CEOs of CurPay, Ted Hover & Christian Curtin Speaks On Crypto Currency! | Biz To Biz Podcast

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Hey everybody, welcome to B2B Vault, the Biz to Biz Podcast, and today's episode is featuring crypto as the topic. And today we have two crypto experts that I've known for a while from CurvePay, Ted Hoover and Christian Curtin. And today we're going to chop it up and talk about what's going on with crypto.. And, you know, and see, you know, so everybody can kind of— it's like a hot topic. Everybody's talking about crypto. I think one of the, you know, Bitcoin is over $100 grand again today. And I don't know, I heard Trump released a coin, and I don't even know if that's directly his or somebody else. You guys know about that Trump coin?

Yeah, skyrocketing.

Amazing.

Yeah, it's skyrocketing.

Yeah, skyrocketed. And Milena, uh, put out a coin, and then, uh, Baron even put out a coin. Oh, he's—

oh, so they're putting out a lot of coins.

Yes, sir.

You're gonna see a lot of that, I think.

I don't know, I'm not a bit— I'm not— I'm, I'm very skeptical on these, uh, on all these meme coins or whatever they call them, right? What do you call— what do you guys call those coins?

Meme coins.

Meme coins.

Meme coins.

Yeah, they should be skeptical because most of them are going to rug pull. 99% of them will rug pull, meaning that they'll, they'll put out a coin, prices skyrocket, and the developers or the owners of the coin will pull it, uh, they'll pull all their, their, their capital out while that price is high, leaving everybody else with a low price.

That happened with that that Haktua girl, right?

Yes. Yeah, it sure did.

She was involved in some coin fiasco.

Yep, they made millions on that, and anybody who bought into it lost.

Really? Well, that's crazy. She said she didn't know. What do you think? You think she knew?

I think she knew some part of it. Yeah, for sure. I think she probably got talked into it, um, because she didn't, you know, she didn't have the experience. But she, she profited from it for sure. The developers really profited from it though. Whoever, whoever had her do that, they made a lot of money. They made millions.

Wow, that's crazy. Because I see all, you know, now I look, you know, I'm looking at like Dogecoin today. Bitcoin's at $103. Doge is up to $579. It's actually down a little bit. Oh, it's at 36 cents. And then, you know, Shibu, Shibu Inu, everybody was in love with that. I have like a few million of those. Um, maybe if it goes up to— if it goes up to like a couple of pennies, you know, that would be nice.

Just hold on to it, then you don't have to worry about those taxes. As long as you hold it, you don't have to worry about taxes.

Well, you don't— you only have to work— the taxes go down if you hold it for less than— if you if you hold it for more than a year, a year, yeah, then the taxes go way down. If you're, if you're buying and selling like on the elevator going up and down, up and down, you know, then you're not doing that. What do you guys think about, uh, Chris? You know, you got to chime in a little bit. Yeah, man, first, what do you think about these, um, the, the Bitcoin EFTs?

I think it's a great entry for those that don't know much about crypto. Right? Uh, you have a lot of people that have hedge fund investments, and if you have the opportunity to buy into it that way rather than have to find a method to do it on your own, I think it's a great option and it's great for the market.

Now, the one thing I see with that is I don't see like that much volatility with the, um, the price of the, of the EFTs, like going— like they didn't skyrocket. Like the value of that one that's run by BlackRock, I don't think the price went up that high compared, you you know, in relative to like Bitcoin went from $70,000 up to over $100,000, right? A $30,000 swing. I didn't really see their stock take a big jump.

Yeah, I think a lot of people are still skeptical of crypto, right? So the BlackRock investors are old-school investors and they're, they're just skeptical. Um, but BlackRock's got a foot in it and they own a lot of Bitcoin. That's what the EFTs did for them.

Do you think that in the AFT push of BlackRock that they're going to say to you, hey Ted, listen, we have this availability, you know, and try to sell it off and sell it to people? Or are they going to kind of, um, try to push new business to that? Like you're talking the older regime?

