The Wolf Of All Streets - Achieving "Hyperbitcoinization" with Alex Adelman, CEO of Lolli

Episode Date: February 25, 2021

Earning cashback has always been boring - you earn pennies on the dollar in points that you may never use. Lolli transformed the rebate industry by offering Bitcoin as a reward, boosting global exposure and giving 10x the rewards that competitors offer with fiat. It is Lolli’s unique position between merchants and consumers that is pushing global adoption. The path to hyperbitcoinization is paved with free Bitcoin for people who have never held it before. In this episode, Melker and Adelman discuss a range of topics including: ・Democratization of commerce ・Death of retail ・Bitcoin as a payments rail ・Omni channels and atomic swaps ・The forefront of consumer and merchant adoption ・Corporations selling Bitcoin ・Central banks adding Bitcoin to the balance sheet ・Hyperbitcoinization ・Removing the middleman ・Open minded maximalism ---- MAKERSPLACE MakersPlace is the go-to premium marketplace for purchasing rare digital artworks from the world’s top creators (Ie. José Delbo, Trevor Jones, Pak, SSX3LAU, Shu Lea Cheang). New artworks are dropped twice a week, where they typically sell out within seconds of release and have been reselling several months later, upwards of 10x. Subscribe for exclusive drop notifications at https://makersplace.com/thewolf ---- Legacy of Dead  This episode was brought to you by Bitcasino. The worlds leading Bitcoin-led online casino and crypto-centric gaming destination. Wager your way into a world of opportunity, with the ultimate Fun, Fast and Fair crypto-casino experience.  Deposit, wager, and withdraw in real-time with a host of top cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), LiteCoin (LTC), Tether (USDT), TRON (TRX), Ripple (XRP), and more!  Use the promo link Bitcasino.io/Scott, to unlock your 200 FREE SPINS in the Legacy of Dead Promotion. ---- Join the Wolf Den newsletter: ►►https://www.getrevue.co/profile/TheWolfDen/members ---- If you enjoyed this conversation, share it with your colleagues & friends, rate, review, and subscribe. This podcast is presented by Blockworks. For exclusive content and events that provide insights into the crypto and blockchain space, visit them at: https://www.blockworks.co

What's up, everybody? I'm Scott Melker, and this is the Wolf of All Streets podcast. Today's guest is the founder and CEO of Lolly, a rewards application that's making it ridiculously easy to own Bitcoin by simply shopping online. With the onset of COVID and the rapidly increasing digital age, online shopping has become bigger than ever before. It's exactly this behavior that Lolly's capitalized on, and they are now rewarding users for their online purchases with Bitcoin, and we all love it. It's my intention to learn just how much growth Lolly's capitalized on, and they are now rewarding users for their online purchases with Bitcoin. And we all love it. It's my intention to learn just how much growth Lolly is seeing and how the recent events like Tesla buying Bitcoin are playing into that growth. Alex Adelman, man, thank you so much for being on the show. Thank you for having me. Big fan of the show

and glad to be here. Awesome, man. I feel like this has been due for a long time, so I'm glad we're doing it. So once again, you're listening to the Wolf of Wall Street's podcast. For twice a week, I talk to your favorite personalities from the worlds of Bitcoin, finance, trading, art, music, sports, and politics. This podcast is powered by BlockWorks, the fastest growing media company in the digital asset space. BlockWorks has 20 Bitcoin and crypto podcasts. I'm excited to be part of their network.

You can visit blockworks.co for access to the highest quality information in the space. You will not be disappointed. And if you like the podcast, follow me on Twitter. You need to check out my website and join my newsletter. You can do both of those things at thewolfofallstreets.io. So now to get to what's important. I'm in my 40s, but you're obviously younger and you graduated college only 10 years ago, right? And you're now the CEO of one of crypto's largest companies. How did that happen so fast? And did you expect to work in the crypto space?

Good question. Yeah, I guess I've always had this belief in the democratization of commerce. I studied economics at university and got really fascinated with like microfinance and, you know, international economics. And I was always kind of perplexed every time I would learn about money or learn about the illusion of money more so of like, why there was so much gray area, why there wasn't this like definitive sort of set rules with money and money printing and fiscal policies and everything that I was learning. And so very early on, I definitely had a lot of ideas around what does the future of money look like and how do we connect the world through commerce? And I think my first company

had a very similar thesis to Bitcoin, which was how do we democratize commerce? How do we give everyone in the world the ability to connect and buy and sell anywhere? And so a few years into building that company, when I learned about Bitcoin, I was like, everything that I was building that was native to Cosmic was then also native to this worldwide currency that was immediately accessible to, I guess, three and a half billion people with an internet connection. That makes a lot of sense. So then what made you transition from doing what you were doing to going basically all in on Bitcoin? Because you guys started long before this was a short thing. I mean, it feels like a short thing now, but you were already doing it

before most people had even heard of it. And the people who had were comparing it to beanie babies and tulips so i i think we're we're sort of we're all like summations of our you know life experiences right and my i've been building uh i was a kid of the internet i got like a computer at age like 11 12 and i very much like you know i when i would play video games i would then want to go build video games and and so much like, you know, I, when I would play video games, I would then want to go build video games. And, and so I remember like, you know, early, early on, like connecting with people all over the world from a very early age and just not really seeing sort of the, the walls of my surroundings. I didn't really understand geographic constraints. And I did really didn't understand fiat constraints either from an early age, because I'd be like

sending money all over on the world to hire developers in Indonesia and Ukraine. And the level of effort and how many times I got like flagged by my bank, flagged by PayPal was just like countless. And I'm like, why? I'm moving money to another human being. Then they believe that this has value. And I believe this has value. Why do we need a hundred middlemen to get from one place to another? And this is like at age like 16. So, you know, fast forward, like when I, when I, when I learned about Bitcoin, it was just made so much sense to me, like why it should exist and why it

