On The Brink with Castle Island - Dan Mottice (Ansible Labs) on Building the Offramp for Web3 (EP.348)

Episode Date: September 14, 2022

Dan Mottice, CEO and Co-Founder of Ansible Labs, joins the show to talk about a new payment gateway for web3. Dan's personal background and how he ended up in financial services The Visa Network, Visa Direct Payouts and Visa Crypto Ansible Labs' raise and what's ahead Off-ramps and why they matter North stars in fintech The consumer experience in a b2b sales cycle Navigating turbulent markets and how to build to win Learn more about Ansible here.   

On today's On the brink, I sat down with Dan Motus, CEO and co-founder of Ancibo Labs. We recently invested in Dan and Ancival as part of their $7 million seed financing, along with archetype and others. Dan shares more about his experience at Visa and what led him to starting a payments platform for blockchain accounts. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Dan Motus. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them where the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions

and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only is an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. 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 the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people start to worry.

So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Welcome to On the Brink. I'm Sean Judge. And today I'm joined by Dan Modis, CEO and co-founder of Ansible Labs. Dan, thanks for joining me today. Yeah, thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it.

Great. Well, maybe before we go, get into Ancibel and your journey into crypto, it'd be great to just get kind of your personal background, the born and raised, and maybe how you ended up in financial services. Yeah, absolutely. That sounds good. So moved around a fair amount as a kid, but ended up mostly growing up in the West Coast in Portland, Oregon, kind of went down to school in the Bay Area and haven't really since left since. I've been in the Bay Area for about 10 years. I went to school at Santa Clara in the South Bay and then moved up to the city after graduation. And then

And then, you know, that's where I jumped into Visa and kind of the rest is history. Awesome. Well, maybe because it's particularly relevant to Ancible, would be great to get a sense for what you worked on at Museum. Obviously, it's been where you spent all of your career up to leading up to Ancibel. You know, what teams do you work on? What are some of the products that you worked on there and be helpful, I think, for listeners to understand. It'll make a lot more sense for why you're starting Ancible. Yeah, for sure.

So I joined Visa as a part of a leadership development program. So spent the first two years or so kind of dabbling in different functional areas of the business, really just learning what Visa actually does, which I think is quite astounding for folks that don't know the business. You know, it's pretty interesting what Visa actually does for the global economy. But we don't have to get into too much of that now. I'll spend some more time on the specific product line that I really dug into. But in summary, basically, after that rotational program, I ended up in a product manager. gig on a product called Visa Direct, which is where I spent the majority of my time at Visa until I jumped into the crypto team there.

But basically, Visa Direct is kind of Visa's global real-time payment system. So for the listeners in the U.S., if you go into your Venmo app, there's basically two options to cash out the balance in your Venmo. One of which uses a system called ACH that's serviced by primarily banks. So J.P. Morgan Chase being a great example of one of the bigger providers for that in the U.S. but basically there's local equivalence of that in every country or most countries around the world. And then there's another option to cash out your balance instantly, which basically uses the card networks. And so Visa saw a lot of success in this product that was called Visa Direct. MasterCard has an equivalent capability called MasterCard Send.

But again, in summary, think of it as a way to basically kind of reverse the both messaging, i.e. kind of like the protocol instruction flow in Visa network itself, as well as the settlement flow in Visa to allow, for kind of the merchant acquirers or kind of the payment originators of the world to deposit funds into checking accounts wherever there's a debit card in front of that account. So to give you a kind of visualization for what that experience looks like, you select that button in your Venmo. You know, there's a slightly higher fee for it because it's kind of a premium service. And then you get instant access to your liquidity from the digital wallet balance back in your

checking account. And so that kind of gives you an idea of what the capability offers at the time where Visa Direct was seeing a lot of success, it also powered a lot of other kind of peer-to-peer programs in the United States. So Square Cash used it to actually power their end-to-end P-to-P scheme, if you will. So you're a cash app user. I'm a cash-up user. If I were to initiate a transaction to you, it actually went through that Visa Direct transaction type as well. Apple Pay Cash used some portion of that transaction for their initial P-to-P launch as well. And point being, think of it as like a kind of configurable Visa transaction type. that can be embedded in different parts of the digital fiat wallet flow that enabled faster money movement using the Visa network.