Yeah, the older regime, you know, they just— it's just another investment for them. They'll put 5% of their investment into it and hopefully it goes up. Um, where— who really benefits from it though, obviously owners, right? You— if you buy into— if you're an investor and you buy into an EFT, then you're not really buying that coin, you're just buying the EFT.

So, right, yeah, the difference with EF— you know, the EFTs, they can buy and sell inside the EFT and there's no taxes.

Exactly. Yep.

So that's kind of an interesting concept. But I was watching the stock to see if it went up, and also I saw like a company, Betterment, they issued a They, they came out with a, with a crypto EFT, and I was watching that one too to see if the prices were fluctuating, and I didn't see a big price fluctuation when it went from $70,000 to $100,000 on the EFT. You would think the value of the EFT would go up. I didn't really see that kind of—

yeah, you could think— no, no, not really, you know. So, you know, I think it's just because you're doing Oh, you're breaking up a little bit.

Hello, Chris, do you hear me?

No, I was hanging out there.

All that snow, all that snow you're getting is messing with your, uh, your internet.

Yeah, we didn't get any snow down here. It's pretty cold outside. It was actually like 60 this morning when I walked Rocky, and now it's down to 53. And North Florida got snow for the first time. The record was 2.4, 2.6 inches, and they got 8 inches of snow. So that's crazy.

That's— it sound right, Allen?

Your internet's cut now, buddy. You froze. Yeah, you're, you're froze, buddy.

But let's, let's keep on the, um, the EFT thing, Ted. So if, like Allen was saying, the— am I still— that allocate in that EFT? It— no, we're gonna— oh, is it the overall value of the EFT is just—

hello, am I back?

Uh, you're— it looks like you're coming back. Yeah, your videos went sharp again. Yeah, it looks like it.

We're gonna have to run a line back in here again. Yeah, we have one in the room, a wire. Yeah, okay, so let's get back into the EFT again.

Like, what—

how come we don't see the value of those EFTs going up?

I, I think that, um, I— like I said, it's pretty much a lot of people are on hold, you know. There's still the lingering crypto um, everything's bad type situation where a lot of the old school investors still having action, but they're not buying in the AFTs. They're buying into— they're just buying and holding. They're putting a lot of their life savings into it. Yeah, I guess if you put in something So what, something, something, if you, if somebody put in and just hold, just put a little bit in, buy 50 here, buy 50 there, it's, it's going to pay off in the long run.

I really would— hold on a second— I really would like to know what the BlackRock pitch is to their, their people, right? Like, what is it? What are they going— what are they saying to them when they have this EFT? When they come out and say, hey, listen, Chris, we have this amazing new EFT, what, what's the actual pitch would be good to hear. Be interesting.

I guess you're buying crypto with the risk of not actually buying it, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, true. And then like Ted said, everybody's a little bit weary, so how do you overcome that, that piece? That's the, the other one.

Time, time and establishment. Um, banks have it out for crypto, right? So because they were directed by the, the governments to, to, um not facilitate it at all, you know, unofficially. So when that becomes acceptable, when banks start saying, hey, cool, now I can, now I can deal with this crypto thing, then people will be more apt to buy into it, to understand how the technology works, how to utilize, you know, these cross-border payments. You can't beat it for cross-border payments.

So the crazy thing is, when we're talking about crypto and crypto acceptance, like people transacting with crypto, I was in a meeting about a week or two ago. And, you know, obviously when Trump got, you know, he won the election, and then all of a sudden crypto went crazy and everybody, the prices went up. One of the, one of the banks came out in a risk meeting and they were like, yeah, if we see any merchants on their website saying they accept crypto, we're going to turn off the merchant accounts.

Yeah, that comes, that's funneled down from the government's saying to the banks, right? So they're directed— they're directing that, and I think that'll change. I think that's going to continue to get better and better and better. Um, compliance officers are going to get more educated on what it actually is. Um, I mean, let's face it, if I pay you $100, you can give that $100 to Chris. Nobody knows that I paid you that $100, right, in cash. Crypto, if I pay you $100 worth of Bitcoin and then you give it to Chris, I know exactly where it came from. I know— not only do I know where it came from, I know where it was mined, and I know every route that it's ever taken. So it's a good thing. It's a good thing for, for everybody.

