The Pomp Podcast - #1495 Ivan Soto Wright | How Crypto Is Changing Payments Forever

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Ivan Soto Wright is the Co-Founder & CEO of MoonPay. In this conversation we talk about what is going on with stablecoins, payments, various places around the world, how enterprises are beginning to get interested in allowing customers to pay in crypto, regulation, and where Ivan thinks the future looks like. =====================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.=======================The future is being built today and the future of currency isn’t dollars, euros, pounds, or yen, it’s crypto. And Gemini thinks that’s a great thing. Because a future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible, that’s a future that we are anxious to be a part of. Go where dollars won’t. With Gemini. =======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on, guys? Today, we've got a great episode with Ivan Sotorait. He is the founder and CEO of Moonpay, one of the fastest growing and largest ways for you to interface with the crypto industry. In this conversation,

we talk about what's going on with stable coins, payments, various places around the world, how enterprises are starting to get interested in allowing people to buy goods and services from them with crypto, what's going on with regulation and where Ivan sees the world going, everything from AI to regulation. This is a fascinating conversation that will definitely teach you something if you watch the entire thing. So I hope you enjoy it. Here's my latest conversation with Ivan Soto-Wright. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement

to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account, but don't have any crypto in your retirement account? Then listen up. This is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement by helping smart investors diversify their savings with access to over 75 cryptocurrencies. With world-class customer service, military-grade encryption, and a vertically integrated licensed trust company, it's no wonder more than 200,000 Americans trust Bitcoin IRA to secure their financial future.

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today and you can earn up to $500 in rewards when you add funds to your account. Today's episode is Brought to you by Gemini. The future is being built today, and the future of currency isn't dollars, euros, pounds, or yen. It's crypto. And Gemini thinks that's a great thing because a future where money is decentralized, inclusive, and globally accessible,

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go check it out at gemini.com slash go where dollars won't. All right, Ivan, I thought a great place to start the conversation. Everyone knows you as like the payments guy. You guys have done a fantastic job of onboarding tons of people, tens of millions of people into payments, DeFi, crypto, et cetera. But you actually started in 2012. You're really, really early to Bitcoin. I don't think most people realize that. So tell us the story of how you found Bitcoin and why'd you buy in 2012? Well, first, thanks for having me on the pod. This is evolution. It's been great to see. So when I started in crypto, my friend wrote his thesis on Bitcoin at George Washington University. And I didn't think much

of it at the time, but I was like, wow, this is like a really cool internet-based money. I should learn more about this. And I went and bought my first Bitcoin on localbitcoins.com, which was, this is, I think Coinbase just came to market in 2012. So this was very, very early. And I didn't think much of it. I just bought, you know, a couple hundred bucks, didn't think much of it. And then I started my career on the institutional side. So I used to work with some of the biggest pension funds, insurance companies. I never predicted. I went from a college DJ to finding myself in the front of institutional finance, but it taught me how to look at the world. And I saw that you're going to have these different asset buckets. You have

equities, you have fixed income, you have real estate. Crypto could be an asset class. And I remember I told some of my colleagues, hey, I'm buying some Bitcoin. And they're like, this is tool of mania. This is not real. But I stuck with it. I kept watching it. And that price kept climbing. And it was actually quite sad. But my grandfather passed away and then managed to put my inheritance into Bitcoin around that period of time. And that was ultimately the seed money that helped me start Moonpay. Incredible. So I think I met you in probably 2020 or 2021

and you were raising money for Moonpay. And at the time you're like, yeah, so we've like got this business and you kind of were like pretty much downplaying the success that you guys had so far. And you're like, I bootstrapped it till now. And I remember like, wait, what? In a world where everyone is raising

an ungodly amount of money, you had just said, no, I'm going to build the business. I'm going to focus on kind of the product and serving our customers versus raising money. what was the original idea and like why did you not raise money why did you just you know choose to kind of just go to this different path well bootstrapping a company is definitely a cool feeling uh you know you being in control but the reality was i couldn't raise money when i first tried to raise uh the seed round i think i even went to speak to you and no one wanted to write

a check into moon pay in the beginning days and so i remember going to silicon valley and at the time it just most people were asking me why is the time now to invest and the reality was uh you have to have long-term conviction and i knew that in the future non-custodial was going to be important you need to own your keys and i thought that wallets were going to be the future i thought wallets are essentially they're going to replace your bank account and it is now going to be the primary interface in which you interact with this new world of finance it's internet driven anyone with an internet connection can participate and i remember you know when i first you know really the really first point around moon pay that was exciting to me was there wasn't an easy accessible