was like the clear and obvious future. And this was back in like 2013 when I was, I had also been building, you know, really a payments company, an e-commerce gateway. And we were hooked into about 99 different payment processors. And so I learned about Bitcoin. I'm like, well, let's just make it a hundred. And we went to all these merchants that we had worked with, you know, the targets of the world, the Macy's of the world, Shopify's. And I was like, let's just plug this in. Like, why would you not want an immutable currency where, you know, there is some demand, people want to move money from here to there. And I got my first, I think, foray in understanding where Bitcoin had its like shortcomings and where we weren't going to see mass adoption in the early days, where I think

a lot of people thought we would. And that, that element was payments. And, you know, when we read the, and go back and read the original Satoshi white paper, it very much looks like a payment platform, right? If you're reading it, literally it is a, you know, P2P payment platform. And so I went, you know, I went to all these merchants and, and their biggest feedback was consumers don't want to pay for it because number go up. The volatility of Bitcoin made it not really the best payment rails because like who wants to give away an asset that's going up over time? And then the other, and it's highly volatile, and it was way more volatile back then.

And then the other thing on the volatility piece, the merchants didn't know what to do with it once they had it. There was no remittance network set up. There was no payment rails. So if, you know, let's just say a target were to accept Bitcoin, they would have to go build out a whole treasury department to go figure out what to do with it. Custody, everything. There was no, you know, Coinbase custody out there. There was no, you know, Grayscale and those sort of institutions that are out there now. So that was like my first foray. I was like, okay, Bitcoin is not going to be a payment rail

from day one. It clearly is to some degree and for some people, but not for mass adoption. So fast forward a little bit, we built this company called Cosmic. It was a very difficult company to build, especially as a first time founder. And we made it work in the end. We ended up getting like, everybody started talking about the buy button and we had become like the inventors of the buy button and so uh everyone starts to look at our company as being like solving all the you know problems of of you know the interconnectivity of of online commerce so we ended up getting bought by our biggest customer which was pop sugar to come and empower 1.2 billion in retail revenue running through shop style and after that we grew about 10x post acquisition we ended up getting

acquired again by a bigger company called Rakuten, which many people knew as Ebates at the time. And Ebates, for those of you who don't know, is the biggest cashback company in the US, many parts of the world, a big Japanese conglomerate. So very quickly, we went in to go power tens of billions of dollars of native commerce. So that was the initiative, at least. So we got to learn about international commerce, all the pain points of like fiat transfers and cashback, all the limitations of being built on top of fiat rails instead of crypto rails.

And that's where like, you know, this idea came to be. I was like, wow, this is the best way in the world to distribute Bitcoin to people through rewards because you're giving it to people as an investment. They don't, they're, they're happy because you're giving it to them. You're not taking it away from them. And then initially, and then it's also the best red pill in the world too, because you're, you're putting it side by side with cash back in points. And we all know Bitcoin is better than cash. Bitcoin is better than points. It's not some arbitrary number. It is a fixed amount. So you're, there's only 21 million of these things. We started this thing three years ago when it was at like four or five K. Now our points, our cash back is now 10 X, you know, 11, 12 X better than any of our competitors like Rakuten and Honey and points programs out there. So now we have all

these like rabid, obsessed, amazing users that are like, I want, you know, Bitcoin over cash. And we've really trained people to think objectively about their money and what they're earning back for their everyday shopping. It's interesting because it feels like then in that context that 2020 was probably the perfect storm for you because we had COVID. And I don't know about you, but a lot of people I spoke to feared that everything was going to die last February and March, and it was actually 180 degrees, right? Everyone started making more money, all these crazy things, at least anyone who was involved in the crypto space. But I have

to imagine it was a perfect storm for you between COVID happening, the online shopping boom, but then also Bitcoin bottomed and has done nothing but go up since last March, right? And that all sort of happened at the same time. So as bad as it seemed, I mean, like you said, we're not only 13x from when you started, we're 13x from 11 months ago. Exactly. So we had basically users that had essentially two years of earnings that have now seen, as you said, 12, 13 X returns on their initial earnings. So, yeah, I mean, you could people are pumped. And and to to your point, too, on the non-obvious thing for people who come from crypto, the the boom of online commerce is absolutely wild. Like we've we've seen like 50% increase across the board, just in just an e-com. Right. And so we also changed a lot of our marketing to go from like travel to, to like health and wellness vitamins. I mean, you can get anything on Lolly

and earn Bitcoin back on just about anything at Lolly. So it's creating this ecosystem where you can earn on like online commerce. Like we definitely made a bet where, you know, there's two bets you could really make. You could either go in-store commerce with like swipes on every card and stuff like that, or you could do pure online. And we took the pure online and we couldn't clearly predict COVID was going to happen. And, you know, in no way would I ever wish it on upon the world, but the net, the net, you know, result has been very good for Lolly because we've been so focused on, on e-com. I mean, is it your stance at this point that because we've seen this

fundamental shift in behavior that brick and mortar is somewhat dead? I mean, who's going to the mall again when they realize how easy it is to buy everything they need online, even if COVID is gone and people are vaccinated. And I just, I personally think there's been a behavioral shift and we're not going to really go back. Do you think the same? Yes and no. I think that it is exaggerated how like of, of like how bad it is. It's like, it's retail's not dead. Like there's plenty of things that people want to do in store. Now e-com has certainly been accelerated, but I mean, I've been in the e-commerce payment space for a long time. And the dream of 10 years ago is out and actually

