The Exodus Summit

Heat. Heat. All right. Heat. Heat. Good morning Omaha and welcome to the Exodus Summit. I'm Aubrey. I'm the co-founder of House Comms. My business partner Elena and I will be your MC's today. A quick orientation. You're about to hear from Exodus on the state of business. See the products Exodus is shipping and be a part of the conversations with the Exodus team and industry leaders. So, the full run of show is in your program. We have an action-packed day for you. Now, before we begin, a brief note so legal doesn't kill me. Um, forward-looking statements. This presentation contains forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described today. All forward-looking statements speak only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them. With that, let's get started. Please give a warm welcome to the CEO and co-founder of Exodus, JP Richardson. What's up everybody? >> Welcome to the first Exodus Summit. I need to get my clicker. There we go. We've got an action-packed show for you here today and we're going to start with some stories. It's great to see all your faces here. So, as an engineer, many of you know that I I just love to build. And in 2011, I wanted to build a website to sell goods and services all over the world. And at that moment in time in 2011, accepting credit cards online was really painful. In fact, it would take two weeks or so to start to be able to accept credit cards. And around that time is when I discovered Bitcoin. Now, at this moment, Bitcoin was really complicated to use. And because I care so much about freedom and control and Bitcoin is the perfect manifestation of that, I decided to dedicate my life's work to making Bitcoin easy to use. Fortunately, around this time, I teamed up with my co-founder Daniel, who has experiences designing for BMW, Disney, Apple, Apple to say the least. and we started out on a mission to make self-custody easy. Now 11 years later, 7.2 million customers, the mission still hasn't changed. Your money should be under your control. Now, a lot of you know this story. We almost didn't get there. May of 2024, we flew out 130 friends, family, and employees to celebrate the big moment of going public, to celebrate ringing the bell on the New York Stock Exchange. Now, that day was supposed to be May 9th, 2024. The night before May 8th, we got a call to the New York Stock Exchange and they said that the SEC had called. We can't list the next day. We can't go public. We can't ring the bell. And we did everything by the book. We followed every rule. And at the 11th hour, the rules were changed. I'll never forget walking into that hotel ballroom that night and telling many people, many of you the next day the listing wasn't going to happen, that we weren't ringing the bell. Some of you I remember having conversations with that evening. I looked around. I saw the heartbreak in everybody's eyes. And that's a memory I'm going to carry with me the rest of my life. But it didn't stop us. We got back to work. And in late December of 2024 after the election, we got the approval. So in January, we flew back to New York. Same company, same stock, same team, maybe a different administration, and we were able to list and ring the bell among some of the people who fought alongside us, who are in this room with us today. And so that's why I'm standing here right now. But we're not done yet. I have an uncomfortable truth I want to share with you. I'm going to tell you something I call the pub test. Years ago, I was at a pub with a friend. He's like, "JP, I want to get into this this crypto thing." So, I said, 'Great.' And this is this is before Exodus had a mobile wallet. I said, 'Let let's find you a wallet. So, we downloaded four wallets. Each one made him write down the 12word secret phrase and then had to quiz him on it. So, he's write his phrase down on a cocktail napkin. Like, dude, what are you doing? test. You can't be doing that. It's so insecure. A decade later, many wallets still fail this pub test. And we wonder why the next billion people haven't showed up. But here's the uncomfortable truth is that nobody cares. Salana, Ethereum, Arbitron, Bass, nobody cares. Your customers don't care. Your friend doesn't care. Your mama doesn't care. The underlying infrastructure has to disappear. If your mom needs to know what chain she's on, we have failed. Now you're at Ex's conference, so you can't expect anything different. X has been the answer from day one. And we take the complexity out and keep all the benefits in. So, let's let's do something right now. I want you to pull out your phone. Pull out your phone. You already got your phone out. Pull out your phone. Take out your phone. Look at your home screen. How many apps do you have to manage your money? You've got a banking app. You've got Venmo. You've got Cash App. You've got maybe Robin Hood. You got some app to trade stocks. Your financial life is spread across all of these companies and none of them are on your side. You shouldn't need this many apps to manage your financial life. We're fixing it. And self custody is at the foundation of this. One app for how people actually use their money. But let's start with something that lets us build this. So as of yesterday, I'm very pleased to share that we have closed on the Monovate and Banks UK acquisition. And this is a turning point. We go from renting the rails to owning them. And some of the Monovate team is with us here today. Until this point, any payment with Exodus had to run through a toller. Card issuers, processors, settlement layers. These acquisitions change that. Monave has processed over $6.5 billion and over six million cards issued. Companies like OKX and Kraken rely on Monovate. banks tech allows cards spend directly from a self-custodial wallet. Originally the cards behind MetaMask, Ledger and Exodus Pay. And so yesterday, both of these companies have officially joined Exodus. Yes, thank you. Now you may wonder how this all fits with the existing business. The past decade revenue was largely based on trading for Exodus. When crypto would go up a revenue goes up. Crypto goes down we go down too. Many of you here have lived those cycles with us. You've believed through both sides of it. Now, trading isn't going anywhere. And we're going to be build more ways for people to use Exodus. But when you own Exodus stock, here's what you own. You own a self-custodial foundation. And everything at Exodus is built on self-custody because it gives customers the most control. near zero fees, instant settlement, global access and things that every consumer wants. Then you have the exo suite which is our enterprise product that gives every company the ability to bring our technology to their customers. And you have Exodus Pay, the consumer layer. You can use digital dollars in your wallet to buy groceries, buy coffee, send money, spend anywhere. Visa and Mastercard are accepted all from one app. And we handle the complexity. You keep the control. All from one app. Now, let's talk about the future of Exodus. AI agents are starting to transact on your behalf. They're going to be booking travel, placing trades, renewing subscriptions. Agents are going to be making billions of microp payments 247 at machine speed. And a self-custodial wallet is the most natural place for an agent to hold and move funds. Building money for agents isn't a 2020 2030 problem. It's a 2026 problem. We'll share more this afternoon. For 11 years, this industry has failed the regular consumer. We didn't we've made a decade of decisions choosing the customer over the protocol or the code. That's the difference. That's exis. And that's how we keep winning. Guys, we have an action-packed day planned for you. Up next, James is going to talk to you about the financials. Thank you very much. Thank you, JP. Next on stage, the person who translates everything you heard into numbers. Please welcome Exodus's chief financial officer, James Grenitki. Hey everybody, uh welcome to Omaha. So there are four topics I want to hit with everybody today. First, the 2025 results uh and what they tell us about the business. Two, why Exodus Pay and Monivate, that acquisition that JP just announced, uh talk about their business model. Three, uh how Exodus Pay uh substantially expands our addressable market. And four, uh how we're allocating our capital to uh to get there. So, just a uh quick reminder that we will absolutely be looking forward today. Uh but first a little bit into the past. So uh 2025 strongest uh strongest year in Exodus history. Delivered $121.6 million in revenue. Uh up 5% year-over-year uh 11 million in adjusted IBIDA uh 9.8 call it 10% margin. Uh and our monthly active users you know very steady base one and a half 1.6 million um you know depending on the period. Uh so very steady uh and and that 5% 5% growth in a softening crypto market that really tells you that the business is heading in uh you know is is is holding up. It's uh those are you know important numbers to take away today are Exos Swap B2B volume that grew you know over roughly 158%. And and the revenue obviously you know that grew you know 136%. So it's again it's our our our best year on record and it tells us two things. One the model works uh but two that model it does have a ceiling and into I'll get into why more here in a second but you know really want to look at you know how we deploy our capital and how we run our business. So you know uh on that note let's look at let's talk about our cost categories right? So, you know, first we think about variable expenses. Uh, and those came in at about 16.7 million. And again, variable expenses, we look at those as expenses that scale directly with our revenue. Our fixed expenses were 62.2 million. And headcount, you know, on average of 225. Uh, and when we look at our fixed costs and our fixed cost base, you know, a lot of you have heard me talk about this in the past. uh you know we are used to managing that from that crypto perspective. So the swings in volatility uh you know are very normal for us over the 10 years and we manage our fixed cost base accordingly. that allows for some, you know, that that operating leverage allows for great operating leverage that when, you know, Bitcoin goes up. Uh, you know, we, you know, see our profits, uh, you know, you know, respond accordingly and in, you know, in in bare markets, you know, we are are very comfortable managing the business, uh, you know, in in bare markets as well with that fixed cost base. Uh, which kind of brings me to the discretionary expenses. So, you know, we spent uh you know, totaled $34.1 million on discretionary. Uh and what's worth flagging is the the $8.3 million of M&A costs, you know, tied to the Monovate transaction. I see one of the Monovate guys who's responsible for that. Um but, uh you know, just know that that obviously, you know, is is that particular deal is not going to happen again. Uh so that's uh you know, that's going to be one time. Um and then if you uh you know think about again just reiterate you know the discipline that we have in the cryp that we've built in the crypto environment you know as we move into more revenue streams and operating in a non-crypto environment uh you know that discipline we believe will be very helpful going forward. this what we're trying to show here is just how correlated you know our revenue has been in the past to to Bitcoin and crypto markets especially um you know you can go through this and you can see the you know the the mid 2023 rangebound uh Bitcoin and and crypto markets uh the late 23 ETF uh uh approvals that's that started to drive the market higher um then you know summer 2024 there's a the draw down and and the revenue pulls back accordingly. Uh you know obviously the best month probably in crypto history uh you know that time period from the election into December you know the election the change in the regulatory environment that was coming the Bitcoin hitting 100,000 you know obviously that had you know great impact on the market and on our business at the time. Um, but if you think about the peaks and the troughs on this chart, you know, the and the and how they map to the the price of Bitcoin and the crypto, you know, market in general, you know, that's the ceiling, you know, that's, you know, that's we are as good as you right now. We're as good as the crypto market. Now, don't get me wrong, crypto market is an amazing place to be, but there's just there's more out there for us. And so that's why if you think about you know why are we would we make these moves when you know in the midst of one of the best periods ever um you know now you now you know because of that ceiling. So you know you know JP touched on it you know Exodus Pay and Monivate you know we are uh you know that again is designed to generate revenue that isn't purely tied to the crypto market and it will greatly increase you know areas for us that I'll get into in a little bit. Um you know opportunities for us to get non-crypto revenue. um you know Exorap and Monivate you know they changed the composition uh you know instead of just swap fees driving you know 90% of our revenue and and only for you know users on the platform that are actively trading um you know we'll earn you interchange processing fees interest on float uh you know businesses that generate income you know regardless of of the crypto market we also have a stable coin Now um you know Exodus users you know they already manage a wide variety of stable coins on our platform. So you know we have all of the major stable coins we have 40 plus blockchains um you know so we support all the major most of the minor actually uh stable coins as well. Uh so that you know that's got us into a really interesting position. But now we have our own stable coin uh that we built in partnership with Moonay. Um and and with that you know that capability you know our users you know they now can access spending with stable coins in the physical world. Um and that's the gap that that Exodus Pay closes. So, you know, two numbers to think about with the stable coin world and and just how big and how fast the stable coin market has come. You know, the global stable market last year, stable coin uh volume last year was 33 trillion. Uh and and stable coin linked credit card spend was five $4.5 billion which is up $673% in a year. Uh and that first number, you know, obviously, you know, that just shows you that, you know, how the the massive nature of the rails. Um and then the second tells you that you know the the there is that's a great start for the demand but there's still going to be more room to run uh on the on the credit card side of the world. Uh so you know here is uh uh stable coin transaction volume surpassing Visa. Um you know that you know that just shows again the magnitude that we're dealing with. Um so with Exodus Pay and Monivate you know we earn again interchange processing uh float um you know on every stable coin linked card you know that that we issue um and and that revenue compounds independent of of crypto prices. So if I have a stable coin and I go to the grocery store and I use Exodus Pay, you know, we still get processing, we still get, you know, all of those different things. Um and it doesn't matter if Bitcoin's at, you know, 5,000 or 500,000. So the question the question really is how do we capture that demand and and again that's why we acquired Monivate and so what is Monivate obviously JP touched on it Monovate is a combination of of Monivate and banks uh these are two UK and EU regulated financial infrastructure business businesses that together formed a licensed operating payments platform so monivates that's the infrastructure layer you know a principle Mastercard and Visa member I believe Discover 2 uh you know that issues cards sponsors bins acquires merchants and operates the processing 3DS fraud IBN uh systems etc. uh it holds an FCA authorized EMI license in the UK and there's also licenses in the EU. So banks is a cryptocard program management layer. So uh it runs the card programs, collateralizes lending and does some FX. It sits between Monivate and the client. So between you know the the the end user uh and and Mastercard and Monivate. Um, and it also has an F FCA registration and it's a crypto uh a crypto asset firm. So again, this is the biggest strategic move we've made as a company. It changed the business in in five different areas. So revenue creation as a standalone business over 90% of our revenue was from swaps, from crypto trading. With Monivate, you know, we got again interchange processing fees, iBand fees, float interest. Um, and so, you know, the funny thing was I was thinking about these slides obviously today and uh, you know, you know, I I I got here and I was looking at my Exodus pay and uh, I'm sorry for the sidetrack here, but I looked I I ordered Door Dash at 6:43 a.m. today. Um, and and the thing about it is I was thinking, man, um, you know, I've got a big family. I've got all the adult kids. I'm going to have four in college here pretty soon. I got my wife. We're all using Exodus Pay. Um, you know, then I thought about Door Dash and another sidetracked to a sidetrack. I ran into like the Door Dash marketing team, I believe, at an event and I showed them my Door Dash and they were they were like, I've got to be one of the top users. As I was talking to them, a Door Dash request came in from my family because I was traveling. Um, and so they gave me all the swag that they could find off their body. They weren't prepared, but they they were like, you've got to have it. And so, so I'm sitting there thinking about that, all this stuff on the drive in here today, and I thought, man, you know, my accounting team, you know, I get all the family going on. my accounting team in Deote, they're going to say, "Oh my god, uh, you know, James' family is material to this business." They're going to have to put a, you know, a schedule in the footnotes of, you know, of when when when my when my kids graduate college and, you know, they're going to want to look at their transcripts to see. Anyway, sorry for the accounting humor. Um, you know, it's it's it is what it is. That's what you get with the CFO presentation, but anyway, that that's where my brain goes. Um, so back to the deal, but I was thinking all of these things, all this interchange processing, you know, these are all things that my family is going to generate for the business through Monave. So, you know, if you think about the total addressable market, uh, you know, you have 78 million crypto crypto traders right now. Uh, you know, and that's a, you know, multi, you know, that's a multi-t trillion dollar opportunity, you know. Um, but if you think about, you know, infrastructure, uh, you think about all of the different ways and, you know, you thinking, you know, JI mentioned or JP mentioned AI. Um, you know, I think that's what we now have to call his AI bot is JI. Um, so, uh, you know, we've got, you know, all of that opportunity in there. There's the businessto business opportunity along with Exodus Pay and being that full stack owner. Here again are the the the six revenue streams. Um you know a couple things to note are you know there's a lot of different margins and I'll get into that just a little bit more per each one of these things. Some of these things are pure pass through some of these things are very high margin. Um and and the revenue from this business comes from from merchants from the clients from interest. You know it again it doesn't depend solely on Exodus users swapping crypto or doing similar activities. Um, and that is a major structural change for us. So, here's a little bit more breakdown of the business. So, again, you've got bin SP uh bin sponsorship, that's 77% of the gross. Um, you've got interest on float, which has some uh um you know, some solid margins uh there. You know, roughly a little bit less than 50% uh or I'm sorry, that's processing. uh interest on float is uh roughly 60 to 70% margin. Um and and all of these things scale as as we sign more B2B users and as Exodus Pay grows. So the six layers of operating today, wallet, swap, stable coin, card issuance, and the banking rails XUS and processing. Um the headline number of that 1.5 to 1.6 6 mus in the Exodus wallet. Uh the 1.36 billion in swap volume last year, the 30 plus uh card issuance clients that that Monovates running. You know, those are some of the headline numbers. So, two more layers that will be ramping in 2026, obviously the Exodus card uh consumer card again, my family helping out contri significantly uh and merchant acquiring. You know, those are those are some of the things that Exodus team was building before uh before the Monavate. Um now the the three enacted development and the merchant merchant acceptant piece you know point of sale uh exodus feed pay features including loans remittances uh and then obviously agentic payments and you know obviously again you know the JI the JP use for agentive payments uh the financial point is that these rails that serve you know AI are stable coins and cards and and we are we have both in multiple different approaches to that and every new layer that we add you know compounds to the layers beneath it. So the revenue per user compounds because each layer captures a different piece of the same transaction. The next slides walks through an example transaction. I like this because now I can talk about pence and pounds. Um, so if you think about a 100 pound transaction, you know, before when we were just a client of of Monave and Banks, you know, we would end up with 55 p. And now a half per 100 pound in this example. Uh after you're talking about a pound30. Um and and so again, you know, this this allows us these different these different streams allow us and the different margins and and by owning these layers and having owner economics, we're allowed to pull different levers, a number of different levers and and not only that, but non-crypto levers. So you know we have the ability to compete on a number of different areas with a number of different margins to pull volume to pull uh you know margin levers etc to maximize the opportunity for the business and obviously for our shareholders the concept of a personal finance hub you know that JP talked about with all your different apps um you know we've obviously got a you know very you know we started with crypto spot trading um you know which you know 18 trillion annual opportunity From there we expand into the retail payments. Uh you know there's what two quadrillion of flows in that space. Business payments 48 trillion when you start to get into that realm. Uh so there is a lot of opportunity here. Um, but if you think about, you know, all these big numbers, I'm not saying Exis is going to get 100% of any of them, but it only takes a smidge to have a very large, very meaningful, uh, you know, company and opportunity and revenue growth. Um, and you know, like I said, we've got a great start and we're moving into um, you know, an even a better mer with this merger. we have even more opportunity with the partners that we already have and the partners that Monovate has. And so if you look at the two names that really stand out here, Alger and MetaMask, um we both work with those. And so, you know, if you think about um if you think about the the priority, those are going to be our priority conversations, you know, starting with now that we have this merger done and we'll be able to as we develop platforms for them. We'll be able to take those and and and you know, not necessarily everyone is going to buy everything, but we have on on either side, those are opportunities to cross-ell um you know, different products because, you know, we believe everyone in the world on the left side, if they don't have one already, they're going to need a crypto wallet. Everyone on the right side, you know, they need they're going to need that credit card layer for, you know, even if it's just for the AI payments. So, there's a lot of opportunity here. Um 2027 targets. So again, you know, I'm just going to hit the highlights here. So we're at 90% from swaps. You know, we believe in 2027 it's going to be uh 60% or less. Um you know, the the margin quality, you could see what we're planning to do there. The platform defensibility, right? Wallet and swap and and we didn't have any card payments. We didn't we didn't DeFi and Tradfi are merging and we didn't have enough on the Tradfi layer. this this acquisitions and the the exodus pay that solves that problem. Here are priorities uh investing in the operating business. Um look there's there's opportunity that exists today. We need to take advantage of that. We need to obviously get Monivate integrated uh fully integrated. Then we need to expand and um you know Exos Swap has been a wonderful product. We need to do more of that. There's still more opportunity there. And then we're working on uh you know some checkout products, some some merchant acquiring as well. Um M&A. So from an M&A perspective um you know we are going to be we're as always deliberate. Um you know we are uh we're being strategic about it. You know we want to accelerate that stack ownership that payment stack ownership uh and extend you know extend into regulated market areas. Obviously we're being disciplined. We have the ability to be opportunistic but you know we have a lot of things that we're working on. So the focus is strategic. And then and then finally you know cash preservation. Look we are a crypto company. We are always going to maintain uh probably a more robust uh uh uh company because we are treasury because we have the uh uh uh the the um the the wounds if you will from the the previous administration that made uh you know getting a loan impossible for a crypto company. So we we still have that in our the back of our mind at all times. So we we're going to be diligent about cash. Uh here we are talking about just that diversification and what we think it will do for you know for our multiple for you know where we're going. Um the most important point is that the company in front of you is now a payments infrastructure company and you know we have a crypto native distribution advantage. So, we are going to be going up into the Tradfi space on that payment stack, but with a a very strong start on the crypto um the the crypto side of it, which again, it's the future. And so, DeFi will tradi here. Um so if you take any nothing away from that uh from this whole time period other than my my children and their their crazy spending habits uh you know just remember that piece that the market will very much come to value. We believe that uh you know that move into tradi and that the real advantage that we have as a crypto company. So with that thank you very much everyone. Thank you, James. Ji, I'm going to use that. Um, from the numbers now to the product. Kevin Wood is director of RevOps at Exodus, and he's going to walk us all through Exo Suite, what's shipped, what's live, and what customers are doing with it right now. Please welcome Kevin Wood. Hey everybody, thanks for coming out today. Uh I'm Kevin Wood. I'm the director of revenue ops here at Exodus. And today we're going to talk about Exo Suite, the new products that we've brought to market and the new products that we offer to our B2B customers. So first we're going to start Exo Swap. Four years ago, we had five or six partners that we were using inside of our swap engine. It was only for Exodus and it was only for our customers. Fast forward a year and a half later, we now have an entire suite of APIs that we published for our B2B partners. We now have up to 16 swap routes, DEX, bridge, swap anything to anything, and something that's really grown in the past couple years. So, from a B2B infrastructure suite, like I mentioned, four years ago, we're a wallet only from our