on-ramp, right? The way to think about MoonPay is like an ATM. So if I'm operating a physical ATM business, my job is to put the ATM in the most highly trafficked places in the world, right? And so same thing applies for the internet world. We're the most highly trafficked websites. And so a lot of the work that we did was how do we have the best SEO in the world? So if you search buy Bitcoin or buy Ethereum or buy Solana, I'm really proud of my team. We're probably one of the first search results that comes up, whether it be through MoonPay, our partners that install ATM or MoonPay itself. And so we worked really hard with the thesis that there needs to be a trusted interface to interact with crypto. No one's going to want to have to go through KYC

multiple times. And so once you onboard with MoonPay once, you have this one click magical checkout experience and you can think of it just like PayPal. So how many people have you guys onboarded now? So about 30 million. So you have 30 million people who have come in, they've signed up, they've gone through KYC, whatever, and they're going, they're buying stuff. And so when go to a retailer you're basically like hey look any of these 30 million people who show up we've pretty much already you know solved that problem and it's very quick uh instantaneous ability for them to be able to transact is that right so you think of it as we start with crypto native merchants so it's not normally you know your starbucks that people are using to pay for crypto

or meaning to buy crypto it's actually the most popular wallets in the world so trust wallet is a client exodus is a client bitcoin.com is a client and for them you know we bring the regulated infrastructure. So we have licenses all across the United States, Europe, UK, rest of world. And we essentially bring that user journey down to as much, you know, as the least amount of friction possible. We want that one click checkout. And so once you've onboarded once, you never have to do it again. And when these people are coming, how many of them are using fiat, like, you know, credit cards, debit cards, things like that, versus they already have crypto and they want to use that to buy something?

So right now we're all about backwards compatibility to the existing system. So you can think about it. My job is how do I localize the experience for every single part of the world with every single payment method? So when we started, it was actually a bit of a controversial thought,

which was let's start with debit and credit cards. Why debit and credit cards? You have hundreds of millions of people on the Visa MasterCard network, right? So you already out of the box have distribution. And it was also challenging because the issue with your debit or credit card is if you charge with your card,

you can do something called a charge back and there's a reversal. So a lot of the work that we had to do was to build a fraud model where we could get comfortable accepting payments from individuals around the world. And so we have to make a judgment call, whether we accept or reject a particular transaction.

And how do we do that at scale without blowing out our fraud rates? Because if we have high fraud rates, Visa and MasterCard would shut us down. And so a lot of the beginning, early part of MoonPay was how do we make sure that we keep these fraud ratios was low and build the gold standard of doing this at scale. And so a lot of the work was build our own proprietary fraud model. Now I can say we're actually 100% internal proprietary model around

how we score particular transactions. When you think of kind of the world, I think a lot of people in maybe the Bitcoin world, stable coins are starting to look at this stuff and they're saying the United States user actually may not appreciate a lot of this technology because the dollar works so well. What do you guys see in the rest of the world? Is it much higher adoption? Are there certain regions that maybe would surprise me where there's more adoption than I would expect? So the big story this year is stablecoins. Everyone wants to talk about stablecoins. As soon as you say the word stablecoin, everyone perks up in a meeting because it's the buzzword of 2025, but it's real. That's better than Metaverse or whatever else.

It's a little bit of the Metaverse, maybe even better than NFTs. But what I would say is, it's already here. So $27 trillion of value was settled on stablecoins in the last year. That's a crazy stat. That's bigger than Visa and MasterCard combined. And I think the value, it's kind of similar to Euro dollars, right? Dollars outside the United States, where I think the real value is actually outside the US where getting access to a dollar denominated bank account, either for a business or an individual can be quite tricky. And so now if you have a stable coin, you can send it to anyone in the world. We're now getting to cost of transaction really declining, right? Where it's super cheap to be sending a stable coin. You can do it for

less than a cent and you can receive it in seconds. And I think that's a revolution. For the first time, it's been really difficult to see alternative payment methods take off in the checkout experience when you think about commerce. Some countries have done it well. For example, Brazil, they have PIX, which is sponsored by the central bank. And it's a really efficient payment method. It's ironic, but in the United States, we're a little bit behind. We've had ACH forever. We've been talking about real-time payments, but no one is using that in everyday commerce. And I actually think with stable coins and your wallet as the primary interface, we have a real opportunity to using it for commerce. And part of the reason we bought

