Latest / Bitcoin for Financial Services Podcast / 1 Billion Users: Why the Lightning Network is Winning

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1 Billion Users: Why the Lightning Network is Winning · Bitcoin for Financial Services Podcast

0:00
The love of money is the root of all evil.
0:02
It says this in the Bible.
0:03
And what has America done?
0:04
We go to war with people who try to not use the dollar
0:09
or try to change the way oil is traded in the world,
0:13
these valuable resources.
0:15
You know, Bitcoin's the solution to that.
0:17
And the fact that Bitcoin gives everyone a lifeline of hope
0:19
to take their money wherever they want with 12 words
0:22
or to build an institutional grade payment rail
0:26
and infrastructure for your business
0:27
so that you can last hundreds of years,
0:29
I think is appealing.
0:30
So, you know, regardless of your flavor, take, belief,
0:35
I mean, Bitcoin's a lifeline for everyone.
0:37
Bitcoin is a currency on the internet.
0:40
If you don't trust any other currency, this is where you go.
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It's going to outperform everything.
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Bitcoin could eventually be worthless.
0:46
Every day is a good day to buy Bitcoin.
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Bitcoin reached its highest price to date.
0:50
Bitcoin hitting a new high.
0:52
It really has reached escape velocity.
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There is no second best.
0:55
Who cares about Bitcoin?
0:56
It's the only secure database that's ever been invented.
0:58
Antisocial
0:59
Bitcoin is the real deal
1:01
Stupid
1:02
Everything is bullish for Bitcoin
1:04
Immoral
1:05
It's going up forever, Laura
1:06
Fix the money
1:08
Fix the world
1:09
Wide work is a registered investment advisor
1:13
and the opinions expressed on the show are their own
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and do not reflect the opinions of the Silicon LLC
1:16
Jordan Gess is a CPA
1:17
and the opinions expressed on the show are their own
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and do not reflect the opinions of trusted CPA or other affiliated firms
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Past performance is not indicative of future performance. Any statements or opinions are subject to change without notice.
1:41
Hey, welcome to the Bitcoin for Financial Services show, the podcast where sound money meets professional services.
1:47
We explore how to build the financial services industry within the principles, ethos, and values of Bitcoin.
1:52
Today, we have the pleasure of speaking to Bobby Schell, the VP of Marketing at Voltage.
1:57
Voltage makes it easy for businesses to support Bitcoin and USD payments with a developer-friendly
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API.
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We tackle a lot in this episode, so get ready.
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All right, let's get right into the episode.
2:11
All righty, welcome back to another episode of the Bitcoin for Financial Services podcast.
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Today, we've got Bobby Schell on the episode.
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Super excited for this conversation.
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Bobby is the VP of Marketing over at Voltage.
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And if you haven't heard about Voltage, well, you are in for a treat.
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If you are still new to the Bitcoin space and trying to get your feet under you,
2:35
buckle up because Lightning is kind of a whole nother world.
2:39
I remember even talking with Wyatt about, hey, we've got Bobby coming on.
2:44
He's going to talk on Lightning.
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And even Wyatt, who's been in Bitcoin for a little while, was like,
2:49
man, I'm a little weak on the lightning subject. So I think that this conversation is just going to
2:55
be really enlightening for a lot of folks out there, even if they've been around for a little
2:59
while. So Bobby, thank you for joining us. Yeah, maybe give us a little bit of background. How
3:06
long have you been in Bitcoin? What do you do over at Voltage? Give everyone just a sense of
3:12
who they're hearing from today. Yeah, thanks for having me. You know,
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like most people in 2012, I was told, get a computer and mine Bitcoin. And I was like,
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I'm in college, you know, I can't afford this. Like who can afford this? And of course, you know,
3:24
you look at yourself like, oh my gosh. And then 2017, you know, November, I remember when the hype
3:30
was going on price going up. That's when I heard about it, discovered it, you know, bought every
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token under the sun, got rich on paper, watched it crash. And then lo and behold, what do you do
3:40
after watching your net worth, you know, go down 80%? Well, you start studying and reading what the
3:45
heck is this thing? And that's where I started to truly understand Bitcoin. And after that,
3:49
you know, got active on X and Twitter back as it was back in the day and just began learning.
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And ever since then, it's just been such an incredible journey, you know, understanding
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across computer science, economics, you know, political game theory, all of these fun topics
4:05
that you just begin to go down the rabbit hole on. And, you know, come 2018, started taking the
4:11
internet a bit more serious, like leveraging it for career and just personal growth. And come 2021,
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made the shift from my career. I worked at a company called Marketing 360, was an early employee.
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Before that, we were called Madwire, helped grow it to a hundred million run rate,
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had a lot of experience, felt confident in Bitcoin as an asset that would serve institutionally and
4:33
just for people globally. Made the leap, been at Voltage for four and a half years now, VP of
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marketing and, you know, Voltage, I help oversee the marketing and just generating demand for our
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product, working on the go-to-market and helping businesses and institutions, you know, understand
4:50
the Lightning Network. And it's been a great journey along the way here. Love it, man. And
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you were telling me right before we went on live, yeah, long-standing employee there behind the CEO.
