Connecting the Consumer to Cryptocurrency with Paul Puey

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Welcome to the Tacos and Tech podcast where we discover cutting edge San Diego technologies and the builders making it happen. I'm your host, Neil Blum, San Diego's tech ambassador, and together you're going to put a face to the name of today's tech leaders with our own blend of local lifestyle.

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And welcome back to the Tacos and Tech Podcast. I am here with longtime Downtown San Diegan co founder and CEO of edge, Paul Pui. Paul, thanks for being on the show.

Hey, thanks for having me, Neil. Pleasure to be on definitely a popular show covering a lot of the tech scene here in San Diego and happy to be a part of it.

Yeah, no, I miss seeing you on your electric skateboard throughout downtown.

Oh, I know that's right. I miss actually being able to commute that way. Kind of the commute to and from the bedroom and the office is just not doing it for me. I actually really miss getting outside and seeing people.

Yeah. Oh, I hear ya for sure. Well, it's good to be with you. Now, do you want to give us a quick overview of what Edge is?

Yeah. So Edge was founded in 2014, originally as AirBitz and our focus was, definitely was, and still today is in cryptocurrency Bitcoin. We had started off with just a simple bitcoin wallet with a focus on key management. We could talk about that later. But basically allowing people to hold their own funds, which is the core fundamental benefit of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, that you can hold and transact your own funds with no counterparty. So airbits allow people to hold their own funds while simplifying the key management to make it feel like a standard kind of cloud based application. And we carry that over into edge. In 2018, we'd pivoted and focused instead of using crypto as a payment mechanism, allowing people to buy, sell and trade multiple different cryptocurrency assets while still controlling their own funds, much in contrast to a lot of the big exchanges in the cryptocurrency world, where they fully hold the funds that people trade with. So pivot into being a mobile Exchange wallet in 2018 and then also rebranded as Edge. Kind of built the tech stack almost from scratch, but relaunched successfully and we've been cranking since then.

Awesome. All right, well, we're going to dive deep into that and talk about kind of your backstory into crypto. We'll get into that. But I think what I know is you grew up in the Bay Area. Is that true?

Yeah, I grew up in the Bay Area since I was about five years old, surrounded by Silicon Valley, you know, the San Francisco scene, went to school in Berkeley, and admittedly not realizing how much of a tech epicenter it was, when you just kind of grow up in it, you just think, oh, this is where I grew up. But then obviously, having worked in tech and been there for, for some time before San Diego, you realize, yeah, there's definitely quite a bit of a concentration there of the tech scene. At least, at least until now, which seems like the tech scene is starting to spread out into places, including San Diego.

Yeah. Were you studying, like engineering at Berkeley or what were you focused on?

Yeah, I've been a computer science dork since I was a kid. I wrote my own database when I was in seventh, sixth or seventh grade to create mail outs that real estate agents would send out. You probably get junk mail, you know, with like, hey, you want to sell your house? Hey, there's some listings for sale. Well, me as a seventh grader, that was part of that, was my job was to create those mail outs and data, enter these addresses from my dad and all of his co workers in a real estate agent agency and then mail them all out. So wrote a database back then. I wrote a game in college. I really had a great time with, you know, doing 3D graphics and from there went to Nvidia. And that was kind of my primary job back when I was in Silicon Valley, was at Nvidia. I love 3D. I love the complexity and magic behind it. I think there's a lot of different computer science fields, you know, AI, drone technology. And for me, graphics was the hard problem that, that fascinated me the most. A lot of the complex math that went underneath the covers. As a game player, you don't know how things go on screen and. And then when you learn how it, how it does work under the covers, it feels like a magician just opened up his hat and showed you the tricks. So yeah, I worked at Nvidia for about seven years before transitioning over to San Diego.

Little did we know back then that Nvidia would be part of mining Ethereum.

It's weird that my two worlds completely didn't collide in the sense that I'd worked at Nvidia and I loved graphics, then went through a completely different career world for almost a decade and then went back into tech in crypto in a field that was very relevant to what I did in graphics. But disjunct time wise from each other.

How'd you make the leap over to San Diego and into a new industry? Because I don't think Nvidia has a presence in San Diego, does it?

