The Pomp Podcast - #370: Jack Mallers on the Future of Strike, Zap, & Lightning Network

Episode Date: August 27, 2020

Jack Mallers is the founder of Zap, which has created Strike, an application that allows anyone to send money instantly, with no fees, anywhere in the world.  In this conversation, we discuss the Lightning Network, Strike's recent progress, tiered KYC, and Ethereum's misleading marketing. =============================== ExpressVPN lets you access the internet as if you’re from a different country. There are hundreds of VPNs out there, but ExpressVPN is ridiculously fast. You can stream everything in HD quality with zero buffering! If you use my link right now at EXPRESSVPN dot com slash pomp, you can get an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free! That’s https://www.expressvpn.com/pomp =============================== Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you are listening to this, you are likely part of the 7.1 million bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not bitcoin. I was in that situation too. Now you can actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax-advantaged dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. https://www.retirewithchoice.com/pomp =============================== Pomp writes a daily letter to over 50,000 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://www.pompletter.com

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Let's kick this thing off. Jack Mollers is the founder of Zap, which has created Strike, an application that allows anyone to send money instantly with no fees anywhere in the world. I'm a proud investor in what Jack is building with Zap and Strike. In this conversation, we discuss the Lightning Network, Strikes Recent Progress, Tiered KYC, and Ethereum's Misleading Marketing. You definitely will enjoy this podcast episode with Jack, just as I did. Before we get into the episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors.

The first is ExpressVPN. Not too long ago, over 100 million people had their personal information stolen in a major data breach. Social security numbers, contact details, credit scores, and more. Basically, their whole life was taken from Capital One customers. It's not just Capital One, though. Equifax, Facebook, eBay, Uber, PlayStation, and Yahoo have all leaked passwords, credit card info, and bank numbers belonging to billions of users. We see this stuff happen in crypto, too, whether it's your account details or other information being leaked or stolen.

And if you think hackers only target large companies to get your information, you're wrong. But that's why I use ExpressVPN to safeguard my personal data online. According to recent reports, hackers can make up to $1,000 from selling someone's personal information on the dark web, making people like me and you easy, lucrative targets. ExpressVPN is an app for your computer and phone that secures and encrypts your data so you can have peace of mind every time you go online. No more getting worried. Go online and have peace of mind.

The app connects with just one click. it's lightning fast and the best part is express vpn costs less than seven bucks a month that's right seven bucks a month and get yourself protected your mom probably told you to wear a condom when you went out on the weekends instead make sure you get express vpn to protect yourself when you're around online so listen if a breach can happen to capital one it can easily happen to an individual like you protect yourself with express vpn the number one vpn rated by wired CNET, The Verge, and countless others. Stop letting people steal your data. Use ExpressVPN. I have a special link, expressvpn.com slash pomp. Again, expressvpn.com slash pomp. If you go right

now, you can arm yourself with an extra three months of ExpressVPN for free. Pomp's got you. As long as you go and use expressvpn.com slash pomp, you'll get three months for free of using it. Like I said, protect yourself. Use ExpressVPN. Our next sponsor is Choice. Choice is a new self-directed IRA product that I'm really excited about. If you're listening to this, you're likely part of the 7.1 million Bitcoin owners who have retirement accounts with dollars in them, but not Bitcoin. I was in that situation too, but not anymore thanks to Choice. You can now actually buy real Bitcoin in your retirement account. I'm talking about owning your private keys and using tax advantage dollars to do it too. Absolute game changer. Go use Choice. Choice is a new

self-directed IRA product. You buy Bitcoin, you hold your private keys, and you use your tax advantage dollars to do it. Retirewithchoice.com slash Pomp. Again, retirewithchoice.com slash Pomp. Almost a thousand people have gone and done this that I've sent. Almost a thousand, and over 800 people already. RetireWithChoice.com slash Pomp. Let's get it cracking. Go buy Bitcoin in your self-directed IRA product. Lastly, don't forget that I write a daily letter to over 50,000 investors about business technology and finance. I break down complex topics into easy to understand language while sharing my personal opinion on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at Pompletter.com. Again, Pompletter.com. Let's get into this episode with Jack

