Bill Barhydt, Founder & CEO of Abra: Bitcoin and the Future of Asset Transfer

Bill Barhydt is the Founder & CEO of Abra. In this conversation, Bill and Anthony Pompliano discuss Abra's recent announcements, the need for better banking globally, how Bill sees Bitcoin becoming more important in the future, and where he plans to take Abra next. BLOCKFI-----BlockFi allows you to keep your crypto, put it up as collateral, and receive a USD loan funded directly to your bank account. They do loans ranging from $2,000 to $10,000,000, and they're perfect for helping you reach your financial goals of all sizes. Visit BlockFi.com/Pomp to learn more about putting your crypto to work without having to sell it. CRYPTO. COM-----Crypto.com is a pioneering payment and cryptocurrency platform that seeks to accelerate the world's transition to cryptocurrency. With the vision of "cryptocurrency in every wallet", the Crypto.com App offers a full range of financial products with competitive pricing, well designed UX and high security. It is the best place to buy, sell and pay with crypto. COINMINE-----The Coinmine One is like an Xbox that turns your electricity into Bitcoin. You just plug it in, connect to wifi, and tap on the crypto you want. It’s so easy anyone can do it. Everything is controlled from the Coinmine mobile app and the Coinmine keeps getting better with over the air updates that add new coins, features and services to your Coinmine. Visit coinmine.com/pomp to get a Coinmine and earn crypto for powering a new world. ETORO-----This episode of Off the Chain is sponsored by eToro, the smartest crypto trading platform, and one of the largest in the world. Join 11 million other traders and create an account at etoro.com and build your crypto portfolio the smart way.

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

• 0:00Anthony Pompliano?

  Whoa. Before we get started, I want to go over the four sponsors for this episode who make all this possible. They're fantastic, so go show them some love. The first is the best URL in the industry, crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal: driving mass adoption. That's why we're all here, right? To get every human on earth a digital wallet and to get them using digital currencies. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and a new card payment. Everything you could want is at crypto.com. They've been longtime supporters of Off the Chain and recently announced a new exchange, so go help them out, download their app from the App Store, or visit crypto.com and tell them POM sent you. There's nothing better in the world than a company helping to drive global adoption of this new technology.

• 0:44Anthony Pompliano?

  Another part of global adoption is making sure that we secure the various blockchains with computing power. CoinMine has built the best consumer experience in mining, hands down, no competition. If you want to help secure the blockchain and get started in mining, you can go to coinmine.com/pom, order a CoinMine, it'll arrive at your door, and you simply take it out of the box, plug it in, and connect to your wifi. You'll be mining your favorite crypto in five minutes or less. It is honestly magical. I have one running right now here in the office, and it's super quiet, it's got no heat, and every person that comes in the office asks, "What is that?" Every single person asks. It's a CoinMine. The best part to me is that the CoinMine comes with a mobile app that's super slick, and the company continues to push over-the-air updates to the device

• 1:25Anthony Pompliano?

  that add functionality, add tokens that can be mined, or increase the efficiency of the device. Similar to how Tesla does car software updates over the air, CoinMine is sending these passively to thousands of CoinMines around the world on a periodic basis. Pretty damn cool. When Farboot and the team pitched me on the idea of an Xbox or PlayStation-like box that could mine cryptocurrency in your home, I was immediately sold. I invested in the business, have a device personally, and keep telling people to go to coinmine.com/pom so they can save a lot of time if they want to get started mining today. CoinMine has a partnership with our third sponsor for this episode, BlockFi. BlockFi is one of my favorite companies in crypto because they allow users to deposit their assets in a deposit account and immediately start earning interest.

• 2:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Think about it, if you keep your digital assets on an exchange or in cold storage, you aren't benefiting from any yield on the asset. With BlockFi, they allow you to deposit crypto and then get paid interest on a monthly basis in crypto. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in ETH? You can do it. Deposit Bitcoin and want to get your interest payment in Bitcoin? You can do it. The rates at BlockFi are currently some of the best in the industry. You can earn 6% interest on Bitcoin and you can earn up to 8.6% APY on GUSD deposits. I'm an investor in the company and think BlockFi is building really important and compelling infrastructure. So go check them out at blockfi.com/pomp. Again, that's blockfi.com/pomp. And that brings us to the last advertiser of the episode, eToro.

• 2:51Anthony Pompliano?

  These guys have absolutely crushed it over the years. Their founder, Yoni, was one of the original Bitcoin OGs and has been ahead of almost every trend in crypto. He built eToro to help people buy, sell, and trade cryptocurrencies. But he added a few twists: social trading, copy trading, and virtual trading accounts. Social trading is a feature where every asset available on the platform has its own separate social feed where people talk about the asset, share trading ideas and analysis, and even include various charts or graphs. Virtual trading accounts is targeted at beginners. If you're just starting out and want to try trading with play money, eToro will give you a virtual account with $100,000 in it to test, learn, and get comfortable. And so, then that brings us to copy trading, which is by far the coolest feature. This allows you, as a user, to select any other user's portfolio to copy.

• 3:36Anthony Pompliano?

  If you see someone on the platform you like, you can set your account to mimic their trades. They buy Bitcoin with 5% of their portfolio? Your portfolio buys 5% Bitcoin. They sell 50% of their Ether position? Your portfolio does the same thing automatically. Copy trading is awesome, so go join the 10-plus million other traders on eToro and start trading all the most popular cryptocurrencies today. They're one of the largest companies in the space and you can get started by going to etoro.com. Again, that is etoro.com, where the entire team is ready to get you started in just a few clicks. And don't forget, go subscribe to the Off the Chain daily newsletter. You can go to offthechain.substack.com. I write a letter of news, analysis, and opinion every morning that goes out to more than 40,000 investors. See you there.

• 4:22Anthony Pompliano?

  What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to Off the Chain, simply the best podcast in crypto. Let's kick this thing off.

• 4:34Anthony Pompliano?

  Bill Borth height is the founder and CEO of Abra, an application that allows users to exchange any digital asset with any other in-app asset anytime, anywhere. In this conversation, we discuss Abra's recent announcements, the need for better banking globally, how Bill sees Bitcoin becoming more important in the future, and where he plans to take Abra next. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do as well.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  Anthony Pompliano is a partner at Morgan Creek Digital. All opinions expressed by Pomp or his guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Morgan Creek Digital or Morgan Creek Capital Management. You should not treat any opinion expressed by Pomp as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

• 5:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Bang, bang. We're back. Bill is the third guest ever to come on Off the Chain twice. Welcome.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  Thanks, man. Thanks for having me again.

• 5:35Anthony Pompliano?

  For sure. All right. We had epic episode last time. There's a bunch of people who have not listened to it. Let's spend kind of two, three minutes just going over your background and kind of what you're doing with Abra, and then we can get into the fun stuff.

• 5:50Speaker 02

  Sure. So I'm a longtime technology payments banking guy. I've been doing this for almost 30 years. I was doing crypto and crypto meant cryptography, not cryptocurrency. I was at the CIA, developing secure messaging systems back in the late 80s, still the Soviet Union, was on the team at Netscape that deployed our certificate server product when we created SSL. And so I helped develop certificate authorities even in different countries when we were trying to do kind of 1.0 e-commerce, and then really got the payments bug in about 15 years ago, and spent a lot of time in developing markets, trying to build money transfer products and the ability to use cell phones and feature phones even to do money transfer.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  Got the crypto bug about, I don't know, probably about a year after the white paper was released. I read it probably a couple of months, three months later. Oh, really? Didn't quite appreciate how, like, I knew that they had tried to solve a double spend problem, which I thought was huge, but really it was probably about like eight months later when I was like, you know, I think this thing could be huge if this guy is right. Were you at the CIA when you read it? No, no, the CIA was in late 80s. I mean, this is a long time ago. Just making sure, because you know I'm gonna ask if you thought the CIA created Bitcoin. No, I don't. I don't think the CIA has smart enough people to have created Bitcoin. I actually am very convinced that Bitcoin was not created by an academic.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  We can save that for another time. I think it's just too much practicality in what was done. And the, anyway, another time. But, yeah, so like the last kind of eight years or so, I've really been super hardcore in Bitcoin. Was mining on a laptop. I think in the very early days, I managed to get a bunch of Bitcoin that way. And then obviously it was on all of the early exchanges and gave the first TED Talk in Bitcoin in 2012. I think it was at like $2 or $3 and that was a huge run up, by the way. What was the reception to the TED Talk? Oh, a lot of people were like, I don't really understand exactly what you're talking about. But the idea that you can basically have a bit, I kind of likened it to BitTorrent,

• 8:00Speaker 02

  where you basically didn't have to trust anyone. That was the way that I could come up with of explaining a decentralized system was like, hey, you can't shut BitTorrent down and you probably can't shut Bitcoin down. And it was very early then, so the reality is you probably could. But the theory is, is that because it's decentralized, you can't shut it down and, you know, try to explain it. And I, there's a mix of TED in those days between the young and the old. And the old in particular, I think it was like way, way, like way out there for them. But, hey, look, the talk is out there and still gets a lot of views and there are way better introductions now. Seven years later, you look pretty smart now. Yeah, well, I get a lot of people come back to me now and say, I can't believe that, you know, you had the foresight to actually even want to give that talk seven years ago.

