TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #531: Creating A Decentralized Super-app with Obi Nwosu

Episode Date: August 19, 2024

Marty sits down with Obi Nwosu to discuss the launch of the launch of the Fedi app. Obi on Twitter: https://x.com/obi Fedi: https://www.fedi.xyz/ 0:00 - Intro 1:27 - Launch euphoria 4:40 - Fedi’s purpose 9:06 - Fedi devs 12:20 - River & Unchained 13:36 - Interoperability and unleashed chat 17:24 - Individual community needs 25:03 - What Fedi replaces 31:21 - Gradually, Then Suddenly & Zaprite 32:59 - How to improve and expand 39:38 - Flipping perspective on money 49:41 - Stability pools 55:48 - Sapping power from fiat system 1:02:31 - Managing expectations - What’s next 1:08:08 - Open source announcement 1:13:25 - Running on a bitcoin standard 1:18:25 - Wrapping up Shoutout to our sponsors: River https://river.com/tftc Unchained https://unchained.com/concierge/ Zaprite https://zaprite.com/tftc Gradually, Then Suddenly https://thesaifhouse.com/gradually TFTC Merch is Available Shop Now: https://merch.tftc.io Join the TFTC Movement: Main YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/c/TFTC21/videos Clips YT Channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUQcW3jxfQfEUS8kqR5pJtQ Website https://tftc.io/ Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://tftc.io/podcasts/

Super apps are the most popular apps in the software ecosystem. Many of them have billions of users or hundreds of millions of users. They're used around the world and they're coming to the West. Telegram is transforming into a super app in front of our eyes. And X.com, their stated mission is to become a super app. So it's going to become much more common in the West. But in Asia and all across the world, these are by far the most common apps. And every single one of them are incredibly centralized.

We need to put that power into the hands of any community anywhere to be able to run. This rip of TFTC was brought to you by River. It's the best place to buy Bitcoin. Go to river.com slash TFTC and enjoy this episode. you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free when 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

And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Obi, welcome back to the show. Thank you. Thank you. Too long, too long. Has been too long. You're just telling me you've had a week since launch.

Euphoria is coming down back to reality. It was a long sprint. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's actually, this is the phase in the three phases of an ambitious startup. This is the phase that I enjoy the most. The first phase is the second most fun, I guess. And so the three phases are initialization. that's like building the car for the race and dragging it up to the finding the driver or the

the crew to man it and then dragging it up to the start line and then there's the market product fit which is where you're it's the early stage of the race where you're vying for position and you're finding your racing line and you finally get a formula that works and you're like you're lapping people and you're just catching up and you know that somebody's working and then there's growth where you're just extending your lead um is the fight the final phase but the growth phase is is a lot of people enjoy that but as for me that's not the that's the easiest phase because you've now got your rhythm you've got your team you're cooking on gas literally and you're just extending your you're just increasing your your lead on a lap by lap basis this is the

point where you're discovering market product fit this phase we're in right now um and the phase that just finished um tuesday last week um on the august 6 2024 was the initialization and we started with um eric justin and myself with literally a early an open source project which was incredible um and a dream but no company and we went from there to forming a company getting an incredible group of investors um and then find this incredible sort of avengers like team um to actually make this dream become a reality and then over the last two years We've been working with communities around the world to refine and listen and refine and never give up, not number go up, never give up until we actually achieved our goal, which is a functioning super app, not run by a centralized entity in Silicon Valley or Beijing, China, but actually run by communities for communities where the sources available eventually open source and all of the elements are using freedom technologies yeah and i think you're

you're being really humble in your description of building a startup because you're not only building a car but the uh internal combustion engine that's going to make that car go is being built in parallel as well in your case the fediment open source protocol and so what was it like in the lead up to last week sort of getting feddy ready to be to be launched as the fediment protocol was being developed because this is i think a proof of concept came out in the summer 2021 eric really leaned into it um in 2022 post bitcoin 2022 and so for the last two years we've had uh that open source project get developed and earlier this year get to a point of stability where version 1.0.0 was launched

and you actually have a viable, stable protocol to build on. So what was it like for you and the team? Yeah, and it's actually interesting because Feddy, the company, is two things. It's the app and it's the team that's behind it that works with communities. But if we're talking about the app itself, the app itself is this sort of integration point for all freedom a number of freedom technologies

one of the most central is custody community custody and that's how we can scale custody to a community level if you can individually custody self-custody is always the best but it's still challenging for many people to be able to do that and so it leaves people hoarding their money in these very centralized custodial offerings with millions and millions of users. We felt that there was something in the middle and that came out with the idea of community custody where trusted members of a community could custody on behalf of their family, because it could be like Uncle Jim's and Auntie Jane's or their group of friends through to their club and football team up to their village or town or company or organization and if you do it that

way and use the community as the unit we could have this gap between the ideal bitcoin standard of self-custody and the current standard the actual on the ground standard which is what is it half a dozen a dozen centralized entities where everybody are custodying their bitcoin and instead could have a scenario where you can have tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands if not millions of these um community custodial pack um offerings and you get these other benefits because it inherently uses ecash it was the first um ecash protocol backed by bitcoin you get privacy simplicity and so on but that's not the only freedom technology we had to integrate into fedi we of course we had to integrate bitcoin and to connect these different um federations

communities to to the rest of the bitcoin ecosystem we had to integrate lightning um and then to extend functionality further we realized very early when we started getting feedback from communities that they needed a way to communicate with each other within the system and that was also privacy preserving from the get-go um and focus on one-to-one communication in the main So, again, we started with XMPP, if you want to know the technical terms for the audience, was the protocol that we used initially as a very popular protocol. But after a while, we realized that we wanted something that was more easily federated and more naturally encrypted. So we moved over to Matrix. And we then went further.