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And I know, and so I know a little bit about Voltage. I've gotten to know Kim over the past
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year that's been great and some of the other members of your team we haven't had a chance to
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sit down quite yet so another reason why i'm excited for this and um but you know when i was
5:16
doing some research about voltage it seems like you all have kind of shifted your strategy a little
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bit over i don't know how many years from more of a self-serve maybe a retail type of model
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to more so going after you know enterprise uh account-based sales and i'm i'm just curious like
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you know what caused that pivot i assume that you you played a pretty heavy role in helping that
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transition assuming that i'm understanding it correctly so maybe talk through what that looked
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like because i just think the it's interesting to see how bitcoin companies especially the ones
5:50
that have been around for several cycles and survived all kinds of different things you know
5:56
how they think about the go-to-market and and the different customers they're working with
5:59
Yeah. So anybody who is playing and tinkering with Bitcoin and Lightning in 2019 and 2020 is an innovator, an early adopter. And that's what our CEO and founder Graham Krizak is. He built this product for people like himself who wanted to build and use Lightning and start to integrate it and build solutions. And there was nothing that made it easy.
6:22
It took like three to four hours of work, a lot of manual labor, and it just wasn't fun.
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And then what he decided is I'm going to package this into an enterprise product and something that people can sign up for in two minutes and you can begin building whatever your heart desires.
6:38
And we did that for a while.
6:39
And it's just like for those who don't know what PLG product led growth is, it's kind of like Zoom or Gmail.
6:45
You can just sign up with an email like Jordan said and just get going.
6:48
Well, with an early stage technology like that, it's very hard to build a business with the tinkerers and these early stage folks.
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And what you got to do is kind of close this gap if you want to have a viable business.
6:59
You see that in startup world where someone shows up too many years too early, the business fails and someone does it later.
7:05
Well, we identified that on our own path to success.
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And you're right. In the last year and a half, we've pivoted to enterprise.
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The idea is, you know, we need to get more exchanges, more neobanks wallets using Lightning and understanding it.
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And that's exactly what we've done.
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And that's what we found success in being able to sell viable businesses that are already leveraging Bitcoin and soon stable coins.
7:27
And that's what's gotten us here over the last year and a half.
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And we're getting in the prep to raise our Series A and to put the pedal down, if you will, on getting, you know, lending institutions, exchanges, neobanks, gaming companies.
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all onboarded the Lightning and it's been an incredible year doing so. So, yeah.
7:47
Love it, man. Okay. No, that's great. And it's such an interesting time to be in Lightning.
7:52
Obviously, I guess like one place that my head goes from that comment is there has been some
7:59
FUD on Lightning, you know, kind of across the board. I'd just be curious how you think about
8:05
this whole, you know, people, I would say, you know, Nick Carter, for example, kind of comes to
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mind as someone who tries to poo-poo lightning and push people into potentially other parts of
8:17
the broader crypto ecosystem. And a big part of our show is obviously we're Bitcoin only. We're
8:23
really focused on that. Curious your thoughts, how you guys navigated some of that, I guess,
8:28
last year going into this year. Yeah. I think proof talks, you have to demonstrate success
8:36
metrics. And, you know, over from 2020, when Michael Saylor was demonstrating Bitcoin on the
8:42
balance sheet and its value, brands followed. You know, we have the ETF now, best ETF of all time
8:48
from many metric standpoints. Same thing goes with Lightning. Over the last year and a half,
8:53
we've been very intentional about capturing success metrics from our customers. You know,
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we've done a report with Fidelity Digital Assets showing the growth of the Lightning network.
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And there's many other brands like River and Breeze who put out yearly reports and it kind of showcases the growth of Lightning.
9:10
Now, one thing that's differentiated with Bitcoin and the Lightning Network versus venture backed chains with a CEO is you got one throat to choke.
9:18
These are venture backed. And if you talk to any exchanges, when you say, hey, how would you prioritize the Lightning Network in your stack?
9:25
They'll explicitly say, you know, we get paid to like market and showcase these other chains.
9:30
So the Solana Foundation, Ethereum, whoever it may be, every crypto token does this, pays exchanges, potentially multiple millions a year to push those tokens to the users.
9:40
Rightfully so, right? That's how it works.
9:42
Bitcoin and the Lightning Network is open source technology.
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It has no marketing team.
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There's no CEO that runs it.
9:48
Its entire viability, growth and understanding of it is from the free market kind of making this clear.
9:55
So that's obviously a challenge in a world of like venture backed when it comes to crypto.
10:00
But the Lightning Network's delivered on its promise.
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Obviously, like Jack Dorsey with Square and Cash App,
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they've got Lightning in the hands of millions of people.
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Square terminals are now handling Lightning payments
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for over 4 million small businesses.
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And Cash App even showcased,
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they have moved about 25% of all of their Bitcoin transactions
10:22
over Lightning within their app.
10:24
So in my purview, this looks like Lightning is functioning
10:28
as an enterprise payment reel.
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And it just takes time for folks to understand that.
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Because again, when you have incentives like paying to get narratives out, it happens pretty
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fast.
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But with the Lightning Network, it's been moving tried and true from this kind of early stage
10:40
tinkering technology to an enterprise grade tool that publicly traded companies use and
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rely on to manage money.
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Yeah.
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Oh, I love that, man.
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I think that it's one of those things I was telling somebody the other day.
