We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast)

Episode Date: June 14, 2023

Preston Pysh chats with André Neves all about Bitcoin and its integration into gaming. André is the co-founder and CTO at Zebedee. Zebedee is a company that lets developers make turnkey financial transactions native to their apps and games. IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 01:41 - What exactly is Zebedee and what makes it unique in the Bitcoin and gaming space? 06:01 - Could you describe, in layman's terms, the technology behind Zebedee's API for streaming Bitcoin sats? 06:01 - What are some use cases for Zebedee's API that game developers might find attractive? 19:33 - How could Zebedee change the landscape of the online gaming industry? 19:33 - How has Zebedee been received by the gaming community so far?  33:42 - Are there any new projects or product offers that you find exciting? 33:59 - How does Nostr potentially fit into all of this? 54:44 - What advice would you give to aspiring engineers who want to venture into this space? 01:02:20 - Where do you see Zebedee in the next 5-10 years? BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. André Neves Twitter. The Zebedee Website.   NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.    SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Range Rover Vacasa AT&T The Bitcoin Way Public American Express Onramp SimpleMining Fundrise Shopify USPS Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

You're listening to TIP. Hey everyone, welcome to this Wednesday's release of the Bitcoin Fundamentals podcast. On today's show, I have a real builder and Bitcoin engineer with Andre Nevis. Andre is the co-founder and CTO at Zebedee. Zebedee is a company that lets developers make turnkey financial transactions native to their apps and games. So instead of fake Mario coins in a game, now game developers can use Zebidi's API to make those imaginary coins now Bitcoin.

inside the games. This opens a whole new incentive structure that benefits the consumer and the game developers that's never been possible before because it makes the money completely interoperable with microtransactions and payments with sound money. So with that, here's my chat with the brilliant Andre Nevis. You're listening to Bitcoin Fundamentals by the Investors Podcast Network. Now for your host, Preston Pish. Hey everyone, welcome to the show. Like I said in the introduction, I'm here with Andre. Andre, this has been a long time coming.

I've been watching what you guys have been doing from afar. And wow, there's some serious moves you guys are making in multiple fronts, which we're going to obviously get into on the show here. So welcome to the Investors podcast. Thanks, Preston. It's a pleasure to be here. I've been a big fan of TIP in general for many years. It's awesome to be here and talking to you.

We got a short chance. to talk when we were down in Orlando. And I was just really impressed with the presentation you had there. So first, let's start off with just talk to people about how you founded your company, what it is, what you were originally trying to accomplish, and then maybe give us just a short overview of maybe how that's evolved through the years. Definitely. You know, where business takes you, sometimes isn't where you originally set off. But I'm curious how that worked out for you guys. Awesome. So let's start at the beginning. right. Zebedee is the name of the company. We're three co-founders, myself, Andre Nevis, Simon Cowell, and Christian Moss. And we like to think of us as the three pillars of the tripod. So I myself come from the systems and applications development background. I have built software of all kinds and all sizes from distributed systems to back-end applications to front-end and mobile apps. Simon Cowell, our CEO, comes from the financial services background. He was prior to Zebedee, he was the head of corporate strategy at BitSamp, which is the largest,

Bitcoin exchange in Europe. And Chris Moss was actually the first person to put Bitcoin into a video game in early 2013, right? And so the three of us got together and we had very similar ideas and paths. My path was actually coming from the application development side. I was leading many software engineering teams out in New York for a better part of the decade and bit the Bitcoin bug and started learning about Bitcoin. Being originally from Brazil, I learned about Bitcoin on the technology side, not really on the monetary side. You know, my folks could send me money and I could send them money and it settled instantaneously. So that was sort of the part where it bit for me. And then right away, I realized

I have to do something with this. The entrepreneurial mind, the driven mind had just said, I have to build something here. And that's what I set out to do. But it, you know, it's a little bit more complex than let's build something, right? You need to build a company. You need to raise money and so on. And, you know, as lots of folks in, you know, normal jobs, let's call it. My job was great, right? I was a director of engineering at a digital product studio, making decent money, growing my career. But it wasn't challenging and it wasn't transformative. I wanted to have impact. And so I applied and I learned and I discovered and I researched and I, you know, started coding things away in the Bitcoin side of things. And that's

where I discovered chain code labs. So in early 2016, with the Lightning Network paper coming out, I really got interested in it, discussed with the Chinko Labs folks about it, and was one of the 10 invited to participate in the one and only, I believe they haven't run another residency program yet for the Lightning Network. This was in early 2018. In that residency program, you probably would recognize other names like Pierre Rochard, like Jack Mallors, like Alex Bosworth, right? So there was a lot of, like Renee Picard, who ended up writing the Lightning Network book. So all of us were in that that cohort. And from there, I decided that, you know, lightning is the future. Bitcoin is definitely the path here. And I believe it was two weeks later, I quit my cushy job and I took the leap,

right? It was time to take that leap of faith. So I went down that rabbit hole at that moment. I love that. Your co-founder that programmed it into a game. You said 2012. So this is before any layer, 2013. This is before any layer two. So explain to us what that was. What did he So he built a tight Christmas. His handle is Mandel Dock online, if you've ever heard of him. He built the very first Bitcoin game in 2013 and he did it with the game Saratobi. And really it was the notion of Bitcoin rewards. You know, he was working at a digital studio similarly in a different company and one of the clients wanted him to build a Bitcoin wallet. And in doing that, he got interested in saying, hey, no one's done a Bitcoin game.

Maybe I should put, you know, Bitcoin in a game and reward folks. And it was actually a pretty big hit, right? The chain was empty compared to now. So the fees were low and it was more or less okay. Then things changed quite rapidly, actually. Coinbase got involved and started advertising his game and giving him money to give out his rewards. And then fees started spiking.

And I think it was a couple of months after he had to shut it down because it was no longer feasible. It cost more to send the reward than it was the reward. And then he said, look, Bitcoin is not it for tiny payments yet. Right. And that was 2013, 2014. So people that aren't intimately familiar on the tech. So with layer two, one of the massive advantages is just immediate settlement with practically no fees that you can stream money.

