{ "episodeId": "SLP714", "speakers": { "stephan": { "name": "Stephan Livera", "role": "host", "tag": "STEPHAN" }, "danny_stagg": { "name": "Danny Stagg", "role": "guest", "tag": "DANNY" }, "guest_2": { "name": "Guest 2", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" }, "guest_3": { "name": "Guest 3", "role": "guest", "tag": "GUEST" } }, "segments": [ { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "00:00", "start": 0.06, "text": "What Bitcoin can do is far exceed the potential of stable coins and other cryptocurrencies. We're playing on the main stage, if we're playing on the main stage, there are expectations that folks have with what a product should and shouldn't look like for when they wanna move value and what it offers, and so we have a unique opportunity to bring this to everyone." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "00:19", "start": 18.56, "text": "Hi, everyone, and welcome back to Stephan Livera podcast. Today we're gonna be talking about Breeze and, their nodeless implementation, as well as the results of the time to build competition, or challenge, let's say. So I wanted to get you guys on to ch- chat about it. Joining us today, we have Danny rejoining us from Breeze. We have, Brianna from the Evento events platform, and we also have Al Yaz, who is, you know, long time, you know, Bitcoin, developer in the space. And Where we're chatting with some of the winners of the challenge. So Danny, do you wanna just give us a bit of an overview, like, you know, now some, you know, regular listeners, you probably heard my episode with Roy, that was live in Lugano, where we were chatting about this, but Danny, give a quick overview just for people who aren't familiar with the Time to Build the Challenge?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "01:06", "start": 65.52, "text": "Yeah, fantastic. Thanks for having us on. So, Time to Build was a global developer challenge that we ran in Q4. the long and short of it was to bring Bitcoin to existing open source apps. We got fifty plus developer communities around the world involved, and they were awesome in sharing it and, and, you know, having meetups or doing stuff online. And then the submissions came in, and, at the start of January 2020, we announced our winners, of which two we have, with us today. And, yeah. Yeah, it was amazing, it was really cool. Obviously, there are several reasons that we'll go into about why now's the time and, you know, obviously time to build is, is what the challenge is called. but yeah, that's what happened and, we're really happy with the outcome and it's been, a very busy start to, to the year." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "01:51", "start": 111.33, "text": "Excellent. Yeah. So give, you know, for people who aren't familiar, if you are a developer now and you're thinking about how to implement Bitcoin and Lightning into your application without doing kind of a Is Breeze SDK nodeless, what is it?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "02:08", "start": 128.07, "text": "Breeze SDK is one of the easiest ways to add Bitcoin to, any app, and the Breeze SDK has two implementations, nodeless implementations, one being Spark, which is our, our latest one, and the original being Liquid. And long and short of it, over the last six or seven years, it's been historically difficult to build on Lightning. It's complex, and one of those challenges is now overcome thanks to the SDK. We've made it, hopefully the guys will, will vouch For me, and that it's, that it's simple to use, but, but that's basically it. We've removed the complexity of, you know, managing channels, running a node, and basically giving developers out of the box one of the simplest ways to add Bitcoin to their app, it can now be done in hours. We've actually had, you know, some applications go in production in just five days. So that's basically it. The complexities that were there are now gone." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "03:00", "start": 179.84, "text": "Yeah. so, Brian, let's go to you. So tell us a little bit about what Tell us a bit about your experience of, building, with the Breeze SDK." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "03:11", "start": 190.51, "text": "Totally. First of all, thank you so much for having me on, and I'm really excited to share what we're doing, and I'm also very thankful to Breeze for putting this challenge up and giving so many people the opportunity to show their work and, you know, their, their capabilities. So thank you to both of you. So Avento is a social events platform that I built, I started building two years ago with the Bree- Vision of making a platform for everyone to use without exploitation. So most events platforms are super expensive and there's lots of ads and, things that we don't like. Usually if you're trying to sell tickets or exchange value over an events platform, there are massive fees, it's usually only in fiat, or in the case of Luma, they only have like ERC20 tokens, which is kind of silly to me. And I wanted to create something that was made for community organizers And, you know, people who host small meetups and conferences, and they're not, you know, trying to get robbed by the typical events platform. I also wanted to create a space for people to actually meet and, you know, because that's the whole point of events, right? So something-- a really big part of that was obviously value exchange, and I didn't want to just plug in Stripe like every other platform does. They take massive fees, and then we would have to take- Massive fees and then it kind of defeats the purpose. I wanted to create, you know, a platform where you could exchange peer-to-peer, right? you could exchange value to a host, thanking them for putting on such a great, BitDev meetup. You could exchange value to a guest of your event, let's say you're trying to onboard a bunch of people, to Bitcoin, for example, and then you have your whole guest list and you wanna send everyone sats and same with comments or photos or any of that, that good stuff. So then it becomes, you Not just an event, but a place where value can be exchanged freely. I didn't want to be an intermediary in that value exchange because I'm a Bitcoiner, it's not really my, you know, wheelhouse, my ethos, and so- You know, when, I was trying to think about a way to put Bitcoin into Evento, I wanted to make sure it was non-custodial, that's a big thing, and very easy to use, and usually those two things don't go hand in hand, as I think all of us know. But then I talked to Roy at, GBS last year, and I was talking to him about my conundrum, and he was like, \"Oh, just use the, the Breeze SDK, it's super easy.