TFTC: A Bitcoin Podcast - #711: How to Turn Any App Into a Bitcoin On-Ramp with Harsha Goli

Episode Date: February 2, 2026

Marty sits down with Harsha Goli to discuss his decade-long journey building Bitcoin infrastructure, the challenges companies face integrating traditional finance rails, and how Magnolia is launching ...a full banking API to help any Bitcoin application convert fiat to Bitcoin across all 50 US states. Harsha on X: https://x.com/arshbot Magnolia: https://magnolia.financial/ 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 Promo Code: TFTC99 Unchained https://unchained.com/tftc/ SLNT https://slnt.com/tftc Lygos: http://bit.ly/3ZtQLwp Salt of the Earth: https://drinksote.com/tftc 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/ 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/

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Discussion (0)
Starting point is 00:00:00 you've had a dynamic where money's become freer than free if you talk about a fed just gone nuts all all the central banks going nuts so it's all acting like safe haven i believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their currency bitcoin wins in the world of fiat currencies bitcoin is the victor i mean that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin. If you're not paying attention, you probably should be. Get that warm cup on your hands. I am. I am using it. This is my current source of warmth. All right. It's working well. Oh, my gosh. We got the deep freeze. It's good for focused work. I've found that over the last three days. I've had a lot of focused work because I've been forced to
Starting point is 00:00:53 stay in the house. It's very punishing if you go outside. Yes. It's like the roads are icy. if i go visit a friend i'm risking life and limb i might as well get work done you know yeah yeah why why risk it you can just sit at the computer you can play with all these ai tools you can push towards a goal you may have but uh i think the idea of focus work uh is apropos for this discussion because i know that you've had a lot of focus work building out magnolia um relatively under the radar behind the scenes for the last couple of years and as we were discussing before we hit record i'm sitting down with harsha goalie and for those of you who are not familiar with harsha he's been in the industry for quite a while and worked on
Starting point is 00:01:44 many impactful projects and companies and so i think instead of me giving your background probably makes sense for you to do that harsh sort of explain your journey um within the bitcoin industry over the last uh better part of a decade over a decade now i think dude thank you for the incredibly warm intro yeah we're over a decade now i started working in the space back in 2015 i was just like a sophomore in college and you know i like back then was really into like open source you know like anything right so i just like me my friends we would just go to hackathons and just work on you know like whatever get out projects we could find make them better or like create something completely new and uh like ship stuff and one of them you know someone was telling
Starting point is 00:02:27 me about bitcoin and like to me the best part of it about bitcoin was that it was a financial thing that was open source and i'm like okay neat i can mess with this um of course i didn't know c you know i only knew python and javascript so i would i would like try to like find whatever clobbered together libraries other people would put together um if anyone else is listening who was a dev around the time that the state of of uh of bitcoin tooling back then was abysmal which you know was pretty awesome for me to work in um and yeah like from there i i decided like okay this stuff is pretty cool i'd like to work on this stuff a little bit more so at the time i had like you know a junior uh you know like job at a company called ge uh they like ge power specifically that
Starting point is 00:03:07 division and i was like okay well you know i'd like to work on bitcoin stuff that they work on turbines so that's not really the same thing uh so i got a job at bid pay which was in atlanta and yeah they just like had me working on effectively this is very this was very controversial we're way past it but they had me working on like a bunch of segwit 2x tooling right so i was like the guy who like spun up the initial segwit 2x testnet i remember like getting a bunch of like usb miners all right and like sticking window a bunch of raspberry pi's we had like 50 of them you know in a room i just buzzing away and i wasn't there for the actual like activation but i can imagine what what day that was because the whole thing just fell over
Starting point is 00:03:45 immediately off by one off by once and so that was that was pretty cool but it was cool like setting up a test net you know like from scratch and yeah like after that um my friends and i we like you know realized like okay there's a lot of work in this space and there's a lot of like tools we can work on so we started our own startup basically like consulting firm that like had some internal products and that did really well until uh eventually i met uh like some folks from fold who were looking for a back-end engineer and they wanted to work on some really really cool stuff um so i was like okay well you know i know i have this startup but it's doing pretty well it can probably chug along without me for a while um let me let me just you know hop on this
Starting point is 00:04:25 team and see what we can do here and i still remember like the job that i ended up applying for was like uh it was it was a closure dev right i don't know if any of you guys know about closure but as a crazy language and um i didn't know any closure still still got the job got hired um and ended up working on their like back end uh like wallet infrastructure for a minute um which is how i started getting familiar with like how enterprises wallets really really worked and yeah like from there we shipped lightning and you know bitcoin uh for fold and eventually like you know launched the actual uh like full debit card right which actually is what got traction full did not have too much interaction on the gift card stuff the debit card really took off um even
Starting point is 00:05:06 though gift cards never really stopped being part of the bottom line and then yeah like so from fold then you know i've worked in a bunch of places i think fold was a place where i kind of decided like okay this stuff is better than like college you know this stuff is better than like working on anything else um just the energy of like you know of thesis and uh like will and tom and all the guys there was just awesome so after i left there i went to work at a couple different places including lightning labs just to work more on lighting stuff that was really really cool i met some of the smartest people in my life there and then worked at voltage as well got my like chops and like product management um and then worked at swan another like uh company i'm sure all you guys
Starting point is 00:05:47 know uh again doing product management stuff specifically uh for their data team and their lightning teams and all this was kind of like going in a very specific direction because i wanted to learn how to run teams effectively on a myriad of different problems because there's been like this problem that i've been kind of seeing in the space which is like you know the tech it like even though i've been working on lightning for a long time and trying to get it implemented with more people um i noticed that most people don't use the new and shiny in bitcoin that's that's never really been a thing about bitcoin um tech like tech enthusiasts like myself do sure but the masses do not and the more i looked at the more i realized like the problem is it isn't
Starting point is 00:06:29 like you know bitcoin necessarily needs a new you know functionality in order to like get mainstream it already was the problem always was that in order to actually get bitcoin you could only go to reliably a couple of the big exchanges and if you were a small company smaller than you know coinbase uh in order to get that same functionality integrated into your application the exact same way coinbase would um you had to do so much right and you had to rely on sometimes really sketchy partners and it was it was a huge burden while it was one of those things where the payoff was immense but the costs were somehow even more immense right i remember at swan we had like five different migrations between like all these different providers it was nonsense you know
Starting point is 00:07:18 especially when like 80 percent of your um 80 percent of your like engineering budget goes toward this one specific problem that that's nonsense to me but anyway that's like my background in a nutshell i've been working in bitcoin for uh i think yeah over 10 years now it's it's the thing i i love i've i uh yeah i i think i'll be working in bitcoin for the rest of my life but you know why not at this point yeah and so this brings us to magnolia which is the company that you found and i've been working on for a couple years now and again highlighting the end of your introduction there which is this problem that exists for many companies in the space who basically just want to interact with bitcoin and make it easy for their customers
Starting point is 00:08:03 most importantly to interact with bitcoin um the third-party dependencies that have existed in the industry um throughout the years have um stood on for lack of a better term shaky foundation and um through my conversations with you and what you're doing at magnolia that's exactly what you're trying to solve is providing a sound foundation for companies trying to build in the space yeah it's it's quite surprising actually you know like i i i gotta empathize with all these builders you know i feel like if you're a builder in bitcoin you've you've got a pretty like tough task ahead of you and you know everyone seems to like solve it but you you spend all this time and energy cultivating an audience online you know getting them to use the application
