Please welcome back your host, Natalie Brunel. All right, this is the fireside chat we've all been waiting for. How are we going to connect hundreds and thousands of companies on the Lightning Network? Well, we're going to hear all about that. So I'd like to welcome back Michael Saylor, executive chairman and founder of MicroStrategy and one of the leading advocates for Bitcoin in the world. And David Marcus, who is the CEO and co-founder of Lightspark. Lightspark is building core infrastructure on the Lightning Network. Most recently, David led all payments and crypto efforts at Meta. In 2018, David started DM, which was formerly known as Libra, you might know it. He joined Meta then called Facebook in 2014 to lead Messenger, which he took from under 200 million monthly users to over 1.5 billion users. He was also previously PayPal's president. Lifelong entrepreneur David Marcus launched two companies in Europe, then founded Mobile Payments Company, Zong in Silicon Valley, which was acquired by PayPal. His story is fascinating. I've had the chance to interview him, but this is probably going to be a better interview. So welcome to the stage.
APPLAUSE So I've been excited about this interview all week. For those of you who are not in the Bitcoin community, David is legendary in the community, and he's one of the most inspirational Bitcoin maximalists in the world. He's leading the charge with regard to scaling the Bitcoin network and connecting corporations everywhere. This is my chance to ask you all these questions I've been wanting to ask, and never had an opportunity.
So I guess, David, I'd like to start with, I mean, you've had an amazing career, across all aspects of FinTech money, payments. How has your career experience shaped your view of Bitcoin today? And what have you learned in the course of your career? Of course, and thank you for having me here. It's such a great event with so many amazing participants. So look, I started my career trying to remove friction from payments, and one of the first companies that I started was Zong, I mean, the company that led to Zong, which was a mobile payments company, and what we tried to do is remove a lot of friction. That company was acquired by PayPal. We did a bunch of different things at PayPal to remove, reduce friction, acquired Venmo, incorporated all these things.
And in 2011, 2012, really got deep into Bitcoin, and it was a fascinating moment. Like, this idea that I could send and receive money, and at the time it was the blockchain.info wallet with, you know, non-custodial, everything, it was really magical, this idea that you can send and receive money without any intermediary, without any centralized party. And then really things got clearer to me when I was leading PayPal, and in Argentina they asked us to remove the ability for people to move money out of the country, and suddenly the price of Bitcoin shut up the day we did that. And it was really clear that people went to local markets, bought Bitcoin, so they could actually get their hard-earned wages out of the country or where they wanted it to be, which should be a basic human right.
And so that really inspired me. And then I went on to Facebook to do some non-payment related things for a while in Messenger, and I realized in late 2017 that basically the networks, the underlying payment networks where the majority of transactions were still happening, hadn't evolved in any shape or form since basically 1974 when Swift was invented, and that all the fintech was basically a little bit of lipstick on a pig, like it's better user experience on the front end, but still dependent on very archaic old rails that don't allow you to move money cross-border Friday after 5pm, and is still very costly.
And so that's when we started a Libra journey, and at the time we looked at Bitcoin and Lightning because that would have been my preferred way, but the technology wasn't mature enough, and so we did something that was more centralized, a stablecoin and a proprietary network that we tried to decentralize as much as possible, but we quickly realized that it was too centralized and probably had the wrong sponsor at the time, so it was shut down by the US government and other governments that, for once, agreed on everything.
And it made us realize that actually the only asset that's neutral enough and decentralized enough to truly be the neutral settlement layer between all of the domestic real-time payment systems that have since then proliferated everywhere is Bitcoin and nothing else, and so that's what we've been doing at Lightsparks in almost two years now. So you started focusing on Bitcoin and the humanitarian aspect in Argentina, what was the year when that Argentinian event took place? I think it was 2013. So probably like to pay so as like 10 pesos to the dollar, or 20. Now probably 10 to the dollar, it is a thousand to the dollar now, right? Correct.
So I don't know, the lesson for everybody is just as the peso was crashing, it still had 99% of its value to lose in the next few years, but getting off of currency debasement, Bitcoin is the neutral settlement layer, so where does lightning come into all of this? What's your view of lightning? What's the role of layer 2s? How do you define a layer 2 and help the audience because you know more than anybody about that? Well, so once you build the conviction that Bitcoin is the neutral settlement network for all payments in the world, you know that it's secure, you know that it's decentralized, you know that its value can't be messed with, you have to make it fast and cheap. And so Bitcoin is very secure on layer 1, but it's slow, it takes 10 minutes for a new block to be added, about 10 minutes. And the fees, especially now that there are more things that are being published on the Bitcoin blockchain, the fees are quite high. And so here comes the lightning network, which is basically a payment layer 2 on top of Bitcoin that enables really fast, like near real time and really cheap movement of Bitcoin.
