The Pomp Podcast - #450: Jed McCaleb on Building Payment Technologies

Episode Date: December 11, 2020

Jed McCaleb is the co-founder and the CTO of Stellar. Prior to co-founding Stellar, McCaleb founded and served as the CTO of the company Ripple until 2013. McCaleb is also known for creating the infamous Mt. Gox. In this conversation, we discuss payment technologies, how Stellar works, the STABLE Act, financial inclusion, and the future of money. ======================= Smart investors know being early is critical to success in crypto. CoinList is where early adopters invest in, earn, and trade the best new crypto assets before they list on other exchanges. Try CoinList Pro and be first to trade on network launch. Sign up via coinlist.co/pomp and earn $10 in BTC after you trade $100. ======================= Crypto.com is the only all-in-one platform that allows you to BUY / SELL / STORE / EARN / LOAN / INVEST crypto all from one place. Join over 1 million users currently using the Crypto.com app. Download and earn $50 USD using my code ‘pomp2020’, or use the link https://platinum.crypto.com/r/pomp2020 when you sign up for one of their metal cards today. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 90,000 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. Jed McCaleb is the co-founder and CTO of Stellar. Prior to co-founding Stellar, McCaleb founded and served as the CTO of the company Ripple until 2013. McCaleb is also known for creating the infamous Mt. Gox. In this conversation, we discuss payment technologies, how Stellar works, the STABLE Act, financial inclusion, and the future of money i really enjoyed this conversation with jed and i hope you do as well before we get into this episode though i want to quickly talk about our sponsors

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us dollars when you use my code pomp 2020 again crypto.com not only do they have a fantastic url but that's the place where mass adoption is occurring crypto.com that all-in-one platform that allows you to buy sell store earn loan or invest crypto all from one place lastly don't forget that i write a daily letter to over 90 000 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. All right, let's get in this episode with Jed. 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. I've got Jed here. Thank you so much for doing this, sir. Yeah, thanks for having me. For sure. Let's just get started with your background. You've got this kind of very extensive technology-driven background. Where did you get started in the business

and technology world, and how do we eventually get to Stellar? Yeah. I've been programming for a really long time, probably since 3rd or 4th grade. I've always been interested in distributed systems. The first successful thing I did was a program called eDonkey 2000, which was like BitTorrent. It was a file sharing thing, this peer-to-peer network that was pretty popular in 2000, around there, 2001. um and then kind of after that was winding down um you know i i i was like working on some other project and then i came across bitcoin and got super excited about it so got really into crypto because it was kind of in line with stuff i've already was working on and uh you know my general

ethos so got it and do you remember the first time that you ever heard about bitcoin or like what your thought was when you saw it yeah uh it was summer of 2010 uh there was like the first article like there's a slash dot article about it and um you know i haven't i hadn't even read slash dot in years but but i was just kind of looking for another project and kind of like looking around and i came across it now i was like uh really surprised that somebody had was able to solve this problem because it didn't seem possible before before i learned about bitcoin i think a lot of people had a similar reaction um and got super excited about it and and that's kind of all i thought about for the next you know well really years but but uh but yeah definitely

So definitely there's like a few, like that month afterwards, that's all I kind of spent my time working on. And where does Mt. Gox come from? Because you basically acquired Mt. Gox, I think, with the URL, but it was really for magic cards. Tell us that story. Oh, yes. So I had, so basically I read about Bitcoin in like, you know, summer of 2010. Kind of immediately I was like, well, I got to want to play around with this. I want to buy some of these things.

And there wasn't a really good way to do that at the time. So then I just said, okay, fine. And I'll just build an exchange. Like it was pretty clear that it needed that kind of thing. And built that over the course of like two weeks. And I, you know, this is so early in Bitcoin's history. It was like very, there was like maybe 2000 people on Bitcoin talk, which is like the extent of people that knew about it at all.

