#1313 Andy Bromberg on How To Disrupt TradFi with Bitcoin & Stablecoins

Andy Bromberg is the CEO of Beam, and a contributor to the Eco Protocol. In this conversation, we discuss why stablecoins are so popular, on-chain payments, meaning of peer-to-peer electronic cash and how that may become a reality now, Beam, impact on individuals, and future outlook. ======================= Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people onchain. But what exactly is Base? It's an Ethereum L2 offering a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the onchain world. Base is a canvas for everyone, with hundreds of apps in the Base ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the onchain space for the first time, Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So, if you're looking for a platform where the future of onchain is being built daily, Base is your destination. Join in and make onchain the next online. Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠base.org⁠⁠⁠⁠ and follow along on Twitter at @BuildOnBase to see cool things to do onchain, everyday. ======================= BetOnline.ag is a proud sponsor of the the Pomp Podcast. Use crypto to bet on sports, play poker and enjoy casino games at BetOnline. Visit https://promotions.betonline.ag/pomp and use promo code POMP100 to receive a 100% matching bonus on any crypto deposit. BetOnline boasts no crypto transaction fees, and processing is anonymous, instantaneous and secure. ======================= Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/ ======================= View 10k+ open startup jobs: ⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠ Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. 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. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode.

• 0:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is with Andy Bromberg. He is the CEO of Beam and a contributor to the ECO Protocol. In this conversation, we discuss why stablecoins are so popular, how on-chain payment dream for years and years is now coming to fruition, what exactly it was meant by peer-to-peer electronic cash, and how that may actually become a reality now. And then we talk about Beam, this global Venmo product that Andy has been leading, and what some of the problems are that they're currently solving, what some of the problems left to solve will be once they get to that point. And then he describes how the technology works and why the financialization of crypto and Wall Street "taking over" may be a positive or a negative thing. I always enjoy talking to Andy. He's been in the industry for a very long time. He's got a ton of great insights, and he is one of the builders actually on the ground working with this technology today.

• 1:14Anthony Pompliano?

  So he shares a bunch about what is happening there as well. Here is my conversation with Andy Bromberg.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 1:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Base. Base is making it their mission to bring a billion people on-chain. What exactly is Base? It's a layer-two offering, a seamless experience for both builders and users. With near-zero gas fees and rapid transaction speeds, Base is shaping the future of the on-chain world. Base is a canvas for everyone with hundreds of apps in the ecosystem, whether you're an emerging creator, a seasoned developer, or someone exploring the on-chain space for the first

• 2:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Time. Base is designed to bring your ideas to life. So if you're looking for a platform where the future of on-chain is being built daily, base is your destination. Join in and make on-chain the next online. Learn more at base.org or follow along on Twitter at build on base. Again, that's at build on base to see cool things to do on-chain every single day. This episode is brought to you by BetOnline. Do you like making a profit from sports betting? Well, set yourself up to take home the most profit possible using crypto to fund your sports betting, casino and poker account at betonline.ag. You can avoid costly transaction fees, get your payouts lightning fast, and do it all securely and anonymously with the highest deposit and withdrawal

• 2:54Anthony Pompliano?

  limits in the industry. If you want to get in on the action, do it the smart way with crypto at betonline.ag. Head to the website, sign up with promo code POMP100 to get 100% bonus on your crypto deposit today. If you go and you deposit, they'll give you 100% bonus if you use promo code POMP100. BetOnline, the game starts here. BetOnline.ag. Go check them out today. All right, guys. Bang, bang. I've got Andy here with me. Andy, on-chain payments has been the dream, literally since Satoshi ripped the Bitcoin white paper, put it online. Everyone said peer-to-peer electronic cash. I'm in, this sounds awesome. It was the product of 40 years of R and D of all these people trying to create electronic cash. Now it's happening?

• 3:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Like, there's Bitcoin and it's definitely global store of value. People are trying to make, you know, Lightning and other payment systems work. But you all are specifically working on this, like, global Venmo solution. So talk a little bit as to, like, what is the state of on-chain payments today?

