TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #387: Building Lightning Network Infrastructure with Graham Krizek from Voltage

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

Join Marty as he sits down with Graham Krizek to discuss the progress of Voltage over the last 2 years, how the lightning network's doing, and where it's going from here. Follow Graham on Twitter Check out Voltage 6:47 - Back on the show after 2 years 9:06 - What's Voltage? 14:23 - Witnessing growth of Voltage and LN 17:43 - What have been LN's biggest strides? 19:44 - Could LN fail? 22:50 - VLS 25:17 - Favorite LN implementation? 27:10 - It's not really one network 30:06 - PTLCs 32:38 - There's lot's left new people to do 34:53 - Learning from and educating customers 41:07 - Making liquidity easier 45:09 - Flow and Surge 49:30 - Voltage privacy 50:16 - Competition for Voltage 55:45 - How's bitcoin doing in general? 58:44 - How does a Bitcoin company handle a potential long bear market? 1:01:43 - Conference fatigue 1:02:59 - Emerging markets driving adoption 1:06:53 - AI and value4value 1:10:29 - Will wallets consolidate? 1:11:48 - Future for Voltage 1:17:31 - Parting words Shoutout to our sponsors: Unchained Capital River CrowdHealth TFTC Merch is Available: Shop Now Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel Clips YT Channel Website Twitter Instagram Follow Marty Bent: Twitter Newsletter Podcast

what's up freaks it's your boy marty here to introduce this rip of tftc rip 386 i sat down with graham kryzik from voltage again update it's been two years since we last talked a lot has happened since the beginning of 2020 um 2021 excuse me i'm not talking about covid stuff i'm talking about bitcoin and lightning voltage has been building lightning infrastructure company for individuals and companies in the space and outside the space who are looking to get in the space. So we caught up, talked about everything that's gone on at Voltage over the last two years, everything that's going on in the Bitcoin Lightning Network, where trends are going. Incredible conversation, incredible human being. I think you guys are

going to enjoy it. Before we jump into it, got to read the top four boostagrams from yesterday's episode that we dropped this morning uh and unfortunately we only have two right now uh i think that's just due to the lack of the episode being out there for too long that's what i'm going to say it is this uh the episode gram is 387 these are the booster grams the top two booster grams from rep 386 3d printing and crypto cloaks with rick v at barn minor 7007 sats a nice palindrome boost we love our palindrome boost here at tftc rick is a beast he has provided so much innovation for ahm that's at home miners hashtag pled miners at john j-o-n 21 21 sets 2,121 sets minor can't spell and a smiley crying laughing emoji

why he spelled everything correctly in that booster gram john i don't know where you're coming at him why are you doing that thank you for participating john and bar minor in the value for value model via podcasting 2.0 boosting the rip with rick v if you guys want to contribute to the show if you're getting value out of the show you want to send it back to us podcasting 2.0 value for value is the best way to do that download apps like fountain breeze podverse uh you're going to do it all we know browser extension echo and stream sets our way boost sets if you like something we said we got a particular amount of value out of a particular episode i want to set it back our way you can do it that way and thank you to all of you who

are currently doing that and do that day in day out weekend week out month in month out year in year out it's coming up on yours this room is brought to you by our good friends at river river's a company it's a bitcoin company i keep wanting to say exchange but there's so much more than that so many more than exchange they're a bitcoin company built by bitcoiners for bitcoiners it's no bs product they're bitcoin only they build their own infrastructure they don't have any trusted third parties that are custodying your bitcoin for them they've built a wallet infrastructure if you buy bitcoin river and you custody it there uh you can be sure that it's in a multi-sig wallet that is 100 backed with full reserves uh even though you can custody bitcoin

on river they would encourage you to move it off they have guides blog posts instructions on how to take control of your own bitcoin again they're bitcoiners they want you to do this they're going to provide you services to get access to bitcoin and they will custody it for you securely and multi-sig if you want to trust it with them but they would encourage you to move it off exchange on top of this they have river mining if you want to mine directly to your river account you can do that they have that easily set up and they've recently launched river lightning services which is an api if you're an engineer looking to build on lightning you want to do that easily river has released their own api that you can build on so you can go check that out if you want to build in

the space again it's much more than the exchange or their bitcoin company uh bitcoin on and off ramp is just one one aspect of what they're building again no trusted third parties they build all their infrastructure if you dca it's important to note if you set up a dollar cost average you're not going to pay any fees on that dca no fee dca beautiful feature they have there um yeah i know you may have uh an exchange does many different cryptocurrencies but also gives you bitcoin that's why i buy your bitcoin but have you tried river you should try river it's all the bitcoiners are hanging out that's where i hang out go to river.com tftc and sign up today this trip was also brought to you by good friends and on chain capital again on chain capital it's

right down the hall if you didn't if you didn't notice if you never heard me say that they're they're pretty close to me here and they're here to help you eliminate single points of failure in your custody model the way they do this they're two or three multi-sig vault where you hold two keys in that multi-sig quorum so you have full control over your bitcoin as long as you have those two keys if you're ever in a pinch you only have one you know chain to be the second and two or three uh quorum to sign they're there for you they have a concierge service whether an individual or a business that's looking to hold a bitcoin treasury unchained is here and their concierge team specifically is here to onboard you they'll

get you comfortable with bitcoin with multi-sig with wallets they're going to send you hardware walls to get the vault set up for you and they'll be there along your journey as your stacking sets Maybe you buy Bitcoin from River. You send it to Unchain. Vault, because you want it to custody your Bitcoin. It's a beautiful thing. Go to Unchain.com slash concierge. Use the code TFTC for $50 off the concierge service.

They have a bunch of other products too. They have an IRA. They have a loan desk. You can buy Bitcoin on Unchain as well. You want to send it directly to cold storage. It's a beautiful thing. Unchain.com slash concierge. Use the code TFTC and enjoy this rip with Graham.

you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor I mean, that's part of the bold case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. I'm ready to start out the podcast by stumbling through my words. I was going to say, I'm ready to flow.

I'm being inspired by your flow. You've blown your hair out. I have, yeah. As a Bitcoiner, you've got to keep people guessing. You can't look the same all the time, right? Yeah. I'll grow my beard out for like three weeks and I'll shave it. yeah actually had a moment uh a shave two days ago and my seven-month-old son didn't recognize me

oh yeah i scared the crap out of him yeah that's all that's always fun scaring your kids when you get yeah drastic drastic change in your looks um i say that then i like wear like a voltage like sweatshirt and it kind of doxes me but um yeah uh you gotta keep keep them guessing it's good merch that's a good crew neck yeah thank you i can't believe it's been two years since you've been on i know that's what i was thinking the same thing i was i was kind of reflecting on the last time i was on and when i was the last time that i came on tfcc about two years ago uh i hadn't even i was i had launched voltage but i wasn't working on a full-time i had a day job and i was like actually really nervous about coming on the podcast i'm like oh it's my day

job i'm gonna find out are they gonna be mad like those kinds of things and um but i mean we did it and yeah it was a great rip and now we're gonna gonna do it again what uh when did you leave your day job officially it would have been february of 2021 so i'm coming up on two years full time with voltage yeah you guys have come a long way yeah i mean it's been a been a wild ride uh for us for the network for bitcoin as a whole i mean um time moves fast in bitcoin it's really crazy yeah there's a lot of guys leveraging you i mean i don't want to look into docs who i was speaking to this morning but i was had a call with somebody this morning they're like yeah we're using voltages are back in. It seems like that's becoming more commonplace in the space. Yeah. I mean, we've,

we've been really fortunate. I mean, things have gone really well. I think that, um, it speaks to the, to the need of a service like Voltage and in the market. And so, um, yeah, I mean, it's been really great and it's been really, uh, that's been one of the funnest things about doing this is working with other Bitcoiners, right? Like it's not, um, I'm not, we're not pushing, you know, some crappy software that I don't really care about. It's like, you know, we're pushing Bitcoin, We're pushing lightning and working with, you know, some of the some of the best people in the space. And it's just that's that's really, really fun. Yeah. And so for any of the freaks out there who may be listening now who are newer to TFTC may not have heard our first rip in 2021 or be aware of what Voltage is.

