#1495 Ivan Soto Wright | How Crypto Is Changing Payments Forever

[0] What's up everyone?

[1] This is Anthony Pompliano.

[2] Many of you know me as Pomp.

[3] You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn.

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[5] My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people.

[6] So let's get into today's episode.

[7] What's going on, guys?

[8] Today we've got a great episode with Ivan Soto -Reit.

[9] He is the founder and CEO of MoonPay, one of the fastest growing and largest ways for you to interface with the crypto industry.

[10] In this conversation, we talk about what's going on with stablecoins, payments, various places around the world, how enterprises are starting to get interested in allowing people to buy goods and services from them with crypto, what's going on with regulation, and where Ivan sees the world going, everything from AI to regulation.

[11] This is a fascinating conversation that will definitely teach you something if you watch the entire thing.

[12] So I hope you enjoy it.

[13] Here's my latest conversation with Ivan Soto Wright.

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[42] All right, Ivan, I thought a great place to start the conversation.

[43] Everyone knows you as like the payments guy.

[44] You guys have done a fantastic job of onboarding tons of people, tens of millions of people into payments, DeFi, crypto, et cetera.

[45] We actually started in 2012.

[46] You're really, really early to Bitcoin.

[47] I don't think most people realize that.

[48] So tell us the story of how you found Bitcoin and why'd you buy in 2012?

[49] Well, first, thanks for having me on the pod.

[50] This is evolution.

[51] It's been great to see.

[52] So when I started in crypto, my friend wrote his thesis on Bitcoin at George Washington University.

[53] And, uh, I didn't think much of it at the time, but I was like, wow, this is like a really cool internet based money.

[54] I should learn more about this.

[55] And, uh, I went and bought my first Bitcoin on local bitcoins .com, which was, uh, this is, I think Coinbase just came to market in 2012.

[56] So this was a very, very early and I didn't think much of it.

[57] I just bought, you know, a couple hundred bucks.

[58] Didn't think much of it.

[59] And then I started my career on the institutional side.

[60] So I used to work with some of the biggest pension funds, insurance companies.

[61] I never predicted.

[62] I went from a college DJ to finding myself in the front of institutional finance, but it taught me how to look at the world.

[63] And I saw that you're going to have these different asset buckets.

[64] You have equities, you have fixed income, you have real estate.

[65] Crypto could be an asset class.

[66] And I remember I told some of my colleagues, hey, I'm buying some Bitcoin.

[67] And they're like.

[68] know this is tulip mania this is not real but you know i stuck with it i kept watching it and that price kept climbing and uh it was actually quite sad but my my grandfather passed away and then managed to put my inheritance into bitcoin uh around that period of time and that was ultimately the seed money that helped me start moon pay Incredible.

[69] So I think I met you in probably 2020 or 2021, and you were raising money for MoonPay.

[70] And at the time, you're like, yeah, so we've got this business.

[71] And you kind of were pretty much downplaying the success that you guys had so far.

[72] And you're like, I bootstrapped it till now.

[73] I remember I was like, wait, what?

[74] In a world where everyone is raising an ungodly amount of money, you had just said, no, I'm going to build the business.

[75] I'm going to focus on the product and serving our customers versus raising money.

[76] What was the original idea?

[77] And like, why did you not raise money?

[78] Why did you just, you know, choose to kind of just go to this different path?

[79] Well, bootstrapping a company is definitely a cool feeling.

[80] You know, you being in control, but the reality was I couldn't raise money.

[81] When I first tried to raise the seed round, I think I even went to speak to you and no one wanted to write a check in the beginning days.

[82] And so I remember going to Silicon Valley and at the time it just, most people were asking me, why is the time now to invest?

[83] And the reality was you just have to have long -term conviction.

[84] and i knew that in the future non -custodial was going to be important you need to own your keys and i thought that wallets were going to be the future i thought wallets are essentially they're going to replace your bank account and it is now going to be the primary interface in which you interact with this new world of finance it's internet driven anyone with an internet connection can participate and i remember you know when i first you know really the really first point around moon pay that was exciting to me was there wasn't an easy accessible on -ramp right um the way to think about moon pay is like an atm so if i'm operating a physical atm business my job is to put the atm in the most highly trafficked places in the world right and so same thing applies for the internet world we're the most highly trafficked websites and so a lot of the work that we did was how do we have the best seo in the world so if you search buy bitcoin or buy ethereum or buy slana i'm really proud of my team we're probably one of the first search results that comes up whether it be through moon pay our partners that install our atm or Moonpay itself.

[85] And so we worked really hard with the thesis that there needs to be a trusted interface to interact with crypto.

[86] No one's going to want to have to go through KYC multiple times.

[87] And so once you onboard with Moonpay once, you have this one -click magical checkout experience, and you can think of it just like PayPal.

[88] So how many people have you guys onboarded now?

[89] So about 30 million.