So it's just very unclear what it was going to happen with it or what it's going to do. So I didn't want to like, I saw I had a domain sitting around this Mt. Gox domain, which I'd used for a project years ago. And it was just kind of idle. So I was like, okay, fine. Let's call it this and do this thing. So that's where the name came from and how that came together. Got it. And so when you're building, you know, kind of the exchange, you're looking at Bitcoin,

you can't stop thinking about it. What was your thought process? Was it like, hey, maybe this thing grows into, you know, a couple of million dollars of volume? Or was it like, this is going to be the next gold reserve currency? Like kind of how bullish were you or what was your thought process at the time? So I thought like, I thought it was an awesome idea and would have loved to see it like take off in the world and like be huge. it seemed kind of like a long shot that that would happen just because it was so small and like

the the the the idea of like the audacity of like saying hey we're going to make this new currency that everyone's going to adopt over the world it's pretty huge right and so so uh you know i thought you know these things only kind of worked to the extent that other people kind of buy into them and like then like also agree that this would be a cool thing and it just seemed like it was one going to be like this kind of niche internet thing that maybe it would grow over like years and years but i had no idea it would grow this quickly right so um uh although i wanted it to but but but it just seemed like it would take a lot longer for people to kind of wrap their heads around it understand that this is a good concept like there was obviously like this group of people

that that kind of got it and understood why the world needed this like alternative to fiat currency but but it was just unclear to me that that was as widespread as it actually turned out to be right So, so, uh, I think me and I think, I think most people like were hopeful, but, but kind of like cautiously optimistic, I guess, like they just thought this would take a lot longer and, and, you know, it was, you know, uh, it was, it was cool to see like how, how fast it got adopted, like widely. So. Absolutely.

And so basically you end up selling Mount Gox, um, Ripple, Stellar, kind of, how do we get to, from Mount Gox to, uh, Stellar? Yeah. So, um, like I said, I kind of just did, I kind of made Maddox just to learn Bitcoin essentially, just like play around with it. And then, you know, I wanted, it was something that the ecosystem clearly needed and it would be a cool project to have, but, but I never really intended to run it long-term. So like, as it kind of started to get traction, I realized it was starting to take up more

and more of my time. Like, it's not something that I really wanted to think about all the time. Like it's, it's, you know, it's not, uh, it's not, well, I mean, I just generally like to work on like harder, like, um, you know, problems, I guess. So, yeah, so I sold it to that guy in Japan, unfortunately, who ended up being pretty incompetent. And, you know, that, you guys can all look up that history if you don't already know. But, and then I was thinking about other, like, basically, I've always thought Bitcoin is this awesome idea, but I was kind of bothered by the mining aspect of it.

Like, it uses, obviously, it uses, like, a ton of resources. And if there's a way to solve this consensus problem without doing that, it would be great, right? So I kind of like started thinking about other ways to like solve like the double spin problem, which is what mining in Bitcoin does is like solve this consensus issue and came up with the idea that kind of led to Ripple. So I moved to California and with the intention of like starting Ripple and like, you know, found some people to work on it with me. You know, we were working on it for a while, then I brought in someone to be CEO. And then that ended up, we ended up not seeing eye to eye and there was like some drama there. And so I eventually left Ripple with the intent of kind of just doing something else entirely.

But the original idea and premise and like the reason why I wanted to do Ripple in the first place or like what like crypto in the first place was still there. And it's like kind of hard to get away from. And so then I set up Stellar with kind of like the intent to just kind of make this network the way that I think is most beneficial to the world. Got it. So let's start with just kind of a 101 of what is Stellar? How does it work? And when you describe it to people who know nothing about, you know, cryptocurrencies or anything like, like what's that description? Yeah. So, well, so the basic problem that we're trying to solve is if you know anything about like the financial infrastructure today, the way, the way money moves around the planet, it's very much pre-internet, right?

There's all these different financial networks, you know, there's like, you know, ACH and SEPA and Swift and like mobile money things and, you know, M-Pesa and all these kinds of things. and and they don't interoperate right they they all have their different standards and and if you want to send money from paypal to you know some mobile money thing in southeast asia you just can't do it right they're just not they just don't communicate uh and this is all this situation is like very much like the way that the way the world was before the internet and and uh the idea behind buying stellar is just how do you make this interoperable layer where all these things can communicate with each other right so not just in different financial networks but different currencies. So if you're holding pesos in Mexico and you want to send $5 to somebody in Italy,

that's really not even possible today in the affordable way. So Stellar is a way to do that. It just allows you to use any currency at any financial institution and seamlessly and effortlessly send anybody else. So that's the goal. And the way we do that is by leveraging this uh innovation that that bitcoin uh came up with which is like this distributed ledger that everyone can see but no one can change arbitrarily right there's like certain rules that have to be followed and there's this consensus mechanism that that that is adhered to and then uh and this ledger is updated over time right and so the beauty of that is that there's no um central party i mean maybe your listeners know all this stuff but but but but there's no there's no person that

