TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #703: Payments Without Permission with Nick Slaney

Episode Date: January 14, 2026

Marty sits down with Nick Slaney, founder of MoneyDevKit and former Block engineer behind BitKey and C=, to discuss how self-custody Bitcoin payments are solving the global access problem that Stripe and stablecoins can't, and why the vibe coding explosion makes this the perfect moment for Lightning to finally go mainstream. Nick on Twitter: https://x.com/nickslaney moneydevkit: https://x.com/moneydevkit STACK SATS hat: https://tftcmerch.io/ Our newsletter: https://www.tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/ TFTC Elite (Ad-free & Discord): https://www.tftc.io/#/portal/signup/ Discord: https://discord.gg/VJ2dABShBz Opportunity Cost Extension: https://www.opportunitycost.app/ Shoutout to our sponsors: Bitkey https://bit.ly/4pOv2L4 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc Salt of the Earth: [https://drinksote.com/tftc\](https://drinksote.com/) 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/ Newsletter [tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/](http://tftc.io/bitcoin-brief/) Twitter https://twitter.com/tftc21 Instagram https://www.instagram.com/tftc.io/ Nostr https://primal.net/tftc Follow Marty Bent: Twitter https://twitter.com/martybent Nostr https://primal.net/martybent Newsletter https://tftc.io/martys-bent/ Podcast https://www.tftc.io/tag/podcasts/

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 And that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Nick Slaney, welcome to the show, sir. Hey, Marty. Thanks for having me on.

Thanks for coming on. I think you're at the intersection of something that fascinates me incredibly right now, which is Bitcoin, obviously. been a bitcoiner for 13 years but i've been getting into vibe coding and you uh you released a demo of integrating your product money dev kit uh into replit and making it easier for vibe coders to to accept payments pretty trivially using the bitcoin network um so jump off why don't we give a a brief description of your background and why you decided to start money dev kit and what it is at a high level yeah definitely uh nick slaney been a bitcoiner for a long time since like 2013 i joined block as a hardware engineer uh and around that time

that's actually when jack started talking more publicly about bitcoin um really exciting for me as a bitcoiner and i was also getting into the lightning network at the time um so that was going on they internally said they were going to start working on what became big key i got onto the big key team exactly as a as a mechanical engineer so i did help do the product design engineer product design for big key uh and at the time i was also getting the lightning network i was like hey we can do more with the lightning network at block we just had cash app withdrawals and deposits at the time um so i went and did a put together a doc picture around the company got the attention of the right people and we started c equals so at block um you know we

started c equals which was a routing node on the lightning network and we wanted to do a lot with that node what we ended up doing was mostly serving cache app and you know making the best routing node we could um and we saw really big growth in volume which was really cool um fast forward to the end of 2024 early 2025 uh i ended up leaving block um and i wanted to pursue kind of the insights we saw at block we saw a bunch of volume on the light network we saw a lot of people paying we didn't see a lot of people actually receiving payments so kind of that money dev kit was born out of that this idea of hey let's make it actually easy to receive lightning payments online and it just so happens you know all this vibe coding ai stuff was taking off i actually started

money dev kit it was me and sonnet at the time like hey take ldk node let's try to make it something i can run which i kind of had an idea about um but from there i got some help got some people to uh you know money dev kit is not completely vibe coded it's made by really legit developers but um yeah it's been a lot so money dev kit is basically now um a way to take lightning payments on your website and we've gotten it to the point where you can just say hey, Replit agent, add payments with money dev kit, and it just works. And that's a dream. So that's a video we put out on New Year's Eve, actually. And we have a bunch of people trying it now. Yeah. And so when you're calling a Replit agent saying, hey, implement money dev kit,

what's happening behind the scenes? So we've actually created an MCP server, which allows you to create an account and do all the money dev kit things via the agent. And Replit has this integration where you can easily add mcp servers so the agent actually reaches out to our website creates an account looks at our docs uh implements everything in our docs and um puts in all the environment variables everything for you so the agent is basically doing everything and we've just given uh the agent the right things to to poke and prod to make it work and i think one of the reasons you're focused on bitcoin specifically money dev kit is because of the sovereign neutral asset of the protocol itself i think there are many people out there vibe coding many applications

will need payments and many people run into problems with something like stripe particularly or even stable coins to a certain extent what is it about bitcoin and the lightning network specifically that is perfectly suited for this explosion in app development that we're seeing the way we can get such an easy flow is because we're doing self-custody and if you go to the money dev kit website we're not saying self-custody care about self-custody this is the biggest thing ever what we're saying is accept payments with self-custody you don't have to do all the onboarding KYC that you have to do when you use something like Stripe. So, you know, we've kind of packaged that up so that we can get the access.

And it's kind of two things. It's access and ease of use. So the demo of just pay ad payments, and then you can take a production payment in less than five minutes. That's huge. No one's been able to do that before. Even if you're in a supported country by Stripe and you go through the Stripe onboarding flow, it'll take, you know, a day at least to get things going. So ease of use is huge, but also access.