And so one of the things that you guys have with your API at Zebedee is people are now creating apps on the app store that you can go and download right now and earn Bitcoin Satoshi's as you're playing the game, which is mine. blowing. And my immediate thought when I see this model as a business person and I'm looking at it, I'm saying, why aren't these game creators incorporating this more into their games? And, you know, I have a little kid. They play the games. And there's all these ads that are constantly popping up. But I would think that you could incentivize people to play the game more if the user,

the person playing the game is participating in the revenue being generated from the ads. And so your company is providing this turnkey solution for game designers to incorporate these payments into it. Talk to us about the evolution of like how you guys came up with the idea to do this. When did you start rolling it out? Just walk us through the whole thing. And then I guess at the end of that, I'm really curious on the game theory, whether people, like, why is it not taking off yet? Do you think it's just we're really early or some of your ideas on that? Definitely. At the core of Zebedy, we have the Zebedy API, and that's really what powers both our B2B and our B2C arms and products.

What you're touching on is our B2B side. So akin to someone that wants to run a mom and pop shop online and sell clothes or stickers online, they would go to Stripe.com and set up an account and then they can accept dollars. Similarly, anyone, whether you are a store or an operator or an e-commerce or an app developer or a game developer, you could just play. Zabidi APIs, right? It's one API. You have a beautiful developer dashboard and you're able to move money at the speed of the internet and you settle money instantaneously, right, anywhere in the world. And so we started the company in 2019 and there were no providers at the time. We were talking about 2018 was effectively when Lightning Network, the Coin's Payment Network became Mainnet, went into Mainnet so everyone could use it in a production environment. And by 2019, there just simply weren't providers that could allow folks outside of Bitcoin to interact with it.

The reality is that Bitcoin is very complex. If someone tells you that they understand Bitcoin through and through, that's a lie. No one actually understands all of Bitcoin. And then you add upon all of the other technologies that are adjacent to Bitcoin, such as the Lightning Network, and it becomes even more cumbersome. So it's not an easy technology to get started with. And in my view, being a technologist, a product developer, a product builder, it is inherently, it's very hard to onboard billions of folks into Bitcoin if it is complicated. It needs to be simplified. And not just for the consumers, it needs to be simplified for developers.

If I tell you, if I tell a developer that in order to interact with Bitcoin, they need to understand all of the intricacies of UTXO management, that is going to go downhill. That is not going to happen. We are not going to get hundreds, thousands, and millions of developers, right? We need to simplify that and abstract that away. Lightning does a great job, whereas Bitcoin is really low level, I would say, layer one. Layer two is a little bit more, I would say, closer to app developers, to application developers. It's more pay and request and it's simpler, right? And yet, in 2019, there weren't any providers, right?

And so in order to foster that ecosystem, Zepiddy's first product release in 2019 and 2020 were the APIs, right, that the first version of the developer dashboard in the APIs. And at first, it was very simple request payments, send payments, effectively pay-ins and pay-outs, right? So for anyone anywhere. And then the technology started evolving. And I want to just take a second to mention our thesis around the adoption of Bitcoin and Lightning is that it needs to be, Bitcoin comes to you when you are ready for Bitcoin. What I mean by that is the censorship of Bitcoin is important for some folks, not all. The monetary divisibility aspect of Bitcoin of 21 million and, you know, that's important to some, not all. The interoperability is important

to some, not all. So you need to meet the customer where they're at. Don't come to a game developer selling hard money. That's not going to sell, right? That's not the selling point. The selling point is here's an interoperable money that you can interact with. Instead of having 50 integrations for your payouts in 50 countries, you have one integration for payouts in all countries, right? Like, that's the selling point. Increase your KPIs, increase your, decrease your churn, right? So you have to meet the customer where they are. You don't just yell Bitcoin features or values, right? And so our thesis was the gaming vertical is ripe for it. This is younger demographic. They are much more in tune with value and point in digital economies. We can talk about

Fortnite. We can talk about World of Warcraft. Every single one of these MMO RPGs is a multi-billion dollar virtual economy. And there's trading actively occurring in that economy. Zebedee, the DEE for ZE stands for digital economy engines. We actually want to power digital economy engines. We want to empower you with solutions, APIs, SDKs, dashboards so that you can power economy engines yourself, whether you're building an application, a game, or a system. Now back into the gaming side, I think to your point as advertising models and how does that works, you were mentioning that you have kids and they play games and they see lots of ads. What clicked very quickly was our technology, one selling this to game developers in early

2020, was by introducing a reward mechanism to users based on the revenue they were getting from ads, they were able to significantly increase retention and significantly decrease churn. So in the video, in the video gaming industry and mobile gaming specifically, we talk about things like D14 and D30, which are effectively, once the user signs up, are they still here after 14 days? Are they still here after 30 days? Or they stay engaging. And notoriously, that is really low, right?

It's effectively what's known as churn. So they sign up, they play it for two days, and then they delete it, right? So you want the user to remain here. And what they found is, and I'll cite some examples, but what they found is every single game developer that introduced our platform and our rewardscape APIs, for example, increase their turn like 10fold, 100 fold, 1,000 fold. So first and foremost, we have Fum Games.

Thumb Games has a very, it's an amazing game. It's a very addictive game called Bitcoin Miner. And it's effectively an idle game. It's a hyper-casual game on your phone. And I believe it was four years ago. they released that game, but there were no rewards, right? It was just a normal game with advertisements. And it flopped.

It was a serious flop. It, you know, months of months of development for nothing. Then Paul West, who's a CEO of Fumgames, discovered the Zebedy API and said, you know, let's give this a try. After the first month of introducing the rewards API and pushing Bitcoin Miner as a new release again, their day 30 retention went up 1,200%. We're talking about a game that had zero use case. interest and, you know, user base. And they introduced one single API, and they were giving back tiny portions of their ad revenue.

And now they just recently crossed over a million active users. This is mind-blown. This is a tiny game that introduced Bitcoin rewards and it exploded. Let's go through a bit bigger, right? Square range, the $6 billion publicly traded company, they're a video game studio. They're most known for IPs like Final Fantasy. You probably have heard of them. they also integrated Zebedee on a handful of titles.