services. We now have Exos Swap with last year 158% year-over-year growth. We've gone from on-ramping with only third parties to being the first of a kind firstparty on-ramp experience exormp inside Exodus. Um, so we're building the infrastructure to allow our partners to allow our users to grow to swap and to to get into the ecosystem here. So our worldass partners, you saw this with with James, but now we have Monave clients, we have our swap partners, and now inevitably the world's going to run on stable coins. So we we're right at the perfect intersection with the Monovate acquisition with what we're doing uh that that AI and some of the others we'll talk about later with with stable coins really at the intersection to be able to provide an entire suite of services to our partners to the industry and bringing crypto stable coin settlement to fintech. A lot of like we've mentioned a lot of uh Monavase businesses in fintech and there's a lot of opportunities for us to get in there and really help those businesses move money quaster and cheaper there. So kind of recent developments with Exos Swap. We have two new clients here in the last 30 days. BitGet, which is a very large AP pack wallet. We've already 12 million plus monthly users. $6 million of volume we've put through Exos Swap already in the past 45 days. OneK wallet, another large AP pack wallet, 300K monthly active users and a million so far to date. And so those are our two latest uh exos swap partners that have come online. And so there's three forces compounding into next into next year. What I talked about recently, we've got Monovate, we've got the Exodus stack, we've got Exo Swap and Exo Ramp. So how we're doing it, we've got new partners. We've signed 10 in the in the first quarter alone. We've got the vertical integration that we mentioned with uh with Monovate. And we're going to be rolling out in Q2 a zero fee campaign swap that is going to allow us still capture revenue while offering zero fee swap. So it's going to be a big value to Exis users. is going to be a big value to our partners and going to be a really great tool uh for our B2B to for new integrations there. Exor ramp. So two years ago we had two or three on-ramping partners. We say how do we start to get closer to the customer? We realized when we looked at kind of the political headwinds things were changing. They weren't great. How do we start to get ahead of that? And so we decided to start our own fiat on-ramp which is called which formerly known as exopay which is now exormp. So we're the only wallet with a firstparty on-ramp service. So we are the merchant of record. We control risk, we control fraud and we have end toend support for our customers. So exormp so we've had a 30x growth in four quarters from when we launched in Q2 of 2025 to where we are today here. And you can see the quarter over quarter growth right here. So leading even now this become a mature product after a year we're still seeing 25% plus quarter overquarter growth. So it's been a incredible product for us so far. We've been able to get like I mentioned closer to the customer. We've been able to start capturing some of that data so we can seamlessly on ramp. We can seamlessly offer cars to customers without another KYC experience. We can add these other features on top of it that allow us to offer more products, offer cheaper products and offer more value to our customers. No longer is on-ramping a black box for our customers. One of the big things at X's is our support and we're able to end toend support a customer with exormp. We were not able to do that before and all that data was a black box. All the poor experiences, all the good experience of our great partners was a black box. So we're able to combine all that into a single product that we're able to offer now. So you can see right here it's been highly successful for us right here and we'll go into some more numbers here. Another big benefit of Exo Ramp is we have a 78% revenue uplift by controlling the COGS. We are in the middle of it. We're able to have a revenue uplift with a a lower cost experience for our customers. So customers are paying less. Exodus is making more and customers having amazing experience. And you can kind of see how these numbers have transformed over the years right here. But we're seeing that this has been huge for us right here. Not only do we control it, but we're having we have a large revenue uplift for this a very similar product. So when we started last year, we were a fraction of the US volume here in in for fiat on-ramping. And you can see Exor ramp in the purple here and our partners, our fiat partners in the dark gray right here. So within the within a year in October 30 October 31 of last year, Exormp is doing more volume than any other partner in the United States. So that shows kind of our commitment to the experience to support and returning customers. So you can see right here 30 days we've done 11.92 million and our partners are doing 10.7 million. So we've seen an incredible growth of Exormp and supporting that product and supporting our customers with amazing experiences. Now Exormp is a small portion of our on-ramp. We have partners that cover the globe. Um so I wanted to really talk about the growth of our on-ramping product and how Exus continues to be the first stop for many customers in their journey in crypto. They come in, they buy crypto, they hold, they trade, they do these things. Inevitably, it's a high a high a very sticky product. And that's another reason why we want to start XR. We want to control that experience. But we have amazing partners who help us continually uh since we started in 2022, which doesn't seem that long ago. You can see the continued growth of our on-ramp product. How we've done that is fine-tune the user experience. uh we have now in the past with with adding exormp we've been able to increase the volume uh while still having the same kind of partner volume as well so we've increased our volume in the United States essentially we've also fine-tuned the experience customers what you'll see is everything everybody's chasing an extra penny on the way down right so we're able to how do we influence the customer journey to have the best experience through our partners through alternative payment methods you know we think of cards in the United States they work everywhere right they they're they're incredibly powerful uh you can honor ramp etc. In other countries, you know, crypto is still a high-risisk payment in the United States and elsewhere. So, pushing alternative payments where we can to create, you know, 80 plus% conversion rate throughout there. But you can see the growth right here, which we which has been really great for us so far. And here's here's a customer story. This is a customer who had issues. As you guys can imagine, on-ramping traditionally is not a you know, you're looking at 50% plus fullfunnel conversions. So, it is uh for lack of a better term, a painful product. How do we take a painful product and make it better? And this is a customer testimony right here. So I cannot even begin to tell you how frustrated I was before I found Exodus. Installed Exodus, bought a random small amount of crypto as a test run. It was here within minutes. The entire process was smooth as can be, which I cannot say for a single one of the competitors. No competition. Thank you. So this is really shows of how getting closer to the customer allows us to own as much of the experience as possible and why we wanted to be where we're at today with Exo Ramp. And so we're going to show a little quick demo here of there's a little Easter egg here, right? So if you find me later, I got the last four of my credit card and my CVC's here. So if you find me later, you're going to have it. So thank you all very much. Really appreciate it. Thank you, Kevin. Now, before we break and you guys re up your coffee, we want you to hear from someone who is using Exodus firsthand, please welcome Latrice. Thank you everyone and thank you for that warm welcome. I'm Latrice Williams and I am so happy to be here today. As I stand before you, you all will notice that I am wearing an American flag on my sweater. And for many people, the American flag represents freedom. It represents opportunity. It also represents bravery. How our founding fathers decided to do something that was revolutionary. And those are the things that I think of when I think of Exodus. I think of the freedom that we are given financially and to do things in a way we've never done before. For those who kind of know my story, some of you all don't know my story, but I've been traveling the world and have been to over 25 countries. And one of the places I went to was in Batswana. And during that time, Exodus had rolled out with the spin card. and I had it and I said, "Let's try this and see if it works. Let's test it." For those who know me briefly, I'm a former professor. You can't really say former. Once an educator, always an educator. So, I'm like, "Let's test this thing. Let's see if it works. Let's see if it can get an A." So, I tested it. I went into the store with my Exodus wallet and bought basic things, groceries, food, essentials that people need every single day. And I went in and bought my groceries, put it in a cart, went to the checkout, tapped my card, paid, and it worked. It worked. And the first thing I said to myself once I got out of the store was, they've just made history. They made history. Do they know that? like I'm in another country using my my stable coin and a wallet holding my own assets that no one has access to and I'm using it at a terminal with a digital credit card. I didn't even have to get the physical one. I'm not even in America and I have food. No other company did that. Even our traditional major players in the world, I won't give them a name shout out, but you all know who they are. No one has done that. This is the first time ever that I didn't have to go and open up a bank account or be in Batswana and ask for someone to send me some money via Western Union. I did it right in the palm of my hands. And so, I just want the Exodus team to know that you all aren't just not making products, you're making history. You all have done something that no one has ever done before and I'm excited about what you all are going to do next. I know there are so many things that are going to be discussed today, but just as a reminder, just like our forefathers were creating something 250 years ago and did not know that this place would still be probably standing today and we'll be celebrating 250 years of America being great. So hopefully in 250 years, Exodus will be celebrating great products that's just not giving people a chance, but giving them people financial freedom, opportunity, and using their assets and their cards and in ways that we've never seen before. So, thank you all for having me here today and sharing this experience with everyone. And uh great job, Exodus team. Continue to make me proud. Thank you. Thank you so much, Latrices. I loved that. Um, now we're going to take a 15minute break. Please be back in your seats by 10:25. We have a special announcement and another demo before our first fireside. And you don't want to miss what's next. 15 minutes. See you back at 10:25. 25. Accounting for some of my jet lag. Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat. Hey. Heat. Heat. Hey, hey, hey. I can't dance. Heat. Heat. I'm a Heat. Heat. Heat. Oh yeah. Hey, hey, hey. I love you. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. The program will resume in 5 minutes. Please make your way to your seats. What is Heat. Heat. Please find a seat. The program will resume in 2 minutes. away. You Please take a seat and turn your mobile devices to their off or silent mode. The program is ready to begin. Please take a seat and turn your mobile devices to their off or silent mode. The program is ready to begin. Welcome back everyone. We are kicking off the second half of the morning with a special announcement. JP is back on stage to deliver it. Please welcome JP Richardson. God, I love that smoke. Are you guys ready for some more face melting announcements today? >> Yes. Yes. It's great that I can break this news here with all of you in the room. But first, we have a quick video for you. >> Ladies and gentlemen, do you love it? Do you need it? Let me hear it. Ladies and gentlemen, do you want it? Do you need it? Let me hear it, ladies and gentlemen. Do you want it? Do you need it? Let me hear it. So, today I'm proud to announce that Exus becomes the official payments partner of the UFC. And brands typically sponsor professional sports for many reasons, but I'm going to talk about two. First, the quality of the brand exposure. The UFC delivers this on a scale almost nothing else in American media can match. And second, because of trust. People will only trust an app they know, especially a financial app. Putting Exodus Pay front and center as the official payments partner of the BR biggest brand and MMA gives that mainstream exposure unlocking trust. Our partnership goes live on June 1st and leads in the 250th birthday of the United States. UFC is running the Freedom 250 fight event on the White House lawn. That's the first UFC fight ever held in the grounds and Exodus will be there for this historic moment. The Exodus logo is going to be inside the Octagon. There's going to be broadcast spots and as the fans walk through the gates, you're going to see Exodus activation footprints everywhere at the White House. Here's what this means for the business. It's a multi-year deal. It's a massive market aligned with our target demographics. Cryptocurious, young, and digitally native. Our story built over 11 years gets an international megaphone every Saturday night. Ex's pay. It's live in all 50 states and rolling out over the world. The product is now ready for distribution. And the UFC gives us access to millions of people. people who already believe what we believe that money should be fast, borderless, and yours. Globally, the UFC reaches 165 countries with 700 million fans worldwide. This is how Exus becomes global payments infrastructure, by building with the right partners. And when UFC fans send or spend money, they're going to think of Exodus. So, we'll see you in the octagon. Thank you. >> Thank you, JP. Very exciting. Our second demo of the morning is one we've been waiting for. Exodus Pay turns self-custody into spending, and AI has been leading the product work to make it happen. Please welcome Chief Product Officer A. Hello, Exodus. It's great to be here. To our shareholders, our customers, and our partners, thank you for being with us. Today we are introducing the next chapter of Exodus. Millions around the world trust Exodus to manage and move their digital assets. That's our foundation trust. So Exodus started as a wallet. Simple, beautiful, and human. But wallet was never a destination. It was just the beginning. It was a way for people to get into Bitcoin and crypto without friction. So today, I'm here to tell you that Exodus is no longer a wallet. That era is over. We're not here to manage money. We're here to move money. We're here to change how it works. Exodus is a movement toward ownership, toward freedom. Exodus movements, that's our company. Exodus is a money movement, a belief system, a community in motion. Exodus is a money platform. That's where it leads. A platform where money lives, not a wallet. A movement, a money movement, a money platform. And not someday, today, right now. So this is the evolution of the product from a crypto wallet to a money platform sovereign by design and human by experience. Exodus, move money. Simple, powerful, and yours. That's our promise. That's the line every customer should feel the moment they open Exodus. Simple, powerful, and yours. We're building an operating system for money. Exodus is money OS. So, let's talk about money. What is money? Money is cash. Money is crypto and it goes beyond that. So our money OS or self-custodial money OS must deliver three core experiences. Cash for every day, crypto for ownership and power for those who want more. One app, one platform expanding over time. Today, Exodus is already one of the best crypto experiences in the world. Our foundation of trust over a decade of building and shipping and showing up every day. That's what gave us permission to go bigger. Now, we add a new foundation. Cash with stable coins for everyday money inside Exodus. And this is how it starts. Exodus Pay. Exodus Pay is our stable coin cash experience and it ships right now. All right. That's Exodus B. Human, powerful, sovereign, and yours truly. exactly how money should feel. I'll tell you more about it. It just works. No crypto knowledge needed. So, this is how Exodus evolves from a wallet to award, from storage to movement, unlocked by payments, unlocked by Exodus Pay. You open the app, Face ID, you're in. No passwords, no seat phrases. No friction, it passes the pop test. KP talks a lot. You add funds with Apple Pay. Seconds, you're in with your card, with your stable coins, a bank transfer. No fees, instant funding is easier than ever. Inside Exodus, you send money to friends just like a text. All sends are also free and instant. No networks, no tokens, no gas. You just send it like a text. You can even send to someone without actually installed to their phone number. And when they install it and sign up, they receive the funds. This is exactly how money should move. Just like a text, you tap to pay and spend with your Exodus card, Apple Pay, online and anywhere Visa is accepted. You can fully live on Exodus and your money does not sit still. Always working. You add funds, you earn. You spend with your card, you earn. You engage with utility, you earn. You earn in any asset. Cash back. Cash back in Bitcoin. Cash back in any asset. This is the beauty of integrating everything into one place. So even your morning coffee can start building your portfolio. One swipe. So Exodus Pay is our self-custodial cash account. Here's the reality. Other money products, they do not win on transactions. They win on balances. Transactions happen and balances move. Balances stay. So we built a system system that brings the money in. Money comes in, we make it useful, it gets used, users earn, users stay, because it feels right. Let's get let's get into revenue. So, here is our truth from day one. We win when our customers win. Exodus is now usage driven and behavior first. We're no longer shipping features. We're we're shipping habits. We're building habits. We win when our users keep money inside Exodus. When they use it, when they move it, when they live on it, and when we expand utility around it, we win as we deliver more value to our customers. stable coin balance, card interchange, card FX, ramps and utility that we expand over time. This changes the business, changes user retention, growth, revenue and valuation. People do not stay because of features. They stay because it feels right. Because of that human connection, Exodus wins on human design and human support. Because when people need help, they talk to a real person 247. That's exist human first. Let's talk about go to market and growth because we're not just shipping a new product. We are also telling the world about it. JB talked about the UFC. How exciting is that? So, let's reset here. We are exiting the wallet category completely. We're extending the technology. You start with digital dollars and you grow into Bitcoin and beyond Bitcoin. Let's talk about Exodus. Who who who are we? We are self-custodial. We are global by default. We are cryptocapable. And now we are payments capable as well. This combination is rare and it's very hard also to to replicate. So this allows us to move faster than anyone else and access markets faster than anyone else as well. So our capabilities self-custodial, global, cryptocapable, payments capable, they unlock four four real behaviors. You own, you use, you save, and you send. So crypto native users, they want ownership. They want Bitcoin. They want self-custody. They want the edge. Give me the edge. Give me inme coins utility first users who want simplicity and wealth give me less tabs save me time I don't want to click so many things I want to I want just access fast access simplicity dollar native users they want stability and effect savings they are escaping their local currency send it to users. They want speed and local ramps. So we have two new user personas unlocked by payments unlocked by Exodus Pay. So the foundation is live as of today. Exodus Pay is now available in the US in all 50 states. Yes, even New York. Also available in Canada, also available in the UK, also available in Europe. and we're just getting started. Let's talk about the US market in the US. We win, we trust our foundation. With self-custody and simplicity, we make Exodus a household name. UFC helps us build trust from crypto trust to mainstream trust. the official payments partner of the UFC. We become part of culture. We align ourselves with cultural moments when attention concentrates. We show up and the biggest events are happening this year right here in the US. The World Cup is the biggest sports event on earth. We will show up. UFC Freedom America 250 the White House. We will show up in the middle of the octagon. Our partner Moon. They distribute our stable coin. Exocach power and exos liquidity is revenue. Now we launch globally. We expand because we can move faster than anyone else. We're self-custodial. We're global. Cryptocapable and PB is capable. Different markets, different needs. It's the same system. You just need to put the user first. In Argentina, where inflation pain is real, users win when they get the best exchange rate. How much did Exodus save me? We optimize in favor of the user because we own the full stack from the stable coin layer to the card swipe layer and that's powerful. We can optimize it in favor of the user. We win with the best digital dollar experience in Latin America. We expand further. We're global. We're global in emerging markets. Nigeria, Philippines, UAE. We win with speed. No more waiting in lines to send money back home. Instant phone based free transfers are everything. Workers, freelancers, expats sending money back home. We capture volume at scale. So the opportunity here is movement. Exodus movement. Let's talk about some of the early signals. FSB one two weeks live now. No marketing. Still no marketing. Users are funding. Users are transacting and users are coming back. And here is something deeper. Actually, our support tickets, our ex space support tickets, 95% of them, they do not even mention crypto. So it's working. It's an early signal but it's working. So our road map now becomes very simple. You start with your cash account, your self custod balance and we expand utility around it and you build your own financial world. You choose what you want to use. You're not forced into anything. So today I'm excited to announce that we are introducing tokenized stocks with on the markets. Wall Street is moving in chain. We will be ready. We have to be ready. It's the same balance now connected to the markets. Our own stock tokconite on Solana now accessible to retail around the world. We're adding new capabilities. This is just a start. I'm also excited to announce that we are launching prediction markets with with poly market a new financial primitive accessible from the same balance. More utility make it useful. Think about the user give them value and maybe you'll win. Same platform more capabilities. All up 10. Same formula. We win when users win. Both targeting a launch in Q2. And we do not do this alone. We are actively looking for strategic partners. With ME, we unlock distribution. With Monivate, we unlock access to banker rails and card issuance. And with the UFC, we we unlock trust at scale. So if you are building a financial product, if you care about your users, you want to give them a world-class experience, talk to us. Exodus becomes the place your users live. We're building the default global money app and we're doing it with partnership. talk to us. Exodus is holding hands from your first paycheck to your first Bitcoin, your first stock, your first business to paying your own employees their first paycheck as well. Exodus is there for every first. Exodus is where your money lives. Exodus becomes your money platform because it feels right. In 2016, we made Bitcoin human. And a decade later in 2026, we make money sovereign. This is Exodus. Move money. simple, powerful, and yours. Thank you. Thank you, A. Now, for our first fireside of the day, we're putting two CEOs on stage to talk about what happens when self-custody meets global payments. You've just seen Exodus Pay. What you're about to hear is the infrastructure story that helps to bring it to life. Joining JP is the CEO of Monivate, Michael Ralph. Now, you may see a QR code on the screen here, unless I'm hallucinating or link if you're watching online. You can submit questions via the QR code or the link if you're on the live stream and we'll answer them your questions later in the afternoon's leadership team AMA. Michael Ralph will join us there as well. Now, please welcome Michael and JP. You know what? I'm gonna I'm do one of these. Get a little comfortable, cozy. All right. So, like said, we're going to have a we're going to have a nice conversation here. We're going to talk about Exodus and Monivate. We're going to talk about Michael's history into Monivate. And let's let's let's start by when I when I first met you, when I so when I first when I first met Michael, I remember he had a sweatshirt on of the New England Patriots. Is that is that right? >> That's right. Yeah. >> Okay. So, being British, how did you get into being a fan of the New England Patriots? Let's Let's start there. That's what everybody wants to know. >> Yeah. So, um, John Madden 93 on the AmIgga, uh, was a game that, uh, I discovered and obviously being British and being young and not understanding the history, uh, I just chose the team that had the word England in it. And um you know it worked out pretty well as I got into the game more and more and realized that for the first time in my life I was supporting a winning team because being uh in soccer being a fan of Tottenham Hotspurs that's kind of a life of uh misery. So so it's been it was a great choice to support New England and then since I've obviously uh you know brushed up on my history as well. I stick by my choice. >> Nice. Nice. So let okay let's give the audience just kind of a sense then about your background and and how did you how did you get into fintech? Let let's start there because I know that you have a a history with fintech before Monavey. So let's let's start there. Let's let's talk about how you got into all of this. >> Yeah. So the the kind of the whirlwind corporate career was Barcley card first and PayPal. um and very much on the merchant acquiring side of life. And in 2009, I joined a group of people that had come together to form a um business called Anthemus Group, which was sitting at the intersection of investment advisory and consultancy. Um and that was, you know, coming into what was being termed fintech at that point off the back of the global financial crash. And in hindsight, I was an entrepreneur in residence. And um you know, I spent most of my days flipping from being pitched by companies that were startups to advising companies that were you know, suffering with the digital innovation dilemma. Um like Vocal Inc. who got acquired by Mastercard. Uh and so I got to see the industry from every angle. Um and it was a great foundation. And over time, I realized I was a really bad investor because I would listen to people's pitches and immediately start to try and think, well, why are they doing it like