Stablecoins Become Real Money When the Rails Actually Work

Intro Passage of the stable coin legislation drafted by the Senate dubbed the Genius Act because analysts say a wave of competition could complicate things. Speaker 2 Stable coin issuer debut right here at the NASDAQ today. Meet David Marcus And LightSpark David, welcome to the podcast. I'm very, very, very excited to have you on. We always start off these Stable Pulse episodes with a section that I like to call braggadocious, which is, you know, a chance for you to introduce yourself to brag a little bit. And you have a, a pretty rich history in terms of what you've done. So I want you to just introduce yourself, talk about what you're building and do not be humble in any way shape or. Speaker 1 Form I mean it's it's it's pretty hard for me to be braggy that that's not how I'm wired. But the Co founder and CEO of Light Spark previously I was at Meta tried and failed to launch this Libra thing, which was like in, you know, probably too early for its time, stablecoin and blockchain network maybe also from the wrong place at the wrong time. We can discuss that or not. And previously before that I ran messaging and a messenger at Meta. And before that I ran PayPal and before that a bunch of payment startups that, you know, my last startup got acquired by PayPal, then ended up running it for a bit. So that's that's me in a nutshell. Speaker 2 Awesome. And I encourage our audience to just go and research David Marcus. David is a really, really good operator and a terrible bragger. So go and go and do your own research. David, I want to start with sort of the why here because we have a lot to dive into in terms of payments and everything. Why Fix Global Payments Now But I, I find that it's always helpful to ground these conversations and why the person is doing what they're doing. So can you tell us a little bit about why you do what you do? Like just between us all, like you could retire today and be perfectly fine, but you're not. You're out here building a start up. It's one of the hardest things to do. Tell us a little bit about why you care not not why should others care about what you're doing, but why do you yourself care about this particular thing? Why you? Why this? Why now? Speaker 1 Yeah, look, I mean, I've done this a few times in my career, which is like get like really obsessive about how broken something is and then feel like it's my kind of mission to actually go try to fix it. And like, I tried to steer away from payments for a little bit after PayPal. Like, you know, and I had a blast doing that, like just running non regulated businesses when I was at Facebook building Messenger. It was a lot of fun and it was fast-paced and like, you know, not regulated, which was kind of a reprieve from the crazy world of money movement and payments. But like that I had lots of hopes and, and dreams for PayPal when I was there, then got frustrated with, you know, the bureaucracy, the whole eBay thing and all of those things. And, and that prompted me to go try something else. But I was hoping that in my time during non doing non payment stuff like the four years I spent on, on messaging that like someone else would have solved how money moves around the world. And during that time, no one did. So I'm like, OK, like, you know, I'm at Facebook. Like we can actually probably do something that actually can carry the whole world with us, meaning like we have enough distribution that we can bring all of the largest companies and banks and financial services players and platforms to actually adopt A platform that we're not going to own. We're going to share with the world to make money move in real time. But unfortunately, you know, we, we did that at a time where the regulatory clarity wasn't around the fact that Facebook touched 3 billion people every month. Like really was a was a very scary thought. Like someone told me one day and it clicked, which is like you, you became systemic even before launching. And, and so every regulator in the world wanted to kill that thing and successfully did. And, and I think, you know, I left with kind of this sense of unfinished business and, and a little bit of, you know, I need to actually go do this thing because like during that period of time, like everyone else that tried also failed. And, and the state of the world when it comes to when it came to global money movement was still in a pretty bad place. So felt like a good opportunity to go assemble a world class team around lights park and, and try to do that. And, and it's been great. Like, you know, startups is really where I belong. I feel really at home in this environment and it's great to build 0 to 1 again, you know, outside without like overhead or, or anything. And it's it's just been a lot of fun in the last four years building Light Spark. Speaker 2 I love it. Well, let's let's dive into Light Spark then. We've talked a lot about sort of your career evolution, but Light Spark has also as a company gone through an evolution on its own right. From Libra Scars To Bitcoin Rails Like there's been pretty tremendous change in the company of Light Spark in the last five years. Tell us a little bit more about Light Spark day one and then, you know, sort of walk us through the evolution there and then tell us a little bit about Light Spark today. Speaker 1 Yeah, sure. I mean, it's been 4 years, but but, but yeah, I mean, look, we started Light Spark and we had a lot of bruises and a lot of body scar tissue from the Libra journey. And we decided we needed to build on top of the most unassailable thing ever built, which is Bitcoin when it comes to money