And on one of the titles called Ludoxenith, which is a game that they published to, I believe, East Asian countries primarily, it's a game for that region. It doubled their revenue by simply introducing a Zebedy API, right? So they effectively, same thing. They introduced the rewards mechanism. And I believe it was 87% increase in their ARPDAO, which is average revenue per daily active user. So we're saying that one API integration, which takes three days to depend, you know, two weeks, you can double your revenue per user in that game. So this is very, very impactful. And this is where it all started, right?

In 2020, we started seeing that this was the impact. And so to my point earlier, it's not about selling Bitcoin. It's not about selling lightning. It's not about selling rewards even. It's about selling better APIs. So, hey, introduce this payout mechanism, this rewards mechanism, and you will double your ARPDAO. You will double your revenue. You will increase your retention.

You will reduce your turn. Games become profitable after they add Zebedee. That's a big, big statement. And that's a true statement that we've been able to hold for all customers that have added it. And it started with gaming, right? And gaming has been great. And it's something that continues to grow. Something that is a little bit different than application development is games take a lot longer of a cycle.

Games don't build for three months and iterate after they're released. They build for six. 12, 18 months, and then they release big, big features, right? So what you're about to see is actually your question was why hasn't it picked up yet? And my answer is that it definitely has. It's just that there are at least 20 games that I see actively being developed that have this capability. And when I say 20 games, I don't mean 20 tiny mobile games.

I mean we have crossed the chasm into desktop games, into web experiences, and mobile, right? So it is coming and it is very much here. it's just the cycle for development for games is quite a bit longer than applications and platforms, right? So throughout the rest of 2023, you will see Zebedee and partners of ours announcing big activations and big game launches. And that should hopefully get you to understand that there's a lot happening behind the scenes. It's just not at the forefront yet. Now, this is unbelievable. Yes.

It's fascinating when we speak to folks, because. The reaction at first, if you're selling Bitcoin is very different than if you're selling what Bitcoin does for your business. That's the impact, right? I'm not interested in selling Bitcoin. Bitcoin sells itself. I'm interested in selling the impact that introducing Bitcoin has. And then what happened was everyone started seeing the impact on the gaming side.

And we started getting knocks on our doors and said, hey, remember, there weren't many providers at the time. And this is early 2020, mid-2020, 2021. One, there were not many providers, API providers are, some folks are very enthusiastic, enthusiasts, let's say. So they build a little API and they put it out, but it's not well maintained. There's lots of compliance concerns, right, regulatory concerns. So what we've chosen to do is said, okay, look, we from the get go are going to be a compliant,

regulated, U.S.-based company, right? So we have, we're an MSB, we have MTRs, like we are effectively able to provide this capability, legally in a regulated manner. And so not only does that change the perception because it's inherently that a public company would need certain capabilities and certain expectations like this, but it also allows us to expand quite a bit more

outside of gaming, right? The reality is that folks started knocking on the door and said, hey, your API is amazing, but I'm not a gamer or a game developer. Can I use it? And at first, it was, as a business, as an entrepreneur, one thing that you can't do is go too wide. If you go too wide and your sales funnel is not focused, you're going to have a very, very big sales funnel, but not many are going to convert.

You need to be specialized in solving problems for individual customers. So at first, we were hesitant and expanding and in opening and saying, look, the use case really is gaming and gamers. Then comes, I believe, mid-2020, late 2021, enough knocks on the door started to sound and we said, okay, maybe it's time. We started working towards our SaaS offering, which effectively automates the entirety of our applications into a way that anyone can sign up and get going with an API key. And we got a few launch partners, right? So most prominently, the very first launch partner of ours was Fountain. Fountain is the podcasting 2.0. I believe Oscar has been a guest of yours.

And Fountain is backed entirely by Zepedy infrastructure. And they don't worry about payments. They just plug an API and they process tens of millions of transactions on the monthly basis. So that was the very first intro into us expanding. And just, I believe a month ago, we opened it to anything in every one. So you can go to dash to Zebedee.io, sign up, get an API key, and start building applications and systems, right? So it's scaled quite well and quite drastically over the years. But really it was, it was on a need basis.

Enough folks are saying, hey, Andre, you are actually at the fourth. forefront of running tens of millions of transactions per month on lightning. Like there are not many teams or companies doing this. I need this. Can I use it? Right? And we said, okay, it's time. We're now secure at a place where we believe it's time to open it.

And that's where streaming money comes in. That's where all of these capabilities have popped up. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd,

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For people that are listening to this, maybe on the Apple podcast or whatever, so Fountain that Andre was talking about, so our show, people can listen to our show, this conversation right now on Fountain. And if they are, they've chosen to stream us, literally stream us, Sats, us money, as they're listening to the show. So if they listen to 10 seconds of it, they're just streaming whatever the rate is that we have set there. they're streaming that for those 10 seconds.

If they listen to the whole show, they're streaming throughout that entire period of time. And the model is to eventually do away with ads on a show so that people can just pay as they listen. I wanted to just so people can understand how mind-blowing this is. And the reason you can't do this with traditional finance is because you can't stream somebody a 30th of a penny, right? Or listening for two seconds or whatever it might be. So that's why this is so revolutionary. When I'm trying to look at it from the gamer, like if I was a game developer and just kind of walking through the entire process, so people can kind of understand the service that you're providing, Andre. So let's say I created a game.

I'm running ads every two minutes during that game in order to generate some type of revenue. So the person who's playing the game, say it's some 13-year-old kid, he downloads this game on his iPad. And are they then saying, this is my Bitcoin wallet where I would like to receive to participate in the ad revenue? Do they just give their lightning address of like where they can receive Bitcoin as they're playing the game? And then talk us through how the game developer is basically loading the Bitcoin to stream it to that person who's playing the game. Walk us through some of that architect. Definitely. I'll do the consumer side first, since it's, more attuned to the audience,

you download a game and you start playing, right? You don't need to enter anything and nothing. Usually, you download a game and you pick up jams or coins or stones, right? And they just put plus one, right, in your little counter. Usually, it's entirely up to the game developer, how they actually implement Zebedee and the rewards into the actual fabric of the game. So some developers have it where as you complete tasks or beat the big boss or, you know, you complete like a big stage of the game, you get a reward. And in that reward may be some

jams, but you get five sats or 20 sats. And so it's part of the game. Some games, like a, like a Tetra style game, for example, coin majong is one that's powered by us. And, you know, if you get five in a row, then you get a reward and it's Bitcoin. And they just add a counter to it. So you get 10s, 20s, cents, 50 cents. When you're ready to cash out or get your rewards, you click to withdraw. And then you lean on the fact that Bitcoin and Lightning are open networks and you just enter a Lightning address. It could be your Zebeddy Lightning address.

