On The Brink with Castle Island - Jeth Soetoyo (Pintu) on building a cryptoasset brokerage in a frontier market (EP.202)

Episode Date: April 5, 2021

Jeth Soetoyo, the founder and CEO of Pintu, a cryptoasset brokerage based on Indonesia joins the show. In this episode we discuss: Jeth's path to the cryptoasset industry and his journey from Consensys to business school to founding Pintu Views on stablecoin adoption and how Jeth and team are approaching this with their Rupiah Token project The Indonesian market and how Pintu is approaching this market opportunity View on DeFi and how centralized infrastructure companies are positioned To learn more about Pintu visit www.pintu.co.id and follow Jeth @Jeth_Soetoyo This episode is brought to you by: Aave is a decentralized, open source, and non-custodial protocol where users can deposits and borrow digital assets, and earn interest on those assets. Head over to aave.com to experience and learn more about DeFi.   Copper is transforming how institutional investors engage with digital assets by developing award-winning custody and next-gen trading infrastructure. Headquartered in London, the firm is scaling rapidly across Asia and North America to bring its suite of products to a wider pool of institutional investors. To learn more visit copper.co or reach out on Twitter, @CopperHQ      

Before we get into this episode, let me tell you a little bit about our sponsors, AVE and Copper. AVE is a decentralized, open source, non-custodial protocol where users can deposit and borrow crypto assets and also earn interest on those assets. Head over to AVE.com, that's AAVE.com, to experience and learn more about defy. This episode is also brought to you by copper. Copper is the global provider for blockchain infrastructure solutions for institutional investors who are looking at actively trading digital assets. It's an award-winning custody application,

and it's connected to 25 of the largest exchanges in the world, ensuring safe storage and movement of those assets for crypto hedge funds, market makers, family offices, and high-net worth individuals. Copper's Clearloop is the first off-chain... Copper's Clearloop is the first off-exchange settlement network for digital assets. It's the easiest and safest way to trade balances in your custody account across multiple exchanges without the same.

those on-chain movements of the assets. Their unique custodial solution and exchange integrations allow you to remove counterparty risk from the equation, enabling you to deploy more capital and trade at higher volumes quickly and securely. To learn more, visit copper.co. That's copper.org. Or reach out to them on Twitter at Copper HQ. Today in the podcast I set down with Jeff Satoyo, the founder of Pintu. Pintu is a fast-growing crypto asset brokerage that's based in Indonesia. I'm a big fan of what Jeff and his team are building, and he's someone who's been in this industry for a while, having spent time at consensus and then attending Harvard Business School before launching Pintu. This was a fun conversation. We talked a lot about the state of the crypto market in Indonesia.

We talked about defy and talked about a lot more. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Jeff Satojo. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, 85,000. billion dollars. 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 to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of concentrated 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 the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Jeff, thank you so much for joining the podcast. This is an early morning podcast for you and it's a nighttime podcast for me. Tell us where you are. Yeah, hi, man. Thanks again for having me. I'm out in Singapore right now where I've been through the last year

since COVID started. But I'm originally from Jakarta, Indonesia, where I grew up and basically run the company from. For the last one year, I've been on the run, basically, from COVID and hiding it out in Singapore. But I need to go back to Indonesia in the next one week or so.

Well, there's a lot to talk about today and definitely want to talk about Pintu, but maybe before we do, you're someone that's been in the crypto scene for quite a while and have spent some time at some of the most iconic places in crypto. So tell me a little bit about how you got started in crypto and what your career journey has been to date. Sure. I think like a lot of people, I started with Bitcoin, primarily playing around with it back in 2016, 2017, and didn't really get serious into it until mid-2017. back then I was just starting off doing my MBA at Harvard and I thought about like what I wanted to refocus my life on.

And I think at that time, blockchain was also gathering a lot of steam. And so I took a part-time job actually at that time. Back then at consensus where I was tasked on a project working on cross-chain atomic swaps. So trying to solve the problem of intermediation and exchanging tokens between different blockchings. The project was called the quality. And I think until now it's still online. But I think back then, the usability was still very poor for cross-chain atomic swaps.