Since we're self-custody, we don't have to have the limitations of Stripe. So there's a lot of people out there. If you go on X right now and you search Stripe rejected, you'll see hundreds of people, a lot of them actually in India who are saying, hey, I made this cool app. I'm really excited. I just found out Stripe doesn't work in my country. What do I do? And they're in a lot of pain. It's like actually probably the worst thing to put days, if not weeks of your life into an app and find out, wait, I can't get paid for this. So using Bitcoin is the best way for us to reach those people because Bitcoin was built with the idea of self-custody in mind. That's what gives us a way to actually reach as many people as possible, as easily as possible. And what's

happening under the hood when you when you use money dev kit and with money dev kit we've basically made libraries that easily fit into what people are using today our first library was next js a lot of people make websites on next js and deploy them to for self it's a very easy thing we have another library that's uh replit so it uses express uh vitae like the kind of things that Replit uses. And what we're doing in the library is we're actually giving you a little mini lightning node that you run yourself. When I say we're giving you a lightning node, I think people automatically go to like, wait, I have to run a server and I have to do this. We do it all for you. So it's an LSP. We actually let you hold your keys and you're able to run a server on your own

infrastructure but we are you know handling channel liquidity and all the kind of complicated stuff the main thing is you're holding your keys and you have a node that's deployed on your own infrastructure and how do you how do you make users aware that they're holding their own keys and the responsibility that comes with that we have uh it in the docs we have it actually in the mcp server too like hey this is uh you want to this is your wallet key you want to keep this safe. But also, we think the typical MoneyDevKit user is maybe not a Bitcoiner. Actually, we kind of hope that's the case. For Bitcoiners, I think they know pretty well, like, hey, this is my key. But also, we want people to be offboarding either to their exchange to get their own local currency

or to their own wallet. So we don't really see MoneyDevKit as the place where you store all your money more just an easy place to receive payments and then from there you can bring it to your wallet your self-custody or to your local currency so we do say hey you know it's good to keep this seed make sure you don't lose it um but also we expect most people to not be keeping a lot of money on money dev kit and right now it's only one-time sales but you have subscriptions and use in space coming soon? Yeah. So we're going to be covering all of the things that people expect from a payment product. A lot of people have made like, hey, you can, this is a developer tool. You can use Bitcoin payments with this, but all they give is send and receive. That's good for a wallet.

But most people who are making websites, they want the full stack. Stripe does a lot more than just the credit card api uh receive credit card payments they're doing customers subscriptions products these are all things we're working on now we actually just got our customers integration started and uh subscriptions and products and all that sorts of things are uh going to be following soon yeah so let's let's lean into the do you think because this has been an ongoing conversation over the last two years particularly as ai has really hit the scene and more particularly this idea of an agentic framework more specifically an autonomous agentic sort of digital ecosystem arising and i've always been under the impression that it makes sense like if agents are going to

be running around the internet doing tasks for humans and some of those tasks necessitating the transfer of money, Bitcoin makes sense. Is this your view as well? And if so, let's explain to the audience why Bitcoin may be perfectly suited for this specifically. Yeah, definitely. The biggest thing is what I was talking about before is the self-custody aspect. With MoneyDevKit, we've made it so self-custody is super accessible and you don't really have to think about it. And the benefits that gives is you can accept payments anywhere. You don't need to have like the very rigid, basically set up a bank account to accept payments. And this translates really well to agents because I think you see a lot of people talking about agentic payments and

a lot of people saying like, this is going to be huge, but I haven't seen anyone actually do it yet and i think a lot of it is they are in um you know discussions with all sorts of people at payment networks and they're talking about the sort of things that keep people from getting on those payment network networks in the first place and trying to figure out how this is going to work with a easy to use self-custody solution that an agent can just spin up itself you don't have to worry about any of that because there's no payment processor that's taking on the risk of what the agent is doing. The agent is just using a software tool that lets it interact with Bitcoin and Lightning. So that's hugely powerful when you're talking about things like, hey, is an agent going

to pay for an MCP server? Are agents going to be paying each other? Are agents going to be creating other agents that then are paying other agents? All these kind of use cases in the traditional finance world, you have to start with, well, where am I going to scan the passport? How do I make sure it's the country I support. And, you know, I know where the money is coming from when it's self-custody and it's very much a responsibilities on the developer and the agent, then it's just so much simpler. So we're, we're looking into the agentic payment stuff now. And I think we can get to a proof of concept much faster than a lot of these companies that are, you know, starting with Stripe or starting with traditional payments. Or stable coins. You know, I think you have strong

views on stable coins specifically what are what are your thoughts on the fascination and the energy behind stable coins as an industry right now a lot of people have asked us about stable coins especially as we raised our seed round kind of hey stable coins are the hot thing we were raising right around the time when stripe was spending a billion dollars on privy and uh bridge and all these kind of stable coin things and i think everyone was there's a lot of fervor but underneath people who know how stable coins work and they know why tether is popular were pretty confused marty i think you were probably i think at least odell was at the um bitcoin for america uh conference in washington dc i was there too yeah yeah and paulo was there