We needed a mechanism to have identity. So we integrated support. And we've only got the basic, but every single user of Feddy automatically gets an NSEC and NPUB, i.e. they get a Nostra identity. And we can use that to integrate with the Nostra ecosystem. And we keep going on and on and on, identifying freedom technologies that reach maturity, that add value, and merge them all together into one application, which is now source available and will eventually be open source as well. So that we have these technologies

and it requires all of them. This is what was the big insight. It requires all of them to be in one offering for really magic to happen. If you miss some of these elements, you don't have the complete picture, which is something that can be used by everybody everywhere.

yeah when you really think about it like the fundamental properties of a bank and particularly a community bank like it's not only custodying sending receiving money it's things like communication coordination getting people together and so this is in my mind something that's truly sci-fi when you talk about like innovation in fintech this is something that is truly unique and new to the space where you're not depending on any incumbent financial system or banking rails to provide banking services to individuals around the world you've built it from scratch which is no no easy task well as i i um have to always um dock my virtual cap um off to my team to make that happen because i said we we had an idea many people for you eric was

mentioning that some of the people that he knew in the cypherpunk circles were saying that this would either never be built or it'll take about a decade to do so the fact that we we did it in two years is a testament to an incredible team i i remember that uh justin um when we had these sort of especially early on would would go on these sort of deep coding sessions and he would take his karate kid red sash stick it around his head and go into coding mode to just deliver make something real that shouldn't really have been real you know and basically make magic happen So now we have a product that has all of the MVP features. It has a global chat and eventually that will be federated.

It has federated Chami and eCache Mint's capability, Feddy Mint. It connects to the Lightning Network. It can be upgraded in two ways. It can be upgraded with something called Feddy Mint modules where you can really add deep functionality across a community, for example, stable balances and social backup and so on and other features like this that will be coming. And it could be graded on an individual basis,

i.e. the equivalent of apps, but we call them FEDI mods. These are basically specialized web pages or web apps. And anyone can build these. Many of them exist already. And this, again, because of the last several years of work the bitcoin ecosystem there are a number of incredible websites that solve problems bit refill allows you to buy gift cards from around the world btc maps allows you to find bitcoin establishments from all over the place um unleash.chat allows you to access ai a stack of news

and primal allows you to access the entire nosta ecosystem um and all of these support things like Nosta for logging in and so on, or WebLend for payments via Lightning. And because all these standards are now out there, we can easily integrate these and upgrade the Feddy app because of the work of thousands of other people from around the world. This episode was presented by River. River is the best, most secure place to buy Bitcoin in the United States. Go to river.com slash TFTC, set up an account today. You'll be able to DCA into Bitcoin without paying any fees. You'll be able to give people Bitcoin via River links. You'll be able to send and receive Bitcoin over the Lightning Network, and you'll be able to set

limit orders. If you want to buy Bitcoin at a particular price below or above where it is now, you can set orders to buy Bitcoin when it hits that price. Go to river.com slash TFTC and set up your account today. This rep was also brought to you by our good friends at Unchained. Unchained is building a financial services platform for a Bitcoin standard. They have over 7,000 clients that are securing over 90,000 Bitcoin with 12,000 keys on their platform. Their platform leverages Bitcoin's native multi-sig properties. Their cornerstone product is their Volt product, a two or three multi-sig Volt, which allows you to hold two of three keys in a multi-sig quorum. That gives you full control over your Bitcoin. They also have an IRA product,

a lending desk, and they're rolling out a bunch of other products, including an inheritance protocol and sound advisory so go to unchained.com set up a call with our concierge onboarding team today tell them that tftc sent you and use the promo code tftc at checkout unchained.com yeah we often talk about the beauty of bitcoin's interoperable nature not just at the protocol level but at the lightning layer now with these traumas whether it's the fediment protocol or cashew like they're all interoperable and then you think of things like noster the interoperability between all these different disparate protocols is something that people i don't still even within bitcoin don't really grasp the gravity of of what can be done like that example that you just walked

through there is like somebody can upgrade an application or a protocol somewhere else and And Fetty can easily implement that and make the Fetty app better. Yeah, a perfect example is Unleash.chat. And it was announced a month or so ago. And it's a cool app, very focused. You can connect to these open source large language models and use them to ask questions and so on, but knowing that they're not under the control of some centralized silicon valley entity for example

um and as a when it came out i just took my uh phone i i um added a fairly mod i put in the url for unleash.chat and the mod was automatically created i renamed it to just unleash.chat and I had a mod. But then when I clicked on the mod, I noticed it had login via Nostra. I clicked on that and the Feddy mod recognized that the person was trying to log in via Nostra, used the Nostra ID that it automatically created for me

when I installed the app and I was logged in. I didn't have to go off to a different app or do anything. And then I needed to credit the Unleash.chat with some Bitcoin to be able to use the services. I again went to credit, it showed an invoice and it says connect to app and connect to wallet. And I clicked on that. And again, the FedE app recognized

that I was trying to log in to try to deposit money into this mod. And it popped up a box saying, do you want to transfer these amounts of sats? And I clicked yes. and eCash privately and simply was converted to Lightning, went over the Lightning network and credited it. And a few seconds later, I saw the balance.

And this was an app that was built and there had been no interaction between NVK and myself on this. It was a great app. I just gave it a go and it just worked. And even better, we've also seen services and websites and mods which have great functionality but didn't quite integrate support for WebLN or LNURL

or NOSTA correctly. And they haven't had that many people using them. And then what would happen is we would add support or in one community they would ask for this service and they would give feedback to the maker of that website that this is not working and they would fix that. because of the fact that we're on the ground actually working with communities who want to use these features beyond just playing around with them but really actually want to use them

they start giving you feedback so we effectively become this outsourced business development marketing user user experience center for the rest of the bitcoin ecosystem yeah and it's actually a good segue into one of the questions i'm most curious to hear your response to which is having worked with communities on the ground over the last two years to figure out exactly what they need like what were some of the most surprising needs that you found and had to build for or what did you go in with particular expectations and then come out with oh actually we need to focus here so i think um i was a few there's a lot um One, we are building an app for everybody, everywhere, but because of the history of

where we came and when you're building a business, you start with a market that you know how to reach and you have an unfair advantage of how to reach and we did that. The network of people that we have on our team have incredible relationships within human rights defender community humanitarian community and globally um in in various communities around the world so communities was our superpower in terms of connections um and many of these communities um need solutions to problems and and bitcoin and the and the freedom technologies around it solve that problem sometimes they're aware that they can solve the problem but it's too complex sometimes they're not but they start with we have a need and can

you help solve that need as opposed to we have a want to use this technology and and we'll figure out an actual needed services later and and so one of the things that we realized very early on is the level of integration there's solutions all over the place that solve their problems but they really want a one-stop shop, which brings them all into one place. And at the beginning, we were struggling, do we just make it a wallet or do we add in other features and so on? And it became clear that we want to add in features like chat and upgradeability because of feedback from users.