you have to like uh absolutely trust uh so like if you have two financial institutions that don't necessarily know each other now they can go through this distributed ledger uh to be able to transact even though they maybe not trust each other and maybe just don't have a formal relationship with each other uh and so it's it's kind of the the like the core like blockchain idea is what kind of unlocks this ability to be able to make this this internet level protocol for for payments right and so so that's what seller is so like basically to be kind of less abstract about it so it what it allows you to do is hold any kind of currency you can hold like dollars euros you know bitcoin anything any anything you want can be tokenized onto the

network uh and it's sort of you know uh you know stellar was launched uh like i think over six years ago now or maybe about six years ago um and then that was like the premise of the idea and like now we're kind of seeing that with all these like stable coins like people have kind of got the point that that it's useful to have um you know representations of money that you're used to using in these same digital networks, right? You want to be able to have your US dollars operate with your Ethereum, operate with your yen or whatever. These things all need to kind of be in the same ecosystem and that unlocks all this kind of power, right? And so that's the idea behind sellers, that you can represent any kind of value and you can trade this value

amongst each other. It's almost like what you're doing is you're basically making the technology interoperable and then where the competition plays out is that like the monetary policy layer, let's say for currencies, right? Is the differentiation is no longer in like, hey, I have dollars in my wallet. I have to physically go to like a currency exchanger at the airport to exchange it for some other currency. Now I just, everything's interoperable, click of a button, I can move in between these, reduce the friction. But at that monetary policy layer, there's obviously differences. And so I can make my decisions based on non-technological barriers to some degree. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, you could imagine a world where,

you know, it's not even currency, but maybe like, you know, if regulations start to allow, like you could have like shares of apple or shares of stock and like when you go to spend they just get seamlessly converted into whatever right so you know like it allows you to just do very different things than what what's done today and gives people like a lot more flexibility uh like right now we're one of the things one of the big things we're working on is this dollar savings project where it's basically like a mobile uh consumer app uh and it allows people in places with really high inflation like say argentina to be able to save their money in dollars right and And so that, that, that, that's like this really awesome use of this technology that,

that wasn't really possible before. So, so, uh, things like that are just like super exciting. Got it. And so basically like, how's it going, right? Like, how do you think about the, uh, adoption, kind of the development and evolution of stellar to where we are today? Is this going well, going better than you expected, not going so well? How do you kind of measure that?

Sure. Yeah. I mean, it's going really well. I mean, it's a, it's a really hard problem. And I think we see this with all throughout all of crypto is that, you know, there's a lot of interest and a lot of hype around it and a lot of people like it. But when you go and look like how people actually using this in the real world, that's pretty still very nascent. Right. There's still not a lot of like, you know, you don't have like a million users using it every day for like actual transactions like that. Right. And I think it's because all of these things depend really heavily on network effects.

Like you need lots of people in the world to be kind of on board before they're useful. right so particularly something like like stellar where it's all about payments right so it if you can only pay to a certain number of people in the world then your payment system isn't that useful so so you kind of have to get over this network effect hurdle and and and that's what's kind of made it take so long for i think all crypto in general right so um but but where we are now is uh you know we have a pretty good uh idea and route for like how to like get a beachhead into into these network effects, how to make things useful for people, uh, before there is a big network. And so that's the main thing we're working on. We've seen, we've seen adoption go

quite a bit over the last year. Like this has been a really big year for us. Uh, the team has grown a lot. Uh, you know, I think, uh, you know, there's more, more accounts on the network. There's way more transactions we've had. I think, I don't figure out what the stats are, but I think like 90% of our operations over the lifetime of history have been in this last year. like it's just the popularity is just increasing like quite a bit um so uh but so so all those things are going great i mean i think there's still obviously we're not done there's still a lot of work to do but uh but yeah we're definitely in the right direction got it and how do you look at yourself and kind of all these other smart contract platforms you know mentioned stable

coins earlier let's take ethereum for example there's lots of activity there is this a world where there's coexistence uh kind of at the end is it there's got to be a winner take all just How do you look at competitive landscape or just other platforms that people can use? Yeah. So, I mean, I think in general, a lot of these, you know, crypto all kind of gets lumped into this one bucket, but I don't think it's like win or take all at all. I mean, it's probably win or take all in like certain niches, but these things are all solving very different problems.