Mahlers. What a legend. I hope you guys enjoy this one. Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. all right guys bang bang jack is back what's up dude what's up man how are you i'm good how are you i'm pumped you're killing it you're killing it for those that don't know uh jack is the founder

ceo uh boss uh brains whatever we want to call it of uh of uh zap which is the makers of strike uh we are uh proud investors of the uh of the business and uh jack and his team so uh maybe for two minutes just give us like the overview for people who didn't listen to the first time you came on the podcast yeah so i'm jack um i'm a third generation finance here in chicago so my my grandfather was chairman of chicago board of trade my dad started one of the bigger futures brokerages here and now i'm in finance but in this weird uh internet money asset thing and uh i'm probably most well known for my work on lightning in particular zap And our flagship product, Strike, is really booming in popularity.

It's a neobank of sorts in the fintech space, very similar to Venmo or Cash App, but it's built from the ground up to be interoperable with Bitcoin and the Lightning Network protocols, which gives us a lot of efficiencies and gains in the payment space. Explain that. So when you say it's built kind of bottoms up to be interoperable with Bitcoin and Lightning, just highlight that a little bit or elaborate. Yeah. So, I mean, I think there's a general movement in the fintech payment space towards neobanking. This idea of cash app is growing and booming in popularity because your money is made more accessible. Legacy banking, showing up to a Chase JP Morgan with your passport and documents, proof of address is really outdated. And people want accessibility with their money. They want their money to really act for them and be in their pocket at all times. And so we wanted to replicate that model, but use Bitcoin and Lightning as it's a more efficient money rail. it's a value transfer protocol that's inherently global it's inherently cheaper it's peer-to-peer and it's an open public standard that's collaborated on by thousands of participates on the internet and so we can do a lot of payment whether it's remittance brick and mortar online commerce rewards we can do that all likely much cheaper and much faster as long as i can get your

bank account or your debit card to speak the lightning and bitcoin protocol and so that sounds really complicated, but that's why we do it. That's where we're an expert. And so we're really just building on top of what PayPal started, what Square started. And we think that this is just the intuitive next step is incorporating Bitcoin and Lightning into that model. And so really what you're doing is you're taking all that complexity and you're offloading it from the units you're having to do that for you to do it, right? Correct. Yeah. I mean, these efficiencies have existed in Bitcoin, the asset class for a decade now at this point. The problem, though, is it required a laundry list of, you know, you got to be a computer scientist, technical expertise,

you got to incur capital gains when you spend it, you got to deal with volatility. And it really priced out a mainstream user or a mainstream business or whoever to really act on this asset class. And so we abstract that away. When you use Strike, you have no tax consequences. You don't deal with any volatility. It's as easy as downloading the app, entering your email and linking your bank account to use. It can be used from anyone five years old to 50 years old to 100 years old. And so we take all that on as a business, which is the real innovation. It's not only a technical innovation, but really there's a lot of product and user experience brought to us as a company. And I think that that's innovative, considering this space hasn't

really prided itself on UX over the last decade. And I think we bring serious value there outside of the obvious technical innovation. So let's maybe talk a little bit about Strike and the beauty of it being that the user doesn't even know necessarily they're using Bitcoin. They're just sending dollars, the recipient's receiving dollars. Talk a little bit just about how it actually works. And then any metrics you want to share around user acquisition or usage from those users, just as you guys have kind of launched in the early days. Yeah. So one of the main innovations of Strike is abstracting Bitcoin into the background. So Bitcoin as a value transfer protocol, the value has been there ever since Satoshi wrote the