becoming alive today out of necessity. And that's the dream of, of Omnichannel. So Omnichannel is this sort of strategy philosophy in commerce where it's like, it's all the same. It should all come from the same, you know, whether it's online, whether it's retail, you should have no disconnect between your online presence and your in-store presence. And so that's accelerated it for everybody. So now what we're going to see is just a way better experience where like, I can go buy something online, pick it up in store within, you know, a few hours, if I really want it then, or I'm going to have faster delivery, or I can use, like, you know, retail as a place to try it on. way easier to distribute across retail and e-com. So it's good for us because like right now we're getting ahead of the, you know, the cycle when everybody is vaccinated and we're back to, you know, the new, the new normal. Like I want you to be able to go like swipe a card

and go earn Bitcoin back on your everyday rewards that you go pick up your groceries or pick up your Adidas from the store. Like there, it should be completely seamless. And before there was this like disparate system where like online was so different than, than in-store now it's all the same. So the same people that we're selling to that are running e-com are also running in-store. And so you should have, we should have an easier path to distribution where you're going to have rewards no matter where you shop. Can you talk about the nuts and bolts of how it actually works? So I think everyone knows, yeah, you use Lolly, you open it, you buy something, it gets a reward. But A, how does that happen? Where does that Bitcoin come from? Where does that Bitcoin go once you get it? And then how do you redeem it? and we started with 500. And we partnered with these merchants. They pay us when our users shop their sites. And then we split that with our users,

sending the lion's share to our users, sending Bitcoin to their Lolly wallets. So yeah, it's pretty straightforward. It works very similarly to a cashback program. The biggest difference is that we actually set up a Bitcoin wallet for our users so that they have real Bitcoin. And then they can move that Bitcoin from our Lolly custodial wallet to any wallet in the world. They could move it to another custody provider. They could move it to their own Bitcoin

address. They can do whatever they want with their Bitcoin. And if they really want to realize gains, which we don't recommend, we recommend holding. But if you want to realize your gains, you can also move it to your US dollar bank account. And that's a very attractive feature for a lot of newcomers that are looking at less as a future asset, and they're looking at it as an investment. And I think at some point, we've all sold Bitcoin and regretted it, but you have to sell it to regret it. That's a good point. You have to feel the pain once so that you never want to feel it again, I guess.

So I'm assuming the merchants pay you in dollars. You guys basically purchase Bitcoin. Yes. Some mechanism, right? It would be really cool if all these merchants all of a sudden had huge Bitcoin wallets and were paying you guys in Bitcoin. That's the vision. That's the vision. So if you think about like what an open commerce network looks like that, you nailed it. Like everybody would have their Bitcoin balance sheet,

their fiat balance sheet, and people would be able to pay and receive whatever they want. So you'd have like, you know, essentially atomic swaps where anybody would be able to, you put anything in and the merchant or person gets anything out. And so it's, it's kind of like, you know, that mean like choose your fighter, like you get to choose your currency and whatever you, you, you pay with and whatever you receive. And that's the future. Like we should have the freedom, everyone in the world should have the freedom to choose whatever currency, whatever money serves them best. And for many people, Bitcoin serves them best. It gives you freedom over your money.

What's interesting though, is that if you ask the United States government, they won't tell you that it's money or currency, and they'll tell you that it's property. So are there tax implications that may not exist with receiving dollar bonuses or points that do exist with receiving Bitcoin? So we take the stance that, you know, we are a rebates company, first and foremost, we happen to give Bitcoin, but that Bitcoin, I mean, that could be points, that could be anything, you know, it's, it just happens to be Bitcoin. And the rebates law, and I'm not a CPA, I will not give tax advice. But we have blog posts from CPAs out there and that rebates are not taxable income. That said, you do assume that like if Bitcoin goes up,

you have to clearly realize those gains, but you are not taxed on your income for rebates, which is a nice little like hack. Yeah. So the stance is that you're not taxed on your income for rebates, which is a nice little like hack. Yeah. So the stance is that you're not taxed on getting the Bitcoin from Lolly as you would if someone paid you with it or something, but you obviously have to report a capital gain whenever you sell it. Correct. Be cool if you could write off a loss if all of a sudden it went to nothing, but I don't think that'll happen. You probably could. You probably could. Yeah, I'm sure. So what are the big plans then for 2021? Now, obviously things are established. There's this crazy growth and you've got to be looking to the future. Yeah, we've got some really big plans for mobile. We

just launched our, what we're calling like our pre-app and it has like a kind of a faucet type feel. So you come in, you have like this loot box, you press it every day, you get a random amount of Bitcoin. Right now, I think it's up to a million Satoshis a day that we're giving out. So people are earning like a serious amount of money at this point on there. And, you know, clearly we have a real business model that supports that. Our merchants pay us. And, you know, clearly we have a real business model that supports that our merchants pay us. And so we actually like, yeah, you can download the app today. And then over the next few weeks, you're actually going to get to do the same thing that you can do on web, which is earn when you shop. So, you know, going to all your favorite merchants that you can

already go through and we're going to launch a lot more, But Postmates and Kroger and eBay and Booking.com, all these sort of merchants that we already have. Now you can go order from your phone and earn Bitcoin from anywhere. So really just opening up commerce more, giving people more ability, more opportunities to earn Bitcoin on their everyday purchases. I actually just had Catherine Coley, the CEO of Binance US on the show. So I think we all saw this sort of growth in interest in trading in markets over 2021, over 2020, right? People were bored. They didn't have anything to gamble on. They got stimulus checks. They started putting money in markets. And she told me that in January of 2021, they did more volume and more signups than all of 2020 combined. So like really insane parabolic growth. Have you guys seen that level or, or a similar level of

insane parabolic growth, you know, over the past few months? Absolutely. Uh, yeah. Um, we, yeah, our, our, our number is the, is the same. I, I've, Catherine's actually, we went to college together actually. Really? Fellow Tar Heel. Yeah. Catherine's actually, we went to college together, actually. Really? Fellow Tar Heel. Yeah, it's such a small world. And so, yeah, we go way back. That's awesome.