• 8:44Speaker 02

  And I said, just, well, for me, it was just interesting technology, really. It was about two years later after that talk that I had the idea for even using it to replace traditional banking systems. When I really dug in and understood multi-sig and some of the other technologies that were coming. Was starting to dig into Ethereum and the idea of having Tori complete smart contracts. And that all came later. I was just enamored with the idea that you can have decentralized money and solve the double spend problem, which, you know, I was following DigiCash when I was at Netscape because we had a relationship with DigiCash. And, and obviously the downside of DigiCash was you had to trust DigiCash. But the idea of, you know, using cryptographic techniques to create money was very compelling. But why bother if you

• 9:28Speaker 02

  have to trust someone, right, to actually create the money?

• 9:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Now, we're at a point where we can separate the creation of the money and the banking, right, and have basically two different kind of crypto-based solutions. One for the issuance of money, which is where Bitcoin is going, and another for the solution of banking, which I'm guessing we'll get into, you know, and how to use crypto to make banking global. I liken one to the noun and one to the verb. And, and so the noun, we can never solve because of this trust issue. We've solved that now, or we've proven that. And if we keep going down the path we're going and we don't F it up, we can, we can solve it at global scale. Because not everyone can participate today, and I hope that eventually everyone can participate.

• 10:07Anthony Pompliano?

  This idea of trusting like the creator of the money, it recently just like smacked me in the face, right? We always talk about it, but there was this photo that went somewhat viral on Twitter, and it's of the ECB Governing Council. I don't know if you saw this.

• 10:21Speaker 02

  I didn't see it. Describe it.

• 10:23Anthony Pompliano?

  There are 24 people sitting at a dinner table in a very plush room that you would expect the elites to be in, right? You know, really nice art on the wall, the floor looks like, you know, the carpet. It kind of reminded me of like, you ever see the pictures of like Donald Trump's apartment with the gold everywhere?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 10:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So they're all sitting there, and there are 23 men and one woman, Christina Lagarde, I think, right, is the one woman. There's not a person in the picture that's younger than 60.

• 10:53Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 10:53Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And it's the ECB Governing Council. And she posted it saying, you know, hey, thanks so much to my colleagues for, for, you know, coming together and us talking about the Governing Council and how we're going to do this, etc. So I took the photo. I said, look, you can either trust these 24 people, right, or you could trust an algorithm that's transparent and controlled by no one. I think it's just such a clear wow, this is going to be archaic, you know, 10, 15, 20 years from now. That we literally were like, wait a minute, 24 people decided what happened to the money? It's pretty crazy.

• 11:24Speaker 02

  But I've also come to understand that we're trying to solve different problems, right? So, so when I say we, I mean, the those who accept the fact that the algorithm is is better, like the way you're the way you I think you mean. Is is is a different problem than these central banks. The central banks, in my opinion, are not trying to create stable money. They're trying to create stable economies. And they will basically do that at the expense of the value of your money. Right? So, so they'll create a managed house of cards. Like they, when we saw in 2007, that, hey, this house of cards isn't necessarily always stable. But their goal is not to say, hey, let's preserve Palm's wealth. Let's preserve Bill's wealth. Their goal is to get everybody employed, have relatively low inflation and do that at the expense of your wealth.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  Not, not, not, and in addition, preserve your wealth. So, so their job is managing economies. Right? So that's why I say, I made this point online, I've made the point 15 times over the last 10 years is that the value of Bitcoin is is very stable. The value of the dollar is plummeting. And that has been true forever. And that is because these people manage economies. They don't manage the value of your money. Actually, they do manage the value of their money, but they're willing to forego that.

• 12:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Well, they're willing to.

• 12:41Anthony Pompliano?

  In order to create a managed economy. Yeah, there's almost in their eyes, there's a sliding scale. The more that you devalue over a long period of time, then the more you can control the economy.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 12:50Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And the expansion and contraction of the money supply and and kind of the, the way that the system is set up is they really fear the market corrections. Right? And so what do you do is there's a way to keep kicking the can down the road. And, you know, it's always the belief that, you know, five, 10 years from now, we'll figure out when we get in that situation.

• 13:08Speaker 02

  Right, right, exactly. Now, think about this, though, right? So, so if you live to be 100, you've seen the value of government created assets. Erode probably 90%. That's, that's the person who it's most acute to. Most people don't appreciate how much government-backed or government-created money depreciates in value because either they don't live long enough to appreciate it, they don't have enough in the early days of their life to actually understand what's happening. But what happens when people start living to be 120 in the West?

• 13:40Anthony Pompliano?

  It's gonna happen.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  Which is gonna happen, right? Technology, singularity, all this great stuff, exponential technologies, which is like, you know, the backbone of my life. All of a sudden, it's gonna matter that the value of your assets is being eroded, right? Independent of your investments.

• 13:57Anthony Pompliano?

  I mean, if you think, what, since 1913, we're sitting in 2019, you're talking a 98% decrease in purchasing power of the US dollar?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 14:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? It's not like it was 20%, right? Like, no, we're talking 98%.

• 14:09Speaker 02

  No, but again, this is their goal. Their goal is basically to manage an economy. They believe this is the only way to get everyone to work, to make everything affordable, right? And to create a quote-unquote "level playing field," whatever that means. And so...

• 14:25Anthony Pompliano?

  Is it sustainable?

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Well, every, every government-created currency has failed eventually, every single one. It's simply a matter of time. If you look at the history of bond markets and war and currency inflation, every currency has failed. Some more spectacularly than others, some have been on the way to failing and have been replaced. We even saw even the euro can buckle because of the inefficiencies across the different economies that they have, where one has to prop up another and they had to break their own rules in order to save the euro a few years ago. So I think it's inevitable that every currency eventually fails. The question is how? How long does it take? And what happens when it does? Right?

• 15:07Speaker 02

  And so that's the future of the euro, that's the future of the dollar, that's the future of the yen. The question is what do we replace it with?

• 15:15Anthony Pompliano?

  And this really gets at the idea of kind of the separation of state and money, right? Which is if every single currency in history has been revolved around some governing organization, right? Whether it was self-governance of early cultures and economies, or it became true governments, if they've all failed... Is there going to be the separation of state and money in terms of the core unit of account? Or is this more of there will be alternative currencies that have the separation of state and money, but that core unit of account, because the economy is so dependent on that government control, we kind of have to have two parallel systems, but we never get rid of the legacy one?

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Well, this is a very long-term question. I think this is a decades-long question. I do think that if I was to predict 25, well, certainly 40 years out, let's go 40 years out, because I think my prediction is much easier than, one, I'll be dead, but two, I think I can see this happening even to the dollar in that timeframe.

• 16:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Nothing like a prediction that only comes true when you're dead.

• 16:15Speaker 02

  I don't have to be around to explain myself when it fails. But, no, I actually think that we're going to evolve, and some people would say devolve to a point where you actually have competing monies, and traditional fiat-backed or fiat-based money will fail. And there'll be lots of competing monies with interoperability across those monies. And so you'll see not only Bitcoin, but you'll see money that's more focused on maybe just payments, which is a little bit more ephemeral. And so, and then you'll be able to exchange digitally between those currencies with on and off ramps when you need to, and different technologies will compete for consumer mind share. Whether that's wrapped up in something that we know as Bitcoin, or whether that's used

• 16:58Speaker 02

  as collateral for something that we might call the dollar, I don't know. We'll see. But I think traditional government monies, certainly within a multi-decade timeframe, will fail collectively. They will be replaced by something that is more competitive. I remember writing an outline for a book pre-Bitcoin that I was really considering writing about the future of money. And chapter one was something about competing federal reserves, meaning have lots of feds and let them all compete with each other.

• 17:27Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is basically what we had when we had just states all had their own money.

• 17:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 17:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Right before there was a federal dollar.

• 17:33Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And Jefferson talked about the dangers of centralized federal money even before we had a central bank, and that was the Jefferson-Hamilton conversation. And so, anyway, I think that...

• 17:48Speaker 02

  The winner here is going to be the people eventually, but the governments are not going to go down without a fight. And I don't mean governments going down in the sense of the government's going to go away. I think the government's value will be right-sized over time.

• 18:02Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  Because when you can't print money, right, you have to right-size your services, right? And so that's the good news about all that.

• 18:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and to me, this gets at, there's a lot of people who've tried to create change, and they've tried to do it one of two ways. Either they want to create kind of a groundswell movement that says, hey, the government is too big, or too onerous, or not effective, not efficient, all this kind of stuff. So let's apply pressure on the government and the government will change itself. Maybe, but probably unlikely. Two is people have tried to get into the government, right? So whether they're representative, the president, whoever, and they want to quote-quote "change" something. You can agree or disagree with what they want to change, but that's their strategy is, you know, if you're an insider, then you can make that change. But both of those things, I think, given the way that our democratic system works, you know, if you get into control and you're there for

• 18:55Anthony Pompliano?

  four to eight years, at some point, the next person comes in, and if they disagree, they just reverse it back, right? And so it's really hard to create kind of systematic change.

• 19:03Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 19:04Anthony Pompliano?

  Here, what we're talking about is, you actually go to the crux of the entire system, and you say, we are going to change this from the ground up, but we're going to do it in a way where, you know, the government, one, can't stop it, but two, is you have a whole network of people who buy into the idea that in order to change a whole bunch of things in society and the economy, you actually have to change the system.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 19:26Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And people basically opt out of one system into the alternative system, but it's an individual choice to do that, rather than it be a government-led type initiative.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Totally. Now, I'm also a big believer that history leaves clues. There's a path that's likely to happen. And if you travel the world like I do, I go to the Philippines, Mexico, Argentina, Venezuela, and I go to these places. And when you talk to people who are older, they've lived that history. You don't need to go read about it, you can just talk to them. They understand, they've lived through multiple currency devaluations, or multiple currency creations, in the case of like Argentina, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, right? Or whatever. And these people... Generally believe that whatever their government creates next is going to fail anyway eventually, right? So they say, yeah, I'll just use a dollar if I can because it's just

• 20:16Speaker 02

  going to take longer to fail. Like, they don't think that the dollar is a great currency. They think that the US dollar is a better, right, let's call it shit shitcoin, government-backed shitcoin, than all of the others.