that rather than just sort of assessing what they were telling me? I was starting to throw maybe a few stones at the glassouses. And um I realized that I should probably stop doing that and build my own glass house. And I came up with uh an idea uh at the time that was somewhat inspired by the Starbucks prepaid program that went mobile. Uh and I created a company called Yoyo Wallet. And that effectively combined payment and loyalty into a single uh mobile payment experience through a dynamic QR code. And the concept was quite simple that when you transact, if you're a merchant, you want to truly know your customer. So, uh, through an integration at the point of sale when you paid with Yo-Yo, you were immediately getting a digital itemized receipt. You were immediately getting your reward points, stamps, cash back, whatever it may be. And so, that was a journey that went for about seven years and I exited that in 2020. Um, and you know, from that point on, I became part of a company called TEA. Um, and I spent a couple of years there sort of helping build out uh sort of on the corporate development front a lot of acquisitions. We did about 18 acquisitions in 18 months at tea. Um got to work with a lot of great founders and entrepreneurs in that process as well. U and one of the things I took responsibility for was coming up with the issuing strategy for tea and we bought three companies payment. >> And when you Michael when you say issuing just so the audience has a sense of really what what does that mean so that the audience knows. >> So issuing is the the structure that sits behind Exodus Pay the ability to effectively put a card in somebody's wallet. Um, acquiring is the ability for them to accept the payment. So when I talk about issuing and acquiring, it's the two sides, make payment, take payment. Um, and so yeah, at TEA on the uh make payment side, issuing uh we bought three companies, paymentology to premier wallet and one of the things that was kind of missing in that strategy was was having the regulatory rails um the licenses. So I'd come across a company called Monovate. Uh but at the time uh Monovate had just started. It was in its infancy. So it wasn't really a right acquisition target. Uh and I ended up taking a sbatical uh from tea. Um started a different business um one for a different day. Uh but we um I ended up getting approached effectively by a head hunter to say, "Hey, there's this role going at a company called Monovate for a CEO they're looking for." And and >> and you didn't at that moment in time, you didn't know anybody at Monovate? >> No. >> Okay. >> No. Um so yeah so I got got approached and uh I knew immediately that it would be very interesting because you know if you look back everyone had been thinking about issuing from the technology centric perspective in in the world of processing. So processing is you know the effectively the the ability to authorize a transaction or decline the transaction. And my thought was two things are super interesting in the market at that time. This is 2000 beginning 2022. One is that you know it's the regulatory rails that builds the defensive moat. The way the world is moving if you own the regulatory rails and you can go to a customer and provide them a one-stop global solution you know that really was a differentiator because fundamentally today if you want to issue a car program um you know as a as a customer you know you'd have to go to maybe five or six different geographic environments to kind of set up that uh infrastructure to do global issuing. Um and the second part was you know I missed the whole uh crypto aspect when I was at Yo-Yo and so um you know as any good entrepreneur knows you don't look back with fondness about the things you succeed you look back and think how did I miss that so um when it came to money I was like look this web 3 environment is absolutely going to be the future we are going to be transacting on stable coins and so we need to build a company that is going to be uh a leader in that domain and so um yeah that's how we that's how I got into into Monovate and how we really sort of focused our minds on the world of web 3 and D5. >> Now before we get into the deal that that we have here, let's let's talk a little bit about the the customers that Monovate has and and let's provide a kind of a profile for the audience of your customers like you know the industry what percentage are in crypto versus non-crypto and let's just give a little bit of a sense and flavor there. >> Yeah. So, so I would describe Monovate as being the bridge that connects the world of traditional finance to the world of web 3, DeFi. And in what we've said internally for a long time is that web 3 is the future of fintech, but there's no web 3 without fintech. And what that translates to in terms of Monovate's approach to customer base is that we've obviously got a very uh good number of customers that sit in that traditional finance space. Um, and you know, there's different verticals that obviously you can look at in that space. So, for example, in the world of payroll, we have a couple of customers called Mar Trust and Ship Money. Um, and that's given them the ability to give seafarers uh a way to get paid when they're, you know, traveling around the world. Uh, we have a company like Hyperlayer, which is a form of Neo Bank. Um, we have customers like uh PCS, Korea, who are again a specialist um almost neo bank for uh migrant workers in the uh French markets. you know, we're actually in France, we're outside of the banks, the the biggest issue of uh card programs in in France. So, you know, it's a real mix and and what we also have built is a is effectively a supply chain payments infrastructure. And so, as we look into verticals like travel and insurance, um you know, we're seeing a lot of opportunity there. And again, all of that is traditional finance. Um and I mentioned obviously we were very early to focusing on the world of web 3 >> and we've got um you know in the first instance someone like banks was a customer which gave us the route through to the um self-custodial world but but monov came at it also from servicing the custodial world. So we have the likes of Kraken and OKX as kind of two marquee customers to reference there and obviously through our banks partnership relationship we have the likes of MetaMask and Ledger on the custodial side. So yeah, it's a good mix and and so in terms you asked about the percentage, you know, right now at least 50% of our pipeline is is the world of web 3 and DeFi. >> Nice. Nice. And I I'll say that uh for us at Exodus, one of the things that you know we we love that Monovate of course has such you know strong infrastructure in the world of web 3, but there was another aspect of this about being outside of the world of web 3 as as Michael had mentioned and actually getting to know some of of Monave's customers and understanding some of the use cases especially like you mentioned Mar Trust and you know how they are paying these employees of of cruise ships and and uh merchant ships all over the world and and that's not even powered by stable coins or crypto today. Is it that's that's correct? That's correct. >> Yeah. And so I think that just presents such a massive opportunity for for both of us now. >> For sure it does. I mean I you know the whole financial services infrastructure is clearly going to over the next you know x number of years migrate to one of you know real-time stable coin issuance and settlement. Um, you know, the concept of money moving literally physically across seas and borders, which really when it's just a movement on ledger is is going to be, you know, a thing of the past. And, you know, we could look at any vertical and just think about the same use case and just focus our time and attention. Each one of those is a multi- trillion dollar opportunity, whether it's insurance, whether it's payroll, whether it's travel. Um, so yeah, we've got an exciting future ahead of us. We've got a lot of work to do. >> Absolutely. And and I'll say that, you know, early in the the acquisition talks now, which is it's been 15 months when I think we we first kind of had this. >> Yeah. We've been dating a while. >> Yeah. That's a great Well, let's get married. >> I wonder if he's ever going to ask. >> Yeah. Let's get down. Wait. So, so I I I remember early in the conversations with with with Monivate and and this deal, I was talking to some some really big players in the space about card programs and and who they used for card programs. And I remember one of the big players in particular had mentioned they're like, "Yeah, you know, we're we're looking at a number of the the options out there and Monovate is is one of the major ones that we're considering." And I'm like, "Oh shit, we we got to go buy this company like ASAP." Because knowing that in the future that we'll be able to capture this this this business. So again, you guys have built such an impressive business. It's just it's been great. Let's talk about now. Okay. So kind of for for the audience here, it can be a little confusing in the sense of this acquisition and and so we're talking about Monivate, we're talking about banks. And so you had mentioned that banks is a customer of Monovate. Can and I know I know you touched on this and when it can you guys give the audience a little bit more depth on what that customer service provider relationship looks like and then we'll talk about how the acquisition deal came together. >> Yeah. So, so Monivate effectively is the foundation infrastructure for facilitating the issuance of cards. And what you then have on top of that is I, you know, you basically have a card program. And certain companies will be direct. They'll have their own card program plugged straight into the Monovate One infrastructure and others may want to do that via a third party that's known as a program manager. What the program manager does effectively is wrap a skin on top of the Monovate infrastructure to provide the holistic service. So they can say that they are providing um effectively one um stop uh one-stop uh solution to uh multiple customers. So you have a one to many through a program manager versus a onetoone where motivate is going direct. and and the the part that banks does that that makes what they've built interesting is effectively an account delegation authority which is what enables you to spend real time on chain uh at the point of sale. So you know when you go and buy whatever it may be a Coca-Cola you're spending you know your Ethereum uh you know that's been backing up uh into whatever wallet that you've um set up. So, you know, that is a very key piece of product IP that is very unique to banks and we were the first in the world to do that. Now, let's let's also talk about I think it's just so important to give everybody a sense more about Monovate. Let's talk about the the the the people and the culture and and one of the things that I will say is, you know, many of us have been out to the headquarters in in the UK and just how great all the people are. Like you can tell when you when you step into the Monovate offices, you can tell just how much the Monovate team cares so much about what what you guys are doing. Let's let's hear a little bit more about that. The culture and and the people and and how you build a company that hires and brings on such such great people. >> Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm immensely proud of what we've built at Monavate and the people that have been part of that journey getting us to where we are today. And knowing that we get to spend more time going forward together in a uh, you know, a bigger, better environment is really pleasing. Um, for me, look, I mean, all businesses, you know, whether they're succeeding or failing, it's, you know, easy to say, oh, the business is great or the business is not great. But the reality is it's the people, right? the people are e turning up every day and doing their job because they know what their job is. You know, back to the Bill Bichc thing, you know, one of my things was, you know, just do your job. I left out the the other bit that we say. Um, but, you know, it sounds very simple, but but actually you can really unpack that a lot when you talk to someone like what is your job and what somebody's view of their job is versus what you want their job to be. you know, you really kind of get into a lot of detail when you realize that actually it's all about communicating and owning your swim lane to a degree and making sure that you know if you rely on others around you that they know where you are on the pitch at any one point in time and within a company obviously it's knowing where we are in the process of delivery. So you know extreme communication becomes super important and transparency of communication and sometimes that transparency is about saying nice things sometimes it's about saying the hard things and so we've built um effectively a culture that's about you know just say it as it is and some people like it and some people don't and the ones that don't that's okay you don't have to be here right so we're quite transparent about that too it's sometimes it's employment so therefore it's a choice so we just have this extreme focus on making sure that everybody understands that, you know, the time you spend in life is very important and you get to make that decision. So don't come here and moan about it, right? But the fact you turn up, we love you, right? I want to do my best work with the people that want to turn up every day. So that's a big part of it. And then I think, you know, another piece that we we sort of really zone in on is ensuring that everyone should recognize that the environment that we're creating and what we're responsible as creating as the leadership is an environment where people can turn up and do their best work. And so they should hold us accountable for that, right? We're responsible. >> But how do you create that environment? I I love that. I mean, just let's double click on that. How do you how do you create that environment? I just think it's just through extreme honesty and transparency. Yeah. You know, and again like the reality of life like when things are going well, you don't really need to talk that much because it's kind of, you know, you know how to score the game. >> So, and you can see it's working or not, but >> but you expect it to work and you expect to win, right? So, it's about well, how we win the game becomes really important. And so, getting into that detail of, you know, never being satisfied fundamentally, right? I mean if you expect to win like I want to I want to make sure that we win in the best way possible and no matter what the score is we should score more right so I just think having this like really unabated appetite of ambition you know that is basically the limiter of your success so if it's unbound like anything should be possible but at the same time you have to be realistic it's not good enough just to be able to say hey I you know I think we should have an environment here that just wants to be extreme winners. Like you have to be able to define, well, how are we going to get there? And that again means you just have to have the hard conversations. If we're expected to win and we're winning, that's great. But along the way, if we're not winning better, you know, literally double click into that. What can we be doing better each and every day? Um, so that continuous cycle of wanting to improve and just be better tomorrow than we were today and hoping today we were better than we were yesterday. And I think that's, you know, that performance culture is super important and helping people understand how you score the game is at at the heart of that. >> One of the things too is is in meeting Michael, I just I noticed how uh direct he is. I mean, and then I'm going to spare some of the the anecdotes, but for me personally, I love to surround myself with people that are direct and and because I consider these kinds of people, if they're very direct to me, they're going to be very honest about how I we the team can get better. And I think that that's just really important because a lot of times you hear you see in business where just you have a lot a lot of praise, right? Praise, praise, praise. And and don't get me wrong, praise can be good at some point in times, but often I I get worried that praise can serve the ego, but the reality is when when you're direct and you give candid feedback, it can just make everybody so much better and uplevel people. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think the key word there you've used is ego, right? I mean, fundamentally what gets in each of our own way every day is our perception of self and sometimes that can be inflated, you know, greater than the reality of the delivery. So, I think if you've got an environment that keeps you honest and keeps that ego in check, um that's super important. And you know having been a a previous founder before and looking back at you know that experience and thinking about all the things that we could have done better you know I I think I probably experienced the death of the ego myself which and I realized the reason why we wasn't as good as we could have been perhaps in that previous journey is because I got in the way of a lot of things because I thought as the founder that I needed to do everything and in truth you realize that actually you know it's about hiring great people and just you know helping them do what they need to do each day and mainly getting out the way as much as possible. So, I'm super direct in that sense >> and and amen to that. So, you know, as as we've been talking about, you know, this this acquisition and deal, you know, it's been, you know, 15 months now and uh so, you know, we've talked about Monavate, we've talked about banks. Let's talk a little bit more of how this acquisition came together. So, so there's there's Monivate, there's banks, and then there's this parent corporation W3C. Let's talk a little bit of kind of the the fusion of that, and then we'll we'll dig into uh Exodus coming together here with W3C and Monovate. >> Yeah. So, the reason it took 15 months, we should add, is because Monovate and banks are regulated entities. There's a process of change of control that you have to go through. So ordinarily you would sign an SPA and expect to close a transaction but what what that change control process allows is effectively a period of time where you just have to wait right. So um but when you step back and banks prior to uh the Exodus transaction had already come to an agreement that we were going to merge the two companies together under a corporate vehicle that was called W3C. W3C is not a trading entity in any way shape or form. Um but it was the holding company that was being put together to essentially allow us to put Monovate and banks into one uh from two companies into one. Um and the concept of that was obviously going to come under the leadership of the Monovate team as well. And so you know we were at the very beginning of that journey. We'd come to an agreement to buy Monavate from its uh main shareholder at the time and we were going through that process and you know my thought at the time was okay I'm going to go raise a shit ton of money pardon my French for this new joint company because you know this is going to be a world beater and you know the only thing that we need is a bit of fuel in the tank. So that process had just got underway and I got uh you know I got got a call to say hey there's a company called Exodus that would you know like to have a chat and maybe thinking about buying W3C. So yeah at the very beginning I was like okay let's go. I like that. All right. So you had Okay. So along the way again 15 15 months 15 months and you had mentioned the the regulators and you know there's I I would say that that for for me as a a founder of of a business Exodus that Exodus by itself I I wouldn't say that it's it's of course there's regulations surrounding Exodus but it's not regulated in the same sense of of fintech and and payments. Can you just talk just a little bit more about kind of that difference and distinction there? So, Exodus being self custody and and the ability to send like stable coins and crypto and just a little bit more on the regulatory differences there between Monivate and Exodus. >> Yeah. So, you know, as I mentioned, Monovate comes from that traditional finance side of life. And because we are essentially enabling people to spend money, we have the principal memberships from Visa, Mastercard and Discover. But, but in order to have that, you have to be registered as what's known as an EMI. It's an electronic money institute. And the way to think about it is it's pretty much like a small bank license. Um, the US actually is a market that has the most different to that setup. the rest of the world actually works around this EMI concept and when you're regulated as if you are basically a banking uh you know providing banking service there's clearly a lot of responsibility you've got for customer funds and the regulator is there to ensure that nothing nefarious happens at the end of the day to the customer funds and so as a CEO or as a you know a shareholder in a in a regulated entity you've basically got a um responsibility to a higher order and that order is the the regulator. So it's it does come with a lot of responsibility you know we we have at times when you know you see in the market that something goes wrong with you know a program or a program manager you know at the core of it what people will really always be wondering is like what about the consumers you know what about the money are they going to be okay and and our job as a regulated entity is to make sure the answer to that is yes because we take responsibility ultimately for making sure that the money is always held in a trusted safeguarded environment. And in the world of crypto, if we look back from the history perspective, obviously it didn't necessarily have that sort of legal framework in which to operate and regulate itself um regulate, you know, instead it was kind of like self-regulation which mean well we can probably get away with this in the terms and conditions and you know that's why we have some stories that have led the path to where the regulation in crypto is going to start looking more and more like it does for traditional finance. um you know for example miker in in Europe um clarity act coming you know here so there's a lot there's a lot effectively of coalesing of these two different industries becoming one and the same thing back to that point that fintech is the enabler of web 3 but web 3 is the future of fintech and on top of that I think it's just so impressive the the again with with what motivates build and that that that regulated infrastructure and so for us as a business you know when we publicly announced announced that this was in November of the end of last year. And so the the the deal was 175 million cash end of end of last year. And and so what a lot of people I think miss in all that is that once you do a deal like that of a regulated business, the deal just it it doesn't close. It's not like, oh, it's done. Here you go. Here's 175 million. Now we own the businesses. It's there's this period of of kind of waiting. You wait for approvals from the regulators. Let's talk a little bit about that and kind of the the uncertainty that comes along with all of that and and just kind of let's let's have the audience hear more about that. >> And by the way, sorry. By the way, guys, remember that QR code, you can you can scan it and you can ask your questions because we're going to have Michael later today. He's going to be a part of our leadership AMA. So, sorry. Go ahead. So until it's done, it's not done, right? I mean, that's the golden rule. And when do you know it's done? Well, it's when the money's in the bank. So until that point, fundamentally, things can happen. And you know, we we and I'm sure you guys have obviously followed what's gone on. We a lot of it's in the public domain. >> Yeah. >> Um so there was, you know, some sideways action for a while. Um that can also happen in any M&A transaction. So yeah, we've we had a little bit of fun along the way there. Um but what it's enabled actually the positives is that you know most M&A lives and dies by what happens next right and that's basically you've got two cultures coming together because you got two different groups of people doing things different ways and I think Jack Welch said it best right there's no such thing as a merger of equals so what you really need is you need to know that if you're acquiring a company that they subscribe to the cultural environment that you have created as the as the purchasing party. And you know, back to the word ego, right? A lot of the time it goes wrong because you got people trying to work with new people and you've got egos in the way. We've had the benefit of getting to know each other actually and and and our relationships been forged in a little bit of fire. >> Yeah. >> I think that's a great way to put it. Yes. >> Um and so, you know, we're at the point now where the transactions closed. We don't have to wait to figure out how we're going to dance together, right? We've kind of learned how to do that along the way. And it's the same for the people on both sides of the business. there's been a lot of coming together as we've navigated some of this complexity that came up. And so for me, you know, as much as it was a real pain in the ass and I think at certain times very unnecessary, all I'm going to look back on is realize that there's so many positives that we've got out of it because we're going to just hit the ground running, you know, and the expectation is having wasted time on things that I think were unnecessary. It just really increases my hunger and appetite to make sure we just get on with things because we got into this knowing that the the opportunity we've got to build that one-stop final app you're ever going to need for finance. Like I feel like my last 25 years of career have been all about this, right? I'm I've seen this generational shift because of technology and the way in which people interact with financial services and product. And so yeah, like I'm like let's kind of get on with it. Well, when you when you talk about that uncertainty, I mean, just I I relate with it so much. I mean, along the way over the again, over the last few months as we've been talking to potential new partnerships and existing partnerships, you know, there's a lot of partners that will will look at the the like, oh, okay, you haven't closed yet, but you're you're gonna close. You don't fully quite know when. Well, we can put this deal together. We just can't sign on it until it's finished. So, I mean I know like I a little birdie told me yesterday was your birthday. Is that is that's right. Right. Yeah. >> Yeah. That's been gone. >> Yeah. Yesterday was your birthday, but but we we again we closed on this officially yesterday. So, I know it was your birthday, but man, I got to tell you it felt like my birthday is how it how it felt. So, so I I don't know. I again that the journey has been it's been incredible to experience and we'll kind of kind of kind of close out on on this um over over the last 15 months and especially the last five months and especially the last two months when it got really hard and I will tell you I have felt like I have been to hell and back with how hard it's been at times. What kept you going through all of this? Like what kept you going? What kept you motivated? Because it would be very easy to be like this is just not worth it. Like I'm just I'm I'm done with this. We're going to just go build. Like just just I'm done. What kept you going through all of this? So it's a really good question. Um basically you know first order of priorities is what do you really believe right and I really believe in the value of bringing our two companies together really believe it in my heart that what we can build with the endto-end product and technology stack that we've got between us that this is now purely just about executing the go to market right and that's actually the fun bit so so you know the I never lost any of my belief around what we're doing this for. And then the second part is um you know a little bit you don't come this far to lose, right? Like you know if you're going to set your mind and and your ambition on a on a goal, you have to win. And it means that no matter what, like you've got to get through it, whatever it takes to win. Sometimes you can win easily and sometimes you got to win ugly, but you got to win. And and I just, you know, I think Jason Hung said it recently in a way that I thought really simplified it quite well, right? Winners win and losers lose. So, you know, and I don't want to be a loser. You know, I've got three young boys that are growing up that look up to me and I don't want them to sort of have this vision of their dad was like, "Yeah, the guy nearly got there, but he never quite made it." You know, they it's kind of, you know, hold yourself to account and and I look at the team at Monovate as well as an example in this, right? And there were two ways in which I scored the game while we were going through this this sort of sideways motion for a period of time. One was are we still signing new customers because this stuff was in the public domain. Can we still sign customers? We did. And the second was do we get to the finish line with the same people that were in the room at the beginning that started this journey with us? Because obviously if people lose faith it means that you know what they believe in has been shaken. And so, you know, I'm very very proud to say we didn't lose a single person at Monovate as a result of what we were going through. And and that's again goes back to kind of like, you know, there is no other option than winning. >> I want to I want to build on that for a moment. You may not remember this as well as I do, but you and I had a conversation. It was about two or three weeks ago, and this conversation, you know, it was we were you and I were facing some really intense stuff. not with but it was with kind of the whole situation that was surrounding it >> and I and I remember I I said to you and I was like hey you know hey dude how you doing and and that's what I said I'm like I said like no like how are you doing you remember what you said to me >> I'm fine >> that's not what you said that's not what you said no no no no you you you said you said how am I doing JP it's not about how I'm doing you said it's how how is how's my team doing and my team's doing great and that's what I'm focused on that's what you to me >> and and that was something that the moment that you said that and really again emphasiz you've done this the entire time you've really emphasized the quality of the team your team over you and that's that is a quality that I among many that I've really admired about you and that was when like the definitive moment for me I was like yes we got to keep pushing we got to keep fighting and for that I appreciate that I appreciate you >> thank you >> ladies and gentlemen thank you for everything. That was great. That was great. Enjoyed that, dude. Thank you. >> Thank you, JP. Thank you, Michael. So, lunch is going to be served where breakfast was in Mammal Hall. So, that's these doors right here. Um, coffee is ready and the food's going to be out shortly because we're a little bit of ahead of ahead of schedule right now, but we'll reconvene here at 12:55 sharp. So, meet someone you haven't met yet, and we'll see you back at 12:55. Thanks. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey. Hey. Hey. You see you feel you. Heat. Heat. Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. I know. I know, right? Heat. Heat. Okay, good news everyone. Lunch is served. So if you want to make your way to Mammo Hall, uh just behind these doors, you can uh enjoy some lunch just where breakfast was served. Okay, we'll be back here at 12:55. I'm steppy. Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. I'm not Black crazy. Denn D. Hey. Hey. Yeah. Heat. Heat. Hey, Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, hey, hey. Back. Back. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Hey, Heat. Heat. Heat. I don't know. I don't know. I know. I know. I don't think I I know. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. All right. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, I can't do I can't do What I can't do I'm done. down every Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Hallelujah. Wonder. You know, you'll see you Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Step up. Set the game up. Hey, go. Heat. Hey, Heat. The program will resume in 5 minutes. Please make your way to your seats. Heat. Heat. Hey. Please find a seat. The program will resume in 2 minutes. Okay. Heat. Heat. Please take a seat and turn your mobile devices to their off or silent mode. The program is ready to begin. Heat. Hey, Heat. Please take a seat and turn your mobile devices to their off or silent mode. The program is ready to begin. By the way, Keith, find your seat, please. Keith, welcome back. I hope you guys had a great lunch. Before we get into afternoon programming, Kevin Wood and Michael Rolf are back on stage for a special announcement. Please welcome them. All right, welcome back everybody. Uh we're going to take a few minutes here to talk about uh a new partnership X is entering to with this new journey we're on with Monivate and banks. uh Exus is entering into a letter of intent with Visa for global issuance. So this has a big impact on our ability to issue cards, Exodus cards uh throughout the world uh sands a few countries, but it's also going to have a lot of benefit for our business for our partners at Monivate and banks and we're going to let Michael talk on that and and the benefit there. Michael would love to hear about it. >> Yeah, I mean in short what it enables is us to be able to issue uh cards for our programs uh in pretty much every country in the world barring a list of 12. Uh so it enables a speed of go to market to uh be expedited for those customers that want to have a global uh franchise base of customers. Um from our perspective as well what it does quite nice is it it cleans up uh the aspect of the motivate banks um relationship as well. uh and it's uh obviously working with Visa will expand the number of potential partnership opportunities that come as a result of working with them directly uh with a view that we can issue anywhere in the world. So we're really excited for this partnership to continue to grow Monavease business, continue to offer new countries to Exodus users as well and we're looking forward to kicking things off with Visa here in the coming months. Thank you. Thank you both. This afternoon we are turning to the assets themselves. Everything treasuries, equities, private credit is moving onchain and the question is which wallet holds it when it gets there. Joining JP for the conversation is one of the most credentialed founders in the space. He built compound. He now runs Superstate, which is putting tokenized treasuries and equities into the hands of everyday investors. Please welcome Robert Lesner and JP Richardson. Like that hat. Look at that hat. That's a great hat. I want to know where you get that hat. Well, Robert, thank you for being with us here today. I know when I when I called you up and invited you to come out here and join us on the stage, one of the things you told me, you said, JP, I'm only going to come out to Omaha if you promise me a good Nebraska steak. >> It's true. >> So, I'm curious, what this and I'm sure everybody else is dying to know this. What is What is your favorite uh cut? >> I like a ribeye. >> You like a ribeye? >> I'm a simple man. I'm a simple man. >> And And if just a ribeye were to magically appear, what kind of sides do you like with your ribeye? >> Oh, uh I like green things. Um I like asparagus. I like green beans. Um I I can do some, you know, heavy mashed potato type stuff, too. Some mac and cheese, but you know, I'm a simple man. >> Okay. Okay. Fair enough. Fair enough. You know what? Thank you. Thank you. How do you >> That That's actually some of the most or that would have been a terrible thing to mess up because if it's like a well done steak, can a person likes it medium rare? Well, >> well, how do you like >> I feel like I have the canonical medium rare answer. Um I feel like you can't go wrong there. >> I don't know. I don't know. Do you Okay, sorry. We're going to tangent on just one more steak thing. When you when somebody orders a steak, well done. Do you happen to judge them? >> You know, I'll be honest. I I haven't really seen it in person. I don't think I've had like any friends who have done that. So, actually, I'm zero. >> Maybe I'm hanging out the wrong crew because I have some people that order steaks. Well done. I'm like, what are you doing? >> Okay. All right. All right. Enough about stakes. Um, so let's let's kind of talk about your your background and history. I mean, I've always thought of you as a builder, someone that's very forward thinking and and we'll get into that later. >> But you are, too. >> Oh, thank you. Uh well we we'll get into that conversation of kind of building and and here in a little bit but let's talk about so you're currently you started superstate before superstate you built compound let's roll back just before compound because I think this is a really pivotal moment for I think the audience to understand what compound is. But before we even touch on compound, why don't you just even just give a a touch of DeFi, right? A lot of people hear the word DeFi. And DeFi means so many different things to so many different people. So, how would you kind of describe Defi to just the kind of the the mainstream person? >> Yeah. I I was actually in the group chat when we came up with the name DeFi, >> so we can we can credit you for that. >> Uh there's others that were involved, too. But you know the way I describe DeFi is using computer programs right we implement these computer programs using smart contracts generally um but using computer programs on blockchains that are open source that are transparent that anyone can interact with to build financial products and financial markets and financial processes that are resilient and robust and work 247 and globally and are not prone to some of the shitty parts of traditional financial markets and traditional financial products. >> Let's double click on that just a little bit. Oftentimes when people talk about DeFi, a word that gets associated with DeFi is is this word called permissionless, right? The permissionless nature of DeFi. What is that what does that really mean for DeFi to be permissionless? >> Yeah, I mean it really starts and inherits all the properties of like the first blockchain Bitcoin, right? Which is Bitcoin is permissionless. you know, you can literally, you know, spin up an address to receive Bitcoin, right, without talking to anybody. And once you have it, you can send it without talking to anyone. You don't need anyone's permission, period. Right? The evolution beyond that you know with you know smart contracts and computing platforms like Ethereum Salana any other blockchain is that you can apply that same logic not just to like I have an asset and I don't have to like talk to anyone to do stuff with it to I don't have to ask anyone's permission to interact with this you know financial market or this other tool and you know we're starting to see you know evolutions beyond that as well where there are products where you might want permission where it's you know using some bank's network or interacting with securities and and issuer things that require a little bit more sign off. But like the foundation of DeFi is, you know, there's a financial product. I can go use it and I can use it at 3 in the morning in my pajamas or I could use it, you know, at 400 p.m. in a suit. It doesn't matter. It's the same thing. I just need a computer. I need a wallet and I need to figure out just how to interact with this. I remember, so this was back, this may have been about 20 2018, 2019 and and I was driving and I really explicitly remember I was I was listening to you on a podcast and on this podcast you were you were talking about Compound and the future of Compound and I was like, "Oh my gosh, this dude is is really thinking about things like nobody else is thinking about." I'm like, "I've got I've got to beat this dude." And and so le let's kind of get into compound now if you'd explain for everybody what is compound and and then what like how did you get into this idea and what's the motivation? Let's let's hear about that. >> Yeah. So you know I was never really into crypto up until about like 2017. Like I like you know bought an ASIC from Butterfly Labs in like 2013 and tried to mine some Bitcoin with >> what's what's an ASIC so that they know. >> Yeah. It basically >> do but just in case. >> Customized like you know hardware to mine Bitcoin more efficiently. Right. Um I never made any money. I was like oh cool that was my like 2013 Bitcoin experience. Um you know I've read you know the Bitcoin white paper. I've read the Ethereum white paper. And I was like, you know, I was impressed by these things, but I was never really into it because I didn't really know what we were supposed to do with it, right? I didn't, in my head, I was not like, oh, it's all it's all going to replace financial markets. I was like, it's really cool tech, but what do you do with it? And then it was, you know, like two years later and I read about this thing called the DAO. The DAO was the first, I'll call it like a decentralized venture capital fund that someone had built on the Ethereum blockchain using smart contracts. And it was really the very first experiment in like societal history of using this new programming concept called like a smart contract and building a financial product with it. And >> and what would you what would you say that that financial product was? because I I remember that moment and I remember the amount of intense excitement like to your point about like the Dow and and and by the way it's it's spelled you know differently as an acronym right when you think of Dow you probably many of you think of like Dow Jones uh but for the cryptos that were >> back in this what what 2015 2016 yeah >> is yeah okay so the Dow DAO >> DAO >> uh so what does the DAO stand for >> decentralized autonomous organization >> yep okay and so the Dow Oh, sorry I interrupt. What What is What does it do for people? >> Here's what it was. Why were they so excited? >> Yeah. It was a computer program and you could send it your ether. You could send it your money and you could then use your investment in this to like vote on how the collective thing would invest your money, right? And that's what it was. It was like a really simple weird like crowd organized venture capital fund. And the idea was that it would succeed and people would make lots of money and be a lot of fun. The problem was, you know, this was like one of the first uses of a smart contract or computer program on a blockchain. And it had a bug in it. And it had a bug to let somebody steal all the money. >> How much money? Because this is important. >> I mean, it was at the Okay. At the time, Ether was like, you know, it was like $10 or something, you know, like so like the total amount of money was not what we now consider to be catastrophic. I thought it was wasn't like a hundred million dollars. >> Yes. It was like >> 100 million isn't catastrophic to you? >> I'm hanging out with this guy more. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. >> Yeah. No, it was a big deal. But like, you know, it really would be the equivalent of like, you know, like $30 billion. It was like, you know, today because like Ether's gone up a lot since then, right? Um, you know, at the time it was like catastrophic because it was like 10% of like, you know, the Ether on the blockchain. It's like in this DAO that had a bug and it got hacked. And I actually discovered this. I wasn't like paying attention to Ethereum or the blockchain. I actually like read about this on Bloomberg. You know, it was it was dunking on the Dow and Ethereum. It was like, you know, catastrophic bug, you know, like all the money stolen Ethereum blockchain forking to like undo, you know, this first DeFi application. >> So, okay. So, you you learned about the Dow, you heard about the Dow, and then walk us from this moment into compound. >> Yeah. So I was blown away. Like I saw this and like some light bulb in my head went off like by the way like as the Dow was blowing up. I was like oh my god like what if you could use this technology in ways that didn't blow up spectacularly? Like what can you actually do with this if you like were to build it correctly? And I had a light background in software engineering. I'm not like a software engineer but I I knew just enough that I was like huh like I don't know anything about solidity. Like I'm gonna look into this. And you know, it was like late 2016. There was like some ICOs happening. That was part of the mania of this whole thing. And I was like eyeballing solidity and I was like paying attention to all of this for the first time. >> Okay. So ICO solidity, let's let's give the audience solidity. What would you say? What what is solidity for the audience? >> It's a programming language that is used to write these computer programs on the Ethereum blockchain. and it's also now the programming language that's used on lots of other uh L2s and systems that have used Ethereum's programming environment. >> Okay. So then let's hit ICO because I think ICO we're it's going to be really important later in this conversation to come back to how does an ICO compare to what you're doing today with superstate and tokenized equities. So we'll come to that later, but if you could give the audience a little bit of a definition of ICO so we can move into that later. >> Yeah. So an ICO is an evolution of something that had been happening in crypto for a while. You know in crypto historically not happening using smart contracts on a blockchain but like throughout crypto's history people have said hey send me crypto and you'll get a new blockchain token in return. Um Ethereum itself was created through an ICO. It was like hey send us Bitcoin and you'll get Ether in return. There have been there had been a number of different um ICOs in history where people had raised money using crypto and people basically crowdfunded it, right? Think of it as like crypto crowdfunding. And what was happening on Ethereum was because there was now this programming language and these smart contracts instead of like having these ICOs that were honestly based on trust like I can't believe any of these ICOs like prior to this. >> Right. Right. You because you could just run off >> and there was there was many of them where I just remember this there was this is mania at the time. Right. You you could invest like people were investing hundreds of millions of dollars in these projects >> on a hope and prayer. >> Yeah. On a hope and prayer. They have, you know, have big vision. Yeah. >> And there's there's no regulatory disclosures or anything of that nature. And but there was just so much mania at that moment in time. >> People were posting on like the Bitcoin talk forums like send me crypto to this address and good things will happen. >> Yes. >> And like people did it like sometimes good things happen and sometimes they ran off with the money. Yes. >> Right. But what was happening on Ethereum by like late 2016, like early 2017 was because of these computer programs, it was no longer based on this like hope and a prayer. You could like interact with a program on the blockchain and you could put your money in and you could get the token from it and it was not like this like waiting game where you crossed your fingers and you were like, I really hope this guy like follows through on their promise. >> Yes. Well, you built something very real and tangible with Compound. >> Yes. And you know, I watched all these ICOs happening. It was like the first use cases for smart contracts that weren't blowing up, right? Like the DAO is this thing that like had a bug in it and ended horribly. But then people started using this new technology of like you can program something on a blockchain for ICOs. And I said, "Okay, well, what else can you do with it?" And you know, my wheels were spinning and I just, you know, I I went for a really long walk one day. You like, you know, through San Francisco and I was like just like trying to think about all the things you could do with this technology. And I probably went on like walks for like four weeks. And at the end of it, I was like, ICOs kind of solved this trust factor, right? Where like you didn't have to just like literally send someone crypto and like cross your fingers, you know, because of the computer program, you could like honestly like interact with people even when you didn't trust them. even when you thought something was shady or like the person on the other side was not to be trusted. And that's kind of the root of crypto in the first place is like you can like solve coordination problems and all these trust problems with blockchains and computer code. And so I sort of looked at it from the ground up and I said, "Okay, well, what in crypto requires trust that isn't solved because no one has built yet?" And for me, it was like lending crypto, right? It was like you still at this time had lots of people being like I want to borrow crypto. I promise I'll pay it back. There had been so many experiments with this. All of them had ended in tears. And it was because like there was nothing that required someone to pay it back. You know, at best you had like a legal contract signed on like, you know, a PDF and like you had the courts, but that wasn't very crypto. But now with this technology to like program assets, I said, "Well, actually, we can like enforce this on the blockchain using computer code." And like the way it would work is you could put your crypto in and then borrow something else. This is before stable coins were invented. So like there wasn't that many people who like wanted to borrow crypto using some other crypto as collateral, you know, locked up with, you know, a computer program. But as soon as stable coins basically like took hold, especially on the Ethereum blockchain, then all of it just made sense to myself and made sense to everybody, which was like, oh, what do you do with this? You put your crypto there and you borrow stable coins against it and no one's able to run off with the money on either side of this. It's all like enforced using a computer program. And suddenly you had a system that worked where even if the person you were interacting with was like a hoodlum and like wanted to steal your money, they couldn't. And so like suddenly there was a safe way to like put up your crypto, borrow money or lend money to people using crypto as collateral. >> I want to say when again when I when I saw compound I thought it was one of the most innovative inventions ever because for Exodus as a wallet, right, we have so much crypto in the wallet and the crypto is just just it's just sitting there, right? it's just sitting there and you know of course people can spend they can do their things with crypto but they're still not putting that capital to work and one of the I think again one of the most innovative things that you built with compound is that it allows a consumer to come in deposit their crypto and also earn um a a yield on it and and so for us at Exodus like early on we had um an integration with Compound again where the consumer could deposit crypto and actually earn some yield and and that was just such a very innovative thing that you built and and so it was just from the consumer perspective to get start to get more utility from crypto it was just amazing. >> Yeah. It was one of the first times you could like use your assets productively without the fear that somebody was just going to like run off with them. >> Right. Yeah. So, okay. So, you you're on the forefront. you've built compound and a great product and then you know now today you you've built Superstate. Let's talk about how did you come up with it? Did you take a bunch of walks again for for weeks to come up with Superstate? Is that what you did? Like talk about how you came up with the idea for Superstate. >> Yeah. So, you know, it was like, you know, late 2022, you know, this is after FTX had blown up. This is after Genesis had blown up. This is after BlockFi had blown up. This is after All these things in crypto had blown up over the last like nine months. Really starting with like Terra Luna and like an unbacked algorith algorithmic stable coin blowing up. There's just like this like long domino effect of just like things going wrong in crypto. And you know after like nine months of just watching all these dominoes fall and like everything blowing up I said like okay well where is crypto really going to succeed right? Where is it really going and like what does it take to get there? And as somebody that was like the founder of a DeFi protocol that was like honestly like incredibly resilient and robust like you know everything in crypto had blown up but like these DeFi protocols hadn't right like Compound hadn't lost anyone's money. It was like still working just as good as it ever had. But everybody's like excitement in the space had like dissipated right like almost overnight. And you know, I took another like set of very long walks through, you know, uh, the neighborhood and I thought to myself like, well, what's going to make DeFi succeed? And to me, when I like zoomed out and looked at DeFi, you know, it had proven itself as this unbelievable proof of concept about how you could build a financial market that operated 247, 365, in an open source way where anyone could like see how it worked. They could know that it's fair. They could know that no one can steal your assets. But the only assets that you could actually use in it were crypto tokens. It was like you could use Ether in it. You could use, you know, wrapped Bitcoin. It was like Bitcoin put inside an Ethereum token. You could use, you know, the Ethereum tokens of like other DeFi protocols and like projects, but like there weren't that many assets that you could use in DeFi. And this applied to Compound, this applied to, you know, Uniswap and automated market makers. this applied to all DeFi is that the list of assets you could actually use it with was quite limited. It was only cryptonnative projects tokens. That's the only thing you could like put inside of DeFi. And as a DeFi founder, I sort of like took a step back and I thought about this and I said, "Well, what's the ceiling here? Like how big can this actually get? Like where's this going?" And in my head, I was like, well, if we can't add new assets into this system, and the only thing we can use for like trading on a blockchain or like using as collateral to borrow lend on a blockchain are like these like 15 tokens and like whatever new token someone makes next week. I was like, it's not really going to scale. Like, we're not going anywhere. And so in my mind like the next step would be well how do you take these properties of a DeFi protocol you know like like these really awesome attributes of like you can like safely let people like do financial activity on a blockchain and combine it with the biggest