And when we started that journey almost two years ago, we realized that lightning was actually great at a theoretical level, but really hard to operate for mainstream companies. And so what we did at Lightspark is we built an enterprise-grade platform that enables companies to connect to the lightning network without any of the complexities of running a node, deploying liquidity, opening channels, finding routes, splitting payments into smaller payments and reassembling them on the other side to make sure that they arrive at the right destination. All concepts that are quite foreign for companies that are just looking to connect to an endpoint and send and receive transactions reliably. And so that's what we've been doing, and we're very happy that actually this week, Coinbase started launching support for lightning on our stack, so that's a major milestone for the network and also for our company, bringing one of the largest exchanges in a world with 100 countries and about 100 million customers onto the network, which is a big milestone for us. Thanks.
So how long do you think lightning has been mature enough that you could start to do the things that you're doing at scale? When did we cross that chasm or cross that barrier when lightning was kind of ready for? So I think that four exchanges or neobanks or institutions that touch both fiat and Bitcoin, the time is now. The time is now to connect them to the network to enable fast, cheap, real-time movement of Bitcoin and other assets. The next slew of companies are actually companies that don't want to touch Bitcoin directly, but they still want global 24-7 settlement of payments and money. And so we announced this UMA standard that stands for universal money address last November that enables consumers or companies to have things that look exactly like an email address, but for money and uses lightning and Bitcoin, but you can, let's say, send US dollars to someone in Mexico receiving Mexican pesos. It settles in real-time end-to-end, but the consumers don't even know that you're using Bitcoin and lightning, or businesses don't even know that either.
And we think it's a little bit like email where most people, if you're not a geek, you don't care about SMTP and TCP IP when you send an email, and in this case, the same is true for Bitcoin and lightning when you send a payment. We're trying to abstract it all to give people what they want, but leverage the neutrality and the global liquidity depth of Bitcoin against all the fiat currencies to make it really efficient and real-time for people to move money around the world. Yeah, so I mean this stuff was, people weren't even talking about it in 2017 or 2018. So tell us about, tell me a little bit more about Lite Spark. You're primarily offering services to corporations. Tell me about your customers. What kind of customers do you have and what kind of challenges are they trying to overcome?
So we have customers that are large exchanges like Coinbase in the US or coins.ph in the Philippines, or wallets and exchanges like Ripio that are very large in Latin America, or banks in Europe like Zappo and others. And we're adding a tremendous amount of exchanges, wallets, and neo-banks that can move Bitcoin. That's kind of the first category of partners. And what we do for them is actually give them an easy, reliable enterprise-grade non-custodial access to lightning. So they run their own node on our stack and they're able to send and receive transactions and they outsource everything but the security. So in the case of the coin-based implementation, they have their keys on their side. They sign everything. So from a security standpoint, they don't outsource that part. They still have this in-house. And then we manage all the complexity of lightning.
So you can send and receive transactions to another endpoint on the network, reliably knowing it's going to happen even for larger transactions. You don't have to worry about liquidity. We provide all of the liquidity on the in-bound side. So it's basically like, you know, it's maybe the wrong analogy, but it's like, you know, you want traditional payments. You connect an API to Stripe. In this case, you want to move Bitcoin fast in real-time. We provide that same level of API and SDK that you would expect from a traditional PSP in payments, basically. Are there different classes of customers with different opportunities or challenges? Yeah.
So, you know, the first set of customers are really the exchanges. You're buying or selling Bitcoin in an exchange. You want to move Bitcoin or bring Bitcoin to an exchange to sell it for another asset. And making all of these exchanges more fluid, more real-time. That's a really key component of moving Bitcoin liquidity between exchanges and wallets. So that's kind of at the basement layer or foundational layer of what we do. And then UMA is more retail facing, despite the fact that we never touch consumers, but we empower banks and wallets and fintech companies to actually really build experiences that enable 24-7 money movement in any currency on top of Bitcoin and Lightning. And so that's kind of the combination of UMA and our stack that's called Lightspark Connect that connects on top of Lightning.
So it's addressing its compliance. It's a messaging protocol that enables sending and receiving institutions to quote exchange rates between Bitcoin and fiat currency, so you can only display the fiat currency and the entire underlying stack on Lightning. Is it different for companies in Europe or South America than companies in the U.S.? Are the requirements the same or are they very regionally? No, it's actually a really good question because when you look at the average Bitcoin purchase on a lot of the exchanges or wallets in the U.S. or in Western Europe, those are fairly large purchases. And then if you want to move that balance onto a wallet on layer one, the fee is still high but like maybe acceptable. In a lot of cases when we work with BitNob in Africa and Ripio in Latin America and many others or in the Philippines, the average purchase of Bitcoin is maybe $30, $25, and people are just stacking sats and buying whatever they can. And if you want to move $20 of Bitcoin right now out of a wallet or an exchange to another wallet on layer one, the transaction will cost you more than your Bitcoin purchase.
And so their Lightning is indispensable, basically. Whereas here it's just a matter of more convenience, faster movement of money, over there it's kind of a must-have. Okay, so tell me about some of the other challenges they're facing. Your customers have compliance issues and you talked about fiat conversion issues as well. You solve those, does Lightning support those things natively? Have you built software on top and how important is it? So it's really important because our clients for the most part are regulated institutions. And so if you don't make things compliant for regulated institutions, in most cases you can't sell it to them and if you do, then they get in trouble and so you can't really build a business.