• 20:28Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 20:29Speaker 02

  Right? And may take longer, so that in their lifetime, it's less likely to fail.

• 20:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 20:33Speaker 02

  But in someone's lifetime, it is going to fail. And that's the difference. And I think that history has shown us that you can print your way out of short-term problems, but long-term, right?

• 20:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Different ballgame.

• 20:47Speaker 02

  It's a different ballgame.

• 20:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. What, um, how does banking fit into all this?

• 20:50Speaker 02

  Well, money's the noun, banking is the verb, right? So, so the noun is, hey, what is it that basically we're going to use as the basis for banking? And that's money. And money can take different forms. Generally, people assume that when we talk about banking, we're talking about government-issued money, but it could be anything, right? What gives it's, I actually have always believed what gives money its value for the most part is the coercion required to force people to pay taxes in dollars and to reconcile the tax bill that you have in dollars. Because we could actually create an economy based purely on sheep if we wanted to, but eventually we'd have to convert some of that sheep back to dollars in order to pay our tax bill. Now, I've talked about this with many, many economists, and they think I'm full of crap when I talk about this because of the power.

• 21:32Anthony Pompliano?

  Sorry, a lot of people who think the economists are full of crap.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, luckily, more people are coming around to our perspective. I think there's less people kind of moving in that direction and more people moving in our direction, even if they have a larger loyalty base right now. But, but over time, you know, like I said, I think that you're going to see this understanding that competition is better, that more money, more types of money is better. And you're going to see a banking system evolve with a new stack. Back to your question, right? The new stack is going to be crypto-based, right?

• 22:06Anthony Pompliano?

  And what does that mean, crypto-based? Like, what does that actually mean?

• 22:08Speaker 02

  Well... Let's, let's, um, let me, let me give you a general terms and then we can put it in average terms, right? So, so everybody's seen lately, the announcement of the Apple Card. I've been testing that. Uh, it's a really cool product. I love how it's integrated with mobile. Uh, there was announcement this week when we're recording this with, um, Citi partnering with Google, uh, for them to get into banking, checking. Now, what's interesting about that is, is that, one, two things, in my opinion. Uh, one is crypto specific, but, but one is every major tech company is going to get into banking in some way.

• 22:39Anthony Pompliano?

  I agree with that.

• 22:40Speaker 02

  And, and they'll do it for, specific to their audience. The, the way Apple did it and the way Google did it should be very indicative to somebody paying attention of how their user bases are different, right? Apple focused very, on very high-end experience around a, a titanium-looking card with a really high spending limit that only focused on integration with Apple Pay in a very high-quality way that would focus on the, uh, probably more of the wealthy.

• 23:09Anthony Pompliano?

  And it's credit.

• 23:10Speaker 02

  And, and, and it's credit on the back. It's a big silver Goldman Sachs on the logo, right? So that, that should all tell you about who they're catering to with that product. Google's announcement focused more on the DDA, the actual savings account, which really, I think, should tell you that their user base in the US is a little bit more kind of straight-up middle-class, uh, and they want to tie that Android, uh, uh, phone to, to that account. Now, when I look at both of those announcements, the company that I think should be most worried on the planet about those announcements, in my opinion, is Samsung. Because Samsung actually, uh, is the one that actually competes the most with Google for mindshare, right? Because it's the Pixel versus, it's not really people

• 23:52Speaker 02

  making a decision about Apple versus a Galaxy. It's usually Galaxy versus a Pixel.

• 23:58Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's like, Apple has what? I think it's like 14% market share or something, you know, Google has, or Android has, you know, 80-plus percent. And so, once you get into the bucket of, I'm gonna buy an Android, then it's which phone do I buy?

• 24:09Speaker 02

  Exactly, exactly. It's, it's, it's, Apple, Apple's focus is experience and margin, right? They put a margin on their experience and that they don't budge from that target. Whereas, in the case of Samsung, there's like, hey, our market globally is wildly fragmented, meaning we have a massive customer base in every country. We can't do easily what Google just did and have it actually solve a problem for us because we have to deal with 75 countries. Am I going to put 75 banking partners in place in 75 countries to create savings accounts? I could, but if I had a single solution that actually did that for me, that would be really interesting. Well, that's what crypto does for us. You could actually create the equivalent of DDAs using smart contracts.

• 24:55Speaker 02

  Right? That solve the same problem where the legal issues become one of crypto custody versus traditional banking. You can, we've even shown through some of your other guests that we can actually pay interest on those accounts.

• 25:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 25:09Speaker 02

  Right? So this is where I think Abra is going.

• 25:11Anthony Pompliano?

  So, okay, so let's, let's talk a little bit about what you've built so far and then we can talk about kind of the future. Describe kind of, what was the original idea for the company?

• 25:20Speaker 02

  So, so the original idea came when I was looking at the money transfer space where I was spending a lot of time. I had created a nonprofit in Haiti after the earthquake. They were literally helicoptering money into the island.

• 25:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It's crazy. Have you seen the pictures of it?

• 25:32Speaker 02

  I was there, dude.

• 25:33Anthony Pompliano?

  It is fucking wild.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  It was wild, right? And so I.

• 25:35Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like pallets of cash just coming in through helicopters.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  Picture a helicopter, like in Vietnam, of all Vietnam videos, that would be bringing in supplies. Those supplies, like, like when huge crates, in this case, that's money. Right? Because Western Union outlets were destroyed, banks were destroyed. But the island gets, or that half of the island of Haiti, gets 30% plus of its GDP from taxi drivers in the US. You know, from, from other, you know, people working in, in, in cleaning and other kind of service oriented jobs in the US, 30%. So, so one, you had, everything was destroyed, plus the money couldn't come in because we couldn't pay it out.

• 26:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep, infrastructure wasn't there.

• 26:20Speaker 02

  Anyway, so I spent a lot of time in the money transfer space in Haiti, Mexico.

• 26:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Is that, is that considered money transferring when they helicopter the money in?

• 26:27Speaker 02

  It certainly is. I, I remember. That's how I actually met a lot of friends that I have today from the State Department, who are working with the Army to help solve this problem. And you want to talk about centralized money? I mean, my God.

• 26:40Anthony Pompliano?

  So the one other story that I have that's similar to this is after Hurricane Katrina in Louisiana, some of the guys I was in the military with, they got called to go down there and they thought, you know, we're going to go pull people out of their homes and kind of the things you would expect that the military shows up in those scenarios. And I remember talking to one of the guys, he goes, oh, no, dude, I was walking around Walmart with my M4. And I said, what? And he goes, yeah, because the armored trucks couldn't actually come and pick up all the cash. So he said, what people didn't realize was we had, you know, two, three, four, or five million dollars sitting in the back and we were literally armed guards to guard the cash. Because all the systems were down, the infrastructure, etc. And I just remember sitting there thinking like, we can think we're the most connected, you know,

• 27:24Anthony Pompliano?

  technology advanced civilization in the world. The power goes out, game over, right? We go right back to the archaic world.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  That was that TV show Revolutions, to digress, but I remember that show was super cool. What happens when the power goes out, pretty much for good.

• 27:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah, I haven't seen it. I'll have to look at it.

• 27:38Speaker 02

  Oh, so good. Back to the, the first season was awesome, then it went downhill. But like, it was basically you're back to the, to the Stone Ages or like, within a few weeks, right?

• 27:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh, yeah.

• 27:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. And ironically, it was a science fiction show because it actually tells you, you find out later why the power went out and it's all science fiction related. Anyway, okay. So, so today, Abra is a super easy to use global crypto wallet that allows you to store dozens of different cryptocurrencies. In the US, you can use your bank account to add money to the app. This week, we announced that we dramatically increased our banking limits. So I think you can do something like $4,000 a transaction and like $8,000 a week in deposits. You can use your Amex card, your credit card to all to buy Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency. You can, we support all the major stable coins now. Everything from Tether to Pax, to True USD.

• 28:31Speaker 02

  We're launching DAI once they, they, they finish their upgrade in a few weeks. All within the Abra app and you can easily with one button click, exchange between those currencies. And we had a mandate in the company, we wanted to create an experience which was more like travel X at the airport than a trading app. So you don't see any fancy ordering in the app, there's no limited stop orders. You want, you want to take your, I'm looking at my app right now, you want to take some, some Stellar Lumens and you want to convert them to Bitcoin. You press exchange, it tells you which currency you want to go from, which currency you want to go to, how much, and you're done.

• 29:05Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's basically, there's a very big bifurcation in the market, right? There's kind of the advanced traders who are, they need the stop limits, they, you know, they're very precise in their pricing and hey, I gotta hit that, you know, exact put, you know, type order and all that kind of stuff. Your user base is, hey, I want to buy some Bitcoin, I want to buy some Stellar, I want to buy, you know, I want to do something that is fairly straightforward and I don't, I don't need the advanced trading functionality.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Correct. And we also have a lot of people who want to use this stuff to send money. So we have some users who use Abra to, to buy like their Bitcoin, their Ether, their Ripple, their Lumens, and then we have some people who will send it. And that's the, the history of Abra was, was that I was interested in figuring out a way of using Bitcoin as the basis for doing money transfer globally. And I had this, I created this idea of the synthetic asset, which was basically a Bitcoin backed or Bitcoin collateralized dollar or Bitcoin collateralized peso.

• 30:05Anthony Pompliano?