assets in the world which is like the 700 trillion dollars of stuff which isn't on a blockchain yet like it hasn't figured out a way to like become a token to be able to interact with a DeFi protocol. They said, "Well, actually, you know, that's the opportunity." It's like, "How do we bring all assets onto a blockchain where they can interact with smart contracts, DeFi protocols, wallets, all of this new infrastructure?" And you started Okay, so you had you had this idea for Superstate. You said around 2022. When did you actually start the company? >> April 23. >> Geez. Okay. So you started superstate with the as the thought of and of like let's go out let's tokenize a bunch of assets let's bring real world securities onchain into an administration that was hostile to crypto what I mean that's one of the most boldest things I've ever heard. So what made you decide to do that? Yeah, I mean, you know, it did seem like a crazy like suicide mission at the time, right? Like I told people I was like, "Yeah, I'm going to like start a company in the US to take US securities and turn them into tokens and bring them on chain like in the Gary Gendler like SEC." And everybody laughed me out of the room. Um, in the same way they like everyone laughed compound out of the room when I first proposed the idea because like it sounded crazy at the time. You know, the thing that I'm relatively good at is like looking like three years in the future and seeing like, well, what's it going to look like? I'm not like a futurist who can predict like AI and predict things 10 years down the road. But like, you know, I basically thought to myself like, well, clearly we're going to turn the corner at some point, you know, like we can't have, you know, an environment where assets can't come on the blockchain. That's ridiculous. Like, I may as well get started on this now. And so I started in 2023 and our approach was like really simple to start. It was like we just want to bring securities on a blockchain. And the simplest way to start was how do we bring T- bills on the blockchain? You know, no one's going to lose their money in T- bills. No one has to worry about how volatile they are. Like the government's not afraid of them. you know, it's a good like sandbox to figure out the mechanics of tokenizing an asset because up until this point, there had been like experiments honestly dating back all the way to like 2017 of like trying to tokenize, you know, assets or tokenize real estate or tokenize security or like tokenize things and bring them on the blockchain. There had been experiments. None of them had like really succeeded at scale. Um, and so given that sort of like prior art, I said, "Well, let's start with something really simple that like we can wrap our head around and like understand what it takes, understand the advantages and the disadvantages and the easy parts and the hard parts and like use this as our proving ground before we move on to like more complicated stuff." >> Absolutely. And and for us at Exodus, I mean, we we tokenized our stock. It was in it was in in 2021 and we we did it on Algrand and and and to your point I mean as we've we as we've evolved our journey and story you know we wanted to do more with our tokenized stock we wanted to think like is it possible for you know people to trade stock on chain is it possible for people to take loans on their stock how can we take advantage of you know not only the you know the great things algrand but how can we use other chains and again not for the consumer to even care about it's like how do we maximize the utility that the chain offers for the investor, for the consumer. And so I I think let's see, you and I started chatting about a lot of these efforts and initiatives. I think I don't know 20 2024 maybe is roughly around that time. >> Yeah. And you know, for the record, like you and Exodus were way ahead of everybody in thinking about like tokenized stock, right? Like Exodus is the first company that has had publicly traded stock on the blockchain, right? Like that is a really cool fact that I don't think the world gives Exodus enough credit for. >> Well, thank you. I mean I I I to me I think again I I think it's one of the mo one of the coolest things in the world to actually give investors that that power and opportunity. And so again like one of the things like you guys were just very forward thinking about this. just talk a little bit about uh you know talk about kind of 2024 and and and before we had the turn of administration what were you what were the things that you were thinking about that you really wanted to make sure that investors could make happen by working with you guys? >> Yeah. So the things that we wanted to make happen, you know, we started off by, you know, tokenizing funds like, you know, specifically private funds for accredited investors and like we started here because, you know, it was the most, you know, regulatory straightforward asset to tokenize. And that's where we thought we were going to be for a while. When the administration changed, we said, "Okay, now there's like finally an SEC that instead of trying to, you know, annihilate everything having to do with crypto is actually trying to encourage people to use crypto and blockchains in productive ways." Like that was the ultimate sea change and that accelerated our thinking on like how quickly we could come to market to work with, you know, companies like Exodus. Um, we thought we were we were fearful that we'd have to stay in like, you know, private fund territory for a lot longer potentially. Um, but we always wanted to like bring every asset on chain and part of that is having the right regulatory tailwinds or at least open-mindedness that finally, you know, existed when, you know, Atkins became the chair of the SEC. >> So, so let's talk about that now. I mean with the change administration you know obviously as I mentioned earlier like for Exodus it's been you know a great change for I mean and not not just Exodus and Superstate really about any company in the industry talk a little bit about uh you know how you see things with the SEC how things have changed for superstate and the industry >> I mean it it's a it's a 180 right so you know crypto as a topic should be bipartisan nonpartisan like crypto is not, you know, something that either side should be like excited about or trying to like crush, right? Crypto is a technology. It's, you know, technology should be boring, right, at the end of the day. And you know, we we basically, you know, we had this unfortunate reality that like for whatever reason it became politicized, right? like during the Biden administration like he appointed the wrong people and they took the ball and they ran in the exact wrong direction with it. >> Well, I know and everybody was so excited about Gary Gendler, the former SEC chair coming in. They were so excited because he was he was an MIT professor that would teach courses on crypto. >> Yeah. There's videos of him, right? Correct me if I'm wrong. There's videos of him saying, you know, talking about securities laws pre before being an SEC Yeah. chairman, right? >> People thought that, you know, the prior SEC was hard on crypto. They were like, "Oh, Clayton, like they were cracking down on ICOs." Like Gary Gendler's going to come in and like open up the floodgates, right? And the exact opposite happened. Um, surprisingly, and like there's a lot of reasons. I'm not going to speculate on why he detourred that hard, but it was it was a bad detour. And now like we're finally at a point where I think we have incredibly level-headed regulators who, you know, everyone I think was hoping that, you know, when there was a new administration, they'd be like, you know, it's a free-for-all. It's the wild west, like going nuts. You know, in a lot of ways, they haven't moved as quickly as I think some people have been hoping. They've been very measured and like levelheaded in like introducing guidance and like new like policy recommendations and, you know, helping to steer things in the right direction. But, you know, there's still a lot of like to-dos and like, you know, I think over the coming months and, you know, we're going to have more that gets unlocked by the SEC. Um, but they're taking a very deliberate and methodical approach to like letting people sort of start to use the blockchain for securities and for traditional assets. So, let's let's talk about that a little bit more. Let's double click on that. So, if I'm say say I'm I'm a company, you know, not exist obviously, I'm I'm a company and I want I want to put my stock on the blockchain. What what do you tell me as a company is is why why should I care about putting my stock on the blockchain? >> Yeah, it's it's a great question and we're we're kind of in like what I would call like the beginning of the second act of, you know, probably a fouract play of, you know, the tokenization of securities and companies like Exodus Stock. So where we're at now today in America is, you know, a company like Exodus, you can tokenize your shares. The same shares that are trading on the stock market, you know, those same shares can move between a brokerage wallet and a token on a blockchain. Like this has been proven out and it works. Those shares can interact with DeFi protocols in a limited way. you know um you know today for some issuers you know we have D5 protocols and Ethereum and Salana where they can take stock and they can borrow against it right this is something that I hope is unlocked for exodus soon um you can borrow against it we're almost at the era where for you know canonical shares in the US the SEC will allow them to trade on decentralized exchanges or AMMs this hasn't happened yet they're sort of like rolling >> you have I and and and just can can you give like maybe a sense of are we are we a few months are we a few years and just however you feel comfortable answering that I don't >> I would measure it in months >> months okay >> not days and not years >> okay >> but months but we're at the point now we're like soon we will hopefully have guidance on like how actual securities the same one that's trading on the stock exchange right are going to trade on decentralized exchanges they've been working up to this guidance they've come out with guidance recently for, you know, when is a website or a wallet a broker, right? Like very helpful guidance so that like people will be able to interact with these decentralized exchanges on blockchains and like at some point soon like I expect and hope that there's going to be additional guidance that's going to start to open the doors. So now if I'm I' if I'm an investor, why do I ultimately care about this technology? I mean, I it's like, well, I I could have my stocks in in Robin Hood or Erade or things like that. Like, why why do I really care as an investor to have my stocks on the blockchain? >> Yeah, there's a few reasons. I I'll I'll list them out. So, the first one is that, you know, when you have your stocks in a brokerage account, you know, it's not your name on the company's books and records. This is like, you know, an abstract concept. you know, do you care if it's like, you know, the DTC's name and then they record your broker's name and then your broker records your name? Like, not really. But, you know, there's less risk and there's like it's a little bit more old-fashioned if you're directly on the company's books and records and they know who you are. It means like in the event of death or bankruptcy or all these things, there's a much more clear claim for the fact that you are the actual shareholder. Um, and so, you know, when you're tokenizing a share natively, like, you know, we do with Exodus, you know, you cut out a lot of middlemen in terms of recording the ownership. It's a way more direct relationship between you as an investor and the company. You're like on the company's official books, and that's really cool, even though it probably won't come up for most people. The second is that over time, it's going to cut costs dramatically, right? when you start to cut out a lot of different middlemen and you sort of strip all that away and you have like I am a token holder shareholder and I can interact with a decentralized exchange or a decentralized borrow lend protocol and it's just me and the like financial product and it settles when I transfer the token and like it's all happening onchain in my wallet. you're cutting out a lot of different layers of cost and friction and time and you know inefficiency and that's going to lead to just cheaper everything right like one of the best examples of like why can a blockchain offer something cheaper and better you know the fact is like a computer program doesn't have any employees right that's a good thing and a scary thing but like you know computer programs running on a blockchain can build hundred billion dollar things with like no offices no real estate no headcount that work 24/7 365, right? You don't need the same cost profile of like traditional financial services. You can have like radically efficient financial products and so it's going to cut cost down. It's not a today thing that's like a overtime thing, but that's like happening right now. And lastly, there's, you know, portability, right? If I want to move shares, whether it's to JP as my friend or to like my cousin on his birthday or to a different broker or to, you know, a different way of like providing safekeeping, it's under my control. It takes like two seconds for me to change where it lives as opposed to like today moving assets out of like a brokerage account is like really really annoying. Yeah, I was gonna say one of the things for for me when I think about it is like today that's that's ex you hit it right there is that like if I have stock in Robin Hood to transfer my stock out of Robin Hood to another brokerage it takes time. It takes days. >> I mean you'll probably just sell everything and then buy it. >> Yeah, that's what people and to me that that's crazy like because you we know being more crypto native if you have Bitcoin in in in Exodus or Coinbase whatever it is that you can easily just send and transfer the Bitcoin immediately. And I just think that's so cool as an unlock from the technology. In addition to that, like when you talk about having a direct relationship with investors, I mean like just this morning I I we had a a board meeting and one of the the or the the proxies like shareholder meeting and we we uh voted on certain initiatives and and the whole voting process is very cumbersome. this traditional voting process because you know our stock is still in some of the traditional areas too and it's it's it's expensive, right? It's it's it's a five figure cost, but that's a cost that companies if they lean solely on tokenized stock, like they don't have to bear that expense. And and another thing that I just that hasn't been tapped into and I think is just crazy exciting is a world where you have that direct relationship with your investors in a product, right? Where you can have the product and you can ask your investors on a real-time basis how they are feeling about certain things. If they they care about this, they care about that. You could survey them directly. Do you have other companies that are interested in these sorts of things? Yeah, there's a lot of creative ideas out there and I think like, you know, as you know, a market and an industry, we've barely scratched the surface on any of this. Like the things you can do when, you know, shares are just, you know, tokens and their zeros and ones and like you can actually move them around easily is something that like people's creativity hasn't really settled on yet. Everyone is used to this system where it's like nine middlemen and you can't know who even owns the shares and you can't move them around. Everyone is stuck in that thinking. But when it's like they're tokens and you can know every single holder of those tokens, there's a huge aperture of new creative things you can do with them, right? Like you could, you know, theoretically like, you know, make the Exodus wallet work differently for Exodus shareholders, right? You could theoretically, you know, pay crypto dividends like directly to shareholders. >> We we've talked about, you know, Bitcoin dividends. We've Yeah. Yeah. >> At some point soon, I hope to break ground on that, right? Um, there's a lot of things you can do when you have a direct relationship with the shareholder who's just a token holder. You know, you know exactly what wallet they're in. So, you can interact with them. You can communicate with them. There's lots of things you can do. You could theoretically distribute shares to your users. Like, it'll go the opposite way like, oh, you use Exodus, like, you know, use it a lot. Like, get some shares, right? Um, you can do a lot. And I can't wait to see where it goes. Well, in closing, Robert, like I I really have always appreciated and respected your your builder mentality and how forward thinking you are. You'd mentioned earlier the ability to kind of see into the future three years or so. When you kind of think about that, think about this. Just give us a sense kind of again in closing that three years from now, what for you do you think is going to have the most impact? I think the thing that's going to have the most impact is when we start to reach critical mass in terms of how many companies shares are like natively on blockchains and like how much of the those shares are natively on blockchains. Like right now if you look at the stock market it's like 0 like it's it's in b like single digit basis points about like how much stock is like tokenized on a blockchain you know let's just call it one basis point. really microscopic. When that number is like 5%. Right? Or even 1% which is on the way to five. When it's 1% suddenly we're going to start to see a much larger you know set of integrations from like traditional wallets from traditional banks like from everyone like everyone's going to start to treat blockchains in general as first class citizens for you know how capital markets work. You know, you're going to start to see companies raising capital on blockchains, right? Right now, they raise capital entirely through like banks that underwrite some transaction. Like, we're going to reach the point within three years where everything, financial services, capital markets, it's all happening on blockchain rails that run 247 and it's just going to it's a freight train that only goes in one direction. >> Absolutely. And amen to that. And Robert, again, I've really appreciated again how forward thinking you are and the the partnership that Exus has with Superstate. Thank you for coming out today and and sharing this wisdom and knowledge with all of us. Thank you so much. >> My pleasure. And after this, JP is going to tell people how I eat my steak and try to embarrass. >> That's good. Thanks, Rob. Appreciate it. Thank you JP. Thank you Robert. Now for our final panel, we are finally talking about the AI elephant in every room. What AI means for stable coins, for self-custody, and what needs to be built underneath all of it. That is what our next panelists are here to talk about. Matias Olivera, CTO of Exodus, Keith Gman, president at Moon, David A. Johnston, open-source contributor to Morpheus. moderated by Aubrey Strobble, co-founder of Hian. Please welcome the panel. Hello everyone. We have the fun panel, the AI panel. Um, as many I think all of us know um who are using these LLMs, AI has totally taken over the timeline. Um, everyone's talking about it. But I want to start simple. Uh, we've talked a lot about payments today. What is AI actually doing for payments today? >> You want me to go? >> And anyone can jump ball. It's jump ball. It's jump ball. Well, since it's public, uh, this morning, Moonpay announced the Moon agent card, uh, which is done in partnership with Exodus and Monivate. And, um, essentially, you know, about a month and a half ago, we launched our Agentic payment solution. Um, and we've seen incredible sort of uptake. You know, it took about a month for the tool to get a million tool calls. M >> um then after the month it took one week to get the second million tool calls. It took one week to get the third million tool calls. It took one week to get the fourth million. So we're seeing it take off like this. Um right now it's really the primitives, right? It's um buy, sell, swap, right, trade um is what you're seeing in terms of agentic payments and flows with Moonay agents. But you know when you start to think about um what is this Moon Agent card doing? Um, it allows you to now move out of a stable coin to stablecoin acceptance flow in the wallets and it allows you to move and affix itself to the Mastercard network, right? So, you could technically today um set up your Moon Pay agent to use this Moon agent card with Exodus and Monovate to program it to buy milk if you wanted automatically. why someone would do that. It doesn't I don't know. But but um this is a very early stage, but like you're starting to see these features roll out very quickly. >> Yeah. And I think you know the uh when I was listening to you know the the other speakers uh you know we're constantly talking about you know people you know like we put this in hands of people we you know people are going to be able to do this people are going to be able to buy that. People are going to be able to tap their phones. And if you think about it like really the the bottleneck for a lot of the things that we're doing and we're working on is people right and people like the payments need like need to move at the speed of people right like uh they cannot move faster than people but when you think about the relationship between people and agents where a person can have in infinite agents right they they can have as many as they want and they can spin up these entities that have agency And that's why, you know, there's a lot of definitions of agents out there. But then you think about, you know, how payments are actually going to be able to move at the speed of machines. And that's I feel like, you know, kind of like why everyone is really excited about uh AI and like payments. >> Yeah. I mean, just personally, I have 23 agents at this point and they're doing most of my payments, right? And they're using APIs. they're paying for them with X42. They're going and grabbing data for analysis and other things that are in my workflows. So, and I think if we can think about it from a broader perspective, I expect 99% of future payments to be agentic. And so, it's sort of table stakes now that you really want to be building towards this world where all of your tools are agent first. That's the documentation. That's the way in which it's served on the website. You know, there's all these methods by which you can make it easy for agents to discover your tool and really, you know, put it to work. And we're in such a fortunate position in web 3 because we've been building these primitives for 15 years now that are fast and settle instantly, right? And are really honestly built for AI more than they're built for humans, right? And I think what's happening is AI is taking away the friction >> from the smart contracts, from all the web 3 primitives, and people can just tell their agent what they want to accomplish. The agent's going to use crypto because it's the fastest and cheapest way to get it done. >> Now, just on on one one sense on that, I think that you just actually brought a really good point together, which is um people like to say AI here and they like to say blockchain here. And I would argue that AI and blockchain are two sides of the same coin, right? Um, I had a great conversation. I want to give this guy credit because I I don't want to steal his idea or his verbiage on it, but I actually thought it was so eloquent, which was John Dagghastino over at Coinbase made a comment to me once where he said, um, all AI is a scalable intelligence and all crypto is a scalable truth, right? And if you go against the backdrop of a world that's getting faster, more efficient, and cheaper, right? like AI is speeding things up and the blockchain is what is allowing sort of that those transactions to happen at the speed that they need to take. >> Yeah. And then you David, you mentioned something about uh discoverability of tools. And I I really want to take that one a step further because if you think about about this from the perspective of the merchants, right? the people like uh offering goods and services to to the world. They are now uh you know in this moment where they need to make a decision where you know they they need to really be thinking about exposing their their catalogs of you know whatever they are offering uh the world to agents because you know there's it's it's happening now where you know >> agents being able to shop for people and discover cataloges and comp like price shop and compare you know that's that's going to be massive and it's like really transformative and revolutionary in the sense that people are gonna like these merchants are going to be able to very effortlessly create a new channel of sales where you know from one day to the other now there is this you know infinite you have 23 agents right and um you know how many agents are going to be out there you know with a world population of 8 billion right and like this channel of sales is really going to be very very impactful >> um I mean it's it's very obvious that crypto has not been easy to use and hopefully this user experience gets better for humans and also for the agents, right? Um I do want to touch on just a little bit of like it sounds great, right? We all are very excited about this talking about it on stage. Actually, a lot of the AI people feel that way about crypto so that we have the AI people not loving crypto. We got the mainstream kind of hating AI. How do we sort of get to the place that we need to be? I think I think you said it right there because you know you say crypto and I think crypto is really the the curse word because you know if you remove that word from the uh from the uh mix then what you really have is that as Keith was saying at some point it's like the the primitives right the primitives that we are building and all of a sudden we realize that we've built primitives that are more native even more native to agents than they were trying to make them for humans you know and I I don't want you know, just uh, you know, discredit all the work that Exodus has been doing about making the the UX and, you know, the the apps more usable. But if you think about this, you know, agents and the and the relationship between agents and humans is like natural language, right? It's like it's very native to us in a way that crypto was never able to be, right? And then agents are machines. So crypto is really very native to them. And that's why, you know, I think, you know, just this this mission of like making crypto more more more usable really has, you know, changed in the sense that, you know, agents are not really going to care how to navigate the complexity of crypto because it's native to them and then we just connect the dots, right? >> I think I think look um remember like 1992 1993 like um I was like well so you have to understand when I was in media I was the youngest person in my job in crypto. I'm a cryptogiatric, right? Like um but like 1992, 1993, right? Like the the the whole conversation was your chip. Uh it was do you have a 386? Do you have a 486? Do you how much memory do you have? What's your BPS and your and your modem? Um the number one ad campaign just to take some people back like in that time period was Intel inside. Everyone cared about Intel inside. When the Pentium chip came out, which was technically the 586, it was the biggest deal on the planet. That all went