Flexa's Plan to Get Crypto Accepted Everywhere! | Daniel McCabe - Thinking Crypto News & Interviews

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
And then of course you learn about the technology and
we do that. That was my aha moment. That's when
I was, oh, wow, this is good to change everything.
We didn't do an ico. We sold to private, accredited
investors at a time when nobody else was doing that.
We never had a public sale. For example, of our
app token, which collateralizes the network.

Speaker 2 (00:16):
People call it meme coins. Right, So you could take
something from culture that is maybe weird or funny, but
the masses are human psychology gravitates to it, and some
of it may not be for you or me. Right,
some of it is just Internet culture. But there's things
like doche coin and fart coin, but they build a
brand and a following and you have network effects. This

(00:39):
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VET token and v chain also recently launched staking, where
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So if you'd like to learn more about v chain,
go to vchain dot org. Link will be in the description. Hey, folks,
welcome into the Thinking Crypto Podcast. I'm your host, Tony
Edward and joining me today is Danny McKay, who is
the co founder and CEO of Flexa. Now. Flexa is

(01:46):
a digital assets payments platform. Danny, great to have.

Speaker 1 (01:49):
You, Thank you. Great to be here.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, Danny, I'm excited to talk about crypto payments and
learn about all the great things Flexa is doing. Well,
let's kick it off with your background. Tell us a
bit about yourself, where you're from, your professional background, and
how'd you end up founding Flexa.

Speaker 1 (02:03):
Yeah, that's a great question. Background specifically, I'm an attorney. So,
as some folks already know, I took a weird path
to get into crypto. But yeah, I was a litigation attorney,
a business litigation attorney. You worked with a lot of startups,
worked in the technology sector quite a bit, and that
led me to crypto. So professionally speaking, I was a
lawyer for many years. This is my fourth Flex is

(02:25):
my fourth startup. So I've dabbled in a few things
here and there, but by far Flex is the focuslex
Flex is the big one, so to speak.

Speaker 2 (02:34):
So where along the journey or like let's say timeline,
did you find a crypto or blockchain and what was
your aha moment?

Speaker 1 (02:41):
That's a great question too do so for me it
was honestly boring. So if you're a trial lawyer, one
of the things you have to do is it damages evaluation.
So if you get a case set, you need to
evaluate damages. Otherwise what's the point of a case if
there are no damages. So I got a case I
want to say, twenty sixteen as a litigation attorne and
crypto was involved in specifically, it was a narrow ether

(03:03):
and bitcoin were involved, and I had to do damages
analysis for you know what possible damages might be. And
in doing that analysis, I kind of went down the
rabbit hole finding out about these different assets and more
importantly the volatility and the appreciation and everything else that
went along with crypto. And then of course you learn
about the technology. And when you do that, that was

(03:25):
my Aha moment. That's when I was, oh, wow, this
is going to change everything, and sure enough it has.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
Yeah, an incredible I mean, obviously you went and started
a business, So tell us about the genesis of flexa
of how did the idea come about on what's the mission?

Speaker 1 (03:40):
The real idea came about with a combination of two things.
One would be Payments where payments focused company. Obviously, you
know we're here to help merchants primarily, you know, helping
merchants thrive in the next era of commerce. So for us,
this is a merchant centric play all the way. And
that really came from one of my co founders, Trevor Filter,
who was in payments his whole professional career. Then the
other co founder, Tyler Spaulding, brought with him a real

(04:03):
deep understanding of blockchain technology. So together they had this
idea of how they can really replace debit and credit rails. Thankfully,
they wanted an attorney as a co founder to help
them build from the beginning. We wanted to build flex
in the most compliant way possible. I knew that they
wouldn't invest an attorney to be a co founder if
they didn't want that to be the case. That gave

(04:23):
me a lot of trust and faith in them. By
the way, at an early time, this is eight years
ago now, it seems crazy. So yeah, so I eagerly
took this opportunity, and knowing what I knew at the
time about crypto, and knowing what I thought could happen,
how the transformative this technology could be, particularly with payments,
I was I was eager to join. That was That's
how I got into it. And you know, obviously still here,
still paving the way you.

Speaker 2 (04:45):
Mentioned those eight years ago. That took a lifetime in crypto,
right with all the things we've seen, some massive collapses FTX.
Now we're in a very different environment, much more crypto
friendly environment. What's it like looking back, you know, going
through that arduous journey, you know, through all the ups
and downs.