Like the problem Bitcoin is solving is very different than what Ethereum is solving, which is very different than what Stellar is solving, right? Ethereum is basically this kind of generic universal computation thing that isn't tailored for payments specifically. We do obviously using it for that, whereas Stellar is designed to fill this very kind of narrow niche. I mean, it's not narrow because everyone sends payments, but it's a specific one. Definitely in the future, multiple of these things will exist.

I think the hope is that Stellar will be very good for, like, cross-border payments and, like, sending, you know, representing other kinds of value. Like, the whole stablecoin thing works way, way better on Stellar just because it's designed to do that. Whereas Ethereum will be, like, you know, like, you're never going to make, like, a prediction market on Stellar, right? Whereas you can do that on Ethereum, right? There's just different things that they can be done on a different platform. Got it. And so when we kind of fast forward here, we say, okay, we're basically giving people the tools to build all kinds of stuff that they want to build. And you're really focused, I think, on making sure

those tools work and operate correctly. How do you think about where we're headed, right? 10 years from now, is this a world where every stock bond currency commodity is digitized and it's on these networks and it's kind of the Bitcoinization of the world and tokenization of the world? uh or is it something that maybe isn't as audacious in terms of uh you know kind of that final state or next decade or so yeah um so i mean i do think like uh yeah that most things will have like some digital representation i mean it just makes it just makes so much more sense and it's easier and like you know if you've ever sent payments with cryptocurrency you know pay for something online then you have to go use a credit card it's just so annoying you have to enter all

like it's just so much nicer right so so i i do think that that uh that we're going to move that direction and um you know i think uh there is some limit to it and there will still like people like the general like population probably doesn't want to deal with their own secret key and it's probably not safe for them to think like that so there will have to be like solutions around that that'll end up looking uh not that different than what we have like you know there'll probably be things like a global Venmo, things like that. But the user experience will be very similar to what they're used to now.

It'll have more capabilities than what they can do today, right? And so I think all of that is really good. But yeah, I mean, I think it will be, we're still a long way to go, like I said, for it to be like, where there's like millions of people using crypto every day for their everyday lives.

But I think we will get there in the next years. And what do you think the response from the incumbents are, right? So like basically what you're building, what, you know, folks are building with stable coins on Ethereum, what Bitcoin is being built, everyone is kind of under attack if you're an incumbent from all of these technological upstarts or really challengers, right? And so put aside for a second who wins, who doesn't win, you know, kind of how it plays out from the challenger side. Just if you're an incumbent, you've got to feel like, you know, the technology industry is coming for us. What do you think is kind of the rational response from them? And is it something where, you know, some of them adopt or adapt and end up surviving while some die?

Or are we looking at potentially like a full-blown disruption of the entire industry and basically none of them can keep up and there's entirely new players? Yeah, I mean, anytime there's like some large technological change, there is this, you know, there are some companies that can handle it. There's some that can't, right? Like, you know, even if you look at like the internet coming along, you know, now there used to be tons of bookstores. now there's just amazon right so like you know i think i think it'll be some something in between uh just like you know in 10 years there's we won't we won't like none of the companies today will be around anything like that but i think i think some of them will adapt and like you see that already like you see like you know like paypal is now accepting bitcoin like square is

obviously very like crypto forward things like this so so some companies are are realizing that this is the way that things are going to be in the future and they're moving that direction uh so i i think you know and some are just moving much more slowly but but uh but i but i think it is inevitable and just like any big change like there's going to be but there's going to be some people that get it and there's just going to be some that that don't right so um you know i mean like paypal for instance they uh they banned like i used to take paypal on mount gox and they like they banned me for life for having a paypal account and now they're accepting bitcoin so so i don't know they've obviously have changed some some fun and they've been waiting 10 years

