How Crypto Solves the Global Money Problem | Paul Bances, PayPal

I think that there's going to be always a portion of the population that's going to want to use Tether for a variety of different reasons. And great, they should have that option. And USDC, big fans of those guys. I know a lot of them over there, and I think what they do is fantastic, and there'll be use cases for them. No one is situated like we are and what we're trying to do here, which is really laser-focused on the payment side. When you start off from the base of 400 million users around the world and tens of millions of merchants and 2.5 decades of knowledge and sort of a regulatory structure in place, I think that's just going to lift sort of the stablecoin market.

Hey everyone, we all know blockchain is changing the world, but who's actually driving it? I'm excited to invite you to the 6th edition of Meridian, a Web3 conference hosted by the Stellar Development Foundation in London from October 15th through 17th. Get early bird tickets at meridian.stellar.org with code BLOCKWORKSPOD. Special thanks to Stellar for sponsoring us. Now let's get into today's episode. Everyone, the Polygon Community Grants program was launched with 1 billion tokens, all for Polygon builders. Really excited to share that on today's episode of Empire. Season 1 of the Polygon Community Grants program is now live. It features $35 million in MATIC to support the next generation of Polygon projects. Join the aggregated future today by applying at polygon. Technology/grants. Big thanks to Polygon for sponsoring Empire. All right, everyone, got a fun podcast today with Paul Bancis, VP of Market and Business Development of PayPal Crypto. Uh, my goal for this is to talk about how, how money moves around the world and how stablecoins enter the chat, basically. So Paul, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much. Uh, as I mentioned to you earlier, it's actually my, my first podcast, so I'm pretty, uh, pretty excited about this. So thank you.

I know, excited, man. The untold story of Paul Bancis. What is It's going to come out. Um, great, man. Well, actually, I took— to start this conversation off, I actually don't want to talk about crypto. I want to talk about just how money moves around the world. Um, you have this background that, uh, kind of positions you to talk about this conversation about just money movement. Uh, you were, from my understanding, leading like MoneyGram's US plus Canada plus LATAM plus Caribbean markets, which is, you know, the whole Western Hemisphere, I feel like. And now you're running a lot of the global market stuff for PayPal Crypto. So maybe just start with the non-crypto. Can you tell us how money moves around the system today?

Yeah. So just by way of background, I started my career off as an attorney. So I was representing here in Miami, Florida, so a lot of international banking clients, and started really focusing on payments and banking from sort of the legal perspective. But then that's when I got interested a little bit more in sort of the operational side. And trying to understand exactly that, how money moves. And I think the biggest misconception is when people start talking about it— I know we're going to lead into stablecoins and crypto— the biggest misconception is, well, why do you need all of that if you have all these ways to move money instantly? And the first thing I tell people is money doesn't move instantly. You have to separate the user experience of what you're seeing with the actual settlement of the money behind the scenes. So if you take a Traditional, even when you use PayPal, Venmo, or Cash App, or whatever you're using in terms of wallet, and you're sending money, those become ledger entries, but nothing has actually settled. Let's look at a typical remittance product where an individual in the US is maybe sending money back home to their parent in Mexico. I walk into a money remitter, I provide the information for my mother. This is the amount I want to send, her information. And process that transaction. And then that money transfer company will process that, and my mother can walk into an agent, uh, 10, 15, 20 minutes later in Mexico and pick up, uh, the money in local currency. So that's fantastic. Most people think, oh, it's great, money has moved and you sent it from the US and received in Mexico. Nothing has actually happened, right? All it is is a bunch of ledger entries on the companies, and all the settlement of the move of the money still has to happen. So in that case, now there's a settlement between that US entity and that foreign entity that's paying out. There could be a various, uh, a variety of different banks involved in correspondent banking, um, and then there's settlement times, etc. And all of that then has a cost, right? Because then we have to use the bank to settle with the agent that is paying out. There's FX components, then there's sort of cash management considerations, um, and people don't realize that, right? That on the back end, the settlement of all of this money through these traditional rails takes time. And we've all experienced— and that's what these sort of products that do allow you to do things sort of instantly or within a couple of minutes. When you look at more traditional ways of sending, for example, a wire transfer, again, it's an instruction that I am sending to my bank. They need to send an instruction. And then there's a settlement of funds. And there's a clearing of all of that. And all of these take days. And the issue with that is that all that money then is being locked up during that time. And as a result of that, cost folks because they can't have access to the money. And then there's a series of costs in just processing that. The beauty of what stablecoins bring and sort of what we were thinking about doing here and why we built this out is that as you reduce some of those intermediaries, and it's not just ledger entries of a booking entry, it's the actual asset that starts to transfer and you have control of that asset that reduces this down from days to a matter of minutes, right? When you look at the technology you use now, whether it's ACH, whether it's SWIFT, anything, it's still a matter of the settlement time takes a much greater time, because it's the difference between an acknowledgment or ledger entry of the value versus the actual movement of the asset. For the first time, it's the asset itself that can move, so I can have a finality of payment with you much quicker. That concept is what got me interested in dealing with this, because when I was at MoneyGram, for example, And by the way, that's where I transitioned from being an attorney to running sort of a P&L. I was very fortunate there. So I got to run all of the Americas for a period of time. One of the most complicated things that we had was the settlement aspect of this. Again, we're moving money around, people are making payments, but then part of our job was to settle with all of these agents around the world using traditional rails. And there you're sort of— you've become victim to some of the policies and procedures of some of these financial institutions. There was this whole concept of de-risking. Where a lot of banks were getting out of the money service business, meaning that they weren't going to provide a bank account for a local money service business. And all of a sudden it's like, okay, I don't have a way to pay this agent. And the agent that's collecting money on my behalf that I'm paying out to people somewhere else in the world, I have no way of collecting that money. And it was those challenges really that sort of opened up this concept of how can the actual asset move much quicker? And that's where it led me down, obviously, the path of crypto and then stablecoins. Themselves. Yeah.

Okay. So maybe one thing to help me understand is I've always understood the use case for a consumer, which is like, yeah, I don't have to lock up. You know, when I send a wire internationally, it might take 3 days. Now I don't have to take— in those 3 days, the capital is locked and that's inefficient. That's basically dead money in the system. And there's, I don't know the number, but probably billions and tens of billions of whatever it is of, I call it dead money. I'm sure there's a technical name there. I haven't really understood the use case for businesses, because, uh, not the business, but like a MoneyGram or a PayPal. If I'm thinking about MoneyGram, for example, like let's say I use MoneyGram and I send money to my family in, uh, I don't know, Latin America or something like that. MoneyGram is actually able to take that float and then make money off of that float. Is my— I've like super layman's, I have no understanding of it, but what I would guess is MoneyGram can make money off the float. So why would they be incentivized to decrease the settlement time?