Speaker 1 (05:03):
Yeah, I'm really proud of our history. We could have
done things differently and we wouldn't be here anymore. We
didn't do an ICO. For example, we sold to private
accredited investors at a time when nobody else was doing that.
We never had a public sale, for example, of our
AMP token which collateralizes the network. Probably talk about that
a little bit later. So we did a lot of

(05:24):
things right in the beginning. We built a compliance program first,
a BSAAML program before we built anything else. We became
fins End registered as a money services business immediately. I
started pursuing money transmitter licenses immediately, so now we have
licenses throughout the nation. We did a lot of things
in the compliance and legal front from the outset in
the beginning to make it through these eight years, because

(05:47):
there have been quite a bit of challenges, not just
with the FTX type stuff that drives the market down
and weekends consumer confidence, but even what we saw with
the SEC for example, in some of the hurdles they
put folks through, including FLEXA was named in a complaint
not as a defendant, but just referenced in a complaint
with allegations about our token which were patently untrue. So

(06:08):
we had to deal with all that. We still have
to deal with all that in certain arenas. So for me,
we built it right in the beginning and those challenges
made us stronger. And we look at those challenges as
helping us find the next opportunity, helping us find the
next reason to build and what to build. So you know,
no complaints will continue to just push forward.

Speaker 2 (06:26):
So let's go through the details of how a merchant
or a business can use flex up to accept crypto
or you know, spend crypto if they want with stable
coins and things like that.

Speaker 1 (06:35):
Yeah, I mean for us it's optionality, right, for merchants,
it's primary optionality. There's a lot of competitors now. People
are especially because the Genius Act, which obviously came out
in July, so it's still kind of brand new. But
what we've seen since Genius is stable coin strategy, stable
coin adoption kind of flood the market. Everyone's trying to
get in in some way with stable coin payments, and

(06:57):
that's wonderful. I don't think anybody would have guessed, for example,
in July, when Genius becomes law, that the market cap
for stable coins would be where it is today. I
think upwards of about three hundred billion or something like that.
We have thirty billion of on chain activity on a
daily basis. I don't think anybody would have thought this
would happen this quickly with stable coins. But for us,

(07:18):
it's not just stable coin payments. It's not just one
token or two tokens. It's not just one chain or
two chains. It has to be everything. It has to
be any asset for the merchants, from any chain for
the merchants. It has to be that way, any wallet,
any asset, and really anywhere, which we're excited to look
forward to some announcements coming up next year on that.

(07:39):
But for us, it's optionality. And I see a lot
of our competitors. They may offer one or two or
three tokens, they may offer one chain, They may require
their merchants to have their own crypto wallets. And if
you're doing that, how are you helping the merchant. Merches
don't want to hold crypto yet, they don't want to
manage and hold in custody crypto yet. So we make
it possible so they can accept FIAT and we can

(07:59):
do that with our payment page product or payment link
payment clips. We do that with our SDK that any
wallet can embed, such that any Walt literally can use
our payment platform in order to make payments with merchants.
So folks can use their walts to make payments with merchants. Honestly,
it's optionality for the merchants, and we do it in
a number of different ways, none of which costs the
merchants anything. Obviously, we do the full integration ourselves. And

(08:22):
of course consumers don't pay for our service, they just
use the digital assets to make payments at many fortune
five hundred merchants and growing.

Speaker 2 (08:30):
That's incredible. And is your service available in the international
markets or just the United States?

Speaker 1 (08:36):
Great question. So right now it's the United States, El Salvador.
We're legally authorized and we will look forward to some
things happening in Canada. We're also super closed in a
number of other international jurisdictions. So you know, I used
to just say any asset, any wallet. I've been throwing
it anywhere on there because for the last year and
a half or so I've really been working hard with
my team on global expansion and again with flex. So

(08:58):
this goes back to what I said at the outset.
We did compliance first, right, we had the BSAML program first.
We do complete KYC ofax screening for folks that use
our network. We're very careful because you know, we want
to talk to regulators and make them feel comfortable, and
more importantly, we want to talk to merchants and let
them know we've got their back. We're protecting them from
day one, so they don't have to worry about a thing.

(09:18):
We take care of compliance. And I've taken that approach
internationally as well. So while I see some companies to
suddenly roll out with the product in a foreign jurisdiction,
we don't do that because we're protecting merchants. We only
launch in the jurisdiction once I feel comfortable with my
CLO that we're either licensed fully to do it or
that we have a legal authority in some other way
to do it. So it's taken us some time on

(09:40):
the international piece, but that's certainly something we're working hard
on and I'm looking forward to to talking more about
in the near term.

Speaker 2 (09:46):
Oh absolutely, And that totally makes sense, and I think
it's the right approach because we're seeing across the globe
different jurisdictions now putting together their rules so to speak,
and guard rails, So you kind of want to wait
for some of those things to be ironed out before
you launch, and like you said, you get to protect
your customers and folks and make sure everything is good there.

