#712 Bringing Bitcoin To The Developing World w/ Ray Youssef

Ray Youssef is the founder and CEO of Paxful. He is the co-founder of the Built with Bitcoin Foundation. In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin, Nigeria, India, El Salvador, and bringing bitcoin to the developing world. ======================= Gemini is a leading regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy, sell, store, and earn bitcoin, ether, and over 40 other cryptocurrencies. Offering industry-leading security, insurance and uptime, Gemini is the go-to trusted platform for beginner and sophisticated investors alike. Open a free account in under 3 minutes at gemini.com/pomp and get $20 of bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within 30 days. ======================= Ethernity.io: The world’s first authenticated and licensed NFT platform, trusted by over 150,000 members. Digital NFTs and exclusive real-world unlockables, authentic partnerships with athletes and artists. Visit Ethernity.io, where you can buy and sell authenticated NFTs from top notable figures, rights, license, and IP holders you can’t find anywhere else; the start of an entire ecosystem bringing utility to #NFTs.

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. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Ray Youssef is the founder and CEO of Paxful. He's the co-founder of the Built with Bitcoin Foundation. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, Nigeria, India, El Salvador, and bringing Bitcoin to the developing world. I really enjoyed this conversation with Ray, and I hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode, though, I want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is Gemini. Gemini is a leading regulated cryptocurrency exchange, a wallet, and a custodian that makes it simple and secure to buy, sell, store, and earn Bitcoin, Ether, and over 40 other cryptocurrencies. They offer industry-leading

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  security, insurance, and uptime. Gemini is the go-to trusted platform for beginner and sophisticated investors alike. You can open a free account in under three minutes at gemini.com/pomp and get $20 of Bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within 30 days. Again, a free account, under three minutes at gemini.com/pomp, and you'll get $20 of Bitcoin after you trade $100 or more within 30 days. Gemini, a leading regulated cryptocurrency exchange, wallet, and custodian. If you haven't tried it out, I highly suggest you do. Go check it out and let me know what you think. Next up is Authenticity. You might have noticed just how many NFT projects are coming onto the market lately. The problem? It's becoming harder and harder to determine the true lifelong value of NFT collectibles. Meet Authenticity, the world's first authenticated

• 1:29Anthony Pompliano?

  and licensed NFT platform, trusted by over 150,000 members. On Authenticity.io, you can buy digital NFTs and redeem real-world unlockable collectibles and experiences. At Authenticity, their team believes in transparency and legitimacy. That's why they partner directly with the individual, the team, the brand, or the league, so you know what you buy is the real deal with value that will stand the test of time. One of the things that sets them apart is they go right to individuals, teams, athletes, musicians, etc., and they sign licensed deals. They have licensed content from names that you know. So visit Authenticity.io to register for upcoming collections, buy and sell in the marketplace, and much more

• 2:11Anthony Pompliano?

  to come, from the app, to Pax, to virtual worlds, and gaming. That's Authenticity.io. Authenticity.io, the licensed NFT platform. Authenticity.io. All right, let's get into this conversation with Ray. I hope you guys enjoy this one.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:49Anthony Pompliano?

  We've got Ray here with us. How are you, man?

• 2:52Speaker 02

  I'm good, brother. How are you?

• 2:53Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm doing fantastic. I've been really looking forward to this.

• 2:56Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I got a whole bunch of questions for you, but first, before we start, can you tell people your background and how Paxville actually got started?

• 3:06Speaker 02

  So my parents took me to America when I was two years old. They were from Egypt to look for probably, you know, a better life, right? Because there was no opportunity where they were. So there were school teachers that came there. My father worked in a newsstand. And I grew up in New York City and I got my first computer when I was 19, taught myself how to code really late, but I got into it really hard. And I had a few successful businesses. I started a ringtone business. I was like the peer-to-peer ringtones. People would upload ringtones and I would share them with the world. It was like the Napster ringtones. And then I went on kind of a spiritual journey, right? And I'll make a long story short, but I went to Egypt during the Egyptian Revolution and I was there in Tahrir Square, fighting

• 3:47Speaker 02

  for my life on the, that night of January 25th. 800 people died on that night. It was quite an adventure. I'm actually writing a book about that. I could write a book about just that one night. But when I came back to America, I saw the narrative that they were feeding was the exact opposite of the narrative that I saw there on the ground. And that started my journey. And I started to wake up and I came back to America and I was right in the middle of Zuccotti Park for Occupy Wall Street. And I went through another adventure there. And at the end of it all, I started to see that it doesn't really matter what you're protesting or what you're doing. If you don't solve the money problem, no other problem matters. That was in 2011. By 2013, I had gotten really deep into Bitcoin. I went to my first Bitcoin meetup after spending, you know, a couple of months researching Bitcoin and I met my

• 4:32Speaker 02

  co-founder and we both bonded over the belief that Bitcoin could actually help the little guy. That it wasn't just another asset class for rich kids to play with. We already have enough of those, right?

• 4:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Take me back to Egypt. When you go there, you knew that this was unfolding or you just happened to be there when the protests happened?

• 4:50Speaker 02

  Oh, no, I knew it was unfolding. I was in New York. I heard about this. I grew up in New York. I never really had a connection with Egypt, but I still had love for the people there. And I saw they were fighting against what is a truly brutal dictator, you know, under Mubarak. Egypt became known for first and foremost, being the expert on torture, right? I booked the first flight over there. I was actually the only one on the plane over there. Everyone was trying to escape. I landed there, went straight to Tahrir Square and I it just that night, a whole melee broke out with all these Mubarak's, at least a ton of goons, and they all started attacking Tahrir Square. We evacuated all the men, all the women and children. And it was just a bunch of guys fighting. It was quite the adventure.

• 5:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And is this like hand to hand, like you guys are punching, kicking and fighting?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 5:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Or is this like they're shooting at you? Or what was it like on the ground?

• 5:38Speaker 02

  So it first started hand to hand. And what everyone started doing, started breaking up pieces of the sidewalk to make stones for throwing. We're setting up barricades. Dudes were arm their cells with like trash cans, the shields. It was like ghetto warfare to the max. And it was, it was pretty wild. I got wounded, actually. And the only proof that I have I was there was front lines caught me when I was being pulled off the front line because I got wounded and I was screaming, long live Egypt, right? I was delirious. I don't know what was going on. I was actually poisoned. They were, they gave me these candies there and it gave me the worst atomic diarrhea imaginable. So basically, that was the first phase. And then the second phase, that's when they brought the snipers, shotguns and all of that stuff. It's a long story. I don't need to get into it now, but it's quite the adventure, really. Yeah.

• 6:23Anthony Pompliano?

  And so when you're there, the people, like one of the things that when I was in the military that I used to always tell people is we send soldiers abroad, right? And they have a flag on their shoulder and they go under the name of patriotism, defending their homeland, all this stuff. But when the shit kicks off, nobody remembers any of that stuff.

• 6:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 6:43Anthony Pompliano?