What are you guys doing? Why are you doing it? Yeah. So so what Voltage is, we're a Bitcoin infrastructure provider. So we just help companies and individuals run infrastructure for Bitcoin and Lightning, obviously, right? But that comes down to mainly Lightning Nodes. Lightning is our kind of cornerstone product. So we help with hosting, running Lightning Nodes. We help with liquidity management. We help with observability.

And then we also do some things inside of like Layer 1, Bitcoin 2 of just kind of operating Bitcoin Nodes and things like that as well. So ultimately, you know, Lightning is complex. There's a lot to it. And there's a lot of people that want to leverage the technology, but there's honestly very few people that have kind of the technical chops to like do it all yourself all the time. And so, you know, that's where we come in. We help people, you know, understand the technology

and ultimately, you know, implement it into their businesses or what they're doing. Yeah. So you guys, I mean, I guess you have three products then in offering. You have the managed node service, you have Flow, you have Surge, and then you've integrated BTC Pay Server as well, correct? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah, we do. Ultimately, you know, we try and hit on kind of like the high points of, you know, one hosting of nodes.

We also help people like actually operate them, like understand, you know, we have a lot of customers that are kind of from like the fiat space or like, you know, they come to Bitcoin not knowing a ton about lighting. And so we help them understand what is liquidity. How do you how do you use it? Those kinds of things. And then, you know, e-commerce solutions like BTC pay server and then, you know, surge. So we're, we're trying to create a platform that really helps people, you know, just use lightning more simply and whether, you know, we're, we're working on doing more, uh, outside of just hosting as well. So, you know, you could still host your node, but we can still help you with that liquidity or the observability or whatever.

So, um, a lot of problems to solve ultimately. And we're just trying to, you know, uh, listen to our users and just solve what, you know, what needs to be done. Yeah. I had Rick from crypto cloaks on yesterday and we were talking about it cause we both use btc pay server and just from i like to i'm not an old dog i can't learn new tricks i just when i set something up i get set in my ways we set our btc pay server and our lightning node up in may of 2019 for our site and for the business it's been running ever since i have a cto that

manages it all but there's like some things that i want as somebody who operates a company on a bitcoin standard and that btc pay server doesn't have um and that i imagine it's something that you're building out something like surge is like i need especially for on-chain when i'm receiving bitcoin you might be dc pay server we have our donation page i make it's a dollar five dollars twenty dollars a hundred dollars somebody input your own amount we've received five hundred dollar donations and so we have all these utxos and btsp server is incredible i love it's my favorite open source project in the space but as a lazy business owner like i i fall behind sometimes like oh maybe i should consolidate these utxos like maybe i would love a software that just pings me and says

hey fee market's relatively low you have these utxos that add up to over 10 million sets maybe you might want to consolidate them yeah yeah definitely that's um yeah that's something that you know surge will either like solve today or eventually solve but that's ultimately i think you know what you just described boils down to there's uh kind of a big uh uh difference in like the the more the more self-sovereign you are the more that you want to you know btc pays over generates a new uh address for every single invoice which is good for privacy good for you know decorrelating um activity things like that but the more that you push down that route kind of the harder it is of like oh i got all these addresses to manage now or same with lightning of

you know the more the more uh private or sovereign you want to do the more responsibility you have which is all like great things those are all great options to have um but there's not a lot i think there's still a ways to go and like tooling to help you um be still like sovereign and private and all these things but still um not make you just do everything on your own from scratch every single time yeah well i mean we told the story yesterday too but that was like the biggest holy shit moment of my life was plugging in the hardware wallet associated with my btc pay server and seeing on my btc pay server you have x amount of bitcoin i plug in the wallet and says you have zero bitcoin i had no idea what a gap it was and i was like what the hell is going

on here yeah yeah oh we've we've heard that a lot a lot and there's also like it's um you know certain wallet softwares uh don't don't do the like they don't let the gap limit be configurable or they don't like let you set the derivation path or anything like that and so we've we've had customers just really freaking out um about you know oh my bitcoin's gone when it's just like no you need to you know adjust these settings or something and so that's a that's definitely a friction point that like we we uh need to work on this all better as well as like the community as a whole um really uh helping people understand the technology and you know just make it make it dead simple yeah and so over the last two years since you've dedicated your life to this full

time i mean voltage and the lightning network have sort of grown in parallel in tandem like to pretty enormous levels like what's it been like building voltage particularly focused on customers who want to leverage the lightning network but don't want to manage it um as the lightning network has grown and changed over the last 24 months yeah i mean it's both both voltage and the lighting have changed a lot since i started like when i started voltage um there's like ellen like there, most of the implementations existed except for LDK. LDK wasn't a thing then. Um, and, but L and D was even had more of the share of the network than it does today. Um, and so, and like things like VLS didn't exist, like there is a lot of, you know, it was very

kind of straightforward, um, in terms of what you could do inside of the network. But now, um, as you look across the network with things like LDK and, you know, all of the VLS, like all of these other new technologies that have come out, you can do a lot more inside of the network, create new experiences, create new things that just weren't really possible before, or at least it was really, really difficult. And so that's something that has been, we've, that's something that I do as kind of like running voltages. Like, you know, I really try not to have opinions on way things should be or what, you know, how the network should look or play out because that's something that I've really learned is that, you know, there's technology is still progressing.

There's still things that are being created, uh, today that didn't exist yesterday. And ultimately we just got to listen to users and, you know, understand what they want and how we're going to solve it. And so, um, there's a lot of technology, uh, that are, that is evolving, um, that really just creates new possibilities inside, inside of lightning. And so that's something that I focus a lot about is not, you know, through these last two years, learning a lot of like the light network that exists today is completely different than what existed two years ago, in terms of your capacity, node count, all these different things. And ultimately, I think that, you know, the light network that we see in two years from today is going to be vastly different again. And I think

that that's just par for the course of like innovation and technology. And that's something that we focus on a lot at voltages, like, you know, solving these problems that need to be solved at the right time. And that also goes into, um, you know, there's some people there's cause some companies like projects out there that are like, you know, creating these, uh, I would call them like utopian projects of like, you know, when the world is on a Bitcoin standard, everyone's going to need this. Like, those are great. Like those are really good tools, but you know, for us, we're very pragmatic of like, how can we get the next, you know, thousand people to start using Bitcoin tomorrow? And then the thousand next day and thousand next

day. And like, what are their pain points? How do we solve them? And so we're, we do get very pragmatic approach on like developing out the network and so what have in terms of like lightning network specifically what are the strides it's made in your mind like what are some of the biggest updates or changes that have happened over the last two years that have really made it better and given it the ability to to reach a commercial user base and then on top of that as that success this happen as always happens with bitcoin and lightning you you fix some things you grow and then you find new problems what are some of the new problems that are arising that you're seeing as well well i think yeah i think one of the big this may be not like enterprise adoption type like

one something that we have learned a lot since you know two years ago or so is like privacy inside of the light network like what you know two years ago i think everyone just kind of thought light networks private didn't really dig in much it was just kind of like sure and then now we have people um that are kind of recent that are more dedicated into like the privacy aspects of lightning and learning you know what is private what isn't private where do we have more to work to do inside of the privacy aspects of lightning and there's still significantly amount you know more amount of work to do there um and then same thing with kind of um adversarial like aspects of the network so things like you know channel jamming or um there's a few like kind of known attack vectors

out there and working through mitigating those, uh, which are not, not necessarily easy problems to solve, but as we look for, you know, forward, I think solving a lot of those kind of like privacy and scalability issues are really going to be, um, at the forefront of people's minds as well as voltage and, uh, trying to solve those in really, really good ways. And, um, you know, I don't, there's not necessarily an exact answer on what that is. There's a lot of ideas, a lot of proposals on how to solve each and every one of them. But I think that that is what, you know, we've had a lot of great success in onboarding across the network, across of, you know, organizations like Cash App wasn't using Lightning two years ago. And like Cash App, you know,