And so when I joined that team, they'd seen a lot of success, especially in North America, as it relates to the P2P use case and usage of that transaction type. And Visa at the time, kind of globally and at the corporate level was really going through this journey as it relates to how to use that capability to service cross-border payouts for payments. And basically came to the conclusion that, you know, there aren't debit cards. everywhere in the world because there's, you know, not banks that issue cards. There's not even banks everywhere and there's a lot of work to be done in kind of, you know, building out established financial infrastructure that we're used to in the U.S. along in a lot of places around the world. Not only that, but even where there are banks that issue debit cards, if you will, the banks weren't yet comfortable with this new type of transaction, i.e., the risk model that they have

associated with, you know, checking accounts, if you will, was built out to support money being pulled from that account to buy stuff online or face-to-face or brick-and-order shops, if you will. And it wasn't, they weren't built out to support these inbound flows, these depository flows into the bank accounts. And so point being, there's an entire team spun up at Visa to basically focus on how do we optimize the ecosystem of issuing banks around the world to receive this transaction type. But even if we did that, it actually would only allow for Visa to capitalize on about 50% of the global payouts opportunity, which you'll hear a bunch of different kind of references and data and data points and TAMs for this, but it's basically between $100 and $120 trillion

of various kind of cross-border money movement value that goes across primarily ACH network, Swift, wires, checks and cash around the world. And so obviously for Visa at that time, they wanted to start capitalizing on these opportunities. And I worked on a team that helped think through how VSA could do so. So not to get too much into the technical details about how it works, but basically there's a bunch of different ways to do this. As I alluded to, there's a bunch of different networks, both for cross-border use cases and domestic use cases, but basically Visa opted into buying a small payments company headquartered out of London that basically allowed for Visa to kind of hub all of the instructional or messaging activity,

as well as the settlement activity, to basically reach bank accounts using different schemes. So automated clearinghouses, real-time payment schemes, real-time gross settlement, a bunch of other kind of acronyms that you'll hear in the traditional payments world. But basically, think of this as kind of like an aggregator that allowed Visa to bridge into non-card ways of moving money. And so spent a lot of time kind of building out the business case for that, ended up acquiring that company and integrating that company into the Visa Direct Product Suite or Business Unit. But thematically, why that's interesting for what we're doing at ANSI is it's basically, how do you bridge from one system to another, right?

And so, I can't remember the exact day, but I believe it was in February of 2021 that we launched kind of this new and improved Visa Direct 2.0 that we called Visa Direct Payouts. But think of this capability as kind of all of the ability that the Visa Network offers, i.e. all of that push-to-car capability, that real-time depository capability to any issuing bank in the world, coupled with the ability to reach bank accounts through all of those other systems I alluded to in 95 or so countries at the time. And to do so, it requires a lot of various kind of complicated message orchestration and settlement flows. And so at the launch of that product. We had spent a lot of time thinking through how you basically simplify the front-end

API through which clients can consume that. I had originated payments to any bank account in the world. But what I really realized was how complicated settlement was, even for the biggest network in the world, to basically orchestrate settlement across all of those nodes within this master network, if you will, right? And so we launched that product. You know, it went really well. I think the product was really well received in market, but I at the time had kind of jumped into the crypto rabbit hole myself. And that was kind of my come to do. Jesus moment, if you will, that it was like, okay, well, if the biggest card network in the world, one of the biggest payments networks in the world is still struggling with the underlying

settlement of how to kind of stitch together all these systems, and there has to be something to crypto. And so that was kind of my like wake up call that there was something with crypto. And I kind of jumped in at that point. So I had been dabbling on the side at that time. I didn't decide to jump in and found Ansible at that time, but I had been dabbling with, you know, the rabbit hole, if you will. And that's kind of what. my wake-up call was for crypto and, you know, Anspoly thematically is really trying to become a bridge for not only kind of the best of traditional payment rails, but also kind of stitched together the pieces to make it easier to use on chain money movement and to make it easier to

