YouSaid · the spoken record

André Neves

lines on the record: 61
first: 2023-06-14
most recent: 2023-06-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“No, thanks, Breston. This was an honor. Thank you so much. I look forward to it. I'm going to tell all my friends, they all follow your show. And so I'm like, hey, I'm going to be on that show now. It's great”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Hey, I was going to say if folks want to get involved, let's go to zbd.gg for the app and for those builders that want to build with Bitcoin, with Noster, go to Zebedee.io for your API keys. It's free for everyone to get started. So we're open and we're here to help you grow.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, thanks. Again, it's an honor to be here. It was great to chat in Orlando conference. I'm glad we got the chance to connect here further and explore more of these ideas. I look forward to the next one. I'm sure we're going to be chatting a lot more.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In my talk, I mentioned this. In my talk, I zapped Jack Dorsey 5,000 sats and I stop and then I say, I don't know where he is in the world. I don't know what wallet he's using. I don't know what Nostracline he's using. I know nothing. The only thing I know is one single identifier and I can send you money globally. I think it's just the beginning of a very disruptive set of years for social media, for communications online, for monetization schemes. I really think folks monetizing their content online through NASA is going to change the landscape”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Easy. If it's not easy and abstracted away, folks will not interact with it. So it'll be everywhere. And I think I'm betting everything on the fact that it'll be everywhere. My entire life is Bitcoin. And now it's very much Noster as well. So it's great to be at the forefront pioneering these technologies.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Gaming, on social experiences. And so folks will be earning, they will be selling, they will be buying, they will be trading, everything will be happening in that sphere. I would love to say that at the five to 10 year mark, everyone has Bitcoin and everyone has not survived. It remains to be seen. I think it's definitely a challenge in and of itself. Network effects have to play out and standards are hard to just grow. But as someone who has both human resources with the company of 70 plus people, capital resources with our fundraising, the right mindset and the right engineers, I really feel like we could make a dent and make an impact in pushing this forward. And our goal is to make Bitcoin approachable, easy, cool, something that anyone, whether you're Joe Schmo down the street, whether you're Ed Smith from the corner, like you can get started with Bitcoin and then you can go down your own journey if you want to learn about self-custody. Yes, you should do that. Let's go for it. If you want to learn about running your own servers, let's go for that.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Omnipresent, right? It's everywhere. Everyone has Bitcoin. And I really do believe that that's going to be the case in the next five to 10. And I believe that something as crucial as a discovery layer, communications layer like Noster can enable that to catapult and to really hit that inflection point. Because I go back to the point, you have a wallet of a Bitcoin wallet. I have a Bitcoin wallet. It is not easy for you and I to interact and transact. But if you have a Nostra client with a wallet attached to it, now I can send you money the same way that I send you messages or any emails, right? So this is something that is very powerful. I think in the five years, I would love to say that Noster has a very active, multi-multi-million user active base. And I actually believe that Noster's will become many digital economies in and of themselves because folks will interact on music, on art, on”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it's funny because I've been living in a lightning monetized enabled world for many years. I use Lightning every single day hundreds of times. And some folks see that as weird because, wait, you make hundreds of payments like every day. That sounds cumbersome. I said, no, that's because you're thinking credit card payments. You're thinking cumbersome payments. You're not saying click a button and the payment has gone globally to the other side of the world, right? And so I have been living in this world for like four plus years now. And I would say that every year that goes by, it gets to the point where it's much easier to sell, to talk, and to introduce this technology to everyone. When I used to talk about Bitcoin and Lightning four years ago, it was, you know, who are you? You're kind of weird. Now it's, oh yeah, I've heard of this. And some folks even come to me saying, hey, I read a book about lightning. That's very interesting that you've been doing this for four years. So in the five-year cycle, I would love to say that Bitcoin is on.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Our moats is social and payments, right? So let's interact. And so Wavelake is focused on music, Fountain is focused on podcasting. Let's leverage DOS. And that's what we've done for the launch partners. Find good partners as you continue growing. And then eventually you could build of your own in that industry.