain, but still allow a very traditional mainstream look and feel and mainstream user experience as well.

In addition to that, we're really expanding the payment network as well. So I think that's a really interesting thing. Obviously, that comes with, you know, adding more assets. So we're looking at like partnering up with all the major protocols to make sure we're in the right places at the right time. We're targeting the right markets at the right time as well. And we're supporting the market with the demands and the needs of the market itself, We're adding assets that are very in demand from not only developers, but also users as well.

So partnering up very closely with, you know, Solana and other ecosystems to basically add support around very key assets on their ecosystems, but also just native assets. We can explore and work closer together with those people as well. Beyond the crypto side, we're also doing a lot of really cool stuff on the traditional Fiat crypto interoperability. So Yanni mentioned MoneyGram as well. we announced that. I think that's one of the biggest, most game-changing innovations that we've launched probably this year. And really what the crux of that integration is, is we're going to be able to take our traditional crypto infrastructure, which allows people to take a variety of crypto assets and swap into a variety of other crypto assets and then allow a cash-out mechanism

or cash-in mechanism, I guess, down the line. But to start a cash-out mechanism for them to pick up local currency after depositing crypto, right? So you can have crypto in your wallet. You could have, you know, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever, swap that into something like USDC and then actually cash out USC and pick up your cash locally at a MoneyGram location in one of their 200,000 locations. So imagine, you know, being in the U.S. normally, but traveling in Thailand, having money in a crypto wallet, and being able to cash out directly in Thailand and pick up cash within 30 minutes at a Thailand location. So pretty powerful stuff to just bridge the gap between traditional financial systems and crypto systems

to make it just like incredibly, incredibly easy for people to operate between both worlds and take their traditional systems and move into one world. That's one as well. We're just working with a number of other payment providers as well and just traditional fiat payment providers as well to make it incredibly easy for people to take any asset that they have and move it in and out of crypto itself. Right. So we have payout jurisdictions all throughout the world. We're constantly working and expanding that. so that, you know, we can actually provide local banking infrastructure in any jurisdiction that we're, we're compliantly allowed to. I'll say that.

So, yeah, just a lot of work that we have under the, I guess, under the hood and in the hopper or the pipeline or whatever you want to call it. But a lot of stuff that we're doing really just, you know, centered around what Yanni said to make it incredibly easy, to make it incredibly robust for a developer to build on and make it easy for other users to come and take advantage of that ecosystem. Yeah, N-Jemma, this was super interesting. Where can people go to find out more about wire? So we got wire.com, sendwire.com, which is our website, new website. It's awesome. It's really nice and the design. And then Twitter is probably our best place to get the latest space.

So just Twitter.com slash sendwire. We love chatting and talking to the ecosystem too. So sales at SendWire, S-A-L-E-S-A-L-E-S at SendW-E-N-D-W-Y-R-E dot com, is a great place to get in touch. Yanni himself looks at all those emails as well. I wouldn't use it as a way to get in touch with them, but he does, he does look at all those emails. And on top of that, I do as well. So, you know, if it's a conversation that you want to have with us or a sales team or just like a general conversation where you think there's a really strategic partnership at play here, we'd love to hear like whatever you guys have and, and, and, you know, do encourage you guys to reach out.

Super. Thank you guys for coming on. I appreciate you having us. Super fun. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you for joining us on this week's episode. We release new episodes every week. You can find and subscribe to the show on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, SoundCloud,

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