And I thought that there was still a much bigger problem, right? Especially for where I came from, which is basically how to get people into crypto. So the Fiat on ramp, the first part of the journey was the biggest problem. And so, and I felt that myself, Matt, when I was in Indonesia, I was trying to buy crypto for the first time, that journey was like really difficult. And the drop-off rates for a lot of people was very high. And so throughout my time in the MBA, started working on like trying to think about how I can solve this problem and ended up starting the Pinto project, which is essentially a crypto exchange slash brokerage based in Indonesia, trying to make that journey very easy for

the first time user. And so I started doing that 2018 and 2019. And, and And when I came back to Indonesia in 2019, did that full time. But what's funny was at that time, we didn't end up launching Pinto yet. And prior to that, we actually launched our stable coin project first, because we believe that for all the crypto out there, there also needs to be a country-specific stable coin to be used for daily transactions, daily use cases whereby other types of cryptos are too volatile. So we did that in 2019.

And then gradually in April 2020, we launched PIN 2 for the first time. And since then, the growth has just been pretty amazing. Yeah. And certainly the numbers are crazy. You know, as you're talking about what got you into crypto, I'm curious how you came at it from either a financial inclusion perspective or from a here's a new kind of non-sovereign store of value perspective. What was it for you that really got you excited enough to spend your whole career in this?

So for me, I think it was building a new financial infrastructure. For me, I've had the experience of exploring fintech. I think two or three years before I started working on this, exploring fintech a lot. And I realized that building a new innovation in the financial services on top of the existing infrastructure is just very difficult. There's just too much legacy software that you need to build on, which makes innovation very difficult and hard. Second of all, the nature is very geographic. So building of fintech means you're serving customer base only in one geography, unlike blockchain, right, where you can like serve the whole road from day one, potentially.

And so those are the things that made me realize. I think the blockchain infrastructure has the potential of having an impact as significant as the internet. And I think in my own opinion, even a larger impact, because I think internet disrupt the data and information distribution, whereas I think the blockchain has the potential of basically rewriting how finance is done. And I just think that's going to be huge. So based from that hypothesis, you know, I forget it's a worthy bet to go all in. Yeah.

Well, I'm glad you did. And I love how you started with the rupee stable coin. I think that this is a fascinating area, which you were really ahead of your time in terms of building stable coin infrastructure. Right now that that is really taken off. And certainly dollar back stablecoins, I guess, are probably the dominant force there. But when you think about the internet of value, I think as Jeremy Aller likes to call it, it's stable coins are really stepping up in filling that role. I'm curious just your view on that market today and if it's matured in a way that has surprised you at all. Sure. Yeah, I think I never thought like stable coins won't reach

market cap over $45 billion now, right? Even more. And I think it will always be like that. As more money comes into crypto, stable coins will just rise along with it. Because for every dollar cryptocurrency floating around, there needs to be like an equivalent or so in stable coins because people are always trading in and out of stable coins. My own personal view of how the stable coin play will go out, I think, is that there will be a dominant force still being led by the U.S.D. Stable Coins. I think that's a given as a global sort of like reserve currency that people are comfortable with. And I think there will be a lot of country-specific stablecoins. I think at the end of the day, every country will need its own stable coin for domestic use cases

for domestic transactions, first of all. And second, no law, no country in the world would want to have, we would want to lose their sovereign power over monetary policy and then the ability to control monetary policy. And so I think they will try and push a local CBDC currencies to be used domestically. So I think there will be a duality where there's going to be like a USDC stable coin or USDC stable coin in play. And then there will be also local domestic stable coins. Yeah. I wonder what your views are on just some of the more private or less regulated stable coins, do you think that we'll have a coexistence of different flavors of stable coins where some are fully surveilled, some are a little bit more on the fringe, maybe they're a

little bit riskier to interact with? Do you envision that dichotomy continuing? Yeah, totally. I believe so, right? If you think about the internet and how the U.S. and China manages their internet, basically you have a U.S. type of internet where that's very open and permissionless, and you have the Chinese version of the internet where it's much more censored and controlled. I think the same thing will happen with CBDCs and with blockchains. I think China will try to roll out a CBDC that's very thought out and controlled in terms of distribution of its CBDC. And I think it will work, right? It will work very well in its own way. And so I think that that would be fine. But for a lot of other countries, I think if you don't have the power behind

