The DeFi Download

Paymobil: Venmo for the world

March 18, 2021 Radix DLT
The DeFi Download
Paymobil: Venmo for the world
Show Notes Transcript

Join Piers Ridyard and the creator of Paymobil, Daniel Nordh, for a discussion on cross-border money transfers using stablecoins.  

Daniel, who previously worked at Coinbase, founded Paymobil to simplify cross-border money transfers using cryptocurrencies, with a focus on delivering a wonderful user experience through a user-friendly app. 

In this episode, Daniel and Piers dive into the features and functionality of Paymobil, and examine the differences in banking experiences between Europe and the United States.



Piers 00:04

Welcome to the DeFi Download, the podcast about decentralized finance and all things crypto, where we dive into the how, what, and why of the projects and assets that are powering the DeFi revolution. I'm your host, Piers Ridyard, CEO of Radix, the world's most scalable, open-source, public, decentralized ledger, built to bring decentralized finance into the mainstream. Daniel Nordh, the founder of Paymobil, a global Venmo using stablecoins, is joining me today. Daniel, thank you so much for coming on our show. 

Daniel 00:29

Thank you very much, it's a pleasure. 

Piers 00:31

So, the thing I like to go into detail on is: what was the problem that you saw in the world that you wanted to solve with crypto with Paymobil and what did you go into it thinking was true? What have you discovered about what your hypothesis around the market was and where you may actually have learned new things from the market? 

Daniel 00:55

Yeah, great question. So before starting Paymobil, I worked at Coinbase, where I led the design team for the consumer products. And, while there, the problem I wanted to solve, or the one I discovered was, obviously, the one around usability of crypto products in general. And in particular, this aspect of— You know, the thing, I think crypto is really good at, the killer app, if you want, it's just sending money, or sending value rather. But I heard from our users there, how scary it was, and how complicated it was to negotiate all the friction points we have still, whether it's hexadecimal addresses, whether it's private key management for noncustodial products, etc, etc. So, the problem I wanted to solve was really the one we've all believed it was going to solve. So, sending money across borders pretty much and making that as simple as any other consumer product out there, so that crypto doesn't have to be the first word you use about the product. But instead, you can talk about the value prop, which is about sending money anywhere, to any email address or phone number in the world.  

Piers 02:08

And what was the reason that you picked using stablecoins as the way of doing that?  

Daniel 02:16

Yeah. So again, there was another thing I heard from our users at Coinbase, who were like, why weren't they sending Bitcoin and Ether and any of the other currencies to each other as we thought they might do? And a big part of that was the volatility. If you're sending Bitcoin or Ether, you are not sure, really, how much you're sending, right? You're not sure if you're going to be overpaying or underpaying. And for real-life situations, where you either owe someone money, you want to pay them back, you're paying a real value that is most often thought of in the currency of the country where those people are in. So, in this case, if I owe you $50, I have to do a lot of calculations to figure out how much Ether or Bitcoin that is, and then tomorrow, it might not be true anyway. So that's why I think stablecoins are fixing one of the problems we heard about. And that's why I focused on that. 

Piers 03:14

So, you built a really beautiful application; it's very, very simple. You sent me $5 a little bit earlier, and I had a chance to play around with it. There's almost no mention of it being crypto, and it's very intuitive and user-friendly. Is that something that you had in your mind from day one? Or has this been a process of iterating that interface and getting to a point where you think it's easy enough for people to use? 

Daniel 03:40

No, it was absolutely there from day one. I believe for this technology to really be— You know, I think the technology is kind of there. In some sense, the technology is way ahead of the user experience. So, my premise was always going into this with, “Okay, what would a product look like that focused on convenience?” We made the choices that were actually best for the user experience because I have not come across a product where that has been done before. Especially with its use case of sending money. So, I was trying to simplify things, both from exposing the technical aspect, but also in terms of the use case. If you're trying to be a general approach wallet, where you will serve every use case, it's hard to provide a simple user interface. So, it was very much there from the start. Like what can we do to make it as simple as possible for someone who is comfortable with using Venmo, or Square Cash, or another FinTech product to actually open up something that we would call a crypto product, but they would just think of as an app that you can send money with? 

