[00:02:27] André Neves: Simon Cowell, our CEO comes from the financial services background. He was prior to Zebedee, he was the head of corporate strategy at Bitstamp, which is the largest Bitcoin exchange in Europe. And Chris Moss was actually the first person to put Bitcoin into a video game in the early 2013, right. And so the three of us got together and we had very similar ideas and, and paths. I actually, my path was actually coming from the application development side. I was leading many software engineering teams out in New York for a better part of the decade and the Bitcoin bug and started learning about Bitcoin. Being originally from Brazil I learned about bitcoin on the technology side, not really on the monetary side.

[00:03:07] André Neves: You know, my folks could send me money and I could send them money, and it settled instantaneously. So that was sort of the, the part where it bit for me. And then right away I realized I have to do something with this. The entrepreneurial mind, the driven mind had just said, I have to build something here.

[00:03:23] André Neves: And that’s what I set out to do. But it, it, you know, it’s a little bit more complex than let’s build something, right? You need to build a company, you need to raise money and so on. And, you know, as lots of folks in normal jobs, let’s call it, my job was great, right? I was a director of engineering at a digital product studio, making decent money, growing my career, but it wasn’t challenging and it wasn’t transformative.

[00:03:45] André Neves: I wanted to have impact. And so I applied and I learned, and I discovered and I researched and I, you know, started coding things away in the Bitcoin side of, of things. And that’s where I discovered Chaincode Labs. So in early 2016, with the Lightning Network paper coming out, I really got interested in it.

[00:04:04] André Neves: Discussed with the Chaincode Labs folks about it, and was one of the 10 invited to participate in the one and only, I believe they haven’t run another residency program yet for the Lightning Network. This was in early 2018. In that residency program, you probably would recognize other names like Pierre Rochard, like Jack Mallers, like Alex Bosworth, right?

[00:04:24] André Neves: So there was a lot of, of like Rene Pickhardt who ended up writing the Lightning Network book. So all of us were in that, that cohort. And from there I decided that, you know, lightning is the future. Bitcoin is definitely the path here. And I believe it was two weeks later, I quit my cushy job and I took the leap, right?

[00:04:41] André Neves: It, it was time to take that leap of faith. So I, I, I went down that rabbit hole at that moment.

[00:04:47] Preston Pysh: I love that. Your co-founder that programmed it into a game. You said 2012. So this is before any?

[00:04:53] André Neves: 2013.

[00:04:54] Preston Pysh: 2013. This is before any layer two. So what, explain to us what that was. What did, what did he do?

[00:05:00] André Neves: So he built a, Chris Moss, his handle is @MandelDuck, if you’ve ever heard of him. He built the very first Bitcoin game in 2013, and he did it with the game Sara toby. And really it was the notion of Bitcoin rewards. You know he was working at a, at a digital studio, similarly in a different company, and wanted the clients, wanted him to build a Bitcoin wallet.

[00:05:21] André Neves: And in doing that, he got interested in saying, hey, no one’s done the Bitcoin game. Maybe I should put, you know, a Bitcoin in a game and reward folks. And it was actually a pretty big hit, right? The chain was empty compared to now, so the fees were low and it was more or less, okay. Then things changed by, by rapidly, actually, Coinbase got involved and started advertising his game and giving him money to give out his rewards, and then fees started spiking.

[00:05:46] André Neves: And I think it was a couple months after he had to shut it down because it was no longer feasible. It cost more to send the reward than it was the reward. And then he said, look, Bitcoin is not it for tiny payments yet, right? Yeah. And that was 2013, 2014.

[00:06:01] Preston Pysh: So people that aren’t intimately familiar on the tax, so with layer two, one of the massive advantages is just immediate settlement with practically no fees that you can stream money.

[00:06:13] Preston Pysh: And so one of the things that you guys have with your API at Zebedee is people are now creating apps on the app store that you can go and download right now and earn Bitcoin Satoshi’s as you’re playing the game, which is mind blowing. Yeah. And my immediate thought, when I see this model as a business person and I’m looking at them saying, why aren’t these game creators incorporating this more into their games?

[00:06:40] Preston Pysh: And you know, when I have little kids, they play the games and there’s all these ads that are constantly popping up. But I would think that you could incentivize people to play the game more if the user, the end, the person playing the game is participating in the revenue being generated from the ads.

[00:06:56] Preston Pysh: And so your company’s providing this turnkey solution for game designers to incorporate these payments into it. Talk to us about the evolution of like how you guys came up with the idea to do this. When did you start rolling it out? Just walk us through the whole thing and then, and then I guess at the end of that, I’m really curious on the game theory, whether people, like, why is it not taking off yet?

[00:07:20] Preston Pysh: Do you think it’s just we’re really early or, or some of your ideas on that?

[00:07:25] André Neves: Definitely. At the core of Zebedee, we have the Zebedee API, and that’s really what powers both our B2B and our B2C arms and products. What you’re touching on is our B2B side, so aimed to someone that wants to run a mom and pop shop online and sell, you know, clothes or stickers online.

[00:07:42] André Neves: They would go to stripe.com and set up an account and then they can accept dollars. Similarly, anyone, whether you are a store or a operator or an e-commerce or an app developer or a game developer, you could just plug Zebedee APIs, right? It’s one API. You have a beautiful developer dashboard and you’re able to move money at the speed of the internet and you’ve settled money instantaneously, right?

[00:08:04] André Neves: Anywhere in the world. And so we started the company in 2019 and there were no providers at the time. We were talking about 2018 was effectively when Lightning Network, Bitcoin’s payment Network became mainnet, went into mainnet so everyone could use it in a, in a production environment. And by 2019, there just simply weren’t providers that could allow folks outside of Bitcoin to interact with it.

[00:08:28] André Neves: The reality is that Bitcoin is very complex. If someone tells you that they understand Bitcoin through and through, that’s a lie. No one actually understands all of Bitcoin. And then you add upon all of the other technologies that are adjacent to Bitcoin, such as the Lightning Network, and it becomes even more cumbersome.

[00:08:43] André Neves: So it’s not an easy technology to get started with, and in my view, being a technologist, a product developer, a, a product builder, it is inherently, it’s very hard to onboard billions of folks into Bitcoin. If it is complicated. It needs to be simplified and not just for the consumers. It needs to be simplified for developers.

[00:09:04] André Neves: If I tell you, if I tell a developer that in order to interact with Bitcoin, they need to understand all of the intricacies of UTXO management. That is going to go downhill.

[00:09:13] André Neves: That is not going to happen. We are not going to get hundreds, thousands, and millions of developers, right?

[00:09:18] André Neves: We need to simplify that and abstract that away.

[00:09:21] André Neves: Lightning does a great job, whereas Bitcoin is really low level. I would say layer one, layer two is a little bit more, I would say, closer to app developers too, to application developers. It’s more pay and request, and it’s simpler, right?

[00:09:35] André Neves: And yet in 2019, there weren’t any providers, right? And so in order to foster that ecosystem, Zebedee’s first product release in 2019, in 2020 were the APIs, right?