\" \"What are you talking about? It Promise. And it actually, yeah, it took us, you know, a few weekends. I worked on it with my husband, Andre, and then, Avento's full stack dev, Alia, who's in Nigeria. So all three of us were working on it together, and it took about four weekends. And then after that, we did a massive demo at BTrust Dev Day in Mauritius, and we onboarded about eighty people to the wallet with zero issues. So like from, you know, day zero to day thirty-one, we were onboarding like eighty people, and then I was already paying my employees, on the Avento app. So it was just, it, it was totally crazy. I couldn't, you know, I've been in the Bitcoin space, worked at a bunch of different- Bitcoin companies, and so I understand the complexity of Lightning and how difficult it is to, to plug it into your product or your service, and Bree's just totally, it's just out of the box, super easy. really, really good" }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "06:51", "start": 411.38, "text": "experience with that. And I think it's worthwhile, obviously, everyone here, all of us on this podcast, probably have some appreciation for this, but maybe if you're a listener who's not as familiar with this, like, think about what would have had to happen to make this a thing, like A few years ago when Lightning was newer, like four or five years ago when Lightning was kind of newer, you might have had to deal with having an LSP or being an LSP, you might have had to deal with like inbound liquidity, you might have had to help coach the customer or the user through like setting up a Lightning wallet and connecting it in some way. Like, I think it's difficult to sort of explain, but I think nowadays the expectation for customers is that it needs to be slick, it needs to be fast. Like it just has to be an app, that's, that's like the modern expectation nowadays, isn't it?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "07:36", "start": 456.02, "text": "Yes. And a big thing for us is that, you know, I don't want Evento to look like a Bitcoiner app. I love Bitcoiner apps, I think they're great, but I wanna onboard people who aren't Bitcoiners and who are a little bit scared of, you know, the whole thing. Most of the people in my life are not Bitcoiners, and they're scared of Bitcoin, and they, you know, open a new wallet, and they're like, So I wanted to create an experience that was really easy from the get-go and that had a lot of explanations throughout the whole process. you know, when you open up an Avento wallet, there's about a million guides on like, you know, from the smallest thing like what is a sat to how do I send a payment, right? It's, it's stuff that we kind of take for granted, but for a normal person, they see like a scan button, they're like, \"What, what do you mean? What do I scan? I don't understand.\" So I think And then in the case of Breeze, it just works every time, so there's no like, there's no fear, oh, did my payment go through? What's going on, right? Every time we've tested it, it's been fine, it's just worked. So I think that also removes a lot of the fear. If you have a product where, you know, the customer, the user gets stuck, right? They're like, I don't wanna use this again, I lost my money, I don't know what happened. So walking through the person, every step of the way Anyways." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "09:02", "start": 541.73, "text": "Excellent. Let's go to you, Algyas. Let's hear a little bit about what you did. I know you did a BTC Pay plugin. So give us a bit of an overview. What did you build?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "09:10", "start": 550.08, "text": "Yeah, well, I guess, since Brianna started with, thanks to everyone, I have to thank Danny for all the bullying that he, successfully applied, because I first did a di-different project that I submitted to, to the hackathon, and then I said, \"Okay, I'm gonna do the BTC Pay as well, \" A bit more complicated, thing to do. But yeah, I mean, as we mentioned before, and I, I'm sometimes ashamed to admit since I've been running Lightning Node since 2018, but I was extremely happy when Nodeless came out because it made everything so easy. I've- Recently, like quite a few people were asking me for solutions, like, \"Oh, I wanna run my own BTC Pay or something for payments,\" but like it, it gets costly to run your own infrastructure if you're only accepting occasional payment, and it's like burn some inbound liquidity, you have to deal with everything. So it was like, \"Okay, if we could solve that part with Spark, it makes running, BTC Pay server a much more lightweight, operation, both in terms of infrastructure, because the node requirements all of the sudden become very small, especially if you use a trimmed node or technically if you're not really needing, on-chain payments, and it's also simple because you don't need to deal with, Any inbound liquidity, LSPs and everything as you mentioned before. So essentially, I've, with some bullying, I did manage to scratch my own itch and, I think that's quite-- Then there's been several people who already pinged me like, \"Oh, I'm gonna deploy this because I have a friend that has this exact problem and I want to actually use this since it's gonna solve, all of the explaining, oh yeah, but now I need to open a channel to you and then you need to rebalance it and...