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There's things that I think probably you and I, you know, we believe to be true and we
10:58
meet newer people in the space that are like, you have to tell them about these things. And it's like,
11:03
oh, you didn't know that. Or you haven't heard it as many times as I've heard it. And so you haven't
11:08
like you, you just don't know. And so one of the funny parts, I think about this podcast is having
11:14
to remind ourselves that, hey, if we're trying to scale this to all these new entrants, especially
11:20
people who come from those other crypto coins, and hey, they got burned, they're looking for,
11:25
hey, what's the legitimate thing here? I think it's just good to always remind people and say
11:32
things over and over again, even though it seems like we're kind of a broken record. So I appreciate
11:36
you doing that. Your wealth deserves intention. Basilic Financial is a Bitcoin-focused wealth
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Your prosperity your purpose intentionally guided at Basilic Financial Visit our website at basilic to schedule free consultation I guess there been this narrative right of Bitcoin is a store of value
12:10
I think that even I was at a talk the other night, a total like TradFi thing where they just came and
12:17
did a market outlook for one of the wealth management firms I've partnered up with,
12:21
again, on the fiat side of things. And even this lady up there on stage, she was saying
12:25
she's their chief investment officer. And she said Bitcoin is a store of value.
12:28
And like, wow, that's crazy. I'm curious now, like we're headed more with the Square stuff and with what you guys are working on, we're headed into this payments rail. We're like trying to prove out the medium of exchange. Maybe highlight some things that you saw in the year, you know, in 2025 of just pushing the ball down the field from a payments standpoint with Bitcoin, not just the store value narrative.
12:52
Yeah. Yeah. So one of our customers, Brains Mining, they are the mining pool that a lot of folks love to use whenever they're connecting their own miners. And a lot of these users are small to medium sized miners, and they're managing their personal balance sheet different from, say, like top five, 10 miners globally.
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Well, Brains has enabled Lightning withdrawals, and they have transferred hundreds of thousands
13:18
of payments and a tremendous amount of Bitcoin through their scale, which is wonderful to
13:23
see.
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But beyond that, average people that interact with it every single day, we now have over
13:30
a billion users with access to Lightning, which is a big milestone across global exchanges
13:35
and neobanks and wallets.
13:37
And Chipper Cash, one of our customers in Africa, they really did no formal go-to-market for
13:42
the Lightning Network. African payment rails are not reliable. And they integrated Lightning over
13:47
a weekend. One of their co-founders is a very talented dev and he got it live quickly. They
13:53
didn't really do marketing for it. They naturally have gotten over 50% of Bitcoin transactions now
13:58
traveling over Lightning. And we've seen other public metrics that, those of like Coinbase and
14:04
others, where they have over 25% of all Bitcoin transactions on Lightning. Same with Cash App.
14:08
So we're starting to see these success metrics where whenever the option's available, customers are beginning to use it and prefer it.
14:17
Not only that, one of the big things that we've been getting kind of latent demand that's been pent up is a lot of stablecoin businesses, like businesses that are using stablecoins at scale.
14:29
They're very excited about the Tether announcement made in January of 2025.
14:33
And due to some of these fees that are happening with stablecoins across chains like Tron, Solana, and Ethereum,
14:39
they want consistency in the cost.
14:42
They don't want these balloon kind of fees going up in these intermittent issues.
14:46
And there's a pretty big demand for Tether and other stablecoins on Lightning,
14:50
which I think is only going to increase and improve the network effect of Bitcoin.
14:55
And for those who are not maybe privy to Bitcoin and the Lightning network,
14:58
It's a peer-to-peer network. So the more capital that comes onto the network, the more peers, the higher the success rate, the better the network effect, which, you know, further drives the value proposition of Bitcoin and Lightning for users.
15:10
Yeah. Okay. So you all are focused on business owners and I guess at the enterprise level,
15:17
and I guess people, especially practitioners like myself, we hear the word enterprise and
15:23
I'm trying to understand, is that a really big company? Is there any, I guess, metrics that you
15:30
are looking at when you're saying, hey, are we going to work with this company or not in terms
15:34
of how you measure their size.
15:36
Is it a volume thing, revenue?
15:39
I'm curious, like if I'm just an advisor listening to this
15:43
and I'm like, hey, this might,
15:44
I wonder if this fits well for a client that I work with
15:47
and maybe want to make an introduction,
15:50
maybe give them a framework of what's a good customer
15:55
that would work with Voltage really well.
15:58
Yeah.
15:59
So, you know, we've got a target ICP
16:02
that we're going after to serve
16:04
who have the shortest sales cycle, and rightfully so. With early stage technology, this is what you
16:10
do. But as far as the lightning network, who is the perfect use case? There's a few buckets,
16:16
I would say. If you fall under one of these, your business would be qualified. If you're not wanting
16:21
to deal with chargebacks or credit card fees, it's an incredible problem solver. It's a no-brainer.
16:27
Anyone that has those issues loves it. Now, there's also Bitcoin native businesses. Anyone
16:33
who's doing large amounts of volume of Bitcoin, the infrastructure and the enterprise adoption
16:40
that you would need from like the Binances, the OKXs, the Coinbases of the world, the
16:46
infrastructure is there for payments over Bitcoin with these major players.
16:51
Now, there's also we have a product, Voltage Credit, which is for a revolving line of credit
16:57
for American based businesses who are doing large volumes in USD or Bitcoin.
17:02
So if you want to take advantage of the lightning rail, which is near zero fees, instant settlement, but have it end in USD so that you're operating under your typical way in which money flows, like settling in dollars, we have that available for businesses too.