It could be any Lightning address. So the game developer is inherently interoperable with every wallet out there. They don't need to sit only with Zebity. So they don't even force their users to use Zebity. Some of them recommend Zebidi, right? Because they want that easy UX for customers. They want the continuity for the user. experience, but it is very much not a requirement. And users have a lightning address and then they

click withdraw or redeem, right? And they receive their stats and they go on about their day. So on the developer side, on the consumer side, it's very straightforward. It's actually not, it's an additive experience, right? You can still play most of the games without actually ever interacting with the Bitcoin. It's just that now your rewards and your points have value and you can take them out. And similar to what you're saying, it's inherently impossible to do in fiat terms because have you ever bought anything less than a dollar online with a credit card? Yeah, that's not a thing, right? And I think the cheapest thing is actually the apps in the app store on iPhones because it's like 99 cents or 69 cents. That's the lowest threshold.

It hits your bank account and it's a dollar 30. It is not 99 cents. And so it is infeasible, impossible to send two stats, five sats. This is, you know, hundreds of a cent, of hundreds of fractions of a cent. Then on, On the developer side, the way this works. Andre, real fast. And not to mention, so everything you just said, plus you can be anywhere in the world. It does not matter where your jurisdiction, you could be VPNing in via the game to whatever a domain or locale in the world that you want. And these things are still withdrawable where, like, if you're dealing with dollars, maybe you can only do that in the U.S.

Or you can only do it over in the EU if you're dealing with you. If you're in a game developer in Brazil and you integrate rewards with Brazilian Rai's, great. You have a 220 million addressable user base of potentially Brazilians who have access to Brazilian fiat rails. But if you introduce Bitcoin, how many people in the world are there, seven plus billion? So like that is now your addressable market. What's interesting is the impact of these micro-transactions, right? So these are micro-micro-nanotransactions even. But the impact that they have is actually macro.

We've seen gamers in Brazil pay rent, pay groceries, pay bills by playing games. It's not a life-changing money necessarily, right? I don't want to suggest that people should work on this, but it is something that makes a very large impact. And when you combine that with depreciating, and this is your bread and butter, depreciating fiat economies and how their currencies are being debased, you look at Brazilian-reized. Brazil has gone through six different monies over the past 60-plus years. So they are very keen on getting the next money.

It's fine. You know, this is it. And it is more, you know, it's better. It's easier to use online. So now on the developer side, again, very simple, go to zebri.io, sign up. You create a game in a project in the dashboard. And you can top it up with Bitcoin. So in the dashboard, you could even deposit Bitcoin.

You could, you know, do the whole flow. You could also buy Bitcoin in the dashboard. So you can top it up with your credit card. And so as a developer, you have all of the. tools at your disposal. And then you use one of our SDKs, one of our APIs. So we have a Rust SDK. We have a Node SDK. We have a Unity SDK. So we come to where you are in your environment. So if you're building a gaming unity, we're there. You're building a server side application in Node.js. We're there with you. And it's as simple as ZBD dot send payment. ZbD.

dot get lightning address, right? It's very readable. It's very simple. Anyone can get started. And once you've loaded some Bitcoin in your project wallet, you can start dishing it out to any users in the world. It's really that simple. And it's free. I forgot to say that's important. It's entirely free. You can sign up and get going. If you're building an application that is going to scale, we will grow with you. So we have a tiered system. We have a pro tier starting at 50 bucks a month. We have a startup tier starting at 500 bucks a month. And if you're building larger enterprises, right, we have enterprise customers. We are able to create custom tiers for you.

But it is free for any hobby developer to get started. And you're able to create projects, get API keys, and start sending money globally. So it's really that simple. And the service that you guys are providing in the back end that they might not, you know, a listener that's not intimately familiar with Lightning, and correct me if I'm wrong, but you guys are doing all the channel management inside of that. of lightning. So is there any other things beyond the channel management that I'm just kind of like waving my hands and like this is what you guys are doing? Like tell the audience what it is

you guys are providing in the background as a service to them that makes it all turnkey. It's actually a fascinating thing because we abstract so much out of it that it becomes so simple that I love it. I use our APIs to build tools and applications and things. And it sort of blows my mind that two years ago or a year ago, this was a completely. completely different landscape. In Lightning, just to very briefly go over, in Lightning, this is a always online liquidity network, right? So it requires constant management. We don't run one node. We run tens of nodes. We don't deploy liquidity manually in opening channels here and there. We have automated systems to this. We need to have high availability servers.

So if a server crashes, we need another one to spin up. We need an entire automation around backups and channel management, data storage, right? All of this is handled, right? We've spent countless resource hours, engineering hours, automating all of these processes. So it's amazing to me that when folks start saying, oh, it's so simple. I say yes, it's so simple.

It was not simple, okay? Like it used to take hundreds of lines of code to send a payment. And I guess now it's, you know, ZBD send payment, right? So it's a lot under the hood. And we have a very robust infrastructure, SISOps and security teams that manage all of this. So you don't worry about liquidity concerns. You don't worry about your payment failing.

We have a 97% plus payment success rate in the network. It's really only if you're paying to the really, really far edge nodes that we would run into any issue. So there's a lot that happens behind the scenes that's automated for the customers. As a person that set up my own node and open like 100 channels and then tried to manage the liquidity of these channels. I can tell you from my own personal experience that it's not something that you're just going to do

and it's easy, like it, especially for somebody that's not technically competent like myself. Really depends on the use case. Yeah, absolutely. If it's a thing to toy around, if it's to learn, if it's to get into, absolutely. If you're running a business,

you're now, it's akin to, hey, I want to run a mom and pop shop to sell T-shirts. Let me just go and become a payment gateway. That's a really big overhead. It depends on the use case. I run nodes myself. But to your point, I'm very technical, right? And I'm able to do that.