Other than one person that I was working with in Silicon Valley who had moved to San Diego in the middle of me working with him, just solo, not as an office. I still remember him and his name. Other than that, Nvidia didn't really have any connections. Obviously one of its main competitors at the time when it was trying to go into mobile was Qualcomm. So it had more competition than it had an office over here in San Diego. But what brought me here was I went to school with a lot of people in Berkeley that actually were from San Diego. And I guess you could say love brought me over here as well. The fiance at the time who went to school in the Bay Area had moved back to San Diego where her family is. And I'd been in the Bay Area almost all my life since I was five. And I definitely could use a change at the time. I was like, I could use a change and just experience a different part of the world. Although it's not that Far, it's still California. It was easy to still head back to family. It was easy to still hit up Silicon Valley where I still had some contacts, yet to experience a different culture, different lifestyle. And I think that San Diego does bring what I call a better balance of kind of the work and the play. And so I really have enjoyed it here since moving.

So you embarked on a few things. You embarked on a city change, but also sounds like an entrepreneurial journey. Is that true at that time? Did you start something as you got here?

I actually started something before I left the Bay Area. So before I left Silicon Valley, I lived in San Francisco, but not in tech. I actually went into small business and I carried that over when I moved into San Diego and I worked in small business as well over here. And it wasn't until I discovered bitcoin, I didn't think I would go back into technology. In all honesty, it wasn't until I discovered Bitcoin in 2013 that the technology world and the interest in it was reinvigorated. And I was like, oh my God, I really want to work in this space, specifically crypto. And decided to pivot and pivot the career back into technology all over again. And for the first time as a founder. So I'd worked in technology, but never as a founder. I'd founded some small businesses, but this is my first kind of entry into the startup world.

Oh, got it. Well, share what kind of small businesses? I'm curious to know what you've dabbled in.

Yeah, people have said I've done a pretty full circle. Immediately after working in tech in San Francisco, I went into restaurant, bar and nightclub scene. So I'd done everything from via bar back to owning and co running a restaurant to kind of dealing with bouncers and hiring and firing bouncers to work the nightclub part of the restaurant. And so it was a very, very different lifestyle. I always loved cooking, and so I'd even gone into culinary school for a few months before then. And I thought that was my future and I probably would have stuck with it other than the. The transition to San Diego also brought about an interest in kind of the. The healthier side of living. Obviously, working in the restaurant, bar. Nightclub scene is not the healthiest career. It's a lot of fun. I think a lot of people have a great time doing it. You meet a lot of cool people, great discounts at other restaurants in the area, but it's not the healthiest environment. I'd gotten into rock climbing at the same time. And so when I transitioned to San Diego. I found that there was a lot of great areas to climb in, a great gym getting built at the time I had moved, and a lot of people I met were great people to have as partners. And so that was kind of a transition. Still in the small business, I ended up working at a gym here in San Diego. Helped them build out from the first gym and build out their programs, instructional programs, as well as. As soon as you're a tech guy, you're always a tech guy, even if that's not your job. You're, you know, the person that helps out with whatever technology that company is needing. And so I helped with, like, the database management, some of the apps that were put together to help stream, streamline operations, things like that, but not as a software developer.

Got it. Okay, so when was the epiphany moment? When did lightning strike and show you Bitcoin?

Or.

Or are you Satoshi?

Oh, God, I would say I'd wish I was Satoshi, but if he's not alive, then I'm glad I'm not Satoshi. But no, actually, I think I fit in in a good spot. I'm definitely not Satoshi. I'm glad I'm not Satoshi. I don't want to know who Satoshi is. In all honesty, I kind of like the mystique of this unknown founder and developer of Bitcoin. But 2013 is when lightning struck for me. I discovered bitcoin through a financial blogger who I was just following regarding what stocks he holds and trades. And one day he just said, I'm putting 5% of my portfolio into bitcoin. And that's it. It was like one sentence at the bottom of his blog. It's all he said. And I was like, well, what is bitcoin? I went to my E Trade account, couldn't find it, had to start googling, went down. What everyone calls as the rabbit hole. I turned into. Gosh, I hope some of my former coworkers don't hear this, but turned easily the worst employee at my job when I was working at the gym, because for about a few weeks I would just be listening to podcasts all day and reading articles about bitcoin. Probably not focusing on the job as much as I should have been, but at that point, I was very fascinated that this is one of the most disruptive, not longest standing technologies that we're going to see really shift our world. You know, I'd seen technology change a lot since I Left it in 2005 to now 2013. 2005, the mobile industry wasn't around. Internet was just kind of barely starting to take take hold. Facebook didn't even exist at the time that I left. Technology that seems almost impossible to think of. Like social media didn't exist. So I saw the technology world change, but none of it interested me from the viewpoint of, yeah, I feel like I want to be a part of that. Until bitcoin came around, I said, okay, this I definitely want to be a part of. This is much like you hear the Internet, decentralized information. Bitcoin was going to decentralize and give broader access to money and payment networks and financial services. And I wanted to be a part of it. So that was 2013.