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it's great framing, too, because I think Satoshi solved the most important problem, which was this Byzantine generals problem. How do you allow for these decentralized systems that move value to even exist in the first place? That was the biggest problem that needed to be solved. And Satoshi wrote this white paper, peer-to-peer electronic cash system, like you said. But then I think we've realized as an industry over the last 15 years, which is crazy, it's been 15 years, that there was a series of other problems that needed to be solved first. One of them was fast and cheap transactions. One of them was allowing people to transact in the currency that they actually already want to transact in, which in most cases is US dollars, which is why I've seen the rise of stablecoins and, you know, over $100 billion worth of stablecoins out there in the market today. You've started to see all of these different problems be solved.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  One of them was, how do you let people participate in these decentralized, non-custodial systems in a user-friendly way? Because maybe some of us are comfortable with seed phrases and managing all of that, but not everyone is. So how do you give them those benefits? And it feels like over the last, call it, five to 10 years, we've solved a lot of these problems and recently have unlocked a couple of really big ones. And I would say the two biggest recent unlocks for on-chain payments. One of them is the production readiness and liveness of alternative L1s and L2s that are fast and cheap. So rollups and L1s that allow people to transact quickly and cheaply with stablecoins. So that was a really big one, and that's really only happened last couple of years. And the other big one, specifically for people building on top of the Ethereum blockchain or its rollups,

• 5:22Speaker 03

  is this idea of account abstraction, which was this new technology that came out, really got to production last year, last March, and allows for the abstraction of a lot of the complexity of managing a wallet for users while retaining the benefits of self-custody. And so we can talk about all that, but we looked at it and said, wow, we think it's finally time. We've gotten these fast and cheap blockchains, we've gotten this account abstraction technology. Stablecoins are obviously here to stay. And so now we can start to build the promised peer-to-peer cash system that people want transfer value all around the world. The first version of that is this product called Beam that we launched, justaboutbeam.eco. And it's a global event most. It's a really simple way for people to move stablecoins anywhere around the world nearly instantly. And there's a ton of interesting stuff we can talk about there, but that feels like the first primitive.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  How do you make it as easy as possible to move money from one place to another nearly instantly for nearly zero fees? And we're finally there as an industry.

• 6:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Talk a little bit as to the importance of the stable coin, right? Obviously, stable value, the whole reason why these things were created was to keep that value stable. And is that important from like a technical standpoint? Or is it just a consumer like psychology and the fact that I may not want to actually spend something where when I go to buy an item, you know, I thought I sent you a hundred dollars, but when you get it is 98. And now all of a sudden you're like, hey, you owe me a little bit more money. So how is stable coins like the importance of that playing into either technical or consumer psychology?

• 6:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. I think it's all about the psychology. So I speak as a huge Bitcoin bull. I mean, most of my liquid net worth is in Bitcoin. You know, I'm all in on this in the future. But I think the problem is it's very hard to get a consumer and mainstream consumer to adopt both a new payment product and a new currency at the same time. So it's very hard to say, okay, you're going to use this new type of wallet that you've never used before. And also you need to use this new currency that has a floating value in order to pay on it, even if that's ultimately where we want to end up and will inevitably end up as people transacting in these truly decentralized, independent crypto assets. We're not there yet. And so I think it's much easier to start with, hey, everyone, here's a new payment product

• 7:26Speaker 03

  that confers different advantages through its non-constellable nature and all these different things, but you can still pay in the familiar currency that you want to pay with. And for a lot of people, that's the dollar. And that includes people both who already pay with dollars. So I live in the United States, I pay with dollars all the time. So it's natural for me to pay with dollars, but also has been discussed all over the place. This is really valuable for people in places who can't usually access the dollar, who want access to US dollars and want access to US dollar-denominated financial services. And they do it in different ways with cash sometimes, but their local payment rails don't support moving dollars around digitally, but crypto enables this, blockchains enable this. And so you can start by offering people this new product, but with a currency in the form of stable coins that people already want to pay with.

• 8:10Speaker 03

  And then over time, that gives us as an industry, the opportunity to increasingly pitch people on, hey, while you're using this product, are you sure you want to be using this currency to nominate your holdings in and to nominate your payments in? And slowly try and shift them over to alternatives over time.

• 8:25Anthony Pompliano?

  When you're watching people use this thing, why are they coming in? Are they coming in because their existing system doesn't work? Are they coming in because, hey?

• 8:36Speaker 03

  I've got Venmo and my friend's got Cash App and I want to be able to, you know, not have to worry about the platforms. Is there a fee standpoint? Like, what is actually driving people to adopt something like Beam? Yeah, I think there's a few things. We've seen a few different kind of categories of users. One of them is people who, like I was saying, want access to dollar-denominated financial services and can't have them digitally in whatever country they're in. Because their local rails just don't support dollars. And so this allows people to really seamlessly pay each other, pay merchants. There's a merchant point-of-sale mode inside Beam that merchants can use to accept payments. So it allows for the kind of dollarization via these stable coins of different places where people want to pay in dollars. So that's one use case. Another is the obvious one that we've talked about in the industry forever around remittances.