i don't know if you noticed that but i think that was the first time paulo ever stepped foot on u.s soil he's a you know the ceo of tether and people in the industry know that tether is popular because it lets you hold dollars in places where it's basically illegal to hold dollars. And Tether's whole business was based around having absolutely no U.S. nexus. No one went to the U.S. They didn't hire any U.S. citizens. So the whole Genius Act, Circle IPO, bridge privy thing, I think to most people in the industry, they were kind of like, what's going on. A USDC has always been a lower market cap than Tether because Tether got global access by completely avoiding the US. And when the Genius Act passed and we saw, hey, this has

these kind of onboarding requirements that banks have, I immediately was like, okay, well, this won't have the access that Tether had. And I think that's the real glaring thing right now. The narrative is, hey, stable coins are going to have Stripe go global. But actually, when you look at the plays, when you actually go through stable coin flows, you usually run into the sort of stuff that keeps people from like India out. So for us at MoneyDevKit, we're maximizing for access. We're really going for those people who are, hey, I created an app. Millions and millions of people can do this now.

but i can't use stripe and what we saw with stable coins was not a big um access expansion at least with the u.s stable coins but we saw basically a fintech play to replace mastercard and visa which is uh you know totally reasonable for stripe to do um and totally reasonable for basically every company in the u.s to try to get around mastercard and visa but for a really global big global TAM play, it doesn't really match up. So for us, Bitcoin was really the thing to go with. And actually, it's really interesting, Marty. We were talking with a traditionally underbanked business in the US. And they told us, hey, we're talking to a bunch of stablecoin companies. They're really excited. But with this Bitcoin thing, do you have to... Will MasterCard get

mad if you're doing this and i had to explain to this company like no bitcoin is an open network there's no uh i don't have to worry about what mastercard thinks about our business um and that to me was a really validating point to this um this idea of like hey these u.s stables that everyone's excited about they don't actually give you more access yeah and that uh i think we're very much aligned with this my pin tweet on my profile right now it's been fun i sent this out in july of last year the noise of this cycle is going to be stablecoin fervor real world asset tokenization in a resurgence of blockchaining all the things especially ai and i think the siren calls of stablecoin specifically are just fascinating because people view them as these

they conflate them with bitcoin's sovereign nature right like stablecoins you have a central issuer whether it's tether or circle or coinbase whoever it may be and they can blacklist you it's like you're you do have some i mean props for props or do there definitely are some efficiency and user experience improvements using stable coins over visa mastercard particularly in settlement times but at the end of the day these are centrally issued dollar um dollar equivalent tokens that can be frozen or blacklisted. And you have a company that sort of dictates who can and cannot use them, where Bitcoin does not have that problem. Exactly. And the other thing with stablecoins is people would say, hey, Nick, don't you think

people want stablecoins? And my response to them is the people we're trying to serve, they don't want stablecoins. They probably don't even actually want Bitcoin. They just want payments. They're in a position where they've made something and they actually can't receive any value. So however we can get it to them is most important. And it being Bitcoin, it means that we don't have those risks that the stablecoin issuers have. And it also means we have more liquidity, more exchanges available. So someone who wants to just take payments, they can get their local currency like rupees, or they can get Bitcoin if they want. But it really, I think, leaning into this kind of medium exchange frame of you can use Bitcoin for a transfer. It's the

easiest way to transfer value across from your old is exactly where we want to be right now. So freaks, this rip of TFTC was brought to you by our good friends at BitKey. BitKey makes Bitcoin easy to use and hard to lose. It is a hardware wallet that natively embeds into a two or three multi-sig. You have one key on the hardware wallet, one key on your mobile device and block stores a key in the cloud for you. This is an incredible hardware device for your friends and family, or maybe yourself who have Bitcoin on exchanges and have for a long time, but haven't taken a step to self-custody because they're worried about the complications of setting up a private public key pair, securing that seed phrase, setting up a pin, setting up

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replaced my wallet. I was using Ridge Wallet because it secured against RFID signal jacking. Silent, the cardholder does the same thing. It's much sleeker, fits in my pocket much easier. I also have the Faraday phone sleeve, which you can put a hardware wallet in. We're actually using it for our keys at the house too. There's been a lot of robberies. They have essential Faraday slings, Faraday backpacks. It's a Bitcoin company. They're running on a Bitcoin standard. They have a Bitcoin treasury. They accept Bitcoin via Strike. So go to slnt.com slash tftc to get 15 off anything or simply just use the code tftc when shopping at slnt.com patented technology special operations approved it has free shipping as well so go check it out what are your thoughts

on the um double-sided market problem because obviously bitcoin payments have been a meme since you've been a bitcoin since i've been a bitcoin i think roger burr particularly back in the 2012 to 14 era really pushing for merchant adoption we've seen a resurgence of that uh particularly in the last year with your former company block and square specifically integrating it into their point of sale systems and i think that's still one of the lingering questions in many bitcoiners minds is like when are enough people going to have bitcoin and be willing to spend it for this use case specifically to make sense yeah it's a big chicken the egg thing and when i look back at you know all the merchant adoption 2013 2014 i bought a laptop off overstock.com with on-chain