Well, it can definitely, you know, trade— you can trace it from a money laundering perspective.

What's going on? Exactly, exactly.

And that's the cost.

Yeah, governments are getting they're, they're opening their eyes to that, right?

Yeah. And you have good people like Kaden Long out there in Wyoming pushing against the, the government trying to get back to the banking when they did the whole collapse and put the locks on. Like Ted was saying, you have good people out there that are pushing for the, the re-regulation of it so the banks are able to accept it.

So I've talked to some like crypto enthusiasts, and I'll let you guys weigh in on this. This, right? So they'll talk to me about like, they'll be like, oh well, there's this whole underground crypto economy where everybody's got these cold wallets, you know, little thumb drives with their crypto on it. And basically, you know, like, so if I have my thumb drive with crypto and then I want to give Chris $1,000 of that crypto, I can send it to him from my wallet, aka the cold wallet, to his cold wallet. But no, who's, who's monitoring that transaction?

Nobody. And it shouldn't be.

No one.

Why, why is it anybody's business if I give you $100?

Goes back to the transaction, but it goes back to Ted's example of giving each other $100, right? So it's the same, it's the same thing, just in a digital manner.

No, I get it. It's like a P2P, like a Zelle right? I can sell you $100, you can sell me $100, right? But the bank knows what that is. But if it's a business transaction, like I'm selling you, you know, 1,000 cups, right? And you pay me with cold wallet crypto, and then I'm not cashing it out, I'm just holding on to it. A guy was telling me a story. He owned a pizza shop in Connecticut, and he had this— these guys had a crypto business down the street. They were buying pizzas every day. And one day they asked him, they said, oh, can we pay you with Bitcoin? I don't remember what the price of Bitcoin was at the time, but it was like $5. And he said, sure, pay me with Bitcoin. So the guy was paying them with Bitcoins and giving them— basically they were just like literally like a thumb drive and sending the guy the coins through some— I don't even know what website they used. And he had a cook, and the cook was like, oh, you can pay me with those Bitcoins. He told me that guy's like a multimillionaire now. The pizza guy who was making pizzas, he's just literally cashing out, huh?

Early adopters, right? Early adopters.

Yeah, he just cashes out a little bit and he's just living off the Bitcoin right now.

Yeah, yeah, for sure. And there's, there's, there's coins that are actually better for transacting those type of transactions than Bitcoin. For example, Dash. Dash, it gets confirmed within 2 seconds. Um, the— there's, there's not really high gas fees, which are the fees you pay when you make a transaction. Um, so we, we talk— we're talking Bitcoin, but Bitcoin really is a— is something you should put in a cold wallet and leave it there and never touch it until you need it or you, you're ready to cash out or whatever, when you feel the price is high. Um, there's a lot of others that are, are much better at those type of transactions. Right?

So, um, well, we see the price of XRP going—

I was just gonna say Ripple. Yep, yep, exactly. It's over $3, right? So, um, that's how we kind of got our started. It was we were trading, um, Ripple back in the day. And, um, you know, Ripple's— Ripple's an amazing technology. Now that's a centralized coin, so that there is no, um, external, uh, um, um, miners that take care of that. That's all internal to Ripple. So, um, you know, they can— you can track every Ripple transaction. That's amazing for cross-border, um, transactions. So if I want to send your company, you know, a million dollars through a bank, I've got to go through a whole lot of hooks and ladders, right? So, but if I want to send you XRP, I just send you XRP. Boom, it's done. Within, within seconds, you have your XRP.

Yeah, kind of the issue is, you know, you want to pay a bill, you can't really pay a bill with this stuff. You got to— it's got to get cashed out, right?

Exactly. And that's where you have to rely on exchanges like Coinbase or Kraken or Gemini, where you, you go to them and you receive the crypto there. You then, um, cash out for USD, or you have an establishment like CurvePay that does that for you. But then again, you run into the banking thing again. The banks then say, whoa, wait a minute, hold on, what's this? I don't, I don't understand this. I'm being told this is not good, um, we can't allow this.