  And how does that work, right? So a Bitcoin backed dollar?

• 30:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the way it works, we don't have much of that going on in the app anymore. Most of the assets have been since ported to, because of all the stable coins that are out there, we don't, we didn't need that. But it really helped Abra out of the gate to be able to offer services quickly. The way it worked was, we had these multi-sig contracts. Multi-sig is a technology in Bitcoin that allows multiple parties to sign a transaction as opposed to just one party. So you can create a wallet where I can only move money if two different parties sign the transaction.

• 30:39Anthony Pompliano?

  There's three of us that all have rights to it, but two out of the three of us have to agree to do it.

• 30:43Speaker 02

  Right, and you can have any combination of that, you can have. Like six out of eight have to sign or whatever. It's very clever. And so we use that technology to basically create contracts that would say, okay, if the price of Bitcoin goes up and you're trying to hold dollars, you're now holding too much Bitcoin. And we would actually take away some of your Bitcoin. If the price of Bitcoin went down and you're holding dollars, you're actually not holding enough Bitcoin. So we would actually give you more Bitcoin. So the value of what you're holding in dollars would be stable. And it would be the Bitcoin that would fluctuate. And we did that to the tune of like over a billion dollars in volume. So we, I think, ran the first truly successful global test of a synthetic asset based on Bitcoin.

• 31:24Speaker 02

  And it was all based on Bitcoin. We did a little bit of Litecoin testing when the system had issues when the mining fees skyrocketed because all of those transactions were on-chain, which was also crazy. And Litecoin helped us with that because when the mining fees for multi-sig transactions hit forty dollars, they were only a couple of dollars with Litecoin. And Litecoin is more or less the same thing when it comes to multi-sig and the scripting languages.

• 31:47Anthony Pompliano?

  So basically you're using Bitcoin rails to transfer dollars?

• 31:51Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 31:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Is a way to look at it.

• 31:52Speaker 02

  That's right. And that for us was originally meant to solve a money transfer use case, back to your original question. And we've since kind of morphed this into a really long-term banking play where the first use case was about investing. So users in the US are able to buy crypto. There's about sixty currencies in the app, cryptocurrencies. And then outside the US, we have a stock investing feature. We're actually going to become a broker-dealer now in the US. So next year you'll be able to do that in the US. You'll be able to buy stocks and you can basically load your money in the Philippines in pesos, for example, and convert that to crypto. You can convert it to Apple shares. You can convert it to Google shares. Or you can convert it to Monero, right? And you can take your Monero and convert that back to pesos.

• 32:35Speaker 02

  Or you could take your Monero and convert it to Apple shares. Right, so, so we want to bring those capabilities to the US and have a global app that, that, that does all of that. And then the next steps for us will really push us more and more towards being that global bank. More payments capabilities, more money transfer capabilities. We try not to do anything that's not global. In other words, if I enable you to pump to transfer money to somebody here in New York, you should also be able to transfer money in our app to the UK, to Germany, to France, to Australia.

• 33:04Anthony Pompliano?

  To anybody.

• 33:05Speaker 02

  To anybody, right? And we have lots of users who figured that out in the app today. We want to make that way easier for people who really aren't necessarily into crypto, but take advantage of the crypto, back to the point about Google versus Samsung. Google is going to have to repeat that partnership in 100 countries in order to match their user base globally.

• 33:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 33:24Speaker 02

  We can do that out of the gate with crypto and not have to put those partnerships in place, except the rails to get money out of the existing system.

• 33:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, and what you're really talking about here is all of the regulation, right? This is probably one of the most misunderstood things by people who are just coming into the ecosystem is, there are two separate systems, right? There's the fiat banking world and kind of the fiat financial system. And then there is the crypto native system. And really where the regulations become onerous. It's not in either one of those separate systems. It's when you try to go between them.

• 33:57Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 33:57Anthony Pompliano?

  So you want to take US dollars and turn it into Bitcoin. Regulators, what are you doing, right? And, and you're going to have a lot of hurdles to jump over. Or reverse, I want to take Bitcoin and go into dollars. What are you doing? Lot of hurdles. But if you, for example, mine Bitcoin and then want to use it within a crypto native system and you don't ever want to go from Bitcoin to back to the legacy world, it's actually not that onerous, right?

• 34:19Speaker 02

  We get a lot of users doing that. We have over 50% of our deposits right now are crypto. The rest are people coming in through the banking system and we're committed to both. Now, at scale, more people will probably come in upfront through the banking system. But we're giving people crypto rails now because we have a lot of awareness for what we're doing in the crypto space. But we need to grow Appra, right? And so the way to do that is to go to every country in the world and actually say, all right, I'm going to make it easy for you to get money out of your bank account. Or like we're doing, for example, in the Philippines, we've Made it easy for you to go from cash to Bitcoin. We run the most successful like in-country cash network in the world for converting pesos to Bitcoin.

• 34:58Anthony Pompliano?

  How does it work?

• 34:59Speaker 02

  You walk into any 7-Eleven or any pawn shop or any remittance outlet in the country. And you basically say, hey, I wanna basically, I wanna load pesos into my Abra app. Unbeknownst to you, what you're actually doing is buying Bitcoin. Right? And then those Bitcoin are basically converted into whatever you wanna hold on the phone using the process I described before.

• 35:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  And we've done that with-

• 35:20Anthony Pompliano?

  And that's a process and a user experience that they're used to doing.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  They're used to doing it because they do it for remittances, they do it for bill payments. Um, it's just very common in the country to deal with cash. And so because all of these stores have Abra signs in them, the awareness for Abra in the Philippines is very, very high. And so what we've realized is from a marketing perspective, there's actually an advantage to being able to provide those ramps. Because it helps you to, at the same time, to create brand awareness if you're solving specific problems. So we had people who, we have people in the Philippines who are doing that just to invest in Bitcoin. We have people who are doing that to send money. We have people who are doing that to bypass the banking system. There's all myriad reasons why people are taking their cash, walking into a 7-Eleven and converting it to Bitcoin. The bottom line is, is it works and it works really well.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  Now, we also have a lot of people in that same country who will use the banking system to get money into Abra or Bitcoin. So we literally have three different ways in that country, right?

• 36:19Anthony Pompliano?

  People are coming in?

• 36:19Speaker 02

  People are coming in. Now, in the US, it's like 80% bank and 20% Bitcoin. Uh, but they could come in via cash if they have a friend who, you know, they wanna hand cash to who owns Bitcoin. And we have people who tell me that they do that as well, right? I use local Bitcoins to get money into Abra, for example, right? Now, we, we're not integrated, they just do it on their own.

• 36:38Anthony Pompliano?

  And so, once people get money in, where do you think this goes, right? So you've kind of built some functionality now that's very obvious in terms of the value that it brings. But like, how does this evolve over time?

• 36:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think I think Abra evolves to become the killer banking play globally. I think what happens

• 36:54Anthony Pompliano?

  That is a bold statement. I love it. This is why I love talking to Bill.

• 36:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so so I look at what's happening right now with the likes of Apple Pay, Google's announcement, all the challenger banks out there. I've got a list that I track of about 100 challenger banks. I mean, there's a lot of companies trying to to kill banks or or change banking.

• 37:12Anthony Pompliano?

  The technologists are assaulting Wall Street.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, but all these banking plays are basically doing the same thing as the banks themselves. They're partnering with banks, they're using the same core banking systems. They just operate faster because they're startups, they're they're they're limber, they're more nimble. They have streamlined compliance systems.

• 37:30Anthony Pompliano?

  It's all basically about, in my opinion at least, better user experience, slicker design.

• 37:35Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 37:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Some kind of marketing gimmick on the front end to incentivize you to come in. And things that are used to incentivize growth, but in the steady state are unsustainable, right? Really high interest rates and all that kind of stuff.

• 37:46Speaker 02

  And that's not what I mean. I mean, if you want software to eat banking, it's got to do it from the inside out, not just from the outside in. Right now, we're focused on the outside in. I want to do it from the inside out, which basically says, let's build crypto-based rails so that every service we launch can be global. I can do deposits, I can do interest payments, I can do lending, I can do even card payments. All basically using crypto rails in a way that makes it easy and transparent to the average user. So whether I'm sending dollars in the US to pounds in the UK or making a pound-based card payment or using those pounds to buy crypto, it's all basically using a single global system that is perfectly legal in every country, provides the rails to get in and out of that system, right?

• 38:31Speaker 02

  So this is where Abra is laying the foundations to build that global bank now, right? And and we want people who, we want to make it useful as we go, right? So everybody who uses Abra to buy crypto today doesn't necessarily do it because they believe in the long-term vision.

• 38:46Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 38:46Speaker 02

  They're doing it because it makes it easy to buy crypto today, get the money in and out of my bank account, send money if I have to send money to somebody else. And we're going to keep adding value along the way, even try to get to profitability in the next step, but continue building on that vision to become a massive global bank.

• 39:02Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, so a couple of tangentially related things that I'm generally interested in your thoughts. First is, when I was at Facebook, one of the things that we probably underestimated our advantage, but since I've left, has become very apparent to me, is a company like Facebook has now, they're probably over 80 million small, medium-sized businesses, so these SMBs.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  Absolutely.

• 39:27Anthony Pompliano?

  And so if you think of them as kind of like retailers, right? If you were to roll out a point-of-sale system or some sort of payments-type product, it's really a marketplace, right? You've got users who are the payers or the purchasers in that transaction, and then you've got people who can receive it. I think a lot of the technology companies focus on the consumer, right? Like that purchaser, having the user base of the businesses already there and being able to incentivize them to adopt and things like that can be helpful. Do you think that in order for kind of this global crypto-based banking system that you're talking about, do you think that it's dependent on the adoption by the retailer? Or do you think that you get the consumers, the consumers are demanding it, and then the retailers are basically forced to start accepting it?