So there is an opportunity sometimes there to monetize on the float depending on how the structure of the money transfer— and I'll speak in general, not just MoneyGram, just money transfer business— depending on how your model works, there's the opportunity to float. But there's also a lot of challenges that come from delayed settlement. You know, you do have sort of at certain times credit risk with your counterparty agents, right? So think about a situation where I'm using an agent in Country X and they're collecting money on individuals that are sending outside of that country. Let's just pick folks sending money out of Chile. And I have an agent down in Chile and they're collecting the money on my behalf, but I am already paying out that distribution of that payment of the Chilean sending to the Spaniard. Uh, when I went— when the recipient in Spain walks into an agent, I've already effectuated that payment. So there's a lot of credit risk also going on with some of these things, right? And that's sort of the counter to it is saying, okay, well If settlement happens T+1, T+2, whatever the case may be, it's both ways. It's not just me settling with the agent, but the agent settling with, in this case, the money transfer company. There's challenges there. As I said, there's the counterparty credit risk. There's also limitations as to the cash management of what some of these agents can do. They just don't have the capacity to pay out. So sometimes you're limited. If you can speed up the settlement process, and it can happen instantaneously, it could happen several times throughout the day. Theoretically, if you can settle on a per-transaction basis, if you're using a stablecoin, that unleashes greater power for those small and medium-sized agents that you want in the country. It's a bit of a risk analysis and benefit analysis of what benefit do I get from monetizing the float, etc., versus what are the costs here, what is my counterparty risk here, and what are the limitations that are inherent now because of the fact that I'm using agents that I need to settle. That's true for moving away even from many remitters. If you just look at a small business, Cash management for a small business is incredibly important. This is why we're excited about— and again, I keep bringing the stablecoin too early into the conversation— but bringing it into sort of our merchant services and what we want to do on the PayPal side is small business needs to pay suppliers, employees, content creators, whatever the case may be. If we could speed up that settlement time and again, you buy something from a small merchant and it could settle on a per transaction basis instead of next day or 2 days or whatever the case may be, unleashes them the ability to buy more supplies, greater content, you know, things to that extent. Um, and we just think that, yeah, while sometimes you lose the ability to monetize certain floats and things like that, just the wave of what that unleashes is just going to grow, uh, sort of the ability to do more business, right? And whether that's remittance and whether that's small business selling, you know, goods and services.

For someone who hasn't— so like people in the US, sometimes I'll share, like I'll talk about stablecoins to people in the US, to my friend, I don't know, my friends or something like that. And they'll say, well, I mean, I have Venmo, right? I have like, yeah, I, you know, I can already send money instantaneously to my friends. And I understand that behind the scenes it's not settling, but like, why would I care about that as a user? Maybe there's actually this Wences Casares. I don't know if you know. Yeah, of course. This is Wences' quote. He's like, crypto is the— I think he was actually talking about Bitcoin at the time. He said, this is, I think, on Laura Shin's podcast, maybe 2016 or 2017. He said, Americans and people in the US are the hardest people to explain Bitcoin to. Why? Because the US works— excuse me, because the government works and your money system works. Um, so maybe you can tell me about like outside of the US to my friends, like speaking with my friends as the target audience here, like who'd have just used Venmo in their life, like what does that look like elsewhere?

Yeah. So you can imagine my challenge when I work for PayPal, Venmo, and I'm trying to explain to them why I'm doing a stablecoin thing. They're like, well, wait a minute, isn't that exactly, you know, what your system does? It is, it is. Interesting that, you know, in the US we have good enough, right? And if it's good enough, then why do you need to sort of innovate? Although we can challenge that a little bit as well. But on the international side, which is again most of my background, let's go back and pick that Chilean that I was talking about earlier. Now let's talk about cross-border e-commerce, right? So that Chilean now to be able to do— and again, we take advantage, we have Venmo, we have PayPal, we have credit cards that we can use that over, you know, anywhere in the world. But for a lot of folks in cross-border in certain regions, it's very difficult for them to do a cross-border transaction because they almost all need to have some sort of international funding instrument like a credit card with international charging capabilities to do international e-commerce. That limits your universe of folks that even using a system like PayPal can buy something from a European merchant, from an Australian merchant, or from a US merchant. In that particular case, crypto in general, or but specifically a stablecoin that's backed by USD, unleashes a lot of purchasing power for that individual. Again, we take for granted how easy it is to get a credit card and have a card with international charging privileges. It's not that easy outside of the US. It's not that easy in Latin America. Small percentage of folks have that. But now, you have folks that if they can have access to the stablecoin locally, what that does is completely unleash some international purchasing power from them, because now they can use that as an instrument that they could use to pay for a merchant anywhere around the world, right? And I think that's where, again, as a global company, when we see these opportunities, the international side for me is the most exciting. Because when you start picking places like Peru and Colombia and Venezuela and Latin America, it becomes very, very interesting what you do there. And that's completely excluding some of the other issues of why folks are going to want a US-backed stablecoin sitting in certain countries, right? I'm talking more on the payments and commerce side, but obviously the ability ability to maintain a value, stablecoin that has a USD value for a lot of these folks in a lot of these countries is a way to hedge against what's happening with their local currency. But just purely from a purchasing standpoint, it does give you purchasing power that we take for granted here in the US. Going back to the US and the comment that was made by your friends, but hey, I have Venmo and PayPal. I'll challenge it a little bit in the sense that we joke. That we are the original stablecoin when you think about it, right? When you think about the concept of PayPal balance, it's a digital representation of an asset, which is a dollar that's sitting in a bank account, um, and you can transact with it within a permissioned environment, right? But I think what was cool, what we did now is, uh, basically tokenize that and put it out to the rest of the world, right? So that, um, before the inherent limitation in any payment wallet was that we both needed to be customers of the same company, right? That limits our optionality and choice. So if you want to use PayPal, PayPal, Venmo, Venmo, Cash App, Cash App, etc. By now incorporating a stablecoin, that becomes the common thread between the wallets and you now have interoperability. So when you talk to your US friends and say, hey, but I have Venmo, yes, but did you now know that with the same Venmo wallet you can pay XYZ person in a non-Venmo wallet just using the PayPal stablecoin? So now you have pure interoperability between PayPal and Venmo. Venmo and other wallets and the ability to receive. So it's just expanded the reach of that same Venmo.