  It shows you and the person next to you, and you want to get the hell out of there. You want to get home safe. You want to make sure no one on your side is injured. Right? Is the same thing going on? Or is there an appeal to a higher level when you're fighting for many of the people that are there on their homeland? Like, like there, there's a difference when you go somewhere else to fight for your homeland or your country, your nation versus when you're actually fighting in your country or in your nation. Like, how, how did you see that in terms of as that fight is unfolding? Are people there trying to just make sure you and I, we're on the same side? Let's get out of here safely. Or is it, no, we actually are doing this for something bigger?

• 7:21Speaker 02

  It's a great question. So it went through different levels, right?

• 7:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay.

• 7:24Speaker 02

  People that I was fighting with, they were soccer fans. They were called the ultras. They're all these young guys and they saw these, you know, these goons, they knew Mubarak sent them. So we're like, oh yeah, gung ho, let's attack these guys. Let's keep them from taking Tahrir Square. Tahrir Square is a massive, massive place, like three times bigger than Times Square. And their three main entrances. So basically, once we evacuated all the women and children, we had to keep Mubarak's goons from coming into Tahrir Square. We were trying to hold it. So we were just trying to barricade the area and keep these guys out. And beginning, it was just kind of like, it was kind of fun, actually. It was almost like you're being in World of Warcraft, but it's real. And everyone was looking at me and they didn't know what to make of me because I was screaming in English. Didn't understand Arabic, like who is this guy? They didn't care because I was fighting with them and I was fighting well, right?

• 8:04Speaker 02

  It was, but then as the night grew on and night started to fall, things got really, really serious. You know, there were people that were there, like I saw a guy whose head was blown off with a shotgun blast. And at that point, everything changes, right? Then it's a desperate situation. And then that's when you start to heal people. It wasn't about even Egypt anymore. It was about God. People were screaming, God is greatest, you know? And then it was that serious, right? It went from just happy fun to God is greatest, pretty damn big.

• 8:31Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the saying? Everyone's a believer in a foxhole, right?

• 8:34Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 8:35Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it that process? So the story in the United States at least was that there was this huge uprising, etc. If you go and you read a little bit of, right, so I am not nearly as well versed as you are. There's a lot to do with food prices increasing, from what I remember in terms of the situation got so dire for people on the ground in terms, they literally couldn't afford to eat, that eventually it led into and kind of fed into this huge uprising. What's the truth? Like, in your view, in terms of like, what was the ultimate tipping point in Egypt at that point where people finally said like enough is enough?

• 9:10Speaker 02

  I'm not an expert there, unfortunately, but you know, the Egyptian people have been traumatized by 30 year rule under Mubarak, where this guy literally like he may torture the Egyptian national export, right? They would torture the people there. There was no speaking out. People were just sick of that. The Egyptians are very warm, very loving people, but they had had enough. And you saw it in the youth, like they were so energized to make this stop. And they fought with their hearts, you know, on their sleeves. But for me, when, you know, I saw that this one night, January 25th, 2011, that's when, you know, they made fun of it to me, and it was the night of the camel, because they really came at us with horses, guys on camels with machetes, right? So they called it the night of the camel, but 800

• 9:51Speaker 02

  people died that night. It was a bloody street fight. I've been in a lot of street fights. I grew up in the hood in New York, so I've seen a lot, but this was on a different level, man. Like, people were dying everywhere, and these guys held it down. It's amazing achievement. Then when I got back to the United States, everyone was like, "It's Facebook!" I'm like, "Facebook? Meta? Excuse me?" Like, there's nothing meta about this, man. This was blood and guts on the street. People were dying, and you're talking about Facebook? So I'm there online trying to defend the position. This is me and only one other guy talking, trying to tell the truth, and you wouldn't believe who it was. Malcolm Gladwell, who wrote The Tipping Point. It was only me and him saying, "Hey, man, this is not Facebook. This was an organic revolution, young people giving up their lives to make this happen."

• 10:34Speaker 02

  And I was like, "There's an army of trolls attacking us every time we say this." So that turned me on to the concept of a nemesis, an organized opposition. And that is what I really needed to begin to just conceptualize the, the level of resistance that humanity is up against, right? And it happens in politics, but on money, it happens on a whole other level. And that's what's so beautiful about the Bitcoin movement, because that's par for the course here.

• 10:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. When you went to Zuccotti Park on Wall Street, obviously, there wasn't violence for the most part, right? It was a very peaceful protest, but there was a lot of people pissed off. A lot of people were very upset with the global financial crisis and felt like the banks had basically gotten one over on the citizens of the country. Was there similarities outside of the violence in terms of people's anger or kind of distrust and feeling of being left behind by a system? Is that a fair characterization, or is that too much of an overreach?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  No, it's fair. So- The spirit was the same, like these young people really cared, like the people I met in Zuccotti Park, they really like, they really, really cared and some of them truly knew what was going on. They were very awakened in the right sense. The other similarity was the level of resistance that I encountered there. Now, a lot of people might look back on the Egyptian Revolution and realize that it was a kind of an orange revolution, right? In fact, it definitely was. In the end, it did not serve the best interests of Egypt. And I saw firsthand in front of my eyes, I saw the whole movement in Zuccotti Park get infiltrated and taken over. And I actually tried to stop it. And I, when you see this happen in real time, it completely changes your perception of things. And that's when I could not deny what was happening.

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Because before that, I was just a typical brainwashed American. I believed everything I saw in the world, I truly did, man. I'm looking back, I couldn't believe how dumb I was. But after this, it was the trauma I needed. It was one trauma after another necessary to break this resistance.

• 12:25Anthony Pompliano?

  And so Paxful today, talk to us about what you guys do on a day to day basis, what the product is.

• 12:31Speaker 02

  So the product is essentially barter for money. If you think about it, it's almost like Hawala 2.0, right? Hawala is a system of money exchange that happened 1400 years ago to solve essentially the same problem that we have now. Back then, the Roman Empire forbid agency. So all these international traders could not trade on behalf of one another. So how do you run international business doing that? Nowadays, we have a very similar problem. It's a problem that I like to call financial apartheid. Some people cannot trade freely and others can. And who can help them? Or you're not allowed to help them, right? Because of all the compliance laws and all this and all this, this intricate web of just broken systems, those people are literally kept in a financial prison, right? So how

• 13:12Speaker 02

  do you help those people? If you ask me why Paxwell is here, Paxwell is here very simply to make those people rich. How do you do that? Just allow them to transact freely. What are the tools you need to do that? Honest money, peer to peer electronic cash, Bitcoin. We have this tool right now, the first time in human history. We also have the idea of peer to peer prevalent in the minds of the people. Uber, Airbnb, Craigslist, peer-to-peer is everywhere. So why not share your bank account and make a payment for someone on their behalf? Right? And we have this amazing movement of peer-to-peer believers, the Bitcoin community, three million strong and growing. Right? So we have everything we need now to actually make this happen and actually free these people from financial apartheid.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  That is the problem, and that is the biggest problem in the world. That is the reason why some people are rich and some people are poor. And once you begin to understand this, it makes it very clear. The natural state of humanity is prosperity, abundance, and wealth. Poverty is an artificially imposed social construct.

• 14:17Anthony Pompliano?

  What is the country that is the most kind of active with your products?