China's trade, which is basically the force pushing out the CBC rollout, I think you won't be as successful. And so I think for a lot of countries, the logical route would be through the open permissionless route, right, where you work on open blockchains, which already have a lot of capital flowing in it, which already has a lot of applications built on top of it. I think that's a smarter route. I think for a smaller country to try and roll out their own CBC on the blockchain, It's just going to be very difficult. It's going to be so fun to see when people start to actually make their first stable coin transactions. I still think we're in the frontier here, but we're funding companies now using USDC.

And it's not like twice as much better as a wire transfer. It kind of mumbled that one. But it is a 10 times. It's an order of magnitude improvement in terms of usability and just the friction of being able to do this. Not to mention the auditability. And, you know, you don't have to worry about, you know, being on the same kind of bank account process or having to wire transfer. It's just a lot easier, I would say, from a usability perspective. So I'm very excited just to see people start to use these things more and in their everyday interactions.

Right. I totally agree with you, man. You won't have to deal with late fees with the bank or the bank closing your account on accident, stuff like this. It was just much easier for us to deal with stable coins. And for a company, we actually also prefer on the operational side dealing with stable points rather than, yeah. Yeah. So talk a little bit about Pinto and the state of the business today.

For those who have not used the product, which is, I'm guessing a lot of people in the United States at least. So what type of services are you offering? And what is seeing the most adoption? Sure. So we launched Pinto in April of 2020. And Pinto is basically the first mobile-focused crypto investment platform in Indonesia that's focused on the retail customers. And our whole vision with Pintu is to become the cryptocurrency bank for the average customer.

And we launched that in April of 2020. And to date, in about a year's time, we have over 300,000 users. And that's just growing massively, I think. There's a lot of adoption from retail now. And the market in Indonesia, I think, really supports the net. of having a cryptocurrency. So a little bit about a backstory, right, man, for Indonesia. Our history of currency is not that great.

Back in 1997, we had an Asian financial crisis, and a lot of families, including mine, we lost our wealth because most of our wealth was tied to the rupee. And the rupee back then devalued by almost 85% within a year's time. And so that memory, I think, is still ingrained in a lot of people. And so fast forward 20 years when you have sort of like another bubble floating around right now. I think people are trying to think about, you know, what's another way we can store wealth? And that's why in Indonesia, the number one asset class that's most adopted is gold,

which I think is quite interesting for our country. Gold is number one, second's mutual fund. And the third asset class that's most adopted is actually cryptocurrencies, even more than equities, which I think for a lot of people in the US would not be the case, right? I think equity is still run more supreme. And I think this is because of a number of reasons, Matt. First of all, Indonesians historically didn't have access to a global asset class, meaning they couldn't buy U.S. equities.

They're pretty much stuck with Indonesian-based equities. And so the entrance of cryptocurrencies allow Indonesians to actually buy an asset class that's global from day one. I think that's a very interesting story narrative. They can participate with the rest of the world, something that they couldn't do before. Yeah. So the growth of Pinto would lead me to believe that there was a major unmet need

in Indonesia just around the on-ramps and accessing this asset class. Maybe speak a little bit about just the state of financial market infrastructure and how the incumbents are thinking about crypto, what the crypto scene is like in Indonesia. Sure. So the crypto scene started back in 2013, 2014. Back then there was one player in the market called Indodex who started offering the brokerage service,

which gradually turned into an exchange, a local exchange. But for the longest time, there weren't any other players in the market. And that basically the service that Indyx provides is very much trader focused, not very friendly for new retail users. And so we saw that there's this big opportunity, that's missing for a lot of new people coming into the market. Their needs are very different, right? For traders, they care about an experience that's optimized for desktop trading,

you know, complicated chart, a lot of features. Whereas for the new retail users, they care about the very simple things like going mobile first. They care about being able to go from zero to crypto in under 10 minutes. And they care about a very simple user journey. And so we try to solve for this customer base. and we end up with a product that I think has a pretty good product market fit with that customer base. And so that was the opportunity that we saw and the need that arose from our customer base.