• 9:18Speaker 03

  And making it really easy to send money across borders and send value across borders. And so that's another really interesting use case. And then another one we found is actually people who just simply travel a bunch. And, you know, I'm an example of this. When I go to London for work and I go out for drinks with a friend and I want to pay them or pay them back for drinks. I actually, I don't have a way to do that. Venmo doesn't work. Cash App doesn't work. I can't pay my friend in London for drinks. And so there's a set of users that are actually looking at it and saying, wow, this just takes the ease of Venmo or the ease of Cash App or the ease of Revolut or whatever they happen to use locally and opens it up and lets anyone use it. And the last thing I'll say is that we've also seen a lot of very crypto-native users

• 10:01Speaker 03

  who, yes, may already have access to stable coins and the ability to pay with stable coins, but are really excited about this product because they see it as the first thing that they could get their crypto non-native friends or family to use. And they're saying, oh, this is finally the product that I could get anyone to use. That anyone who's skeptical or has been afraid of using these types of products, now they can actually use this. And so a lot of crypto-native users are also getting in and using it. And I think one last thing I'll say is that in the global payment space, I think there's basically two categories of products and centralized products on the consumer side. One of them is peer-to-peer products like Venmo or Cash App. And every country has a local equivalent of this where they're really easy to use, super friendly, very simple, cheap, but they

• 10:46Speaker 03

  Almost always only work inside a single country or a single region. They don't work across borders. And you've got the separate category of products like Wise or Remitly or Western Union that are specifically cross-border payments products. Uh, but those products typically have much higher fees. The user interface is quite different from the peer-to-peer payment products. It's more complicated. And what this non-custodial, stablecoin-powered type of product allows for is kind of merging the best of both worlds and getting a product that can pay across borders. Both feels is easy to use as something like a Venmo or a Cash App. And so that's, I think, where a lot of the, the promise is, is kind of uniting the best of, of those different categories.

• 11:24Anthony Pompliano?

  So what, what's interesting to me is that with Beam, you can send like a link and someone can kind of just pay you. It, it's very similar to, um, you know, Stripe, I think, took this huge database and they kind of boiled it down to two lines of code. You put on your website, bam, you can process payments. Then we saw like the rise of Gumroad and basically now anyone could have a link anywhere on the internet and bam, you're immediately to a shopping page and go and sign up. It seems like you guys are kind of taking some of those, you know, longer-term trends and now buckle bucking it into, uh, peer-to-peer payments. Is the person who's involved in that transaction, I'll say you just send me that link. Do I have to download the app? Do I have to create an account? Like, like, how am I actually engaging here?

• 12:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And one of the reasons I ask that is because, uh, on one hand, the less friction, the better, the, the easier it is to transact, et cetera. On the other hand, you got to build a product. And so historically it's been awesome. If you said to someone, hey, do you want to see all the content I'm posting on Facebook? You have to sign up for a Facebook account, right? If you want to receive a payment from me, you have to sign up for that service. And so it helps to kind of draw more people into the product itself. So how do you think about the balance between frictionless payments, but also, you know, acquiring users and kind of building, uh, those accounts out?

• 12:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a great question. So we, we have this feature called Beam Links that you talked about where I can send money using Beam to an address or a person's username, which is an on-chain username, or I can create a link. And I can say, I'm going to put five USDC in this link and I'm going to text this link to a friend or WhatsApp it to them or signal it to them or email it to them or whatever I want to do. And they click that link and when they click that link, it pops up. Into Beam and they can claim the money in that link, but they don't actually need to create an account. So all they have to do is hit claim and all of a sudden in this web wallet, no download required, no app, no account creation required. They can have money in that account and send it to someone else without going through an onboarding process. Now, that's great. And I think the frictionlessness is really powerful, but most people do want

• 13:19Speaker 03

  to access their money on multiple devices or have backups for it. And so we allow people to then create an account to save access to those, to that account via their email or their X account. We're adding more auth options to making it really simple for people to save access. They can access it on another device or recover it if they, if they lose that. So I think for us, it's, it's all about, it is a balance, but it starts with making the most frictionless payment experience possible. And then, once people experience that, their typical reaction is wow, that was really frictionless. I would like to continue to use this product. And so then they create an account and go do it. But right now Beam is just a web product. There's no app to download. We don't work through the app stores. It's just a website that you go to. It makes it really simple. And there's no onboarding required. You just, it's like a MetaMask wallet, or Phantom, or

• 14:04Speaker 03

  Rabbi, or Ledger, or whatever. You can just put money into it and send money out. And because it's non custodial, there's no onboarding process required there.