Piers 04:53

And who is the target audience, target user for this? 

Daniel 04:57

Yeah, so it's people who frequently transact across borders, but in a similar way to Venmo or Square Cash, where you're interacting with people you already know. So, you're paying friends and family, largely smaller amounts. So, again, the use case dictates the solutions here a bit. But this is not trying to be a general remittance service on day one. It's focused more on people who send money frequently, say, sub $250. So that could be between the US and Latin America, US and India, many of those corridors where people do it frequently, but in smaller amounts. 

Piers 05:37

So, often, the difficult bit of that, if I understand it correctly, is the end bits, the on and off-ramps, and just picking up and using your application. I can absolutely see your main on-ramp there is a credit card or a debit card, which makes a lot of sense, and allows you to go global quite quickly. But from the off-ramp side, like if I'm in India, how do I go from what I've received into rupees? Or if I'm in Italy, euros or whatever? 

Daniel 06:05

Yeah, absolutely. I think, as an ecosystem, we all kind of struggle with this a little bit at the moment. It's the least developed part, I think, of the whole ecosystem and it's the one where there's still the most friction. So, we work with different partners in different regions in the US. Wire is one of them. In India, there's a company called Transact. But quite frankly, I think this is a part of the ecosystem that still has a lot of development in front of it. But, you know, we're playing a long game here, where, I'm sure you do, too, believe in a world where, in a couple of years from now, 5-10 years, cryptocurrency in general, and stablecoins in particular, will go from being a niche application or a technology that very few people are even aware of, to something that is much more commonplace. So, I guess the long game is that people won't really need to cash out as much as they do today. They'll be able to spend stablecoin from their wallets directly, whether that's paying other people or buying products directly online. But the short answer is we will need to engage with off-ramp partners in each country. So, while it's a global product from day one, where we can serve any customer anywhere, the on and off-ramps situation is the same as for other products: we have to find solutions for each geography. 

Piers 07:36

For this product, particularly, do you see that your key long-term, protective moat, or differentiating factor, those relationships that are built to make those off-ramps? Or do you see it as those can be provided by anyone, but what we really want to focus on is the core user experience and just being a wonderful user experience and making it really easy to connect to people? Or do you see both of those as being important factors? 

Daniel 08:04

I think both are but if the technology is fairly advanced in the ecosystem, I think what has not been is the user experience. So, some of the key innovations that we've been trying to focus on here are the private key management situation to not expose all that complexity to people. The second one is the human-readable addresses, the fact that you can send money to any email address or phone number in the world and use your contact book as you would in any other FinTech app. So those are some of the biggest barriers we saw beforehand. And I guess the hope is that the part of the moat here is to actually attract a big network of people that are using the app, which is similar to some of the other payment apps that were part of the non-crypto wave, like Venmo, or Square Cash, or even PayPal.  

Piers 09:00

I mean, I love your one-liner: "a global Venmo using stablecoins." It's very succinct and it describes exactly what it is. People love the experience of Venmo. And so, as soon as you said that, I was like, right, I understand exactly what this is doing. But also, I can see how much complexity is being hidden behind such a simple user interface to abstract away a lot of that stuff. So, one of my other questions was going to be regulation, things like custody and crypto assets, things like KYC, AML, regulation, all of that stuff that sits behind the complexity that sits behind the simplicity. If you were going to be giving advice to other DeFi makers and people who are trying to go down this route of making a really simple user interface, but at the same time, having to do those schleps and having to work out how to make that usable for their users, what are the key learnings you've come across as you've been building this that you're like, Man, that would be really great if I'd known that at the start, or This really makes a difference, knowing how to do this bit and really focusing on that bit? 