• 40:13Speaker 02

  Sure, okay, let's break that down. So let's talk about the existing systems and talk about Facebook, and then I think where I think it's really going. Today, the existing solutions assume that the banking rails are in place, right? Card networks basically assume, by and large, that the network, the social network of connecting consumers to each other, connecting consumers to merchants, is facilitated by the banks, and they act as a network that connects the dots, like the internet is a network of networks, that's what the internet is. Card networks are a network of networks where the networks are the banks. It doesn't have to be that way, Facebook has just showed us that, right? So, the next step is to say, can we replace the, keep the card networks in place, right? And replace the banks with something else?

• 40:58Speaker 02

  I actually think if it was just as easy to settle with a stablecoin, the card networks would gladly do it. What do they care? As long as, as a matter of fact, the more middlemen they can eliminate in the transaction.

• 41:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Better for them.

• 41:10Speaker 02

  The better for them. Right? So that's going to happen, in my opinion, right? Especially in places where they have less, the banks have less power within, within the big four networks globally. So expect that to happen internationally in the next 24 months. I, I, I would bet any amount of money, you start to see stablecoin-based settlement for card products, which completely bypass the banks. Now, let's relate that to the networks themselves. Well, the, the networks are the ones most threatened by the social, like, social networks getting into payments.

• 41:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Yep.

• 41:39Speaker 02

  Right? Because they're the ones that actually have created via brute force, the social network fabric that enables payments to happen today. Facebook did it in less than 10 years, right? At a fraction of the cost in today's dollars and can basically overlay payments on that.

• 41:54Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, they have distribution.

• 41:55Speaker 02

  Absolutely. Between consumers and consumers, which is the Libra vision, or business and consumers, right? Which they can easily do with their money transfer licenses.

• 42:03Anthony Pompliano?

  And they're starting to do this kind of like, the, the thing about Facebook specifically is pretty interesting, is they actually have two plays in the payment space. Skrt, skrt! Wanna know who has the best URL? Crypto.com. That's right, crypto.com. They're a crypto platform with one goal: motherf***ing mass adoption. That's why we're all here. We're trying to get crypto in every wallet. Crypto.com is helping people do that through buying, earning, lending, and card payment. Everything you could want at crypto.com. Go help your boy out, tell him Pomp sent you. Download the app or visit crypto.com. Pomp's got you, always. Ever wanted to get into mining and didn't know how? Don't worry, your boy Pomp's got you.

• 42:47Anthony Pompliano?

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• 43:29Anthony Pompliano?

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• 44:08Anthony Pompliano?

  And then they recently have started touting more and more the Facebook Pay, which is send fiat money in the regular world, you know, kind of legacy world across all of our apps and products.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  That's the short-term practical way to make money using the

• 44:21Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like a long-term strategy and a short-term strategy.

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Right. Now, they could have easily built Libra, by the way, using that model, right? But I actually think it's interesting that they chose to take a much more complex approach, which long-term separates, again, that noun from the verb to say, okay, let's separate the money from the actual banking services we want to provide. I think that they made it way too complicated for themselves and they could have made it much easier out of the gate, but whatever. I do think that if I'm Visa, Mastercard, Amex, a little less so because they're closed loop, but if I'm looking at this whole universe, the company that's probably scares me the most right now is Facebook, right? Even more so than Apple and Google because they have that connectivity tissue between their users that they created over multiple decades, right? And can easily overlay payments on that and incentivize people to use it.

• 45:10Speaker 02

  And people think, oh, people aren't going to trust Facebook and that's a bunch of crap, right? The average user isn't paying attention to this discussion of Cambridge Analytica and this trust, that trust, they just don't care.

• 45:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Not only in the US is that true, but it's definitely true globally.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  Globally, they're growing like crazy.

• 45:26Anthony Pompliano?

  When I was there,

• 45:30Anthony Pompliano?

  I won't show the exact use of the country and kind of what we were doing etc. But basically, from a structural standpoint, Facebook had grown so rapidly that we were literally running out of people to bring on to Facebook, right? Like, people with internet connectivity were, there was not very many of them left.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  That's why they're trying to get into the business of providing the connectivity, because it's the only way they could grow.

• 45:49Anthony Pompliano?

  We, I think it was 2014 or 2015, launched internet.org, which was, we're gonna go give the internet to everyone.

• 45:54Speaker 02

  And people hated the idea that Google, that Facebook would, or Google would provide services like that, because Google's doing the same thing, because then they would own the user relationship. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. If they're gonna spend their own money to solve this problem, let them do it.

• 46:09Anthony Pompliano?

  We had something called Facebook Lite. I may get the names wrong, but I think that's what it was. And basically, what it was, it was zero-rated, which for all intents and purposes means people could use it for free. And there was a deal that got done where it got preloaded on hardware. So if you went and, let's say you were in Ghana or Nigeria, you know, something like that, and you bought one of these phones, it came preloaded with Facebook Lite, and in some countries, there was actually eight applications that it came with. One of them was Wikipedia, one was, you know, I think a woman's health, Facebook, etc. And I remember, the results came back from like a user study, and multiple people in there, in some form or fashion, said Mark Zuckerberg created the internet.

• 46:50Anthony Pompliano?

  And it was this feeling of, I accessed the internet through this portal. This portal was created by Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook, so Mark Zuckerberg created the internet. And I remember thinking to myself, one, that's wild if you say that in the western world, right? If people are like, how could you believe that? But two is, if you think that those people care about Cambridge Analytica, or the meddling in the election, they're not, one, not even aware of it, let alone, two, even if they did it, all they're saying is, that happens in every country. What do you mean?

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Exactly. Most countries, it's legal to be a politician and a lobbyist. So, you know, it's only like in the US and Europe where, or maybe Australia, where, Canada, where we basically have this kind of, you know, unique vision on how the rest of the world should work vis a vis our own.

• 47:38Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and it brings me back to this idea of, and I think what you're hitting around here is the connectivity, right? And so I have pretty strong views, I think, in terms of there are two things that should be open and permissionless in the world, right? And it's information and money. So the movement of those two things is really important that we incentivize that to be as free flowing as possible, right? There's other things like stocks and bonds and kind of the regulated financial system, etc. I'm actually much more comfortable with that not being in a free, open, permissionless

• 48:07Speaker 02

  Well, I'm not, but, but, but we can

• 48:09Anthony Pompliano?

  All right, we can debate that, right? But, and it's more of a, I don't think regulators will allow people to transact securities back and forth without them being able to step in and say timeout.

• 48:17Speaker 02

  Not now, for sure.

• 48:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, but, but for sure, money and information, like, you would have to spend a lot of time to convince me otherwise that shouldn't be open and free. Well, Facebook solved the information one, right? And it basically said, look, now it's not, is it truly open and permissionless? No, but it's probably the best thing we have so far, right? In terms of staying connected to people around the world, communicating in multiple formats and different multimedia, you know, formats, etc. And so why can't they do money? Right? It's not that big of a change. If you're on Facebook Messenger and I send you a message versus I press a button, I send you money? Yeah, there's a little bit of difference there, but it's not much.

• 48:56Speaker 02

  Right. The difference between Facebook and Visa is Visa connects to the banks and Facebook is basically going to just connect to a stored value, whether that stored value is Libra or something they create that's centralized. Ultimately, it's going to work.

• 49:10Anthony Pompliano?

  Or Bitcoin.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  Or Bitcoin, absolutely. And, and I actually think

• 49:14Anthony Pompliano?

  Come on, David, come on, man.

• 49:15Speaker 02

  Well, I actually know these guys, they're really good guys, and I've spent a lot of time with them. And I actually think that their biggest fear when it came to Bitcoin was what happens if we turn on 100,000, even 100,000, and they have billions. If we turn on 100,000 WhatsApp users who immediately, within minutes, start spending money and sending money in our app, what's going to happen to the Bitcoin rails?

• 49:36Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  And they basically came to the conclusion that Bitcoin's going to go to 100,000 and mining fees are going to hit $75. And this is not going to work for the kind of remittances that we want to do. And they wanted to do this relatively quickly. And even though, even though people are saying, hey, this Libra thing's going to take years, Even if it takes two or three years, that's still relatively quickly relative to the internet. And so they need this to work now in their mind. And I think there was some consternation that Bitcoin wouldn't be able to scale even vis a vis Lightning to do the kinds of transactions they want to do relatively quickly.

• 50:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, it's very important, right? You know, you and I both know the same people there. And I always am careful to caveat the conversation. These people are very pro Bitcoin, right?

• 50:18Speaker 02

  Absolutely. And they were- Most of them that I know actually are holding Bitcoin personally.

• 50:21Anthony Pompliano?

  And were very early-

• 50:22Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 50:23Anthony Pompliano?

  Bought in size, they believe, etc. But what they believe is today it serves more as a store of value. And what they really want is they want a payment-

• 50:33Speaker 02

  Right.

• 50:33Anthony Pompliano?

  Avenue.

• 50:34Speaker 02

  Payments are ephemeral from a consumer's perspective. Meaning that how it goes from me to them and what happens in between is it's kind of gone in a fleeting moment. And I don't really care as long as it works. And I trust that it's going to arrive, right? People, in my money transfer days, people would say, "I hate that I have to trust Western Union, but I do, right? And I'll gladly pay up the, you know, 10% in FX and transaction fees that I have to pay to send money because I simply know it's going to get there, right?" Now, the reality is they don't have to pay 10% in fees for the money to get there, even without Bitcoin, right? They can pay a fraction of that. But they continue to do that because they trust that the money's going to arrive.