bitcoin i don't even want to look back at that transaction and know how much money that's worth now um but it was there right you could buy things on overstock with on-chain bitcoin i think the issues were um on-chain was slow i mean it's why lightning was invented right and also bitcoin hadn't really caught on yet. We were as super early adopter days. Now it's, you know, 10 plus years later, Bitcoin has already had its big kind of investor institutional investment phase. Um, all the kinds of memes around buying Bitcoin, more people own Bitcoin now. And also the technology is so much better. The, how far we've come with lightning is actually really impressive. and i think we're still at kind of the precipice of people reducing that to real practice

like actually taking the stuff we've done with lightning and making accessible for normal people so i think back in the day merchant adoption was a good idea but the consumers weren't there i think now we have the opposite problem i think we have a lot of people who either hold bitcoin or have access to send bitcoin and we don't have a lot of people accepting it. So we're kind of back at the beginning, but now I see a lot of demand on the consumer side and we're just going to shore it up on the merchant side. I was told that lightning is a complete and utter failure. Yeah, this is what I was going crazy about in 2024. 2024 was such a dark time for lightning

between Phoenix pulling out of the US and all that sort of uncertainty with the Biden administration um but at the time that's when at c equals our volumes were really changing and we were seeing you know what went from something where everyone was just sending uh you know deposits to other exchanges it started to shift towards payment size payments going to payment looking destinations in pretty good size for the lightning network and that's somewhat captured in the river um report but um yeah i was going crazy in 2024 i mean the fee market was a little wild too but um you know i think what i was saying through all that through all the ordinal stuff was this is going to blow over in like a year and we're going to be back to one

sap per b bite and we're going to be cruising and that's where we've ended up so you know lightning is definitely not dead a lot of people are using it and with money definitely i think a lot more people are going to be using it. Well, what would you say are the most underappreciated or is completely misunderstood aspects of the lightning network and how it's being used today and how much activity is actually happening on it? I think people really get tied up with the technical details. I think as an industry with Bitcoin, we're really focused on science when we should be focused on engineering. And what I mean by that is everyone's looking at lightning and they're looking at, okay, in a high fee market, it costs more to open channels or,

okay, if I use a UTXO sharing, then I can spread this cost out. And I think we're kind of looking at the wrong problems. I think what we really should be focusing on is how do we get this to people? How do we make this so people want to use it? And right now our fees are much, much lower than anything someone can use today. Like the person in India example, someone in India wants to take payments right now. They have to open an LLC in the US, which is just a giant cost right there. And then once you actually, if you can get on Stripe, once you're on Stripe and you're trying to take global payments, you start at, it's like 4.4% and you pay 1% on the currency exchange. So you're at like 5.4% if you're in the US. If you're outside the US, you're at 6.4%

because they tag on another percent to exchange to your local currency. So all of this focus on lightning fees and trying to get to micro BIPs for sending payments, it's not really the right focus. Because if I give someone payments in India right now, they're going to be like, wow, I could never have payments before and now I can have payments. So I feel like we micro focus on these things that are very abstract to normal people. And what we actually need to give is a nicely abstracted experience that someone can just use. So there's so much with lightning and Bitcoin where it's just like, OK, this is cool. And this will help when we have 100 million users.

But right now we don't have 100 million people sending payments. So the actual things we need to do are totally different. when you say like sending payments so i think to your point another big update from the block family companies i think was cash apps ability to pay a bitcoin invoice using your dollar balance on the app so do you think more companies integrating that particular use case strike obviously has it as well i think there are a few others that do that but Do you think that's like a necessary low level infrastructure that needs to be widely adopted to really allow money dev kit users to have incredible success because their end users at the end of the day, if they have cash app or strike and they know that they don't actually need to hold Bitcoin to pay a Bitcoin invoice, that they can they can buy something without needing to worry about holding Bitcoin? yeah it's huge for us because um yeah i mean it's a much better experience and it's something that

i was uh really hammering on at block is hey we should do this we should make this very easy for someone to just send a bitcoin payment i tweeted about it a lot too but basically yeah it fills that medium of exchange use case i think we're at right now we have the ux to be able to convert from dollars to Bitcoin and send it anywhere. And we have the liquidity in the exchanges to convert from Bitcoin to local currency anywhere else. And that's what people want. They don't necessarily, there are definitely people who want Bitcoin and we love them. And they're going to do probably really well if they hold Bitcoin over the long term. But most people, they want money in their bank account and Bitcoin is uniquely positioned to deliver that.

so i'm really happy that cash did that experience and i think if you're running an exchange right now and you can see kind of the if you're looking ahead having this sort of auto convert on and off ramp i know bull is doing it i think bull bitcoin is actually in a really good position and cash app and strike of course being able to be the on and off ramp for something like money dev kit is insanely valuable because we're going to have a lot of users who are creating apps, creating value, and they're going to want to just get money in their bank account. And that partnership, whether you're on the accepting side or you're partnering with a wallet, it's kind of the right setup to make money really flow. So that's why we use Cash App with every

demo we have because it's just so simple and quick and it's such a good example i could use coinbase or i could use another app and you get there but you have to like buy bitcoin you have to send it um i think if you're an exchange and you want to be forward thinking and you want to be in the future you should be looking at cash app and how they actually do their stuff yeah what's the response been like uh since you've been releasing these demos over the last few months i mean i think the replit one um was probably the biggest because obviously there's a lot of focus on replit specifically as people are getting into vibe coding but i have to imagine that um having that mcp um server integrated into replit could be massive for you guys yeah

