Evan is the founder of Zeus. An open source lightning wallet available for iOS and Android. In addition to their best-in-class self custody tools they recently launched cashu support in their beta release.
Evan on Nostr: https://primal.net/evan
Zeus: https://zeusln.com/
EPISODE: 156
BLOCK: 893560
PRICE: 1096 sats per dollar
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(00:00:00) CNBC
(00:02:29) Introduction
(00:05:15) Zeus Wallet Overview
(00:08:41) Zeus Wallet Features and Updates
(00:10:55) Neutrino and Privacy in Bitcoin Wallets
(00:17:19) Bitcoin Wallet User Experience
(00:18:08) Cashu Integration in Zeus
(00:21:12) Lightning Network and Hub-and-Spoke Model
(00:30:49) Bitcoin Park Node Management
(00:35:36) Cashu Wallet and User Journey
(00:41:56) Thresholds for Self-Custody
(00:46:04) User Prompts and Education
(00:50:09) Zeus Wallet Features: Gifting and Tokens
(00:54:06) Swaps and User Flow
(01:03:31) Future Developments in Bitcoin Wallets
(01:13:18) USD Tokens and Stablecoins on Bitcoin
(01:20:12) ETFs and Bitcoin Market Dynamics
(01:31:04) Final Thoughts and Future Plans
[00:00:00]
Unknown:
A lot of green on the screen today as you know. However, you probably didn't look at Bitcoin. Tenea McHale did, and she's here. It's up 3%.
[00:00:09] Unknown:
What do you make of the way that this has been trading? It's decoupled obviously from the Nasdaq, which was a trend for a while. How do you see it? Something that people were looking for all month because if you go back to earlier this month, it really was trading in line with stocks. It just was not seeing the big, you know, pops and drops, that one, we're used to seeing out of Bitcoin. And two, it is outperforming the S and P. It has not really caught up with gold, the, you know, leading safe haven. But, I think you are seeing evidence not just I think that the obvious and easy narrative would be that we're talking about Fed independence today. So Bitcoin is kind of acting as that hedge against, you know, political uncertainty. But I also think that it's not just enthusiasm. It's also a exhaustion. You're seeing people investors wanting to, you know, get back into risk, but just maybe not the type of risk that's tied to earnings or head policy. You got a quick thought? I do. Look. You've got a president who's very interested, and his family's very interested in Bitcoin doing well, crypto doing well. And I think you're close to regulation
[00:01:09] Unknown:
or some positive announcements on policy, and that's what's driving it. It's evidence Bitcoin's support of nature is evidence that we have not had a deleveraging event. Because you have a deleveraging event, everything's going down. Well, it has underperformed the S and P and Nasdaq overall since the peak. Recently, though, to your point, it is trading pretty well up from 82 just a week and a half or two weeks ago. Real quick last thought. I think one of the hardest things for investors is to wrap their heads around the fact that day to day, it does trade like a risk asset, but medium long term, it trades like as,
[00:01:42] Unknown:
like a safe haven. If you look at gold outperformance, that kind of, you know, can act as an indicator of where Bitcoin heads when the dust kinda settles.
[00:02:29] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Wednesday, freaks. Tuesday. It's Tuesday. It's your host, Odell, here for another civil dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro was CNBC. They called Bitcoin a safe haven. They said the decoupling word feels like a moment in time. Who the hell knows? I have a great guest here, but before I get to that, dispatch as always is not funded by ads. We do not have any ads or sponsors. We are funded by stats from you guys, from our loving audience, the ride or die freaks. Thank you for supporting the show. Two ways of doing that. You can do that in podcasting two point o apps like Fountain Podcasts, or you can do that by joining us in the live stream where the freaks dwell at silldispatch.com/stream and sending zaps.
We have a great live audience today, and someone has just proven that zaps work. Thank you, Sasha, and with a hundred sats. The largest boost of last week was from Rod Palmer, journalist at Google News. He zapped 21,000 sats, and he said, Odell isn't grumpy. I will die on this hill. Thank you for dying on the hill. I appreciate you, with a huge smile on my face. Anyway, with all that said, we have returned guest, Evan Kaludis. This is twelfth appearance on Civil Dispatch. We don't have to explain to him how the show works. How's it going, Evan? Pretty good, Matt. Feels good to be back. Number 12.
Pretty crazy.
[00:04:00] Evan Kaloudis:
It's a little excessive. When am I gonna start saying no to your invitations?
[00:04:05] ODELL:
Well, we took a break a little bit so people would forget about you to bring it back and add some spice to the show. You know, Evan actually one when I used to do this weekly before I got completely overwhelmed, I had to miss a week, but we wanted the trend to continue. So Evan actually hosted a dispatch without me. That's that's how much of a return guest he is.
[00:04:28] Evan Kaloudis:
There we go. So, yeah. Just, let's, let's not do that again.
[00:04:34] ODELL:
You you gotta keep the strong yourself. But, We didn't we we didn't narrate her. We didn't do it again. We just did that once, but it was great. I appreciated it. I do I am trying to keep the streak alive again going into this next bull cycle. We do have NVK joining us next Wednesday at twenty one hundred UTC. And, I'm pretty excited for that conversation. But, anyway, Evan, now we have Mav twenty one zapped. 19 7 60 sets. Thank you, Mav. Appreciate the support. Weird. Why why did you choose that number? I don't know. But, I feel like it has importance.
Anyway, Evan, you're the creator of Zeus. We will be talking about Zeus today. I I don't know if any freaks are listening that don't know what Zeus is, but why don't we start with a brief explanation about why zoo what is Zeus? Why Zeus? Why should people care? Hit us.
[00:05:37] Evan Kaloudis:
Sure thing. So in a nutshell, I would say Zeus is at least it's up there with the most powerful mobile Bitcoin wallet in the world. You have, like, a crazy feature set, immense amount of flexibility from whether you're web just getting started to the power user Cypherpunk that's connecting to their own node, managing their lightning node liquidity on the go. And we're trying to reach every user in between.
[00:06:09] ODELL:
Love it. I mean, the way I like to look at it is if I lost access to all software except for three pieces of software in my Bitcoin journey. What do I need? I need Bitcoin Core, Sparrow, and Zeus. It's the pinnacle toolkit right there. So thank you for making it all possible.
[00:06:32] Evan Kaloudis:
What can I say? That's amazing company. Yeah. Just, just very humbled to hear that. Thank you.
[00:06:41] ODELL:
So Zeus. If you haven't used Zeus yet, Zeus is a mobile wallet, and it basically aims to be your everything and anything lightning wallet on mobile. And it's come a long way. I mean, originally, it started as purely a way to connect to your own node running at home or on a server, but most people were at home. They would be running, like, a start nine or something at home, and they'd connect their Zeus back to to remote control it because you're not, like, traveling around with your node to, like, pay for things.
[00:07:19] Evan Kaloudis:
Right. Yeah. Back then Yeah. Go on. Back then, it was just I was getting my lightning node started. I set up my Raspberry Pi three. I was on lightning. I had, like, you know, maybe five channels. And, you know, there was nowhere in the city when I was, you know, back in New York to pay. So I was just checking in on my routing, making sure everything was still running, see if I collected a couple sats from being in between. And, yeah, it just sort of evolved from there. Over time, we added support for more interfaces. So it started with L and D connected core lightning node.
We added support for some other interfaces like L and D Hub. And then, you know, more recently, the last year and a half, when we started working on it full time, we added a full wallet, a note in the phone, lightning address service, LSP services. We've got three going on four now. So you could purchase channels, get connected to the lightning net network with ease. We've developed specs now for renewing those channels. And then we've got a massive new release coming out the door that's gonna have support for Cashew eCash. We are gearing up to release our swap service so you could swap between phones on chain and on lightning without having to close or open channels necessarily.
And we're gearing up for our one point o release by the end of the year. So it's a very, very busy year, but, you know, a lot to be excited about, a lot to catch up on.
[00:09:01] ODELL:
So in developer communities, there's different thoughts behind one point o releases. You're aware you can just you can just make a one point o release. Right?
[00:09:12] Evan Kaloudis:
Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, I I could go the route and do 90 nine point
[00:09:18] Unknown:
nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine 99 nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine 9999999 nine 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
[00:09:21] ODELL:
You never hit one point o. Yeah. It's at
[00:09:26] Evan Kaloudis:
makes sense to, like, demark something.
[00:09:29] ODELL:
And, You can just do the Bitcoin core approach, and you can just skip, like, one through twenty five. When did they start? Like, at twenty six or something? Yeah. I think at 24, they went from o point
[00:09:41] Evan Kaloudis:
two to 24 o, which is an awesome approach too. I've definitely thought about it. Maybe it won't be Zeus one point o. Maybe it'll be Zeus 12 o. And you guys will be like, wow. It's been a while that and you'll really software, which is also a crazy thing about. It's been six years of putting this, app out.
[00:10:03] ODELL:
Dude, that's crazy. Impressive. You deserve you deserve a lot more credit than you get. What a grind. Okay. So last time I had you on the show appearance 11, I think we had you had just launched note in a phone. I remember the memes going around that the note is in the phone. You launched the light mode, and you launched the lightning address, support for receive. Yeah. And so since then, the big release is well, so first of all, let's how is that going? How's the note on the phone thing going? How it was a little bit controversial how you were doing the lightning addresses. Yeah. That's the same thing. Let's do a debrief on that. Like, how how is everything going with the the light node?
[00:10:55] Evan Kaloudis:
Okay. So on the light node front, we've had some really good results. Just in terms of the feature set, you know, it's sort of peerless having that full LND node in the phone. On the other side of things, we have had some difficulties with how we fetch our blocks. So the Neutrino back end is fantastic privacy wise because you can't really know what a peer is querying for. However, if you're in an environment with, like, a really high ping time, like, not great Internet, so just note in the phone doesn't work too hot. So with that caveat, you know, I'd say it works really well, but we still need to check that issue off so we could make sure that people even, you know, in low quality Internet areas can still use this. So that's gonna be a big focus for us after the 11 o release to tackle.
Other than that, it's been
[00:11:54] ODELL:
quite tough. Gonna solve that? Are you just gonna do Electrum server? Or
[00:11:59] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, like a lot of the features in Zeus, we like to give people optionality. Obviously, we don't wanna rug the people who for which Neutrino works well for. But on startup, I think it makes sense to ask. There's hey. Would you like to have the more private, maybe less reliable option? Maybe do, like, a speed test as we're getting set up, or do you want the less private, but more reliable, quicker option? And, you know, I think if we have that in there, that solves, like, 90% of our troubleshooting cases. So that'll be exciting to put together. And, we have a bit of a prototype. It's still a little early, but, we're gonna try to submit that upstream to L and D, which is very exciting.
[00:12:45] ODELL:
Can you just explain really quick to the freaks how Neutrino works? Because I think it's fascinating.
[00:12:52] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. So, it's BIP one fifty seven one fifty eight. It's called block filters. And instead of requesting, like, a query putting in a query for, like, your address, like, Electrum, you'll put in a query for, you know, an address to try to get the balance for it. Or you're you'll ask for, like, a specific block. But with Neutrino, you're asking for, like, groups of blocks, in this sort of random cadence. And it's more demanding. It's more resource intensive for your node in the phone to figure out which blocks to ask for so it's sufficiently randomized. It also takes more, you know, networking resources. You're pulling down more data. But, someone running one of these Neutrino servers can't really ascertain, like, what you're looking for, who you are, what your transactions are. They can't really link your IP that's requesting this data to, you know, your private Bitcoin, information.
So, yeah, it's it's amazing in that regard, but the performance can be lacking depending on your Internet connection or where you are in the world, for sure.
[00:14:04] ODELL:
Would you does this example make sense to you that, like, if if you're using the traditional ELECTRA model, you're basically asking for a balance of an address. But if you use Neutrino, it's it's it's basically your phone is getting a summary of every block, like a condensed summary of every block in order to figure out what the balances are. Not every
[00:14:28] Evan Kaloudis:
single block, but enough of a selection of randomized blocks in the mix so that it's, you know, very, very difficult for someone snooping in to piece together what you're actually asking for and what you're actually
[00:14:44] ODELL:
It's not every block? No. I was trying to So then how so wouldn't you have balanced mismatches if it's not every block?
[00:14:55] Evan Kaloudis:
Well, you're grabbing not the entire block contents, but you're grabbing the headers of each and every single one. So you'll grab the so that everything adds up with the hashes. And then from there, you can you're querying for Right. Blocks with that random algorithm.
[00:15:16] ODELL:
That are relevant for you? Yeah. With with others mixed in so that you don't know which ones are yours? Exactly. Exactly. Just sprinkling some
[00:15:28] Evan Kaloudis:
some red herrings, stuff you don't really need to have, but to make it more difficult for someone who has, like, a passive listening connection, you know, or the host of these, instances.
[00:15:41] ODELL:
And and the wallet that really championed this at first was Wasabi. Yeah. Has are there any other main mainstream wallets that are using Neutrino right now besides you?
[00:15:55] Evan Kaloudis:
No. Not really. We know the LDK guys have been interested in it and could potentially add it on the line. You know, it's it's really mostly been used by LND, the Wasabi guys. So LND variant wallets, like Blix Wallet use it. Breeze, the, you know, the first version, I don't think the new version uses it. So, yeah, it's quite limited, which is quite unfortunate because the privacy properties are, you know, they're they're peerless. They're so hard to beat.
[00:16:31] ODELL:
Well, the main argument against it historically has been that it's heavy for mobile. Right? Yeah. Which you kinda just admitted.
[00:16:39] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. Yeah. You use more networking data. So it is a trade off. And, you know, we're sort of leaning into this ethos in our tagline. It's Bitcoin payments your way at Zeus. So we don't expect everyone to be using Bitcoin the same exact way. And if you do and people are using it in a way that doesn't line up with exactly how you use it, you're gonna have a bad time because Bitcoin is permissionless permissionless money. So, yeah, we're we're just trying to get this beautiful technology in the hands of as many people as possible. And I think that we're in a really unique position with Zeus with all these building blocks we've been putting together from, you know, the remote node, the node in the phone, CashewNow.
And the way I like to think of it is, like, we could sort of become this, you know, Bitcoin Sherpa of sorts, where we're educating the users as they go along, give them the information they need to have to make these informed decisions, and sort of show them the way after meeting where they're at.
[00:17:52] ODELL:
Love it. That is always that's always been the dream for me. You know? One really well written wallet that, like, brings the user through the journey and kind of helps guide them. I like the term Sherpa. It makes a lot of sense to me. Okay. So let's talk about Cashew, and then we can jump into a bunch of other things. You were probably one of the world's loudest, most educated Cashew critics, for months. And then you bent the knee and integrated in integrated into Zeus. What's going on over there in your head? How do you think about Cashew? Do you want do you wanna apologize to Cali?
Like, how are you how are you And he is he is really nice. He is a really nice guy about it.
[00:18:46] Evan Kaloudis:
But, you know, I I think he's understood my perspective the whole way. You know, I remember us, you know, sitting out in Prague, for the conference out there and just, you know, sitting on some of the benches and just having, like, really passionate rant. I'm like, you know, ultimately, self custody is what Bitcoin is, like, half the value proposition. And, yeah, I was really going off on ECASH. I'm like, this is all
[00:19:15] ODELL:
bullshit compared to self custody. You know? It's it's could be a stepping stone, but, you know, we gotta get people on this. This is
[00:19:23] Evan Kaloudis:
But, you know, Cali took you like a champ, and he understood what what I was, you know, going for. But, yeah, I mean, you know, my my perspective has really changed over time, especially considering, like, taking a deep look at how people are using Bitcoin today. You know, what's the world that we're in now? You know? The post ETF world, right, with the micro strategy bulls. You know, some of the discussions that you see online are ridiculous. They're like, what's your, what's your micro strategy to Bitcoin ratio? And they're like, bro, I can't be bothered to hold my own keys.
I'm all in on micro strategy. Now this, like, new derivative, what's it called, Misty.
[00:20:14] ODELL:
M s t y.
[00:20:16] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. So, it's that there's and there's certainly the difficulties that we've encountered with, you know, bringing people on and showing them how to run their own channels, learning all the ins and outs of, you know, managing your liquidity. Those are all very real things, and, you know, there's, like, huge gaps that you need to get there to that point in terms of education. Otherwise, you're gonna really struggle in a lot of different ways from inbound and outbound capacity to channel reserves to, you know, a close versus a forced close. And for a lot of people, like, that's still gonna be something that they wanna reach, and there's definitely benefits to doing it that way, but it's not gonna be for everyone.
So to really expect everyone to be using Bitcoin the same way, it's a bit silly. At the same time, we did really see that with the LSB. It is so much easier to just have single channels, single relationship with this one entity that will connect it on the network and sort of a lot of the other challenges of, like, okay. Dude, is this channel good enough? Is this channel good enough? You know, there there's people that swear by our setup now and really appreciate it and enjoy using it just by having a singular channel with the Olympus node that we run. So
[00:21:54] ODELL:
Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. So, I mean, I wanted to talk about Casio, but you brought this up. So can we just talk about this real quick? I you remember when Lightning was first proposed, the b cashers were like, this is just gonna turn into a hub and spoke system. And Oh, yeah. The the main the main critique of Lightning was that, I've noticed personally I mean, if the freaks go way back, if their true rider dies and they go back to, you know, episode two or episode one with Evan, I think you were the first I think you were the first ever dispatch.
If not, you were number two. At that point, I had 200 channels on my node, you know, where all the plugs were connecting with each other. We're we're I just lost a ton of money on on chain transactions. And now when people ask me, it's just one fat channel, maybe two if you want redundancy Yeah. With someone who's really well connected. So where the where the b cashers correct,
[00:22:57] Evan Kaloudis:
is this the problem? Like, how do you how do you think about that? To a certain extent, they're right. I think there is a centralizing factor of having these hubs on lightning. But I think what's important is that you're able to route around these hubs. Right? It's to have that censorship resistance just like the Internet is built. Right? Like, if one hop on the Internet decides to start censoring traffic, you can route around it. And I think, importantly, Lightning has those censorship resistant properties, which is what we're really all in it for.