white paper and ran the first node. The accessibility, though, to that value has been really tough you have to be a computer scientist you got to pay capital gains you got to deal with volatility and so we take that all on as a business i mean that's our job to do that and as a user you sign up you link your bank account you scan a qr code you click pay and it's really really dead simple um we abstract all that we can get into the live trading and sort of the fanciness in the background but uh the point is that mainstream users can now benefit from what is the greatest value peer-to-peer value transfer that's inherently global that the human race has ever encountered um and as far as our numbers i mean we launched our beta 45 days ago um we've

already exceeded over half a million dollars in volume we do hundreds of thousands of dollars every couple weeks at this point we're likely to hit our first million dollar month um either september or october um thousands and thousands of users we're going to be entering uh europe market uk um likely in q3 which will open the gate to remittances we've got a partnership with visa some big merchants onboarding and the acquiring side we recently launched our rewards program so we're flying at high speed i think we've got some of the most talented engineers in this space and uh yeah good things are happening man lightning works bitcoin works and strike works so i think uh the haters haters may be upset but we're we're pretty happy with how things are going

every time i talk to you uh there's always new products and uh in more progress which is usually a good sign uh lots of people wanted to know about kyc and then uh various states that you can operate in can operate in so maybe just talk a little bit high level just how you think about KYC and state by state rollout? And then any updates there in terms of things you guys are doing? Yeah. So one of the challenges with launching this product is there's obviously compliance and regulation involved. But to what depth is the question? The only severely regulated business so far in this space has been brokerage services and exchanges because that has been the use case for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a speculative asset class. That's been what's attracted most

users to date, right? Is that if I buy this thing, I hold this thing, I get richer. And that's not far from the truth. And so the most successful businesses have been those that offer that service. However, we're very different. We use Bitcoin almost as a utility function. So we're like a quasi processor and regulators were really thrown off by us. I remember calling some of the biggest law firms in the country and explaining the idea and put their brain immediately in a pretzel. And so it's been, it's been a long haul and a journey and they don't necessarily know how to regulate us. So right now we kind of fall under the exchange regulation with some exceptions. So long story short, that's the reasoning for the KYC. Do I think KYC should exist for strike?

No. Do I like KYC? No. Do I think it's helpful? No. But do I want to go to jail and have my business shut down? No. And so I maintain relationships with these people. At the end of the day, they're human beings. They mean no harm. And so what we've deployed is a tiered KYC. So in the beginning, when you download Strike, you can enter your email and your phone number and 75% of the time, that's going to be enough. And you're able to use the service up until certain limits. And then as you use the service and grow as a user, we'll need more and more and more information. These limits aren't hard-coded. In fact, they aren't even a strict law. Again, we kind of just fall in this no man's land. We are really innovating and the first of its kind

in this space. We're almost making the laws with regulators as we go on, which is fun and painful at the same token. So that's my as transparent as I can be rant about KYC. If it were up to me, it wouldn't exist. But I think it's even more valuable for us as a business to comply and push forward because we're really paving a way for many more in this space to follow in our footsteps and making great strides. So, you know, do the best we can. And you call this tiered KYC? Yeah. So we break it into two steps. There's light KYC and what we consider full KYC. And Light KYC gives us enough information for our banking partners and regulators to feel like they know relatively you're a real human being, you exist, you're not a terrorist, and that you can make consumer level payments. Because at the end of the day, we're not allowing people to send 500 grand of cash overseas yet.

These are small retail payments, retail users, mainstream type user. and so regulators and banking partners feel comfortable where I got your name I got your email I got your phone number you know what you seem like a good guy you're allowed to scan a QR code on our watch and that's okay but if you start exceeding limits of you know a couple thousand bucks five thousand ten thousand dollars well hey if you don't mind what's your address because you are you are spending a lot of money or what's your birthday and so this is an active conversation I I mean, I used to be an engineer all day, all night. Now I'm a suit that just happens to prefer a hoodie.

But I spend all my time talking with regulators, really grinding them down into what they're trying to accomplish, explaining lightning to them and hopefully get these limits removed and get them comfortable with the idea that Bitcoin as an infrastructure piece is going to play a part in payments. And then that doesn't mean that anyone's at risk of laundering money or funding terrorists. It's very similar to, you know, what Stripe does or what Square does, and they don't require you to give your social security number when you want to be a merchant on their platform. So I think we'll get there. But to their credit, it's all new and rightfully scary.