And for them, and we're seeing the exact same thing. Yeah, we literally doubled over the last few months. So it's been amazing. And the whole team effort, there's you know, there's so much good, like organic growth happening. People are coming into Bitcoin. They want it for free. They want to like, you know,

dip their toes in it before they maybe like make a big purchase of Bitcoin or investment in Bitcoin. So I like to think of Lolly as being the app that will bring Bitcoin to the next 100 million people. And because it makes it so easy, it takes all the risk out of it. You're just shopping as you normally would. And then you get Bitcoin. So for a lot of people,

it's a good like training wheels to get involved. But then we kind of have, we have two customers. We have our Bitcoin maximalists that want as much Bitcoin as possible. You know, people have to go buy things. You know, you can't, no matter how much Bitcoin you want or need, you can't, you can't give up groceries. right? So it's like, you're still going to go buy things online for your family, your friends, gifts, essentials. And so we're like, well, why not earn Bitcoin on it? So we have those customers. And then we have all these people, these like no coiners that are coming in that are saying like, I want Bitcoin instead of cash. I want Bitcoin instead of points. And then those users are growing tremendously. So we're well over 50% of our users are brand new to crypto, have never touched it before. And those are the users I'm honestly most excited about because that's going

to take Bitcoin to the moon. That's going to take Bitcoin to the masses. And our goal, let's go bring Bitcoin to billions of people. And that's our real initiative here. I was going to say, and I mean, you basically just stated it for me, but I look at the growth of these exchanges like Binance.US, and one could obviously argue that it's because people are more interested in speculating and not necessarily interested in Bitcoin as an asset. But the fact that you're seeing the same kind of growth with people that literally just want to get more Bitcoin to me is so much more bullish. I'm just like thrilled to hear it. Yeah. And the non-obvious piece, and you nailed it on the consumer side, the non-obvious piece is like that no one actually gets to see is on the merchant side. So we have a two-sided market, right? So we've got merchants on one end, we've got consumers on the merchant side. So I, you know, we have a two-sided market, right? So we've got merchants

on one end, we've got consumers on the other. Everyone sees like all these consumers are coming in. Everyone's really pumped. Nobody sees the emails I'm getting from merchants being like merchants that told me no three years ago or two years ago, one year ago. Now they're like, oh my God, you were right. Like consumers want Bitcoin. Our numbers speak for themselves. We have absurd amount of users that are coming in. And the beautiful part about our model is that we basically have a forcing function to get merchant adoption and consumer adoption, and we don't have to be a payment company. So we're getting Bitcoin friendly merchants all day. Like, you know, Kroger came on board the

other day and eBay came on board the other day. We just landed one of our biggest merchants of all time the other day from a conversation I had on Clubhouse. We're getting these merchants that are coming on board because they see that Bitcoin is a thing that they need to be a part of and they can't go convince their CEO that Bitcoin should be a payment rail and maybe it shouldn't. But it's almost like training wheels for the merchant as well. So we're, we're at the forefront of both consumer adoption and merchant adoption, and that's the Holy grail. And, and so, you know, play this out five years when we go to our merchants and we say, Hey, look, you know, we've got millions and millions or tens of millions of users that have Bitcoin in their wallet. They now want to pay with that. Then we go to the

merchants and we say, let's go drop in Lollipay. Let's go drop in, you know, Bitcoin Pay Server or whatever, you know, is the best open commerce network, you know, that's leveraging Bitcoin. And then let's go give our users the ability to pay with Bitcoin anywhere in the world. And yeah, and so that's the future, right? That's where you create this beautiful open source payment network through the rails of Bitcoin. And that's where you start to see the hints of hyper-Bitcoinization coming through. It's official. The digital art market is going mainstream. It's been exploding this past year with over 10 million in sales in December alone, and it's just getting started. There's no better time than now to diversify your holdings with art investments, which have long been seen as an asset class

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And then after we've reached like sort of massive adoption, where you have tens of millions of users that have all these like rewards, you know, Bitcoin rewards, that's when I think we'll start to see people be like, okay, well, I have a lot of Bitcoin now. Maybe I have more Bitcoin than I have fiat. And now I want to go put some of that to work and using spending rails almost as like,

as like an offboarding or like a ramp. Instead of selling it on an exchange, you just go spend a bit. Exactly. And I also think in this beautiful way, it creates when you when you understand the power of sound money, you also are way smarter with your money. So I love this, like, I love the meme, we lean into it a lot on Twitter, where also are way smarter with your money. So I love this. Like, I love the meme. We lean into it a lot on Twitter where it's like Bitcoin is your savings account and, and, and fiat is your checking account. And when you change that psychology, you get so much smarter with your money about like what you're spending, how diligent you are about your finances, because you're like, there's only 21 million of these things. And I am so lucky to have the amount that I have. So why do I want, why would I want to get rid of these things?

And so I think it's a better world. It's sort of like the dream of like these like savings apps and like, you know, that, that, that teach you how to spend and teach how to save. That's what I think Lolly ultimately becomes. It's like, how do you save the most money on all of your purchases and you, you get smart with where you're spending and where you're earning. And that's the future of commerce. That's the future of Bitcoin. That's the future of Lolly. Yeah, and certainly the future of personal finance is people understanding how important

it is to passively invest and passively earn. You know, the two. That's why apps like Round the X in the crypto space or acorns are so popular because it takes money that you don't think about and it saves it for you guys are on the other kind of on the other side about of that. It takes a little bit of Bitcoin just keeps putting it away until one day you wake up in five years, you say, holy crap, I've got a lot of money. Yeah, exactly. It creeps up on you. And we literally have people who have earned two Bitcoin. I mean, that's crazy. It's pretty amazing. I mean, to earn six figures in rewards, just shopping when literally if you just hadn't turned it on, you wouldn't have that money. Yeah.