ginormous financial institution. They're incorporated Lightning. And so it hasn't necessarily been a hindrance in adoption. But as we move forward, I think that as we onboard more and more people to that magnitude, we're gonna have to really start looking at some of these like scalability like um attack vectors and privacy and things like that yeah and that's always been the big question in regards to lightning specifically i mean it was derided as this just fun project that bitcoiners are playing with it would never be scalable here we are when was launched 2018 um beginning of 2018 so here we are almost five years later it has reached significant adoption obviously not mass adoption but it's made significant strides

do you still worry is there any lingering thoughts in your back of your mind like hey this lightning network could fail to scale or provide the utility that that bitcoiners think it can yeah no that's a great question i think um so i don't i don't really have that doubt in my mind there's a couple reasons for that i think that um one again going back to like you know the the advances we've made since two years ago to now are significant and like you know it's easy for us to sit here today and say you know we got so much more work to do look at the mountain we have to climb but you need to look back and like look at where have we come from so far and like it's significant so we need to kind of um take it you know take it all in at once um and then additionally like with a lot of

the technology improvements that are happening i think that there's a increased opportunity for more uh more adoption more ease of use and i think that um so a couple things like a lot of uh i think the lightning network is a lot larger than a lot of people on twitter like to think like i think the amount of like private channels is more significant than you know what people think i think the amount of people that are actually looking at the space and like working on things like behind the scenes is more significant so i think that um the hard the hard part is quantifying the lightning network today is really comes down to like you know the node count the channel count the channel capacity. Like those are like the three public metrics that we have for the white

network, but ultimately those aren't really great metrics. Like those aren't good at actually quantifying, is this thing working or not? You know, those metrics are more about like, you know, there's a whole private channel, like aspects or unannounced channels. And there's also like, you know, the more important metrics are like the throughput of how many transactions are being, you know, sent across this. What is like the cumulative value of those? And those are inherently private. Like those will never really be known, you know, the only way is like people self-reporting. And so I think that, I think we've come a long way. And I think it's easy for people to kind of point to these lacking metrics and say, oh, it's not, but they're

lacking metrics. Like they're not great. And then also I think that, you know, something that we're hyper-focused on at Voltage is like, you know, solving things like non-custodially or trying to push as much ownership or ejectability to a user. And so I think if, you know, if we look at the lightning network. And it's this grandiose layer two solution is supposed to scale Bitcoin. But if it's so difficult to you, the only so difficult to use, the only way to use it is through custodians. We failed like that's just straight up like, you know, we just reinvented Visa and we're going to go back to censorship. We're going to go back to like, you know, a seizure, all of these things. And so that is something that we're focused on is making sure that we can adjust the

or innovate the technology to get us to where we can still do things non-custodially and still give ownership to people, but make it as easy as these custodial solutions that everyone's kind of, um, that are, I would say a majority of users are custodial today. And so really shifting that narrative. And if we're custodial and lightning, like it's just kind of all mute. So you mentioned VLS a couple of times earlier in the conversation, does that play into this? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I think that that's something that we're, uh, we're like kind of looking at and figuring ways of incorporating into, and just to give a quick explainer on VLS, VLS is like validating lightning signer. It's kind of a policy engine that lets a user set policies on kind of what's

happening inside of their lightning node. And then along with that, usually they kind of go in tandem as like remote keys. So being able to sign, you know, transactions from, you know, your phone or a hardware wallet or anything like that. And so there's, there's a lot to unpack there but like ultimately innovations like that and um you know easier liquidity there's kind of a laundry list of things that we can do to improve the user experience of lightning to the point where uh it's as easy as custodial but you still have you know you still on the keys you can still you know control your funds do all those things yeah and paul toy teased this a few months ago that that he had made a breakthrough in the vls technology so another way to describe it right

These are separating the private key from the node infrastructure. So ideally, who knows how it plays out in the long run, short term, medium run, whatever it is. But I think ideally, in my mind, if you're able to give end users the private key, maybe it sits on a Star 9 Labs embassy, maybe it sits on your computer. Maybe you have just like a dedicated Wi-Fi enabled USB device you can plug into your wall and you have the private key and you say, hey, you can sign all the transactions. associated with this node and then somebody like voltage takes on the heavy lifting actually managing the node but you guys have no control over the funds yeah exactly exactly and there's a like there's there's a lot even to go beyond that of like um things that aren't possible in lightning today but are uh maybe being worked on or possible are like multi-sig lightning um and

things like that which you know take some um iteration on like the the spec and and some of those things, but like ultimately there's a lot of opportunity to like kind of push, uh, push those types of things forward. Uh, and so, you know, ultimately either, um, having more robust, you know, um, signing mechanisms or, um, key distribution and things like that. Um, so I think that there's, I, I have a feeling this year is going to push a lot, um, a lot of innovation in that direction. I know that people like the LDK team, um, are focused on a lot of those kinds of, um, those types of solutions so i think there's a lot of work to be done in that in that realm yeah which brings us to a spicy part of the conversation lightning network implementations do you have

a favorite a favorite well or any surprising you um yeah so that's a good question so i think that um lnd so we you know us at voltage like we obviously you know being a hosting provider we have touched every single implementation we've probably used it more than than most people of each one. And so we have a lot of experience kind of across the board. And I think that each one is kind of well suited for specific tasks. So if you're trying to build out kind of more mobile wallet experiences, LDK is definitely like the one to go with. If you're trying to do a more kind of enterprise, like large scale node for a custodial service or something like L&D is definitely still like the winner there. Core Lightning is coming up and has a little bit more,

you know, some opportunity and something like the scalability aspect. So it's like, and that's something we work with our customers on is like understanding their use case and figuring out which one fits into what they want to do. And so I wouldn't say that I won't, I won't say that I have a favorite. I won't, you know, I don't want to go down that path, but I think they all have like unique opportunities to solve problems in their own ways. And so I think it comes down to what you want to do. And I also think that, you know, there's a lot of innovation happening inside of like mutiny. So you talked with, with Paul, um uh paul miller like you know it was several months back or something i think and he talked

a little bit about mutiny so that's like a very privacy-centric wallet that's built using ldk and so i think that there's there's a lot of opportunity for kind of new implementations or kind of new things to be built alongside those two and i think that i think that ultimately um there will be more implementations and i think that there'll be more focus in a particular direction of like the most private one or the most scalable one or the most you know configurable and so i think there's again a lot of opportunity in that space that's not a bad outcome give people optionality yeah and that goes back to i mean what you're saying about there not being very good metrics on the space for the lightning network and even saying that the lightning network is a bit

of a misnomer because via these different implementations or just via sub networks that you can build in lightning there's multiple there could be multiple lightning networks in the future. Yeah. I mean, definitely. And I think that that's, um, I can't remember who kind of had the idea, but like, I think that, um, as we see a lot, um, more things come out of like either surveillance tech or like custodial services or whatever, I think that people kind of, some people have the idea of like these two lightning networks. One of them is kind of like a highly regulated, like, um, highly regulated, like environment. The other one is like more, um you know pleb focus more private all those things and um i think it's a possible outcome

that's what is so great about the lightning network in general is that you have that option like there's not um lightning not being a consensus layer allows you to do things like me and you could have a lightning channel we that's all that we have it's just me and you we only transact with each other and that's it and that could that's its own lightning network in a way and i think that um there's a lot of opportunity to uh you can pick and choose do you want to operate in this regulated one do you want to operate in this you know less regulated one or like where do you want to go with it and um so i think that that's like a really exciting um benefit to lightning as well is the ability to really pick and choose how you want to interact with it yeah then you can even imagine a

future in which like particular companies or services that don't want to risk something like a channel jamming attack on the more the broader network will create just sub networks or themselves and their customers and they can sort of isolate and work within that that circular economy of the of a company and its customers and then maybe interact with the broader lightning network very few times yeah i mean we've definitely seen that kind of uh play out in some ways of like some of the larger financial institutions have to have like legal contracts with like their channel partners because they're, you know, afraid of, oh, if there's a bug in the technology or if yeah, like, uh, you aren't going to attack me or something like that. And so they, um, until maybe