So we had to do a lot of things to make Lightning compliance a thing, which it really lacked a lot of capabilities there. And so we enable a fully compliant solution for Lightning that enables them to abide by travel rule, that enables them to check the other endpoint or the institution that they're sending to or receiving from. And that's all embedded in the UMA protocol as well. And so we really enable regulated institutions to be fully compliant in sending and receiving transactions on top of the Lightning. If you didn't do it, they'd have to do it. And if they would do it, they'd probably have a thousand companies all trying to do the same thing over and over again, right?
Yeah, and we provide a package solution that enables people using our stack to actually meet their compliance requirements. And what about the currency conversions? That's actually a really cool experience, right? Because you can be, let's say, in the Philippines and you can claim a new address in the Philippines and you can be, you know, dollar sign, Michael at coins.ph. And I can be in, say, Europe and I have a bank account with Exapo. I have dollar sign, David, at Exapo.com. You want to receive Filipino peso. I'm using euros. So I can use my balance in euros, send you money, the value that I want to send, that can be denominated in the user experience in Filipino peso or Euro, you choose. And then you hit the send button and one second later, 24-7, at a very low cost, you get Filipino peso on the other side.
Which is currently almost a magical experience if you're trying to move money across borders across like an open network that developers can build on. And we're very bullish about this. It's going to take a long time for us to actually get a maximal reach of the network. But we're already starting early signs of huge promise for us. And that also is really interesting. I know there are many different types of companies in the audience right now needing to move money in all kinds of different shapes or form. And I think it's really important to pay attention to this because I think it can be a massive competitive advantage if you can either receive or not. Or you can either receive or disburse money globally faster and better than your competitors. You can actually build a pretty significant competitive advantage.
And one use case that we've been thinking about is like, let's say that you're a platform that has a lot of creators and creators, if they're not in the US and most of those platforms are in the US, the long tail gets paid every six months. And so that holds GDP back, like the global GDP of like the world and people in different countries by a lot. And what if you could stream money in real time as people are actually getting views? Or are gig economy workers, Uber drivers or whatever, they would just get the money at the time they performed a task or they get views. And that would unlock a lot of value for the world.
Are we moving toward an era where I could send $20 to anybody's email address or UMA address in one second for Penny or something? That's the goal. You think more money will be sent in fiat currency over these lightning rails than Satoshi's are sent? Or like what do you think will happen? How will people actually use this capability and reality? So the way that I think about this is that in this case, bitcoins are like packets, like if I make an internet analogy. Bitcoin are like packets on top of lightning, which is kind of TCP IP. And so you convert currency into the most neutral form of digital internet money that has ever been created for the time of one second So that value can actually be transported natively on the internet to where it needs to go.
So it's cash final, real time settlement, which is magical because right now if you think about the correspondent banking and Swift and all these things, the money doesn't actually move at the time the transaction happens. It's just database changes at the edges, but then people have to net settle later and it's all kinds of complications that are unneeded. In this case, money moves on the internet natively, which is our goal is to try to make money move natively on the internet like every other piece of data. And then it gets converted at the edges to whatever you want. And I think that's the way that most people are going to use it for a while, except if you're in a country where, of course, people mis-manage their currency, and in which case you might want to receive those payments in Bitcoin, which is of course natively supported by the protocol.
So is lightning the internet of money? I certainly hope so. If we're moving down the internet of money timeline, I'm thinking back to the, like 1994 and some random entrepreneurs in Arlington, Virginia, came to my office there pitching me on the internet thing and they told us our company needed a website. And I don't know, sometime thereafter, the big idea was I thought maybe I should buy up strategy.com or michael.com or michael.com or hope.com, because it'd be really cool to have an email address like me at Michael. And then I thought about these other addressing implications and now 30 years has gone by.
So the question now is if the internet money is just breaking, is it where are we and maybe more importantly, how many companies are going to start working with this technology over the next four years, and then the four years thereafter, and if you had to look out over the next 10 to 12 years or something, how do you think this is going to develop? So my bet is, let's take 10 years. My bet is in 10 years, every company in the world that needs to send payments cross-border will use lightning to do that. Either knowingly or not knowingly, but the underlying technology that will transport value cross-border for the world will be lightning for any consumer and any company. And when you think about the opportunity, the opportunity is enormous. Like right now, Swift slash correspondent banking processes still about $5 trillion a day. And that's with all of the constraints, right?
You can't do it after 5 p.m. You can't do it Friday night or over the weekends. It's costly to send an international wire. So maybe it's not five. It's maybe it's $50 trillion a day of value that really wants to travel, but it's constrained by the current limitations of the system. And so all of that will actually transit onto lightning and use Bitcoin as a neutral, almost TCPIP packet or neutral value, digital form of value on the Internet. And that's an enormous opportunity for all of us. And certainly for us, if we succeed in helping making that happen on an open network like lightning.