Daniel 10:07

Yeah, that's a great question. I think, especially in the Ethereum world, there is actually a huge amount of building blocks already that make it easy for people who want to build products on top of the infrastructure. So, huge props to everyone who's already built a ton of stuff. We're using Web 3.0, the Web 3.0 library on mobile, and that's already a huge help. But let's see, what other things? Well, key management is always a hurdle, and crypto is a global technology, inherently global. So, I debated a bit whether this should be a custodial or noncustodial product, and eventually, we went down the noncustodial route, which could give you more headache from a user experience perspective. But in this case, it was just too good an opportunity to give up the fact that we could serve anybody anywhere from day one. I think that's the fantastic promise of noncustodial: Like you are sort of breaking free from the regulatory aspect of having to ask permission for each country you want to serve. Which is amazing, but it does pose the problem of how do you get, quote, "normal people" into the ecosystem, if they first need to download an app, and then need to understand everything about private key management, those sorts of things. 

Piers 11:49

So how have you actually abstracted that away in the app? Because I didn't notice that it was a noncustodial app at all. 

Daniel 11:56

Yeah, that's a great question. You know, we're still in a private beta. So, we are still considering a few other additions. But basically, under the hood, what happens is when you create an account on the device, a key pair is generated on the device. It never leaves the device, never comes to our servers. So as soon as it's created, the private key is encrypted and we save it to your device’s keychain. So, if you're on iOS, we actually encrypt it and save it in the iOS keychain, which we also use sign-in with Apple. So that means that your keychain is very likely to be backed up on iCloud. So now, that probably sets off some alarm bells for some people. But you know, crypto products are a trade-off between convenience, privacy, and security. And, again, we're probably stressing the convenience side here. And this is a product meant for smaller amounts; this is not to store your whole wealth. So, I think it's the right trade-off for this use case. 

Piers 13:02

That's a really clever way of using the existing ecosystem of password storage management and API keys and all that kind of stuff that then you can— Yeah, it's great. It's pretty clever. And so, from the point of view of customer service and stuff like that, you've radically reduced this likelihood of people going: I didn't write down those 24 characters, but I've lost my money, can I get it back, please? At least the number of times that's going to happen is hopefully going to be massively reduced. So, you're still in test flight. What's your plan, as much as you can talk about in terms of your go-to-market and how are you going to build your first communities that want to send money to each other with this product? 

Daniel 13:48

Yeah, that's a great question. So, we're in the final stages of a private beta. We'll be launching pretty soon on iOS, to begin with, and the community is going to be two parts. One is— You know, clearly this is still a crypto product and I believe that people in the crypto community are always interested in things that push a new angle and try and solve a new problem that other products haven't necessarily tackled before. So definitely the first couple of 100, couple of 1000 users it's highly likely that they have already been exposed to a crypto product. But what Paymobil enables is that you can now send crypto to people who have never had a crypto wallet before, right? They don't need to— you don't need to talk to them about the wallet before you can send them money. You can literally just send money to their email address, which is then held in an escrow smart contract before they actually claim it. But it gets rid of that barrier to entry so that it's much, much easier to grow, both the user base for our app, but also the user base of stablecoins and crypto in general because you can send it to literally anybody. So, again, going back to who this is for, this is for people who like to send money across borders. And since stablecoins’ 99% of the supply is dollar-based so far, so it's probably going to be appealing to people who live in countries where the dollar is actually a good choice compared to the local currency. So, obviously talking about Latin America here, where cashing out maybe isn't the first priority, just getting paid, being able to get paid in dollars and sending other people dollars, but the need to cash out is lower. 

Piers 15:45

A slightly controversial question: What stablecoin are you using? 