Helio very recently was we integrate into Shopify, we integrate into WooCommerce, and we think that's the next leg to complete crypto being in everyday life. Explain this acquisition, right? I think people may have read the headline, but they don't really understand what Helio is or why you guys strategically did this. So everyone would ask me, oh, MoonPay, you must make it easy. And I would get DM'd all the time. Hey, I want to, you know, I've got a private jet company and I want to accept crypto payments. Or, you know, I have a general retail business, you know, name XYZ business and they want to accept crypto. MoonPay traditionally didn't do that. And the market for it was still quite small. There was, you know, Coinbase Commerce and a couple others. But I was

really impressed with this team, you know, called Helio. And they really focused on the Solana ecosystem. So they actually control Solana Pay. They work very closely with Solana Pay in partnership and it's powered directly in your Shopify experience. And if you try it, it's magical. Like you can connect your Phantom wallet, one click, and then it basically asks you to authorize a transaction. You authorize a transaction in USDC. And for the merchant, it's a game changer because accepting a Visa MasterCard transaction is expensive and you might not get it on a weekend, right? It can take days for it to settle. This settles instantly and it's 10X, a 10-fold cheaper payment method. So I think there's a

real opportunity. Yeah, that's interesting. When you take a look at who these retailers are, like Amazon, Shopify, is this a big part of their business or is it still mostly, you know, kind of smaller, innovative type companies that are saying, hey, where can I gain an advantage on those incumbents? Yeah. So I think, you know, this is exactly how it played out for MoonPay. It wasn't, you know, we've spoken to a bunch of Fortune 500 companies that want to, you know, talk about enabling crypto use cases. But normally, you know, to be frank, it's great for an earnings report to talk about something innovative that you're doing within a pilot program, but you're not seeing a ton of traction quite yet. Do I think we'll get there? Yes. So first you start with the crypto

natives. And so that's what we did on the MoonPay side. And that's exactly what Helio has done. If you want to buy a Solana phone, for example, the Seeker, you can use Solana Pay and you can check out with your wallet. And so it's still quite a small audience today, but I think it starts there. And then eventually, bigger companies recognize the value. One of the things that I always look at from a technology standpoint is consumer behavior is usually a limiting factor. So technologists naturally, you know, they're the hammer looking for the nail. It's like, oh, technology is this limiting factor. But if you look at the internet, you know, putting your credit card in on early 90s, maybe the technology worked, maybe it was slow, maybe it wasn't perfect, but people didn't trust it. They were like, I'm not putting my credit card on the internet, like somebody's gonna steal my money type thing. Um, are there certain consumer behaviors today that are limiting that may just take time to change and that will kind of unleash this, you know, wall of liquidity or transaction volume to these retailers? So, you know, we had this thesis early that, you know, and it was a bit

controversial at the time was, uh, we collect KYC on behalf of the customer, but that was really because we want to reduce the friction. So you do it once and you never have to do it again. And if you think about the origin story of PayPal, PayPal, you know, really grew because of integrations inside of companies like eBay. And it was scary online. If you put your credit card details online, there was all sorts of cases where people were getting phished and there was a lot of fraud. And so PayPal was able to build this behavior profile across anywhere PayPal was integrated. And that was part of the reason why one of the most biggest challenges they had to solve was fraud. And they built a fraud engine to really reduce the amount of fraud coming through

their system. Same thing takes place for crypto. And actually KYC is one of the rules that we use inside of our fraud engine to help us reduce fraud across the system. But the idea is we got to reduce the friction. And so part of what we do is we literally look every single day, we're looking at how do we optimize this experience? How do we improve the conversion? Every single screen matters. How do you make this feel like an Apple Pay-esque experience? Part of what we did over last years we actually said you know our product is okay it's not phenomenal it's like you know we have a really high bar for you know an incredible user experience and so we actually threw out the product rebuilt it from scratch we call it the orion flow and it feels slick if you

are someone that is just trying to buy bitcoin for the first time i can say hand over heart i think moon pay is one of the easiest ways to do it when um you look at the moon pay product where you started to where you are today, what have been the big inflection points that have really led to more of this kind of user adoption? Obviously there's a whole, I'm going to call like business development or sales and marketing strategy to go get the B2B partner and get this ATM, as you call it, like in the place where there's a lot of traffic. But that doesn't simply, if you just put something there, it doesn't mean people are going to use it, right? It still has to be user-friendly. It still has to kind of work. So what are those things that you've learned