And so early on, that wasn't something we were clear about. But when we saw the delight on their eyes where within a chat, they can just send payments, or they can integrate with these mods, which they could have done separately. You could say, well, why don't I just open up a web browser? And why don't I also have a different app that connects to the web browser? And why don't I just switch between the screens? But when people want to get stuff done, they don't want that friction of switching between multiple different apps. They want it to be integrated. So that was the first, the desire to be integrated. It's not a technology. It's the combination of multiple technologies

in one place seamlessly. And we've started that journey, but that journey is going to continue for several months to come as we make it even more slick, this integration. The next thing that became clear was the need for, again, when you're dealing with people who you're trying to expand the number of people using bitcoin you realize that um people who don't know about bitcoin etc will need more than just the technology the human elements we call it the federal order and the federal council um this human element is as important as the as the as the technological element often people just focus on the technology and they don't realize that people will need support and and help if you think about the iphone why is that different from an android

phone because you have things like the apple stores and the genius bars that you can go to so the normal user the mass market feels comfortable that they can use this incredible piece of technology but if there's something that they don't understand there is a place to go to Whereas if you're using Android, now at this stage, it's progressed. People can understand how to use it. But for the first one to two to three years, that was the killer advantage of the iPhone. So again, the second thing we learned, that the human element in many of these areas is absolutely essential. And that's hard to build because it's about relationships.

It's about trust. And you have to build that for people to be able to switch, especially from other solutions that they already know. Then there were truths that we were probably aware of, but we didn't want to admit as Bitcoiners. And after a while of hearing it again and again and again, we realized that there was some need to stabilize the value of Bitcoin for short periods of time. long term we know it's impossible to stabilize the value of any assets for forever and in fact even for fiat fiat attempts to do it and it does it for a long period of time and then it generally has some sort of catastrophic failure because of trying to do an impossible thing but for short periods of time for a month or two when people are receiving money from family for

example or from aid agencies and that money is to buy this amount of food for the month and that amount of food is priced um in the local currency they want to make sure that um a short-term reduction in price doesn't mean that by 10 doesn't like that happened last month for example we saw a 10 20 reduction in the price of bitcoin that would mean if people were on a bitcoin standard for that month, they would have 10% less food, 10% less accommodation, 10% less fuel for their car, 10% less medicine for their children or elderly parents, which would mean that many people would have literally been in dire straits as a result of that. But what we observed is the communities that don't have disposable income, or don't have large amounts of disposable income,

who were using stable balances actually were able to continue on and weren't affected. And so again, that product came very early on as something that we realized was being asked for again and again by communities. And we started working on that over 18 months ago. It was actually came out of a hackathon originally, and we then took over the code

and because it was open source and improved it and made it production ready. Because making something that works in a hackathon and making something that's production ready that you would have people use real money is a very different thing. That's a 12 to 24, 36-month journey to go from proof of concept to reality. And so we worked on that quietly behind the scenes, and it's now pretty fault-tolerant and pretty bulletproof. So I could go on and on about the uncommon knowledge, the need for integrating everything, the need for including chat, the need for having some stable solution. But as Bitcoiners, we wanted a solution that didn't involve, if possible, adding on a third party asset backing because that would introduce a centralization vector again. And we wanted to always give the power to communities to do.

So, yeah, I could give you another 10, but those are a few. Yeah, if I recall correctly, the last time we talked, maybe like a year, year and a half ago now at this point, you're describing the ambitions of what you're trying to build at Fetty as the open source WeChat, the power app of the world. It seems like you guys are pretty damn close to that or you're there having launched. And I think this is a good point to talk about how this is an alternative to what people are doing right now. like what does this replace for these communities that you've been working with for the last couple of years so one one example um so um it depends on the community but uh one example is rep unite they work with communities around the world. They can reunite, as the name suggests,

refugees with their loved ones. But they also work with communities and often refugee communities and to provide aid and then help them use that aid. They very quickly and very early cottoned on to the realization that community was key and before even Freddie existed they were starting to work in a community context. They worked with communities and they would deliver aid and then they would work with

trusted members of those communities to report back on how the aid was used to suggest ways in which the aid would be used locally and then handle the detail on the ground locally. This was the realization and it's sort of common sense that people who are local and trusted are going to be able to react quicker than someone who's remote they're going to be and likely react more accurately than someone who's remote but they would need tools to help them so they started building tools in-house with more limited resources than us and they use a combination for they realize it needs to have conversations happening so they built some stuff on whatsapp with bots and so on they also needed a way for people to hold money and so on so they started

using bitcoin to send and bitcoin wallets um that were managed by members of the community they would have wanted to use multisig or some sort of federated model but that was too complicated to use the solutions out there for these communities so one one person or would have a normal wallet in that community and there would just be a convention that it would not be spent by that one person unless multiple people agreed so they they they smoke and mirrored sort of some sort of multi-sig offering as well and then they would have different web pages or different apps for specific use cases and specific purposes they would also find and locate people to help on and off um on-ramp and off-ramp bitcoin to local currency as well and so what would end up

happening is this big training overhead to bring people up to speed because they had to use these different apps and different services and a lot of complexity to be able to service and manage that then along comes ready and in one app they could do every single thing that they wanted to do and better and more integrated and so it was it was um basically obvious that this was the solution for them and that was in a very early stage i think we were alpha we were working with them when we were just going to alpha like they were some of the earliest clients um so that's that's just you're not an example where having it all integrated in one place solves um a key problem also working with communities on the ground as well to train them and bring them up

to speed, again, solves a key problem. For other people, in certain communities, privacy is quite important. Privacy of communication and privacy of money is important. I won't go into more details than that, but that's useful for certain communities, especially people who are living under the yoke of authoritarian regimes. And in other communities, it was the coordination element, the community savings and spending. So we saw these in Togo, for example, is an area where we're working with farming cooperatives and they're able to organize and collectively hold money.