move value around the world using, you know, stable coins and blockchains. So, yeah, I'll kind of stop there and see if any of that kind of, you know, you know, triggers any conversation points. Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, from everything from working on real-time payments to thinking about settlement, cross-border transactions, it's very logical way to start to think about crypto, start to think about building something in crypto. Maybe tell us a little bit more about Ancable and kind of the mission of the firm and kind of where you're at today.

Yeah, for sure. So I think one thing I'd like to clarify is just like by definition, what is an Anansable. So Anansable is kind of a term rooted inside. that's basically this fictional device or tech that's capable of instantaneous or faster than like communication across infinite distance. And it's right. So, you know, we're kind of sci-fi nerds at Ansible and we're building out a team of folks that this kind of excites.

And basically our goal with our first product beam and what will hopefully become a platform called Beam is to create kind of this financial or money movement Ansible between the crypto economy and the traditional economy. So really breaking that down a little bit further, basically we're trying to make it easier to move value around the world using the best. best of traditional networks and on-chain money movement. And so to date, you know, we got started when I left Visa and end of March. My co-founder, Matt Van Houten left mid-April or so. And we, you know, fortunately were able to close our raise before kind of things went a bit south in the private markets.

And so we've just closed out a seven million dollar seat round. And we're using that primarily to build out the team and to get our first product beam to market. And, you know, especially importantly to build out a really rigorous compliance engine that basically can be this trust layer that gets the banks and the networks and the various global providers that are going to be required for us to build this thing comfortable with kind of touching crypto, if you will. And so we're at about 17 members full time and, you know, growing pretty quickly. Obviously, the dynamics as we've all, we're all aware of have changed a little bit. So I think it's a good time to build.

But wouldn't say we're slowing down. I wouldn't say our kind of orientation around the mission that is being has changed much. Very helpful. Well, Ancable, I mean, one of the things that, and as a full disclosure, Castle Island as an investor and Dan and Ancival as part of that seed round. And one of the things that was super interesting about what you were building is that Ancival's really helping with the off ramps. And it'd be great to kind of unpack it a little bit because on ramps have been a big focus today.

And, you know, you have all these different companies out there thinking, how do we make it easier for people to buy cryptocurrency or NFTs? How do we make a more seamless experience for someone to interact with the Defi protocol? So maybe help us understand with the process today of entering Web 3 with Fiat or leaving Web 3 with Fiat looks like and why you chose off-ramps as a starting place. Yeah, definitely. So I think if you look back, you know, several years that centralized exchanges were the primary place through which you could on-ramp, quote-unquote, into crypto. And so, you know, they focus really on not only global support to begin, but in the U.S., especially kind of the regulatory framework and pushing forth with the regulatory

framework that would allow for this business to not only, you know, persist and become a thing, if you will, but also thrive. And so, you know, if it weren't for the centralized exchanges and what they've done in this space, I don't think we'd be where we are. That said, I think there was a lot of room for improvement in how you kind of make a seamless on-rimp experience occur, i.e., how do you connect into these fintech applications, basically? How do you prove who you are? How do you choose the payment method that you prefer to pay with and what's easiest for you as a consumer? And then lastly, like, what do you do with that crypto? So enter a lot of these kind of like crypto-specialized PSPs or payment services providers like MoonP, like Wire, who is probably first in the space,

like Ramp, like Transac, who basically said, okay, but we have the centralized exchanges. is they're very focused on kind of this speculative investment use case, i.e. I buy ether. I buy Bitcoin because I think longer term it has more upside than buying anything in the S&P 500. But let's not focus on that. Let's just focus on making it a really streamlined experience to just buy crypto. So I can do what I want with it. Right. And so it's really capitalized on crypto, I think as a lot of folks know, but just to explain it a bit further, you actually have to interact with a different type of wallet, right? You have to interact with the self-custodied wallet like Metamask or others that exist on different change. And so to do so, you basically have to buy through a bribe cryptocurrency or a crypto asset through a centralized service provider and then actually transfer that cryptocurrency to another type of wallet like Metamask.