movement. And so, you know, at the time, the only thing that could actually work for real time money settlements using Bitcoin in the background like, and bear in mind like our view was never that people wanted to actually use Bitcoin to move money that they use for everyday purchases, but rather that we could use Bitcoin as TCP IP packets to net settle between domestic payment systems that themselves are real time and and virtually free. Speaker 2 David, can I enter? Can I interrupt here and tell us a little bit about what a TCP packet is? Speaker 1 A TCP IP packet is basically the the the backbone of the Internet. Like TCP IP is the protocol that actually carries like packets of data that enables us to have this conversation over a video right now or enables like websites to exist or, or apps. It's the transport layer for data on top of the Internet. And, and so we're like, OK, like the same way that TCPIP moves packets of data on the Internet for information for everything else, we can use Bitcoin as TCPIP packets, the equivalent of TCPIP packets for value for money. And it turns out no one controls it. It turns out that censorship resistance, it's fully decentralized, etcetera. And so, you know, we started on building on top of that and on top of Lightning and, and basically connecting domestic payment systems to enable them to be interoperable with something else than SWIFT and correspondent banking, which was kind of, it's still kind of the default. And, and so we started the journey there and the, the thought was, OK, we're just going to go talk to banks and we're going to give them the capability to actually move money between them in real time on top of a network that no one owns. And we're going to build the network that way And it's going to be great. Then it's going to be straight line and should be fantastic. And of course, as it goes in payments, it's never like that. Like, you know, you actually go and talk to banks, they're excited, but they want to see who else is going to get on the network. You have a 22 two sided cold start network problem, right? And so we realized, OK, we're going to have to do this the hard way. And instead of actually have building the best settlement network in the world and having all the banks come on, we're going to have to go build interoperability with the entire payment systems and banking systems of all the countries in the world that has a real time payment system, which is virtually every country now. And so we started that long road of building redundant connectivity into every single payment system that we could. We're now at 62 countries going on 70 by the end of the year where we can move money in real time 24/7 at a fraction of the cost of any other network. And and then like stable coins became like really a bigger thing. Not, you know that there's a lot of hype and stablecoin that like I really like didn't love like in the early days of stablecoin was like everyone comparing the volume of stablecoins to visas volume, where like the stable volume was just defy swaps and nothing to do with payments, right. It's like, and, and so like, you know, the real volume of payment last year, like of stablecoin is growing really fast, but I think it's about $400 billion according to best estimates, right? Which is like good, it's nice. But like, you know, like, you know, JP Morgan global money movement does like an order of magnitude of that every single day, right? So we're, we still have like ways to go, but stablecoin regulatory clarity changed the game in a way that enabled everyone to actually touch and interact with them and use them. And so we started building compatibility with every stable coin, with every stable coin, other network, etcetera, because like we want the network and the balances that are on the network to reach as far and wide as possible. And so over the years, we basically build a number of different capabilities that live under this platform that we call Grid, Light Spark Grid. And basically with Light Spark Grid, you can now reach 62 countries in real time. You can do payouts, you can create accounts now as of this half like you can issue debit cards like stable coin back debit cards with a partnership with Visa that we have. And we're also principal members now like in, in Europe, a Visa and here in the US we, we work, we announced this week a partnership with Lithic and and lead bank to actually have the program run here in the US. So like we we have a set of capabilities when it comes to global money movement that I think are unparalleled at this point. And we can serve banks and financial institutions that are regulated in a really good way to replace like correspondent banking and all the non real time batch process like 50 plus years old, like architecture and infrastructure with something real time and Internet era like. And, and on top of that, we can enable platforms to create global accounts and, and and beam dollars in real time and give people ways to spend that dollars and, and ways that are better than any other accounts in the world. So, you know, I mean, that's a super long winded answer, but like, you know, that's kind of the arc of what we built over the last four years. Speaker 2 So in my view, and you correct me if I'm wrong here, David, Light Light Spark started with sort of the development of, of the Lightning network. Grid Becomes A Full Payment Stack You guys were initially here to build a blockchain. It is expanded to far, far, far beyond the settlement layer of, of payments. It seems like you guys are trying to verticalize the payment stack in in as many ways as possible. Can you tell me a little bit more about