On The Brink with Castle Island - Alex Leishman (River Financial) on running a Bitcoin financial institution (EP.39)

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

Alex Leishman, the cofounder and CEO of River Financial joins the show. In this episode we discuss:  - Why Alex started River Financial - Why they are Bitcoin only - Why other exchanges were so quick to list tokens - The role of banks in Bitcoin - Practical issues with implementing Proof of Reserves To learn more about River Financial visit: www.river.com  

What's up everyone? This is Nick Carter with another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. This week we have Alex Leishman on the show. Alex is the founder and CEO of River Financial, a Bitcoin-only financial institution. Alex is also one of the main orchestrators behind the Socratic seminar in San Francisco, which is part of the Bitcoin bit devs meetup. So Alex is a pretty differentiated opinion on exchange topic. So we talk about why River is Bitcoin only, why other crypto banks or exchanges were so eager to list so many assets, what the role is of banks or custodial institutions in Bitcoin, and some topics which are really close to my heart, like how exchanges can practically implement something like proof of reserves.

We also talk about whether Alex sees the utility in alternative uses of block space like lightning and liquid and his view on some tricky questions, like whether to give users access to forks or not. So this is a fascinating conversation. I really learned a lot from it, and I hope you do as well. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees, will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by. by the housing crisis.

The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. And print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called a Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to the On the Brink podcast with Castle Island. I'm Nick Carter. And I'm Matt Walsh.

And we're here at the River Financial Offices in San Francisco with Alex Leishman. Welcome to the show, Alex. Thanks for having me, guys. Our pleasure, man. I've been wanting to get you on here for a long time. Yeah, I'm excited. I remember when we met and you didn't have an office yet. And now here you are.

Yeah, moving on up. Yeah. So why do you tell us a little bit about River, just so our listeners have some context? Sure, yeah. So River is a what I like to call a Bitcoin financial institution. Today we make it really easy for users who sign up to connect their bank account, easily acquire Bitcoin either one time or with a discounted recurring purchase to dollar cost average in. We provide really solid financial tooling around your finances and your Bitcoin investment.

So things like providing you very clear insights into the unrealized gains and losses of your Bitcoin holdings. We provide what I like to consider best in class Bitcoin functionality. So we provide access to the Lightning Network. You can deposit and withdraw to your account via the Lightning Network, via on-chain. We are native Segwit by default. And then going forward, you're going to see a lot more both Bitcoin Protocol level functionality and novel features on that end from us and also more traditional financial products that people are also asking for.

And so how long has you ever been live? We've been up and running for about two months live. We spent about eight months building this whole thing out. We tried to do everything right from the beginning. So like I've told other folks, we're self-hosted. So we run our own physical server cluster. The vast majority of our infrastructure doesn't run in the cloud. We built our own Bitcoin wallet and infrastructure on the back end

for managing keys. and this allows us to provide a lot of flexibility around the type of Bitcoin functionality we can offer on this site. And yeah, so, yeah, but we've been up and running for about two months now, and the growth has been great. The adoption has been great. We only operate in eight U.S. states right now, but that's going to change quickly over the next few months

as we get our money transmitter licenses. other jurisdictions. So River is both a brokerage and a custodian, but not an exchange, right? Correct. I think the words, the words are all somewhat interchangeable and mean different things to different people. We do allow you to exchange Bitcoin for dollars, but we're not a product for traders. You don't see an order book when you log in. It's a very clean, simple experience for people who don't want to deal with, you know, seeing candlestick charts and analyzing markets. Just people who want to accumulate either really quickly one time or over time or in a dollar cost average over time the insight behind what we're building is the vast majority of people either they

don't know or want to know or just don't want to bother with order books and exchanges like the vast majority of people in the world who buy shares of of equities they don't they don't go to the New York Stock Exchange and analyze order book depth well you also couldn't have an account on the NYAC as an individual right that's true so you're insight was that people use these exchanges in a custodial manner and you might as well drop the pretense of being a venue for traders if most of the users are going to be treating you as a bank. Right. Yeah. Exactly. We want to provide the services for users who want to trust us to manage their holdings to have the proper controls around their Bitcoin and to be able to spend it how they see fit.

and like I've said before, you know, easily withdraw it whenever they want to. So the way I like to phrase that is we want to be an institution people can trust, but don't have to trust. So can you tell us a little bit about your path to founding river where you doing before? Yeah. So I moved out to San Francisco about six years ago, six or seven years ago, to pursue the dream of being a Bitcoin engineer. I had fell in love with Bitcoin before that and became obsessed with it like many people. And moved out here and did a programming boot camp. And then shortly after that got a job at a company called MyCoin, which was a Bitcoin brokerage for Taiwan, but they had an office in Palo Alto.

So I worked there for about a year and a half, building up my web engineering skills, just breathing Bitcoin day in and day out, building consumer product around that. And then ended up going back to grad school at that. Stanford where I did my master's in computer science. I studied computer security there. I helped teach the first Bitcoin class with Dan Bonae as one of his teaching assistants and helped create some of the coursework for that. And then also did some research around Bitcoin while I was there. I helped dig into whether or not using something like BLS signatures as opposed to ECDSA is a promising path forward for Bitcoin. BLS signatures have a digital digital digital. Digital.

cryptographic signature, but they have this special property that they're, they can be non-interactively aggregated. So in theory, you could have a single Bitcoin block, a Bitcoin block with a bunch of transactions and one signature that represents the signatures for all of the transactions, or all of the inputs in the block. That kind of reminds me of how Gryn works a little bit. Yeah, Gryn uses Schnur signatures, which are, interactively aggregatable, but this would be, this could potentially be even more compressed than Grin. I believe Chia has BLS signatures or plans to.

Yeah, Bram has done a great job building out tooling and libraries for BLS signatures with Chia. The thing is with BLS signatures, one of the big debates around it is that one, it introduces a new cryptographic assumption to Bitcoin, and that's the pairing. assumption it uses this cryptographic primitive called pairings to do the math magic that it does to make itself non-interactively aggregatable. But the other argument against it is that actually they're slower to verify. And the real bottleneck for Bitcoin isn't the data the signatures take up. It's the CPU speed and the time required to verify the signatures that's actually slow.