[90] So you have 30 million people who have come in, they've signed up, they've gone through KYC, whatever, and they're going, they're buying stuff.

[91] And so when you go to a retailer, you're basically like, hey, look, any of these 30 million people who show up, we've pretty much already solved that problem.

[92] And it's very quick, instantaneous ability for them to be able to transact.

[93] Is that right?

[94] So you think of it as we start with crypto native merchants.

[95] So it's not normally your Starbucks that people are using to pay for crypto or meaning to buy crypto.

[96] It's actually the most popular wallets in the world.

[97] So Trust Wallet is - client, Exodus is a client, Bitcoin .com is a client.

[98] And for them, you know, we bring the regulated infrastructure.

[99] So we have licenses all across the United States, Europe, UK, rest of world.

[100] And we essentially bring that user journey down to as much, you know, as the least amount of friction possible.

[101] We want that one click checkout.

[102] And so once you've onboarded once, you never have to do it again.

[103] And when these people are coming, how many of them are using Fiat?

[104] Like, you know, credit cards, debit cards, things like that versus they already have crypto and they want to use that to buy something.

[105] So right now we're all about backwards compatibility to the existing system.

[106] So you can think about it.

[107] My job is how do I localize the experience for every single part of the world with every single payment method?

[108] So when we started, it was actually a bit of a controversial thought, which was let's start with debit and credit cards.

[109] Why debit and credit cards?

[110] You have hundreds of millions of people on the Visa MasterCard network, right?

[111] So you already out of the box have distribution.

[112] And it was also challenging because the issue with your debit or credit card is if you charge with your card, you can do something called a charge back and there's a reversal.

[113] So a lot of the work that we had to do was to build a fraud model where we could get comfortable accepting payments from individuals around the world.

[114] And so we have to make a judgment call, whether we accept or reject a particular transaction.

[115] And how do we do that at scale without blowing out our fraud rates?

[116] Because if we have high fraud rates, Visa and MasterCard would shut us down.

[117] And so a lot of the beginning, early part of Moonpay was how do we make sure that we keep these fraud ratios low and build the gold standard of doing this at scale?

[118] And so a lot of the work was build our own proprietary fraud model.

[119] Now I can say we're actually 100 % internal proprietary model around how we score particular transactions.

[120] When you think of...

[121] kind of the world.

[122] I think a lot of people in maybe the Bitcoin world, stable coins are starting to look at this stuff and they're saying the United States user actually may not appreciate a lot of this technology because the dollar works so well.

[123] What do you guys see in the rest of the world?

[124] Is it much higher adoption?

[125] Are there certain regions that maybe would surprise me where there's more adoption than I would expect?

[126] So the big story this year is stable coins.

[127] Everyone wants to talk about stable coins.

[128] As soon as you say the word stable coin, everyone perks up in a meeting because it's the buzzword of 2025, but it's real.

[129] It's better than metaverse or whatever else.

[130] It's a little better than metaverse, better, you know, maybe even better than FT's.

[131] But, you know, what I would say is, you know, it's already here.

[132] So $27 trillion of value was settled.

[133] on stable coins in the last year that's a crazy stat that's bigger than visa and mastercard combined and i think the value it's kind of similar to euro dollars right dollars outside the united states where i think the real value is actually outside the us where getting access to a dollar denominated bank account either for a business or an individual can be quite tricky and so now if you have a stable coin you can send it to anyone in the world we're now getting to cost of transaction really declining right where it's super cheap to be sending a stable coin you can do it for less than a cent and you can receive it in seconds.

[134] And I think that's a revolution.

[135] For the first time, you know, it's been really difficult to see alternative payment methods take off in the checkout experience when you think about commerce.

[136] You know, some countries have done it well.

[137] For example, Brazil, they have PIX, which is, you know.

[138] sponsored by the central bank, and it's a really efficient payment method.

[139] It's ironic, but the United States, we're a little bit behind.

[140] We've had ACH forever.

[141] We've been talking about real -time payments, but no one is using that in everyday commerce.

[142] And I actually think with stable coins and your wallet as the primary interface, we have a real opportunity to be using it for commerce.

[143] And part of the reason we bought Helio very recently was we integrate into Shopify, we integrate into WooCommerce, and we think that's the next leg to complete crypto being in everyday life.

[144] Explain this acquisition, right?

[145] I think people may have read the headline, but they don't really understand what Helio is or like why you guys strategically did this.

[146] So everyone would ask me, oh, MoonPay, you must make it easy.

[147] And I would get DM'd all the time.

[148] Hey, I want to, you know, I've got a private jet company and I want to accept crypto payments or, you know, I have a, you know, general retail business, you know, name XYZ business and they want to accept crypto.

[149] MoonPay traditionally didn't do that.

[150] And the market for it was still quite small.

[151] There was, you know, Coinbase Commerce and a couple others.

[152] But I was really impressed with this team called Helio, and they really focus on the Solana ecosystem.