I think that that's the unlock. That's the unlock right there is, um, I am as a Venmo user, I am limited to only sending money between other Venmo users. So let's say there are 350 million Americans. I don't know how many people have Venmo. Let's call it 50 million. I'm making that number up. 100 million, whatever the number is, I'm still limited. That's, let's say at 100 million, that's still only a third of the US, right? But now with the stablecoin, I can send to people with Cash App, I can send to people with Apple Pay, whatever.

And internationally as well. And that's— and funny little story is, you know, PayPal obviously owns Venmo. We've had it for several years.

Phenomenal acquisition, by the way. Didn't you guys get it for like $24 million?

I don't remember the amount, but yeah, it's paid off.

Looking back, phenomenal.

Yeah, that was a fantastic one. But the funny thing is, and I think you know, the head of our business unit, José Fernández da Ponte, he says this often, is We have PayPal, we have Venmo, but those systems never really spoke to each other. So the first transaction that occurred between a Venmo wallet and a PayPal wallet was a crypto transaction with what— when we—

That's something I didn't realize.

Yeah, when we released the transfers product a couple of years ago, the ability to transfer crypto, because as you know, we have sort of a slow roll of how we put our products out into the market. So first it was closed within the ecosystem, and then we opened up transfers. The first transaction was between, uh, Venmo, PayPal was a Bitcoin transfer, right? And then now you can use the stablecoin. Was it necessary to use crypto or stablecoin? Probably not. But the reality of the situation is it is something that unlocked that possibility, right? Um, so we feel that this is a way for that interconnection and interoperability of wallets, which leads to, again, the main thing that we're concerned with is optionality and choice. You should be able to look at one side of the transaction and say, whichever way you want to pay, we should be able to support it. I should look at the other side of the payment and say, whichever way you want to receive it and you want to be settled, we want to be able to support that. And that's sort of our guiding principle here is optionality and choice. Some folks will never use any of these products, some folks will. And the other aspect is, while you may not use it on the front end, there's still arguments of why it's important on the back end, on the settlement side, for this, because, you know, there's two— there's the consumer-facing aspect. Am I going to use a stablecoin for a payment? Or there's also the, I'm going to use blank for the payment, but unbeknownst to them, in the background, there's a whole stablecoin aspect that's being used for the settlement and the movement of that money, right? So I think there's a combination of both of those, that you're still using your traditional Venmo, but there's a world in which maybe I am using stablecoin in the background to do intercompany settlements or settlements with any other entity that I need to.

Hmm. Maybe, uh, maybe we can get into PYUSD now. Um, I'd love to, I'd actually love to just learn more about the, the almost history of crypto strategy inside of PayPal. Like my rough memory is that you guys got into this around 2020. Um, I'm sure there were, I'm sure PayPal was exploring this internally and way, way, way before that. But I remember, I think you guys launched a wallet in 2020. There was some sort of checkout with crypto in the years following that, but I'd love for you to, take us in. I actually don't know when you joined PayPal, but take us inside of what you remember there.

Sure. No, fantastic. It's a good story, actually. So it's actually my second time at PayPal. I was here 2010 to '14, still a lawyer back then, but that's where I met José Fernández da Ponte, who at the time ran the Latin America region, and I was his lawyer. We both leave PayPal around 2014, 2015, and then we reunited in 2019 Part of our remit there was specifically to help put together the cryptocurrency strategy for PayPal and execute on that. As you suggest, there had been some research that had been done. We had some folks that were doing a blockchain research team and all of that. It was really in 2019 when we started to think about, okay, what, if anything, should we be doing in the space? We did a lot of research at the time and a lot of blind studies, etc., just to determine did we have a right to play in the space and what it would look like. We were highly encouraged by those results, which indicated not only that we had a right to be in the space, but it seemed that we were positioned to be a leader in the space as well. And because of, again, 2.5 decades of moving value around the world, digital payments platform, our knowledge of fraud, fraud prevention, illicit activity, security, everything like that, we thought we were in a good position to take advantage also of that double-sided network to make a meaningful difference for the industry. So we put the strategy together and it was sort of a long strategy. In the beginning, it was— we needed to get folks accustomed to the idea of PayPal and crypto or PayPal and digital currencies. And that's where in 2020, so right in the middle of the pandemic, October of 2020, we launched the Buy, Hold, Sell product. And that was the ability to buy cryptocurrency, hold it in your PayPal wallet, and sell it. So you couldn't transfer it out. So still very closed. But that was sort of the initial entry point because we wanted folks to understand, okay, PayPal's jumping into the space, but doing it in the PayPal fashion. And what I mean by that is we're a global entity, highly regulated around the world. We have a very, very strong culture of compliance here. So we wanted to make sure that we did things the right way from that perspective and also understanding who our customers were. Our hypothesis at the time was not we're going to launch this, we're going to steal a bunch of traders that are on other platforms. That's not the case. Ours didn't have a lot of bells and whistles. It was designed to be for what we called crypto curious, right? It was customer— PayPal customer who's heard of cryptocurrency and wanted to get in, wanted to explore Bitcoin. So it was all about making a very best-in-class, user-friendly design. We limited to 4 coins. It was Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, Litecoin. and a very seamless sort of process full of educational materials, etc., because we knew that this was going to be for folks that were not necessarily, uh, you know, too knowledgeable of, of sort of the industry so far. And that's exactly the case, right? Uh, what we did and what we're very proud of, it's not that I stole other crypto folks from other— I, we actually created new ones, right? We got our user base who had not been in cryptocurrency before and then started interacting. So we brought millions and millions and millions of people to crypto because that was our base and that's what we catered to.

My brother, by the way, Paul, my brother said, should I buy crypto? Should I buy crypto? And then I forget how the conversation went. I was like, yeah, buy crypto. And he didn't buy crypto. And then finally he said, I just got some crypto. I bought some, I think it was Bitcoin and Solana and ETH or something like that. I said, that's awesome. Where did you buy it? He said, I bought it on my Venmo account.