• 14:12Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the like, market dynamics or the competitive pressure this provides to the existing players? Both legacy players, you know, the, the Venmos, the Cash Apps, et cetera, but also the like crypto type payment players, some of which are the same, right? I mean, obviously PayPal is now getting into this Cash App, but some are also just crypto native. And so how do you think about where the landscape is and like how you guys kind of fit into that?

• 14:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think the, the advantage is, it feels like a very classic Clay Christensen style disruption opportunity where this non custodial wallet approach, and I want to unpack that a little bit. So I do think, I keep saying this non custodial, self custodial concept, and it's really important to why this, why this is valuable and differentiated. But it allows for much lower overhead in serving customers. And that allows for a much lower cost structure and a much broader appeal and, and ability to use it. And when I say non custodial, you know, I think people listening to this, we've, you know, we all pay attention to crypto. And when we think of non custodial, what we think of is, You know, not your keys, not your crypto. I want to have access to my own keys. And that may be true for some of us, but broadly, the world, I think, doesn't really care about

• 15:22Speaker 03

  that that much, except in certain places and certain pockets where it's super valuable. But most people don't really care about managing their own keys. That's and you can see evidence of that, right? Coinbase, which is a very centralized product, amazing company, has a ton of user assets because people are comfortable saying, I don't need to own my keys. And that's fine. But a product being non custodial is more than just offering users the opportunity to own their own keys. It also dramatically changes the approach that the product can take to global expansion. And what I mean by this is that if you look at a centralized custodial financial product, something like a Coinbase, their kind of core product, or like I was saying, Transferwise, or Venmo, or any of these products, they have to go country by country.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  And because they're custodial, because they are hanging, they are in control of users' money, they have to go and build a team locally, build the bank partnerships, get licensed, and be tightly regulated because they are in control of users' money. Users have to trust them, and that then leads to regulation on those entities. But for non custodial products, whether it's Beam, or it's, again, MetaMask or Ledger, because the company that builds the product can't touch the user's money, the regulatory burden and the trust burden is much lower, right? We can't in Beam move your money around, even if we wanted to. We literally can't. It's non custodial. You're in control of your own keys on your own device, in the same way you are with MetaMask or Ledger. And you know, MetaMask can't move your money. They they simply can't.

• 16:51Speaker 03

  And so that allows you to be global on on day one. Beam is live in nearly every country around the world because there is no need to go place by place and get regulated by every single country because it's non custodial. You're not in control of users' funds. And so that's a huge competitive differentiator that is then putting a lot of pressure on other companies. If you look at something like Transferwise, which is an amazing company, or Wise now, amazing company, I've mentioned them a couple of times, billion dollars in revenue a year, incredible business, incredible operation, they've built something really impressive. They're only live in 65 or 70 countries. And that's an enormous cross border payments business, live in only those countries because the overhead of going to new ones is so significant. But for a non custodial product, you can be live in every country immediately, and

• 17:35Speaker 03

  that's a huge competitive advantage.

• 17:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Is there a world where some of these other organizations just plug into it? Like, you know, one of the promises of the Bitcoin ecosystem is on Lightning and anyone can plug in, whether you're a traditional bank, your Cash App, or your crypto native thing. Is that kind of the idea here as well is that almost the infrastructure itself ends up being this like settlement layer and now all of a sudden you really are breaking down the walls in a weird way. And so on one hand, that is a great growth hack, right? Is like you turn on a product like this and immediately you have the ability to send money to, you know, hundreds of millions of people, whereas historically you had to go build up that user base. But also it can lead to disruption on the other side, like kind of somebody builds a better interface,

• 18:23Anthony Pompliano?

  somebody builds a better, you know, kind of product, like they could come and just take your users as well. And so it makes it more of like almost like a free market competition.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  This is, I think, one of the most interesting topics in this space. Crypto is by its nature open, right? These wallets, they can all send money to each other. Whatever Bitcoin wallet you're using, you can send money to another user, even if they're using a totally different wallet, which is not the way that the traditional financial world works. These are each kind of wallet gardens that are very hard to migrate onto and very hard to migrate off of. And like you said, that comes with upsides and downsides. But I think it is a huge mistake for businesses operating in this industry to take the wall to garden approach. I think the biggest advantage is the openness and that's what users, it comes with its downsides too, but users want that and I believe that people that build these open systems will win. Because like you said, it opens it up for the market and lets the market decide what is best.