And so that's kind of the transparent inside look at a day in life for me. Talk a little bit about, you've done a fantastic job going and meeting with these regulators and really translating kind of the things that I think people in the Bitcoin community know and understand and are excited about to, I'll call it regulator language, right? Or kind of adult language, if they were saying it. But ultimately, I'm assuming that these people are not excited about this, like you said, kind of brains in a pretzel. But they seem to be coming around. And so talk a little bit just about as these conversations have progressed, and you've gotten to know these people, like that transition from regulators and from law firms and things like that into like, oh, wow, this is a really cool idea. And like, we want to actually help make this happen rather than fight it. Yeah. So I think an important point to keep in mind is that at the end of the day, these are all human beings. And I don't think any of them are acting maliciously more so than just doing their job. The real risk that Bitcoin poses to a local regulator, so not the President of the United States, who ultimately has great control over the US dollar and a strong relationship with the Federal Reserve. I'm talking about local state regulation. The risk it poses to them is getting them fired and getting them in trouble and ruining their reputation. And so what they can't have happen is give someone like Strike a lot of leeway and have

that backfire and have Strike end up funding the next terrorist attack. And they're fired. Everyone's in the can. Bitcoin's reputation is down the chute. And so that's the real risk. And so what's good for me is just going, hey, shaking their hand, letting them know I'm a human being too. I mean no harm. I'm not trying to fund the dark web. I'm not trying to allow people to transact privately on malicious services. I'm trying to improve payments. I think payments are really expensive. I think that there's a lot of opportunity to make things faster, cheaper. I think remittances should be a free and instant service and that people shouldn't have their lives put in harm's way in third world countries by trying to pick up a Western Union check. I think that I can solve that problem. And they really understand that. And as soon as I can explain the technology, give them a demo, have them download the app. No human being wants to be an enemy. I think part of being a human being is the opportunity to be part of something bigger than yourself. I think everyone in the Bitcoin community can relate to that. That's one of the beautiful things about Bitcoin is no one is bigger than Bitcoin. And it's really great to be a part of this thing.

And I think regulators feel the same thing. They don't want to look at Bitcoin as maybe probably the greatest investment opportunity and technological innovation of our lifetime and likely for centuries to come. And they don't want to be the enemy. And so I think they're very willing. They just, they need some job security, just like the rest of us. So that's, that's my impression. And they're good people. They pick up my phone call. I'll get them cub tickets when they do me favors, you know, the whole nine, the whole nine. Talk about fees and how Strike makes money. I saw a lot of people tweeting saying, you know, kind of how the hell is this possible and how do you make money? Yeah, well, you know, how does Square make money, right? No one charges the consumer. There's no native business model for the consumer.

For you to offer P2P payments, or even if you're Visa, you know, your debit card, you're not charging the guy who's buying the coffee. He's already paying for the good or service. the very clear customer is on the acquiring side. And so there's a few revenue models that are super intuitive to strike is that we're getting involved in the acquiring side.

And so right now acquirers, which is fancy word for merchants, they foot the bill in all of commerce, right? And so we think we can offer them a similar or better service for cheaper than what they're paying now. We also are a OTC desk of sorts is that we trade all of our own flow. So how does a trader make money? I think you guys can all answer that question yourself. And I'm a trader. So we also handle all of our own flow. So we're very similar to a Robin Hood and sense is that we handle and live trade consumer retail flow.