Are you trying to get your account back? Or is that a focus of yours? No, not really. I don't need a PayPal account at this point. I've got Bitcoin. Absolutely. And so when you think about kind of the world as we're evolving here,

a lot of times I just think about like where you spend your time. And obviously you're spending majority, if not all of your time on Stellar. What do you think about some of the other things that are going on? Is this a world where you're like, hey, look, you know, Bitcoin, Stellar,

and then tokenization of assets, or like, how do you kind of just think about the things that you're personally interested in and where you spend your time? Yeah. I mean, obviously there's just a ton going on in crypto space in general, and it's just very hard to like keep track of it all. And, you know, frankly, I don't spend that much time thinking about projects outside of Stellar. Like, I mean, there's so much to do with, with the Stellar network that, that, uh, that, that just kind of takes up all my, all my bandwidth. I mean, there's, uh, so yeah. So, I mean, I think, I think the things are interesting for me are just again this idea that that that that uh the world needs

is interoperable later between all these things and like how do we make that possible and how do you bootstrap that network and that that's mainly what i spend time thinking about and just and kind of some stuff about like how like once you once you start to get scale like how do you make these networks um go much further than they can today because you know they're uh all of these things have pretty bad scaling properties if you compare them to just like a you know a database that you can like shard and all this kind of stuff so you you have to come up with like methods for like how this is going to work long term and so that's that's what we're spending a lot of time doing now it's like you know like what like what like how does this work in the wind condition like i mean

how do you actually get like millions and millions of people on these networks so um yeah so we have some ideas around that that's pretty much got it uh there was recently this new piece of legislation that was put forward called the Stable Act. And it essentially, you know, very broad generalization says you can't create a stable coin unless you've got a federal bank charter, right? And for all intents and purposes. And there's a lot of controversy around this. It feels like, you know, some people in the political sphere think this is the greatest idea ever, and they're going to, you know, work diligently to get it approved. There's a lot of people, I think, in the crypto community that say this is way off base and kind of exposes their lack of understanding of a lot

of this. How do you think about it? And kind of, is there anything that you guys are doing from I saw you guys put out an announcement or just kind of a statement. Just, just talk through that piece of legislation. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. We put out a blog post about it. That kind of goes into it. I mean, I, I, I appreciate the idea behind it. I, what I assume is the idea is that they want to like, you know, protect consumers from, from like, you know, losing all their money. Right. Which is, you know, which is something that obviously needs to happen. But,

but I mean, this, this particular piece of legislation seems like, like poorly crafted. I mean, it seems like it would ban things like like venmo originally i mean that's a digital currency that that that wasn't a bank i mean i think paypal's right now but but originally when demo started you know that would have been disallowed right and that's just like terrible for innovation and it all just lets you do is just have these these people that are banks these old that they there's there's no motivation for them to improve their situation or consumers like like the consumers ultimately will hurt by that because like there's not new innovation and and they just become like

these like kind of calcified dinosaurs. And there's no, there's no, there's nothing that they're competing against, which, which is like what drives all of this improvement for consumers. Right. So it just seems like a very bad approach to me. Yeah. And to me, what was so interesting about when they, you know, announced the legislation or the proposed legislation was basically saying like, Hey, we're doing this for financial inclusion. Like the banks have always preyed on everybody. So instead of allowing a kind of free market competition and innovation to take hold. We're basically going to just put a bunch of bureaucracy and regulatory hurdles in the way, which seemed counter to the position they were taking. Yeah, for sure. I don't see

how this would help financial inclusion at all. I mean, like all of that stuff is going to be done by someone who actually cares about the problem and is not a bank and wants and needs some token that it can, you know, send around to these people. And that's just, it's just prohibits that. So, yeah. Yeah. And how do you think about crypto in light of financial inclusion? I think it's much easier to kind of understand it in the most extreme cases where people have no access to banking in some third world country and like, hey, now with an internet connection, but just maybe in the more developed world, like where do you see that happening? Is it affecting a certain portion of the population, like the bottom 50% of Americans? Is it something where, nope, this is going to be pervasive and everybody, regardless of socioeconomic status, are going to end up using this stuff? Just talk through that financial inclusion component and kind of where you see a lot of this technology fitting. Sure. Yeah. I mean, we've spent a lot of time working on financial inclusion at SDF. I mean, that was kind of one of our original thrusts. And like, you know, we've always thought that this is going to take off in the developing world much more quicker than the developer world.