So just because the signature is aggregated, the time it takes to verify it is still the time it would take to verify all the individual signatures. So if Bitcoin had BLS, IBD would be slower? Potentially, yes. IBD would potentially be slower. It's a CPU bandwidth tradeoff. The data would be, the blocks would be smaller, but the time to verify would be larger. And the disc rights is in practice is the main bottleneck, right, when you do IBD? Well, it depends on your disk, but it's actually a lot of it's the cryptographic operations. So if you look at the analysis that Bitmex did about the different Bitcoin versions and the IBD times,

you'll see that when LibSec P-256K1 was introduced, which was the handwritten like a cryptographic operations library that Peter and others wrote, that significantly reduced IBD time because the open SSL wasn't an optimized implementation of the elliptic curve operations for Bitcoin. So a lot of it's just compute bottleneck. And right now the only cryptographic assumption in Bitcoin is the discrete log assumption right? Yeah, yeah. The elliptic curve discrete log, ECDH problem. The assumption is that that's hard, which of course we can't prove for sure. But we believe it's true. We believe it's true.

Yeah. So after Stanford, you joined Polychain, right? Not right. Not quite. So I actually went to Airbnb first. I did a short stint on the security team at Airbnb to get some experience in big tech. And in Airbnb, we had this channel on Slack that I spent most of my time on, just talking about Bitcoin.

And there was also some internal efforts to, you know, there's always. some internal effort at some big tech company to try to get something with Bitcoin to happen, which rarely ever does. And so I tried to move the needle there a little bit. I was mostly doing data security though and ended up spending a lot of my time actually just trying to delete as much data as possible, which saved them a lot of money because my take was the user data. Yeah. Well, I mean, yeah, any sort of data, right? The easiest data is to secure is data that doesn't exist. And so a lot of these tech companies, when you get to a certain size, you have so much

data laying around from data analytics that have happened 10 years ago that people forgot about sitting in some data store somewhere. And you find, you know, you inevitably, if someone decides to go do the digging, they find potentially petabytes of data that no one's using. Right. And the real answer to securing it is just deleting it. And it also saves millions of dollars. So that's my little.

side project. Data is a liability, as opposed to now said. Data is a liability. It costs money to store, and after a certain amount of time, if no one's using it, you know, you're better off often just deleting it. One easy way, one easy heuristic, at least in a big organization, I know this is a little bit of a distraction is you just to block access to it for a few months and see if anyone complains. And if not, then that's a sign. Maybe it's okay to get rid of. Now, there's obviously, you know, caveats to that then. Yeah, I feel like you can't just go around wanting to deleting data if you are in the regulated financial services industry.

Definitely not. You know, obviously there's disaster recovery things you need to do. I'm not talking broadly, just do this anywhere. But yeah. So then, so I was at Airbnb for a while. I ended up leaving to join an investment fund called Polychain Capital. I joined mostly to focus on Bitcoin investments. and help kind of bring some of those in the door,

which of course is tough. As you know, VC and Bitcoin, there aren't tons of opportunities. I was also one of the few engineers on the team who was actually kind of someone who could write code. So I was also spending some of my time building some infrastructure for them, for managing some of their assets. So I wore two hats.

I was writing code, but I was also doing venture investing. and, you know, obviously spending a lot of time on Bitcoin stuff. And but really, really, at the end of the day, for the last, you know, eight years, I've been wanting to start this company, which is now called River, and decided to leave and start this. And I left on very good terms. You know, they were one of the investors in the company. And so, so, yeah, that's been great. So you mentioned that you've wanted to start this company for eight years. Do you remember what the light bulb moment was for you when you initially became attracted to Bitcoin?

Well, it's funny, actually. I wanted to start this company before I knew about Bitcoin. The origins of this company started when I was in college and reading a lot about, and I read the denationalization of money. And that day, I read the denationalization of money. The light bulb moment came where I realized my dream was to start a financial institution outside of the purview of the Federal Reserve. And I thought that that would look like offering private money backed by commodities to offer sound money to people in the United States and abroad.

Wow, so you really had your Austrian credentials even before Bitcoin, huh? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't call myself an economist. I definitely couldn't sit down and, you know, trade jabs with, you know, the more erudite and educated folks in the space. But it's just, I just knew something about it felt right. And yeah, you know, the ideas have always just appealed to me on a philosophical level. I, but, you know, Friedrich Hayek was also quoted as saying he doesn't think that we'll ever have good money until we take the thing out of the hands of government and that we need to do it through some sly, roundabout way. And one of the big hangups for me was starting a company and having a

issuing my own money, my own private money, wasn't sly or roundabout at all. And I couldn't figure out how that would make a viable business or how it wouldn't get totally shut down by the government. So you were envisioning a private currency, which would be free floating or peg to a basket? Free, well, like probably backed by a basket of commodities that attempted to, you know, this was just a high-level idea. I was 22. I wasn't, you know, I was chewing on these things. It was, you know, ideally the basket of commodities that follows inflation, you know, decently represents the price of consumer goods. What's interesting is that commodities have done terribly in the last decade.

Yeah. So this private money wouldn't have, it would have been sort of inflationary. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I also, like, I didn't understand, I didn't realize, I didn't, I couldn't figure out how to practically accomplish something like that. And. Well, I think narrow bank. in the U.S. are kind of like borderline illegal almost. Yeah. Yeah. So they're getting,

they're like very significant structural barriers to doing something like that. Totally. Not to mention the fact that you talk about central issuance and the fact that there was no way to do that until the creation of Bitcoin. There was no way to do it in a decentralized manner. Exactly. And when I discovered Bitcoin, that's when the light bulb went off because then it was it broke the paradigm and the false dichotomy in my head of private money. and public money and government money. It was neither private nor government. And that was the aha moment. It was, it belonged to everybody, but it wasn't a government controlled currency. And that, that blew my mind. And when that, when that kicked in, it's just the rest of history. I just knew that I had to

work on this. How convenient is that the Satoshi invented Bitcoin, which made this idea viable? Oh, that's the part that I feel like I sound silly when I say it. But this whole thing, and I think other people feel this way, it feels like fate. And it almost, it's more than just the stuff is rational and logical. And when I chatted with Marty, he had the right, the perfect word. Like there's this gravity that's just pulling us in a direction. And there's a sort of religious, not religious, but there's just this feeling that there's this fate. And everything is just kind of worked out so far. And I don't know why. And I can't

explain it. And I hope it continues. I'm not naive in thinking everything's definitely going to go well. But so far it has. And I don't know. It's just kind of cool. That's stirring. I mean, I certainly agree. Yeah. I think there's a reason we've all devoted our careers to this. Yeah. So it's special. It's very special. I don't, there's nothing else like this. So you've had some interesting seats over the course of your career in this industry. Talk a little bit about what it was like to be an investment firm during the run-up of non-Bitcoin assets. And you alluded to the fact that Bitcoin businesses haven't always been as attractive to the venture community. Why do you think that is?