• 14:22Speaker 02

  I'd have to give it up to my boys and girls in Nigeria. Those people are on a different.

• 14:26Anthony Pompliano?

  They're crazy, right?

• 14:27Speaker 02

  They're amazing. So people ask me like, why is Paxwell here? How did you guys get the seven million users bootstrapped? Are you guys geniuses? No, very simple. Our journey defines our values and our value. Number one, stay connected to the streets. Right? Back in 2017, while this was happening, right? Or even before that, 2016, I started reaching out to like all these Africans online, trying to show them how to trade Bitcoins. Right? I gave away like a thousand of my own Bitcoin, just trying to show people how to trade. And I would talk with Africans constantly, right? And of all the Africans are all brilliant, very like ambitious people, but the Nigerians were on a different level. And I said, I'm going to invest my time here because these guys can move. And when I finally went there, went to Legos, then I met the people.

• 15:10Speaker 02

  I saw the sheer depth of the brilliance and ambition there and the problems, the problems that they have. We cannot imagine in Nigeria, if you have a bank account, you've got money in it. You get a Visa debit card, bank card, you can only spend a hundred dollars a month online with that. You're not even buying an Xbox. If you want to send money to the country next door, Cameroon or Ghana, it's either just take a suitcase full of cash and hop in a plane and do it. They are literally in a financial prison. And once I saw that, I said, you know what? This is the place. These are the people, they're going to make this stick. But the first thing we had to do was get Bitcoin into the country. How do you get Bitcoin in the country where it's nearly impossible to get money out of the country? So we had to solve that problem, right?

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Ten million dollars is the minimum order for cacao beans if you want to ship it out of Nigeria. I didn't have ten million dollars.

• 15:57Anthony Pompliano?

  That's crazy.

• 15:58Speaker 02

  To ship out cacao beans. So what were we gonna do? How are we gonna get Bitcoins into Nigerian hands, right? We had to give the Nigerians a digital import, a digital asset that they could import into the country and exchange it for Bitcoins. So what did we do? Showed them how to get gift cards and exchange it with Chinese gamers. And that got fifty million dollars a week to this day into the country.

• 16:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain how that works.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  So very simply, someone with, uh, someone in Nigeria wants a Bitcoin, right? He will get a gift card by any means. If he's doing some work there, he'll say, hey, pay me with a gift card, an Amazon gift card code, right? And just an e-code, someone will send it to him as payment. He'll go on to Paxful, he'll see an offer, some guy in China says, hey, give me a hundred dollar Amazon gift card code and I'll give you eighty bucks worth of Bitcoin. And they'll do the trade with the escrow, boom, the guy gets his Bitcoin instantly. There's no coinbase in Nigeria, right? So this is how he did it. Sixty million dollars to this day a week flows through that single corridor. And that's how we got the first Bitcoins into Africa with sheer like hustle. And it was a huge hack, but it worked.

• 17:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And so I've been to Nigeria, I went to Lagos, uh, and I went to, um, Computer Village. I'm assuming that you've been there, uh, probably multiple times.

• 17:12Anthony Pompliano?

  And what blew me away, this is probably in twenty fifteen, maybe, I went maybe twenty sixteen,

• 17:18Anthony Pompliano?

  is just how young the population is, how digitally native the population is. And the whole idea of electronics, gift cards, like all these things that in the US, we may not think is like the most important thing, but they're definitely a big part of, uh, the consumerism and like e-commerce and stuff like that. That's all being played out in like an analog world. You can walk down Computer Village and there's all of the phone stores. There's people handing out gift cards. There's people who are selling all sorts of different dongles and chargers and like, like all this stuff. And sure, it's a place where that specifically is supposed to be happening. It's literally called Computer Village. But I walked through, the first time I walked through, I was like, what the hell is this? And I literally came back and I wrote a piece, uh, that said, I saw the future of the consumer internet in Nigeria.

• 18:01Anthony Pompliano?

  Because it was just such a small, or such a large, young population that was so digitally native. It just felt like, of course, these people are gonna move all to the internet and start doing it. It sounds like you saw that as well. And then you figured out, well, how do we actually insert Bitcoin into this situation on top of it?

• 18:20Speaker 02

  Everything I've learned about the killer app of Bitcoin, I've learned from the people of Nigeria, and I have to thank them for that. These guys are brilliant, and they will find a way to solve any problem. They will literally barter anything to get to the final result. They will use any financial container necessary, and they'll make it work, and then they'll find a way to scale it up. And that is the beauty of a culture so driven. So, if you want to understand the future of the world, just look at Nigeria, and you think about what just happened recently. Their government instituted draconian means to stop all the Bitcoin. Why? In January 2020, remittances into Nigeria were $2.5 billion a month. By September, it'd fallen to $55 million.

• 19:00Anthony Pompliano?

  2.5 billion?

• 19:02Speaker 02

  To 55 million. It's 98.7% GQ. Now, granted, a lot of that was because of COVID.

• 19:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 19:07Speaker 02

  But a lot of that is because of crypto, Bitcoin specifically, because Paxwell at that point had only supported Bitcoin. Now we support Tether as well. But the Nigerian people saw that, hey, wait a minute, I can ask my friends and family to just send me Bitcoin, and I'll actually make a profit, the remittance, instead of paying a fee, and they just scaled it up to the point that freaked out the entire government.

• 19:28Anthony Pompliano?

  So they banned Bitcoin ownership, or trading, or usage? What is the actual thing in Nigeria?

• 19:33Speaker 02

  The central bank forbid any of their banks from doing business with cryptocurrency exchanges.

• 19:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so they tried to cut off the legacy system from the new system?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  Exactly. And when that happened, peer-to-peer volume spiked by 20%. You can't stop Nigerians, right? They just went to Paxwell and he kept trading. Unfortunately, then, you know, there's a bit of corruption in Nigeria, and the police started, you know, harassing known Bitcoin holders. But even the Nigerian people, they're resilient against that as well. So there's really no stopping it.

• 20:00Anthony Pompliano?

  I, uh, I don't think I've ever told this story before. I got shaken down in Nigeria. Uh, I was in a Uber, and I was being driven, um, at night with a buddy of mine, and we got pulled over. And the Uber driver's just, you know, like, normal stuff. He's basically probably like, hey, I got two white guys with me. Like, of course, we're gonna get pulled over. And the cops had us get out of the car, and thankfully, my buddy had been in this situation before, and he, as we were sitting in the car, he immediately said, take your wallet and hide it. And so I didn't know what that meant. So what I did was I just reached in and I took my wallet, the money out of my wallet and I put it in my sock. He took his wallet, threw it underneath the chair in front of him. And we got out and they were asking us for money or whatever. And I'll never forget it because, you know, they're asking us for money. I just pull them out. I don't have any money, whatever.

• 20:44Anthony Pompliano?