In terms of just accessibility in Indonesia, what is it like, you know, one thing that's interesting to me is that you don't have U.S. companies like aggressively going into Indonesia. And I'd imagine that's due to some of the market idiosyncrasies. So maybe speak a little bit about that. Sure. So building up the Fiat integrations is probably one of the more difficult parts. Navigating the banks locally, building the Fiat integrations one by one. Like I mentioned before, man, I think every country has their own Fiat rails. And so a crypto company would always have to integrate locally and navigate locally. It's not a copy and paste model. So I think that one part is in itself a challenge for a lot of companies. The second challenge is regulation. We have regulation in Indonesia that manages cryptocurrency exchanges and brokerages. So the government of Indonesia in 2020 came out with an exchange regulation where companies serving customers through Fiat crypto transactions need to be licensed

and need to be registered with the Ministry of Trade. And so without that license, what that means is that companies operating Indonesia would get banned or blacklisted. And customers would have to access their websites through VPNs. Yeah. So definitely some idiosyncrasies that would favor a boots on the ground approach in Indonesia, it sounds like. For sure.

For sure. Yeah. When you look at the future of the products and services that you want to be in, are there comparable markets where you see, okay, there's a playbook being run here. I'm curious what your view is on some of the infrastructure that's being built out in the United States and whether or not that's the type of thing that would be possible in Indonesia efforts on your radar? Yeah, I think for a lot of people in Indonesia, I think at the end of the day, it's very similar. People are hungry for yield. And that is a thesis that resonates

with everyone around the world, right? And so we try to build products that serve this need. I think we started off with trading, crypto to fiat trading. But our next product would probably a borrowing and lending product whereby users can generate interest on their crypto holdings. I think everywhere around the world, that story, that use case makes a lot of sense. And beyond that, probably products that are a little bit more risky for users who are more experienced might be margin products or derivative products. Bear in mind, though, that a lot of Indonesians are not as experienced using derivative products. Like the options market never took off in Indonesia. It was very much a U.S. type of thing.

So we also have to think about which derivative products potentially would make sense for Indonesians. That's really interesting. And as you think about from your perspective of adding new assets onto the platform, what are people asking for and how do you think about that in terms of prioritizing new assets to add? Sure. So I think we try and focus on adding assets that we ourselves believe have a long-term potential. So I always like to tell my team, like, if we want to list an asset, it must be an asset that I myself would want to hold for like the next five years or 10 years.

Because at the end of the day, we also believe that we're stewards of our customers, and we need to guide them in the right direction. So that's one thing. In terms of, so that's in terms of listing tokens. But in terms of priority, Matt, I think we try and focus on doubling, down on our core use case, which is trading. So improving that trading infrastructure, improving the list of tokens that we provide,

improving the spreads for our customers. So just really owning that market right. I think beyond that, a big opportunity that we're working hard towards is enabling access to cryptocurrencies beyond just the PIN to M. So we're building a B2B to C play whereby we offer crypto to other platforms, platforms. It might be investment platforms. It might be e-commerce platforms to offer crypto to the

end users. So we believe that in order to reach the next 100 million people, it probably won't all be through Pintu. And we want to be an enabler in that narrative. And so that's something that we've been working hard on. I think those two things are the priorities right now. Yeah. So it sounds like what you're saying is almost kind of a leapfrogging of traditional financial services with some of these integrations potentially into more fintech apps. Is that what you're referring to. Yeah, correct. You're exactly right. And I think a lot of companies are starting to look that way, right? Matt, there's just a lot of capital flooring around cryptocurrencies. That's really difficult to ignore. And I think you see this as well in the States with cash and offer in crypto,