Well, I think that in 2017, the answer was very obvious liquidity. when you could invest in tokens as opposed to equity in companies that are building for the long term, why would you go for the equity when you could have potentially 10x year investment in six months and be immediately liquid? I think that was. But seeing that, it was hard to reason. It was hard to tell any investor not to pursue that because obviously if you think, think you can get away with it, then from a purely economically rational standpoint, it makes sense to follow those investments. But I think at the end of the day, there was a group

of people that knew that that was a short-term bubble that some people would be able to capitalize on, and then there are the people who actually believe that that was a sustainable investment model. And I was definitely in the camp of people who knew that this wasn't going to last. And I mostly just ignored it because it just felt like noise and a distraction anyways. But it did make people a lot of money. It's hard to argue against that. Is it surprising to you that to some extent it's still going on? Not that we have these ICOs that are being publicly launched, but we still have a tremendous amount of capital going into that category. Yeah, it doesn't surprise me really. And I don't think that people will ever stop trying to invest in making in making their own money

because the potential payoff is too high if you can make even having even marginal success with that but I do think that 2017 will just led to an enormous amount of malinvestment and also just it directed the focus of investors and the public to things that long-term aren't gonna work and a lot of focus is still there unfortunately and it hasn't been just the the capital that's been that misallocated but the attention and the time in the people's efforts have been misallocated and we're starting to see that come back but I think it's gonna linger for a while because the reality is you know thousands

of people are gonna have to admit to themselves at some point that everything they've spent their time working on over the last you know a few years has been a total waste with some of this stuff. I guess one of the things that is unresolved in certain parts of the market is this question around, can any of these crypto asset networks be viable if they're not treated like money? And there's some pockets of this industry still believe that there will be value accrual to things that don't compete to be stores of value, which is perplexing to me.

Yeah, I don't know. I don't know how it's going to play out. I think that if, but I think the reality is if you're a founder of one of these things and you can get some investors and convince that, and you're convincing enough to get the investors to buy into it, then that's an easy way for you to make money. And then if they can find dumber investors to buy it from them, then they can make money.

I mean, I think that's never going to stop, right? even if it's long term not economically rational. So that's kind of what I think most of the stuff is. I was just hoping there's a greater fool, and there usually is. And I don't think they're going to be stopped being greater fools. Yeah. I have this theory of, you know, Bitcoin open like the Overton window. So Bitcoin, its creation, reintroduce this idea to the world,

that it's like okay to create a private non-state money. I mean, I wouldn't describe Bitcoin as private, but, you know, in the context of, you know, the dollar, I would, you know, call it private. And then this idea just captured the minds of tons of essentially opportunists who said, well, you know, if Satoshi can do it, I can do it too. Totally. But this time I'm going to allocate myself 20% of the supply. Yeah. And introduce, you know, various extractive measures. And, you know, I don't, I think it may not even have been preventable.

Like, although Bitcoin is very pure, I think the fact that Bitcoin exists made it permissible once again to dare to dream that, you know, like anybody could create their own, like currency. And since the payoff is so big for that, you know, like, look at ripple. The payoff is absolutely inordinate. it. There's going to be so many willing entrepreneurs that are going to keep trying to do this, keep trying to unseat Bitcoin. Yeah. And people will keep making money from it, I think.

And a lot of these, and I think in the Bitcoin community, a lot of people had hoped that these people would end up getting in trouble and things like that. I don't think that's going to happen either. Like, I don't think anything's going to happen to a lot of these guys from what I can tell. I mean, nothing's happened so far. Maybe it will. But I don't. don't think we can rely on like you know i don't think the cc's if you look at this point you're like

look at ripples board right um what's the reality that uh something's gonna really have bad happen to them like i don't know they've made enough money at this point where they've hit the tier where they could handle pretty much anything that comes at him yeah i've seen the ripple uh lobbyists in action in dc yeah they're uh they're very polished yeah uh brad garlinghouse is very very charismatic Yeah. I saw him speak directly juxtaposed with Joseph Lubin at the DC FinTech conference earlier this year or last year. And Brad like carried the room. Yep. And of course, everything he was saying was nonsense, right? It was like, you know, we discovered XRP, like we're the, we're the Exxon mobile to XRP's oil. They got really lucky discovering that XRP. Yeah. I mean, it was one of the odds. They just found it. It was bubbling up through the sewer rates in San Francisco. And, They saw the opportunity before anyone else. They just started to put it in buckets, and then they built a pipeline. Good for them, honestly.

I wish I was there. So this backdrop is kind of a natural segue, I think, to River only supports Bitcoin. Yes. And why is that? And will that change? What's the thinking? So there's a few reasons behind this. One is the totally practical reason of being, when you're a small company, it's very important

to do one thing and do it very well. And so I actually consider our being Bitcoin only completely economically rational for us. Bitcoin is by far in a way the most widely held asset of any cryptocurrency. It captures the attention. It has the network effect far beyond anything else. Why would we try to support a million different things that are far less used in far less interesting to people instead of the one big thing everyone uses and just doing it really well.

So there's the purely economically rational, logical reason we do that. And then there's the ideological reason, which is I also genuinely believe that Bitcoin is going to win the race in becoming a worldwide money and store of value far surpassing, continuing to surpass anything else, any other cryptocurrency. and I don't want to weigh ourselves down with supporting things that aren't going to last long term. So one of the things that you're kind of hinting at there is just the engineering challenges to support some of these longer tail assets. Just talk a little bit about what that looks like and how complex that can be to support those assets. Absolutely.