I mean, it sounds like if you were already following someone who in 2013 was making that big of a bet, you were already, you have that early adopter mindset and you look, or at least you look for early adopters to follow.

Right.

Because that's quite a leading edge thing to believe in.

In 2013, 2013, when I got into it, I think it was relative. Today it's always relative, right? Like relative today. Yeah, that's so bleeding edge relative to where I saw other people in the space where they had already been it from the days when you could mine on a laptop and actually be profitable. From the days when there were no mobile wallets, from the days when there were no exchanges and the only way to acquire it was to either mine it or play a game of poker with your bitcoin friends and actually earn some from them or win some from them. Those are what I feel like are the OG early adopters. Well, I noticed one thing. Around 2018, people started calling me an OG, like, oh, Paul, you're one of the OG Bitcoiners. I think it's by virtue of having seen two boom and bust cycles of crypto, which maybe many of your listeners aren't aware of. But yeah, this thing goes in cycles. And when you've experienced two gut wrenching crashes and are still around, you graduate to becoming what they call an og.

Yeah, for sure. When did the first San Diego bitcoin meetup come together or the community start to coalesce?

So actually, before I discovered bitcoin, so I discovered bitcoin, I was already in the meetup scene for climbing. I love climbing and meetup was a great way to find climbing partners. And there I looked for bitcoin. There was already a group that was founded by a few people and I think they'd already had a handful of Meetups. So this was summer of 2013. I think a few meetups had already been occurring since like March, February or March of that year. But I got involved, I got to know the organizers and started hosting my own meetups with the same group. The same group hosting a few meetups of my own. Really focused on education, showing people how to use wallets, how to use exchanges, how to do key management. At the same time, really thinking about what I wanted to do in the space, what product I wanted to build, and hunting around for co founders and other people to work with me. And by the beginning of 2014, September of 2013, I discovered Bitcoin around May of 2013, April, May, June, around that time frame. But by about October, I was pretty determined that I wanted to exit what I was currently doing and then go into crypto full time. And so that's when I was. I was writing a white paper on the architecture for what would become airbit. So I was kind of networking, finding investors, finding co founders and finding other folks to help build the company with. Awesome.

So how did it all come together? Who ended up joining in and starting airbits with you?

Got it, got it. So original founders, William Swanson, he's still with us to this day. Scott Morgan, who's now with the nanome team, he came on as an early investor and did a little bit of HR and biz dev for us as kind of operations work with us. Damon Cutillo and Tim Horton were two other co founders. They're not active on day to day anymore, but we still communicate and they still help us out with here and there tasks. They actually came out of another project called Breadcrumbs, which was a startup accelerated through, gosh, I'm trying to remember now, the downtown Evo Nexus. Yeah, exactly. They came through EVO Nexus. And I had met through one of the Startup Weekend events and I had bumped into them. All of my co founders, I'd bumped in through, into, through the bitcoin ecosystem, through one of the meetups or at a conference. Probably one of those two. Scott I met at a conference and the meetups. William and Damon, I met through bitcoin meetups in San Diego as well. And they were all local.

Okay, we must have met. Not until 2016, you and I, when you started hosting the hardcore Bitcoin meetups at AirBitz. Does that sound right?

16 or 17 maybe possibly as early as 15. In 15, we'd moved to downtown. We were in north park. Originally went to the Bay Area at the very beginning of 2015 to do an accelerator. Plug and Play. Yeah, we actually entered a pitch competition for plug and play in San Diego, won a spot and then moved to the Bear for just two months and then came back to San Diego in North park, transitioned over into downtown. That's when we started hosting the meetups in our office. So that might as early as 2015 we might have met, but likely 2016 when things really started to ramp up. And then 2017, we were hosting meetups every month in the office and exceeding like 100 people in the last bull run when everyone's coming out and wanting to learn about bitcoin.

Those were packed nights, hot and sweaty inside the airbeds office.

We would turn on the AC at around noon in preparation for the meetup and just crank it full blast where everyone in the office freezing. But by like 6:37 o', clock, it was starting to get hot and sweaty inside of the office because yeah, people were packing the house.

So cool how many people you had students, like presenting white papers, you know, had all these projects just kind of like showing up and you know, kind of showing off for the first time.

Which. Which was really cool. No, it was really exciting.