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For your platform, for your user base. And then when you're ready and you have that, okay, I want to self-host and do all the payment capability ourselves. Great. Disconnect that API and do it yourself because you've now excelled at your moat. So definitely focusing. And I think one way to just describe that is for our launch show at the ZBD app, instead of building all of those capabilities that we want inside of the app, there are things that we're doing with launch partners. So Fountain is a launch partner of ours. Wavelake is a launch partner of ours. So if you post Wavelake links of music links into the ZBD app in your social feed, Zebed is able to pick that up. And once you zap someone, it automatically splits between the artist and the poster of that post, right? We are not the ones doing the music piece here. We are interacting with an open standard of music that allows us to interact. So we're not trying to become the music moat. That's not our moat.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Of these, whatever analogy we want to create here, if you attempt to go through too many of these, the similar to the sales cycle, right? If it's too broad, you will fail. You will not find that one moat and you will be a generalist, good company on many fronts, but no one will come to you because you are the best. And people come to the best. They don't come to the third best or the fifth best or the generalist. They come for the best. So if I want payments online, I go to stripe.com because that's the best right now. If I want lightning payments, I go to Zebedi because that's the best, right? So you need to find what your mode is and not go too broad. And otherwise, you're going to meet those numbers. Focus where you're at and then evolve. So what I recommend to folks that are very hardcore Bitcoiners that want to do their own payment gateway capabilities is don't start from that from scratch. Use an API provider so that you can build the best user experience for your”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Because you feel like you can solve all your problems with engineering solutions. And that's not the case. You really need to focus on what you can build. I voice similar feedback to those at the Wolf NYC cohort, which was, look, you need to pick where you are going to be the best. So if you're building a gaming platform that allows for money to flow in that platform, great. Are you going to be the best money provider or are you going to be the best gaming platform? So be the best gaming platform and plug in a money provider. If you're going to be an exchange of some kind, okay, I need licenses. Great. So that's going to be your focus. Don't do that and mining and this and that, right? Like you need to find your moat, your big moat. And once you have that moat and once you have that focus and that level of notoriety and trustworthiness in that vertical, okay, find another moat. You've excelled in this vertical. Move on. If you attempt to bite too many,”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So focus is really important. I'm glad you were touching on this. It's something that as a builder, you feel like you can just, oh, I can do it. Don't worry. I'm going to handle this. And as a builder, like a developer, you really feel that you can do that.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“is work, right? So you need to get that boundaries. I have very few boundaries. Work is life and life is work for me and maybe that's why it works, but it affects people. It affects your relationships. It affects, you know, your business to take that into account. It's not a light thing. Everyone says that, but it shouldn't be taken as a light thing. It's you will work, right? It's going to be many, many hours. And so take that into account. But nothing will ever scratch that itch until you go the thing that you want to build. So I highly recommend. It's amazing to be at a position like I am with a team, with a company, with many products. It's the dream come true and I really highly recommend everyone to attend it.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Many things that you had never expected. I'm a CTO, but I'm arguably the CPO of the company, and I'm arguably involved in every facet of the company, from the marketing to strategy to, I do customer support. I have a team of 73 people in the company remotely distributed, and I still do customer support, Preston. And that's why it's important. Everyone sees that in the company. Like we're all working towards the same mission. So you will do things like my VP of engineering was our video recorder in our VR chat room. Do you see what I mean? Like, that is not a engineering role, but everyone is willing to do that. So as a startup builder, you're going to put your big boy pants on or your big girl pants on and it's going to be a long ride and you're going to do many things you do not expect. And then last but not least, I think it's really important that if you are the entrepreneur type like myself and the builder type, you need to understand that work is life and life.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it may not seem like the right move, but it is that moment. And once you take that leap, you feel that relief. You don't even know if it's going to pan out, but I did what I wanted to do. I challenged myself. Of course, run through your cases, run through your best case scenario, worst case scenario. I'm not saying just go for it, but follow your gut, follow your intuition. And it is always a leap. If it doesn't feel like a leap, it's probably not a big deal enough. So that's one piece that I mentioned. The second piece is it's so much more work than you can imagine. You're going to do”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually gave, so my talks at MIT are great. I highly recommend. I discuss the Lightning address and the other one I discusser. Very highly recommend those two talks. I also gave a recent talk at the Wolf NYC cohort of founders. These are, for those that don't know, these are Lightning and Bitcoin founders going through an incubator process. And in that talk, I touched on this, right? Things that as a founder you should be aware of and so on. I think three themes come up to mind, and I'll quickly go through them. The first one being it's a massive leap. I talked about in the beginning, I had a great job, right? And it was great. I love my job, love the people I work with. When it bites, you know that it bites and you know that you need it, there's an itch that you have to scratch, you will not be able to scratch that itch until you take that leap. Okay, if that's your feeling, you are the entrepreneur type and you want to scratch that itch and you will have to take that leap eventually, it's scary.