We don't want these centralized hubs. It's it's not about, like, the centralization isn't the end to it. Right? It's like, what is the result that we wanna see? We want censorship resistance. And I think that we've proven over time that it's gonna be really damn hard to stop people from making the lightning network transaction they wanna make from the privacy properties that in are inherently built into it, but also the ease of use of just opening up channels to the peers that you wanna get to. Hell, even if you're going through those big hubs, you know how difficult it is to stop a transaction from being routed to someplace you don't want it to go if the user's putting together the path on their own device, it's impossible.
So I would ask someone who's concerned about the centralizing factors of Lightning. It's like, what are you concerned about? To what end does this thing need to work? So, yes, there's definitely centralizing forces on lightning, but what's it gonna do? It's it's gonna stop people from making those payments that they wanna make, that they don't want you to make now.
[00:24:45] ODELL:
So your answer is that it is hub and spoke Yeah. But it's fine.
[00:24:51] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:24:52] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's my answer too. I'm just it's just interesting. Right? There's nothing to do I can have this conversation with, so I think it's kinda interesting.
[00:25:03] Evan Kaloudis:
I mean, there's a lot of crazy dichotomies, and there's a lot of tensions that we need to face as we're trying to scale this technology to be used by, you know, billions of people on the planet. And, we gotta be honest with ourselves, but we also so gotta be, like, realistic and and pragmatic and and think about how these things work in practice. Right? Like, if we're just gonna sit on a pedestal and say, oh, you gotta run your note on tour and only connect to people that are nims and, you know, you're just gonna have a bad time. How do people use this in practice, and and what are the the end results? And, I yeah.
Yeah. We just gotta be honest with ourselves about all of this then. So let me tell you
[00:25:52] ODELL:
let me tell you and all the freaks a little story just because I feel like you'd find it entertaining. So Mempool's cleared. Praise be. And when that happened, Bitcoin Park had maybe, like, 13 channels or 10 channels or something like that. And, you know, time is scarce. So I just went in there and just closed all the channels at once, and paid two sets per byte. And then mempool is filled up ever so briefly. And during that process, I get a text message from Ron. He's like, Matt, the lightning note's down. I was like, no. It's not. It's fine. Everything's fine. It'll be back up in, like, ten minutes. It took forty five minutes for the for the channel to get open, but now it's just one it's just one fat channel to async. That's it. I was like, don't worry. It's gonna be fine, and then it'll be better after that.
And it's just one fat channel to async. The the cypherpunk dream is over, and now it's just beautiful hub and spoke
[00:26:54] Evan Kaloudis:
hub and spoke system. Anyway, that's my story. Well, it does it doesn't necessarily have to be all like that. I think there's some nuance here we can go into.
[00:27:02] ODELL:
Right. I woulda opened it I woulda opened it to to your to to your hub, but, there's a channel capacity limit.
[00:27:12] Evan Kaloudis:
Well, there's a channel capacity limit for people that we haven't whitelisted. So here's the funny thing. So for all the corporate peep, like, customers that we have for the Zeus wide service, you know, we help you get set up with lightning if they're doing high volume. We typically set them up with a channel acceptor, and we'll say, hey. Who are the big hubs that, you know, it's okay to accept these channels from in an open or announced capacity, and what limits are you okay with them opening those up? And then for the plebs, who might still want to open up a channel to you, but you don't want them to necessarily announce it to the network because god knows what kind of liquidity management these plebs do.
You know, what limits do you wanna put in place there? So someone who wants to be running, like, these operations where, you know, payment speed and reliability has a real effect on, you know, the consumers or the customers they're serving. You wanna get really granular in there and, like, discriminate a little bit. So maybe the plebs that you've opened all these channels to, maybe you'd rather have them be the ones that open the channel to you because they'd be the ones incurring, like, the bulk of the forced closed costs. And then you also don't want them to announce the channels to you because someone trying to make a payment to you might try to route through these plebs if they have the lowest fees to your note, and you don't know what kind of inbound they have.
So, yeah, there is there is some complexity there, but only if only as you're, like, getting your your bindings with, like, how liquidity and routing on the network works. So I think that with the channel acceptor, I think Bitcoin Park would probably be better off being a little, more open in that regard.
[00:29:08] ODELL:
I just don't wanna deal with it. We also you know, it's it's Bitcoin Park is
[00:29:19] Evan Kaloudis:
Well, is this the node for receiving
[00:29:21] ODELL:
payments at I like I like to call Bitcoin is Bitcoin Park is a a unprofitable for profit business. Not a non non for profit. It's just an unprofitable for profit business. So as a result, we're constantly having to sell out of our channels, and I don't wanna close the channels. So there's a whole another nuance to it where it's like I get sat stuck in channels that don't have liquidity to our off ramp to sell for dollars to pay our fiat expenses. So having one or two large channels, two well connected peers takes away a lot of headache instead of, like, sending, you know, $500 chunks to to an exchange because you don't have liquidity.
[00:30:17] Evan Kaloudis:
It also depends on your flow. So, like, it is this usually, like, a node you're making outgoing payments to or receiving inbound?
[00:30:25] ODELL:
Both. That's the point. Right? It's like we're receiving we're receiving payments in our in, like, the cafe and membership dues, and and then we're we're spending it mostly well, sometimes to pay contractors, but also, like, pay contractors directly in Bitcoin, but also just to, like, sell dollars to pay the rent and shit.
[00:30:50] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah.
[00:30:52] ODELL:
Anyway, why would before we're, like, off on a tangent already, and now we're doing, like, customer support. Everything's fine at Bitcoin Park. Our payment reliability is fantastic. You you have a completely different philosophy than Async on this. How do you, like so Async just like any you can just open a channel with them any size. Doesn't you don't have to be white listed. But meanwhile, you have the Olympus node, like, heavily locked down. How do how do you how are they getting away with it?
[00:31:26] Evan Kaloudis:
How are they run getting away with it? I mean, they have a immense amount of liquidity deployed. I think they say they're, like, the biggest node on the network, a hundred million dollars worth of Bitcoin on it. Not maybe not all deployed, but ready to deploy at any point.
[00:31:43] ODELL:
We don't have a hundred million dollars to put on that,
[00:31:47] Evan Kaloudis:
so we have to be a little more, discriminatory. That being said, sometimes async's not the best peer to peer up with. Sometimes you do have those people that open up those channels. They don't have a well maintained node. You try to route through them or try people try to get to you through them and those four channels. And, it really increases payment, routing time and decreases the reliability. So, you know, some some issues you can solve partially by throwing money at, but not fully. I think that people would have a much better experience, with their payments, at least as a peer, at least as someone running their own node and connecting to async, if they were a little more discriminatory. The thing is the Phoenix client is also using trampoline routing.
So they've have these, this profile of payments in the graph and that they make to the people using the Phoenix wallet, and that sort of smooth soothes over some stuff as well. Whereas something like Zeus, has the user do all the routing calculations on their own device, and this come bit of a a trade off. So Phoenix, at least in most cases, in which they're not using Bolt 12 or Blinded Pass, they have, like, full visibility into the payments that you're making, because they're essentially routing these payments for you and helping them get to the destination. Whereas Zeus, the trade off is, like, you're downloading this graph data in advance. We call this the express graph sync.
If you have the node in the phone or you're just listening to the network if you have a remote node, but all your payments are cal your payment routes are co calculated locally, and we don't have any insights into that.
[00:33:49] ODELL:
And as a result, like, Phoenix is fast as fuck and Zeus is, like, you have your thirty second sovereignty wait time or whatever.
[00:33:57] Evan Kaloudis:
Well, yeah, it depends on, you know, how fresh the graph data you have is, where your channels are, if you've opened them by yourself to destinations of your choosing or if you're using the LSP.
[00:34:10] ODELL:
There's a lot of factors there. Fair enough. Okay. So all of that intricacy, Cashew fixes that.
[00:34:21] Evan Kaloudis:
In a lot of ways. Yes. So Cashew, Chow Me and Ecash. It is a custodial solution. You still have the perks of being able to restore your funds from your seed. We derive your cashew seed from the embedded LND seed. From there, you're able to connect to one or multiple mints, that are the custodians that you're using. You have, I'd say, really good degree of privacy, for a custodial product. The Mint is not able to kick you off of it. If they're gonna shut operations down or rug the funds, they can't just take it from any single individual. They're gonna take it from everyone.
And, yeah, I mean, you have to you're trusting a lot with the Mint. Like, the Mint has to be managing their own lightning node. They have to have their own good channels. But if it's well maintained, you remove the headache of managing your own channels, and, you know, you should just be able to start accepting payments without much of a headache. So I stepping stone for people trying to get into lightning, into the ecosystem the first time. And the way that we have it integrated in Zeus is quite novel, and we sort of will guide you towards self custody as you accumulate more and more of a balance and provide you with educational resources so you sort of make heads and tails of what this self custody thing is and how is it compared to the eCash wallet that you're starting off with.
[00:36:11] ODELL:
Yeah. So, I mean, I was playing around with the newest release that has Cashew in it. I real like, the Mint Discovery is awesome. I've used a lot of Cashew wallets. I guess you're you're pulling it from BitcoinMints.com, right, which is, like, the Nostr enabled discovery service.
[00:36:31] Unknown:
Mhmm. So
[00:36:33] Evan Kaloudis:
the Nostr or the Bitcoin Mints website with the reviews for the Mints is a fantastic feature to have in there. And, yeah, it it's it's just fantastic start, but it's not the final destination that we wanna go with it. I'd say that with Cashew, the Mint Discovery, the Mint choosing is probably the highest friction point. How do you select a custodian that gets trustworthy enough?
[00:37:07] ODELL:
And, you know, there's not a Especially if you're brand new. Like, you're brand new. I'm onboarding like, that's where Cashew really shines is for a brand new user, and, like, you're bringing them in. And their first question is is like, okay. Which mint do you choose? Like, I have no idea. Like, is this something I put in my mouth to make my breath smell better?
[00:37:25] Evan Kaloudis:
Exactly. So we're gonna be spending a lot on this one and trying to get it absolutely right. I think a social element, of course, is already there in which people are voting for the ones that but, you know, it's still not a ton of data that we're dealing with. I think over time, it's gonna become more social with your social graph, probably powered by. And, you know, I think what the muni guys did with their implementation where you sort of got to see which of the people you vouch for, whichever mince is is probably the way that we're gonna end up going. I think a mix of that with some sort of algorithm to help you auto select, could be very valuable.
But, yeah, there's there's still a lot that we wanna dive into. You know? The current
[00:38:22] ODELL:
what we have is still an alpha, and I think even before
[00:38:26] Evan Kaloudis:
the gold master gets out, I know. It's gonna be different still.
[00:38:34] ODELL:
What do you think about the Titanic approach to mints where you have, the user keep money in multiple mints, and then you can use multipart payments to do the payment so that if any single mint goes down, they don't lose all their money.
[00:38:51] Evan Kaloudis:
Absolutely love it. Distribute risk. Try out different mints. Have a little money in a couple different ones. You know? It's could be difficult to run a mint and a lightning node. Definitely. So if someone's go undergoing maintenance, you don't have all your money in one pot as you're getting started. You just switch to another one and make sure your payments continue. Yeah. I'm I'm using, like, four or five minutes at a time right now.
[00:39:20] ODELL:
But I'm, like, I'm saying, like, as almost like a default flow. Because the problem that that the problem that every Cashew wallet developer has is they don't wanna choose the mint for the user. Mhmm. They don't wanna choose your custodian relationship. They don't want that liability or responsibility on them. But then as a result, no matter what happens, you always have this friction point that no matter how graceful you make it, you're making the user make a very critical decision Right. Very early on in their journey. Is there something there where the default could be, like, the five bestments or something? I mean, I don't know. Best is not an objective claim. I I I don't know. I don't pretend to know how to do it. But where the default is instead of picking one mint for them, you basically pick, like, a handful and split the risk up.
[00:40:18] Evan Kaloudis:
Absolutely. So we have all these heuristics. You know, I think there's, like, a new site for determining, you know, payment success rates to these mints, how well they're managed. You could use that as well as the social stuff we were talking about. Pick five. Have the user just rotate through those as they're accepting payments. And then, you know, you gotta start thinking, okay. What's the worst case scenario from? So if the user is using a single mint and it gets rugged, they lose a % of their money. But if they're using five and one goes down, well, you got rugged 20% only. Could be better for sure. Same thing just in terms of payment reliability.
One goes down for maintenance. It always defer to another one. There's a ton of perks there for sure. But at this you're adding more mints for the user to, you know, rotate through. You're introducing more third party risk. It's just what balance, what sort of distribution you're comfortable, with dispersing that risk. Obviously, if you had a mint that you could trust 100%, you'd rather just use that. You know, if your neighbor was running the mint and you could go knock on his door, you'd probably be better off using that one singular mint than five random ones from five strangers on the Internet. So it really depends on your situation. But that being said, yeah, splitting up that risk, could be valuable in a lot of ways just as long as you don't need all the money at once and dealing with, you know, the downtime that you're adding to the picture there.
[00:41:57] ODELL:
So the way you look at the user journey is they come in. They probably start with Cashew.
[00:42:05] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[00:42:06] ODELL:
And then as more money gets built up in this custodial wallet, once they hit a certain threshold, then they're gonna be moving to the node in the phone model, and they would have they would effectively pay for a channel from the LSP to go full sovereign. Is that the that's the dream. Right?
[00:42:27] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. So easy path would be press one button, upgrade, get your channel. Once it's opened up, move the remaining balance over to self custody. But at the same time, we also wanna give people who are a little more advanced, they know exactly what they wanna do, a little bit more flexibility. Maybe they want to swap their nuts out. Their Satoshis on eCash for an on chain UTXO to kick to cold storage. We want people to be able to do that too. Maybe they wanna take that UTXO and then open up to, you know, a friend or a restaurant that they frequent. They should be able to do that too. So we wanna provide, like, these rails, this easy path for the novice user to use, but still give them all the optionality that users for giving people.
[00:43:25] ODELL:
How do you think about that makes sense to me. I mean, it's interesting, right, because Cashew is such a new project Yeah. That right now, if you think about, like, the percentage of of users that are using Cashew that are also running a node separately is probably quite high. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if, like, 70% of Casue users also have a full lightning node. So there's definitely a user out there that would wanna do both regardless, which is Yeah. It's just kinda interesting to think about. But in the future, I presume that, like, 95% of Casio users won't be running their own node, and it'll be like a gradual stepping stone. So threshold wise, what what do you what is what is the ideal threshold from when you move? That's the million set question is what is the ideal threshold where you move to sovereign lightning from Cashew?
[00:44:27] Evan Kaloudis:
And, you know, that's that's exactly right. It's a difficult question to ask because there's so many externalities here. Like, we don't really know the user's financial system, right, or financial situation rather. We don't know how much money they have. We what's a lot for them. You don't really wanna make these, like, decisions for them automatically, if the money in their wallet is all that they have right now. Like, let's say they gained 10,000 sats in their wallet, and that's enough for a channel, and they wanna get a channel from us at the lowest rate, and it's, like, 5,000 sats. You wanna automatically take half their money for them to go to self custody?
No. That doesn't make sense to me. So what we're doing is prompting the user and giving them the information that they need to make an informed decision. We tell them at so they hit certain thresholds at, you know, 10,000 sats, 20 5 thousand sats, 50 thousand sats. We gotta see if we're gonna cap it. Right now, it's uncapped. But if you hit a hundred thousand sats, the messages get a bit more intense. And, you know, there's also a lot of fun things we can do with that too.
[00:45:42] ODELL:
Wait. Well, like, how intense do they get? What do the messages say?
[00:45:47] Evan Kaloudis:
You know, it's like, it starts off, you know, you can afford a self custodial channel right now. You know? Hit this button, check out what the rates are, and see if you wanna upgrade. And then keep going. It's like, it's, it would be better for you to upgrade right now. There's rehypothecation or that there's risk of losing your funds if you don't hold your own keys and don't go to self custody. And then down the line, it's like, woah. This is not you're being crazy. You have a lot of money in cash you. And then if we really wanna be rambunctious, maybe we'll say, you got rugged is what could be a message we show you. You don't upgrade.
I don't know. We're we're still experimenting with a lot of that. Obviously, it's very on brand with the Zeus wallet to be a little tongue in cheek, be a little rambunctious. But, you know, we also don't wanna necessarily scare users out the gate. So we're working on providing the resources, providing documentation pages, trying to get people ins and outs of what these trade offs are between these different systems. And to be frank, there's, like, a lot of noise, and there's a lot of places you can get caught up with navigating the Bitcoin wallet journey right now.
There's a lot of different solutions on the market. There's a lot of people misrepresenting what their product actually is. And, of course, there's a lot of nuance, to what the properties of all these things are. And, you know, it just really sort of, grinds my gears a little bit when people just don't want to be upfront with their users with what they're peddling, and we never wanna be in that situation. We wanna sort of be upfront with users and sort of guide them, to where they should wanna be by clearly displaying the trade offs.
[00:47:45] ODELL:
So, I mean, you said a hundred thousand sats is when you start getting more aggressive. I mean, that's only $80.
[00:47:53] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[00:47:56] ODELL:
I mean, my gut says that's probably a little bit low. Did you see the Homeland Security secretary, Christy Noem? She got robbed. Her purse got robbed. She had $3,000 in cash in it.
[00:48:15] Evan Kaloudis:
Did she declare that? Where'd she get where'd she get robbed?
[00:48:19] ODELL:
She she she said it after she got robbed that there was $3,000 in cat like, in the police report or whatever.
[00:48:26] Evan Kaloudis:
Where did she get robbed?