along the way that you think are important? The worst thing possible for an entrepreneur is saying, we'll build it and they will come. You learn that, you know, trying to build a consumer business. When we started, we actually tried to build a wallet at first and then thought, oh, actually, it's really hard to get adoption for this new technology, this new wallet, unless you have distribution. And so I think most entrepreneurs after going through, and before I started Moonpay, I started a consumer business connecting to your bank account and helping you sweep it into a savings account. It's called Saveable. But the problem was I had to get, you know, acquire customers. And that was quite tricky. You know, the insight on this one was,

let's go B2B first. We still have the relationship with the end consumer, but that gets you crazy distribution and scale. And part of the thinking was, these wallets are going to replace centralized exchanges. I genuinely believe that the wallet is going to be the primary interface. And if you think about it, centralized exchanges really existed out of convenience, right? They would do a lot of different activities that were all bundled together. They would custody your crypto. And we can obviously, you know, that was one of the principles of, you know, why I got excited about crypto was peer to peer. You should be able to move money freely if you have a wallet, wallet to wallet. And so I think the big shift that you're seeing right now is people will move away from centralized exchanges, go directly inside the wallet.

And MoonPay can help bring a bunch of that functionality that existed in that centralized exchange for convenience. So you can use all the popular payment methods. We just announced MoonPay Balance where you can fund in via ACH. So you don't need to go to a centralized exchange anymore. And if you look at the trend right now, DeFi is about 40% of the overall retail activity at its peak. I think that trend will continue to go up and to the right, and more and more transactions are going to start settling peer to peer. In terms of the biggest inflection points for us, it was getting the right accounts. We started with Bitcoin.com. If you're going after a B2B

business, you want to get the biggest, baddest logo you could get. And at the time, I was like, Bitcoin.com was an amazing first client to start with. And they still remain one of our top key partners. And so part of what we pride ourselves is these long-term relationships. We've been a monetization engine, a partner to a lot of these companies that want to access all these incredible payment methods to bring more people into their ecosystem. And so, you know, I think a lot of it is building the trust with those partners. The reality is the crypto space is small. So one of the other really interesting insights was, you know, we always admire Stripe from afar. They had built a really great self-serve, you know, developer focused experience. But the reality is

there's such, you know, there's so few merchants that are going to need MoonPay type infrastructure that self-service was less of a priority for us. Now we've started to invest in it as the market continues to scale, but you could really name, you know, on a couple hands, how many clients really, really matter in this space. And so we really focused on giving them the best experience. When you think about what's going on in the world, there's been a shift in the political kind of posturing, the regulatory posturing towards crypto in general. There's calls for a stablecoin bill. There's calls for a strategic Bitcoin reserve and all these different things. If you had to wave a magic wand and pick one or two things that you think would be

the biggest tailwinds either for your business or kind of payments in general, what are the things that you feel like should happen on that front? So I have to say any company that survives this last couple of years, you definitely needed to have grit. You need to have grit. You need to have focus because they weren't tailwinds. They were headwinds, right? Full-on headwinds. And part of it was really basic things. You would think it wouldn't be that hard to classify particular assets. Is this asset a commodity? Is it security? Is it a collectible? Is it something else? I think what's really promising is we're going to have that clear regulatory framework to define particular assets. Also, if you have a stable

coin, you know, a lot of the issues that we face in crypto normally stem from counterparty risk, right? And, you know, the idea that you can have a stable coin, you need to have it backed with US dollars, you need to know that those US dollars are there. And so I think we're getting to a place where we're going to have stable coin regulation, where we're going to be able to attest that those dollars are actually in fact, they're sitting in treasuries. And so I think it's going to be a safer market that people can trust, right? We want to have a place where we have less rug pulls, like regulars do play an important role, like we want it, we want consumers to be safe. But we also want, you know, we don't want to stifle innovation. We want entrepreneurs to stay here on shore in

the United States, building the best technology, building the best companies. And so I think it's been incredible to see a shift towards crypto actually being a key economic pillar of this administration. You know, I think, you know, I'm very excited that I'm here building the United States. I'm here in New York. We're now opening up a new office based here in New York. And so, you know, we really think that once you get to a place where there's regulatory clarity, More and more people are going to be comfortable to take the risk to build these incredible innovations and bring them to market. And also stable coins, if you really think about it, they're in the United States interest. We obviously want the dollar reserve status to remain the key currency of the world.