There you go. There you go. It's exactly that. At one point in time, I want to say the stat was something like 70% of the holders or people that were buying and selling crypto on the PayPal platforms designated as either their first or amongst their first crypto activity. We really brought a wave of users to come in. So we were highly encouraged by the results of that. That was October 2020, middle of pandemic. I remember I was, uh, you know, we were all, uh, working from home and I rented a place up in the Northeast, uh, you know, for that month, uh, to, to kind of go through, uh, and enjoy the, the weather up there in October. And, uh, you know, we were able to launch and it was fantastic time. The reception was, was great from the industry, right? I mean, obviously there's some folks that I don't believe any entity should ever be involved, any incumbent entity should be involved in the space. But really what we felt is people were excited about, you know, an incumbent player like us, well-positioned to be able to come in and say, hey, we're going to support this. So we decided at that time to then build a business unit around what we were doing. Before it was 4 or 5 of us sort of running around trying to do this, very much of a startup feel to it. But then when we launched and we saw the reception, we created a business unit called Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and Digital Currency, or BCDC. José is the head of that, and I sit as part of the leadership team there. And then we made an acquisition of a company out of Tel Aviv called Curve, without the E at the end, which was another fantastic acquisition. I have to tell you, some of the most talented engineers—

Curve, the custodian?

Yes. I forgot that you guys bought Curve.

We used to work with Curve in 2018 and 2019.

Yeah, it was a Fantastic. I got to tell you, just some of the most talented folks that I've ever had the pleasure of working with, and it's been a great integration into PayPal. We wound down the Curve business, but we used that to build in some of the infrastructure that we have now on our crypto business. Then we created this business unit to have end-to-end visibility on all things that we were doing. Strategically, we wanted to have a dedicated team, not only of engineers and product, but but legal and compliance and risk relations and regulatory relations and government relations. So we created this BCDC unit, which is now a couple of hundred employees. And then from there, it was, I think, again, one of the most, you know, people don't highlight it as much as they should, is when we offered transfers for the first time, because it was the number one thing obviously that folks were asking us about as our own customers started to evolve. From, okay, buy, hold, sell, I'm getting educated. Well, hey, I want to now interact with the rest of the ecosystem. I kind of have to hold it at PayPal. So we said, okay, now we're going to launch the ability to do on-chain transfers. Again, maybe it's not so unique in the crypto world, but when you look back at the PayPal world, first time you're kind of breaking down that walled garden, right? And saying now your PayPal wallet can interact with wallets outside of the world, outside of the ecosystem and vice versa. And we did that a couple of years ago and that was now extraordinary, right? Because now we started attracting folks that valued a lot of things that PayPal had to offer as, again, being a reputable company with some of the things that we have in place. They're just used to interacting with us. They've made purchases for decades with us. We started attracting a different crowd in terms of people that were much more active in the community. We built the transfer product and we extended that to Venmo as well. We did some international expansion as well, but then that led to the stablecoin. The stablecoin, strategy was in place for a while in terms of we had been looking at it for a while and we thought that it finally had reached the right time, that we had gone through the process of what we wanted to, to feel comfortable and feel that we can manage this. And we were able to launch in August of last year. And as you know, we launched initially on Ethereum as an ERC-20 token. And then recently we expanded that to Solana a couple of months ago.

Now, hey everyone, Jason Yanowitz here. Just wanted to take a, a quick break to talk about something exciting in the world of blockchain. The Stellar Development Foundation is hosting their 6th annual Meridian Conference this October 15th through 17th in London. It's a 3-day event where the brightest minds in Web3 come together to discuss everything from tokenization to DeFi. If you're a developer builder, policymaker, or business leader looking to make an impact in transforming global systems through blockchain, this is your chance to join the conversation. You'll get to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future of this space. Head over to meridian.stellar.org and use the code BLOCKWORKSPOD for early bird pricing. Now let's get back to today's episode. This episode is brought to you by Polygon. Polygon Labs is developing the next generation of open-source zero-knowledge tech to aggregate crypto liquidity and user bases, empowering developers to grow in a unified web of interoperable chains with the AggLayer. That was a big mouthful, so I'm going to tell you what it means in my, in my words. There's all these things popping up, L2s and L3s, and it's chaos, right? If you are building something, you no longer have to worry about bootstrapping liquidity. You can basically to just build in the AggLayer, to tap into the liquidity of the AggLayer and the users of the AggLayer. You get the users, you get the liquidity. It's the AggLayer. It's hot. It's by Polygon Labs. They've got the Polygon Community Grants program. It was launched with 1 billion tokens just for Polygon builders. Season 1, it's live right now. It features 35 million in MATIC to support the next generation of Polygon builders. Join the aggregated future today by applying at polygon.technology/grants. That's polygon.technology/grants. If you talk to anyone, let them know Blockworks sent you. Tell me about the go-to-market and how you thought about building it and which part of the stack you guys had to own. Um, yeah, because you guys are built on Paxos, right? So like, why not build the full stack yourself? Like, why build on Paxos? Why outsource that? Like, tell me about those decisions.

Obviously, we thought a lot about the design of all of this, and what we needed to own and not own, what we were good at and what our core was, and what perhaps we should outsource. Starting first with Paxos, first of all, we had a relationship already with Paxos. They're the ones that power our trading and custody. Whenever you buy Bitcoin or Ethereum or whatever, or Ether that you buy on PayPal or Venmo, it's actually being powered by Paxos in the background. So we have that integration. And we're big fans of Paxos. I think the approach that they've taken in the market, Chad and Walter, of, you know, again, going back to our culture of compliance, to focus on being compliant and doing the right things from day one, you know, built— we built a very strong relationship with them. And we were very impressed with their operational aspects of this. It's not that, you know, we really looked under the hood and said, walk me through this entire thing of how you do this. And we decided that at that time, the right move for us was was definitely to partner with them. You know, they're subject matter experts. They had had stablecoins in the market already. They knew everything from the technical side to also the reserve asset management side. And again, keep in mind, we were still kind of a small team here at PayPal. So we wanted to make sure, look, let's, let's, let's get the experts to do this. And we enjoy a great relationship with them. And we were able to launch with them. And we've benefited a lot from that relationship with Paxos and their experience. I should also mention that even when we launched the buy, hold, sell product, You know, with our relationship with them, we were actually the first company to ever receive— I don't know if you know this— a conditional BitLicense from the New York Department of Financial Services. It was actually— we were the first one. So usually a BitLicense could take much more time. It took us a matter of months to be able to do this so that when we launched, we could include New York in our launch. And that relationship with the New York DFS is also very important for us. You know, we started with a conditional BitLicense, then we got the full BitLicense. And what was important here also, that Paxos did all of their stablecoin activity in connection with the DFS, right, in connection with the New York DFS in terms of their supervised as a limited purpose trust company. So we thought, again, this just makes absolute sense for us, you know, we're aligned as to how we approach the business. They're subject matter experts, they have, you know, a team that knows how to do this, we have a really strong relationship. So that should be sort of the go-to-market approach there. What we want to have now, with all that being said, I mean, then the logical question there may be, well, why not just support a stablecoin that exists, you know, out there, as opposed to even having a PayPal stablecoin?