[00:48:28] ODELL:
She was at she was at dinner or lunch in Washington, DC, and her purse was on the ground, and they grabbed her purse. But, anyway, my point is is what's more secure, $3,000 in cash in your purse or $3,000 in your favorite mint? If she had it in her mint and she kept her seed, she probably would still have the $3,000.
[00:48:53] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. That is true. That's the thing with having an ecash seed. You could have it backed up. You could have it in multiple places. Cash, you can only have in one place. So in that regard, e cash is better than regular cash.
[00:49:10] ODELL:
It's just something to think. Like, what is the amount? I don't know what the I've people ask me this all the time. Like, I don't know the amount depends on the user, so it's it's a little bit difficult to have a proper flow. I would say that as it gets larger, maybe consider making the prompts turn to caps, and speak more clearly to the user
[00:49:30] Evan Kaloudis:
and might get through to them. That's an idea. Well, you know, I think we're there's different ways that we can convey the message to people. There's a lot of resources we could put in front of them. There's a lot of things that we could distill down to basics. Getting louder, putting things in caps, making things more highlighted in the UI. I believe we we posted a demo on social media on, that showed how, you know, you get past 10,000 sats. As you get closer and closer to a hundred thousand, your ecash balance under the balance view ensues gets more red, more fiery. I think I like that. A lot of visual cues like that. You know? We wanna be very upfront. We have, like, a giant custodial all caps label on it that you can't turn off by default.
And, of course, you know, as you get your own channel, we're gonna stop bothering you about things. Like, once you are at the rodeo, we might give you some other prompts, things that might be useful for you. But, you know, we're not gonna be hounding you the same way that we would, if you just have this e cash balance. And I think we're in, like, a really unique position there, Matt, Because if you think about the average custodial wallet, how many of them actually have the incentive to be like,
[00:50:54] ODELL:
this is a lot here. Maybe you should upgrade to self custody.
[00:50:58] Evan Kaloudis:
Probably not very many, especially if they're all really basing their their, business on these transaction fees and charging you as you're making payments out. If you make one big payment out, like, maybe they could collect a lot there, but they wanna keep you in that wallet and using it every day. And they said they don't really have the financial incentive to guide you to self custody. Whereas Zeus is in a unique position because of the lightning service provider that's built around catering self custodial users. We're in this unique position to be like, hey. We have these other products that have a lot of these benefits to you. You should consider upgrading and reaping those benefits.
[00:51:41] ODELL:
You you actually make no money if they use the Cashew element. It's that reverse incentive.
[00:51:46] Evan Kaloudis:
Right. Right. I mean, there's some stuff with the Zeus Pay plus perks that we're working out right now that they could potentially be sitting on Cashew the whole time. I mean, they probably wouldn't after all the yelling we do at them with them. But, potentially, yeah, they could just use the wallet, and we don't reap the benefits of it at all. And that's fine. I mean, that's the case with Zeus today. You can have a lightning wallet. You could connect it to it. You can manage it with Zeus. You cannot buy any channels from us. You cannot send us any sets. And that's fine. You sort of just gotta be okay with that if you're gonna ship free and open source software.
But long term, we think that, you know, beyond the support that we've gotten just from donations, we think that the services that we provide are valuable. And, you know, they're top shelf. They know that if they're gonna use us, they're gonna have payment reliability, good rates, and pretty much get that top shelf product that we strive to be.
[00:52:50] ODELL:
Well, I'm glad you brought that up. I don't know if you listened to my the show with Rob Hamilton last week, but they've been resistant to open sourcing Trident Wallet, for business reasons. And we had a long conversation about it that I'm not gonna put words in his mouth. But, I really do applaud you trying to build a business on top of an open source stack. I mean, I think to me, that's that's the dream. The dream is a sustainable profit, you know, profitable business that also maintains an open source stack and gives their users full control. It's definitely the harder path, but you seem to be taking it.
[00:53:34] Evan Kaloudis:
We're try we're trying. We think that on the consumer side, we need to do that. Obviously, there's a lot of other tools that we use internally. Right? Like, running the LSP, making sure that we're dealing with the stupid compliance checkboxes we gotta check off in The US. And a lot of the tooling that we've built out to just run an efficient lightning node and LSP, not all of that's out of the box. Right? And a lot of that stuff is gonna stay inside the box so that we can help other corporate users. But on the consumer side, when we're talking about individual's money, we think it's very important. It's imperative for that to all be free and open source and for people to be able to audit it, inspect it, as well as build on top of it.
Obviously, there's a lot of trade offs that you're making there, but I I simply can't see I I wouldn't be comfortable with putting out those black boxes, for people to use and and just not be able to call their money back, without us. As for Rob's business, you know, I I don't know all the ins and outs. Obviously, Anchor Wash is a very different, product. I'd encourage him to consider open sourcing what he can. But, you know, it's gonna be very different ways that people are using it. I I imagine people will be interfacing with Anchor Watch more directly for their savings products, so I can't really make any judgments.
[00:55:08] ODELL:
Fair enough. Wasn't asking you to make any judgments there. I, okay. So back to Cashew. So we're using Cashew, and I have a lightning address with Zeus Pay. So I set up my Mint. Yep. Let's do my user flow. I I I connected to a Mint on my note in the phone product. I used to have channels on that wallet, but now I don't have channels. Okay. Did was I talking to you and I was like, oh, shit. I have a bunch of money in this wallet that I completely forgot about? Did I tell you that? Yeah. Yeah. It's like the modern day equivalent of finding the change in the couch, but
[00:55:53] Evan Kaloudis:
you just found $600 of quarters instead.
[00:55:57] ODELL:
So, anyway, I I closed that channel, and then I withdrew it, like, a week ago. And then I created the Cashew wallet. It's in the same wallet. Then I tried to send money to that lightning address, and it didn't come to my Mint. The payment failed. Should the payment work in that situate? If I have a channel, I guess I'm going all over the place. You have to balance this thing now. If I have one Lightning address Mhmm. And I have channels, and I also have a Mint setup, where does that payment go to? Does it try and go to the channel first? And if the channel fails, it should gracefully move over to the Mint. How does that work?
[00:56:39] Evan Kaloudis:
Again, I think it's a user decision. Maybe we could have a fallback system, but at the moment, the user decides. What kind of lightning address do I wanna have set up? So with Zeus Pay originally, we had the system called Zap Logger. We still do, and it's it's great. It basically leverages Huddl invoices. So let's say you have the note in your phone. You're offline. You can't that payment on. We would basically create a Huddl invoice, an invoice that gets held by the creator or the LSP for a little bit. And the receiver has twenty four hours to redeem it or it gets returned back to the sender.
And this was controversial because it holds up an HCLC slot, a hash time lock contract slot within your link channel. You can only have a certain amount of those. It's about 500. And, some people were giving us some flack about it saying it would break the lightning network and cause a lot of problems for operators. And I'm proud to say it didn't cause issues at all. Perhaps we didn't really push it to the limit. Maybe if we had, you know, hundreds of thousands of people really slamming on it, it could potentially be an issue. But I think we've dissuaded a lot of that. In cases in which you were having a lot of flows, you could just open up new channels, more channels, to the source of those payments.
With that being said, we now have more options now for how you wanna use the lightning address. There's the app blocker mode that anyone could use if they're using an LND node. They have the Cashew mode, which you can use if you have the Cashew wallet with your embedded LND node. And now we have a third mode, which is the Nasr Wallet Connect method. So if you have a remote node that has Nasr Wallet Connect as a connection method on it, you can receive payments directly to your remote node twenty four seven. And, basically, you can switch between those three modes, seamlessly depending on what your current wallet supports.
You could go into your use pay settings and say, hey. I wanna go to Cashew right now or Cashew. I I was sorta like saying Cashew. Let's let's normalize that. Or, like, you wanna switch back to your remote node. And I've sort of been hopping between the three address types the last couple weeks, sort of having those fallbacks. For now, manually choosing, which one's enabled at any given time. But, yeah, it could totally evolve into the point where we have, like, a a hierarchy where you say, hey. Try hitting this mint. Try hitting this mint. Fall back to my Albi Hub, and I'll connect mode. And if that doesn't work, just let me go to Zap locker, which would be a very interesting, product. I mean, hell. If you a payment's coming in, you wanna receive it one way or another. Right? You don't wanna miss an incoming Zap. So why not give people the optionality to make sure that they don't miss a single set? You'll sort it out later.
So we have a lot of flexibility with this product, and we're excited to see it evolve further and excited to see how people like it. But, obviously, with the Cashew, much better user experience for the senders. They're not wait worrying about these pending payments. For the receivers, they're not worrying about having to redeem the payments within twenty four hours. And for people running the remote nodes, they don't have to worry about redeeming payments in the app at all. They just land on the node. They get a notification that it's there, and that's that.
So tons of flexibility So it
[01:00:27] ODELL:
it it changes my suffix when I change it. Right? Now I'm at Odell at Zeus nuts dot com.
[01:00:34] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. You're on so by default, the cash users will use Zeus nuts when you switch to and that's probably why you couldn't make the payment earlier.
[01:00:43] ODELL:
Wait. So I mean, I mean, I didn't realize I had to change it in settings, but
[01:00:48] Evan Kaloudis:
it doesn't mean I lose Odell at Zeus Pay if I switch to Odell at Zeus Nuts. Right? No. No. You're locked in. We wouldn't let people split that up. We don't need more Odell imposters. No. You are the of Zeus Nuts and Zeus Pay. It's just a matter when it's active at a given time.
[01:01:05] ODELL:
But they both can't be active at the same time. It's not like if someone pays Zeus Pay when I have Zeus Nuts active, it's just a failed payment. Right? No. Maybe we'll tweak that over time, but right now, you're the only Odell on the Zeus Stack. Okay. Well, I really like the I like the idea of a fallback. Right? Because I just wanna ex I wanna be able to accept the payment regardless.
[01:01:28] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah.
[01:01:29] ODELL:
And, ideally, I mean, I think I'd rather accept it to my sovereign lightning channel. But if I don't have capacity, then it be able to fall back would be kinda nice. Maybe that's a premium feature. Maybe you can monetize on that. So just to be clear, [email protected], if I I can receive zaps to that, and there's no Zap there's no Zap locker thing. It's just instant. Right? It's instant. The sender will have their payment completed
[01:02:00] Evan Kaloudis:
automatically. There's no limit to how big or how small those payments can be as long as the mint has inbound capacity. You could send a payment as small as one sat to as big as whatever the Mint can handle. You don't have to worry about redeeming them within twenty four hours. By default, when your Zeus wallet starts up, it'll redeem them. I know we made a ton of optimizations to ZeusPay. So even if you're using Zaplocker, if you're using Cashew, whatever, the redemption process is about 50% quicker, so it's gonna fly by redeeming those. And, yeah, we we've got some really novel, stuff under the hood where your Zap is locked to your Cashew wallet's pub key so that we can't really, take that away from you. That that belongs to you as long as you still have your keys.
So a lot of cool. There, a lot of great UX improvements. And, yeah, we think that people using the embedded LND node, having channels even may still wanna just keep the Cashew wallet just for the better UX. And then we'll probably add, like, an automated threshold where it says, okay. Once I have a 10,000 sats in the Cashew wallet, let me just swap that automatically to lightning. So a lot of our stuff is largely still focused around self custody and making sure that we provide the best experience on that front. And we think that with ECash, we got a lot of awesome experiences that we couldn't do previously.
Like, we have someone who's been asking us to add gifting into Zeus for years now, like, the last three, four years. They're like, we just simply can't do it without having a custodial aspect, and we don't wanna be responsible for holding users' funds. But now with Cashew being able to mint a token, give it to someone, even post that QR, that token string on social media, is amazing. And if no one redeems it, like, if you try to gift it to, like, your server or something, you could check-in on the status of the token. They're like, oh, if it's been thirty days, this jerk didn't take the free money I gave him. You can just pull it back, which is amazing.
And, we made it very clear in the Zeus UI when you have tokens that you've issued, that haven't been redeemed yet, you just get the little eCash icon in your wallet header. So you could always just check-in on those, see how they're going, see how long it takes for Bob at the bar to claim his free sats or not.
[01:04:41] ODELL:
That's awesome.
[01:04:42] Evan Kaloudis:
So that's just, like, something we weren't able to do before, and we think it makes for a fantastic UX, something that we wanna check off for a long time.
[01:04:52] ODELL:
Oh, so I have to actually go to the lightning address and press redeem to to have it show up in my wallet?
[01:04:59] Evan Kaloudis:
No. There should be, an automatic redeem functionality just like the Zap locker. What in settings? Yeah. So if that's not working, it might be one of the quirks we gotta work out in the alpha. We'll be doing some testing. But
[01:05:15] ODELL:
Well, we're we're testing it live on air. I'm, I'm pressing redeem now. I sent myself sats to my Zeus nuts. I got it. It worked.
[01:05:30] Evan Kaloudis:
How often does a demo do live work? You're Check.
[01:05:35] ODELL:
Well, I mean, it didn't auto redeem. It's the only kinda work. One of two. That's a it's a win. Is it was it supposed to auto am I supposed to change something in settings? Or it should be on by default.
[01:05:49] Evan Kaloudis:
Maybe
[01:05:50] ODELL:
it Automatically
[01:05:51] Evan Kaloudis:
accept payments on startup. Only is sweeping them right now when you open the wallet up, but didn't catch it as it was coming in live. But, yeah, they should they should Okay. By the time, it should be sweeping them as you get them into the wallet.
[01:06:10] ODELL:
It's pretty clean, man. It's it's impressive.
[01:06:13] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. Well, we we spent a lot of time thinking about the UI. Go on. We had a lot of pages to pull from a lot of the existing Cashew wallets, and we we did a lot of, it's called dogfooding, where we just try out the product ourselves for weeks and weeks. We took a lot we we built it very quickly because Cashew is very easy to build upon, but we spent some time just testing it relentlessly and making sure everything works. We don't want anyone to lose any more money than they have to, you know, if they're gonna be getting rugged every week from their badmints. So
[01:06:50] ODELL:
Wow. Someone's still a little bit salty. Were you talking shit about Cashew publicly while you were building it in the background?
[01:06:57] Evan Kaloudis:
No. I mean, I always make jokes about it. You know my personality. Like,
[01:07:02] ODELL:
I
[01:07:03] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. I mean, you announced it on April fools. Kale didn't even if I was gonna rug him or not. I'm like people are like, is this real? Is this real? And, Kale is like, I I don't I'm not not sure if it's real. And I'm like, is it real, Kale, or am I teaching you an intro lesson about how it feels to be rugged? But he's got a good sense of humor too. He enjoyed it. He's he's happy once he finally saw the code. He's like, oh, okay. I'm gonna fork this.
[01:07:32] ODELL:
I knew I knew you guys weren't gonna rag us. Okay. So you mentioned swaps. What do you have in mind with swaps? How does that impact the user? What would the flow look like? Are you using bolts like everybody else? Okay. So swaps, we're really excited about. We have it running on Testnet now. We are about to deploy our mainnet instance after
[01:07:53] Evan Kaloudis:
just grinding it out. There's gonna be both, a web interface as well as an integration directly in the wallet. It is, at present, based off of Boltz. So we fork Boltz off. We are gonna be running our own instance, but users will have the ability to point to any Bolt powered swap service. So we're gonna have, like, three or four defaults. The Zeus one will be the default, of course, but it's trivial to switch between them, shop between all the different prices. Although we're gonna be trying to, keep it at the same pricing as the Bolt Exchange service. They've just built a great product. It's quite likely we'll derive it a little bit more as time goes on. We have some interesting concepts that we wanna explore.
Hopefully, we can submit some of them upstream to bolts. But, yeah, we just think there's a great demand for people to be able to get their funds, some funds off of Lightning to Unchained without having to close out the entire channel, especially now that L and D is in a bit of a weird state where they don't quite have splicing yet. It's not trivial to get those funds out. And, it's just in a very interesting business proposition for us too because, you know, we could charge on the swaps. We already have this experience running these lightning nodes and managing liquidity. And instead of having to commit to these, you know, arrangements where people are locking up your liquidity for, you know, two weeks to a year in the lightning channels, a swap only takes, you know, up to twenty minutes worst case scenario. Case scenario.
So it's a little bit easier to manage in that regard. As far as a user goes, we have a really clean UI. It's trivial to pull out funds from individual channels in the Zeus UI. We'll be iterating on it too so you get really granular with a very clear UI as you go on. And you could basically use it with any of the interfaces as long as you have an on chain address to spit out to. We'll help you generate an address just internally with one click. But you could also point it to an external address, whether it be an external bolt 11 address or an external address depending on what direction you're going. Just have a lot of added flexibility and a lot better user experience in a lot of regards.
And, hell, the ability to mix the Cashew and the swaps together, like, put all these nuts together, go right to an on chain address that's potentially
[01:10:45] ODELL:
The opposite is even more powerful. Like, using Cashew as a for newcomer, they need Lightning sats to begin with because you can't deposit on chain. But with this, presumably, they could install Zeus, open a Casu wallet, and then send Bitcoin from their exchange that doesn't support Lightning directly into the to the charming eCash wallet. Right? Just swap it right in. However you want. Bitcoin payments, you're away.
[01:11:20] Evan Kaloudis:
That's So now we have a wallet that has all these different Right? Yeah. Go on. We have self custodial lightning, of course. We have the on chain wallet. We have eCash, and we have support for these external signers, like your hardware wallet, like a cold card queue or seed signer. You could basically go any direction, swap between them however you see fit with a combination of melting a nut out of a mint and the swap service, opening, closing channels, however you see fit. Complete freedom to do whatever you want. We're gonna provide rails for you to sort of guide you to the direction, but if you want, you could just take those those bumpers off and do as you see fit.