• 51:13Anthony Pompliano?

  Of course.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  So I think that Facebook will get a certain amount of users doing things because they trust that when they use WhatsApp, it works. When they use Instagram, it works. And that's why they're going to start creating branding that makes people clear that when they're using Instagram, they're using a Facebook product. So that when they send money from Instagram to WhatsApp, they know that it's actually going to arrive because it's all Facebook at the end of the day. So it becomes an identity management play.

• 51:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Here's the unpopular opinion or kind of the contrarian view of the Western world. People trust Facebook more than they trust the banks.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  Oh, a hundred percent.

• 51:47Anthony Pompliano?

  Even in the West.

• 51:48Speaker 02

  We look, we do NPS, Net Promoter Score Analysis on our own user base all the time. We have very high NPS at Abra. It's on the order of like sixty, sixty, sixty-five percent.

• 51:58Anthony Pompliano?

  That's pretty high.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  That is very high. Now, we, there are banks in the US that have negative NPS scores. Now, let's, let's understand what a negative NPS score means. That means you spend money to acquire a customer and that customer actually detracts value on a net basis from your entire user base because they hate your product so much after you've acquired them. So, so.

• 52:16Anthony Pompliano?

  They're the least trusted industry on a brand basis.

• 52:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 52:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Right, is basically if you, they do, you know, media, banking, et cetera, and every year, year after year, it's the banks are the least trusted brands.

• 52:28Speaker 02

  The only other organization that would have a, as low an NPS score would be Congress if you could figure out how to create one for, for the US Congress, like, right, I, I, I'm not kidding, there are literally are banks that have a net negative NPS score. So, Facebook's NPS score is obviously not negative, right? So, it's higher than the banks by definition and they have a much bigger user base globally than Visa and Mastercard probably combined, right? So, so at that point, maybe even Amex, and you combine the three, like, Facebook's network is bigger, period, right? So, obviously, right, for them to get into banking means getting into payments, back to your earlier comment, getting into merchant payments, it's all the same thing at the end of the day.

• 53:09Anthony Pompliano?

  As you think about building kind of this bank of the future, right, if you will, and, and the bank being crypto native, do you worry about those large technology companies coming in and, and I don't mean this in a negative way to them, but just kind of like one foot in, one foot out, right? So, they kind of have multiple, you know, kind of pieces on the chessboard, right? So, they've got a crypto play, they've got kind of a legacy play, maybe they'll have two or three other plays that they, they kind of put out there and they're really, they're pushing full speed on all of them, but they're trying to figure out which one is going to be the one that they can, you know, double and triple down on.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 53:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Do you worry about kind of that type of competitor, if you will? Or do you think that you've really got to commit to crypto native and that's the future? And kind of that's where we end up. And so having all of your resources dedicated to that ends up being the most advantageous thing.

• 53:58Speaker 02

  Well, I worry about Abra and I worry about adding value today, right? So that's what I focus on. I can't focus on what anybody else is doing except for myself. I do spend a lot of time looking at what I think I'm replacing, right? Meaning if I have a user who's using Abra to buy crypto, is this the first time they're doing it? Or am I replacing something else? And it's a mix. I'd say the vast majority are using Abra as first time users. Or if they got Bitcoin somewhere else, it was a standalone Bitcoin app and they're moving into something that gives them access to lots of coins. Or maybe they want to use the Bitcoin for money transfer and they're doing that for the first time. Because I can send Bitcoin to somebody who receives pesos or dollars, for example. And Abra makes that very easy. So, so we think about it in that context and we simply want to add more value as we go.

• 54:42Speaker 02

  And we know that if we're nimble and fast and we execute really well in the user experience, which is our bread and butter, that we will continue to grow as a company. And that's what I focus on. I can't, I can't spend my time worrying about what 17 other companies are doing to execute. Because our history has already shown us that when we execute well, the users will actually use the product. And more importantly, they'll talk about it to their friends without me having to pay them oodles of dollars to talk about it.

• 55:07Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, and part of this user experience advantage, if you will, right, is for those that have not built technology products before, one of the, the cheap tricks, if you will, if you want to increase growth, increase engagement, et cetera, you could do simple things like make the page load faster, right? Like, like, like people don't think about it, but there's test after test. Companies I've worked at, companies I've built and obviously companies we've invested in where if the page loads in two seconds versus half a second, the half a second can drive much more engagement, much more growth, et cetera. And so you can get things through performance wins, right, that drive growth. But you also can get things through simply, hey, it now takes you two clicks to buy Bitcoin rather than it being four clicks.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 55:49Anthony Pompliano?

  And so that user experience, I don't think that people put a lot of weight on it when you talk about it. Because it's such a qualitative thing where you can't really quantify what is the user experience. But when you look at data, you can really tell the difference. And it's been something that you guys have kind of hung your hat on in terms of being able to use that to as an advantage.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  We track every click. Now, we don't know that it was Pomp that clicked here, but we know a user clicked here. We know that a certain number of users clicked here and didn't finish. Like, for example, if I want to load Money Through My Bank account, we know that, for example, X percent of our users every day start that process and don't finish. And so we're constantly talking.

• 56:24Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like an aggregated anonymous.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  It's aggregated anonymous information. And we say, okay, how can we improve this process? So we'll send out surveys and ask users, are you willing to talk to us about your experience with Abra? And a certain percentage are because they're very passionate users. And so that goes into iterating constantly on what we call improving the funnel. The funnel basically says, okay, I have a certain percentage of users. We've had, we've had over a million downloads of the Abra app now, which is a lot in the crypto sphere. Right? And, and, and we have, you know, six figures of active users every month. And again, this isn't trading, right? This is, you know, a much stickier retail kind of user. So, so we dig in with them. Like, I'm looking at our app right now. If I take my thumb and I pull down from the top of the screen, I see a little scroll wheel that actually updates the entire portfolio. We have users who log into the app all day to do that

• 57:11Speaker 02

  because it's the simple, easy, non-trader way to track prices. And they just open up the app, scroll down with their thumb, and they say, I love doing that. I love doing that every couple of hours.

• 57:21Anthony Pompliano?

  It's the dopamine hit.

• 57:23Speaker 02

  It's the dopamine hit. Exactly. And so, you know, we had a charts function in the app. It was kind of mediocre. We ripped it out. A couple of weeks, we're launching a new one. It's, it's, it's not meant for the trader. It's meant for the easy, like, retail consumer to look at the Bitcoin price or the Stellar price or the Ripple price and say, oh, I get it. It's moving, it's trending in this direction. I'm going to buy. That's it.

• 57:42Anthony Pompliano?

  So this brings me to one of the areas I've started to think more about, right? Which is, you've come at the bank of the future, if you call it, right? From a wallet-first retail user.

• 57:57Anthony Pompliano?

  Acquire an asset, send and receive, right? It's kind of the core functionality of what you built. You built a great product that obviously people have been very attracted to. It's grown very quickly. And I think one of the key differentiators for you is, and they keep coming back, right? So you've built this really great ecosystem. If you flip it on the other side, there's another group of people who are going after the same opportunity. I don't think that you're directly competitive with them, but their strategy has been build an exchange, right? So go after the trader, look for volume and liquidity. And then once you have that, then start to build out services, et cetera. Today, most of those services actually have been more trader centric. So futures and all that kind of stuff. I think that they're starting to tip their hand a little bit and say, hey, like they

• 58:42Anthony Pompliano?

  may get into some of the banking services, et cetera. How do you see going after that same opportunity? Is it a thing where they're going to have to come into the wallet? You know, many of them are acquired wallets, et cetera? Or is it something where a wallet you then expect over the future, you can add some of that more trader centric type functionality and it gets you to the same kind of end result?

• 59:03Speaker 02

  That's a great question. So my perspective on this was five years ago, I had thought about building an exchange. I felt like I had a lot of advantages in doing that, so maybe I should do it. But I also knew, and you know, I was at Goldman. I understand how this stuff works.

• 59:18Anthony Pompliano?

  Oh my God, you worked at Goldman Sachs?

• 59:20Speaker 02

  Exactly. When it actually wasn't evil, you know, when to say that you were, or when people were still like, oh my God, yeah, I worked at Goldman. It was cool to have it on your resume. But the reality is, is that I wasn't passionate about that. I was passionate about solving real consumer problems. I came from the money transfer space. And look, the reality is, is that the most of the money being made in crypto today is being made on leverage and not even just on trading. It's being made on leverage, right? That's why Bitmex is so profitable. I think the people who are making money in the crypto space are doing it because they offer leverage based products. And that's fine. That's a product that a certain percentage of the population that's active in trading needs. That's not why we exist and we have to follow our own passion and our own vision. Otherwise, we're going to fail.