Daniel 15:49

Yeah. For me, the choice was fairly clear for this use case, at least. So, we're using USDC, which to me represents the most trusted stablecoin, if I was to recommend it to a person who has never owned crypto. There are other coins out there, some are bigger in supply, but maybe not something I'm comfortable with recommending. There are other ones that are maybe smaller in supply but have a different type of securitization, which I think are fantastic, but maybe, again, not what I would recommend if I would send money to my family who's never had a crypto product before. So, for me, that was the trade-off. But the goal going forward is not necessarily to be just serving one stablecoin. Right? The beauty here over time is that we can let our users select their base currency, whether they want that to be USDC, Dai, even Tether, or, ideally, later on when there are a euro stablecoin, a pound, a yen, a rupee because the dollar is good, but it's not necessarily the stable currency for people in Europe. 

Piers 17:05

Right. It's not localized currency. And this is one of the things that we were talking about a lot, probably two years ago, in Radix, when we were talking about stablecoins and how you can build stablecoins. And this idea that money is global is sort of not true. Money is local, it's jurisdictionally bound. People think of money in terms of what their local currency is, and receiving something other than their local currency often creates this sort of cognitive dissonance. There are some people, obviously, in some countries, for whom the dollar is a de facto currency or have a high preference for receipt of dollars or are at least fine with receiving dollars. But there's plenty of countries, where receiving $1 is neither useful, particularly, nor can you instantly base it in what that means to you. Like for me, at least, when someone sends me dollars, even though I deal with those quite often, my life is in pounds. And so, I still do have a little bit of— it's not as bad as some countries and some people who would be dealing with this less, but I still do have a little bit of an “Oh, what is that in pounds?” that happens in my head all of the time and it's not always the same answer. And so, yeah, I think that there is that massive need as well for multicurrency stablecoins, other type that the world can trust because I think that sometimes it ends up being quite US-centric in how we decide what the first currencies are going to be on top of these legends. 

Daniel 18:43

I completely agree. I mean, it's called stablecoin for a reason, and it's stable to a currency. But if I send money to my friends in France, or London, or Portugal, or anywhere else, as soon as you introduce a dollar to the Euro, or dollar to the pound, then it's suddenly this exchange rate, not necessarily risk, but it's another cognitive thing that you need to think of. So, our plan long term is that obviously, if I send money to you in the UK, the default currency you would receive would be pounds, and we would facilitate that exchange on the back-end so you wouldn't have to worry about it. But then at the same time, let people set their base currency. So, if you, for whatever reason, preferred to get dollars, you could change that and that setting would remain over time. So, I'm completely with you. 

Piers 19:37

So, in terms of flow of money, I suppose I'm going to take a guess, what happens is someone puts their card details in, the card payment goes to Paymobil, and then Paymobil buys the crypto on an exchange and then sends that stablecoin to the user's address that they would have got when it was generated when that user was generated on the account. 

Daniel 20:00

It's close. But since we're a noncustodial product, and we're trying to stay out of the flow of funds as much as possible, well actually at all, the on-ramp partners we have, handle the card information, and then send the sender USDC, in this case to the address that we can specify for the customer. So, they can actually, in this case, with Paymobil, send money that they don't yet— they can send USDC that they don't yet have. So just by using Apple Pay and a debit card, someone who has never held USDC in their account yet can send another person USDC. So, it doesn't have to first come to your address and then be sent out. That's kind of neat.  

Piers 20:49

It is very neat. And I suppose you're just using the people who have already got those regulatory approvals and certifications to do all of the steps that are necessary to do that. 

Daniel 21:00

Correct. Over time, of course, we may think about streamlining that and owning more of that vertical stack. But at the moment, I think our advantage is that we can serve a lot of countries at the same time or early on, instead of focusing all our energy on one geography. You know, that's one of the reasons that Venmo or even Square Cash has hardly left the United States; it's just so much effort. 

Piers 21:30

Do you think that's true? That's a really interesting statement. I have no data to back this up but the experience of banking in Europe is very different from the experience of banking in America.  

Daniel 21:43

I agree. 