So ahead of us for the rest of the year after we get 11 o out, we have a lot of challenges. And they're not so much technical anymore because we've gotten everything that we want running in this app, basically. Basically. But it's all gonna be focused on the interface and the user experience and how we make it as simple as possible for the newcomers while maintaining all the full functionality that we've built over the years. So we're So we're really excited for this new challenge we had have ahead of us. The product is really undergoing an evolution, and we think we're gonna hit a maturity point where it's ready to put this one point o label on.
So we have so much to be excited about with all these pieces, but yet the work still continues because design, UI, UX, it's a whole other beast. So just time to put another hat on soon.
[01:13:13] ODELL:
I love it. You're crushing it. Keep up the good work. So we you've mentioned many different ways you can use Zeus, on chain, self custody Lightning, custodial Lightning. We're seeing a new trend with wallets that was started with Aqua Wallet and then recently with Breeze's latest wallet, Misty Breeze, to use liquid with swaps. So liquid at rest. Do you keep money on liquid? And then when you wanna make a lightning transaction, there's a an on demand swap happens. What are your thoughts on liquid? Do you plan on adding Tether to your wallet? How are you thinking about this? Liquid
[01:14:02] Evan Kaloudis:
is fine if you're upfront with your users about what it is. It's a custodial side chain. Liquid's got a lot of perks because it's got all these different partners signing off on it. But at the same time, we don't know who all the signers are, Matt. That's not great. As far as these products go, the end user experience is really good in a lot of ways. It's, like, easy to use, easy to get set up with. Right? Have your balance in liquid. You can have a seed you can restore from. The limitations, though, and the fees have some room for improvement. The swaps can be costly, and that's what the service providers are really depending on. In a lot of cases, having a self custodial channel is actually cheaper.
And then you also have these constraints with what amounts you can send, and how they actually end up operating. Let's say if you bootstrap a lightning address to them, you have, like, these limits used. In a lot of cases, they need to be big enough to justify a swap, or they end up being even more custodial than it would be to just use liquid by itself. And then those fees aren't great. Like, if you were to receive a hundred sat zap and have to pay 45 of those sats per swap costs, it's not so great for those users getting set up.
[01:15:44] ODELL:
Well, when I was when I was testing Misty, they they just don't let you do payments underneath under a thousand SATs. Is there a way around that, I guess?
[01:15:58] Evan Kaloudis:
Or make sure the user doesn't have all their sats eaten up by fees. It's tough. It's tough when you're doing these swap based things. Right? Like and we saw it with, with Moon Wallet. Right? Like, all these wallets are really just Yeah. Liquid. So a little less intensive. They'll scale better with the feed market, but they really still have all these same constraints with the UTXOs on their their chains even if they are side chains. I think I'm really more intrigued by what's gonna shake out with some of these other systems. I know, at Zeus, we're keeping our eyes close on Arc, which is really interesting, but has its own set of challenges for sure.
But I think could end up having a a better user experience as well as some other proposals that we find really interesting that we're keeping our eyes on that we could potentially see in, like, a Zeus two point o.
[01:17:06] ODELL:
Like what?
[01:17:09] Evan Kaloudis:
You know, there's just a couple of interesting proposals. Our friend, Supertestnet. So Super, we worked on, the Zap locker spec together, got that into Zeus. He's got a protocol called Hedgehog, and he's been strapping that onto a coin pool scheme, which is super interesting. And, honestly, it doesn't have enough people looking at it. I think there's some problems that he still needs to address in it, but I think the properties that it has are just unbelievable. You get a lot of the perks that you get with eCash and Cashew, like, being able to send asynchronously and have these tokens that could be redeemed, better onboarding flows.
But to do it all in a self custodial manner, it's sort of like a holy grail. So we're taking a look at that, trying to help push that along where we can. And, yeah, we're just generally being open to things. Like, we know that with this technology, things are changing rapidly. The way people use Bitcoin self custodially right now is gonna be very different than it looks like in five years and ten years. I think we have some sort of, like, solace in the fact that Lightning is working so well. I think it's proven its placement as the payment rails. The way that you're gonna clear these payments, near instantly and sort of being this bridge between all these different systems.
But there's, like, this interesting battle brewing right now to see how people are going to be using Bitcoin. And we need to be open to exploring them all, chasing down all the value propositions of them, seeing what the trade offs are, and sort of being, you know, realistic in in what people are gonna end up using because, like I said, the behavior that is apparent right now where people are just chasing yield on ETFs, you know, is is really not the world that we wanna be in.
[01:19:27] ODELL:
I mean, the dream wallet would be if I could hold MSTY in my Zeus wallet and then have the dividends auto swap into Cashew so then I can just pay for my coffee?
[01:19:43] Evan Kaloudis:
Maybe. I mean, that'd be interesting. I mean, we saw we see we're we're seeing a lot of interesting stuff going on right now. Right?
[01:19:53] ODELL:
I mean, I was just fucking around. Obviously, that's not what I want. No. Don't no. Hey. Listen. Don't take it up against you.
[01:20:00] Evan Kaloudis:
You you're gonna take it, Matt. Right? You'll be dead where the yield comes from. It's all about the yield. But, no. I don't know, man. We'll we'll we'll we'll see. About that cash flow. See how things freak out. Obviously, this there seems to be some focus on bringing stables to Bitcoin, which obviously comes with a lot of pros and cons.
[01:20:26] ODELL:
Yeah. How do you feel about that? Terrified
[01:20:30] Evan Kaloudis:
at how it could go wrong, first and foremost, but I understand why a lot of people are getting, excited about it. And I really do think it could do some crazy things for you know, it could open up a lot of doors, for what these flows look like. I I think we just need to be careful about I mean, we're already playing with fire, having all of these nation like In what way? I mean, obviously, Bitcoin is not meant for governments to embrace and be like, oh, yeah. This is gonna be great. Like, what happens when they show up for the next soft fork meeting and they're like, no. I don't think so. We got all these economic nodes, and we're gonna signal that we're not activating this upgrade that we need. Like, that that would be pretty bad. But at the same time, if they're just running the same code that everyone else is running, There's a limit to how much pain they could on us.
At the same time, we also have these ETFs, a lot of paper Bitcoin in the air that can you know, I I think we're evidencing it right now. Like, there's a lot of on suppression. The same sort of thing that happened when gold ETFs, got spun up. Obviously, these guys in the middle wanna make a buck on it where they can. And
[01:22:08] ODELL:
You think you think ETFs are already playing paper Bitcoin games, like fractionally reserve?
[01:22:16] Evan Kaloudis:
It's the temptation is so
[01:22:19] ODELL:
I mean, it's a pretty bold claim.
[01:22:22] Evan Kaloudis:
I mean, I think we'd be foolish to not think that people would at least try. I don't know what how widespread the practice is. I I don't have evidence directly of people doing it. I'm not bringing it to, you know, the SEC right now. I'm not that guy.
[01:22:39] ODELL:
Probably wouldn't be. Not right now.
[01:22:42] Evan Kaloudis:
No. No. No. No. No. That's that's not my forte. But come on. I mean, you know, human nature. People are fallible. They're gonna do bad stuff if they have the opportunity to do so.
[01:22:56] ODELL:
No. I agree. I just I mean, I think it'd be pretty quick for them to I don't know if they're doing it yet. There's no way for us to verify. Right? That's the dangerous part. And no one's no one's doing proof of reserves except for Bitb
[01:23:15] Evan Kaloudis:
and Meta Planet and the South and Dorn government. Like, really the only saving grace we have is that the cost of doing that is so low. But unless it become common yeah. What privileges? If the holders of those ETFs demand it and it becomes common practice, then we can totally end up in this crazy fractional reserve world.
[01:23:40] ODELL:
Well, I mean, I think the the combination of so many places so many Bitcoin exchanges, and then the fact that you can easily self custody makes it very different than gold. Like, try and take settlement of a million dollars worth of gold. That'd be a pain in the ass. Like, your wife is I mean, she'll be happy that she has a million dollars worth of gold, but she'd be kinda pissed off if, like, the truck pulls up, and it's like a whole fucking thing. With Bitcoin, you don't have that issue. So if you have enough people taking self custody, eventually, anyone who plays games should get wrecked, just blowing the fuck out. But we got And I think that looks like in private. That's what protects us. Saying this all time. It's like It'll be messy as fuck is what it's gonna be, but, like and people will lose a lot of money, but I think it happens. I, like, I I think it's it's the natural protection mechanism we have. Right? Yeah. It's just unfortunate that,
[01:24:39] Evan Kaloudis:
you know, some of these players are getting so big. They're gonna have such downstream effects on people who actually get hurt.
[01:24:49] ODELL:
But if you think about it right? So let's just walk through it. Self cuss if you're holding Bitcoin self custody, right, and let's use, let's use BlackRock as an example. Let's say BlackRock doesn't have all the Bitcoin that they're say they do. And they try and suppress the price, and they're successful with it. And then enough people are just constantly stacking Sats to cold storage that eventually the price suppression breaks and Bitcoin runs to the upside. And we have, you know, a couple weeks where we just go up 20% or 30%, and they're underwater and they're freaking out. And someone figures it out, and they just blow the fuck up.
Now if you're holding the BlackRock ETF, you just you just played yourself. Congratulations. Like, you just lost your money, or you took a haircut, whatever, 40%, thirty %, whatever the fraction is. But does I don't think the Bitcoin market responds downward in that situation. If BlackRock is short It's a small margin. They would have to they would have to try and source it in the open market. And and and also, like, a bunch of people that thought they had Bitcoin but were holding BlackRock realized they don't have Bitcoin. They might individually try and source to try and make themselves whole and have the Bitcoin they thought they did. So, actually, in that situation, we'd probably there might be a moment of panic, but we'd probably go up in that situation.
So you, humble self custody holder, aren't like, you're in a better sit like, you're pretty much unfazed. If anything, it might be a benefit. That's that's providing
[01:26:35] Evan Kaloudis:
the fraud gets called out and and discovered. You know? As you're having these pay these paper Bitcoin on the market, it's, you know, it it's suppressing the price. There's more fake supply going on and sort of pushes that sort of supply crunch moment that those suddenly moments kicks them down the road. But when discovered, Matt Right. These events become very, very violent as the price signals correct themselves, as, the price correct itself compared to the supply that there actually is compared to what we thought there was. It's gonna make for some explosive times, and it's for some explosive swings.
And we could at least have some solace in the fact that they will almost certainly happen, and they will make for some great times for us as holders, and just in terms of headlines. Now the problem we have to worry about is if that causes government to step in and intervene and be like, okay. We gotta get Michael Sailor his Bitcoin back. We're gonna do a hard fork. Right now, I think we'd survive that pretty easily. We'd be like, no. Fuck you. But if the government becomes more entrenched in Bitcoin, they're using it for, you know, all these retirement funds, backing it as a reserve asset, like, to a crazy extent, like, then we're gonna have some real battles on our hands. We gotta be ready to go to war because, you know, we're just gonna have bailouts again.
[01:28:18] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean but that would be the first the first instinct would be a bailout, not a hostile hard fork. It would be print money, buy Bitcoin on the open market.
[01:28:29] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. I mean, just just because just because these these bankers and the politicians, everything's a nail and the hammer is the printing press. Right? It's just the easiest Yeah. Weapon to deploy. So
[01:28:46] ODELL:
Way easier to print money and do a bailout than
[01:28:50] Evan Kaloudis:
hard has filed for the mailing class and show up at BitDevs.
[01:28:56] ODELL:
I mean, I don't know what, yeah, I mean, I don't know what situation we'd have to be in for, like, there to be support. I I still think we're probably pretty far away from a hard fork because
[01:29:11] Evan Kaloudis:
MSTR mismanaged their keys. They would have to be, like, a vast amount of the populace retiring, lost their retirement funds, and you had uprisings and stuff. You'd have to get really, really
[01:29:23] ODELL:
Yeah. But none of those people hold Bitcoin or run notes or anything. They all have a CR. That's the whole point. So they kinda I mean, they kinda played themselves in that situation. They're gonna want that anyway. No one can comprehend what happens. One way or the other. Yeah. It could it'll be interesting. No matter how you cut it, it's gonna I think the most interesting times are still ahead of us. That's for sure.
[01:29:52] Evan Kaloudis:
We'll see. I mean, once the US dollar is issued on Taproot assets and everyone's using it, then
[01:30:01] ODELL:
Well, I'm glad you brought it back to that. So, I mean, this is my original question. You just went all in on, like, post ETF and this and what we're playing with fire. What what is your opinion on USD tokens on Lightning, and are you thinking about implementing them in Zeus? Is there actually demand for it? How do you think about that? I think in the world, there is demand for
[01:30:27] Evan Kaloudis:
stable coins. I don't think there's necessarily demand for that among Zeus users per se, but, you know, being combo, we don't have a crazy amount. We have tens of thousands of users. We don't have hundreds of thousands or millions of users. I think that, of course, we should be skeptical of embracing these assets. But if we have, a, the opportunity to make it easier to liquidate US dollars directly to Bitcoin, we should embrace that where we can. And, b, the opportunities that we have to Bitcoinize and eCashize the dollar, meaning it has the fantastic privacy properties that this technology affords us and doesn't take us down the dystopian CBDC future that could very well happen. I don't care how many times the sitting president says we're not implementing it. That could change like that with the next administration.
I I think we'd be remiss not to jump on those opportunities. I think there's a bit of an inevitability when technology is just so overwhelmingly, better in a lot of ways. That being said, it's not gonna be so straightforward when the powers that be understand the value of having that level of control, that privacy invasion, that surveillance. It's really going to be difficult, but we we need to recognize too is that there's not just one entity in the state. Yes. It operates like that, but there are many different factions that stand to benefit in many different ways. And the administration we have now is gonna look different from the one that follows this, and these views are gonna evolve as the technology evolves and as the market embraces it more and more.
So, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't expect, shit coins in Zeus. I mean, but, you know, the one we just added right now. But I do expect the dollar to continue to lean towards those stable coins to become more and more digital, and we can only hope that it's in a way that we can easily to Bitcoin and that it has good privacy properties. That's not this dystopian nightmare. So we'll see. Some developments I'm seeing are good. Some are really bad. It's it's really gonna be an interesting battle that takes place for the the next couple of decades, I think, before we before that new Bretton Woods moment really happens. There's a lot of things that could happen in between when things really start to break down currency reset.
It's crazy to be at the forefront of it and and seeing it firsthand. You know?
[01:33:36] ODELL:
I could tell you're becoming an experienced CEO because it was, like, the most long winded non answer about adding Oh, no. Tell us about coming to the shoes. Come on. Even even as a taproot asset? No. No. I don't think so.
[01:33:53] Evan Kaloudis:
I think our mission is to spread Bitcoin to the world. I think that we'd stand to benefit if Tether is issued on Lightning and is used. I think we'd see a great amount of benefit from the increased volumes on Lightning. We would benefit from that. But we are just really focused on spreading Bitcoin. And, hopefully, people who are liquidating that tether, that USDT in getting on to Bitcoin eventually find their way in Zeus.
[01:34:29] ODELL:
Love it. Well, sir, you are crushing it. We are all very I think I can speak for everyone that we're very grateful to have you building on Bitcoin. I don't know. My life would be much more difficult without Zeus than without your work, so thank you. What do you think about coming back on when you release 1%. Absolutely. 13?
[01:34:50] Evan Kaloudis:
Episode 13. Yeah. Let's do it.
[01:34:53] ODELL:
Awesome. Good chat, sir. Do you have any final thoughts for our freaks before we,
[01:34:59] Evan Kaloudis:
wrap here? Let's see. Check out the Zeus o point 11 alpha. We need as many people testing it as possible. Let's get those bugs ironed out. We're gonna be hooking up a lot of people with some of the Zeus Pay plus features, so they could test things out. A lot of the perks there are gonna be developing, but consider checking them out and subscribing once it's all deployed so you could support us and enjoy those great perks. Look out for swaps coming soon. They're not in the current alpha, but they'll be dropping in the next week or two. And, yeah, just give us as much feedback as possible. We're always listening. We're trying to see how people are using Zeus, try to fill in the gaps.
We've been laying down all these stones, laying down this path to where we wanna go and making self custodial Bitcoin the best experience it can be and onboarding as many people as possible to making Bitcoin payments widespread reality, and that's not gonna happen without the help of a whole lot of people. So we're just try playing trying to play our part where we can.
[01:36:10] ODELL:
Wonderful. Freaks, search Zeus in your favorite app store. Press that download button. Check it out. Play around with it. Give your feedback to Evan. He loves all your feedback, especially if you just tag him on Take him on him on Oscar. Hit him with a GIF. No. Honestly, probably. Yeah. Hit him with one of those. All caps. Two minutes.
[01:36:31] Evan Kaloudis:
Be nice, guys. Come on. Evan, thank you. Thank No. I can take it.
[01:36:37] Unknown:
Thank thank you for
[01:36:40] ODELL:
It was a good chat, sir. It was a good chat. Thank you for joining us. Freaks, thank you for supporting the show. Thank you for listening. Share with your friends and family. All the relevant links are still dispatch.com. It's available in all podcast apps, YouTube, Nostr, download primal. Join us on Nostr, Zapsats. We have NVK coming next week. That's gonna be Tuesday, the twenty ninth. I think I might have said Wednesday earlier. I was just fucking up my days again, but it's Tuesday, the twenty ninth. Same time, twenty one hundred UTC, if you wanna join us in the live chat. Otherwise, we'll be posting podcast apps afterwards. Lito zapped 10,000 sats in the Zap stream. Thank you, Lito.
A couple more shout outs shouts to BTC pins, my awesome Zeus tumbler. Dude, BTC pins is best in class. What's his website? Is it BGCpins.com?
[01:37:38] Evan Kaloudis:
Unbelievable. We've done, like, three pins with him. They're all quality. I got a shout out to Canuto. He made this awesome Cashew Zeus dog tag. It looks pretty crazy. Baller. And, yeah, just chows to everyone who supports us and allows us to do what we love and help spread Bitcoin to the masses. It's not just that shiny rock that you stash under your mattress. Let's make it something that people can use every day for payments all across the world.