some of those problems are better solved, they have just like legal contracts, um, to kind of like have a, you know, a binding agreement that one's not going to mess with the other. Um, and so I think that, uh, and, and maybe even solving those kinds of channel jamming attacks and things like that there is probably always um situations where you only want to have channel partners that you trust or um there's less just kind of opening up into random nodes and so um there's a and that also kind of comes down to personal strategy on what you want to do um do you want to just open up channels into random places or do you want to be more pragmatic about it and so um again it's optionality yeah oh what are your thoughts on i mean this is a bit random it doesn't really build

on that part of the discussion, but it's nagging in my head. I want to talk about it. Are you paying attention to the potential transition from HTLCs to PTLCs for channel elephants? I personally haven't been very, I haven't followed that kind of dialogue much. I think some

of our engineers, I'm sure, are closer to that conversation. Me, I just, you know, I'm again, it kind of goes back to having an objective view of like the network of like, you know, whatever the kind of the people that are looking at the protocol that think is best and like most scalable and solves

like these problems, like, you know, I'm all for it. And so, and then we at Voltage just kind of digest things as they become ready and available to use. And so that's kind of the way that I think about PTLCs as well as, you know, it sounds great. Like, you know, let's go for it. And when it's ready, we'll start looking at, you know, how can we incorporate this? How can we upgrade or whatever? So, so that's kind of my take on it. It's not a very good answer because i don't follow like the the i try and follow as much technical things as i can but there's only so much that you can follow there's so much out there that's one thing is that i mean in an ideal world ptlc is they seem better from a privacy perspective from uh extendability perspective

and what you can do within those channels but it seems like so for the hash timeline contracts or how you open up a channel with a counterparty. On Lightning right now, there's not a proposal, but ideally there's a more optimal way to open up these time lock contracts, which is point time lock contracts, PTLCs, and a lot of the Lightning developers would like to transition to that, but you have this thing where the Lightning network is growing massively and people are using it and it's getting usability.

And even though PTLCs may be more optimal than HTLCs, there's potential that the network just grows so large before anybody makes that transition that it would be somewhat of a logistical nightmare to close all those HTLCs and reopen PTLCs. Yeah, and I think that there is maybe, I could be wrong on this, so I probably shouldn't say it, but I'm going to,

but I think there's people working on ways of trying to upgrade channels to support PTLCs without having to close them, but I don't really know what the... I think Lalo's working on that, yeah. Yeah, I think that there could be a path forward with that, But I think ultimately, like what, this is another reason to be bullish on Lightning is that there's, you know, the network that exists today isn't the network that's going to exist tomorrow and the day after and the day after. Like there's so much thing, there's so much that we know that we can do and evolve with it that it's just mind boggling.

And I think that, you know, ultimately a lot of that just kind of, you know, there's coordination across all these different teams and stuff like that. But it's really like kind of a manpower issue of like, you know, if we had not saying we had 10x the developers inside of lightning, like, you know, it would be we would be in a utopian place right now. But I think that there is a significant amount that can be done if we just had some more people working on it, that we can advance things further. And so I think that that's one like a call to action for anyone that's interested in the space. I mean, definitely get interested because there's just there is a lot to be done across the board. there's so much work to be done and that also is a reason to be bullish because you know there's um you know the network that exists today is just a small fraction of what it will be in the future yeah it's the i mean i could not co-sign that any harder the opportunity is massive if you

want to come innovate and leave your mark on the world not only lightning like design for lightning apps designed for on-chain protocol apps like just the whole space is wide open it's extremely exciting and you're on you're on the cutting edge of of changing the world and the global monetary system so why wouldn't you want to come work on it yeah yeah definitely and i think like that's that's what's a big difference between you know when i started voltage and today is there there used to not be that many like opportunities to contribute to bitcoin besides being a software engineer like that was kind of that was what anyone that wanted to get in bitcoin you had to be a software engineer now today that's totally not true yeah i mean there's so many good bitcoin

companies out there and they hire across the board designers like you know sales whatever like there's just tons of opportunity you guys have impeccable design by the way oh thank you thank you very beautiful oh thank you yeah we appreciate that we've uh we've done a lot of work we have you know some great designers um and you know bobby our vp of marketing does a great job on kind of kind of coordinating a lot of that stuff so yeah we appreciate that yeah it's uh it's very pretty yeah thanks and they're like good ux as well intuitive um what that means like what what are some of the like the main lessons you've learned from interacting with your growing list of customers over the last year is anything uh dealing with a particular customer that really

showed you huh i didn't recognize this before um this is something interesting i'm learning from dealing with people in the unique ways in which they want to leverage Lightning? Yeah, I mean, there's been a lot. There's been a lot of kind of like lessons learned. And I think it's like one of the big things that we've seen really recently is there's a lot of people coming to us

that are not Bitcoin-focused people. So we have a lot of like Bitcoin companies that use us that are, you know, they understand Bitcoin, Bitcoin native, all of those things. But we're seeing an increase in the amount of non-Bitcoin-centric companies. So these are people like traditional fiat payment processors that understand that Bitcoin and the Lightning Network is a superior means of moving money around the world. And they understand that they need to leverage the technology or be left behind.

And so they are coming to us looking for solutions on like, you know, hey, we need to start looking at our plans for Bitcoin and the Lightning Network. And, you know, we help them through that. And so that has also been a huge eye-opener in terms of, you know, what is, what are the UX problems inside of lightning? You know, you can talk with a, a pleb all day on like, you know, why, what do you need to do with a channel? But then you go to some traditional fiat payment processor and they're like, why the hell do I need to, what is a channel? Why do I need to have liquidity? Like, can I just like send something? Um, and so, so that's been a big, just kind of eye-opener just in terms of like the UX, but it's also, I think that that sentiment

of those types of people coming to us is, again, super bullish for the network. People are waking up to the fact that if you want to send money, internationally or locally even, the means of sending over the light network is superior to anything else. It's faster, it's cheaper, it's all of these things. And people are waking up to that and they're trying to understand what their strategy is for it. And so along with that, there's a huge amount of things that we learn and we get insights into on people that want to leverage the technology, but they aren't coming from a, from a Bitcoin perspective, they're coming at it from, I need to use this to save my business X dollars or whatever. And so that's been, that's something that we're, you know, hyper-focused on

now is like really solving the UX in a way that's not, you know, not telling, not having to educate everyone. What is the channel? What is liquidity? What do you need to do? And more just solving that so that you can just start using it instead of understanding, then using it, you can just jump right in so these this particular subset of clients may have this inclination like all right maybe we need to adopt this because it's better do you do you see them get more resolve after they've set up with you they've accepted some payments and they realize they're like holy shit this is actually really uh really profound like maybe i should be digging more into this yeah i mean it's yeah it's been it's been really fun working with those types of people because there

is generally an aha moment of like wow like the I think the biggest thing that they really struggle to wrap their head around it's like the settlement times of like when you make a payment and that payment says succeeded like that means that it's it's done like it's a payment made and they're like well don't like we have to wait like a couple days to like clear it or like you know what what happens next it's like no it's done like that's it and that has been I think the biggest uh eye opener to a lot of those folks is like it's it's truly instant settlement and that's not like a marketing term it's it's a fact yeah it just does blows people it does blow people's minds blows people's minds um that was part of the conversation i was having earlier with um somebody in the

mining space too and this is something we experienced at great american mining uh this isn't even particular to the lightning network but it was just dealing with mineral rights owners who are used to um just letting an oil and gas company come in extract their oil or gas send it down market and then get a royalty check maybe 90 to 120 days later where yeah we would go to them and be like hey you could take your gas and kind instead of sending it down pipeline just have the the oil and gas operator on your land uh siphon some of the gas off to this this plot of land here we'll put mining operations here you mine bitcoin you get paid out every day that was mind-blowing for them they can monetize their gas on sites instantly and get those revenues

