Weve got a special episode with Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and a familiar host for Decoder listeners, and David Marcus, the CEO of Lightspark. Thats a company that just launched a service to make fast transactions using Bitcoin on something called the Lightning Network. David was previously at PayPal, and then he led Metas big payments effort that went nowhere, but hes got a lot to say about where crypto and payments are right now.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Nilay Patel: Alex, welcome.
NP: Its good to have you back. Why did Lightspark catch your eye? What did you find interesting about this little startup?
AH: Yeah, I dont cover crypto all the time, but I do pay attention to what David Marcus is doing. He is a Bitcoin OG and has been in the space for a long time. And he had quite a journey trying to launch Facebooks cryptocurrency.
NP: David was the president of PayPal, and then we should talk about what happened at Facebook just for a second. Facebook wanted to launch a new cryptocurrency called Libra, was going to do it with governments around the world and different payment services, and it collapsed under the weight of its political ambitions. And now, David is back with a much leaner, simpler startup. Did you talk about the difference between those two ideas?
AH: We did. Libra, for people who dont remember, it feels like a blur now, this was in 2019, Facebook was going to do this stablecoin that was David Marcus brainchild, really, and he led it inside the company. And it met a lot of resistance for several reasons, but mainly, I think when you talk to people who worked on it, it was because Facebook was doing it, but there were also concerns just about a private company of that size creating a currency, and it was based on a basket of fiat currencies rather than just one pure cryptocurrency.
This gets kind of in the weeds, but I think the distinction is important because David has essentially decided that, for his next company and interestingly, he took a lot of the founding team that made Libra with him at Facebook to Lightspark with him that its going to be simpler for him to just build on top of Bitcoin. He chose that instead of all the other cryptocurrencies, layer one networks out there, ethereum, etc.
And I think David, out of pretty much anyone in the industry, knows the most about the regulatory environment around crypto because, when he was doing Libra, he testified in front of Congress. I remember there was a photo of [Mark] Zuckerbergs face on the dollar bill, with Zuck Bucks displayed behind him at one point. He had to meet regulators all around the world. They tried incorporating Libra in several different countries, including Switzerland. This is a guy who knows the global regulatory situation around crypto better than anyone. So the fact that he decided to make a company that he told me he hopes to be his lifes work around Bitcoin, specifically, I thought was interesting.
NP: Yeah, thats actually a really interesting part to me. We lived through what I would call crypto summer last year, where the hype was off the charts. There was a lot of conversation about ethereum, these other coins. I think that has all fallen by the wayside. Its interesting to me that, out of all that wreckage, Dave Marcus is back, and hes saying Bitcoin is it, and its still viable, and hes managed to raise a bunch of money with that pitch.
AH: Yeah, hes raised a lot of money and the companys pretty lean, but I think his goal is to scale Bitcoin as a payments network. Hes a payments guy through and through. Thats what he was doing at PayPal. He led the acquisition of Braintree and Venmo when he was there and what he was trying to do at Facebook when he was working on Messenger before Libra even had to do with payments. So this has really been his lifes work, and he sees the opportunity thanks to this thing called a layer two network, which is this network that sits on top of Bitcoin, called Lightning, to let people actually transact using Bitcoin.
And the most interesting part of all this is that he thinks people dont even need to know that Bitcoin is the network theyre using to transact with because Lightning is that fast, and he actually sees companies using it to settle back into fiat on both sides of the transaction, so legal tender in real time. And I think thats really interesting because hes basically saying, with this network, we can obfuscate crypto out of the equation for the end consumer, and they dont even need to know that theyre using it necessarily.
NP: Thats fascinating. Did you ask him the only question I ever want to ask anybody about Bitcoin, which is, if I have a Bitcoin, why would I ever spend it?
AH: Well, that gets to the whole reason hes doing the company, which is he agrees that Bitcoin is, in its current state, a bad thing to transact with. It fluctuates. The idea with Lightning and the company hes building, which is basically Bitcoin payments in a box for companies, is that its happening so fast, and its using microtransactions, so micro fractions of Bitcoins, called Satoshis, with this Lightning network, of course, that you dont even know that Bitcoin is being transacted, and it happens so fast that the price fluctuations dont matter.