Free money. Literally free money. Yeah. The question is, I mean, you talk about it being five years down the road and all this. Does it ever even need to become a payment rail? I mean, especially in a world with now, I mean, listen, stable coins have eliminated some of the, you know, the payment aspects of Bitcoin. Certainly it's faster. It's not volatile. It's generally cheaper to send.

So, I mean, does Bitcoin need to do that to be a success? Or can Bitcoin be what it is? And, you know, that sort of disappears that narrative. You're totally right. And this is actually more of like the 10 year timeframe that we look at where it may take even longer than that, because it actually has to be a mind shift, a mindset shift in the global ecosystem where, but also, you know, we're in the US, right? So we're thinking of it like, we are so lucky to have, you know, the quote, unquote, most stable currency in the world, the most powerful currency in the world, being the US dollar. Yeah, quote, unquote. And so it, if you look at like, this is what I studied in school. When you look at like macroeconomics and financial policies and

the like, you know, sovereign countries and how they manage their wealth, everybody wants U.S. dollars, right? So if everybody changes that mindset from wanting US dollars to now wanting Bitcoin, as if you're like a, you know, a country that, you know, wants to literally hold Bitcoin on your treasury account, your balance sheet, like that's where I think we're going to start to see this like worldwide shift where Bitcoin actually will become more stable than any currency in the world. I don't, you know, like, like I'm not, I'm not a, an economist. I, you know, I, I, I studied it in undergrad, but in no way am I an expert in this. But I do have this like macroeconomic belief that eventually that day will come where Bitcoin becomes more stable

than any currency in the world. And it'll become, it'll become more stable than many currencies that are not us dollar. They're not, you know, the, the Chinese yen well before, like, you know, we need Bitcoin to become a payment rail, but at that point, Bitcoin will make sense as a payment rail, because it will be more stable for 90% of the countries than, than the U S right. So U S will probably be the last to see it. And we have to understand that as American citizens that rely on the U S dollar being stable, that we're going to be the last to see it because we we have to understand that as American citizens that rely on the US dollar being stable,

that we're going to be the last to see it because we have the most stable currency. Up until then, Lolly and many centralized companies like ours will need stable coins and use stable coins very actively to serve as a rail. At the end of the day, my biggest criticism of the payment space is not necessarily fiat, right? It's not like money printer go brr, and I totally, you know, am frustrated that I don't have control of the supply of my money. I am deeply frustrated by that I can, I can protest, I can say, hey, you know, be more diligent with, you know, money printing and like, you know, like, you know, have some have some class in this all of like, you know, what you're doing. But I have no control of that. Right. Like literally, as an individual, I have no control of what my government is printing

their money. I can try and vote for somebody, but it doesn't work. Right. So sure. My like, Bitcoin is peaceful protest against, you know, the money printer and the same thing, you know, gold has been forever and the U.S. has never banned gold. Like, you know, the U.S. isn't coming to your house right now and saying like, give me all your gold or going to every jewelry store and saying, give me all your gold. The same will be true for Bitcoin. And if we don't, we'll have a mass revolt if that changes. But the important thing to consider with stablecoins is that

stablecoins, as Bitcoiners, we have to be pro-stablecoin because ultimately, it will usher in the future of Bitcoin and hyper-Bitcoinization. And there's two camps here. There's people who are like, never stablecoins, stablecoins are shitcoins. And I just like really violently disagree with that standpoint. I am more against the tax collectors along the way. There's so many, if you understand, most people that are actually against stable coins and think of stable coins as shit coins, they don't understand payments. They might understand, you know, fiscal policy. They might understand government, you know, like printing money, but they don't actually understand payments. And so the real enemy of it all is the tax collector. And I mean,

the tax collector is like the middleman, the third parties, the third parties. And me as a payment person that is like building businesses over the last 10 years on payment rails, the person that I'm actually way more like upset about and want to remove from the equation is not the government. I actually think the government is actually very good in many cases and in many cases does have our best interests. There are plenty of bad parties out there. There are plenty of bad actors out there. But for the most part, I'm trying to move money from point A to point B. And I've got 10 people that are taking money from me that don't need to be there. So with stable coins, we remove everybody from that equation.

And with Bitcoin, we definitely remove everybody from the equation. But we have to think realistically. We have to think in baby steps. And we have to think of like, what's our end goal here? We want to get to hyper-Bitcoinization as fast as possible. And the way to get to that is actually to adopt stable coins and to give everybody in the world the ability to move money, whatever money that they choose. So you can't tell everyone in the world, you know, take Bitcoin, do Bitcoin, like, you know, this is the best currency in the world that will come trust the process. Eventually you'll see there's 21 a million of these things and there's unlimited amount of these things. What are you going to choose? Choose your fighter. We can't force feed that for somebody who grew up on

the dollar, myself included. And the dollar is, you know, for like most people good enough. And so you have to move from stable coins first, then into Bitcoin. And that's where we'll see the future emerge of, I think the future we all want to live in. It's so true. It's almost like the money printing and fiscal policy are a distraction for the problems that actually exist. Because, like you said, you can vote for someone in theory, but we both know that both parties are going to print. So there's nobody that you can vote for that's going to change this. Because no party wants to be the one that gets elected and tells you that you're going to have austerity and a depression. Exactly. So, you know, at the end of the day, it's really the boots on the ground are eliminating all of the middlemen in these transactions. You've been through it and

down the road, obviously. And you talked very much at the beginning about paying people in foreign countries and how complex that obviously becomes. Oh, my God. Well, and what I have experienced when you dumb that even down further, paying someone a small amount of money in a foreign country is effectively impossible. Yes. Right. You can't send somebody $5 in Africa without them paying 15 or $20 to get the $5. Exactly. Right. And so, I mean, Most people don't understand that, you know, like,