Speaker 1 (10:07):
Amen. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (10:09):
And as far as assets that you support, you mentioned
stable coins, I'm assuming you support the top stable coins
and crypto assets. So if I wanted to pay with
bitcoin or ether things like that, I can do it.

Speaker 1 (10:18):
Yeah. Absolutely. I think we always say ninety nine plus,
but really it's anything digital. Any digital token that can
be traded can be spent on the FlexIt platform, and
so really I look at as kind of infinite. I
mean we're talking about today. I mean it's funny. When
we launch flex I think there maybe were two thousand
different tokens maybe, and today there's just a ridiculous amount
of token, not all of them being traded, of course,

(10:38):
but there's tens of thousands of tokens today. We could
create a token right now in the time it takes
to do the next fifteen minutes of this podcast if
we wanted to. So, tokens are popping up everywhere, and
we never wanted to strip merchants of optionality. So we
think all tokens should be spendable and We're going to
keep it that way. So yeah, of course bitcoin you
can spend on our network right now, ether of course,
light coin. All the token that folks want to spend

(11:01):
you can spend, and even some that maybe they don't
want to spend, like for instance, there's a lot of
folks that think spending bitcoin is crazy, and that's fine,
that's up to them. But yet it's been our top
asset for spending since we founded Flexa in twenty eighteen.
That is going to change. Folks are spending stable coins
a lot more now because the Genius Act. And I've
said this before publicly, but I really think merchant loyalty

(11:24):
points are going to make a huge play and merchants
are going to have their own tokens. That to me
is super exciting. We've been working with some super high
end merchants and how to roll something like that out.

Speaker 2 (11:35):
I'm very fascinated by that with these businesses, and I've
been having different conversations with different folks about once we
have like clarity, these businesses create rewards tokens that could
be traded in the open market. They can build relationships
to other business where you can go spend that token.
There So let's say, for example, it's a Walmart token
or Amazon token, and I can go to Starbucks and
spend it. It could trade in the open market. Maybe

(11:57):
Walmart and Amazon say hey, hold on to witning. You
can earn rewards like staking. There's a lot of possibilities here.

Speaker 1 (12:04):
So the possibilities, really, to your point, are endless. And
I think I heard the word clarity commodity are out there,
and I think that is going to be a driver.
I mean, we've been waiting for this. It's on the horizon.
I've personally been to DC too many times to count
and had too many meetings to count. Genius was great,
but Clarity is going to be bigger. And I've said
this too. Tax reform will be the third pillar of
all this. You give merchants the Genius Act for stable coins,

(12:27):
Clarity Act, so they actually know which tokens are commodities
and securities and which tokens they can accept a safe manner.
And then you give some to tax reform. So it
was deminimus relief. At least when you're buying, for example,
a cup of coffee shouldn't be a taxable event. Wow.
I mean, I know we've been talking to emergants for
eight years, and I personally know that is an explosive

(12:48):
moment for digital asset payments. It's what they've been waiting for.
It's what we've been waiting for so while. We've been
educating merchants, and I think we've talked to I mean,
I have to honestly think we've talked to every fortune
one hundred, if not five hundred merchant in the last
eight years. I mean, over ninety percent of them has
shown excitement about digital asset payments. It doesn't mean they're
all ready to launch. We've worked with some of them

(13:09):
for five plus years getting them ready to launch. I
think twenty twenty six will be big in that regard.
Some folks are getting ready to launch, and a lot
of that is because of Clarity. A lot of that
is because the promise of clarity right now that they're
really looking at it more seriously, so you you convert
that promise into an actual law. I couldn't be more excited.

Speaker 2 (13:29):
Yeah, it's gonna be an exciting time and I can't
wait to see the innovation post that bill being passed
or signing to law, and the clarity people will have
to invest more build and do a lot of innovation.

Speaker 1 (13:40):
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Now you mentioned, you know stable coins, you expect that
to grow as far as payments being used. You know,
we got the Genius Act in place and so forth. Yeah,
and you mentioned, you know there's some people, well good
amount of people that use bitcoin. But do you think
over time it becomes more so heavy weighted stable coins
versus these other assets, or maybe bitcoin catches up because

(14:06):
Bitcoin's price continues to go up, that spending a fee
s of Toshi's it becomes like nothing because the price
is so high.

Speaker 1 (14:13):
Yeah. I think there will always be folks spending bitcoin
because that was the original promise of bitcoin. It's supposed
to be a payment token. I think, you know, the
real bitcoin folks want to use bitcoin for that purpose,
and they always will. To your point, it won't be
maybe a lot and they're going to hold the bulk
of their assets in that form, but yeah, they'll always
spend it. It won't be the real spending driver. Though

(14:34):
stable coins are already accomplishing that. They're catching up quite quickly.
I mentioned Bitcoin's always been the most spent token on
our platform. That's changing quickly because of stable coins. And
again I can't understate, you know, speaking with merchants, loyalty
points and merchant tokens haven't even begun. Yeah, that's a
whole new game, and that's going to unlock so much.