Hes a really smart guy. He thinks very thoughtfully about this stuff. Hes a long-term thinker. He doesnt really buy into the hype waves of the different crypto summers weve had. Hes been through many crypto winters. He thinks this one, interestingly, will be a very long and painful one, but hes choosing to start a company in the space anyway, really in the middle of it. And he thinks he has the best bet at doing something in a space thats not going to get gunned down by regulators like Libra was. And also just hearing him reflect on going from a big company, Facebook, trying to lead a project, basically a startup within that company, which is what Libra was, to actually just running his own startup now and what he enjoys about that and what the tradeoffs are, I thought was really interesting.
NP: Thats pure Decoder bait. All right. Im excited for this one. Its a good conversation. To the moon, Alex Heath with Lightspark CEO David Marcus. Here we go.
David Marcus, youre the CEO and co-founder of Lightspark. Welcome to Decoder.
I first wanted to just table set and talk about the crypto industry more broadly. I think its safe to say were in a crypto winter, thanks in large part to the collapse of FTX. Youve got rising interest rates a lot of factors in there. I was reading your end-of-2022 predictions post, and you predicted that we wont exit this crypto winter this year and probably not in 2024, either. And you wrote that A lot of value, trust and stability was destroyed in 2022. Youve been doing this for a really long time, and youve lived through multiple crypto winters. Im not sure how many. Do you know how many?
At least three, if not four.
Whats different about this one in your mind versus the others?
I think that this one is different because the industry got a lot bigger. So the downturn affected many more people, touched more consumers, more companies, more investors. There was a ton more capital deployed in this cycle versus the previous cycles. So its just bigger.
And when you think about the opportunity still for crypto, what is it? Especially when you have this much disillusionment, so many retail investors were touched by the collapse of FTX. What is the long-term potential for the market?
Well, look, I think that everything thats speculative ends up in booms and busts cycles. Its only if you build something valuable that solves real-world problems that you can actually create long-standing value. And so I think were starting on that journey now. There are a bunch of companies that built things that solve real-world problems, exchanges, wallets, and many more. But there was so much speculation and teams that were just building something just for the sake of listing a token and making a quick buck. And I feel like this era is coming to an end if it hasnt ended already. And now teams are actually focusing on building valuable things.
You left Facebook in December of 2021, which we can get more into later. When did you decide that your new company was going to be Bitcoin focused? Because what you were doing at Facebook was a stablecoin. Why Bitcoin?
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So I had this idea in the back of my mind, but I wasnt sure yet that I was going to just take the plunge and go with it. Many friends told me, You should take at least nine months off. And after month three, I was really going crazy, so it was time for me to get back on the horse. But why Bitcoin? Because Ive come to the conclusion that if you want a true open, interoperable protocol for money on the internet, which is what were trying to help build here, it has to be built on something that literally no one controls.
Bitcoin is the only network and asset that fits the bill when you think about it that way. Theres no consortium of companies. Theres no people at the helm. Theres no leader. Theres Satoshi Nakamoto, but who knows who they or he or she is? And thats kind of all of the value of the network.
Its also the most robust network out there and battle-tested network out there that has been around for over 13 years and has resisted all possible kinds of attacks and issues. So it is, in our mind, the only network that can support a truly open interoperable protocol for money on the internet.
What you just said open, interoperable protocol sounds similar to what you were trying to do with Libra, but I know what youre doing with Lightspark is different. Why not Bitcoin as the basis for what Libra was? Why go from the synthetic stablecoin approach to Bitcoin?
So we actually explored Lightning in the early days of Libra, and we spent time looking at it, and we had a lot of back and forth, and Lightning wasnt mature enough at the time. Were talking early 2018. And the problem with Bitcoin as a pure play transactional asset, if you dont have a real-time settlement network to move money in real time is the volatility of Bitcoin itself. And so it makes it a poor medium of exchange. Not everywhere, because you have a number of countries where the volatility of Bitcoin is actually better than the alternative of hyperinflation of their own home currency. At that time, we felt like we needed to try to bring something to the market that had really stable value so that it could become a great medium of exchange. And if we wanted that at the time, we had to go build something proprietary to actually support it because there was no blockchain that would do at-scale, real-time settlement for potentially hundreds of million if not billions of people.
What is Lightning for people who are listening and arent quite sure? Maybe theyve heard of it in passing but arent sure.
So Lightning is a Layer 2 payments protocol built on top of Bitcoin, and the concept is basically one of a channel-based payment network. And so you open payment channels between people or entities that want to transact with one another, and you basically move beads, for the lack of a better term, from one side to another. And you can do that in real time because those channels are very fast. And then theres a network. So lets say that you and I have a payment channel open and we want to pay someone else and you have a channel open with that third person, but I dont. I can go through you to actually pay that third person.