\" Everything else. And yes, there's always the, the debate of, state chain and Bitcoin part, but that's one of the thing that I added to the plugin immediately after the hackathon deadline was, done was the treasury management. So you can set your own exposure, if you will, to the state chain. So said, okay, anything after ten K sets, just swap to on-chain on this address, this xPub, and it's working. So it's a perfect I think pragmatic approach to--" }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "11:38", "start": 697.91, "text": "Yeah, I think it, I think it's a pragmatic choice. Let's just take a quick second and make sure everyone's familiar. For anyone who's new, BTC Pay is a well-known, it's an open-source payment processor, it's well-known and loved by the Bitcoin community. It is, it's a Bitcoin stack, like it's a web server and like, it, it can run a Bitcoin node and it can run a Lightning node and people can run a merchant service using BTC Pay. And so there are, it's like, you can have it on like You know, hosted version of it using, let's say, Lunar node or Voltage or some of these other people, and then so what Alyas, what you've built is a plug-in for people that allows them to have BTC Pay but without having to run the Lightning node in the background, which maybe it can save them a bit of cost and a bit of effort and make it a bit simpler and easier for them to be able to quickly take payments, right? Because what we're kind of talking about here, especially e-either for Briana's case or in Alyas's case, is we want people Shops and apps that allow them to take Bitcoin and Lightning payments without having to worry about so much of the complexity. So, oh yes, do you wanna just touch on a bit of that complexity that you are, let's say, obviating by having your plugin?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "12:48", "start": 768.41, "text": "Yeah, exactly as you mentioned, you, with this plugin, you remove the need to have your own Lightning node, which BTC Pay does set up for you. But, one thing that I didn't initially think of, but, turned out it's also brilliant is the speed of how fast you can start accepting payments, because when you set up a new BTC Pay node, you have the on-chain sync, and even if you use the fast sync that takes a while, especially on a bad hardware, slow internet connections, and then you also need to sync the- Lightning node opened the channel so it could, on a-- depending on your infrastructure, it could take days to actually get to a point where you can start accepting payments if you do the full blown node setup, opening channels, et cetera, versus here it's literally in minutes or seconds because all you need is the API key and install the plugin and you are ready to accept the payments, which I think is a significant benefit Versus trying to explain, oh, we set up everything now, but let's come back in three days after everything has synced and you will be ready to accept that payment after you've paid the thirty k for the LSP, the channel opening. So I think it, it removes a lot of friction." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "14:02", "start": 841.96, "text": "Right. So I guess in this case, the user can set up a, a BTC Pay instance, use your plug-in, and then instantly take payments over Spark? Yes. That's, I mean, that's what you're, you're doing. And then in the background, the BTC Pay instance can still be doing its Bitcoin on-chain sync, but in the meantime, you can still be doing Spark payments. Of course, there's certain trust model, you know, of that. But the idea is over time, it just gets you started, and then over time, you can sweep some of that out into your own cold storage or whatever you wanna set it up, well, however you wanna get it out." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "14:34", "start": 874.08, "text": "Yeah, exactly. Because why I love all the nodeless implementation is" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "14:42", "start": 881.95, "text": "Putting savings there, but it improves the velocity of money significantly because it enables use cases that you just doesn't make sense, before, because when the conversation starts, oh, we need to deploy several BTCs of liquidity and set up servers and all of that, it's already it gets very complicated, and yes, there's ways to get around, but It still takes time versus here it's so fast it makes, it enables quite a few use cases that you just-- There was no econ-- economics before where you could, would make sense to do it. And now even before on Liquid, it was already a huge unlock, but now with Spark, I think it's-- I'm becoming more bullish on Lightning again." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "15:27", "start": 927.24, "text": "Right, yeah, because I mean, that's the thing, for, for years it was like, \"Lightning is the only L2.