because it just works and people aren't used to that with payments we actually had um i had like a fintech payments pm say like hey where do you do the onboarding i'd explain to them oh it's self self-custody you don't uh you don't have to do this for self-custody and um i think people are just astounded that they can just add payments in five minutes the access story is key but the ease of use and the ux is actually um kind of surprisingly what people are responding most about they're like i can't believe i can just do this this quickly um and especially i actually had one person say, oh, why should I use this next to Stripe? And I wasn't expecting it. I was thinking, okay, maybe most people are using this because they can't use Stripe. But that international

payment story, if you want to take payments globally, you actually get hammered on fees to do that. So it's been interesting. There's a lot of cool websites that are being spun up right now. And whenever you put out a video, it's kind of a lagging effect. It's like you get hundreds of thousands of views and you get you know a thousand bookmarks and those are all people who are going to go um it's really interesting for vibe coding and kind of this industry it all happens nights and weekends it's like someone doing a side project in their spare time and you know it only takes uh eventually those hit and take off and people start investing more and more time into it so um it's been really cool to see what people create and uh we're excited for what's next

what are what are some examples of things that people are using money dev kit with uh we have uh you know matt belez is a um he's kind of a famous vibe coder he was early on talking about vibe coding in bitcoin he's created impressionista.fun uh he told me that image generation is like the hello world of ai vibe coded apps where you just make like a nice app that calls maybe the open ai image generation um api and he has a nice prompt to make them all like super aesthetic pictures so he's using money dev kit which is really exciting and it's kind of cool because you see vibe coders and you see how they're talked about online and you think it's just like someone who's really dumb who can't do anything but in reality they're making more and more sophisticated apps

so what started as an image generation website has now gone to okay you can display your images on the website and now you can receive tips and you know matt has gone from just simple one-time payments to now he's looking for you know a way to attract customers and a way to pay out to customers so it's super interesting how someone goes from vibe coding something simple to now they're thinking about auth and databases and stuff like that another example is uh e currency hodler on uh x he is building sat doku so it's a sudoku website where you can pay for more lives when you want to keep going if you've made a mistake and you want to actually keep going so that's a very simple easy one-time payment uh but now he's gone to add an ai assistant that

actually makes you better at sudoku and you can pay the ai assistant to uh actually um make you bear it sudoku so he is another example where he's like started with something simple that's vibe coded and now he's wanting to track customers he's got a leaderboard he's got all these features he wants to add that are now approaching what someone on x is talking about when they're making like a a very nice uh software as a service website so um it's really interesting Someone who's really super early, they're already getting into stuff like auth, databases, customers, all the stuff that we're looking at. What is your ideal customer in your mind? The ideal customer is someone in one of these countries that aren't served by Stripe.

They have created an app that they think is valuable, and they pick up MoneyDevKit because they just want to get payments, and they don't have any other way to do it. That's where we really want to be. early customers are Bitcoiners who are excited. I mean, just day one, we've made it so that you can vibe code lighting payments into your website. And for Bitcoin, that kind of wasn't really a thing before. You'd have to run a server somewhere. You'd have to pay a monthly fee here to have just a library that you can take payments with is already, I think, a huge upgrade for Bitcoin payments in the Bitcoin space. But our dream is to be in India, to be in all these people who are saying, I can't use Stripe on X, they start using MoneyDevKit. Because those are people who are not

necessarily excited about Bitcoin, they're just excited about getting payments. And in a world where more and more people can make apps now and more and more people can make things that are valuable being able to give them a payment solution that gets them that value i think is tremendously valuable yeah and on the topic of vibe coding uh not necessarily well maybe we can focus on money dev kit but how somebody who's been uh engineering products for pretty large massive corporations block obviously um for many years now how how profound is the emergence of these ai tools and what is your preferred stack if you don't mind me asking yeah it's uh it's amazing um so at block you know i said i was a hardware engineer i'm not actually a software

engineer um and we had a team of software engineers building sequels uh we were using lightning dev kit um and the team would do a lot of the implementation i would do more like the product work and kind of define where we're going but now at money dev kit with ai my stack i use cursor i think uh people might call me an on canal for using cursor everyone's in cloud code and you know on a terminal um but with opus actually in the past month there was a bunch of user feedback that we had in linear and we're like okay we'll get to this um you know over the past like few weeks i've just been assigning them to opus through cursor and just getting a lot done and that's not something even over this past year with sonnet and all the other models codex i was doing work

but i was never really confident that we could merge it i would always have you know a developer look at it. Now with Opus, I can just, you know, I need something different on the website. I need something different with this experience. I can prompt it. And it's something we merged like that day. So our speed has really increased. It's really dramatic. A lot of people are talking about this online now, like Opus is one-shotting all these things. It's true. And it's now at a point where instead of being the annoying ceo who's like hey can we get this in someday you know um i can just go do it and so now i'm picking up all those kind of annoying not quite um super um you know hard tickets i can just do all those in a weekend and then we're you know we're on to the

big important stuff so it's uh it's truly like a a really big change in terms of the amount of headcount do you think you'll need in the long run how does it affect that like how big do you think you can get money dev kit with yeah we're not really focused on making money dev kit like this giant team um will grow to whatever we need to but right now we have um four developers and uh we're hiring a designer soon and i feel pretty good about that I think that's a really good place to be. And we have a lot of, you know, with Money Dev Kit, we are doing a lot of specialized stuff behind the scenes.