The edge of the spectrum of outsourcing would be just integrate USDC or something like that.

Right. And, and, you know, a couple of reasons why we didn't do that is, is number one, again, we think some of the value here is that it is tied to an entity like PayPal, right? And, and, um, you know, the trust that we bring to the market, the security that we bring, the way that we value things of protecting our consumers and all that was important, but also going back to the regulatory side and the risk side is Supporting a stablecoin in PayPal is not an insignificant endeavor. We wanted to have a voice in it, a seat at the table. While Paxos is the issuer, we have a very close relationship and we can make certain decisions that we think need to be made for the stablecoin from a regulatory side, functionality side, etc. For example, just the reserve assets that we have to support PYUSD is actually more conservative than even the New York guidance suggests. That's a decision we wanted. We wanted to be very conservative on that side. So having that relationship with Paxos and having sort of a seat at the table, we felt we're more comfortable bringing this into the ecosystem. Is there a world where it can be more than one? Absolutely. But we just think that for us, having that was important, having that seat at the table. And again, I think the ubiquity of the brand and wanting folks to understand that it's not just a stablecoin, but when all of this is finally built out, the global on and off ramps that you're going to have, because, you know, stablecoins have to coexist, right, with the existing payments that we have, the ability to do sort of global on and off ramps and all of that, it's very, very important to us. So we wanted it to be part of that PayPal brand, right, and that people trust and have used for decades. So that was sort of some of the logic behind that. What we did want to own for sure and focus our energy is what we do well. And that's these fantastic sort of user experiences that we have for consumers and for merchants globally. And we're focusing a lot of our— even today, a lot of our efforts are building that out. Right. And we have very talented folks here that are building out some very cool things for e-commerce, for P2P payments, for B2C payments. And that's what we're really focusing on during that time. The other thing that we did want to have major ownership in we did build, build up was the sort of the backend monitoring. You know, again, we're very strong culture of compliance here. So we did a lot of work to make sure that either whether it's buying Bitcoin or ETH or whether it's, you know, the stablecoin, that we had the tools necessary for our compliance teams to be able to do the right monitoring and reporting and risk management and all of that kind of jazz.

And that just means like Chainalysis or Ellipsis or TRM or—

we have a bunch of those that are integrated and have built up a team. And now I would argue they're some of the, you know, the best in the industry right now because we really built this up from scratch. And, you know, and not only the knowledge of what happens on the crypto side, but how do you sort of weave that into what's happening overall, right? So we can look at holistic relationships with folks and holistic sort of money movement, not just the stablecoin side. And I think that again speaks to the power of what we can do because of what we've been doing for the last couple of decades. So we definitely wanted to build that out and we did. Do that with our team as well.

Who do you think of as a bigger competitor, USDC or Tether?

So I'm going to cheat you out of an answer and say I don't think anybody— I don't think we should be talking about competitors at this point in time of where we are in the stablecoin market.

That's a very PR—

Thank you. Thank you. But there's a reason for it. There's a reason for that. And I think it's because Honestly speaking, I think we're such at the early stages of this that if we're talking about taking share away from Tether or someone else, you're having the wrong conversation. This really should be about building. Now, I think that there's going to be always a portion of the population that's going to want to use Tether for a variety of different reasons. And great, they should have that option. And USDC, big fans of those guys. I know a lot of them over there. And I think what they do is fantastic. And there'll be use cases for them. In our case, I think, for the way that I see it is, No one is situated like we are and what we're trying to do here, which is really laser-focused on the payment side. Obviously, there's going to be activity on the crypto side of the house, and we love that. And we love what people are doing in the ecosystem and supporting— want to support developers and building on this is fantastic. But as I said, our focus is how do we unleash the power of this for payments, make it more efficient, less costly for merchants, for consumers, for remitters. When you start off from the base of 400 million users around the world and tens of millions of merchants, and 2.5 decades of knowledge and regulatory structure in place, I think that's just going to lift the stablecoin market. And we're going to look the same way that when we started looking at this, the market was around $4 or $5 billion, I think it was, and now it's over $100 billion. The same way that you and I are having this conversation, and when somebody sees this 3 or 4 years from now, they're going to be like, oh, these guys, it's 10x of what they were talking about, what the market size could be. So that's the way that I, that I view it. And also the other distinguishing thing for us, which I think is going to be a major component in sort of enterprise adoption and adoption by other financial service providers, all this is again our commitment to the regulatory side. Right. We are the only one that has that regulatory sort of overview of, you know, limited purpose trust of Paxos, you know, also BitLance and the token itself or stablecoin itself. That's going to matter. We can say whatever we want, but if you want a traditional incumbent financial service provider or a large enterprise to start using your stablecoin for XYZ, they have a risk management program, they have committees, they're going to look at this, they're going to want to do due diligence. And I can tell you that every conversation I have ever had, I always ask about licensing, regulatory structure of whoever my counterparty is. And I think that's going to matter when companies are really starting to double down and using the technology. Technology, right? So, and I think that again, we're very well positioned in that.

Yeah. Okay. That was a very safe PR answer. Let me ask you—

I appreciate that.

Yeah. Your PR team's gonna be very happy with you. Let me ask it differently. I'm actually not really getting at USDC versus Tether. It's, um, for people who have, uh, people in the US might not realize this, but so you, you, USDC really dominates in the US, but if you go somewhere like LATAM, like it's, or, or, or Africa or, uh, Asia, it's very dominated by Tether. So I'm curious, like, when you think about the global, global development of, of PYUSD, do you get more excited about— if you only had to pick one market, maybe I could phrase it like that— US market, uh, expansion of PYUSD, or like the global market of PYUSD?

No, I, obviously it's the global market of PYUSD. I think it's what's very, very exciting. And I think going to your point of, of, uh, you know, certain markets in LATAM and Tether, it's that's where the ability to have those seamless on-ramp and off-ramps really start to matter, right? And, and that's— so again, when you start getting down the rabbit hole of what this can unleash, and you can start thinking about, you know, I can receive a stablecoin into my whatever wallet, and then I can use, you know, the local PayPal to, to, to do an off-ramp of that, or, or use that for international commerce— that's where I think it becomes exciting. So again, you know, on the US, a lot of wonderful use cases there that I'm excited to see, but obviously on the international side where it's a bit more challenging is where we— those cross-border payments is what becomes very, very, very critical for us. Yeah.