And only after that can you actually interact with Defi or with an NFT marketplace or with any other of these kind of like protocols or Web3 platforms or DAPs that people are creating. And so even as is, it's a bit clunky, if you will, to get onboarded into the space. But a lot of improvement has been done in the space. And especially in the past bull market, a lot of money's been raised to try to make it easier, right, to kind of create these curated experience that allow you to on-ram directly on-to an NFT platform, for example, to buy your first NFT, right? And so, well, I think there's a lot of room for improvement there. And we may eventually get to, you know, also solving for different on-ramp use cases or flows. We actually decided to focus on a different gap, which is, to your point, off-ramp, right? And so taking a step back, the reason we solved for it, what we wanted to solve for off-bramp first is because,

Because number one, really, very few people are focused on off-ramp. I think there's a few reasons for that. I think there's a lot of money to be made in on-ramp. And to your point, there's been a theme that is, how do we get more people into the space? How do we get more retail users and institutions into the space? And how do we keep liquidity in the space so that, you know, the market cap across the entire space continues to accrue value, right? But I believe that for a lot of the kind of non-speculative investment-related use cases that we saw in the last full run to actually take off internness. So, for example, some of the interesting stuff to do with crypto gaming, some of the interesting stuff we saw to do with NFT ecosystems thriving, some of the use cases we saw with Dow's and Dow contribution and folks getting paid on chain, right?

There actually is a real need to actually get that value out of the crypto economy so that it can be spent in the real world. And so the only way to do that right now, so if you assume that you've received value on chain, it's been received to a self-custody wallet, the only way to really offer it right now is to just send that value back through a centralized exchange. like Coinbase, manually trade that back to a fiat currency. Often you're paying multiple fees within that journey, i.e., you know, just take ETH, for example, you're paying gas when you sign the metamass transfer. You then pay a fee in Coinbase to, you know, trade back into a fiat currency. And then you're manually instructing kind of an antiquated payment instruction, a wire, basically, from the centralized experience wallet app.

Then you wait three to five days for you to get the access to that fee liquidity, right? And so there's just so much room for improvement. right. And so that's what we decided to solve first. I think a lot of this actually stem from some feedback I had been getting from the market while I was kind of exploring what I could be doing at Ansible. And I think people in the last bull market came to this realization that there needs to be kind of this co-or, there might need to be this coexistence between the crypto economy and like the traditional economy. And I think there are still the purists that, you know, may not want to acknowledge that. But a lot of folks came to grips with that. And I think in summary, it's really, really difficult to create an

entirely new merchant acceptance network. And so why do so, right? Like, why not create more streamlined capabilities that allow you to kind of transfer the value that's earned or crude on the on-chain economy back to traditional store value accounts so that it can just be spent using traditional mechanisms, right? And so that's what we're focusing on. So I think we're still in kind of use case exploratory mode. I think I alluded to a lot that we're excited about. But I think that's kind of why in summary we decided to target off-front first, just because it really was It's the biggest gap in market. And so, you know, we're eager to solve that gap.

And then we're hopeful that that kind of removes this kind of thing that we're calling the one-way ticket effect, that some people also call the house money effect of Krippa right now and brings a lot more users into the space because we'll have the tools to give them comfort that, you know, when they enter crypto and then when they go and explore the various use cases that are possible in the crypto economy, they all have tools that can kind of safely allow them to return that value back to their, you know, traditional accounts and then spend that value in the real world. Yeah. And, you know, the meta mask to getting cash in your bank account, it's many days and you're paying fees along the way. It's a pretty expensive process. But to your point, the one-way ticket effect, a lot of people in crypto are one-way type movers. They move money in and they move it around, but the off-rent part is not something that they necessarily think about. And so what was the reception as you started to build this and started to talk with investors?

started to talk with people kind of in the crypto and blockchain ecosystem. Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of people ask that question, right? It's like once you enter, why would you ever leave? But I would go back to this point that there was almost an expansion of possible use cases in the crypto economy that really came to be in the past call it like two years or so. And you could kind of call that web three. You can call it whatever you want.