and not have to wait three to six months to get those royalty checks yeah yeah definitely like that's the that sort of story applies just all over the board like it's really crazy um just i mean it's how comfortable people have gotten with like the idea of like 60 day you know payment windows and things like that and then um you think like you know sonota who's doing kind of like energy payments um via the lightning network like that's that's obviously uh a spot that's prime for you know lightning adoption and so i'm really excited for that team and what they're building and i think it just goes to show like uh one once you kind of get in there and you show them you don't have to wait 60 days to get this you know large chunk of money you can get

paid you know instantly and like at an interval of like every hour or something instead of you know having to wait for the end of the month and then sending it like it's just it's the ways that two parties can interact it just really changes that entirely yeah no need for a business like chime anymore it's like giving my paycheck a couple days early it's like hey we can set up the infrastructure. We can get paid by the hour immediately if you want to. Yeah. That's, I think you had a tweet about that. It was probably a while ago, but it was, I think that lightning can like really disrupt like the payday loans industry, because like you don't have to wait, you know, for your check every two weeks or once a month or something,

you know, you can get paid every day or something like that. And so there's just less need for those kind of predatory loans against people that just need money today. And so, yeah, again, another big opportunity space. Yeah. So what's exciting you right now? oh man um a lot of things like what something that really um excites me inside of voltages we're working a lot of like lsp work so lsp kind of means a lot of things inside of the network but specifically on like the liquidity side as we see uh that's a big pain point um for people so if you want to set up a btc pay server or something um requiring you to hey you got to go shop around to get these 10 channels so then people can pay you or something like that is that's not a good ux and

so we're working on more just automated liquidity. So essentially abstracting away all of like the inbound issues and just being able to, you know, generate an invoice, send a payment, we'll make sure through like RLSP services that the payment gets there. And so I think that's going to open up a lot of doors for a lot of people. And I think that, you know, no, like kind of running nodes and operating nodes was really hard. I feel like we solved that. I mean, fairly well, there's still a lot of work to do there, but I think liquidity is definitely like the next juggernaut that we got to go after in terms of really simplifying for people so that's something we're really focused on is making the liquidity story you know much much easier and so we have

some things we're working on that will probably probably be available for testing at least by like this quarter oh yeah and as somebody's dealing with these liquidity issues day in and day out what are what are some of those issues like for you guys if you're trying to solve these problems for your customers what what problems are you running to and sort of that meme where you're taking on the grenades yeah they're sleeping in bed like what what are those grenades and knives for you guys yeah so i mean the things that we're working on i mean just generally speaking just inbound in general so like you know today if you want to go stand up a bgc pay or something you know you have to go to amboss or something to like buy channels or

get them from ellen big or you know all some of these places where you can just buy a channel for and you gotta usually buy several to make sure that you people can pay from different areas of the network. Um, but we're kind of making like a, a liquidity service that will essentially, you can, you know, use it to just generate an invoice and people will pay to like our well connected node. And then we'll make sure to like open up a channel to you or resolve the payment. So you can basically just forget about inbound entirely. And, you know, we'll just make sure that, you know, payments get there. Um, and we'll make sure that our node is, you know, well connected and all that stuff. So that's, um, I think that that in of itself is like,

is a really big deal. Um, and then we're also, you know, just trying to make like outbound simpler too so kind of getting from you know at the end of the day most most people aren't using um don't aren't the way to fund a bitcoin channel today is you have to have bitcoin open up a channel you have you know that those stats that you can send out um but usually people are like buying that bitcoin you know swan or river or whatever and then like you know transferring that to their lnd node or their node in general and then opening up channels with it like that's like you know a four-step process to get there no one's really you know no one is usually opening it from like cold storage or something where you already have bitcoin so it's it's a little

onerous to get to the ability to send via lightning so that's kind of the next step is like okay inbound is is fairly solved and so now we need to work on outbound of like how do you just get sats in a lightning channel that you can go and send out and so that goes right along with the inbound story but um i think that's like the logical next step and how do you think that could solve straight fiat to a channel without bound liquidity or yeah i mean there's several ways i think that um so the there you obviously have to use kind of an on off ramp to go from like dollars into bitcoin but then there's things like you know submarine swaps that you can do to like you know get the funds in or just uh you know pay the that fiat on an off ramp could have lightning

already and so they just like kind of pay an invoice into your node so there's a couple different ways of doing that but ultimately um trying to reduce those steps from like you know four steps into like one or maybe two of like buy bitcoin send it to your channel um it's kind of like is the idea there yeah yeah there's so much to figure out yeah what uh what else because you guys have so that's flow right um in terms of channel management stuff what like what is the whole uh spec of flow yeah so full like flow it started out as a uh a wrapper on top of lightning labs's pool um auction service and so that that's what it was today you can buy a channel really easily via pools auction service um that has been okay um it's it's kind of had a few issues and

whatnot and it's been a it's a good v1 of it but that's kind of like the v2 of flow is to uh create more just automated lsp stuff so it's not like necessarily buying a channel from like an auction service is more just, Hey, here's my node pub key. I want to make sure that payments get there, make it happen. And, you know, we do that. And so it's a much, much simpler flow that not, not, not, not to be, not to be funny. It's a much simpler flow to that. And so, so we're just really, really revamping that. And ultimately we really want to create a platform that's very holistic and really combining all of these things into like just a really easy experience. So you don't have to, you know, today you have your voltage node, you got to go to flow

and like buy a channel and like it's kind of a back and forth but we want to make a more unified experience where it's just you know what you got a node you want to accept payments here you go it's done yeah yeah and on top of it yeah and then the analytics that you guys provide on top of it is that something again i'm a caveman with uh our lightning node is like we're writing scripts to like pull data from our node to give me like a daily update on all the sats that have flowed through it. Yeah. Yeah. That's it's, it's really amazing how many people do that. Like it's almost everyone, I mean, cause there really isn't a good solution for it. Like, and so almost everyone is just kind of writing these scripts to like, you know, give them notifications of

payments or just like create CSVs or whatever. And it's just like, that's, that's one of the big surprises is talking with customers is everyone is just doing rewriting, you know, the same tool in a different way for the same problem. And so that's kind of what we're aiming for with surge is to really, um, make it, make the observability of your node, um, really, really simple. And so you can just kind of plug it in and just visualize everything that's happening of, you know, your channels, your balances, all those things, but also be able to like, you know, export those into like a QuickBooks compatible CSV. So then you can go like, you know, do import it, you know, really, really easily. So you don't have to write these scripts over and

over again. And same thing with like, you know, alerting of, Hey, did your node go offline? Did a channel get forced closed? Are you having a high payment failure rate? And so these are all things that really exist everywhere else inside of like the tech world. And so we're just kind of bringing that same thinking into lightning. And, you know, people have been, you know, we've been we've been demoing that with some customers and people are really excited about it because it really solves a really big need of just like, hey, you know, I'm not going to use the command line to go and export data that I'm going to go and send to my accountant every day or every week or whatever um i need a tool that's going to do that for me and you know that's what we're trying

to solve yeah thank you for building it because yeah the uh csvs emails sent from the scripts while they're they're helpful it would be nice to have just like a pretty ui get updated and just like have it all consolidated yeah that's one thing that gives me stress is somebody running especially with podcasting 2.0 where people are just streaming us yeah one set every minute all day every day just like thinking about like the accounting at the end of the year gives me a migraine yeah your accountant quits like every year you gotta find a new one that can trick into dealing with it um but yeah like that's the great thing about surge too is like it'll have um the ability to like give people you can give your accountant access to surge and they don't have

access to your note or anything but they can see the balances do their own exports do all the things so um and especially inside of like a large organization where you have like a finance team well they you just you don't want to go back and forth all the time just give them access to search they can export all the data that they need see everything um and they never actually like have access to the node itself and so it's it will simplify a lot of that back and forth um between the two and i think that that's um it's it's a it's one of the less sexy things but it's one of the most necessary things um inside of like you know getting large scale companies to adopt lightning yeah and then one way in which you guys built voltage particularly like the technical