Starting point is 00:08:50 that you're trying to like get them to use whether it's you know a wallet or a bitcoin lending app or even a white glove service, right? That takes a lot of effort, a lot of energy. And it kind of sucks because after you've done all this effort, all this work, you try to make it as easy as possible to onboard your customers. And you realize getting these kind of integrations in your application isn't like signing up for a credit card,
Starting point is 00:09:14 where it's like one form, or going to a bank and signing a couple of papers and then getting access to the financial system. When you try and do this as a business, specifically like you know in bitcoin and you know stable coins or anything else it's it's so tedious it's so expensive and it's really just out of out of reach right you basically have two options one is just get like state licenses to get money transmitter like you know uh like access right and it's state by state it's not like if if i go to a bank and i sign up for a bank account i can
Starting point is 00:09:46 use that bank account anywhere in the u.s that's not how it works if you're a business you know and then alternatively you you set up an account with someone else who runs the infrastructure for you and that process is incredibly tedious i think like for us it can go over uh like three months when we were doing this you know ourselves um and then on top of it they charge incredibly high minimums um i like in the in the neighborhood of like 20 to 30k a month you know it's like this is for a massive like business like polymarket you know not for someone who's like uh i got like a pretty effective you know retail audience but not like you know i've dominated the world effective you know and that's that's just kind of wild to me um but but yeah so
Starting point is 00:10:31 like what we're trying to do what what the i've really kind of identified as a huge problem in bitcoin is i'm trying to turn every single one of these applications like big ones for sure but also smaller ones as well into bridges where you can just go with you know your credit card your bank details whatever and be able to convert uh yourself from a pre-coiner to like a bitcoiner that that's that's the idea here all these obligations should be able to take someone's money and give them bitcoin right instead of shoving them off to coinbase or something and so what was the process of building this out like let's get a landscape of the technical architecture that exists and then i guess the compliance architecture necessary to facilitate
Starting point is 00:11:14 this as well yeah so you know from a technical point of view it's actually like i guess for me it's not that hard because it's something i built like three or four times in my career right but it's like having an enterprise wallet system having uh what's called a like a double entry accounting ledger so it just does it's just a well-built like accounting system um and then on top of that having a robust api that is not overwhelming that part's you know honestly not the most complicated part um i've done that multiple times most people have some version of that in in the systems you know um and then of course like a connection to your banking partner and that's that's where things get hard the the hard part is interacting with the banking providers
Starting point is 00:11:55 um the hard part is like yeah being able to to talk that really it's step one um that that was actually kind of wild when i realized just how hard that was going to be at the time i think like i had really long hair you know i i just done like you know a huge hippie dive it was awesome you know i lived in the van for a couple years and uh i realized like okay i'm going to these conferences you know i've got my hair tied up all nice and stuff uh in order to meet like a lot of these bakers but um i i've got to like you know make some changes to my appearance here you know i've got to like pick up a different kind of uh like repertoire and i've got to like cut my hair i've got to stop referring to ourselves as crypto to try and explain myself to them just be like no
Starting point is 00:12:31 we do bitcoin you know the bitcoin is the thing we do you know we don't get involved with anything else and after like honestly a large number of uh of conferences and conversations we managed to like, find a lot of really healthy inroads into the banking world with, like, with really good, like, compliance folks on our backs, too. There's a whole separate world of Bitcoin dedicated just to compliance. And it's, like, kind of fascinating, right? Like, Haley Lennon is a great name in this space, too. She's, like, the general counsel of Fold, right? And she was our lawyer at one point. And she was able to, like, intro us to all these people who are on the Bitcoin compliance side of things. And they know all the right people
Starting point is 00:13:11 in the compliance world to like you know get you past uh all the big roadblocks that exist for kind of everyone else that was honestly pretty wild for us to realize like okay compliance is not that effective and the the way how compliance tends to work is it's all about like making sure that you know who you know is someone with a lot of uh like moral accountability essentially right and that does apparently like go quite a long way in the compliance world and i do kind of see it understand it now yeah and so let's take a step back a high level view who is your ideal customer and how do they interact with you going from zero to one so right now like a huge focus for us is we've realized that a huge pain point is okay so like bitcoin right like the biggest value of
Starting point is 00:14:00 bitcoin is the value it has and i think like 2026 is turning out into this year where a lot of people are moving their Bitcoin into some kind of non-custodial setup, whatever it may be, where they can also take a loan out against it, right? And be able to utilize the value that they've accrued in some kind of way. But this has been like kind of a silent explosion over the last, like, you know, I think six months to a year. And I think it's going to really, really, really get big in 2026. Ledin has like a crazy high ARR now, which is wild. L-E-D-N. They're like, I think, a leader in this space um i think it's like 100 million or something and and the reason i bring this up is because all these different bitcoin backed lending uh like folks they all issue the
Starting point is 00:14:42 loans in a stable coin and something i've learned from talking to these folks is the whole uh like narrative for stable coins for trading is kind of like dead right but people are still taking out these loans and that's because they're taking out these loans at decent rates specifically to use them in the real world you know for to pay for their like daughter's you know college or you know to upgrade you know a property to have or whatever um and so what we're plugging into for a lot of these folks is we're plugging into uh like their systems to convert their stable coins to fiat directly for their end user that way their end user doesn't have to take a couple more points uh at coinbase or something like that so that's someone that we're like really kind of charging
Starting point is 00:15:22 headfirst in but basically our ideal customer is any kind of like you know bitcoin business that's got a large, like a high retail audience that they're looking to monetize, you know, effectively. We've interviewed a couple other wallets as well that are doing just that. And yeah, and oh, and also anyone who's looking to access the US and EU, like, you know, financial markets, essentially. So South American companies and like Asian companies too,
Starting point is 00:15:50 who would like to onboard folks from the EU, super, super valuable for us right now. So freaks, if you've been listening for a while, you've probably heard us all talk about BitKey. It's a Bitcoin wallet built for people who want self-custody to actually fit into their lives. BitKey is a private multi-sig wallet that removes the biggest point of failure in traditional self-custody, the seed phrase. No ceremony, nothing to hide, and no single mistake that can put your Bitcoin at risk. We all know things get lost. I lose things all the time. Phones get replaced. Life happens. BitKey specifically
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Starting point is 00:17:32 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. Let's dive into the stablecoins conversation. What are you seeing? You mentioned the trading narrative which was the stable coin the predominant stable coin narrative for many years i think makes sense yeah it was birthed out of bitfinex which is this big exchange and there was obviously the ability to send these stable coins between exchanges to um our prices or just get better margin rates on on different exchanges at any given point in time but it seems like it's breaking out of that the confines of trading only and breaking into um true for lack of a better
Starting point is 00:18:19 term utility for everyday retail consumers who aren't traders um do you see it coming to america yeah i think that's a big question i have in my mind right now i think do stable coins make sense in the united states and then even if they do or don't what um is the activity like outside of the united states from your perspective yeah i mean to your point i think everyone everyone knows that there's a lot of activity for stablecoins in developing nations, specifically in South America and Central America, but the U.S. Now, what's happening in the U.S. is actually quite, quite fascinating right now because of the Genius Bill.