This collective savings is a very, very common functionality and feature. And what's exciting about us is these organizations or communities have different problems. They have problems with internet access. They have problems with complexity, language translation. But here's the thing. Once you solve those problems in the rest of the world, they are equally applicable in the West. Yes, we have very good internet, but not everywhere. If you're at a busy concert or if you're underground on the subway, you might have for a short period of time no internet. You can still do an e-cash transaction in certain circumstances in those scenarios. Or if you're just somewhere where internet is a bit

more flaky and not so reliable, because of the work we've done working in these edge case extreme environments, it means that our app will tend to operate better than an app that's been built in the West, designed for the West and never, and assumes perfect gigabit internet and the latest and greatest smartphone and, and, or, or tablets and nothing in between. Those ones will work in the West, but they will never work in the rest of the world. If you can work in the rest of the world, you automatically are guaranteed to work in the West as well. Quick break here, freaks. This rip is brought to you by Gradually Then Suddenly, a framework for understanding Bitcoin is money by Parker Lewis. I wrote the forward to the book. I'm honored to have done so because

it's the best zero to one primer. If you're looking for a logical explanation of why Bitcoin obsoletes all other money, buy one for yourself and maybe a few for your friends. Go to the safe house.com slash gradually. That's the safe house.com safe spelled S A I F the safe house.com slash gradually use the promo code TFTC for $5 off a checkout. Buy it now freaks. The price of Bitcoin is going up. You need to understand it. This is the best zero to one primer. This rip was also brought to you by good friends at ZapRite. If you're a Bitcoiner and run a business or an independent contractor, you should be accepting Bitcoin as payment. If not you, then who? If we believe that fiat is systemically fragile and is a risk, the rails that that

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That's what we were discussing before we hit record, is like designing for these extreme edge cases really forces you to build the most robust product possible. And with that in mind, with the launch happening last week, What is your approach post-launch to figuring out how to improve the product and get it in the hands of more people? Yeah, so this is the exciting time. We've got a few different things we're doing. We continue to work with these communities that we've worked with already and we've built strong relationships with and are giving us incredible feedback.

and we already have a long list of features so I mean we really appreciate people commenting and giving us feedback it's likely that 9 out of 10 of the things that come back will already be on

our list of things to add or improve but we're always looking out for that 1 out of 10 so please keep it coming but we're going to continue to work with them the other thing we're going to do is continually make it easier and easier and easier for people to set up their own federations and that's a key thing for us wherever you want to set it up for your family or for your community or anything in between or

your company or anything in between we want to make that easier and easier and easier because we think that that will lead to a level of innovation that we have no visibility on it might be a community anywhere in the world they'll set up a federation um they set up just for that community. It could be private and have no online footprint, but only the people who know about it will be the people in the community. Or it could be a public federation that you want to have as public good that is for anyone to use. We're interested to see what people do with that. And if we see people doing that organically and there's a use case that gains adoption, we'll lean into that and support that with resources and effort and time um and the other

thing that we're very keen to do is see people building more fairly mods and or taking their existing websites or web apps and either they will eight times out of ten they'll just work or out of out of the box so just work as a fairly much but sometimes with a few an hour or so of tweaking, they will work better. And generally, the improvements make the app better or the web app better overall. Adding in WebLend support is just a good thing to do. It means that Albie and all these other services will work. Adding in support for Nosta logins is just a good thing to do. So we're always looking to make sure that when you have support for Feddy, you're automatically making your offering better for yourself and therefore for the community. So working with

existing um humanitarian human rights defenders communities disempowered communities to continue to get feedback from these edge cases as you say all these educations represent billions of people by the way but still from a western perspective they're edge cases um and also making it really easy for people to serve their own federation we'll we're gonna that's gonna be an iterative process um and then with all of this feedback from people organically selling their own federations feedback from the communities that we're working um closely with um feedback from people building mods we will then take the feedback um and adjust the product improve and improve and improve and it would just get better and better and better until one day some community somewhere is looks

around and realizes that a large percent over half of their transactions in a monthly basis for their community are happening on bitcoin rails in one way or another wherever it's a main chain e-cash lightning or otherwise um and when that happens we know we've hit the milestone for market product fit and we switch to the next phase which is growth where we'll just Just see what's working and just lean into it. And we won't stop until we pass 1 billion users. Yeah, we were talking about this earlier this week. It seems like the point at which people in meat space

don't need to convert Bitcoin to dollars and then go spend at a merchant. Like once those merchants adopt and it's just like FETI app to FETI app, Bitcoin to Bitcoin, whether it's de-cash, lightning, on-chain, that will be a critical tipping point and moment where it's like,

all right, this thing is running wild. That's the market product fit. And there's many hypotheses as to how that can happen. It doesn't really matter which one it is. We're exploring the ones that seem from the last 18 months to have the most excitement.

They're the ones that got people like, say the children excited and rep unite and so on. but we're also really excited to have this Cambrian explosion where we just make it easy for anybody to serve a federation. It's already quite easy. It's just going to get easier and easier over the next three or four months now that we're able to focus in on it. My vision, my sort of crazy idea would be you should be able to at some point be able to click a button and create a federation, you know, or if you already have the hardware, download an app

app and just click and it will just create and we're we're we know technically how to do that and it would just every month that goes by the hope is it just gets easier and easier towards that that goal so that it becomes less and less of an excuse to run a federation and if you run a federation that's the beginning of running other stuff in a self in a self-running way so So you'll start with that community custody, but then you can imagine people start taking on lightning node operation and Bitcoin node running as well is something that is related to running a federation.