and then you know there's all sorts of sub-industries and payment space like remittances i think right now our main priority is finding target market uh fit and ensuring that this product is here to stay that it scales and we understand the landscape and where we can drive most efficiency but as far as business models go i mean they're all over the place i think we're we're in a really really good space i i totally get the caution uh in that you know if you're not paying anything then you you are the product and that i'm selling data or anything but it's very clear in our terms i mean i personally would never do that but don't take my word for it it's in our terms of service it's in our privacy policy and the consumer is not our customer um the consumer

is a valuable asset to us as a company we we really value the fact that you guys all prefer to send payments over strike and that you enjoy our service and we'll continue to deliver to you for free um but that is as honest i can be with you without giving away you know the secrets that are worth millions of dollars at this point so don't give those away jack um you had a uh at this point what is called epic and viral thread uh about ethereum uh and vitalik etc uh honestly let you take it away. It's your stage. Talk, explain what was the thought process there? And has your mind changed at all? Yeah, I mean, I wouldn't say my mind has changed. There's certainly things I want to clarify. The point of the thread was not to discourage innovation

and people trying new things. I'm a big fan of people trying new things. And I'm one of those people. So I do respect Vitalik to great lengths in certain categories. My problem is there's a few things I have issues with. One is that Ethereum is an attempt, it's an experiment with no technical backing as of yet to date. There's no proof that what they're trying to do is going to work. And so far, it hasn't really worked. However, the marketing is the exact opposite. And that's my huge problem, is that it seems that their marketing is malicious, it's misleading, and it's intentional. And I wish that they would be more transparent and more honest about that, because it's, in return, very damaging to the cryptocurrency space,

when ushering in new users, and these users are getting burned and getting an experience that is just false advertising is my first thing. And my second thing is Ethereum, I think, is very damaging to Bitcoin in that same sense in that they claim that the Bitcoin developer community is malicious and mean. They claim that Bitcoin is slow, that Bitcoin isn't cheap. And they really use Bitcoin to self-market themselves.

And I think it's selfish. And I think it really, I mean, I myself have spent my entire adult life and career in Bitcoin, and I don't think that it's fair. And I think, you know, people like Vitalik owe early Bitcoin developers an apology. And I think it's about time someone called him out, or maybe, I mean, it's long overdue someone called him out, but I'll put it this way. I'm not scared to call him out. So that's my high level two minute summary is I appreciate Ethereum as a project. Do I think it's working? No. Do I think that they're lying in their marketing and they're telling retail investors it's working because they got a funnel in retail somehow? Last time it was ICOs, this time it's DeFi. Yeah, I think that is happening. I think that there are people that are knowingly lying to retail investors and securities industry. That's a crime. And I think that they have no problem conveniently blasting individuals in the Bitcoin space like Greg Maxwell and Bitcoin the Project to their own personal gain. And I take that personally because I've dedicated my life to Bitcoin. I really, really don't appreciate that. So that was more or less my qualms. We'll do the uncensored version next time.

But explain a little bit about the misleading marketing. I think that this is a nuanced point here that when people hear that, they're just going to say, I don't really know what that means. So elaborate on that. Yeah. Okay. So in this cryptocurrency space, tradeoffs are very well defined technically. So the reason Bitcoin may appear slow, it may appear expensive, that's because it's decided to be decentralized, to be censorship resistant. So as far as I'm concerned, there has been no technological breakthrough to provide censorship

resistance and a decentralized property faster and cheaper, okay? And this is not up to debate. This is just math. And so, for example, for some blockchain or cryptocurrency project to advertise themselves in that realm, like, oh, we're faster and cheaper than Bitcoin, oh, and we're also decentralized and we're also censorship resistant um according to math last time i read you know research papers that is a lie boldface lie um and so that's just a high level example that i think everyone can relate to you've seen the point market cap advertisements and such and so uh

or vitalik will say things like i don't see any difference between a light client node and a full node. I mean, that's just a boldface lie, or you are dangerously idiotic on the topic. Either way, not good news. And so I guess without ranting more, that's what I mean is that, sure, there can be blockchains that are faster and cheaper, but let's take the decentralized and censorship resistant labels off those. Do you mind? Because they can't accomplish them all. And I know that for a fact. It's just computer science. And it would take 10 more Satoshi white papers to the level of brilliance that Satoshi delivered to deliver on all the promises of Ethereum and the other top 10 altcoins in the overall total market cap. And so that's my problem is the computer