• 1:00:05Speaker 02

  If you create a product just because it makes money, right? And you don't know what you're doing and you're not passionate about it, you're not willing to really dig deep and own it, you're going to fail. And so we knew in our heart of hearts that we were here for a specific reason. Now, that having been said, we also believe that a lot of those exchange-based services are going to become commoditized over time. I think Coinbase raised their prices this summer. That's an anomaly, in my opinion. There's so many exchanges out there that, over time, there's going to have to be consolidation, and there's going to have to be price competition, because they all have the same APIs, they all have more or less the same prices, they all use the same stablecoins. With the exception of maybe Binance, they all offer this wide breadth of tokens, where

• 1:00:46Speaker 02

  Binance just will offer anything, which is a really interesting perspective. But anyway, it becomes a commodity, and the stack has to change, and the stack has to evolve. And the stack evolves to look like a crypto-specific banking stack, where, in my opinion, the crypto becomes what I call TCP/IP for money. So for the viewers who don't know what that means, is that when you use Netflix today, you're actually using this networking technology, whose complexity is completely hidden to you as a consumer. There's another way to watch videos besides the way you're doing it. You can actually write a little code, create a TCP/IP socket, download individual packets of information, and recreate the video. Now, that's insane. Nobody would do that, but you could.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  So Abra is basically creating that Netflix-like user experience to hide that complexity of the crypto, to recreate an entirely new banking stack that's relevant for the next generation of Snapchat users, of people who don't understand why we even had bank branches in the first place, but also think globally. And so that's how this is going to evolve, in my opinion, over time. And the exchanges will have a place in that system. They become more like the Goldman's of the world, where they're providing the equivalent of the repo and those money market accounts, services that we need to run our crypto banking system. So they're laying the foundations for that today, and it's very important.

• 1:02:11Speaker 02

  Abra can't function without those exchanges, OTC desks, and everybody playing their part in creating a liquid crypto environment. We're simply saying, the next evolution is to create a stack for banking that the retail consumer can use that hides that complexity. Just like you don't understand the complexity as the average banking customer of what happens in overnight repo markets and money markets, and how the bank's doing fractional reserve banking, and all that great stuff that has to happen for the existing system to work. Right. So, so long answer to your question, but the bottom line is, is that those exchange rails become the backbone of a next generation banking system.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  And Abra wants to be the retail component to that banking system and offer the deposit products, the lending products, the payment products with a high quality mobile user experience that people are going to want globally.

• 1:03:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, to me it is, you've taken a strategy where if you own the end user, right? You have a lot of advantages and it's because they trust your brand.

• 1:03:13Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:03:14Anthony Pompliano?

  They trust that when I press this button on the mobile app, it does what I want it to do. Right. My assets are secure and there's an element in crypto that we haven't seen it play out yet, but I think a lot about, talked to our founders, which is doing things today that are short term focused will hurt you in the long run. Right. And so gouging people on fees, right? All this kind of stuff because it's all around the brand and the way people talk about you, et cetera. But if you take a really long term view, 20 year view, and you say, look, we're going to do things the right way and we're going to make sure that, you know, we have your best interest at heart and we really align what we do with what you do. What you find is that's not a marketing message, right?

• 1:03:59Anthony Pompliano?

  It's not like you go, you know, slap that on, on a, on a pitch deck or on a billboard and everyone's like, oh yeah, of course. Every company says it, but if you actually do it over a long period of time, you separate yourself, right? Because every other company succumbs to doing the things for the short term around profitability or revenue or whatever it is. And so to me, that is much easier to do when you have the direct relationship with the user than it is if you're the behind the scene rails or you've got an exchange and then you are simply just trying to add more functionality, et cetera. And so it'll be very interesting to see how this plays out because I don't think a lot of people are thinking that way right now, but the people who do-

• 1:04:39Speaker 02

  Well, they can if they don't have the users.

• 1:04:40Anthony Pompliano?

  Well, that's a great point.

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  So, so we split test products all the time, right? So we have users who are getting new features that other users don't see. We do surveys every day, but it's not the same user base every day. They would get annoying and so we can mix it up now because, and Facebook does this to the tune of millions of users, right? We can't do that. We don't have millions of users.

• 1:04:58Anthony Pompliano?

  We were experts.

• 1:05:00Speaker 02

  So we do the same thing, but we do it from a small, a slightly smaller perspective. We'll, we'll split test with hundreds or thousands of users and then deploy relatively quickly if we think something's working or pull back if, if we think something's detracting.

• 1:05:12Anthony Pompliano?

  For, for those that don't know, this, um, this kind of A B testing or split testing, it sounds like an easy concept, right?

• 1:05:19Speaker 02

  It's very hard.

• 1:05:20Anthony Pompliano?

  Which is simply, hey, Bill is a user, I'm a user, the product shows, you know, me experience A and Bill experience B, and it sees what we do and they're optimizing for us to click a button.

• 1:05:30Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:05:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? And, uh, if I click the button and Bill doesn't, then, and enough people follow my lead and not Bill's, then eventually they ship to 100% of the user base, the button I saw versus the differentiated button that Bill saw. But, um, when I was at Facebook, we would do things like, uh, if you just take one button, right? Or the edge is rounded or squared?

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:05:50Anthony Pompliano?

  What's the color? What's the font? Is the font underlined? Is there a shadow? Is it not? Right? Is there, um, how much space is between the, uh, letters in the top of the, uh, button and the bottom of the button? What is the shade of green and blue? And, and all of these variables, and there was literally custom-built infrastructure internally where you could basically put all the variables in and then because they had so much traffic, they would show all the different variables and eventually, you know, two, three days later, you would get, okay, here's the results. Right? And this combination of, uh, no shadow, you know, square edge, this shade of green with this font, this underlined, uh, you know, whatever gets the most clicks.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  So, so we've even done that level of testing with our acquisition marketing.

• 1:06:31Anthony Pompliano?

  Ah.

• 1:06:32Speaker 02

  So when you're putting a message on, a paid message on social media, for example, on Twitter or on Facebook, um, that's how we have acquired some of our users and we'll test different messages at the same time. And then those sites are really good at giving us feedback on the click, the click-through rates we're getting on different messages. And then we can test not only the click-through rate, but the ultimate signup rate, meaning what expectations are we setting at the top of the funnel? And how are those expectations being met at the bottom of the funnel? We actually tested some advertising in the Philippines where, when we rolled out the, the stock features that we had talked about there. And our awareness for Bitcoin sales was so high in the Philippines that as we were testing the stock features, a super majority of those users weren't using the app they

• 1:07:16Speaker 02

  were downloading to buy stocks. It was reminding them that there was actually a, an easy way to buy Bitcoin.

• 1:07:23Anthony Pompliano?

  That's amazing.

• 1:07:24Speaker 02

  They had already heard about. So it actually was more of a, it turned into a retargeting almost, for those of you who understand marketing, for a way to buy Bitcoin, even though it was advertising by Apple. And we were like, what the hell's going on here? And then when we dug in, we realized, hey, these people actually know Abra already. And you're reminding them that they should be buying Bitcoin inadvertently.

• 1:07:41Anthony Pompliano?

  It's amazing.

• 1:07:41Speaker 02

  When you were advertising Apple. And, and so we said, okay, well, but that pointed to another problem, which was, we have users who are aware of buying Bitcoin, who actually have never bought stocks before, who don't understand buying stocks, who don't even know what the letters ET and F mean. And so we had to start putting more content and awareness in place on that, when we had assumed that we had to spend more content awareness on crypto. We had already created enough content and awareness in the crypto space that we'd have to go back and do the same thing in the traditional investing world, because the international user base just didn't know. I actually did a talk in the Philippines, and I think like 100 people showed up. I would say maybe 10 knew what an ETF was, out of 100. And these were all people who were putting real money into the app. So I actually

• 1:08:25Speaker 02

  did a few minutes on what a stock is, like what it means to have an exchange traded fund, and you know, mix it up like in that regard. And people were so thankful that, you know, we've spent, in the meantime, there's guides on, on stock investing that we had to create, when there's all kinds of, obviously, companies have spent millions, right? I mean, we're not, we're not the first to offer, you know, that kind of product. And, and so, it was, it was, anyway, that type of testing led us to understand some things about even the marketing of this that we didn't come to appreciate.

• 1:08:55Anthony Pompliano?

  It, it's one of my favorite parts about building products and, and growth work, etc., is the human kind of bias, and what you think is going to work, you're always surprised by what people...

• 1:09:08Speaker 02

  Unbelievably so. I mean, we're always wrong. And, and the only way to get right is to get out there and do it, and quickly iterate and test. Now, it's frustrating, because as a startup CEO, you want to basically spend a dollar, and put a dollar into the machine, and get exactly X out the other side of the machine. And you can't expect that realistically, when you're creating a new product or a new company out of the gates, you have to be willing to test and iterate, and you have to set expectations. That it takes time to do that, but you also need the macroeconomics to work, right? So this year, we've had a lot of ups and downs, right? So in the crypto space, for example, like things spiked for us this summer and the volumes in exchanges have come way down. I think, I think exchange trading volume has come down like 70, 80%.

• 1:09:51Anthony Pompliano?

  Now, we're not

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  Since the summer.

• 1:09:52Anthony Pompliano?

  Since the summer, right?

• 1:09:53Speaker 02

  And so, so, so we're not an exchange, so we don't see the same exact generations. We do see peaks and valleys that follow price to some degree. And so, so all of that talk on marketing presupposes that the market itself is there.

• 1:10:08Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:08Speaker 02

  Right? You have to market a product that people do ultimately want or, or are going to use.

• 1:10:12Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And what you're talking about is building a company is very scientific, right? I think a lot of people just think, oh, you create a product, throw it out in the world and like cross your fingers and it exploded. And there's a number of equations, if you will, that if you really know what you're doing, you focus on, right? And so, you know, for your business, I'm sure that you've got some number in your head of every time we sign up a user, they're worth X to us over the lifetime.

• 1:10:39Speaker 02

  And we know exactly what those numbers are today. We talked about them in our monthly board reports.