But, you know, we saw, for example, Axi Infinity take off. ultimately, you know, they made a lot of progress for the space and, you know, I think helped people think differently about what's possible on chain. And so that's just one example of a world in which people are earning value on chain. And, you know, they're earning money in a way that was never possible using the crypto primitives, if you will. And for that income that's being realized on chain, they need to spend that value in the real world. And you can't use metamast to do so, right? So that's just one use case that kind of like caused the light bulb moment to go off my head. I think we also spent a lot of time with various folks that are trying to crack like on-chain payments,

which, you know, it is kind of the holy grill, but I think it's, it's going to be a tough one. And we definitely have some ideas about how to do so as well, but we're not quite there yet. But I think they've realized that for any like, you know, on-chain merchant or business to actually receive payments on-chain in something like a stable coin or in a, you know, something like Heath or something like Bitcoin for those merchants, for those businesses to actually use that value, they need to get it out and for them to just send that value back to their FTX account or their, you know, their Coinbase account or even their circle account. It's just too inefficient and there needs to be better ways for them to manage that working capital. And so

actually on the back of our fundraise announcement, we saw a lot of interest from folks that are, I'd say, within two themes or thematic buckets, one of which is those that are focused on that kind of pain point I just referenced. One of the first. One of which is like call it on-chain working capital management. It's like you are a business that's crypto-native. You know, how do I do taxes? How do I do invoences? How do I pay my bills?

And so the fact of the matter is you can't really do that on chain for most companies, right? And all of them are using that kind of really, really haphazard, cumbersome process that I alluded to to get their value back to the railroad. And so just take like the classic example of like, I got to pay my AWS bills. How am I going to do it right now? There should be better ways to do that. And so thematically, I think. There's a lot of positive reception to things like that that we really weren't thinking about when we initially set up to solve this problem, but then are getting exciting as we're kind of coming to market.

And then also there's a bunch of people that are building solutions for folks that are entirely, you know, building businesses on chains. Or they could be DAOs, for example. And like these DAOs are paying their contributors on chain, right? And these contributors live in the real world. They can't wait, you know, five to 10 days to number one get, you know, their on-chain income. back to their bank accounts so they can spend it. And then number two, they can't wait for their reimbursements for some out-of-pocket they expense on behalf of the Dow for some event that they saw, right?

And so I just think that like more and more, well, first of all, as we advocate more that this is a possibility and that people see how easy it can be, that there's just going to be so many folks that get interested in this capability and that, you know, just as we evangelize more for it and as we speak to it more, there's going to be so many more use cases that come out of the word works that say, oh, I get this. Like, you know, we really do need this tool. And I can kind of see why this is a thing and why you guys are focused on that to begin.

Makes a lot of sense. I mean, when we initially first started chatting, it was kind of the individual use case. But more and more, you can start to see these business or Dow type use cases to solve a lot of the problems that you're talking about. How do you think about, I mean, you're in product build mode? How do you think about kind of go to market and selling into some of these organizations, particularly if it's a Dow? Yeah, for sure. I think it's the early days, especially for things like Dow's. I think it's still early days for businesses that truly manage, like, you know, greater than 50% of their treasury on chain, for example. The way that we're thinking about it is that we're going where we are in the process of finalizing our MVP for Beam that we will expose as a direct-to-consumer web app, basically. So to give you an illustration of that flow, think of, you know, you're interacting with any data much like you would go interact with.