Most people are. So I think it's important to have options. If there ever wanted to be a comedy for technical people, it would have just been a camera over my shoulder, just watching my actions on the computer. People would really get it. It would be a top-notch comedy for folks. Hey, so there's a huge development in social media happening right now, Andre, with Noster.

I had Will Kasserin on probably back at the beginning of the year talking about what he's doing with Damos, and this is a huge breakthrough. So from your vantage point, tell people why you think Noster is a really big deal, how it potentially complements Bitcoin, and how you guys are trying to. treating this as a company kind of moving forward. Yeah, absolutely. I think it may make sense to go a little bit back into the history of Nostr and explaining a bit of how it all came about, seeing that we were, I have been a privileged

participants in this whole journey. So for context, ZEBedi is our enterprise solution software company, right? We have both B2C and B2B products, and at our core, we have this API platform. But primarily the API platform does a set full of things, but it consumes open networks. It consumes Bitcoin and it consumes Lightning Network and it consumes open source software, right? So as a technologist, as a product builder, as a developer, it was always really important for me and for my teams that we support open source. We support open development.

We support innovation. Early on in the company, we started with what was internally known as ZBD Labs, eventually became ZBDOSS for open source. But then we said, look, this is growing too much. It's now time for us to make this into an organization. Let's deploy resources, both capital and human resources to them, to this organization. And so we created from ZBD, we created NBD. Right, NBD stands for no big deal. It's our open source arm. And so, and whereas ZBD has products that are a revenue generating and are searching for customers, NBD just puts out code. And the announcement I said, NBD has no KPIs, NBD has no deadlines.

We just put out sovereign software to the world, right? Our lead engineer and our lead open source developer is Fiat Jaffe. Fiatjaf, for those who don't know, is a very prolific developer in the Bitcoin Lightning ecosystem. And he has been with us for well over three years now. And one thing that I've been able to do is identify, I pride myself in doing, I guess, is identify individuals who show a lot of. of drive, ambition and ability to deliver on really challenging times, innovative, and very, I guess challenging really is the word, right?

You know, as a developer, usually you run into a problem, you Google it. Or nowadays, I guess you chat GPT it, right? Or stack for your flow. You know, with lightning and with things like Noster, there was no one that had gone through that before. So you need to be at the forefront and ready to get your hands dirty. I pride myself in finding those folks and really enabling them and feel Jeff was one of them. And so I brought him on to Zebedee early on. He worked on a lot of things in the,

in the Zebedee ecosystem, no, core to Zebedee. But very early on, I said, hey, man, you need to be doing open source. And from that, I think lots of things like LN URLs, like Lightning Address came around. These are things that we have built and integrated with. And he said, hey, I want to try and solve this problem. And we said, great, go ahead. I believe in you. Let's do it. So So Fiatjaf, low and behold, goes and spends a weekend and comes out and says, here's a little thing that I've been trying to build. As with any standard, standards online are just standards. They're nothing. It's just here's a set of instructions.

Every standard needs network effects. You need participants to participate. And with Noster being released in late 2020, it actually just saw organic growth for a good two years. It didn't really see it was organic. Folks were getting involved, interested. And because of the relationship with Bitcoin, there were a lot of. of Bitcoin developers into that space. So it was very easy to see the combination of both.

It wasn't until December of 2022 that Jack Dorsey got a whiff Noster and then reached out to Fiat Jaff and said, hey, I want to donate money to you. Fia Jaff reached out to me. I remember him sending me a screenshot of the message from Jack on Twitter. And he's like, is this fake? Right. And I'm like, I don't know. It looks real.

So that's where it sort of, you know, began. And then December 2020, from until now, I think things have just skyrocketed, both on the terms of funding developers for the space, but also just applications, clients, relays. Every single sort of software has been developed around Noster now. And, you know, I believe there are now over hundreds of thousands of users using the platform at scale. Noster is very different because it is, I guess, touching on some of the things that I've done in the past. in terms of presentations. I've been able to dumb down these. I don't love the term, dumb it down,

but you know, you dumb it down the terms and the architectural details in a way that folks can understand. I use the sense of emailing to really get the idea across. So Preston probably use Gmail. I may use Outlook.

My cousins could use Yahoo. And, you know, you could use any email out there. And it's a different email provider. It's a different email client. but they all subscribe to the same protocol, the same simple mail transfer protocol. And that's why messages can be exchanged regardless of where you are, regardless of server or client you're using.

In social media environments and communication environments nowadays, you need a Twitter account to talk to your Twitter friends. You need a Facebook account to use Facebook and you need a TikTok and then Snapchat and Instagram and you keep going, right? There's what, 50 of them at least. And as an aside, you now have password manager problems because you need to, you know, You can't repeat passwords. It's insecure and so forth.

So let's imagine a world where my accounts on Twitter could log me into Facebook. My accounts on Twitter could post on TikTok, right? And so if these applications were clients of a protocol, just like emails work, you would see a plethora of activity because now it's all interoperable, right? That's why email is so prevalent. As a developer, emails are extremely outdated. the code that goes into emails display, the rendering of emails, is from 1995. Okay.

It's very outdated. But it's abundant because it is the single interoperable way to communicate with everyone in the world. And it's still here. And it's 2023. So Noster could disrupt that on the social media side. With Noster, you create akin to Bitcoin. You have a public and a private key. Right?

And that's your identity. And you're able to take that and log in on any client, on any experience. So I could log in to a Twitter-esque experience, and I could take my followers and my lists and my follow count, and I could go over to my other Instagram-like experience with the same followers, with the same individuals, right? So it's really the interoperability that's really impactful. And because of the way the architecture of Noster works, there's two parts that are really

interesting to me. One is, it's extremely simple. I was talking about standards and how Bitcoin is very complicated, right? It's complicated for many reasons, but it is complicated. And so it's important that we bring the developer closer to that ecosystem so they can build applications. Noster, on the other hand, is extremely simple. It's one event, right? It's one single object that defines events.