stack of it is all the data inside the nodes you guys are operating is encrypted right so you have no access to it right yeah yeah like by default um real bedford's playing peter mccormick seriously i think they just scored yeah it sounds like it's something like that um yeah so like so the by default like the nodes that we run are basically black boxes to us so we don't you know we can't see what your channels are who your peers are with any of that data so it's all it's all a black box and um you know using more tools is like all opt-ins like that's that's something um you know privacy is is a big deal and so uh by default all the nodes are essentially just you know black boxes yeah which is massive um and yeah so what do you what are you seeing in terms of

like uh not new developments in the space we've covered that but like uh competition or sort of new types of companies that are maybe getting more specialized in lightning service provider or the analytics side of things how are you seeing the landscape of um more people coming to this lightning network service provider space yeah i mean it's it's it's gotten interesting over the last couple of years. And I think that, um, there's, yeah, there's a lot of people that are kind of, um, solving different things in different ways. And that goes back to like kind of the, uh, when I think about these things, I really, you really got to focus on taking more of a, an objective view of, you know, just understanding what the user needs,

how to best solve that. And I think that, um, you know, I think that we're on the path to do that. And I think that there's a lot of, um, other like, you know, unique, uh, companies that are creating, I think that, uh, I mean, Amboss like didn't exist, you know, uh, when I started Voltage. And like, that's a great company that kind of specializes in visualizing network data and things like that. So like those types of companies are very, very interesting. And then I think that there's a lot of people just applying the technology in just new ways, which is super exciting. And so ultimately, like, you know, there's more custodial services that have popped up. And again, this is, it's crazy to think about, you know, two years ago, but like

there wasn't, you know, the El Salvador announcement, like the Achievo wallet and all those things weren't there, you know, at the time. And so thinking about, you know, all the things that have popped up since then of, you know, a lot of custodial services, which is, um, which is fine. I think that, you know, when she, when El Salvador adopted it really the only path forward was custodial and that's, you know, the way that most El Salvadorians used it. Um, and you know, that's, that's fine. Like, you know, let's just, let's get the adoption rolling, but that's again, kind of going back to where we want to focus on is, um, giving similar experiences in a non-custodial fashion is, is certainly important. And, um, so yeah, so there's been, there's been

a lot of uh innovation happening that enable new experiences new things to be built like i mentioned mutiny earlier you know shouting out to that again of you know building some kind of like privacy centric like wallet was not possible like back you know back two years ago and so um with a lot of those opportunities i think that there's a lot of and like sensei like uh there you know the john uh can trails like uh implementation on top of ldk uh there's just there's a lot more opportunity to do new and unique things. And so, you know, we pay close attention to what's possible and, you know, where does, what tool can solve the user's problems in the best way at the right time. Yeah. And I know you're pragmatic and objective, just dealing with

what's in front of you right now, but what are you looking forward to or what would you like to see built that would help you out and what you're doing? That's a good, that's a good question. I think that, I mean, the things that it's like, what a big initiative that we're kind of working on right now is um kind of decentralizing ourselves and so we're working on getting into like more cloud providers we're working on standing up our own data center here in austin so yeah being able to do more of that and so i think that um that has there's a lot of tools out there for that but they're like i think doing it in a very bitcoin centric way is like less there's not there's not a lot for that and so um that's some things that we've had to kind of like

take on ourselves and so i think that more uh more things that help us run our infrastructure which is maybe a maybe a lame answer but like i think that you know as we look to decentralize ourselves um looking at services that kind of help with that story and and that's something i'm really excited about for this year is looking into you know doing more like there's there's a lot more out there than just bitcoin and lightning we're going to start playing with some of those things like you know like like uh like esplora and like some of those like block explorer technology or um just even more just um general um maybe not bitcoin centric things but just more general um privacy tooling or things like that so there's a lot out there and i think that making those

things more you know digestible and helpful or usable would be would be great for us yeah i don't think that was a lame answer that's the thing good hardware is not pretty for some reason Hardware turns people off, but I think we're trying, especially in a Bitcoin standard where it's a protection of private, public key pairs via hardware and the operation of nodes via hardware. Bitcoiners should be very in tune with the landscape of different hardware options and what's going on because it's going to be incredibly important. This is a hardware revolution just as much as it is a software revolution.

Yeah, no, I mean, definitely. I definitely agree. And I think that that's what I love about Bitcoin in general, from more of a philosophical level, is that you have the ejectability of anything. Like you can start on voltage and you can transition to running your own node. You can vice versa. Like you can really pick and choose what tool you want to use when and where. And you have the ability to be as completely self-sovereign as you want to and do all the

things yourself. Use a block stream satellite to broadcast. You could do all of it. or if you want to go 100% custodial, you can do that. And so Bitcoin in general, you have the optionality to choose what level you want to have trust, not have trust, and all those things, and that's a big deal, and that's not possible anywhere else,

and that's something that just gets me excited about Bitcoin in general. Yeah. Speaking about Bitcoin generally, how are you feeling about the state of the overall network? What are your thoughts on Bitcoin and its position considering this global macro economic back backdrop potential to go into a massive recession potential depression what are your thoughts on like say of bitcoin generally adoption whatever it may be it's narrative yeah i mean it's i i'm optimistic um and maybe i'm just generally an optimist but i think that i'm really optimistic i am i am for several reasons of like we've seen

this last year has been a shit show of just problem after problem in the DeFi crypto space. But nonetheless, Bitcoin is looped into those, you know, not by our choosing, but we are. And it's still the price hasn't really fallen anymore. You know, it came down initially, but FTX crashed. Bitcoin hasn't really moved. You know, Celsius crashed. Bitcoin didn't really move. And so I do feel positively about that. And, you know, looking forward into what can happen for Bitcoin specifically. And then I also think, I mean, it's the typical saying of, you know,

the bear markets for building. And so I think that that's one of the great things of, you know, when Bitcoin was at 60K, I think everyone's really starry-eyed. And, you know, it's just classic. You know, I've been through so many of these cycles. You just see it over and over again. And so I'm okay being at where we're at.

And I think that there's a lot of opportunity for us to build some really great things. And then I'm super excited for the next bull cycle when we're, you know, more positioned from a tech tech perspective to really take advantage of a lot of those a lot of those things. So ultimately, and then, you know, global macro is I just I don't think too terribly much about it. You know, you just I just kind of roll with it from that perspective. But I think Bitcoin generally really excited about it, really excited about where we're at. And I think that, you know, like I mentioned earlier about these customers coming to us, like there's still people coming to us that are, you know, outside the Bitcoin. space that want to use that technology and adopt it. And so I think that over the last year we've

seen, I think every bull and bear cycle, we see a divergence of Bitcoin from crypto and every year, um, crypto key, like, you know, ICOs, and then, you know, that all crashed, like NFTs and like all of these, like, you know, big giant exchanges that are, you know, committing fraud. And so I think, um, ultimately we're separating ourselves. And I think that people are really realizing that um over and over again and so that's also i would call it a positive of the last definitely six months of this silver lining yeah yeah exactly exactly and so i think that's a really good um it sucks because people got hurt in celsius and ftx and like you know they lost money and all those things and like you know that's a horrible thing but um the sooner we can

get rid of these bad people the better yeah rip the band-aid off yeah get them out sorry barry Yeah. Oh, man. I'm, yeah. Interested to see how that one plays out. But then, I mean, Bitcoin more generally, but now Voltage and you being a founder and somebody who's in charge of this business, how do you approach the prospect of a pull-on bear market, managing your team, managing your balance sheet, your company? How's your perspective going into 2023? through i mean again i'm optimistic i think that um they're the the last several years and kind of um in the vc world and operating company everything we're just we're maybe abnormal and so i think people got really used to the abnormality and i think that we're maybe today in an over corrective

cycle and then we're going to like level out into like a more standard um normal operating um capacity there but i think you know generally speaking voltage holds bitcoin on its balance cheat. You know, we're going to be using it for liquidity and like all of these things. So like we're, you know, we've never stopped allocating to Bitcoin even during these, you know, down markets. And, you know, we're, we are optimistic for what we can do and what we're doing. So like ultimately Outlook hasn't really changed in terms of, you know, what we can do, our team and all those things. And so we have a really incredible team that we've been really fortunate, you know, to have. And so overall, I'm really optimistic. And I think it just goes back to, you know,

bear markets of our building and we're just we're going to do that we're going to like just really double down on uh building things out and um yeah and then i think that you know we'll we'll be able to like you know weather the storm and you know get to get to where we need to be at the end and i think that you know for those out there that are um maybe interested in starting you know bitcoin companies or projects or anything like that i mean i think still do it um and just under like i i think maybe there's just understand kind of the the nuances of like the differences and And like, you know, it used to be anyone could get a chunk of money to go and start something. And maybe you need to have a little bit more of a pragmatic approach and really understand, you know, the problem solution and those types of things.