I think so at a high level, I think the way I'd frame this is that if, so the same companies that support tons of different assets, like to treat these things like their equities. And the argument there is along the lines of all these protocols have very different features that are very, that make them very distinct and useful for different things, right? Yet they've built these apps that treat all these all of these cryptocurrencies like they're exactly the same thing, right? And they don't surface any protocol-specific functionality of,

any of the assets generally. We're seeing a little of that change with the staking functionality, but more or less, they're just treating all of these like you can buy it, you can sell it, you can send it, and you can receive it. They don't surface anything beyond that to their users. So it's, in my opinion, that is self-contradictory, right? And so if the special aspect of these cryptocurrencies isn't the protocol level specifics of them, then you should try to focus on servicing the benefits of those unique features to your users. So with Bitcoin, you know, that's what we try and do. So we allow to give access to the Lightning Network.

We give access to all the latest Bitcoin protocol functionality. And because Bitcoin has the best tooling and built around it, we can provide functionality far beyond what anyone else is providing to their users. So from an engineering perspective, if we had to support even just two assets beyond not just Bitcoin. Let's say we had to support Bitcoin and another cryptocurrency. Our infrastructure would now have to be abstracted so that we could handle key management for both cryptocurrencies,

which means that we wouldn't be able to use, for example, partially signed Bitcoin transactions as the language of communication between our Bitcoin services, between our cold storage and our wallet, between our wallet and our web app, in between our web app and our users someday when we offer functionality around that, we would have to create our own standard for storing key material.

We'd have to have an arbitrary secret store for our cold storage, as opposed to using Bitcoin's native multi-sig for our cold storage. Everything would just balloon in complexity, and we wouldn't be able to do anything, easily build, Bitcoin-specific functionality.

Yeah. What's your explanation for why these exchanges or crypto banks were so eager to support so many alternatives to Bitcoin? Well, I think there's two explanations. One is the reality of the market in 2017. And them viscerally realizing what their business is, is they're a casino. Like most of these companies are effectively casinos, and they know that. They're not going to say it publicly, but they are casinos. And by offering all these different assets, they were able to monetize significantly that speculative bubble.

And so that was the reality of their business in the market. And also, the leadership at the top, I don't think, had of these companies, had the desire or vision or same opinions as a, you know, a company like ours to build something for the long term around Bitcoin and and treating it as if it's going to, it alone is going to become this global money. They kind of see this as becoming, you'll see it in Coinbase's product, right? Right. Now you can log in. You see they said the market was up 5% today, right? They're normalizing treating these things as equities. Like this is some sort of stock market and all these different cryptocurrencies are

like different companies and they're legitimate. minimizing what I think a lot of us would consider total garbage investments. And that's good for their top line. So it's economically rational given the direction their products taken for them to do that. But I don't think what they're building is a long-term thing that's really going to last and bring this new type of money to the world. And your bet is that there will be some kind of regime change here. discontinuity in terms of the market demand transitioning from solely demand for

supporting lots and lots of tokens for speculative purposes to supporting savings style products built on top of Bitcoin with more sophistication more depth. Yeah, I mean I think that there's the natural there's the natural gravity and direction that the market will take towards that and I do think that's that we see we see you see Bitcoin is also like the intolerant minority, right? Even people who love altcoins and training that at the end of the day, want to increase their Bitcoin stack generally, right? I know a lot of people who work these companies working on other coins, a lot of them really

just care about how much Bitcoin they have. So I think we already kind of see this in the market is Bitcoin is that foundation for everything. And I also think though, for Bitcoin to be, to go to to the next level, people have to build the companies to take it to the next level. And that's also what my goal is with River is helping take Bitcoin to the next level because it takes people actually building something to make anything happen. Yeah, sometimes there's this potentially somewhat naive view among Bitcoiners that like if the

the coin just like mechanically appreciates regardless of like the various businesses built around it on top of it. And I'm generally of the view that there actually needs to be some tooling and some, you know, service providers that will, you know, allow you to actually unlock the benefits of that thing. Kind of, you know, like kind of the counterpoint to this FAP protocol idea, that all the value would solely accrue to the asset itself. Yeah, absolutely. I think that, Yeah, I mean, institutions are extremely important for civilization. And if Bitcoin is to fulfill its destiny and its role in the world as global money and a global store of value, we have to have institutions that have built on Bitcoin and have helped it realize its potential

and provided access to people who do want to trust institutions. Do you feel that there is a contradiction at all in terms of being, you know, right now a custodial institution, you know, obviously juxtaposed against Bitcoin's, Bitcoin's best properties being available to you once you physically own the asset. I don't, actually. I don't think there's any contradiction at all. And I think this, this goes back all the way to Hal Finney, who said that he thinks that Bitcoin banks are going to be a big deal. And this is partially fulfilling Hal Finney's vision. And I agree with How Finney. I don't think it's contradictory. Bitcoin is all about choice. And if you give people choice, they can choose

to hold it themselves or they can choose to trust someone else to hold it. And that's okay. I think the main value that Bitcoin gives is a check on what institutions can get away with. You can't get your dollars in any material sense out of the financial system in the United States. You can only get so much cash out of a bank. It's a lot of work to get your dollars. out with Bitcoin you know you can withdraw all of it from an institution and it's a check on what the institution can get away with and not to mention that the dollars in your bank are not a base money well exactly they are a liability exactly and so I don't I don't think it's a contradiction to offer

custodial services to individuals because I think the reality is that the vast majority of people don't want to be trusted or responsible for storing their savings on a thumb drive in a safe in their house and you know having to know what you know multi-sig even means or what a signature even means I but I do think that it's it is I do think here's the harsh reality there will be an institution that becomes very big around Bitcoin do we want those in or more than one institution do we want those institutions to be run by people who get it or by people who don't get it. And the way I saw this was, if someone's going to do it, I want to do it because

I know that I can build a company run by people who get it. And I think it's like I think that's just the reality. Right now, Coinbase is about 800,000 bitcoins in their vaults. Yep. Do you consider that? Is that the, is that an institution which has already reached critical mass? I mean, hard to say. Is there a you know, is there a threshold of bitcoins held at these custodial institutions, which may not even share in the ethos, you know, as we understand it, at which point we say, well, the Bitcoin project has been derailed potentially? I don't know. It's hard to say. I don't think we can say today that the Bitcoin project's been derailed. I think that also, we're very early in this,

and these early companies in this space can easily become unseated. We saw the first round of this happen in 2013, 2014, over the last five to 10 years is Coinbase roast of prominence in Mount Gox, which was the, in these early exchanges

in the industry, which were the stalwarts of the industry, they've been around, they were the ones making all the money totally gone now, right? Every early exchange is basically gone other than with the extent. exception of bit stamp yeah exception which is kind of a cool story I don't know I

like that they've like lingered so long they've been able to stick around but they're not the biggest these days no right so I don't think the I don't think we've seen the maturation of this market yet I think that we're still very early and companies that do this the right way are still being built and have a lot of potential to unseat the current quote-unquote kings that don't aren't doing this the right way. One of the interesting things is that the properties of Bitcoin actually makes some of this systemic risk, less of a risk. If multi-sig were to be used at an enterprise level, you could imagine a world where

