61 – How Stripe will bring Normies to Crypto, Coinbase & Apples beef, + more SBF news.

Tracey: [00:00:20] Welcome to the Crypto Curious podcast designed to help you navigate the dynamic world of cryptocurrency. We're here for anyone who is interested in crypto at all. Maybe you've already dipped your toe in the water. Maybe you don't know anything about it. And this is the very beginning. But we recommend heading back to the very early episodes to get your footing. However, if you think you're ready to dive in headfirst, then let's do it. In this week's episode, we discuss the exciting news from Stripe facilitating Fiat to crypto payments. We look at the Coinbase and Apple fees debate, which is going on on Twitter right now. And we talk more about incoming crypto regulation. Plus, there's a load of juicy news bites this week, so please stick around. My name is Tracey and I'm joined, as always, by Craig and Blake from the Bamboo App. Hey, guys, welcome to this week's show. How are you doing? 

Blake: [00:01:08] Go well, Tracey here just, you know, daily grind here, watching what's in the markets. 

Tracey: [00:01:14] And what's going on in those markets. How are you going, Craig? What's happening? 

Craig: [00:01:17] Going good. What's happening? Me and Blake actually went to a Binance event last Wednesday night, which was interesting. 

Tracey: [00:01:24] I had great FOMO. 

Craig: [00:01:25] Yeah, it was actually pretty packed out, to be honest, which is a good sign. 

Blake: [00:01:30] Did you get any free Binance merch? 

Craig: [00:01:32] Craig Yeah, I did. I've got a jumper and the shirt. 

Tracey: [00:01:37] Really? 

Craig: [00:01:38] Yeah. I got this bag and I got a jumper which fit me fine. And them the shirts were like, I'm giving it to my, like, like 12 year old cousin because I'm not going to fit anyone. Not even made this so small. No. You know.

Tracey: [00:01:48] We actually haven't spoken to Craig since his event. I did get Blake's rundown of the event and what he did after the event, which is pretty cool. But Craig, what? I didn't actually speak to you, so I didn't know there was merch. So you got it. You got a cool hoodie, which is awesome. I love a bit of Binance merch Barney's for giving away carpet that we're giving away these really cool. That's these Binance mats. I didn't have many of them, but people were chomping at the bit to get their hands on these really cool Binance mats, and they had these really cool hoodies. Did you get one of the black Binance hoodies?

Craig: [00:02:19] Yes, I did. 

Tracey: [00:02:19] Oh, good on you. Everyone was desperate for those. 

Craig: [00:02:21] Well, the one takeaway that I've got Trace for you is that they are licking their lips at FTC's is capitulation. They're seeing market share ready to be taken. So they're obviously balls and the massive focus on institutional money. They're bringing out a new product for institutions. So they're going for it. 

Tracey: [00:02:41] And I think I saw somewhere in a news article in the last couple of days, we shared it. I mean, you'd like that they were saying that Binance might eventually end up being decentralised as well. Somewhere along the way, they're going to make a play to be centralised and decentralised, so we're going to go down that road eventually as well. 

Blake: [00:03:01] I think they've always had decentralised products like their let there be like the Binance Smart Chain, which may or may not be decentralised as well as a decentralised exchange. But, you know, I think they're going to try and play in both worlds. But at the same time, I'm hesitant to say how decentralised some of these products will actually be. 

Tracey: [00:03:23] Mm hmm. Interesting. Oh, good. So Binance's event was fun then. Big tech for Binance. Cool. Look, let's get on with our first big bit of news. And everyone's been talking about this one because it is quite exciting for space. But Stripe has launched a project to facilitate fee to crypto payments for companies all around the world. It involves a customisable widget that can be embedded directly into dexs, NFT platforms, wallets or Dapps to allow customers to instantly purchase crypto. So Stripe will offer onramp services to handle the KYC, which is know your customer payments and fraud protection and compliance issues. So do we want to break this down a little bit further to our users to explain exactly what this is playing? 