(14:55):
And there's you know, you can brainstorm, as you have
already here today, how you can use loyalty points in
the form of tokens and merchant tokens themselves to incentivize consumers,
to reward consumers, and to increase payments. And we haven't
talked about this, but you know, one of the things
we've done at Flexa because we've built this payment platform
the way we have, we've now opened up commerce for everybody.

(15:18):
No longer are you restricted from participating in e commerce
because you don't have the right credit score, you can't
get the right credit card, you don't have a bank account,
or your underbank or underbanked. No longer are those hurdles,
which means instead of something like you know, seventy eight
to eighty four percent of the population participating in commerce,
now you're talking about ninety nine plus percent of the

(15:39):
global population participate to participate in commerce through payments, which
is also a game changer. So you combine that with
what we're talking about in loyalty points and merchant tokens.
This thing is just it's too massive to even imagine
right now, and that gives us a lot of excitement
as this year ends we move into twenty twenty six.
That gives us so much excitement about FLEXA and that's

(16:00):
why we're heads down building as hard as fast as possible.

Speaker 2 (16:03):
Oh. Absolutely, tell us a bit about liquidity, because maybe
we're certain assets outside of Bitcoin. You know, Bitcoin like
the most liquid acid in crypto. But like let's say
you go down to listen, you're supporting some all coins.
It may not be as popular, but when you get
the liquidity. Are you working with different exchanges?

Speaker 1 (16:18):
Yeah, so we work with exchange partners. Coinbases an exchange
partner of ours, Gemini is an exchange partner of ours.
We work with other exchanges as well. You know, I'm
in the process of lining that up that same thing internationally,
so we'll always have exchange partners for that piece of it.
But I can tell you related to that as the
app token, So we created AMP to be a collateral
token to backstop all of our payments and the utility

(16:40):
it serves cannot be understated here. I don't know that
there's a Flexa without app, because what other folks are
trying to do is build digital asset payment rails that
are not collateralized, which means you give merchants a horrible choice.
You know, they really have this problem, what if the
transaction fails or what if the network fails. So some
of these works are much faster now than they used

(17:01):
to be, so unlike Bitcoin, it might not take you
thirty minutes anymore for a transaction to confirm. Maybe it
takes you a second or less than a second, but
that doesn't mean that network is going to stay up
all the time. So how do you protect merchants the
transaction takes thirty to forty minutes. Well, you can have
that because you can't sit there with a cup of
coffee waiting for a transaction to process. And you also
can't have the risk of a network failing or the

(17:22):
transaction failing in any way. So other digital asset payment
platforms say, hey, that's just part of the risk. But
we've said at Flexus since day one is shouldn't be
part of your problem, merchant. So the AMP token collateralizes
every payment. The world's only neutral collateral token. It collateralizes
every payment that fows for our network, so we can

(17:43):
promise merchants they will be paid, not only promise, we
can actually guarantee merchants, every one of them, that they'll
receive full payments. And we're the only payment platform that
can do that because we're the only payment platform that
utilizes the AMP token to collateralize payments. So, you know,
this thing collect you wrap it all up everything I've
talked about with any token, any wallet, what's happening with clarity,

(18:05):
what's happening with merchants developing loyalty tokens and merchant tokens.
The fact that our rail is completely collateralized by AMP.
It's a unique payment platform. It's the most unique payment platform.
And in talking to merchants, you know, once they understand it,
and sometimes it takes some time, it's really the only option.
It's the only viable option.

Speaker 2 (18:25):
Oh, it's amazing. Yeah, I can't think of anybody else
who's doing that with you know, the token setups. That's
really great.

Speaker 1 (18:30):
Yeah, yeah, nobody else is doing it. I mean it's hard.

Speaker 2 (18:32):
It was hard.

Speaker 1 (18:32):
I mean I've said this before. The work involved in
pulling this off. It knows no wonder. It's taking eight
years to get to where we are. The work involved
in just having a token mature to the point where
it's used in a utility form like this, to have
that AMP token backstopping flex of payments, you cannot do
that overnight. You can't do it overnight, especially when you
go through some of the hurdles we talked about earlier. Yeah,

(18:54):
we didn't mentioned the pandemic. I mean, that could have
knocked us out, you know, but for some really loyal
merce who really love what we were building, I don't
know where we would have made it through that, because
you know, we were a brick and mortar in store
payments only at that point. That prompted us obviously to
move on online. But yeah, it really took a grind
from us and really heads down stuff to pull this off.