• 19:15Speaker 03

  And ultimately, if you've built the best product, people will come to you and that's the way it should work. And so I think leaning into the openness is really important. One of the things we've done in Beam is that we've realized we're building this product, this kind of global Venmo product, but there's all of these problems that we've solved under the hood in the infrastructure layer that enables a lot of the easy functionality of Beam. And we should open that up and let other people use that too, in the way that you just said. And one analogy I think about a lot is, I think of payments as a little bit like a, like a water system where you're getting water in your house. And the analogy is that You've got a faucet which you use. I turn my faucet on and I fill up a cup of water. In order to get there, the water flows through pipes.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  And then you talk about the water itself. There's three pieces, the faucet, the pipes and the water itself. And the analogy to payments is that you've got payment products, the actual faucet, the thing that the user has used to interface with the money. You've got infrastructure or pipes that move the money around, whether that's the ACH system or the Bitcoin or Ethereum blockchains or whatever it may be. And you've got the water itself, which is the money. Is it Bitcoin? Is it stable coins? Is it ETH? Is it? What is it? You've got each of these three levels, the faucet, the pipes and the water, and each of those levels can be innovated on. So I think of Beam as innovating on the faucet level, at the product level, innovating on the user interface and how you can make it easier. But in so doing, we've built a bunch of infrastructure at the pipes level that we're now looking at opening up and allowing other people to use.

• 20:41Speaker 03

  Because I think that benefits the openness of the system and allows people to get the most effective execution for what they're trying to do.

• 20:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So as I try to think about where the world is headed, it feels like AI is bringing down the cost of like language barriers. And the promise is going to be like, I don't know, you go on a trip somewhere, you have like a thing in your ear and it auto translates. Kind of like when you see the government officials at these big events and everything's getting auto translated for them. Payments, specifically the way that you're talking about and what Beam is, seems to be doing a very similar type of thing where now borders go away. Will currency differentiations go away as well? And so now all of a sudden, the ability for me to pay in my native currency but be received in another native currency, that kind of gets pushed to the background and like I'm just thinking about sending value.

• 21:32Anthony Pompliano?

  And the currencies are kind of selected on either end of the transaction by each participant?

• 21:37Speaker 03

  I think it's a beautiful bit in the future because people should have choice in what currency they are using. And the advent of first the internet, digital payments, and now these global blockchain distributed ledgers is enabling that, is enabling people to pick what money they want. You can live in any country in the world now, effectively any country, and use stable coins, use dollars. And I expect that we're going to see stable coins begin to be issued for. All sorts of different currencies, not just dollars and pounds and euros, but other currencies too. And so people will be able to choose what currency they want from the list of fiat currencies or digital versions of fiat currencies. And then they'll also be able to choose from a list of independent, you know, non-governmental currencies or assets like Bitcoin or Ethereum or any other currency out there.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  And because of this seamless movement of value, because of products like decentralized exchanges, you'll just be able to pick what you want. And I think there's, there's a lot of discussion about the kind of reserve currency status. There has been in, you know, the Bitcoin industry since the beginning, talking about reserve currencies. And there's one school of thought that is around, uh, you know, is Bitcoin going to be the next reserve currency? Or is it the dollar going to stay? Or is there going to be something else? Or what's, what's the next reserve currency? And there's a theory, I think I heard this first and really liked it from Lynn Alden, um, who's brilliant. That maybe we're not going to see a single unipolar reserve currency again. Maybe because of how easy it is to move between different forms of value electronically today.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  We're just going to see a fragmentation where different places or different types of transactions will have their own currency that people use. And maybe for a certain set of transactions, that's using the US dollar. And for a certain set of transactions, it's a different regional fiat-based currency. Maybe for a certain set of transactions on the internet economy, that's Bitcoin or whatever it may be. And that I think is a, a really interesting vision of the world where because it's so easy now to move between these different forms of value. Each person can pick what they want to save in, what they want to spend in. And they don't need to have that match up with what the person on the other side wants. I can live my whole life in Bitcoin. And if I want to buy a coffee down the street and the coffee shop owner wants US dollars on the other side,

• 23:46Speaker 03

  that can just happen and no one needs to care about what the other person wants.