These are the names of posts, right? So if you're making a post on Noster, that's an event. If you're updating your profile image, that's an event. And so it's extremely simple for developers to get started, which meant that hundreds of developers, have already gotten involved and have already been building. So that's one piece. The other piece is around Noster's big censorship-resistant capability, which is very akin to Bitcoin's values,

which is the notion that, you know, if Twitter doesn't like what I'm saying, Twitter can just ban my account. On Noster, the way it works is if XYZ client doesn't like what I'm saying, or if XYZ server or relay doesn't like what I'm saying, I can take my keys and I can go to another one. And if they don't like what I'm saying, I can go to yet another one, right? And I can host my own if I want to. And everyone could still

read my messages and everyone could still interact with me. So the optionality akin to Bitcoin, you can hold your Bitcoin. You can use hundreds of different wallets. With Noster, you could self-host your Noster relay and clients. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. No, it's not your imagination. Risk and regulation are ramping up. And customers now expect proof of security just to do business. That's why VANTA is a game changer. VANTA automates your compliance process and brings compliance, risk, and customer trust together on one AI-powered platform. So whether you're prepping for a SOC or running an enterprise GRC program, VANTA keeps you secure and keeps your deals moving. Instead of chasing spreadsheets and screenshots, VANTA gives you

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This is a paid advertisement. All right. Back to the show. I've got a question for you on this. So when you were going through it, and I love the analogy you're using between email and then on the social layer, but I was immediately thinking, well, Well, why can't we just do what we're doing on Nostr with the email protocol with the SMTP protocol? And I think it's getting, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like a lot of the servers that are providing the SMTP protocol to users and users is captured or it's centralized, which doesn't give a person this type of flexibility of being quote unquote canceled.

So is that what it is that makes it different? Let me explain a little bit more. I guess with emails, you can self-host your email, right? You can run an email server. It is very cumbersome and complex, right? It is not something that anyone just does. It's not, you know, click and get started. So that's one piece.

The other piece is with something as ossified as SMTP, if you were to introduce a new version of SMTP or a new addition to the protocol or a new thing, you now need every major institution, every major email provider. We're talking about Google. We're talking about Yahoo. You need to convince those folks to change the protocol and now adopt this new. Because it doesn't, again, standards are just instructions. I could write a new instruction, but if no one else in the email protocol is following the instruction,

then it never came to fruition. So it's a much higher barrier to entry when we say let's evolve a protocol that is ossified, then let's create something new that has different features and different capabilities. Could we evolve SMTP? Theoretically, yes, we could take SMTP and evolve it. I don't think it would be a perfect fit, but you could always build upon standards. It's just a much higher lift. We're talking about, you know, the entirety of the internet from applications, systems,

you know, backends. They're all aware of emails in this way. To introduce something new, that's a very big change. And so that's why we wouldn't want to pursue that angle. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. And what's interesting, so like I run an umbral and they rolled out, hey, run your own Noster Relay on Umbrel for your personal account so that you could never be canceled.

And it was so turnkey. I just clicked a couple buttons. And I was like, wow, this is some serious like freedom tech as far as like keeping your your messages. As you're looking at this new protocol and what appears. to be something that's just growing like wildfire globally right now. How do you see that from a Zebedee's standpoint of a business opportunity? Or do you see this as a business opportunity using Bitcoin with Noster and whatnot? Yeah. So going back to the NBD, our open source arm,

the reality is that when open networks are thriving and are growing, things like Bitcoin, things like Lightning Network, we are at a place where they can compound. So if we're able to Bitcoin and Lightning to work in a Nostra environment. We have two open networks, decentralized networks, that can grow organically and in their own merits, but they can enable capabilities that couldn't have been possible before. A thing that's very key to Bitcoin is everyone, like there has been, what, 14 years now that millions of people now have Bitcoin addresses, they have Lightning wallets, they have Bitcoin wallets.

But it's not easy to send to each other, right? Because I need to say, hey, Preston, I need to understand, where is your wallet? Can you send me a QR code of some kind so that I can find you? Noster provides a discoverability layer for Bitcoin-enabled identities. So you are an identity, a digital nomad, right? You are a person on the internet. You have a wallet, but you haven't been able to advertise to tell people that this is my wallet. Now there's a medium for it.

So where we see that is, again, Zepidi consumes open. So we consume Bitcoin, we consume lightning, we are now consuming Noster. The way we see it is gaming and online experiences are inherent and social experience are inherently social, right? You need people to interact. It's not just you and a game or you and a robot. You want you and other players. You want you and other friends.

You want you and your mates playing something or learning something. So at the Zebedee side on the consumer business, we have the ZBD app. That's where folks learn about new games. That's where they get involved with podcasting systems. That's where they discover monetized experiences online. And it's a full blown Bitcoin Lightning wallet in there. It was inherently to us that we needed to bring a social aspect to this. And we were always going to build it.

And then as soon as December last year, things exploded, right? And Nostar kind of grew. It's awesome that we're now able to be talking to you about this because we have just released the new version of the ZBD app. The ZBD app now has a massive social part of it. It's a very big ZBD app upgrade. We are rolling out the Alpha Access right now. So go to ZBD.G and sign up for the wait list.

We're letting people in in the thousands every week. There's a lot of interest. And what this means is that any developer or any user or any gamer or any person out there can sign up to the ZBD app and get started with both Bitcoin and Noster. You get a social identity that is monetized. And for us, the angle here is to disrupt monetization schemes that exist nowadays. If you look into the way the current monetization works in digital content creation scheme, right, revenue sharing and brand deals is really how it works. If you're a, you know, 100,000 plus influencer on Instagram or on Facebook or on Snapchat

or on TikTok, sorry, you're able to monetize that through brand partnerships or advertisements or so on. But not only do they take a hefty cut, right? OnlyFans takes 20%. Patreon takes 15%. Twitter and substack take 10%. So the content creator economy online is not ripe for it. And Noster and Bitcoin are here to solve that problem. With Nosser and Bitcoin in the ZBD app, you maintain 99% of your earnings.

You're able to put out content that is consumed by the entirety of the world, regardless of where they are in the world, which jurisdiction they are, which fiat money they use. They're able to get Bitcoin and they're able to zap you. They zap two cents or $2,000, right? It's really up to you how that works. And so by disrupting this content monetization online, I believe this is going to foster lots of innovation, lots of creativity, lots of new things.