(19:16):
And you know that's why I keep coming back with this.
This is the most excited I've been at Flexa since
we started, and the future is unbelievably bright. We're just
trying to figure out how to take advantage of it best.

Speaker 2 (19:26):
Oh for sure, Now I read about FLEXA terminal tells
you that and if I'm not mistaken. That's launching in
twenty twenty six.

Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah, it is. So that's you know, emvs have what
one thousands, they're limited to one thousand different assets that
they can you can spend with it. That makes no
sense when we're talking about tens of thousands of tokens.
So FlexIt terminal built in cooperation in partnership with Burner,
makes it possible for folks to use that terminal for
immediate crypto still on our payment rail, but it makes

(19:55):
it possible. It's the actual terminal, so you can make
those payments. And for us that's critic important because it
gives again merchants optionality. Certainly not required. Nothing is required
from a merchant. If they want to take digital asset payments,
they don't need a terminal, they don't need to do anything.
We integrate with their point of sale directly, and that
will always be true. It's just another piece to give

(20:15):
merchants optionality, so they'd accept payments in that way if
they want to. And it may be a critically important
piece because folks are used to that and I like
to do that, and some merchants want it. So you know,
this is the truth. If a merchant wants something in
this space, We're going to deliver it for them.

Speaker 2 (20:30):
Danny. There's an interesting kind of movement happening with crypto
where it's human behavior tokenized on the blockchain and a
financialized and people call it meme coins. Right, So you
could take something from culture that is maybe weird or funny,
but the masses are human psychology gravitates to it. And

(20:51):
sure some of it may not be for you or me, right,
some of it is just Internet culture. But there's things
like doche coin and fart coin. But the build a
brand and a following, and you have network effects. So
how do you You may have touched a bit on this,
but how do you navigate that to say, hey, look
there's a big demographic that's backing this coin. It's the

(21:11):
craziest thing ever. But there's people hold it and merchase
want to accept it, so we're going to facilitate it.

Speaker 1 (21:18):
Yeah. I mean I look at it first from the
legal perspective, which is if coinbase and Gemini support the token.
I rely a lot on their teams to make sure
something is first of all, legally permissible to be traded,
let alone spent at point of sale. With one of
our merchants, and then we have our own token review
committee at Flexa. So every token that we allow to

(21:40):
be spent on our platform has gone through not only
the coinbase and Gemini review, but our Flexa internal review
before it gets to the point where it can actually
be spent. Other than that, honestly, it could be anything.
It really could be. I mean, I draw the line
at hate speech. There's something that's promoting hate speech or
something like that. As long as I'm CEO of Flexa,
nobody's going to be able to spend it. But other

(22:03):
than that, no, if it's popular, if it's doge, or
if it's something that folks get behind and they love it,
even even no one's asked, but even furt coin, you
will make it spendable if enough people want it to
be spendable, and more importantly, if our merchant wants it
to be spendable. Yeah. So, yeah, we don't want to
limit this. We built this so anything digital can be spent,
and I mean it that way. I mean, even you

(22:24):
look at tokenization of assets, which is going nuts right now.
I think right now you're kind of in that post pilot,
early production phase of tokenization of assets. But that's happening.
I mean, most major banks, most major even real estate
companies are looking at tokenization of assets in a very
real way. There's no reason why tokenize assets. If they

(22:46):
can be traded, they should be able to be spent,
and they can be We're already built so they can
be that flexous. So this is just another example of
building flexa the right way. So any asset, any digital asset,
can be spent. And that's again for merchant optionality primarily
exciting days.

Speaker 2 (23:01):
Yeah, it's so fascinating because there's so many possibilities. And
you know, one of the things I thought about as
we're having this conversation when you have these meme coins, Look,
there's a certain demographic in the public that will hold it.
There's a community, but I think there are merchants, there
are businesses. So if you run a comedy show or
you do something that's funny or lighthearted, right, that's a

(23:21):
great demographic to tap into it. Accept that coin because
it's you know, from a brand resonance standpoint, it's on point. Now,
if you're a Fortune five hundred company, you may not
want to accept far coin, right, but hey, that's okay.
There's different verticals, different cohorts right as it would.

Speaker 1 (23:37):
Yeah. I mean it's important to realize too that FLEXA
doesn't require the merchant to accept any specific coin. For example,
a merchant wants to take USD only we're licensed to
pull that off. Not every digital payment platform is. Like
some would say, sorry, we don't have the money transmit
your license, or we're not a money services business. Thankfully,
we built that in the beginning, so merchants can accept

(23:58):
USD if they want to. In fact, you could spend
bitcoin at point of sale. The merchant could take light coin,
they could take any asset they want because of our platform.
So if it's it's USDA USD one day and ether
of the next and bitcoin the next, that's fine by us.
So truthfully speaking, someone could spend four coin and the
merchant does not need to hold that.