[00:09:45] André Neves: That the first version of the developer dashboard in the APIs. And at first it was very simple, request payments, send payments effectively, pay ins and payouts, for anyone, anywhere. And then the technology started evolving and I want to just take a second to, to mention, our thesis around the adoption of Bitcoin and lightning is that it needs to be Bitcoin comes to you when you are ready for Bitcoin.

[00:10:10] André Neves: What I mean by that is the censorship resistance aspect of Bitcoin is important for some folks. Not all the monetary divisibility aspect of Bitcoin of 21 million. And, and you know, that’s important to some. Not all. The interoperability is important to some, not all. So you need to meet the customer where they’re at.

[00:10:28] André Neves: Don’t come to a game developer selling hard money.

[00:10:32] André Neves: That’s not going to sell, right? That’s not the selling point. The selling point is here’s an interoperable money that you can interact with in instead of having 50 integrations for your payouts in 50 countries, you have one integration for payouts in all countries, right?

[00:10:44] André Neves: Like that’s the selling point.

[00:10:46] André Neves: Increase your KPIs, improve your, decrease your churn, right? So you have to meet the customer where they are. You don’t just yell Bitcoin features or, or values, right? And so our thesis was the gaming vertical is ripe for it. This is younger demographic. They are much more in tune with value and point and digital economies.

[00:11:07] André Neves: We can talk about Fortnite, we can talk about World of Warcraft. Every single one of these MMO RPGs is a multi-billion dollar virtual economy, and there’s trading actively occurring in that economy. Zebedee, the D E E for Zebedee stands for digital Economy Engines. We actually want to power digital economy engines.

[00:11:27] André Neves: We want to empower you with solutions, APIs, SDKs, dashboards, so that you can power economy engines yourself, whether you’re building an application, a game, or a system.

[00:11:39] André Neves: Now, back into the gaming side, I think to your point is advertising models and how does that works. You were mentioning that you have kids and they play games and they see lots of ads.

[00:11:48] André Neves: What what clicked very quickly was our technology. One, selling this to game developers in early 2020 was by introducing a reward mechanism to users based on the re the, the revenue they were getting from ads, they were able to significantly increase retention and significantly decrease churn. So in the video, in the video gaming industry and mobile gaming specifically, we talk about things like D14 and D30, which are effectively, once the user signs up, are they still here after 14 days?

[00:12:19] André Neves: Are they still here after 30 days? Are they still engaging? And notoriously, that is really hello, right? It’s effectively what’s known as churn. So they sign up, they play for two days, and then they delete it, right? So you want the user to remain here. And what they found is, and I’ll, I’ll cite some examples, but what they found is every single game developer that introduced our platform and our rewards gave APIs, for example, increased their turn like tenfold, a hundred fold, a thousand fold.

[00:12:44] André Neves: So first and foremost, we have Fumb Games. Fumb Games has a very, it’s an amazing game. It’s a very addictive game called Bitcoin Miner, and it’s effectively an idle game. It’s a hyper causal game on your phone. And I believe it was four years ago, they released that game, but there were no rewards, right?

[00:13:01] André Neves: It was just a normal game with advertisements and it flopped. It was a serious flop. It it, you know, months and months of development or nothing.

[00:13:09] André Neves: Then Paul West, who’s the CEO of Fumb Games, discovered the API and said, you know, let’s give this a try. After the first month of introducing the rewards API and pushing Bitcoin Miner as a new release, again, their day 30 retention went up 1200%.

[00:13:24] André Neves: We’re talking about a game that had zero use case interest and you know, user base. Yeah. And they introduced one single API and they were giving back tiny portions of their ad revenue. And now they just recently crossed over a million active users.

[00:13:39] André Neves: This is mind blowing. This is a, a tiny game that introduced Bitcoin rewards and it exploded.

[00:13:45] André Neves: Let’s go through a bit bigger, right? Square inch, the 6 billion publicly traded company. They’re a video game studio. They’re most, most known for IPs like Final Fantasy. You probably have heard of them. They also integrated Zebedee on a handful of titles and on one of the titles called Ludo Zenith, which is a game that they published to, I believe East Asian countries primarily. It’s, it’s a game for that, that region. It doubled their revenue by simply introducing as every API, right? So they effectively, same thing. They introduced the rewards mechanism, and I believe it was 87% increase in their ARPDA, which is average revenue per daily active user. So we’re saying that one API integration, which takes three days to depend, you know, two weeks, you can double your revenue per user in that game, right?

[00:14:33] André Neves: So this is very, very impactful and this is where it all started, right? In 2020, we started seeing that this was the impact. And so to my point earlier, it’s not about selling Bitcoin, it’s not about selling lightning, it’s not about selling rewards even. It’s about selling better KPIs. So hey, introduce this payout mechanism, this rewards mechanism, and you will double your ARPDA out.

[00:14:52] André Neves: You will double your revenue, you will increase your retention, and you’ll reduce your churn.

[00:14:56] André Neves: Games become profitable after they add. That’s a big, big statement, and that’s a true statement that we’ve, we’ve been able to hold for all customers that have added it. And it started with gaming, right? And, and gaming has been great and, and it’s something that continues to grow something that is a little bit different than application development.

[00:15:14] André Neves: As games take a lot longer of a cycle, games don’t, you know, build for three months and iterate after they’re released, they build for 6, 12, 18 months and then they release big, big features, right? So what you’re about to see is actually your question was why it hasn’t it picked up yet? And my answer is that it definitely has.

[00:15:33] André Neves: It’s just that it, there are at least 20 games that I see actively being developed that have this capability. And when I say 20 games, I don’t mean 20 tiny mobile games. I mean, we have crossed the chasm into desktop games, into web experiences and mobile, right? So it is coming and it is very much here.

[00:15:51] André Neves: It’s just the cycle for development for games. It’s quite a bit longer than applications and, and platforms. Right? So throughout the rest of 2023, you will see Zebedee and partners of ours announcing big activations and big game launches. And that should hopefully get you to understand that there’s a lot happening behind the scenes.

[00:16:10] André Neves: It’s just not at the forefront yet.

[00:16:13] Preston Pysh: This is a, this is unbelievable. It’s unbelievable.

[00:16:18] André Neves: It’s fascinating when we speak to folks because the reaction at first if you’re selling Bitcoin is very different than if you’re selling what Bitcoin does for your business. That’s the impact, right? I’m not interested in selling Bitcoin.

[00:16:31] André Neves: Bitcoin sells itself. I’m interested in selling the impact that introducing Bitcoin has.

[00:16:35] André Neves: And then what happened was everyone started seeing the impact on the gaming side and we started getting knocks on our doors and said, Hey, remember there weren’t many providers at the time, and this is early 2020, mid 2020, 2021.

[00:16:48] André Neves: You know, there were not many providers. API providers are, are some folks are very enthusiast enthusiasts, let’s say. So they build a little API and they put it out, but it’s not well maintained.