sort of that pursuit towards integrating with bare metal? I think that right now a lot of the people who are listening, they might be neo bank founders and a lot of fintechs today, the way that they build fintechs is by wrapping this and wrapping that and and wrapping the other thing, right? You guys are taking a very, very different approach. Can you talk a little bit about that philosophy of going sort of as bare metal as possible when it comes to building out this rail? Speaker 1 I mean, first of all, like, you know that there's a lot of naive day if you haven't been in payments and like you go and build a product. And so, you know, there's lots of people who think they can just like build a, a nice self custodial wallet with stable coins and then like give it to people and design it well. And that's it, right. And unfortunately, you know, people or businesses using these accounts, they need to use those balances for their everyday needs and, and, and to buy things and, you know, whether it's goods or services in the markets and economies that they live in. And so if you can't move that balance to your local payment system or your local banking system, if you can't have a card that you can use to actually pay at, you know, in this case, 175,000,000 plus merchants around the world or go to an ATM and get cash for those purchases that still require cash. If you can't do all of these things and you can't do them really, really well, then you're stuck with wallets that has digital money you can't use and no one wants that, right. So, so you have to go and do the work of integrating into the domestic payment systems. And it turns out that like, you know, if, if you're, if you're relying on third parties and aggregators that only do that, like the vast majority of them fail miserably at delivering a high quality service because they work with a number of different banks that have different risk appetites, that have different types of API stacks and connectivity and availability time. And so lots of payments failures and all these things. And if you want to replace the current payment system, it not only has to be real time and faster, but it has to be as reliable or more reliable in terms of payment success rates than existing payment systems. And like that requires A tremendous amount of work to have redundant routes into every single domestic payment system to ensure that you can meet local and global regulatory requirements that you do that in the system and hideaway all of the complexity behind a beautiful, the beautifully designed API, which we take a lot of pride in. Like, I think you know, everyone, everyone that we work with, our partners, our clients love our documentation, our API, our agent forward development frameworks that enables you to unleash an agent and build really, really quickly on top of our stack. And we take a lot of pride in hiding all of that complexity away. It's magic money movement basically. And we're just like, like, don't worry about the sausage making. We worry about that. And we eat glass and and do all of those things on on behalf of our partners and our clients so that they can build the best possible apps and services for money movement in the world. Speaker 2 I love that. I, I think, you know, good technology is indistinguishable from magic. So I think I jumped the gun a little bit. David, I, I said that you guys were building closer to bare metal. I want to give an example of that. So you guys recently went out and acquired an EMI in Europe. Tell me a little bit more about what that means, how that builds into your philosophy of of going bare metal, what that can enable for light Spark as a as a payment network. Give me more context and information on that. Speaker 1 Yeah, for sure. So we, we bought a company called Striga. It was AYC company ran by a fabulous team like that really build a lot with very little very scrappy. Going Bare Metal In Europe The team like you know, figured out like Europe was kind of the highest leverage thing they could do. They moved to Estonia because it was like they thought the best environment from a regulatory standpoint, cost standpoint, etcetera. And build their from people like, you know, Prashant the, the, the founder of the company never, never spent any time there before he moved there. And you know, he spent his time in India and in the US and never spent time there. And just like move there, spent like the last like 5 years there or so built A-Team and built a fabulous company and a big fan of those guys. So, so we bought the company, we acquired the company and now the team is, is Light Spark Payments Europe, lower Light Spark Europe. And and so they had a vast license in Europe which they worked with us on upgrading to a CASP and EMI license. And that enables us to now not only do all of the activities that relates to digital assets in Europe like you know, stable coin issuance, transmission like custody, etcetera, but also have a direct access to the SEPA real time payment networks that cover network that covers 32 countries in the EA zone straight through central bank connectivity. So it doesn't get closer to the metal than that, like unless you become a central bank yourself. So, so you know, that's an example of how we like to do things. We like to get as close to the metal as possible. And in some cases we do it differently. Like in the US for instance, like we decided not to apply for an OCC charter and we can discuss why that is and, and rely on really solid bank partnerships to do that and to have connectivity to RTP and Fed now and ACH and, and do that really, really well. And we think that's the right decision. But