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Bitcoin and you get a debit card that's very cumbersome for us Bitcoin needs to be as simple it needs to be cool it needs to be friendly so you download ZBD you're able to download games or apps or engage in experiences where you earn Bitcoin and once you earn that bitcoin you're then able to interact with others in the social environment right so you can zap each other you can like each other's posts once you've done that you've arrived at an ecosystem of value driven engagement instead of just likes and retweets which feed an algorithm right we want valued engagement with folks we don't want just random numbers being thrown around so the zbd app is that entry point for everyone and you can get started today at zbd.gg and signing up for the waitlist”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And they're able to zap you. They zap two cents or two thousand dollars, right? It's really up to you how that works. And so by disrupting this content monetization online, I believe this is going to foster lots of innovation, lots of creativity, lots of new things. Keep 99% of your value. That's a big deal. The second one is encrypted DMs with payments. This is something that's not been here. It's 2023. We have Bitcoin. We should be able to send messages around the world. We should be able to send money around the world with the new ZBD app. You can do that. You can sign up and you can send messages akin to how you do with Twitter DMs, akin to how you do you with Instagram. But money is part of the fabric of your experience. And specifically to us, the ZBD app has lots of ways for you to learn Bitcoin, a big hurdle for folks is to buy Bitcoin, to get Bitcoin, right? And you have to get an exchange account and you have to buy.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Schemes that exist nowadays. If you look into the way the current monetization works in digital content creation scheme, revenue sharing and brand deals is really how it works. If you're a hundred thousand plus influencer on Instagram or on Facebook or on Snapchat or on TikTok, sorry, you're able to monetize that through brand partnerships or advertisements or so on. But not only do they take a hefty cut, right? OnlyFans takes 20%, Patreon takes 15%, Twitter and Substack take 10%, right? So the content creator economy online is not ripe for it. And Nostra and Bitcoin are here to solve that problem. With Nostra and Bitcoin and the ZBD app, you maintain 99% of your earnings, right? You're able to put out content that is consumed by the entire, which jurisdiction they are, which fiat money they use, they're able to get”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's a full-blown Bitcoin It was inherently to us that we needed to bring a social aspect to this. And we were always going to build it. And then as soon as December last year, things exploded, right? And Noster kind of grew. It's awesome that we're now able to be talking to you about this because we have just released the new version of the ZBD app. The ZBD app now has a massive social part of it. It's a very big ZBD app upgrade. We are rolling out the Alpha Access right now. So go to ZBD.gg and sign up for the waitlist. We're letting people in in the thousands every week. There's a lot of interest. And what this means is that any developer or any user or any gamer or any person out there can sign up to the ZBD app and get started with both Bitcoin and Noster. You get a social identity that is monetized. And for us, the angle here is to disrupt monetization.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Layer for Bitcoin enabled identities. So you are an identity, a digital nomad, right? You are a person on the internet. You have a wallet, but you haven't been able to advertise to tell people that this is my wallet. Now there's a medium for it. So where we see that is, again, Zebede consumes open networks. So we consume Bitcoin, we consume Lightning. We're now consuming Noster. The way we see it is gaming and online experiences are inherent in social experience are inherently social, right? You need people to interact. It's not just you and a game or you and a robot. You want you and other players. You want you and other friends. You want you and your mates playing something. or learning something so at the Zebedee side on the consumer business we have the ZBD app that's where folks learn about new games that's where they get involved with you know podcasting systems that's where they you know discover monetized experiences online”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so going back to the NBD, our open source ARM, the reality is that when open networks are thriving and are growing, things like Bitcoin, things like Lightning Network, we are at a place where they can compound. So if we're able to get Bitcoin and Lightning to work in a nostril environment, we have two open networks, decentralized networks that can grow organically and in their own merits, but they can enable capabilities that couldn't have been possible before. A thing that's very key to Bitcoin is everyone like there has been, what, 14 years now that millions of people now have Bitcoin addresses. They have Lightning wallets, they have Bitcoin wallets. But it's not easy to send to each other, right? Because I need to say, hey, Preston, I need to understand where's your wallet? Can you send me a QR code of some kind so that I can find you, right? Noster provides a discoverability.