Starting point is 00:18:58 The Genius Bill creates a lot of pressure to implement stablecoins somewhere in the U.S., right? Like in the U.S. banking system in particular. That's fundamentally what the Genius Bill does. And if y'all aren't aware of how the Genius Bill really works, it basically creates a ton of incentive to buy up t-bills and then issue stable coins against these t-bills right and so now you have like a lot of like stable coins that are like rolling around like okay we need to find a use for these stable coins in order to like justify like our business right because we're
Starting point is 00:19:29 giving most of our um you know like return from the t-bills that are generated back to the end user um which is you know a whole conversation in and of itself uh but we have these stable coins we need to fit them somewhere and so what we're kind of seeing is we're seeing this like really kind of backwards thing happen where normally if people implement products and stuff after there's some level of demand but what we're seeing with stable coins is people are implementing stable coins everywhere and seeing where they fit you know what sticks and what doesn't stick and one of the things that's sticking quite well is this concept of okay everyone's got some amount of like you know like bitcoin or maybe even like some other assets as
Starting point is 00:20:10 well that they want to take out loans against. Taking out the loans typically ends up being part of this, you know, like protocol, either it's a smart contract, you know, on Aave or something like that, or, you know, more like I think gaining more popularity, it's some kind of like Bitcoin backed loan, right? But either way, it doesn't really matter. You're going to get a stable coin as a result of this loan. And getting a stable coin is cool, but a lot of these people are not using these loans to like gamble more. That's just not what a lot of these folks are doing they're using it to like like actually improve their lives in some way these loans are not that high anymore i think before it made a lot of sense to uh like you know kind of gamble
Starting point is 00:20:50 on you know another project or whatever when they were between like you know 15 and 12 but now you see them going kind of low in some platforms it's as low as like six percent i think a pretty good price you can get in bitcoin is 10 and those are like low enough to actually justify like building you know real value in the real world you know and that's kind of fascinating so seeing that take off is really kind of interesting where else will stable coins fit i don't know you know i i'm i'm a skeptic in general i i like seeing things before i believe it you know i you know call me crazy but i i don't know where else it fits right now but i see that one really kind of like actually getting use cases right now um i'd be very curious to see if anyone uses them on the day-to-day
Starting point is 00:21:36 elsewhere yeah it's obviously a big topic of discussion right now with the genius act and um again it seems like they're trying to manufacture demand for these treasuries and that's the one thing a big question in my mind is um is it a be careful what you wish for scenario with the genius act where um you have to recognize that stable coins the success of stable coins to date has been driven by this regulatory gray area that's existed and allowed um individuals outside the border of the united states to get access to dollar instruments um rather trivially uh yeah i mean like to to their point the reason why they're doing it why they're they're so uh like interested in doing it is because if if it's not the us dollar it's the chinese like yen
Starting point is 00:22:26 right um it's the russian ruble and so everyone wants to like take advantage of these like you know deteriorating economies and just plant our flag in the first thing you know we've done this with real dollars like in the past you know especially like in africa to stabilize economies and you know in zimbabwe like you know after the currency like went to hyperinflation people started using the us dollar you know um that that is like that is what happened but i do agree that it is quite literally artificial demand you know that's what the genius bill is um and i i do think it's interesting that we're just trying to like fit it in anywhere we can um i i i uh i look forward to the day when my walmart app offers stablecoin as a rewards option you know like i'm sure that's
Starting point is 00:23:12 coming you know that's that's gonna be wild but um switching gears a little bit and building on conversations we've had over the years i think magnolia um the impetus for you starting it again as you alluded to is that um there are companies that try to do something have tried to do something similar in the past i think most notably prime trust uh and have failed epically and so i guess what are the lessons learned from their failures and how you're trying to prove on that and make sure that Magnolia is sound. Yeah, dude. Yeah, I remember Prime Trust.
Starting point is 00:23:51 The first version of Fold built against Prime Trust, you know, and we, you know, frankly loved it. It was great from a tech point of view. It was everything we ever wanted. It's just that it turns out the way how their operating side like worked was not, you know, everything we wanted. There's this like really kind of incredible story
Starting point is 00:24:11 with Prime Trust and I think also like Forger's Trust where they ended up just losing a ton of money because they had some really complicated key ceremony, right? And the result of this really complicated key ceremony was they ended up losing the actual private keys that backed the deposit addresses at Prime Trust. And so people were depositing money at Prime Trust and for, I think, a couple weeks,
Starting point is 00:24:39 no one realized that they were putting money into a black hole, you know? they really were and when it came time to withdraw the money you know for typical operation purposes only then did they realize like we don't have this cash you know prime trust wasn't hacked you know they may have been hacked at some point there in their history but this specific instance they weren't hacked and that is that is just baffling to me so like really my career is kind of built on the failures of these entities and it's not just prime trust you there's a couple of them out there uh because folks like me and myself you know specifically
Starting point is 00:25:13 we had to deal with these ramifications right so we learned a lot some of the big things that we really learned is like the compliance folks the operation folks and the engineering folks they have to be in the same room they cannot operate independently you know they need to constantly talk they need to understand like um okay here's what we're implementing this is how we're doing it this is what our you know our own like policies say and here's what needs to get modified. This has been a really, really valuable exercise for us every time it happens, specifically because really often we realize something can get shaved down. Something doesn't have to get complicated, right? Or even, okay, we're implementing something that is actually very
Starting point is 00:25:55 dangerous for us, you know? And that is kind of a huge boon. From the security side, we made the decision that my computer is just completely segregated away from all of our systems and from ensuring that our security is on top, our CTO, he's 100% in charge of that. And that's his focus, right? Alongside building features and stuff. But this separation of concerns makes it so that I'm able to work on my stuff and he's able to work on his stuff. And my job is just ensuring the machine gets to keep going forward. And his job is making sure that the machine is well oiled to go forward the separation of concerns works out i think a lot better um i know that the prime trust method of doing this stuff was a little bit uh more democratic where
Starting point is 00:26:41 you know keys were separated between a bunch of different people um we have separated keys out it's not one individual but our keys aren't separated between individuals they're separated in like um like actual different key servers you know um they're only one individual who's you know like got a shotgun at home and takes security very seriously like he is in charge of and i think that's probably like the right way for how we handle things right now so freaks when you take bitcoin seriously you start with custody you want to control your keys avoid single points of failure and make sure your savings cannot disappear because you or someone else screwed up that is what unchained has been focused on since 2016 unchained is the leader in collaborative multi-sig
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Starting point is 00:27:49 hodlers or opt for the highest level private client service with unchained signature and get a dedicated account manager discounted trading fees exclusive access to events and features and much much more if you want a partner that helps you secure and grow your bitcoin without giving up control go to unchained.com and use the code tftc10 at checkout to get 10 off your new bitcoin multisig vault that's tftc10 at unchained.com sup freaks been seeing a lot of youtube comments Marty your skin looks so good you're looking fit these days how are you doing it well number one I'm going to the gym more trying to get my swell on trying to be a good example for my young son to fit healthy dad but part of that is having a good regimen particularly staying hydrated making
Starting point is 00:28:31 sure I have the right electrolytes and salts in my body that is why I use salt of the earth I drink probably three of these a day with one packet of salt the earth I'm like in the pink lemonade right now it's my flavor of choice uh this is their creatine i've added this to my regimen they have it in these packets as well uh makes it extremely convenient if you're traveling you want to work out while you're traveling but you don't want to be carrying a white bag of powder going through tsa it's very very uh nerve-wracking at times you have to explain hates it's not what you think it is it's creatine i'm trying to get my swell on um make sure you're staying hydrated i have become addicted to these it's made my life a lot better i can supplement this for coffee in the morning
Starting point is 00:29:17 and be energized right away i can supplement i can bring the creatine wherever i need to just put a couple packets in here before i head to the gym bring this to the gym drinking out of a glass bottle make sure i'm not injecting any microplastics into my body go to drinksote.com use the code tftc and you'll get 15 off anything in the store that's drinksote.com code tftc What is this key setup? I mean, you mentioned multiple different servers. One guy, how do you ensure that there's no key man risk with the setup? Yeah, so we use multiple different key servers from different other custodians specifically.