Coinbase has a key, you know, River has a key, fidelity has, and there are any variety of multi-sig schemes that could make custody safer at an institutional level. Now, I think there's going to be some regulatory questions around the definition of custody in the eyes of the SEC and eyes of you know, banks and things like that. But Bitcoin is in some ways the perfect asset to prevent some of these issues at a systemic level. Yep. Yeah, I think so.

I think what's also gonna be very interesting is if Bitcoin continues to be by default, mostly held in full reserve or not. Because the reality is, I think it's important to forget that the laws of economics and finance don't just change when Bitcoin exists, right? If an institution or an individual who's holding wealth, whether it's at an institution or on their own,

is just sitting on that wealth and full reserve, that's economic potential that they're not putting into motion, that they're not utilizing. And so I do think we're gonna actually see more and more fractional reserve opportunities come as Bitcoin matures. And I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I think that's like people,

that's Bitcoin really coming into maturity and being used for, productive efforts. It doesn't make sense to sit on a billion dollars of Bitcoin and not use any of it for productive to get a return and invest. So I don't know. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out. Although if you think about all the gold in the world, you know, there's a few trillion owned by central banks and some more, maybe another couple trillion and sitting in vaults in London, which is financialized. And then the remaining couple trillion is held in quote-unquote full-reserve format by individuals,

mostly as ingots or jewelry. Yeah. So I think there's always some demand to hold base money in a full-reserve manner. Totally. Yeah, I mean, I agree. I think a lot of people will hold it in full reserve. But, I mean, it's a good point. Will Bitcoin continue to play its role completely as money?

or will it look just like gold does today? Or does gold only serve that role today because we have fiat money? You know, a bank, you know, a bank back in the day, banks a long time ago used to be where you could deposit gold, right? And they'd hold some of the gold and lend out some of it. Yeah. Right?

So I don't know. And the problem there was that the cost of verifying the integrity of the gold was so high that it ended up just centralizing recursively until it was basically held in one that you know there is one gold full node which was uh you know either the the you know the u.s central bank or like the london bullion market association exactly which has this whole supply chain each link is authenticated yep you know from mine to refiner to you know jewelers and so on yep so you know that to me is the really big distinction yeah quidcuin is eminently cheaper to verify absolutely so you can free it from these like costs

walled gardens. Yep. Although, you know, the thing that gets me is we don't take advantage of Bitcoin's verification properties, so you know where this is going. Yeah, I like it. We don't take, like custodians of Bitcoin do not do very much to prove to their depositors that they have the Bitcoin that they claim they have. Yep. So this is obviously the proof of reserve idea. Yeah. I mean, you seem somewhat receptive to this, although, you know, right now, only coin floor does it. What is your view on the kind of the state of the art in terms of proof reserve and like the ease of doing that and maybe even the tradeoffs if they exist? Yeah. So I think proof of reserves is a really is a really good idea and a good direction for

a company to take. I do think that it's important though for everyone to always know that no matter what if your money, if your Bitcoin is at another institution, you're trying to investing them at the end of the day, and proof of reserves doesn't allow you to completely know for sure that you're able to get your money out, right? Yeah, it's not a panacea. It's not a panacea. At the end of the day, that company could still block your account, right? It could still just say, I'm not going to give you the money, but I have it, right?

And it's important to remember all of the caveats with various types of proof reserves. You know, it's easy for a company to lend or borrow Bitcoin to, you know, for a short period of time to prove they have a certain amount and then get rid of it again. And you still also need an auditor to prove that the assets equals liabilities. With the liabilities being potentially diffuse or difficult to keep track of, as we saw in like 2009. Exactly. Exactly. And you can have these chains liabilities that cascade across institutions. And so it's not, so I've done a lot of thinking about this. There's a lot of zero knowledge schemes. There's a lot of really complex ideas to do this. There's also a lot of very simple ones, you know, just signing your cold wallet or moving it back and forth every now and then and tweeting that you're going to do it.

Finance does that. It shows some confidence, but, you know, how do I know what their liability? are, right? How do I know what their user deposits are supposed to be? And if it's that amount, I don't, right? There's a spectrum of assurances you can provide to depositors. So you could do what exchanges do now, which is basically nothing. And I'm mostly talking about the like not strictly regulated exchanges. Because like the highly regulated ones, you can presume that they have audits and so on. Although I would like them to be more forthcoming about that. The unregulated ones, the next thing you could do is you can rely on these third parties that actually tag all the addresses and track the balances. And if, you know, on chain, you do a bit of detective work. And if the

trading volumes are way out of whack relative to the deposits, clearly something's wrong. So like, people think that about hit BDC right now, by the way. So people are accusing them of doing something sketchy because the deposits don't seem to match the claim trading volumes. That's very weak. though, you know. So then the next thing would be to go to that exchange as one of these third parties and say, here, like, we think we tagged all your wallet, like your balances. Like, what do you think? Is this right? And they could say yes or no. Very few exchanges are at that stage right now. The next thing they could do would be a user facing proof of reserve, which gives you, I think, even stronger assurances where potentially you as a depositor could verify that they actually have

the specific coins that, you know, are allocated to you. Yep. And then I think the very, strongest thing would be to combine the rigors of like regulation so a genuine audit and maybe if the US ever created a regulatory standard for crypto banks or something which seems only to exist in Wyoming right now pair that with a user facing proof of reserve attestation and you have the auditor you know do the the tricky work of trying to assume or understand the liabilities yeah I I I tend to agree with that. I think at the end of the day, an audit is always what you want. I have an idea for what I would like to do for proof of reserves. And I think the actual best, the company that's done it the best so far, and weirdly, I don't think they marketed it much,

was back in the day, I haven't used them in a while, but Zappo. So this was one of the things you were talking about is when you deposit segregated accounts right yeah you know so this is this is this is a you know something we can offer uh with the way we build our bitcoin infrastructure is we have every every user potentially gets a vault sort of account in our system in our system or sub account whatever you want to call it and we have an isolated wallet on our back end for them uh isolated cold wallet or path or or sub sub key as part of a cold wallet and whenever they deposit to that vault they see the UTXO they sent on chain, stay there, and not move. And they know that came from them.