like where, wherever we can, we try to get as close to the metal as possible. Speaker 2 I'm curious to get your thoughts on the slew of OCC charters that are being handed out recently. Why Skipping The OCC Charter Obviously you have Arabor and Augustus who just got awarded their OCC charters. You have people like Wise who did famously did not get awarded their OCC charters as as someone who has been building in payments through of many different political regimes, you've seen your fair share of regulators going in and out. What are your thoughts on the current appetite for OCC charters? Is this a good thing? How will this play out? Give me your insight on that. Speaker 1 Well, yeah, I mean, I'm a bit of a contrarian. So when everyone is doing something, I try to like, question whether this is like actually the right thing to do or, or whether like there's something that other people don't see. And I, I personally like, I, I, I've been through so many cycles of craziness, right? It's like when I took over at PayPal, this was when the CFPB was like actually created and we had lots of issues with them and, and, and I had to go like solve that. We had like a regulatory nightmare in Australia with AUS track. Like we have all kinds of different things that, you know, we had to deal with. And then of course, with Libra, I, I, I lived like the, the most high profile like scrutiny ever, probably from global regulators and central bankers. So like I've seen this movie play out in a number of different ways. And I think when you see who's getting those licenses right now and how many in the volume, etcetera, and you see how politically charged this is becoming. My expectation is that at some point in time, a new administration is going to come in, new leadership at the OCC is going to come in and they're going to look at all of these licenses, these charters that they've actually awarded to companies. And they're going to be like, wait a minute, like, like you really have a business running a bank. Do you know really what you're doing? And then a lot of them are actually going to be in some sort of penalty box is my prediction, where you have capped deposits, like you can't launch new products, etcetera. And I don't want to put ourselves in that position. I feel like, you know, we're in the business of money movement, which is really hard. We have MTLS almost everywhere. We need to have them. And so we can do what we need to do from a payment standpoint at the state level. And we rely on phenomenal banking partners that like have built a really good stack. And I think, you know, we want to build this company for the next 100 years, right? It's like it has to be around in 100 years, right? And so if we do that in a way that actually doesn't enable a single regulator to actually really throw a wrench into our journey, then we're, we're going to do that. And, and if we can't, we can't. But like, like if there are like in this case, alternative paths that enables us to do that without giving away such, such leverage, then you know we'll do it. Speaker 2 You know, it's a, it's a really interesting time building in payments because you see people in real time taking those variety, those different paths. And I think it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. I was talking to a few different lawyers. One is currently in the process of getting MTLS. Another one is a former DFNS lawyer and they were telling me like, hey, we're actually specifically not taking the OCC route because the second that you become an OCC Chartered Bank, it means that they have the purview to hamstring you on your product road map. They have the, the purview to go in and, and meddle in, in your business in a way that I don't think most people realize. And so while some are gunning for this OCC charter, I think there are a lot of people who are like you who don't, who specifically do not want to go out and get that OCC charter, even though it's easier to get now than it ever has been. And I, I think that the, my prediction could be wrong, but my prediction is the companies that actually optimize for agility here and who remain dynamic in the face of, of changing regulation are going to be the ones that, that win. So I, I'm glad that you and I are, are thinking alike there. But to, to the point there, like there's a lot of different people taking a lot of different paths here. It's a lot of competition, right? And a lot of it coming very, very quickly, well funded, everything like that. Competition And The One-API Bet How do you view competition in the space? I mean, you're, you're a staunch capitalist, you love competition. I know that. But there's a lot of people trying to build out stable Coinbase payment rails today. How do you view that landscape and how do you view Light Spark as as differentiating itself within that landscape? Speaker 1 Well, first of all, I'd love to compete. Like, I think, you know, competition makes everything better for everyone and it's fun. And so look, I think that like the competitive set is getting broader and broader by the day. And it's kind of interesting because what we want to do here is to really present an almost like a single API based integration for our partners that can do all the things that multiple companies can do for them. So if you look at like the set of capabilities we have from global money movements, whether it's Fiat, it's stablecoins, it's other assets all the way to the edges of local payment trails and local currencies in 60, two countries soon to be 70, soon to be 100. After that, if you look at the ability for us to issue accounts like self custodial wallets, like best in