So yeah, some banks get upset when people get deposits from like Coinbase. They go, oh, where's this money coming from? Who? Coinbase is sending you $50,000? Like, what happened?

Right, exactly.

Yeah, I remember I cashed out some coin and I got a phone call from my bank and they were like, hey, can you come into the bank today? We need to discuss, like, you got 5 deposits from Coinbase. Who's Coinbase, right?

What it was, and it's a publicly traded company, right?

It's what—

yeah, but they didn't know what it was. Was it— this was years and years ago when everything like first started and I was invested in a mining thing and my, you know, we were mining coins and then I was buying coins on Coinbase. And back then you could, you could only send Coinbase like $500 a day. So I was sending, you know, $500, $500, $500. I was buying and there was no rule, there was no tax, you know. There was tax on the profit, but it was treated completely different than it's treated today, right?

And that's where regulations do come in. And as much as we want to be decentralized, um, we do need regulations and clarity, really clarity, because The IRS makes up their rules on what they feel it's supposed to be. The SEC has made up their rules on what they feel it's supposed to be, and so on and so forth. When we get clarity, then everybody can play by the rules. Everybody can play by the same rules, right? So, um, once clarity comes in, then you'll see a lot less market manipulation, because right now there's a lot of market manipulation. When you see these highs that go to 109, somebody's working that in the background.

And definitely there's definitely like whales out there. I've talked to a couple of guys who are crypto whales and they're like, yeah, all we do is we're just riding it up and riding it down and making hundreds of thousands of dollars a day.

Exactly. Exactly.

A day.

Yeah, exactly. And that's what our software does, is it does that for you.

Yeah.

Well, you know, they're at the end of the day, you know, if you're playing with $1 million or half a million dollars, you can definitely ride, ride stuff up and ride stuff down, you know, just like in the stock market, like day trading, you know.

Right. And but you could do that with $5. So that's the thing is that there's no— there's nothing that says you can't buy $5 worth of, uh, Bitcoin today and then sell it at $110, say for example. And then when it goes down again, you buy back in again and you're slowly increasing your wallet, right? You're building your bags, as we say. Right. Um, that's the nice thing, as opposed to like, say, stocks, where, you know, you have places like Robinhood and whatnot, but generally people don't— are— don't have the ability to do that in stocks. They, they— you have to jump through hoops for that.

I would love to do an experiment, put in like $50 and see exactly how much can I turn the $50 into it in a year, and then how much is the And then what would the tax bill be? Do I come out ahead or do I— does the taxes just gobble it all up?

At the end of the day, at the end of the day, the taxes are on your capital gains, just like stocks. So you're— if you make $100, you have to pay taxes on $100. If you keep it for more than a year, like you were saying before, it's— the taxes are a lot less. So you hold it sell it at the end, you know, at the beginning of the year, or however you want to do that. But I mean, it's a tax nightmare for sure, because you have to, you have to account for every transaction. That's where the tax nightmare comes in. It's no different than any other capital gains situation as far as taxes go. But it, but it's, it is a nightmare because there are so many transactions. Well, you, we should set up an account for you at CurvePay. We'll set up a CurvePay. You put $50 on your, your, um in your exchange and just let it go, see what it does.

That would be a pretty interesting experiment.

Competition.

Come back in a few months and then see exactly how much we were able to turn it into.

Right, exactly, exactly. And of course, a lot depends on the market, but, but, but if you're— if, if it's 3 in the morning and the price goes up to 110, and then at 5 in the morning it goes back down to 104, You're not going to catch that where our AI does. Our AI says, oh, sell this, all right, let's buy back in. And you're like, wait a minute, I had 3 transactions last night, why did it do that? Oh, look at that, the price went up and it went back down again. And look, I've got just that little bit, a few satoshis more Bitcoin, right?