Speaker 2 (24:18):
Yeah, and obviously we're using forty coin as an example, right,
but it could be the other stuff. It could be
I don't know, a monkey coin or something and a
zoo accepts it.

Speaker 1 (24:27):
Yeah why not? Why not? Man? No, I think sky's
the limit. And that again, you're going to exactly what
we talk about, which is optionality. Merchants should be able
to do what they want it should be for them,
you know, gone or the days when the debit and
credit rails kind of dictate to merchants what they're going
to pay and how they're going to accept. I mean
those things, you know, those old, ancient, broken analog debit

(24:50):
and credit rails invented some thirty years before the internet
costs this country two percent of his GDP annually. Seven
hundred billion dollars annually is a social cost of payments
on those broken out of date, analog, really antique payment rails.
So those should have been gone a long time ago.
We think you're at flex so they have a shelf

(25:11):
life of maybe ten to twenty years and then they're
just gone. And we're doing everything in our power to
make that timeline come quicker.

Speaker 2 (25:18):
So on that note, Danny, because one of my questions
for you is going to be it's twenty thirty five,
how do you see crypto in payments and the economy,
and what's your like predictions? You know, and obviously we
won't hold it to you, but you know, well, how
do you see the future of payments? So I'm the
one here that thinks it is going to be ten years,
not twenty.

Speaker 1 (25:37):
I always pushed that faster, and I just again, I
look at what's happened in stable coins since Genius, which
was only in July. That just happened in July, and
we already see these ridiculous numbers about on chain activity.
So for me, by twenty thirty five, not only will
all payments be digital asset payments in some way or another,
but folks won't even know what's happening, just like you know.

(25:59):
The easiest way to think of it is, folks don't
think of how they can possibly make a cell phone
call today, or how you send a text message. You
just do it. No one's wondering what that technology is,
or how do you build that? No one today. Everybody
wonders about crypto. How does this work? Why is this working?
Is it safe? It's scary. This is a scary thing.
I thought it was for you know, money laundering and
funding terrorism and it once they learned that, no, no, no,

(26:21):
of course, any asset can be used for those things,
but crypto is probably the dumbest asset to use for
those things because it's all public and unschained. But once
you start to educate folks and they learn about the technology,
how much faster it is, how more inclusive it is,
how much safer it is, the privacy protection features this
which we haven't even talked about. Every bit of it
is better. Merchants are learning that. Most merchants already know that.

(26:43):
They're just rolling it out over time. Consumers won't even know.
As the UX gets better, consumers won't even know what's happening.
It's going to be as easy or easier than their
current payment flow to be faster, you know, just work,
and it's going to be better. It already is better.
It's just not fully adopted yet. So by twenty thirty five,
I think it's completely taken over payments. I wouldn't be

(27:04):
surprised if you know, the visas, amexs and master cards
of the world have gotten a board too late. Everything
they're trying to do right now isn't crypto payments. It's
it's it's crypto on roads and off ramps, using those
ancient analog payment rehels, which are broken and costs the
seven hundred billion dollars annually nobody wants. Nobody wants. So yeah,

(27:24):
I look forward to twenty thirty five and maybe sooner.

Speaker 2 (27:27):
Yeah, it's gon exciting time and to your point of consumer,
most of the people won't know that the stable points are.
Blockchain tech is running behind the scenes right now and
obviously as they the crypto acid class grows and there's
more holders. Uh what you guys are doing? Will you
know if I want to spend my big winner in
my Ether or Solona or whatever it is, I could
have that optionality. It'll be very seamless.

Speaker 1 (27:49):
Absolutely, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (27:52):
Now you mentioned you got some launches coming up in
twenty twenty six, we got the Terminal launch. Is there
anything else on your road map that you want to highlight?

Speaker 1 (28:00):
So what we've been really focused on as merchants. So
we've been working with merchants for literally eight years, so
some of them we've been talking to seven plus cheers,
And what I'm excited about is finally bringing those merchants
out of kind of hiding and getting them rolling with
digital asset payment acceptance. So we're focused on that. We

(28:21):
have our product about where we want it for next year.
We've been refining a few things, so whether it's payment pages,
payment clips, payment links, there's a number of different ways
merchants can accept digital asset payments through Flex's platform and
with what we've done on our SDK, so any wallet
can integrate and use our payment platform. We really feel
like we're in a good place now with merchants and
as they learn more about AMP, which takes some time,

(28:44):
because again we're the only one collateralizing payments and that's
a weird topic right by the way, all your payments
are collateralized by this token called AMP that folks can
buy globally and pledges collateral. There's a bit of a
break there. Wait, how does that work? How does that
possibly work? So by the time they learn or it's
you know, to a merchant, they absolutely love it, but
it takes time to educate. But for us, what that

(29:06):
means is it's just this twenty twenty six should be
just this year of bringing merchants on, turning them on,
getting them ready new jurisdictions internationally, with new merchants and
new and bigger merchants here at home.