Just because, you know, because the financial infrastructure is just so much weaker there. Right. And there's it's in the same way that like, you know, cell phone adoption happened first or like much quicker in places like Philippines and Indonesia where people didn't have landlines already. Right. So you can kind of just leapfrog it if you're not if you're not beholden to the old system. But I think crypto and definitely Stellar just helped the financial inclusion story tremendously because they make it where they just reduce, take out a lot of friction from the system. One of the things that was kind of causing financial exclusion, I guess, before is because it was just very expensive for banks to actually serve these people, right? So like if they couldn't make a certain amount per customer, then it just it just wasn't feasible for them to do it because because, you know, their systems were just like old and cumbersome and it was actually expensive for them to help these people. Whereas, you know, if you have like, you know, if you have like like some mobile wallet that's built on something like Stellar, you can have some digital dollar in there and you can pay people and you can, you know, you can have it connected to like, you know, like savings and like interest bearing things, stuff like that. And all that becomes essentially like this very lightweight bank account, and it's like super cheap to service and can connect people to the wider financial world, which is what you want to do to financially include people.

So ultimately, it should be very beneficial for people not just in places like Nigeria, but places in the U.S. as well, right? So that's around. And is the thought process that eventually take an average consumer, whether they're in the United States or a developing country, all of their interaction with the financial system will be done through algorithms and networks and kind of decentralized type applications? or do you think that there still will be this like coexistence hybrid world where maybe I have a traditional bank account at a centralized entity, but then I also use some of these other pieces of technology to earn more interest or kind of, you know, send money remittances or whatever it is. Yeah. I mean, I think, I think it will be some sort of hybrid. I mean, like I was saying before, it's like, I think it'll be, I don't think people ever get to

the point where they want to secure people in general want to secure their own private keys. So you'll always need some institution that's essentially acting like a custodian or at least like facilitating you with these things, right? And then there's also stuff where like for the stable coin model to work, like usually somebody has to like hold the deposits, right? And so, you know, if you want interest on things, like somebody has to be like originating these loans and all that kind of thing. So there's still a lot of like places where traditional financial players need to kind of be in the ecosystem. I think what things like Stellar and Crypto do is just make it where it's just much more flexible. It makes it where it's like a much more even playing field where there's just less gatekeepers to the system. If you're a new entrant, like say someone sets up a new user-first bank, they can easily compete with these old banks,

even though they don't have new customers because they're kind of on the same infrastructure, the same meaning like the cryptocurrency layer. right so so uh because it makes everything interoperable it makes it where there's like more competition which will make it where there's more uh where there's more benefit ultimately for the consumers it's kind of what i'm saying got it and then in terms of stellar as you guys kind of build for that world um how many people do you guys have and kind of what is everyone focused on right in terms of um the different bodies of work that you guys are are actively pursuing right Sure. Yeah. We're about 80 people right now. We're focused on several things. The entity is Stellar Development Foundation, which was the nonprofit that was set up to

shepherd the Stellar network. We do a few things. We make sure that the core code base keeps getting maintained and getting it forward. Like I said, we work on things like scalability and all that kind of stuff um the things and then and then we work on kind of on the policy side like you know like weighing on things like the stable act like you just mentioned and just making sure that uh legislator like regulators and legislators know uh understand what crypto is and understand what stellar is and like you know they just need to be educated on it for the most part and like because it is this new complicated technology and so just like helping that that that type of things and And then lastly, like, helping on, like, kind of the ecosystem side with, like, with, you know, talking to partners and, like, introducing partners to each other, facilitating connections between them.

One of the big things that I mentioned earlier is that we're making this dollar savings app. It's called Vibrant. It's mainly focused in Argentina. And the idea there is that, you know, people in Argentina, they suffer, like, really high inflation. They can, like, convert their pesos into dollars and hold them in this app, and they can send it around amongst each other and things like that. so um so efforts like that where we we spend like trying to make stellar useful for real people in the world right so we have another one in in between nigeria and europe there's like a big b2b payments corridor going over stellar that we're helping foster and like you know like

contribute to so things like that where we just we're trying to make this this technology like one hand we're like building the technology but like a big part of the organization is just trying to make this actually useful for people uh which i think is it's kind of that focus it seems a little bit neglected in the crypto industry in general to me it's like people get kind of enamored with the technology is and like new side of like how do we actually make it where this is useful for people so we spend a lot of time everyone wants to show you what shiny thing they can do with the tech but uh but the user doesn't necessarily care of course uh before i let you go i always ask the same two questions to everyone and then you'll get to ask me one to

finish up uh the first is what is the most important book that you've ever read uh and if you don't read a lot of books, you can say any piece of content. Sure. Uh, the most important, but I mean, there's a ton of really good books. Uh, um, I don't know. I mean, one of the ones that I think about a lot is this book, beginning of infinity by David Deutsch. Uh, it's, it's essentially, um, it's, it's very positive take on, on, on, on human progress and knowledge. Essentially it's, it's essentially like, uh, there's certain, there's certain ways of structuring things where they can kind of go infinite like if you look at the way like dna is for instance like it's this cool code that allows you to build all these kind of different organisms and uh there's