Starting point is 00:29:57 So they're all watching out. I think a lot of it is automated, but for deposit addresses, those go into cold storage directly. But it's not cold storage that's run by us. It's cold storage run by someone else. that way you know like there isn't really a situation where we mess up our money that we send out is you know completely segregated from money that we receive so there's just an operations focus to make sure that you know we we always have enough money to uh withdraw um yeah like we we've we've had to go through kind of a lot of iterations of this design for our compliance
Starting point is 00:30:29 program specifically uh and so we have this all really well documented in our in our policies And whenever regulators or banking partners or even customers ask us for these, we're able to, like, kind of provide specifications, like, kind of on hand, which is nice, you know. But it's really, in my opinion, nothing that isn't industry standard, you know. This kind of separation of concerns is what everyone should be doing, right? It's something super crazy and magical. Are the regulators getting smarter on this, on how this technical architecture should be built? They're not really on the technical architecture side of things. They're really concerned about, like, over leveraging rehypothecation and making sure that certain individuals are touching it or not touching it, right?
Starting point is 00:31:15 Like, that's really what they care about. And they've gotten smarter in the sense that they're not going to allow, like, fancy diagrams to get in the way of their understanding, right? So if we send them diagrams and they don't understand it, they'll tell us it's not understandable out of the back, you know? Make it better. fair enough you know like so um which we've done a couple times we have like a whole uh like project for uh diagrams specifically for regulators like for this topic and they're huge they're like powerpoint presentations that are like over 200 pages long right or 200 slides but it works you know they get it they get the idea yeah and so now i mean you've got a big announcement
Starting point is 00:31:58 coming up we're recording this on tuesday the 27th but i think over the weekend you guys are going to be um coming out with some news and this will be published after so by the time this reaches the audience the news will be announced um what uh what do we have in store so uh like later this past year right i think december we launched a price right we want this yeah we do um we found some people really liked it and you know onboarded it and this price oracle works specifically with uh discrete log contracts right so it's like a a much more uh like trustless way of uh handling these bitcoin back loans and we we were also we also like announced that okay we're supporting um and so instead of stable coins you know you can do
Starting point is 00:32:47 disbursements for these loans via fiat so you can get a you know cold hard cash in your bank um And people are really excited about that. The big announcement that will be out by the time you guys hear this is that we are releasing our full-fledged banking products for everyone to use in the U.S. and soon the EU. And so what I mean in the U.S., I mean, we can launch this in New York, Florida, California, Texas, and all the states in between. and what this product is it's it's a full bank right over an api so you can spin up individual accounts right like you know routing account number for each of your end users through this system if that's what you want to do put fiat into it or have it do an ach pull which is like auto pay convert it into bitcoin and then send it to whoever it is you need to send it to this is to
Starting point is 00:33:42 my knowledge the the the quickest way to convert someone like it's convert someone's fiat to bitcoin or lightning um and the most uh programmatic and like extents or an expendable way or whatever um oh my gosh i'm forgetting the term but yeah this is the most like programmatic way you can do it uh so that's kind of a huge huge win so there's no iframes involved in this It's not MoonPay or anything like that, which means that people can create their own custom flows as they'd like, right? And that also does include with AI. So as long as you're onboarded with us in past KYB, which we've gotten down from six weeks to less than a week now, so it's really easy to get turned around on that. You can just implement our API into existing infrastructure and turn any application into a full-fledged bank.
Starting point is 00:34:36 that's huge that's what i wish i had five years ago how's this work on the licensing side of things similar prime jobs in that way where you guys have licenses and charter so we have some licenses uh but really like the big change that we made in 2045 is we realized like what we should do instead is we should really focus on getting like everyone is just saying this is great come back like we we'd love to talk when you have more than you know a couple states right we realize people want to go to all these states so we figured out a way with our banking partners we have three different banking partners to use our licenses in different states so that we can actually just go to all these different states all at once right it turns out some of our banking
Starting point is 00:35:19 partners also have uh locations in eu as well so we can do native european transfers so not swift in the eu um we're working on implementing that right now that has to come in a month or two after we do the U.S. launch, but this brings our services kind of everywhere right now. In the future, I think it's going to make sense for us to finish up these applications. Unfortunately, these applications normally take a year or two. Right now, because of all the stuff that's going on,
Starting point is 00:35:48 everyone is backlogged. So it's actually going to take even longer than that. So we realized we're going to have to come back to the applications whenever the regulators get back to us and just kind of handle it from there. but till then you know we can we can go in all these states uh and and bring our services to just about anyone we can and that that's a pretty big win for us right it's gotten people really excited yeah you mentioned ai how do you see ai playing in into all this because i've been
Starting point is 00:36:16 leaning into it as heavily as possible um here at tftc um doing research at 1031 things like that and is becoming more and more powerful by the day. I was actually playing around with, I had my agent playing around with MoneyDevKit last night and it was pretty cool to see what it can do. So how do you see this intersection of AI and not only what you're doing at Magnolia, but Bitcoin more broadly?