Keep 99% of your value. That's a big deal. The second one is encrypted DMs with payments. This is something that's not been here. It's 2023. We have Bitcoin. We should be able to. send messages around the world, we should be able to send money around the world. With the new

ZBD app, you can do that. You can sign up and you can send messages akin to how you do with Twitter DMs, akin to how you do you with Instagram, but money is part of the fabric of your experience. And specifically to us, the ZBD app has lots of ways for you to earn Bitcoin. A big hurdle for folks is to buy Bitcoin, to get Bitcoin, right? And you have to get an exchange account and you have to buy Bitcoin and you get a debit card. That's very cumbersome. For us, Bitcoin, needs to be as simple. It needs to be cool and needs to be friendly. So you download ZBD, you're able to download games or apps or engage in experiences where you earn Bitcoin. And once you earn that Bitcoin, you're then able to interact with others in the social environment. So you can zap each other.

You can like each other's posts. Once you've done that, you've arrived at an ecosystem of value driven engagement instead of just likes and retweets, which feed an algorithm. Right. We want valued engagement with folks. We don't want just random numbers being thrown around. So the ZBD app is that entry point for everyone. And you can get started today at ZBD.G and signing up for the waitlist. Love it. Love it.

So Andre, I prepping for the thing for this interview, I saw you were asked to be a speaker at MIT. Having seen some of the things that you've done in the space, you're a very successful entrepreneur and builder, like a true builder. in this space. We have a lot of people, young people that listen to the show that might want to become an entrepreneur.

What type of entrepreneurial guidance or advice do you have for people to just basically be an A player like yourself to be out there, just crushing it and making moves? Like, what's your advice to these people? I actually gave, so my talks that in MIT are great. I highly recommend. I discuss the lightning address

and the other one I discuss Noster. Very highly recommend those two talks. I also gave a recent talk at the WOF, NYC cohort founders. These are, for those that don't know, these are lightning and Bitcoin founders going through a incubator process. And in that talk, I touched on this, right? Things that as a founder you should be aware of and so on. I think three themes come up to mind and I'll quickly go through them.

The first one being, it's a massive leap. I talked about it in the beginning. I had a great job, right? And it was great. I love my job. Love the people I work with. when it bites, you know that it bites and you know that you need it. There's an itch that you have to scratch. You will not be able to scratch that itch until you take that leap. Okay. If that's your

feeling, you are the entrepreneur type and you want to scratch that itch and you will have to take that leap eventually. It's scary and it may not seem like the right move, but it is it is that moment. And once you take that leap, you feel that relief. You don't even know if it's going to pan out, But I did what I wanted to do. I challenged myself. Of course, run through your cases, run through your best case scenario, worst case scenario. I'm not saying just go for it.

But follow your gut, follow your intuition, and it is always a leap. If it doesn't feel like a leap, it's probably not a big deal enough. So that's one piece that I mentioned. The second piece is it's so much more work than you can imagine. You're going to do so many things that you had never expected. I'm a CTO, but I'm arguably the CPO of the company. and I'm arguably, you know, involved in every facet of the company, from the marketing to strategy to, I do customer support.

I have a team of 73 people in the company remotely distributed, and I still do customer support, Preston. And that's why it's important. Everyone sees that in the company, like we're all working towards the same mission. So you will do things, like my VP of engineering was our video recorder in our VR chat room. Do you see what I mean? Like, that is not a team of engineering role, but everyone is willing to do that. So as a startup builder, you're going to put your big boy pants on or your big girl pants on and it's going to be a long ride and you're going to do many things you do not expect.

And then last but not least, I think it's really important that if you are the entrepreneur type like myself and the builder type, you need to understand that work is life and life is work. Right. So you need to get that boundaries. I have very few boundaries. Work is life and life is work for me and maybe that's why it works. but it affects people, it affects your relationships. It affects, you know, your business to take that into account. It's not a light thing.

Everyone says that, but it shouldn't be taken as a light thing. It's you will work, right? It's going to be many, many hours. And so take that into account. But nothing will ever scratch that itch until you go and build the thing that you want to build. So I highly recommend. And it's amazing to be at a position like I am with a team, with a company, with many products. It's a dream come true.

And I really highly recommend everyone to attempt it. Any tips, so those are amazing. Any tips for people on focusing on the right thing? Because one thing I see that's really common with entrepreneurs or people that are trying to become an entrepreneur is they've got these ideas. And having built something historically, sometimes you can just look at it and be like,

well, that's a huge hurdle and you might be biting off too much. You talked about a little bit earlier in the conversation with being too broad when you come into market. What tips do you have for people to help? help focus in on where they should be focusing their energy and making sure that they're not biting off too much or that they're too narrow. And it's not even really a business. It's just more of like a small niche idea.

What advice you have on that front? So focus is really important. I'm glad you'll touch on this. It's something that as a builder you feel like you can just, oh, I can do it. You know, don't worry. I'm going to handle this. And as a builder, like a developer, you really feel that you can do that because you feel like you can solve all your problems with engineering.

solutions. And that's not the case. You really need to focus on what you can build. I voice similar feedback to those at the Wolf NYC cohort, which was, look, you need to pick where you are going to be the best. So if you're building a gaming platform that allows for money to flow in that platform, great, are you going to be the best money provider or are you going to be the best gaming platform? So be the best gaming platform and plug in a money provider. If you're going to be an exchange of some kind. Okay, I need licenses. Great. So that's going to be your focus. Don't do that and mining and this and that, right? Like, you need to find your moat, your big moat. And once you have that moat and once you have that focus and that level of notoriety and trustworthiness in that vertical, okay, find another moat.

You've excelled in this vertical, move on. If you attempt to bite too many of these, these, you know, whatever analogy we want to create here, if you're attempt to go to too many of these, the similar to sales cycle, right? If it's too broad, you will fail. You will not find that one moat and you will be a generalist good company in many fronts, but no one will come to you because you are the best. And people come to the best. They don't come to the third best or the fifth best or the generalist. They come for the best. So if I want payments online, I go to stripe.com because that's the best right now. If I want lightning payments, I go to Zebedee because that's the best, right? So you need to find what your mode is and not go too broad.