  And they like wouldn't leave us alone, but it wasn't like a scary situation. It wasn't like a, it was almost like this is like how this happens here. And so I took out my phone and I saw the video and I started recording and I was like, they're trying to shake us down, like joking around. And the cops immediately started ducking out of the video, right? I'm like, all right, you guys can go, whatever. And so I just remember like, it was like such like a weird experience because like in the United States, if somebody said like, oh, I got shaken down. Like there would be the threat of violence and like, it wasn't like that at all. And the next day I remember telling the Nigerian that we were with, who was kind of acting as our guide there. And he was like laughing at us. He was just like, like, oh, you, the Nigeria you see every day is very different than the Nigeria that everyone else sees on a daily basis.

• 21:26Anthony Pompliano?

  And so I started paying more attention of what was going on in the country. And I just kept coming back to the fact that the population was growing so quickly. And the estimate that I've seen is that by 2050, there will be more Nigerian citizens than US citizens based on population growth rates.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  Usually.

• 21:43Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, it's just like, does that end up being, if you can almost like orange pill a nation? That's growing that quickly and is going to have that many people, that that ends up actually being the future of Bitcoin and, and kind of this entire industry?

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Absolutely. I mean, consider that every, out of every 10 Africans outside of Africa, six are Nigerian. Right? These are people that are social, that are, you know, prevalent, that travel the world, that are very knowledgeable, that are highly ambitious. They know, if you look at Nigerian populations in America, almost all of them, doctor, lawyers, high tiered, top professionals, driven, driven. And you know, all the corruption they have, that we have to deal with when we go there, the Nigerian people have to deal with it 10 times worse. Right? So I just want to say it again here. So everyone understands Nigerian people are some of the most honest and forthright people I've ever have to do business with. We have an office over there. We opened a Bitcoin center in Abuja, Pakistan, Asia. They are some of the most amazing people I've ever met in my life. I would trust them with my life. Oh, yeah.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  Calling you out, bro. Oh, he's a little, he's our man there. He's a Nelson Mandela fellow. He runs our Bitcoin center in Abuja. We're opening up some Lagos. Every day people come into that center and they want to learn about Bitcoin and these guys, they educate them and they are so happy. You should see how happy they are.

• 22:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Tell me about the center. What's going on in the Bitcoin center?

• 22:57Speaker 02

  Education, street education. You can come there and you can meet anyone and they will sit you through and will answer all your questions about Bitcoin, walk you through your first Bitcoin purchase, peer to peer. We're inviting speakers to come there as well and educate the people. You have to understand that Nigerian people are, they are so interested to learn. Like this one lady, her name is Rachel, you know, she was working in the, in the kitchen, in the, in the Transcorp Hilton in Abuja, and she saw my built with Bitcoin cap on, and she just came up to me and she started asking me, teach me about Bitcoin, please. Like she literally left the kitchen with her apron still on, and she didn't have, she didn't have her cellphone, it was broken. She just wrote her number on a crumpled up piece of paper because that's how much she wanted to

• 23:38Speaker 02

  learn. We built this Bitcoin center for people like her. Because I met my co-founder at the Bitcoin Center in New York, right? So now it's time to pass it on. Oh, and we're opening up a Bitcoin Center in El Salvador soon. It's going to be a massive space as well.

• 23:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Outside of Nigeria, what is the second largest geography?

• 23:55Speaker 02

  India.

• 23:56Anthony Pompliano?

  India.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  Kenya. Cameroon is blowing up. Ghana is huge, absolutely huge in Ghana.

• 24:02Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're, you're one of the people who I think is going to agree with this, but, but check me if not. The developed nations are almost too developed. We don't need Bitcoin from an everyday need. We need it from a devaluation of the currency. So admitted to long-term, it becomes more obvious if you look at. But if you look from a day-to-day purpose, if I need to go to the ATM, I can go to the ATM pretty easily. If I need to move my money, if I need to take my money out, I don't worry about them taking it from me. I don't worry about any sort of true censorship, right, etc. It's not true in a lot of developing nations, right? You know, we've seen the, the numbers. I don't know what Nigeria is banked versus unbanked. El Salvador, I think it's like 80% unbanked, right? You, you sort of look at these numbers and it's like, oh, these people need this on a daily basis. And so does that lend to

• 24:45Anthony Pompliano?

  the fact that the developing, developing nations will adopt this stuff faster than the developed nations? Or do you think it's actually going to just kind of all happen together?

• 24:54Speaker 02

  Oh, no, no, they're way ahead and they're going to be far, far ahead. So like you were saying, there are two narratives. Well, actually, there's three. There's the Peter Schiff narrative over here, right? Bitcoin, blah, blah.

• 25:03Anthony Pompliano?

  We're going back to the gold standard.

• 25:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. Then there's the second narrative, which is, you know, Bitcoin is a store of value, right? In the West, developing world, that's most prominent. And it does make sense, right? Then there's this whole other narrative, which we learned from watching the peoples of Africa in the emerging world, which is Bitcoin as a means of exchange. Bitcoin as a way to move us beyond the walls of this financial prison, this economic apartheid that they're in. You can exchange with something like peer-to-peer markets like Paxful. You can get Bitcoin through any means, whether it's a gift card, cash, any online wallet, et cetera. And once you have that Bitcoin, and this is the powerful point, you can exchange it for anything else. So if I need to pay an invoice somewhere in Europe where I don't have a bank account, I can sell the Bitcoin to someone there and they'll pay it for me with their bank account or their online wallet.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  I can send money back home to my friends and family from the West into the emerging world and cut all the fees and all the border payments and everything and save money. Commerce as well, the merchants in the emerging world, they can't get Visa and Mastercard merchant accounts, right? And they want to sell their goods to the world. They can use Bitcoin. And even those merchants in the West that want to access all the buyers in the emerging world, but they can't because of fraud, well, here comes Bitcoin. So along every use case, speculation is just one of the use cases of Bitcoin. You could also put store of value investing into that as well. But then there's payments, remittance, wealth preservation and commerce. And the seventh use case I call social good, right? And the emerging world, those are prevalent and that's what's going to lead. And that's why they're leading. Nigeria is the leading country in the world for Bitcoin adoption.

• 26:33Speaker 02

  And that's only going to increase. Some people ask me, is what is a, you know, do thirty percent of Nigerians have Bitcoin? Absolutely not. It's less than one percent. It's just the quality of those one percent. They are so intense that it seems like it's thirty percent. But you can imagine, once thirty percent of Nigeria does have Bitcoin, how fast it's going to spread to the rest of Africa. One point one billion people, seven hundred million young people. Can you imagine?

• 26:59Anthony Pompliano?

  Crazy. What questions you guys got? Yeah, so my question would be somewhat around regulation, right? We've seen China ban Bitcoin. They may be unbanning it, I guess now. El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as legal tender. There's been much more conversations around it here in the United States. So just your opinion on kind of like. One, do you see someone going all in on Bitcoin similar to the, to how El Salvador did it? But two, does whoever do this just get a huge advantage? Are they, are they getting that first mover advantage and putting themselves far and away ahead of everyone else?

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Well, El Salvador is a special situation because of their president. He's a special character guaranteed. Right now, we're in actually talks with, you know, some of the biggest governments in MENA and Africa about Bitcoin, but they have very rudimentary questions, right? So the way I'm trying to present this to them is, look, guys, you depend on the diaspora communities in your country to bring all this foreign money into the country, right? And let's put it down right here. All this foreign money, dollars and euros, you know, all these emerging countries, they consider that hard money, right? And they need to keep enough of that in their country to prop up the value of their currency, right? That's actually the biggest problem in the world right now.