17:18
So if that's of interest, that is also something.
17:21
So there's not really this, is it one to 10 employees or 10,000 employees?
17:26
We have a breadth of businesses that fall under these different buckets, but the main problems would be under those.
17:31
Okay, that makes sense. And talk to me a little bit more about the line of credit, because I think that that's one of the things that we hear when we're talking with someone who's like, hey, how much of my balance sheet should I be holding in in Bitcoin?
17:46
And there's always this difficult thing of, you know, maybe a long dated asset like a Bitcoin.
17:51
You're you're planning to hold that for the long term.
17:53
But then you've got payroll to hit.
17:56
You've got suppliers that you've got to pay.
17:59
All those things that are much more short dated, maybe 30 to 60 days.
18:03
It sounds like the line of credit is like a really, I guess, maybe explain the mechanics there.
18:08
Is it something where you you post Bitcoin and you're able to draw on that in dollars or in stable coins on top of that?
18:15
and then pay interest on that as you need to pay it back?
18:19
Is that basically the mechanics of that?
18:22
There's the option to post some collateral,
18:24
but the line of credit is based on your payment flows.
18:28
So this is what makes it unique.
18:29
If you say, hey, we're doing $5 million in payments monthly,
18:33
we can assess that,
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and then based on the payment flows of the business,
18:38
extend a line of credit.
18:40
So you're not actually having to post collateral in all situations.
18:43
It's a case-by-case basis,
18:45
But that's what's in demand. So let's talk about like, let's take a step back the extreme scenario.
18:50
You know, miners, they might sell anywhere from 40 to 100 percent of their Bitcoin monthly, effectively shorting Bitcoin by selling it.
18:58
What they can do is have a working line of credit, make payments with that and then settle up at whatever time they want to manage.
19:05
So we've we've met with quite a few miners and they've all got their own unique nuanced way in which they're handling their cash and managing their Bitcoin stack.
19:14
So it gives flexibility to teams to do what's necessary for them. We've also had some businesses that do payroll in a blend of Bitcoin and USD, and they might want to manage Bitcoin payments in their cash in a certain way.
19:28
And they simply need this day-to-day flexibility where we don't want to have to deal with waiting on these inbound flows from our customers because it's a multi-trillion dollar problem, like the accounts receivable problem, collecting cash.
19:41
You know, it's coming in, but is it here yet?
19:44
A flexible working line of credit is incredible for those type of businesses because they can
19:48
make payments when they need on time, in real time.
19:51
And as revenue comes in, you can pay down the line of credit, which is something that
19:56
hasn't been done in the market before.
19:57
And we're really excited to provide that to businesses.
20:00
Okay.
20:01
And that, I guess that makes me, that kind of brings me, you know, I was in Vegas.
20:04
I saw you speak up on stage in Vegas.
20:07
That's, I think when I first got introduced to you and your orange suit, I mentioned that
20:11
to you.
20:11
So if anybody hasn't seen that, maybe try to go find the YouTube clip of that because it was a beautiful bright orange suit.
20:18
Very memorable.
20:19
But, you know, one of the big stories I think that came out of Vegas was when Square got up on stage and talked about how they were leveraging their Bitcoin stack through lightning rails to create this whole, you know, yield.
20:32
And, you know, I hear the word yield and I'm like, I don't know what it is, but I just kind of like I have this like bad reaction to that word at this point.
20:42
And so I'm curious, maybe talk about the mechanics of that so that someone newer to the space can understand what that looks like.
20:49
And I'm curious also if Voltage, if you can speak on it, I guess, if there's any product that someone can post a big stack of Bitcoin.
20:58
and maybe it is a miner that's been around for a long time and earn a percentage on that.
21:04
Yeah. Yeah, that's a great question. So this was probably the biggest news out of Bitcoin 2025,
21:11
in my opinion. Cash App shared that they generated a 9.7% yield while custodying their Bitcoin by
21:20
routing payments over the Lightning Network. So what does this mean? Well, Cash App, what they do
21:26
is they send a lot of payments out
21:27
from their application for their customers.
21:31
Lightning Network is a peer-to-peer network.
21:33
So money is flowing both ways.
21:36
And because it's peer-to-peer,
21:38
even though you can send money,
21:40
money can flow through you.
21:41
So imagine this Cash App,
21:42
a payment's going from Coinbase to Binance.
21:45
Let's just say they don't have a channel connected together
21:47
and it needs to flow through Cash App's node.
21:50
By doing that, they earn a very small percentage of yield.
21:53
But when you're doing this at scale,
21:54
you know hundreds of millions billions of dollars of payments yearly and you're capturing that small
21:59
spread that is where a lot of yield is had and there are third-party markets like ambos where
22:05
if a new node comes onto the network you can buy a channel from a top peer to ensure you have high
22:11
payment success we are partnered with ambos and they have a yield product that allows capital
22:17
holders to bring their money their bitcoin to the lightning network to help facilitate and route
22:23
payments. So we do have a partner and a program for that. And that's what Amboss has solved for a
22:28
lot of these big institutional Bitcoin holders who say, hey, we see the value in lightning.
22:33
We want to participate, take advantage of the payments, instant global near zero fees.
22:38
And we also would like to capture some of that yield that Cash App was doing,
22:43
which I believe was in the tune of multiple millions of dollars, nine to 10 millions of dollars.