So the, so the, like we, we talked before, like, like the, we think like the, the markets where we saw a lot of success where people were using Bitcoin to buy items and, and then get fiat in their bank accounts, right? Businesses. The success we saw was with like adult clubs, people buying champagne rooms, some nightclubs, real estate transactions, which can be very complicated because somebody might have to pay with multiple wallets to get hundreds of thousands of dollars because they're not keeping all their, all their coin on one wallet. So you might need multiple invoices. People renting yachts, paying for vacations. We saw a lot of that. And then all of a sudden, you know, the last, uh, president, you know, changed the, changed the tax laws around. And then all of a sudden, like, all that spending kind of stopped. And also, I think some of the people using that, started going like wallet to wallet, you know, kind of like handing each other cash versus, you know, they got more educated on the whole crypto scene and, uh, started doing those kind of transactions. Although you can't really do that with real estate, and I think the banks kind of soured on the real estate also.

Yeah, they did. And that, again, that comes back down from the, um, from the regulations, the regulators putting the hold on that. One thing that you mentioned is that, you know, the adult clubs, we've always said that, you know, what if you put a, uh, uh, uh, what is it, the UPC seal tattoo on the girl and they could just scan your phone right on her butt? That's, that's perfect. Tip her that way, right? Right.

No, that was going on in a few clubs that they were— people were tipping the— tipping the dancers with coin. We heard about that. I mean, today a lot of tipping is going on with Cash App, Venmo, Zelle, because we see it. Someone will do a chargeback and then the next thing you know they'll be like, oh, I'm charging back this transaction, but also I gave the girl $1,500 in my Zelle or Venmo and she didn't come to my hotel. Well, That has nothing to do with the club. They're, they're independent contractors, right? Charge that back, right? So, you know, that's the other good thing with crypto. There's no chargebacks when it comes to disputes. Yeah, you can't really do a dispute.

Exactly.

So what do you guys think the future holds for like businesses and crypto? What do you think? Do you think it's going to be— I think it's more limited right now to like larger, um, you know, larger purchases like luxury purchases. And I think until it's actually like working on a credit card machine where the transaction's taking place like on the credit card terminal, you know, and then sending a message back to the terminal and producing a receipt, I think that, you know, so someone could pay for a pizza or a meal. I think we're kind of a ways off from seeing like that type of technology.

No, no, it's here. We have it. We have a POS. We have a— you can, you can use a POS as a merchant. You can, you can— we just display a QR code and the, um, the consumer scans his wallet right on the QR code and it comes back and notifies the merchant that, hey, the transaction went through.

Right, but I'm saying it's not, it's not like included in their credit card batch. You know what I'm saying?

Oh, right, right. Credit card companies don't want to mix and match. That's why. That's the reason.

But that's, but that's a different solution. If you are using a provider such as Nationwide Payments, you settle directly. If whoever's settling back to the merchant, if CurePay is implemented in there, you can just settle to their rails, right, to their bank account, and then they can settle weekly with the merchant on their credit card.

No, I'm just talking about from a reporting standpoint of, you know, like I started in the credit card business to give you an example. You would get— in the days of— in 2000, you would get a deposit for your Visa, MasterCard, a deposit for debit, a deposit for your diners, a deposit from Discover, and a deposit from, from, uh, American Express. Today you get all that money. You can take all those cards and more, right? Because there's tons of cards that just ride on MasterCard or the Discover rail, right? And American Express OpBlue, so you can get all your money in one, in one deposit. I think when you start doing all these like third-party things, even like buy now pay later, crypto, and you have lots of employees running transactions, it's—

it—

you need to have a better way to reconcile that, have those transactions Okay, we have that, we have that, we have that.

And let me ask you a question: how long did it take debit cards to get accepted? Like when debit cards first came out?