away the second Steve Jobs held up an iPod and said thousand songs in your pocket and people stopped talking about the tech, started talking about the experience. Think about 2002 when you got you know the beginning stages of um uh the uh you know high definition televisions coming about. Um like I had one in 2002. The only channel I had this is what I was telling you at lunch. The only channel I had on my first high definition te television was the Discovery Channel and my friends would come over to watch grapes and nature, right? And like if you remember um year two of like that coming out evolving, like the HBO went on, you know, high definition and they didn't even know how to do the makeup on it, right? And The Sopranos looked like a disaster. Um uh a few a few years ago I wrote this article um about crypto and it was on it's on NASDAQ. It's called Nobody Cares How Their toilet Works. Um, and you know, like here's the reality. If you go on to Wikipedia and you search how does my toilet work, you get a 10,000word article with 82 reference points, right? Um, I guarantee none of you have thought about how your toilet works. Okay? Nobody cares. That's what crypto is. That's what AI is, right? Like right now, we're in this weird phase where these technologies are coming about and you get an overstated presence of them in the media, in your face. Um, but we're talking about the technology. We're not talking about the experiences that they're actually delivering. If you want a real experience and you want to see how crypto really works in a really meaningful way, and this was something that we were talking about earlier, I'm like, I would, and this is where I would actually give credit to Exodus, like go and download Exodus Pay, right? And like if you look like here's my Apple wallet. This is how I use my phone already, right? without anyone knowing that I could literally go into my Exodus card, right, that is currently sitting there with it's a debit card on the Visa network with stables on it. Nobody knows. Like I could literally hand this to a friend. I could give this to Aubrey and put $100 on it as a gift card. She has no clue that it's crypto and it works the same way. She taps and it deducts. And like by the way, that's the only way my mom is going to come on to this is abstract away all of the complexities of these of the tech and allow people to see what the actual experience is. What people are going to see with AI, what people are going to see with crypto is improved experiences. That's it, right? They're going to say, "This is such a better experience." Um, nobody's going to care how it works. >> Well, and I think that's the magic that happened in January when you saw that open claw moment. engineers had had those same capabilities for years, like 23, 24, 25, Claude was getting better and better and better. It was the moment that you could automatically talk with your agent through WhatsApp. Yep. >> You could connect it to Signal and you're just chatting with it like any other employee and you could pretend it was your chief of staff. You could pretend it was your personal assistant and you just told it what you wanted. You never had to open a terminal. You didn't need to know what a terminal was. you could just use a messenger like you did in your normal life. And that's why it was such an amazing breakout moment because I went to and spoke at some of those very first claw events. You know who showed up? Wasn't engineers, it was executives, it was investors, it was VCs, it was family offices, it was lawyers, it was accounts, anybody that wanted to use these tools but hadn't been able to get over that technical barrier before. And and the reality of both of these um technologies is like when you don't the the challenge crypto's had is it's the worst marketed technology on the planet, right? Like it has like it is right. Um and it doesn't focus on the benefits as much and um and it takes, you know, it it's maturing as a technology, but the reality is is when people don't understand something, they tend to value it down to zero, right? And then they dismiss it. And so a lot of people because they've been turned off by things in crypto value it at zero. That's different than AI where people are literally petrified that AI will take their jobs, right? And so people are digging their heels in it to it because they're saying, "Oh my god, um like I'm rendered useless because of this new sort of existence and I don't understand how to navigate it." Right? And so I think that like the challenges both have is people are coming to light with like not knowing how to navigate this moment in time and like people want to say h this moment in time is different but it's not like it's a paradigm shift and we've seen this before. >> Um uh sorry I feel like I'm like to right but it's like >> well yeah I think some interesting things were said here. I mean 23 agents first of all is who's counting? Like that's that's a crazy >> I'm kind of disappointed. I expect more from you. >> I know. I thought I'd have over a hundred by now. >> I Me, too. >> Well, and and payments are something that like let's be honest, payments sometimes don't feel great. Like payments, something transactional. But there are some human sides to making a payment that you still want to do. I I was on a panel uh in Arizona and someone said, "Well, if I want to get a gift from my friend, I could just use my agent to get it." But like, don't you still want to like think of your friend and be a thoughtful person? Don't you just want to automate away the things that are you don't want to do like paying your utility bill or like doing some of the more menial tasks? So, it's like where is that line from like a human level versus something you don't want to do anymore? >> Well, it I think I I I would take that, you know, also one level further and and say, you know, there's AI as a as a technology, you know, it's just like empowers us to do more of the things that we like doing and less of the things that we don't like doing, right? And like a little bit of what you were saying David um >> where you know as an engineer myself you know I have experienced this uh this you know just moment where I was like you know holy holy crap you know what what do we have here in front of us and it was also you know January 20 uh 26 and uh you know I was you know I always loved coding and I always loved building products and I um but what I didn't know is what really what was it that I liked about that, right? And like when uh I gave AI kind of like really an opportunity with, you know, claude and like uh really trying to build something from scratch, I realized that I had, you know, not spend like a single minute, full minute inside my, you know, code editor. And now I look back and I I look back at the thousands of lines of code that I wrote over the years and I'm like, did I used to write all these by hand? Like letter by letter, word by word. And it's crazy. It's just like crazy to think about that today and you know to you what you were saying it's like you know I think this is uh really as a tool this is really um uncovering a uh a new skill set that you need in people you know when you look inside your company when you look inside your team when you look inside your life you know what things I enjoy doing and what things uh you know I I I want to delegate and you know three days ago I was telling you about this and like we launched this uh agent in uh in Slack. The Slack is the the messaging app that we use to to collaborate in Exodus. It's a remote company. So all of our work life and sorry I'm extending too too long with this but I think it's you know really juicy. Uh the the we were talking with JP and how do we make you know our people more productive? How do we make our people you know just do more and and and and you know produce more value while you know using these tools and like the paradigm shift for me was when I realized that you know you don't have to force people to use these tools right like before engineers used to use cloud to write code and like question was like what if cla is writing all the code now and people don't have to use cloud it's like cloud writing the code and engineers reviewing the code so that set me and and the team on a mission to build this agent where anyone in the company in the messaging app can ask uh Neo is the name of this agent you know hey Neo you know I want to solve this issue I want to build this feature I'm frustrated with this aspect of the product and then see it come to life and you know few minutes 10 minutes 15 minutes later you know come with you know the feature built and that's been highlighting how you know some people that you have in the just were handicapped by their by their ability to actually build and produce the code and you start seeing how you know the skill set that you want in the future. It's more about you know the the analytical thinking about the the product thinking about the customer centric thinking about the pro proactivity about the creativity to solve you know and and there is a lot of people in the in our company that have those traits and you see them interacting with this this bot right and it doesn't matter if you're an engineer or not and this is telling us a lot about you know how it it's transforming work as well. >> Yeah. >> Did you want to add anything David? Well, just very clearly like you're saying, the bottleneck has shifted from the time it takes me to execute something to the time it takes me to describe what I want to execute >> 100%. >> Right. So, articulating that outcome, polishing what the agent creates like that's most of my time at this point because you might develop the specifications and the outcome you want for an hour and then it takes 15 minutes for the agent to actually build it out and then look at the result and really >> which used to be the slowest part, right? be the slowest part, right? You would come up with an idea and it would take you a month to build it. >> And now effectively the only bottleneck I have is, you know, being able to articulate articulate to my agent what I want to exist, right? Which is really wonderful, right? Because I've got this huge backlog of ideas and thoughts I've wanted to effectuate over the years and now I can sort of empty that backlog and just push it into reality. But but going back to your question for one second, right? Like um I think you're right, but like I like the human element is increasingly important, right? So think about it this way. Um let's start with what's the impact of like these AI technologies on jobs and employment, right? Like the reality is is it's going to be incredibly disruptive. Like I like I'm sorry like like it will and like there's going to be a lot of people in the beginning of their careers, right? like coming out of college in the first few years that are going to be faced with the fact that things are going to have to be automated and they're going to have to figure out how to come out of it, right? And then there's going to be um uh people later in their careers that are going to have to figure out how to use these tools as superpowers and then to how how to implement them. Um the people who don't evolve with them are essentially commoditized and the people who evolve with them like actually become more valuable to the companies and to the organizations that they come. And the reason I bring this example up is is because you asked this question about payments and the human aspect of payments, right? Um I think that to to your point um and and you allude to it as well, right? Like there's going to be certain low-level payments that you're never going to want to have to think about that like will happen and we'll take care of it. >> Um this is not you shouldn't think about this through the extreme of now that this techn is here like we don't have to do anything. We hand it all over to the bots. We're going to stage into it, right? We're only like in the beginning stages of it. But like I think that you're going to find that the things that are going to be replaced are going to be the annoyances and the things that are going to become more valuable are going to be the things that are extraordinarily personal, right? And like the human element in this in this transformation actually becomes increasingly important. >> Yeah. Um, I think I think it'll be interesting to watch evolve just because with, you know, all technology and also working in the media, there's always that one story that something goes rogue, right? There's going to be an AI agent, remember this, that like buys somebody a yacht accidentally. And like, >> who's liable in that situation? Like, this sounds great, but you that's a lot of trust for your grandma, your dad, or your uncle to be like, "Okay, let me just let this bot do it for me." But like what is your what is your answer? Because that will happen. There will be a headline somewhere. It might not be a yacht. It could be something else. >> Yesterday the state of California, right? Yesterday the state of California >> Yeah. >> passed legislation that said that they could ticket uh uh autonomous vehicles. >> Like who? >> Yes. Like a Whimo. Okay. Explain how this one's going to work. Right. Yeah. So, like if you have autonomous Tesla cabs and the governor of California doesn't like Elon Musk, could he technically have people out there pushing them like a little past to the point where he could just start to fine these autonomous Tesla vehicles so that way Tesla is responsible for it. I like nobody knows where this is going to go. What I would say is is look at like any moment in time that like there's a huge paradigm shift, right? The one that I like to reference the most is like 1879 to 1904. I told you I was a geriatric in this space, right? But it's like um but no, but like here's here's what happened. Between 1879 and 1904, the airplane, the light bulb, the telephone, the automobile were all invented, right? So picture that 25 year period. The airplane, the light bulb, the telephone, and the automobile. So if you died in 1878, you don't know those inventions. And if you were born in 1905, you only know those inventions, right? like where we are today with AI and uh and these blockchain technologies is we're like kind of like in 1910 where a lot of people are like you know what that automobile thing is amazing but I'm going to stick with my horse right now um and that's fine um because we don't know what the second third fourth order of magnitude impacts of these technologies are and what you said is 100% going to happen >> there's no doubt >> I mean but I do think it's a valid question I think people in the audience are probably like yeah I I maybe I am interested in using an agent but I if it does go rogue, I don't want my money just being sent. >> So this is why the Moon Pay Moon Agent was so important was so up until us launching the Moon Agent um like it was your wallet that you had to actually fill up with a certain amount of crypto and so that means that it could be drained down to zero if something went wrong. Um what I now I feel like I'm a great ad for Exodus. This is a fantastic one, right? What what this what this uh partnership with Exodus and Monovate enables is you're able to predetermine what the debit card amount is for the agent to use. So if you say you're only enabled to use $25, it can only go up to $25, right? And like that is and on the Visa network or on the Mastercard network. And that's an important shift because now all of a sudden it's not take an arbitrary amount and put it into a wallet and then let the agents determine it. Now you're actually setting the amount and allowing it to transact with a cap as to what the maximum amount. >> Yeah. And and and the reason why that's, you know, it's just kind of like so powerful is because you can create cards as you create like email accounts today, right? Like before it's like, oh, I have my I have to go to the bank to get my card and then it's like my single card that I'm working to get the credit spending limit, you know, as high as I as I can and then it's is that the same car that I need to give my agent? No. Right. like the technology that we have and we're building and you know the the partnerships that we're creating are all about you know just a simplicity of you know unlocking all these you know new ways of you know using the same or interacting with the same financial products that we we've been interacting for years just way better right I can click a button and create a new card for my fridge that you we're talking about that to buy buy the milk right and it's the this card is going to have a set of policies that is going to allow this card to spend spend at the grocery store and in this category I mean you can even give your your dietary preferences to the fridge and it can buy for you you know the amount of the the you know the percentage of you know protein and fat you want to eat right >> so so this is what the we were talking about earlier today at lunch which was remember when like the internet of things was emerging and people were like oh you'll get an email from your fridge that you ran out of milk right okay like this is like a real example like an and LG came out with the fridge that was like, "Hey, like," and I'd love that like an email like fridgeelg.com like to Keith like like a, "Hey, Keith, you ran out of milk, right?" Um, but now imagine uh like I literally can set up a debit card, right, for my fridge and I say to the fridge, um, I'm going to give you a budget of $500 a month for groceries and here are the groceries that matter as staples in my household. And as I go down and I'm running out of milk or I'm running out like I don't drink a lot of milk. I drink a lot of coffee and seltzer. So it's like like I'm making 90-year-old right like but like as as I'm running out of seltzer um instead of it sending me the email it just orders the seltzer and it deducts from my debit card because it ultimately can transact in addition to um anything else. Right. So I think like that's how like one example of like my mother using like this debit cover. She wouldn't know that it's crypto. She wouldn't know that it's anything. It's just that the fridge is attached to sensors. The sensors determine that you're down low on something. You've already given it a budget allocated and it orders it for you and it shows up. >> Yeah. And uh you know I I think you touched on a very important thing which is like what are we actually building in this world, right? And it's like, you know, the the agents are very non-deterministic. Like you're having a conversation with an agent, you don't know, you know, what can happen. You know, the agent can go rogue. And like, so what we're building is like the policies that we put in place so that the a when when your your home's fridge want to go rogue and evolve into being a yacht fridge, you know, and want to buy a yacht with a credit card that you gave it, you know, it's going to say, "No, no, you're going to stay a fridge at home. You're a fridge, not a >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. you're not going to be able to travel the the the ocean. >> Well, the exciting thing for me is the primitives that you just described are going to enable a world where I'm telling my agent, hey, I want to ride across town to the hotel. And instead of going to a fat incumbent like Uber, right, who's become extremely rent seeeking, I don't know if you guys know this, but Uber went from charging 2% on the fee. Today they charge 60% on the fee and they're basically doing that to just process the payments and have a database of riders and of drivers. Like that's insane, right? They've become the taxi cartel that they replaced, you know, 10, 20 years ago. And so I think there's so many examples where this technology where I can take the intent of my agent, I can connect it to that payment primitive. Now all of a sudden I don't need that intermediary. I don't need that renseeking involved. So I think I'm more excited and less worried about people getting replaced. I'm happy to displace these fat incumbents which are taking most of the money away from that driver and away from that user just to sit there as a middleman. >> So we'll see. We'll see about this yacht situation. I I do think it's going to happen though. >> It will happen. >> It will happen. Um, >> they are not using Okay, we might only have one for room for one more question, which time flew by. Um, >> I want to get your guys' predictions that you're willing to bet on right now about AI. Um, in the next year when we come back to the Exodus Summit, we'll reflect on these, but what is something that you're willing to bet on right now with AI? Um, and maybe we start with David. Um, I think one of the biggest things is we've only seen the tip of the iceberg with the open claw moment. That was really sort of early adopters who were non-engineers getting access to it. But there's still a lot of friction uh to getting an agent. I think in the next 12 months, most of that friction will go away and getting an agent will be a single click or a single conversation and a text. And so I think you're going to see agents continue to proliferate and they're mostly going to be using uh these primitives. So yeah, May 2027 maybe there's 10 20 million people today with an agent. I wouldn't be surprised if that is 100 million or more by next year. >> Wow. >> Oh man. Um so many um I guess you know in the in the same line as that you know kind of I I think about this in like two two ways. one way is the the the external way in which AI can you know transform industries and transform you know our lives and then the other one is the internal when you're thinking about you know the your company you know your workforce and everything and for the external I think you know AI is going to not just replace a lot of the incumbents but it's also going to uh you know eliminate a lot of the the the issues that we have today that you know all of these companies uh were born to solve and it's going to expose you know a whole lot of new uh bottlenecks that we're going to go tackle next. And I don't know if it's going to happen in the next 12 months, but probably, but when I, you know, we're talking about the fridge or we're talking about, you know, the the the Uber situation, I I can only help thinking about, you know, what's going to happen with, you know, after we disrupt, you know, we disrupted payments and we disrupted, you know, the ability to move money at the speed of, you know, machines. uh then you know how are we going to disrupt the ability to move goods across the world you know as fast as you know these dash door dash you know delivery guys are shipping you the pizza right so that's one one of the things and then internally I think you know it's just going to disrupt entirely how you know uh we think about the skill set that we need uh to hire people and we need to retain people right and like when when I'm thinking about hiring an engineer like and maybe I'm not even looking at their code anymore right and maybe I'm looking at their you know how they think about a problem how they think about you know uh the customers how they think about the product and maybe it's not even called an engineer anymore in the future right it's that's how you know how much things can change uh over the next years because I think this is truly a revolution as you know some other revolutions that we've seen in the in the history I don't make predictions >> okay >> um but can I give one bit of advice on that >> Sure I'll let you give advice >> on Um, like when I say the word atomic, how many of you in this audience, I'm just because the lights are there, like how many of you when I say the word atomic think bomb? You just raise your hand. And how many of you think clean nuclear energy? Okay, so two, three, three of you. Okay, my point is is that like everyone's very fearful of of this technology. people's brains go towards the negative when they don't know something like that's why I give this example of the atomic sort of like prompt. Um if you like TED talks watch this TED talk by Kevin Kelly who's one of the founders of Wired called the future defined by optimists. >> Um and I think it will change your perspective on how you're consuming information and how you will open your mind up to how the world is changing. Um, if I had to make a prediction, um, as it relates to Hold on, I was gonna say to Exodus, I would say say I think that the, um, I think that the Monovate acquisition would probably going to be the most transformative thing that happened to this organization. I think it's an amazing sort of moment to capture payments and evolution in this in this thing. So, I think you're right and I think that this is going to be huge. >> And where can everybody find you guys >> online? >> Leave me alone >> at the conference. at the conference >> year later. >> Keith loves people. Please, please. >> I actually love Aubrey. Um I I'm Keith Gman on X and Instagram. >> I'm actually not very findable. So So you can find me in the real life. No, not because of that. I just I don't know. I just like organic. >> I tend to build a lot of open source. So I'm always on X talking about that. Uh D. Johnston EC is my handle. But you know, I think really what we've covered today, I can't overemphasize how important it is that people lean in, understand this topic, and get to the point where they've got access to freedom of intelligence, and they have a self- sovereignty over their AI. This will be an extension of your brain. And the key with Exodus and what crypto has built is if you can own that private key, you can have access to that future, right? Not your private key, not your AI. >> People are going to learn that the hard way or the easy way. And so I think the work that we've done the last 15 years has really set the groundwork for there to be a very optimistic outcome for AI. >> Fantastic. Well, I I'm more bullish Aente Payments after this panel. So, round of applause for our panelists. Thank you guys for joining me. All right. Thank you to our panel. Now, we'll take 25 minutes and be back at 2:40 for something you're going to want to be in the room for. The full Exodus leadership team plus motivate CEO Michael Ralph on stage together taking your questions. I will see you at 240. Hey, hey, hey. What you do? I need to do what you I'm a Back. Hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, hey. Hello. Happy Heat. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey. Hey Heat. Heat. Billy feel. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. What do you Come on. Heat. Heat. Heat. Hey, Heat. feel. Feel the heat. Heat. Heat. 2. 