Blake: [00:04:08] Yeah, for sure. So, yes, Stripe is one of the largest payment processors in North America. And this is a big deal because it's been notoriously hard to if you're a decentralised project or like a decentralised exchange to have fiat on ramps, currently they don't really exist. So. 

Tracey: [00:04:25] So maybe we should go back and explain what stripe does now in, in, in the world. 

Craig: [00:04:30] Yeah. So Stripes are massive. They're like the back end of payments for stores, for merchants, for businesses, and they're like just for some connections, like the eighth biggest fintech company in the world. I think they are the fifth biggest payment processor in the world. So obviously I think Visa is up there with one or two and Stripe has sort of been seen as the challenger to those guys for a while now. Wasn't Elon Musk involved in Stripe originally?

Tracey: [00:04:56] Yes, he's out now, but he was. He was originally there. Yeah. 

Craig: [00:04:59] Yeah, right. That's interesting. Yeah, you can already use there's like a widget that stripe provides now for decentralised products like Magic Ayton Aureus, which I think is a decentralised music streaming platform and some of the decentralised apps and defi like if you want to buy a theory on some dapps, you can use the stripe and you can just do it. Straight through with fear, and.

Tracey: [00:05:21] All of them are at the moment on Solana. I'm not sure why that is. 

Craig: [00:05:24] Probably the gas phase. 

Tracey: [00:05:25] Potentially, right? Yeah. 

Craig: [00:05:27] So I guess what this means is like if straw becomes a top payment processor for DAPPS, that means you don't need to go through the headache of buying something from a centralised exchange. So for example. Exactly. So for example, Trace, when you bought your WhatsApp band that you love. 

Tracey: [00:05:44] Muse. 

Craig: [00:05:45] When you bought your Muse album NFT, you probably had to go to Binance's, buy Ethereum, send it in the metamask and then do the whole QR, whereas it's a drop. You could probably just use your Visa card bank straight on the blockchain, which is awesome. 

Blake: [00:05:57] Obviously the trade off here is that then you would need to KYC in the process here. Mm hmm. You know, and some projects, you know, obviously going to embrace that and other projects simply won't. 

Tracey: [00:06:08] Could that mean then, Blake? So with Ocean Floor, they would have this embedded and they'd be able to do the transaction straight away. Mm hmm. 

Blake: [00:06:15] Yeah, potentially. 

Tracey: [00:06:16] So, Stripe. Okay. So, I mean, everyone was really excited about this because it seems to be, like you said, bridging that gap so people would be able to go straight to their metamask and make that purchase without having to do that additional step. Because if you're new to the space and at the moment, say, with this new step that Instagram's done, where you can now buy NFT on Instagram, part of that big issue in the last 6 to 12 months of bridging artists from Web two to web3 was they were spending all their time educating these newbies on how to get their feet to Etherium or Solana to make these purchases. And that was that beat that were people were getting really confused on this solves that they won't need to they won't need to have that step there. So it is pretty big. 

Craig: [00:07:07] I feel like the comparison of it is like when Apple Pay first came out, like it didn't seem like now I can't live with that Apple Pay because like even the idea of getting my card from my wallet to buy something online, I'm just like, I can't be bothered now. Yeah. Whereas now you're going to go like, bang, it's going to be easy. And this can be the same situation for people with. I can't be bothered learning about Metamask only by learning about Etherium. Let's just integrate Stripe too easily. Yeah, it's great. 

Tracey: [00:07:33] It is. It's a big step. And everyone was very excited. Speaking of Apple, let's move on to our next story. Apple has been getting a bit beat down at the moment due to its 30% fees. And in the latest story this week involves Coinbase. Coinbase Wallet announced that ISO users can no longer send NFTs to each other because Apple is asking for a 30% cut on gas fees on mobile transactions. Which is just madness. And they clearly don't understand how gas fees work. Tell us a bit more about this one. 

Craig: [00:08:04] Yeah, so there's been a bit of Twitter beef, a new Twitter offering this week at Apple versus Coinbase. Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, has been on the blower on Twitter saying this. 

Tracey: [00:08:14] So basically, Elon's having a break bashing Apple and now Brian up. 