What about B2B versus B2C? What— I don't know if you know this number off the top of your head, but like what roughly percentage of PayPal's business is, uh, B2B versus B2C? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So, so yeah, it's, it's, it's different components because, uh, you know, obviously our bread and butter is, is sort of the, the commerce side of the house, right? So it's consumer to So somebody buying a pair of shoes and we'll process that payment. You can use your PayPal account, which is what we call our branded service, right? So I'm sure you've gone to a website, you want to buy a $200 pair of shoes, you see checkout with PayPal, right? So you go and now you're authenticating to PayPal. Now you're using your PayPal account. That's a big part of our business. That's the branded checkout that I'm using my PayPal account to buy the pair of shoes. There's also the unbranded checkout, which is I don't want to use a PayPal account. I don't even have a PayPal account. I just want to enter my credit card and my debit card. Card, but in the backend who's processing that is also PayPal, right? That merchant has an arrangement with us and we're processing your credit card even though you don't know that we're behind the scenes on that. That's our unbranded checkout. That's really the bulk of what we do is that sort of consumer to business side. There is the P2P component, right? And we also not only have the P2P component that's within PayPal, meaning I can just send you a PayPal payment or I can send you a Venmo payment. Not sure if you know this, but we also have the Zoom remittance business, which is similar to the money transfer companies we were talking about.

Zoom with an X, right?

Not Zoom with a Z. Zoom with an X, not Zoom with a Z, right, exactly. Zoom with an X. That we actually, the BCDC group, now took over in terms of managing that. We took it over at the end of last year because specifically we saw a lot of interesting interaction between cryptocurrency and remittances, cross-border payments. And we thought, hey, there's a lot that we can do here. That is an important business, right? The Zoom remittance business as well. That's outside of PayPal and Venmo. It's sort of a different service that we provide. But that is a major component of what we do too. And that is a pure remittance business there. That is individuals digitally sending a remittance back to friends and family, kind of a MoneyGram, Western Union type of thing. The other interesting components we— people don't realize we also have a B2C business. And that is sometimes businesses need to pay out to individuals. Think maybe a ridesharing app that collects funds and needs to pay its drivers, or, uh, or it could be, you know, some sort of with their consumers that they're issuing some sort of payments back. Um, and that's sort of what we call the hyper wallet, uh, functionality that we have is the ability to do payouts into bank accounts, etc. Very excited about that because, you know, there you're limited to, hey, where are the bank accounts that you can place money into and all of that. If you start doing payouts with the stablecoin, perhaps you can start reaching other types of wallets as well, right? So we see it both on the C2B side, the B2C side, and then obviously on the B2B side, it's about the efficiencies of settlement there. And as I said before, cash management aspects for small businesses, um, we started to do that already and start working with, um, some use cases of just testing out proof of concept for folks of using the stablecoin versus, uh, using a traditional fiat. We made an investment in a company called Mesh not too long ago, and we funded that with PYUSD right on a Friday afternoon, and the transaction was instantaneous. It's fantastic to show, hey, here's, here's an example of not having to send a wire on a Friday, wait till Monday or whatever to close. We'll send it, we close, everything's fantastic, and we did it in a matter of minutes, right? We also included on the P2P side, on the remittance side in Zoom, we now offer folks the ability to fund a remittance with PYUSD. And so normally when you send a remittance, let's go back to the example of $100 I'm sending to my mother in Mexico, uh, I can pay with that with a variety of ways here on my Zoom app. Uh, we now allow you to pay with PYUSD. Now because PYUSD is our stablecoin and there's no sort of processing fee in between from interchange or anything like that, we're able to give it to these folks, uh, for no transaction fee at all. For free. So there's, there's no fee for you to send it. There's still obviously an FX component, but there's no fee. And waiving a fee because you're not funding it with PYUSD, it's a couple of dollars when you're sending $100, a $2 or $3 fee, 3% of the transaction. Right. And that's showing folks that, well, again, here's the efficiencies of it. We take all of this out and you have less costs, you have less losses because, you know, you're not using a chargeback on a stablecoin. It's sort of good funds that we're using. We are able to process this, not charge you anything, and your family member on the other side is getting more bang for their buck, right? It's getting more for the same $100 that you send. You know, now they're getting more because there's no fees that are being taken out of it. So that's what we're trying to do as well, is making sure that in all those different elements, we start showing folks here, here's the value of sort of the PYSD, whether it's funding instrument. And right now, the individual same as checkout with crypto, when you— the concept of Checkout with Crypto was to, as I said before, optionality and choice in the sense of I want to look at the consumer and say, you pay the way you want to pay. And I want to look at the merchant and say, we'll settle with you the way that you want to. In the beginning, it was very clear to us that the merchants did not want to receive cryptocurrency. So the Checkout with Crypto product, much like now the PYUSD, actually gets converted to fiat in one fell swoop of a seamless transaction instantaneously. And the merchant is completely unaware of the fact that you paid with Bitcoin to buy the $200 pair of shoes. It's converted and all of that. What becomes interesting now, and is now conversations of folks are, well, wait a minute, what if I do want to receive the digital currency directly? And that's what I think the stablecoin permits more than any other, because when you reduce the volatility and all of that issue, now you're starting to have conversations saying, oh, perhaps not only is the payment funded in a stablecoin, but can it be settled in a stablecoin? Coin. Again, less cost, perhaps there's a lower take rate on something of those transactions, and there's ability to provide some value back to consumers. So again, the possibilities in all of this are very, very interesting. Yeah.