When debit cards first came out and the PIN debit hit, that, that went like wildfire. Every business wanted a PIN pad. That was the hottest thing. We just walk in and go, oh, do you want to get a PIN pad? Oh, you're only going to pay 79 cents a transaction. Everybody would sign up. Everybody, you know, that's the whole thing is if you have something that's going to be as fast as credit cards, going to be, be accountable, right? So they're going to be able to see it like in their software somewhere and they're going to have a report and there's not going to be like a glitch with the employees, then it's going to work. But if it's not going to be that way, then it's going to be a— it's a problem. Like We had strip clubs that would have a problem. They would give a guy a QR code for $5,000. The guy would only have $3,000 in his wallet, and the transaction would be partially approved. Nobody knew, nobody was checking it, you know, they just knew the guy paid, but nobody looked to see like, oh, that only got partially approved. Hey, you still owe us $2,000. They found out the next day, and then they get mad, and we're like, no, we showed you that you have to go check it. That.

That's the part, that's the part where we have, we have instant live reporting that, that shows you exactly how much you receive.

I know, but if you got 20 employees in your restaurant, right, nobody— they're not— the employees don't care. They just want to get— they just want the person to check out and pay, right? Right.

So we have—

you have to have a system where it's tied into the point of sale, where it's tied back to the credit card machine where receipts are printing out and, you know, not an email, not a text message, not go check the app, because that's too much work. If it's just— if I'm the business owner and I'm just issuing an invoice and then I'm getting paid, obviously I can monitor that a lot better in that kind of environment. But in like a fast-paced environment, you know, I think there's a lot of work to be done before that can be like totally accepted in, in businesses.

True. And then I think also too, we have the ability to do underpayments, right? So Ted built in that if anybody were to produce a POS transaction for $500 and you tried to pay the $300 like you're talking about, it'll automatically boot the transaction. So it's not going to accept it, right?

But they don't know where does the decline message go. Is it—

it'd be right on the device. Right on the device, right in front of the— whoever's producing it to the consumer.

I think it's, you know, I think the product is good for like, you have a luxury business, a jewelry store, you're selling a car, you're in a more controlled environment. I think it's going to work. I think that we're a long way from like people are checking out at the grocery store and you have this. That's why I always say, you know, credit cards, why does it work? Because it's fast-paced, boom boom boom. Everybody's paying really fast and you're moving through the line, right? I mean, who hates it when you get in line at Publix and you got some 80-year-old lady in front of you and she starts whipping out the checkbook or somebody's whipping out a bunch of cash and that sometimes you have a young cashier, they're like, they're looking at the bills like, what is that? Right? And then they got to give the person back some change. They're like freaking out like they haven't done that, you know, because if you sit and you just watch like at a grocery store or any kind of even Costco or something, or a movie theater, you know, the line is just going boom boom boom. Everybody's just swipe swipe swipe swipe swipe, you know. It'd be really cool if somebody figured out like, hey, let's put this coin on a card, you know. I mean, I know Coinbase has a card, right? And then you can pay your bill at the end of the month by cashing out your coin and paying the bill, or you just send them a check. You know, you just pay out of your bank account. But it would be really cool if it was like on a card, and then it would be more accountable for those— for that flow, like, you know, that flow of business. Otherwise, I see it for, you know, listen, we had a bunch of jewelry guys doing it, but then they all stopped. And I think they all went like the route of the cold wallet kind of deal, and, you know, and started doing it, them, like, do-it-yourself kind of deal.

And that's the cool thing about crypto, right, is that it puts the power in, you know, in your hands, not a bank, not, not anybody else.

Yeah, well, that's, that's where, you know, how does that fit into the— how does that fit into the business world is what I think people kind of figure out. Like, how does that fit into, like, a restaurant or a grocery store accepting some kind of, some kind of crypto You know, and, and then being able to train all your cashiers or all your servers in a restaurant that have how it works and have it be as fast as a credit card.

Yeah, people are doing it. People are doing it. There's, there's people that live totally on crypto. They don't pay— they pay all their bills in crypto. They pay everything with crypto. They go into, um, the right stores that have— that accept crypto, right? Whether that be with a service— some, some of these places are doing a service, or— and some of them are doing it like, like you said, with a cold wallet. The tech savvy ones, or just have their own cold wallet and say, hey, send me this. And they get a notification, they look at their wallet, say, hey, I received this. Go ahead, take your phone, take your necklace, whatever, you know.