[01:38:13] ODELL:
Damn right. Love you all.
A lot of green on the screen today as you know. However, you probably didn't look at Bitcoin. Tenea McHale did, and she's here. It's up 3%.
[00:00:09] Unknown:
What do you make of the way that this has been trading? It's decoupled obviously from the Nasdaq, which was a trend for a while. How do you see it? Something that people were looking for all month because if you go back to earlier this month, it really was trading in line with stocks. It just was not seeing the big, you know, pops and drops, that one, we're used to seeing out of Bitcoin. And two, it is outperforming the S and P. It has not really caught up with gold, the, you know, leading safe haven. But, I think you are seeing evidence not just I think that the obvious and easy narrative would be that we're talking about Fed independence today. So Bitcoin is kind of acting as that hedge against, you know, political uncertainty. But I also think that it's not just enthusiasm. It's also a exhaustion. You're seeing people investors wanting to, you know, get back into risk, but just maybe not the type of risk that's tied to earnings or head policy. You got a quick thought? I do. Look. You've got a president who's very interested, and his family's very interested in Bitcoin doing well, crypto doing well. And I think you're close to regulation
[00:01:09] Unknown:
or some positive announcements on policy, and that's what's driving it. It's evidence Bitcoin's support of nature is evidence that we have not had a deleveraging event. Because you have a deleveraging event, everything's going down. Well, it has underperformed the S and P and Nasdaq overall since the peak. Recently, though, to your point, it is trading pretty well up from 82 just a week and a half or two weeks ago. Real quick last thought. I think one of the hardest things for investors is to wrap their heads around the fact that day to day, it does trade like a risk asset, but medium long term, it trades like as,
[00:01:42] Unknown:
like a safe haven. If you look at gold outperformance, that kind of, you know, can act as an indicator of where Bitcoin heads when the dust kinda settles.
[00:02:29] ODELL:
Happy Bitcoin Wednesday, freaks. Tuesday. It's Tuesday. It's your host, Odell, here for another civil dispatch, the interactive live show focused on actual Bitcoin and Freedom Tech discussion. That intro was CNBC. They called Bitcoin a safe haven. They said the decoupling word feels like a moment in time. Who the hell knows? I have a great guest here, but before I get to that, dispatch as always is not funded by ads. We do not have any ads or sponsors. We are funded by stats from you guys, from our loving audience, the ride or die freaks. Thank you for supporting the show. Two ways of doing that. You can do that in podcasting two point o apps like Fountain Podcasts, or you can do that by joining us in the live stream where the freaks dwell at silldispatch.com/stream and sending zaps.
We have a great live audience today, and someone has just proven that zaps work. Thank you, Sasha, and with a hundred sats. The largest boost of last week was from Rod Palmer, journalist at Google News. He zapped 21,000 sats, and he said, Odell isn't grumpy. I will die on this hill. Thank you for dying on the hill. I appreciate you, with a huge smile on my face. Anyway, with all that said, we have returned guest, Evan Kaludis. This is twelfth appearance on Civil Dispatch. We don't have to explain to him how the show works. How's it going, Evan? Pretty good, Matt. Feels good to be back. Number 12.
Pretty crazy.
[00:04:00] Evan Kaloudis:
It's a little excessive. When am I gonna start saying no to your invitations?
[00:04:05] ODELL:
Well, we took a break a little bit so people would forget about you to bring it back and add some spice to the show. You know, Evan actually one when I used to do this weekly before I got completely overwhelmed, I had to miss a week, but we wanted the trend to continue. So Evan actually hosted a dispatch without me. That's that's how much of a return guest he is.
[00:04:28] Evan Kaloudis:
There we go. So, yeah. Just, let's, let's not do that again.
[00:04:34] ODELL:
You you gotta keep the strong yourself. But, We didn't we we didn't narrate her. We didn't do it again. We just did that once, but it was great. I appreciated it. I do I am trying to keep the streak alive again going into this next bull cycle. We do have NVK joining us next Wednesday at twenty one hundred UTC. And, I'm pretty excited for that conversation. But, anyway, Evan, now we have Mav twenty one zapped. 19 7 60 sets. Thank you, Mav. Appreciate the support. Weird. Why why did you choose that number? I don't know. But, I feel like it has importance.
Anyway, Evan, you're the creator of Zeus. We will be talking about Zeus today. I I don't know if any freaks are listening that don't know what Zeus is, but why don't we start with a brief explanation about why zoo what is Zeus? Why Zeus? Why should people care? Hit us.
[00:05:37] Evan Kaloudis:
Sure thing. So in a nutshell, I would say Zeus is at least it's up there with the most powerful mobile Bitcoin wallet in the world. You have, like, a crazy feature set, immense amount of flexibility from whether you're web just getting started to the power user Cypherpunk that's connecting to their own node, managing their lightning node liquidity on the go. And we're trying to reach every user in between.
[00:06:09] ODELL:
Love it. I mean, the way I like to look at it is if I lost access to all software except for three pieces of software in my Bitcoin journey. What do I need? I need Bitcoin Core, Sparrow, and Zeus. It's the pinnacle toolkit right there. So thank you for making it all possible.
[00:06:32] Evan Kaloudis:
What can I say? That's amazing company. Yeah. Just, just very humbled to hear that. Thank you.
[00:06:41] ODELL:
So Zeus. If you haven't used Zeus yet, Zeus is a mobile wallet, and it basically aims to be your everything and anything lightning wallet on mobile. And it's come a long way. I mean, originally, it started as purely a way to connect to your own node running at home or on a server, but most people were at home. They would be running, like, a start nine or something at home, and they'd connect their Zeus back to to remote control it because you're not, like, traveling around with your node to, like, pay for things.
[00:07:19] Evan Kaloudis:
Right. Yeah. Back then Yeah. Go on. Back then, it was just I was getting my lightning node started. I set up my Raspberry Pi three. I was on lightning. I had, like, you know, maybe five channels. And, you know, there was nowhere in the city when I was, you know, back in New York to pay. So I was just checking in on my routing, making sure everything was still running, see if I collected a couple sats from being in between. And, yeah, it just sort of evolved from there. Over time, we added support for more interfaces. So it started with L and D connected core lightning node.
We added support for some other interfaces like L and D Hub. And then, you know, more recently, the last year and a half, when we started working on it full time, we added a full wallet, a note in the phone, lightning address service, LSP services. We've got three going on four now. So you could purchase channels, get connected to the lightning net network with ease. We've developed specs now for renewing those channels. And then we've got a massive new release coming out the door that's gonna have support for Cashew eCash. We are gearing up to release our swap service so you could swap between phones on chain and on lightning without having to close or open channels necessarily.
And we're gearing up for our one point o release by the end of the year. So it's a very, very busy year, but, you know, a lot to be excited about, a lot to catch up on.
[00:09:01] ODELL:
So in developer communities, there's different thoughts behind one point o releases. You're aware you can just you can just make a one point o release. Right?
[00:09:12] Evan Kaloudis:
Oh, yeah. I mean, you know, I I could go the route and do 90 nine point
[00:09:18] Unknown:
nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine 99 nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine nine 9999999 nine 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999
[00:09:21] ODELL:
You never hit one point o. Yeah. It's at
[00:09:26] Evan Kaloudis:
makes sense to, like, demark something.
[00:09:29] ODELL:
And, You can just do the Bitcoin core approach, and you can just skip, like, one through twenty five. When did they start? Like, at twenty six or something? Yeah. I think at 24, they went from o point
[00:09:41] Evan Kaloudis:
two to 24 o, which is an awesome approach too. I've definitely thought about it. Maybe it won't be Zeus one point o. Maybe it'll be Zeus 12 o. And you guys will be like, wow. It's been a while that and you'll really software, which is also a crazy thing about. It's been six years of putting this, app out.
[00:10:03] ODELL:
Dude, that's crazy. Impressive. You deserve you deserve a lot more credit than you get. What a grind. Okay. So last time I had you on the show appearance 11, I think we had you had just launched note in a phone. I remember the memes going around that the note is in the phone. You launched the light mode, and you launched the lightning address, support for receive. Yeah. And so since then, the big release is well, so first of all, let's how is that going? How's the note on the phone thing going? How it was a little bit controversial how you were doing the lightning addresses. Yeah. That's the same thing. Let's do a debrief on that. Like, how how is everything going with the the light node?
[00:10:55] Evan Kaloudis:
Okay. So on the light node front, we've had some really good results. Just in terms of the feature set, you know, it's sort of peerless having that full LND node in the phone. On the other side of things, we have had some difficulties with how we fetch our blocks. So the Neutrino back end is fantastic privacy wise because you can't really know what a peer is querying for. However, if you're in an environment with, like, a really high ping time, like, not great Internet, so just note in the phone doesn't work too hot. So with that caveat, you know, I'd say it works really well, but we still need to check that issue off so we could make sure that people even, you know, in low quality Internet areas can still use this. So that's gonna be a big focus for us after the 11 o release to tackle.
Other than that, it's been
[00:11:54] ODELL:
quite tough. Gonna solve that? Are you just gonna do Electrum server? Or
[00:11:59] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, like a lot of the features in Zeus, we like to give people optionality. Obviously, we don't wanna rug the people who for which Neutrino works well for. But on startup, I think it makes sense to ask. There's hey. Would you like to have the more private, maybe less reliable option? Maybe do, like, a speed test as we're getting set up, or do you want the less private, but more reliable, quicker option? And, you know, I think if we have that in there, that solves, like, 90% of our troubleshooting cases. So that'll be exciting to put together. And, we have a bit of a prototype. It's still a little early, but, we're gonna try to submit that upstream to L and D, which is very exciting.
[00:12:45] ODELL:
Can you just explain really quick to the freaks how Neutrino works? Because I think it's fascinating.
[00:12:52] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. So, it's BIP one fifty seven one fifty eight. It's called block filters. And instead of requesting, like, a query putting in a query for, like, your address, like, Electrum, you'll put in a query for, you know, an address to try to get the balance for it. Or you're you'll ask for, like, a specific block. But with Neutrino, you're asking for, like, groups of blocks, in this sort of random cadence. And it's more demanding. It's more resource intensive for your node in the phone to figure out which blocks to ask for so it's sufficiently randomized. It also takes more, you know, networking resources. You're pulling down more data. But, someone running one of these Neutrino servers can't really ascertain, like, what you're looking for, who you are, what your transactions are. They can't really link your IP that's requesting this data to, you know, your private Bitcoin, information.
So, yeah, it's it's amazing in that regard, but the performance can be lacking depending on your Internet connection or where you are in the world, for sure.
[00:14:04] ODELL:
Would you does this example make sense to you that, like, if if you're using the traditional ELECTRA model, you're basically asking for a balance of an address. But if you use Neutrino, it's it's it's basically your phone is getting a summary of every block, like a condensed summary of every block in order to figure out what the balances are. Not every
[00:14:28] Evan Kaloudis:
single block, but enough of a selection of randomized blocks in the mix so that it's, you know, very, very difficult for someone snooping in to piece together what you're actually asking for and what you're actually
[00:14:44] ODELL:
It's not every block? No. I was trying to So then how so wouldn't you have balanced mismatches if it's not every block?
[00:14:55] Evan Kaloudis:
Well, you're grabbing not the entire block contents, but you're grabbing the headers of each and every single one. So you'll grab the so that everything adds up with the hashes. And then from there, you can you're querying for Right. Blocks with that random algorithm.
[00:15:16] ODELL:
That are relevant for you? Yeah. With with others mixed in so that you don't know which ones are yours? Exactly. Exactly. Just sprinkling some
[00:15:28] Evan Kaloudis:
some red herrings, stuff you don't really need to have, but to make it more difficult for someone who has, like, a passive listening connection, you know, or the host of these, instances.
[00:15:41] ODELL:
And and the wallet that really championed this at first was Wasabi. Yeah. Has are there any other main mainstream wallets that are using Neutrino right now besides you?
[00:15:55] Evan Kaloudis:
No. Not really. We know the LDK guys have been interested in it and could potentially add it on the line. You know, it's it's really mostly been used by LND, the Wasabi guys. So LND variant wallets, like Blix Wallet use it. Breeze, the, you know, the first version, I don't think the new version uses it. So, yeah, it's quite limited, which is quite unfortunate because the privacy properties are, you know, they're they're peerless. They're so hard to beat.
[00:16:31] ODELL:
Well, the main argument against it historically has been that it's heavy for mobile. Right? Yeah. Which you kinda just admitted.
[00:16:39] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. Yeah. You use more networking data. So it is a trade off. And, you know, we're sort of leaning into this ethos in our tagline. It's Bitcoin payments your way at Zeus. So we don't expect everyone to be using Bitcoin the same exact way. And if you do and people are using it in a way that doesn't line up with exactly how you use it, you're gonna have a bad time because Bitcoin is permissionless permissionless money. So, yeah, we're we're just trying to get this beautiful technology in the hands of as many people as possible. And I think that we're in a really unique position with Zeus with all these building blocks we've been putting together from, you know, the remote node, the node in the phone, CashewNow.
And the way I like to think of it is, like, we could sort of become this, you know, Bitcoin Sherpa of sorts, where we're educating the users as they go along, give them the information they need to have to make these informed decisions, and sort of show them the way after meeting where they're at.
[00:17:52] ODELL:
Love it. That is always that's always been the dream for me. You know? One really well written wallet that, like, brings the user through the journey and kind of helps guide them. I like the term Sherpa. It makes a lot of sense to me. Okay. So let's talk about Cashew, and then we can jump into a bunch of other things. You were probably one of the world's loudest, most educated Cashew critics, for months. And then you bent the knee and integrated in integrated into Zeus. What's going on over there in your head? How do you think about Cashew? Do you want do you wanna apologize to Cali?
Like, how are you how are you And he is he is really nice. He is a really nice guy about it.
[00:18:46] Evan Kaloudis:
But, you know, I I think he's understood my perspective the whole way. You know, I remember us, you know, sitting out in Prague, for the conference out there and just, you know, sitting on some of the benches and just having, like, really passionate rant. I'm like, you know, ultimately, self custody is what Bitcoin is, like, half the value proposition. And, yeah, I was really going off on ECASH. I'm like, this is all
[00:19:15] ODELL:
bullshit compared to self custody. You know? It's it's could be a stepping stone, but, you know, we gotta get people on this. This is
[00:19:23] Evan Kaloudis:
But, you know, Cali took you like a champ, and he understood what what I was, you know, going for. But, yeah, I mean, you know, my my perspective has really changed over time, especially considering, like, taking a deep look at how people are using Bitcoin today. You know, what's the world that we're in now? You know? The post ETF world, right, with the micro strategy bulls. You know, some of the discussions that you see online are ridiculous. They're like, what's your, what's your micro strategy to Bitcoin ratio? And they're like, bro, I can't be bothered to hold my own keys.
I'm all in on micro strategy. Now this, like, new derivative, what's it called, Misty.
[00:20:14] ODELL:
M s t y.
[00:20:16] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. So, it's that there's and there's certainly the difficulties that we've encountered with, you know, bringing people on and showing them how to run their own channels, learning all the ins and outs of, you know, managing your liquidity. Those are all very real things, and, you know, there's, like, huge gaps that you need to get there to that point in terms of education. Otherwise, you're gonna really struggle in a lot of different ways from inbound and outbound capacity to channel reserves to, you know, a close versus a forced close. And for a lot of people, like, that's still gonna be something that they wanna reach, and there's definitely benefits to doing it that way, but it's not gonna be for everyone.
So to really expect everyone to be using Bitcoin the same way, it's a bit silly. At the same time, we did really see that with the LSB. It is so much easier to just have single channels, single relationship with this one entity that will connect it on the network and sort of a lot of the other challenges of, like, okay. Dude, is this channel good enough? Is this channel good enough? You know, there there's people that swear by our setup now and really appreciate it and enjoy using it just by having a singular channel with the Olympus node that we run. So
[00:21:54] ODELL:
Wait. Wait. Wait. Wait. So, I mean, I wanted to talk about Casio, but you brought this up. So can we just talk about this real quick? I you remember when Lightning was first proposed, the b cashers were like, this is just gonna turn into a hub and spoke system. And Oh, yeah. The the main the main critique of Lightning was that, I've noticed personally I mean, if the freaks go way back, if their true rider dies and they go back to, you know, episode two or episode one with Evan, I think you were the first I think you were the first ever dispatch.
If not, you were number two. At that point, I had 200 channels on my node, you know, where all the plugs were connecting with each other. We're we're I just lost a ton of money on on chain transactions. And now when people ask me, it's just one fat channel, maybe two if you want redundancy Yeah. With someone who's really well connected. So where the where the b cashers correct,
[00:22:57] Evan Kaloudis:
is this the problem? Like, how do you how do you think about that? To a certain extent, they're right. I think there is a centralizing factor of having these hubs on lightning. But I think what's important is that you're able to route around these hubs. Right? It's to have that censorship resistance just like the Internet is built. Right? Like, if one hop on the Internet decides to start censoring traffic, you can route around it. And I think, importantly, Lightning has those censorship resistant properties, which is what we're really all in it for.
We don't want these centralized hubs. It's it's not about, like, the centralization isn't the end to it. Right? It's like, what is the result that we wanna see? We want censorship resistance. And I think that we've proven over time that it's gonna be really damn hard to stop people from making the lightning network transaction they wanna make from the privacy properties that in are inherently built into it, but also the ease of use of just opening up channels to the peers that you wanna get to. Hell, even if you're going through those big hubs, you know how difficult it is to stop a transaction from being routed to someplace you don't want it to go if the user's putting together the path on their own device, it's impossible.
So I would ask someone who's concerned about the centralizing factors of Lightning. It's like, what are you concerned about? To what end does this thing need to work? So, yes, there's definitely centralizing forces on lightning, but what's it gonna do? It's it's gonna stop people from making those payments that they wanna make, that they don't want you to make now.