We want it distributed everywhere. What better way to distribute it than over the Internet? When you think about the variety of products that have come to market, those headwinds that you talk about, I immediately go to, when I first entered this industry, Bitcoin was supposed to be a threat to the US dollar. It seems like Bitcoin is winning and the dollar is winning. It's more popular than ever for bilateral trade. Stablecoins have extended dollar dominance. They both can win. They both can win.

But what's fascinating to me is the one area where the dollar is weak is technologically. So we went from this like analog age of physical dollars and like change and, you know, old standard, all the things people know. We moved to this electronic dollar and electronic dollar works pretty well in the United States, obviously elsewhere remains to be seen. But stable coins are a far superior technology for exposure to the dollar. And so do you see a world where the U.S. actually adopts a stable coin? Do they try to nationalize one of like the stable coin issuers? How do you see this playing out? Because it's kind of a weird thing for-

I hope to God they don't nationalize the stable coin. I hope so too. But, you know, if you're sitting there and you're like, hey, look, we're used to being the, you know, the person who is able to issue this money. All of a sudden you're like, well, there's somebody else who has like a more superior way for people to transact in this thing.

But technically we're still like the center of monetary policy. So it's kind of like a weird dynamic. How do you just see this playing out? And it feels like it becomes pretty important for the United States and the economy. So right now, the stablecoin market is a duopoly for the most part. And so we'd love to see more innovation, more issuers. And I really think this should be left to the private sector. You want to be able to innovate on even what chains it's going to ultimately sit on, right?

We're constantly making it. There's new blockchains. There's new layer twos. There's new layer ones even. And all the technology is just trying to benefit consumer. Now, who am I to predict which blockchain is ultimately going to be adopted? We're completely agnostic, but we want to see more and more innovation there. And so my concern of the government trying to do it, I'm glad that we've made a position in the United States that we're not going to have central bank digital currencies.

I think that would be a risk to the consumers in terms of privacy. I'm glad we got ahead of that issue, but I really think it belongs to the private sector. And we want more companies issuing stable coins. We want to have more innovative products around stable coins. So the next piece is, can we start sharing the yield with consumers? Because then it's not only a U.S. dollar bank account abroad, it's also interest, right? Or, you know, here for consumers, you know, you basically have a way to actually see this replacing your bank account. And so hopefully we get to that clarity over this year with the new stablecoin legislation.

Got it. What are you most excited about in kind of the next year or two? It feels like everyone's got their thing, right? You know, some people it's price, some people it's regulation. What are you most excited about? Well, I'm a product guy and I love, you know, really looking at the product experience beginning to end. And I generally think that this is the technology that can be used by everyone. Like before, you know, I remember when I first got started, you need to use the terminal inside your commuter to basically interact with a Bitcoin wallet.

And it was like the Electrum wallet. And it was like quite hard to use. We're innovating on the user experience, which is great for everyday consumers. On top of that, I also think the trend that's going to really take off is AI agents, right? You're going to start giving an AI agent permission over executing transactions on your behalf. And so we need to prepare for that. And I think the next frontier is your APIs need to be AI friendly. AI agents do not care about your UI.

As much as I care about beautiful product experiences, AI, it just needs to functionally work. And so a lot of the work that we're doing is making sure that we could take advantage of this new innovation. Yeah. When we see all this product stuff happening, you mentioned artificial intelligence, there was the agents, everyone's really excited about that stuff. Historically, I thought that Bitcoin was money for machines, you know, kind of Bitcoin was

money for software. Again, stable coins, though, become this really interesting thing. If we go and we maybe peek around the corner and look kind of futuristically forward, do the agents have wallets? Do they transact with each other? Do they like store their wealth in Bitcoin, but use stable coins? Like, how do you just see this playing out where it really does feel like a lot of these technologies are coming together in what I usually refer to as like an automated age? More so than it's just crypto or it's just AI or it's just, you know, one technology. They're all coming together, and that's really what's laying the foundation for the future.

For sure. It's definitely amalgamation of all these technologies coming together. They benefit each other. And I think AI agents right now are incredible read-only, right? They're being able to pull a ton of different information. It's actually, you can ask an AI agent almost anything. And even on Twitter, you're starting to see, on X, you're starting to see AI agents build huge followings and have all sorts of alpha that they're telling you about the market.