[00:16:59] André Neves: There’s lots of compliance, reg concerns, right? Regulatory concerns. So what we’ve chosen to do is said, okay, look, we from the get-go are going to be a compliant regulated US-based.

[00:17:11] André Neves: Right. So we have, we’re an MSB. We have MTLs, like we are effectively able to provide this capability legally in a regulated manner. And so not only does that change the perception, because it’s inherently that a public company would need certain capabilities and certain expectations like this, but it also allows us to expand quite a bit more outside of gaming, right?

[00:17:33] André Neves: The reality is that folks started knocking on the door and said, Hey, your API is amazing, but I’m not a gamer or a game developer. Can I use it? And at first it was as a business,

[00:17:43] André Neves: as as an entrepreneur, one thing that you can’t do is go too wide. If you go too wide and your sales funnel is not focused, you’re going to have a very, very big sales funnel, but not many are going to convert, right?

[00:17:55] André Neves: You need to be specialized in solving problems for individual customers. So at first we were hesitant in expanding in an opening and saying, look, the use case really is gaming and gamers. Then comes, I believe, mid 2021 late 2021. Enough knocks on the door started to sound, and we said, okay, maybe it’s time.

[00:18:16] André Neves: We started working towards our SaaS offering, which effectively automates the entirety of our applications into a way that anyone can sign up and get going with an API key. And we’ve got a few launch partners, right? So most prominently, the very first launch partner of ours was Fountain. Fountain is the podcasting 2.0.

[00:18:35] André Neves: I I believe Oscar has been a, a guest of yours. And Fountain is backed entirely by Zebedee infrastructure and they don’t worry about payments. They just plug in API and they process tens of millions of transactions on a monthly basis. So that was the very first intro into us expanding and just believe a month ago we opened it to anything and every one.

[00:18:58] André Neves: So you can go to zebedee.io, sign up, get an API key, and start building applications and, and systems, right? So it’s, it’s scaled quite well and quite drastically over the years. But really it was, it was on a need basis. Enough folks are saying, hey André, you are actually at the forefront of running tens of millions of transactions per month on Lightning.

[00:19:18] André Neves: Like there are not many teams or companies doing this. I need this, can I use it?

[00:19:22] André Neves: Right? And, and we said, okay, it’s time. We we’re now secure at a place where we believe it’s time to open it. And that’s where streaming money comes in. And that’s where all of these capabilities have popped up.

[00:19:33] Preston Pysh: For people that are listening to this, maybe on the Apple Podcast or whatever.

[00:19:36] Preston Pysh: So Fountain that André was talking about. So our show people can listen to our show. This conversation right now on Fountain. And if they are, they’ve chosen to stream us, literally stream us, sat us money as they’re listening to the show. So if they listen to 10 seconds of it, they’re just streaming whatever the rate is that we have set there, they’re streaming that for those 10 seconds.

[00:19:59] Preston Pysh: If they listen to the whole show, they’re streaming throughout that entire period of time. And the model is to eventually do away with ads on a show so that people can just pay as they listen. I wanted to just, just so people can understand like how like mind blowing this is, and the reason you can’t do this with traditional finances because you can’t stream somebody a 30th of a penny.

[00:20:21] Preston Pysh: Right. Or listening for two seconds or whatever it might be. So that’s why this is so revolutionary when I’m, I’m trying to look at it from the gamer, like if I was a game developer and just kind of walking through the entire process and so people can kind of understand the service that you’re providing, André.

[00:20:39] Preston Pysh: So let’s say I created a game. I’m running ads every two minutes during that game in order to generate some type of revenue. So the, the person who’s playing the game say it’s some 13 year old kid, he downloads this game on his iPad. And are they then saying, this is my Bitcoin wallet, where I would like to receive, to participate in the, in the ad revenue?

[00:21:03] Preston Pysh: Do they just give their lightning address of like where they can receive Bitcoin as they’re playing the game? And then talk us through how the, the game developer is basically loading the Bitcoin to stream it to that person who’s playing the game. Walk us through some of that, that architecture.

[00:21:20] André Neves: Definitely I’ll do the consumer side first, since it’s more attuned to the, to the audience. You download a game and you start playing right there. You don’t need to enter anything and nothing’s, usually you download a game and you pick up gems or coins or stones, right? And they just put plus one right in your little counter.

[00:21:38] André Neves: Usually in, it’s entirely up to the game developer how they, I actually implement Zebedee and the rewards into the actual fabric of the game. So some developers have it where as you complete tasks or beat the big boss or you know, you complete like a big stage of the game, you get a reward. And in that reward, maybe some gems, but you get five SATs or 20 SATs.

[00:22:00] André Neves: And so it’s part of the game. Some games like a like a Tetris style game, for example coin Majong is, is one that’s powered by us. And, you know, if you get five in a row, then you get a reward. And it’s, it’s bitcoin. And they just add a counter to it. So you get 10 stats, 20 stats, 50 stats. When you’re ready to cash out or get your rewards, you click to withdraw, and then you lean on the fact that Bitcoin and Lightning are open networks and you just enter a lightning address.

[00:22:27] André Neves: It could be your Zebedee Lightning address, it could be any lightning address, right? So the game developer is inherently interoperable. With every wallet out there, they don’t need to sit only with Zebedee. So they don’t even force their users to use Zebedee.

[00:22:41] André Neves: Some of them recommend Zebedee, right? Because they want that, you know, easy UX for customers.

[00:22:47] André Neves: They want the continuity for the user experience, but it is very much not a requirement. And users have a lightning address and then they click withdraw or, or redeem, right? And they receive their stats and they go on about their day. So on the developer side on the consumer side, it’s very straightforward.

[00:23:03] André Neves: It’s, it’s actually not, it’s an additive experience, right? You can still play most of the games without actually ever interacting with the Bitcoin. It’s just that now your rewards and your points have value and you can take them out.

[00:23:16] André Neves: And similar to what you’re saying, it’s inherently impossible to do in fiat terms because have you ever bought anything less than a dollar online with a credit card? Yeah, that’s not a thing. Right? And I think the cheapest thing is actually the apps in the app store on I iPhones, because it’s like 99 cents or, or 69 cents, that’s the lowest threshold. It hits your bank account and it’s a dollar 30, okay? It is not 99 90 9 cents. And so it is infeasible impossible to send two stats, five stats.

[00:23:44] André Neves: This is, you know, hundreds of ascent, hundreds of fractions of ascent. Then on the developer side, the way this works on-

[00:23:51] Preston Pysh: André real fast and, and not to mention, so everything you just said plus. You can be anywhere in the world. It does not matter where your jurisdiction, you could be VPNing in via the game to whatever, a domain or locale in the world that you want.

[00:24:06] Preston Pysh: Yes. And these things are still controllable. Where like if you’re dealing with dollars, maybe you can only do that in the US or you can only do it over in the if you’re dealing with-

[00:24:15] André Neves: if you’re in, if you’re in a game developer in Brazil and you integrate rewards with Brazilian eyes, great. You have a 220 million addressable user base of potentially Brazilians who have access to Brazilian Piat rails.