And those continued on, I would imagine. You know, are they still happening during.

COVID During COVID less. So we obviously don't have the physical in person events. Right before COVID we did have a meetup. We stopped hosting them in our office in downtown only because we started building out and filling up with more desks and it just wasn't as conducive for larger meetups. One of our staff members at the time did fork off and have a blockchain developers meetup which had smaller attendance, like 10 to 12 people, which we still hosted, but we were actually partnering with union cowork in downtown and we were hosting meetups at their location for some time. One of the challenges was just us finding time to get speakers and organize the event. So we weren't as consistent in 2018, 2019, 2020 as we were in 2017. Admittedly, 2017 was the pivot year for Edge where we were airbits, but we went heads down to rebuild Edge. So it was a new product build. It's almost like the company started over from scratch. As you probably have experienced, it's different to be building a product than launching one. Once you've launched one, you're now both building and maintaining. And you know, the company grew a little bit, became a lot busier, just became harder for us to organize the meetups. But Chris Goshong who's one of the, he's the main organizer of the meetup. I'm actually going to meet up with him a little later today and kind of discuss like hey, how can we kind of keep the meetup going through Covid and then also how do we expect to do events as we hopefully transition into back. Back into normalcy and be able to do more physical in person events.

Awesome. Tell DJ DJ Kinkle we say hello.

That's right. Yeah, we'll definitely do Neil.

Yep, that's great. Well I'm glad you're, you're keeping that alive and going but you I would imag your guys company has completely grown obviously as prominence has grown and people have different needs obviously Airbit is being so tied to bitcoin and then realizing wait, we could be servicing so much more. Right. Which is kind of the impetus for going off into edge. Take us through kind of that journey, especially as the bull and bears kind of went up and down. What did that do to your product?

So timing historically for Airbit has admittedly with respect to this market cycle has been poor. We've had to build and deploy in mostly bear markets. So if you look at the timing of bitcoin, Bitcoin has about a three to four year cycle in the sense that the issuance of bitcoin changes every four years, about three and a half to four years. However, much gets issued out into the network as kind of its inflation schedule gets cut in half every four years. That usually triggers another bull market. So as you know, in economy, just economics, supply and demand, if you have less supply and the same demand, prices go up. So every four years the supply gets cut in half and so therefore the demand causes the price to go up. That first happened in 2013 is when I learned about Bitcoin. Founded Airbit in 2014, launched it at the end of 2014 as the market was tanking, like tanking through 2014, really hitting a bottom the middle of 2015 before starting to recover in 2016. So we had launched our first product Airbitz right into the bear market. And admittedly that was really tough. We grew, but not to the speed that we would have liked to grow relative to the product, what we felt was a pretty good market fit. So it was a very slow growth over the course of 2015, 2016, come 2017 and actually end of 2016, 2017, the crypto industry had really ballooned into many different projects. And that's where the prevalence of what people call altcoins and ethereum and other assets than bitcoin really became very popular. So middle to end of 2016 is when we started the pivot to go into Edge as well. Arbitrage was like I'd mentioned, is focused on payments merchant adoption and that just didn't really take off. The trend for people is when you have an asset that's growing in value, it's not the one that you want to spend, it's the one you want to hold. So when you want to use as an investment and then you spend your more liquid depreciating assets such as dollars. So spending of crypto and bitcoin ended up not being a good use case, hence part of the pivot. We're realizing a lot of people are simply using crypto as for now an asset to invest in. So allowing people to buy, sell and trade through our app became the focus of Edge, which we launched in 2018, going right into the next bear market. So 2017 was the big bull run, but we were building, we were heads down building and kind of missed out on that bull run. We got more users, but into our old app that didn't quite have the fit of what they needed. We saw the user base skyrocket, but temporarily and it wasn't really a fit for the time. Launched Edge in 2018 as the market was once again tanking and we were still able to grow through that. So our growth has been steady through 2018, steady through 2019. There hasn't been a single quarter where we haven't grown our exchange volume. And then 2020 was definitely a marked year for us where we grew very noticeably quarter after quarter, ending the year on great all time highs. And starting the first quarter of 2021, just the first few weeks, first month of the year is almost equivalent to like a quarter of last year. Yeah, so our growth is. We've been about 3 to 5x growth a year and it's looking like about a 10 to 20x for 2021 is going to be very, very, very feasible.

And do you find that's tied to price of bitcoin and then the following in of a whole new group of people that come in and you're making money not necessarily off the price, but off of brand new accounts and new users and everything like that?