• 28:12Speaker 02

  If they accept Bitcoin into the country and they allow their people like to accept money in Bitcoin for all the gigs they're doing outside of the country, et cetera. And they start accepting that Bitcoin and giving them local money exchange. What they effectively can do is they can mobilize their internal labor force to bring in hard currency. Because they can exchange that Bitcoin via OTC for dollars, euros, or whatever they want at any time. And we're coming to them and telling them, hey, guys, number one, allowing Bitcoin to come into your country is not going to take euros or dollars out of your economy. This is their biggest concern, really. It's actually going to bring more euros and dollars into the economy. And when you say that, they really have a hard time believing it, but that's the truth. Because that's what their people are doing right now on an individual level.

• 28:57Speaker 02

  Once the government does that and they have this huge store of Bitcoin, you can imagine how much that's going to appreciate in the years to come. And at any time, they can choose to turn into foreign currency and raise the value of their own currency. Now, on a secondary note, they want to ask, they ask, oh, what about terrorist financing? What about money laundering? Those things are very easy to track and control. And the truth is, there's so much good, clean business out there that needs to be done, considering the financial apartheid and the curtain that they're under, that all that other stuff is not even worth considering. So it's not even an issue.

• 29:29Anthony Pompliano?

  Gotcha. John, what do you got?

• 29:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, nice to meet you. Can you talk about what you and Paxwell are working on now? What regions you guys are going after? How you guys are trying to expand customer bases? And then any new assets you guys may be looking at to use in your system?

• 29:44Speaker 02

  Well, the question of assets, that's a hard one. We only just recently started supporting Ethereum. We've been very slow to add assets to Paxful and, you know, a lot of people are always asking us to add this and add that. But, and it would make us more money, that's true, but we see it as having an ethical responsibility to protect our users. You know, everyone's like, when is she, when is Paxful gonna add Shebu?

• 30:07Speaker 02

  No, we just added, we have Bitcoin, we have USDT, and now we have Ethereum. And that's only because our users, tremendous demand from the streets, right? So that's why. There has to be real use cases for anything that we add. All the Bitcoin maxies, they can argue against Ethereum, but there's actually real use cases now, right? And that's worth considering. So as far as what we're working on, we're working on products. Products that will be built on top of this peer-to-peer marketplace and allow grandma to be able to send money back home or make a payment without the complexity of cryptocurrency, certainly without the volatility of cryptocurrency. And if we do our jobs right, cryptocurrency, you know, doesn't even have to be visible in the entire operation. It'll just be able to do what you need to do better, faster and easier.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  And should you choose to dive into the rabbit hole that is Bitcoin, God bless you. All the resources are here at your disposal.

• 30:56Anthony Pompliano?

  Gotcha. What I find so powerful about this is that you're taking a two-pronged approach. If I'm going and I'm looking at it systematically for the country of Nigeria, giving them the asset is not enough, right? Like inserting it into the economy is not enough because you're actually doing education as well. It's almost the, you have to give people access, how you expertly did with the gift cards, but you also have to explain why. And then it's almost like the education is what spreads and then people eventually realize the answer. So like a lot of times we spend time talking, people always ask me like, what's the best way to explain to my parents Bitcoin? I said, don't start with Bitcoin, start with the problem.

• 31:38Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 31:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And when you start with the problem and then people understand the problem, then they ask you, they lean in, they ask, well, what can I do about it? Oh, let me tell you about this other thing. And so i- it's in some way, the education ends up letting people then choose for themselves. And they begin to understand why something is important in their life. And that ends up having a much longer, kind of higher retention, more engagement type outcome, which is ultimately what you guys are seeing in a lot of the data, it sounds like.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And to, you know, to finish answering John's question, it's all about education, right? You, we, every market that we go to, we're going there and we're leading with education, right? Built with Bitcoin. That was a non-for-profit that we started 2017. And the mission is to build 100 schools across the emerging world. We built six in Africa so far. We'll be building others in Latin America, Southeast Asia, et cetera. And that's education on a fundamental level, but these Bitcoin centers are education on an even higher level. And that's going to go beyond that. We want to incubate all these startups and all these, all these builders to build on top of Bitcoin and crypto. So they understand what they're actually building, so they can actually deliver real solutions to people. Education comes first. It's, it's the start of everything.

• 32:47Speaker 02

  You can never invest too much into it. You'd be surprised at how fundamental it's lacking. Like, for example, 2FA, this is one of the biggest things there is, especially in Africa, because most, most Africans, they use their same email for their email as they will use for every, you know, financial account that they open up. And unfortunately, I would say that 99.9% of all African websites have been hacked and their passwords have been stored in clear text. So there's some hacker out there that has your email, has your password for your email, which you're using for everything else, right? So just getting people to use 2FA, that's a huge, that's a huge, huge part of it. And then from there, everything else comes, but people do want to learn, right? So if you're offering people education and they want to learn, it's a worthy investment.

• 33:32Speaker 02

  I don't see enough of this happening in the space. So I invite everyone to come join us, because you can never educate too much, and education builds trust.

• 33:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So I am looking right now at a couple of articles that were written in July of this year, one from The Guardian as an example, talking about why the Nigerian government is reacting to Bitcoin. And it specifically cites you guys in the article. And it says that Nigeria is now second only to the US for Bitcoin trading in terms of the country. And what it also touches on though is this is not just a, hey, we like this asset, we want to engage in this asset, we want to hold this asset. It's also talking about a different array of factors, political repression, currency controls, rampant inflation,

• 34:18Anthony Pompliano?

  etc. How important is it to go first to places that have these macro issues versus you could show up to another developing nation that maybe doesn't have, I think the inflation in Nigeria is like 15% or something, right? Doesn't have, as they talk about here, a political repression or the currency controls. Like, is it almost like you have to go to the situations that are the most messed up? And that's where people really need the product? And it's easier to help educate them?

• 34:45Speaker 02

  Boots on the ground, baby. If you're not willing to do that, you need to get out of the game. It's all about boots on the ground. Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, El Salvador, Brazil, Cameroon, Senegal, Argentina, Chile, all these places, Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, these are all markets that are really opening up right now. And we see it first, because we are talking to the people every day. I'm the CEO of the company. I do customer support every single day. Not just on our website, on Twitter, on Instagram, Telegram, WhatsApp, wherever people can find me, I'm always talking to people. And that's what everyone in the company does. You have to be a part of Paxwell, you have to do that. And that goes for everyone in the space. If you don't have the cojones,

• 35:28Speaker 02

  set boots on the ground in these places, then you shouldn't be in the game. Paxwell is here because we love setting boots on the ground. And we lead by doing that. And when you do, the opportunities open up. Everyone welcomes us.

• 35:41Anthony Pompliano?

  Walk me through, what is the, um, when you, you choose a country and you say, okay, we're going to go there and you put the boots on the ground. Do you just literally put two people on a flight and say, figure it out? Uh, or is there like a, um, uh, strategy and an actual execution plan?