Right, that's what I'm saying. I think they got to come up with some more universal ways on how to, on how to, on how to use this so that it's more acceptable, like on a large, much larger scale.

So that's what we're working for. Yeah, that's coming. We have that. And if, again, these are just policies and procedures that merchants want done this way, cool, we build it for them. We're more of a technology company that we build things for people.

And do you think— let me ask you a question, Allen. So now that Trump is in office, right, the last time we spoke, it was early. Crypto was new, right? Dial-up internet days of crypto. The more that people learn about it, education and adoption, right? If you are able to educate—

uh-oh, Chris, we lost, we lost you, we lost your sound, buddy.

Hello?

Yep, we got you.

All right. Yeah, so like nowadays, um, more people are coming to realize what cryptocurrency is. Back in the, you know, the early days, you had people that, like we talked about, I knew Ted, Ted told me people tell— it just was word of mouth. Now that you see it all in the news all the time, you're going to see a lot more adoption and people wanting to purchase and merchants down the street saying, hey, this guy has it, I need to have it. And then that's where it blossoms a bit at the lower level, the retail levels, right? I think you're right on the luxury piece and the corporate side, but the day is coming. And like Ted had mentioned Dash before, they have a really great merchant network already. And I think from a personal standpoint, there needs to be that coin that everybody agrees is going to be the one that you can use for transactional, like, day-to-day.

I think definitely, I think something needs to be decided by, who knows, the federal government or consensus of some organization. But I think also the banks need to, you know, kind of understand, like, people are gonna putting this crypto, you know, cashing out this crypto and putting it into their bank accounts. But then again, You know, it just comes down to, you know, the— at some point the government is going to have to have a way to monitor crypto the same way they monitor cash and credit cards and ACH and wires.

And they're doing that now. Like, the FBI's got a great system of how they monitor things. Like, it used to be that people were getting their computers locked up and you had to pay X amount into, um, some wallet and to get it unlocked, or whole utility companies. It was happening. But now the FBI can find those people so fast. They can't use that money. They, they— it's— if that was, uh, me dropping off $100,000 to the utility to, uh, uh, or the utility dropped $100,000 off to me to unlock their computers, it would be a completely different story. With crypto, they, they know. Follow the money. They can follow the money so easy in crypto. And, and while that's a good thing, it's also a bad thing because that's it takes out, you know, the anonymity that people want. But, you know, hey, you got to take the good with the bad.

Well, I think it's just got to merge. I think like, yeah, you know, at some point, you know, they need to take the government, you know, whether it's Trump or it's the person after him, they got to figure out like, okay, we're going to take this crypto and we're going to merge it into the Fed or some whatever, or some other organization that's going to work with the Fed. So that it all can work together so people can, you know, use this, you know, use, uh, digital money. I mean, I think the part of it is, is people don't want to see their dollars that they have in their bank account turn into some kind of digital currency, right? Because they don't want to have any volatility with that coin. And that's kind of where I think it needs to go, is that there's whatever coin everybody's transacting with is a dollar, right? It's a dollar. The rest of everything else is like an investment piece, right?

But it needs to be— it needs to be decentralized, stay decentralized though. We don't— you can't have it centralized. It takes away a lot.

Well, no, I'm just talking about from a monitoring standpoint.

Yeah, from a monitor.

I remember, sure, I did, I did like 300 or 400 transactions on Coinbase And my brother's like, you know, you got to pay taxes with all that blah blah blah you're doing. And I'm like, okay. So then I downloaded all these transactions from Coinbase, and then my brother's like, oh, now you got to go on this, on a— take a spreadsheet. I'm like, dude, like, you— like, how am I supposed to figure that out? And then there was some company, I'm not going to remember the name of it, I can't remember, it's called CoinLedger or something like that. And so you take your— you download all your stuff from Coinbase and then you upload it to this CoinLedger thing. And then the CoinLedger figures out like all the stuff that you did, how much cash you put in, what fees did you pay on the way in, then how much cash did you take out, how many fees you pay, what fees you paid on the way out, what did you invest, and then what was the net profit.

Right, exactly.