you know, with Robin Hood offering crypto. And I think it comes also a big revenue generator for these companies. It's just too difficult to ignore right now. Yeah. Well, it's fascinating that some of the largest banks in the United States are ignoring it still. Today we had Bank of America come out with some pretty bearish comments just around the future Bitcoin. Meanwhile, Morgan Stanley released an announcement around enabling Bitcoin products from Nidig and Galaxy on their platform. So I think depending on the bank, you have people leaning into it, people leaning out of it. But it feels to me like one of these things where the timer is really ticking on management teams at banks here, whether they know it or not. Because

two years from now, this is going to look totally different. And there's going to be a board level conversation around how did we miss this? It's like missing the internet if you're a bank right now. Right, right. No, you're exactly right. You're exactly right. And I think a couple of banks in Indonesia themselves started to look into it. But it's just, you know, for a one of these guys, it's a difficult concept to wrap their hands around. I think that's one thing. And the second thing is, even if you've got your heads wrapped around it, how do you think about? the technology, what services do you roll out, how do you manage custody? A lot of these questions are difficult for the larger institutions because there's so much used to building on a system

that was provided to them the day they joined the bank, right? They've never had to build the system from the ground out. And so I think a lot of these conversations aren't being held by management and banks. I think that's first of all. And that's like, for us, at least Indonesia, they have a totally different set of regulators. The SEC equivalent is, I'm sorry, the financial authorities in Indonesia are the ones that regulate banks, but crypto is totally under the Ministry of Trade. And so now you need to start working with a totally different regulator, which is something also new for Indonesian banks.

Yeah. It's going to be interesting to see how that evolves. You know, one thing that almost none of the banks are looking at, and maybe even some of the crypto infrastructure companies, aren't really spending a ton of time on yet is defy, although it's growing like crazy. And, you know, you were at consensus, you had a front row seat to some of this being built. So what are your just general thoughts on what has happened over the past year in defy and just general impressions? Honestly, I think that defy really is here to stay. It's going to be the future.

Defy is the future of finance. I totally believe in it on the ground. We're plugged in with a lot of the communities in Indonesia. And I think that defy is probably the next step that people do. Once they've accessed cryptocurrencies, once they've bought cryptocurrencies, the next question is, how can I participate in defy? With the recent gas prices on Ethereum,

actually a lot of Indonesian users who have generally less income than people in the States are starting to move towards finance marching. So that's a big contender as well, actually, in Southeast Asia at least. for Ethereum. So I have a lot of friends from traditional finance who are actually playing a lot of these, a lot of these projects on finance smart chain. Yeah, I've certainly seen that too. Yeah. Yeah. And so I think DFI is here to stay. And that's, I guess, is the next question

for bankers. So, right? How do they wrap around their heads around DIP? I think the concept of DFI is just totally a paradigm shift for a lot of the city. financial finance guys. And I think if they don't play in defy, they're just going to be basically priced out by the time they come in. How do you think about that from your perspective at Pintu? I mean, there's definitely a future where people would be viewing Pintu, I guess, as competitive with a DFI protocol along certain product lines, you know, if you ever got into lending or something, for instance, or borrowing. Do you think that this is something where firms like Pintu start to lean into Defi and offer an interface on top of it? Do you see it as competitive? How do you think about it?

100% man. I believe in the future of Defi. And so if we ignore it, we're just going to die, I think. And so we really have to adapt to it much quicker than originally planned. We're going to probably try and integrate on the back end space and sort of like have our own UI and US and the front and allow customers to earn interest on their cryptos or or fill forth. And that's a plan that we have in mind. Yeah. I've been really dying for that type of use case, I think, or user experience, I guess I should say. It's pretty clear that there's just an insatiable appetite, especially when you look at the tooling and how it's actually pretty difficult to engage with defy. Now, granted, it's 10 times easier now than it was three, four months ago. And

when you were at consensus, it was orders of magnitude more difficult. But the fact that people are getting over that hurdle and getting involved and teaching themselves how to use these pretty primitive tools just shows you the tremendous appetite. If it was just as easy as logging on to Pinto and having an account, then many more people would probably be using DFI protocols, is my guess. No, yeah, you're exactly right. And I think that statement actually makes me recall my time in 2017, like working in DFI, right? Like, the U.S., even back then, especially back then,