class self custodial wallets that don't require seed phrases and, and private key management and all of that stuff. The ability for those accounts to hold a variety of different stable coins across all kinds of different chains. The ability for those accounts to have debit cards. The ability for those accounts to actually move money locally and globally on local and global payment networks in real time. The ability for these platforms to actually earn yield and interchange on card swipes, on card transactions and, and FX and global money movement. And, and you look at all these capabilities. If you want to build that today across like competitors, you have to assemble a bunch of different companies or capabilities together and stitch them together. And, and so that you don't have a single, you know, you don't, you don't have a, a one stop shop that you can go to with a super like well designed API and, and, and and documentation and easy to build surface that enables you to do that in that many countries in with one partnership with one stack. Like it just doesn't exist, right. I mean, you can, you can partner with a bunch of other players that can do that for you. But like then you have to stitch all of the logic together and stitch all of the things together. And then you have like different billing capability, like different billing and feeds of, of funds that are coming in that you have to reconcile on your end, etcetera. So I think we have the best platform in the world right now. I, I, I honestly, I would not say that. I would have not said, said that like 6 months ago or nine months ago, nine months ago or six months ago. We're playing catch up on a number of dimensions. Like in terms of the, if you look at the capabilities of every single one of those companies, the way that they provide them, like you have a bunch of companies doing stable coin back cards as the only thing they do. And like, you know, we weren't there, now we are. So there's a number of dimensions like that, that I think we weren't best in class at each of these things like 6-9 months from now, like 6-9 months ago. But I feel really good about us being best in class across all of these dimensions at the moment. And I think that makes a difference when companies choose who to work with. Speaker 2 Yeah, I I've studied the history of your career a bit, David, and seems like the, the through line throughout your entire career has been that you want to build open neutral global payment rails, which I love by the way. You started lights light Spark as sort of a technology within the Lightning Network, which is very, very Bitcoin to line. You did so for neutrality. Fast forward four years, you're now working with a variety of different block chains, a variety of different stable coins, a variety of different rails. Can you talk to me a little bit about how you go about still balancing that mission of, of open and and neutral with the, you know, the existing payment rails that go beyond Bitcoin today? Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, you know, I had this moment where I think spiritual, spiritually, we're very aligned like in, in the way that we think about the long term and state of the world with companies like Block, for instance, that, you know, have built like a superb product with Cash App and continue to want to build on top of Bitcoin for the same reasons we started building on Bitcoin. Neutral Rails Across Chains And there's a moment in time where cash app basically started saying, wait a minute, like, you know, stablecoins have a use case, they have regulatory clarity. We want to enable that and, and we're going to do USDC on top of Solana as a way to start doing that. And like, what, what, why do you do that on Solana? At first I was like, why don't you just use Spark, which arguably at the time, Spark is our settlement network on top of Bitcoin. With that, basically we built purpose built for stable coin settlements when we realized that Lightning wasn't going to cut, cut it for that. And and of course, at the time Spark wasn't mature to the level of Solana clearly. And and I was like, why, why are they doing that? And then I realized like they're talking about stable coins in the same way that they talk about the domestic payment system, which is like you have Fiat rails and basically stablecoin rails are just another Fiat rail. And if we integrate into Spain in Mexico or PIX in Brazil or set by in Europe, like why don't we integrate into all of these other block chains that enable money movement and give our customers the choice to actually use whatever they want and, and give their customers the flexibility of moving money to whatever endpoint they want on whatever network they want at any given point in time. And I think this was kind of a turning point for us in terms of let's stop like trying to get to the end state in one go and try to like, try to bring everyone to the most decentralized network in the world and one false fell swoop. Like you just have to give people what they want, enable them to do more things than anyone else in terms of money movement. Do it at the lowest cost possible with the highest reliability possible. You know, fastest settlement times. And then once you have network density and you have the network effects playing out, then, you know, you, you have all these endpoints that you can then optimize on the most decentralized and open network in the world, but you can't do it in one go. And I think that's, that's how we're thinking about the world. And, and we still believe in that. And we still believe like, you know, I feel like our, our spark volume are going through the