And so that's the first generation, I think. the second generation will be those AI agents actually have walls attached to them because they're not going to open up a bank account with Wells Fargo. They're going to go spin up a cryptocurrency wallet, have it connected to them. They're going to have ownership and control over it. And then you may decide to delegate your wallet over to the AI agent to actually execute on your behalf. So we're going to go from read-only to read-write. And that's the next big shift that we're going to see. And so that comes down to having the right APIs that are developer friendly and the use cases to start to grow but i think you know for a bunch of folks like they

might want to set uh an ai agent and forget and it will just grow uh your portfolio on your behalf i think that's going to be really exciting everyone's going to hire their own like hedge fund manager right to personally work for them i used to i used to play a lot of video games and the the analogy i have is like you know if you played legend of zelda you had your navi fairy kind of like following around that's essentially your ai agent right now it's giving you information but then it can start to do things on your behalf which i think is super talk to me about d5 um There's obviously been a big focus on CeFi, the large financial organizations. They tend to be very centralized.

It's kind of what they know. You have this thought that actually the world is moving much quicker towards the decentralized finance world than maybe people realize. Yeah. So, I mean, centralization definitely has benefits of convenience, right? And that's why we saw most people gravitate towards centralized exchanges. But there's limitations with that, right? A really good example is new assets that are being issued, right?

Getting access to those new assets, you have to go through a listing committee. It's got to go through regulatory approval to turn on an asset. Whereas in DeFi, if someone spins up the smart contract and issues an asset, it's accessible to anyone. And so what you're starting to see is the shift towards what we're seeing in real time. People topping up their wallet using MoonPay into Solana or USDC or another stable coin and then trading directly using a DeFi protocol. And so I think that trend will continue to grow because, and it's a real threat to the centralized exchange model.

What do you think is the outcome there? Do you think the centralized exchanges can persist? For sure. Like there's always going to be a benefit. You know, I think if you look at most of the ETFs that were filed, most of them are using Coinbase custody. You know, it's an incredible institutional business

for institutions. There's, you know, real, you know, reason to have centralized exchanges. But for retail, I think it can be a cheaper, faster, more efficient experience. The one thing we still need to solve is cross-chain. It's still not quite easy to do cross-chain activity using a cryptocurrency wallet and using DeFi. So centralized exchanges are still a bit better for that. But for things that are on-chain, it's far better and you can get your asset in seconds. A great example was you had Trump launch a meme coin. No one was expecting Trump to launch a meme coin, and none of the centralized exchanges had it available.

So we actually saw an explosion of activity of wallets that had demand for MoonPay topping up into USDC or topping into Solana so they could trade and get access to it. How does this work? Explain what happened here because I know there's this crazy story of kind of panic maybe inside of MoonPay, but in a positive way. Yeah, we've got cool heads. We've been through a lot. you go through lots of ups and downs. And so it was a good test, uh, for us as, as a team. Uh, and you know, these types of situations bring your team super close together. So I'll give you the story. So, uh, it's the crypto ball in DC. Uh, it's the inauguration weekend. And, uh, we

find out that night, you know, at the ball, David Sachs has given a speech, uh, that this Trump coin gets launched. And I remember Keith, our president of enterprise points to me. He's like, Hey, have you seen this Trump coin? I'm like, no, I haven't seen it. And he's like, yeah, it's at a couple of billion market cap. I was like, this doesn't make sense. Like we haven't really seen something blow up. Like maybe it's like, but maybe it's fake. I had no idea. And so it turned out to be real. And all of a sudden, you know, I don't think much of it, you know, and then the next morning I wake up and our CFO calls us and says, Hey, Ivan, we have a liquidity issue. I'm like, what do you mean we have a liquidity issue? We have tons of money in the

bank. No, our money is actually in BlackRock T-bills. And typically we prepare for having adequate capital, you know, multiples on our all-time highs. But, you know, in that first day we did almost $60 million of sales on debit and credit cards, PayPal, and Venmo into MoonPay across our ecosystem. So that was an abnormal event, right? Our best event up until that point was about 15 million. So it was a 4X on the first day. And the problem you have is the banking system is not 24-7. And so we're not going to get settled. So when we process a card, it takes days for that money to settle into our account, or especially on a weekend, right? And it was a bank holiday weekend. So we weren't going to get settled till Tuesday.

