Bitcoin Lightning payments, self-custody yield, and stablecoin interoperability are converging on one infrastructure layer, and the companies building it are already seeing massive demand. Tedd Huff, CEO of fintech advisory firm Voalyre and founder of Fintech Confidential, sits down with Jesse Shrader, co-founder and CEO of Amboss Technologies, to break down how Lightning Network infrastructure is reshaping payment processing, treasury strategy, and compliance for fintech operators worldwide.

Card networks charge 2% to 5% per transaction. Lightning brings that to 0.29%. Square just announced zero Bitcoin processing fees for its entire retailer network. The Genius Act is flooding the market with stablecoins, but those assets live on blockchains that do not talk to each other. Jesse explains how Taproot Assets on Lightning can unify fragmented stablecoin systems through cross-asset, in-flight currency exchange. He also walks through how Rails, a self-custodial Bitcoin yield product with over 2,600 on its waitlist, lets companies earn yield from payment routing without giving up custody. The conversation includes real founder lessons on fundraising, board strategy, and preparing for a future where AI systems pay each other.

FIND OUT MORE

1️⃣ Lightning payment processing at 0.29% is a 10x reduction from card network fees; run the math on what your business saves annually.

2️⃣ Self-custody yield is now possible on Bitcoin without handing your asset to a third party; Rails automates the infrastructure so you do not need to be an expert.

3️⃣ Build your board with the smartest people you have ever met, and replace anyone who is not fully invested in your success.

4️⃣ Map your fiat compliance obligations into decentralized payment environments now, before a sanctions violation forces the conversation.

5️⃣ Start designing guardrails for AI agents with spending authority; machine-to-machine payments are expected within three to five years.

LINKS

Guest

Jesse Shrader on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shraderjesse/

Company

Amboss Technologies: https://amboss.tech/

Amboss Space (Lightning Network Explorer): https://amboss.space/

Rails: https://www.amboss.tech/rails

Amboss on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/ambosstech

Fintech Confidential

Podcast: https://fintechconfidential.com/listen

Notifications: https://fintechconfidential.com/access

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/fintechconfidential

X: https://x.com/FTconfidential

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/fintechconfidential

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fintechconfidential

Supporters

DFNS provides wallets as a service that is API first, multi-chain by design, and secured with MPC so you can launch across over 50 blockchains without managing private keys. Request a demo at fintechconfidential.com/dfns

Skyflow is a zero trust data privacy vault delivered as an API that lets you collect, secure, and tokenize personal information with built-in features for PCI, CCPA, GDPR, and SOC 2 compliance. Visit skyflowsecure.com

Hawk AI provides AI tools for real-time payment screening, ML transaction monitoring, and dynamic customer risk rating to make compliance more effective and help fight fraud and financial crime. Visit gethawkai.com

About

Jesse Shrader is the CEO and co-founder of Amboss Technologies. He holds a degree in Environmental Resources Engineering from Humboldt State University and previously worked in highway asset management at the Oregon Department of Transportation. His experience handling calls for class action lawsuits against banks exposed him to predatory overdraft practices and pushed him toward building decentralized payment infrastructure.

Amboss Technologies is a payment infrastructure and data analytics company built on Bitcoin's Lightning Network, founded in 2021. Its products include Magma (liquidity marketplace), Rails (self-custodial yield), Reflex (compliance automation), and Amboss Space (network explorer).

Tedd Huff, CEO of fintech advisory firm Voalyre and host of Fintech Confidential. Fintech Confidential is a production of DD3 Media, bringing you the people, tech, and companies that change how you pay and get paid.

Chapters

00:01:02 DFNS: Wallets as a Service (Sponsor)

00:02:20 Welcome to Web3 with FTC

00:02:51 Meet Jesse Shrader and Amboss

00:05:32 Rails Launch and Bitcoin Yield Demand

00:06:37 From Engineering to Bitcoin Infrastructure

00:09:18 Stablecoins, Genius Act, and Interoperability

00:12:39 Self-Custody Yield with Rails

00:16:40 Why Lightning Over Layer One

00:19:08 Amboss Product Suite

00:21:45 Compliance, Sanctions, and Reflex

00:24:15 Skyflow: Data Privacy Vault (Sponsor)

00:25:17 How Rails Generates Yield

00:29:31 Lower Fees and Merchant Adoption

00:35:24 Founder Lessons and Fundraising

00:39:30 Build Your Board Strategically

00:41:50 Crystal Ball: AI Paying AI

00:45:18 Voltage Partnership Announcement

00:47:12 Hawk AI: Fighting Financial Crime (Sponsor)

00:47:57 Disclaimer

This is where you get the insights to the shifts that matter,

that the plumbing in the financial system is broken.

It's been over 15 years since Bitcoin came to market.

Bitcoin transactions take a while to settle

and accessible to everyone global.

And then there was a panic within the Bitcoin community.

And so everybody was freaking out like, how do we do this?

Well, now we're decentralizing that

they, they want yield on their assets.

Why are we paying so much instant payments?

Is now El Salvador announced that Bitcoin was going to become,

boom.

It pops up and it's in there.

The one piece of advice, what would it be?

And in one sentence,

if someone else is holding your Bitcoin, you're in trouble

looking to hear.

What do you see happening in the next three to five years?

I'm seeing.

In that crystal ball,

welcome to FinTech Confidential, bringing you the

people, tech and companies that change how you pay and get paid.

You're building a FinTech product.

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Welcome to Web3 with FTC.

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We talk with builders and decision makers who are actually doing the

work, and whether you're a founder exec, or just trying to stay

ahead, this is where you get the insights to the shifts that matter.

So let's go ahead.

Get started.

Hey, Jesse, I am super happy to have you on today, man,

it's been a long time coming.

Uh, it's great to be here with you, Ted,

and very excited to dive in.

For those of you who don't know Jesse already, let me

give you a little bit of background.

Jesse went from being an environmental engineer who was building physical

infrastructure and made the complete switch over to Bitcoin's

lightning network infrastructure.

Now, his background really gives him a broad view on a number of

different things, but one of his experiences was handling calls.

For class action lawsuits against banks and between the experiences of

the physical infrastructure and seeing what was going on with the banks,

these experiences exposed him to fundamental flaws in traditional banking.

Systems and pushed him to build an open, decentralized payment infrastructure.

Jesse decided in 2021 that he was going to co-found Ambos Technologies, and

this was done to fix the critical pain points, the Bitcoin Lightning Network.

They've done this by building an AI driven infrastructure.

They provide data analytics, liquidity solutions, compliance tools that

all make Bitcoin payments scalable.

Efficient and accessible to everyone globally to do this.

They didn't just launch one product.

They, they launched a handful, so they launched Magma, which is the largest

lightning liquidity marketplace.

They most recently launched Rails, a self custodial Bitcoin yield service,

and they also have Reflex, which is a compliance automation engine

for those types of needs that you have around compliance and bitcoin.

Now I got the opportunity, Jesse, to see you launch rails at Bitcoin 2025

here in Las Vegas earlier this year.

You're joining us today from Bitcoin, Amsterdam.

I am so jealous.

I really wish I was there.

Couldn't make it happen, but I'm so happy that you're there.

You know, one of the things that I thought was really interesting is within.

A short period of time of launching Rails, you guys ended up with over

2,600 already on the wait list and it really is a testament for how your

engineering mindset is able to turn these complex lightning network challenges

into practical, usable solutions.

Yeah, thanks so much for like highlighting all of that,

but basically since we launched it.

We stumbled onto this incredible demands that people have for

Bitcoin denominated yield.

I think one of the biggest stories that we've had so far is the Bitcoin Treasury

Company, so MicroStrategy, meta Planet.

All of these companies, one after the other, are focused

on accumulation strategies.

How do they get Bitcoin and get more of it once they have some?

And so that's really where our product end, where people could actually.

Keep self custody of their Bitcoin, keep a low risk exposure, and then be able to

deploy that and access yields on their Bitcoin, giving them a whole opportunity

to expand what they have developed already as far as their treasury strategy.

But really the magic happens when we link that with payments, where we

get payment volume, because at the end of the day, that's what drives.

Additional Bitcoin accumulation, which is what everybody is focused on this year.

So I have to ask, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bring us back just a little

bit, but I have to ask like, how do you go from looking at what it takes to

build road infrastructure, to building digital infrastructure for bitcoin?

How do you make that jump?

I mean, that isn't a jump that we hear taken very often.

Yeah.

Basically I studied environmental engineering, which a lot of

people, that's basically, I studied wastewater treatment and I can tell

you right now that the plumbing in the financial system is broken.

So that's the way that I look at it, because I learned from a call center job

that I had, you know, as a temp that.

People were essentially getting robbed through overdraft fees.

And now, and as you start diving into that, you see how broken

the system is, where people with literally no money are being charged

an additional $30 every time.

And then the bank is reorganizing those transactions to take more

money, to have more overdraft events.

Essentially, that is highway robbery of people that literally have none.

So that told me that the plumbing in the financial system was rotten.

Now, going forward from that, how do we build solid infrastructure and moving

on to my next job as an engineer?

Literally, they will throw engineers anywhere to solve any type of problem.

And so I started working in transportation highway asset

management, building a highway network.

And if you think about it, after I had experienced the

financial plumbing being broken.

Now I have a financial transportation layer.

This is really what we're focused on.

How do you maintain a highway system and how do you maintain a

financial transportation system?

And those two concepts combined kind of lead me to what the Lightning Network

is right now, which is a financial transportation layer that is built on an

honest system, which is all on Bitcoin, where it doesn't require trust at all.

There's no backroom deals.

There's no boardroom that is making decisions on how

people's money should operate.

It's regular people building infrastructure that sets us up well for

the future, gets people moving their money faster, uh, through trustless systems.

Have a, a safe highway experience of the financial transportation layer

as you talk about this.

I can't believe that it's been over 15 years since.

Bitcoin came to market.

But even though in the overarching piece that is a short period of time, if you

look at the use of money and currency, the speed in which it has transformed

the way that we think about things, there's a lot of perspectives that just

haven't kept up with that transformation.

There are still a lot of people that look at.

Bitcoin is being slow or expensive, especially when you are using it

for just moving money, AKA payments.

I know you've done a lot of work to solve that.

Help us understand what you're seeing right now in the market

around Bitcoin payments.

Yeah.

What we're seeing is everybody and their mother is launching their own stable coin.

So basically we saw the Genius Act.

Um, it basically opens up the floodgates, so everybody is creating

their own stable coin, and it's all on these different blockchains and

none of them talk to each other.

We've seen tron, so Tether on Tron, most popular stablecoin that's out there.

We're seeing transactions on Tron.

A completely centralized blockchain actually costs

three to $6 per transaction.

So we're seeing all these new blockchains pop up that are thinking

that they're gonna solve the exact same problem that Bitcoin already

solved over its 15 year existence.

And basically what Bitcoin figured out is we have to move to the next layer.

So that means we have to move to the Lightning network because it's

faster, it's cheaper, it still maintains the trust, the trustless

nature, and the decentralization.

It doesn't compromise on those things, and with everybody launching their

own stable coin, we're gonna have a massive interoperability problem.

These blockchains don't talk to each other and they can't govern one another.

So basically what we need to do is actually bring these all into

the same system and that's what Lightning Network is capable of doing.

There was a recent update.

Is called tap assets.

So really a development over the last year and or and change is basically making

it possible for cross asset payments.

So in-flight currency exchange, that is what we have in the future for lightning,

and that is the perfect answer to a major problem that we have where everybody's

launching their own stable coin and it answers the interoperability problem.

So instead of having a completely fractured ecosystem, we can actually

unify on trustless technology that is fully decentralized and that's on Bitcoin.

Well, and you'd start off the conversation today by

mentioning these organizations.

Whether it be MicroStrategy, sorry, strategy, they drop the micro, they're

no longer micro, they macro now, I don't know, strategy and micro sailor are

trying to accumulate as much as they can.

You've got BlackRock that's trying to accumulate as much as they can.

You've got all these different things going on in that space.

One of the big topics around stable coins are yield AKA, they call them rewards.

That's a lot of the conversation that's going on today.

It sounds like everybody is just.

They want yield on their assets.

How do you see the tension behind the folks who are holding to generate

the yield versus those who are using for payment managing themselves?

And what have you seen change between those?

Since launching Rails,

we're seeing the Bitcoin treasury companies, so strategy and others

really explore the gamut of possibilities.

How can they accumulate more Bitcoin?

And we're seeing strategy come out with.

Offering after offering, so from stretch down to these leveraged plays

or actually reducing volatility.

So we're seeing strategy explore all sorts of different opportunities

that the Bitcoin ecosystem opens up.

We're also seeing other Bitcoin treasury companies explore carry trade

strategies to accumulate more Bitcoin.

But the thing is, all of these exist on different parts of

the risk and reward spectrum.

What we launched with Rails is we're thinking, we know Bitcoin, we know that

it is pristine collateral, and that if someone else is holding your Bitcoin,

you're in trouble because you have to trust them and you have to rely on them.

And we realize that there wasn't a system that allows you to maintain

self custody, so not have to trust other people, but still get access

to some yield opportunities.

That's what we built with Rails.

We built it so that these companies or individuals can maintain self custody,

one of the core principles of Bitcoin, and still tap into yield opportunities.

And those yield opportunities really come from payments activity.

So since the Lightning Network has, you know, been invented, been created,

been being built over these past five years that Ambos has existed.

Really, it's becoming infrastructure.

So you're taking your Bitcoin and you're turning it into basically

pipes of the financial system.

We're reinventing the financial plumbing in a more honest way,

and once your Bitcoin is set up as that infrastructure, you get to

basically run your own toll road.

And so every time a payment passes through, you're getting to capture

a small portion of that transaction.

As a small fee instead of Visa and MasterCard, American Express, taking

the lion's share of all the financial activity and all of the fees that

are being generated from that, well now we're decentralizing that.

So basically anybody can participate with a small amount of hardware

or even use a cloud service.

Just pay monthly, put your Bitcoin to work, and now you are part of this

financial infrastructure of the future that's building a more honest system.

As you're talking about all this movement and the trustless

environments and all these different things, you know, like you and others

have said, Bitcoin has one of the highest security that's available because it

doesn't work on consensus and it isn't based upon a decision in a boardroom.

But at the same time, it's also incredibly complex.

We're talking about routing, you're talking about liquidity, you're

talking about channel management.

There's so many different things that come into play with this.

Why?

Why did you take on something so complex rather than building

something so much simpler?

Have you ever sat at a table that rocks just a little bit?

Basically, as an engineer, I'll never stop working to fix that and make a stable.

Table.

But basically the deal is that there's something that was fundamentally

wrong with Bitcoin payments when I first started to use it.

I see this beautiful system that just has a little something wrong with it, and

that was that it wasn't ready to scale for the future, and it had slow payments.

I knew that Bitcoin at the first layer, the layer one, can only

do seven transactions per second.

And does that prepare us for the future?

In 2021, El Salvador announced that Bitcoin was going to become legal tender,

and then there was a panic within the Bitcoin community because we're seeing

Bitcoin transactions be over $3 and for the people of El Salvador death

not a financial system that works.

And we also know that Bitcoin transactions take a while to settle.

Stand around for 60 minutes while you're buying your coffee.

That doesn't make sense.

So basically we knew that the path forward had to be lightning, where you

have that instant settlement and that payments can actually be very low cost

settle immediately, and it works globally.

It doesn't compromise on Bitcoin's core principles.

I think it's interesting as you talk about that 16

minute timeframe just recently.

Someone paid me with Bitcoin and I gave 'em my wallet address sitting there

and they're like, okay, it's done.

And I looked and I kept hitting refresh and refresh and refresh.

Nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing.

Lo and behold, about 17 to 20 minutes later, boom, it pops up and it's in there.

And.

Which just made me think, well, obviously they're not using the Lightning

Network in order to make this happen.

I don't know what they were using or where it was coming from, what wallet

type it was coming from, or what exchange they were using, or if they had to do

a Fiat to Bitcoin conversion first.

I don't know what happened, but all I know is that that time period you

talked about really does happen when not using the Lightning Network.

But I wanna shift a little bit.

Really talk about where ambos plays.

I mean, you guys have built, as I mentioned in the intro, an

impressive suite of products.

You know, you have magma reflex most recently rails, and each

one tackles this specific problem within the infrastructure.

I would love if you could.

Break down what you've built and why it matters to have built all the

pieces and not just one or the other.

Yeah.

Lighting's all about coordination, so you're building a network.

This is not interfacing with a protocol.

I don't like staring at code.

I like clicking buttons.

So basically the first step was basically go from the command line

interface to clicky buttons because that's something that I can work with.

And that's how I found my co-founder.

Uh, he was building Thunder Hub, which was the first node management

software that was available that actually had a user interface.

So that was something that I could use.

Now, once you have that interface.

You need to connect to other people.

Basically what we built was the phone book for the Lightning Network.

Ambos Space is a lighting network explorer, so you could

think about it as a directory.

So who else is using the Lightning Network and how do I connect to them?

So basically think about it as the phone book of the Lightning Network.

Now, once you get connected, there's a whole economy that pops up.

You realize that you need other people to take action in

order to solve your problems.

So how do we solve that?

Like in our daily lives?

Well, we basically pay people to solve the problems that we encounter.

I've got an issue.

I need this thing paved.

I need some concrete port.

Basically dial up the phone book and then find out someone that can actually

solve your problem and you pay them.

So what we had to build next was the marketplace.

How do you pay other people to solve the infrastructure problems that you have in

your financial transportation network?

Well, basically, you're paying other people to create a new financial

connection, so get your financial home connected to the rest of the network,

and that's what magma really is.

But since we're dealing with money.

There's this whole other layer that we have to deal with, which

is this whole compliance thing.

The internet is borderless and anyone can participate, but you're

talking about money here, and that is a highly regulated space.

We've got these things called sanctions, which cause massive

problems all around the world.

People that adhere to US laws well, basically that means that you're not

going to be connecting to North Korea, you're not going to be connecting to Iran.

You basically have to have some type of financial controls, but you're doing

this in a completely permissionless way.

So you need some software to take your existing fiat laws and put them into

this internet based decentralized space.

And that's what Reflex does.

So that's interesting you bring that up.

'cause it takes me back probably four months ago-ish.

When a company thought they were just paying an IT services company, which then

they found out that they were actually paying nation state actors out of North

Korea and it just spun everything up.

It was actually, I think either pre or just post Genius.

I can't remember exactly when, and so everybody was freaking out, like, how

do we make sure this doesn't happen?

How do we make sure that it doesn't go two, three, you know?

In traditional fi, they like to go two or three layers of KYC or know your

customer, and they're like, how do we do this in the digital asset space?

And.

So they scrambled around to that and you can see some of those effects and

some of the legislation that's gone on.

Also, some of the arguments that the financial institutions are having about

the uptick and the increasing demand of using Bitcoin and other digital

assets for payments has been really interesting to see all of that happen.

But the like, as you're thinking about, as I'm thinking about, that's kind of where.

My brain meant, but I know we need to talk about rails because that

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And if you could get a little bit deep into how making a

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So what do you have with Bitcoin is financial infrastructure, but

it does take a lot of engineering to turn it into that financial infrastructure and

that's what we're building with Rails.

So basically.

We've got all these companies that have started to accumulate Bitcoin

and they wanna put it to work.

You set up a lightning node, and we're doing this for you in the background.

You don't have to be an expert in this because we built a lot of the automations.

So basically you bring your money and now deposit into your own wallet that

is now set up and it's ready to address the needs of people that wanna receive

payments over the Lightning network.

So you become the contractor that's building the driveways, that's

laying the foundations for all this financial connectivity, and

really that's what Rails does.

It does automatic fulfillment because you don't have to be

a concrete expert or anything.

It's basically we're writing software and we're writing the automation

scripts so that you're automatically fulfilling this with your Bitcoin

and getting paid for doing that.

With rails, we have very limited permissions.

So with that, then we can go and take the actions on your behalf because

that's what you sign up for Rails to do.

So how would you explain to somebody how this

is different than staking?

Staking is completely different.

So really it's about how a blockchain functions.

Like that's what staking is.

It's taking your money and voting with it.

On how this system is processing transactions, and thankfully

Bitcoin doesn't have that.

It has proof of work.

We're using energy and computing power, which is as neutral as it gets.

So Bitcoin doesn't require any staking.

When people look at staking systems, they know I'm putting in some

money, I'm getting some reward.

This is a little bit different because on the lighting network,

we're building infrastructure.

There's supply of, you know, Bitcoin that's ready to be

infrastructure, and then there's demand for that infrastructure.

Those two have to be balanced.

So really Rails is focused on actually helping to price this new supply.

And there's so much Bitcoin that is looking for yield.

So what's the appropriate price to charge for this?

Let's make sure that it is profitable to actually.

Supply for that demand that is out there, and also how are we building the demand?

And the demand is really coming from payments activity.

So how do we get more people set up to receive lightning payments that is ready

to pay a minor payment processing fee?

Right now when you're doing payment processing, you know people are

paying two to 5% to Visa, MasterCard, other payment processors, and.

Like, why are we paying so much?

At the end of the day, payments should be very low cost, and what we're doing

with Rails is bringing all this Bitcoin to lower the cost of payment processing,

and that means that the payment processing costs for instant payments is now 0.29%.

So we've done a more than 10 x reduction in that payment processing fee.

That's extremely meaningful to merchants.

That means no more chargebacks.

That means no more overdraft fees, but basically you're getting paid faster

and answering the cash flow problems.

And what we're positioning this for in the future, the varying near

future, is that businesses can start to receive stable coin payments

because the biggest objection to accepting Bitcoin and lightning

payments has been Bitcoin's volatility.

Because it introduces cashflow problems.

And if we can deliver stable coins over these same rails that we're building,

that answers the major objection that merchants have had to adopt a more

efficient payment processing technology.

One of the super popular, I guess is the word that

I would use methods in which to.

Reduce the costs of payment acceptance from merchants that are accepting

Visa, MasterCard, DE card brands

has been to pass that on to the consumer in the form of dual pricing

or a surcharge or some means.

So they're just increasing their overall cost of their goods in a

way that separates their cost from.

The network cost.

Do you see

there being a similar dichotomy when you look at Bitcoin payments, or is it just

so inexpensive that it doesn't matter?

This is introducing a massive change.

What we saw just yesterday was Square introducing Bitcoin payments

for all of their retailers.

This is like.

Accessing the biggest retailer network that is out there, which is the square

network, and for all of them, all of the Bitcoin payments, those transactions,

any of those payment processing fees are down to zero for the next year.

And that's a clear indicator of just how much more efficient this actually

is if we're driving forward this new decentralized payments economy.

It is massively reducing the cost of these transactions.

That means that, you know, retailers don't have to pay 4% for payment processing

fees, and because retailers have been passing on those costs to consumers as

a way to recover those costs, that means that consumers get to see lower prices.

That's huge because what we understand as inflation, you know, as Bitcoiners

is one thing, but for the rest of the world, when we think about inflation,

it's about consumer price index.

How are the costs of goods increasing or decreasing?

And what we've seen for all of our lives is those costs of goods increasing.

And partially it's being driven by the fact that payment processing has

actually been increasing in costs using the traditional financial system.

And what we're bringing to the table is a more efficient way to transact,

which means that could translate into lower prices for consumers.

So this is near and dear to my heart to actually be able to introduce a technology

that improves things and lowers prices.

It's funny, as you mentioned, the cost has gone up as

the speed has increased as well.

Some of the traditional payment methods outside of cards, if you look

at a CH, you know, it's not unusual to see it at 10, maybe 25 cents.

Per a CH.

What I think has been really interesting is that how fast the amount increases

when you go from standard, which is two days to next day to same day.

So the jump from, let's just keep it super simple, 25 cents for

two days to $10 per same day.

All they're doing

is marking

a flag on the file to say, fund this today, which

I think is very interesting, at least, and I'm oversimplifying to

everyone, just so you're aware.

There's a few other things that go on in there, but it's very much just a,

what kind of a CH, what's the flag?

Is this standard?

Same day, next day flag, and then the date in which it's supposed to post.

Those are really the only differences.

It gets delivered very similarly in the same bio format.

It hits the same cut times, like all of these things happen.

So I think that's interesting as you talk about the increase in cost and

the opportunity to get that speed.

At an even lower cost.

Yeah.

Children born today are not going to know what you mean by

three to five business days.

They're not gonna know what banking hours are.

They're going to have an app to access this financial system in a fully

decentralized way, and it's gonna be available 24 7, and it's not gonna

rely on all the people that have to do these manual checks for every

a CH that is actually happening.

There's no reason why you would need to pay exorbitant amounts to settle money

quickly in the internet age, when we have internet based money, it's a critical

step to actually make this leap into a new financial infrastructure that

actually has decentralized benefits.

It's not just benefiting a few people on Wall Street, like this is regular people

that are using their savings and putting it to work as financial infrastructure.

It's delivering a better product to the end consumer

because they have 24 7 access.

They have very low cost transactions and very fast

transactions anywhere in the world.

These are all big problems to solve, and driving

the cost down in payments is important, but it doesn't come free.

So I know you're in the thick of fundraising right now.

Building in this space.

It's complex.

Every founder that's watching today is really wondering

what have you learned so far?

And I would really like if you could talk about real challenges that

you've come up against and your advice on how to overcome similar

challenges.

Yeah.

I think as a founder.

Myself, I experienced tons of imposter syndrome.

Am I really the right person to be tackling this?

And you know, it might sound crazy to you, but each person has a unique set

of experiences that uniquely equip them to solve problems for having an

engineering background, I think kind of primes you to be problem solvers, but.

Also being empathetic and being able to understand a problem deeply and

being able to relate and say, yeah, I feel your pain and I want to be able to

address that and solve a problem for you.

And basically then your business sense has to kick in.

How do I charge for this?

Like, I would love to just, you know, help you out.

Come on bro, help me.

But basically you have to find.

Some way to actually charge for this.

And if I were to do it all over again, I think it would focus more on service

industries, you know, just like actually providing a simple service.

But you know, what I went after was really marketplaces and when

you have a marketplace, you have two different sets of customers.

You've that are completely different types.

You've got the supply side and you've got the demand side.

Those are completely different people.

Now, that means you have two sets of messages that you need to deliver

to two different sets of customers.

You find them in different places and like they don't speak the same language,

so that becomes way more complicated than simply providing a service.

I understand the problem.

I've advised a solution, and now I've got one type of customer

that I can uniquely address.

So if you were to summarize thus far what the top three lessons

that you've learned in building ambos and you wish you would've known before

you even got started, especially as you mentioned around product market

fit in a decentralized ecosystem.

Where everybody's expecting something different.

What are the top three lessons that you've learned from that?

I think it's up to you.

So you get to decide who you're going to serve, and then secondly, if

you're going to do a venture backed startup, always be fundraising.

Basically, you're going to continue operating as long as you have

money, and if you don't have money, then you have to stop operating.

So that always be fundraising is probably going to be a mantra.

And then the last piece is you have to be the bad guy at some point.

My brother gave me the book, the Hard Things About Hard Things.

It was a great book to understand deeply what you will have

to experience as a founder.

Um, some people relate it to staring into the abyss and chewing glass.

Basically.

It will be difficult.

And there it's a very long haul and there is no exit unless

you're going to do an IPO.

And the average time to an IPO is 14 to 15 years.

Basically, those are the three pieces of advice that I have,

those three major lessons learned.

I hope it can help people navigate those same problems that I experienced.

So I'm gonna ask you if you could summarize the one piece of advice.

You would give a FinTech founder or an executive, what would it be?

And in one sentence,

build your board.

Strategically,

what does that mean?

Your board?

Strategically

as a founder, you are going to get access to some

of the smartest people that you've ever encountered, and that is the

privilege of being a founder Now.

The people that are investing in your company and later to become

the board of your company should be the smartest people that you've ever

encountered, and you're going to need expertise in these different areas.

You're tapping their network as well, so you are bringing the hardest problems

that you've ever faced to the smartest people that you've ever met, and they

are fully invested in your success.

And if they're not fully invested in your success, then they

don't belong on your board.

So be selective.