roof right now, just because everyone's building on top of it right now. It's like the, you know, the most capable L2 built on top of Bitcoin purpose built for stable coins. And like every, everyone needs like fast real time Bitcoin settlements and swaps between Bitcoin and stable coins and stable coin settlement that has like reach into the Bitcoin network. And so the volumes are going through the roof. Like everyone's building on top of it, like tether and tether wallet and all of the, the wallets that you know, but also with like moon pay and others for swaps and, and, and others using, you know, partner company that has built swaps like that. There are two of them. There's flash net, there's garden, etcetera that does a lot of of stable coin swaps and flash net is growing like crazy now as well. And so we have the settlement network that's like hyper competitive with everything else that's built on top of the most decentralized network in the world. And like, once you have network density, you can rationalize how these payments are routed between one another and build it on top of the most open network in the world. But like, again, like that's kind of like it's going to take 10 years and OK, fine, 10 years is not that long actually. Speaker 2 Yeah, I think you touched on something really interesting that I want to dive into, which is using blockchain based payments, primarily stablecoin, as a conduit between disparate systems, right? You have Pics that works really well in Brazil. You have Spay, you have SWIFT, you have, you know, UPC, you have all of these really, really disparate systems. And it's part of the reason why if I go to my friends in the United States, they're like, oh, why do we need stable coins, right? The system that I used domestically works really well, but the second that you need the system to communicate with one another, the entire process breaks down. And I very, very much see stable coins as again, the the connectivity layer between these disparate systems. Talk to me about why it's not that easy, right? Like, I think a lot of times people oversimplify and say, oh, stable coins can get money from here to there just like that. Tell me about why it's so so hard to build something like Light Spark. Speaker 1 So let's take a concrete example. So one of our clients and partners is Sofi. So, so far major U.S. bank, they wanted to start offering real time global payments to their customers. SoFi Walkthrough And Hidden Complexity They didn't want to use old rails, they wanted to use new rails. They selected us to do that. And the experience, if you try it right now is like you, you have a bank account in the US so far bank accounts, it has all the services that you may want. And then you want to send money back home to family in Mexico or in India. And so you send dollars to someone in India receiving rupees. It settles within seconds in real time. Like the experience is basically you see exactly what the person is going to receive in their currency. Or you can send an exact amount in rupees or in Brazil in real eyes or in in peso or whatever you want. And it's a beautiful experience. It's like literally as easy as sending a text message. And, and what happens behind the scenes is actually pretty complicated, right? And, and, and like it requires Sofi to actually integrate into our API. That's the easy part. But then like the way that it settles is actually that Sofi sends U.S. dollars for those transactions using Fed. Now in real time, we take these dollars, we convert these dollars into either Bitcoin or stablecoins, depending on the depth of liquidity in that market of the asset. That is actually going to give us the best effects rate at that point in time, which is an important thing by the way. We're the only ones that have the ability to do that, select the the least cost routing network based on depth of liquidity against local Fiat currency to provide best effects. And so then at the edges of the network that that transaction settles. So it's like that, that money, you never have to park money at the edges of the network in all these countries that you never have to have dormant liquidity on the network. It's all real time. So that money now goes from RF that the Sofi FBO accounts like that we operate for them that receive the funds from them using Fed. Now it goes from dollars to stable coin to that other country. In that other country it gets converted to the local currency and pushed to their local payment system and gets delivered to that users or that receiver's bank, right? What happened between that also is like you have to have compliance that actually goes through these things so that like Sofi can enable their, you know, OFAC checks, AML checks, all these things. And the recipient bank has the data that is actually required for them to accept that payment without blocking it, right? So all of that happens off band like, you know, and, and this is kind of like the, the, the baseline protocols that we've built for compliance. And, and all of this happens in three seconds end to end from the US to India. And so like this is actually really complicated. And then you have to have redundant routes because not all of the routes work at all times. And so there's like so much complexity. If you pop the hoods and you look at the piping and you look at like the cables and all the craziness going on, it's actually pretty wild. But the result is magic money movement behind us. Like superbly easy to use API and like, that's what we like to do. It's like, but it's and then so now you, you take this and you multiply it by 62 countries and then, you know, 70 and then a hundred