like similar things that happen with like like with human language like it's like a fixed set of letters but you can make essentially infinite amounts of of content with it and uh it's just it's just a very interesting cool plug so yeah that's that's one of my favorites second question more fun aliens are you a believer or a non-believer uh i i don't know i go back and forth they used to be pretty convinced that they had to be there somewhere the fact that we don't see them or haven't seen them in so long uh makes me wonder if if we are in fact alone at least in kind of our light cone uh but um i don't know if they are there you know i don't know there's this other book called three body problem we're serious about this trilogy and basically its premise is

that that if there are aliens out in the world uh they essentially are all hiding because if any alien civilization sees another alien civilization it really behooves them to just destroy that other civilization so we kind of have to hide uh so maybe that's what's going on too which would be which might be really bad for us because we're not hiding but but uh but yeah so i don't know it's it's weird that we haven't seen them i'm definitely in the camp of uh we don't want them to find us, we want to find them for sure. You could ask me one question to wrap up. What do you got for me? Well, you have a question. Yeah. Well, so yeah. What is, what's the most interesting thing that you've seen in the last year? Yeah. I mean, I think the easy answer is

Bitcoin, right? Just in terms of like that, that kind of has the capture the hearts and minds of not only the retail side and kind of the everyday person, but also the institution. But I changed a little bit in terms of, I had a guy who recently come on the podcast. He's from Canada. He literally spent, I don't know, he's like 32 years old or so. He spent the last 10, 12 years of his life laying tile, doing construction, kind of just very, you know, manual type, what I would consider like the everyday person type jobs. And I brought him on the podcast because he basically was like, look, you know, in 2016 or 17, he went over to a buddy's house. They were all drinking some beers, watching sports uh and usually they're talking about their fancy football teams and all this

nonsense and somebody says something about crypto and he was like oh you can get rich there cool like you know how do i get an account and what do i buy right you know kind of the classic story and he said what that set him off on though over the last three or four years was basically went down the rabbit hole he started to learn about what is money you know financial uh infrastructure kind of monetary policy um all the financial inclusion stuff like just all the things that I think once you've spent a lot of time looking at this stuff you're like hey this stuff's important and I wish more people knew about it yeah uh and so he said this one line to me that was just like really powerful he was like I'm not trying to take over the world I'm just trying to provide

a better life for my family and I think that like we always forget because it's so cool to talk about you know JP Morgan's doing this or you know uh this exchange just popped up and they're going to take down the New York Stock Exchange or you know this network's going to take out Visa and like sure a lot of that is going to happen but we kind of forget about like that everyday person who literally is just like i now feel better educated and he's even as far as i said like if all this fails and i lose all my money uh i still feel better off because i got educated during this process and so to me like we're now reaching the point where like you're starting to have enough content in the space you're starting to have enough information you're starting to have enough

people where you can see like a true impact on society um and so it's kind of cool just to think about like if that trend continues you know 20 years from now 10 years from now like yeah actually probably your your kind of vision of like you know people in the developing world like yeah actually a lot of them probably do interact with this stuff right even in the developed world uh and i think that ultimately like that's the interesting part right or the the part that i think we all hope happens um but it takes you know work every day like you guys are doing and others to uh to actually build the technology to make it happen yeah no it's pretty cool that uh i mean one of the one of the good benefits of this whole like crypto revolution i guess is that that people are

starting to understand a lot more like basically it's like we're gonna pull back the curtain on how money works like you kind of just took it for granted beforehand but now you're like oh wait this is this is what's going on back here that's uh yeah it's been pretty cool in 2020 you know they're basically in the united states running trillion dollar uh marketing campaigns for uh hey we could just like edit our bank account like oh okay i can't do that right so like i uh nice that you guys can uh where can we send people to find you on the internet uh or find out more about stellar sure yeah uh i mean our website's though.org and our reddit is pretty active uh our seller um i mean my twitter account i never really use twitter but it's there if you want to occasionally retweet

uh just at jen mccaleb so but yeah awesome man well listen thank you so much for doing this i think people will learn a lot and i'll have to do it again in the future yeah great talking to you