And more and more of this infrastructure becomes decentralized with basically the Fediment servers being the sort of patient zero of these decentralized hardware and services. Yeah, with that in mind, there's a lot of preconceived notions, particularly from the Western perspective. It's like, I find it hard to believe that people are going to do this, but I think, if anything, in emerging markets, people have really proven if they need to get something done,

they will get it done. And again, in these extreme edge cases, the individuals find a way to make things work and so on that thought like what are what are some other preconceived notions from the western world as you build this product targeted firstly for emerging markets that may be a blind spot that people don't really recognize or realize yeah um there are many but one that just immediately came to mind when you said it was and this was a big insight for me as well i mean i i'm a like a child of two worlds my my family came from from nigeria i grew up in the uk i traveled backwards between the two so i like

to think that i have like a foot in these two worlds but even then i was completely blind to this one uh namely that um in the west um especially the communities that we're in we're in the bitcoin community people understand concepts like stacking sats they understand um the importance of having disposable income and savings and bitcoin as a savings technology inherently so we are actually even in western terms where most of the west is very consumerist and and doesn't focus enough on savings we're already like an unusual subset of that and so if you have disposable income and you understand the importance of savings and investment then your relationship with money is going to be first money is the store of value because i have

value to store so i'm going to see as a store of value first second it's a medium of exchange but again if you have value to store um you probably are likely to have a plethora of payment options like just you have more than you know to account but you're going to have visa paypal dinos card amex you're going to have um you're going to have mastercard and venmo and um you're just going to have a ton of options um and many of them are actually even though behind the scenes this is sort of like um this sort of like ruby goldberg here machine of different companies from your point of view you just literally take your phone nowadays and or a piece of plastic and tap it on some machine and the payment's made it's literally one tap to pay for for most people

and so money as a medium of exchange your experience of it is only a short amount of If you take all those taps over the period of a month, you probably actually are transacting and going through the process of transacting for minutes a month, maybe two or three minutes a month when you add all those taps up together. Whereas you're thinking about it as a store of value for almost all the month. And then finally, store of units of account, i.e. how you measure prices and thinking about prices. Unless you're buying a house or a car, you're generally not really thinking about money as a unit of account. If you have savings and so on, if you think about the times when you buy a cup of coffee from various places, you probably don't know how much you paid for the coffee. you just didn't even think about the unit of account it was you just checked was it was it under was it one was it one or um units or was it two units was it under ten dollars then i don't really care the price you know because you have enough wealth to just not even think about the money as a unit of account so number one by far store of value because you have value to store

because of technology you spend a little bit thinking about and money as a medium of exchange in your monthly living and almost no time thinking about it as a unit of account unless you're literally buying a house then you'll be thinking about the price and negotiating about thinking about price um now the moment that you are in a disempowered community and you have no disposable income it literally flips and that was the insight um your first thought is not store a value because you have no value to store so if you have nobody to store you you don't you can't start thinking about do i use an etf or not or do i do um some sort of staking or a yield you can't think about that because that requires you or even trading or investing in nfts or or

inscriptions all of that requires disposable income to be able to do that um and so 99.9 of what people work on in the west is not relevant to anybody who does not have any disposable income which is billions of people so store of value you spend the least amount of time thinking about not the most. Your second, you spend much more time on medium of exchange because you might do the same number of transactions in a month. You're buying food, accommodation, and so on, but you have way less and way less efficient payment options. But you might be using cash way more often, which means that if I want to buy something, I can't just go online and pay. Or if I do get to the shop, when I buy it, I don't just tap to pay. I have to go into my wallet, find the coins,

find the change, and then pass it to the merchant. And then they give me the change. I receive the change. I count it. So actually, the actual medium of exchange interaction is a larger percentage of your month because you have less efficient tools to do it. So you spend more time think of it as a medium of exchange. And then finally, again, if you are someone who has no disposable income, slight movements in price or prices going up or down have a massive effect to you. So every single purchase you're making, you're thinking about the price. If you're buying a coffee, you think about the price of the coffee. And this is not just the global stuff. This disempowered communities everywhere in Midwest United States or Northern UK or the outskirts

of Paris, it will be the same. If you have no disposable income, you're going to be consumed about units of account. How much is the price of this? How much is the price of that? I have the budget. Can I afford it? Is my money going to reach the end of the month? So you're spending most of your time thinking about unit of account in your local currency, not in Bitcoin, not in usd in your local currency you're thinking about you know the count your second you're spending second the most of the time thinking about medium of exchange because medium of exchange is much less efficient you don't have this smorgasbord of payment options and the ones you do have are way slower if i haven't got enough cash i have to go and walk to my bank and withdraw cash

and come back out you know so again it takes i spend a lot of time thinking about it as a medium exchange and i spend the absolute least time thinking about it as store of value and that's the big thing the moment you don't have disposable cash your relationship with money does a 180 overnight and that was a big insight for us and and a lot of the things that we built around that are um as a result of that and if you're in the west and you and you don't have that realization a lot of the things that are needed to get bitcoin to be used as a medium of exchange would just be invisible to you they're beyond your um they're beyond your sphere of of of ability to perceive because you're living in a world where disposable disposable capital is the norm and so

you have to sort of mentally think imagine i had no disposable cash can i empathize and mentally intuit that world and if you do you'll realize that a lot of the products and offerings that you have to give have to be the diametric opposite of of of what they are in the west just one example you want to be able to convert bitcoin to fiat and fiat to bitcoin in the west the predominant conversion that you're interested in as a consumer is fiat to bitcoin you want to buy bitcoin you want to stack sats but in a world where you have no disposable income then what generally is happening is you're receiving bitcoin from friends from family from abroad the diaspora from aid agencies and the predominant conversion is going from bitcoin to fiat you just want to

quickly convert it into fiat so you can buy the stuff that you need to buy so it's literally as a result of that difference disposable income or not your relationship just on conversion becomes immediately flipped and so that was a big insight and and a lot we're still we're still um digging into what it means in terms of of the interface but we think that that insight is a key part of us of finding the solution for bitcoin being used as a medium of exchange yeah thinking about what you just said in the product they're bringing to market particularly like stability pools do you think on the unit of account side being able to give communities in emerging markets of the world like these dollar stability pools like that is one step in the right

