Jamal Raees & Yanni Giannaros: Wyre – Using Blockchain for Cross-Border Payments #449

Transcript

welcome to epicenter the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization the blockchain revolution i'm frederica ants and today i'm speaking with yani the founder and ceo and jamal the director of crypto strategy m from wire and wire is a fiat on-ramp to various blockchains and we will talk about this in detail in just a bit but just before i would like to tell you about our sponsors this week our first one says paraswap paraswap is a multi-chain dax aggregator this means that through paraswap you can easily access the liquidity of various different decentralized exchanges the protocol automatically finds the cheapest liquidity for you so you can

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epicenter is also brought to you by course one um securing blockchains and earning rewards need not be energy intensive or complicated and by staking your assets with course one you contribute to network security and earn rewards too chorus 1 has been a pioneer in the space since 2018 and secures billions of dollars in assets and over um on over 25 decentralized networks including solana cosmos and ethereum if you're an institution or want to run your own branded note you can use chorus 1's white label servers and their battle proven infrastructure to participate in proof of stake networks in an easy and direct manner head over to chorus.one and start your staking journey today yani and jamal it's a pleasure to have

you on thank you so much for having us thank you for having us so um i actually read up on wire um before this episode as i do um and it struck me how incredibly old wire is for crypto company um so wire was founded in 2013 so you are up there with the oldest companies we've ever had on tell me about what wire was about initially because you pivoted a couple of times right yeah the the wire story is like a much of a story of like why are a pivoting uh it's a it's like a very standard pivot

uh startup story which is really really awesome but yeah we're we're an ancient dinosaur in the space so we we started in 2012 2013 uh you know both my co-founder and i at the time were fascinated by crypto we were big into reddit big into like uh 4chan and like all the different communities and we fell in love with the bitcoin community which was like the original community you know that was uh it was very similar to kind of like the web through community as it is today where everyone got together and started building projects and it was like a big group group uh group project essentially right so we fell in love with this uh community and and wanted to build some products into it and the first thing where we noticed was like hey all these people have bitcoins but they can't do

anything with them it's just like 2012 2013 it's like everyone had all their bitcoins they couldn't spend it pay wasn't uh like everywhere yet you know they were starting to get some merchants but you know people have bitcoins they couldn't spend them and we're like hey would it wouldn't it be cool if we made an application to make it super easy for people to use their bitcoins and buy anything on the internet so we released something we were called snap card there uh then and released a product in the space that enabled anybody on the internet to buy anything using their bitcoins and it was kind of like magic how it worked just overlaid on your browser went on the shopping cart you paid in bitcoins you converted into us dollars and bought it with uh with um kind of our credit card so that's the

that's the beginning story of wire and and you know that led us down the journey to where we are today uh and through bear markets bull markets and and it's it's pretty fascinating to see where it's come to but we absolutely fell in love in 2012 2013. the culture in crypto has changed substantially in the last 10 years right so a lot of the people who join the ecosystem early they've left how have you experienced uh the last decade yeah i mean like it's a lot of people have left but a tremendous amount of people have come in right so um oh yeah absolutely and and you know the thing that um the thing that really kept us around was really you know we we saw that there was something really

unique being built here right and this is like pretty early on we realized that there was um it quite looked like the beginning of the internet era right where every there was a lot of excitement people are in it to win it type situation and that people are coming here leaving high quality jobs to come build on this incredible technology and that was you know you say the same conversation today but that was the same conversation in 2013 where people were leaving their jobs at google people are leaving their jobs at facebook and they're like this is fascinating i need to get my some of the brightest minds are coming into space so that trend's been there since day one and i think that um in couple with that we you know we were directly dealing with financial services like we were uh helping people use use

their bitcoins and try to make it easier for people to spend anywhere and the when we started kind of lifting every single curtain in the space right we started lifting like okay well how does ach work well how do wires work how do cross-border payments where how does like money transfer work and all this sort of elements we realized how broken every single financial system was so and how big of an opportunity bitcoin and another cryptocurrencies could really play in the space so pretty early on that's what kept us around uh in in addition to the community being fascinating and and and the rapid pace of just change that's happening in space so i think that's like what got us addicted to it and i to be honest like there isn't any other exciting industry that's happening today uh like in comparison to crypto i

think this is the most fascinating ecosystem and i think the biggest change is happening here in the world so um i i probably my excitement that i had in 2012 is probably uh if not more today but very similar to what it was in 10 years ago so it's it's it's very exciting time for sure i mean this was a super long time ago but what did you actually do before you got into crypto yeah so for me personally i was um i worked at a data encryption company called safenet so they um they they encrypt like most of the world's data so like the the phone that's sitting on the president's desk right now is encrypted by safe net technology it's like custom encryption that's used for very obscure

government purposes it was that out of bell camp maryland they ended up selling uh to gemalto which is another large encryption company so i worked there i was i was more i wasn't on the encrypt they hired more cryptographers than any other company in the world more than the government as well uh safenet did but i wasn't in that department at all but i was in kind of like the webmaster managing websites and and doing a lot of different stuff there uh for that entire organization so that's uh that's actually how i found out about bitcoin so in the intranet these cryptographers posted this bitcoin white paper in 2011 i think uh early 2012 late 2011 and they're like this is fascinating and in the internet nobody ever responded to anything it was like the internal board of like some some like large company and

there's like a few people that ever upvoted in the it was like a microsoft access i believe and they posted this and there's like 100 comments on there i'm like all right i got to read about this i read half the white paper and i didn't understand anything but what i did uh do is go to bitcoin.org which was on the the white paper and instantly fall in love with just like this crazy community that was sending like these bitcoins back and forth there's almost like hey it's like yeah i definitely want some bitcoins like hey can i yeah i'll write a post and like get 100 bitcoins or whatever it was back then um but that's how that's how i i fell in love with the community and got into it oh super interesting yeah that's that's that's a super long time ago um so

when you were just talking about um the the the first offering that wire actually had um kind of being an overlay for other websites to kind of um create this bridge between crypto and like the usual credit card forms that people have to fill out to actually buy stuff from a regulatory point of view was this easier back then or i mean because now i mean this sounds like you know it would sound all kinds of um aml bells and i mean it sounds like a nightmare so basically was this an issue back then uh i mean like we were very uh