And so I think it is a little bit of a different environment for sure. But I think that, you know, us as Voltage, we're excited for the opportunity to go and build in this kind of scenario. And I think that there's a lot more people that are like us out there. Yeah. Better markets for building. Yeah. it's not just i mean it is cliche but it's true it is funny it is true i i really hate the amount of cliche like sayings in terms we have in bitcoin but like that i that one is definitely true yeah

i mean because you get the bull markets and then you get the shit coin distraction and it is true i mean you know i've talked to mac corral about this even like the core developers working at the protocol level the price is ripping it's hard to focus yeah oh yeah yeah definitely and it's yeah there's um it's just a lot of uh a lot of noise you know amongst it all and it's uh and then you you think about like all the conferences and things like that it's everyone's um yeah we're just so focused on like price and like all these things and no one's you know and these times we're more focused on like the tech and that that's that's what i like yeah same and we were touching on it before we hit record but conference fatigue is real yeah oh for sure yeah i feel like

there's one every week now i know i mean it was like it feels like after covid like everyone's like everyone's gonna start a conference everyone's gonna put on a conference and um you know we we as a company have really had to take a step back and just really evaluate okay what's what's the most important one let's divide and conquer everyone go to a different one or something like that so um you know it's it's exciting a lot of opportunity to do you know fun things but it's also it it's tiring yeah towards the end of last year i was probably at like my six or seven conference i was like it's all the same people yeah yeah obviously there's there's different overlap and stuff like that obviously conferences um very bullish on conferences popping up in

different parts of the world but here in the u.s it's like a caravan of bitcoiners just go from city to city yeah yeah definitely i think that that's where a lot of um opportunity is in kind of the international space where you know just new conferences are reinvigorating old ones um which is really exciting i mean i think that that's um a lot of opportunity there for more international conferences yeah and i'd be interested to hear your perspective on this considering uh leaning into uh different parts of the world particularly emerging markets like that's been one of the theses behind the scenes the emerging markets will really drive a good material portion of lightning network adoption as we move forward because it's

desperately needed the utility of that final instant settlement the ability to send smaller amounts of money um are you seeing that confirmed at all from your perspective of voltage yeah i mean we are we definitely are and we're you know we're talking we talk with a lot of um you know developing countries or people that are building for that kind of market and so um we definitely do see that and i think that there's uh still a lot of opportunity to go i think that you know africa has been over the last year has been really um a bustling uh area to to be uh to that are both working on lightning as far as like development talent goes as well as um you know just the usage and people um actually adopting the technology as well so uh i do i do see that and i do see that as

um a way uh for us to really scale and then we some of you haven't even touched on is like taro and like all of that stuff. I was just about to mention it. Yeah, I mean, like, so, yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. Like, I am bullish on that. I think that, you know, it's a very, people have a lot of different opinions on it of like, you know, bringing kind of a more regulated instrument into the Bitcoin space. I think there's positives and negatives to that.

But I think ultimately, like people do, one of the biggest things that we hear is a volatility risk when integrating Lightning of like, hey, you got to hold Bitcoin in these channels, you know, Bitcoin's volatile, and they don't necessarily like that. So I think that being able to have a solution for that, you know, more natively is exciting. And I think that, you know, you can kind of enter and exit Bitcoin into like fiat on and off ramps like Strike or any of those services. But ultimately, you lose a lot of the benefits of Bitcoin in those on and off ramps with like, you know, the transaction fees and all those things. So having a more native way to do that is exciting and i do think that it is uh definitely going to be popular in

these kind of like third world countries or like developing countries or anything like that and so um i am bullish on it i think that i'm really interested to see how the rest of kind of the development goes with it but i think generally speaking like uh i see it as a big trojan horse into getting people um comfortable with kind of the network and how things operate and you know maybe maybe one day the stable coins aren't needed anymore and now we're fully bitcoin and this is like that that step to get there yeah the sat standard yeah and then you have things like fediments that are coming to 4.2 which i think create the possibility to create stable coins going over lightning network as well that'll be i'm really excited to see what the open source

vitamin projects does what fetty does on top of that as we head into uh 2023 because i i'm excited for that too i mean all kinds of trade-offs again it'll be people like uh fedements are historical options like you're you're not a bitcoiner but sue me sue me it's extremely fascinating to me yeah i mean i i agree i think it's all super fascinating and that's what's um been really eye-opening too is just the amount of um other layer twos like that you know that possible with like, you know, I would call FedEminet like a layer two or, you know, there's lightning, there's liquid, there's all these other things. There's coin pools, which I don't know if that's gotten much traction, but there's a lot of different opportunities to scale Bitcoin. And I

think that they can all coexist too. They can all, you know, it just depends on what you want to do and how you want to do it. Yeah. FedE is really interesting. We're, you know, we're talking with that team on like, you know, is there services that we can do with that, you know, to help people set up FedEments and things like that. So that'll be really interesting over the next year to see how that technology plays out. So I do agree with you. Yeah. And then you mentioned like AI earlier, or you were talking about like server rack space and doing other things. That's another thing I think, cause I've been experimenting with it. I've been experimenting with mid journey specifically to create thumbnails for the bent. And I can tell there's a lot of GPU compute on

the back end just for how how long it's beginning to take to to produce the thumbnail compared to where it was a couple months ago when i first started using tellers increased demand and so they're definitely having server pressure on the back end and i think mash and mash uh demoed this using replit they spun up like an ai generator an ai picture generator that was payable in sats server the lightning network and so in terms of like untapping that potential if you think i mean i've been using it i think it's useful for me particularly the image generation stuff yeah i would love if it were able to be faster in the way it became faster so i was just able to um help support the the server infrastructure on the back end by paying immediately indirectly yeah i mean

i think that i think that theme that you're talking about there's it goes down to like value for value right and like that whole thing of like and i i see that as a an enormous opportunity of you know who if if they made you enter in a credit card and like you know charge you a dollar every time you did an image generation you know you might be less uh less eager to use that and but if you you know uh integrate a lightning voice or show a lightning invoice that just maybe you know integrated with like your web browser or something and just it just pays it you know you're it's a better experience and you're more willing to even contribute to them for that you know server infrastructure and doing those things so i think that i mean value for value has always

been exciting to me and i think that it's uh has so much use just everywhere and um and shout to adam curry for kind of i'm championing that in the early days and i think that um we see that being able to be applied to so many different things and i think that that's really exciting yeah that's gotta be matt when you think about like lightning network enabled api calls again going back to like these sub networks and the amount of frat like i don't think people fathom the amount of traffic that will be going over lightning network if we do go to this value for value model or whether it's you free streaming us ads for the podcast or somebody pinging uh an ai image generator api and having to pay for that

and then you added things uh like sonota like paying for electricity on the go and then we can't even imagine what else is going to be built and just the amount of sats flows that are going to be happening once this finally takes off is going to be unfathomable yeah i definitely agree and i think um and i think it's it's already it's already happening to like again comparing to two years ago there wasn't a lot of companies building for these things their value for value wasn't like podcasting 2.0 wasn't a thing yet it was kind of on the cusp um and yet we didn't have mash we didn't have so we didn't have all of these companies that are kind of building in it and so um i think that we're yeah we're on that cusp of like you know there's real you know real people

real companies that are optimizing for these solutions and so it's gonna be really exciting to see what comes out of it yeah in terms of like the different types of wallets obviously We have mobile wallets. You have browser extension wallets like Albi. You have more custodial wallets like Mesh, Blue Wallet, whatever it may be. How do you think this evolves? Like, how do you think people interact with the Lightning Network predominantly moving forward? Is it browser extension?