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A protocol that is ossified, then let's create something new that has different features and different capabilities. Could we evolve SMTP? Theoretically, yes, we could take SMTP and evolve it. I don't think it would be a perfect fit, but you could always build upon standards. It's just a much higher lift. We're talking about, you know, the entirety of the internet from applications, systems, backends, they're all aware of emails in this way. to introduce something new that's a very big change And so that's why we wouldn't want to pursue that angle. Does that make sense?”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Let me explain a little bit more. I guess with emails, you can self-host your email, right? You can run an email server. It is very cumbersome and complex, right? It is not something that anyone just does. It's not, you know, click and get started. So that's one piece. The other piece is with something as ossified as SMTP. If you were to introduce a new version of SMTP or a new addition to the protocol or a new thing, you now need every major institution, every major email provider. We're talking about Google. We're talking about Yahoo. You need to convince those folks to change the protocol and now adopt this new because it doesn't, again, standards are just instructions. I could write a new instruction, but if no one else in the email protocol is following the instruction, then it never came to fruition, right? So it's a much higher barrier to entry when we say let's evolve.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Resistant capability, which is very akin to Bitcoin's values, which is the notion that if Twitter doesn't like what I'm saying, Twitter can just ban my account. On Noster, the way it works is if XYZ client doesn't like what I'm saying, or if XYZ server or relay doesn't like what I'm saying, I can take my keys and I can go to another one. And if they don't like what I'm saying, I can go to yet another one, right? And I can host my own if I want to. And everyone could still read my messages and everyone could still interact with me. So the optionality akin to Bitcoin, you can hold your Bitcoin, you can use hundreds of different wallets, right? With Noster, you could self-host your Noster relay and clients.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Same individuals, right? So it's really the interoperability that's really impactful. And because of the way the architecture of Noster works, there's two parts that are really interesting to me. One is it's extremely simple. I was talking about standards and how Bitcoin is very complicated, right? It's complicated for many reasons, but it is complicated. And so it's important that we bring the developer closer to that ecosystem so they can build applications. Nostr, on the other hand, is extremely simple. It's one event, right? It's one single object that defines events. These are the names of posts, right? So if you're making a post on Noster, that's an event. If you're updating your profile image, that's an event. And so it's extremely simple for developers to get started, which meant that hundreds of developers have already gotten involved and have already been building. So that's one piece. The other piece is around Noster's big sensor.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Just like emails work, you would see a plethora of activity because now it's all interoperable, right? That's why email is so prevalent. As a developer, emails are extremely outdated. The code that goes into emails display, the rendering of emails, is from 1995. It's very outdated, but it's abundant because it is the single interoperable way to communicate with everyone in the world. And it's still here in its 2023. So Nostr could disrupt that on the social media side with Noster, you create a Bitcoin, you have a public and a private key, right? And you're able, that's your identity. And you're able to take that and log in on any client, on any experience. So I could log in to a Twitter-esque experience and I could take my followers and my lists and my follow count and I could go over to my other Instagram-like experience with the same followers with the”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And you could use any email out there, and it's a different email provider, it's a different email client, but they all subscribe to the same protocol, the same simple mail transfer protocol. And that's why messages can be exchanged regardless of where you are, regardless of server or client you're using. In social media environments and communication environments nowadays, you need a Twitter account to talk to your Twitter friends. You need a Facebook account to use Facebook. You need a TikTok. And then Snapchat and Instagram, and you keep going, right? There's what? 50 of them at least. And as an aside, you now have password manager problems.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The message from Jack on Twitter and he's like, is this fake? And I'm like, I don't know. It looks real So that's where it sort of began. And then December 2022 from till now, I think things have just skyrocketed, both on the terms of funding developers for the space, but also applications, clients, relays, every single sort of software has been developed around Noster now. And I believe there are now over hundreds of thousands of users using the platform at scale. Noster is very different because it is, I guess, touching on some of the things that I've done in the past in terms of presentations. I've been able to dumb down these, I don't love the term, dumb it down, but I don't, you know, you dumb it down the terms and the architectural details in a way that folks can understand. I use the sense of emailing to really get the idea across. So Preston probably used Gmail. I may use Outlook. My cousins could use Yahoo.