They know that's their coins. And if we make it public that when you deposit a UTXO into this account, that UTIXO stays there unmoved and it's your UTXO, everyone can verify that and see that it's not moving. And then the last missing piece here is to verify that we have control over those. UTXOs and we haven't lost the keys. And with that, it's quite trivial to just sign a dummy transaction every quarter or something. Now the operations behind that aren't trivial if their keys are cold and scaling that to many users.

But then we can provide a quarterly proof of key ownership for all of those outputs. And then you know that the coins are there. that you deposited and you know that they can be spent every quarter and that's you know where you would potentially store most of your coins with the company and I think that solves most peoples would alleviate most concerns so you could request that instead of having your coins in an omnibus account you have them in this specific configuration yeah the way I imagine it potentially working for us and this is something we're still thinking through is you know Instead of just having one account with River, you can have multiple account types,

whether that's just a transactional spending account, which we wouldn't have this for, because the coins need to be pooled and some need to be hot so that we can satisfy demands. But then you can have this vault account where it's a three to five day withdrawal period. It goes through multiple, notifies you multiple times, easily gives the ability to cancel over time through multiple meetings. media to make sure that you got this notification if you were sim swapped or whatever. And that's where you would store the bulk of your coins with us. And you'd get a regular proof of reserve. You'd constantly see the proof of reserve.

You see the UTXOs were there. And you'd get a quarterly, potentially proof of ownership. And yeah, so that's how I, that's the idea. I have. One thing that kind of entertains me about this like T plus 4 delivery or whatever is how we are constantly reinstituting deferred

settlement and as financial institutions that touch Bitcoin while the kind of the whole point of Bitcoin was to have that immediate final kind of physical settlement. But you know deferred settlement actually

has its uses. There for a reason. I have some thoughts on that and I think that touches a broader, I think that touches on a broader topic of the Bitcoin community actually not acknowledging that the financial worlds having developed over the last couple thousand years does have has gotten some things right we got to give it to them you got to give it to them like they've gotten some things right like this whole double entry you know bookkeeping and accounting financial tooling best execution best yeah best like like the math behind

performance tracking and in these kind of and controls around accounts like these account structures and like the the fact that banks move slowly isn't because not necessarily because they're evil it's because one they're kind of old but two things that move slowly are more secure generally right if you have to like if you have to go into a bank walk in show an ID to make a wire like just adding that barrier to physical presence, you know, makes it harder for someone to steal your money. It's much more, less convenient. Totally. But there's a, there's a very clear tradeoff between convenience and security generally. And I think that, I do think that there is something

to the way banks operate that, you know, you don't hear every day of your people's bank accounts being drained. Yeah. They are getting something right. And it's important to acknowledge that. So you bring up a great point and it sort of speaks to some of the market structure things that we like to explore on this podcast. In traditional financial services, you'll see a bifurcation. You'll see brokerages are very different from exchanges who are very different from custodians. The way crypto assets and this market structure has evolved, it's sort of a vertically integrated stack in some respect. Do you see that bifurcating in the future? I guess you're already starting to see it bifurcate, but I'm curious where you think we're

headed. Yeah, I do. I think there's the vertically integrated players like Coinbase, and I don't think see that changing too much. However, I do think that a company like ours, the approach we're taking in my theory behind this is we're building a brand and we're building a different type of company than someone building trading infrastructure, market infrastructure, and things like that. That's a different business. One, I'm just not experienced with that. That's not something I'm personally very interested in, so we're not spending our time in there. I also think that economically, it's that money isn't, isn't, there's no, there's no, they don't care about brand. They care about, it's an, it's an algorithm. They care about the expected value of a trade,

and it's completely ruthless. We're building something that's about relationships with individuals and our clients and so that's why we're not focused on the the trading side of things we benefit greatly from all of those all those companies competing for you know our our volume and our our our activity but we're focused on you know so we're not taking that totally vertically integrated approach we're focusing on building really good consumer and institutional grade tooling around managing your assets. And, you know, some people would call that custody.

I don't really like that word because it kind of, you wouldn't, you don't call your bank account, your dollar custody. It's just. Because they don't even have the dollars. Well, yeah, they don't even have the dollars. But it's, it's just, you know, it's your account with us. And we want to, and, you know, we want to. provide you the services that you want to easily manage that, and we want to have a relationship

and with our clients that, because at the end of the day, I mean, we're hoping to build long-term relationships and build a service that makes our clients, you know, really happy. And it's just a different game. So one thing I'm pretty curious about is, like, exchanges as stewards of the Bitcoin system. They consume the most block space of any sort of entity out there. Yeah. And they've been pretty bad stewards, you know. So, like, I used to joke that they're like Denethor, like the steward of Gondor.

I don't know if you're Lord of the Rings fan. No, I don't. I've seen the movies, but it's been a while. So Denothor is Boromir and Faramir's dad. Okay. He's the guy that he wasn't the king of Gondor. He was the steward. So he was like taking care of it until the king, who's Erragorn, returned.

and he did a really bad job, you know, like he didn't, he wasn't awake to the threat from Mordor. Yeah. You know, so, and then eventually threw himself off the top of Minstereth. Oh. So, yeah. So exchanges do a really bad job of, they have a responsibility towards the protocol, in my opinion.

Yeah. And for the most part, it took them a very long time to adopt Segwit. For the most part, they don't do batching. Yep. For a number of reasons. And generally, they just use. Bitcoin an incredibly wasteful way. And they have these super fragmented U-TXOsets and like the whole thing sucks.

Yep. What can they do better? What are you going to do here mindful of your duty to steward Bitcoin block space? Yeah. So this is obviously very important to us. Batching is very important to us. We built batching into our service from day one, the ability to do it. And as our user base and volume grows, it's going to be increasingly important.