• 35:55Speaker 02

  Well, that's a good question. So I usually put myself.

• 35:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay. All right. I like that answer. That's a great answer.

• 36:00Speaker 02

  And the second I touch down, like, okay, I need a latte. Let's get some coffee. Right? And the first thing I'm looking to do, number one, is I want to identify the problems that people have. Right? So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to try to meet all the Bitcoin believers. There's people on Paxful in every country in the world where, you know, every country in the world is Paxful. So I'll have a big meetup there, throw a big dinner, beer, everything. Come on down, meet the CEO, let's talk. Right? And I'm trying to find out what are the problems people face on the day to day level here. And it's normal people trying to get money back home, merchants trying to sell their goods, OTC traders, whatever it might be. Tell me every single little bit of friction that you have. That is the goal that I'm looking for. And once you understand that by actually talking to

• 36:43Speaker 02

  real people face to face, the next thing is, okay, what are the dominant ways to transact? What are the top payment methods here? Bank transfers, of course, right? But there's all these online wallets, right? Which are the most popular ones, especially amongst young people? Which are the ones that have corridors outside of the country? Right? And then you identify the biggest players in the country. Who's actively solving these problems right now and how? Then, once you have that matrix of problems, payment networks and players, then you can start to make things happen. And that's where that real hustle of business development comes in. And it's very simple. You identify, you just find the problem to solve, right? Like of all those problems, you pick the problem, then you figure out which payment methods you're going to use to solve this problem. And you bring in the

• 37:27Speaker 02

  light players to do it. And you show them, okay, here's the platform that you can use. What do you need to change about this that can make you do your work better? And how can we incentivize you? So there's major upside going forward. If you do that right, you will have a magical system. You will build magical corridors all over the world. You will create a new market of magical money friends in that country and the effects will be absolutely explosive.

• 37:50Anthony Pompliano?

  How many people do you think have used Bitcoin and cryptocurrency so far? I've seen estimates as low as 50 million people globally. I've seen estimates as high as like 300 million. Do you have a sense for where you think that is? You have 7 million, so I can't imagine it's 50, right? Like, like you guys are big, but you're not the whole market. Coinbase has, I don't know, 68, 70 million registered users, right? So they're not all active, but at least at some point they set up an account and registered. So like 200 million? Is that a fair estimation in your opinion?

• 38:24Speaker 02

  That I've used it directly or that it's touched people? Because the thing about Paxos is that third-party transactions are a thing right now. So if I bring that into it, you know, like I will somehow, you know, I'll go on Paxos and I'll sell some Bitcoins to pay an invoice in the UK via bank transfer, right? So if you count that other side, it's at least at half a billion.

• 38:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, so if you count the third-party transactions, then it's half a billion. But if you take that out, 200, 150?

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Easily 200.

• 38:49Anthony Pompliano?

  200, okay, so let's say 200. What do you think it is at the end of this decade? So in 2021, 2030, what do you think the number of just humans around the world that have used this stuff ends up being?

• 39:05Speaker 02

  The end of this decade? We're talking nine years here, brother?

• 39:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yes.

• 39:10Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm going for 4 billion.

• 39:12Anthony Pompliano?

  4 billion?

• 39:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:13Anthony Pompliano?

  I think that's a pretty good guess.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm going for 4 billion. That's our target, 4 billion humans in the emerging world. I don't really care about the West. I'm not even considering them. 4 billion humans in the emerging world. And we can do it now because all these remittance partners, all these people that wouldn't talk to us before, wouldn't even look at us, they're coming to us now. Even the banks in Africa are coming to us. We met with the banks, we met with the government, we met with all of these people. They want to learn, they want to understand, and they're coming to us now. A year from now, it's going to be even more explosive. And then we can actually like let the money flow freely. We can actually, you know, take some Bitcoins, sell it, and then turn it into a cash payout at a, what do you call it, POS central or mom and pop gas station in Kenya or Nigeria, South Africa? Forget it. It'll reach the entire world at that point, 4 billion.

• 39:59Speaker 02

  Billion people easily.

• 40:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Four billion people by the end of the decade. And then when you think about, uh, let's say 30% penetration in Nigeria today. So let's go to one of your most popular markets. What is it going to take to go from 30 to 90% penetration?

• 40:13Speaker 02

  So, okay, so that number being thrown on 30% is wrong. It's less than 1%.

• 40:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Less than 1%.

• 40:18Speaker 02

  It's less than 1%.

• 40:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Explain why?

• 40:21Speaker 02

  It seems like it's 30%, but there's so much traffic. It's intense, but people just don't understand Nigerians, right? Nigerians are prolific people. They have immense hustle, immense drive, immense ambition and energy, right? So that 1% seems like 30, when it actually does get to 30. Oh my goodness. I mean, at that point, we'll be like, that'll be like three, four years down the line, I think. And at that point, the whole world will be, all of Africa will be moving forward. All of Western Africa will be saturated because Nigerians are everywhere. They'll drive this adoption intensely. That's what people have to understand. Like to make that happen though, will mean boots on the ground. Like these educational centers where people can come in, meet someone face to face. That has to happen because you're not going to get people in the emerging world going to this en masse

• 41:06Speaker 02

  in a purely digital format. This is their money. You know, if you go to someone there and say, hey, keep your life savings on your phone or your computer. And they'll be like, come on, man. There's a bit of handholding.

• 41:15Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. So you think that it's a very small percent, 1% or whatever right now, uh, three or four years to 30. And then how do we get to 90? Is it literally just boots on the ground and everyone focused on making this happen?

• 41:28Speaker 02

  To get to 90%, uh, this is difficult because if you go out into like rural parts of Africa, like we built our six Bitcoin, built a Bitcoin school in Kaduna State in Nigeria. Uh, this is really like rough territory, like, you know, you'll.

• 41:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that where the fighting is happening in like northern Nigeria?

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Okay, exactly. We go to the places where there's the most need. The school is safe though. There's, there's a lot of protection. The governor of the state is, you know, very cooperative. But if you go to that place, you'll be like out of a hundred people. And like two of them will actually have a cell phone, right? So you're talking about the, you know, there has to be, you know, basic utilities like cell phone access first coming in there. So for us to reach 90%, we're going to have to be at the point where we're actually giving away cell phones. Or we have mesh networks set up to support all this infrastructure. So there's a lot that has to lead in there because people don't understand how underdeveloped it is outside of the cities in those places. That's the only thing holding it back.

• 42:23Anthony Pompliano?

  When you think about what it's going to take from here, what are the things that you're prepared, right? When you start out with a story like Egypt, when you talk about Zuccotti Park, those are, you know, life-changing moments for you and experiences. What else do you think has to happen in order for this to kind of proliferate across the world?

• 42:46Speaker 02

  You know, for all the tools that we play with, we play with money, we play with technology, it's a spiritual battle. You know, it might sound corny to some people, but it truly is. We're dealing with money here, right? And money has been the first pillar that the bad guys took control of. They are able to basically cut off value transition of humanity, which means we can't cooperate and cooperation is our greatest strength. Right? So we have to understand that at the end of the day, this is a spiritual battle. We're in a bull market right now and nowhere is a spiritual battle tougher than in a bull market. Right? You look at all the greed happening. You look at all the pain that's going to be coming because of what's going on, right?