So its a pretty unusual setup, but its not unfamiliar. Networking on the internet looks fairly similar in the sense that you have routers on the internet that route packets. You dont have to be connected directly with anyone and everyone. You can move those packets through third parties, et cetera. So a small unit of Bitcoin on top of Lightning for us is a little bit like a TCP/IP packet for money.
And Lightning, importantly, like Bitcoin, is not controlled by a centralized entity?
Correct. It runs on top of Bitcoin, so its completely decentralized. It brings a lot of capabilities to Bitcoin when it comes to payments because its near real time. So its really, really fast. Its very cheap, and its almost infinitely scalable. And its also private, which Bitcoin Layer 1 isnt. It basically has all of the attributes of a great open payment network.
Is there any concern with the fact that the protocol is private in that its not totally visible on chain like Bitcoin in terms of the decentralization of it over time?
No, because you can see the topography of the network. The only thing you cant see is actually whos paying whom, which is a feature when it comes to payments.
If youre a merchant, you dont want your competitors to know exactly how much youre doing in sales any given day or month. If youre a consumer, you dont want people to know exactly who youre transacting with at all times. And so privacy is a feature of all existing payment networks and the same here with Lightning.
So you are thinking about Lightning even while youre at Facebook in the early iterations of coming up with Libra. You leave Facebook at the end of 2021, and you have friends telling you you should take some time, you should not just jump right in. You did anyway. You jumped in. What was the impetus to jump in and go, even after everything you went through at Facebook and having to speak in front of Congress, all the scrutiny what made you go, Im ready to do another company?
Yeah, thats a good question. I feel like I had a deep sense of unfinished business, and I think all of us, all of my co-founders here, feel exactly the same way because the fact that were in 2023 and that money moves the same way it moved in the late 60s and 70s on top of completely archaic, outdated systems is borderline infuriating to me. Its just not right. Its an anomaly in the world. Money should move the same way anything else on the internet moves. You should be able to send money the way you send an email or a text message. We failed trying to do that when we tried the Libra / DM journey at Facebook. And in that time period, everyone else that tried also failed. And so we still felt that massive amount of fire and passion to actually go fix that for the world because we feel its just not right.
And what I think is also unique about Lightspark and the founding team that you have with you is its pretty much everyone who worked on Libra with you, almost, at least at the senior level, it seems. What was it like convincing everyone who just went through this with you?
Well, its not everyone, but
But look, I feel like we shared that same passion for seeing this through. And this is actually really trying to help the world with an open, interoperable, dirt-cheap, real-time settlement payment protocol. And so when we started hanging out again, we all felt the same feeling, the same fire to actually go and do this. So it wasnt actually a complicated path to actually form that co-founding team that we have. And everyone felt like we still needed to try this. And as far as Im concerned personally, Ive now absolutely decided, and I have the purest possible version of clarity on this, that this is going to be my lifes thing. Im just not going to stop until I get it done. This is it.
Lets get into Lightspark, then. So you recognize Bitcoin and Lightning are what you want to build on. Where is the opportunity to make a company in that space, and what is Lightspark?
The one downside currently with Lightning is actually that its very complicated to fully understand. And the barrier of entry as far as just the learning curve is so incredibly high that it dissuades a lot of people to actually use that network. Additionally, operationally, its actually very complex to operationalize Lightning because spinning up a node is complicated, but then you need to open channels with other peers on the network to have a well-connected node. And when you do that, when payments actually get routed through your nodes, you need to rebalance the liquidity that is actually locked up in payment channels. So this concept of payment channels is a little bit foreign for everyone who wants to actually send and receive money across the world 24/7 in real time.
The first step is really simplifying all of that, really removing all of the complexity and building an enterprise-grade entry point to Lightning so that developers and platforms around the world can actually tap into all the benefits of a real-time global payment network.
So thats what were doing, and thats what were launching this week. Its really the easiest, fastest way for anyone to actually onboard the Lightning network and send and receive payments in no time. No operational overhead, no high liquidity requirements, none of that. Weve taken something thats fairly complex but great when you know how to use it into something thats actually really simple, reliable, and enterprise-grade. And the business model for us is actually quite simple, which is were providing all these services, and were taking a small cut of the transactions that actually go through our stack. And its not dissimilar from AWS or any SaaS cloud-based business which brings together software that makes something thats complicated, simple and accessible and charges a small fee for it.