\" And, I mean, that was true, it was true to say that, Lightning was was the only, let's say, true, quote-unquote, true decentralized L2. And now I think we're starting to see a bit of reinvigorated interest around Liquid, of course, Spark is a new L2 and Ark is a new one. These are kind of like the new kids on the block, and now we're sort of seeing a lot of interest in those. They offer a different trade-off, and they offer it, you know, and sometimes like if you're thinking like, you know, the, pick the right tool for the job, right? It's like this tool Some new apps, what are some functionality that, what are some things that weren't previously possible given, let's say, the fees or the hurdles of trying to get up, get a stripe settlement or stripe account set up?" }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "16:18", "start": 978.47, "text": "I think it's There's several parts. First of all, you don't have an inherent infrastructure cost, so everything is cheaper. Because I've spoken with a lot of people over the years who've tried to start businesses in this direction, oh, like I, I would do node hosting, et cetera. But then a lot of people want to accept Bitcoin payments, but they accept them very infrequently. So then by default, you're gonna reach for a custodial solution because you're not gonna be Paying fifty bucks on server costs a year or a month, plus dealing with liquidity to accept eighty bucks a month in payments or even more, like it's a significant cost. Now it makes a lot of sense, and even if you're very Worried about the state chain part, it's still a much, much better option than any custodial solution. Plus, I think with Spark, we can wallet of Satoshi now migrated to enable self-custodial account, so I think we can get around a lot of Rules that are blocking a lot of utility or basically we can make self-custodial experience the same as custodial for most people or very close to it, which brings us best of both worlds, which was before, like we went to several iterations of Lightning on phones and apps and full nodes and LSP, and I guess we were just slowly coming towards, we're gonna have to be a bit less preachy about it and a bit more pragmatic And I've personally had to go through this phase of, okay, I actually primary care, primarily just care about Bitcoin payments, and I want velocity, I want fast payments, I want to be able to set it up quickly, don't care about it Again, you can manage your, exposure to it very well, and it, it just works. And one aspect that we didn't cover before is because I do run a node, I have all the infrastructure to run this by myself, but I actually prefer using this from security model point of view because I have a not huge lightning node, but it's a meaningful amount of Bitcoin for me. I don't necessarily want to expose that routing node to all the Things that I'm developing and potentially vibe coding something together that will then, it's to send payments from my lightning node. So I think that's a very underappreciated, Part of it because it enables a much faster iteration with much less risk, versus, I don't know, setting up an L and bit and then leaking your key somewhere and, oh shit, now I lost everything because of that. Right." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "19:10", "start": 1149.65, "text": "It allows for very easy experimentation. And now, you know, oftentimes in the early part of setting up a business, you're just trying different ideas and trying to see what sticks. It's interesting you mentioned the vibe coding thing. Obviously, that's become a big thing now. Danny, I'm curious from your perspective on the bre- Breeze side, like how is the Breeze team thinking about the whole vibe co-vibe coding thing in terms of people who want to use Breeze SDK? Like, is that something you're looking at? Is that something that's, you know, you're gonna expect more and more people are gonna start doing that?" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "19:39", "start": 1179.25, "text": "Hundred percent. I think so. We already seen it through the challenge as well. One of the, the winners who did one of the, an integration for Primal openly said they vibe coded it and has started building different things in the space based off of this. How are we looking at it? I mean, so my, my background, I'm in marketing, I've got to think about like, how do we reach more people, right? And specifically this kind of area is where I'm at today. We're trying to make, first of all, make sure it's as easy as You can vibe code with it. Second of all, making sure that all of our documentation is friendly enough. Ali is far, far more acquainted with this world than I am as well. He actually, in fact, did the last year the context files, which a number of folks use for us to use the pre-sdks well. And so to answer your question, is, is yes, this is here, this is here, and I think there's different levels. There's people like Ali, as you, God knows what he's doing, right? You're working, you're working with An agent and using your knowledge and basically making yourself more productive, and I'm talking on behalf of Aliose here, but that's what I see most developers do. And then you get the other folks, the people like myself, right? I'm literally like, finally got a, a, a, an in on this world in which I can start building stuff. So we're thinking about it like that, how can we make both people like me get involved and start building applications, 'cause I might have an idea that, you know, becomes the next product. But likewise, developers, they're working with it 'cause we're making it easier and easier to integrate, and we know the user experience is fantastic. So it kind of, both things, I think we have a very good developer experience, and I think we have a very good user Hopefully, and, and what we're seeing is an acceleration of people adopting. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "21:24", "start": 1284.43, "text": "And you touched on something there around the context file. Now, Alia, maybe you're better to touch on this, but my understanding here is this is like that, MCP, it's a called Model Context Protocol, is it? And it's sort of like a way for them to-- Well, maybe you can explain it better for us. Like, what exactly is that and how is that, like, are you building it so that other, let's say, vibe coding or coding tools nowadays, like, The, let's say, grab the documentation on Breeze SDK and know what to fill where." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "21:57", "start": 1316.9, "text": "Yeah, exactly. I mean, the context files were, let's say, now, now already outdated way of doing these things because, when I've done it, I've done it for, like, also Liquid SDK, like, LDK and stuff, for a couple of projects just to make it easier. So it's essentially like a condensed documentation with examples of, \"This is how you send a payment, this is how you receive a payment.