i mean in 2013 we were very naive about that sort of stuff i think like most people in the crypto space were right like we were just starting out we you know hey we have this problem we're trying to help people buy items and whatnot and it was very much a stopgap solution right it was like kind of like hey you give us bitcoin we converted into a fiat and we drop ship it over to you and there you got to set up an account so we understood who you were but it was like money transfer like now we're a financial regula we're a regulated financial institution like that that's like i think anywhere you go in the space there's like red flags uh all across the board but as us like a weekend project that we started in like back in 2012 2013

people buying 50 worth of like amazon goods it was like we didn't we didn't really think about it in that way right and it wasn't until you know this was like the first iteration and then we got bigger and the volume started increasing and then we started realizing that hey this is a stop gap solution if we're really serious about crypto we need to go all in and build a bitcoin payment processor because why would people use once people start accepting crypto on their website why would people use us anymore and we went all into merchant payment processing which is very similar to like the business model uh early on and that was like right before the first bear market and we just like hit a massive wall because nobody wanted to spend their bitcoin but that was the evolution out of that product and uh

jamal probably has a lot of stories because uh this breakdown is in bitpay um back in that similar time period as well but uh that's the that to answer your question no aml concerns were not an issue uh although we did get regulated with fincen pretty quickly after we went into bitcoin payment processing cool jamal you you joined um uh wire only recently like last year or so um what what what what did you do before and how did you meet emiliani uh yeah i'm i'm somewhat needed wire um i joined about a year and change a year and less than a quarter ago um feels like a couple of years now

but um that's just normal in the crypto space but uh no i've been here a while i i've been in crypto for a good amount of time to you um so prior to being at wire i looked after partnerships for square um i was inadvertently kind of put into the crypto space but mainly on main platform partnerships but i did dabble a little bit with uh the cash app ecosystems and the folk there um uh not too many crypto products there but did get my feet wet there uh prior to square i was there just about a year uh prior to square i led bd globally for bitpay for about four years from 2016 to about 2020. uh prior to that i'd you know put my foot in the ring with a couple crypto startups that were smaller in the atlanta area where i'm based uh and

there's never actually turned out to be anything but that's where i kind of got my start late 2016 or sorry early 2016 late 2015 kind of learning about ethereum and what that was and what smart contracts are and how that would be revolutionary in the in the coming years um but yeah that's kind of what got me into it um i had a lot of experience with payments really saw crypto's the future of the payments ecosystem and the new finance financial mechanism to do that so that's just really what drew me more than anything else cool and how did you guys meet um actually through uh so my cousin my cousin actually is uh a big crypto guy as well got me into crypto in the early days uh also worked at bidpay with me kind of early on um he actually left to lead the product team

here at wire um and he just like loved it was raving about it ever since he got there i was hitting some walls um in some of the the earlier parts of my career at square um just you know really wanted to get back into the crypto reigns and that's how i met yanni and there's like two minutes of a conversation and i was like i'm on board dude let's do this so you you are you are formerly the director of crypto strategy what does the director of crypto strategy actually do so our team really focuses primarily on all of our strategy behind our crypto integrations so why would we integrate a particular asset what we do with non-asset crypto integrations as well so

some of the work we do with smart contracts some of the work we do with nfts uh just kind of the strategy and also the external relationship that goes into managing some of these new asset integrations and non-asset integrations as well yeah just that there's like it's so it's so fascinating we have like you know teams build a lot of partnerships around payments like how do we work with banks how do we work with uh different payment providers but very few teams actually have good strategies around like how do we work with protocols like if we're going to integrate a program it's not a done a set in forget it type situation so jamal really thinks strategically on a lot of those uh partnerships like okay well what's uh you know what's a long-term vision of like working with polygon what's the long-term vision of

working with seller and how do we how do we help that ecosystem grow because we we're a very integral part to these like uh protocols and um i think it's like jabal does incredible work on just like really putting a win-win relationship between uh kind of our street uh our crypto partnerships which is really awesome it's a definitely a new role in the space that where i i bet we're going to start seeing a lot more over the next couple of years cool can can you tell us about um can you walk me through how wire works on a technical level i can walk you through some of our product stack kind of the value prop behind it um you know there's there's a suite of apis and that can get pretty complex um but uh you know i can just walk you through kind of like the vision

behind some of those products uh when you think about wire and what value we deliver it really is two major value propositions number one is the sexy side which is what i consider to be all the the fiat payment network and the crypto asset integrations that we've had so we just have a a very robust network of payment methods compliant payment methods compliant payment operations and then just a number of integrations across multiple different blockchains and these apis are designed to allow developers to come in and very easily build on these these apis to allow interoperability within their own environments right so whether that's taking a fiat payment turning that into crypto providing infrastructure to holding crypto in the app uh moving crypto into other cryptos

or crypto or off ramping crypto back into cash and delivering that cash across multiple jurisdictions to different bank accounts all of those integrations require an incredible amount of individual work negotiation management and compliance as well so wire actually goes out and does the work of pre-connecting to all these traditional systems as well as these new blockchain systems to allow developers to come in and build on top of those without having to worry about individualizing each one of these connections that's value prop number one the behind the scenes the not so sexy value prop that's probably more important in my eyes which is the regulatory and compliance work that goes into providing this service to customers so there's an incredible amount of licensing an incredible amount of compliance aml due diligence work that needs to be done delivering these

systems to developers delivering these systems to end users right so wire is a registered money service business here in the in the states where we're based but we're also internationally regulated we have licenses across the world we're registered with different financial and governing bodies across the entire globe we also have money transmitter licenses throughout the entire united states each one of those individual licenses requires an incredible amount of work an incredible amount of capital an incredible amount of maintenance right so wire goes out and actually does the work maintaining the compliance and maintaining the regulatory satisfaction with all these regulators to make sure that any developer that comes and builds on wire actually gets to take advantage of our regulatory umbrella and not have to worry about that licensing regime themselves right

the products are kind of distributed uh very much so underneath that but those are the two major value props uh if you want to get into the products a little bit more and stop me if we want to double click into any one of these at any point in time uh but there are three major areas of how we really transfer value is the way i think about it or or provide value or hold value number one is is getting money from external sources onto the platform uh or onto the app or onto some sort of environment for a developer and that includes being able to process a card process an apple pay payment process a bank payment on a banking network in the united states or internationally as well right so being able to support multiple pay in methods to be able to take