[00:24:27] André Neves: But if you introduce Bitcoin, how many people in the world are there? Seven plus billion. So like that is now your addressable market. What’s interesting is the impact of these microtransactions, right? So these are micro, micro, nano transactions even. But the impact that they have is actually macro. We’ve seen gamers in Brazil pay rent, pay groceries, pay bills by playing games.

[00:24:49] André Neves: It’s not, it’s not a life-changing money necessarily, right? I don’t want to suggest that people should work on this, but it is something that makes a very large impact. And when you combine that with depreciating, and this is your bread and butter, depreciating fiat economies, and how their currencies are being debased, you look at Brazilian eyes, Brazil has gone through six different monies over the past 60 plus years.

[00:25:12] André Neves: So they are very keen on getting the next money. It’s fine, you know, this is it. And it is more, you know, it’s better, it’s, it’s easier to use online. So now on the developer side, again, very simple. Go to zebedee.Io, sign up. You create a game in a project, in the, in the dashboard, and you can top it up with Bitcoin.

[00:25:32] André Neves: So in the dashboard you could even deposit Bitcoin, you could, you know, do the whole flow. You could also buy Bitcoin in the dashboard, so you can top it up with your credit card. And so as a developer, you have all of the tools at your disposal. And then you use one of our SDKs, one of our APIs. So we have a Rust sdk, we have a node sdk, we have a Unity sdk. So we come to where you are in your environment. So if you’re building a gaming in Unity, we’re there. You’re building a server side application in no js, we’re there with you. And it’s as simple as Zebedee dot send payment, Zebedee get lightning address, right? It’s very readable. It’s very simple. Anyone can get started.

[00:26:12] André Neves: And once you’ve loaded some Bitcoin in your project wallet, you can start dishing it out to any users in the world, right? So it’s, it’s really that simple. And it’s free, I forgot to say that’s important. It’s entirely free. You can sign up and get going. If you’re building an application that is going to scale, we will grow with you.

[00:26:29] André Neves: So there, we have a tiered system. We have a pro tier starting at 50 bucks a month. We have a startup tier starting at 500 bucks a month. And if you’re building larger enterprises, right, we have enterprise customers, we are able to create custom tiers for you. But it is free for any hobby developer to get started, and you’re able to create projects, get API keys, and start sending money globally.

[00:26:50] André Neves: So it’s, it’s really that simple.

[00:26:53] Preston Pysh: In the service that you guys are providing in the backend, that they might not, you know, a listener that’s not intimately familiar with Lightning, and correct me if I’m wrong, but you guys are doing all the channel management inside of Lightning. So what, is there any other things beyond the channel management that I’m just kind of like waving my hands and like, this is what you guys are doing.

[00:27:10] Preston Pysh: Like tell the audience what what it is you guys are, are providing in the background as a service to them that makes it all turnkey.

[00:27:18] André Neves: It’s actually a fascinating thing because we abstract so much out of it that it becomes so simple that I, I love it, right? I use our APIs to build tools and applications and things, and it sort of blows my mind that two years ago or a year ago, this was a completely different landscape.

[00:27:35] André Neves: In lightning, Just to very briefly go over in lightning, this is a on always online liquidity network, right? So it requires constant management.

[00:27:44] André Neves: We don’t run one node. We run tens of nodes. We don’t deploy liquidity manually in opening channels here and there. We have automated systems to this. We need to have high availability servers. So if a server crashes, we need another one to spin up. We need an entire automation around backups and channel management, data storage, right? All of this is handled right? We’ve spent countless resource hours, engineering hours automating all of these processes. So it’s amazing to me that when folks start saying, oh, it’s so simple, I say, yes, it’s, it’s so simple. No it, it was not simple. Okay? Like it used to take hundreds of lines of code to send a payment, and I guess now it’s, you know, Zebedee send payment, right? Yeah. So it’s a lot under the hood and we have a very robust infrastructure, CSOPs and security teams that manage all of this. So you don’t worry about liquidity concerns, you don’t worry about your payment failing.

[00:28:37] André Neves: We have a 97 plus percent plus payment success rate in the network. It’s really only if you’re paying to, you know, the really, really far edge nodes that we would run into any issues. So there’s a lot that happens behind the scenes that’s, that’s automated for the customers.

[00:28:52] Preston Pysh: As a person that’s set up my own node and opened like a hundred channels and then tried to manage the liquidity of these channels.

[00:29:00] Preston Pysh: I can tell you from my own personal experience that it’s not something that you’re just going to do and, and it’s easy. Like it, especially for somebody that’s not technically competent like myself.

[00:29:12] André Neves: Really, really depends on the use case. Yeah, yeah. Absolutely.

[00:29:15] André Neves: I, if it’s a things to toy around, if it’s to learn, if it’s to get engaged.

[00:29:19] André Neves: Yeah, absolutely. If you’re running a business, you’re now it’s, it’s a to, hey, I want to run a mom and pop shop to sell t-shirts. Let me just go and become a payment gateway.

[00:29:29] André Neves: That, that’s a really big overhead. It depends on the use case. I run nodes myself, but to your point, I’m very technical, right. And, and I’m able to do that.

[00:29:38] André Neves: Most people are, so I, I think it’s important to have options.

[00:29:42] Preston Pysh: If there ever wanted to be a comedy for technical people, it would’ve just been a camera over my shoulder just watching my actions on the computer. People would really get, it would be a top-notch comedy for folks. Hey, so there’s, there is a huge development in social media happening right now.

[00:29:59] Preston Pysh: André, with Nostr, I had Will Casarin on probably back at the beginning of the year talking about what he’s doing with dmo and this is a huge breakthrough. So from your vantage point, tell people why you think Nostr is a really big deal, how it potentially compliments Bitcoin and how you guys are treating this as a company kind of moving forward.

[00:30:27] André Neves: Yeah, absolutely. I think it may make sense to go a little bit back into the history of Nostr and explaining a, a bit of how it all came about, seeing that we were, I have been a privileged participant in this whole journey. So for context Zebedee is our enterprise solution software company, right? We have both B2C and B2B products.

[00:30:49] André Neves: And at our core, we have this API platform, but primarily the API platform does, you know, a, a set full of things, but it consumes open networks, it consumes Bitcoin and it consumes Lightning Network and it consumes open source a software, right? So as a technologist, as a product builder, as a developer, it was always really important for me and for my teams that we support open source, we support open development, we support innovation. Early on in the company, we started with what was internally known as ZBD labs eventually became ZBDOSS for open source. But then we said, look, this is growing too much. It’s now time for us to make this into an organization. Let’s deploy resources, both capital and human resources to them, to this organization.

[00:31:32] André Neves: And so we created from ZBD, we created NBD, right? NBD stands for no big deal. It’s our open source arm. And so, and whereas ZBD has products that are revenue generating and then are searching for customers, NBD just puts out code. And the announcement, I said NBD has no KPIs. NBD has no deadlines.