Piers 21:44

And so, just being able to send money to someone instantly, same day, in the UK, for free, has been something that's just existed for, basically, as long as I've been sending money to anyone. I can vaguely remember, I think, some transfers between banks taking more than instant. But that's been there for a long time, the fast payment system in general, and then in Europe as well. So, I've always been curious because there isn't really a Venmo in the UK. I'm sure there are some small companies who would disagree with me, but there's not a big player like Venmo in the US and there isn't really the same sort of thing in Europe. Apart from a few in, I think, Sweden, that have managed to do these full-stack integrations with the banking system and so, it uses the identity card. Some countries have got a very, very well integrated banking and identity systems and you can use the identity and a special link that allows you to pay between people in a Venmo-like way, but actually, it's pulling from a bank account, I really understand it. But that's the only instance that I've seen where instead of a completely separate build, where you build a completely secondary rail, where you're sending things across. So, I'm curious about whether or not that is a complete truth that I often hear repeated that the reason that Venmo isn't in other countries is because it's really hard to set up local regulatory rules. But then there are countries that have got really hard bankings that also don't have Venmo, so—  

Daniel 23:24

Oh yeah, I take your point. It is definitely very different in the US and Europe. It is so interesting that in the US, a private entity pretty much had to step in and solve this problem because it wasn't being solved in the way that we've been used to seeing these kinds of problems being solved in Europe, entirely privately tackled, which is very different. And I agree. In Sweden, you know, I was born in Sweden, and there's this system called Swish, which pretty much everybody has, which is tied to your phone number. And then you use the electronic ID to connect to your bank. So yeah, some places are definitely much more advanced. But we still have this situation where, in each locality, in each geography, in each country, there's often a national alternative, right? If you want to send money to someone within the country, it's mostly fine. And in Europe, it's mostly fine if you want to send between countries, but you might have to resort to IBAN numbers and stuff. But we're still lacking this kind of global system that we got with email, right? Before email, we didn't use to send that many international letters. But email is totally global, and with a very simple address, we can send, communicate with anybody across the world. And that's where I think payments are heading. But we haven't yet solved the problems. The infrastructure is getting there but the user experience is not. 

Piers 24:57

So, if you had a magic wand and you could magic up any next feature of the infrastructure or next available tool that you wanted (and we've discussed a few things like better off-ramps, more multi-currency stablecoins), what's the top-of-mind thing that you're just being “Man, if that existed that would be amazing!”? 

Daniel 25:18

Yeah, I think some of the things that I'm really excited about happening right now, or in the next year or so, is to figure out scaling in general, both in terms of throughput and fees. And I think we're seeing that a bit again, now, where basic transactions are getting squeezed, and it's getting more expensive. So, a lot of the upcoming solutions that I'm hearing about, and reading about, and seeing being tested are super exciting. Whether it's Eth2, or whether it's Optimistic Rollups, or Zero-Knowledge Proofs, all of these layer 2 options are very promising to me. But that's something we need to solve for this to really get to the size that we probably need for serving a global community. 

Piers 26:11

That's interesting. And you're— I mean, that's obviously one of the key things that Radix has built for, but the reason that you see that is because you're looking forwards and saying this is a problem that is coming down the line, or you're already looking at it and going “Man, these transaction costs are really hurting my bottom line, and they really need to come down for this to be a viable business”? 

Daniel 26:35

Well, I think it's a combination. I believe firmly that we should be removing the friction point from the end-user of having to think about transaction fees. Like you say, when you transfer money between a bank in the UK and one in France or another bank in the UK, you don't sit there and think, “Hmm, am I going to pay a fee here for doing that?” And I think technically it makes sense that the Ethereum network needs a fee. But I do not believe that the end-user needs to be exposed to that complexity. So, in terms of unit economics, for people who are actually providing these products, obviously it’s super helpful if the actual cost is lower, trending towards zero, or very close to zero. And if the scale or the usage of the network goes up, then the total fee will still be very high. So, I think it's a combination of I know what the end-user experience needs to be but I'm also conscious of the businesses that are actually trying to provide those and to lower the cost for them. 

Piers 27:47

What's your general view, take on the DeFi ecosystem as a whole? 