Craig: [00:08:18] And seising on SBF for having a break. So it's, um, it's apple versus Coinbase this week but a bit of context. So Apple pretty much charges an app 30% of in-app purchases. So Chase, when your son is on Minecraft he buys a skin for ten bucks surfing all that much. Apple to take in three bucks of that, right? Mm hmm. So they're comparing gas fees to these in-app purchases, which is completely ridiculous. Coinbase has compared it to, like, charging Gmail for every email sent, which is obviously not sustainable because you're just moving transactions across the Internet, not necessarily an in-app purchase. Mm hmm. So what's actually happened here is that the wallet's latest update has been blocked. So you can't send empties if you have the new Coinbase app and it's pretty much causing a massive hoo ha in the industry. And it shows the lack. 

Tracey: [00:09:14] Of understanding.

Craig: [00:09:15] Of a company like Apple. 

Tracey: [00:09:17] Is it, though, or are they just basically going to stop a bit of progress here that's going to just kind of put the brakes on for a minute because. Sure. 

Craig: [00:09:24] You think you've got a tinfoil hat on there. 

Tracey: [00:09:27] I just think, you know, let's think about what we are. We're cryptocurrency. We're about decentralisation and stopping these big data companies. Who's one of these big data companies? 

Craig: [00:09:36] Apple. 

Tracey: [00:09:37] Oh, bingo. 

Blake: [00:09:39] Apple prides themselves are not being a data company. They've tried to differentiate in the market from Google by implementing the non storage of data. And that's why, you know, many companies have had so many problems with target marketing because essentially Apple's blocked them and that's why. 

Tracey: [00:09:55] We love having Blake on the show. Ladies and gentlemen, well done. They go then? Well, in that case, you know what they are. They are just greedy. And someone likened this to the fact that they're getting 30%, they're charging you rent is basically like being a landlord. Can we have 32% of rent, please? Sure. And then you go and have a garage sale and they knock on the door and go. We'll take an extra 30% of what you just sold in the garage. Sale thinks they can't do that. It's really. Youkilis. So I hope Armstrong, you know, sticks it to them. And, you know. 

Craig: [00:10:23] Well, Apple have dealt with a couple of big rivals right now. It was Mark Zuckerberg a few months ago, Elon Musk lately because they threatened Elon Musk getting Twitter off the App Store and then the Spotify CEO as well has been going at them because they favour their own music app over Spotify and now Coinbase. So they're pissing a lot of people off. 

Tracey: [00:10:45] Trace Well, look, well, let's just keep an eye and see how that one goes out. But we're talking about this today because it's in our backyard right now with Coinbase and upsetting the apple cart. So we shall see where that one goes. Look, we might take a little bit of a break there. And when we come back, we're going to talk about the sexy subject of regulation. We'll be back. Welcome back to listening to the Crypto Curious podcast. So regulation, it's something we're going to be hearing about a whole lot more, especially as we move into 2023. We think it will dominate the chat there. Blake shared an article with us earlier this week or late last week sorry. And it brought up some questions with regulation in the crypto. Going to be self-regulation or self-destruction. So the article here in the Australian Financial Review made some great points written by Tom Richardson. So Blake, what did you like about this article that Tom wrote? 

Blake: [00:11:44] Yeah, this is certainly an element of the industry that doesn't get spoken about enough. Now, obviously, regulation has become a hot topic since the FTC's fiasco and many of the other things that we've seen this year. And as a result, regulators want to fast track some policies to protect consumers, which is a great endeavour. But I think it's really important to note that it's extremely difficult for regulators to regulate decentralised finance and decentralised organisations, because essentially they're not domiciled anywhere. And, you know, they may or may not have people in the country, for example, Australia, that participate in that organisation so that it's hard for regulators to extend the rules to these groups. Now regulation does cover really well your local exchanges and investment apps and other locally domiciled businesses. Now you know what? We're going to see more and more of these local businesses advocating for more regulation in order to build a moat around their businesses and encourage people to potentially use their service as opposed to a decentralised service. And we saw that's what Sam Bankman-Fried was doing when he was in Washington. He was advocating for rules and regulation that supported his business. And we see that in all jurisdictions now. And, you know, these people that are advocating for regulation in the crypto space may or may not be aligned with the principles of, you know, what blockchain technology was built upon, like decentralisation and transparency and permissionless access to your and financial freedom and financial sovereignty. So yeah, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. 