So people talk about one month settlement or one day or two days settlement, and you're describing a possible world where it's like one second settlement, right? So we're going from a day to a second or? Yes. I don't know what the order of magnitude difference is. How many seconds in the day or in the month? And then I guess we're going, in theory, we're going from a $10 fee or a 2% fee. So what are the fees going to be? What do you think is the, what's the cost difference in the conventional credit networks like these in MasterCard versus the systems you're rolling out? Like, how did it cost in the friction?
Well, I think, you know, if we compare apples to apples, which is like not in time to settle, but cost-wise. Like if you look at wires, international wires are swift or, you know, average cost between $40 and $50 for consumers or even businesses to initiate and complete a wire. And so, you know, right now, that also prevents you from sending small amounts. On lightning, you could send 10 cents and make it very cost-effective and, you know, pay a very small fee. And so payments could actually really stream and flow on the internet natively 24-7, where value will accrue to where it needs to go. We're also moving to a world where AI agents are going to become more prevalent transactional agents on our behalfs and on behalf of our company, where we're going to give the authority through AI agents to accomplish a task and net settle with one another.
So what currency are they going to use to net settle value natively in real time at a low cost on the Internet? I can't think of any other than Bitcoin that's neutral enough for everyone to accept it as a standard. That's also a big opportunity on top of lightning as we change our modalities of moving value around the world. Yeah, I always thought of it as like achieving superconductions or, you know, low impedance friction-free or high frequency. I mean, there are certain applications you can't even think about in the old world. Like how would you swap money back and forth 100 times an hour or 100 times a minute?
You wouldn't, yeah, which sounds too fast, but if you're a musician, you know, that vibration doesn't seem that bad at all. But it takes me to the next question, which is, so what kind of companies do you think would benefit from this? And what kind of killer apps or what kind of applications are going to drive corporate adoption? So what we're doing right now is really getting all of the endpoints that are compatible with the existing payment rails and that have the ability to onboard the liquidity from existing endpoints that contain regular money onto this digital transactional network. And so those are the exchanges, those are the banks that, you know, can touch Bitcoin, those are, you know, different institutions that do that.
But in a world where you'll have hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people that have an address for money that can be settled in real time and the currency if they're choosing, you can imagine all kinds of new applications, streaming money to endpoints is one of them, new forms of payments for merchants that would reach new audiences or new clients' bases that they can't reach, the ability to create brand new business models to enable people to actually contribute to anything that you're building from anywhere around the world. It will do to the world, I believe it will do to the world and have an impact to the world that, you know, is going to be as important as the Internet itself was in its own time for communications and for how much faster we're moving now for better or worse, but like we're, you know, we went from the fax era to the Internet era of email and instant messaging, but many people when they were faxing back and forth, you know, and you told them like there's an Internet now that's coming and you'll be able to do email and all kinds of things like, I don't need this, it's fine, right? And now, like who's sending a fax, right?
So, you know, I think that that's going to happen to payments and the way money moves around the world and it's going to happen in this coming decade. And so I think that for everyone here, it's important to pay attention to this, to stay close to this, to get ahead of your competition, to, especially if, you know, parts of what you do depend on moving money faster around the world and building a better experience for your stakeholders. When do you think the big tech players like Apple or Google or your former employer, Microsoft start to take notice and integrate or play in this kind of ecosystem? I think we're not far. I think, you know, we're just getting to the stage where we've made lightning really usable by people who are in the business of moving Bitcoin around the world.
If you were to do that like two years ago, that's why many even large exchanges weren't on lightning until recently. It's just like the amount of complexity that comes with lightning. If you're trying to do it yourself with no software or help is just, you know, very high, especially if you want compliance and high reliability and the ability to have like very high performance.
And so that's just now. That's the now. And so now that all of these companies that are actually bringing the bridges to the traditional financial system onto the network are connecting to the network at a higher clip. Now we can build applications. So UMA is one of such applications like, and it's an open source standard. Everyone can build on it. They don't need to become a client of Lightspark to do that.
Some people are actually doing it like some companies are implementing UMA without like us being part of it. But that is kind of the moment where this network becomes usable by consumers in a way that's like understandable without any of the complexity of Bitcoin or crypto or payments that are needing a new modality. And I think that once you have enough consumers that are using that, which is happening right now, then other larger tech platforms will pay more attention.
Because then they can actually, you know, take a look at the data. They, you know, take huge advantage. Like they can benefit from that and offer better services in businesses that are very global by nature. So could anybody spin up a company in Africa or South America or Asia and start to work with these protocols? Yeah, absolutely. 100%. How do you balance in your R&D effort? How do you balance the work that you do that you make proprietary with intent to sell to your enterprise customers versus the work that you put into the layer to open protocol?