[00:24:45] ODELL:
So your answer is that it is hub and spoke Yeah. But it's fine.
[00:24:51] Unknown:
Yeah.
[00:24:52] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean, I think that's my answer too. I'm just it's just interesting. Right? There's nothing to do I can have this conversation with, so I think it's kinda interesting.
[00:25:03] Evan Kaloudis:
I mean, there's a lot of crazy dichotomies, and there's a lot of tensions that we need to face as we're trying to scale this technology to be used by, you know, billions of people on the planet. And, we gotta be honest with ourselves, but we also so gotta be, like, realistic and and pragmatic and and think about how these things work in practice. Right? Like, if we're just gonna sit on a pedestal and say, oh, you gotta run your note on tour and only connect to people that are nims and, you know, you're just gonna have a bad time. How do people use this in practice, and and what are the the end results? And, I yeah.
Yeah. We just gotta be honest with ourselves about all of this then. So let me tell you
[00:25:52] ODELL:
let me tell you and all the freaks a little story just because I feel like you'd find it entertaining. So Mempool's cleared. Praise be. And when that happened, Bitcoin Park had maybe, like, 13 channels or 10 channels or something like that. And, you know, time is scarce. So I just went in there and just closed all the channels at once, and paid two sets per byte. And then mempool is filled up ever so briefly. And during that process, I get a text message from Ron. He's like, Matt, the lightning note's down. I was like, no. It's not. It's fine. Everything's fine. It'll be back up in, like, ten minutes. It took forty five minutes for the for the channel to get open, but now it's just one it's just one fat channel to async. That's it. I was like, don't worry. It's gonna be fine, and then it'll be better after that.
And it's just one fat channel to async. The the cypherpunk dream is over, and now it's just beautiful hub and spoke
[00:26:54] Evan Kaloudis:
hub and spoke system. Anyway, that's my story. Well, it does it doesn't necessarily have to be all like that. I think there's some nuance here we can go into.
[00:27:02] ODELL:
Right. I woulda opened it I woulda opened it to to your to to your hub, but, there's a channel capacity limit.
[00:27:12] Evan Kaloudis:
Well, there's a channel capacity limit for people that we haven't whitelisted. So here's the funny thing. So for all the corporate peep, like, customers that we have for the Zeus wide service, you know, we help you get set up with lightning if they're doing high volume. We typically set them up with a channel acceptor, and we'll say, hey. Who are the big hubs that, you know, it's okay to accept these channels from in an open or announced capacity, and what limits are you okay with them opening those up? And then for the plebs, who might still want to open up a channel to you, but you don't want them to necessarily announce it to the network because god knows what kind of liquidity management these plebs do.
You know, what limits do you wanna put in place there? So someone who wants to be running, like, these operations where, you know, payment speed and reliability has a real effect on, you know, the consumers or the customers they're serving. You wanna get really granular in there and, like, discriminate a little bit. So maybe the plebs that you've opened all these channels to, maybe you'd rather have them be the ones that open the channel to you because they'd be the ones incurring, like, the bulk of the forced closed costs. And then you also don't want them to announce the channels to you because someone trying to make a payment to you might try to route through these plebs if they have the lowest fees to your note, and you don't know what kind of inbound they have.
So, yeah, there is there is some complexity there, but only if only as you're, like, getting your your bindings with, like, how liquidity and routing on the network works. So I think that with the channel acceptor, I think Bitcoin Park would probably be better off being a little, more open in that regard.
[00:29:08] ODELL:
I just don't wanna deal with it. We also you know, it's it's Bitcoin Park is
[00:29:19] Evan Kaloudis:
Well, is this the node for receiving
[00:29:21] ODELL:
payments at I like I like to call Bitcoin is Bitcoin Park is a a unprofitable for profit business. Not a non non for profit. It's just an unprofitable for profit business. So as a result, we're constantly having to sell out of our channels, and I don't wanna close the channels. So there's a whole another nuance to it where it's like I get sat stuck in channels that don't have liquidity to our off ramp to sell for dollars to pay our fiat expenses. So having one or two large channels, two well connected peers takes away a lot of headache instead of, like, sending, you know, $500 chunks to to an exchange because you don't have liquidity.
[00:30:17] Evan Kaloudis:
It also depends on your flow. So, like, it is this usually, like, a node you're making outgoing payments to or receiving inbound?
[00:30:25] ODELL:
Both. That's the point. Right? It's like we're receiving we're receiving payments in our in, like, the cafe and membership dues, and and then we're we're spending it mostly well, sometimes to pay contractors, but also, like, pay contractors directly in Bitcoin, but also just to, like, sell dollars to pay the rent and shit.
[00:30:50] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah.
[00:30:52] ODELL:
Anyway, why would before we're, like, off on a tangent already, and now we're doing, like, customer support. Everything's fine at Bitcoin Park. Our payment reliability is fantastic. You you have a completely different philosophy than Async on this. How do you, like so Async just like any you can just open a channel with them any size. Doesn't you don't have to be white listed. But meanwhile, you have the Olympus node, like, heavily locked down. How do how do you how are they getting away with it?
[00:31:26] Evan Kaloudis:
How are they run getting away with it? I mean, they have a immense amount of liquidity deployed. I think they say they're, like, the biggest node on the network, a hundred million dollars worth of Bitcoin on it. Not maybe not all deployed, but ready to deploy at any point.
[00:31:43] ODELL:
We don't have a hundred million dollars to put on that,
[00:31:47] Evan Kaloudis:
so we have to be a little more, discriminatory. That being said, sometimes async's not the best peer to peer up with. Sometimes you do have those people that open up those channels. They don't have a well maintained node. You try to route through them or try people try to get to you through them and those four channels. And, it really increases payment, routing time and decreases the reliability. So, you know, some some issues you can solve partially by throwing money at, but not fully. I think that people would have a much better experience, with their payments, at least as a peer, at least as someone running their own node and connecting to async, if they were a little more discriminatory. The thing is the Phoenix client is also using trampoline routing.
So they've have these, this profile of payments in the graph and that they make to the people using the Phoenix wallet, and that sort of smooth soothes over some stuff as well. Whereas something like Zeus, has the user do all the routing calculations on their own device, and this come bit of a a trade off. So Phoenix, at least in most cases, in which they're not using Bolt 12 or Blinded Pass, they have, like, full visibility into the payments that you're making, because they're essentially routing these payments for you and helping them get to the destination. Whereas Zeus, the trade off is, like, you're downloading this graph data in advance. We call this the express graph sync.
If you have the node in the phone or you're just listening to the network if you have a remote node, but all your payments are cal your payment routes are co calculated locally, and we don't have any insights into that.
[00:33:49] ODELL:
And as a result, like, Phoenix is fast as fuck and Zeus is, like, you have your thirty second sovereignty wait time or whatever.
[00:33:57] Evan Kaloudis:
Well, yeah, it depends on, you know, how fresh the graph data you have is, where your channels are, if you've opened them by yourself to destinations of your choosing or if you're using the LSP.
[00:34:10] ODELL:
There's a lot of factors there. Fair enough. Okay. So all of that intricacy, Cashew fixes that.
[00:34:21] Evan Kaloudis:
In a lot of ways. Yes. So Cashew, Chow Me and Ecash. It is a custodial solution. You still have the perks of being able to restore your funds from your seed. We derive your cashew seed from the embedded LND seed. From there, you're able to connect to one or multiple mints, that are the custodians that you're using. You have, I'd say, really good degree of privacy, for a custodial product. The Mint is not able to kick you off of it. If they're gonna shut operations down or rug the funds, they can't just take it from any single individual. They're gonna take it from everyone.
And, yeah, I mean, you have to you're trusting a lot with the Mint. Like, the Mint has to be managing their own lightning node. They have to have their own good channels. But if it's well maintained, you remove the headache of managing your own channels, and, you know, you should just be able to start accepting payments without much of a headache. So I stepping stone for people trying to get into lightning, into the ecosystem the first time. And the way that we have it integrated in Zeus is quite novel, and we sort of will guide you towards self custody as you accumulate more and more of a balance and provide you with educational resources so you sort of make heads and tails of what this self custody thing is and how is it compared to the eCash wallet that you're starting off with.
[00:36:11] ODELL:
Yeah. So, I mean, I was playing around with the newest release that has Cashew in it. I real like, the Mint Discovery is awesome. I've used a lot of Cashew wallets. I guess you're you're pulling it from BitcoinMints.com, right, which is, like, the Nostr enabled discovery service.
[00:36:31] Unknown:
Mhmm. So
[00:36:33] Evan Kaloudis:
the Nostr or the Bitcoin Mints website with the reviews for the Mints is a fantastic feature to have in there. And, yeah, it it's it's just fantastic start, but it's not the final destination that we wanna go with it. I'd say that with Cashew, the Mint Discovery, the Mint choosing is probably the highest friction point. How do you select a custodian that gets trustworthy enough?
[00:37:07] ODELL:
And, you know, there's not a Especially if you're brand new. Like, you're brand new. I'm onboarding like, that's where Cashew really shines is for a brand new user, and, like, you're bringing them in. And their first question is is like, okay. Which mint do you choose? Like, I have no idea. Like, is this something I put in my mouth to make my breath smell better?
[00:37:25] Evan Kaloudis:
Exactly. So we're gonna be spending a lot on this one and trying to get it absolutely right. I think a social element, of course, is already there in which people are voting for the ones that but, you know, it's still not a ton of data that we're dealing with. I think over time, it's gonna become more social with your social graph, probably powered by. And, you know, I think what the muni guys did with their implementation where you sort of got to see which of the people you vouch for, whichever mince is is probably the way that we're gonna end up going. I think a mix of that with some sort of algorithm to help you auto select, could be very valuable.
But, yeah, there's there's still a lot that we wanna dive into. You know? The current
[00:38:22] ODELL:
what we have is still an alpha, and I think even before
[00:38:26] Evan Kaloudis:
the gold master gets out, I know. It's gonna be different still.
[00:38:34] ODELL:
What do you think about the Titanic approach to mints where you have, the user keep money in multiple mints, and then you can use multipart payments to do the payment so that if any single mint goes down, they don't lose all their money.
[00:38:51] Evan Kaloudis:
Absolutely love it. Distribute risk. Try out different mints. Have a little money in a couple different ones. You know? It's could be difficult to run a mint and a lightning node. Definitely. So if someone's go undergoing maintenance, you don't have all your money in one pot as you're getting started. You just switch to another one and make sure your payments continue. Yeah. I'm I'm using, like, four or five minutes at a time right now.
[00:39:20] ODELL:
But I'm, like, I'm saying, like, as almost like a default flow. Because the problem that that the problem that every Cashew wallet developer has is they don't wanna choose the mint for the user. Mhmm. They don't wanna choose your custodian relationship. They don't want that liability or responsibility on them. But then as a result, no matter what happens, you always have this friction point that no matter how graceful you make it, you're making the user make a very critical decision Right. Very early on in their journey. Is there something there where the default could be, like, the five bestments or something? I mean, I don't know. Best is not an objective claim. I I I don't know. I don't pretend to know how to do it. But where the default is instead of picking one mint for them, you basically pick, like, a handful and split the risk up.
[00:40:18] Evan Kaloudis:
Absolutely. So we have all these heuristics. You know, I think there's, like, a new site for determining, you know, payment success rates to these mints, how well they're managed. You could use that as well as the social stuff we were talking about. Pick five. Have the user just rotate through those as they're accepting payments. And then, you know, you gotta start thinking, okay. What's the worst case scenario from? So if the user is using a single mint and it gets rugged, they lose a % of their money. But if they're using five and one goes down, well, you got rugged 20% only. Could be better for sure. Same thing just in terms of payment reliability.
One goes down for maintenance. It always defer to another one. There's a ton of perks there for sure. But at this you're adding more mints for the user to, you know, rotate through. You're introducing more third party risk. It's just what balance, what sort of distribution you're comfortable, with dispersing that risk. Obviously, if you had a mint that you could trust 100%, you'd rather just use that. You know, if your neighbor was running the mint and you could go knock on his door, you'd probably be better off using that one singular mint than five random ones from five strangers on the Internet. So it really depends on your situation. But that being said, yeah, splitting up that risk, could be valuable in a lot of ways just as long as you don't need all the money at once and dealing with, you know, the downtime that you're adding to the picture there.
[00:41:57] ODELL:
So the way you look at the user journey is they come in. They probably start with Cashew.
[00:42:05] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[00:42:06] ODELL:
And then as more money gets built up in this custodial wallet, once they hit a certain threshold, then they're gonna be moving to the node in the phone model, and they would have they would effectively pay for a channel from the LSP to go full sovereign. Is that the that's the dream. Right?
[00:42:27] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. So easy path would be press one button, upgrade, get your channel. Once it's opened up, move the remaining balance over to self custody. But at the same time, we also wanna give people who are a little more advanced, they know exactly what they wanna do, a little bit more flexibility. Maybe they want to swap their nuts out. Their Satoshis on eCash for an on chain UTXO to kick to cold storage. We want people to be able to do that too. Maybe they wanna take that UTXO and then open up to, you know, a friend or a restaurant that they frequent. They should be able to do that too. So we wanna provide, like, these rails, this easy path for the novice user to use, but still give them all the optionality that users for giving people.
[00:43:25] ODELL:
How do you think about that makes sense to me. I mean, it's interesting, right, because Cashew is such a new project Yeah. That right now, if you think about, like, the percentage of of users that are using Cashew that are also running a node separately is probably quite high. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if, like, 70% of Casue users also have a full lightning node. So there's definitely a user out there that would wanna do both regardless, which is Yeah. It's just kinda interesting to think about. But in the future, I presume that, like, 95% of Casio users won't be running their own node, and it'll be like a gradual stepping stone. So threshold wise, what what do you what is what is the ideal threshold from when you move? That's the million set question is what is the ideal threshold where you move to sovereign lightning from Cashew?
[00:44:27] Evan Kaloudis:
And, you know, that's that's exactly right. It's a difficult question to ask because there's so many externalities here. Like, we don't really know the user's financial system, right, or financial situation rather. We don't know how much money they have. We what's a lot for them. You don't really wanna make these, like, decisions for them automatically, if the money in their wallet is all that they have right now. Like, let's say they gained 10,000 sats in their wallet, and that's enough for a channel, and they wanna get a channel from us at the lowest rate, and it's, like, 5,000 sats. You wanna automatically take half their money for them to go to self custody?
No. That doesn't make sense to me. So what we're doing is prompting the user and giving them the information that they need to make an informed decision. We tell them at so they hit certain thresholds at, you know, 10,000 sats, 20 5 thousand sats, 50 thousand sats. We gotta see if we're gonna cap it. Right now, it's uncapped. But if you hit a hundred thousand sats, the messages get a bit more intense. And, you know, there's also a lot of fun things we can do with that too.
[00:45:42] ODELL:
Wait. Well, like, how intense do they get? What do the messages say?
[00:45:47] Evan Kaloudis:
You know, it's like, it starts off, you know, you can afford a self custodial channel right now. You know? Hit this button, check out what the rates are, and see if you wanna upgrade. And then keep going. It's like, it's, it would be better for you to upgrade right now. There's rehypothecation or that there's risk of losing your funds if you don't hold your own keys and don't go to self custody. And then down the line, it's like, woah. This is not you're being crazy. You have a lot of money in cash you. And then if we really wanna be rambunctious, maybe we'll say, you got rugged is what could be a message we show you. You don't upgrade.
I don't know. We're we're still experimenting with a lot of that. Obviously, it's very on brand with the Zeus wallet to be a little tongue in cheek, be a little rambunctious. But, you know, we also don't wanna necessarily scare users out the gate. So we're working on providing the resources, providing documentation pages, trying to get people ins and outs of what these trade offs are between these different systems. And to be frank, there's, like, a lot of noise, and there's a lot of places you can get caught up with navigating the Bitcoin wallet journey right now.
There's a lot of different solutions on the market. There's a lot of people misrepresenting what their product actually is. And, of course, there's a lot of nuance, to what the properties of all these things are. And, you know, it just really sort of, grinds my gears a little bit when people just don't want to be upfront with their users with what they're peddling, and we never wanna be in that situation. We wanna sort of be upfront with users and sort of guide them, to where they should wanna be by clearly displaying the trade offs.
[00:47:45] ODELL:
So, I mean, you said a hundred thousand sats is when you start getting more aggressive. I mean, that's only $80.
[00:47:53] Unknown:
Mhmm.
[00:47:56] ODELL:
I mean, my gut says that's probably a little bit low. Did you see the Homeland Security secretary, Christy Noem? She got robbed. Her purse got robbed. She had $3,000 in cash in it.
[00:48:15] Evan Kaloudis:
Did she declare that? Where'd she get where'd she get robbed?
[00:48:19] ODELL:
She she she said it after she got robbed that there was $3,000 in cat like, in the police report or whatever.
[00:48:26] Evan Kaloudis:
Where did she get robbed?
[00:48:28] ODELL:
She was at she was at dinner or lunch in Washington, DC, and her purse was on the ground, and they grabbed her purse. But, anyway, my point is is what's more secure, $3,000 in cash in your purse or $3,000 in your favorite mint? If she had it in her mint and she kept her seed, she probably would still have the $3,000.
[00:48:53] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. That is true. That's the thing with having an ecash seed. You could have it backed up. You could have it in multiple places. Cash, you can only have in one place. So in that regard, e cash is better than regular cash.