compound or AVE or OpenC or OpenCore or whatever that may be, you'll connect to your non-custodial wallet of your choice. You will go through our enrollment process and then upload your preferred payment credential. We'll then have kind of a profile for you on record, after which you can take advantage of this kind of instant off-ram capability. So to your point, you know, when we were initially thinking about it, it was very kind of consumer-centric. It was very almost nondescript in some ways about like where we actually think that this was going to gain traction. But we're primarily using that as a way to illustrate to the market how much better these flows can be. And almost using it as a way to, number one, validate the flows and validate our product

architecture to make sure that it doesn't break before I go and sell it to anybody, right? And then number two, also basically use that as a kind of a tool that we can use to go explain what we mean to folks within the ecosystem that could help help us build out kind of our embedded offering. So we've been going back and forth a lot about like to what extent we're going to be really doubling down on the consumer side of things. I think we're very much leaning in on the fact that we want this to be kind of an embedded primitive that folks can capitalize on. But just think of our initial go-to-market as a way to show to the market what's possible and to help us kind of drum up the creative minds that are out there building in the space so that we can then,

you know, as we enter Q4 and then as we enter Q1 of 23, really refine this kind of dev platform approach that will help us expose these services through APIs and then basically have it as this kind of white label capability that can be embedded in in various different front ends. And I think thematically there's some we've discussed and others we can discuss if it's of interest. That said, I think one thing that we are really interested in is like William Hockey from Plaid had a really interesting comment in the cartoon Avatar's pod. I think over this weekend it was released wherein they took a purposeful product decision

early on to basically expose PlaidLink as their kind of, you know, consumer-facing element that streamline the onboarding process. And after that, they, you know, they attribute like 90% plus of their market cap to the fact that they made that design decision. And so we're definitely drawing some inspiration from that. And the fact of the matter is like, we still need to do KYC. And a lot of these truly decentralized builders don't want to do it. So we're kind of dabbling with this idea of like using at least some portion of our

consumer-facing property that we create for the initial launch, as a consumer-facing UI that we can basically use as a streamlined KYC process, and then basically embed the rest of the payments APIs, if you will, behind the scenes as embedded services. That's something that you and I have chatted quite a bit about, specifically with regards to a company like Plaid and thinking through other great FinTech companies that were founded during tumultuous periods or existed but emerged even stronger from a downturn in a market. I think famously PayPal in early 2002, the NASDAQ was down 65% over the prior 18 months and they IPOed an $800 million valuation.

They were acquired five months later for a billion and a half. And this is during a time when the NASDAQ fell by an additional 22%. And so you start to think about like, what are these product decisions? What are these business decisions that these great fintech companies that are serving kind of as North Stars for Ansible? What do they do? And I think in the PayPal's case, obviously, it was going from negative 40 million of EBITDA in 2001 to a run rate of 30 million of EBITDA at the time of acquisition and kind of stepping off the cost side of the equation still growing really well. But, you know, was really rewarded in the market at the time when people are really trying to figure out how to monetize. eyeballs. Are there others that you look at, whether it's Plaid or PayPal or others that

emerged kind of during the great financial crisis? And how do you think about these North Stars and how do you see these businesses compared to what the market looks like today? Yeah, I think that's a great question. I think we definitely draw inspiration from various companies. I think the way that we're thinking about ourselves as of now are that we're trying to couple kind of what Plaid did from a data aggregation perspective with what companies like transfer wise or what's now wise or Neum did in creating the pipes business, the global pipes business, if you will, for kind of global payout delivery. I think it's less to do with the market cycles in that regard, but more to do with just kind of the North Star companies that we're trying to

kind of learn from and strive to emulate, if you will. I will say thematically, something that I've found interesting is the kind of apps infrastructure cycle that Pachey and McCormick alluded to in one of his kind of earlier write-ups if we're not boring, wherein we kind of go from the infrastructure phase to the app phase and back and forth in these ebbs and flows. In crypto, right, it's just far faster than it is in SaaS and that it was in e-commerce, et cetera. And so I will say that as it relates to crypto and where we are right now, I believe that we are entering infrastructure phase again. We saw some really interesting new use cases and apps, which I've alluded to. And what I'm excited for in this next infrastructure phase is helping focus attention.