[153] So they actually control Solana Pay.

[154] They work very closely with Solana Pay in partnership.

[155] powered directly in your Shopify experience.

[156] And if you try it, it's magical.

[157] Like you can connect your phantom wallet one click, and then it basically asks you to authorize a transaction.

[158] You authorize a transaction in USDC.

[159] And for the merchant, it's a game changer because, you know, accepting a Visa MasterCard transaction is expensive and you might not get it on a weekend, right?

[160] It can take days for it to settle.

[161] This settles instantly.

[162] And it's, you know, 10X, a tenfold cheaper payment method.

[163] So I think there's a real opportunity.

[164] Yeah, that's interesting.

[165] When you take a look at who these retailers are, like Amazon, Shopify, is this a big part of their business?

[166] Or is it still mostly, you know, kind of smaller, innovative type companies that are saying, hey, where can I gain an advantage on those incumbents?

[167] Yeah, so I think, you know, This is exactly how it played out for Moonpay.

[168] We've spoken to a bunch of Fortune 500 companies that want to talk about enabling crypto use cases.

[169] But normally, to be frank, it's great for an earnings report to talk about something innovative that you're doing within a pilot program, but you're not seeing a ton of traction quite yet.

[170] Do I think we'll get there?

[171] Yes.

[172] So first you start with the crypto natives.

[173] And so that's what we did on the MoonPay side.

[174] And that's exactly what Helio has done.

[175] It's working, you know, if you want to buy a Solana phone, for example, the Seeker, you can use Solana Pay and you can check out with your wallet.

[176] And so it's still quite a small audience today, but I think it starts there.

[177] And then eventually, you know, bigger companies recognize the value.

[178] One of the things that I always look at from a technology standpoint is consumer behavior.

[179] is usually a limiting factor so technologists naturally you know they're the hammer looking for the nail it's like oh technology is this limiting factor but if you look at the internet you know putting your credit card in on uh early 90s maybe the technology worked maybe it was slow maybe it wasn't perfect but uh people didn't trust it they were like i'm not putting my credit card on the internet like somebody's gonna steal my money type thing um Are there certain consumer behaviors today that are limiting that may just take time to change and that will kind of unleash this, you know, wall of liquidity or transaction volume to these retailers?

[180] So, you know, we had this thesis early that, you know, and it was a bit controversial at the time was we collect KYC on behalf of the customer.

[181] But that was really because we want to reduce the friction.

[182] So you do it once and you never have to do it again.

[183] And if you think about the origin story of PayPal, PayPal, you know, really grew because of integrations inside of companies like eBay.

[184] Right.

[185] And it was scary online.

[186] If you put your credit card details online, there was a, you know, there was all sorts of cases where people were getting phished and there was a lot of fraud.

[187] And so PayPal was able.

[188] to build this behavior profile across anywhere PayPal was integrated.

[189] And that was part of the reason why one of the most biggest challenges they had to solve was fraud.

[190] And they built a fraud engine to really reduce the amount of fraud coming through their system.

[191] Same thing takes place for crypto.

[192] And actually KYC is one of the.

[193] you know, rules that we use inside of our fraud engine to help us reduce fraud across the system.

[194] But the idea is, you know, we got to reduce the friction, right?

[195] And so part of what we do is we literally look every single, you know, every single day we're looking at how do we optimize this experience?

[196] How do we improve the conversion?

[197] Every single screen matters.

[198] How do you make this feel like an Apple Pay -esque experience?

[199] Part of what we did over the last year is we actually said, you know, our product is okay.

[200] It's not phenomenal.

[201] It's like, you know, we have a really high bar for, you know, an incredible user experience.

[202] And so we actually threw out the product, rebuilt it from scratch.

[203] We call it the Orion flow.

[204] And it feels slick.

[205] If you are someone that is just trying to buy Bitcoin for the first time, I can say hand over heart.

[206] I think Moonpay is one of the easiest ways to do it.

[207] You look at the MoonPay product, where you started to where you are today.

[208] What have been the big inflection points that have really led to more of this kind of user adoption?

[209] Obviously, there's a whole, I'm going to call it business development or sales and marketing strategy to go get the B2B partner and get this ATM, as you call it, in the place where there's a lot of traffic.

[210] But that doesn't...

[211] Simply, if you just put something there, it doesn't mean people are going to use it, right?

[212] It still has to be user -friendly.

[213] It still has to kind of work.

[214] So what are those things that you've learned along the way that you think are important?

[215] The worst thing possible for an entrepreneur is saying, we'll build it and they will come.

[216] You learn that, you know, trying to build a consumer business.

[217] When we started, we actually tried to build a wallet at first and then thought, oh, actually, it's really hard to get adoption for this new technology, this new wallet, unless you have distribution.

[218] And so I think most entrepreneurs after going through and before I started MoonPay, I started a consumer business connecting.

[219] to your bank account and helping you sweep it into a savings account.