[00:31:53] André Neves: We just put out sovereign software to the world, right? Our lead engineer and our lead open source developer is Fiatjaf. Fiatjaf, for those who don’t know, is a very prolific developer in the Bitcoin lightning ecosystem. And he has been with us for well over three years now. And one thing that I’ve, I’ve been able to do is identify, I pride myself in doing, I guess, is identify individuals who show a lot of drive, ambition and, and ability to deliver on really challenging times, innovative and very, I guess challenging really is the word right to, you know, you’re as a developer usually you run into a problem, you Google it, or nowadays I guess you ChatGPT it, right?

[00:32:35] André Neves: Or stack flow. You know, with Lightning and with things like Nostr, there was no one that had gone through that before. So you need to be at the forefront and, and ready to get your hands dirty. I pride myself in, in finding those folks and really enabling them. And Fiatjaf was one of them, and so I brought him onto Zebedee.

[00:32:51] André Neves: Early on he worked on a lot of things in the, in the Zebedee ecosystem you know, court to Zebedee. But very early on I said, Hey man, you need to be doing open source. And from that, I think lots of things like l n anywhere else, like lightning address came around. These are things that we have built and, and integrated with.

[00:33:09] André Neves: And he said, Hey, I want to try and solve this problem. And we said, great. Go ahead. I believe in you. Let’s do it. So Fiatjaf lo and behold goes and spends a weekend and comes out and says, here’s a little thing that I’ve been trying to build. As with any standard standards online are just standards.

[00:33:27] André Neves: They’re nothing. It’s just, here’s a set of instructions. Every standard needs a network effect. You need participants to, to participate.

[00:33:34] André Neves: And with Nostr being released in late 2020, it actually just saw organic growth for a good two years. It didn’t really see, it was organic. Folks were getting involved, interested, and because of the relationship with Bitcoin, there were a lot of Bitcoin developers into that space.

[00:33:50] André Neves: So it was very, very easy to see the combination of both. It wasn’t until December of 2022 that Jack Dorsey got a whiff, Nostr and then reached out to Fiatjaf and said, Hey, I want to donate money to you. Fiatjaf reached out to me. I remember him sending me a screenshot of the message from Jack on Twitter, and he is like, is this fake right?

[00:34:11] André Neves: And I, and I’m like, I, I don’t know. It looks real. So that’s where it sort of, you know, began. And then December, 2022 from till now, I think things have just skyrocketed both on the terms of, of funding developers for the space, but also just applications,

[00:34:27] André Neves: clients, relays. Every single sort of software has been developed around Nostr now, and, you know, I, I believe there are now over hundreds of thousands of users using the platform at scale. Nostr is very different because it is, I guess, touching on some of the things that I’ve, I’ve done in the past in terms of presentations, I’ve been able to dumb down these. I don’t love the term dumb it down, but I don’t, you know, you’ve dumb it down the terms and, and, and the architectural details in a way that folks can understand.

[00:35:00] André Neves: I used the, the sense of emailing to really get the idea across. Okay, so Preston probably use Gmail, I may use Outlook, my cousins could use Yahoo.

[00:35:10] André Neves: And you know, you could use any email out there. And it’s a different email provider.

[00:35:14] André Neves: It’s a different email client, but they all subscribe to the same protocol, the same simple mail transfer protocol. And that’s why messages can be exchanged regardless of where you are, regardless of server or client you’re using. In social media environments and communication environments nowadays, you need a Twitter account to talk to your Twitter friends. You need a Facebook account, to use Facebook, and you need a TikTok, and then Snapchat and Instagram, and you keep going, right?

[00:35:37] André Neves: There’s what, 50 of them at least. And on as an aside, you now have password manager problems because you need to, you know, you can’t repeat passwords. It’s insecure and so forth. So let’s imagine a world where my accounts on Twitter could log me into Facebook.

[00:35:53] André Neves: My accounts on Twitter could post on TikTok, right? And so if these applications were clients of a protocol, just like emails work, you would see a plethora of activity because now it’s all interoperable, right? That’s why email is so prevalent. As a developer, emails are extremely outdated. The code that goes into emails display, the rendering of emails is from 1995.

[00:36:19] André Neves: Okay. It’s, it’s very outdated, but it’s abundant because it is the single interoperable way to communicate with everyone in the world. And it’s still here and it’s 2023. So Naster could disrupt that. On the social media side, with

[00:36:33] André Neves: Nostr, you create a, into Bitcoin, you have a public and a private key. Right.

[00:36:37] André Neves: And you’re able, that’s your identity, and you’re able to take that and log in on any client, on any experience. So I could log to a Twitter esque experience and I could take my followers and my lists and my follow count, and I could go over to my other Instagram like experience with the same followers.

[00:36:56] André Neves: With the same individuals. Right. So it’s, it’s really the interoperability that’s really impactful. And because of the way the architecture of Naster works, there’s two parts that are really interesting to me. One is it’s extremely simple. I was talking about standards and how Bitcoin is very complicated, right?

[00:37:13] André Neves: It’s complicated for many reasons, but it is complicated. And so it’s important that we, we bring the developer closer to that ecosystem so they can build applications. Nostr, on the other hand, is extremely simple. It’s one event, right? It’s one single object that defines events. These are the names of posts, right?

[00:37:32] André Neves: So if you’re making a post on Nostr, that’s an event. If you’re updating your profile image, that’s an event, right? And so it’s extremely simple for developers to get started, which meant that hundreds of developers have already gotten involved and have already been building. So that’s one piece. The other piece is around Nasser’s, big censorship resistance capability, which is very akin to Bitcoin’s values, which is the notion that, you know, if Twitter doesn’t, like what I’m saying, Twitter can just ban my account.

[00:38:01] André Neves: On nostr, the way it works is if X, Y, Z client doesn’t like what I’m saying, or if X, Y, Z server or relay doesn’t like what I’m saying, I can take my keys and I can go to another one.

[00:38:11] André Neves: And if they don’t like what I’m saying, I can go to yet another one. Right. And I can host my own if I want to. And everyone could still read my messages and everyone could still interact with me.

[00:38:20] André Neves: So the optionality ache into Bitcoin, you can hold your Bitcoin, you can use hundreds of different wallets, right? With naster you could self-host your Nostr relay and clients.

[00:38:31] Preston Pysh: I’ve got a question for you on this. So my, when you were going through it, and I love the analogy you’re using between email and then on the social layer, but I was immediately thinking, well, why can’t we just do what we’re doing on Nostr with the email protocol, with the SMTP protocol?

[00:38:48] André Neves: And I think it’s getting, I, I, correct me if I’m wrong, but it seems like a lot of the servers that are providing theSMTP protocol to users, end users is. Captured, or it’s centralized, which doesn’t give a person this type of flexibility of being quote unquote canceled. So is that what it is that makes it different?

[00:39:12] André Neves: Let me, let me explain a little bit more. I guess with emails, you can self host your email, right? You can run an email server. It is very cumbersome and complex, right? It is not something that anyone just does. It’s not, you know, click and get started. So that’s one piece. The other piece is with something as ossified asSMTP, if you were to introduce a new version of SMTP or a new addition to the protocol or a new thing.