Daniel 27:54

I think it's fascinating. It's just incredibly fast-moving. Every month, almost every week, there's something new coming out that is pushing the boundaries. I'm personally not super deep into the whole investment side of things. And frankly, it's scary acrobatics sometimes [laughs] with single block transactions happening between— 

Piers 28:23

The flash loans. 

Daniel 28:24

Yeah, flash loans and, you know, I was at ETHDenver when that thing happened. And it's just an extraordinarily—  

Piers 28:32

bZx— 

Daniel 28:34

Yeah. 

Piers 28:36

—arbitrage hack. 

Daniel 28:37

People find new ways of using all these building blocks and that is super cool. I'm also a little bit scared because it feels like there might be a hole somewhere in the system that could end up hurting everybody. So, I would say my overall view is that’s super fascinating; I wouldn't go all-in on it myself right now, putting my net worth in all of this, but maybe I'm slightly more conservative than some, but I just think it's super positive that people are working on this. But yeah, I'm more interested right now at least in solving problems that I know people are having that are outside of the crypto ecosystem right now. 

Piers 29:23

So that's a really interesting take. Is there anything that, even not saying, putting your money into it, but just being like, “Hey, that's a really cool innovation, I'm really curious to see where that goes,” in the DeFi space? I mean, there's a number of things that have been done there, right? So, there's things like pools and shares rather than discrete financial products and things like continuous function market makers, things that make things like Uniswap possible, or make things like Aave possible, or the ability to create overcollateralized contracts to create synthetic products like you're seeing on Synthetix. Does it all feel just a little bit like financial engineering? Or is there some of those things that you're like, “Wow, I'm really excited to see how x is going to proceed from here”? 

Daniel 30:11

Yeah, I think that, being completely honest, a lot of that stuff is a little bit over my head, which scares me. Like you mentioned, financial engineering. A lot of it feels exactly like that to me.  

Piers 30:26

Right. I mean it literally is, right?  

Daniel 30:28

Yes. Perfect word [laughter]. Anything that I don't quite understand is probably not where I should be putting my money. So, I'm amazed at how many people in crypto seem to be super savvy financial people. But then I also have a slight worry that some of them maybe aren't [laughs]. So, the things that are more interesting to me, maybe are some of the things that are using the technology, but not necessarily just in terms of this financial engineering. So, things like Zora or Foundation that just launched, which are thinking about tokenizing, maybe, real-world cultural assets, and enabling a new way of partial ownership, those sorts of things. That's super exciting to me because it's new. It's trying to do something that wasn't necessarily possible before. 

Piers 31:27

What do you mean by a cultural asset? 

Daniel 31:29

It's early days there, but Zora did this tape. It's basically a musical artefact. You know, I used to work in music as well. And there was always this fantastic feeling of knowing that you were an owner of a limited copy of, say, a particular record, or, in this case, cassettes, so that you're one of only 100 people in the world that actually owned this product. But what they've done is, I guess, combined the financial engineering with this kind of limited aspect of it, and you could invest in— again, we keep coming back to financial and investment, which is, maybe, what excites me less, but it's still new. It's a new use case, it's not just trying to recreate options, or bonds, or margin, or, you know, [unintelligible 00:32:30]. So, I'm really curious, I don't think we've really, we don't really know what could be possible there. But I love seeing people solving one problem at a time and digging and seeing what treasure we are going to find. 

Piers 32:46

You said you previously worked at Coinbase, right?  

Daniel 32:48

Yes.  

Piers 32:49

What was your journey into crypto like and what was the most surprising thing that you learned along the way as you were working at an exchange? 