Speaker 2 (29:19):
Danny, I don't know if this makes sense for your business,
but it's something that I'm waiting to see someone solve,
and that is micro payments for streaming and web monetization
and so forth. Is have you guys thought about anything
like that.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
One hundred percent. So that's part of everything that I'm
talking about. And so yeah, when I say merchants, I'm
not just talking about the traditional fortune one hundred is
who we are working with and talking to, and that's
part of what I'm talking about. But I'm talking about
all the above, right, So it might be in the
infrastructure you're talking about, it could be in gaming, it
could be pretty much anywhere that payments are made in

(29:53):
any format, in any ecosystem. We've been building that for
two years. I said this in a post once and
I exposed that we you know, we were processing stable coin,
but it's five to six years before anybody else was,
quite frankly, so when Genius rolls out, that was kind
of old news to us. We've been stable coins we
used for payments on our platform forever, and I think
we're about five years ahead of everybody else on the

(30:14):
other payment ecosystems that exist out there, which for us
at Flex is hugely exciting. It's exciting for our merchant partners,
and it's part of the reason I look forward to
twenty twenty six so much.

Speaker 2 (30:25):
That's awesome, Danny, you've been in this industry for a
long time, So I'm curious to get your take on
the amount of Tradify Wall Street institutions now entering crypto banks,
the major investment firms. It's incredible. Many of them were
anti crypto for a long time. Now they've completely done A.

Speaker 1 (30:42):
One to eighty and Aaron Brace yea, I've kind of
always called bullshit on that. Excuse my friendship. They were
publicly anti crypto, but we were meet I was a
meeting with them in twenty eighteen nineteen. They were all building,
they were all learning, They all knew exactly what was coming.
Some of them had these black sites where they wouldn't
have it in their building. They would have it literally
a hidden office where you'd meet with the crypto teams

(31:03):
in twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen. So, y know, we all
know the famous ones who say they ate crypto. Well,
they've been building for ten years. So I'm not shocked
by any of this. I don't think anybody should be.
They're not only ready, but they're gonna launch all of them,
and they know they have to because it's really simple.
They know the technology is better.

Speaker 2 (31:24):
Oh yeah, and it's incredible. They are launching ETFs, they're
launching tokenized products, custody stable coins, and much more. You know,
there's talks of the banks they want to launch their
own stable coins. How do you think this stable coin
market plays out? Because there might need to be some
consolidation here. Everybody in their uncle can have a stable coin. No,

(31:44):
everybody and their uncle's going to try to have a
stable coin right now. It's built though, in genius especially,
you know, without going into the nitty gritty of the
regulatory details, it's really hard once you get past a
certain threshold if you grow too much, you know, for
you know, it's a bit different than being regulated like
a bank, but not that different, right, It's it's really
hard to get to that level and succeed. So there's

(32:06):
a bit of a first mover advantage in place for
the usdcas and tether of the world, et cetera. But
you're going to see stable coins.

Speaker 1 (32:15):
You are going to see them, and there are going
to be many Who's gonna win that war? I think
there will be some consolidation. I think there will be
some deaths, and there's gonna be more than one winner.
There's gonna be a lot of winners. There's a lot
of room for everybody. The space is huge, it's international,
and stable coins folks are finally starting to realize thanks
to genius. Again, it took regulatory clarity. It took an

(32:36):
actual law for folks to feel safe enough to learn
enough to really use it. And that's what's gonna happen
with clarity. So you go back to that, and that's
why you're seeing what's happened with stable points happen. So
to your point, there's gonna be a lot of them.
Some of them are gonna be bigger winners than others.
But I just see it as such an open space
for creative minds that great things will happen.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
Oh for sure. One of the things you've seen in
the industry is a lot of crypto companies going public.
There's expecting to be more in twenty twenty six. You
get the SEC chair talking about making it easy and
so forth. FLEXA have any plans along those lines that
you can share.