• 1:10:42Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah. And then the goal is, okay, let's, I'll make up a number, right? There, we're going to make $50 off every user that signs up over their lifetime. And now, how do we go find a new user for less than $50? It's kind of a very easy one, right? And literally, it's the cost to acquire that customer versus the lifetime value. And so, the part that always cracks me up is, you know, there's a lot of people who are excited about building companies and all this stuff and they come in and, and I really ask them like, what is the science here, right? Like, what are the important equations? How are you making progress against them, et cetera? And what I find is that people just don't know. But the second that they real, you know, somebody teaches them or shows them, okay, here's five equations, you need to figure out these. And if you show them in a positive light or you've done the work to get them where they

• 1:11:27Anthony Pompliano?

  need to be, you'll raise as much money as you ever want, right? And, and because you built a machine. And when you build a machine, it does come down to that, put a dollar in, you know, get 100 on the backend. A lot of people are interested in being a part of that.

• 1:11:38Speaker 02

  It's a big lesson for wannabe entrepreneurs is study the kind of the whole funnel process, soup to nuts. There are so many books out there about how to, how to, how to really address that, that address this really well. But what does it mean to acquire a customer? What does it mean to convert a customer? How do you manage the funnel? How do you manage unit economics? And if you can't do that well, You're going to, you're never going to win as an entrepreneur. Or if you don't surround yourself with people that can do that well.

• 1:12:08Anthony Pompliano?

  So you've done this well. Abra recently announced that you've added a ton of new cryptocurrencies, etc. Talked a little bit about the announcement.

• 1:12:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, so back to the point about listening to your users. The number one requested feature from our users was more cryptocurrencies. Just over and over again, more crypto. Actually, higher limits was was close to number one, but but but more cryptocurrencies was definitely number one.

• 1:12:30Anthony Pompliano?

  And you had how many before?

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  I don't know, I think it was like 30.

• 1:12:33Anthony Pompliano?

  30, okay.

• 1:12:34Speaker 02

  30 or so. So we've added another 60 in the US. We actually added 200 to the app. We're just making about 60 of those available to the US. And it has to do with how we manage custody. We work with third-party partners who manage custody and the exchange of those. And so we're beholden to their to their rules. So for example, the services in the US is available in like, I think, 47 states. And not in New York and a couple of other states. We're working on New York right now because our service providers don't have the bit license to do that.

• 1:13:03Anthony Pompliano?

  Yeah, New York is still frankly somehow, some way decided that they don't want their constituents to use this.

• 1:13:11Speaker 02

  It's it's crazy. As a former New Yorker and also an American, but it is what it is. We'll we'll figure it out. We'll do the work to get the license either ourselves or our partner. We're working with them now. And eventually, New Yorkers will have it. But by and large, we try to make every product available to every consumer in the world. There's 200 new cryptocurrencies in the app. About 60 of those are available in the US. And the rest will be made available to our international users in the coming coming days and weeks.

• 1:13:37Anthony Pompliano?

  Got it. Where can people get the app?

• 1:13:39Speaker 02

  So you go to abra.com is the easiest way.

• 1:13:42Anthony Pompliano?

  How'd you get that URL?

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  It was hard.

• 1:13:44Anthony Pompliano?

  That's actually pretty legit.

• 1:13:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was pretty legit. And and what was hard was was not paying what they originally wanted.

• 1:13:51Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm sure.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  For the URL. If I if I tell people what I paid, they'd be like, how did you do that? Because, you know, it was a company that actually had bought another company called Abra in a totally different space. And they weren't using the name anymore. So they really didn't want it. So I got kind of lucky. And then I actually had some friends at the company that bought it. And I actually was able to finagle my way in there to the CEO and kind of have a heart to heart to say, hey, you don't really need this. Come on. And by the way, I'm trying to solve real global problems here. And you can really do good by giving this up. And and by the way, I'll give you some money, but it's not going to move the needle. And you guys really feel good about, you know, having done this. And you can go back to the old employees from the old Abra and say, hey, look what we're doing with this. This is kind of cool. And they agreed.

• 1:14:30Anthony Pompliano?

  What a salesman.

• 1:14:33Speaker 02

  But by the way, that took six months. So to be clear, like it wasn't a four-minute conversation over.

• 1:14:38Anthony Pompliano?

  So you're ready for this is, I'm not going to say the URL because everyone will go bid on it. But there are multiple people who have bought URLs that they think I'll be interested in. Whether they're around company names or, you know, whatever, they usually, there's some kind of press article or something. They go and buy it and turn right around and email same day and say, do you want to buy this 5,000, 10,000? And I literally say to them, I said,

• 1:15:04Speaker 02

  I bought like Pomp XYZ or Pomp that XYZ and I came to you and I say, hey, why don't you buy it from me?

• 1:15:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Like literally, it recently happened.

• 1:15:13Anthony Pompliano?

  We invested in a company and somebody went and bought the URL that was like pretty close, right? And then came and said, do you want to do it? And I said, no, first of all. Second of all, I hope you link to a bunch of stuff. So it gives us great SEO.

• 1:15:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Right? Like basically just, you know, what are these people doing? But when you really need something, right? It's worth having the conversation.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  So we originally had goabra.com.

• 1:15:39Anthony Pompliano?

  Goabra.

• 1:15:40Speaker 02

  We didn't have, we still do. We actually own 50 variants to your point.

• 1:15:43Anthony Pompliano?

  Okay, yeah.

• 1:15:43Speaker 02

  So there's 50 different ways to get to abra.com. We own them all.

• 1:15:47Anthony Pompliano?

  I'm going to go buy the 50 first and then make you buy it from me.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  I don't need it at this point. So please don't do that, Mr. Pomp audience. And when you go to abra.com, there'll be a link to download from the App Store or the Play Store. You just go to the App Store or Play Store and search for Abra and you'll find it. And like I said, we get lots of downloads every day. And so, you know, please come join the family.

• 1:16:09Anthony Pompliano?

  Where'd the name come from?

• 1:16:11Speaker 02

  So that was a tough one. I went through a multi-month process.

• 1:16:17Anthony Pompliano?

  It's like naming a child.

• 1:16:18Speaker 02

  It is like naming a child. As a matter of fact, this was harder. I actually came up with the names of my three boys much faster. That was my role. I actually named them as it sits. I didn't have to give birth to them. And

• 1:16:30Anthony Pompliano?

  Both processes, both processes took multiple months?

• 1:16:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. My ex was gracious in letting me, letting me name the kids. Anyway, another story for another day. was tough. So I love the, remember I was focused on money transfer remittances. I had this idea for a better remittance app, ABRA. I was like, that works, that works, that works really well. And my, at the time, my middle son was really into magic. He could, it was a de-cardistry. You ever see people be able to do like, where they shuffle cards and they can actually hold like, cards eight different ways in their hands at the same time? He could do that at like 10, right? Cause he's, he's 16 now or 17, but, but he was, you know, this was five years ago when I named the company. And it was like abracadabra, right? So there was a magical component to that.

• 1:17:14Speaker 02

  I said, I mean, he's gonna love that. And so between the better remittance app and the idea of magic and the synthetic currency to me was very much like magic. It was very simple. I love the idea of having a one, one syllable word that will work in multiple countries. Right? That it works in, in an Arabic speaking country, in a Latin speaking country, in, you know, Germanic speaking countries. That's very hard too. I went through that at Netscape, when we would launch new products and people couldn't say the product. Because we had a lot of people who were very, you know, Mountain View centric, right? Not even East Bay centric, right? And then I'd go to Timbuktu and they'd be like, they couldn't say the product name. And so we did even testing of that where I would actually call up friends who I knew spoke a foreign language and say, do me a favor, say Abra. And I would listen to them say, Abra. All right, thank you. And I hang up.

• 1:18:00Anthony Pompliano?

  What the hell is Bill's crazy idea now?

• 1:18:02Speaker 02

  Right, right. Exactly. So, so naming a company is really hard. And the more passionate about it you are, the harder it is, because the closer to it you are. And so we had a lot of debates about it. And I was on the fence myself. There was other names. I don't even remember them now, which, which is very telling. But one of my co-founders reminded me that there were other names that we were on the fence about.

• 1:18:22Anthony Pompliano?

  Change history, man. Abra was the name from day one and you're ready to go with it.

• 1:18:26Speaker 02

  We have a holding company that owns the shares and it's called Plutus Financial. Plutus is the Greek god of wealth. And, and so I wanted a holding, I knew that that would never be a consumer name, but I had to, I had to call the company something. And so we just, we just kept it in place because it was easier not to change. We may change it to Abra later. But if you look at our terms of service, it actually says your terms of service are with Plutus Financial, which is actually an interesting name in and of itself.

• 1:18:50Anthony Pompliano?

  I love that.

• 1:18:50Speaker 02

  The Greek god of wealth. But Abra is a, is the right product name for us.

• 1:18:54Anthony Pompliano?

  I love it. All right, man. Listen, I really appreciate you coming and doing this. You've got a very unique perspective, and I think you've been around, obviously, for a very long time. So the experience is well appreciated, and I'll have to do this again sometime in the future. You'll have to come back for time number three.

• 1:19:11Speaker 02

  I want to be the first person to be on for a third time. So, all right, don't give that up.

• 1:19:16Anthony Pompliano?

  Deal.

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  All right, man. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 1:19:19Anthony Pompliano?

  Absolutely.

• 1:19:20Speaker 02

  All right.

• 1:19:21Anthony Pompliano?

  Hey, everyone. Pop here. If you liked this episode of Off the Chain and want to help us take crypto to the top of the Apple, Spotify, and other podcast charts, please do us a favor and rate, review, and subscribe. To review, simply go to the Off the Chain homepage, scroll down until you see the five blank stars. Taking 15 seconds to fill those stars in and leave a quick review goes a long way in helping us take the entire crypto ecosystem to the top of the charts. I appreciate you listening, and see you next time on Off the Chain.