external funding sources from your customers and then be able to transfer value into your app um and again it doesn't have to be a conversion like fiat to crypto it could be fiat fiat it could be crypto to crypto it could be um any variety or any combination of those as well but it's just transferring value from external sources onto the platform and that in the more traditional sense is called fiat on ramping the second piece is you know beyond that fiat on-ramp or beyond that on-ramp into crypto what infrastructure do we provide for an app to actually integrate crypto infrastructure as a holding mechanism within their app itself and that's where we actually have our custodial wallets api as well so we have the ability to spin up user infrastructure user objects on the api that allow users to create

custodial balances on the app tied to their original user credentials so for example if i'm a bank or something like neobank trying to build an app or whatever it is i can take my regular users username and password and create a user object on wires api to allow people to custody a variety of assets through wire directly in the app so it looks and feels like i'm just holding money directly in that app but ultimately what's happening is wire is taking possession in a secure and and compliant environment and custodying those assets for the end user and providing them basically the look and feel and execution of a real normal wallet without actually having to worry about

what are private keys and what is the liability of self-custody and what is it like to hold money on the blockchain itself without having to worry about those things a user can take advantage of blockchain assets and hold things on a platform the cool thing about this too is we can also attach kyc to it and attach different payment methods to it as well so it's a really versatile just raw user object we can take kyc data and attach that to maintain compliance but also make it really easy for them to you know attach a debit card or attach a bank payment so that they can go in and out of fiat into crypto from crypto to crypto and then back to fiat out so again stack number two or area number two of our products and services are the infrastructure around what we do with

crypto what we do with fiat what we do with assets while they're on the platform and being held the third area is getting money off the platform so we have a number of products suites apis whatever you want to call them that allow people to take non-custodial or custodial assets whether they're held by wire or not and be able to transfer value on a payout mechanism as well so that could mean off-ramping that could mean taking one bitcoin and paying out a thousand consultants a certain amount of value in fiat in a variety of fiats that could be taking crypto converting crypto and doing mass payments out directly on the blockchain to to multiple blockchain addresses basically our ability to automate payouts and conversions within those payouts to be able to get money

off platforms directly to where users want them whether it be in their wallet whether it be in their bank account or not how many networks are you guys on it's so it's a it's a the the beautiful thing about our suite it's actually not that many apis the value props and what you can build are vast so like um they're actually just a few it's like transfers wallets and users there's just three right so transfers enables people to transfer money in and out but just the value prop on-ramps and off-ramps is a little bit different but the design of the apis are super beautiful so a lot of developers come to our api docs and they're like wow these are like and just like if i understand transfers i understand i understand everything about the api docs right so it's uh and then so like transfers allow people to move

money in and out and convert the currency on one api call while it's allowed enables people to actually store funds on the wallet and the user allows people to actually provide kyc information and attach payment methods to that user object so it's just like really three apis but the possibilities of what you can build is you can build a coinbase in less than a few hours uh with the whole set of apis so it's it's quite cool which networks do you guys run on so are you talking about like crypto blockchains yeah crypto blockchain networks um we have uh more than a handful um obviously you know bitcoin and ethereum are two really you know kind of old age-old classics for us and

a lot of traction and volume comes from those two networks um we're also exploring a lot of other layer ones and layer two protocols as well so we're integrated with polygon we're integrated with stellar two major partners for us as well uh we also have support for avalanche algorithm um a couple other layer twos like palm and loop loopering as well uh and then exploring you know more than more than 10 plus different protocols in the hopper right now to get across the finish line hopefully in the next six months to 12 months here what are the criteria for unramping new protocols um and i think jamal this is probably a question for you um it it varies uh it depends on the situation where you know crypto is so fast growing and the the landscape is changing so

much that we have to be agile on our feet and we have to be regularly you know willing to rethink how we add new assets and prioritize them bob in the in the present time we have three categories that we really fall to um number one and probably our our preference to add is just strong ecosystem assets right so this could be an asset like polygon or stellar where there's a really robust ecosystem of developers and applications that are building on that that asset or that blockchain and by supporting assets on the blockchain and supporting traditional you know traditional fiat on-ramps and off-ramps into that asset we can support that developer ecosystem better so that would be again like an asset like polygon or stellar or solana or one of these other strong ecosystems where there's a very

strong network of developers already building on it again that's our our priority and our preference to start supporting the strongest ecosystems of developers so we can start providing those developers the toolkits that they need to build apps the second category is there are strategic channels that we just want to go after by listing certain assets so this could be like us supporting the loopering layer 2 protocol for us to be able to support gamestop's new nft marketplace that is going to be built on loop ring zk roll up so we would want to list loop ring not only because it's a very strong ecosystem but most importantly because there's a strategic channel with gamestop and a few other strategic partners that are building on this asset and we want to be able to support that particular ecosystem because we see it as very strategic and

aligned to what we're trying to provide at wire so that's the second category is being able to provide a new asset or supporting new protocol based on the the strategic channel that we're bringing to the table whether it's a brand value a particular channel a volume a particular marketing value whatever it is the third and least interesting to us is the paid list category obviously there are certain certain ecosystems that are really budding and flush with cash that may not be strong and robust yet and they just might want to fuel the growth of their ecosystem by providing a fiat on-ramp to their developers um and and attracting developers by providing a fiat on ramp right so some people actually use us as a as a developer acquisition tool to be able to go out and get an ecosystem and get a market of

their own because we provide that developer toolkit that's necessary for these developers to actually be attracted to the ecosystem as a whole right so in those situations we work out a strategic arrangement with a particular partner to say we're willing to provide this upfront legwork and resource to provide an integration to your ecosystem but we want a commitment of this much uh volume this much capital or whatever it is to be able to make sure it's a strategic play for all of us yeah that makes uh that makes complete sense you were talking about the three legs of the business so basically the on-ramp the off-ramp and the custodianship um i assume all three of these come with different challenges what are the challenges that come with uh running in on-ramp

yeah yeah happy happy too so i mean like where where do you start so the just a recap on the three it's on ramps like well custodian and then off-ramps right so you got three main pillars of like what we are our main our main business with both on-ramps and off-ramps like we're you know i think the big the devil's in the details on a lot of these flows because people are building unique products and you know how do you um productize everything to make it easy for people to build and get them in you know because when you release apis like people can take the apis and build anything really uh but how do you streamline it into flows that are compliant flows that are easy to understand for developers that have no

idea what compliance is or kyc or aml and build it in a way that it's like hey it's super easy to build get api keys and start doing it but it needs to follow this sort of uh flow so i think that you know that's a lifelong journey type situation for our company like the easier that we make it the the the faster it will be for innovation to happen in the space right because people build products in the faster scale and um and and more users will come to the ecosystem and and and and that's the whole vision of wire right uh making it easy for developers to really build and bring end users into the space so um you know that that that's been a big challenge and i'd say that you know it's a it's a life we we're we're getting better at it um