Yeah, that's something we give a lot of thought to when we build something. And to the extent possible, we try to make things more open source and, you know, give it to the community so they can build their own solutions. And I think that's really important. For instance, I, you know, having very, very high quality self custody lightning wallets, I think is very important for the network and something that we want to contribute to and help companies building because the openness of the network over the long run is what's going to make this payment network different than closed networks that are the ones dominating right now.
And so having open networks, having many participants building, having the entire Bitcoin community advancing the state of the art of the capabilities that we can build on top of lightning and across Bitcoin is really vital. And so we want to contribute to that as much as possible. When you think about corporate adoption of digital payments and lightning, do you see a world where it's thousands of companies, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions? Definitely millions. It's like everyone.
Any company and companies, you know, I think during the river presentation earlier, Alex showed like, you know, how big the global trade or the global movement of money is for companies. Versus consumers. And so companies in nature are more multinational than consumers and they need to move money around for themselves, for their partners, for their stakeholders. And so having the ability to do that in a more efficient way in real time, not having to have a lot of liquidity sitting in foreign bank accounts exposed to effects risk, you know, just being able to repatriate all of that money and send payments to where they need to be when they need to get there. That's going to be transformational for many, many companies.
Okay, so now I'm going to ask you a hard question. You've got dozens and dozens of customers all around the world. We're talking about the digital transformation of payments and digital transactions and pure digital, you know, money moving the speed of light. Do you think, you know, and that's against the backdrop of, you know, Elon says he wants to make ex Twitter payments platform and then you've got Google and Apple Pay and then you've got innovators like Cash App that are very aggressive in river and you've got the Bitcoin players and then you've got the US ecosystem, the European ecosystem, South America, I was just in Brazil. They seem to be very, almost more enthusiastic than the US. So if you had the handicap, who's going to drive the digital transformation or who gets it or who will be most aggressive? Will it be traditional banks in the US or Europe or South America? Will it be the mega tax? Will it be mid-size fintechs? You know, you know PayPal thinks, you know, you see Cash App. Will it be pure Bitcoin companies? Will it be some crypto entrepreneurs or crypto exchanges? You know, at some point someone's going to push, get a massive success and stampede everybody else here. But if you had to guess who's going to be the torch bear here, how would you handicap that or assess the situation?
I think it's going to be companies that, in the payment space, build the best consumer experience tapping into domestic payment rails and building the best possible experience domestically. So think of like in the US, Venmo, Cash App, etc. But that then do a similar excellent job at connecting on top of something like lightning with something like UMA or an addressing scheme that enables them to have maximum network reach of moving money in the currency that people want to the endpoint they want in a second at a very low cost. And I think the combination, by the way, that combination and the way that it comes across to consumers needs to be completely transparent.
So you're using a payment app and at some point you're going to use, like if you're in Brazil, you're going to use PIX for a domestic payment in Brazil. But now you're sending money to the US. Now I'm using, you know, lightning, but as a consumer, I don't know. I'm just sending re-eyes to someone who wants to receive dollars in the US. And I don't need to know it's lightning, but the companies that are going to build the best hybrid experience of bringing the best of domestic, fast, real-time payment systems and global interoperability onto lightning in a super consumer friendly way are the ones that are going to break through. I'm absolutely convinced of that.
Okay. So I guess we're agreed that this is coming and it's going to be a big deal. We've got a lot of corporate executives and IT professionals and other business leaders in the audience. What kind of advice would you give them as they proceed in their digital transformation journey if they want to put pure digital payments and your technology into their products or services? So I think, you know, first of all, you know, pay attention because like it's changing very slowly and then all suddenly. And you want to be part of the first batch when it happens suddenly and not be left behind. And I think that's really critical.
And so the way to do that is really try to figure out like what are the use cases in your companies that need to be revolutionized or that need to evolve when it comes to moving money, between endpoints where you need money to move and ask yourself the question, can I actually use these new technologies to move money to where it needs to be faster than my competition, cheaper than my competition? Can I have a competitive edge by doing that? And if so, there are lots of solutions out there and, you know, certainly we can help, but there are lots of solutions out there to actually plug into it, even if you don't touch Bitcoin. You can connect to the Lightning Network and move dollars to another endpoints that needs to receive another currency on Lightning. So pay attention, try to figure out whether they're good use cases where you can start small experiments with it and then, you know, use it full-scale once you're confident that it's built the right way. But it's coming and it's coming sooner than you think.
How long would it take from the point that someone picks up the phone and calls you to the point when they could deploy a solution like Coinbase just did? So it depends on the type of integration. On the back-hand side, and, you know, without getting too much into the details, but we have a simple version of the implementation. In that version, you know, within a few days, you can be up and running, sending and receiving Bitcoin to the other side of the world in real time at a very low cost. UMA, if you have a consumer-facing implementation that you need to do, takes a little bit more time because you need to integrate with your front-end. There's a bunch of front-end work. And so I say, if it's just back-end, it's probably, you know, a couple of weeks of work with testing, et cetera, that will enable you to do that.