If it arrives at all. Right. And so, I mean, most people don't understand that, you know, like if it arrives at all. Right. Exactly. Right. So, I mean, I, you know, I'm not a payments guy like you are, but that seems like that's what all of this fixes. And that's why if you truly want decentralization and if you truly believe in the ethos of Bitcoin, you should support stablecoin so that I can just send somebody five bucks for making a cool image for me from the Philippines. Absolutely. Yeah. And that's the future of payments. Like it's the inevitable future. We will not derail that. And I mean, I see it clear as day from where I'm at, where, you know, come from the payments world. I see everything that's broken in the payments world. You know, I've been moving money on the internet since I was,

you know, for the last, it's like 16 years now, right? So I see everything that's broken. We need a internet native currency and we need internet native currencies to get to the inevitable future of a Bitcoin standard. And you also talked about the idea of central banks putting Bitcoin on their balance sheet. I think that I personally, maybe I'm exceedingly bullish. I think that's something we see within 12 months, personally. Oh, absolutely. I believe that that's something, not in the United States, but as you said, in other countries. I guarantee it's already happened. Yeah.

I mean, I think Estonia might have, I could be wrong. I think Estonia already made a play there, but I bet it's happened way more than we actually know. And most treasuries are not going to be as transparent. And it might not be the countries that the United States wants to discuss at the moment who have had the foresight to do it because it's probably to circumvent some sanctions that we've put on them.

But that said, if that's kind of the final boss, central banks, well, we're seeing the progress towards that now. I want to talk about, obviously, we had micro strategy. We've talked that to death. But Tesla, right? I mean, Tesla comes in with a $1.5 billion buy. Do you think that that's the floodgates to this sort of activity where corporations, countries, and we go up that ladder, start to put Bitcoin on the balance sheet. Yeah. So it's full circle too. If you've been following us on Twitter, I've been tweeting at Elon for three years now to win Bitcoin, win Bitcoin rebate, win Bitcoin back, all this stuff. And I mean, there's a reason why I'm tweeting at him and not Ford, right? Tesla is such a leader and they understand memetic engineering and they understand like

Elon in particular, he understands how the internet works, right? And so because of that, it is like such a, he's such a force and Tesla is thus such a force that everybody's going to go follow them. They've proven enough success at this point. I mean, I think it's safe to say they them. They've proven enough success at this point. I mean, I think it's safe to say they make one of the best cars in the world, the history of the world. And so he's such a leader that everybody has to be looking at him being like, okay, what does he know about Bitcoin that I don't? What does Michael Saylor know that I don't? And so it is the floodgate opening and the MicroStrategy Summit where they were talking to all of our, you know, all of our merchants saying, like, put Bitcoin on the balance sheet.

And I'm seeing, like, you know, the list of people who are on this, these Fortune 1000 merchants that are on there. And I'm like, oh, my God, I've been preaching to some of these merchants forever. Some of them are holdouts, right? And so now their CFO that I personally know two, three years ago said, never, we're never giving Bitcoin rewards are now putting Bitcoin on the balance sheet. So what happens for us? What happens for them? Like this is the, this is the floodgate. And the most beautiful thing about Bitcoin is everybody has access to it. So you can just, you can sit there on your, on your, in your armchair and just ignore it and say, Oh, I'll get in later. I'll get in when it goes up and it's going to be too late. So it's like, you have to, everybody has to have

some sort, like somebody, everybody should own Bitcoin. There's no, there's no excuse at this point, whether you're earning it, whether you're buying it, like everybody has to have some amount of Bitcoin so that you understand it. And you, everybody should read the Bitcoin standard. Everybody should read the Satoshi white paper. Everybody should listen to this podcast and share with their friends. Like you have to understand what money is, or you will get left behind. I was just, I literally was tweeting about it today. I said, there's like 2000 companies showed up to Michael Saylor's conference on how to buy Bitcoin, right? If 5% of them decide to do it, we've got 100 more companies. We haven't even gotten 10 yet. Oh my God. Tip of the iceberg. Tip of the iceberg. Right. And so, I mean, what is that going to do? Even for the people who just care about making money what what does that do to the price and that's fine like that that's the thing that i think also there's a lot of people that have been

in bitcoin for a long time that are more principles thinkers like like and i would consider myself this as well of like the bitcoin solved a problem for me as a payments engineer early on to say like oh my god clear as day principles of this, the technology of this price is cool, but it's not the coolest part. That said, I am very self-aware of what Bitcoin is to most people. And most people, they see a gold rush. They see a Bitcoin rush. You know, they're like, I want to make money. And that we have to be completely honest with ourselves. That is a feature of Bitcoin. And that should be accepted and applauded. And number go up technology, it should be, you know, like applauded. That said, if you use Lolly, half of our messaging is around the principles of Bitcoin, why the price is going up, why it's so interesting, why it's such an important thing for the world. And if we discount that,

the principles, we also like don't do a service to our users that are coming in through the price. They are saying, I want to earn more points than, than Rakuten or more cash back than Rakuten. It's like, we, we have to teach people about than, than Rakuten or more cash back than Rakuten. It's like, we, we have to teach people about why your money's going up and why this, this, this technology is so important. And that's why, you know, you know, I'll share the crap out of this, this, this podcast, because yeah, we're all, we're all like people who have never learned about Bitcoin are definitely getting into, you know into Bitcoin education because they originally got into it because of the price. And now they're starting to listen about the principles, the economics, the philosophy of what money is and what it will become.