Yeah, we make money off people trading inside of the app. So when the people want to acquire bitcoin, they get in for the first time and they buy it in their app. There's money to be made there when they trade it between different assets. Bitcoin to Ethereum or to a stablecoin, we make money there. So yeah, basically it's a mobile self custody exchange, buy, sell and trade. But after a trade is complete you have the funds inside your own keys. So that is how we're making money. And so our primary metric is exchange volume and it's been consistently growing. And so while we've been around as a company for a while, as Edge, which we find is a better product market fit, we're a much younger company in that regard, only having launched in 2018, but things have been going pretty well since then.

And actually something we talked about earlier around the early adopter mentality, there's kind of this crossing the chasm sphere of going from early. Do you know that phrase at all? The crossing the chasm from early adopter into majority. Right?

Mainstream.

Yeah, the mainstream. And you're kind of. You have bellwether on that, right? You can tell volumes. And that piece, where are we in bitcoin? Are we still super early adopter to the world?

We're still, I won't call it like the super early adopter. Everyone tries to make the analogy of what year are you relative, say the Internet, like you know, are you 1995 Internet or whatnot? And in many ways from the viewpoint of media, like how media covers bitcoin, it's getting pretty widely covered across the media and major people, like heck, the richest man in the world, Elon Musk even is talking about bitcoin. So I feel like there's widespread knowledge of it in contrast to say early 90s when there wasn't widespread knowledge of the Internet. And I remember I just started college just to kind of show my age here, like in the early 90s and before then not many people talked about the Internet. They talked about aol, they talked about calling into a dial up service which had a sandbox kind of wall gardened online experience. But they weren't talking about the full Internet connectivity of the Internet. However, while they weren't talking about it, if you went to any reputable four year institution, college, university, they were widely interconnected with Internet. Everybody had an email account with their, with their campus. They used it for classes and it was what you would call actually needed. It was actually used. It was used for that purpose, not just experiment and tinker with. Obviously there was no money to really be made with. You don't hold the coin of the Internet, right? So the Internet didn't have a coin that you could hold, only it had companies building on it. But early 90s it was already being used even though there was little money to be made on it. And so that's kind of a weird dichotomy to cryptocurrency, where it's not widely used by the layman for its purpose of sending and receiving value. Right. The layman doesn't use it. These a lot of colleges, while they're equipped to be able to mine and promote crypto within campus, maybe even use it for payments inside of schools, they don't. So its usage adoption is very minimal in comparison to the Internet. But it's recognition, I feel like, exceeds the early 90s Internet. It's probably like mid to late 90s Internet is where crypto is from. A mindset, recognizable name, Bitcoin especially. People have heard of it, but we're nowhere close to what you're talking about. We haven't crossed the chasm in no way at all. It's not being used for its potential yet at this point. Not even close.

All right, well that's good for us who've been in it for a while.

Yeah, we still got a lot more room for growth. And for those who aren't in it yet, there's still a lot more room for growth. So it's not too late to get in for sure.

So you talked about Edge potentially having a pretty huge year 10 to 20x. What is that going to be based on? Is it just new adoptions, rates, or what is, you know, like, tell me what the next one to two years look like for Edge.

Got it. So a few things as far as where do we base that on? Well, it's also based on timing of our own industry. So we're sitting on top of a very volatile foundation as far as cryptocurrency. And I think one of the challenges of funding or founding a company in the cryptocurrency space is that you're founding a company on a super volatile foundation of crypto and your market might suddenly 10 or 20x in a few months, just based on the cycles of crypto. When we go into a bull market, it bull markets hard and when it crashes, it crashes hard. Never as low as it was prior to the bull market, but still hard enough where you have to manage resources pretty wisely. Like you've got to ramp up quickly and hire people to be able to handle the incoming bull run and not trip over yourself and lose users because you can't handle that influx. But then you also have to handle the down ramp where suddenly you don't have as many users all of a sudden. So what I'm basing our expectations of are yes, a definitely the industry and we are entering this new bull run market where we've broken all time highs from three years ago and a lot more institutional investors are coming in as well. As I'm basing on just our past performance, the fact that here's what we've been able to do and grow consistently in the bear markets so guarantee we've been able to grow this much in the bear markets 3-5x a year and now with the bull market and how that bull market looked when we were airbit, even as airbitz when we didn't even have a good product market fit and how much the user base ramped up quickly in 2017 without us doing any marketing. We were heads down completely building edge. But that app was out there taking that and Transcribing that into 2021 is where we're expecting that 10 to 20 if not exceeding 20 for a brief period of time growth throughout the year. It's going to be widely seen by a good chunk of the crypto space. We're hoping to capitalize it on more than, more than the average by providing, I think the things that people are looking for right now, the buy, sell and trade. With a strong focus now on more autonomy and privacy, there has been a bit of a lash back and especially now with the advent of events like the WhatsApp, privacy permissions and people lashing back at Facebook and a lot of these centralized services, building that in crypto helps first of all because crypto is kind of catered around privacy and autonomy and controlling your own funds. But then also within the crypto space, building a product that adheres to those principles appeals to a broad swath of this industry, in contrast to the large centralized exchanges that have existed for a number of years.