science isn't there, but the marketing's there. And it's really misleading to innocent retail investors so my favorite uh test to run with people is all this defy and uh and stuff like that that comes to be decentralized i just asked the founders uh if the government came and said you had to go to jail if you don't shut it off could you shut it off yeah right like oh you could okay this is not decentralized right like that's the whole point is if there's like a kill switch it's not actually decentralized it's not censorship resistant it's not you know i mean like all of these examples and i think that we're now getting to the point like there's a there's a very real uh argument to be made that if uh ethereum was found to be um a security if ether was found to

be a security and was told to shut down could they shut it and i think they could probably yeah and if the government asked for the existing supply would they be able to answer probably not it's it's really scary. I like to call this whole altcoin trend, I like to call it an arbitrage on the trend. And what I mean by that is altcoins, in my opinion, they're taking the arbitrage difference between the overall interest that society has in cryptocurrency, because I think at this point, it's fairly intuitive that it's a massive investment opportunity. And it's a technological breakthrough that should not go unnoticed. Fair enough. However, to the ability someone can understand why it's important, how it works technically. There's a large gap between

there. You're getting everyone between high school kids and 70-year-old grandparents that are opening Coinbase accounts and wanting to put money in this asset class. Do they know the difference between a full node and a light client and what it means to be sufficiently peer-to-peer and decentralized? No. Within that arbitrage opportunity, I can create wood coin and sell it to you. And I think, you know, naturally markets get efficient. And so that arbitrage opportunity is going to shrink and get lower and lower and lower. And it was much easier to sell wood coin 10 years ago than it is today. And it's going to be much harder to sell wood coin 10 years from now than it is today. But I like to call it an arbitrage on the trend. And is it a good thing

or a bad thing? It kind of depends on your viewpoint of, you know, do you want a centralized party, like a regulated entity, like the SEC or something, saying what should and shouldn't be allowed and what should and isn't sufficiently decentralized? Probably not. So is this the best way to go about making an efficient marketplace in this industry? Maybe. But it's dangerous, man. It's dangerous. And a lot of people are going to lose a lot of money and they're innocent. And so it sucks. It sucks to see. Give us an update on Lightning Network. You are one of the world experts, I would say, or those close to what's going on there. Yeah, well, I think, you know, the most exciting update is it's working. It's working, which wasn't always a guarantee, even as long as a few years ago.

So it works, right? Like we're shoveling millions of dollars, like I said, through it. And as far as some of the excitements on the horizon, we are lifting the limits. The Lightning community is lifting the limits within the protocol. So talk about being responsible with your marketing and responsible with your rollout. Lightning had really severe limits. So you could not open a channel bigger than 0.16 BTC. You cannot send a payment size over 0.042 BTC.

And those limits now are lifted because the protocol has proven to be secure enough and reliable enough and still wouldn't pour all your money into it. We'll do that as ZAP as a business. We consider ourselves enough expert. But yeah, I think that's what's exciting is that you're talking about a protocol that is instant settlement and self-clearing on an asset class that's natively digital. and inherently global. So you can transfer value anywhere in the world for essentially free and essentially instant for the first time in human history. And so that is an insane thing.

And now you can do that without any real limits. And so anywhere between consumer retail payment activity to large traders having private relationships with exchanges and doing live arbitrage with $100,000 lightning payments and millions of dollars size channels, everywhere in between. I mean, it's really, I think it's a huge deal. And I think over the next six months or so, that'll be the big narrative is getting more and more capital on because these limits are lifted. Literally, quite literally betting on you and Lightning to be successful. So I agree with you. Last question before I got a fun one for you is talk a little bit about where the Lightning Network is going. So you kind of just hinted a little bit at kind of the movement of millions