And then we have partners. Like, you know, we have partners. Like, you know, one of them is called ZeroHash. It can enable you to actually connect to our stack without touching Bitcoin. And they will basically take care of the conversion for you to have access to the lightning network. There's a number of different ways that we can help you get onto the network without, like, getting deep into Bitcoin rails. So that means that pretty much there's no reason why every crypto custodian or Bitcoin custodian in the world shouldn't be integrating lightning. Into their service stack. Correct. There were lots of good reasons for them not to do this or not to prioritize this work until recently. Now there's absolutely no reason left.
Yeah, so everybody, it's a customer of some Bitcoin company that doesn't support lightning. You might want to go lobby because now it can be done quickly. Totally. Effectively. And then, like, and then the cost of managing that network to make it, like, super high performance and reliable is completely gone. It used to be, you know, quite intensive. Okay, so there are trolls and haters on the internet that complain that lightning is not as reliable as they'd like it to be. What do you have to say to them? Tell us about your experience with lightning, reliability, robustness, and how would you assess the fault tolerance of the network? I mean, my best answer is just, you know, now if you have a Coinbase account, like, you know, I don't think it's rolled out to 100% yet, but it'll be soon. Many people around the world have a Coinbase that can just try it for yourself.
Like put it to the test and see if it works or doesn't work. And you'll find out that works really, really well. And it's really magical when you can press a send button and send money around the world. And it arrives a second later with huge reliability. I think, you know, it's a magical experience. And so you can try it for yourself. So I don't like to talk about these things. I like for people to actually do it and try for themselves and find out for themselves. But I think, you know, the critics were critical of lightning for a reason. If you're spinning up your node, and you're trying to find out who you're going to connect and open channels with other nodes to move value around the lightning network.
And then you're trying to have the liquidity in the right place so that you can receive payments. You have to have enough inbound liquidity. And then, you know, the minute you receive a payment, your channel is all unbalanced. You need to rebalance that channel. And then you have to figure out how you spread split payments into multi-part payments, et cetera. Like all of these things are, like the haters are right. That if you have to go do all of these things, you know, it's just, it doesn't compute. It's too complicated. The same way that, like, no one is racking servers and configuring routers, like the physical router anymore, because now you use AWS and all these things.
And it's easy. And now, you know, a lot of people can focus on what matters to their business rather than racking servers. Same is true for lightning. And that wasn't true before. But now, it's really as easy as it can be. So you're providing an enterprise-grade lightning platform that allows corporations to plug in in a high-performance fault-tolerant, compliant fashion. Correct. And that's been available for how long? Well, I mean, I think, you know, the level at which we're now is just, you know, probably being, you know, nine months, I would say. So it's still pretty recent. So, so you're here, right? This is year one of an explosive opportunity. Is it reasonable to say at this point that, you know, given the fact that lightning on top of Bitcoin allows instant final settlement, not just to Bitcoin, but of other fiat currencies, doesn't it mean that we've now got a solution, which is faster, cheaper, more reliable than any other crypto rails for moving stuff around the world? So I think on the efficiency side, it's at par with other solutions that are out there, but there's a distinction, and I'm glad you asked a question. Other competitive solutions or different alternatives could be, you know, you use, you know, stablecoins on, you know, roll up or stablecoins on top of. How's it going to be stable, tether on Tron? Yeah, so that, for instance. And, and I think for a bunch of different use cases, this might be good. But the problem is in this case, when you think about decentralization, you're actually trusting one centralized company to not mess this up. And the one thing I learned through the Libra journey is that doesn't really work long term, right? It can work for specific use cases where it's just an optimization. But I think that the centralization of trust is a problem if you want a truly neutral settlement network that enables people to really trust that no one's going to mess up with the network that moves money for everyone around the world.
And certainly not like, you know, a centralized corporation managing the entire thing, because then you're back to the point of the starting point. And it's not a truly open thing like the internet, right? And so that's the thing I learned a really hard way on the Libra journey is that if you build any point, any single point of failure, then eventually you'll have a problem. And lightning is the decentralized, fault-tolerant, non-custodial solution to all those crypto token networks that are collapsing. We've got a little bit of time left. Would you want to take some questions from the audience? I'd love that. Okay. So. Hi, David. I'm John Kim. What is your feelings about taboo assets? So the question, I don't know whether people can hear, so I'm going to repeat it. We'll have to write your repeat to question. So the question was about taboo assets. So I actually think that, you know, bringing stablecoins, other assets, other tokens on top of Bitcoin and lightning is now an inevitable thing. And so there's taboo assets. There's a bunch of others that are also trying, you know, similar protocols to bring assets on top of lightning. And one part of me is super excited about that. This idea that you can bring stablecoins and optimize specific transactions that are in the same currency from the center and receiver without having to do the conversion, which I think is going to be net positive.