You just described me, right? I wasn't here in 2013 looking for a payment solution. I was a dude looking to make a whole lot of money when I heard about it in 2016 and early 2017. And all my friends were talking about getting hilariously rich, buying complete shit coins on like exchanges with Bitcoin pairs. I didn't even understand what I was buying or what it was worth. It was just everything was going up. And I sort of backed into the importance of it and all the things that we've discussed about Bitcoin as hard money. So I think that, you know, listen, the number go up thing didn't work in 2017 because the world wasn So I think that, you know, listen, the number go up thing didn't work in 2017, because the world wasn't ready. And, you know, it really was sort of a

speculative bubble. But now when you have the floor of MicroStrategy, Tesla, and all these companies and future governments coming in, it's a very, very different time for retail to FOMO in, in my opinion. Absolutely, absolutely. And yeah, you're totally right. I think a lot of people came in the way that you came in and it makes sense. We have to be like totally accepting and welcome that. Yeah, because they're going to find, as you said, the real red pill is getting excited about how much money you're making. Yeah, exactly. I think just a lot of people don't see that. So, I mean, I never asked for price targets, anything like that. I'm just curious, like a lot of people, every time it goes up, want to call the top, right?

Because it's just the numbers become so mind-blowing. 50,000, 100,000, 300,000, a million. I mean, do you think that it's reasonable to expect that sort of appreciation? To this date, I've never given a price target. And it's not one of those things where it's like, I think giving a price target in my mind is giving financial advice to people. And I will never give financial advice. I think that the way to think about it is the more people that adopt this and adopt the philosophy that like you and

I have adopted, it is crazy to think that more people adopting this technology and treating it the way that we treat it, which is like, I treat Bitcoin as, as like, you know, a dominant currency. Like I treat it as like, like I'm never selling my Bitcoin. Right. So like, like what does that become? The more people that believe that, that are never selling their Bitcoin, right? So like, like, what does that become? The more people that believe that, that are never selling their Bitcoin, there's only 21 million of these things. So what do you think is going to happen with the price is like what I push back on the answer. And I always, I would say like, you know, read the Bitcoin standard, read the Satoshi White paper, do your own research, like, you know, listen, listen to podcasts, like, you know, get, get active on Bitcoin,

Twitter about trends that are happening like there's there's there's so many resources that fit with the philosophy of bitcoin that are accessible to everybody and it's like do your own research and figure out for yourself what you think it's going to be but i don't think numbers going down i'll say that much yeah i mean i don't give targets either honestly and i'm a trader so i know i'm gonna look dumb right so i don't i don't, there's no upside to that. Yeah, you're just spotting trends. You're like, do the education,

like figure it out for yourself. At the most basic level. I mean, literally you should be able to explain to a middle schooler the simple concepts of supply and demand. Yeah. Right. I mean, we are seeing factually on-chain metrics

showing that the supply is being removed from the exchanges. It's being removed from the markets, being sent into cold storage. And when you talk about and think about these huge numbers, well, I mean, Bitcoin did a 13X this year, like we just talked about. 2X is six figures. Yeah. I mean, this is not abnormal price movement for Bitcoin to expect those crazy prices. So I think it's totally reasonable. I just have no idea where that, where that ceiling is. Do you think that any of these companies that are buying it to put it on their balance sheet have a number in mind where they eventually are like,

this is too crazy and I'm selling it? That's a good question. I mean, people are going to sell all along the way and then they're going to regret it. So it's, there's really no, I mean, any, any number that goes up is like, you know, people are going to try to take gains and, and, and, and, you know, like realize those gains. I just don't, I think everybody, like I've, I've regretted every time I've ever sold. So now I'm in this position where I'm like, well, I'm just never selling. I just always have, I have to make more money so that I can have more Bitcoin, but I'm never selling my Bitcoin. Right. You're probably in the unique situation where your job covers your life and you don't need to. I mean, there's obviously going to be people who, you know, have life things come up where they sell. But I think that most people have share

that same principle. And I don't think you put something on your balance sheet to sell it in six months at a 2x and take short-term capital gains. I mean, reasonably, I think the minute you say, I'm putting this on my balance sheet as an asset, you're locking it down, in my opinion. Yeah, exactly. At least that's what I believe. So I have to ask, will you ever allow rewards in other cryptocurrencies? Are you sticking to Bitcoin?

We, I mean, we've had clearly like every, every token project, every, you know, every one on like, you know, from Ethereum has been pitching us since we launched to launch. And we've been, I'm a big believer that Bitcoin has already like served society. It's already proven its value to society in a very real way. And also and like, we aren't as confident. And like, let's just say we gave someone some token that like went down or something like that, that they then have a bad experience with Lolly. It's like, I knew from like 2017, when we launched in a bear market, that Bitcoin was going to go up, like near, near 100% certainty. I'm like, it has too much value. It's too important. It's already served its value to society. And so I was like, I just need to give this to more people. I need more people to come on board. So with everything else, like, like Ethereum

for as cool and interesting as it is, it hasn't served society in the same way. It has served developers to, to build decentralized applications, dApps. And I'm not like some, like I am a Bitcoin maximalist in many senses, but I'm not the kind of Bitcoin maximalist that is saying there will never be anything else in the world. I am a very open-minded maximalist in that I want things to challenge Bitcoin. I want things. I just haven't seen it. So, like, I think stablecoins that are largely built on top of Ethereum are absolutely incredible. And as we talked about before, an inevitable path to hyperbitcoinization. That said, we are in its infancy,

and there's so many things that can break Tether and break, you know, stablecoins right now. And we are in day one of stablecoins. And we're in day one of stablecoins. And we're in day one of Bitcoin too. But we would be naive to say we're never going to have any other thing to emerge. My first principles thinking though is, does it have a path to hyper-Bitcoinization? That is my philosophy. So I want all of our users to ultimately have Bitcoin. And so sure, if someone wants to earn stablecoin back at some point, that's an inevitable future. And they want to earn interest on those stablecoins.