• 43:27Speaker 02

  And what has to happen is we need the best minds in this space to take their eyes off of this whole Gordon Gekko-ish kind of nebula that we're in and focus it again on the ground in the places that need it most.

• 43:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Walk me through, and we can use Nigeria as the example since we've been talking there, a Nigerian, how is this changing their life? Like, how does Bitcoin change a Nigerian's life on a day-to-day basis?

• 43:53Speaker 02

  Well, if you look at the traders on Paxful, it's made them rich, right? Come up to me, I mean, these are normal people that were unemployed and it's like, hey, I was unemployed and now I have five employees and like you show me their life. Like I bought this car and I go, that's great. But then there's the people that they're serving, right? The people that they're serving to do their, you know, to do their daily tasks, whether it's receive money from friends and family to run their business more efficiently. And they're doing a lot better as well. So everywhere you look, Bitcoin is creating wealth for people, not just in the price rising. It's about people actually being able to trade. Free trade creates wealth. If you remove the restrictions and the friction from trade, then the result is just wealth is being created on a large scale and medium scale and on a small scale as well.

• 44:37Speaker 02

  People are able to do business that they couldn't have done before. People are able to receive money at a greater frequency and a greater rate than they were before. And this is, these are normal people, right? Normal, everyday people on the ground every day. It's making their life easier. It's putting more money in their pockets. And, and look at example like America. For the average American, an extra 50 bucks a month, that's actually a lot of money. That changes lives here. And you can imagine how it is in Africa, in Latin America, in Southeast Asia. It's even greater. And Bitcoin is having a similar effect over there as well. Especially people into the peer-to-peer trading. So it's creating wealth. That's what it's doing. And ultimately, that's why our job, our job is to come here and create wealth for the people that need it most. For the people that might not even think they deserve to have it.

• 45:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. It, it feels like what you're balancing here is there's absolutely a financial aspect, right? And financial aspect, meaning like there's a price that goes up and down. And people naturally are humans and they're going to try to buy low and sell high. Right? That's going to happen with traders or, or whatever. But there's another part, and I think the part that, you know, you and I see eye to eye on is there's a group of people who, um, if we look at the United States, we ask, go to work. And when you go to work, you can be an accountant, you can be a teacher, a fireman. You can literally be a middle manager at a corporation. Whatever your job is, go be as good at that job as you possibly can. If you do a good job, you will have the, uh, ability to be promoted, gain further, uh, in your, uh, career. You get paid more money, et cetera.

• 46:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, by the way, after you come home from work and we've asked you to do a good job there, you have to spend less money than you make and then you need to become a professional trader. You have to be an investor. And the reason we have to be an investor is because if you simply just save your currency, now, all of a sudden, it is going to be devalued away. And so that request of the average American, let alone in other countries, but even in America, go be the best you can at your job, your chosen career path, and also, everyone has to be an investor because the currency is being devalued. There is no store of value that protects that purchasing power. That, to me, is ultimately where Bitcoin sits, is like that savings technology and can really change people's lives, because you'd only need to get them

• 46:50Anthony Pompliano?

  to understand market structures of the two different assets, and say, listen, if you want to use for currency purposes, any other currency, fiat currency, whatever, like, knock yourself out. That's not actually the problem, right? If I want to use dollars to send back and forth with you right now, whether it's a dollar, a naira, or Bitcoin, as long as you and I can receive it, the actual monetary policy in that exchange isn't the problem, right? It's the who's holding it at the end. And if you just hold the naira, right, it's even worse than the dollar. But if you hold it and store your wealth in it for long periods of time, that's where the problem comes in. And it feels like that's a big piece of what you guys are doing, is you're helping people understand with these Bitcoin centers, etc., hey, this is a savings technology, this is a global store of value. Of course, there's

• 47:32Anthony Pompliano?

  going to be these other currencies, but that global store of value is really, really powerful and can change your life.

• 47:37Speaker 02

  Absolutely. You know, wealth preservation is one of the core uses of Bitcoin. And it's this thing from speculation, right? This is just, hey, put your money in some Bitcoin, don't watch the price for two years, and just wait. This is responsible financial behavior, and it's easy, right? You don't have to be a master investor. This is something that everyone should do. And it's true, you know, people that have done that have seen the rewards of doing that. And I hope people in the West will continue to do that more and more. As America gets poorer and poorer, and we see this happening, I think a lot of people are going to start waking up to this.

• 48:11Anthony Pompliano?

  You guys got any other questions in terms of what Ray's doing all around the world?

• 48:15Speaker 03

  In Africa, and I guess Asia as well, where you guys are trying to do this work, what other issues are people running into when trying to get that either financial literacy or just be able to store their value of wealth in? Like, it sounds like remittance payments and the ability to trade freely between one another, cross borders, is a big deal, but is there anything else you see that kind of stands out?

• 48:36Speaker 02

  Remains is huge. Payments are huge too. Like in 2017, what happened is the central bank over there forbid people from sending out wires out of the country because they wanted to hold on to the euros and dollars for themselves, right? And then all these guys came to Paxwell and like, I'm just doing the customer support and I'm asking them, why are you here? You know, why did you type Bitcoin to a search engine and get over here? And they're like, yeah, I buy cars from America and I have them sent over here to Africa and I sell them for a profit, but I can't do that anymore. I'm like, oh, okay. Well, how much is the car you're buying? Oh, it's a $6,087 Range Rover from Manheim Auctions in Detroit. I'm like, okay, bro. Here, just buy $6,000 worth of Bitcoin from this guy. You can do it on bank transfer, peer-to-peer. And then I'm

• 49:20Speaker 02

  gonna show you how you can sell that Bitcoin to someone in America and he'll pay the invoice for you from his local American bank account to the auction. It'll take one day. And at first they're like, no way, man. This is a scam. But once they tried, it was they were desperate. There were literally no other options. It worked. And they couldn't believe it. Like, wow, this actually works. And they could continue their business. And once it worked for them, they told all their friends. You could say that's the payments commerce use case, but literally anything you need to do with money, you can do with Bitcoin and a peer-to-peer marketplace. Because you can literally turn that Bitcoin into anything else. So effectively, what a peer-to-peer marketplace is, is it functions as a universal translator of money and a transporter as well. And that's honestly the invention that

• 50:02Speaker 02

  the world has needed for the past 1,400 years, especially the past 70 years, was that's when this curtain of financial apartheid has, you know, it's been weighing on the necks of humanity so strongly. And nowhere you see that more evident like than in Africa.

• 50:17Anthony Pompliano?

  The piece that, as you're talking is like hitting home to me, is that people in a lot of these developing nations, they have a supercomputer in their phone. And when you can carry your wealth on your phone, you can transact with anyone, anywhere, anytime, without permission from anyone. I've always thought the store of value, right, as like a big key piece to this. And it is, but the ability to use the mobile device, like if I really start to think more deeply about it, there's a number of mobile banking products in African countries that have leapfrogged American user experiences. Right. Because basically they got to start from scratch, right? And that was actually an advantage because they didn't have the legacy system kind of to just iterate off of.