Craig: [00:13:41] So right now, the state of centralised exchanges, they are not, are they not regulated? 

Blake: [00:13:46] Well, they're regulated somewhat. Now, of course, they're regulated by things like consumer protection. And, you know, they can't make false or misleading statements if they have financial products on their platform then that would be regulated by ASIC, the Australian Securities Investment Commission, as well as that they're regulated from a point of view of KYC and AML, and that stands for Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering. So many of our listeners would have the experience of you having to hand over their ID when signing up to a cryptocurrency exchange. And that's so that your money laundering can be traced and tracked for those that are bad actors. So it is regulated somewhat, but it doesn't have its own regulatory regime specifically for crypto investment and trading platforms. 

Tracey: [00:14:37] Do you think maybe that will see some type of consortium of groups sticking together? So instead of Sam going out on his own, maybe Sam and says or maybe exchanges here in Australia acting together to sit down and lobby about regulation so that it's done in a more user friendly or group friendly manner. 

Blake: [00:14:55] Yeah, we see that every day in Australia. We have Blockchain Australia in the US we have the Global Blockchain Business Council and there're countless other industry organisations that, you know, push forward their agenda from a regulatory point of view. But you know, there seems to be a hell of a lot less people pushing forward the regulatory agenda of decentralised finance because by the nature of it they're not regulated. So there's a disproportionate amount of lobbying for businesses versus the technology itself. 

Tracey: [00:15:28] Yeah, some good points there. And again, I think it's not going to be the last time we speak on this subject. I think it will. It'll make a big part of the narrative around crypto throughout the remainder of this bear market, which will likely be for the entirety of 2023, I would imagine. So we'll keep you informed. We're really informed, yes. Really. You've called the bottom, though. Should we do another bottom call for this week? 

Blake: [00:15:51] If we do one every week, we'll be right eventually. 

Craig: [00:15:54] I'll be right eventually. Yeah, exactly. Are we? 

Tracey: [00:15:56] Right? Eventually. I know he hasn't mentioned that yet. But moving on to our next story. Today, Coindesk released the 100 most influential persons list. And no surprise that sees. And do we want to know why he won? Blake, you tell us right in it. Why did he wait? Why did he win? 

Blake: [00:16:16] Blake says he won because he has the ability to vanquish a $40 billion rival with a single tweet. Now, I don't know if you could be any more influential than that, but certainly topping the list of most influential people. 

Tracey: [00:16:30] That is gold. And as we're reading that, Craig has just found out who topped the list last year. Tell our listeners who topped the list last year, Craig. 

Craig: [00:16:39] Sam Bankman-Fried topped it last year, so hopefully we don't say wow. Coindesk first. 

Tracey: [00:16:45] Look at that. 

Craig: [00:16:47] Well, last year, if you remember Trace, they did the NFT. They auctioned NFT of the little characters off.

Tracey: [00:16:52] I know. That's what I was saying. Yeah, I think I remember at the time. 

Craig: [00:16:55] Well, he was influential. Wasn't he? Single Handedly crush the market? 

Tracey: [00:16:59] Oh, absolutely. I wonder why. So, Sam, one last year for why. I wonder what what did it say for him? Winning for being. 

Craig: [00:17:05] Well, he was on the full throttle with his, you know, giving back to the world. He pitch and he's also in his twenties. So he was like the youngest in riches gone crypto for a long time. 

Tracey: [00:17:18] Yeah. Yeah. Is some great some great here at the time. Oh, how the mighty do fall. There we go. Moving on. Look, a little bit of breaking news for today. Another one who's fallen to the contagion or signal trading here. And Michael, what's the story that's come to light today here, boys? Yeah. 