2. Heat. Heat. Heat. Heat. Where are you? I'm stepping up. The program will resume in 5 minutes. Please make your way to your seats. Hey. Hey. Hey. Heat. Hey, heat. Hey, heat. Hey, hey, hey. Please find a seat. The program will resume in 2 minutes. Heat. Heat. Please take a seat and turn your mobile devices to their off or silent mode. The program is ready to begin. summits. The Exodus leadership team is on stage together with Monovate CEO Michael Ralph and the next section belongs to you. Your questions, your answers. Now I'm going to invite the team to join me on stage and we are ready when you are. Um, okay, we got a lot of people on stage. Um before we get into it, I'm going to give each uh panelist an opportunity to just introduce themselves and uh say a little bit about what they do. Why don't we start in the front row? >> Start. Uh Amain, I've been with Exus for eight years now and I live in Dubai. >> That work? Okay. All right. Uh I'm James. I uh I I I'm from Wisconsin and I just you know, anybody know Bob? Buer on the the old commercials. That's kind of what I feel like right now. You know, must be in the front row. So, I've been seven years, not as long as a so go ahead. >> I'm Matiasa. I am uh from Uruguay. It's like about 15 hours by plane south. Um I am the CTO of Exodus and I've been with the company for seven years. >> Hi, I'm Michael. I'm the CEO of Monovate. I've been with Exodus for about 24 hours. um >> at Exodus. I've been with the company for about four years now and I am from Canada. >> Hi everyone. I'm Gerardo. I'm the chief security officer. Um I'm from Italy as you can see from my name and my accent and u I've been with Exodus for one year. >> Hi, I'm Moshi and I'm the VP of customer support at Exodus. I've been with Exodus for seven years and I'm originally from Singapore, but I live in Texas now. >> I'm Eva Thorton. I'm the director of People Ops, born in Ireland, but I'm from New Hampshire and I've been with the uh company for about a year. >> Fantastic. And JP was supposed to join us on stage, but he is a CEO and he's busy taking, you know, calls and doing deals. So, um we but we're excited to have all of you guys on stage. So, let's dive into it. We can start with James. Um question we have here is can you walk us through how you actually make money across banks and motivate stack and what that looks like at scale. >> Um wow must be an analyst. Um so yeah so you know went through that and and it's very nice to uh to have some help uh you know with Michael here. He can definitely go into even more detail. Um but you know obviously you know the the general idea is you when you you wish you a card um you know Exodus take take Exodus Pay you know my favorite example um you know you you swipe that card and you know the beautiful thing from a from a a CFO perspective maybe not so much from uh you know a tech perspective but traditional finance there's so many intermediaries uh and each single one of those intermediaries you know there's touch points or you know revenue generation points and uh you know so now we have that ability to to go in there. So whether that's interchange processing um you know uh interest on on on um uh funds uh because it's a you know slight you know different system than than we have right now. Um and and the the other thing is so you know when when uh Exodus Pay uh you know when that launches and we have you know you know we look at the TAM and we look at the number of opportunities to get more users. More users equals more cards. More cards equals more swipes. More swipes equals more transactions. More transactions equals more times to touch all the different intermediaries and and and uh you know clip some revenue. Uh Michael, I don't know if you want to add to that. I mean I I would say that there are roughly 50 different charging points that we have in the Monovate business model for the services we provide. Um interchange is one of the big components of that which is what Chambers references but flows through a transaction process. Um and on the uh bank side as well you've got sort of the additional uh account service fees uh that would associate with moving money. you know, although it's an onchain transaction, at a certain point, it's obviously flowing into the fiat system as well. So, yeah, it's a very robust commercial model that we're able to deploy um and you know, it's highly customizable relative to the opportunity of the customer that we're working with. >> Thank you. Uh next question, uh potentially Leticia or Shoshi could answer this on customer support as a competitive advantage. Exodus often talks about trust and user experience, but investors usually discount customer support as a cost center. What is your approach and how does it translate to competitive advantage? Yeah, when um customers run into friction with the app and it gets resolved by great customer support that exceeds their expectations, uh they don't just stay, they become even more loyal, more committed to the product because they've received an experience um that surpasses anything else that they've encountered from other companies. We had a customer that contacted our support desk uh about a court problem. Uh we escalated the case, resolved it, and had the pleasure of going on a Zoom call with him. During that conversation, uh we learned that he was about to make a major purchase when the card problems cropped up and that actually delayed uh the process for his purchase getting fulfilled. uh and as a result he had to absorb some additional unforeseen opportunity cost. When we heard that we did something that most other companies probably won't do. We sent him a gift in Exoc to his pay card uh because we wanted to make up for the experience but also because we believe in making things right for the customer. He was not expecting that. Uh and in fact he was very grateful and in his own words unprompted told us that uh this was far above and beyond any customer service uh that he's ever received. Um and that's not just a satisfied customer. that's uh an advocate um because you know he went and told his friends and family after that about Exodus um and he has reference points for this type of customer service being better than any others he's received because he um used to work in a bank and he's tried almost every card you know um out there Crypto.com, Coinbase um and he still chose Exodus and stayed with Exodus over um even the cash app and um PayPal was what if if I recall correctly. Um so that's a very different model from the kind of traditional um cost of acquisition for a customer through a marketing ad or campaign. Um but you know that's what the support queue produces um when it's done right. We're not just resolving customer issues. We're um converting them into lifelong customers and then they bring others along with them to the product. And that's our competitive advantage. >> And I just want to build on what Shoi shared because I think it points to something even bigger about how Exodus operates. I remember two years ago and it feels just like yesterday, the leadership team, we got together in a room in Chicago and we rebuilt our core values from the ground up. And one of the values we picked and I would say probably the most important value we picked that day was customer obsession. And not because it sounded good, but because we looked around and we realized that it already described how the best people in our company operated. And you can see that in how the company's built. We don't just have, you know, customer support sitting on the sidelines. Our customer support team is so integrated with our product team. And in fact, we've had almost 30 people come out of our customer support team that are now in different areas of the business in engineering, in product, and you know, even in the leadership team. And I think that's because we deliberately elevate those who truly listen and deeply understand our customers. I think that matters now more than ever, especially with moving from wallet to a payments and daily utility platform where we're not just asking people to hold their money with us, but to send and spend and manage and and build their wealth with us. I think trust means everything. And one of the greatest things that we do to build that trust is putting our customers first always. Um I think other companies in the space are just starting to figure that out but that's a standard we've been building towards since day one. >> Fantastic. Uh have an AI question here. Um and we just spoke about AI but AI is being addressed or adopted aggressively across the industry. What is Exodus's approach to staying at the bleeding edge of AI capabilities and how are you uh maintaining an a secure internal posture at the same time and protecting against external AIdriven threat models? Okay. So, uh, first, uh, I was listening to JP's keynote today and I was thinking, um, not not because I was bored of the the keynote, it was great, but mine works in curious ways sometimes. And I was thinking about this analogy where, you know, AI is as a technology, AI is like electricity, right? And has a lot of power to transform what we do, right? And uh what it means for our jobs is you know we I'm constantly thinking what do we what are we building ourselves and you know internally to make our people more you know uh powerful and more productive and what are we you know delegating to you know or waiting for this uh not waiting but you know just uh knowing that these these platforms like the underlying you know cloud open AI are just gonna get better right and that's a very hard question to answer because you know you don't want to go around uh building another you know electricity competitor. You want to you want to build you want to be thinking about building what what are the tools you know that pre-ele electricity era you know I can now power with this new technology to make me more productive. So I grab like a screwdriver and I say, "Oh, before I was able to, you know, put, you know, 10 screws per minute and now I'm able to put like 100, right?" And that's a 10x productivity gain. But we need to be finding these screwdrivers to uh to build for our people because it doesn't stop at what we're already doing, which is giving everyone access to to claude. But we also need to give people the right ways for using these tools so that they can get 10x productivity and not 10x you know garbage because that's the power of this technology. So that's what we're investing on. Two years ago we created this team to build us these screwdrivers and then we hand these screwdrivers to Gerardo to him so that we don't drill ourselves you know through the hands or anything like that. So >> yeah thank you for the uh I guess the screwdrivers. So yeah, I guess to add to Matias, the second part of the question was about how do we maintain a secure posture as well as how do we um kind of mitigate external threats that are now powered by I. So from an internal standpoint, Matia mentioned that we have a team. So um my team, the security team has been working very closely with this team in integrating all these screwdrivers in uh everything we do. uh start with engineering because that's where the initial value came from uh from our uh work and experimentation within the company but also now uh everywhere else uh pretty much every company every um team within Exodus leverages AI in one way or another from automating workflows to um even supporting customers as well as producing uh product features. uh we just uh released a tool that enables everyone in the company to uh ship features in the product. So how do we do that? Um we have been uh pretty deliberate on the roll out of these tools. Um before during the AI panel we talk about you know agents going rogue and spending a bunch of money on behalf of the users. So we're kind of approaching the same um uh way with internal tooling. So we know where uh AIS uh exists, our agent exists, we know what they can do, we know what they cannot do, and we provide safe environments for everybody to use these agents in the in the in the most secure and safe way. Um so that's one of the internal uh from internal point of view. From an external point of view, what we are seeing in the industry is that attackers and uh um cyber uh attacks in general, they are cheaper and quicker to execute. So we're seeing social engineering, we say we see like fake videos, uh fake interviews. So not just on the technical side, but also connected to the human aspects of uh of of technology and what we do. And being a remote company we are very success susceptible to it because we have to kind of take it at zoom value not just a face value uh who we hire. Of course there is um all sort of checks that we do before and after uh we we proceed with hiring and we work very closely with the people team on this. Um but yeah I think that another thing that we're seeing is the um the cost of exploiting vulnerabilities not just finding them exploiting them. uh we see like automated attacks are very fast in spreading. So uh all of this uh is is definitely an increased risk for the company and the way we're approaching is this is that we're effectively leveraging the same techniques and tools that attackers uh are leveraging out there internally. So we kind of attack our own systems in the same way that attackers would do. And that gives us the you know it's always an ar an arms race right who gets there first but at least we know by good by doing it we uh many times we we get there first and we solve problems before we they actually become uh real problems and impactful for exodus and I think another thing that is important that we are focusing on is that uh AI moves very fast and so we cannot just wait and um see what the AI does and react to this all these issues and threats. But we uh take a very strategic approach into addressing uh large amount of risks. Uh by eliminating completely uh vulnerabilities and weaknesses in our systems so that AI even if there is a problem down the line we are better prepared not only in preventing and responding and then mitigating in case anything uh goes wrong. >> Thank you. Uh I believe this is an analyst question. Monthly active users have been relatively steady. What are the main levers to get user growth go going and how should we think about growth from users versus monetization per user? Uh an orer James probably >> uh let me let me start um and and this is going to be a weird train of thought so bear with me. Um I I was I was listening to the to the to the beginning here and I knew u pretty much where everybody was from. Uh, but it's it's pretty it was pretty interesting to me and I was thinking about, you know, the business and and it's it's, you know, not only just, you know, the people in it and how we run it, but our but our user base right now. Um, which is where I'm going to tie everything back, but I mean, you think about it, I think you said you were born in Ireland, so I think that makes me the only native born American on the panel here, right? And so, um, you know, so if you think about that that diversity, if you think about that that worldwide, I mean, you know, I mean, I don't think any of us may be from the same country, frankly. Um I mean EPHA you know lives here but um you know so if you think about it from that perspective and then you think about our our user base it's it's mostly outside the US. I mean it's you know 66 75% you know depending on what the users are doing right and so that really allows us to have um you know that that user base that we've built that consistent steady million and a half uh you know uh million6 uh mauus you know that that is that is a real strength with that going into exodus pay you know that that that user base is international and so if I you know and and you know if I go down to uh uh you know they everybody laughs at me, but I go to Mexico a lot. I really like Mexico. So I go down there. I I I'm not using my wife and my family that you know they're not using Venmo, right? But guess what they can use now? They could use Exodus Pay. And so um you know, so that that that that is a great starting point for us um to to take all of the you know the the new Monovate uh tools, the Exodus Pay that that we're building and and it really just is a it's a is a great starting point. So a I'll let you take it from there. >> Yeah, I'll I'll say that M user actually now it's not the KPI that we're chasing anymore. Like the KPI that we're looking at right now is monthly transacting users. Are we actually creating habits? Are we actually delivering value to our customers? So the question will always be like how can we create great experiences that keep users in so that they feel good and it feels right again. So uh as far as growth goes so today we have exocache that's I want to say it's it's one of our uh biggest growth levers going forward and distribution through Mumbai uh that will be powerful as well u launching globally when we launch in Argentina when we launch in Nigeria when we launch uh in these different uh countries and we saw some real pain that is that's there we we can achieve uh like levels of growth that we cannot see like we we've have never achieved before. So I I'm excited about again again just expanding beyond uh uh like the US and the focus in the US. One thing that I will add here as well is that when we look at competition and though although it is healthy, I would say uh again we are no longer competing on on actions like how can we build great experiences that keep users in and when balances stay we we are competing on that on the default money account like how can we create a great experience to keep the user same. So one balance and then we build the features around it and we keep we keep adding utility around it and we make it useful uh and again solve the real pain uh per geo per per country. >> Yeah. >> And uh now a question on people culture and compliance. Crypto started as a rebellion to institutions. Now you're a public company with SEC obligations. How do you build the people operations for the company Exodus is becoming without losing the DNA that made the product matter in the first place? >> Great question. Um I would say crypto is built on a belief system, a set of principles that about who should control your money. Um that's exactly why Exodus exists. It's to empower individuals to control their lives in a digital world. And that didn't change just because we were listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Um, neither did the DNA that built this company. And we protect our DNA with every hire we make. Um, every decision every day. Um, I would say the people function is built on three core values. Um, it's getting the right shit done. Sorry for my language. Extreme ownership and customer obsession. As you've seen here today, we've talked a lot about that. We our our users trust us with financial sovereignty, and that's something we take incredibly serious. They aren't just like a poster on a wall or things to put in a PDF. They really are a hiring bar. Um, it's something we value very much in how we even hire, how we internally promote. uh we have it embedded in all of our processes and we are borderless. Um you see a lot of return to office mandates and cluster hiring. We are in 50 countries. Our workforce speaks 60 languages and it's not because we engineered it that way. It's just we don't have borders. We we really look for the best talent wherever you are in the world. And with that, you know, our talent by bar bar is also really high. Um, we just truly hire for ownership and within our core values and our culture. It didn't happen by design. Um, it was really about building intention and and aligning to those core values. And we really believe in just mental health, physical health, um investing in the whole person, not just, you know, um I don't know, it's really about making it doing your best work and just having really the best people on the team wherever you are. Uh we believe in impact, not activity. I think that's really important. It's really just about doing the best work possible. And with AI, we have a new skills gap. And so we're really investing in our workforce, whatever tools they need, internal, you know, education, we're adding it to our hiring processes. And while AI agents are useful, they're not quite on the payroll yet. Um, and compliance is just built into that. you know, it's something we take seriously being a publicly traded company, but they were also embedded in our processes prior to being public. So, to answer the question, um, our DNA has really just stayed the same. It's just we're more visible now. >> I also want to give, um, like a testament to what if I was just saying because, you know, um, self- custody, I feel like we we don't talk about it as much as we probably should at Exodus. uh self- custody from a technical point of view is very hard and you know you you see from the outside that you know we acquire all these you know um compliance now you know with the moves that we're doing in order to stay competitive but really what you don't see is that we have remained really truly you know um loyal to our self-custody values and everything that you want to do from a technical point of view pretty much is 100 times harder because we want to make it self custodial right it It would be very easy to have everyone's private keys in our servers and you know just move money create limit orders you know just when we're thinking about these things you know there's always a healthy tension between you know what we're doing compliance technology product where we're trying to keep that value true for our customers and you know that's something we that's always been part of the company since you know the very beginning and since I I joined almost seven years ago and even when we're thinking about you know agentic wallets We're not thinking about it from hey you know we have all this money here you know our agents can tap into it. We're thinking about truly giving agent delegated agent custodial wallet to the agents so they truly have the funds so so that no one can stick their hands into that that money and take it from you or from your agents. >> Can I add even more on that one? Um I would say that uh uh you know I think that that just being a public company yes crypto has this rebellious streak. Um but I I think that there is actually some allure for public company from the the the exodus and the in the crypto mindset. So, you know, one of the things that, you know, that crypto people love is like, you know, they talk about uh transparency and, you know, you can see things on the blockchain and and you know, and so if you think about, you know, public reporting, yeah, it it it costs a lot of money. Um, and you know, it's a lot of work, but you know, it it it is a a commitment to transparency to, you know, to our our folks internally, our investors, and then, you know, generally the world, right? And so I think that especially that transparency one um you know that that value uh is is is something that's very helpful. you know, there's talk about going to a a six-month cycle, and I think that, you know, for us internally, you know, we would rather do it, you know, we definitely don't want to go off quarterly reporting, but you know, you know, we've gone and we've added monthly, you know, we do a monthly press release with updates, right? You know, we want to be, you know, generally we want to be more transparent, you know, rather than less. So, so I think that, you know, that that although, you know, it's all maybe that is the rebellion that we want to give more information, not less. I don't know. Anyone have anything else to add? No, that was great. They need they need to make mics for taller people. I feel like I'm trying to juggle like I don't know what's going on here. Okay. Um, as stable coins become more widely used, where do you see the biggest monetization opportunities? And then this can be for anyone, but uh maybe maybe James. >> I like money. >> Seems like you're the money guy. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, man, there that's there there are so it's it's it's it's kind of it's a it's a it's a wonderful problem and it's also um uh uh you know a challenge, right? Because you can do there's you can make money there's going to be people that are going to make monies that make money in ways that we haven't even thought about, right? Um and and agents that are going to make money in in you know in in ways that we haven't even thought about using stable coins and things of that nature. So, um, you know, I think you can think of, uh, uh, you know, just besides besides all of the things we talked about all day today, right? I think there's, you know, things we haven't talked about are, um, uh, you know, there's, uh, you know, there's opportunities on on on different on different blockchains. there's um you know anything that is anything that there ex exists in the financial world in the traditional financial world nowadays can almost certainly be done faster better cheaper or just eliminated thanks to stable coins and so um you know from that perspective you know if if anything that you can think of that involves money um you know it will move to a stable coin and there'll be and then an AI to just a 100,000 exit and um you know it's it's going to go from there. Yeah, Allah adds to that. Basically, the biggest opportunity here is liquidity itself. Uh, think lending loans with our own system. We can do Bitcoin backed loans as well where you can get some cash by uh locking your Bitcoin for example, all self-custodial. We take this to the next level with all the traditional money applications, insurance, inheritance. How how do we even mortgages and financing homes like how how do we bring that to the soft custodial experience? So all of these are opportunities and some of them will come with UX challenges and that's the joy of it is is how can we solve how can we remove this technology? How can we simplify it so that it keeps uh it still feels familiar but at the same time it is so powerful uh behind the scenes. So that's the challenge and that's the opportunity as well. At the same time >> I I want to add something to that as well. Um because you know there is an complimentary aspect of stable coins that you know we haven't talked about which is the programmability of when you grab dollars and you put them on digital digital rails the opportunity that that enables and the uh the amount of things that are going to be created that we don't even know yet as you know James was saying because you know dollars can now be programmed and what this means is you know just building in rules into you how a dollar is going to move from one hand to the other, how little of a portion of, you know, that dollar can move from one place to the other and how fast it can move and based on what conditions and that just opens up, you know, a lot of opportunity and, you know, just owning that stack and, you know, owning the Exoc, you know, the the the stable coin that is going to, you know, be transacting and powering the economy of the future because we we need to think beyond, you know, the existing uh you know mortgages, spending all that is going to happen but way more is going to happen as well. >> Yeah. I mean just D and you know really started a thought in my head you know just the idea of velocity of money right um can you imagine and and Matias too can you imagine if that where we're at now with AI we had it happened in in 1985 and most people were still writing paper checks right and or you know doing a direct deposit now granted I'm going to get a little nerdy here because this is kind of my thing but I love you know if if most people you know you get paid on a Friday in the United States. Most people don't know that the money comes out of the company's bank account on Wednesday because it takes, you know, it's it's t transaction plus two two days to clear for for a historical way that that was done. AC is automatic automated clearing house, right? So >> that international, right? If you needed to be international. >> Oh yeah, forget it. I mean, we literally had an example of of, you know, uh yeah, as Michael knows, we were doing a transaction. I wonder what one. And uh you know we were sending you know tens of millions of dollars via a and uh I won't say the name but uh they just built a brand new building in New York City. Um and and uh you know they flagged our they flagged our wires for fraud. It was you know a a publicly traded company doing sending money to a you know a regulated uh uh you know FCA UK EMI corporation and and they just said oh no fraud. And they held it for what? Five days, six days. >> Five days. >> Yeah. Five days. So I mean, you know that you can can you imagine an AI, how is the AI, you know, how are you gonna have your AI bot do something with uncertainty of fiveday settlement? It's just, you know, it it it just will it will not be there. But so now what you've got