Starting point is 00:36:44 Dude, the financial system should not be locked out to people who are building. It just should not be, right? We want to make it as accessible as possible. So if people want to utilize like, you know, banking in their like vibe car products we can make sure that they do it safely right but ai can actually do the implementation create incredibly delightful flows for people and yeah i agree we've we've been leaning into it pretty hard too it's helped us out kind of tremendously um the different
Starting point is 00:37:12 like teams at magnolia handle it very differently right um so our engineering team has a very like complex and precise method of handling ai that's very different from how our compliance team handles it and our compliance team was able to reduce its you know like our kyb process our onboarding process from like six weeks down to like less than one with the help of ai just like you know optimizing what it can and reducing flows and trying to get as many uh like you know multiple birds hit with one stone so to speak and i use it kind of all the time specifically with the Ralph Wiggum loop, if you're familiar with that. I use that all the time for our docs and our main web page as well. That way, I don't have to bother our devs about it. And I can make sure
Starting point is 00:37:56 our docs are as accurate as possible. And I'm actually watching it run right now because I'm going to El Salvador tomorrow. And I need this new website out. So I'm just watching it just iterate. But we use it kind of a lot. And I do kind of have this belief that I've always been against hiring as a growth metric right i do believe ai is going to really be able to like supercharge really really powerful operators at a company and let people go even farther with you know their seed or pre-seed stage right we've been we've gone we've come pretty far on pre-seed and uh you know at some point we're gonna like raise our next round but we don't want to just you know like burn capital here for the sake of burning capital we want everyone to go as far as they can
Starting point is 00:38:37 um and ai really does supercharge bugs it's insane and to your point that's i think if you're a founder out there not leveraging these tools obviously you've got to be careful to an extent it's easy to fuck on yourself if you're not using it appropriately but to your point if you're um the sort of high level operator that understands the risk and understands how to use it if you're not utilizing it you're going to get i don't want to say maybe left behind but i think from a sort of balance sheet management perspective there's no reason not to lean into it so you can keep headcount as low as possible get to revenue profitability and begin stacking sats as quickly as possible oh yeah oh yeah plus like with all the twitter stuff it's all everyone gets to see so you
Starting point is 00:39:27 you have no excuse you kind of excuse all the tricks are right there bod bod is big or i think now it's renamed but you know whatever the next trick will be i'm sure it'll be very useful multibot multibot now um do you think that i wonder if we're in a bubble on twitter and yes it's obviously a massive topic of discussion um in our twitter bubble but like how many people outside of that bubble are actually utilizing these tools or even recognize that they exist and are as powerful as they are?
Starting point is 00:40:00 I think like from a retail point of view, most people are already on like ChatGPT specifically because it has a free tier, but using it in this kind of like complex way is definitely in the realm of tech enthusiasts, right? It absolutely is. There's still like a lot of setup, a lot of like stuff you have to do.
Starting point is 00:40:19 You have to have like a prerequisite amount of knowledge to understand. that code cloud code exists right for something like um bod bot you know maybe like folks buy like the apple mini or whatever where they figure out they can just run it locally um but as time goes on you're gonna see a lot of uh like products that just spin up the whole thing for you so like one that's already existed before blood bot is um interaction if you're familiar with interaction it's a it's a telegram bot essentially pretty delightful startup flow but as as things like this get bigger you're going to see more full-fledged agents that i think are a little
Starting point is 00:40:57 bit more appealing to the the mass audience right so like like a good check for me that i always have is my little sister she's she's a chemical engineer right that's what she does she just wrapped up her education but she is not in tech not in the slightest like the way like you know you and i are and so i ask her like you know what do people think about like ai and stuff like that and her point of view is listen it's cool for like cheating on tests but as far as like actually doing like chemical engineering work it's it's fucking useless you know um and so like there's still a lot of room for this stuff to to get in the hands of everyday people you know people in other like sectors it's it's really i think focused on on us right now people in the tech
Starting point is 00:41:35 enthusiast world yeah that's fun i um i guess saying a lot of focus work with the snowstorm that hit the northeast over the weekend and i had some downtime on sunday and spent an hour and a half spinning up clawed bot and making sure that was secure behind tail scale behind uh behind a firewall and all of that that stuff and then i've been slowly but surely conversing with it and iterating on on sort of how i'm interacting with it over the last two days and it is insane what this thing can do so what's the difference between clodbot and like a wall for a ralph wiggum loop like would you say clodbot is like significantly like uh like better than like just doing fundamentally the same thing but in a more like narrow context
Starting point is 00:42:24 uh i'll preface this with i'm not an expert on the intricate differences between ralph wiggum which is essentially you give a product development roadmap with very specific outcomes that you want to complete in sort of a modular fashion. You give it a task, and it just basically runs and checks if it's actually completing this task as laid out in the PDR. And once it's done, it's done. Whereas Cloudbot, I tried Ralph Wiggum just to play with it.
Starting point is 00:43:02 for one thing and didn't really, you know, didn't really I didn't I wasn't really able to get it working. So my personal experience, I found a good secure setup for CloudBot on Sunday and was successfully able to set it up. I think the one common thing they have is like with Ralph Wiggum, you're storing context in the task files. So like it has context that it can constantly pull from after it clears context. And that's what I think CloudBot does as well.
Starting point is 00:43:32 just in a different way and then from what i understand clawbot the open source projects this has a bunch of sort of overlaid integrations that's been that have been built out over the last month it's still a really uh nation project but um i don't know just intuitively for me if somebody is not highly technical technical enough to be dangerous can get in the terminal and um do some stuff uh with some direction uh it's been a much smoother experience for me personally you guys should check it out i've definitely i've i've heard really interesting things about it i think the biggest interesting thing is like unlike any other like system it's it's not user-driven you know which is very very valuable what do you mean by that minus just an autonomous yeah well it's
Starting point is 00:44:19 it lets its loop run like regardless of what you're doing with it so it'll always be checking your dms it'll if you ask it to like keep an eye on this or that you know it'll constantly just keep an eye on this or that and let you know when things like when you need it like get surfaced But alternatively from everything else, you know, for Ralph Wiggum, I have to set the, like, checklist up and then execute. And the thing, the task I was running here just, like, finished iteration 38, you know, and now it's done. Now it's time to check the work and give feedback and go on. It's just a bigger loop, but it's still a user-driven loop. But the difference between CloudBot is it's not user-driven.