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And we said, great, go ahead. I believe in you. Let's do it. So Fija, lo and behold, goes and spends a weekend and comes out and says, here's a little thing that I've been trying to build. As with any standard, standards online are just standards. They're nothing. It's just, here's a set of instructions. Every standard needs network effects. You need participants to participate. And with Noster being released in late 2020, it actually just saw organic growth for a good two years. It didn't really see it was organic. Folks were getting involved, interested. And because of the relationship with Bitcoin, there were a lot of Bitcoin developers into that space. So it was very, very easy to see the combination of both. It wasn't until December of 2022 that Jack Dorsey got a with Noster and then reached out to Fiat Jeff and said, hey, I want to donate money to you. Fiat Jeff reached out to me. I remember him sending me a screenshot of”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Who show a lot of drive, ambition, and ability to deliver on really challenging times, innovative and very, I guess, challenging really is the word, right? As a developer, usually you run into a problem, you Google it. Or nowadays, I guess you chat GPT it, right? Or stack order flow. With Lightning and with things like Noster, there was no one that had gone through that before. So you need to be at the forefront and ready to get your hands dirty. I pride myself in finding those folks and really enabling them. And Fiat Jaff was one of them. And so I brought him onto Zebedee early on. He worked on a lot of things in the Zebede ecosystem court to Zebedee, but very early on I said, hey, man, you need to be doing open source. And from that, I think lots of things like LNURLs, like Lightning address came around. These are things that we have built and integrated with. And he said, hey, I want to try and solve this problem.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We said, look, this is growing too much. It's now time for us to make this into an organization. Let's deploy resources, both capital and human resources to them, to this organization. And so we created from ZBD, we created NBD, right? NBD stands for no big deal. It's our open source arm. And so, and whereas ZBD has products that are revenue generating and are searching for customers, NBD just puts out code and the announcement I said NBD has no KPIs NBD has no deadlines. We just put out sovereign software to the world, right? Our lead engineer and our lead open source developer is Fiat Jeff. Fiat Jeff for those who don't know is a very prolific developer in the Bitcoin Lightning ecosystem and he has been with us for well over three years now. And one thing that I've been able to do is identify, I pride myself in doing, I guess, is identify individuals.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, absolutely. I think it may make sense to go a little bit back into the history of Noster and explaining a bit of how it all came about, seeing that we were, I have been a privileged participant in this whole journey. So for context, Zebedee is our enterprise solution software company, right? We have both B2C and B2B products. And at our core, we have this API platform. But primarily the API platform does a set full of things, but it consumes open networks. It consumes Bitcoin and it consumes Lightning Network and it consumes open source software, right? So as a technologist, as a product builder, as a developer, it was always really important for me and for my teams that we support open source. We support open development. We support innovation. Early on in the company, we started with what was internally known as ZBD Labs. Eventually became ZBD OSS for open source. But then”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Depends on the use case. I run nodes myself. But to your point, I'm very technical, right? And I'm able to do that. Most people are. So I think it's important to have options.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Really depends on the use case. Yeah, absolutely. If it's a thing to toy around, if it's to learn, if it's to get engaged, absolutely. If you're running a business, it's akin to, hey, I want to run a mom and pop shop to sell t-shirts. Let me just go and become a payment gateway. That's a really big overhead.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, like it used to take hundreds of lines of code to send a payment. And I guess now it's ZBD send payment, right? So it's a lot under the hood. And we have a very robust infrastructure, SysOps, and security teams that manage all of this. So you don't worry about liquidity concerns. You don't worry about your payment failing. We have 97 plus percent plus payment success rate in the network. It's really only if you're paying to the really, really far edge nodes that we would run into any issue. There's a lot that happens behind the scenes. That's automated for the customers.