We're doing all the lightning stack. We're running everything that Spiral has, basically. And we're doing a lot of kind of special stuff. We're ahead of the LSP spec. We're doing all these kind of things that are very custom lightning things that AI can't do. So we'll always need kind of our lightning experts we've been lucky to hire. But for the feature work, when we talk about, hey, how quickly can we make something that matches Stripe in terms of subscriptions and features, I think we can get there really quickly. you in control. They secure over $12 billion in Bitcoin for more than 12,000 clients. That means

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make this viable i've always believed in self-custodial lightning and what we're doing at c equals was really to um further that uh the not a ton of this changed i think back to 2023 when we're doing like mutiny i was so excited about muni i was a big mutiny use user the mutiny guys shout out to ben and to tony and to paul they took the first draft of self-custody lightning and they did everything they could with it and they found all the bugs they found all the hard stuff um you know the ldk team really kind of decided hey we want to make mobile lightning work and that is really hard and i think i consider like mutiny kind of the first generation of lightning wallets where they figured everything out and uh i think um a lot of those bugs are

ironed out now and a lot of that stuff um has been figured out on on the backs of things like community. I think Matt's right. In the next year, I think we'll see a lot more self-custody Lightning. The way everything panned out with the fee market and the early take on self-custody Lightning payments, people got disillusioned. People went and created whole new L2s. um was it super necessary i don't know um but yeah i think uh now everything's a lot more refined and we have a lot better idea of how to make things work so uh i mean our entire company is staked on self-custody lightning right now and it's working amazing what was the biggest thing figured out was the uh keeping private keys and the secure enclave in the cloud

is it channel management lsp stuff muni took ldk kind of to its limit of running in the browser and really being super lightweight which was something no one had really attempted before um to that extent and i think in doing that they found there's no like one big thing where it was like hey we figured this out and now everything works it was a bunch of little tiny bugs that um you know free ai i'm just thinking about that little three-person team going through all the support and everything um it goes back to a little bit of what i was saying before it's the engineering it's like in theory everything should have worked with lightning but in practice when you have users and they're actually finding all those edge cases and corner cases um it's really hard work but what

you end up with is a much more refined product so like you know the force closes the the feast stuff anchor channels all these sorts of things have made the experience so much better um and now i think it's up to um someone with a good amount of kind of product vision to really take what we have the lightning primitives and make it a really nicely polished product what um what is lacking from lightning that you would like to say would make your your life easier if anything my big thing is subscriptions so we can make subscriptions work at money dev kit in a way that i think is okay for someone who's an early adopter but what lightning really lacks is a native way to do pull payments i actually talked about this recently on x said

saying uh hey we should bring back this bolt 12 for current spec i think rusty's been working on it. And Christian responded as well. Just this way to let people do recurring payments. That's how everyone pays their bills. It's how they pay for Netflix. It's a very expected thing that you can sign up for a service, give your payment details, and just have it work. So that's kind of what I'm ringing the bell about nowadays. It's more the payment protocol stuff as opposed to we need this very specific low level feature. It's the stuff that makes payments work on kind of a higher level. What's holding that up right now? Recurring payments? I think it's just a classic open source spec process when you're trying to get something that multiple implementations

are going to use. Everyone has their own priorities. I think the Lightning ecosystem deserves a lot of credit here because you have three different clients that are effectively interoperating on Lightning. I think it's actually like a huge achievement and everyone's talking about Bitcoin Core all the time, but what's happening in the Lightning spec meetings is actually pretty impressive. So I have to find out exactly what it's going to take. I think to actually get something like that in, you need at least two implementations. But the big thing to really make that feature work while it's need to adopt it and that's why i say you know if you're have a lightning integration um you really want to be on the latest stuff so that you can um

interoperate with you know the coolest features yeah yeah that's my big question bringing this back to like stable coins versus lightning too again it seems like the focus in the broader tech fintech sectors on stable coins and i think you and i both agree that lightning is a superior technology bitcoin is a superior technology what do you think it's going to take for the broader market to recognize that i think just better high level abstractions like what we're doing with money dev kit it's money dev kit like if you go on our website we actually don't talk about bitcoin we're big bitcoin believers we're all bitcoiners but we're not trying to sell bitcoin the asset we're trying to sell the access and the ability to actually be on the network and

actually like accept and receive value so i think that's a big part of it and yeah i think bitcoin has a real clear advantage because when you try to use stable coins right now marty i don't know if you've ever like used the stable coin app recently or even go and try to pay a stable coin payment it's pick your stable coin pick the chain only send usdc on base or you lose all your money and then it's there's no privacy this is actually a really terrible experience beyond just the liquidity and the access people aren't doing this that's why i'm saying like this is a it's a meme that's gonna go away um you know i think in the u.s maybe stable coin rails get tucked under bank accounts or something like that and that's that's fine like um stripe's gonna make more