What is that fee relative to I know theres not really competition when it comes to Lightning, but in terms of similar types of companies that exist on other payment rails?
Well, so we have a tiered payment plan, but at scale, well basically collect about 15 basis points with no minimum fixed fee. So at a $100 transaction level, thats about half of the cheapest payment systems that typically settle not in real time. Take ACH, for instance, which settles in three days. Its considered to be really cheap. And thats about half of that for real-time secure payments.
Who do you see the customer being for this, maybe now, but also, I think probably more importantly, as you think about company building in the next several years? Who do you see being the companies wanting to plug into this network?
Were excited and optimistic about this concept of streaming money.
So right now, were really targeting this toward developers, wallets, exchanges, OTC players. But the developers piece is really the most intriguing to us because we feel that if you empower developers with great developer tools and you give them the ability to send and receive money and build products and services that can move value around the world on the internet in real time at a really low cost, that you can build crazy new experiences. So a good example of that, of something that were actually pretty excited about and optimistic about, is this concept of streaming money.
And let me just take a minute to explain what streaming money is. Because for the last two decades, weve been talking about micropayments as a thing, and it never became a thing. And the reason it never became a thing is that the current rails and the way that the pricing is set for payments cannot actually support that use case. The attempts that have typically been made require you as a consumer to preload a wallet that is actually not interoperable with other properties or other publishers and then start spending gradually as you go. So you dont know as a consumer that you want to put $20 in one publishers wallet and you cant use that balance anywhere else. Its not really a micropayment its a commitment.
And then the way that the pricing is structured has a minimum fee. So if you wanted to do a 2 cents or 5 cents transaction, the actual cost of the transaction would far exceed the actual amount youre trying to send. And so streaming money is this concept that you can actually send a cent or a fraction of a cent every second if you want on the network, between say a consumer wallet and a creator wallet. So lets say that now this podcast would become a premium podcast where the first 10 minutes are free, but then you have dynamic pricing and the most interesting parts are maybe more expensive, and consumers could actually spend cents every second for each segment or every five seconds or every 10 seconds, and that would work globally.
Its a concept that we think is very exciting because it could create new monetization opportunities for creators; it could create just new payment models as you go. And were very excited about what developers are going to build once you remove all of the constraints of all of these legacy payment rails that are around.
This is naturally leading us into company process questions. How do you go about selling this product? Do you build a sales team in-house to go out and knock on peoples doors, so to speak? Do you just wait and hope that developers see this and flock to it? Youre starting the company from scratch. How do you think about that?
Well, eventually, well build a sales team, but right now, the sales team is a sales team of internal people, me included, and were reaching out to companies we know well. And I think we have a pretty good sense of the real problems that those companies are facing and how we can help them address them and how we can help them build new products that would make them more competitive in pretty competitive landscapes. So I think, at first, its going to be all internal. The company is small its a startup, which feels amazing.
Twenty-six. So its just perfect. And so were going to keep it as small for as long as we possibly can. So were very principled in how we hire, and we just dont want to ever get to this place where were bloated. So we just want to take it easy with hiring. But that being said, were going to launch this product, were going to get a number of developers and clients on the platform, and then we have a pretty busy road map ahead where were going to continue iterating on the product and build more capabilities and features in whatevers left of this year.
How much money have you raised?
So we dont really talk about that. It was a fairly substantial round, but we feel like the-
The reporting I saw was $175 million.
So ballpark, correct? The reason I ask is because I think it speaks to the longevity of what youre hoping to create and also just the resilience of the company itself.
I think for me, the important thing was how can I structure this in such a way that we can focus on the work and only the work for as long as possible with no or minimal overhead? And part of the fundraising strategy was that I actually dont want to be in a world where were fundraising every other year because that takes three months out of the year for the senior leadership team. And so I feel like this is a competitive advantage that we can actually focus on the core product and building rather than being distracted.
The downside of it, though, is if youre not very cognizant of the fact that you have a lot of resources and you should try to box that, then you become bloated and fat prematurely, and you cant ship anything. Its like this notion that nothing great has ever been shipped by a large team, and I really believe in that. Were trying to act and behave as if we needed to raise at the end of this year, despite the fact that we dont.
Maybe if we could dive into that a little more how do you think about using capital now as a startup founder versus when you worked at a large company with a ton of resources before? You have a lot of resources relative to most companies your size and just personal connections. You mentioned, We want to operate as though we may need to raise at some point. We dont want to just think that we have unlimited resources. How do you, as a CEO, manage that day-to-day with the team and manage expectations?