of dollars and large channel sizes, etc. But just kind of continue going down that thread, if you will. Yeah. Well, I think one of the bigger opportunities for Lightning is fixing the inefficiency that is in the marketplace within Bitcoin, in the exchange space, in the liquidity space. Arbitrage opportunities, settlement between familiar counterparties. I mean, it takes a long time and it's generally expensive to settle between these exchanges, between, I mean, liquid network, for example, that Blockstream is working on. I mean, that's a solution valued in hundreds of millions of dollars, right? The capital that's backing that and the brains behind that and Lightning has a chance to achieve that potentially even better to give you some

relative sense of the size of this opportunity in dollar terms. So I do think that right now, Lightning seems to be to feed chickens and draw dicks on a digital art canvas. Okay, but now strike is involved and now remittances on the horizon. And now we're doing cashback deals. Now we're making it much cheaper. Instead of 2.9% plus 30 cents for a merchant, we can process merchant payments for free. And then I think the next step is going to be DRW, Cumberland, jump trading, the big market makers in this space are all of a sudden arbitraging over lightning channels, doing large OTC trades over lightning. This market is becoming extremely, extremely, extremely efficient, fast-paced, and cheap, which is

going to increase the velocity of the asset magnitudes. And that'll be appealing to a set of investors and a set of market participants that maybe not don't have the interest quite yet um but i think it'll be a big deal and uh mulling them over it's going to be amazing this gets adopted globally i really don't think people understand the innovation here nor do they understand uh how small it is today and how big it can get like the um the delta between where we are and where we're going is absolutely massive in my opinion yeah everything about this industry uh the r&r makes no sense in your favor not not against you but in your favor i mean uh the numbers are you know once in a generation so you know lucky lucky to be alive and involved

and smart enough to uh to find jack waller's building this perfect so uh last question for you a more fun one i know you're a big big basketball fan how did you survive the last couple of months without going to play basketball nor be able to watch the nba on television i don't know man every morning i check my pulse make sure i'm still alive um i don't know i mean you control what you can control right uh all these events in 2020 as a you know blanket description that have been unfortunate uh you know bitcoin specifically is a technology that is built for the paranoid i think so all of us love speculating on the fact that the world's crumbling and the world has really delivered on that paranoia and taking basketball away from me

for example is one of the things i never would have expected so how have i survived um fuck if i know but i'm still here and i'm standing uh so i i really hope it doesn't do that to me again and then the next time i might i might die uh but yeah i'm excited the playoffs are back on now I'm a Deli fan because of BlockFi. And I'm a Spencer Dinwiddie fan, Nets fan because of you. And I just, anyone win but LeBron. As long as LeBron doesn't win this year, I don't care. That's my only ask.

So one of the most depressing things I saw during the like really heavy lockdown period was in New York, they went around. These guys literally went around to every single playground and they took the rims off the backboards. Yep. And I was like, come on, really? whose job was it that they showed up and they're like all right you gotta go take all the rims down

across the city and i was just like i guess that's literally what they're gonna do so they're pretty serious about it it's been chaos man it's been chaos like come on guys the least you can do is let us put up a few free throws with a mask on but i guess not all right man where can people go uh download strike people hold on before jack says this go try it out it's super legit fast as hell it's cheap you can send money anywhere in the world uh and you do it all over the bitcoin network uh and you don't even realize you're doing it so go and download strike where can they go yeah well we're crushing it man we're now if you just search strike in the app store we're now the number one result so you can just yeah how about

that so you can just go search strike in the app store uh for specific links you go to beta.strike.me slash download okay hold on you gotta you gotta run that one back yeah beta.strike.me slash download or just go to the app store and search strike correct and yeah we're all over twitter um i'm the most accessible human on the internet every handle is just my full name i'll answer every dm and uh yeah i mean i write this at the end of all my blog posts this community has been so great to me as an individual and so great uh to the work i've done and the company that is zap so i appreciate all your support the feedback i read every customer support ticket so i really really appreciate it doing a great job man we'll do it again soon thank you

Yes, sir. Appreciate it, buddy.