[00:49:10] ODELL:
It's just something to think. Like, what is the amount? I don't know what the I've people ask me this all the time. Like, I don't know the amount depends on the user, so it's it's a little bit difficult to have a proper flow. I would say that as it gets larger, maybe consider making the prompts turn to caps, and speak more clearly to the user
[00:49:30] Evan Kaloudis:
and might get through to them. That's an idea. Well, you know, I think we're there's different ways that we can convey the message to people. There's a lot of resources we could put in front of them. There's a lot of things that we could distill down to basics. Getting louder, putting things in caps, making things more highlighted in the UI. I believe we we posted a demo on social media on, that showed how, you know, you get past 10,000 sats. As you get closer and closer to a hundred thousand, your ecash balance under the balance view ensues gets more red, more fiery. I think I like that. A lot of visual cues like that. You know? We wanna be very upfront. We have, like, a giant custodial all caps label on it that you can't turn off by default.
And, of course, you know, as you get your own channel, we're gonna stop bothering you about things. Like, once you are at the rodeo, we might give you some other prompts, things that might be useful for you. But, you know, we're not gonna be hounding you the same way that we would, if you just have this e cash balance. And I think we're in, like, a really unique position there, Matt, Because if you think about the average custodial wallet, how many of them actually have the incentive to be like,
[00:50:54] ODELL:
this is a lot here. Maybe you should upgrade to self custody.
[00:50:58] Evan Kaloudis:
Probably not very many, especially if they're all really basing their their, business on these transaction fees and charging you as you're making payments out. If you make one big payment out, like, maybe they could collect a lot there, but they wanna keep you in that wallet and using it every day. And they said they don't really have the financial incentive to guide you to self custody. Whereas Zeus is in a unique position because of the lightning service provider that's built around catering self custodial users. We're in this unique position to be like, hey. We have these other products that have a lot of these benefits to you. You should consider upgrading and reaping those benefits.
[00:51:41] ODELL:
You you actually make no money if they use the Cashew element. It's that reverse incentive.
[00:51:46] Evan Kaloudis:
Right. Right. I mean, there's some stuff with the Zeus Pay plus perks that we're working out right now that they could potentially be sitting on Cashew the whole time. I mean, they probably wouldn't after all the yelling we do at them with them. But, potentially, yeah, they could just use the wallet, and we don't reap the benefits of it at all. And that's fine. I mean, that's the case with Zeus today. You can have a lightning wallet. You could connect it to it. You can manage it with Zeus. You cannot buy any channels from us. You cannot send us any sets. And that's fine. You sort of just gotta be okay with that if you're gonna ship free and open source software.
But long term, we think that, you know, beyond the support that we've gotten just from donations, we think that the services that we provide are valuable. And, you know, they're top shelf. They know that if they're gonna use us, they're gonna have payment reliability, good rates, and pretty much get that top shelf product that we strive to be.
[00:52:50] ODELL:
Well, I'm glad you brought that up. I don't know if you listened to my the show with Rob Hamilton last week, but they've been resistant to open sourcing Trident Wallet, for business reasons. And we had a long conversation about it that I'm not gonna put words in his mouth. But, I really do applaud you trying to build a business on top of an open source stack. I mean, I think to me, that's that's the dream. The dream is a sustainable profit, you know, profitable business that also maintains an open source stack and gives their users full control. It's definitely the harder path, but you seem to be taking it.
[00:53:34] Evan Kaloudis:
We're try we're trying. We think that on the consumer side, we need to do that. Obviously, there's a lot of other tools that we use internally. Right? Like, running the LSP, making sure that we're dealing with the stupid compliance checkboxes we gotta check off in The US. And a lot of the tooling that we've built out to just run an efficient lightning node and LSP, not all of that's out of the box. Right? And a lot of that stuff is gonna stay inside the box so that we can help other corporate users. But on the consumer side, when we're talking about individual's money, we think it's very important. It's imperative for that to all be free and open source and for people to be able to audit it, inspect it, as well as build on top of it.
Obviously, there's a lot of trade offs that you're making there, but I I simply can't see I I wouldn't be comfortable with putting out those black boxes, for people to use and and just not be able to call their money back, without us. As for Rob's business, you know, I I don't know all the ins and outs. Obviously, Anchor Wash is a very different, product. I'd encourage him to consider open sourcing what he can. But, you know, it's gonna be very different ways that people are using it. I I imagine people will be interfacing with Anchor Watch more directly for their savings products, so I can't really make any judgments.
[00:55:08] ODELL:
Fair enough. Wasn't asking you to make any judgments there. I, okay. So back to Cashew. So we're using Cashew, and I have a lightning address with Zeus Pay. So I set up my Mint. Yep. Let's do my user flow. I I I connected to a Mint on my note in the phone product. I used to have channels on that wallet, but now I don't have channels. Okay. Did was I talking to you and I was like, oh, shit. I have a bunch of money in this wallet that I completely forgot about? Did I tell you that? Yeah. Yeah. It's like the modern day equivalent of finding the change in the couch, but
[00:55:53] Evan Kaloudis:
you just found $600 of quarters instead.
[00:55:57] ODELL:
So, anyway, I I closed that channel, and then I withdrew it, like, a week ago. And then I created the Cashew wallet. It's in the same wallet. Then I tried to send money to that lightning address, and it didn't come to my Mint. The payment failed. Should the payment work in that situate? If I have a channel, I guess I'm going all over the place. You have to balance this thing now. If I have one Lightning address Mhmm. And I have channels, and I also have a Mint setup, where does that payment go to? Does it try and go to the channel first? And if the channel fails, it should gracefully move over to the Mint. How does that work?
[00:56:39] Evan Kaloudis:
Again, I think it's a user decision. Maybe we could have a fallback system, but at the moment, the user decides. What kind of lightning address do I wanna have set up? So with Zeus Pay originally, we had the system called Zap Logger. We still do, and it's it's great. It basically leverages Huddl invoices. So let's say you have the note in your phone. You're offline. You can't that payment on. We would basically create a Huddl invoice, an invoice that gets held by the creator or the LSP for a little bit. And the receiver has twenty four hours to redeem it or it gets returned back to the sender.
And this was controversial because it holds up an HCLC slot, a hash time lock contract slot within your link channel. You can only have a certain amount of those. It's about 500. And, some people were giving us some flack about it saying it would break the lightning network and cause a lot of problems for operators. And I'm proud to say it didn't cause issues at all. Perhaps we didn't really push it to the limit. Maybe if we had, you know, hundreds of thousands of people really slamming on it, it could potentially be an issue. But I think we've dissuaded a lot of that. In cases in which you were having a lot of flows, you could just open up new channels, more channels, to the source of those payments.
With that being said, we now have more options now for how you wanna use the lightning address. There's the app blocker mode that anyone could use if they're using an LND node. They have the Cashew mode, which you can use if you have the Cashew wallet with your embedded LND node. And now we have a third mode, which is the Nasr Wallet Connect method. So if you have a remote node that has Nasr Wallet Connect as a connection method on it, you can receive payments directly to your remote node twenty four seven. And, basically, you can switch between those three modes, seamlessly depending on what your current wallet supports.
You could go into your use pay settings and say, hey. I wanna go to Cashew right now or Cashew. I I was sorta like saying Cashew. Let's let's normalize that. Or, like, you wanna switch back to your remote node. And I've sort of been hopping between the three address types the last couple weeks, sort of having those fallbacks. For now, manually choosing, which one's enabled at any given time. But, yeah, it could totally evolve into the point where we have, like, a a hierarchy where you say, hey. Try hitting this mint. Try hitting this mint. Fall back to my Albi Hub, and I'll connect mode. And if that doesn't work, just let me go to Zap locker, which would be a very interesting, product. I mean, hell. If you a payment's coming in, you wanna receive it one way or another. Right? You don't wanna miss an incoming Zap. So why not give people the optionality to make sure that they don't miss a single set? You'll sort it out later.
So we have a lot of flexibility with this product, and we're excited to see it evolve further and excited to see how people like it. But, obviously, with the Cashew, much better user experience for the senders. They're not wait worrying about these pending payments. For the receivers, they're not worrying about having to redeem the payments within twenty four hours. And for people running the remote nodes, they don't have to worry about redeeming payments in the app at all. They just land on the node. They get a notification that it's there, and that's that.
So tons of flexibility So it
[01:00:27] ODELL:
it it changes my suffix when I change it. Right? Now I'm at Odell at Zeus nuts dot com.
[01:00:34] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. You're on so by default, the cash users will use Zeus nuts when you switch to and that's probably why you couldn't make the payment earlier.
[01:00:43] ODELL:
Wait. So I mean, I mean, I didn't realize I had to change it in settings, but
[01:00:48] Evan Kaloudis:
it doesn't mean I lose Odell at Zeus Pay if I switch to Odell at Zeus Nuts. Right? No. No. You're locked in. We wouldn't let people split that up. We don't need more Odell imposters. No. You are the of Zeus Nuts and Zeus Pay. It's just a matter when it's active at a given time.
[01:01:05] ODELL:
But they both can't be active at the same time. It's not like if someone pays Zeus Pay when I have Zeus Nuts active, it's just a failed payment. Right? No. Maybe we'll tweak that over time, but right now, you're the only Odell on the Zeus Stack. Okay. Well, I really like the I like the idea of a fallback. Right? Because I just wanna ex I wanna be able to accept the payment regardless.
[01:01:28] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah.
[01:01:29] ODELL:
And, ideally, I mean, I think I'd rather accept it to my sovereign lightning channel. But if I don't have capacity, then it be able to fall back would be kinda nice. Maybe that's a premium feature. Maybe you can monetize on that. So just to be clear, [email protected], if I I can receive zaps to that, and there's no Zap there's no Zap locker thing. It's just instant. Right? It's instant. The sender will have their payment completed
[01:02:00] Evan Kaloudis:
automatically. There's no limit to how big or how small those payments can be as long as the mint has inbound capacity. You could send a payment as small as one sat to as big as whatever the Mint can handle. You don't have to worry about redeeming them within twenty four hours. By default, when your Zeus wallet starts up, it'll redeem them. I know we made a ton of optimizations to ZeusPay. So even if you're using Zaplocker, if you're using Cashew, whatever, the redemption process is about 50% quicker, so it's gonna fly by redeeming those. And, yeah, we we've got some really novel, stuff under the hood where your Zap is locked to your Cashew wallet's pub key so that we can't really, take that away from you. That that belongs to you as long as you still have your keys.
So a lot of cool. There, a lot of great UX improvements. And, yeah, we think that people using the embedded LND node, having channels even may still wanna just keep the Cashew wallet just for the better UX. And then we'll probably add, like, an automated threshold where it says, okay. Once I have a 10,000 sats in the Cashew wallet, let me just swap that automatically to lightning. So a lot of our stuff is largely still focused around self custody and making sure that we provide the best experience on that front. And we think that with ECash, we got a lot of awesome experiences that we couldn't do previously.
Like, we have someone who's been asking us to add gifting into Zeus for years now, like, the last three, four years. They're like, we just simply can't do it without having a custodial aspect, and we don't wanna be responsible for holding users' funds. But now with Cashew being able to mint a token, give it to someone, even post that QR, that token string on social media, is amazing. And if no one redeems it, like, if you try to gift it to, like, your server or something, you could check-in on the status of the token. They're like, oh, if it's been thirty days, this jerk didn't take the free money I gave him. You can just pull it back, which is amazing.
And, we made it very clear in the Zeus UI when you have tokens that you've issued, that haven't been redeemed yet, you just get the little eCash icon in your wallet header. So you could always just check-in on those, see how they're going, see how long it takes for Bob at the bar to claim his free sats or not.
[01:04:41] ODELL:
That's awesome.
[01:04:42] Evan Kaloudis:
So that's just, like, something we weren't able to do before, and we think it makes for a fantastic UX, something that we wanna check off for a long time.
[01:04:52] ODELL:
Oh, so I have to actually go to the lightning address and press redeem to to have it show up in my wallet?
[01:04:59] Evan Kaloudis:
No. There should be, an automatic redeem functionality just like the Zap locker. What in settings? Yeah. So if that's not working, it might be one of the quirks we gotta work out in the alpha. We'll be doing some testing. But
[01:05:15] ODELL:
Well, we're we're testing it live on air. I'm, I'm pressing redeem now. I sent myself sats to my Zeus nuts. I got it. It worked.
[01:05:30] Evan Kaloudis:
How often does a demo do live work? You're Check.
[01:05:35] ODELL:
Well, I mean, it didn't auto redeem. It's the only kinda work. One of two. That's a it's a win. Is it was it supposed to auto am I supposed to change something in settings? Or it should be on by default.
[01:05:49] Evan Kaloudis:
Maybe
[01:05:50] ODELL:
it Automatically
[01:05:51] Evan Kaloudis:
accept payments on startup. Only is sweeping them right now when you open the wallet up, but didn't catch it as it was coming in live. But, yeah, they should they should Okay. By the time, it should be sweeping them as you get them into the wallet.
[01:06:10] ODELL:
It's pretty clean, man. It's it's impressive.
[01:06:13] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. Well, we we spent a lot of time thinking about the UI. Go on. We had a lot of pages to pull from a lot of the existing Cashew wallets, and we we did a lot of, it's called dogfooding, where we just try out the product ourselves for weeks and weeks. We took a lot we we built it very quickly because Cashew is very easy to build upon, but we spent some time just testing it relentlessly and making sure everything works. We don't want anyone to lose any more money than they have to, you know, if they're gonna be getting rugged every week from their badmints. So
[01:06:50] ODELL:
Wow. Someone's still a little bit salty. Were you talking shit about Cashew publicly while you were building it in the background?
[01:06:57] Evan Kaloudis:
No. I mean, I always make jokes about it. You know my personality. Like,
[01:07:02] ODELL:
I
[01:07:03] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. I mean, you announced it on April fools. Kale didn't even if I was gonna rug him or not. I'm like people are like, is this real? Is this real? And, Kale is like, I I don't I'm not not sure if it's real. And I'm like, is it real, Kale, or am I teaching you an intro lesson about how it feels to be rugged? But he's got a good sense of humor too. He enjoyed it. He's he's happy once he finally saw the code. He's like, oh, okay. I'm gonna fork this.
[01:07:32] ODELL:
I knew I knew you guys weren't gonna rag us. Okay. So you mentioned swaps. What do you have in mind with swaps? How does that impact the user? What would the flow look like? Are you using bolts like everybody else? Okay. So swaps, we're really excited about. We have it running on Testnet now. We are about to deploy our mainnet instance after
[01:07:53] Evan Kaloudis:
just grinding it out. There's gonna be both, a web interface as well as an integration directly in the wallet. It is, at present, based off of Boltz. So we fork Boltz off. We are gonna be running our own instance, but users will have the ability to point to any Bolt powered swap service. So we're gonna have, like, three or four defaults. The Zeus one will be the default, of course, but it's trivial to switch between them, shop between all the different prices. Although we're gonna be trying to, keep it at the same pricing as the Bolt Exchange service. They've just built a great product. It's quite likely we'll derive it a little bit more as time goes on. We have some interesting concepts that we wanna explore.
Hopefully, we can submit some of them upstream to bolts. But, yeah, we just think there's a great demand for people to be able to get their funds, some funds off of Lightning to Unchained without having to close out the entire channel, especially now that L and D is in a bit of a weird state where they don't quite have splicing yet. It's not trivial to get those funds out. And, it's just in a very interesting business proposition for us too because, you know, we could charge on the swaps. We already have this experience running these lightning nodes and managing liquidity. And instead of having to commit to these, you know, arrangements where people are locking up your liquidity for, you know, two weeks to a year in the lightning channels, a swap only takes, you know, up to twenty minutes worst case scenario. Case scenario.
So it's a little bit easier to manage in that regard. As far as a user goes, we have a really clean UI. It's trivial to pull out funds from individual channels in the Zeus UI. We'll be iterating on it too so you get really granular with a very clear UI as you go on. And you could basically use it with any of the interfaces as long as you have an on chain address to spit out to. We'll help you generate an address just internally with one click. But you could also point it to an external address, whether it be an external bolt 11 address or an external address depending on what direction you're going. Just have a lot of added flexibility and a lot better user experience in a lot of regards.
And, hell, the ability to mix the Cashew and the swaps together, like, put all these nuts together, go right to an on chain address that's potentially
[01:10:45] ODELL:
The opposite is even more powerful. Like, using Cashew as a for newcomer, they need Lightning sats to begin with because you can't deposit on chain. But with this, presumably, they could install Zeus, open a Casu wallet, and then send Bitcoin from their exchange that doesn't support Lightning directly into the to the charming eCash wallet. Right? Just swap it right in. However you want. Bitcoin payments, you're away.
[01:11:20] Evan Kaloudis:
That's So now we have a wallet that has all these different Right? Yeah. Go on. We have self custodial lightning, of course. We have the on chain wallet. We have eCash, and we have support for these external signers, like your hardware wallet, like a cold card queue or seed signer. You could basically go any direction, swap between them however you see fit with a combination of melting a nut out of a mint and the swap service, opening, closing channels, however you see fit. Complete freedom to do whatever you want. We're gonna provide rails for you to sort of guide you to the direction, but if you want, you could just take those those bumpers off and do as you see fit.
So ahead of us for the rest of the year after we get 11 o out, we have a lot of challenges. And they're not so much technical anymore because we've gotten everything that we want running in this app, basically. Basically. But it's all gonna be focused on the interface and the user experience and how we make it as simple as possible for the newcomers while maintaining all the full functionality that we've built over the years. So we're So we're really excited for this new challenge we had have ahead of us. The product is really undergoing an evolution, and we think we're gonna hit a maturity point where it's ready to put this one point o label on.
So we have so much to be excited about with all these pieces, but yet the work still continues because design, UI, UX, it's a whole other beast. So just time to put another hat on soon.