Ooh, that's exciting a lot for what's to come. I love how as volatile as bitcoin is, it's your industry and you have to build a company on it and you're so calm and collected about it. Obviously you have to be right. You have to disconnect yourself from the price. Right. You just can't watch bitcoin price all day while you're coding.

Sure you can. You're not, I mean, you're not doing that, Neil. It's true.

It's on my wall. You know, full time. Nah, exactly.

You know, we've got a little ticker at the office going across the ceiling, but I mean, you do and you don't. So it would be way too short sighted for a founder working in the crypto space to say, I absolutely don't care about price. I put aside, I'm just going to, to build. That would be totally short sighted because if you know anything from history, the price does affect the volume of users, the volume of their transactions within your platform, and you have to prepare for that as well. As a crypto company, maybe this is not true of all crypto companies, but for us, we're also affected by the virtue of, we gain our revenue in crypto, mostly bitcoin. And a lot of times you gain that revenue and if you haven't spent it or you haven't contributed, converted it, then the volatility of the asset will affect you. So we want to keep an eye on that because it's like, okay, well if this is a month where things have totally mooned and we feel like we're hitting a bit of a peak, we should settle off some of our bitcoin. We should be selling some of that off basic treasury management. That's something most startups don't ever have to deal with. They earn in dollars, they keep in dollars. However, startups in other countries may have to, we've been so spoiled as people in the US and that the dollar is the, the global reserve currency. And more importantly, it's a currency that other assets are priced against that we don't have to deal with. Treasury management, you hold dollars, you just use them as a company in crypto. It's almost as if we're a company outside of the US earning in another asset than dollars. And we've paid everybody in our company in bitcoin, so we also pay out in something other than dollars. So in that sense, treasury management does actually matter and it's, it's important. But you'd like to think that you'd be able to focus purely on product. But yes, this thing called price that's sitting on the screen that you kind of watch every so often while you're coding actually does matter. You can't say that it has no bearing on your company. It definitely does.

We've been sitting at some pretty record highs over the last few weeks. Settled down a little bit, but compared to where we were for most of 2020, which was high, single digit, thousands, maybe to the 10,000. Right. And then boom, December, we rock it up to what, 40, I think max 42,000.

Exactly. Like down to the dollar at least on one of the exchanges. I think bitstamp, which is One of the most popular exchanges for price discovery. 42,000. Yep.

And we've been kind of hovering in the low 30s for a few weeks now. And it feels like the bitcoin excitement either in the media has tamped down a little bit, probably more because some crazy stocks have come through. Right, like the Gamestop and other things like that. But bitcoin is still 3x where it was like 6 weeks ago.

Exactly. No, it's huge. I think the thing that people forget about with bitcoin and its bull market runs is it goes through crazy swings on the way to its all time highs. And so to give people listening a little bit of a basis for comparison, the previous bull market of 2016, end of 2016, going into the end of 2017, took Bitcoin from a previous all time high of about 1100 in 2013, broke the all time high in early 2017. Of that, 1100 went all the way up to 19,000 by the end. But during the course of doing that, it had multiple 30% drops. Right? 30 to 40% drops were not uncommon on the way up to its all time high. Now, ironically, I looked up the technical definition of a bear market or a bear cycle, and it was defined by a 20% drop or more like if you've dropped more than 20%, then you're in bear territory. That's nothing in crypto it's like 20%. I mean, it definitely is more now than it was before. Before we had 20% on a daily. Now we have 20% on. You know, every few months we'll hit a really bad 20% drop. So we're sitting at about a 30, 25, 30% drop from all time high of 42,000. But we haven't what I'd call hit anywhere close to what I'd call a bear market. Not only that, but those 30 plus percent drops that happened in 2017, while going from 1100 to 19,000, those drops lasted sometimes as long as two months. Right. We, we would hit some peak at say like 3000 and then slowly drop all the way to 1900 or 1800 before breaking 3000 again. About 10. Two. Some. Yeah, some two and a half months later. So this is really on par to the course. And if you've never been in and been closely tied to a bull run in the crypto markets, it can seem almost as if, oh, it sounds like everything stalled and ended okay, 42,000, I guess. Quiet. All right, we're back into the bear market. But while that is always possible, I can't Guarantee that we're going to hit 1020 x, you know, by the end of the year. It feels unlikely that this is the end of the current bull run and we still have some gains to be had before we enter another quiet cycle for the next three years.