I figured out like that whole thing, but it was— when I first did it the first time, that was a huge process. That was a pain in the butt. Today Coinbase just gives you that data.

Exactly, exactly.

They just spit it out on a PDF and you're done. Yeah, in the beginning that's not how it was, and I was doing a lot of buying and selling of, of Litecoin, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, a bunch of stuff like that. So it's much easier today to get And it'll get—

and it'll continue to get easier. Yeah, for sure. And yeah, I have a question.

If people want to trade crypto, where do they go? Do they go to— do they go to kerpay.com and sign up for an account there?

No, to— what you— yeah, of course, that's definitely what they want to do, but they need to get on an exchange. So a reputable exchange, uh, um, you know, if you're in the States, it's got to be Gemini, it's got to be, uh, Coinbase, Kraken. Um, get on a reputable exchange, um, then sign up for CurvePay and tie your account into it, and then CurvePay handles the rest for you.

Okay, and then you put cash on the exchange?

Yeah, you, you deal with that exchange, and like I said, it has to be reputable. Don't do a fly-by-night, hey, I got this exchange, it's new, and use a reputable exchange. Um, and understand if— understand if you— when you have coins on an exchange Um, it's— they hold the coins for you. It's their responsibility to hold the coins, right?

They hold the coins for you.

Yep.

So if you— anybody wants to do it, I'm gonna— I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna set up a CurvePay account. I have a bunch of crypto, about $4,000 or $5,000 on the, uh, on Coinbase. Let's see if we can turn it into some more money.

Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's do a demo with it. We'll, we'll show you exactly how to set up your account. Uh, uh, what coin you can pick— any coin that Coinbase trades. And let the AI take care of it. It'll buy some of this, it'll sell some of that. And when this goes up, it'll sell it. When that goes down, it'll buy it. It handles everything for you.

I think, Allen, so you should— I would have— I want to go back to your thing where you said put in $50 and see what happens over a time frame. You should do the B2B Vault $25, $50 CurePay challenge, and your listeners and your followers all get in and put $50 in on a single coin. You choose the coin. And then you set your parameters and whoever has the most returns over X timeframe is deemed the winner of the B2B Vault CurePay challenge.

We'll have to figure out how to do that.

Yeah, we'll send you some ideas on that.

So if you guys are— and if you own a business and you think you want to accept, uh, especially a luxury business right now, and you want to accept, um, crypto in your business, you can reach out to me at Nationwide Payment Systems, and we can help you get set up with CurvePay on the merchant side so that you can accept crypto. And yet you can either keep the crypto or you can put it— get fiat into your bank account, right?

Yes, sir.

Okay, so that's— so you guys give us a— Chris, give us a little sign-off.

Yes, sir.

Give us a CurvePay pitch.

Yes, I— CurvePay, seamless to consumer, risk-free to merchant solution, except allowing you to accept up to 60 coins aggregated back, like Allen mentioned, to a specific asset, to a stablecoin and/or fiat. Simple, easy-to-use API, recurring invoicing and POS software. And then on the trader side, non-custodial, which is super nice and easy to hook up to your exchange. Touch base with us and we'll hook you up and Thank you for having us today, Allen. Appreciate it.

Yes, thank you.

Yeah, thank you for having us. It's always a pleasure to speak with you, Allen. You're one of the biggest in the industry, and we always appreciate your advice and your direction that you've given us. For sure.

All right, well, thanks for having you guys on today. Chris and Ted, known each other for a couple years. Anybody's interested in CARPE can reach out to them directly. You can reach out to me. We'll help you get the information you need and get you set up. And, you know, you never know, you might get a big customer come in and want to pay you with some, some crypto. So I think we're going to see more of that. I think we're going to see crypto start to inch its way back into the business world in a big way in 2025.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thank you guys for listening. Thank you to our listeners for listening B2B Vault today. Want more info about crypto, again, reach out to us. Otherwise, if you like the episode, like, subscribe, share, tell all your friends about it. And Crypto 2025, let's go!

Let's go!

Cheers!

Thank you guys. Thanks.

All right, peace out. Carpe diem!