[01:13:13] ODELL:
I love it. You're crushing it. Keep up the good work. So we you've mentioned many different ways you can use Zeus, on chain, self custody Lightning, custodial Lightning. We're seeing a new trend with wallets that was started with Aqua Wallet and then recently with Breeze's latest wallet, Misty Breeze, to use liquid with swaps. So liquid at rest. Do you keep money on liquid? And then when you wanna make a lightning transaction, there's a an on demand swap happens. What are your thoughts on liquid? Do you plan on adding Tether to your wallet? How are you thinking about this? Liquid
[01:14:02] Evan Kaloudis:
is fine if you're upfront with your users about what it is. It's a custodial side chain. Liquid's got a lot of perks because it's got all these different partners signing off on it. But at the same time, we don't know who all the signers are, Matt. That's not great. As far as these products go, the end user experience is really good in a lot of ways. It's, like, easy to use, easy to get set up with. Right? Have your balance in liquid. You can have a seed you can restore from. The limitations, though, and the fees have some room for improvement. The swaps can be costly, and that's what the service providers are really depending on. In a lot of cases, having a self custodial channel is actually cheaper.
And then you also have these constraints with what amounts you can send, and how they actually end up operating. Let's say if you bootstrap a lightning address to them, you have, like, these limits used. In a lot of cases, they need to be big enough to justify a swap, or they end up being even more custodial than it would be to just use liquid by itself. And then those fees aren't great. Like, if you were to receive a hundred sat zap and have to pay 45 of those sats per swap costs, it's not so great for those users getting set up.
[01:15:44] ODELL:
Well, when I was when I was testing Misty, they they just don't let you do payments underneath under a thousand SATs. Is there a way around that, I guess?
[01:15:58] Evan Kaloudis:
Or make sure the user doesn't have all their sats eaten up by fees. It's tough. It's tough when you're doing these swap based things. Right? Like and we saw it with, with Moon Wallet. Right? Like, all these wallets are really just Yeah. Liquid. So a little less intensive. They'll scale better with the feed market, but they really still have all these same constraints with the UTXOs on their their chains even if they are side chains. I think I'm really more intrigued by what's gonna shake out with some of these other systems. I know, at Zeus, we're keeping our eyes close on Arc, which is really interesting, but has its own set of challenges for sure.
But I think could end up having a a better user experience as well as some other proposals that we find really interesting that we're keeping our eyes on that we could potentially see in, like, a Zeus two point o.
[01:17:06] ODELL:
Like what?
[01:17:09] Evan Kaloudis:
You know, there's just a couple of interesting proposals. Our friend, Supertestnet. So Super, we worked on, the Zap locker spec together, got that into Zeus. He's got a protocol called Hedgehog, and he's been strapping that onto a coin pool scheme, which is super interesting. And, honestly, it doesn't have enough people looking at it. I think there's some problems that he still needs to address in it, but I think the properties that it has are just unbelievable. You get a lot of the perks that you get with eCash and Cashew, like, being able to send asynchronously and have these tokens that could be redeemed, better onboarding flows.
But to do it all in a self custodial manner, it's sort of like a holy grail. So we're taking a look at that, trying to help push that along where we can. And, yeah, we're just generally being open to things. Like, we know that with this technology, things are changing rapidly. The way people use Bitcoin self custodially right now is gonna be very different than it looks like in five years and ten years. I think we have some sort of, like, solace in the fact that Lightning is working so well. I think it's proven its placement as the payment rails. The way that you're gonna clear these payments, near instantly and sort of being this bridge between all these different systems.
But there's, like, this interesting battle brewing right now to see how people are going to be using Bitcoin. And we need to be open to exploring them all, chasing down all the value propositions of them, seeing what the trade offs are, and sort of being, you know, realistic in in what people are gonna end up using because, like I said, the behavior that is apparent right now where people are just chasing yield on ETFs, you know, is is really not the world that we wanna be in.
[01:19:27] ODELL:
I mean, the dream wallet would be if I could hold MSTY in my Zeus wallet and then have the dividends auto swap into Cashew so then I can just pay for my coffee?
[01:19:43] Evan Kaloudis:
Maybe. I mean, that'd be interesting. I mean, we saw we see we're we're seeing a lot of interesting stuff going on right now. Right?
[01:19:53] ODELL:
I mean, I was just fucking around. Obviously, that's not what I want. No. Don't no. Hey. Listen. Don't take it up against you.
[01:20:00] Evan Kaloudis:
You you're gonna take it, Matt. Right? You'll be dead where the yield comes from. It's all about the yield. But, no. I don't know, man. We'll we'll we'll we'll see. About that cash flow. See how things freak out. Obviously, this there seems to be some focus on bringing stables to Bitcoin, which obviously comes with a lot of pros and cons.
[01:20:26] ODELL:
Yeah. How do you feel about that? Terrified
[01:20:30] Evan Kaloudis:
at how it could go wrong, first and foremost, but I understand why a lot of people are getting, excited about it. And I really do think it could do some crazy things for you know, it could open up a lot of doors, for what these flows look like. I I think we just need to be careful about I mean, we're already playing with fire, having all of these nation like In what way? I mean, obviously, Bitcoin is not meant for governments to embrace and be like, oh, yeah. This is gonna be great. Like, what happens when they show up for the next soft fork meeting and they're like, no. I don't think so. We got all these economic nodes, and we're gonna signal that we're not activating this upgrade that we need. Like, that that would be pretty bad. But at the same time, if they're just running the same code that everyone else is running, There's a limit to how much pain they could on us.
At the same time, we also have these ETFs, a lot of paper Bitcoin in the air that can you know, I I think we're evidencing it right now. Like, there's a lot of on suppression. The same sort of thing that happened when gold ETFs, got spun up. Obviously, these guys in the middle wanna make a buck on it where they can. And
[01:22:08] ODELL:
You think you think ETFs are already playing paper Bitcoin games, like fractionally reserve?
[01:22:16] Evan Kaloudis:
It's the temptation is so
[01:22:19] ODELL:
I mean, it's a pretty bold claim.
[01:22:22] Evan Kaloudis:
I mean, I think we'd be foolish to not think that people would at least try. I don't know what how widespread the practice is. I I don't have evidence directly of people doing it. I'm not bringing it to, you know, the SEC right now. I'm not that guy.
[01:22:39] ODELL:
Probably wouldn't be. Not right now.
[01:22:42] Evan Kaloudis:
No. No. No. No. No. That's that's not my forte. But come on. I mean, you know, human nature. People are fallible. They're gonna do bad stuff if they have the opportunity to do so.
[01:22:56] ODELL:
No. I agree. I just I mean, I think it'd be pretty quick for them to I don't know if they're doing it yet. There's no way for us to verify. Right? That's the dangerous part. And no one's no one's doing proof of reserves except for Bitb
[01:23:15] Evan Kaloudis:
and Meta Planet and the South and Dorn government. Like, really the only saving grace we have is that the cost of doing that is so low. But unless it become common yeah. What privileges? If the holders of those ETFs demand it and it becomes common practice, then we can totally end up in this crazy fractional reserve world.
[01:23:40] ODELL:
Well, I mean, I think the the combination of so many places so many Bitcoin exchanges, and then the fact that you can easily self custody makes it very different than gold. Like, try and take settlement of a million dollars worth of gold. That'd be a pain in the ass. Like, your wife is I mean, she'll be happy that she has a million dollars worth of gold, but she'd be kinda pissed off if, like, the truck pulls up, and it's like a whole fucking thing. With Bitcoin, you don't have that issue. So if you have enough people taking self custody, eventually, anyone who plays games should get wrecked, just blowing the fuck out. But we got And I think that looks like in private. That's what protects us. Saying this all time. It's like It'll be messy as fuck is what it's gonna be, but, like and people will lose a lot of money, but I think it happens. I, like, I I think it's it's the natural protection mechanism we have. Right? Yeah. It's just unfortunate that,
[01:24:39] Evan Kaloudis:
you know, some of these players are getting so big. They're gonna have such downstream effects on people who actually get hurt.
[01:24:49] ODELL:
But if you think about it right? So let's just walk through it. Self cuss if you're holding Bitcoin self custody, right, and let's use, let's use BlackRock as an example. Let's say BlackRock doesn't have all the Bitcoin that they're say they do. And they try and suppress the price, and they're successful with it. And then enough people are just constantly stacking Sats to cold storage that eventually the price suppression breaks and Bitcoin runs to the upside. And we have, you know, a couple weeks where we just go up 20% or 30%, and they're underwater and they're freaking out. And someone figures it out, and they just blow the fuck up.
Now if you're holding the BlackRock ETF, you just you just played yourself. Congratulations. Like, you just lost your money, or you took a haircut, whatever, 40%, thirty %, whatever the fraction is. But does I don't think the Bitcoin market responds downward in that situation. If BlackRock is short It's a small margin. They would have to they would have to try and source it in the open market. And and and also, like, a bunch of people that thought they had Bitcoin but were holding BlackRock realized they don't have Bitcoin. They might individually try and source to try and make themselves whole and have the Bitcoin they thought they did. So, actually, in that situation, we'd probably there might be a moment of panic, but we'd probably go up in that situation.
So you, humble self custody holder, aren't like, you're in a better sit like, you're pretty much unfazed. If anything, it might be a benefit. That's that's providing
[01:26:35] Evan Kaloudis:
the fraud gets called out and and discovered. You know? As you're having these pay these paper Bitcoin on the market, it's, you know, it it's suppressing the price. There's more fake supply going on and sort of pushes that sort of supply crunch moment that those suddenly moments kicks them down the road. But when discovered, Matt Right. These events become very, very violent as the price signals correct themselves, as, the price correct itself compared to the supply that there actually is compared to what we thought there was. It's gonna make for some explosive times, and it's for some explosive swings.
And we could at least have some solace in the fact that they will almost certainly happen, and they will make for some great times for us as holders, and just in terms of headlines. Now the problem we have to worry about is if that causes government to step in and intervene and be like, okay. We gotta get Michael Sailor his Bitcoin back. We're gonna do a hard fork. Right now, I think we'd survive that pretty easily. We'd be like, no. Fuck you. But if the government becomes more entrenched in Bitcoin, they're using it for, you know, all these retirement funds, backing it as a reserve asset, like, to a crazy extent, like, then we're gonna have some real battles on our hands. We gotta be ready to go to war because, you know, we're just gonna have bailouts again.
[01:28:18] ODELL:
Yeah. I mean but that would be the first the first instinct would be a bailout, not a hostile hard fork. It would be print money, buy Bitcoin on the open market.
[01:28:29] Evan Kaloudis:
Yeah. I mean, just just because just because these these bankers and the politicians, everything's a nail and the hammer is the printing press. Right? It's just the easiest Yeah. Weapon to deploy. So
[01:28:46] ODELL:
Way easier to print money and do a bailout than
[01:28:50] Evan Kaloudis:
hard has filed for the mailing class and show up at BitDevs.
[01:28:56] ODELL:
I mean, I don't know what, yeah, I mean, I don't know what situation we'd have to be in for, like, there to be support. I I still think we're probably pretty far away from a hard fork because
[01:29:11] Evan Kaloudis:
MSTR mismanaged their keys. They would have to be, like, a vast amount of the populace retiring, lost their retirement funds, and you had uprisings and stuff. You'd have to get really, really
[01:29:23] ODELL:
Yeah. But none of those people hold Bitcoin or run notes or anything. They all have a CR. That's the whole point. So they kinda I mean, they kinda played themselves in that situation. They're gonna want that anyway. No one can comprehend what happens. One way or the other. Yeah. It could it'll be interesting. No matter how you cut it, it's gonna I think the most interesting times are still ahead of us. That's for sure.
[01:29:52] Evan Kaloudis:
We'll see. I mean, once the US dollar is issued on Taproot assets and everyone's using it, then
[01:30:01] ODELL:
Well, I'm glad you brought it back to that. So, I mean, this is my original question. You just went all in on, like, post ETF and this and what we're playing with fire. What what is your opinion on USD tokens on Lightning, and are you thinking about implementing them in Zeus? Is there actually demand for it? How do you think about that? I think in the world, there is demand for
[01:30:27] Evan Kaloudis:
stable coins. I don't think there's necessarily demand for that among Zeus users per se, but, you know, being combo, we don't have a crazy amount. We have tens of thousands of users. We don't have hundreds of thousands or millions of users. I think that, of course, we should be skeptical of embracing these assets. But if we have, a, the opportunity to make it easier to liquidate US dollars directly to Bitcoin, we should embrace that where we can. And, b, the opportunities that we have to Bitcoinize and eCashize the dollar, meaning it has the fantastic privacy properties that this technology affords us and doesn't take us down the dystopian CBDC future that could very well happen. I don't care how many times the sitting president says we're not implementing it. That could change like that with the next administration.
I I think we'd be remiss not to jump on those opportunities. I think there's a bit of an inevitability when technology is just so overwhelmingly, better in a lot of ways. That being said, it's not gonna be so straightforward when the powers that be understand the value of having that level of control, that privacy invasion, that surveillance. It's really going to be difficult, but we we need to recognize too is that there's not just one entity in the state. Yes. It operates like that, but there are many different factions that stand to benefit in many different ways. And the administration we have now is gonna look different from the one that follows this, and these views are gonna evolve as the technology evolves and as the market embraces it more and more.
So, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't expect, shit coins in Zeus. I mean, but, you know, the one we just added right now. But I do expect the dollar to continue to lean towards those stable coins to become more and more digital, and we can only hope that it's in a way that we can easily to Bitcoin and that it has good privacy properties. That's not this dystopian nightmare. So we'll see. Some developments I'm seeing are good. Some are really bad. It's it's really gonna be an interesting battle that takes place for the the next couple of decades, I think, before we before that new Bretton Woods moment really happens. There's a lot of things that could happen in between when things really start to break down currency reset.
It's crazy to be at the forefront of it and and seeing it firsthand. You know?
[01:33:36] ODELL:
I could tell you're becoming an experienced CEO because it was, like, the most long winded non answer about adding Oh, no. Tell us about coming to the shoes. Come on. Even even as a taproot asset? No. No. I don't think so.
[01:33:53] Evan Kaloudis:
I think our mission is to spread Bitcoin to the world. I think that we'd stand to benefit if Tether is issued on Lightning and is used. I think we'd see a great amount of benefit from the increased volumes on Lightning. We would benefit from that. But we are just really focused on spreading Bitcoin. And, hopefully, people who are liquidating that tether, that USDT in getting on to Bitcoin eventually find their way in Zeus.
[01:34:29] ODELL:
Love it. Well, sir, you are crushing it. We are all very I think I can speak for everyone that we're very grateful to have you building on Bitcoin. I don't know. My life would be much more difficult without Zeus than without your work, so thank you. What do you think about coming back on when you release 1%. Absolutely. 13?
[01:34:50] Evan Kaloudis:
Episode 13. Yeah. Let's do it.
[01:34:53] ODELL:
Awesome. Good chat, sir. Do you have any final thoughts for our freaks before we,
[01:34:59] Evan Kaloudis:
wrap here? Let's see. Check out the Zeus o point 11 alpha. We need as many people testing it as possible. Let's get those bugs ironed out. We're gonna be hooking up a lot of people with some of the Zeus Pay plus features, so they could test things out. A lot of the perks there are gonna be developing, but consider checking them out and subscribing once it's all deployed so you could support us and enjoy those great perks. Look out for swaps coming soon. They're not in the current alpha, but they'll be dropping in the next week or two. And, yeah, just give us as much feedback as possible. We're always listening. We're trying to see how people are using Zeus, try to fill in the gaps.
We've been laying down all these stones, laying down this path to where we wanna go and making self custodial Bitcoin the best experience it can be and onboarding as many people as possible to making Bitcoin payments widespread reality, and that's not gonna happen without the help of a whole lot of people. So we're just try playing trying to play our part where we can.
[01:36:10] ODELL:
Wonderful. Freaks, search Zeus in your favorite app store. Press that download button. Check it out. Play around with it. Give your feedback to Evan. He loves all your feedback, especially if you just tag him on Take him on him on Oscar. Hit him with a GIF. No. Honestly, probably. Yeah. Hit him with one of those. All caps. Two minutes.
[01:36:31] Evan Kaloudis:
Be nice, guys. Come on. Evan, thank you. Thank No. I can take it.
[01:36:37] Unknown:
Thank thank you for
[01:36:40] ODELL:
It was a good chat, sir. It was a good chat. Thank you for joining us. Freaks, thank you for supporting the show. Thank you for listening. Share with your friends and family. All the relevant links are still dispatch.com. It's available in all podcast apps, YouTube, Nostr, download primal. Join us on Nostr, Zapsats. We have NVK coming next week. That's gonna be Tuesday, the twenty ninth. I think I might have said Wednesday earlier. I was just fucking up my days again, but it's Tuesday, the twenty ninth. Same time, twenty one hundred UTC, if you wanna join us in the live chat. Otherwise, we'll be posting podcast apps afterwards. Lito zapped 10,000 sats in the Zap stream. Thank you, Lito.
A couple more shout outs shouts to BTC pins, my awesome Zeus tumbler. Dude, BTC pins is best in class. What's his website? Is it BGCpins.com?
[01:37:38] Evan Kaloudis:
Unbelievable. We've done, like, three pins with him. They're all quality. I got a shout out to Canuto. He made this awesome Cashew Zeus dog tag. It looks pretty crazy. Baller. And, yeah, just chows to everyone who supports us and allows us to do what we love and help spread Bitcoin to the masses. It's not just that shiny rock that you stash under your mattress. Let's make it something that people can use every day for payments all across the world.
[01:38:13] ODELL:
Damn right. Love you all.
CNBC
Introduction
Zeus Wallet Overview
Zeus Wallet Features and Updates
Neutrino and Privacy in Bitcoin Wallets
Bitcoin Wallet User Experience
Cashu Integration in Zeus
Lightning Network and Hub-and-Spoke Model
Bitcoin Park Node Management
Cashu Wallet and User Journey
Thresholds for Self-Custody
User Prompts and Education
Zeus Wallet Features: Gifting and Tokens
Swaps and User Flow
Future Developments in Bitcoin Wallets
USD Tokens and Stablecoins on Bitcoin
ETFs and Bitcoin Market Dynamics
Final Thoughts and Future Plans