22:48
So this has become a very compelling thing for treasury companies, for businesses that
22:54
do a lot of volume, even BitRefill.
22:57
They're a company who's been selling gift cards for Bitcoin for eight to nine years.
23:03
After the conference, they checked out their yield and they're generating something like
23:07
three to 4% on their payment flows as well.
23:10
So we now have a practical model that finance teams are following where they can leverage
23:16
the payments and also earn yield to take that Bitcoin asset and earn from it. So it's really
23:23
one of the most exciting things I'd say like in the Lightning space. And yeah, yeah, I'm glad you
23:29
called that out. Yeah. And I guess it like it solves a lot of problems for multiple parties,
23:34
because my understanding is Lightning does better the more liquidity that is, you know,
23:41
posted, I guess, to the Lightning Network, right? I guess, real quick, that's true, right?
23:47
Yeah, in some ways. Over the last year, you'll have seen many nodes went offline,
23:53
many channels went offline. And this is because, remember back in the day, we built for the pleb,
23:57
the individual, and now enterprises are adopting it. So a lot of these early plebs and just small
24:03
nodes they shutting down but you able to still open channels and we seeing big players open channels but the money is being managed more effectively There many innovations as far as how channel management goes how liquidity is allocated how to best manage channels
24:19
And these efficiencies allow you to actually send more. So to one component, if you think about it,
24:24
the more exchanges come online and bring liquidity and the more enterprise players and high quality
24:30
nodes, considering this is a peer-to-beer network, come online, reliability increases.
24:35
Liquidity is where it needs to be because you now have a long-term thinker who's doing
24:40
better.
24:41
And you're absolutely right.
24:42
More liquidity is going to lead to more transactions, faster transactions.
24:47
And what I believe we'll begin to see is even bigger transactions happening on Lightning.
24:52
But continue your question.
24:53
I know that was like a two-part question.
24:54
It sounded like you were doing it.
24:55
No, no, you're good.
24:56
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25:35
I guess the other side is people just used to have just idle Bitcoin, right? They would just
25:42
be holding it in a cold storage, maybe a multi-sig, but it was just sitting there and it used to be
25:47
the yield you got on your Bitcoin was the price appreciation that happened over time.
25:52
And then if you wanted to get, you know, more official yield, you would have to, you know,
25:58
take risk and, you know, you would have to post that with a custodian. You are trusting that,
26:04
you know, what are they doing? You know, hopefully they're not doing anything nefarious on the other
26:08
side with that Bitcoin and then you're getting a yield. And then the question that I have always
26:12
asked to, especially to my friends and other cryptocurrencies is where does that yield come
26:17
from? And so I think that it's, it's a very powerful, uh, thing that now, if, especially
26:23
for someone in my seat or in a financial advisor seat, who's maybe not technically understanding,
26:29
you know, macaroons, all the things that happen behind the scenes on the lightning network,
26:34
we can very simply understand you put this amount of Bitcoin in, you still custody the funds,
26:39
right and like a two of two uh multi-sig on the lightning network and then very simply you're able
26:46
to get interest or yield back on that bitcoin as it's being put to work and you're not having to
26:51
take that you're doing that in a much lower risk environment versus what you had to do
26:55
in years past and of course we know what happened to a lot of those people who did that and they
27:00
lost bitcoin because of it right oh yeah yeah yeah yeah in the past it was you know trust us
27:06
with your money, we will basically lend it out to other people who may lend it out again.
27:12
The world's going to keep doing that, but do you want to expose yourself to that considering we've
27:17
seen the outcome a few times? That's for every risk manager to decide. But with the Lightning
27:23
Network, it is a peer-to-peer. You hold your own keys and you're capable of earning yield
27:27
by providing liquidity to Bitcoin's most dominant layer too, this being used in enterprise and
27:34
publicly traded companies. So that's appealing. And I think it's one of the, you know, safe is a
27:42
word that always needs to be defined, but compared to what lending and yield stuff that has blown up
27:48
in the industry's face before, I can confidently say that it is probably one of the better ways
27:54
for business if they're pursuing some type of yield to handle the situation, because you still
27:59
custody your own funds in many of these scenarios yeah okay cool uh i think that that's i i think
28:06
that that's probably a comprehensive you know thing on on that topic i'm curious i guess if
28:12
we wanted to go a little bit different direction uh another big uh topic that i saw a lot last year
28:19
throughout the year was stable coins you've mentioned them a little bit um and right now
28:24
stable coins kind of operate on multi you know on a bunch of different chains or maybe three come to
28:29
mind right ethereum solana um and then i guess the lightning is is this thing that a lot of
28:36
bitcoiners we've been promised with the whole like taproot assets uh going into lightning do you want
28:41
to touch on any of that stuff and and like when bitcoiners might be able to see because i think
28:46
obviously the stable coins it's captured the attention of the u.s government to find a new
28:51
buyer for their treasuries that no one less and less people want to purchase for good reason um
28:56
So I don't know, maybe we talk, maybe we go that direction a little bit just to understand how stable coins fit into Lightning and how that kind of feeds the beast that is Bitcoin down the road.
29:07
Yeah, yeah. So Taproot Assets is the innovation that enables stable coin issuance or any token issuance on top of the Lightning network.
29:16
So without getting technical, the simple way to think of it is Bitcoin is the ultimate trust, decentralized. Lightning is the layer two, instant settlement, global, near zero fees. Great for businesses who want privacy as well.