is you've got instant settlement and and and then instant use of the money, right? So, if someone pays you in your Exodus Pay wallet right now or your Exodus Pay app, you can go and and you can swipe that credit card, right? So, right now, it's it's it's instant ability. So, if you're a a bar owner, I like to say, on, you know, a 4-day weekend, say Thanksgiving, everybody comes home from college on Thanksgiving and, you know, Wednesday night, you have this amazing night. Um, and, you know, you might not get paid, you know, because all the settlement and everything else with credit cards and everything else. Heaven forbid somebody writes a check. I mean, you might not actually be able to use your money until, you know, Tuesday of the next week, right? Uh when the when the money comes in. So, um you know, now with with Exodus Pay, you get it instantly and then you can swipe that card wherever you want or make payments, you know, pay someone with Exoc. So, um so now you've got, you know, just pick a random number, a billion dollars on a random Friday of payroll. You know, that you know, that money is now actually available on Wednesday. And so that money is going to be more money in the financial system and just increase and so there'll be more money available to do more payments that are going to go faster and then you throw AI on top of it and it's just going to you know the amount of money that's going to flow through the financial system because of stable coins is going to be exponential. So there's amazing opportunity. Another small comment to add to that, you know, think about the the to the programmability aspect of, you know, the digital dollars and think about, you know, these dollars working for you, you know, as you hold them the yield and then think about when you make a payment, when you swipe your card and that money moves from your wallet to the wallet of the merchant, it never stop working, right? And it's working for the merchant now. So, think about that for a second and like you realize how this is a a great value unlock. It's going to be fast, guys. We won't be able to keep up. Um, we have a lot of QR questions then and thank you so much for submitting them. Um, for Michael, pre merger during the time building Monave, what were some of the biggest hurdles and how did you overcome them? >> How long have we got? So um so so the thing about building a company like Monovate which for out of the box is is regulated from the get-go you know the the need to structurally build the company in a way that adheres to all the various requirements for your scheme partners for the regulators. um you know means that you've got you know at any points in time you know a certain amount of commitment of capital that is actually to a degree not too dissimilar to what we're just talking about there that's that's tied up and it means that you know your actual ability to invest is also at certain points going to be a little bit tighter and I think the Monovate story one of the things I'm quite proud about is that you know when I look at the peer group that you can compare Monovate to in that in this recent five years and you look at what we built fundamentally, you know, sort of the return on the dollar that we got in terms of the functionality that we created is is pretty extensive. But the hurdle that we had to overcome in order to get that type of efficiency the best um startup environment when it cames came to sort of founding investment. um it was quite a challenging environment and so that was in itself you know a sort of a regular recurring hurdle that we would would face. Um I'd say the other part is that you know in with with Brexit um you know there's a rather than having sort of one European jurisdiction you know there is obviously uh multiple and and running a FCA regulated company in the UK in theory is the same as running it in Europe albeit as time has elapsed from that Brexit scenario you can start to see that in Europe there is a is also kind of a moving away from kind of the idea that each each country will sort of succeed to uh another regulator. And so, you know, that challenge of staying ahead of the regulatory challenges uh is is also again one of those sort of recurring continuous hurdles. Um and it's so core to our business that the ability to sort of expand internationally in a way where we are able to own more of the economics in that process you know you have to embrace that and and so you know as much we were talking about fintech I was talking about us being a fintech and web 3 earlier you know really at the sort of foundation level we're a reggg tech uh and that again is a constant investment of of time that is important uh and I think kind of the last one because otherwise I would be able to take up all the rest of the time. um would be really from a from a team perspective, you know, the size of the opportunity that we have is so great. The the hurdle you have is to think what is the what's the one, two or three things that we can do this week that will really move the needle. and you're constantly having to prioritize, you know, when you know that there are probably 25 things at any one point in time you want to really be able to do because you know that needle can definitely be moved. Um, and so, you know, one of the things that I think comes out of this, uh, transaction and being part of a bigger environment that sees the world the way we see it is we're just going to unlock so much more potential because there's a meeting of the minds that's happening here with the people that we've got alongside the obviously the ability to now really truly invest in that international expansion in a way that that will unlock, you know, limitless potential opportunities. So, yeah, it's tomorrow there'll be a new hurdle. You know, there's always hurdles. Thank you very much. Um, how are we positioning the Exodus pay card against other crypto card products like Crypto.com, Coinbase, MetaMask, and others? Specifically, what do we see as our clearest differentiators? >> Uh, I'll take that one. So, anyone anyone can issue a card, right? That works anywhere. the >> how. >> Yeah. So, uh the challenge here or what what we're competing on is really where balances live. So, the main differentiator for our cars that they are soft custodial. So our cards are stable at the moment you spend them versus uh with any other uh custodial let's say crypto platform they would convert it to fiat and then you can spend it. So that's that's one differentiator is is that you hold the keys until the moment you spend. So now with a card um we go back to this concept of again we're not competing on the stable coin layer. We're not competing on the card layer. We're competing on the default money account the default or the primary money account where where your money lives. So if you if you're holding dollars actually this is home. If you're holding Bitcoin this is home. If you have a combination, some magical combination, you like to hold some cash and you are invested in some some stock, Exodus can serve you as well. So really it's about asking like how do we give users a great experience? How do we solve uh their frustration with again whether it is money fragmentation, multiple apps, whether it is uh high fees for sending money. So if we win that primary money account, uh everything else follows. >> Thank you. As you think about payment at the payments opportunity longer term, what does the business look like in a few years for scale use cases and revenue contribution? >> James probably >> hopefully talk about revenue. No. Uh I'd say that um the easiest one is probably the the the the last u you know because I touched on that earlier. You know it's it's uh you know there's a real opportunity to to move and and and and diversify um just because there's there's a lot I'm sorry my w my mind wanders to move uh away from that that crypto uh that crypto trading revenue. Not that that's a great business. It's obviously a great business. is literally what what is paying for all this right now. Um but you just look at that opportunity. You look at my no one in my family other than me is yoloing into Melaniacoin, right? Um and and so uh but they are all buying Door Dash, right? So uh so that that that that TAM is just so much different. So the the easy thing for me to say, well, especially after doing, you know, a large transaction, um, you know, I know that our revenue is is going to diversify and and be much more than than just trading. Um, and so, so that's the easy part. Um, you know, exactly where that's going to be. You know, I think that that, uh, you know, from the Monovate perspective, you know, there are a lot of different levers, you know, that I mentioned that can be pulled and and and the regulation, as as Michael was saying, is always changing, right? So, um, you know, every time there's a regulation, there's going to be, uh, you know, it maybe it stifles, you know, one part of the thing, uh, of of a business, but that it inevitably creates other opportunities, right? Um, as as the water goes somewhere else, um, you know, down down the the the plains, uh, since we're in Nebraska. Um >> and and I just want to add to on the point of of use cases. Um uh because we're already uh you know our existing consumer base, they're already showing us uh what that looks like. Um uh most of our Exodus pay customers that write to support, they're already using their pay card as their primary payments card. Um and as a mentioned earlier, 95% of Exodus um pay customers that write to support are not talking about the wallet. They're not asking about the wallet. They're asking about their Amazon purchases, refunds, gas station pre-authorizations. Um, you know, so two two stories, two real stories that I want to share um that um give us some ideas of the use cases that we're already seeing. Uh the first is uh we have a US consumer. He's a cryptonative, very cryptosavvy, and he's been with Exodus for six years now. um looking to spend his crypto his stable coins on real world purchases. On the day that we launched pay in the US um he funded his pay card to make a purchase for um a Subaru um and that transaction went through with stable coins. So stable coins on his part but the merchant received it as fiat instant settlement uh no crypto complexity for the consumer or the merchant. Uh second uh example also a US consumer um um she's an international traveler uh and needed to catch the last flight out of Batswana to South Africa uh but all her bank debit cards declined that flight purchase because it was not part of a US airline. What got her that seat on that last flight out of Batswana that day was her Exodus card. uh when she landed in South Africa um she needed an Uber catch an Uber uh but again her bank her bank cards debit cards declined that booking but Exodus got her that Uber Uber car. Uh so these two examples um represent different use cases that we're already seeing um with our existing consumer base especially um wallet consumers to now converting to card consumers. Um and uh you know I think that um the takeaway here is that for for these consumers for the global cryptonative uh we give them a product where they can finally spend their stable coins and their crypto and then for the global consumer you give them a card that actually works when nothing else does. um you know that's um that's where we can see the product that really solves real world problems and and and gets adoption and conversion uh at a much larger scale. Uh one more thing to add here. Uh I think just talking about payments and stable coins. Um every company will have its ICO moment. Every brand will issue their own money and they want that control because they will get access to uh loyalty from their customers. So the natural home is going to be a self-custodial spend. That's the technology that we have today. Today we announced motivate we announced a partnership with Visa and I'm excited to see where that goes with the future of money just moving into onchain and even moving in the direction of um settlement on chain as well. There is a massive opportunity there. So the future is bright. That's all I can say. >> Thank you. Yeah, huge unlock and those customer examples are are fantastic. Um, what are the economic drivers of Exodus Pay? Does Exodus make money off transaction volume or exocash AUM? >> Yeah, I can take this one. So, the two main drivers are uh the stable coin balance. So, because it's backed by uh dollar, so we uh it generates yield. So, that's one. So liquidity is now revenue for Exodus. The second driver is going to be volume and transactions going through Exodus. So that's utility around that balance. So liquidity and when that liquidity moves from one place to another place uh that becomes uh another driver as well. >> Yeah. Yeah, with the transaction, you know, you we've gone from 55 p and that 100 pound example to uh to 1 pound50. I just had to say it again because it's cool. Uh but you know, there's also, you know, if you have Bitcoin and you want a stable coin, uh you know, that's a swap. That's an o revenue that's a revenue opportunity. Um you know, so there's there's there's a lot more to it. I mean, just to name a few and to keep going. And >> just just one one more thing because it's important also the card the card. So we have the interchange, we have FX, we have uh all the economics around just spending a card and and swapping the card. So that's also a major uh revenue driver on growth driver. >> Exodus is launching lots of products in lots of jurisdictions. Uh what combination are you most confident you can capture? So it's all starts again I'm going to come back to this which is a great user experience. So we're starting with the cash with the self-custo account and then layering things on top of it. So you can move your cash into your uh crypto account. You can own Bitcoin, you can own Ethereum and all the other assets. That's our legacy. From there you can move into tokenized stocks can invest in US equities or any asset that is tokenized. You go from there and now you can start also interacting with any utility that we offer. Whether it is with prediction markets, whether it is with future offerings, I mentioned loans, I mentioned lending. Like these are all problems that we need to solve. And again, it needs to be simple. It needs to be easy to use. It needs to be intuitive. And we cannot just slab a product out there and just expect people to like it needs to be needs to feel good. Um so it's it's really the system itself is the winning idea. It is you have the balance and you build things around it and and that's the winning idea that I see. Now the qu the challenge now is going to be also how do you tell the world about this? And this is where the strategy of going into a country and finding a real pain and trying to solve that pain in in a way that just again makes you feel good. It makes you want to keep using Exodus and keep uh interacting with with the ecosystem. Uh so that's the strategy when it comes to telling the world about but it's really the winning idea here is going to be the system itself. one balance around it. >> All right, I'm gonna go. Sorry for the stories, guys, but uh I'm old and uh it's my right. Um so I back in the late 1900s, as my children would tell me, I was a a foreign exchange student in Germany and in order to pay the bills, um you know, I was given travelers checks. Does anybody remember travelers checks? I mean, does how does that concept seem nowadays? And so just really to to back up what a is saying a is saying the system you know the technology itself is it will just powers so many things that were unheard of you long time ago and so uh you know so if you think about that and then you again if you go back to Exodusy go back to this wildly international team that we have with a wildly international user base that provides amazing stories and amazing feedback consumer feedback and I mean we've got people from 50 countries at Exodus. We've got users from well over I mean hundreds of I don't even know how many countries there are, but pretty much every single one of them we've got users. How many how many? >> 195. >> 195. And I bet we've got people in probably 190 of them. Um wherever the US government allows us to we've got we've got customers, right? So that's most um so yeah. So I think that that that the technology is going to allow things that just were not even dreamt of back in the late 1900s one and then two if there's a team that's you know avail that that can really do this it's going to be this team. So I think that's what I'd say there. >> Thank you. Uh question for Michael. Uh with Monovate now involved and ex Exodus pay starting does Exodus have any new competitors and if so who are they? So, Exodus obviously has its traditional competitors on the B TOC side of of the fence. On the B2B side under Monavey, you know, we have um in Europe uh fractional competitors but very few full stack competitors. Um, so you know, I can think of a company like Payetics in central eastern Europe, um, that has a stack that is closely more comparable to Monovates, but not not quite going in the well in the way that we do on the issuing side with stable coins and things like that. So there's a lot of differentiation we have in our in our product stack. Um you can look at the components and you can say that you know a Marqueta has processing and they also now have TPL which is a bin sponsor. Um again there's a huge amount of differentiation in the actual wholesome nature of our product stack that gives us a lot of differentiation there. Um so if you look at Marqueta as a processor you can say well there are other processes too. Um and the beauty about that is that most of them don't have uh the ability to do BIN sponsorship. So they don't have their own regulated identity which means actually they're actually partners of Monovate. Um so sort of the picture I'm building here is that you know really and truly the biggest competitor that would come to the table actually ironically would be a scheme because you know when we have a customer that gets to maybe a certain size uh you know at a point in the future they may decide to become principal member themselves and they may then you know selfissue effectively and that's a sign that we've done a great job by the way like we shouldn't be worrying about that. We should be celebrating that because if you can get a program that goes from zero to you know five million cards and the economics start to make sense that there's a real benefit to them to be their own principal member and invest in that structure themselves then you know that's testament to the work that we did and helping them get there. Um, you know, more broadly speaking, you know, as I think about the end-to-end capacity now of what Monavate has with what Exodus Pay has, and you kind of flip back to that, James, I think, nails it perfectly well, you know, from 50 p to 1 pound 30, 1 pound 40, 1 pound50, whatever it ends up being depending on the um the mix of international spend because from a Mavivate perspective, we obviously predominantly been UK Europe to date and that is in a capp interchange environment and so the more issuing we do on the international basis the higher the uh opportunity in terms of the share of interchange we're going to get because the interchange rates are higher. So um yeah very very interesting uh market opportunity for us. >> Thank you. And uh a big topic of conversation it's about quantum computing and the threat of quantum computing. Do you personally have any opinions of the threat of quantum? >> I'll let you take this one, J. >> Yeah, I guess I can uh take this one. Um, so definitely it's uh it's um I think it's like AI. It's not if it's a when. So I think that there's definitely um um we're we're looking at the problem. Uh it doesn't affect us immediately, but we're definitely looking at the problem. I think the the advantage that we have with Exodus is that we are technology agnostic. So we can uh choose the best solution to unlock the experiences that our users uh want to give to our users. So when and uh when the time the time of quantum computing comes we will uh definitely look at the options available out there and we're going to make the best choice that not only protect our users funds but also provides the experience while always maintaining as Matias said the DNA of uh self- custody and again our goal is providing utility uh all technical challenges are what we enjoy. enjoy solving. And so I guess that it's like any other problem we're going to face with uh it would be quantum, would be AI, will be any other uh issues that the the future is going to come. I think that we're going to always focus on what's best for our users. >> I also think you know it's it's important to say that you know quantum computer is not only our problem to solve right. It's like the whole not only the whole industry of crypto is built on uh you know cryptography. It's like everything that you do on the internet pretty much that requires protecting you. Your credit card numbers, your you know your passwords, everything can be affected by this. And what that means that this is a breath of you know fresh air for everyone because you know it's it's not us having to you know just kind of go fix these issues or you know think about how we're going to solve quantum computer. It's like the whole world thinking about how this technology and also from a you know someone said about you know I think it was Keith you know the the optimism you know we need to approach these technologies from a perspective of what they are going to unlock for us and you know what goods are going to you know they are they going to bring to you know the the world >> thank you. Yeah, quantum is a huge opportunity. We only have less than five minutes left and I want to give you guys the opportunity because you've been such a lovely bunch to say. Um, if there's anything you're just really excited about, anything you didn't get to say, anything you want to include? Um, yeah. >> Anything you're proud of? just great being with you here and actually just talking to real customers and like we've been working on this like I've been with now for for eight years like that's eight years of my life and just showing up every day solving problems and trying to really put the customer first. to actually meet some of the people that I've worked with even for the first time today. It is just uh it's an honor and and I'm excited that we have the chance now to share some of the things that we are working on and uh to me this is really the beginning of something special, the beginning of what I like to call the age of Exodus. So uh exciting stuff coming. I think I'll I'll bookend that a little bit being the the new boy so to speak. Um so what's really excited me about combining Monave Exodus together is is really the journey that I know that we've got ahead of us. You know, I think we can sort of map out the next 20 years and know that we're about to see more change in the next 20 years than the entirety of financial services history. Um and you know to be part of a company that has the foundational tools required to play a significant role in essentially dramatically changing how all of us uh you know around the world interact with our financial lives is truly um you know one a great honor but but two it's you know I can't think of of another industry that has this much dramatic change ahead of itself in a in a way that's touching so many people. And so it's a great responsibility and and to sort of be able to look back in, you know, years to come when I'm rocking on a chair on a porch rather than uh, you know, on a on a chair on a stage. um you know to think that in some small way that you've been part of a team of people that all saw that you know the vision of what the world is going to be you know not necessarily you know from the same start point but you know that point in the horizon we're all looking at I think it's uh you know truly as I say it's an honor so >> warm round of applause for the for the panelists thank you guys so much these guys are working so hard for you so really appreciate Heat. Heat. I'm steppy gamer. All right, everyone. Thank you so much to the Exodus leadership team. Now, we're almost at the end of the day. I want to really take a moment though to to thank everyone who came to the stage, came to the stage throughout the day and just now answered every question in the queue. And um this is really just I hope you can feel the energy in this room. An incredible team, an incredible group. Now, a little bit of housekeeping. If you are posting, make sure that you tag Exodus on Twitter or wherever you are. Um, the team will be around all afternoon and there's more time for questions at happy hour, which is coming soon. So, bring any of the ones that we didn't get to there. But we're not done yet. JP is going to be coming back to the stage with one more announcement to close the day. This is maybe the one that you flew here for. So, eyes up, phones down. Please welcome JP back to the stage. Yes. Yes. Yes. Gosh. Again, thank you for all being here today. Before we get a drink, I want to take a few moments to talk to you about the future of Exodus. But first, let's look at the announcements from today. Visa, UFC, the Moon Agents card, Monovate, and Banks UK close. And we're not finished. As we've been talking on stage today, our team has been working around the clock to complete the last piece of the puzzle. Banks US this deal we just literally signed this moments ago. The company expects to receive the assets of the acquired entities promptly and once received we can implement the vision we had when we decided to acquire these companies. >> Yes. Like I said, literally this and this this is no joke. When when that's I wasn't out on the panel, right? And when everybody was out in the panel, that's when I got the news. So it's it feels amazing. So in the last 24 hours, the pieces of banks and Monovate acquisition has clicked into place and you're seeing me announce this. What you're not seeing is the thousands of hours our team has taken putting in all-nighters to make this moment a reality. This is the perfect announcement to end the day as we enter the next chapter of Exodus. Transitioning from speculation to payments. In fact, there's been so much winning today, as one famous person would say, we're almost tired of winning. I was going to reveal another announcement, but I want to save it for next week. We can end on this note. Thank you to our panelists and guests, and a heartfelt thank you to our shareholders. to everyone in this room who flew in and rode the waves with us. And those waves have been choppy. This has been a hard year, but I have to tell you, the past 10 days have actually been the most intense of my career. We've been vulnerable here. I'm running on three hours sleep right now. I know you can tell. I've heard I've heard people say to me yesterday, JP, you look tired. I'm like, what are you what are you telling me when you say I look tired? But I want you to know half the team here is run on way less. Blake, James, Kevin, several others you've seen and haven't seen. They've been pushing and fighting day and night. I'm truly humbled and grateful for them. This team has been fighting fighting for each other, fighting for our customers, fighting for you. And now we are winning. Exodus Pay, the Moon Agents card, Visa, UFC, Monivate, Banks UK, and Banks US. These moves transition Exodus the self-custodial wallet to Exodus, the full payments platform. Exodus is fighting for this vision and we're winning. Guys, thank you for being here with us today. Heat Hey baby. Hey If you're lonely, you know I'm here waiting for you. I'm just ahead. I'm just a broken shattered. I'm just a crosshair. I'm just leaving here with you.