Starting point is 00:44:56 Yeah, this is clearly, like, the direction that development is going in, right? like um i think people are going to rely on this stuff like to a crazy degree i spent like five years you know some narrative loop like this yeah yeah and like i said no not to be dangerous which means no enough to know that i shouldn't just give claude bot everything so i've been very sort of restrained on um the access that i can have access to claude code and i can interact with it via telegram yeah we are it's actually funny we had like a long conversation in the magnolia uh like all hands yesterday about like the security concerns of like a lot of these ai tools right um because like you know we handle pii right like we definitely do we we can't be
Starting point is 00:45:40 like turning on i think it was like the bypass permissions on like you know you know uh we can't be piping the stuff in and uh and that's just that's for the folks who don't have production access you know uh and so like we we were like we have to add to our compliance documents like okay you know we're going to use ai but this is how we use it we're going to use it in these like you know specific environments where you know it doesn't have access to all this other stuff and um it's actually kind of like kind of interesting because we're on the side i think of we care about security a lot you know we care about making sure that this data isn't going to go in the wrong direction and i can only imagine how the companies or other places like you know that lack of you
Starting point is 00:46:17 know security and i'm just really looking forward to like is 2026 going to be the year of just a lot more hacks you know like across the whole industry because most people are just leaving like the credentials and just you know like white text right plain text and it's going to be a great year for hackers for black hats yeah yeah getting familiar with dot env files is uh very important i think for a lot of people out there oh yeah well like how do you think this changes um like company building right like we mentioned like headcount and all that like how i guess to phrase this another way like how far do you think you can go um with a head count under 20 at magnolia very far um but when when i came to when i moved to new york last year i moved
Starting point is 00:47:15 into this like hacker house right called the residency in chinatown it was awesome you know it was my first time living with a lot of like you know kind of deep like silicon valley tech folks who are really just you know in the grind and genuinely a great time and i remember something that they always pointed out about me that i'd never heard anyone refer to me about they always said that i was a very like agentic person you know and i asked them like what does that mean is this like you know an ai thing they're like no no it just means that when you see a problem you do something about it you know and i i've noticed that in all my founder friends that's very much who they are. When they see a problem, they do something about it. And I think fundamentally
Starting point is 00:47:56 what this is going to allow in the long run is it's going to allow that barrier entry. So if you just want to do something, you can do it. You see these tweets online where being an idea guy is now the alpha. And I do kind of agree with that. I think things have changed now to the point where it's really just a battle of willpower. How much willpower do you have? It's always been a question of willpower but sometimes you know like people are able to go really really far in the wrong direction you know that's detrimental to them that's part of the risk you know are you going uh are you waiting until the right moment for your thing or are you being boneheaded in whatever direction you're going um and i think with with like the advent of these tools it's
Starting point is 00:48:39 going to specifically make it a lot easier for people to iterate and get to the stage that they want to get to right like being able to launch a product and then being able to test the thesis you know out uh while also being able to maybe get more information on what it is they're trying to do you know like it's it's never been so easy to get feedback on like the greater uh like context of your space than asking you know like a research bot hey spend like three hours researching anything that has to do with this space here and give me like a competitive analysis of these different companies and how they're doing and you know what flaws might be um it's never been so easy and i think i think that does change like the landscape of business quite a lot in the sense
Starting point is 00:49:23 that it just we're reducing information asymmetry you know and that lets people make more uh well-informed decisions while also allowing them to like get more done you know before I think the things that limited founders were very much in the resource like division you know like uh how much you know money you have obviously but also like what your talent pool is um what connections you have but with with modern AI if you're simply creative enough you can overcome a lot of these problems like I've been you know for this launch here right where we're fundamentally a b2b product I have to talk to people in order like you know get them to like to be aware of our product. I've just had Claude, you know, just running against like Twitter and Chrome and say
Starting point is 00:50:11 like, Hey, you know, look at everyone who follows me, you know, are they working on something that makes sense for, for like integrating with us, you know, and create like a leads list here and then rank it in terms of like how well I probably know them, you know? And that is something that wasn't possible, you know, before that's, that's reducing information asymmetry here. there's a lot of things you can do with that um but really that's not like it's it's not a question of like how smart is harsha it's just a question of how bad does harsha want it you know but i think now more than ever uh that that barrier is lowered you know and i think that's that's fantastic frankly for innovation as a whole i completely agree i think you put that uh beautifully
Starting point is 00:50:56 people with agency are going to thrive in this world and i i'm not so sure that i'm convinced that it's going to be the job killer apocalypse that it's being marketed as certainly it's going to have an effect on the jobs market and will displace a lot of jobs but i think on the other side of things i think i think it was aaron levy or aaron levy aaron lemon the guy from box.com he put out um an article basically saying like jevin's paradox compute is upon us like you think just because you're becoming more efficient with these resources in this case compute you're going to use less of it but what we'll actually find is that we just use more and more and by extension one could one could speculate that that that means that um the potential
Starting point is 00:51:43 jobs that exist in the future are way more bountiful than they currently are if and i do think um to your point we do need some sort of social resurgence of individual agency and creativity um to emerge to to make that a reality and and there will obviously be a period of time where we're sort of reacting and getting comfortable with this change. But I think people begin to realize like, okay, this is what these tools can do if I just start thinking in a different way
Starting point is 00:52:23 and thinking more creatively and actually getting off my ass and typing into these LLMs, maybe something will happen. And I think that'll have a net positive effect on the job market. Maybe that's naive. Maybe that's too optimistic.