so we needed significant working capital and we needed it fast and we needed it in crypto um so we couldn't just go to someone that had the money it was like you had to have stable coins or crypto readily available so it was uh it was a movie of a story i had to basically uh liquidate some of my personal bitcoin to buy us you know we were like had a countdown ticker of how many hours we would have until we'd run out of liquidity and we're also you know a key part of the ecosystem we can't our wallets depend on moon pays infrastructure so it's not acceptable that we go down we cannot have downtime and so uh thankfully i was here in new york about two weeks ago with keith grossman our president of enterprise and we sat down with mike novogratz

and uh you know he was first port of call in my mind we had to call mike and see if he could help us out it was the call lasted a minute and 30 seconds and he made the decision he said look you know i like what you guys are doing uh and he said look i think i can make something happen and so the whole rest of the day was you know the paperwork uh we put lians you know the problem is you can't even put a lien on the blackrock t bills because it's a weekend and so part of it is on trust and good faith i did a personal lien on my assets so um you know i pledged everything to make sure that the company uh would continue operating and we over collateralized you know between the blackrock t bills and my personal loan and uh we were able to get the money and

so we get 100 million dollars you know we're jumping up and down we're like yes we saved the day. Next morning we wake up and the volume doubles. And so all of a sudden we find out that we need even more capital. And I didn't want to go with my tail between my legs to Mike and say, look, I need another 60 million bucks. And so we got the idea to reach out to Brad Garlinghouse who happened to be in DC. And I was like, who else would be sitting on crypto capital? and he steps in for us. So I definitely owe Brad and Mike a lot of good faith in providing that loan

in such short notice. And so we were able to operate. On Tuesday, we paid it all back. But it's a really good example as to why crypto is 24-7. Your money and your bank account isn't readily available. And so it really shows why I think crypto is the future.

Are you able to say what the interest rate was? It was great. I mean, they were super nice. I don't want to disclose it for them, but they, they made some money, but we obviously were able to stay operational and we didn't lose money. Yeah. Um, there's a lot of people who have traded against Mike hearing in a time of need that he's a nice guy is maybe the first time anyone's ever heard that. So when Mike watches this, he'll, he'll get a good laugh out of it. Um, when you think of those moments, uh, how do

you prepare for the next big unforeseen thing? Right. It's kind of this crazy thing in crypto where in a, I don't know if you're Amazon or something, right. You kind of know, okay, uh, Black Friday's coming, holidays are coming. You go through some of these events, maybe some, you know, really good book comes out, but it's going to be minuscule, even if it's a blowout compared to things that they've seen in the past.

Cryptos are the wild west, man. Well, you gotta be prepared for anything. You gotta be prepared for anything, you know? And I think- In both directions too, right? Trump coin is a good thing, but there could be tons of selling because people are worried about, you know,

some event or something. I love the quote that being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the abyss. you know that's what it kind of feels like you know at times like you just have to have grit you've got to have you know thankfully i you know in college i was a rower and that's probably one of the most painful things that you can do to your body is you just immediately get to lactic acid in about 15 seconds if you're pulling as hard as you possibly can on these machines and uh you know if you do that type of thing you i think you're prepared for anything in life and so i was

definitely shaped by being in kind of tough uh environments and staying really focused and you just gotta have to have you know thick skin if you're in crypto yeah you're dealing with so many unknowns like you know there's so many unknown unknowns right uh that will come at you and you just gotta play your cards as they as they are dealt with to you and and uh you know just really believe in yourself i think that's you know what i can tell every entrepreneur is believe in yourself because if you believe in yourself and you have long-term conviction and you make you know general we we we talk about this concept at moon pay of kaizen which is these one percent uh incremental gains that you can have you know inspired by toyota um and i really believe that's true just

incremental progress every single day compounds and you can have extraordinary results let's talk about the business itself what numbers are public that you can share with us in terms of revenue you know uh customer size valuation any of that stuff so we raised our series a back in uh 2021 uh you know 3.4 billion valuation bootstrap the company really proud of that outcome and it really was put money on the balance sheet uh one for opportunities around m a attract talent uh and And for us, it was also building out the MoonPay account and the consumer business. So really happy to report that we've achieved on all these things. We obviously had to deal with a challenging macroeconomic environment, but I can share

that business grew by 112% in net revenue over the last year. We're cashflow positive and profitable. And we really have huge ambitions for this business. We think this business is a business we could take public at some point. I think there's a lot of opportunities for industry consolidation. We think M&A will be a big part of our strategy. There's some exceptional teams out there. I always find that some of the best talent are entrepreneurs.