[220] It's called Saveable.

[221] But the problem was I had to get...

[222] acquire customers, and that was quite tricky.

[223] The insight on this one was, let's go B2B first.

[224] We still have the relationship with the end consumer, but that gets you crazy distribution and scale.

[225] And part of the thinking was, these wallets are going to replace centralized exchanges.

[226] I genuinely believe that the wallet is going to be the primary interface.

[227] And if you think about it, centralized exchanges really existed out of convenience, right?

[228] They would do a lot of different activities that were all bundled together.

[229] They would custody your...

[230] crypto.

[231] And we can obviously, you know, that was one of the principles of, you know, why I got excited about crypto was peer to peer.

[232] You should be able to move money freely if you have a wallet, wallet to wallet.

[233] And so I think the big shift that you're seeing right now is people will move away from centralized exchanges, go directly inside the wallet, and MoonPay can help bring a bunch of that functionality that existed in that centralized exchange for convenience.

[234] So you can use all the popular payment methods.

[235] We just announced MoonPay Balance, where you can fund in via ACH.

[236] So you don't need to go to a centralized exchange anymore.

[237] And if you look at the trend right now, DeFi is about 40 % of the overall retail activity at its peak.

[238] I think that trend will continue to go up into the right and more and more transactions are going to start settling peer to peer.

[239] In terms of like the biggest inflection points for us, it was, you know, getting the right accounts.

[240] You know, we started with Bitcoin .com.

[241] You know, if you're going after a B2B business, you want to get the biggest, baddest logo you could get.

[242] And at the time I was like, Bitcoin .com was an amazing first client to start with.

[243] And they still remain one of our top key partners.

[244] And so part of what we pride ourselves is these long -term relationships.

[245] We've been a monetization engine, a partner to a lot of these companies that want to access all these incredible payment methods to bring more people into their ecosystem.

[246] And so, you know, I think a lot of it is building the trust with those partners.

[247] The reality is the crypto space is small.

[248] One of the other really interesting insights was, you know, we always admire Stripe from afar.

[249] They had built a really great self -serve, you know, developer focused experience.

[250] But the reality is there's such, you know, there's so few merchants that are going to need Moonbase type infrastructure that self -service was less of a priority for us.

[251] Now we started to invest in it as the market continues to scale.

[252] But you could really name, you know, on a couple hands, how many clients really, really matter in this space.

[253] And so we really...

[254] focused on giving them the best experience.

[255] When you think about what's going on in the world, there's been a shift in the political kind of posturing, the regulatory posturing towards crypto in general.

[256] There's calls for a stable coin bill.

[257] There's calls for a strategic Bitcoin reserve and all these different things.

[258] If you had to wave a magic wand and pick one or two things that you think would be the biggest tailwinds either for your business or kind of payments in general, what are the things that you feel like should happen on that front?

[259] So I have to say any company that survives this last couple of years, you definitely needed to have grit.

[260] um you need to have grit you need to have focus because uh they weren't tailwinds they were headwinds right full -on headwinds and part of it was you know really basic things like you would think it wouldn't be that hard to classify particular assets like is this asset a commodity is this security is it a collectible is it something else i think what's really promising is we're going to have that clear regulatory framework to define particular assets also if you have a stable coin you know a lot of the issues that we face in crypto normally stem from counterparty risk right and And the idea that you can have a stablecoin, you need to have it backed with US dollars.

[261] You need to know that those US dollars are there.

[262] And so I think we're getting to a place where we're going to have stablecoin regulation, where we're going to be able to attest that those dollars are actually, in fact, there.

[263] They're sitting in treasuries.

[264] And so I think it's going to be a safer market that people can trust.

[265] We want to have a place where we have less rug pulls.

[266] Regulars do play an important role.

[267] We want consumers to be safe, but we also don't want to stifle innovation.

[268] We want entrepreneurs to stay here onshore in the United States, building the business.

[269] best technology, building the best companies.

[270] And so I think it's been incredible to see a shift towards crypto actually being a key economic pillar of this administration.

[271] You know, I think, you know, I'm very excited that I'm here building the United States.

[272] I'm here in New York.

[273] We're now opening up a new office based here in New York.

[274] And so, you know, we really think that once you get to a place where there's regulatory clarity, more and more people are going to be comfortable to take the risks to build these incredible innovations and bring them to market.

[275] And also stable coins, if you really think about it, they're in the United States interest.

[276] We obviously want the dollar reserve status to remain the key currency of the world.

[277] We want it distributed everywhere.

[278] What better way to distribute it than over the internet?

[279] When you think about the variety of products that have come to market, those headwinds that you talk about, I immediately go to when I first entered this industry, Bitcoin was supposed to be a threat to the US dollar.

[280] It seems like Bitcoin is winning and the dollar is winning.

[281] It's more popular than ever for bilateral trade.

[282] Stablecoins have extended dollar dominance.

[283] They both can win.