anything about the U.S. around creating like Toshanatomac's office, basically the text, right? it's just really difficult. And I think until now, for a lot of projects out there, maybe the Dexas are already okay, but for a lot of projects, I think the user experience is still very poor. And there's something that we need to fix

in order to get the next, like, you know, 5, 10, 9 people into Defi. Yeah. So you're someone that's had many roles in this industry. You also got an MBA at a really exciting time where I should say a lot of talent came out of that MBA class. You have a lot of classmates that are in the industry. now. So it was a very talented class. I'm curious what type of advice you give to people that

are reaching out to you for advice on how to get involved in this industry and when they ask you about the path that you were on. I'm curious, you know, what advice you give to other people. Yeah. So I think for me, it was having the time to explore this new industry was very helpful. I think it's very difficult to jump into crypto and the crypto space without allocating us. significant amount of time to learn the building blocks of how blockchain works and piecing together the crypto puzzle how each of the players work with each other i think that takes a bit of time but there's so much resources out there man nowadays for someone who's totally new i've always recommended and i know anthony anthony anthony pluse's books mastering ethereum method mastering bitcoin those are always

great and then you've got a lot of the news portals the coin desk coin telegraph those are always great And I think beyond that, like listening to your podcast. Shout out. Thank you. Yeah, yeah. Listening to your podcast is a great resource. There's too many great podcasts as well out there. And so I think those are probably the places you want to start with. You want to start with listening to people in the industry who carry weight and who you know can be a good source of like information.

So definitely those, I think those resources are probably the best start with. Yeah, that's a great shout out. I started by watching all of Andreas's videos as well. That was kind of where I was starting. And back when I was in business school, I also had a lot of time on my hands. And I was just living on the Bitcoin subreddit at the time. It's just like refreshing there, which turns out like there's there ended up being a lot of fights on that subreddit with the big blockers and the small blockers over the year. So I don't go back to it as much anymore. And a lot of conversation moved to Twitter and stuff. And now there's podcasts and everything. But it does help to have a little bit of time

your hands, I guess, to explore these things. Yeah, because there's a lot of information to absorb. Yeah, it can be a very daunting for a lot of people. I think it's also one of these things where no matter how much you think you have this thing figured out as an industry, it's just moving so quickly that you definitely don't. And so I remember when I was first trying to get up the learning curve on Bitcoin, it didn't immediately click for me that this was digital gold sound money. There was definitely a heavy payments bent to the way I was coming at it initially. And I I think I was a big blocker there for a hot minute before I started to really see the light. But in the same way that everyone is trying to figure out what Bitcoin was for a while,

I think there are pockets of this industry, probably defy now, definitely NFTs, where people are just trying to figure out like what's the taxonomy, how do I even think about this, what are the use cases? It's just moving really quickly. And I think there are some really interesting people that are at the cutting edge of all of this and, you know, the bankless guys in defy or an example there. And there's starting to be some really interesting. NFT blogs just about how to think about this. It's a place where the content is just coming at you so

fast. So I would agree with you. I mean, I think there's just stuff to read, stuff to learn about in all of these categories. Yeah, yeah. I wish there was like an aggregator of all these resources. I feel like at the same time, they're very much scattered everywhere. And now you've got the paid for research groups, which rolls out a lot of great content, but you've got to pay for. So I do think at the same time it's maturing to become like the financial industry, you know, where you've got a lot of paid for research, maybe created by banks or financial institutions. I think that same concept is rolling out in the crypto space. Yeah, definitely, definitely. We see that as well.

What is exciting to you right now? You don't have a lot of free time, I'm sure. But when you do have some time to dig around and mess around with projects or spend time researching other things that are happening in the industry, What's most exciting to you right now? Okay, so I have a backlog of like 40 projects to look at, man. And we're always constantly, like, looking at the defy space, to be honest. I think the defy, 85% of my time looking at defy and then maybe 15% trying to look into NFTs, but I think predominantly the use case of finance is still huge.