\" So like a short instruction Manual for an LLM, because a couple years, two years ago, year ago, it was still a bit more tricky. Cloud code will go to Breeze SDK repo, figure out what it needs to do. The context windows are bigger, so you can be less mindful of it. It's the, the tools have become more s-smarter, so it's, you can be more sloppy, but a year ago, tools were less mature than now, so the more- The more you could help, the more you could point it towards our-- not the ten pages of documentation, but you know, this is a short file with examples. This is how you use the SDK, this is the best, way to do it. Also now the guys at Briez have actually included examples in all the programming languages in the repo, so LLMs are now very happy with development with Briez SDK, it has made things very easier. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "23:18", "start": 1398.37, "text": "It's kind of like what we hear in the old days I mean, it's still re-relevant today, but people talk about like SEO, and now it's sort of like, not just about getting discovered by humans, it's about getting discovered by AI tooling, right? It's like you've got to have your documentation good so that the AI tools can pick it up and you might get hopefully discovered or, you know, used in that way." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "23:39", "start": 1418.78, "text": "I, want-- wanted to just jump in on that. That's become a-- I can't tell you how that's become like front of mind and accelerated in the last two months as well. Like Genetic marketing, whatever, and it makes everyone sound very like blur jargon, but like foundational, that's what you need to do right now. And so even folks like myself No one's gonna, you're gonna get, you know, tenner penny expert come up and say that they know what they're talking about, but I think to the point of how this landscape has even changed in the last year or last six months, you're now, we're now all playing catch up because the tools are getting better and better and better, so we're actually having to now adapt how we even present the documentation, like how specifically, you know, do we want this received? Am I doing it the right way? Working with developers in our team as well to make sure that it does this Just to like amplify this, but to make sure that builders get exactly what they need to build, 'cause it's getting to that inflection point, I guess, where AI tools in building have just-- I mean, it's here, we're in it. It's really, yeah, it's really," }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "24:44", "start": 1483.74, "text": "yeah, it sounds like it's, it feels very real, right, the productivity from it. Let's go back to you, Brianna, I wanna hear a bit from you. I know your focus is probably more on the product design, UX, UI, so give us a bit" }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "25:02", "start": 1501.51, "text": "Vento from the UX/UI perspective." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "25:05", "start": 1504.65, "text": "For sure. So I actually did a lot of pair coding with Andre at home on the weekends. We, you know, he would-- he has like a million agents running at once, by the way. It's crazy. but, you know, we would, you know, be running one thing and then, okay, let's test it. And the, the whole time I was just thinking, again, how would an average person understand this, right? So there was, there was a moment where we were trying to figure out how to communicate like submarine swaps. And, I remember seeing what Andre had built, and the language was super confusing just for like an average person, obviously, but for him, he was like, \"Yeah, this is pretty simple, just click--\" On Swap, you know, you choose the price that you wanna pay them, like that's, that's just- Even that was too" }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "25:53", "start": 1552.83, "text": "complicated, yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "25:55", "start": 1555.05, "text": "That's too complicated for, for any normal person, non-technical person, right? And so then we worked through like the language, right? Like, do people even care how this is done, right? 'Cause he had a whole explanation of what was happening behind the scenes, I'm like, if I saw that, I would be worried that, like, am I swapping my money for something else? Am I going to get my money? What Why is this red? You know, is this a bad thing? And so like, let's just not explain what's happening at all, first of all. It's too complicated. and then just, you know, group it into Like, you know, slow, medium, fast, and give them a price, and give them as few options as possible, just to like, \"Oh, I want my money now, \" or \"I don't care if it takes another hour, \" right? So that's just an example of, you know, a situation. Gotcha. And so to be clear, what we're talking about" }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "26:46", "start": 1606.47, "text": "here is a submarine swap. Which direction are we talking about? The user is paying on chain and then taking it in lightning, or it's the other way around, they're paying lightning and" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "26:54", "start": 1614.36, "text": "they're receiving To receive their payment, right? So that's kind of like a complicated," }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "27:05", "start": 1624.77, "text": "right? So it's like, kind of like they've got funds in there and they wanna swap out. It's like swapping out. Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "27:11", "start": 1630.91, "text": "yeah. So- Okay." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "27:12", "start": 1632.27, "text": "Yeah." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "27:13", "start": 1632.65, "text": "It's, it's, it's a little complicated. That was an example. Another, another thing that we were thinking about is obviously backups, because that's quite complicated for someone, and just making sure that they do backup their wallet, right? Because in this situation, if you log into a, another instance of Evento- So your wallet isn't just gonna magically appear there, you have to like, you know, you have to re-sign in, if you will. And so that's something that I've been thinking about a lot. And, you know, obviously we don't wanna have to force people to back up through the sign up process of creating the wallet, because then I think that just creates, you know, friction. More friction, yeah. I don't, I don't know what this is, this is kind of scary. You want them to just create the wallet, there it is, and then, you know The, the onboarding there is very important, explaining what it is in a very simple way, just like, you know, keep this very safe. You don't, we're not gonna tell you like, don't put it in your notes app or whatever, 'cause everyone will, or in their contacts or whatever. It's just keep it safe, and if you need to log into your wallet again, just use this. So keeping that language very easy to understand, 'cause most people will see that and they'll get very confused. This is, also after me testing the wallet with my friends Nothing about Bitcoin, right? And I think that's a really important thing to do if you're trying to build a product for, a Bitcoin product for an average person, is have them try it, and their negative feedback is the best feedback that you can get so that you can solve that problem immediately, right? Like, what are they most scared of when interacting with Bitcoin? and then like, let's really think hard on how we can solve that problem for them, because like, you know, in the beginning, the internet was hard f- to use for everyone, right? It was And like everything was new about it. I think the same goes for Bitcoin, it's just figuring out like, how does the average person think about something like this, and how can we make it as familiar as possible for them? Right? Like signing into their bank account or accessing their Venmo or whatever it is, shouldn't be scary." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "29:20", "start": 1760.41, "text": "Yeah. And so in terms of the wallets and like the flow for, again, for a normal user, not for like a Bitcoiner per se, is it gonna look like, you know? They would set up, in this case, they're setting up Evento, the app, they're installing that, and then it has an inbuilt wallet, and then that's the wallet that they will receive payments to or make payments out of, and it's using like either the Spark version or the Liquid version." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "29:45", "start": 1785.37, "text": "Yeah, the Spark version. So, so basically the idea is, so right now it's in beta, we're actually planning on releasing it out of beta in the next week, and an iOS app is coming very soon, which is very exciting, and by the way, it's very easy to the iOS app, so there were no problems. But basically, someone signs up for an Evento account, and it's an option to set up your wallet, right? We're not forcing anyone to set up their wallet as soon as they create an Evento account. We're going to nudge them in various ways, but another great way to encourage someone to set up a wallet that we're going to, you know, implement is, let's say I wanna send you Bitcoin, I see that you're on the guest list, right? You don't have a wallet, it says like, \"You So I'm gonna have a button that says like, \"Hey, notify this person you're trying to send the money, set up their wallet.\" And so hopefully, you know, like if you're doing meetups, right? You can just click that on every single guest and have them set up their first Bitcoin wallet so that you can easily send them Sats. So that's, that's one way we're gonna try to nudge folks to set up their wallets. this is something that worked pretty well at, Dev Day in Mauritius, right? We had people, you know, and we said, hey, we wanna send all of the guests Sats, so set up your wallet, and we'll send you twenty-one Sats or whatever. So we're gonna, we're gonna figure out all these, these little ways to nudge people to create Bitcoin wallets, and then throughout that process, make sure that they understand everything that they're doing, right? Not just opening up a wallet and then, like, I don't know what any of this is. So holding their hand through it." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "31:23", "start": 1883.37, "text": "Yeah. I'm curious how you see this as a, like a UI/UX I have multiple, many wallets, right? I'll have like wallet for Satoshi and Phoenix and this and like all these different wallets. Are you seeing it like in the, in the case with Evento, then it's just gonna be like it's another Bitcoin Lightning wallet? And now, to be fair, you can just move things around between these different wallets. Are you seeing that like that's just, you know, people are just naturally just gonna do that, and it's like kind of the equivalent of everyone having like four or five different Bitcoin apps, 'cause many of them will have Lightning integrated in some" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "31:56", "start": 1915.79, "text": "I mean, here's what I see, at least for the future of Avento, right? I want to-- we're working on creating peer-to-peer ticketing, and that's its own complexity in and of itself, but we wanna make sure that, you know, from the beginning, we wanted to make sure that the host has a Bitcoin wallet, right? Not everyone will, and so we also wanted to make sure that we can verify that payment that's happening. it's very tricky 'cause you can't do that without having access to the wallet, but we're working on a protocol That problem, and I think, yeah, we have a PR, that's, that's in, in