Totally agree. So that's on the price side. What about on building, first of all, in 2017, like so many coins, right? Like, the ICOs were insane. Do you have some advice for new people entering as builders and wanting to build product? And then also tell me through, are you seeing a lot of new builders in San Diego as well?

Got it. So I haven't. I'll answer the last question first. I haven't seen a ton of new builders in San Diego. A few coins kind of originated in San Diego and have branched out. I know Solano is a very fascinating project. We're in close talks with them as well. We've seen a few founders move into, into San Diego from the Bay Area, and so there's some of that. But as far as like a new project that's really starting to gain a foothold in the industry, I haven't seen any yet, but I can't say that I know all of them. I have gotten to a few discussions with people that have mentioned projects that I hadn't heard of that are. That are based in San Diego. So I'm hoping to actually meet some other products that I just haven't learned about. Admitting not having our meetups is a bit of a hindrance because that has definitely brought some projects out of the woodwork that I've gotten to meet and interact with. So I'm hoping to see more with respect to kind of advice on people looking to build and what's been exciting. I'm really, really exciting. Excited about the Defi movement. And so to give your listeners some context, DeFi is short for decentralized finance. And the way I like to think of this is in a way, bitcoin started decentralized finance. It allowed you to hold and send and receive money without a third party party. So that was the decentralized part of it is that there's no central party that your money flows through to hold or transact. That's just the money part. That's kind of like saying you have a decentralized gold. But if you look at our current financial system, it's more than just the money. It's the services that sit on top of the money. It's taking out loans, it's insurance, it's gaining interest on your money. It's as well being able to trade your money right from one asset to another. So decentralized exchanges known as dexes are widely in use today. One of the more popular dexs actually exceeds the trading volume on the biggest bitcoin company in the world, Coinbase. The decentralized exchange uniswap is exceeding the volume done on Coinbase. And I'm excited about seeing these services replace the centralized alternatives. That's something that I know we're building into Edge. That's one of our mandates for this year is we really want to get core integrated decentralized finance allowing people to put some money into an interest bearing account that beats your banks today, which are giving you barely any, if not practically negative interest. In the crypto world, you can easily be earning 5, 8, sometimes 15% interest on the dollar. You deposit your dollars into a crypto contract and earn 8% interest, very common, as well as taking out crypto collateralized loans. So for people that have been in crypto for a while, they may have experienced some gains. They might want to be able to use some of those gains, you know, and actually buy stuff, pay off credit card debt, which I did buy a car, but they don't want to sell their crypto. The same sense that maybe your house went up in value and you want to be able to extract some of that value but not sell your house, right? You take out a second mortgage. You can do this in bitcoin. And this was started by a lot of centralized services that basically behaved like banks. You deposit your bitcoin with them as collateral, then they give you dollars that can now be 100% done with a smart contract on Ethereum where you don't have to trust any counterparty. And that's something that I actually used and didn't have to put in any applications. No kyc, no personal info, fully accessible by anyone, anywhere in the world. And that's really at the heart of what crypto is supposed to bring. It's a financial system accessible to anyone. And so the DEFI movement is taking that accessibility of money and bring it to another level of accessibility of financial services. And actually I think that's going to be the first level of. We talked about the mass adoption and it's not really right there for bitcoin because no one's really using it or just holding it. I think the first level of mass adoption will be the use of decentralized financial services because you're actually giving someone a product that they already needed in the legacy financial world. But now giving them that decentralized alternative from anywhere.

Awesome. It's exciting and it's great to see the fidelities and the JP Morgans tiptoeing their way to that. So if they do stuff sometimes, that usually will bring others with them as well too.

And with companies that large, for them to just put a toe in the water, their toe is like a gigantic tidal wave. In the crypto world, they dip a toe and that that ripple is us. We're like ants in the water. When that toe gets dipped in, it just creates these gigantic waves because it's just so much money. We're talking trillions of dollars and they're just putting, oh, we're just going to put in 50 billion. It's just 50 billion of our trillion. But yeah, that makes a huge wave in the space and obviously starts to affect the price pretty quickly.