• 23:50Anthony Pompliano?

  It physically made a ton of progress technically. What other problems were there to work on? Like what else is left, if you will?

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's still a bunch of problems. I think one big one is privacy. And there have been, there's been a bunch of work on this on different facets, but ultimately I do think for a lot of transactions, people want privacy. And solving that for all of these different forms of moving digital value on these open ledgers, I think is a big, big problem. A lot of smart people working on it, but that's a really big problem. So that's one, one big category I think a lot about. Second, there's still room to compress on fees. Even the most efficient rollups today on Ethereum are still charging in the low tens of cents. And there's line of sight to this getting better, but that needs to come down to cent or sub cent transaction fees, which we do see on other networks already like Solana. And so that's another thing that's important.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  And then a big one is that in solving a bunch of these problems over the last few years, I think we've created a new problem for ourselves. And that new problem is the fragmentation of liquidity across different chains and rollups. Now you might have a wallet on optimism, I might have a wallet on base or whatever other network. And those don't send to each other, right? And it's not easy to manage that. And so now we've gotten to this fragmentation where there's all these options for different chains that people can use. But it's much harder to then transact. And so again, some of the infrastructure we're building on for Beam, which I can speak about too, is around solving that. And how do we, now that we have all these different chains that are good for different reasons and different purposes? How do we abstract that away for users?

• 25:27Speaker 03

  Because ultimately users should not care about what chain they are on. That doesn't, that shouldn't matter to most users. What matters is an understanding of the value and the assets that they're getting. And a natively issued USDC on two different chains shouldn't feel different to users. They shouldn't need to worry about that, that distinction. And so I think that's now one of the next big problems that needs to be solved.

• 25:51Anthony Pompliano?

  When you see Facebook try to get into payments, when you see some of these other businesses, is that just a conclusion that every single one of these tech companies wants to be a payments company? Like, is payment that valuable? And what we're talking about here will empower them to kind of accelerate and get there quicker?

• 26:10Speaker 03

  Payments is really valuable. And there's just kind of a simple truism that at some level, the TAM of payments, the addressable market for payments is equal to the TAM of every other market combined, because markets are denominated in the payments that get made, right? If you, if the healthcare industry is taking in X billion or trillion dollars a year, well, those are all payments that need to happen, right? You're denominating it in, in the transaction of money and payments is the sum of all of that. And so it is a huge market. It's gargantuan. And ultimately, the most valuable things in the world are moving information and moving value, because that is what allows humanity to keep advancing and allows us to develop the technologies that then let us do all the other things that are critical of the world.

• 26:54Speaker 03

  And so, yeah, moving information, moving value, that's what matters. And so everyone wants to get into payments at some point. And everyone realizes, as their business gets big enough, oh, my business is now naturally doing a bunch of payments or it's involved a lot of payments. You think about the scale of payments involved in Facebook's ad business. Enormous, right? You look at the scale of payments in any business, once they get big enough. Uber's payments, right? The scale of payments payouts to drivers, pay-ins from, from customers. All of these businesses turn into giant payment businesses. And they realize that the payment stack that they use is really tall. There are five, 10, 15 different businesses between them and their customer in the acceptance of payments.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  And they start to look at that very critically and say, wow, that's, that's a lot of money that we are spending out of our revenue and affecting our bottom line. And so what can we do to vertically integrate? So you see every business start to step up this. I think another great example, by the way, is Target. Target is retail business, relatively low margin compared to the world of software businesses. And they realize these credit card fees are really high and so they launch products around that. They have this thing called the Red Card, which is a way to skip part of the card rails and make more effective payments. And I think that as these crypto payment rails get better and better, we're going to see businesses increasingly realize that that's actually the lowest cost, most effective way for them to accept payments. They should move towards it.

• 28:24Anthony Pompliano?

  One of my last questions for you is, what's the impact if this thing gets global adoption for individuals themselves? What does that world look like?