the, in the works right now, with Breeze. To make that happen. But ideally, I want it to be kind of the wallet for your events, right? If you're a host, for you to collect income, through Avento. And, you know, for us, like we also have a bunch of different little options, like you can spend Bitcoin inside of Avento through BitRefill. You don't even have to leave the app or anything. So it's another thing, right? I, I received Bitcoin for my event, but how do I spend it? how do I actually use this money? So options to earn. So we're, you know, putting a bunch of like, other Bitcoin companies that allow you to earn Bitcoin on, you know, through mobile gaming or whatever it is, like CBD or Lolly or Fold, right? This sort of stuff. It's like, I want to send value to people, but I don't know how to get Bitcoin myself. And then, yeah, so I want it to be this kind of like whole ecosystem within Avento, where it's like, I have a wallet where I can tip my favorite hosts and my favorite people that I For tickets or receive money as a host for tickets. So that's, that's how I see it. It is a beautiful wallet as well, so if you don't even use Evento for events, but you like the wallet, like, you just have it" }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "33:47", "start": 2027.49, "text": "as a wallet, right? So an option." }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "33:50", "start": 2029.53, "text": "It's a great wallet. Like, I, I literally, I use it every single day. I pay everyone I need to pay with it, and it just, it's great. It's, it's, It's less, it's less Bitcoinery. So if you wanna onboard like a, you know, a fresh person, I recommend it." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "34:07", "start": 2046.8, "text": "Cool. Danny, let's, just touch on the liquid versus, Spark, aspects of it. Like if somebody's looking at this and thinking, \"How do I decide between going for the liquid version or the Spark version?\"" }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "34:18", "start": 2058.3, "text": "So, I mean, both are great solutions. I think the thing is with Spark today, I think there are no minimum limits, it's instant, or effectively instant, and- And, obviously that there's things like unilateral exit to Bitcoin, what Liquid offers, you've got access to USDT, which some folks want for stablecoins, and that, it's basically that what we're seeing is generally people Wanting instant that experience, I'm leaning towards Spark, 'cause that, 'cause that's what you want today. And I think something that kind of Breanna was talking about there is, it's about the experience, and I think you said it earlier, like we're, we're competing with experience. Now there are trade-offs, of course there are trade-offs, that's, that's where we're at. But those trade-offs now- Are for that experience, and so that's kind of where we're at. So Roy's done some great pieces for folks who wanna go a bit more in detail, recently to do with Spark and Liquid, but I think one of the, the things we're seeing is, is a, a flood of interest in the Spark implementation, which is great." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "35:20", "start": 2119.74, "text": "Yeah, it's interesting to see. Curious, any general comments you guys have on like what's going on with like L2s and just generally with Bitcoin, like, are you just seeing that is-- It seems like there's been a lot These dev-developers, builder circles, it seems to me, from what I'm hearing, there's a lot of excitement around these." }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "35:40", "start": 2139.52, "text": "I, I can talk, and I'm sure Ali has, can go from the kind of developer's point of view, but what we're seeing right now is Lightning's the common language. It's connecting all of these different L2s that come, that come with different trade-offs, right? So right now, you've got Spark, you've got Liquid, you've got ARK, all of these various things are coming, and they offer different things. Now, Things, and that's absolutely fine. But what I would say, and it's more to the pragmatic responses, that you're building not just for Bitcoiners anymore. We're playing on the, on the main stage, and if we're playing on the main stage, there are expectations that folks have with what a product should and shouldn't look like for when they wanna move value, and what Bitcoin can do is far exceed the potential of stable coins and other cryptocurrencies in what it offers. And so we have a unique opportunity to bring this to everyone, and I think sometimes maybe the- Rhetoric or maybe the commentary that goes with it, all those trade-offs and the pragmatism is lost in maybe a more passionate debate about what Bitcoin is or isn't. So that's kind of what I'm seeing today is just a huge excitement though for those that are pragmatic and to be on the whole, most people are pretty pragmatic. So, I'll let Alia turn around and say about the developer side of it though." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "36:55", "start": 2214.63, "text": "Yeah, no, definitely. I think the, good level of pragmatism has benefited us all a bit just from observing what- What's happening around talking with other node operators, I also have been seeing in the recent months that things have been picking up in terms of just volumes going around. It feels like after many years, there's like seeing somewhat natural payment flows that you would imagine. It's not just huge rebalances or no-stops going around. Like you see real value of like fifty bucks being sent or like you would look at a credit card statement, what you spent on daily basis. So I am cautiously optimistic that we're moving into the direction that we've been all hoping for since twenty nineteen, to the point of what we were discussing before. I do think that all the new tooling and all the new sidechains, L2s are quite a big unlock, just because it's-- it just gives you so