countries and you see how complex it gets, right? Speaker 2 Yeah, And for audience members that are confused, I I think that's the point, right? International payments are about 20 times more complex than than it seems. And for those who are building the space, you know that the payments can sometimes be the easy part. And the compliance orchestration behind it is actually one of the hardest things to do. But to David's point, Light Spark has taken all of that complexity and done all the hard work to present to you with a, a really beautiful API. So I, I love that. The next thing that I want to ask you about David is just sort of your, your contrarian views over the course of your career. You know, you've worked in large traditional corporations before. I imagine that many of your colleagues that you have had have not joined you in your crusade to build a centralized neutral payment rails. Why do you think that this technology didn't make a lot of sense to your colleagues back then? And what do you think traditional, like the traditional payment world still doesn't understand about stablecoin payments? Speaker 1 Yeah, I think, I think the, the key thing that like if you don't, if you don't understand that, like then you need, you need to understand it, which is that like the like I know we pushed out the decision on the Clarity Act to, you know, after recess at this point, which is a shame. Regulatory Clarity Redefines Money But at least we have Genius and we have MICA in Europe and we have similar frameworks everywhere in the world. And this happened only last year, right? And as of last year, basically, these things made stable coins money, like real money in the eyes of the regulators, in the eyes of the banks, in the eyes of regulated financial institutions. And I think this is such an important turning point because you're actually redefining what money is and what money can be into digital form. And and that by itself is a massive unlock. And and before that, it was kind of the Gray zone. And like you had a bunch of financial institutions. They were like, yeah, this is kind of cute, like, you know, very low actual volumes and like, you know, I'm not going to touch it and risk like the our entire business on us touching something that doesn't have the full regulatory clarity needed to actually interact with those things. And I think the change that happened last year is a Seminole moment for the industry because it redefined what money is and, and, and, and clarified that digital money was actually real money that you can use in, in all kinds of different ways. And I think I think that that's probably why a lot of people were were just standing by the sidelines instead of, of building. And I think, you know, now that you have that regulatory clarity, it's all about like, you know, OK, now you have that regulatory clarity, you want to use this and you want to move money and value in real time and settle in real time and replaced all of these batch processed systems in the world. Then who are the companies that you can work with to help you do that? And and which companies are are the best prepared for that in terms of capabilities? And and that's why we feel very fortunate that we did all the work we did in the last four years to be where we are today, because all the things are really converging and lining up. Speaker 2 David, I I think that you and I see the future very similarly. We believe in a future where money moves just as data does on the Internet, where geographic borders and bank holidays don't matter. And a farmer in Vietnam. Speaker 1 Yeah. When you send a text, like it used to be that you sent a text internationally and it costs you like a dollar per text message. And so you were like, no, I'm not going to text my friend in Europe because, like, I, I don't want to spend that kind of money. Yeah. And now no one thinks about like texting internationally or nationally as a thing. Speaker 2 Yeah, well, I think it goes even beyond that though. Like if I were to send someone an e-mail, I can write that on my phone and I can send this. And it doesn't matter what Internet provider the person on the other side has. It doesn't matter what country they're in. It doesn't matter what Gmail host they use. They get the e-mail. And so data has been able to to move at the speed of the Internet for many, many, many years now. Money has not. And for something that is so unbelievably critical for our entire earth to, to function properly, this type of stuff is needed, right? Really, really needed. And I think that, like the reason I'm in this space, I imagine that the reason you're in the space is because there's a gap. There's a gap between the way that money should operate and the way that money does operate. I think you know, yourself and, and light spark are doing a lot to close that gap. And that gap is, is quickly closing. But there's, there's still a pretty big difference between the way that money should operate and the way that money does operate. And to that end, I want to sort of get into the particulars of what you and Light Spark need to do to make that future a reality. And then also, you know what needs to happen on a macro level in order for the world to get to a place where money moves as money should. Speaker 1 Yeah. So I think, you know, for us, like I have a pretty clearview of what we need to do for a very long time. The Coming Shift In Accounts And and for us, it's really all about can we create the capabilities for money movement and accounts. And the accounts thing we haven't touched on a lot, but like, I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll spend it. Yeah. I