Starting point is 00:52:38 Maybe it's a pipe dream, but i could see it playing out that way no i i am let me ask you a question let me ask you a question before the power drill right how did people fasten like two pieces of wood together right like before before we were able to drill things in how how do we screw drills in or screw yeah screws on it uh do you know the answer to this uh did spurs even exist was just like hammer i think yeah but there were there were screws it's like this like tool it's like a rod that comes out with a crank handle right um and there's two there's two parts of it one is you have to drill the hole first right because it was just you know it was too high torque to go through
Starting point is 00:53:21 the wood and then you had to put the the long screw all the way in you know and this is only really feasible for for long screws right for anything smaller you use a nail um but it was a pretty tedious job you know frankly um and this was like a specialized part of of construction as a whole and whenever like my friends like you know mentioning you know they're worried about ai like taking everyone's jobs make everyone like homeless right i bring i bring this up you know that we're long we're long past that era and no one even remembers that tool anymore uh everyone only thinks about how easy it is to take your drill and screw it in and i ask people like do people still have homes you know like do we still build houses you know are there is there
Starting point is 00:54:00 a lack of construction jobs right now no there's actually a huge boom of construction jobs because these tools allow people to build more faster you know it just increases the economic output of them and yes when when electric tools especially the corded ones and the cordless ones came out you know people who like specialize in you know like doing this they they got displaced absolutely you know and that probably sucked for them you know genuinely i like my family and the things that my family like my my mom and dad have done over the years they've been displaced multiple times i've been displaced but economic displacement is a very normal part of any kind of healthy economy you know all it means is you got to switch gears you got to do something else you know it
Starting point is 00:54:43 doesn't mean you lose your job forever uh people oftentimes learn a lot of skills that are you know you can use somewhere else now that's a very normal healthy part of the economy but the part everyone seems to forget is like the economic output of an individual does compound think about all the all the hand cranks that are saved now every time you screw in a drill you know and i think the exact same thing happens with ai right now building all these like products and all these like you know simple like sass and limitations are you know hundreds of million dollar like you know enterprises that don't necessarily have to be they don't have to charge such massive amounts now people can spin up like you know their own competitors to all these massive sass products
Starting point is 00:55:22 right and now like that that's a good thing for everyone the costs go down for everyone as a result you know um and i i do think that like not even long term like short to midterm we're gonna see a lot of economic like boom that comes out of this now that comes with the caveat and everyone's waiting for this in the ai world will enterprise actually pick up like uh tooling that reflects um a lot of these ai things right that's what everyone's waiting for in the in the meta of the ai world and if if enterprise is not able to pick up direct ai tooling to fund the ai bubble then the bubble does pop you know and we're gonna have to wait for our electric drills a little bit a little bit longer but you know right well dig into that a little further what do you
Starting point is 00:56:06 mean by um enterprise figuring this out and getting the tooling right yeah so i mean okay so right now like the ai world's in a very specific spot we put a lot of money in to a lot of these like you know data farms and a lot of these server farms you know ram prices through the roof and you know gpus are pretty much hard to like impossible to find all that stuff um the thing is you know microsoft and you know open ai and all these folks only have so much cash to burn on this stuff and so they've been utilizing a lot of really interesting um like economic tools to fund a lot of these like projects a lot of these tools uh i think the term i've heard from the economist is they are economic innovations which is you know always
Starting point is 00:56:47 a great thing to hear um and so uh like everyone's pretty pretty sure that you know if these data farms don't or if these server farms don't work out it's going to be a relatively big pop right and we've already seen a big pop uh in these you know huge hype driven investments like evs are a huge one right regardless of how you feel about evs that project is kind of dead right now right mostly due to the the death of government subsidies and some companies some manufacturers spent you know billions of dollars building battery plants in the u.s billions of dollars that they're not going to get a good return on those same lenders are the ones backing the ai bubble as well um building a lot of these data farms and so everyone's just kind of like waiting with
Starting point is 00:57:33 bated breath in 2026 does enterprise actually pick up the bill and start paying significant amounts for a lot of these ai tools you know people kind of feel like retail is tapped out for for uh for ai and people are trying to figure out ways to monetize retail you know more so i think like the tech enthusiasts are happy to pay the $200 a month, but most retailers are just happy with free ChatDBT. And if not free ChatDBT, free DeepSeek, you know, so ChatDBT is going to have to stay free. And so, yeah, like right now everyone's looking for what the next thing is. And, you know, the initial reports are, frankly, enterprise isn't getting that much value out of AI tooling. You know, if anything, they're actually losing money because AI tooling is
Starting point is 00:58:16 kind of expensive for them so we're gonna have to see like you know what what can a lot of the big guys do to actually change this and if if some decisions that they do may don't make that much sense like implementing ads in chat gpt or you know making it harder to use cloud code outside of cloud code it's due to this like large-scale macroeconomics thing they they do need the enterprise angle to pay off um and so that that that's what i mean by that spark you know there's lot going on over there you know i i hope the bubble doesn't pop but it could no i mean as somebody who's been using claude um pretty heavily over the last six months i look at my usage look at my bill and i'm like just like knowing how hard i've hammered it and some days i'm like i'm
Starting point is 00:58:59 definitely not paying enough for this as being subsidized to to some extent it's like how long can that subsidization persist before the reality sets in and you don't have a deeper sort of investor pockets to dig into um which is interesting it's like are we going to see a dot-com bubble like pop and sort of valley of despair for a few years and the market eventually figures it out between now and 2030 like okay here's how to do it and not only do it but do it in a way where you can make money it actually makes economic sense and consumers are paying for what they're consuming and the producers of that net product are actually making money because that's all it comes down to you have to make money at the end of the day
Starting point is 00:59:46 but but then you also have this like existential geopolitical angle to it where um it has been deemed uh existentially critical to uh the future of freedom in the digital age america versus china So you do have daddy, daddy, uncle Sam, who seems pretty motivated to step in and back it up as well. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. There's I it's the only thing I know is that technology advancements always come in waves. Right. There's there's always a big one. And the crashes, that's the same thing that happened with EVs. You know, we're on like, I think, the third or fourth waves of EVs. People forget there was a wave in the 80s, you know, during the the oil crisis. And like there was a wave in the mid 2010s and there was a recent wave that just crashed there.
Starting point is 01:00:39 And now, you know, the Ford Lightning is going to go and throw in a gas generator, you know, so that that's about how it's going. And I might buy it, you know, complete transparency. I think that's awesome. But will AI like have a crash? It would follow the pattern of every other technological advancement if it did. Yeah. Just using pure heuristics, it would make sense that it should at some point. um bringing this back to bitcoin what um what are your thoughts on the current state of bitcoin both from a economic technical adoption standpoint and then uh the industry the state of the bitcoin industry um where it is right now where it could be 12 months from now particularly if uh magnolia takes off or a changing i don't know if you saw but uh op tx hash has uh a bip now right which is
Starting point is 01:01:33 interesting i think it came out like a like an hour or two before i hopped on um so that's interesting um are like basically at the high level of bitcoin right you zoom out as much as possible there's there's where is bitcoin going at an enterprise level where's bitcoin going at a legal level and then where's going where's bitcoin going at a tech level right and when it comes to enterprise plays there have been some interesting plays over 2025 um but by and large the value of bitcoin um like has always been the actual like you know buy sell like a price of bitcoin um people are trying to take advantage of that in really interesting ways like mstr you know has always been, like, how do we acquire more of this on the bet that it's going to go up? And, you know,
Starting point is 01:02:23 we're going to use all these different, like, devices to get that, you know, to get that going, right? And I think Bitcoin treasury companies are always some version of that, right? It's, you know, I'm not trying to say if it's good or bad, but that's, they're playing on the price of Bitcoin. And that seems to be, like, more of the enterprise play when it comes to Bitcoin. When it comes to the legal aspect of Bitcoin, it's pretty much just riding the coattails of the genius bill and the clarity act you know um i think all those conversations are about stable coins um but bitcoin just kind of follows you know along right uh it's just hanging out in the same conversation but uh not the part that everyone's like fighting this way that way over it's it's