direction where they're not making the conscious decision of all right how much how many naira do i have how many um vietnam dong do i have they're they're you give them a dollar saving account that's backed by bitcoin with these stability pools and that is a step in the right direction where they get the yeah they get the peace of mind like i have a dollar savings tool now that i didn't have before and even though the dollar is inflating and our monetary policy isn't as responsible as many would like it to be it's impossible to ignore that out of all the fiat currencies it is relatively the most stable yeah and but it's interesting even that might not be far enough um and again this is part of the insights but a dollar savings tool we again

naturally think yeah we want stable coins usd stable coins and so on but actually we are seeing that there could be more of a demand for local currency stable assets why would i want that i mean us usds why why would i want the local currency because for me in this world my unit of account is not usd usd is just as alien to me as bitcoin and this is where you know so we're not going far enough but then you think well but it inflates far worse well okay so i need to educate people about keynesian versus austrian economics and no i just want to pay for my groceries and i need the currency that's in the that the prices are in in my in my country which is why for example you can't do that with a fiat backed stablecoin

you just can't do that because feedback to stablecoins require fiat banks and and teva is not even willing to hold the money in a european bank you know they're pushing back in europe let alone hold it in a boswanan bank account so um you can only do that with something like stable balances and each community needs to do that for their own community but what can be done though is because it's backed by bitcoin you could potentially hedge that um against usd and therefore that delta could be potentially given back to the user in in in a form of effectively they have a local currency but with some level of interest so they almost now have not just a community custody solution but they have an interest-bearing account almost for

themselves and that's subconsciously and psychologically way more intuitive than a usd account um than a usd account which is in a currency that there's 642.5 kenyan shillings to the U.S. dollar and I need 2,500 Kenyan shillings for my groceries. What is that in U.S. dollars? What is that in U.S. dollars? I have no idea. I'm pretty numerate, but I don't think I can easily in my head do 2,500 divided by 642.5. I just can't do that in my head very easily. So why would we expect billions of people to be able to do that? But if you tell me my budget is 2,500 and you give me 2,500 Kenyan shillings, and by the way, if I manage to hold onto some of it, I earn more Kenyan shillings, that makes more sense. And it's thousands of

decisions like that, that come from realizing and listening to people on the ground that you realize that these would have not, you're not going to come to these insights if you're in the West and not dealing, or if, no, it's not actually the West, actually. I think that that language we need to adjust. It's if you're in an environment where you and your friends have disposable income, because you could be in the global South and you and your friends have disposable income. And again, you might not notice this because you're going to be in your disposable income bubble in in the global south um and you might be very familiar with bitcoin and stable coins and so on and be using those and be doing significant volumes but not aware of your

fellow countrymen and women who are not in that camp and the same will happen in the west as well where you could be living somewhere and you have disposable income which we're all most people in in the Bitcoin space are fortunate to be and I can't be including myself. And so, but there'll be someone round the corner who doesn't have that situation and their reality is literally the diametric opposite of yours. But because everybody that you know is going to be another bird of the same feather, as it were, your view of the world is going to be based around that. Now, in the West, is the percentage of people who have disposable income is way higher than in the global south but it's it's still the same thing this is a worldwide issue um medium of exchange usage of bitcoin is

going to be in a community somewhere my bet will be in a community somewhere where um first it will eventually be everywhere but the first will be in places where they do not have disposable income wherever that is in the world but that will be it just they tend to be more frequently in the global south but it's more about do you have disposable income or not yeah that makes sense and do you think with hopefully the success of feddy it's continued adoption like that's what interests me about what you're building and designing for these extreme edge cases like is your hope at some point over the long haul one decade two decades however long it takes these economies sort of meet in the middle like you give individuals in these lower tier economic

situations the tools to to pull themselves up and coordinate activity and give themselves the ability to separate themselves from the ills of the central bank and governments that that control their money and debase their money slowly but surely and sometimes even more rapidly over time i i well i one that's my hope but i don't think it's 10 20 years i think actually we're going to see them meeting in the middle very soon um really so if we take we talk a lot about these disempowered communities but even empowered communities i think that you're going to find people wanting to use something like a Feddy as a very simple spending, lightning spending wallet.

It's an incredible experience, and it's only going to get better if you want to. But if you want it where you can choose who is going to be your custodian, you can choose and set up a custodian closer to you or in your community. But the experience is this simple experience that's as simple as using some of these more centralized solutions you're going to still find that useful and so that you're going to gain so you're going to see them both using it in in that context the other thing that i'm really excited to see and we're already starting to see and we're going to lean into that is that you have um in the global south all these people and who want to use it as an app to help them um manage money

spend money and eventually form savings um as they if they're constantly receiving money in bitcoin and then they convert it to local currency and they realize that the amount of local currency they get for the same amount of bitcoin keeps going up or the amount of bitcoin to receive the same amount of local currency keeps going down they will be um implicitly trained on the concept of inflation without having to be trained on the concept of inflation but um to service these federations and communities there's going to be a series of different service providers that will need and will start to appear you're going to have you're seeing these public federations starting to pop up for example and they provide a service for people who want to store smaller

amounts or get started before they set up their own federation so I mean interested to see how that goes um there is something called um fed event gateways that connect federations to the lightning network federations can run them themselves but you're starting to see people offering that as a third party service where they can service multiple federations so the federations only need to um in a trustless way so the federations only needs to um um the communities only to run the federations and they can connect to one or more gateways to connect to lightning network um and that's another service that we're starting to see that's a and and a third yet a third one is for stable balance someone has to be be willing to provide stability

in bitcoin the the benefit of doing that is they can they are effectively going long bitcoin so they can earn a yield on their bitcoin but the end users uh are benefit from from having stability for these short periods of time and again we're starting to see interest in providing that stability provision and then finally all of these things um need um time and skill to set up and support so you're starting again to see people um looking to offer services where they help people set up stability provision services or help people um set up 30 minute gateways or help people to set up federations so it's basically set up support services as well so and all of these i think are fertile ground for people in the west to right now effectively stack more sats by helping

communities around the world and in advancing the use case and proof of the use case of bitcoin as a medium of exchange globally while so it's a win-win they get to gain more bitcoin while helping people and well advancing the cause of bitcoin yeah you know it'll be interesting to see how that side of the market develops because if you agree that the price of bitcoin is going to go up long term like i wonder if there's a contractual agreement whatever it may be that you could set up where if you lock bitcoin in you keep it there for four years so like if you're a bitcoiner and you're thinking like all right what are the chances that the price of bitcoin goes up what's the time horizon I'm comfortable with.