[00:39:39] André Neves: You now need every major institution, every major email provider, we’re talking about Google, we’re talking about Yahoo. You need to convince those folks to change the protocol and now adopt this new, because it, it doesn’t, again, standards are just instructions. I could write a new instruction, but if no one else in the email protocol is following the instruction, then it, it never came to fruition.

[00:40:03] André Neves: Right? So it’s a much higher barrier to entry. When we say, let’s evolve a protocol that is ossified, then let’s create something new that has different features and different capabilities. Could we evolveSMTP? Theoretically, yes. We could take SMTP and evolve it. I don’t think it would be a perfect fit, but you could always build upon standards.

[00:40:24] André Neves: It’s just a much higher lift. We’re talking about, you know, the entirety of the internet. From application systems, you know, backends, they’re all aware of emails in this way to introduce something new. That’s a very big change. And so that’s why we wouldn’t want to pursue that angle. Does that make sense?

[00:40:41] Preston Pysh: Yeah, it does. And what’s interesting, so like I run a umbrella. Yeah. And they rolled out, Hey, run your own nore relay on Umbr for your personal account so that you could never be canceled. And it was so turnkey. I just, I clicked a couple buttons and I was like, wow, this is some serious, like freedom tech as far as like keeping your, your, your messages as you’re looking at this new protocol and what appears to be something that’s just growing like wildfire globally right now, how do you see that from a Zebedee standpoint of a business opportunity?

[00:41:16] Preston Pysh: Or do you see this as a business opportunity using Bitcoin with Nostr and, and whatnot?

[00:41:22] André Neves: Yeah, so going back to the NBD, our open source arm, the reality is that when open networks are thriving and are growing, things like Bitcoin, things like lightning network, we are at a place where they can compound.

[00:41:35] André Neves: So if we’re able to get Bitcoin and lightning to work in a Nostra environment, we have two open networks, decentralized networks that can grow organically and in their own merits, but they can enable capabilities that couldn’t have been possible before. A thing that, that’s very key to Bitcoin is everyone for like, there has been, what, 14 years now, that millions of people now have Bitcoin addresses.

[00:42:01] André Neves: They have lightning wallets, they have Bitcoin wallets, but it’s not easy to send to each other, right? Because I need to say, Hey Preston, I need to understand where’s your wallet? Can you send me a QR code of some kind so that I can find you? Right?

[00:42:14] André Neves: Nostr provides a discoverability layer for bitcoin enabled identities. So you are an identity, a digital nomad, right? You are a person on the internet, you have a wallet, but you haven’t been able to advertise to tell people that this is my wallet. Now there’s a medium for it. So where we see that is, again, Zebedee consumes open networks. So we consume Bitcoin, we consume lightning.

[00:42:39] André Neves: We are now consuming Nostr. The way we see it is gaming and online experiences are inherent and social experience are inherently social, right? You need people to interact. It’s not just you in a game or you and a robot. You want you and other players, you want you and other friends. You want you and your mates playing something or learning something.

[00:42:58] André Neves: So at the Zebedee side on the consumer business, we have the ZBD app. That’s where folks learn about new games. That’s where they get involved with, you know, podcasting systems. That’s where they, you know, discovered monetized experiences online. And it’s a full-blown Bitcoin lightning wallet in there.

[00:43:15] André Neves: It was inherently to us that we needed to bring a social aspect to this and we were always going to build it. And then in, you know, as soon as December last year, things exploded, right? And Nostr kind of grew. It’s awesome that we’re now able to be talking to you about this because we have just released the new version of the ZBD app.

[00:43:34] André Neves: The ZBD app now has a massive social part of it. It’s a very big ZBD app upgrade. We are rolling out the alpha access right now, so go to zbd.gg and sign up for the wait list. We are letting people in in the thousands every week. There’s a lot of interest.

[00:43:51] André Neves: And what this means is that any developer or any user or any gamer or any person out there can sign up to the ZBD app and get started.

[00:44:00] André Neves: With both Bitcoin and Nostr, you get a social identity that is monetized. And for us, the angle here is to disrupt monetization schemes that exist nowadays.

[00:44:12] André Neves: If you look into the way the current monetization works in digital content creation scheme, right, revenue sharing and, and brand deals is really how it works.

[00:44:21] André Neves: If you’re a, you know, a hundred thousand plus influencer on Instagram or on Facebook, or on Snapchat or on TikTok, so you’re able to monetize that through brand partnerships or, or advertisements or so on. But not only do they take a hefty cut, right? Only fans takes 20%. Patreon takes 15%. Twitter and, and some stock take 10%, right?

[00:44:43] André Neves: So the content creator economy online is not ripe for it, and Nasser and Bitcoin are here to solve that problem with Nostr and Bitcoin. In the ZBD app, you maintain 99% of your earnings. You are able to put out content that is consumed by the entirety of the world, regardless of where they are in the world, which jurisdiction they are, which fiat money they use, they’re able to get Bitcoin and they’re able to zap you.

[00:45:07] André Neves: They zap 2 cents or $2,000, right? It’s really up to you how that works. And so by disrupting this, this content and monetization online, I believe this is going to foster lots of innovation, lots of creativity, lots of new things. Keep 99% of your value. That’s a big deal. The second one is encrypted dms with payments.

[00:45:29] André Neves: This is something that’s not been here, it’s 2023. We have Bitcoin.

[00:45:33] André Neves: We should be able to send messages around the world. We should be able to send money around the world with the new ZBD app.

[00:45:39] André Neves: You can do that. You can sign up and you can send messages a to how you do with Twitter, dms ache to how you do you with Instagram.

[00:45:45] André Neves: But money is part of the fabric of your experience and specifically to us. The ZBD app has lots of ways for you to earn Bitcoin. A big hurdle for folks is to buy Bitcoin. To get Bitcoin right, and you have to get an exchange account and you have to buy Bitcoin and you get a a debit card. That’s very cumbersome.

[00:46:03] André Neves: For us, Bitcoin needs to be as simple. It needs to be cool, it needs to be friendly. So you download zBD, you’re able to download games or apps or engage in experiences where you earn Bitcoin. And once you earn that Bitcoin, you’re then able to interact with others in the social environment, right? So you can zap each other, you can like each other’s posts.

[00:46:20] André Neves: Once you’ve done that, you’ve arrived at an ecosystem of value-driven engagement instead of just likes and retweets, which feed an algorithm, right? We want valued engagement with folks. We don’t want just random numbers being thrown around. So the ZBD app is that entry point for everyone, and you can get started today at ZBD gg and signing up for the wait list.

[00:46:44] Preston Pysh: Love it. Love it. So André I’m prepping for the thing I for this interview. I saw you were asked to be a speaker at MIT, having seen some of the things that you’ve done in the space. You’re a very successful entrepreneur and builder, like a true builder in this space. We have a lot of people, young people that listen to the show.

[00:47:05] Preston Pysh: That might want to become an entrepreneur. What type of entrepreneurial guidance or advice do you have for people to just basically be an, a player like yourself, to be out there and just crushing it and making moves? Like, what’s, what’s your advice to these people?