Starting point is 01:03:03 people are fighting over the stable coins and the yield from the stable coins and uh what what to do with that. And then when it comes to the tech side of Bitcoin, the thing is, Bitcoin has had a lot of tech improvements over the years, almost none of them getting serious adoption, right? I mean, not just Lightning. When I mean serious, I mean serious compared to Bitcoin, right? Lightning is there and has been awesome for a while, but now we've got Spark and Arc and a lot of other like layer twos that are coming up and you know those are all fine and do like interesting things but then there's all these like other upgrades to bitcoin coming along like you know whether or not covenants come to bitcoin all these different questions but the thing is compared to the other
Starting point is 01:03:50 two things i described the enterprise and the legal changes that are you know in the bitcoin space all these tech innovations they they do seem smaller right significantly and as a developer right that's my entire background i would like to see those innovations be bigger and make more of a splash but that's just not the part of bitcoin people are really interested in you know so for magnolia i i want to follow the things that like have much bigger splashes you know which to us seems to be tooling and services that have to do regarding what the price of bitcoin you know like pragmatically that's just the direction that everything is in so if there's a way we can use the price of bitcoin to make other people money or to you know like convert pre-coiners in that
Starting point is 01:04:37 that's where i think magnolia wants to be for these other projects i want to support them the best i can because there there might be like some way to you know have a really cool like lending protocol uh related to some of these things or a really cool like way to bridge gaps here with lightning we support lighting and magnolia and that lets us plug in things like arc and maybe even spark and that's fantastic but i think the future for 2026 is going to be a lot like really focused on these bigger folks right now um i think the thing that people haven't really talked about is that uh the retail retail isn't pumping in uh bitcoin and not even ai you know so i think people are feeling squeezed right now but enterprises are are out here they're doing things so that's
Starting point is 01:05:22 magnolia's got to be yeah there's an order of operations to bitcoin's long-term success is something i've i've long said and i mean expressed in other ways like store value meaning exchange unit of account whatever it may be it seems like we're still squarely in the early phase of adoption where it's monetizing and like it or not that is where a lot of money is going to be made this particular point in time and where a lot of the activity is but to your point about the second layers to that that's i'd be interested to get your thoughts on that like how much do you think people in the industry should even market them um right so you think of like spark arc um charming mints uh liquid these second layers like i think 2025 was the year at least
Starting point is 01:06:06 in my perspective that people in the industry begin to realize oh all these things are interoperable and if we can combine them in creative ways we can eke out efficiencies and and really improve our processes as a Bitcoin service provider. One thing that comes to mind is being able to automatically rebalance channels by combining ARK and Lightning. Obviously, caveat, at scale you'll probably need covenants, but we're not at that point yet. Point being, the point that I'm trying to make is
Starting point is 01:06:41 how much of these second-layer technologies should even be marketed to the public? And should they just be viewed as the back end infrastructure that app developers and product developers integrate and don't even don't even really market to the end user that that's what's happening in the back end? I think that second part, like all this stuff is really complicated for even people in this space, you know, all these different like different protocol schemes. But to your point, it's it's becoming pretty interoperable, you know. and i think we're gonna have like it's gonna have its moment when there's a killer application somewhere in in this like whole you know ecosphere but all these different ecosystems work together quite effectively so let's say you know we partner with like arc for example and someone else partners with spark and both of them are trying to like interact with some application on like
Starting point is 01:07:35 some layer two that is neither of those right but everyone has bridges we can all interact with the end application uh just like quite fine right and i think that is a world like worth kind of like going for you know like if that explosion occurs everyone wins especially when it's interoperable um how soon will that well how soon will that it will take to get there i have no idea i think we're firmly past the era where there's like like a lot of you know frankly just like scam projects out there i think that the guys that are left are like probably pretty good at this point um i've been paying attention to i think like a couple days ago i checked in on a couple projects that i was always a little uh uh skeptical of just to see what they what they were up to i hadn't
Starting point is 01:08:18 heard about them and you know i don't think they're doing super well which is good to see that you know they're not gonna get involved in any of our conversations but that's a good thing because now i can kind of like generally start to trust like okay we've weeded out a lot of folks from 2025 you guys are left they're still building they're launching and they're doing things let's see what they come up with. And if they come up with something good, hopefully there's a way we can all bridge over there with minimal cost, you know, then everyone really wins out on one person's game. You know, I think that's like kind of the strategy other projects have really taken when they had like, you know, a lot of, you know, different projects that needed to interact with
Starting point is 01:08:55 each other for whatever reason. I think that's a winning strategy. You know, as long as it's all based on Bitcoin, I'm happy. Yeah. And considering where the price is too, like I actually... get a i get a bit of guilty pleasure out of the price consolidating like it has some people freaking out and i think it's been a trope for at least uh as long as i've been in bitcoin like building happens in the bear markets not to say that this is a bear market like we've experienced in the past but it feels like that to many particularly many who are relatively new to bitcoin and if you just zoom out and look at all the progress that's been made whether that's uh in the business sector industry being built on top of the protocol or the protocol and the
Starting point is 01:09:40 second layer protocol is being built on top of it it's been pretty massive um from my perspective it's the signal in the sea of uh price noise that exists in my mind yeah i think if if you're someone who uh thinks that this is a bear market then you know just don't worry like you know you'll lose that idea over time every now and then i like see a tweet like the price is down and it's like actually higher the last time i i knew the price and i'm just like oh i don't like yeah like i've been in bitcoin long enough to what even is the price right now i have no idea something really probably oh it's at 88 that's funny i think the last time i saw it was at 86 so i'm not i'm not too upset 88 88 lucky lucky number 88 um yeah this has been awesome
Starting point is 01:10:29 What parting thoughts, messages, ideas around Magnolia that we haven't touched on do you have for the freaks out there? Yeah, I mean, like really what we're trying to do is just make it easy to get banked, right? Like to get you banked, to get your customers banked so that you can just implement whatever interface you want, right? Like you can go as far as creating a new bank if that's what you want to do with Magnolia. If you want just auto pay or even just auto DCA, you can do that with Magnolia. Like what we're trying to do here is just create as much financial tooling as possible for the builders. And if there's something that, you know, that you would like to see that you don't think
Starting point is 01:11:10 we have, reach out, you know, maybe there's a way you can do it where I'm a very customer first person, right? If people tell me they want to go to EU, we'll go to EU. We figured out a way to do it. People told us that they wanted to go to all 50 states, you know, and that's what they wanted to focus on they don't want to focus on geofencing people from like alaska right or indiana so um we figured out a way to do that you know um we're very like customer focused and i think that's that's really worked out for us and our launch is kind of based on what people have really
Starting point is 01:11:40 wanted so you know if you're building something and you've got a customer base that you want to to like you know connect to trad rails for whatever reason reach out there's probably some way we can help you like genuinely i think all bitcoin apps can can utilize something like this um yeah and even even if uh you just want to say hi also we'd love to just talk with people i love chatting with you on bitcoin y'all are my people you know so i just love to talk oh yeah well thank you for your time today congrats on getting this over the line i know it's been a lot of a lot of hard work on your end and the in the uh end of your team there at magnolia so looking forward to seeing you guys really get out there and uh we'll have to do this at some point again
Starting point is 01:12:22 in the future until next time man thank you so much for having me on and i'll catch you when i see you peace 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 whether that's youtube apple spotify make sure you like and subscribe to the show and if you can leave a rating on the podcasting platforms. That goes a long way. Last but not least, if you want to get these episodes a day early and ad-free, make sure you download the Fountain podcasting app. You can go to fountain.fm to find that. $5 a month gets you every episode a day
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