It's like, all right, I'll lock it up and provide liquidity to the stability pool for four years. And if Bitcoin does what it has done historically, I should have more Bitcoin at the end of the day for providing that service. Or you can hedge and you could, if it's local currency, you could hedge it against USD and then you're, what's the chance that USD

is going to perform better than the local currencies? Like 99.99% and I've still effectively earned a Bitcoin yield. so there's ways you can like reduce the risk you so you can choose i just go long and and make um but for long periods of time and and make a large yield or i hedge and make a smaller but way more lower risk yield and i can choose to do the two so there's uh there's there's just so much and stuff and and here's the thing you're you're able to retain your bitcoin um obviously if you provide a good service um earn more while helping communities and so that's why these two sides are coming together um and advancing the cause of of bitcoin not just as a store of value but as a

medium of exchange it's like a win-win-win and uh um yeah i'm interested to see how that progresses as well yeah with this in mind i mean everything we're talking about today that we have talked about over the last couple of years um both on air and off air like this is something that i recognized immediately when eric first dropped the mvp of his e-cash system a few years ago was like well this could be massive and a lot of people jump forward to the end state possibilities of everything you can do here but as we all know particularly if you've been in bitcoin for long enough like managing expectations is important so with that in mind like what is what would you say in regards to that just managing expectations like obviously everything we're talking about

as possible in the long run but these things have to be built out these markets have to be developed you need user feedback iteration all that and so with that in mind what would you tell the audience in terms of where we are today and what the path to getting to these endpoints look like and what should people expect that to look like that's a that's a really good question because um it's just Well, I would say that we have now launched and it's taken about two years. I, as the sort of crazy entrepreneur, said it was going to take six months and it took two years to get to this stage. But many people, an example was a friend of Eric's, felt that this was either never going to happen or take over a decade based on conservative estimates to achieve. And so the fact that we've got to this point in two years is incredible.

um but the next phase um the market product fit phase is where um we work really hard to find really strong demand in one or two markets around the world it doesn't matter where they are um but we before we go on to like aggressive growth we want to stay patient we're building a decentralized super app a super app run by and for communities which is built completely off freedom technologies only um so an experience like wechat or alipay or what elon musk wants for x.com but instead of running by the you know chinese government or you know a silicon valley megalomaniac it's run by communities for communities and um this is something that we need to just keep focusing on and know that it will take some time to do that being the case

our progress is incredibly fast and every day that goes by every week that goes by it will just get better and better and better well let's say every month just i don't want to but you'll you'll see adjustments and improvements every month on an ongoing basis yeah and i mean i can attest Just the user experience alone. Once you figure out, and you guys have made it really easy, particularly with the launch last week, to join a federation. You don't have to paste codes or anything anymore. You just click and you're in.

And the ability to join a federation, hit receive, and then present somebody with a Lightning invoice and get Bitcoin that way. And then when you're spending from there on out, not knowing, not needing to know, maybe you do know, but you don't need to know how that Bitcoin is moving, whether it's within the Mint or to a Lightning invoice, like to use their experience is just far superior in the reliability.

And shout out to Eric on that as well, because there's also something called observer.fediment.org, which is really cool, which is Fediment Observer is basically like the Fediment ecosystem equivalent of a blockchain explorer. So the beauty of the eCash protocol is that you can be completely transparent

about all e-cash, not all of the information at the federation stores to anyone in the world. And because it's cryptographically perfectly private to the guardians, it means it's perfectly private to anyone else.

So you can actually observe minting of e-cash and redemptions and so on for any publicly listed federation. So, and over time, this is very early days there will be more um transaction history of these public federations there will be um more i'm assuming more public federations and you'll be able to see them and and navigate them and and observe and so yeah it's the first blockchain explorer the fede

mental observer um um as well and so but this is part of it on on one hand as a user you have this really simple experience with the Feddy app. But as someone who wants to be able to observe the Feddy sphere, as it were, and how it's operating, it'll be interesting to see when an event happens, how does, and it will be interesting for us to see, you're going to see the same time as us. When an event happens, how does the Feddy sphere react to that?

Just like how does an event happening in geopolitics affect the Bitcoin blockchain, you know, or the mempool? where it will be interesting to see as well. Yeah, yeah, it will be. And I think it's also, before we wrap up here, we should mention what you guys announced at the end of your launch video last week was the fact that by January 3rd, 2026,

the FETI platform will be AGPL, open source technology. Yeah. So as of May the 4th, may the 4th be with you. We already went source available, but we kept on the wraps until the announcement where we gave a copy of the source code to a number of parties just in case. So right now, from a security point of view, you want to be able to see the code. You can do that already. It was possible from May 4th and it's possible now. And in fact, the moment we did it, we added something to the Bitcoin blockchain, which was the hash of the letter confirming that we were going over to this protocol of source available and eventually open source. And it's an interesting block number. I think it was like block 8 for 2069, I believe it was, which is a nice cool number.