[00:47:21] André Neves: I actually gave- so my talks at MIT are great. I highly recommend I discuss the lightning address and the other one I discuss Nostr, very highly recommend those two talks. I also gave a, a recent talk at the Wolf NYC cohort founders. These are for those that don’t know, these are lightning and Bitcoin founders going through incubator process.

[00:47:41] André Neves: And in that talk, I, I touched on this, right? Things that as a founder you should be aware of and so on.

[00:47:46] André Neves: I think three themes come up to mind and I’ll, I’ll quickly go through them. The first one being it’s a massive leap. I talked about it in the beginning. I had a, I had a great job, right? And, and it was great.

[00:47:57] André Neves: I love my job, loved the people I work with. When it bites. You know that it bites and you know that you need it. It, there’s an itch that you have to scratch. You will not be able to scratch that itch until you take that leap. Okay? If that’s your feeling, you are the entrepreneur type and you want to scratch that itch, and you will have to take that leap eventually.

[00:48:15] André Neves: It’s scary and it may not seem like the right move, but it is. It is that moment. And on the, once you take that leap, you feel that relief. You don’t even know if it’s going to pan out. But I did what I wanted to do. I challenged myself, of course, run through your cases, run through your, your best case scenario, worst case scenario.

[00:48:32] André Neves: I’m not saying just, just go for it, but follow your gut, follow your intuition, and, and it is always a leap. If it doesn’t feel like a leap. It’s probably not a big deal enough. So that’s one, one piece that I mentioned. The second piece is, it’s so much more work than you can imagine. You’re going to do so many things that you had never expected.

[00:48:51] André Neves: I’m a CTO, but I’m arguably the CPO of the company and I’m arguably, you know, involved in every facet of the company. From the marketing to strategy, to I do customer support. I have a team of 73 people in the company remotely distributed, and I still do customer support, Preston. And that’s why it’s important everyone seasons that in the company.

[00:49:09] André Neves: Like we’re all working towards the same mission. So you will do things like my VP of engineering was our video recorder in our vR chat room. You see what I mean? Like that is not a piece of engineering role, but everyone is willing to do that. So as a startup builder, you’re going to put your big boy pants on or your big girl pants on and it’s going to be a long ride.

[00:49:30] André Neves: And, and you’re going to do many things you do not expect. And then last but not least, I think it’s really important that if you are the entrepreneur type, like myself and the builder type, you need to understand that work is life and life is work, right? So you need to get that boundaries.

[00:49:47] André Neves: I have very few boundaries. Work is life, and life has worked for me, and maybe that’s why it works, but it affects people. That affects your relationships. It affects, you know, your business to take that into account. It’s not a light thing, everyone says that, but it’s, it

[00:49:59] André Neves: shouldn’t be taken as a light thing. It’s, you will work, right?

[00:50:02] André Neves: It’s going to be many, many hours. And so take that into account, but nothing will ever scratch that itch until you go and, and build the thing that you want to build. So I, I highly recommend and it’s amazing to be at a position like I am with a team, with a company, with many products. It’s a dream come true and I really highly recommend everyone to attend it.

[00:50:22] Preston Pysh: Any tips? So those are amazing. Any, any tips for people on focusing on the right thing? Because one thing I see that’s really common with entrepreneurs are people that are trying to become an entrepreneur is they’ve got these ideas and, you know, having built something historically, you sometimes you can just look at it and be like, wow.

[00:50:40] Preston Pysh: That’s a huge hurdle, and you might be biting off too much. You talked about a little bit earlier in the conversation with like being too broad. When you come into market, what tips do you have for people to help focus in on where they should be focusing their energy and making sure that they’re not biting off too much or that they’re too narrow?

[00:50:58] Preston Pysh: And it’s not even really a business, it’s just more of like a, a small niche idea. How do you, how do, what advice do you have on that front?

[00:51:05] André Neves: So focus is really important, and I’m glad you touched on this. It’s something that as a builder, you feel like you can just, oh, I, I can do it. You know, don’t worry.

[00:51:12] André Neves: I’m going to handle this. And, and as a, as a builder, like a developer, you really feel that you can do that. Because you feel like you can solve all your problems with engineering solutions, and that’s not the case. You really need to focus on what you can build. I, I voiced similar feedback to those at the, at the Wolf NYC cohort, which was, look, you need to pick where you are going to be the best. So if you’re building a gaming platform that allows for money to flow in that platform,

[00:51:38] André Neves: Are you going to be the best money provider or are you going to be the best gaming platform? So be the best gaming platform and plug in a money provider if you’re going to be an exchange of, of some kind. Okay, I need licenses.

[00:51:51] André Neves: Great. So that’s going to be your focus. Don’t do that. And mining and this and that, right? Like you need to find your moat, your big moat. And once you have that moat, and once you have that focus and that level of notoriety and trustworthiness in that vertical, okay, find another moat. You have, you’ve excelled in this vertical move on. If you attempt to bite too many of these, these, you know, whatever analogy we want to create here.

[00:52:16] André Neves: If you attempt to go through too many of these, similar to the sales cycle, right? If it’s too broad, you will fail. You will not find that one moat and you will be a generalist, good company in many fronts, but no one will come to you because you are the best.

[00:52:31] André Neves: And people come to the best, they don’t come to the third best or the fifth best, or the generalist. They come for the best. So if I want payments online, I go to stripe.com because that’s the best right now. If I want lightning payments, I go to Zebedee because that’s the best, right?

[00:52:44] André Neves: So you need to find what your mode is and not go too broad.

[00:52:48] André Neves: And otherwise you’re going to, you’re not going to meet those numbers. Focus where you’re at and then evolve. So what I recommend to folks that are very hardcore Bitcoiners, that want to do their own payment gateway capabilities is, Don’t start from that from scratch. Use an API provider so that you can build the best user experience for your app, for your platform, for your user base.

[00:53:10] André Neves: And then when you’re ready and you have that, okay, I want to self-host and do all the payment capability ourselves. Great. Disconnect that API and do it yourself because you’ve now excelled at your moat.

[00:53:20] André Neves: So definitely focusing, and I think one way to just describe that is for our launch show, the ZBD app, instead of building all of those capabilities that we want inside of the app, there are things that we’re doing with Launch partners. So Fountain is a launch partner of ours. Wave Lake is a launch partner of ours. So if you post Wave Lake links of music links into the ZBD app in your social feed, Zebedee is able to pick that up. And once you zap someone, it automatically splits between the artist and the poster of that post, right? We are not the ones doing the music piece here.

[00:53:55] André Neves: We are interacting with an open standard of, of music that allows us to interact. So we’re not trying to become the music moat. That’s not our moat. Our moat is social and payments, right? So let’s interact. And so they are, wave Lake is focused on music, fountain is focused on podcasting. Let’s leverage those and that’s what we’ve done for the launch partners.

[00:54:13] André Neves: Find good partners as you continue growing and then eventually you could build moat your of your own in that industry.