And within the D-Fi space, I think we break it down into three different categories that we look at. Dexas is one of them. Borrowing and lending is one. And the third is like just a bunch of different other use cases. And I think what's interesting, what we think is recently a little bit interesting is that we've been trying to look back into algorithmic stable coins. It's something that came up back then and then kind of died out with Al-Grand. a couple of years back, but I think there might be a use case for that going forward. It's just we're still trying to wrap our hands around how to execute it, what assets to

collateralize, and which price to track. There's this small project called a foot protocol that we've been looking into. So something like that, yeah. Yeah, algorithmic stable coins has been something that has been fascinating over the years. And certainly if you think about it from the perspective of what are the regulatory choke points for the industry, just getting dollars into the system and having like a peg is a big one. And so if there is an algorithmic stable coin that actually works and can scale with the capital that's being flown into the industry, then it could be a really game changer. Yeah. And I think a lot of the algorithmic stable coins actually is more interesting for me and for us is the ones that are not tied to USDA are the ones that are tied to other crypto.

Because if we believe in crypto first economy, we need to have a sort of like stable coin. that's crypto native from day one in terms of not only the way you build it, but also the way you priced it, yeah, which I think historically for a lot of stable points, they tried to peg the price to the US dollar. But I think in the future, some of these table coins would be more interesting if they're pegged price of other cryptocurrencies. Pag to like a basket of cryptocurrencies or something like that, like a bank core. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. The thing I've always wrestled with, and I know a lot of teams are working on this, is just kind of the centralization of the price feed and how that exactly works. And it's, someone will figure it out, right? And I guess

to some extent, there are projects that are pretty far along with some of these issues. For sure, for sure. Yeah. What about your stuff at? What are you looking into nowadays? We're spending a lot of time on, on Lightning these days. Actually, we're back to Lightning. I was telling someone earlier today that I've kind of gone through troths of disillusionment, over the years with Lightning because it was, you know, you could see it coming and then it took a long time to build, or at least it felt like it did, but it actually didn't. We'd really think about it. But now you're starting to see a next wave of entrepreneurs that aren't even really bitcoins. They're just kind of tackling a problem around something like streaming payments or

microtipping or something like that in coming to Lightning just as a better tool to solve their problem. So that's a space I'm spending a lot of time on. And I actually think exchange to exchange settlement is a great use case for lightning, just having channels between brokerages and exchanges and being able to settle at industrial scale. Yeah, curious what you think about that. So the layer two solutions, there's been a couple, I think, that we've been looking at. But the most difficult part about the layer two solutions so far that we've seen is that at the end of the day, you've got to wrap your tokens and then sort of like have a synthetic token on the layer two, which is a very big sort of friction map. And so we're always,

trying to find solutions that keep tokens on the layer one, but maybe have a different sort of like spinning into it. We've been looking at one solution map whereby essentially the tokens remain on layer one, but what you swap on the layer two is the access to those tokens. So like the private keys or something like that, right? Interesting. Yeah. And so the tokens remain on layer one and you swap the private keys and you can access those tokens on layer one. That's pretty fascinating. When you think about Pinto over the long term, do you see yourself pushing more into quote unquote traditional financial services and really just being a financial technology

company that meets everyday needs of people, you know, whatever that is? Be a mortgage someday. It could be a, you know, just a regular checking account, but all powered on crypto rails. How big do you think this could be? Totally, man. I think our goal is to become like the crypto bank for soft PC. Asia. And if I believe in that vision, then I totally see the potential that all your financial products that you're getting through your bank now will one day be done on top of crypto. And so

that's the end goal that we're moving toward. Super exciting. You guys are growing like crazy. I'm sure there are a lot of people listening who would love to figure out how to get in touch with you, learn about your job board. So where can we send people to follow you and learn more about Pintu? Sure. We have our website, which you can check out, which is W. www.pin 2.co.com. ID. And of course, you can always drop me an email if there's anything particular, like business about wise or drop opportunities that you're interested in. You can email me and Jeff at pin 2.co.org.com. ID. Jeff, this has been great. Thanks so much for joining us today. Hope to see you in person at some point

in 2021. Oh, yeah, for sure. Thanks for having me, Matt. Yeah, looking forward to visit me in the States sometime soon. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island.Vicc. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink dashpodcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.