[284] But what's fascinating to me is the one area where the dollar is weak is technologically.

[285] So we went from this like analog age of physical dollars and like change and, you know, gold standard, all the things people know.

[286] We moved to this electronic dollar and electronic dollar works pretty well in the United States.

[287] Obviously elsewhere remains to be seen.

[288] Stablecoins are a far superior technology.

[289] for exposure to the dollar and so do you see a world where the us actually adopts a stable coin um do they try to nationalize one of like the stable coin issuers like how do you see this playing out because it's kind of a weird thing for i hope to god they don't nationalize i hope so too but you know if you're sitting there and you're like hey look we're used to being the you know the person who is able to issue this money all of a sudden you're like well there's somebody else who has like a more superior way for people to transact in this thing but technically we're still like the center of monetary policy so it's kind of like a weird dynamic um how do you just see this playing out yeah in feels like it becomes pretty important for the United States and the economy.

[290] So right now, the stablecoin market is a duopoly for the most part.

[291] And so we'd love to see more innovation, more issuers.

[292] And I really think this should be left to the private sector.

[293] You want to be able to innovate on even what chains it's going to ultimately sit on, right?

[294] We're constantly making it.

[295] There's new blockchains, there's new layer twos, there's new layer ones even.

[296] And all this technology is just trying to benefit consumer.

[297] Now.

[298] Who am I to predict which blockchain is ultimately going to be adopted?

[299] We're completely agnostic, but we want to see more and more innovation there.

[300] And so my concern of the government trying to do it, I'm glad that we've made a position in the United States that we're not going to have central bank digital currencies.

[301] I think that would be a risk to the consumers in terms of privacy.

[302] I'm glad we got ahead of that issue, but I really think it belongs to the private sector.

[303] And we want more companies issuing stable coins.

[304] We want to have more innovative products around stable coins.

[305] So the next piece is, can we start sharing the yield with consumers?

[306] Because then...

[307] it's not only a US dollar bank account abroad, it's also interest, right?

[308] Or, you know, here for consumers, you know, you basically have a way to actually see this replacing your bank account.

[309] And so hopefully we get to that clarity over this year with the new stablecoin legislation.

[310] Got it.

[311] What are you most excited about in kind of the next year or two?

[312] It feels like everyone's got their thing, right?

[313] You know, some people it's price, some people it's regulation.

[314] What are you most excited about?

[315] Well, I'm a product guy and I love really looking at the product experience beginning to end.

[316] And I generally think that this is the technology that can be used by everyone.

[317] Like before, I remember when I first got started, you need to use the terminal inside your commuter to basically interact with a Bitcoin wallet.

[318] And I was like the Electrum wallet and it was like quite hard to use.

[319] We're innovating on the user experience, which is great for everyday consumers.

[320] On top of that, I also think the trend that's going to really take off is AI agents, right?

[321] You're going to start giving an AI agent permission.

[322] over executing transactions on your behalf.

[323] And so we need to prepare for that.

[324] And I think the next frontier is your APIs need to be AI friendly.

[325] AI agents do not care about your UI.

[326] As much as I care about beautiful product experiences, AI, it just needs to functionally work.

[327] And so a lot of the work that we're doing is making sure that we could take advantage of this new innovation.

[328] Yeah.

[329] When we see all this product stuff happening, you mentioned artificial intelligence, there's the agents, everyone's really excited about that stuff.

[330] historically i thought that bitcoin was money for machines you know kind of bitcoin was money for software against stable coins though become this really interesting thing if we go and we maybe peek around the corner and look kind of futuristically forward Do the agents have wallets?

[331] Do they transact with each other?

[332] Do they like store their wealth in Bitcoin, but use, you know, stable coins?

[333] Like, how do you just see this playing out where it really does feel like a lot of these technologies are coming together in what I usually refer to as like an automated age, more so that it's just crypto or it's just AI or it's just, you know, one technology.

[334] They're all coming together.

[335] And that's really what's laying the foundation for the future.

[336] For sure.

[337] It's definitely an amalgamation of all these technologies coming together.

[338] They benefit each other.

[339] And I think AI agents right now are incredible read -only, right?

[340] They're being able to pull a ton of different information.

[341] It's actually, you can ask an AI agent almost anything.

[342] And even on Twitter, you're starting to see on X, you're starting to see AI agents.

[343] uh you know build huge followings and have all sorts of alpha that they're telling you about the market um and so that's the first generation i think the second generation will be those ai agents actually have wallets attached to them because they're not going to open up a bank account with wells fargo they're going to go spin up a cryptocurrency wallet have it connected to them They're going to have ownership and control over it.

[344] And then you may decide to delegate your wallet over to the AI agent to actually execute on your behalf.

[345] So we're going to go from read -only to read -write.

[346] And that's the next big shift that we're going to see.

[347] And so that comes down to having the right APIs that are developer -friendly and the use cases to start to grow.