Its culture its 100 percent culture. And at this scale, culture setting is really not hard because its 26 people. Were all thinking about things the same way. And a good measure of a good culture is when you add someone to the team and they feel theyve always been here two weeks in. And so far, 100 percent of people who joined are exactly that. So we feel pretty good about our culture. And whenever we want to add a software engineer to the team or we want to add anyone on the team, theres a lot of healthy debate. Do we really need that additional role? Do we really need that additional role for more than a certain period of time? Is it a permanent function that we need someone to actually look after or not?
And I feel like weve got the right culture. At the time we talk now, were launching a product in a few days, and everyones been working around the clock over the weekend because were pushing something to production for the first time. And its just such a great feeling to see people being so hardcore and driven without you having to just ask. Its just natural. So culture is everything at this scale.
And for you as a manager, whats been the biggest surprise from going from Big Tech you were president at PayPal before to a small company? Whats been the most surprising and also maybe the most rewarding in that shift?
So first of all, I dont see myself as a manager. It feels very large company to talk about it that way. But also, remember that I did startups for all of my life before this decade in large companies. So it feels right at home, it feels very natural for me, and it feels like something thats really in my DNA. It feels just right. So I have no surprises whatsoever, except that I didnt know whether I was going to enjoy the hustle of building something from scratch again with the same level of fulfillment and happiness. And Im actually surprised on the other side of it. Ive just never felt this great. Its amazing to be with such talented people on our team doing something really meaningful and no overhead.
Talk about then, I know youre only 26 people, but how have you structured the company and the people you brought on, and are you a functional organization? How do you think about scaling the company organizationally?
Well, right now, were pretty flat. So theres not a lot of structure by design, and we have very, very senior leaders. So its not like we need to spend a ton of time talking about how to structure the team. An interesting thing that Ive done and tried in the past that works really well is that when I look at the engineering team, the responsibilities are actually split in two. So we have James Everingham, whos done so many things in our industry for so many years, and hes really focused on the management piece of the engineering team, the process or lack of process, so to speak. So hes really acting in a way that enables every single engineer to do their best work and not have overhead.
And then Kevin Hurley, our CTO, is really deep into tech in the engine room with all of the engineers. So its a split structure on one side, more day-to-day management process stuff and, on the other, really deep into the technical weeds of how do we actually make this protocol become the winning protocol for money on the internet.
And are you spending most of your time on product, or is it
Im doing everything. So its product, its sales, BD partnerships, everything. Its great.
This idea of transacting with Bitcoin is a fascinating one to me, and its one that the industry has talked about for years, and obviously, were talking about it with Lightning. I think the inherent tension in this is that many Bitcoin buyers really still see Bitcoin as an investment, even though youve got people like Gensler out there saying, Its the only crypto I would consider a commodity. Doesnt really pass the Howey Test, which maybe thats debatable
Its not, its really not.
Its not, okay. But when you have people out there making still $1 million coin price predictions, it seems like thats a very hard mindset to change for people to think of Bitcoin as more than just a thing you hold on to the digital gold analogy. So can you unpack that from your perspective and how you think that will shift because youre making a huge bet that it will?
Dirt-cheap transactions, real-time settlement, infinite scalability almost.
So lets step back for a minute. First of all, it cant be a really great way to transact if every transaction takes 10-, 20-plus minutes to clear. And every transaction is actually more expensive than the existing alternatives. So that doesnt work. So in comes Lightning, really dirt-cheap transactions, real-time settlement, infinite scalability almost. So that solves that problem.
And now, when you think about the behavior of people and the way that they think about Bitcoin and transacting with Bitcoin, you talked about the fact that people think of it as gold. But if you go back in history, the way that this happened is basically people were transacting with precious metals and the likes, and then they realized it was actually pretty inconvenient to actually move around with heavy gold to pay for stuff. And so they came up with bank notes.
So bank notes were basically just a paper that said you had the gold stashed somewhere. And that was true until 1972 when we stopped the gold-pegged dollar. I see Bitcoin to be exactly that, which is today youre actually not paying with Bitcoin because, to your point, its volatile. It moves in price, et cetera, just like gold was and still is, right?