Daniel 33:00

Yeah, so I had been on the side-lines or aware of things since probably 2013. But it wasn't until I started working at Coinbase that I got really deep into all the technical side of things. But I think, one thing that is easy to forget once you are now working in this space is that it's still a bit of a threshold for people to get over, to get comfortable with, “Yeah, this is probably the future.” A lot of people outside still have this idea. Our researchers at Coinbase spoke to so many of the people that were coming to crypto for the first time that they learned what were the hurdles that they needed to get over. And some of them are like, “Oh, is this a scam?”, “Bitcoin, it's just to get rich quick,” or “it's a lottery ticket,” whatever. Right? So yeah, it was enlightening to see that everybody on the inside is 100% believer like this is the new financial system. But it's still such a small part of the world being aware of that and bridging that gap. And, again, that's why I'm building Paymobil for people who actually have never touched or never wanted to touch crypto can see like, “Oh, okay, yeah, of course, this is better than me not being able to send money with Venmo to someone in Brazil.” Right?  

Piers 34:27

It's really funny you say that, because at Radix we did a lot of user testing around stablecoins, I think two years ago. And it was fascinating. What we were trying to do was see whether or not we could recreate the experience of being sent a check and using a noncustodial web wallet generation protocol in the back-end so that you could send someone like $10 worth of stablecoins. And they could just claim it and you could send it anywhere via text message, or via an email, or whatever. And we did some actual customer interviews, where we sat down with people, we got people off the street, and we set up a process as if they had just received it as a text message on their phone. And one that really sticks with me is one guy, professional, worked for one of the big consultancy companies and went through the entire process. And at the end of it, he was like, “Okay, cool, fine. I've come to the end of the process.” So, we completed these tests, we did a debrief, and we said, “Oh, and by the way, in the back-end, this is a crypto token. What do you think about that?” And he was like, “Oh, my God, you guys have just— you guys just tricked me into using crypto. Isn't that what drug dealers use? Isn't that what like— Isn't that illegal?” And I think that there was a real bubble pop moment for me where, not only do people not understand crypto, they're actually, in some cases, afraid of it. And he was genuinely angry that we had, even in a simulated environment where he hadn't even received any money, but he had touched crypto. Have you experienced anything like that in your user testing or do you feel like the world's moved on enough now that that's not so much of a problem? 

Daniel 36:13

Yeah, it's super interesting to hear that and I think that echoes a lot of the things we heard with new people coming to Coinbase. It was slightly different there because they were most often seeking us out. They were curious, but they hadn't yet overcome all the hurdles. Now, I think it's largely true. I mean, probably 1% of the world's population is even aware, let alone comfortable with crypto. And you know, Bitcoin is the currency that—  

Piers 36:45

The gateway drug.  

Daniel 36:46

Yeah, people will hear about Bitcoin first. Like in 99% of cases Bitcoin is the cryptocurrency that they will get familiar with first, which I think is a good thing, right? Actually, I would say, Bitcoin has a very good brand. But it still also has this baggage. It's only 10 years old. There's been a lot of shady stuff on the side, people who've lost a lot of money. So, it's hard. We need to convince people that it's trustworthy and that there are real-world use cases for it. Not just, “Oh, buy some because it'll keep going up.” Right? That's not really— [laughs]. You know, it appeals to people who want to speculate, and that's the product-market fit it's had so far. It's speculation, right? Very, very few other use cases have actually reached product-market fit. Of course, DeFi, I believe, has, with a small, small, small market, but it's still around financial gain. You don't often use your bank for— we would like to get financial gain from our bank, but it's mostly not, right? It's just something we need. So, I'm very excited about people who are working on things that are appealing to people outside of the small bubble. 

Piers 38:08

Interesting. Well, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate you coming on the show. It's been such a pleasure talking with you, Daniel. If anyone wants to find out more about Paymobil and wants to use the app or get told when it's going to be available, how can they follow you, how can they get involved? How can they download all that good stuff? 

Daniel 38:28

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. So, our website is paymobil.co. And Paymobil, that's without an E at the end. So paymobil.co. We are currently in private beta but should be opening up very, very soon. So, you can sign up there and we'll be available in the App Store very soon. So again, thanks for having me. 

Piers 38:53

Thank you. Have a great day.