And with a lot of the new use cases that came out, helping build experiences that are a bit less scary than using Coinbase's right now, right? Than using the centralized exchanges of the moon pays of the world are. And almost being this more trusted friendlier brand that consumers can say, yeah, I get the crypto is a thing. I've been waiting on the sidelines, and now, like, there's just better tools out there that are going to make me comfortable with using it. And, you know, for better or for worse, I think those tools are going to have to be centralized, right? And so less to do with kind of your allusion to kind of like hyper mic macro cycles. I'm more interested on building infrastructure, given where we are on this market, that is really well tailored for hopefully mainstream adoption in the next app cycle that emerges in the next one or two years in the crypto economy. And, you know, we hope to be a brand that kind of brings trust to the space.

We often say that we're trying to try, we're trying to create kind of like trust in this, trustless world. And that, you know, we're trying to be a brand. We're trying to be a company that that really, you know, serves as this, is this kind of like comfortable fintech that basically allows for people to use crypto in a way that wasn't possible in past cycles and emerged from this kind of chaos as a another one of those brands that, you know, hopefully is, you know, a pretty big deal in the next several years. We get really excited about that.

I mean, we look back at the 2018-2019 crypto bear market and companies like Talos that we invested in, other companies that were not investors in, but that have turned out to be fantastic kind of infrastructure plays, whether it's fireblocks or pie and software companies that really benefited from kind of the cycle in 2020, 21. In terms of timing, where are you today? It sounds like you guys have ramped pretty quickly on the team. team side, but when will we be able to kind of see you guys live? Yeah, definitely. So we've opened up our wait list. As I said, we, we are kind of going back and forth as to how much we're

investing in a consumer presence versus an embedded presence. But it's been received super well. So we're planning to go live in this fall. We'll be kind of doing a phase launch, starting with friends and family, you know, investors, local community members, et cetera, and those that were early on the wait list and then we'll be kind of phasing in users, you know, towards the latter half of fall, primarily with the intent to learn about how people are using the service, how frequently they're off-ramping, what kind of ticket size they're off-ramping with or kind of like the payment value size, right? And then we're going to use that as a way to really target the use cases and especially use that as a way to drum up the B2-B-2-C or B-2-B pipeline, if you will, so that we can

hit the ground running and start working on spinning up our dev platform and embedding the solution into platforms that basically service the consumer communities that have kind of, we've kind of captured their attention of with the initial wait list exposure to the market. So expect to see us live with the consumer web app in fall. We'll be opening it up to more and more users. We're super eager to get feedback on what people want to see. And especially within the kind of creator economy space, the ownership economy space, among some of the other kind of on-chain economy themes that we discussed earlier in the pod where we're very open to feedback and we'd love to learn more about like what will make this product kind of best for the communities we're

trying to serve. And then that said, if you're out there and you're building platforms to serve any of those communities or there's communities that we just haven't thought of, would love to chat, would love to learn more about your off ramp and payouts needs. And we're in this kind of beautiful phase that is, you know, we have the ability to move really quickly and adapt the product to what the market needs. And while I think the pain point's clear, we can do a lot. to create solutions that really aren't out there in the market yet. So I expect to see us really ramp towards the latter half of 2022. And then our goal is to really start to do some commercial deals with platforms starting

in early to mid-23. Terrific. And I guess for those folks that are out there that are looking to potentially partner with you and Ancibel or if they're interested in joining, where can people find you? Yeah, I think Twitter is your best bet at Ancable Labs on Twitter. Pretty active on there. And then we do have a Discord community if you want to hop in there. We're kind of doing our best to shift that away from kind of the classic NFT-Shill Discord

communities more towards kind of a developer-centric, you know, engaging communities. So we'd love to hear from you and there. And then, yeah, feel free to contact me on Twitter as well. Awesome. Well, this has been great, Dan. I really appreciate you joining us today. Absolutely. Sean. It's great to chat and thanks for having me on.

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