mean, I feel like, so, OK, we've redefined what money is and, and and there's regulatory clarity on what money is like digitally, like fine. Like stable coins are money. Great, but what that unlocks as well is like, you know, what is an account like? You know, like now there's a flurry of neo banks, like many will fail. We can talk about that separately, but like, and some will succeed and it was just going to be great. But like what is a bank? What is a bank account? What is a like, you know, what is the the, the thing that holds your money? Where do you receive your payroll like thing? What are the things you can do with those accounts? All of this is about to be blown up like completely. And, and I think like the banks are going to be super important because like, I still think that at the end of the day, we need lending capacity. We need like this ability to fuel our economy and, and people and, and all kinds of different things. And so banks will still remain like super critical in that process. But if you're a creator on a platform or if you're. A driver for like a platform that you know, pays lots of drivers or a host for a platform that pays lots of hosts for a lodging or all of these people that basically like their payroll is basically received from platforms that actually like pay them. Like are they going to have like receive those that money in a bank account or are they going to have a branded account from these platforms that are going to pay them? That's going to become their account with a debit card with the ability to actually like do high yield stuff with the ability to buy real world asset like US equities, like on chain outside of the US with the ability to do all these things. I think like they're like, that's a massive, massive tsunami that's actually like, just like forming in the far distance, but like with a lot of intensity and energy. And, and I think that's going to completely, completely change the landscape in the next five years. And, and, and there's no reason for these platforms to give away all of these economics to the edge banks serving those, those, those, those people that they've created the economy, economic opportunity for. And they're the economic Nexus of, right. It's like, so, so I think that that's just going to be a profound change that's, that's afoot right now and inevitable. And we're super well positioned for it. And, and like this is really exciting because then you can build a network and then as you have more nodes in the network, like as they start to actually transact with one another, they can transact on Nets. You don't need to depend so much on, on external networks, etcetera. So there's just like lots there. Speaker 2 Yeah, I love, I love it and I I agree with that vision. I think that embedded finance today has allowed for anyone to become a fintech. If you have distribution and you have access to users, you can become a fintech. And historically that was really, really hard to do because there was always this fight for being the primary financial interaction of a user. And banks have owned that for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. But now, like I said, anyone can become a fintech. And before it was really hard to do that because your account over here could not talk to your account over here and could not talk to your account you. Speaker 1 Mean licenses everywhere, absolutely. Build a compliance program and build servicing and yeah, yeah. Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, up until a few months ago, and you're the guy to talk to about this, my PayPal could not send money to my Venmo and my Venmo could not send money. Speaker 1 I use. I use that analogy. Speaker 2 And listen, these are two companies that have the same parent organization, but the same thing can be said for, you know, my cash app to my Venmo or my Venmo to this that the other thing now that does not need to be the case. What you are building the the rails that you are building on enable again these district systems to be connected via secure rails. Now we have so much more that you and I should be covering. David, I want to talk about, you know, how the dollar gets wrapped and expands around the world and, and everything like that. Closing But this could be a 7 hour podcast if we go down those those roads. And I want to be respectful of your time here. So David, any last thoughts that you have? Anything that people should know about Light Spark about, you know, getting involved before we wrap up here? Speaker 1 No, this was great. And, and I mean, we, we, we didn't talk about this, but we just redid our, our website to cover really all the capabilities that we have. So I encourage people to go on lightspark.com and find out more. Speaker 2 I love it. Well, David, thank you so much for joining us. Next time we're going to talk about, you know, dollars expanding around the world, agentic finance and, and everything like that. You have stated on a number of occasions that you're most likely going to be dedicating the rest of your life to this mission. And I really, really hope that you do. And for the world's sake, the rest of the world should hope that you do as as well. And we hope that you're successful. If you want to learn more about Light Spark for audience, go to their website. It's updated. It's beautiful. I spent a disproportionate amount of time on there. Also reach out to their team. I know a lot of their team. They're all very friendly and and responsive. So please, please, please learn more about Light Spark. Do your deep dives. David, I appreciate the time. Thanks for joining us. Speaker 1 Thank you, Dante. Thanks for having me.