I am more of a believer in the free market than anything. So to take away something from someone that they want to earn, it should not be entirely up to me that someone should not be able to earn something that they are demanding. And to be perfectly honest, we've had a lot of demand over the last few months to earn things. And I take a philosophy. I'm like, who am I to say that somebody shouldn't be able to earn what they want to earn? Like, I'm more of a free market thinker than I am to say, like, you have to earn Bitcoin. Like, this is the thing. I can believe it all I want. I can shape my marketing around it. And actually, I think we've seen it with different exchanges. There's been some exchanges that are very Bitcoin centric and will not shill, you know, shit coins here and there. And then there's some that are like,

you know, shit coin casinos. So we can very much take a stance where we're going to be Bitcoin first, but we can take an approach where it's like, okay, maybe you should have, you know, stable coins back if you think Bitcoin's dipping or whatever it is. And maybe those stable coins you can use to like pay with things. And maybe that's more pervasive currency. So yeah, I mean, that was a long answer to saying I am very open-minded and I'm just saying like, you know, tell me what you guys want as users of our currency. If you want stable coins over Bitcoin, that's up to you. It's not up to me. Right. Interesting what you said about the exchanges. I had Dan Held on the show and he's like the Bitcoin maximalist, maximalist of all maximalists. And he works at Kraken and they,

you know, they trade all coins, but he talks about Bitcoin on his own time. You know, so I think that like that is a very common thing. I want to touch on something you said. You said that in 2017 and 2018, like you never had a doubt. 100% it's going up. You maintained your conviction. I don't think that's the case for most people. So A, why? And B, how gratifying is it to see Bitcoin over $ 50 000 dollars after that i i take the the matt

odell approach of uh stay humble and so i i think like i don't want to dunk on everyone it's no i'm not i'm not i'm look look i you know i i'm uh uh i'm five nine i can't dunk right so right? So not yet, I'm working on it. But it's a I, I think that, like, I very much believe that the way that you convince 4 billion people is not by, you know, dunking on them, it's by inviting them having like an open mind and saying, like, look, this is what I believe. And you don't have to believe the same thing. And that's fine. And like, I, I think like, you have to be open minded, you can't be like, you know, force feeding this thing, you have to almost like Trojan horse red pill somebody into into, you know, believing Bitcoin. And that's the beauty of law. That's what it is, right? It's not saying buy this, buy this, buy this, like, take your hard earned money. It is. Yeah, it's like, here it is. Like it's free.

So come on board. And it's like the, the $10 that you earn is now $40. Like that's how you're going to convince people. And so it's like, my philosophy is true with my product. And so sure. Like I have friends that are being like, that I, I said, I said in 2013, Hey, read the white paper. Hey, consider Bitcoin still to this day. I've never told anyone to buy Bitcoin. I know that's surprising to be in to this day, I've never told anyone to buy Bitcoin. I know that's surprising to be in the Bitcoin space. I've never told anyone to buy Bitcoin. And a lot of my friends are pissed that I didn't tell them to buy Bitcoin. But I'm pissed that they didn't go read the Bitcoin standard when it came out. I'm pissed that they didn't read the Satoshi white paper when it came out.

I've said, day one, do your research. This is fundamentally going to change the world. It is extremely important. And you need to change the world. It is extremely important and you need to do your research and people ignored me. So I give those friends shit that like didn't read. I don't give them shit for not buying, but if they didn't read and if I, cause I know some of them are so smart and if they had read the shit that I sent them, they would have bought that that day. And the same way I bought, right? Like the same way I got into it. So that that's, that's my thing bought right like the same way I got into it so

that that's that's my thing I'm not going to dunk on anybody but I am going to say hey you should have read this thing when I told you to read it you should teach Amanda Fish teach Amanda Fish right I mean you can't tell people what to do they need to come to it themselves I mean I still have friends no matter how high it goes that actually that somehow in their mind the higher the price goes the more it reinforces to them that it's not valuable. Exactly. Which blows my mind. Yeah.

Because maybe it's PTSD from 2017 or whatever. They still have that in their mind, and they think that inevitably it has to go down. But I think what you're saying and what I believe also that's really important is that it really is still early, in my opinion. Very early. Yeah. There's a lot of people who are like, I'm not going to pay. I'm not buying it at $54,000. You know, I don't know what the price will be when this comes out, but there's a lot of people who say that to me. Oh,

I should have bought it at 20. I'm not buying it at 50. Exactly. So yeah, yeah, I totally agree. It's, it's, we're, we're in day one of this, like, you know, this Bitcoin revolution, this crypto revolution. And, yeah, I mean, now's the time, like, whether you're stacking sats with Lolly or whether you're buying Bitcoin, you know, now's the time to get involved and do your research, right? Like, there's so many resources out there. So, it's like, there's really no excuse.

Take a couple hours on a Sunday and just like, you know, do your research. Awesome. I love what you guys are doing. I absolutely love your conviction and that you stuck it out. You were early and you stuck it out for this long. So it's nice to see, I'm sure, the fruits of your labors. Where can everybody follow you and sign up? Yeah. So lolly.com, L-O-L-L-I.com. Try Lolly on Twitter. We're super active. A lot of fun memes. And then, yeah, my DMs are always open if people have questions. Our company's DMs are always open.

Support at Lolly.com if you ever have issues. But yeah, I mean, keep stacking those stats and keep building the future we all want to live in. And I appreciate you and everything you're doing for crypto education and teaching people, showing people the light. And yes, keep listening to live in. And I appreciate you and everything you're doing for crypto education and teaching people, showing people the light. And yes, keep listening to the pod. We're going to meme our way right to the top.

Exactly. To the moon. Thank you again, man. I appreciate it. Scott, great meeting you. Take care. Bye.