And otherwise, you're not going to meet those numbers. Focus where you're at and then evolve. So what I recommend to folks that are very hardcore Bitcoiners that want to do their own payment gateway capabilities is don't start from that from scratch. Use an API provider so that you can build the best user experience for your app, for your platform, for your user base. And then when you're ready and you have that, okay, I want to self-host and do all the payment capability ourselves.

great, disconnect that API and do it yourself because you've now excelled at your remote. So definitely focusing. And I think one way to just describe that is for our launch at the ZBD app, instead of building all of those capabilities that we want inside of the app, there are things that we're doing with launch partners. So Fountain is a launch partner of ours. Wave Lake is a launch partner of ours. So if you post Wave Lake links of music links into the ZBD app in your social feed, ZEBD is able to pick that up. And Once you zap someone, it automatically splits between the artist and the poster of that post, right? We are not the ones doing the music piece here.

We are interacting with an open standard of music that allows us to interact. So we're not trying to become the music moat. That's not our moats. Our moat is social and payments, right? So let's interact. And so they are, Wave Lake is focused on music. Fountain is focused on podcasting. Let's leverage those.

And that's what we've done for the launch partners. Find good partners as you continue growing and then eventually you could build moat of your own in that industry. It feels like we're just so early in where this is potentially going. So my last question for you, Andre, is just five years from now. What does this look like? Ten years from now? When do you think that things start kind of hitting a critical mass time-wise and then like what does that just describe this world to us? that you envisioned like five years from now.

Yeah, it's funny because I've been living in a lightning monetized, enabled world for many years. I use lightning every single day hundreds of times. And some folks see that as weird because, where you make hundreds of payments, like every day, that sounds cumbersome. I said, no,

that's because you're thinking credit card payments. You're thinking cumbersome payments. You're not saying click a button and the payment has gone globally to the other side of the world, right? And so I have been living in this world for like four, plus years now. And I would say that every year that goes by, it gets to the point where it's much easier to sell, to talk, and to introduce this technology to everyone. When I used to talk about Bitcoin and Lightning four years ago, it was, you know, who are you? You're kind of weird. Now it's,

oh yeah, I've heard of this. And some folks even come to me saying, hey, I read a book about lightning. That's very interesting that you've been doing this for four years. So in the five your cycle, I would love to say that Bitcoin is omnipresent, right? It's everywhere. Everyone has Bitcoin. And I really do believe that that's going to be the case in the next five to 10. And I believe that something as crucial as a discovery layer, communications layer like Noster can enable that to catapult and to really hit that inflection point. Because I go back to the point, you have a wallet, I have a Bitcoin wallet. It is not easy for you and I to interact and transact. But if you have a Noster client with a wallet attached to it, now I can send you money the same way that I send you messages or any emails, right?

So this is something that is very powerful. I think in the five years, I would love to say that Noster has a very active, multi, multi million user active base. And I actually believe that Noster will become many digital economies in and of themselves because folks will interact on music, on art, on gaming, on social experience. And so folks will be earning, they will be selling, they will be buying, they will be trading. Everything will be happening in that sphere. I would love to say that at the five to 10 year mark, everyone has Bitcoin and everyone has not their clients. It remains to be seen.

I think it's definitely a challenge in and of itself. Network effects have to play out. And standards are hard to just grow. But as someone who has both human resources with the company of 70 plus people, capital resources with our fundraising, the right mindset and the right engineers. I really feel like we could make a dent and make an impact and pushing this forward. And our goal is to make Bitcoin approachable, easy, cool, something that anyone, whether you're Joe Schmoe down the street, whether you're Ed Smith from the corner, like you can get started

with Bitcoin and then you can go down your own journey. If you want to learn about self-custody, yes, you should do that. Let's go for it. If you want to learn about running your own servers, let's go for that. But it needs to be easy. If it's not easy and abstracted away, folks will not interact with it. So it'll be everywhere. And I think I'm betting everything on the fact that it will be everywhere.

My entire life is Bitcoin. And now it's very much Nostr as well. So it's great to be at the forefront pioneering these technologies. So as you were talking, I went to Damos, which is Noster. I just typed in your name. And I clicked on the little lightning bolt that was right next to your name. And I got a thousand stats here, right? I'm going to send.

and just the kind of demo for people, I just sent you a thousand sats. You didn't tell me your, you didn't tell me your bank address, you didn't tell me anything. I don't know where you're at in the world right now. There we go, I just received money.

And there you go. You just got the thousand sats that I just sent you. And we did not have to tell each other anything. Nothing. Nothing. And I just sent you 27 cents. And I don't even know where you are in the world. Big spender.

Big spend. In my talk, I mentioned this, in my talk, I zap Jack Dorsey, 5,000 sats, and I stop and then I say, I don't know where he is in the world. I don't know what wallet he's using. I don't know what Nasser client he's using. I know nothing. The only thing I know is one single identifier, and I can send you money globally.

I think it's just the beginning of a very disruptive set of years for social media, for communications online, for monetization schemes. I really think, you know, folks monetizing their content online through Nassar is going to change the landscape. Wow. Super impressive to talk to us to you. And this was a real honor for me just to be able to have this conversation. And I'm just thoroughly impressed with people talk about builders in the space. You, sir, are one hell of a builder. And this is a real pleasure to talk to you. No, thanks, Preston. Again, it's an honor to be here. It was great to chat at the, in Orlando conference. I'm glad we got the chance to connect here further and explore more of these ideas. I look forward to the next one. I'm sure. we're going to be chatting a lot more. Yes, for sure.

We'll have links in the show notes to everything that Andre mentioned during the show. Anything else you want to highlight, Andre, we'll also have your Twitter profile, your Nostre profile there. There you go. I was going to send you a thousand stats too if they want. Hey, I was going to say if folks want to get involved, let's go to ZbD.G for the app and for those builders that want to build with Bitcoin with Noster, go to Zebedee. for your API keys. It's free for everyone to get started. So we're open and we're here to help you grow. I love it. All right. Andre, thank you, sir. No, thanks, Preston. This was an honor.

Thank you so much. I look forward to it. I'm going to tell all my friends, they all follow your show. And so I'm like, hey, I'm going to be on that show now. It's great. If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific show. shows come out every Wednesday, and I'd love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it's something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm. So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that,

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