and the ways that we're getting better at it is making sure that we have like really crystal clear api docs right have preferred use cases so our solutions engineering team like has like all these like play books or cookbooks of like what to do oh i'm building an nft marketplace like hey we highly advise you build it this way or hey here's like a playbook on how to do it and people prefer to like we're almost like giving people playbooks on how to run their business but people prefer it right because they're it's their first time in there so um and in the way that we got there is like there's a lot of regulatory work that needs to happen right because we can't move you know one flow needs to go a specific way and and we need to work with regulators and have a specific flow of

funds so we we know this because of trial air and error so um and we know this because we've worked with all the regulators in the jurisdictions that we operate and so uh i'd say that that that's been a like when i think about the business i think about like how do we simplify that process um and that's a big limiting factor to our success if we make that easier i think that's like the throttle um on how we can get more business um do you have any comments on that i think on-ramping is is an interesting space um i'm not uh he's probably gonna slap my wrist for saying this i'm not like ultra bullish on it in the long run um i think it's an important space it's extremely extremely important don't get me wrong but it's becoming increasingly saturated because there's just so much heat around

that i mean the the real value that we're bringing to the crypto ecosystem is that we're people like us wire other people involved in the fiat on ramp space we're ushering the next billion people into crypto right so ultimately that space has so much heat and so much use the importance tied to it that it's becoming an increasingly saturated market so for us we're not very you know bullish on double downing on that that commoditized space we think that the real value is going to come from expanding the infrastructure more onto the blockchain side right so there's there's a like a feature that we just launched called smart ramps which is us differentiating ourselves differentiating ourselves from the traditional fiat on ramps by just you know providing the the humdrum here let me take your card and deliver you an

asset that's pretty easy and and not too difficult and becoming again increasingly saturated to let me actually take that asset for you and actually execute on chain calls and transactions on your behalf right so that you don't need to have or need to understand what private keys and wallets and what that liability looks like we can actually execute smart contract functions directly on your behalf we're launching this feature actually in a couple weeks with skyweaver which is a really really popular game on the polygon ecosystem with over a hundred thousand active users every single day um most importantly which thirty percent thirty forty fifty percent of the which are first time crypto users people have never really created a crypto wallet before and that's just such an exciting market for us because this is such a

ripe ripe uh target market to usher in into the crypto ecosystem to help people understand you know i i i'm interested in crypto i'm a little savvy with technology but i'm not you know not in the crypto space how do i get there right and ushering these folks into the crypto ecosystem with a set of tools that's designed to take advantage of all the benefits of cryptocurrency and blockchain without having to push them out of their comfort zone and into the deep end and having to understand the depths of crypto i think solutions like this are incredibly important um and i'm happy to dive into that a little bit more but i don't want to take away from what you wanted to ask with this question dude can i add something in there uh just uh just uh yeah so um what jamal said is is is it i

definitely i'm not gonna slap you on the wrist after saying that it's something to me yeah we we wrote this down uh you know we really believe that the on-ramp business is a race to the bottom like i think in our 2022 strategy doc that we we don't share outside of the wire but i think it's it's like already like i think it's like very important that everyone knows like we do believe that it's a it's a racer bottom right so uh on ramping is going to be a highly commoditized business and you're already starting to see that stripe coinbase every single player everybody mom and dog is basically creating an on-ramp right if you're a payment processor you're like oh well i can on-ramp too margins are high and what you're going to see is going to be margin compression and which we already saw we have been

seeing and there's going to be it's going to go it's going to go straight to where card processing is today uh so and we've seen that in many other industries so how do we how do we build unique experiences to connect uh web3 payment experiences to traditional uh traditional financial systems is like our key thesis and how do we do that in a way that is customizable and really really awesome is like oh something that we're really prioritizing and smart ramps is just the beginning of that so uh we have a whole slew of products i mean now to really get us to build these unique experiences that will really shape the way that the next billion people get into crypto a favorite um ecosystem mantra is uh not your keys not your coins

how do you guys feel about this um i mean contrasting this with um i mean we all know that the user experience of the you know the seed phrases and stuff this is it's a horrible user experience um but uh wallet projects are kind of are working on making this easier be it via account abstraction or snaps or whatever um so how do how do you see those two um universes converge or not converge actually just some thoughts uh jamal probably has

a lot of thoughts on this as well um i i definitely you know so for us like we're us personally probably i'm not gonna speak for jamal but for me personally like i'm a security freak right so like my personal fonts i i have all my own ledger and like and and and have like deep security like like have like three ripped up papers all across the planet that i have like backups on and and i have my own you know so that's just on my side i think for wire when i think about it it's like hey we we're helping a lot of enterprises we're helping a lot of businesses get into crypto and having a cons we're a fully custodial solution right so people are building on top of our wall infrastructure there are means of like doing something cool in the future with

non-custodial and we have like integration methods where you if you're not custodial wallet you can interact with our apis and and whatnot um so we build some good bridges there but we're still in the phase where people are dipping their toes in this ecosystem and we're we're providing technology for enterprises to really make it as easy as possible for them for them to get up and running we talk to businesses and jamal probably talks more than i do but like we talk to businesses almost almost every single day and they're like hey we're like we recommend them it's like you should be thinking about a non-custodial solution or you should be thinking about this this integration they're just like we don't have the team we don't have the the knowledge know how and there's like such a steep learning curve to get there um

that you know they're just preferred to use rest apis to actually spin up a wallet have somebody take care of all the node management have somebody take care of all the security because it's not easy to do we've seen the opposite though too like companies like gamestop really go the non-custodial route and really build it the right way but it also took them like six to nine months to build something i think even longer than that right so there are pros and cons in both ways but um you know personally we believe that non-custodial is a way to future um and it might be interesting with now the acquisition of bolt uh that we could probably play in that arena that there's a really strong consumer play but for the time being like we're fully non-fully custodial platform um that make it easy for enterprises to build

you spoke about bolt so you guys were acquired by bolt recently for a billion and a half so bring us up to speed um on bolt what does bolt do yeah so bolt is a one click it's a leading one click checkout for so that leaving one click check out for every single merchant out there so they make it super they they come in replace the entire shopping experience shopping cart experience for any single merchant and provide a new way to uh help merchants get more conversions through their shopping cart but and they do this or one click checkout they their their technology goes deep so not only do they just do one click they have like a whole wallet infrastructure that they're building out they have a

whole end-to-end solution for merchants they have like a fraud mitigation solution so every single transaction that goes through bolt is unidentified through them so there are full payments platform that enables uh merchants to have the best shopping experience and help them get more conversions through the doors so um we get they acquired us earlier this year um we signed the merger agreement with them uh and we're finalizing the uh we're probably 30 days out 30 to 45 days out on the full acquisition which you're really really excited about but you know crypto you know when you're thinking about commerce like crypto is 100 gonna be there whether it's you're settling to your merchants in uscc whether it is uh you know earning interest on your

balances on the platform whether it is accepting crypto whether it is you know really reaching those consumers uh and enabling them to have crypto wallets crypto is going to be a strong play and i think that there's a massive opportunity for them to really uh make it a more efficient transaction for all the merchants but um i think there's a really strong play for them to like really go after like a paypal or a coinbase in the next coming year so really really exciting acquisition that we're it's going to be something that we're going to continue to build on the the most exciting thing is that they built like probably the best shopping cart experience uh it really is a one-click shopping like one crypto shopping experience so the coolest thing um and probably our final iteration of our

checkout would be one click crypto so how do we make take that same technology and bring it to crypto so when you're in metamask you press one button and you actually buy crypto if everything's happening behind the scenes it's connecting your payment method and crypto's just delivered so we could bring the best experience to crypto so that's that's kind of like the the iteration number one that we're coming out with um and that's that's gonna be really exciting we're working on that right now so yeah and i just wanted to add i mean we're everyone's really excited i think uh the thing that's most exciting about it is that number one their vision their strategy their philosophy on the way to go about you know and and handling the payment space is very aligned with ours right they want to democratize the

payment space they want to democratize e-commerce and they think that the proper way of going about it is is building a robust ecosystem that people build on top of and people add value to themselves which is very aligned with what we think so that's number one we're really excited about pairing up and just you know partnering up with someone who's very strategically aligned to us and then on top of that too there's there's also a lot of just like synergies across the board they're very much so all in on crypto they really see this as a massive payment mechanism for the future they think this is the future of e-commerce the future of payments and we're uh you know very critical piece of their strategy in exploring and expanding into that field um so we're just really excited to be like the bell of the ball uh for them to be honest

with you where they're really excited about this space and they see us as that strategy strategic partner to actually enter in and operate in that space uh so really excited for the deal to go through and eventually i guess we'll operate independently underneath them but i'm excited to bring value in the crypto ecosystem there's a lot of synergistic projects like like johnny mentioned basically zooming out a little bit payments have always been kind of at the forefront of what people expected to happen in the group in the crypto space right and now um like you know 12 years in or so um we haven't really seen payment applications take off why do you think that is

i don't think that's there's definitely payment systems working today right i definitely don't think that you see like uh there's companies like veeam that's still out there that's doing business to business uh bank transfers uh that that built on top of the cross-border payments so it is working in many many use cases we have like a lot of partners are built on top of wire air tm is a really good example of this that's built on top of the stellar uscc network that is moving you know they're they're taking um they have a special grant from the u.s government and they're using their wallet to actually distribute uh covert release directly into venezuela under a special ofac license and that's helping you know thousands and thousands of people in venezuela to get funds for covered relief that they weren't getting from

their own government so i think these real-life use cases are happening and they're really really interesting and um so i wouldn't say it's not working i definitely and airtame is doing this i think in principle it works right so that's that's the thing in principle it works but if you look at the things that have really taken off in crypto i would argue that payments is not one of them i i would uh i definitely think i definitely think payments happen uh there maybe it's not as vocal but i think the expansion of uscc more merchants are accepting uscc uh having uscc on their balance sheet and using that as like a stable currency i think that that's really expanded out on just like in paying out merchants so we see a lot of use cases with uh merchants coming to us and hey i can't pay out

these people in these certain areas can i use your crypto payouts api to actually pay them out so i think that payments in this general sense i think it is a massive use case and you know we started out as a business at um try to find real life use cases for we're trying to solve real problems like we're not trying to just build a new put list of it on a peg type situation and uh create like trying to solve a problem that's not there like you know we went into merchant payment process then we went into crypto wallet then we went into cross-border payments all because we believe that um and then we started leveraging our api infrastructure to help developers build these sort of applications that's like the evolution of wire but you know we payments has been a massive use case and

there are companies are really building on top of the payments ecosystem um maybe they're not at scale yet but it's gonna take time it it definitely it's not gonna happen overnight but visa going in and accepting uscc is a big move forward uh you see mastercard accepting uscc as well so i i think it's like you know um first they'll come very slowly then they'll calm all at once type situation so that's that's i i think the evolution is going to happen uh i mean i i agree 100 i think there's a significant amount of traction it and it might be a little bit behind the scenes today but there's definitely significant amount of traction i think we're we're a little bit spoiled sometimes in you know how fast the crypto ecosystem has grown and we expect that kind of value to grow everywhere else there's been a tremendous amount of

focus on the trading use cases of crypto and a lot of institutional money has flown in so because of that you're seeing really really high volume numbers but i mean it took people 50 years to get comfortable with putting money on a debit card and getting to the point that we're at today and you know obviously i don't think it'll take 50 years for us but innovation takes time um especially at the most foundational level so i think we're we're still early when it comes to that adoption curve and i still think we have time compared to some of the other adoptions that have kind of grown out there but to yanny's point i still think that there's a significant amount of traction already happening in the space i mean you have significant companies like bitpay where i was you know first start started getting my feet wet with

crypto um open node uh coin payments other crypto payment processors i mean bitpay back in 2017 was operating with over 100 or sorry over a billion dollars in in crypto payments every year uh i think there's a even bigger massive market of behind the scenes b2b transactions within the crypto space that actually has volumes that does kind of you know compare to some of the traditional fiat systems that you see today you have people you know even even fortune top 50 type companies that use crypto as a payment mechanism to move money across borders because it can be actually cheaper and faster than a bank wire in certain situations or can shield them from volatility and fx conversions in certain situations as well so those are real pain points that are actually delivering millions of dollars of

changes onto a balance sheet and that's you know not the sexiest of taglines and on top of that that it's also not you know it's it's it's not something that these companies want to publicly talk about uh because they're very cautious about how the crypto ecosystem is kind of viewed and stigmatized in the current space so a lot of this is happening behind the scenes and has been happening behind the scenes for several years um i think uh been growing it's been growing tremendously tremendously tremendously and i think people are getting like every day people are getting more comfortable with crypto and that spills down from the retail level all the way up to the institutional the massive multinational conglomerate level as well and you're seeing some innovation at all levels in that um i think to your earlier question you probably were focusing more on like where's the retail

use case why am i not buying coffee with crypto why am i not buying my shoes with crypto and i think that's happening also to a certain extent it is all happening also but you're right it's not happening at the scale that we're used to like the rest of the space is growing so dramatically fast because i think people are just really interested in pouring money into the ecosystem to see where it goes and they think that it's too early to pull money out and actually use that to buy things so i think that's just kind of where the phase that we're in right now i mean at bitpay uh we onboarded several several merchants that would be you know in the fortune top hundred category merchants that do a ridiculous amount of volume in traditional systems but even they didn't see traction when it came to

accepting cryptocurrency as a form of payment why because it's just it's number one i think the volatility makes it really difficult and number two the availability of crypto is just not where we want it yet uh it's not outrageously easy for you to go earn crypto and replenish whatever you spent right so if i spend a hundred dollars on a t-shirt today with bitcoin and next week that 100 t-shirts worth 150 i don't feel like the best investor right and that's because i i take so long i wait so long to get availability of crypto if i got a weekly paycheck in crypto that wouldn't be the same level of volatility it wouldn't be that much of an issue for me right so i think we're we're just not at that phase yet um and you know like solutions like wires solutions like fiat on-ramps

solutions like gun exchanges that are are getting close to making this a very very seamless experience for users will change that and usher in that new availability of liquidity which then will spill over to a payment mechanism so i just think we're too early in that little curve super interesting bitcoin bitcoin's not built to be uh you know a lot of people think of it or as a payment system like it's not yet right like uh it will be one day but like there's a lot of regulatory infrastructure that needs to happen i mean like i'm not gonna calculate capital gains taxes every time i buy a t-shirt right like it's like hey that's gonna be just insane right so i think that uscc and stable coins will be the first foray and i think that a lot of neo banks are reaching out to wire

and they're like hey how do we get uscc in into our neo banks and um and and leveraging the the whole uscc network outside of the banking ecosystem to actually move value and create businesses i think that's like at almost every single large neo bank is starting to have a strategy around that and why is a perfect tool toolkit for them to build that i think the other thing is that that um you know we're starting to see some of these massive companies like we just partnered with uh just last week or it you know friday and then we announced it on monday we just partnered with moneygram on helping every single moneygram user be able to on-ramp directly cash directly into uscc and deposit directly into one of our digital wallets like air tm or that's built on top of wires so i think we're starting

to see a lot of these huge use cases come to life and it's going to extend out into people to do cross-border payments or pay pay goods and we're going to have much more innovation happening in the payments ecosystem which is going to be very awesome super interesting take um let's talk about your business model so you guys take fees in several different places right so let's talk about the on-ramp fee so basically if i if i um come with a credit card and i uh want to buy ether with it what are the fees that i would pay uh so for depending on your payment method um but if you're trying to buy let's say with your debit card or maybe an apple paid transaction um depending

on where you are we'll charge uh like a card fee um so that fee would be in the united states 2.9 plus 30 cents uh internationally outside the united states we charge 3.9 percent plus 30 cents how does it compare to traditional payment providers it's that's around 2 right it's i think it's almost the exact same if not the exact same um you know like major providers in the space traditional e-commerce giants or whatever it is you know traditional payment processors operating in a similar flat fee card flat fee regardless of card type payment model i think they're exactly the same fees and and do these fees cover your costs so i mean we talked about um the regular

regulatory um uh back office uh infrastructure that you guys kind of have to have in place that doesn't sound cheap so do you operate at cost or are you currently still in the red yeah so i can help answer this so right now the way that we make money is a few ways so we have our fees that we charge are are on the the payment side every time you move money we charge some sort of fee and then we have a fee every time you want to move money off so like if you're like doing global payouts and we have a fee there um so for for us like if we're doing it at cost basically there's some fees in like exchanging uh

rep like if i want to go from us dollars to bitcoin there's like a small fee that we charge there too uh but they're we're basically doing it at calls we're moving to a model right now where it's going to be a self-service model where you'll be able to just get access to our apis and pay us a monthly sas fee so a lot of developers just come on and don't pay us anything and so we're gonna be moving a model that we're gonna be uh it's gonna be like hey get access to our apis it's gonna be 59.99 a month or something like that so that that's gonna be like our our main revenue model going forward that that we're moving to uh within the next like couple months and the custody um use case do you do that uh for free

would you right now we're like allergic to uh charging for money for some reason like we're just like alert we don't charge anything for a while custody and for we don't charge anything for our users api it's like the best tool if anyone's listening to this that's like looking to build a wallet or a kyc product it's like completely free right now uh so uh definitely come in before we start charging for it we are like it doesn't make sense for us to like build all this node infrastructure manage the servers like do all the security around the wallet custody like we are going to be charging for that within the next two months so it's gonna be in this like monthly sas fee that we're building in so like if you want to have like a thousand wallets like that you're building on top of it's gonna be some

fee and a higher fee if you want to go more and then also if you want enhanced due diligence or kyc information we'll start charging per user basis so that's like we're not charging right now for that but it is something that we're expecting to charge over the next like coming months it doesn't make sense not to and everyone all our partners are like what do you mean it's free it's uh federico you're you're putting us on the spot a little bit but i appreciate it it's a good it's a it's a good thing to be put on the spot for though uh so it's like uh yeah um what are the jurisdictional restrictions so basically uh i i am based in germany so i have a credit card can i use wire for some products yeah for some products

yeah absolutely so you could take your debit card credit card buy ethereum buy a number of assets have us deliver it non-custodially to your wallet um throughout eu there's a variety of other products here and there that we have support for but yeah we do have support throughout um throughout europe we actually recently just acquired a vast license as well so we're in the process of building custodial solutions to be able to custody digital assets for european merchants as well it's a you know it's a it's a strange regulatory environment in europe so we have to be very careful about how we you know dance around these nuances and roll out products but we have a really really really strong legal and compliance team um with like over you know five decades of experience at some of the biggest traditional

financial institutions and also the biggest uh crypto institutions as well so these are like the best in class people that are really rolling out the best regulatory framework for us um but yeah with that in mind we are rolling out products throughout europe uh been more to come even more so in the next coming months too what do you make of the current regulatory environment yeah you could take it so many different directions uh so there's a lot happening right now in the regulatory environment there's a lot of stuff happening with sec here in the ui so just focusing on the us a little bit more so we're we're mostly focusing like we have like most most regulatory jurisdictions of the us um but there's obviously it's a global there's every single country is going

through different um very variations of something similar so there's a lot going on with the sec right all securities based uh regulation right now i think that over the next coming years i mean they were not they're they're tripling the size of the the sec's department for enforcement for securities uh directly related to crypto uh we're starting to see a lot more uh how should i say this uh we're starting to see a lot more requests coming in from enforcement action on on that sort of side of the world just internally and then also externally as well uh what's available to the public but we're just you know we wire is receiving a lot of requests on that sort of front so um and we we comply with everything that we receive but there you know there's um

there's a lot going on on that side and i think there's gonna it's gonna be something that's gonna be more prevalent and i think there's gonna but you know i view that as almost a good thing because like it's gonna be terrible for the first companies that get uh dinged but hopefully that provides a little bit more you know the strategy that sec has come out with was like uh you know action by enforcement right so like we'll give you clarity as we enforce people um and you know which is a terrible way of doing things right you probably want to you you hope that people give you some guidance and then you'd have some guidance like in in kind of operating it was my opinion it was very terrible how the whole block by stuff went down i i don't know if you're familiar but like

um they basically yeah they they went in and they basically gave them fine it's like well here's the way that you're supposed to be operating but you know if you could have told us that before we could have maybe given us a grace period of like changing our business model it's brand new technology this hasn't been done before but it's unfortunate how people are coming uh come to those firms and i think we're gonna see a lot more of that in the sec side um you know vincennes generally had like kind of the money transmission certainly have like good guidance around money transmission and custodial assets like there that that really hasn't changed in the in in the other side the tricky part is kind of like how to deal with uscc and stable coins right um and that's uh come to light over the past couple couple of

months but every state has different views on like hey is ustc uh a fiat asset or is it kind of a crypto asset and there's different ways that you can interact with uh different um those different assets but we'll see a lot more clarification on a state by state level over the next coming years which is going to be good because like there's all sorts of like pi permissible investment requirements that you need because if you have like a lot of crypto and you don't have it on your balance sheet it just makes it the whole um the the the description of the classification of acid very very tricky in that sort of sense so hopefully we'll get more clarity around that so i think regulation overall is good for the environment it's just like uh

enforcement action by enforcement is not which is basically how many of these regulatory bodies are handling this so it's gonna be tricky here in the us at least um i can't speak for germany but i know germany has uh has been very proactive in in kind of like uh giving kind of like guidance on companies although it's taken a long time and i know a few companies have gone to germany to get their e-money license or whatever it might be but i think it they've given good guidance on what to do uh up front which is good some commentary on on regulation how we view it here but in general like we we're very pro regulation and pro enforcement and it's needed to to really uh move the the

ecosystem forward it feels like there's a lot of pretty aggressive rhetoric going on from the regulatory arena in the states but also in europe where do you think um this um public and regulatory backlash against web3 technologies kind of comes from i think it's just a lack of understanding um to be honest with you it's a very new technology that came out incredibly incredibly quickly and you know to be frank with you regulators and traditional uh incumbents are not used to the speed that that web 3 kind of really evolved uh with or whatever the right

terminology is there so i think the regulators are just kind of you know shell shocked a little bit or caught off guard a little bit in the sense that they don't really understand this they need some time to understand this and i think we're starting to get to the the beginning of that right now i think in the beginning of the space there was like little to no guidance and the space was just not really big enough to make any big traction or big moves with the regulators the space is obviously big enough now where it is on the radar of every regulator and i think now the the regulators are starting to get to the point where they're you know caustically reacting in the beginning and now they're starting to understand and and providing proper regulatory framework and regulatory guidance for for people so i think honestly a majority of it

stems from just like a lack of understanding and uh to be honest with you like poor stigmas that have been built from from communities outside of crypto and how they view cryptocurrency and how those communities are a little bit more um in direct contact with those regulators and and obviously those regulators listen to those traditional financial systems before they listen to a new crypto system um so i think it's just you know a combination of a lot of little things but i think we're on the cusp of it it really changing i think um i think there's been some trial by fire for sure but i think we're getting to the point where like there's a healthy amount of people that understand and still a healthy amount of people that are scared but we're transitioning a large portion of that scared population to the the

population that understands yeah like d5 is like the 31st largest bank in the space so when you look at it like in the entire world right so if you look at d5 is total it's the 31st largest bank so it's like definitely not a force i can't be reckoned with and i think it's really important when you have situations like the celsius situation that's happening right now and situations like terra i think it's really important that consumers know what they're investing in right usually you have like a whole regulatory uh framework around like financial advisors to give you you have to go get your series six license or whatever license you need to get in each jurisdiction but you have to go get a license to be able to qualify give opinion like give an opinion on

like a financial asset that you're going to be recommending other retail investors to invest in right and that just that framework does not exist in in web 3 and d5 so that that's like uh you know i think that it's it's a new concept and and people there needs to be some kind of framework there that can adapt both well for to help consumers be protected and i think it's like very terrible that you know people don't have these kind of this education and everyone sees their friend getting rich or everyone sees like people posting on twitter i can like do this money giveaway but it's just like a very terrible situation that's happening right now and people need to be cautious um for sure but so um but yeah that that's um some thoughts on i i'm very for having people be educated

on what they're investing or having frameworks around that how do you see the future of um crypto fiat interfaces do you think they're going to change fundamentally do you think kind of the interfaces are going to blur yeah i definitely think that everything's going to be a digital wallet at one point um it's like bound to happen cash is going to be like something that doesn't exist anymore in the next like 30 years uh everything would be a digital asset um so um yeah 100 it would definitely in value yeah so i i definitely don't i think uh digital wallets will be the largest banks in the next coming years and the the that's that's exchanges will be in my opinion i think exchanges will be the

largest like nasdaq's like nobody in the next 30 years i don't think that anybody anybody would want to go float their company on nasdaq or something like that people would go to coinbase and float their company uh and go public that's just going to be the new standard of going ipoing uh but that that's just like some personal thoughts there i agree um i mean ultimately i don't know if personally the like cryptocurrency or bitcoin like i've been asked this question about uh 500 000 times like will bitcoin replace the dollar and i don't think that that'll ever happen to be honest with you um could it be some sort of like digital currency that's blockchain based one day for sure i could i could 100 see that um i don't see traditional crypto

volatile assets or you know commodities or whatever you want to call them replacing the the dollar today i think volatility is just frankly unacceptable for a retail user um but yeah like i 100 see that the the benefits of blockchain and the benefits of these digital assets is is constantly overpowering the traditional financial benefits of dollars and and digital dollars that we see today like in a bank account or whatnot um i think there's always going to be a healthy mix of both and i think it'll take a significant significant amount of time to phase out one and go towards the other but i like i see an overwhelming overwhelming majority of people who understood traditional financial systems and then learned crypto over the last years and then actually have like

completely converted completely converted and i haven't met people too many people on the other boat right which is that they've learned crypto and then they're like no i like the traditional financial system better i mean sure it has its pros and cons uh but you know under once you understand the technology and what it truly solves and minus a couple of pain points here and there which are temporary pain points that that will be solved as the innovation gets roughed out um yeah like i haven't met anyone who's really like learned at the depths of crypto and turned around and been like i'd rather go back to the other side so what's on your guys uh roadmap for the foreseeable future for wire yeah yeah so i'm happy to answer then jamal if you have so maybe you can talk about some of the crypto stuff that

you're releasing out there uh on that side so uh there's there's really three things so integration to bolt's really big thing right so we're gonna be focusing on like um for the rest of the year like hey what does it makes it you know how do we integrate with ball like what is a product this one click check out other one click crypto is gonna be a really big product that we release that we're really excited about um we're definitely going to be focusing on uh moving into a self-service model kind of like the pricing stuff that we chatted about earlier uh and like making sure that we are well priced uh we're offering the right prices and and making sure that um we have a really awesome developer dashboard and and making it more exciting and then the kind of the third bucket is really focusing on

distribution right so distribution means a lot of different things but which i'm going to let jamal talk about some of the crypto stuff but uh really focusing on how do we get our services to every single protocol and make it easier for uh people to develop on onto wire but those are kind of like the three main buckets that were for the rest of the six months that we're going to be focused on jamal do you have anything you want to talk about on the crypto side uh i mean echo 100 of everything again said i think uh wire's vision my personal vision everyone's vision at wire is to align and make it just tremendously easy for developers to enter into the ecosystem and build um so everything that we're focused on is really how do we provide them the ultimate toolkit the ultimate uh suite of apis where they can

start building on on wire and actually provide immediate value and take advantage of the blockchain um so a large portion of our initiatives are centered around that i think smart ramps is probably the most exciting and the most recent of those initiatives um so with smart ramps we are are building out a solution that's open architected to be able to take traditional fiat payments including card payments bank card payments debit card payments apple pay payments today but also expanding into bank payments in the future and actually being able to take those those traditional fiat assets and actually purchase crypto assets and then execute alongside that that that api call a smart contract call to be able to execute some sort of smart contract function on the blockchain itself uh the like i mentioned earlier i think we're iterating the the first round of this

with skyweaver which is a pretty popular blockchain based game we're going to allow people to purchase nfts directly from a smart contract with their debit card and i think that's really really powerful right so those initiatives are really just designed around how do we make it incredibly incredibly easy for developers to target mainstream traditional users but still to take advantages of any decentralized technology that they can um so i think that's like a really cool initiative and we're double downing in that entire space as well right what more infrastructure can we build on the blockchain itself what more execution can we actually provide on the actual blockchain but still allow a very traditional mainstream look and feel and mainstream user experience as well in addition to that we're really

expanding the payment network as well so i think that's a really interesting thing um obviously that comes with you know adding more assets so we're looking at like partnering up with all the major protocols to make sure we're in the right places at the right time we're targeting the right markets at the right time as well and we're supporting the market with the demands and the needs of the market itself right so we're adding assets that are very in demand from not only developers but also users as well so partnering up very closely with you know solana and other ecosystems um to basically add support around very key assets on their ecosystems but also just native assets so we can explore and work closely together with uh those people as well uh beyond the crypto side we're also doing a lot of really cool stuff on the

traditional fiat crypto interoperability um so yanni mentioned moneygram as well we announced that uh i think that's one of the biggest most game-changing innovations that we've launched probably this year um and and really what the the crux of that integration is is we're going to be able to take our traditional crypto infrastructure which allows people to take a variety of crypto assets and swap into a variety of other crypto assets and then allow a cash out mechanism or cash in mechanism i guess down the line but to start a cash out mechanism for them to pick up local currency in uh after depositing crypto right so you could have crypto in your wallet you could have you know like bitcoin ethereum whatever um swap that into something like usdc and then

actually cash out usdc and pick up your cash locally at a moneygram location in one of their 200 000 locations so imagine you know being in the us normally but traveling in thailand having money in a crypto wallet and being able to cash out directly in thailand and pick up cash within 30 minutes um at a thailand location so pretty powerful stuff to just bridge the gap between traditional financial systems and crypto systems to make it just like incredibly incredibly easy for people to operate between both worlds and take their traditional systems and move into one world um that's one as well we're just working with a number of other payment providers as well and and just traditional fiat payment providers as well to make it incredibly easy for people to take any asset that they have

and move it in and out of crypto itself right so we have payout jurisdictions all throughout the world we're constantly working and expanding that so that you know we can actually provide local banking infrastructure in any jurisdiction that we're we're up uh we're compliantly allowed to i'll say that um so yeah just a lot of work uh that we have under the i guess under the hood and in the hop in the hopper or the pipeline or whatever you want to call it but a lot of stuff that we're doing really just you know centered around what yani said to make it incredibly easy to make it incredibly robust for a developer to build on and make it easy for other users to come in and take advantage of that ecosystem yanni gemma this was super interesting um where can people go to find out more

about wire yeah uh so we've got wired.com ascentwire.com uh which is our website new website um and it's awesome super it's really nicely designed and then uh twitter is probably the best place uh to get the latest views so just uh twitter.comwired we love chatting and talking to to the ecosystem too so sales at sendwire s-a-l-e-s at send wire send it's a great place to get in touch um yani himself looks at all those emails as well um i wouldn't use it as a way to get in touch with him but he does he does look at all those emails um and on top of that i do as well so you know if it's if it's a conversation that you

want to have with us or a sales team or just like a general conversation where you think there's there's a really strategic partnership at play here we'd love to hear like whatever you guys have and and do do encourage you guys to reach out super thank you guys for coming on i appreciate you having us super fun thank you so much for having us