money but for people around the world who want to take global payments having something that's really truly interoperable and is very simple is going to be the thing that wins yeah that's funny i have avoided successfully and who knows maybe i'm alone maybe i'm not doing as much uh research since i should be but i've observed enough to understand that the friction uh is there and i don't want to you know i'm going to go through the brain damage and figure it out myself honest it's funny like i have contractors that live um that'll do work for us outside the u.s and i've had them send me stablecoin invoices i'm like i don't have stablecoins just send me a bitcoin address and they reply in five minutes with the bitcoin address it's like just it's it's much

easier for me obviously i'm a hardcore bitcoiner but it's just as easy to spin up a bitcoin wallet and send an address and receive that money um and the complexity of the stablecoin landscape as such where it's like i think there's a lot of noise and there's going to be a lot of capital burn focusing on that and that's a testament actually to the pain people feel when they're trying to take global payments like they're going through all that complexity just to be able to get something so i think we can give them a much better experience um bitcoin yeah what um what would you say to anybody listening to this uh how could they get involved in help money dev kits uh dream come true in terms of getting bitcoin payments spread on the internet as vibe coding

includes make something cool we're at a time where you can just make stuff and we you know the barriers to actually writing code have been tremendously lowered i think a lot of people like some people have like an aversion to ai i understand where that comes from but if you have an idea you can just build it right now and you can go on replit and you can say hey make me this it's not perfect but it works really well and if you want to take payments um you can just use money dev kit we're working on integrations that let you very easily get uh cash in your bank account so you don't necessarily have to be a bitcoin believer but the more people who use this stuff and show that it's valuable it's better for the ecosystem because more people are sending

bitcoin payments um better in my mind yeah it is great i mean i think the example that you gave earlier is very in line with how i've been vibe coding we're like when you were starting out money dev kit just using sonnet to get the the proof of concepts mvp together like everything that i vibe coded that's how i use it like i'll use replit or plot code get it to a certain point then have the self-awareness to understand that i don't understand the um the the holes that could exist in the thing i vibe coded and then i find a competent developer and say hey here's this thing do you see what i'm trying to build here like can you make sure it's not insecure and actually works and hand it off and the thing gets built i think it's that's another important thing to recognize

with vibe coding if you're not a software engineer and you don't understand um where you can foot gun yourself you can get it to a certain place find a developer who doesn't know what they're doing and they can take it from there pretty sure that way yeah i mean that's how i felt in april i think now i feel like you could probably just send it um if you're gonna do it if you're gonna build a business where you're handling uh or helping people uh you know send receive payments maybe have someone look at that but for most ideas they're pretty low stakes and you know you're not like handling other people's money um and if you're using money dev kit we've got all that taken care of for you so i would say you know don't uh don't lose your confidence

marty i think you could send it without a developer right now well i still need to get better at the uh just like the back end so like setting up for sell like i'm still learning how to do that like getting the domain setting up the dns like all that all that stuff that system admin stuff that i'm not trained in getting more familiar with it so stuff like that where i need the the last mile help yeah the cool thing is you can actually learn a lot too like just telling the agent to do it and if it can't do it a lot of times it'll be like well here's what i would do um and yeah there is still i think i'm a little bit of advantage because i definitely am a i'm a bit of a nerd and i'm you know running nodes and doing all that stuff so there is some base level knowledge but

you can get really far yeah so having been in bitcoin for a while now and being on the cutting edge of building products that have touched millions of people um what are your thoughts on the current state of bitcoin broadly um the network the sort of social movement behind it i don't know for lack of a better term of the awareness the brand awareness is bitcoin exceeding your expectations has it come up short in 2026 isn't right where you thought it would be like how um how's bitcoin doing in your mind i like where bitcoin is honestly i think we've come really far um i think we still focus on things that are too low level that people don't care about uh most people

example, HTTP, TCP, these protocols that run the internet, very important. There are very passionate people who have put a lot of time into making that work. And, you know, they're there with the Linux foundation, all those mailing lists, and they're still slaving away at the low level things that make things work. But most people, they just use Facebook. They don't care about HTTP or TCP or anything like that. So when I think about Bitcoin, I see us focusing a lot on like the very low level things that no one cares about. And not a lot of people are building the high level stuff that people actually care about. So, you know, I'm really happy where the tech is. I think there's still things we have to do. There's always upgrades we have to do. There's

always things we need to fix. Nothing is perfect. But I think the real focus for Bitcoin 2026 and beyond is making things that people actually want to use and that's a different kind of heart like it's not the spec work and you know the interoperability and you know consensus and mempool stuff it's more taking it up to a level where someone's actually using it and finding out how they break it where the sharp edges are it's different hard work that we need to be doing um and that's why i say also if you have an idea for an app um you want to take payments or you want to send payments or you want to make a wallet you should just do it because we need it this may be controversial but do you think we need better tastemakers on bitcoin app development specifically

oh yeah absolutely um matt belez is actually really good with this he makes some cool stuff um and you know when you talk about taste there's like technical taste which is actually a big part of it like just the way you use bitcoin and lightning there's like a certain technical taste there but there's also just yeah the higher level like more broadly appealing taste of what do people want to use um and it's not even just i think when people talk about tastes or thinking like the way something looks but the way something is used and feels um a lot of people out there the first thing you do when you have a new cool tool uh with a bunch of like configuration options is you make an app and you expose every option