29:33
stable coins, like the final piece, at least at this stage of innovation on top of lightning.
29:39
And you have this vertical integration stack of the market dominant, institutional grade
29:44
asset, the settlement network, and now the dollar denominated asset that the world demands,
29:50
whether it be America or global.
29:52
And what I think this is going to mean for a lot of teams is, I think businesses are discussing,
29:59
do we issue our own stable coin? Do we use Tether, USDC, or a Challenger stable coin,
30:04
some of these newer ones? I think that the big thing to consider is, again, if Bitcoin's the
30:10
institutional asset and these other tokens are not necessarily as viable long-term,
30:16
do we want to have exposure to the stable coins we do on, let's say, Ethereum, Solanotron,
30:22
and Lightning? And I think if you look at Tether, what they have done is they have their token
30:27
issued on as many chains as possible because they want to have market dominance. They also have
30:32
deprecated their token from certain chains that are not reliable. You can go back and look at the
30:36
last year and a half and they've actually removed their token from four or five chains. So I think
30:41
Lightning is going to become one of the big viable alternatives because Bitcoin's one. Lightning is
30:49
it's for all intents and purposes right now, the best layer two there is in the longest standing.
30:54
And with stable coins coming on top, I think finance teams and risk managers, product managers, they're going to want to see stable coins on top of Lightning as well, being the market dominant asset with this chain.
31:06
But we don't have really a large stable coin on Lightning yet. There's DPIX, I believe, out of Brazil. But we're starting to see the interest from like the top 10, top 20 coins exploring adding their stables on top of Lightning, which it sounds like will be in 2026. So it's some pretty big news.
31:24
Yeah. Okay. So you mentioned product. I guess where my head goes from there is like, there are all these products that are being built, especially in like the AI space. Right. And I've had to crack up, you know, there's all these people are like, oh, everyone that was like a Bitcoin, you know, fanatic is now an AI expert.
31:44
I know that's probably not true for us.
31:47
Like we're, you know, we're dabbling like everyone else, but it's interesting.
31:51
There's the, there's been this longstanding narrative, at least over the last two or three
31:54
years that at Z's like AI agents or basically, you know, even with the clod bot that everyone's
32:01
been playing around with, where it's doing things without you even asking it to do it.
32:05
I'm just curious to get your thoughts on the narrative of AI agents will trade in something
32:12
like Bitcoin on a Lightning network in order to do payments with each other.
32:18
And then I guess a follow-up to that would also be, you mentioned gaming at least once,
32:23
if not a couple of times.
32:25
And we've seen the whole economy of streaming people money to Twitch stream or whatever
32:34
it might be.
32:35
I'm curious how you see something like that fit into, how you see Bitcoin on Lightning
32:40
fit into that rumble we just launched you know on rumble so that people can actually pay us over
32:47
lightning uh into our rumble bitcoin wallet and um so i'm just curious i guess that that's a pretty
32:52
broad question but you can take it whatever direction you want to from an ai agent standpoint
32:57
micropayments yeah i mean on the ai side i'll keep it brief like um l402 um is what is a part
33:09
of the Lightning protocol and even other crypto protocols, like making it possible to have
33:15
machine to machine payments and like pay per use on API calls. Currently, a lot of it's done by
33:21
cards. It'll probably continually be done by cards. And there may be some edge use cases where people
33:26
use crypto. Do I believe long term it'll all converge on Bitcoin and Lightning? We've all
33:30
heard the argument. Yes, machines are going to choose the decentralized money that is most
33:34
valuable with the most reliable network. And, you know, we'll see what happens. Every chain is
33:40
trying to solve for that. And I think we'll probably continue to see those with the most
33:45
money and capital to invest, get the earliest adoption. Kind of like altcoins and altchains
33:51
are always the playground. Bitcoin comes later and ends up dominating the market like we've always
33:55
seen. But in terms of like iGaming and some of these other folks, like it's like the early
34:01
internet, you know, like, you saw like the internet first start getting adoption in some of these like
34:08
fringe high risk, like weird ways like Silk Road, like the pornography industry, the gaming industry,
34:15
we're seeing the same thing with payments. And I think iGaming, they have a high risk problem,
34:19
there's tremendous chargeback risk, like users want to play fast. And that's why the crypto payments
34:26
as a whole are just taking over iGaming by storm. Because chargebacks are a major problem and credit
34:31
card fees just eat margins. The Lightning Network is playing a major role in solving that problem as
34:37
well because we were at the ICE Barcelona, probably one of the biggest gaming conferences
34:42
on planet Earth. It was overwhelming how big it was. There's a lot of crypto casinos who just say
34:47
like, hey, we accept crypto, but the fees will randomly balloon and we want to have lower fees.
34:52
And we tell them the value prop of Lightning and they say, this makes perfect sense.
34:55
And a lot of these gaming payment service providers or platforms that are your all-in-one hub and solution to launch an iGaming platform, they want to have 10 to 20 payment options available for their customers to kind of a la carte build the type of experience they want.
35:10
And these businesses are exploring Bitcoin and Lightning because, again, it's the most market-dominant coin and it's got the most at-scale layer two in the world, like we mentioned earlier, with over a billion users with access to it.
35:23
Now, there's still massive demand for stable coins. So the big thing I just always tell folks is like, right now with the American government being so all in on stable coins, it's perfectly reasonable that everyone's focusing on stable coins like end of Q4 and Q1.