• 51:02Anthony Pompliano?

  They just got to build what it looks like. Is that what's happening with Bitcoin as well? In some crazy way, we're just starting from scratch and building the right thing rather than trying to integrate it into the legacy system in the US?

• 51:14Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Look at M-Pesa, you know, M-Pesa is the Kenyan mobile wallet started by Safaricom, one of the top telcos there. And they just did it. They didn't ask for permission from regulators, otherwise they would never have done it. They just did it and became the biggest thing in Kenya. 98% of all Kenyans have an M-Pesa account. Very few have bank accounts now because they don't need them. And Bitcoin is the same thing, because Bitcoin is global and Pan African and Pan anything else. For example, M-Pesa exists in seven countries in Africa. An M-Pesa user in Kenya cannot send money to an M-Pesa user in Ghana. The two networks are separate.

• 51:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 51:52Speaker 02

  And that just shows you the breadth of the problems. There's 2,000 payment networks in Africa, only 3% of them talk to each other. So again, what is this glue that creates this Pan, like Pan regional utility? It's Bitcoin and Pan global too. You want to access liquidity in China, in Indonesia, here is Bitcoin and a peer-to-peer marketplace. And it literally opens everything up. That's why I call it Hawala 2.0. The Roman government forbid, they forbid, forbid agency 1400 years ago. And we're in a world right now where the whole concept of agency has been just restricted and barreled down to only a few. Right? Not no one else can transact. So it's the same problem. And here is the solution, peer-to-peer electronic cash.

• 52:35Anthony Pompliano?

  I want to end with one question, and I see a couple of people in the chat. They're saying things like, this guy is so passionate about people. I love what he's doing for Africa. He's a wealth of information, etc.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Thanks.

• 52:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Why are you doing this? Like, what does Bitcoin mean to you? And why are you spending so much of your time, energy and kind of mental cycles on driving adoption in places that other people don't even want to go or haven't ever been?

• 53:04Speaker 02

  You know, I'd like to say, yeah, I'm doing it to add value. I'm doing it to the right thing. But the truth is like, I grew up as an immigrant in New York City. And I saw what my mother and father went through when they came to this country. And you know, God bless America for allowing us to have that opportunity. But it was not easy. Like what my father went through, like working in U. Stand in Columbus Circle in the eighties and nineties during the crack epidemic, just to make enough for us to eat what my mother had to go through. I mean, that was hell. Why do people have to leave their homes and go to a foreign country just to have basic opportunity? Why is that a problem in the world? Why are some places better than others?

• 53:46Speaker 02

  I didn't know the answers to these questions as a child, but I know the answer to this question now. We're living under a system of artificial wealth control. It is debt-based system that is anti-human. And I don't like things that are anti-human. I'm just trying to help out my people. And by my people, I just mean humans, right? But it's a very emotional thing for me. I'm a very emotional guy. I'm driven by emotion to do these things. Otherwise, I wouldn't go through this kind of hell, right? It's hard to do these things, right? To be on the ground, these places, to push new boundaries, to go up against all these regulators, you know, and try to make a real like change. If you want to go through something hard, try to make a real change in the world. And the Bitcoin community knows that better than any other community in the world.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  And if you really want to change things, you've got to be on the street to do this. As hard as it is, the harder it is, I know I'm doing something right. I want to see a world where my mother and father would not have to leave their country and go to a place where they were not welcome, where they didn't speak the language, where they had to go through that hell. Why couldn't they have opportunity where they are? Why can't everyone enjoy the kind of opportunity that we have or had? That's all I want. I want a pro-human world. That's it. I believe in a world where everyone can be wealthy. I believe that poverty is artificial and the wealth, abundance and prosperity, that is natural. And I'm just fighting to make that happen. That's all.

• 55:10Anthony Pompliano?

  That's why I like you.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  I like you too.

• 55:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Before, before I let you leave, I'm gonna give you the floor. Who in Nigeria or other countries around the world do you look back and you say, "Thank you to"? Like, these are the people who along the way deserve credit. Because I think one of the things that in the Western world, specifically in the United States, we put these people on pedestals that are hedge fund managers or billionaires or founders of companies. But the deeper you go into where true adoption is occurring, there's people who nobody even knows their name. So are there two, three, four, 20 people that you're like, "The world should know these people's names"?

• 55:53Speaker 02

  I have to give a shout out to the hardcore hustlers and no one knows their name. Like, one guy, his name was Tolan77, that was his username on Paxful. And this guy literally cleared like 90% of all the gift card transactions in the very beginning, when it was all these like unemployed, single moms coming there and trying to get their first Bitcoin. This guy made it happen. He was 19 years old, a college student in Texas, and he just went to hustle like a madman and was doing $10 gift cards just to get people their first Bitcoin. Like, a hustler on that level, Tolan77, you saved the day, bro. And to all the guys out there like him, and you gotta understand, these are people that are not even technical. You ask them to explain how Bitcoin worked, they don't know.

• 56:35Speaker 02

  But they just took a chance on this Bitcoin thing and just got to business. Like, straight up lemonade-style, stand out business, and they made it work and they did the hard work to make it happen. And to all the brothers and sisters in Nigeria, in Ghana, in Kenya, in South Africa, in El Salvador, in India, in Pakistan, in Bangladesh, all those people that are making the hustle happen, especially those first few guys and girls in Nigeria that got in on the gift cards and they took a cha-chance and they made it happen and showed us what this Bitcoin thing is really all about. All love and respect to you guys. I learned everything I know from watching you. Your hustle is inspiring. It is legendary.

• 57:16Speaker 02

  I'm writing a book and I promise you, you will be mentioned.

• 57:19Anthony Pompliano?

  You have a title for the book yet?

• 57:21Speaker 02

  Not yet, brother. Maybe you can help me with that.

• 57:23Anthony Pompliano?

  No, no, no, I'm not getting in the way of anything you're doing. You're doing pretty damn well yourself. So I'll let you just do your thing. I am putting Ray's Twitter account right now in the chat. Make sure you guys go follow him. Is there anywhere else that you want to send people where they can learn more about what you guys are doing?

• 57:39Speaker 02

  You can go to my Twitter. You can go to the Paxil Twitter. You can go to Paxil on YouTube. You can go to our blog, Paxil.com. You can go to just Paxil and just do, you know, play around there. But reach out to me personally. Like, again, I'm shooting out of flare here to anyone out there who wants to change the world, especially if you're a product guy or a product gal, reach out to me. We are building some amazing new things. We have an insatiable appetite for talent. And if you are good and if you have empathy, this is the key thing you need to be at Paxil, empathy for the people. I promise you, you'll be in an environment where you can execute freely, where you can do whatever you want as a mini CEO and reach the people in your work where you'll reach millions in real time.

• 58:22Speaker 02

  I will not get in your way. I'll be out to help you. So if you're out there and you're listening, come to me.

• 58:29Anthony Pompliano?

  That's the best pitch anyone's done on this show ever. All right. You guys got anything else? No, that was great though. Awesome. I appreciate you coming on and taking the time to do this.