much options of what to do, how to move, choose your threat model, choose your risk profile, and I'm, I'm quite bullish, and I have maybe had- Slightly different opinions a while back, or at least I think that things have stagnated a bit, in terms of people's excitement to build things, and I think in the last year things have taken up Quite well, and we're mov-moving into the right direction. And obviously, all these tools, as we've touched before on the, the LLMs, and you can create so many more things so much quicker. The first thing that I built on Spark was an MCP to do payments so I could test my things that I create with LLMs faster, for example. So I think we're getting into a loop, that will- Speed up the process, and I'm definitely working on a lot of other ways to, I, I want to make everyone a payment provider basically, make, make it as easy as possible to deploy APIs, because BTC Pay is great, but it's still a huge chunk of software. There's many ways that you can just maybe want to accept occasional payments or do it in a super lightweight way. And to the point that we've, you've mentioned before, yeah, every- Everyone has ten wallets, and that, that was always the problem. Like, if I open my phone, I'm gonna discover twenty K sets in a wallet that I forgot that I have. It happens all the time with, the way of Spark has it here, where everything is essentially just, Seed phrase or a private key, then you can use the same, basically the same account in multiple wallets. So even with the example of, let's say you're a merchant and you don't have strong tax obligations with your BTC Pay, Bitcoin flow, you just use the same seed in a daily wallet that you use. So whatever your payment web store gets in, you can spend directly, you don't need to move the money around. We've just unlocked something that was not necessarily possible before. Neither in fiat or Bitcoin space. So I think we are finally coming to a stage where we're gonna see huge benefits of just instantly moving money around. Oh, I received a payment on my business account, let's, I'm gonna swap part to my spending wallet, I'm gonna send something to a no-asset account that I support. We're, we're raising the velocity of which we can send money around and enable everyone to just do crazy shit that you couldn't do before. So I, I'm very bullish on Bitcoin Bitcoin payments in this year." }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "40:30", "start": 2430.43, "text": "That's fantastic, and I think we are-- It's interesting because people aren't necessarily sharing it online or they're not, you know, you don't necessarily see it from the outside. So an outsider doesn't necessarily see that, oh, actually, Lightning volumes are picking up over time because some of it's hidden, some of it isn't publicly disclosed, or it's like they're looking at the public, the channel amount, which actually that has started to rise too, but the actual-- What you're not seeing is the, the actual turnover of that, unless you are That's in the flow. So you might not see that if you're an outsider, but that's definitely what I'm hearing from other people in and around Lightning also, that we are seeing more volumes on Lightning now. So that's really interesting to see. So I think, I think, yeah, we've covered kind of the key points. So just before we wrap up, everyone, just, tell us where people can find you and, find your work online. Brianna, do you wanna go first?" }, { "speaker": "guest_2", "time": "41:21", "start": 2481.37, "text": "Yeah, of course. So you can, try Avento out at Avento dot S O. Right now the, you know, the wallet is in beta, but check next week and it's gonna be out of beta. But Avento dot S O, you can use everything totally normally. It's completely free to use for everyone. So, you know, if you like it, let me know, and if you wanna host an event I would love that. Also, let me know if you need anything, we'll build whatever you want. And on Twitter, I am b r i i m h d, so, you can, you can follow me there, and then the Avento account is Avento underscore S O." }, { "speaker": "guest_3", "time": "42:00", "start": 2520.41, "text": "Al Dias. Well, I'm not gonna recite any n pubs, but the easiest way to find all my contacts is just visit disobey dot dev and there is, all the projects and contacts and" }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "42:12", "start": 2531.82, "text": "everything else needed. Excellent. And, Danny, people who wanna find you or find out more about Breeze," }, { "speaker": "stephan", "time": "42:18", "start": 2537.76, "text": "the G, forward slash s d k, you can go on there, you can see all our partners, you can see both implementations, go to the documentation, you can get all the latest updates from us at breeze underscore tech. and I just wanted to add one final note To everyone that helped, took part, even yourself, 'cause you, you've helped us amplify this as well. Like the, the challenge was, and I genuinely mean this sincerely, awesome. And what was even more cool is that you're really seeing folks- Start to see beyond building just for Bitcoiners too, is how can we bring this in the hands of as many people as possible? And I think with that kind of mentality and the kind of where we're going, I think this year ahead is gonna be absolutely-- I was gonna, I was gonna curse, but it's gonna be epic, so I don't need to curse, it's fantastic. So yeah, I think this is a" }, { "speaker": "danny_stagg", "time": "43:05", "start": 2585.3, "text": "great opportunity now. It's sort of, you know, people seem to be a bit disappointed about the price, but I think they're wrong. I think, you know Maybe they're, they're somebody who is a developer, but they haven't built Bitcoin into their app. Share this episode with them so they can learn a bit about the experience. And of course, all the links will be in the show notes. that's it from us guys. Thank you, and we'll see you in the next one." } ] }