And so one thing that we really pride ourselves on is how do we bring more entrepreneurial talent to MoonPay? And I think M&A is one of the best ways to do that. So we're constantly on the lookout. We want to keep localizing this experience. So more payment methods, more geographies. We want the MoonPay account to be spendable everywhere. We really think we're building a generational business at MoonPay.

When you think about these acquisitions, how do you go about evaluating what makes sense and what doesn't? So number one thing is if you can find a business that's cashflow positive and profitable, you know, typically that's kind of a no brainer, right? You pay some multiple on that. And if you can get them to believe in your company and your company stock, you can find us as acquisitions. So, you know, part of the reason you want to do these valuation events is to use your company currency. You know, I think the other thing we look for is just like crazy people, crazy hungry people. Like, you know, it's all about people at the end of the day. And so if you can find that talent that is motivated, that has a really clear vision. And for us, you know, our vision is pretty broad. It's payments infrastructure for the entire crypto economy.

How do we make that happen? And I think it's going to take a village to make that happen. So you need to find a whole group of entrepreneurs that have the same vision. Do you think that the M&A that we're seeing right now, I mean, you guys have been part of this, that is going to stay in the private markets? Or do you also see, you know, hey, let's get into public markets so we can use the publicly traded stock rather than kind of these more infrequent valuation methods? So I think right now, within crypto as a category, there really aren't that many public companies. We have Coinbase, we have miners, and then we have things like MicroStrategy. But it's still a relatively small pool of companies. Hopefully, we see within this administration in this period, I know a bunch of people are filing for IPO or direct listings,

and I think you're going to see a greater consortium of companies. But I think the real opportunity is yes, exactly that. You want to be able to convince people that your stock is valuable. And so being public is a, it's a great currency that you can use if you want to keep growing. So, you know, it's obviously something that we've been thinking about. When, when somebody asks you, what is MoonPay? What's your like one or two sentence description? The simplest way to explain it is it's the passport to the crypto economy. So, you know, you can take this passport anywhere. You know, it's like, you know, going to the moon, right? We're taking our passport, we're called MoonPay. And so this new world of crypto can be confusing.

Our job is to simplify it and make it, we want the MoonPay account to be the only account that you need. Once you've signed up to MoonPay, you can play with any decentralized application. And I think over time, there'll be an equivalent of people compare us to PayPal. MoonPay is the PayPal for crypto. Eventually there needs to be a brain tree as well. So more custom white label API focused solutions. So I'll give you a hint in some of the ways that we're thinking. And then what's your one or two sentence description as to why people should come work at Moonpay? Well, I work at Moonpay. Well, you know, you got to work hard. You got to work super hard, you know, but we also have fun. You got to work hard, play hard. You know, I think

life is short. I tell anyone that, you know, I recruit, it's like, you're, you're investing your time, you know, and your time is literally the most valuable asset that you have. And so, you know, if you're investing your time, you should be thinking, you know, is this worth it? Is it worth it for me? And ultimately that's about the environment we create. Like, do we make a place that's inspiring, that you can learn a lot. We want people to accelerate in their careers. We've had folks that have joined us and started in what you'd call an analyst or associate

or just came in as a full-stack engineer and now leading the entire function. So that's one of the things I'm really excited about. And then I'm inspired by people that even leave MoonPay and start their own companies, right? That's like, really, as an entrepreneur, it's like one of the most amazing things to see is other people build amazing companies.

And however much time they decide to spend with us, I want it to be productive and I ultimately want the best for them. So it's been, it's been great. And it's like one of the greatest privileges you have as an entrepreneur, as a CEO, is being able to mentor and hopefully grow the next generation of amazing entrepreneurs.

Where can we send people to find you on the internet? I don't know. I don't know. I guess really, no, I'm not that hard to find. You can find me on X. You can find me on- What are you like, like hiding? No, no, not soon on those.

I'm not Satoshi, but no, you can just check me out. Ivan Hodl on Twitter, Hodl, hold on for dear life. That was always the, you know, the mantra for crypto. that I still really believe in. You just have to long Bitcoin, short the bankers. It's the same concept here, right? We're long this technology. You have to have a long-term perspective

about crypto to succeed. And so that's something we don't really pay attention to too much on the short-term market moves. There's obviously metas in crypto that are constantly evolving, but the infrastructure level, we really have to think over the long-term, how do we deliver the very best experience in crypto?

And so we're proud to play a small part in making that happen. I think you guys are doing a fantastic job. So I appreciate you coming and doing this and we'll definitely do it again in the future. Awesome. Thanks, Bob.