And one side of me is terrified about this idea that something huge could be built upon a centralized thing on top of Bitcoin, which has the beautiful nature of being truly decentralized and truly neutral. So I'm equally excited and terrified about this thing. Okay, next. Hi, so if you think about sending value internationally and say, for example, if I want to remit some money to India using lightning, how does it work from legal perspective and capital controls and how do you get around that from different jurisdictions which have different controls? How does it work? So we don't typically go around these things. We just abide by them. But so the way it works is that, you know, if you're using the UMA standard, the universal money address standard, the center and receivers can like know, you know, which institution is in which jurisdiction. And it's a pre-transaction messaging protocol. And so you can exchange the information that is required by your domestic regulatory regime.
So for instance, now in Europe, travel rule is becoming a big deal and they need to validate that. So you can do that natively within UMA. And the same is true in this case. Like, you know, if you're authorized as a regulated institution in India to receive international payments or send international payments, then you'll be able to do that. And you'll be able to have the right data exchange with the other institution to meet your compliance requirements. And that's all built into the protocol. And because it's a pre-transaction messaging product or rather standard, that actually enables you to not get in trouble for accepting transactions that you shouldn't be accepting in the first place. Yes. Yes.
I have a question about sending Bitcoin through Coinbase internationally to, let's say, employees in India or the Philippines. If you buy it as property, but then you send it, can you expense it, but you're sending property. So it's, how is that handled IRS-wise? Okay. So tax law question, who wants to answer that? I'm not the right guy for that. Yeah, I don't, I mean, look, if you're on, so let me answer the question on that. Be handled by the platform, you would think.
Yeah, on, like, if you're sending and receiving, let's say, you know, dollars to someone, let's say in Brazil who's receiving Brazilian reis, right? You're sending dollars, it gets transmitted with Bitcoin that gets repurposed, right? You know, it's a, it's a little bit like, you know, if you're, like, if you think about the, the, the small Bitcoin that is moving around like an Uber car on the Uber network, it's going to transport that passenger to the endpoint. And then it's going to make the trip back. And so basically, you're, you're settling from a tax perspective like an international effects transaction and not like you're moving your own Bitcoin to another person. And I would say if you're just moving your Bitcoin, one Bitcoin from one custodian to another, it's, it's just a transfer of your own property from a customer. If it's your self, yeah, it wouldn't be taxable.
Yeah. If you're actually selling it in order to convert it to a currency, then there's going to be a taxable event one way or the other. But that would be handled by the platform that sold it. You would handle it there. Okay. Hey, David, quick question here. So in 2019, you testified in front of Congress. My finest moment. It was awesome. So now five years later, how would you view the regulators or Congress? Do they understand it? Or they don't? What's your sentiment of view of how they look at it, these transactions? They understand it better than when I testified, I think. I think that there are more and more people on the Hill who really understand it, and especially Bitcoin. I think Bitcoin has a very special status. And the land of, if you think of crypto as a whole, I think Bitcoin has a very special status in the sense that it's truly neutral. And I think many, many people on the Hill really understand that. And I think you're seeing now all of the very large Bitcoin ETFs that have come to the market from BlackRock and Fidelity and others.
And so I think that at this stage, even if the image of the Hill or regulators can seem to be more hostile to the industry in general, I think that when it comes to Bitcoin, the status of play is really clear. And that's why very large regulated institutions feel comfortable enough to actually move forward and issue brand new products that have a lot of reach with the confidence that they're in within the rails of the current regulation and loss. So I think we're in a much better place. I feel like when we try to do what we try to do with Libra and DM, it was a very novel concept.
The sponsor of the project, it was a terrible time at the time for the image of the company. It's so much better now. But it was a difficult time where there was a trust issue, there was a centralization issue because stablecoin was part of it. There was a brand new blockchain that you have to explain. And the beauty with Bitcoin is that it's not something that we've built, it's not that something controls, it's something that's truly neutral, it's like a protocol that's running in a very decentralized way. And I think that's a lot clearer for a lot of the regulators and lawmakers.
I think someone has a question here that they've been wanting to ask for a while as well. We'll make it work. Thank you. It seems like there's going to be a race to the bottom. What is your revenue model? I think that, I mean, look, it's kind of an interesting question because I feel like the competition, when the competition is like a thousand times more expensive, because it relies on technology that's really archaic, you don't spend a lot of time thinking about that, right? Because the improvements of a brand new set of Rails brand new network that is open, that enables full interoperability, that enables developers to build on top of it, and that enables anyone to build a competitive solution and settle on it in real time at a very low cost at the network level, is just going to create so much value that there's just going to be way more than enough for people who bring real value and solve real problems for real customers and real use cases to have a fair cut of the value that they generate for their clients. I'm very, very confident about that.
Hey, David. It's Ray Wong with Constellation Research. Question for you is, do you see the payment gateways and the payment companies like a MasterCard Visa as your friend or as a partner, or do they see you as the enemy because you're basically coming in at less than a BIP, and they're coming in at like 150 BIPs per transaction? Yes, so that's actually a really good question.