35:40
I think people in just leadership positions, like the champions in these companies, like the thought leaders, the visionaries, they're trying to get the stablecoin strategy in place because they should have done it yesterday.
35:52
Now they've got regulatory clarity.
35:54
I think the big next step is you know more integration of Bitcoin which has you know very you know a vote of approval from the government if you will alongside stablecoins and then bringing stables on top of Lightning But iGaming and a lot of these kind of high risk areas they have a big incentive to take advantage of Bitcoin and stable coins at large This episode is brought to you by Satoshi
36:23
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36:27
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visit satoshipacioli.com. Okay, I want to call back again for kind of a business owner,
36:54
like something that I run into even personally. Like if I wanted to pay an employee, for example,
37:00
out of a corporate treasury account that we have in the business, right now, if I just do that on
37:06
chain and they're a little bit savvy, they can pretty easily trace back, okay, this is the amount
37:11
of Bitcoin that's sitting in that wallet. This is the dollar. And that's generally not how it works.
37:18
You're an employee of a company. You don't necessarily know how much capital, unless
37:23
they're publicly traded, I guess. But if you're a privately held company, you generally don't tell
37:26
your employees how much money you have sitting in the bank. Obviously, Lightning adds this layer
37:33
of privacy, maybe just talk through any of the mechanics that I missed about privacy on chain.
37:39
And then how lightning really solves that problem for anyone, I guess, an enterprise level company,
37:46
you know, like a national, like a government that can't let other governments know how much
37:52
money they've got sitting here there. Yeah, let's go there for a little bit.
37:56
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, on-chain Bitcoin, you can go download the Bitcoin ledger today and see
38:04
every transaction, every address. You know, companies like Chainalysis, they try to connect
38:08
those dots to help authorities discern where payments go, right? So it's pretty transparent,
38:13
like criminals, you're crazy if you use on-chain, it's easy to track. With Lightning, what's very
38:18
interesting is you do an on-chain transaction to open a channel and you can send whatever you would
38:23
like back and forth. And since it's peer to peer, you only know where it hopped from your peer. So
38:29
if Coinbase and Binance are sending a transaction and it routes through a node,
38:35
the node that's routing the payment doesn't necessarily know all of the details of the
38:42
payment. So when it comes to the peer to peer nature, you don't know always what's going on
38:49
unless it is a peer for a simple level.
38:52
But more importantly, private channels is what a lot of companies will use
38:57
where say you're a public company, you don't want payment flows to be public.
39:01
You open a private channel with another in your holding company.
39:07
Let's say you're a bank, a classic example, a holding company of a bank.
39:11
You got the lending arm, the banking arm, the whatever arm.
39:15
And you just want to use, let's say, our USD line of credit.
39:19
to, you know, send over Bitcoin settling dollars, like a bank could do that and solve their cash flow
39:24
problem immediately of like instant settlement. That's another kind of appealing thing from a
39:30
privacy standpoint. But this is also to go back to our why like papers and these industry papers on
39:37
lightning are important. And when we did with Fidelity Digital Assets, like we can only share
39:42
and expose the data we know from our node, we have no visibility into the rest of the network,
39:46
We only know what has happened within our node and like one hop away, like with our peers.
39:51
So whenever River does a report, Voltage does a report with Fidelity Digital Assets or someone else shares it, we can only share what we see from our node.
39:59
And at that time, I believe when we did the report, we're sending 25 to 30 percent of all Lightning transactions is like the enterprise, like institutional provider of infrastructure.
40:09
It gives a glimpse into the network.
40:11
These private channels, no one can really report on them.
40:14
Chainalysis can't see them.
40:15
So that's where it becomes interesting for some public companies who say, hey, we still need the privacy banking gives us and we can leverage Bitcoin. It can become appealing.
40:24
Yeah. No, it's good. I'm glad. Man, we've covered a lot of ground, some of it technical, some of it product stuff. I've followed you now, I guess, for six or eight months, something like that.
40:37
And I know a big part of your journey in Bitcoin, as well as a lot of the people that I run into, is just that Bitcoin is hope.
40:46
It provides hope, especially for people who feel like they've been left behind by the economic system.
40:53
And then you take it, I think, in a really good way.
40:55
You take it one step further to understand what is the hope that we're really all after beyond just money solving our everyday needs for our families and our businesses.
41:06
I would just love to kind of end it here with like, just opine a little bit on, I guess, what got you into Bitcoin from a standpoint of, you know, there's something broken here.
41:18
I think that's where a lot of people come in.
41:19
There's something broken.
41:20
How do we solve for that?
41:22
And then also, I'd love to give you the opportunity to just talk through, you know, your message of like, what is your ultimate hope in and and let people who are listening take that and and see how that might apply to their life as well.
41:37
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, Bitcoin is unique.
41:41
Like we've started the talk discussing like this rabbit hole of everything you you learn and go down.
41:47
It can be like drinking from a fire hose.
41:49
And the one thing I've always known is the love of money is the root of all evil.
41:53
It says this in the Bible.
41:54
And what has America done?
41:56
We go to war with people who try to not use the dollar or try to change the way oil is
42:03
traded in the world, these valuable resources.
42:06
And that has never felt good, I think, to a lot of people because we don't like war.
42:11
We don't like our money debased.
42:13
We don't like our savings robbed from under us.
42:15
So what is Bitcoin?
42:17
You know, Bitcoin is the solution to that, you know, and, you know, scripturally, it always talks about like looking in oneself, looking at your heart.
42:25
But whenever I look at the world objectively and I take spiritual discernment, I see, well, the love of money is the root of all evil at a government perspective, too, because when there's a central issuer who has the money printer, the cancel on effect takes control.
42:38
And those who are closest to it are rewarded. That's not equal weights and measures.
42:42
You know, that's not an equal playing field.
42:45
You know, there's no such thing as equal opportunity that doesn't exist in the world.
42:50
It's like a pie in the sky kind of fake reality.
42:53
But an equal playing field is a reality that is actually tangible.
42:57
And that is what Bitcoin gives everyone.
42:59
There's a scarce 21 million effect, no central issuer, having every four years that reduces the issuance by 50%.
43:06
and you can run your own node to verify the supply
43:11
to make sure that these things are true
43:12
and they still continue to be true.
43:14
So while my hope is in my faith in the Lord Jesus
43:18
and my creator, it's nice on this earth to have a tool
43:21
that can solve the love of money problem,
43:23
which self-preservation and seeking out one's own good
43:29
ahead of others is just one of the most common
43:31
slippery slopes we see.
43:33
And the fact that Bitcoin gives everyone a lifeline of hope
43:36
to take their money wherever they want with 12 words or to build an institutional grade payment
43:42
rail and infrastructure for your business so that you can last hundreds of years, I think is
43:46
appealing. So, you know, regardless of your flavor, take belief, I mean, Bitcoin's a lifeline for
43:52
everyone. Yeah. I love that. I always love just, yeah, kind of towards the end, just kind of,
43:59
there's so many people out there that have lost hope and they don't know where to turn. They always,
44:03
A lot of them turn to, you know, things that just ends up not filling that hole in their
44:09
heart.
44:09
So I'm glad you had a chance to talk about that.
44:12
I guess the last thing is like, okay, so we just started the year.
44:14
It's January 29th when we're recording.
44:16
If you look out to this year, you know, we're not really focused too much on price on this
44:22
show just because there's so much more interesting things to talk about.
44:25
I think price will come.
44:27
What are you excited about?
44:29
You know, be it just broad, you could take it that direction or voltage specific.
44:33
for what you guys are going to market with and building this year yeah that's a good question um
44:41
i mean i'm excited for lightning obviously it's it's delivering tremendous value globally and
44:46
that's really exciting but um the line of credit we're doing giving usd optionality to businesses
44:51
is really fun that's a big focus for us this year and there's a lot of appetite for that a lot of
44:56
demand because people have been asking companies like strike unchained lava leaden for something
45:02
like this for a long time and there's nothing like it. So the fact that we can fill a gap in
45:06
the market that's needed is tremendously exciting. But beyond all of that, man, the thing I'm really
45:11
excited about is just seeing Bitcoin become everyday money. Like the work that Square and
45:18
Cash App are doing to like make it tangible for people is incredible. Seeing, you know,
45:24
just digital money being natively integrated online, like you were mentioning with Rumble,
45:29
Like it's becoming commonplace for Bitcoin and Lightning to be a part of these online
45:33
experiences.
45:34
And I think that's what makes it tangible for people.
45:36
You ask that question, like what made you shift to enterprise?
45:39
Like it's exactly that, you know, Rumble has an audience of millions.
45:43
And if you don't just bring it to the people where they are and allow them to experience
45:47
it in a kind of native, natural and delightful way, people will never do it.
45:53
It's the same thing as like Steve Jobs making the iPhone.
45:56
People were like, this is crazy.
45:57
No one's going to use it.
45:58
And our world couldn't function without it at this point.
46:01
You know what I mean?
46:02
So I think that's really exciting.
46:04
Like the innovators who are just making it practical and a good user experience.
46:09
I think that's the most exciting thing.
46:11
So shout out to the user experience designers and the front end developers who are bringing Bitcoin, you know, to the world in a delightful way.
46:19
Yeah, I love it, man.
46:20
Okay, this has been great.
46:22
I'm super excited we got connected to do this.
46:24
yeah, I guess anyone who's, you know, walking away from this episode, where can they find you?
46:30
Where can they get involved, you know, with Voltage if they see a need
46:33
here to introduce their customer or client to your all service?
46:40
Yeah. So our website is voltage.cloud. You can find me on X, just like the iPhone. My name is
46:48
I Bobby Shell, B-O-B-B-Y-S-H-E-L-L, I Bobby Shell. And I'm on LinkedIn here and there. Those are the
46:55
main areas. I am on Noster. I check it a little less just because it's not as relevant for the
47:00
day-to-day work. And I'm more so working than like having fun, just like enjoying the internet. But
47:05
those are the best places to connect. And if you'd love to learn more about the line of credit,
47:08
we'd love to chat. This is a cutting edge product, tremendously value for businesses.
47:13
So we'd love to talk more about that. But it's been a pleasure. And if anyone wants to chat,
47:17
learn about Bitcoin and lightning, shoot me a DM. I'm happy to be a resource for anyone who needs it.
47:21
Lovely. All right. Thank you so much, Bobby. I appreciate your time today.
47:25
Talk to you soon. Appreciate it, Jordan. All right. Bye.
47:27
Bye.
47:47
comes and our clients are better served. Stay sharp, stay sovereign, and keep leading from the front.