Speaker 1 (33:10):
No, not right now, And I'm not saying no, I
won't share it. I'm saying no, we don't have those
plans right now. You know, my co founder and I Trevor,
I haven't thought outside of how we best help merchants
in eight years, so truthfully speaking, you know, we haven't
even we haven't thought about anything other than how we
build this platform for merchants, how we best protect AMP,

(33:31):
and how we best use AMP to callateralize payments. You know,
for us, it goes hand in hand. It's just for merchants.
It's just for merchant optionalities, helping them thrive in the
next air of commerce. And someday in the future, if
we achieve this great goal of replacing debit and credit
rails with a far better piece of technology that helps merchants,
I guess we'll take a breath and think of options then,

(33:52):
but not right now.

Speaker 2 (33:54):
Yeah, you guys are head sound building right, absolutely? Yeah,
are you using AI in any way to facilit will
tate your services?

Speaker 1 (34:01):
So we're a bit slow to that. I was cautious.
You know, sometimes the lawyer in me comes out and
delays things here a bit too much. But yeah, we've
implemented some AI, very carefully implemented some AI and what
we're building and how we build it. And by the way,
you know AI aggregators. This is another payment ecosystem there
that we're working with as well. And we're building for

(34:22):
so I think there's a lot of opportunity there. I
just try to be really careful. Again, it's not because
I want Flexi to be protected, It's because I want
merchants to be protected. So maybe we're going to roll
it out kind of carefully and thoughtfully, but it is
something we're focused on.

Speaker 2 (34:33):
Yeah, oh for sure. I know there's a lot of
talks of AI agents and that economy and look at
still at ground level, so we have to figure out
the rules and regulations around that. But yeah, you can
imagine they're going to be taking payments and stable coins
and other assets.

Speaker 1 (34:47):
Yeah, yeah, absolutely, Yeah, and somebody's got to power those payments.
So yeah, we're focused. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:53):
Awesome, d any great stuff. I got some wrap up
questions here for you. Sure, first, if you could create
your own metaverse, what would the theme be?

Speaker 1 (35:00):
You know what, I'd go back to nature somehow. I
like to you know, I do a lot in nature.
I try to do as interesting. Fact. I don't know
if everybody knows this, but over ninety percent of human
existence was spent in the hunter gatherer phase, so we
have not evolved for what we're living in. We have
not evolved for this office in Manhattan. We're not here,
We're not supposed to be So for me, it would

(35:20):
have to be something in nature, Definitely, something in nature,
something where I can go fishing in nature.

Speaker 2 (35:23):
Maybe, oh for sure. Yeah, especially in it's this technology
driven world and digital world and every.

Speaker 1 (35:28):
Us furst right, it's yeah, our bodies biologically we're not
supposed to be here right now, so I would want
to use technology to bring.

Speaker 2 (35:36):
Me back absolutely, rapid fire questions. Favorite food, Yeah, it's.

Speaker 1 (35:41):
Got to be pizza. It's got to be pizza. And
I'm a Chicago guy originally, so for me, it's going
to be thin cruss, tavern style Chicago pizza.

Speaker 2 (35:48):
Nice. Favorite musician or band.

Speaker 1 (35:50):
I mean Beatles one Beatles, Beetles a kind of my formation.
Also Beetles led to everything else. So my favorite band
in college with the Pixies, number of other bands with Pixies.
Nothing happened without the Beatles to me, nothing, So it's Beatles.

Speaker 2 (36:02):
Nice.

Speaker 1 (36:03):
Favorite movie, favorite movie, Holy hell, So that's impossible. I
just have too many, too many favorite movies. I mean, immediately,
what comes to my mind is The Godfather because that
was my favorite movie for so long. But yeah, too
many to count.

Speaker 2 (36:17):
Oh, for sure, favorite book that's.

Speaker 1 (36:20):
Even worse than movies. You're killing me Flan O'Brien, Third Policeman,
probably if I had to limit it to one only
because the writing is spectacular and the kind of there's
a bit of a sci fi twist in there to
a piece of classic literature that I like, So I'll
go with that one.

Speaker 2 (36:36):
And when you're not working, what are you doing for fun?

Speaker 1 (36:38):
For fun, I'm either out with my wife. We're either
having a great dinner in a cocktail somewhere here in
the city, or I'm in nature somewhere fishing. So yeah,
it's one of those two. It's either. Yeah, it's a
bit of a yin and yang for me. I'm in
the city enjoying a good meal, or I'm lost somewhere
in the Little.

Speaker 2 (36:53):
Danny awesome stuff, Absolute pleasure. I love what you guys
are building. And you know, we talked a bit about
before the recording, we're gonna have to do around two
since we're both near New York, and uh, we're gonna
do it in person. But thank you so much for
joining me.

Speaker 1 (37:06):
Appreciate it, Tony, Thank you.

Speaker 2 (37:08):
M

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Flexa's Plan to Get Crypto Accepted Everywhere! | Daniel McCabe

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}Flexa's Plan to Get Crypto Accepted Everywhere! | Daniel McCabe