Blake: [00:17:35] So I'm probably just for a little bit of context. There's a platform called Maple Finance, which is an Aussie born platform which allows funds and market makers and hedge funds to lend crypto to one another using smart contracts. So they've done, you know, over $1,000,000,000 in loans in the last year or so. And they've been a raging success. And orthogonal trading, which I think was a BVI based hedge fund, but also had a presence here in Australia with some of their team members. They unfortunately seem to have been caught up in the FTC's liquidity crisis and have defaulted on one of their loans on Maple to the tune of about $32 million. So. Hope everyone is hopeful. Everyone's alright at the door. But it just shows that the contagion from the six year debacle is going to continue probably for many more weeks and months.

Tracey: [00:18:36] Yeah, that's not so good. And with that, we'll move on now to our short, sharp news bias. Crazy on a kick off. 

Craig: [00:18:44] So one of the largest financial companies, Fidelity, has announced they've started opening retail, bitcoin and Aether trading accounts. Now, they did have it available for institutions. Now they are available for retail. So the company has announced its move to an early subscribers list, with the title being the wait is over. Now, they've waited for the bear market, so they probably should have got a move out before, but just another place to buy. 

Tracey: [00:19:12] Perfect time to buy the zero eight guy. What's next? You want to go blank? 

Blake: [00:19:18] Yeah. The drama is not over like we just described. And Amazon wants a piece of it. The company is partnering with the Russo brothers, best known for the Marvel movies, to make a show on the spectacular collapse of the cryptocurrency giant. Yeah, they're looking to go into production in spring 2023, and I think everyone is going to be queuing up to see this movie. But, you know, it's not over yet, so I'm sure they'll be refining the script over the coming months. 

Tracey: [00:19:47] Yeah, I think it's going to take a while. They're going to have to leave it to the last minute to film because it'll be forever changing. But sticking with FDX, the DOJ watchdog filed a motion seeking an independent examiner to look over the FTC's collapse. So the internal agency compares the failure of FDX to that of the Lehman Brothers and the New Century Financial. In the motion, the Justice Department says the appointment of an independent examiner would be in the interest of FTC creditors and other interested parties. So that seems like the only way to move forward, really. And we'll see what comes out of it too.

Craig: [00:20:23] And the next one I've got here is I've got a bag of this GM X. I am cherry picking this story because I've shown them on the podcast before. They have fine financial advice. 

Tracey: [00:20:34] We don't. 

Craig: [00:20:34] They have flipped uniswap in daily revenue for the first time ever. Everyone that was has been futures trading on FTX has now gone to GMX and all these decentralised exchanges have seen huge growth and you can actually look up the law of growth. If you go start at GM, you can actually see it live. So then the other market leader, Chase told you so. 

Tracey: [00:20:57] Yeah, they've done really well. Yeah. Flying well. 

Blake: [00:21:00] Uniswap has launched its own NFT aggregator platform and the aggregator allows users to view. Listings from the open see look rare. And if and other marketplaces. That's a pretty cool service users are able to compare prices across the markets and trade the NFTs either individually or in batches. Now this is awesome. The obvious positioning is to be a one stop shop here so you don't have to go anywhere else. So Uniswap Sagrada will be the first major NFT platform to open source its front end. So this suggests that we're going to see many other forks or copies of this platform. But did anyone look into the fees that are going to be charged, or are they just passing it through straight to the platforms that, you know, the trades would be executed on? 

Tracey: [00:21:46] I assumed that they'd be passing it through, but I didn't. 

Blake: [00:21:48] Look, I want good stuff. 

Tracey: [00:21:49] Yeah, I love uni. Okay, moving on. One of the original promises of Web3 was the transfer of power of platforms to the Creator as well as power. It's money. So open season announced last Friday that creators have also earned more than 1 billion on their platform just this year. So that's more than Facebook and Tik Tok and Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat have all paid out to their creators. So that's pretty big news coming through from open season. 

Craig: [00:22:18] And last one for today. Bad news for the Ripple Army. They've been delisted from the Coinbase wallet. They've also scrapped a few assets from their Self-Custody mobile wallet, citing consumer interest, which is an interesting one. They're also getting rid of Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum Classic, which had three OGs they're getting rid of, which is quite interesting. 