• 28:33Speaker 03

  It is, it's so interesting that we have become used to, as individuals, a world where we cannot instantly freely move value that we own to someone else. We're just used to this. This is fine. You're like, oh, I gotta pay someone who lives somewhere else. That's gonna be a pain, or it's gonna cost me a bunch of fees, or I can't do it on the weekend, or whatever. We're talking about your money that you want to pay to someone else. And I think that right to transact freely and cheaply is just a basic human right. You should be able to move your money to someone else. But we've become so used to by the system, all the issues with it. And it depends on the country you're in, but maybe it takes a couple of days for a transfer to work, or you wanna withdraw from a product, it takes a couple of days.

• 29:18Speaker 03

  And if you just think about it, instead of starting from what we have today and how we can eliminate the problems, but just from first principles, just from the ground up, how should payments work? It should be that if you have money or value that you would like to transfer to someone else, you should be able to do it freely or nearly freely and instantly, anywhere in the world with no restrictions. That is what it should be. And you can choose to put more restrictions on yourself, you can make it more secure, you can do all these things, but that should be in users' control, that should be in individuals' control, and in today's world, it's not. And so I think if this gets global adoption, all this stuff that has come about as a result of this non-constodial payment stack really happens,

• 30:00Speaker 03

  we're just going to see a world that looks more like that first principles world of I can transfer value anywhere. In the same way, we're now used to the idea that I can transfer information anywhere. I can get a text to anyone I want in the world instantly. That's what the world's gonna look like for payments, and I think that's the way that the world should be.

• 30:18Anthony Pompliano?

  So the reason why I ask that question is because whenever we solve one problem in the world, we usually create another one. One of my favorite examples, people have heard me talk about before is like self-driving cars, reduce car accidents. Now we will have an organ shortage because organ donations come from car accidents. And so now we gotta go figure out like synthetic organs or something. What are the problems that pop up by solving payments? And like, how do you think about, okay, the maybe the downsides to this where people can say, let's solve this problem. And then we're gonna get ready to solve the next one?

• 30:49Speaker 03

  There's tons. And I think one of the biggest ones is that there is some level of friction in the system that just shouldn't exist for payments. And there's some levels of friction, like, for example, you can't send money on a weekend over certain payment rules. That just doesn't make sense. That's, that's, that seems silly. But then there's other parts of the system where there's friction and it makes sense. Like, if you make it too easy for someone to send money, their money to someone else, well, then all of a sudden scams become much easier. Right? There's, there's friction. You can, you can reverse an ACH payment. You can reverse, you know, different types of transfers. And if that goes away, then all of a sudden, it becomes much easier for someone to get defrauded, because they get convinced to send their money to someone else and they send their money and then it's, it's gone. And that's it. And they, there was no limit

• 31:33Speaker 03

  to how much they could send. And so there's a dark side to all of this. But I think that the, my view there is that then the problems to be solved are, how do you give people finer grained control over the parameters around their money? And I think that's a solvable problem. But that's one that does need to be solved in parallel to this. There is friction that exists in the payment system that exists for good reason. And we have to figure out how to let people reintroduce that for themselves in a way that doesn't cause them to all of a sudden have money just flowing out of them without them really meaning to.

• 32:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And then what about team wise? Like, who's working on this? And where are you finding those people? And who are you looking for? In case anyone who's listening to this is excited and potentially wants to come work with you guys?

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, we, thanks for asking. We've got an amazing team. We're about 25 people all over, mostly US and US time zones, but all over. Right now, we're definitely looking for a designer. Beam is a super fun product to design. It's great building this non-considered, simple user interface to abstract away the complexity of crypto, really fun, and a front-end engineer to work on that as well. And those are kind of our two biggest things, as well as someone to help out with DevOps and backend infrastructure. But we're always looking for exceptional people. So if you're interested, and if this resonates with you, even if you're not one of the people I just said, I would love to hear from you and chat about how we could work together.

• 32:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Awesome. Where can we send people to find you on the internet?

• 32:54Speaker 03

  At Andy underscore Bromberg on Twitter and at bromberg.eth on Warpcast on Forecaster, which I recommend everyone check out if you haven't already.

• 33:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Are you spending more time on Twitter slash X or on Forecaster?

• 33:09Speaker 03

  Forecaster's picking up. It's, you know, it's really good, and the signal to noise is exceptional. And there's just lots of cool things happening on there. So yeah, come check it out. It's lots of fun.

• 33:19Anthony Pompliano?

  All right. Well, send some people over there as well. I appreciate the time. We'll definitely do this again in the future.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Awesome. Thanks for having me.