[348] But I think for a bunch of folks, they might want to set an AI agent and forget, and it will just grow your portfolio on your behalf.

[349] I think that's going to be really exciting.

[350] Everyone's going to hire their own hedge fund manager to personally work for them.

[351] I used to play a lot of video games and the analogy I have is like, you know, if you played Legend of Zelda, you had your Navi fairy kind of like following you around.

[352] That's essentially your AI agent.

[353] Right now it's giving you information, but then it can start to do things on your behalf, which I think is super cool.

[354] Talk to me about DeFi.

[355] There's obviously been a big focus on CeFi, the large financial organizations.

[356] They tend to be very centralized.

[357] It's kind of what they know.

[358] You have this thought that actually the world is moving much quicker towards the decentralized finance world than maybe people realize.

[359] Yeah.

[360] So, I mean, centralization definitely has benefits of convenience, right?

[361] And that's why we saw most people gravitate towards centralized exchanges.

[362] But there's limitations with that, right?

[363] A really good example is new assets that are being issued, right?

[364] Getting access to those new assets, you have to go through a listing committee.

[365] It's got to go through regulatory approval to turn on an asset.

[366] Whereas in DeFi, if someone spins up the smart contract and issues an asset, it's accessible to anyone.

[367] And so what you're starting to see is the shift towards what we're seeing in real time, people topping up their wallet using MoonPay into Solana or USDC or another stable coin, and then trading directly using a DeFi protocol.

[368] And so I think that trend will continue to grow because, and it's a real threat to the centralized exchange model.

[369] What do you think is the outcome there?

[370] Do you think the centralized exchanges can persist?

[371] For sure.

[372] There's always going to be a benefit.

[373] I think if you look at most of the ETFs that were filed, most of them are using Coinbase Custody.

[374] It's an incredible institutional business for institutions.

[375] There's real reason to have centralized exchanges.

[376] But for retail, I think it can be a cheaper, faster, more efficient experience.

[377] The one thing we still need to solve is cross -chain.

[378] It's still not quite easy to do cross -chain activity using a cryptocurrency wallet and using DeFi.

[379] So centralized exchanges are still a little bit better for that.

[380] But for things that are on...

[381] chain, it's far better and you can get your asset in seconds.

[382] You know, a great example was, you know, you had Trump launch a meme coin.

[383] No one was expecting Trump to launch a meme coin and none of the centralized exchanges had it available.

[384] So we actually saw an explosion of activity of wallets that had demand for MoonPay topping up into USDC or topping into Solana so they could trade and get access to it.

[385] How does this, explain like what happened here?

[386] Cause I know there's this crazy story of, uh, uh, kind of.

[387] panic, maybe inside of Moonpay, but in a positive way?

[388] Yeah, we've got cool heads.

[389] We've been through a lot.

[390] You go through lots of ups and downs.

[391] And so it was a good test for us as a team.

[392] And these type of situations bring your team super close together.

[393] So I'll give you the story.

[394] So it's the crypto ball in DC.

[395] It's the inauguration weekend.

[396] And we find out that night.

[397] you know at the ball david sachs has given a speech uh that this trump coin gets launched and i remember keith our president enterprise points to me he's like hey have you seen this trump coin i'm like no i haven't seen it and he's like yeah it's at a couple billion market cap i was like this doesn't make sense like we haven't really seen something blow up like maybe it's like but maybe it's fake yeah i had no idea and so you know it turned out to be real and all of a sudden uh you know i don't think much of it you know and then the next morning i wake up and our cfo calls us and says hey ivan we have a liquidity issue i'm like what do you mean we have a liquidity issue tons of money in the bank.

[398] No, our money is actually in BlackRock T -bills.

[399] And typically, we prepare for having adequate capital, multiples on our all -time highs.

[400] But in that first day, we did almost $60 million of sales on debit and credit cards, PayPal, and Venmo into MoonPay across our ecosystem.

[401] So that was an abnormal event.

[402] Our best event up until that point was about $15 million.

[403] So it was a 4X on the first day.

[404] And the problem you have is the banking system is not 24 -7.

[405] and so you know we're not going to get settled so when we process a card it takes days for that money to settle into our account uh or you know especially on a weekend right and it was a bank holiday weekend so we weren't going to get settled till tuesday so we needed significant working capital and we needed it fast and we needed it in crypto So we couldn't just go to someone that had the money.

[406] It was like you had to have stable coins or crypto readily available.

[407] So it was a movie of a story.

[408] I had to basically liquidate some of my personal Bitcoin to buy us.

[409] We had a countdown ticker of how many hours we would have until we'd run out of liquidity.

[410] And we're also a key part of the ecosystem.

[411] Our wallets depend on Moonpay's infrastructure.

[412] So it's not acceptable that we go down.

[413] We cannot have downtime.

[414] And so thankfully, I was here in New York about two weeks ago with Keith.

[415] Grossman, our president of enterprise.