Yeah, man, it's exciting. We could talk crypto all day. But we can take that conversation over to Twitter, which seems to be one of the top spots for talking crypto. And Reddit, it seems like as well too.

Reddit and Twitter. Yeah, I think it seems like the hot spaces for where the average layman avoids. None of my family's on Twitter. None of my family is on Reddit. It's almost like you've got to be in an industry that has a lot of debate and then so you throw it onto Twitter. Politics. Great. Throw it onto Twitter. Unless you're a Trump fan, which unfortunately he doesn't have access to Twitter anymore. But any other industry with. With hot topics, the debate goes there. And definitely crypto has quite a few hot topics.

All right, well, we'll find you on there. How do we follow you on Twitter?

What's your handle on Twitter? I'm Paulinator with two Ls, P A U L L I N a T O R. I'll admit I don't tweet a whole lot. Try to actually try to go heads down and keep building. But I'll get into a few different discussions with some of the influencers on there. But you can find me there. And yeah, I'm not really as on social media, I think as many other founders, I prefer to work on product but I'll chime in every so often.

Yeah, all good. We know in San Diego to find you on the startup slack, so that's always good.

Yep, I'm over there. Startup slack, the San Diego JS Slack as well. I'm on there. You know we do build in JavaScript over at Edge and So that's one of the meetups I enjoyed joining.

Well, we look forward to getting the bitcoin meetup, you know, going again. Virtually be awesome. But we got to know before we let you go, we got to know your favorite taco. This is the tacos in tech podcast after all.

Got it. Oh, man. Can I do two?

All right. Just for you.

Okay. Okay. So I'm gonna do one traditional and one non traditional. So definitely the adobada, specifically the one over at Tacos El Cabron over on fourth Street, a block away from our office. If you haven't had it, you gotta have it. You know, props up to those guys. They opened only about a year, year and a half ago and it was much needed spot over there in downtown. So Tacos El Cabron de adobada. And then second, very non traditional, almost anything over at City Tacos. Jerry over there has made phenomenal tacos. Everything from like octopus to anything at a ceviche. Taco taco. At one point in time, probably my favorite were the scallops. So I'm not sure if he's selling that one anymore. But the scallop tacos over at City Tacos in North Park. Yes, Big thumbs up.

Yeah, they've been doing well. They've expanded too. They're up in north county as well too. So we're really happy, it's really proud to see, see them doing well.

And I saw a sign. I think he's also opening one up over in Seaport Village, I believe. I think I saw the City Tacos logo over there. So yeah, love them. And actually when we were in north park, he was accepting bitcoin for quite some time.

That's cool.

So he was one of the first few bitcoin merchants back when that was a cool thing.

Yeah. Now it's just a story when you spent way too much of your bitcoin on a Domino's pizza or something.

I've scrolled through my history on On Edge from all the times, especially 2015, when I was spending a lot of bitcoin and looked at the thousand dollar haircut I got and you know, the thousand dollar, you name it, you know, I think coffee, bag of coffee beans, I bought that kind of stuff. But it's okay. It's all right. I helped spread the word. Other people got into it. They probably bought more crypto. Spread the word as well. That's all it is.

It's better than in our bank account in a vault, you know, hidden away from the world, you know, being used and accessible. Yeah, we're thrilled that you guys are doing well, that you're riding the wave and for all the growth coming up. And thanks for joining us on the podcast.

Yeah, thanks for having me. And if any of those listeners by chance are interested, if you guys are interested in crypto and you're also looking to work in the crypto space, definitely hit us up. We're hiring a few different positions so we'd love to talk to people local here in San Diego. We are a local company, only have about one or two remote folks so we like to keep it in and local to the community as much as possible.

Awesome. Yeah, we'll put your guys website and careers page in the show notes and we'll be sure to share that out. But thanks Paul.

Alright, thanks a whole bunch Neil.

Thanks for joining us on the Tacos and Tech podcast with Neil Blum. Thanks again to Cox Business for helping make this possible by expanding the reach of the San Diego tech ecosystem. Big shout out to School of Rap for our rad intro music. And thanks as well to Nest Podcast Network where we are recording live inside their studio at Nest Co working in Bankers Hill. You can find Neil Bloom on Twitter eelbloom as well as fresh food, tech and tacos and Tech Pod on Twitter too.

Startups get the party, Startups get the party started. You want tech and tacos, tacos in tech, you know we got it.

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