Thinking about the two different use cases for USDC versus Tether, um, so, so USDC, like, I use USDC for— you mentioned the Mesh, like, PayPal Ventures funded Mesh with PYUSD. Like, I do the same with USDC, which is I fund like most angel investments at some point in the last couple of years, it moved from like funding via wire to funding via USD. And Blockworks accepts stablecoins for a lot of our like merchant— I call like B2B merchant-to-merchant payments. Tether is different though. Tether has a lot of— like a lot of the big trading— a lot of the big trading firms use Tether as like the pair, basically. Have you thought about like, is that something that you guys want to get into, is having, you know, people are trading on Quobi and OKX and Coinbase and Kraken, and it's like they're trading BT— it's not BTC Tether, it's BTC PYUSD. Is that a thing you want to— guys, you want to—

yeah, no, absolutely. That's when I said, that's when I said, you know, what's happening in the ecosystem and all of that, and we really want to support. There are already certain platforms, by the way, you see three— either PYUSD to fiat, you see PYUSD to another stablecoin, but in some you already see PYUSD to at least Bitcoin Bitcoin and ETH, right, as trading pairs. And certainly, you know, I want to be clear, I'm focusing a lot of what I'm saying on the payment side. It was very important for us, uh, to build this for everybody, right? And we want that community to, to use and support and for trading activity and all of that. We think there's a lot of value in that. Our focus is on building this, and we want sort of the ecosystem to start developing that. But we do have a team of folks that we work with and constantly having conversations and seeing what are the opportunities in there. That's why you already see liquidity pools that are up there and the newer ones on Solana and all of that. And we really want to participate in that and help that grow. We really want to be a good player for the entire industry, right? It's just that when we talk about what we're controlling and what we're building, it's more on that payment side. But very, very encouraged about what we're seeing there. And again, the reception was pretty cool when we launched on Solana. I think there was sort of a— people may have thought, are these guys a one-trick pony? Like, they're going to— they launched on Ethereum. That's sort of the easiest entry point, the obvious— you want with the ubiquitous one, but now saying, hey guys, now we've brought in a second chain and these are the reasons why, and this is the reasons why we chose Solana. I think people now are starting to again understand, hey, these, these guys are in it for the long haul, right? And, and the fact that we pick open permissionless sort of protocols, it's because we want to really benefit from this incredible developer community and people, all the incredible things that people are doing. Um, when you asked earlier about what did we need to own and not own, I'm most excited about just what people are going to build on what we're doing and the use cases that we're going to see. And again, people were very excited with Solana, especially with the whole token extension thing. I don't know if you read that.

Yeah.

So, you know, it's, it's, it's great that that aspect and that part of the community is going to continue to grow. We're going to do whatever we can to support that. But yeah, our focus is obviously on this side.

This might be more of a question for, for Edwin. Who's, uh, for people who don't know, he's the chief architect or CTO.

He is our extremely talented CTO, Edwin Aoki.

So I don't know if this is more— it's probably more of a question for him, but maybe I don't know if you have insight into it. Why did you guys choose— so, so you guys built on the ETH, like, L1 main chain, and then you were looking for other— I read the press release of the announcement. It was like you needed a reliable protocol, lower gas fees, and, uh, higher transaction speed, I think, were the three characteristics. Why did you choose Solana over maybe one of the other L1s, like an Aptos or something like that? And why did you choose it over some of the L2s, like Optimism or Arbitrum? I don't know if you have insight into that.

Yeah, no, of course. I'll say this. One of the wonderful benefits of working for a company like PayPal is you get to speak to everybody, right? Everybody's going to answer your phone call and is willing to have a conversation. So I consider one of the— and I mean this sincerely— one of the great benefits of what I've been doing the last 5 years is is getting to meet all these people that are building this incredible stuff and understanding what they're doing. So we're big fans of what a lot of folks are doing on both the Layer 1 and Layer 2 side. And we looked at a wide variety of them, right? And we had wonderful choices, right? I don't think there was a bad choice in the bunch that we had narrowed it down to. And again, you mentioned Aptos, and we're investors in Aptos, and it's very close to a bunch of folks on what they're doing. But we felt at the end that you know, the next one needed to be, you know, Solana for a variety of reasons. I think they had done a good job of becoming sort of important in that stablecoin side. If you look at sort of their volume and what they had been doing, I think it was very, very important on that side. The fact that we were able to, again, with the token extensions, looking at it from a payment standpoint, which obviously speed, costs, and all of that is important, but also this concept of like, you know, private, confidential, essentially maintaining the privacy and confidentiality of the amount of the transaction, which is going to be important for some of our merchants, etc. They seem to have taken strong steps towards solving that sort of payments side of the house, right? And some of the things that they were looking at. And we worked very closely with that team and we're just impressed with what they were doing. But again, we could have gone in other directions, but very strong team. They're very impressed with what they were doing. We had a seat at the table of talking to them what our needs were going to be. And I think it's worked out, you know, very, very well. You know, we always intended to be multi-chain. It's just we didn't know what the sequence was going to be. And I don't know how many, you know, chains at the end. You know, I don't foresee us being in dozens and dozens and dozens. I think it's a handful. But it depends on what you're optimizing for. In this particular case, you know, they had been tested for some time. They've been in the market, focus on payments, some of the cool things that they were building, and just, you know, big fans of of their team itself and what they were enjoying is why we went down that route. I'm sure Edwin has a much more eloquent and complex answer to it, but, but from my perspective, it was that.

Yeah. How do you think about the— so it's tough to talk about crypto today without talking about the political climate. I don't know if you can, you can touch on this, but like, how does the current political climate impact product decisions that you guys make and how you think about PYUSD?

Very— it really does obviously impact, you know, anything that you're trying to do globally. Again, we're a global company, so we always— when you say political, not just US, thinking all over the world. Part of my responsibility is I work very, very closely with our reg relations team and our government relations team and sort of try to assess what we should be doing where. And, you know, you do have despite being a giant company like PayPal, you have a limited amount of resources like everybody does, right? And want to make sure you deploy them the right way. The lack of certainty is certainly a deterrent for us sometimes in picking which market or which product or what we're going to do, because, you know, these things are not necessarily easy to do. It's not flipping a switch, right? You— it's— and the reason I say that, and for people to say, well, it's— why is this so complex? Remember that we've built this all within the PayPal house. It was very important for us just to not be something outside of it and be, like we say, a speedboat. It needed to be part of the main carrier, right? So all of this that we do touches all of the aspects of what exists already within the PayPal ecosystem, the PayPal Wallet, the PayPal platform. So there's significant decisions that we're making in terms of products to prioritize or markets. When there's a lack of clarity, um, you know, you start getting a little bit shy about investing too much if you think it's going to— you know, you try to read the tea leaves of where it's going, but The lack of clarity can really disrupt what you're trying to do if all of a sudden there's a massive shift in sort of the mindset or a new set of obligations that come in that you didn't contemplate, and then you kind of turn things on its head. And we are trying to, as much as possible, obviously considering local requirements, we're trying to have a universal experience for everybody, right? We want to be able to— I don't want to do one-offs at every market, and it has to be a completely different look and feel, different this and that. We want to try to make this as uniform as possible. So when there's a lack of clarity, it does become a risk of you investing in XYZ, right? And when we look at markets that we've expanded in, you know, we've expanded the buy, hold, sell market to the UK and to Europe through Luxembourg, setting ourselves up there for, for obviously, you know, the future. But that's the only international expansion we've done so far. And that's of the buy, hold, sell product, the PYOSD is obviously global in nature because it's open and permissionless. But from a PayPal perspective, you can only interact with it in your PayPal and Venmo wallet in the US. But we obviously monitor, and we have a very talented government relations team. They monitor what's happening around the world. We, as I said earlier about, you know, one of the benefits of working for PayPal is everybody's willing to speak to you. That's also true on the regulatory and government side, right? I think we have a very good reputation for 2 and a half decades of being good, you know, good players in the space, the adults, uh, in terms of, you know, responsible innovation, etc. So we get invited a lot to speak, um, and hopefully help shape some of what this looks like, right, domestically and internationally. But no, certainly that is, uh, you know, one of the top considerations for us in anything that we decide to do and prioritize. Absolutely.