Tracey: [00:22:39] Not from the platform. Just from the wallet, correct? 

Blake: [00:22:41] Yeah. There's one other item that we may or may not want to chuck in there that I thought was really interesting about RTX and Sam over the last week coming out on different media channels to try and what seems to be changed, the narrative of how he's been perceived in the media. Now, you know, it's obviously been quite clear that this organisation was mismanaged and it all started at the top with Sam. But, you know, what we're seeing now is Sam taking interviews and muddying the waters a little bit to make it seem as though that, you know, he was more innocent than potentially he was. And, you know, it was his subordinates that were potentially making all the mistakes. Now, this is quite important because he would be getting advice from his lawyers and media specialists to go out there, muddy the waters. Because, you know, when this does go to court and he's persecuted, if the waters are muddied about the narrative that he's putting out into the marketplace. 

Tracey: [00:23:43] Then don't think anyone's buying it. But yeah. 

Blake: [00:23:45] But it could be the case that people do. And more importantly, Tracey, I think what we're going to see is the left leaning news agencies support this narrative to show that, you know, potentially cover their own bum just because they are 100%. You know, we had some of these institutions and organisations promoting, you know, Sam Bankman-Fried as a poster child. But now obviously they've seen what's happened and what we've seen many articles come out that are soft hitting and almost uncovering, maybe this narrative will be picked up and distributed in order for some of these groups. 

Tracey: [00:24:23] I think that they're kind of already doing it and it's all out there a lot. But I think no matter how much media training they've given him, he's not doing a very good job of it. 

Craig: [00:24:32] Well, not the whole narrative across all of those publications are like removing the intent of Sam. They're saying that, like, the language is like how Sam failed to save the world, like how it blew up in Sam's and Sam's power when, like, they were moving all in ten, even though, like, we know that he was funnelling funds to his hedge fund. 

Blake: [00:24:54] Yeah. And that's one of the key points around fraud. If fraud was committed, there needed to be intent. And I think you're right. And if he can muddy the waters to show that there was an intent of fraud and it was just a big, you know, mismanagement, then, you know, his sentence potentially would be very different. 

Tracey: [00:25:09] Is definitely the way they're doing. Even when he answers questions, you see, he looks down, he's looking, did I even do it he's like, did I? 

Craig: [00:25:16] Yeah, he, he says. 

Tracey: [00:25:17] They're studying the question, how do I say this to get out of what they've just said to me, you know, because people have been asking a few direct questions. That's how he's answering.

Craig: [00:25:26] And the guy in the ABC is like, Yes or no? Did you know? He's asked three times and he didn't answer it once. He gave the best politician answer, and I guarantee you, he's got media people, lawyers living in his Bahamas apartment with him probably behind the camera telling him what to say. It's a joke. 

Tracey: [00:25:43] He's posters going up, say, yeah, yeah, save it. 

Blake: [00:25:46] Yeah, we're flipkart's guys. 

Tracey: [00:25:50] But who is it? Actually, Genevieve again put up that really good one where he was feeding information to the Financial Times around when he was trying to make it onto the The Rich list. And he was actually here. This is my involvement with Alameda. Here are the sheets here, the lists of all the money that's in. Right now. He only did that three or four months ago. So for him to be that involved at that point, you know, like the question about did you write the code with the back door goes, I don't know how to write code. You know, and they're like, I gave it. Interesting. Interesting. We shall see. Again, it's going to take a long time for all of that to play out, obviously. 

Craig: [00:26:25] Yeah. 

Tracey: [00:26:25] And with that, we shall leave it there for another week of crypto news. Please do join us again next week as we bring you the next instalment of crypto news. Follow us on all the different places on social media where you can follow us. Keep your emails coming to podcast@getbamboo.io. Don't forget to rate and review us. Wherever you listen to your podcasts, please join us again next week. Bye for now. 

Craig: [00:26:50] See you guys. 

Blake: [00:26:51] Bye.