[416] And we sat down with Mike Novogratz and, you know, he was first port of call in my mind.

[417] We had to call Mike and see if he could help us out.

[418] It was the call lasted a minute and 30 seconds.

[419] And he made the decision.

[420] He said, look.

[421] you know, I like what you guys are doing.

[422] And he said, look, I think I can make something happen.

[423] And so the whole rest of the day was, you know, the paperwork, we put liens, you know, the problem is you can't even put a lien on the BlackRock T -bills because it's a weekend.

[424] And so part of it is on trust and good faith.

[425] I did a personal lien on my assets.

[426] So, you know, I pledged everything to make sure that the company would continue operating.

[427] And we over collateralized, you know, between the BlackRock T -bills and my personal loan.

[428] And we were able get the money and so we get 100 million dollars you know we're jumping up and down we're like yes we saved the day uh next morning we wake up and uh the volume doubles and so all of a sudden we find out that we need even more capital and i didn't want to go with you know my tail between my legs to mike and say look i need another 60 million bucks um and so uh we got the idea to reach out to brad garlinghouse who happened to be in dc and i was like who else would be sitting on crypto capital and he steps in for us so you know i definitely owe brad and uh and mike uh you know a lot a lot of good faith in and providing that loan in such short notice and so we were able to operate on tuesday we paid it all back um but it's a really good example as to why you know crypto is 24 7.

[429] uh you know your money and your bank account isn't readily available and so uh really shows why i think crypto is the future are you able to say what the interest rate was it was great i mean they were super nice i don't want to disclose it for them but they they made some money but we obviously were able to stay operational and we didn't lose money yeah um there's a lot of people who have traded against mike hearing in a time of need that he's a nice guy is maybe the first time anyone's ever heard that so when mike watches this he'll get a good laugh out of it um when you think of those moments uh how do you prepare for the next big unforeseen thing, right?

[430] It's kind of this crazy thing in crypto where in a, I don't know, if you're Amazon or something, right?

[431] You kind of know, okay, Black Friday's coming, holidays are coming.

[432] You go through some of these events, maybe some, you know, really good book comes out, but it's going to be minuscule, even if it's a blowout compared to things that they've seen in the past.

[433] Cryptos from the Wild West, man. You gotta be prepared for anything.

[434] You gotta be prepared for anything, you know?

[435] And I think in both directions too, right?

[436] Trump coin is a good thing, but there could be tons of selling because people are worried about, you know, some event or something.

[437] I love the quote that being an entrepreneur is like eating glass and staring into the vests.

[438] You know, that's what it kind of feels like.

[439] You know, at times, like you just have to have grit.

[440] You've got to have, you know.

[441] Thankfully, in college, I was a rower.

[442] And that's probably one of the most painful things that you can do to your body is you just immediately get to lactic acid in about 15 seconds if you're pulling as hard as you possibly can on these machines.

[443] and uh you know if you do that type of thing you i think you're prepared for anything in life and so uh i was definitely shaped by being in kind of tough uh environments and staying really focused and you just gotta have to have you know thick skin if you're in crypto yeah you're dealing with so many unknowns like you know there's so many unknown unknowns right uh that will come at you and you just gotta play your cards as they as they are dealt with to you and and uh you know just really believe in yourself i think that's you know what i can tell every entrepreneur is believe in yourself because if you believe in yourself and you have long term conviction.

[444] And you make, you know, general, we talk about this concept at Moonpay of Kaizen, which is these 1 % incremental gains that you can have, you know, inspired by Toyota.

[445] And I really believe that's true, just incremental progress every single day, compounds, and you can have extraordinary results.

[446] let's talk about the business itself what numbers are public that you can share with us in terms of revenue you know uh customer size valuation and that stuff so we raised our series a back in 2021 you know, 3 .4 billion valuation bootstrapped the company, really proud of that outcome.

[447] And it really was put money on the balance sheet, one for opportunities around M &A, attract talent.

[448] And for us, it was also building out the MoonPay account and the consumer business.

[449] So really happy to report that we've achieved on all these things.

[450] We obviously had to deal with a challenging macroeconomic environment, but I can share that, you know, business grew by 112 % in net revenue over the last year, where cashflow positive and profitable.

[451] And we really have huge ambitions for this business.

[452] We think this business is a business we could take public at some point.

[453] I think there's a lot of opportunities for industry consolidation.

[454] We think M &A will be a big part of our strategy.

[455] There's some exceptional teams out there.

[456] I always find that some of the best talent are entrepreneurs.

[457] And so one thing that we really pride ourselves on is how do we bring more entrepreneurial talent to MoonPay?

[458] And I think M &A is one of the best ways to do that.

[459] So we're constantly on the lookout.

[460] We want to keep localizing this experience.

[461] So more payment methods, more...

[462] geographies.

[463] We want the Moonpay account to be spendable everywhere.

[464] We really think we're building a generational business at Moonpay.

[465] When you think about these acquisitions, how do you go about evaluating what makes sense and what doesn't?

[466] So number one thing is if you can find a business that's cashflow positive and profitable, typically that's kind of a no brainer, right?

[467] You pay some multiple on that.

[468] And if you can get them to believe in your company and your company stock, you can find those exact acquisitions.

[469] So part of the reason you want to do these valuation events is to use your company currency.

[470] I think the other thing we look for is just like, Crazy people, crazy hungry people.

[471] It's all about people at the end of the day.

[472] And so if you can find that talent that is motivated, that has a really clear vision.

[473] And for us, our vision is pretty broad.

[474] It's payments infrastructure for the entire crypto economy.

[475] How do we make that happen?

[476] And I think it's going to take a village to make that happen.

[477] So you need to find a whole group of entrepreneurs that have the same vision.

[478] Do you think that the M &A that we're seeing right now, I mean, you guys have been part of this, that is going to stay in the private markets?

[479] Or do you also see, you know, hey, let's get into public markets so we can use the publicly traded stock rather than kind of these more infrequent valuation methods?

[480] So I think right now within crypto as a category, there really aren't that many public companies.

[481] Like we have, you know, Coinbase, we have miners, right?

[482] And then we have things like MicroStrategy.

[483] But, you know, it's still a relatively small pool of companies.

[484] Hopefully we see within this administration in this period, I know a bunch of people are filing for IPO and or direct listings.

[485] And I think you're going to see a greater consortium of companies.

[486] But I think, you know, the real opportunity is, yes, exactly that.

[487] You want to be able to convince people.

[488] that your stock is valuable.

[489] And so being public, it's a great currency that you can use if you want to keep growing.

[490] So, you know, it's obviously something that we've been thinking about.

[491] When somebody asks you, what is Moonpay?

[492] What's your like one or two sentence description?

[493] The simplest way to explain it is it's the passport to the crypto economy.

[494] So, you know, you can take this passport anywhere.

[495] You know, it's like, you know, going to the moon, right?

[496] We're taking our passport, we're called MoonPay.

[497] And so this new world of crypto can be confusing.

[498] Our job is to simplify it and make it, you know, we want the MoonPay account to be the only account that you need.

[499] Once you've signed up to MoonPay, you can play with any decentralized application.

[500] And I think over time, you know, you know, there'll be an equivalent of, you know, people compare us to PayPal, you know, MoonPay is, you know, the PayPal for crypto, you know, eventually there needs to be a brain tree as well.

[501] So more custom white label API focused solutions.

[502] So I'll give you a hint in some of the ways that we're thinking.

[503] And then what's your, you know, one or two sentence description as to why people should come work at Moonpay?

[504] Well, I work at Moonpay.

[505] Well, you got to work hard.

[506] You got to work super hard.

[507] But we also have fun.

[508] You got to work hard, play hard.

[509] I think life is short.

[510] I tell anyone that I recruit, it's like, you're investing your time.

[511] And your time is literally the most valuable asset that you have.

[512] And so if you're investing your time, you should be thinking, is this worth it?

[513] Is it worth it for me?

[514] And ultimately, that's about the environment we create.

[515] Like, do we make a place that's inspiring, that you can learn a lot?

[516] We want people to accelerate in their careers.

[517] We've had folks that have joined us and, you know, started in, you know, you would call, you know, an analyst or associate or, you know, just came in as a full stack engineer and now leading the entire function.

[518] So, you know, that's one of the things I'm really excited about.

[519] And then I'm inspired by people that even leave Moonpay and start their own companies, right?

[520] That's like, really, as an entrepreneur, it's like one of the most amazing things to see is other people build amazing companies.

[521] however much time they decide to spend with us i want it to be productive and i ultimately want the best for them so it's been uh it's been great and it's like one of the greatest privileges you have as an entrepreneur as a ceo is being able to mentor and hopefully grow the next generation of amazing entrepreneurs where can we send people to find you on the internet I don't know.

[522] I don't know.

[523] I guess really, no, I'm not that hard to find.

[524] You can find me on X. You can find me on X. No, no, not synonymous.

[525] I'm on Satoshi, but no, you can just check me out.

[526] Ivan Hodel on Twitter.

[527] Hodel, hold on for dear life.

[528] That was always the, you know, the mantra for crypto that I still really believe in.

[529] You just have to, you know, long Bitcoin short the bankers.

[530] It's the same concept here, right?

[531] We're long this, you know, technology.

[532] You have to have a long -term perspective about it.

[533] crypto to succeed and so that's something we don't really pay attention to too much on the short -term market moves we you know there's obviously metas in crypto that are constantly evolving uh but the infrastructure level we really have to think over the long term how do we deliver the very best experience in crypto and so we're proud to play a small part in making that happen i think you guys are doing a fantastic job so i appreciate you coming and doing this and we'll definitely do it again in the future awesome thanks