But if you can actually use fractions of Bitcoin on top of Lightning, in real time, and you have liquidity with all of the other fiat currencies that exist in the world, you can build products that are actually denominated in whatever currency you want. And so the underlying transaction and settlement asset is Bitcoin, but what consumers or merchants are exposed to can be whatever currency you want because you just get in and out of the network the same way that when you send an image, it gets broken into zeros and ones and sent over a TCP/IP network on the internet. You could break down value with small amounts of Bitcoin transacting and moving on the Lightning network in real time.
So we see it as a core infrastructure to move value around. And then our hope is that developers and other players will build services on top of this stack that are denominated in whatever currency they choose.
So the idea is that the end consumer doesnt even necessarily know that this was settled through the Lightning network or Bitcoin.
Its all in fiat for the consumer.
Do you see the world trending in denominations of Satoshis, or Sats, which are the smallest units of Bitcoins or staying in fiat, which is legal tender like dollars? Or do you think thats more of a sector-specific thing?
I think there might be really good use cases for native Sats-denominated payments, and so if you spend time on Nostr, which is this decentralized social network running on relays.
Jack Dorsey is a huge proponent of it. It integrates with Lightning.
Yeah. It integrates with Lightning, and its fascinating to see the velocity of payments for Zaps or small payments for tipping essentially for posts. And you see the growth of the volume of payments on the network with very, very tiny amounts. And I think when it comes to publishing or when it comes to content monetization or creator monetization, I think you could see models exist on top of this network that are going to be Sats-denominated because its kind of the native purest form of payment on the settlement network. And so again, well see what developers build now that the bearer of entry in terms of complexity and operational overhead has been completely eliminated.
What is the number one concern you hear from a potential customer youre talking to about building on Lightning, building with you?
Yeah, thats a great question. We spent a lot of time engaging with all kinds of potential future customers, and they fall into two categories. One is they have looked into Lightning because, on paper, it looks amazing. And then theyve spent cycles to actually try to get a well-connected node and try to get transactions moving on the network. And then they threw in the towel because it was too operationally intensive and complicated, and they had to have full-time people actually managing their node. So thats one category.
The other category is actually, Oh, I already am on the Lightning Network, but I have all of these same problems. Wouldnt it be nice to actually not have to deal with all of that stuff so we can focus on our core business, which is definitely not managing a node on the Lightning network?
So its a little bit like if, in 2023, you wanted to launch a website where you would have to actually go buy a server hardware and a router and configure the whole thing and put it in a rack and do all of these things, no one would do it. And so the analogy is basically that now its going to be as simple as just going to a hosting website and launching your website with what-you-see-is-what-you-get kind of tools. So thats basically the analogy. Were moving from that rack, a server, connected to a router era of the Lightning network to, I go to lightspark.com, I open an account, and Im up and running in minutes.
I thought you were going to say maybe a regulatory concern about using or settling with Bitcoin at all. Does that not really come up?
Out of all of the networks and assets out there, Bitcoin has the greatest regulatory clarity.
No. Thats one of the advantages also of building on top of Bitcoin, which is that out of all of the networks and assets out there, it has the greatest regulatory clarity. And you see it because you see mainstream financial institutions offering Bitcoin products. Fidelity is now offering a 401(k) denominated in Bitcoin and the ability for any Fidelity customer to buy and sell Bitcoin. You can see mainstream financial services companies, well-established brands, carry Bitcoin products for their customers. And you dont see that with other assets and other networks. And thats because there is more regulatory clarity than with any other assets or network.
Do you think theres enough, though? Regulatory clarity?
Look, if you ask me about the state of the US regulatory clarity for crypto in general, of course we dont have enough regulatory clarity. Ive been very vocal about that as well, which is if you want to reap the benefits of this revolution because it is a revolution that will actually benefit consumers and create the next generation of leading companies and if you want all of that to happen in the US, you need to have clear laws and regulations that, on one hand, protect consumers but, on the other, really incentivizes innovation to stay onshore in the US rather than just escape and go to The Bahamas or wherever you want to go.
So I think its essential. Im optimistic that were moving in the right direction. I think right now, you can see the House Financial Services Committee actually moving in a direction of trying to bring more clarity for digital assets in general. So I think well get to a good place, but its been, I know, very frustrating for many, many players out there to not have a clear set of rules that they can operate around.
Do you have any sense of optimism, though, just in seeing what the tenor of the conversation was like when you were at Facebook and you were speaking before Congress in DC a lot, versus now in the progression? It seems like progression has been made, but maybe only on the edges in terms of
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