One of our plans is to actually surface that in the UI and allow our clients when they withdraw to choose between an immediate withdrawal or a batched, delayed withdrawal. Because you need latency for batching to work really, unless you have extremely high volumes. But, you know, they can't, your withdrawal volumes are capped by the Bitcoin protocol anyway. So, but yeah, so, so exactly. So batching only works when you're at a certain scale. You know, otherwise you have to kind of delay over some time period to wait for those withdrawals, withdrawal requests to come in. But it's definitely, it's something we're already prepared to do.

When it comes to just using the protocol and using the block space, being good stewards of the block space, You know, it's, on one hand, it's easy to judge the competitors, the older companies. Their infrastructure is older. A lot of this is about tooling and technical debt. Not that they don't, they're actively don't care. I mean, don't get me wrong. There is a large aspect of this where they're choosing not to allocate the resources they could to make this happen. But I think it's important to understand that economically they don't really have a strong reason to.

They're not going to lose so far. Because the fee pressure, they either pass it on to end users. They pass the fee pressure on to end users. Most people aren't withdrawing anyways. Yeah. Maybe 5%. Right. So if you, I think it's fair to judge companies, but you also have to look at the economics.

And the reality is that there isn't a huge economic incentive so far for them to be up to date with the protocol. Do you think this will change if we have another? their kind of period of elevated fees in Bitcoin? I think this will, yes. And I think that's where they're being short-term thinking by not staying up to date. And that's one of the reasons we are focused on always having the latest protocol advancements.

And always, we're already thinking through what what Schnorr and Taproot means for us and implementing that. I don't see why we wouldn't be able to support sending to Tap Route day one or shortly after the fork happens. And, I mean, one, so there's a few aspects here that I think the other exchanges have missed. One is if you're always got the latest tech, that just evokes competency. And it really is a brand builder. And it just makes you look legit to a small group of people who will care about this.

But those small group of people are very influential, and they talk a lot. But then there's the longer term economic implications of being prepared for high fees on Bitcoin. Which I think many of us see as inevitable. But I mean, by high, you know, I think of high fees as like, you know, maybe two to three bucks of transaction. Yep. But that alone, I think, is a sufficient corrective force. Yep. To enforce better behavior.

Yeah. No, I agree. And the reality is right now it's just so cheap that it just doesn't matter too much to them. And a lot of their fee logic is a remnant of the last bubble where they were just trying to not, they were just trying to reduce customer service complaints, I think. And so they were just like hard coding it at a high value to just like, make sure that everything just always made it into the, into the blockchain.

Yeah, fee estimation is something else I didn't point to. But another issue where you actually got kind of a positive feedback loop because everybody was using the same fee estimators and they would spit out high values. Yeah. And so it's just like a mess. Now, you could argue that exchanges today that are using arbitrarily high fees or helping subsidize the security of the network. But, you know, yeah. Unfortunately, fees are still in the single digit percentages of minor reward.

Yes. Okay, so you were a fan of Bitcoin alternative block spaces like Lightning as well. Yeah. So Lightning is live at River, right? Yes, yes. What do you make of alternative trust models, like something like a liquid, for instance? Would you ever consider using that? I promise Blockstream didn't set me up to asking this.

Would you consider using that, for instance, to perform net settlement with a big exchange that you were using for liquidity? Well, I don't want to say never. I don't think, I don't want to speak in absolutes there. Right now, I don't see a strong reason to do that. If we have a trusted business partner We'll just Trust each other to settle up

At some point anyways Might as well do that with Bitcoin I don't think doing it in real time is that important Surfacing like liquid to our users also so far I mean it's so small that it doesn't really make sense It also just confuse it's one more quote unquote asset Like we said it's just like a bunch of complexity for no real Gain for us now

It is interesting I'm glad people are experienced experimenting with it. I do I do like to see alternative trust models work. I do think that I'm not totally against alternative trust models. I think you know a custodial institution is an alternative trust model. So So yeah, I mean it's cool. I I've played around with liquid. I think it's a cool idea. I think the cryptography behind it is really neat So I do hope it does find some find some use case where where it does really fill it fill a need. Lots of these big NADs that we run into now that, you know, custody a lot of Bitcoin, in the wake of 2017, they will now, they have a written fork policy.

So they'll have some sort of document that defines what their course of action is in the face of potentially a contentious fork. Yep. As unlikely as that may seem in Bitcoin today. Have you given any thought to something like that as to, you know, let's say you really, grow in stature, you will be considered a node like any other, but also an economic node, so you'll have more influence, really. So your kind of verification rules matter at that point. Yeah. You know, so like, is that a responsibility that you have, you know, spend time thinking a amount? And do you have a editorial position on like what Bitcoin is, for instance?

I have spent some time thinking about this. And it's funny. I think I was maybe thinking about it in the shower last night. But the answer is, today we don't have a written policy. We probably should, but I also don't know how to do that. It's not, I'm kind of someone who leans towards this idea where trying to write down rules for something so inherently complex as Bitcoin consensus for our company is just going to cause, potentially,

I haven't fully thought this through. I'm just kind of thinking out loud here, but one of my hesitations, I should say, is that writing that down explicitly will cause more problems than it solves, and that as long as we make it clear that regardless, whatever happens, users will be able to access both sides of the fork, which is more of the ethical imperative, at least assuming it's not a total minority fork that is causing more problems than it's worth. Well, right. I mean, that would be a critique I actually would have had of many exchanges. It's that they legitimated this notion of users being entitled to their coins on these meritless forks, which caused a huge amount of chaos and then also caused users. If exchanges, for instance, has just said, we will not spend engineering resources or time on these forks. Users wouldn't have had that entitlement. Yeah.

But they, you know, they were attracted. They saw the price on corn market. happened like, oh, I've been shortchanged here by like $56 because I didn't get my Bitcoin diamond. Well, and I think the lawsuits also probably started rolling in, too, if I had to guess. Yeah. If anything, it should be a lesson in people overrating the economic value of these forks based on like an initial high print on a coin market cap.

Yeah. I mean, it's admittedly something that we need to do more thinking about. Luckily, we're not that era is behind us and when that comes next. When's the next fork fest? I don't know. But we need to do more thinking about that. I'm hesitant to ever, I'm hesitant to try to figure out a set of rules that define the fork will follow. If there ever is a truly, kind of equally contentious fork, that's not obvious.