But beyond that, we will be fully open source latest, and that's in the latest January 3rd, 2026. If we were at any point as a company to decide to shut down or stop developing the FedE app, it would instantly become open source from that point onwards instantly as part of the terms as well as a little detail and also at any point we could decide to say we're going open source earlier and once we say that we can go earlier we can never go later and if we state an earlier date that is the new new target date so that will be the absolute latest time and it could be significantly before that that's awesome it's incredible to see it's uh also i mean that's uh one of the frustrating parts about being in bitcoin and particularly when new

protocols launch happen with the lightning network still happening to today happening with the federman protocols everybody expects it to be this out-of-the-box panacea that works immediately and does everything that it can do right out of the box and it's simply not the case these things have to get built and that has been one of the most rewarding things for me as just an observer over the last three years is that it is getting built it is getting better it is increasing user experience privacy usability and it's it's going to take time And the fact that we've gotten to the point where you guys have your official launch out in the wild and now you're going and working with the communities to iterate and continue to improve the product, like, this is a very exciting time. Um, and that's what I would caution anybody listening who, um, reads a white paper, sees

like initial protocol launch and, uh, sits there asking like, why can't it do all the things you said it could do? It's like, well, it takes time to build. And I think where you're building at Fetty and the work that your team is doing on the Fetty Mint protocol is a testament to, um, if you spend the time and put the effort in, like you can actually build powerful products that that are giving the world utility that simply does not exist anywhere out anywhere else but it takes time it takes time but we have an incredible team and we're adding to the team all the time as well um and um yeah you're

gonna we've now started the race and it's just going to the foundations are in place and they're very reliable and the core foundations are there so now it's the fun bit because we now actually get to open it up to more people that accelerates the amount of feedback we get and we can resource up to be able to fulfill the feedback that they give us so it's just going to get better and better and better um this is the way forward super apps are the most popular apps in the software ecosystem um many of them have billions of users or hundreds of millions of users um they use around the world and they're coming to the west telegram is transforming into a super in front of our eyes and x.com their stated mission is to become a super app so it's going to become

much more common in the west but in in asia and across the world it's already these are by far the most common apps and every single one of them are incredibly centralized we need to put that power into the hands of any community anywhere to be able to run and that's what we are going to do we must do it and we will go we are going to do it and uh we are going to ngu never give up until we have done it well i know i said that was the last topic but and we don't have to put this in the recording if you're not comfortable talking about it but the other number ngu number go up as a founder running a business on a bitcoin standard what has bitcoin in the treasury meant to you guys in terms of how it gives you optionality business yeah it gives us incredible

option and so this is where i had the advantage of running a bitcoin exchange for many years starting above a garage um and very focused on bitcoin um and after a while it became clear to me Probably around 2015, and we had a lot of pushback from our investors at that time on this idea. But I just felt that we're a Bitcoin exchange, and so we're effectively a one-way bet on Bitcoin. If Bitcoin fails, then our business becomes obsolete anyway, so we might as well hold Bitcoin. This was a very crazy idea at the time. Because we and also what we are doing as a business is inherently helping Bitcoin become more of a money, become more proven. So as we succeed, Bitcoin should go up in value by virtue of our activities.

And yes, we generate revenues and so on. But if we just did the numbers, the amounts that we can make from holding Bitcoin in our treasury could also be significant. And that was pushed back for probably about a year until we finally managed to get it to agreement for that. We hold a small amount of Bitcoin. And after over the following few years, we ran for nearly a decade. It grew to quite a sizable amount and ended up being a significant amount of our assets in the end, beyond our revenues, our profitable revenues. So that's already was ingrained. So when we had the opportunity in Feddy, we had the same conversation and we realized that we wanted to put a significant amount in Bitcoin as well.

But the key difference here, though, from the learnings from my previous company is I was really insistent that the core investors that we worked with were people who had an understanding, an inherent understanding of the power of Bitcoin and being on a Bitcoin standard and people who shared the mission and vision of not just for FedE, but for Bitcoin and the greater Bitcoin ecosystem. that was key and that was the learning so they wouldn't take a year to agree and as a result um there was broad approval for this idea i i talked to um uh jack booth who's who's um on the board and you know i was going to put a certain percentage in his only response is why don't you put a larger percentage in and which is like and and i would i'm sure it'd be the same if it was anyone from 1031 or Block or Trammell Venture Partners or anyone else. They would have understood the importance of being on a Bitcoin standard. And so we did that. And it means that we've been able to build a team. We're also obviously very focused on being

controlled with our expenses. But even so, we're growing and we've been operating for two years now. And at this point in time, we still have, in terms of asset value, more money than the amount that we originally raised in the company, even after all the costs for two years. And that's by virtue of what's obvious for someone in this, but outside of the space, not so obvious, but the power of being on a Bitcoin standard. Yeah, it's extremely powerful. 1031 is definitely similar to Jeff Booth. like why not more why not more it's uh it is and it is insane it completely um changes the way founders view again the optionality that if you take a long-term view and obviously you have over a decade experience building companies in the bitcoin space and

we're able to recognize that um with the exchange you're running in the uk uh bit floor and apply that to fetty like it's it's a secret weapon that that many people particularly outside the bitcoin space do not recognize and if you're really working on a project with very ambitious goals like the ability to have that treasury safety net held in bitcoin just gives you the ability to to focus on those ambitious goals which is again a secret weapon yeah it's exactly it anyway that's uh that's where we are we're super excited we're we're ready to rock and roll um and now we're we're actually racing we're moving um yeah i'm just i i don't like to talk too much about what's coming in future i really prefer proof of work

over proof of talk um so um but yeah i'm very very excited about what we're going to see in the perceived velocity of feddy over the over the coming months yeah i'm as well um very pumped for you guys very proud of everything you guys are doing um having having been close like i remember and i'm getting wordy here at the end but i remember when justin and the mutiny guys did the first mint to lightning gateway payment in the commons in Austin and that being like a magical moment. I was like over their shoulder watching them executed from the command line and that's the type of stuff that most people don't see that I remember the feeling of joy that was

in that room because it's like holy shit it worked and to see it a full fledged super app now like it's not easy. before i i was aware of uh um um freddy mint uh eric also did a tweet of the first buying a cup of coffee with ecash in 2021 i believe it was um so as well so you know there's a lot of there's a lot of history um by both of those guys and also the team that's been supporting them and uh yeah where my mission is to make is to just work with incredible people um and bring this missing piece of the ecosystem out there and and be as a fully fledged part which is basically providing this simple integration point and user experience that anyone can access and anyone can

use and if we're not doing a good enough job support the code and and build something better either compete um contribute or comment if you if you can't contribute and you can't can't compete then comment and we'll take all the feedback um really gratefully because no matter how it's given um we're very thick skinned and it's all going to lead us to learn and improve the product so we're ready for it let's go you heard it here first we'll end there obi thank you that's all we got today all right peace