The— a lot of the big stablecoins, whether it's like GUSD back in the day with Gemini or BUSD with Binance or Tether with Bitfinex or USDC with their Coinbase relationship. They've had these big exchange relationships.

Yeah.

Um, and they've almost kind of planted their flag with one exchange and then obviously they expand to all the exchanges. Do you guys like, is that, is that on the roadmap to have some sort of strategic partnership with an exchange?

Never say never. I, we don't currently have a plan to do that. We are sort of, when you say it's tied to, you know, the stablecoin tied to Gemini, Well, the stablecoin side to PayPal, right? Uh, and we're more than an exchange, right? But, uh, but no, I mean, obviously, um, you know, you never know where the markets are going to go and opportunities that are going to come up. But right now our focus is tying this to PayPal and all the things that PayPal can offer, right? Um, and I think when you start looking at that, not only the ability to trade, but when you start looking again commerce side and all the other things that we power, we support, um, You know, that's, that's the main focus now. But no, I could see that in the future, uh, you know, opportunities. This market shifts so quickly, you know. If we had this conversation 2 years ago— and again, invite me back 2 years from now and we'll have another conversation and see how much of what I said is nonsense by comparison— but it's just, it all changes so quickly that, um, that's actually the exciting part of this, right? It's not black and white, it's not binary. It's, uh, it's, it's— there's a lot of opportunities here. For collaboration. And as I said, when you start talking about interoperability and all of that, it's exciting because I think that's, um, that's what's going to keep this market going, right? That's what's going to keep this ecosystem going is the fact of when you start talking about that, that, um, the interoperability and sort of the openness of this, uh, the possibilities become, you know, great, right, of what you can do.

Yeah, maybe as we think about wrapping this up, we can, um, I'd love to just get your almost like the most optimistic endgame for PYUSD? And I'm not talking like 2 years from now, like what basically, what does the world look like in, let's call it 10, 15, 20 years? If you guys are— maybe we can limit it to 5 or 10 years. I mean, the world in 20 years, man, I don't even want to—

I was going to say, yeah.

Uh, but yeah, 5 to 10 years, like if you guys are wildly successful at executing every single thing that you want to execute, what does, uh, how is the world different, um, with PYUSD?

That directly and indirectly, and I'll explain what that means, money movement is benefiting from this stablecoin rail that we have now provided to the globe. And what I mean by that directly is I do think success looks like individuals being able to use a stablecoin for payments and having that optionality and having that choice. And it's going to coexist, you know, in 5, 10 years. Do I think, oh, this is going to replace cash or credit cards or what? No, it's going to coexist with that, but that is a meaningful coexistence in terms of having optionality and choice for people that they understand how to use this. And what I mean by that is success also looks like abstracting away the complexities of all of this, right? Most people— I always use the same analogy— most people can't tell you how an email works, but my 86-year-old dad knows how to send an email. Right, and it can do that. We need the same thing here. He doesn't need to understand how crypto or stablecoins work, but he needs to have a very easy way of being able to plug in some information and all of a sudden the stablecoin goes to the other side. So if you're able to abstract all of that away, I think having meaningful, um, usage by individuals in front ends is success. But for me, the bigger one is everything else that we've been talking about before, is whether or not it's you and I that are using the stablecoin but our financial institutions, other service providers, other enterprises on the backend, just reaching more efficiency and passing that efficiency along to the individuals. It's, you know, one of my— again, coming from remittances, you know, being poor, it costs a lot of money. And those are the folks— it's expensive to be poor. The people that pay the highest sort of fees for things are usually the individuals who are not in position to pay those fees. So I would love to see, because of that change in the infrastructure, because of the change on the backend, that fees can come down and it becomes more efficient for folks and they can receive their payments quicker and they don't have to pay exorbitant fees and they don't have to wait in line for 2 or 3 hours for things to occur. That for me is success here, right? And that you can buy a pair of shoes with PYUSD at a merchant and it becomes an efficient way of paying. We've unlocked international commerce. The P2P side, individuals are receiving money quicker, and there's just a general sort of usage of this to bring efficiencies that ultimately, ultimately benefit the end user. That's how I would define where we want to be in the next 5 years.

Nice. Paul, anything we didn't touch on that you wanted to touch on? Anything that we missed?

No, I just, uh, I have to say again, first podcast, so this is fantastic. Thank you for taking it easy on me.

Not too shabby for the first one.

I appreciate it. I just like to say You know, again, PayPal's in this, right? This is not a hobby for us. We have a very, very dedicated group of folks who really believe in the things that we've been building. It's been wonderful to see that grow and to be finally out and launched in the things that we're doing. We're very excited. And again, we feed off of what people want. I know it sounds like a cliché, but we really do that. We're constantly doing research and speaking to people. So we encourage folks to reach out to us and tell us, what do you need? What do you want? Want, right? We're not building this out of ego. We're not building this out of, uh, you know, just for, for our own entertainment. We want to really solve real-world problems and, and sort of fill in those gaps that we think we're uniquely positioned to do, right? And whether that's on-ramps and off-ramps, as I said, whether it's, you know, the concept of, you know, just, uh, a payment being part of a transaction and how we fit this all into a transaction, all of that stuff. So we really want, um, folks to reach out to us and let us know what they need. Because that's going to encourage us to keep building and keep putting good stuff out there.

Cool. Well, Paul, appreciate it.

Excellent, man. I appreciate it.

Hey everyone, big thanks for watching today's episode. Wanted to just quickly remind you about the Stellar Development Foundation's 6th Annual Meridian Conference this October 15th through 17th in London. This is an incredible opportunity to network with the forward thinkers who are defining the future. Of this space. Head over to meridian.stellar.org and use the code BLOCKWORKSPOD for early bird pricing.