[00:54:20] Preston Pysh: It feels like we’re just so early in where this is potentially going. So like my last question for you, André, is just five years from now, what does this look like 10 years from now?

[00:54:33] Preston Pysh: What, when do you think that we, that things start kind of hitting a critical mass time-wise, and then like what does that just describe this world to us that, that you, that you envisioned like five years from now?

[00:54:46] André Neves: Yeah. It’s funny because I’ve been living in a lightning monetized enabled world for many years.

[00:54:52] André Neves: I use lightning every single day, hundreds of times. And some folks see that as weird because, wait, you make hundreds of payments like every day? That sounds cumbersome. I said, no, that’s because you’re thinking credit card payments. You’re thinking cumbersome payments, you’re, you’re not saying click a button and the payment has gone globally to the other side of the world.

[00:55:08] André Neves: Right? And so I have been living in this world for like four plus years now, and I would say that every year that goes by, it gets to the point where it’s much easier to sell, to talk, and to introduce this technology to everyone.

[00:55:23] André Neves: When I used to talk about Bitcoin and Lightning four years ago, it was, you know, who are you?

[00:55:27] André Neves: You’re kind of weird. Now it’s, oh yeah, I’ve heard of this. And some folks even come to me saying, Hey, I read a book about lightning. That’s very interesting that you’ve been doing this for four years. So in the five year cycle, I would love to say that Bitcoin is omnipresent, right? It’s everywhere. Everyone has Bitcoin, and I really do believe that that’s going to be the case in the next five to 10. And I believe that’s something as crucial as a discovery layer, communications layer, like Nostr can enable that to catapult and to really hit that inflection point. Because I go back to the point, you have a wallet of a Bitcoin wallet.

[00:56:03] André Neves: I have a Bitcoin wallet. It is not easy for you and I to interact and transact. But if you have a Nostr client with a wallet attached to it, now I can send you money the same way that I send you messages or any emails, right? So this is something that is very powerful.

[00:56:17] André Neves: I think in the five years, I would love to say that Nostr has a very active, multi multimillion user active base.

[00:56:25] André Neves: And I actually believe that Nostr will become many digital economies in and of themselves because folks will interact on music, on art, on gaming, on social experiences. And so folks will be earning, they will be selling, they will be buying, they will be trading. Everything will be happening in that sphere.

[00:56:44] André Neves: I would love to say that at the five to 10 year mark, everyone has Bitcoin and everyone has no their clients. It remains to be seen. I think it’s definitely a challenge in and of itself. Network effects have to play out and you know, standards are hard to just grow. But as someone who has both human resources with the company of 70 plus people, capital resources, with our fundraising.

[00:57:05] André Neves: The right mindset and the right engineers. I really feel like we could make a dent and make an impact in pushing this forward. And our goal is to make Bitcoin approachable, easy. Cool. Something that anyone, whether you’re Joe Schmid down the street, whether you’re Ed Smith from the corner, like you can get started with Bitcoin and then you can go down your own journey.

[00:57:23] André Neves: If you want to learn about self custody, yes, you should do that. Let’s go for it. If you want to learn about running your own servers, let’s go for that. But it needs to be easy. If it’s not easy and abstracted away, folks will not interact with it. So it’ll be everywhere. And I, I think I’m betting everything on the fact that it’ll be everywhere.

[00:57:40] André Neves: My entire life is Bitcoin and now it’s very much Nostr as well. So it’s great to be at the forefront pioneering these, these technologies.

[00:57:48] Preston Pysh: So as you were talking, I went to Damus, which is Nostr. Yeah, I just typed in your name and I clicked on the little lightning bolt where it was right next to your name.

[00:57:59] Preston Pysh: Oh. And I got a thousand sat here. Right. I’m going to send and just to kind of demo for people, I just sent you a thousand sat, you didn’t tell me your, you didn’t tell me your bank address. You didn’t tell me anything. I don’t know where you’re at in the world right now.

[00:58:13] André Neves: There we go. I just received money.

[00:58:15] Preston Pysh: And there you go.

[00:58:16] Preston Pysh: You just got the thousand SATs that I just sent you and we did not have to tell each other anything. Nothing. Nothing.

[00:58:25] Preston Pysh: And I just sent you 27 cents.

[00:58:28] André Neves: And I don’t even know where you are in the world.

[00:58:29] Preston Pysh: Big spender.

[00:58:29] André Neves: Yeah. I, I, in my talk, I mentioned this, I zap in my talk I zap Jack Dorsey 5,000 sets, I stop and then I say, I don’t know where he is in the world.

[00:58:39] André Neves: I don’t know what wallet he’s using. I don’t know what an client he’s using. I know nothing. The only thing I know is one single identifier and I can send you money globally. I think it’s just the beginning of a very disruptive set of years for, for social media, for communications online, for monetization schemes. I really think, you know, folks monetizing their content online through Nostr is going to change the landscape.

[00:59:03] Preston Pysh: Wow. Super impressive. The talk is, to you and this was a real honor for me just to be able to have this conversation and I’m just thoroughly impressed with-

[00:59:15] André Neves: Thank you.

[00:59:15] Preston Pysh: People talk about builders in the space. You, sir, are one hell of a builder and this was a real pleasure to talk to you.

[00:59:22] André Neves: No, thanks Preston. Again, it’s an honor to be here. It it was great to chat at at the in Orlando conference. I’m glad we got the chance to connect here further and, and explore more of these ideas. I look forward to the next one.

[00:59:32] André Neves: I’m sure we’re going to be chatting a lot more.

[00:59:34] Preston Pysh: Yes, for sure. We’ll have links in the show notes to everything that André mentioned during the show. Anything else you want to highlight, André? We’ll also have your, your Twitter profile, your Nostr profile there.

[00:59:45] André Neves: There you go. I was going to say.

[00:59:47] Preston Pysh: We can send you a thousand sats too if they want.

[00:59:49] André Neves: Hey I was going to say if if folks want to get involved, let’s go to ZBD.Gg for the app and for those builders that want to build with Bitcoin, with naster, go to zebedee.Io for your API keys. It’s free for everyone to get started, so we’re open and we’re here to help you grow.

[01:00:06] Preston Pysh: I love it. Alright, André. Thank you sir.

[01:00:08] André Neves: No, thanks Preston, this was, it was an honor. Thank you so much. I look forward to it. I’m going to tell all my friends, they all follow your show and so I’m like, hey, I’m going to be on that show now. So it’s great.

[01:00:20] Preston Pysh: If you guys enjoyed this conversation, be sure to follow the show on whatever podcast application you use. Just search for, We Study Billionaires. The Bitcoin specific shows come out every Wednesday, and I’d love to have you as a regular listener. If you enjoyed the show or you learned something new or you found it valuable, if you can leave a review, we would really appreciate that. And it’s something that helps others find the interview in the search algorithm.

[01:00:44] Preston Pysh: So anything you can do to help out with a review, we would just greatly appreciate. And with that, thanks for listening and I’ll catch you again next week.

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