and then you can configure everything and you as a person who appreciates the technology you're like yes this is so cool i can do all these things but someone who just needs a technology but isn't actually um isn't actually into it they want the very highly opinionated paved path that does everything for you and that's what we need more of in bitcoin yeah what is an app that doesn't exist that you think should exist and could basically unlock that that recognition because i agree i think bitcoin app developers are people integrating bitcoin into their app we still haven't crossed the chasm of like tapping into the zeitgeist and being part of something that goes viral um i mean outside of like cash app and all that but those are like exchanges and

payment wallets but i'm looking for something outside of bitcoin that integrates it in a novel way that the product's so good that even though it has bitcoin integrated and that may seem to be a hurdle for most people want to use it the the experience is so good that they figure out how to use bitcoin anyway the big thing for me was money dev kit that's why i went and made that Um, but beyond money dev kit, it's, um, all of these websites, I did a video on this. There's all these websites where you just Google, you have to do one thing. I did, um, SVG to ping. You have like a nice SVG logo.

You want to put it somewhere else. You have to make it a ping file. I could, you know, there's probably some terminal app that I could install that'll do it super easily. But what I actually do is I Google SVG to ping. I go to a really gross website with a million ads on it and I put it in. So I made a website where you can do that. But instead of seeing a bunch of gross ads, you just do a quick micropayment and then you're done. There's so much low-hanging fruit like that that I think could be a lot nicer. And yeah, just like anything where you just want to do global payments and you just want it to work, just anything that's cool, just make it, add payments to it. there's a bunch of really interesting industries that stripe doesn't serve it's beyond just uh you

know the 120 countries they don't serve it's like fortune telling apps um one of the coolest things i actually saw recently was uh this website called chart to ai and it's uh are you into astrology marty you gotta i i there are many people in my uh my my family uh that are into astrology my sister and my wife specifically they would love this because basically what it does you put in your information it gives you a birth chart and then someone has just gone through and iterated with ai to basically put in all the astrology knowledge ever and they've made it so you basically put in your information you get this super long prompt and you plug it into chat gpt and it gives you like the best horoscope reading you could ever get like it was i i did it you

know i'm not a big astrology guy but you know just see see what it's like it was like telling me about my life like current life at that moment in ways i was like wait how do you know this so um that's really cool but the interesting thing so you should try it's chart2.ai but the interesting interesting thing is stripe actually doesn't serve fortune telling services so if you are you know you're driving along and you see like the psychic uh on the side of the road um they can't use stripe because you know it's a high risk industry for that maybe some chargebacks or something like that if you make an app like that you basically need to use money dev kit there's a lot of businesses like that where it's like totally legal everything's above board but you can't

actually be banked if you're in that business so maybe you're uh your wife or um your sister you said um maybe they want to make an app with uh with astrology or something like that they could use money dev kit i'm gonna have to give i'm gonna have to give them the advice ladies it's time to start vibe coding and you can work on it together um this is fascinating this is awesome thank you um thank you for building money dev kit number one i think i completely agree we need something as simple as like an api call in cli to get payments integrated in the apps and the fact that i think the way you've approached the market specifically building a replet mcp at a time when it's one of the hottest companies in the world is strategically uh incredibly sappy um

and so i hope and obviously amjad is a bitcoin or two and don't want to dox anybody but i know there's bitcoiners and uh very strategic places within replet specifically and so uh it will be cool to see if they lean into it and uh do they do you know if they have any plans of like highlighting money dev kit within replit like hey if you want to add payments here's one of the easiest options amjad already blasted us out um it's a dream for replit because we were talking to replit a few years ago and you know they were talking about how they had all these users but 80 of them were outside the u.s that's where replit started really with the underserved and now i think maybe that balance is a little different but they have 30 million users and i'm

willing to bet a big proportion of them just can't monetize these cool websites that they're making. So I think it's a match made in heaven. And of course, we're talking to Replit now about how we can keep going with that. But yeah, it's exactly where Amjad wants to be. He's talked about how access to creating software and creating cool things is kind of Replit's mission. And our mission is access for payments so i think it's um you know a really cool thing and i hope we can go further with it oh yeah working uh anybody is so curious find out more about money dev kit more about you um get involved for me i'm nick slaney on x for money dev kit just go to money dev kit dot com docs dot money dev kit dot com um just ask your agent to add money dev kit to your app

and uh yeah feel free to ping me if you need help i'm happy to uh hop in replit multiplayer and uh you know help you out if something's getting stuck but the idea is you just ask your agent to uh add my dev kit and it just works go do it freaks i know a lot of you are vibe coding out there get on it get on it nick thank you for your time uh this has been incredible hopefully we could do it again at some point in the future thanks a lot marty yeah i had a good time glad to happy to do to go awesome peace and love freaks thank you for listening to this episode of tftc if you've made it this far i imagine you got some value out of the episode if so please share it far and wide with your friends and family we're looking to get the word out there also wherever you're listening

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