Is it mobile first? I think, yeah, I mean, that's a good question. I don't know if I have a great answer to it. I think that there's a lot of opportunity to do, I mean, multiple things. I think that, um, it, maybe it's you, maybe it's all of the above of like, maybe it's, we can create an integrated experience across all of these different things and you just, you know, you can use it in these different scenarios or, um, or you just have separate balances or, um, you know, segment amount or something like that.

And so I think that there's a lot of opportunity and see how those things play out. But I think ultimately, um, people will want to use lightning in all of those contexts, you know, mobile and like in the web and all of these different things. And I think that, uh, I think that the more, the more native of an experience we can make the better. And so I think that that's, I think there's, I don't know if I have a direct answer of like the way that I think it'll go. I think it'll be, um, really interested to see kind of just what the users decide and

what, what ultimately they want. And I think, uh, unifying those experiences is going to be probably a direction. A lot of people move. Yeah. It's dope. So early freaks. Yeah. If you want to come build, leave your mark again.

Come build over here. So where do you want Voltage to go over the next 2023? What's your one-year, three-year, five-year plan for Voltage? I know you're pragmatic, you're objective, you think about what's important, but you have to have some grander scheme of how you see this playing out. Yeah, I mean, we really want to create just an experience inside of Lightning that is just, that's not weird. like when you when you think about comparing using lightning to using gmail or something

there's a there's an obvious difference in the user experiences the flows and everything like that and so we're trying to create an experience that is a gmail right and but again non-custodially and so that's the really challenging part you can do that kind of custodially today but like that's not exciting to me like we need the ability for a user to like own own the full uh like the full access to their funds um and so uh so that's kind of like our north star that's where we're driving to is to make an experience that is not abnormal um and in ultimately like letting letting users or companies or anything kind of choose what points they want to hit and that's kind of the way that i'm i'm building out voltage is um having a set of services and like you know they all

combine really really nicely to a really simple experience but if you wanted to just use you know of the lsp or you just wanted to use surge or any of these pieces you can do that too and so we're really just trying to solve um the problems inside of lightning to enable it to scale like into you know a to 10x 100x whatever the number is and um and there's still an insane amount of work to be done to get to that point so um you know there's a lot lot to a lot to happen over the next you know several years and that's what you know my my theme for this year is just really to ship more products. So we really want to just start hammering, getting a lot of things out there and, uh, a lot of new things, um, to help people. And so, uh, so yeah, I think ultimately, you know,

what we're trying to do is create a service that is just dead simple to use and can scale to, you know, any, any level that you would, that you had won inside of lightning, um, but still give people the optionality to, you know, to pick and choose what levels they enter into. And so big grandiose plan um lots to do to make that happen and you know we're we're working towards it yeah and i guess last question before we wrap up here because you mentioned building in the bear to prepare for uh the next bull market if it comes probably will come yeah but with that in mind so you with every bull market comes another bigger wave of adoption how do you prioritize uh what you guys build to work on and focus on at voltage with that in mind like with that

lingering thought all right when the bull comes there's gonna be an onslaught of adoption like we haven't experienced in the past here's what we need to prioritize be ready for that yeah yeah i mean that's a good question i think um a lot of it comes from i think i mean we luckily we've learned a lot i mean from operating for for a couple years and just seeing kind of the operating in the last bull market of kind of what's necessary and so um i think that what what we what we really think about is i think it goes back to just making it not weird it's like when someone you know is trying to you know we're trying to onboard walmart or something and they we have to explain channels to them or like you know where like what does a node do how does it

like those things are like i think that the more that we can um make it a normal experience the better. And I think that when we think about the next bull market and bull cycle, I think that we're going to see an increase of people looking at lightning. And if we're still at the point where we have to explain all of these things and we have to, you know, we have to educate them on how to manage their channels and do all of these things, like they're going to leave and they're, they're, you know, they're not going to ultimately come to lightning and Bitcoin and all these things. And so we need to be prepared. I think ultimately, I think that boils down to user experience. I think the user experience needs to be at a level that is ready for new people to

enter. Cause right now we're onboarding existing Bitcoiners. That's great. That's fine. But like next bull cycle, we're going to be getting looked at from people that aren't as, you know, Bitcoin native and, or have their, you know, multi-sig set up like at home and all those things. And so we need to have a user experience that can satisfy those people. And that is going unlock, you know, the next level for lightning. Yeah. I was going to say, it sounds like it's more UX oriented than infrastructure oriented. Yeah. I would say, I mean, they kind of go hand in hand. Um, but ultimately like what we want to present, what we want to do is, is a lot of UX improvements. And I think how we solve that is infrastructure related, but the thing that we

want to surface is the UX improvement. Yeah. I'm excited for you guys. Yeah. Excited for Bitcoin. Yeah, me too, man. I think that there's a lot to happen, a lot of things happening across the space, and I'm just super excited. I am as well. I'm happy you pinged me. Yeah.

I didn't know you were going to be in town. I'm happy you came to town and we were able to do this. Yeah, I'm glad we could do it. Glad I got to stop by, and yeah, love visiting Austin. Yeah, we shouldn't wait two years for the next one. We've got to do this more often. Yeah, for sure, for sure. We'll have to do something with Odell sometime, too.

Yes. he'll be well to figure out when we're all in town either Nashville here wherever we find ourselves at the same spot any final parting notes for the freaks out there I mean just keep building like I think

what I always like to have as a call to action is you know if you haven't messed with played with lightning at all yet do it like there's always kind of you know everyone falls down this Bitcoin rabbit hole you learn about you know Bitcoin the technology the sound money all those things lightning is just kind of like the next rabbit hole of like diving down into

what is possible inside of that and so if you haven't done that yet definitely do it even if it's just like a custodial wallet moon wallet or wallet of satoshi any of those things just start playing with it figure out what's possible and what you can do with it um and then that's going to lead you know you down this journey of kind of what is what is the next phase of bitcoin going to be like and then similar call to action side of like builders just if you are interested in contributing to Bitcoin, um, in any capacity, even if it's, you know, developer, non-developer, um, full-time, part-time, anything like definitely just get your hands dirty. And, uh, I think it's very rewarding for one. And then two, um, it's very likely going to lead to something bigger,

you know, uh, in, in the end. So, um, you know, definitely encourage everyone to get involved in one way, shape or form. Yeah. This may come off as a bit uncouth, but I do think the Bitcoin industry is about to be the or be the beneficiary of a positive externality a silver lining of an impending recession that particularly affects the tech industry we're going to have a lot of good developer talent which is getting laid off from there silicon valley tech jobs are like all right i'm sure there's a bunch of orange pill people who are in these companies who've been thinking about it and may not have had the courage to take the leap but now may be

forced to yeah Coinbase laid off a thousand people today today today I didn't catch that today yeah it's a new round of playoffs at Coinbase so yeah anyone that's you know feeling the effects of that like definitely kind of explored the space and you know we

we welcome you in the Bitcoin land come come build still early oh yeah still so much to build it's always a pleasure sir yeah thank you Marty it's been fun. Thank you for crushing it. Where can we find out more about you voltage or should we send the freaks? Yeah, good question. So I'm on Twitter. I'm at G Krizik, G K R I Z E K voltage. Our website is voltage.cloud. Twitter is voltage underscore cloud. Um, so yeah, just reach out, DM me,

DMs open. I'm happy to help anyone out in any way we can building on lightning, working in lightning, any of those things. I mean, my, I have an open door. We'll link to all that in show notes freaks hope you enjoyed this rip peace and love