Because at that point, your rules maybe... Start breaking down. Yeah, you can't anticipate. Exactly. I feel like it's a bit of a fool's errand to try and preemptively write rules for that. But when it comes to minority forks, you know, we have to figure that out. Realistically, if it's over a certain value, you pretty much have to be able to give that to customers, I think. Or else they're going to get pissed.

No matter what you told them ahead of time, they're going to get pissed. Or you could say, we're never going to support any for... and avoid the problem entirely. Yeah. I just don't know if that's actually realistic, realistically tenable. I tend to think that the failure of a lot of those forks, it was certainly a gambit, you know, and we saw some very creative stuff like with Bitcoin Private,

which was like deliberately extractive in nature. The failure of all of those forks means that it's probably less likely that we get anymore anytime soon. That's my hope. Yeah. Just for you personally, would you want to see a version of Bitcoin that had confidential transactions in it? I used to be more supportive of something like that.

I think as I went through grad school, as I matured as an engineer, I'm actually more and more skeptical of including anything like that. One, because it often inevitably comes with, one, 100% increases a complexity of the system. two is unlikely to bring any sort of absolute privacy and it's going to be marginal improvement in privacy yeah because in practice these systems are not truly private with just obscuring balances yeah and human human anything humans make is is susceptible to to bugs and something is critical as Bitcoin, just having the values out in plain sight, the values of the transactions, having it trivial to detect any sort of inflation is, I think, more of a benefit than a cost.

I do think that the fact that Bitcoin is so easy to verify, the supply is part of its value proposition to the world, even though it does hurt its privacy, it does have an impact on privacy. I'm very scared of complexity. Look at Zcash, right? They had one of the subscripts in the Zcash paper and one of the formulas was a typo. And it was like a one instead of a two. And that that was implemented and led to a completely fatal flaw in the first version of it that they luckily fixed without any real catastrophe. But I'm just too scared of this stuff. We actually don't know if it's been exploited yet. Well, we don't because it's in the shielded pool. They have this turnstile thing, but yeah. We don't know. And you know, you can get the

smartest PhD who understands this math inside and out and who reviewed that paper and they didn't catch it, right? Well, that's the problem with cutting edge cryptography is that the set of people that can actually use it and review it is small. Yeah. And that's, and that's a thing like the thing about cryptography that I love is that it's so dynamic, especially in this era, it's so, there are so many advances. But I think it's important to remember that we don't. understand this stuff that well and we have to be very careful when we choose to use it. You know when it comes to using it for you know experimental encryption for messaging, fine. But when it comes to like the base protocol for what's potentially the world, the money

of the world, we have to be very, very careful with any sort of fancy math. So we'll let you go in a minute but one thing that I really wanted to ask was, you know, If you look at the financial sector in the last decade, it's increasingly used for political purposes as opposed to just being a neutral service provider. So banking has become politicized. We see public lobbying, even bills being promoted in Congress to like strip all gun manufacturers of their bank licenses, for instance, or bank relationships. You know, regardless of your stance on that issue, you can see how if that kind of behavior

becomes normalized, it's really destabilizing to society. And it, you know, and like if you look at the world at large, the U.S. has totally embraced this idea of using their position, their status is like the world's full node operator for finance for these strategic, even military purposes. Yep. And this is also trickled into crypto. So, you know, infamously, Wikileaks was one of the entities that catalyze some public knowledge of Bitcoin in 2011. Satoshi was actually a little bit nervous about that. And then, lo and behold, fast forward to, I think, 2017 and Coinbase D-platforms WikiLeaks, their merchant account.

Yep. Because they have committed wrong thing, you know, because they, I guess they offended them or they didn't conform, you know, to the correct political opinions. Yeah. What do you make of this? And, you know, do you at River have a commitment to, to not you, to not de-platform on the basis of like political opinions. Yeah.

So, so these are great questions. And I've done a lot of thinking about this. And I'm personally very much on the side of pro-free speech, pro-allowing anyone who's, to use our platform. I don't want to ever ban anyone because unless I'm legally required to, right? That's the heuristic I take. Now, the reality of the situation is a little more complicated. And that's because a company like Coinbase and a company like ours and other companies in the space rely on third parties to process payments. And that's really what the gotcha is here.

It's not necessarily the government saying, telling Coinbase that they need to remove WikiLeaks account. That might have been the case with Wikileaks. I don't know. But these entities are beholden to Visa and the banking system. Right. And so if, for example, you know, toy scenario here, but let's say you're some online, you know, SaaS company and you process payments via Stripe or, you know, Visa MasterCard. And Visa says, I found out that, you know, Joe Schmoe is using your service to do this, the gun to, you know, this gun manufacturer is using your service to, you know, I don't know, pay their employees or something like that. I'm going to shut you down. you can't process any payments if you don't kick this guy off your platform.

What choice do you really have? Do you just go down? Do you just take the whole thing down and close up shop and all your employees lose their jobs? And, you know, dad can't pay for dinner. Or do you say, do you kind of put up a fight? But at the end of the day, you're not going to want to fight against Visa and just do what they say. And so hopefully, I mean, the hope here is at the end of the day, if Bitcoin really fulfills this potential, those third parties can't, there's no third party that can ever gate you out of moving money around because Bitcoin becomes the money. So.

But that's not the reality today. That's not the reality today. And so I don't know what the answer is. I wish I did, but I don't. And it's really sad, you know, it's not something, it's not a world I want to, I don't. want to see this happen. You know, maybe what this means is maybe really what the obligation of a company like ours, you know, hopefully someday we're big and have more influence is helping push legislation

in the right direction, right? Maybe making some sort of protection, you know, protecting people's right to access to financial services if they're not doing anything that breaks the law, right? or something around that. I don't know. But, yeah. Bitcoin potentially fixes this. Bitcoin potentially fixes this.

I mean, it fixed it for WikiLeaks. At the end of the day, WikiLeaks didn't need a Coinbase account, right? And they also made a ton of money on Bitcoin. Right. So, I mean, that is moving in the right direction. Yeah. It's just more convenient to have that payment processor relationship with Coinbase. Totally.

So, Alex, this has been an absolute pleasure. Where can people find out more? about River Financial. River.com. Yeah, easy to remember. So river.com, our I-V-E-R. That's a good domain. Yeah, we're really lucky we got it. Well, Nick and I are both users, and so we're excited to see how the product develops. Thanks so much for joining us on the podcast today. Thanks for having me, guys.