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's actually a fascinating thing because we abstract so much out of it that it becomes so simple that I love it, right? I use our APIs to build tools and applications and things. And it sort of blows my mind that two years ago or a year ago, this was a completely different landscape. In Lightning, just to very briefly go over, in Lightning, this is always online liquidity network, right? So it requires constant management. We don't run one node. We run tens of nodes. We don't deploy liquidity manually in opening channels here and there. We have automated systems to this. We need to have high availability servers. So if a server crashes, we need another one to spin up. We need an entire automation around backups and channel management, data storage, right? All of this is handled, right? We've spent countless resource hours, engineering hours, automating all of these processes. So it's amazing to me that when folks”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Sun payment ZBD dot get lightning address, right? It's very readable. It's very simple. Anyone can get started. And once you've loaded some Bitcoin in your project wallet, you can start dishing it out to any users in the world. So it's really that simple and it's free. I forgot to say that's important. It's entirely free. You can sign up and get going. If you're building an application that is going to scale, we will grow with you. So we have a tiered system. We have a pro tier starting at 50 bucks a month. We have a startup tier starting at 500 bucks a month. And if you're building larger enterprises, right, we have enterprise customers, we are able to create custom tiers for you, but it is free for any hobby developer to get started and you're able to create projects, get API keys, and start sending money globally. So it's really that simple.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Six different monies over the past 60 plus years. So they are very keen on getting the next money. It's fine. This is it and it is more, you know, it's better. It's easier to use online. So now on the developer side, again, very simple. Go to Zebri.io, sign up. You create a game in a project in the dashboard. And you can top it up with Bitcoin. So in the dashboard, you could even deposit Bitcoin. You could, you know, do the whole flow. You could also buy Bitcoin in the dashboard. So you can top it up with your credit card. And so as a developer, you have all of the tools at your disposal. And then you use one of our SDKs, one of our APIs. So we have a Rust SDK. We have a Node SDK. We have a Unity SDK. So we come to where you are in your environment. So if you're building a gaming in Unity, we're there. You're building a server side application in Node.js. We're there with you. And it's as simple as ZBD.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You, if you're dealing with a game developer in Brazil and you integrate rewards with Brazilian AIs, great. You have a 220 million addressable user base of potentially Brazilians who have access to Brazilian Piat Rails. But if you introduce Bitcoin, how many people in the world are there? Seven plus billion. So that is now your addressable market. What's interesting is the impact of these microtransactions, right? So these are micro, micro, nano transactions even, but the impact that they have is actually macro. We've seen gamers in Brazil pay rent, pay groceries, pay bills by playing games. It's not a life-changing money necessarily, right? I don't want to suggest that people should work on this, but it is something that makes a very large impact. And when you combine that with depreciating, and this is your bread and butter, depreciating fiat economies and how their currencies are being debased, you look at Brazilian reasons. Brazil has gone through”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ever interacting with the Bitcoin, it's just that now your rewards and your points have value and you can take them out. And similar to what you're saying, it's inherently impossible to do in fiat terms because have you ever bought anything less than a dollar online with a credit card? Yeah, that's not a thing, right? And I think the cheapest thing is actually the apps in the app store on iPhones because it's like 99 cents or 69 cents. That's the lowest threshold. It hits your bank account and it's $1.30. Okay. It is not 99 cents. And so it is infeasible, impossible to send two sets, five sats. This is hundreds of a cent of hundreds of fractions of a cent. Then on the developer side, the way this works.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“10 sats, 20 sats, 50s. When you're ready to cash out or get your rewards, you click to withdraw. And then you lean on the fact that Bitcoin and Lightning are open networks and you just enter a Lightning address. It could be your Zebedee Lightning address. It could be any Lightning address, right? So the game developer is inherently interoperable with every wallet out there. They don't need to sit only with Zebby. So they don't even force their users to use Zebby. Some of them recommend Zebede, right? Because they want that easy UX for customers. They want the continuity for the user experience. But it is very much not a requirement. And users have a Lightning address and then they click withdraw or redeem, right? And they receive their stats and they go on about their day. So on the developer side, on the consumer side, it's very straightforward. It's actually not, it's an additive experience, right? You can still play most of the games without actually”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'll do the consumer side first since it's more attuned to the audience. You download a game and you start playing, right? You don't need to enter anything and nothing. Usually you download a game and you pick up jams or coins or stones, right? And they just put plus one in your little counter. Usually it's entirely up to the game developer how they actually implement Zebedee and the rewards into the actual fabric of the game. So some developers have it where as you complete tasks or beat the big boss or you know you complete like a big stage of the game, you get a reward. And in that reward may be some jams, but you get five sats or 20 sats. And so it's part of the game. Some games like a Tetris style game, for example, Coin Majong is one that's powered by us. And if you get five in a row, then you get a reward and it's Bitcoin. And they just add a counter to it.