That is some fabulous advice.

You know, I've always told a number of folks, even if you're not a founder,

you should have that advisory board that you have, that when you have

an idea or a problem or you want a different perspective, that you can

pick up the phone and reach out to them.

And also I recommend not just waiting until you need it to reach out to them.

Um, you know, I, I, as a founder also get really, really busy and a lot, two or

three months will go by before I realize that I haven't reached out to somebody.

And then, then I, I'm, I'm reached redoing it again.

So I think I would even expand on that, to have your own personal board of advisors

and to reach out to them frequently, even to share with them successes and.

If you're having the same problem over and over again and you find yourself three

calls later talking about the same problem to them, ask them, why do you think I'm

still having this same problem, and what would you suggest I do to eliminate it?

So that's some of the stuff that I like to offer as well.

Jesse, we have come to my favorite part of every episode, so I've gone ahead.

I've pulled out our crystal ball.

What I want you to do, I want you to look close, look ahead.

Lightning is evolving fast.

AI is creating new payment use cases.

The infrastructure you're building is doing everything to move it forward.

If you look into here, what do you see happening in the next three?

To five years.

I'm seeing in that crystal ball, an explosion of AI systems, they're

all going to start paying each other.

Basically.

That means that we're going to need not just any old blockchain, we're going

to need these incredible connections that are ready to scale, that machines

are going to be paying each other.

I mean, we're seeing optimists and other robots pop up like in the home.

Mm-hmm.

And.

If we actually want to equip them to really solve problems for us,

well, wouldn't you want to go send your optimist robot shopping?

Wouldn't it be pulling something from the shelves?

What kind of money are you going to be handing over to your

robot to be able to be spent?

Like, think about that a bit because we're going to wanna automate that

process, create those guardrails for it, and kind of be able to take a step back.

And be able to delegate far more than we've ever experienced.

And I think this is happening in the next three to five years that we're going to.

Stop doing so much of the work all the time.

We're going to delegate things and we're going to be extremely efficient about that

because we've invested in the financial infrastructure that makes it happen.

Well, Jesse, I want to thank you for taking the time out.

I know it's late over there in Amsterdam, so thank you for taking the

time out during a crazy conference.

You know, I wanna just hit on like three things that really stuck in

my mind from today's conversation.

One is that infrastructure is infrastructure.

Whether it's plumbing for water, or it's plumbing for Bitcoin,

they all need to flow smoothly.

They all need to work well, and any place that it gets clogged,

it's gonna cause some issues.

The second piece that I took away from today is that

hard problems need to be solved.

It doesn't always have to be hard to solve them.

It may take time, it may take effort, but it doesn't have to be hard to solve them.

And then lastly, I really love the approach to.

How you've handled your fundraising, your guidance, and especially talking

about how other FinTech founders and executives can move themselves forward.

So those things are what stuck with me today.

Hopefully everybody else got something just as good, if not

better from today's episode.

But Jesse, before we go, is there anything.

You want to share with us maybe that I left out?

Ted, it's been an absolute pleasure to be joining you and I'm very

excited for your listeners to see what's happening on the Lightning Network.

And I think going forward we've got an upcoming announcement

for Bitcoin Amsterdam that we've actually partnered with Voltage

to actually have a payments API.

That means that people can start accepting not only Bitcoin.

With the lighting network with very little setup, but they could

also start receiving stable coins.

I think this is going to be massive because it solves

the interoperability problem.

It solves the payment processing fees.

It solves the chargeback fees, basically.

I'm very excited to get it in the hands of more people because these are

huge problems that we need to address.

To get ourselves set up for the future.

It's so exciting that you're making the announcement with Graham.

He's been on the show.

We had a great conversation about what Voltage is doing for the

Lightning Network, and it's awesome to see two amazing founders coming

together to continue to deliver more and more value to the networks.

So folks.

That does it for this episode of Web3 with FTC.

These conversations, they are designed to give you more than

just the service level sound bites.

We're here to show you how real operators think, lead, and make things happen, and

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If you want to go deeper into what we're tracking behind the scenes, sign

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serious about where FinTech is going.

And as always.

Keep moving forward as we wrap up today's episode.

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