And I'm not like, you know, Michael, you called me a Bitcoin maximalist. I'm certainly a Bitcoin pragmatist as well. And I think that the reality is that the payment networks have a huge moat, especially in-store payments, because they have terminals everywhere. They're proprietary closed. And they provide a user experience, which is amazing, right? It's like, you know, no one actually complains that their payment experience, like when they're buying a coffee somewhere, sucks.
I think that, you know, many people in our industry have always fantasized and used this example of, I'm going to go buy a cup of coffee with Bitcoin, and then you have all of these videos on Twitter if people are an ex, you know, scanning a QR code, and it takes like 50 times more time to actually actually get the payment going. And so I think the reality and the practical aspects of all of this is those networks will combine. And they will be used for the purpose where they're the best at. And certainly there's just going to be price pressure on a bunch of different things, notably online payments and merchant payments that are digital exclusively. I think that's going to definitely bring a lot of price pressure and competition. I think the physical world is going to be hard for a while still. And so I'm more of the mindset of trying to make lightning compatible with all the payments network out there to extend its utility and reach. And that's what we're doing right now.
The reason I brought that up is because the margin compression coming from India being able to deliver first world capabilities that third world is happening, especially when you think of UPI, you're going to be the other piece that's going to float the rest of the market at those transaction costs. And it's kind of like when we have a hundred dollar drone going after a million dollar missile, right? That's the level margin compression we're seeing in that market. Yeah. Thank you.
Hey, David. We've been talking a lot about international remittances. About a month ago you tweeted AI's native currency will be Bitcoin. Can you elaborate more on that? Are we going to see new use cases, disruptive business models? What do you see? Yeah. I mean, look, think about this this way. Like, you know, I don't know, maybe Satoshi is an AI. It's like, you know, Bitcoin is so smart and clever that it's hard to imagine that only one person invented it. But think about it this way. If you're trying to move and net settle an exchange of value between a network of AI agents performing tasks, performing tasks for us humans, what is the currency that you're going to use? It has to be digital native, right? It can't be something that requires the friction of converting non-digital money into digital money. So it has to be digitally native. And no one in the world will accept any form of native digital value that's not maximally neutral, right? Because it's like not like the Europeans are not going to accept an American version of a digital asset or vice versa.
And so, like, what is the most neutral form of digital native internet money? It's Bitcoin. And so if you make it super efficient, super fast, real-time, at the speed of AI transactions, that's basically going to be the native currency of AI. And then it's kind of this interesting thing where a few years ago there was this article that blew my mind that Google Translate built AI's to do the translation service, which is really a mind-boggling service when you think about it 20 years ago, like a thing that you can talk to and speak another language. It's pretty remarkable what they did with it with this level of fidelity. But they figured out that this AI that was actually using, on assisted learning, on needed learning, came up with its own language.
And it was kind of its own neutral language to basically translate one language to another using its own thing. And so what is it going to be for value between AI agents? Definitely Bitcoin, because that's the neutral language of value on the Internet native. And so I think it's like the most likely candidate here. So what does the world look like when all nation states accept Bitcoin as legal tender? I don't know about that. I think that's a hard question. I feel that, you know, you certainly see what happened in El Salvador and a number of other countries where they do. But I still think that for the vast majority of nation states that run a home currency that's a decent home currency, and I'm pretty sure that Michael will have a point of view on why it's not a good idea to keep a lot of your savings in those currencies.
But I think for day-to-day payments, those currencies are good enough. I think that those governments will want their own currency to be that unit of account for day-to-day transactions. They'll want to be able to continue to manage their monetary policy that's either terrible or bad or good. But I think that's the reality of the world, the inescapable reality of the world. But I think some countries will want to do that. Some countries that need to get out of decades of mismanagement of currency controls and devaluations and massive inflation might want to look into that, and it might benefit them like it already did for El Salvador and others, like in terms of influx of foreign capital and all kinds of different things.
But yeah, I think for the foreseeable future at least, I think that nation states will continue to have their own currencies as the main thing and take advantage of lightning to net settle with other countries and enable their economy to thrive by enabling more capital freedom for their constituents. I think we have time for one last question. Hi, David Dax-Hanson. You talk about native and also neutral. Can you talk a little bit about UMA and the end currency when you're moving from Bitcoin into the end currency pesos, euro, dollars? Are those also going to be native tokenized balances, commercial bank balances, stable coins? What does that look like? So today, the way that UMA works is you're sending, let's say, from an exchange or a neo-bank that can handle both your home currency and Bitcoin. So at the time of the transaction, you're communicating with the recipient institution that's on the network.
The recipient institution, let's say you're receiving Filipino peso, you're basically going to say, okay, my quote for every satoshi or for every amount to convert to Filipino peso is that much. The sending institution will charge a spread if they want. And then the transaction basically gets converted from US dollars to SATs, pushed on the network, converted to Filipino peso at the end. And so in this case, the balances are real fiat balances. They're not like a digital representation of the currency.
There's actual real balances sitting in your account the same way that you would for a domestic payment on those out. Well, thank you, David. Thank you so much. It's been very enlightening. Thank you to everybody in the audience. We've been a great audience today.