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Applications and systems, right? So it's scaled quite well and quite drastically over the years, but really it was on a need basis. And enough folks are saying, hey, Andre, you are actually at the forefront of running tens of millions of transactions per month on Lightning. Like there are not many teams or companies doing this. I need this. Can I use it? Right. And we said, okay, it's time. We're now secure at a place where we believe it's time to open it. And that's where streaming money comes in. That's where all of these capabilities have popped up.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2021, late 2021, enough knocks on the door started to sound and we said, okay, maybe it's time. We started working towards our SaaS offering, which effectively automates the entirety of our applications into a way that anyone can sign up and get going with an API key. And we got a few launch partners, right? So most prominently, the very first launch partner of ours was Fountain. Fountain is the podcasting 2.0. I believe Oscar has been a guest of yours. And Fountain is backed entirely by Zebede infrastructure. And they don't worry about payments. They just plug an API and they process tens of millions of transactions on a monthly basis. So that was the very first intro into us expanding and just believe a month ago, we opened it to anything and everyone. So you can go to Zebedi.io, sign up, get an API key, and start building.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We have MTLs, like we are effectively able to provide this capability legally in a regulated manner. And so not only does that change the perception because it's inherently that a public company would need certain capabilities and certain expectations like this. But it also allows us to expand quite a bit more outside of gaming, right? The reality is that folks started knocking on the door and said, hey, your API is amazing, but I'm not a gamer or a game developer. Can I use it? And at first, it was as a business as an entrepreneur, one thing that you can't do is go too wide. If you go too wide and your sales funnel is not focused, you're going to have a very, very big sales funnel, but not many are going to convert, right? You need to be specialized in solving problems for individual customers. So at first we were hesitant in expanding and in opening and saying, look, the use case really is gaming and gamers. Then comes, I believe,”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's fascinating when we speak to folks because the reaction at first, if you're selling Bitcoin, is very different than if you're selling what Bitcoin does for your business. That's the impact, right? I'm not interested in selling Bitcoin. Bitcoin sells itself. I'm interested in selling the impact that introducing Bitcoin has. And then what happened was everyone started seeing the impact on the gaming side. And we started getting knocks on our doors and said, hey, remember there weren't many providers at the time and this is early 2020, mid-2020, 2021, you know, there were not many providers, API providers are, some folks are very enthusiasts, let's say. So they build a little API and they put it out, but it's not well maintained. There's lots of compliance concerns, right? Regulatory concerns. So what we've chosen to do is said, okay, look, we from the get-go are going to be a compliant, regulated, US-based company, right? So we have, we're an MS.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, what you're about to see is actually your question was why it hasn't picked up yet. And my answer is it definitely has. It's just that there are at least 20 games that I see actively being developed that have this capability. And when I say 20 games, I don't mean 20 tiny mobile games. I mean we have crossed the chasm into desktop games, into web experiences and mobile, right? So it is coming and it is very much here. It's just the cycle for development for games is quite a bit longer than applications and platforms, right? So throughout the rest of 2023, you will see Zebedee and partners of ours announcing big activations and big game launches. And that should hopefully get you to understand that there's a lot happening behind the scenes. It's just not at the forefront yet.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Where it all started, right? In 2020, we started seeing that this was the impact. And so to my point earlier, it's not about selling Bitcoin. It's not about selling Lightnet. It's not about selling rewards even. It's about selling better KPIs. So, hey, introduce this payout mechanism, this rewards mechanism, and you will double your ARPD out. You will double your revenue. You will increase your retention. You will reduce your churn. Games become profitable after they add Zebedee. That's a big, big statement. And that's a true statement that we've been able to hold for all customers that have added it. And it started with gaming, right? And gaming has been great. And it's something that continues to grow, something that is a little bit different than application development as games take a lot longer of a cycle. Games don't, you know, build for three months and iterate after they're released. They build for six, 12.”
2023-06-14 · We Study Billionaires · BTC134: Bitcoin Integration Into Gaming with André Neves (Bitcoin Podcast) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT