Brian Mahoney, Chief Business Officer at Thesis and co-founder of Mezo.org Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me on. I'm excited to be here, Peter. So I wanna start out with something controversial you said. um Actually, it's not controversial, but it is interesting though. You called yourself a Bitcoin stoic. uh Maybe give us a sense of what that means and then help us understand kind of like how you got into the whole crypto space. Yeah, so Bitcoin Stoic is our term for the Bitcoin Maxis. uh So we believe that there's sort of a better way to describe them. Maybe Bitcoin Maxi or the term Maxi is a little bit aggressive on the description. uh So for us, we prefer the term Stoic, which really just means, you know, long-term believer holder and, you know, particularly a believer in the kind of what Bitcoin is about, the ethos of it. And for us, we refer to that as freedom tech. uh We got into Bitcoin and have been building in Bitcoin because we believe in the ethos first and foremost and the power to sort of revolutionize capital markets, finance, global markets as it is. And so that's sort of why we call it Stellarx versus Maxis. uh And because a lot of them, we like to believe our users not just hold holders as well. So that's sort how we think about the user demographic internally. ah And then in terms of my story and how I got into this space. So I like to say I'm a former TradFi guy turned DeFi Tgen. But what I mean by that is I was in traditional capital markets and finance banking world for just about 10 years before I took the leap full time into crypto. This was back in 2016 and Bitcoin and the promise of sort of blockchain technology was my sort of initial bite at the rabbit hole. then since then, I've been working on really building and trying to democratize capital markets and finance ever since. I have this sort of tailwind belief that blockchains are how internet money, which is really what Bitcoin and the rest of crypto is all about. It should be built on an internet first and native experience. um know, if think about the way blockchains are designed, they're built for an internet, you know, 24 seven, globally accessible financial world. And the current banking system, you know, conversely is operated on the Swift network, which was, you know, built in a analog pre internet world dating back to the late eighties and nineties. So if you're a believer that know, internet, the internet and the power of, you know, digitally native and just in general apps and the way that, you know, we interact as a sort of human race and economy globally today. If the internet is going to continue to proliferate and eat everything, finance is up next and it starts with blockchains and Bitcoin. How do you balance kind of the long-term vision and ideology, the crypto-punk ideology with practicality? Yeah, it's a great question, which is kind why we call it this. That's why we use the term stoic as opposed to Maxi. You know, I think there's, it's definitely a little bit of a barbell or sort of pendulum type approach. You know, having that 10 year vision, but you know, thinking, okay, how do you bootstrap that along the way? I refer to this as sort of like the zero to one stage, which is like the classic, you know, idea to product in the startup world and finding that product market fit. And then the one to two stage, is how do you scale beyond and really hit, know, a hundred million plus users make a difference in kind of the average, average everyday lives of people around the world. And so for us, what we're doing is building towards that 10 year vision. And we have been because thesis actually has been building on and around Bitcoin since dating back to 2014. But for us, you know, finding those use cases along the way is critical so we can keep that snowball and momentum going. Um, so it's really, you know, starting first, especially with like a lot of the kind of the beachhead or like land and expand use cases are crypto native or, or defy, know, decentralized finance type users finding that. then, you know, bootstrapping from there and kind of finding that product market fit beyond and to the average users. And, um, I think it's been a little bit of a challenge, not just for us, but the space in general, especially with some of the regulatory, uh, headwinds that have been faced in the industry. think we've hit sort of at least from a United States perspective, there's been a lot of that's been opening up, especially with the new administration that's coming in. I think regulatory clarity is here. ah So that should make things a bit easier going forward, is the hope with that clarity to really kind of move from beyond just like that crypto native, DeFi use case into real world use cases or Web2, if you call it that. And that's the thinking there. So we're positioned for both and expanding iteratively along the way. you know, phrases that you use like beachhead, land and expand sounds very practical to me. And it's actually refreshing to hear that because you don't hear that from a lot of crypto native folks. um And it shows that you're coming into the crypto space with a rich and varied business background, which I think is very helpful for crypto in general. um Let's switch to... to thesis and mezzo. For the audience who may not be familiar with thesis, maybe tell us about that and then how mezzo came out of that. Yeah, So Feces, as I mentioned, has been around dating back to 2014. We've been building the space. Our first company was this company called Fold, which is still around today. They actually listed on the NASDAQ in the US here publicly. Actually, the bell ringing was about a couple of weeks ago from this recording. So we're pretty excited to that. was a, excited about that. was a nine year journey to get to that point. And, you know, I think it's... showing that the power of Bitcoin and native applications is starting to really hit more of the average kind of user and becoming mainstream. And for us, Thesis has really just kind of been tightening and iterating on that playbook as we go along ever since we started with Fold. um Since then, we usually prefer to kind of do one to two projects a cycle. uh So we're a studio model where we put our own capital and resources in first. um As a company, have uh about 70 folks at Vesis and it really blows down to like proving these kind of product market use cases, getting into a what's going to make a difference in people's lives and how do we make Bitcoin useful, which is our North Star. um So we tend to make deep conviction bets one to two a cycle. And this current cycle Mezo.org is one of those main bets. We've done a few others over the years. We have TBDC, which is a Bitcoin bridge that's sort of analogous to, you're familiar, if your audience is familiar with WBTC, it's a wrapped Bitcoin competitor, but it has more of a decentralized signer set. So it's very much aligned with the Bitcoin ethos. So a lot of these like rapid coins are two of three or more centralized in nature. And for us, we've tried to make TBDC and related products as close to Bitcoin as possible in terms of the decentralization, open source, kind of public good ethos. ah And then Mezo.org in particular is kind of the expansion upon that. We realized that, you know, the sort of the side chain or Bitcoin L2, kind of whatever you want to call it, roll up. There's plenty of different names for it. Has still not quite found the product market fit yet in the space, although there's been a lot of folks attacking it over the years and trying to, you know, kind of create this beyond hodl type of use case for Bitcoin. And it's pretty clear that, you know, it's, challenging to do that on the Bitcoin L1. And so that's why an L2 or sidechain sort of use case makes sense because it creates, you know, it unlocks that scalability, but still can kind of tie back to Bitcoin at the end of the day. So for us, that's what Mezo.org is about is, you know, creating a place where you can come and make your Bitcoin useful and really kind of create a, almost like a bank on yourself type experience, which means, you know, you can hold and speculate if you want, which you can also maybe take out a loan against your Bitcoin. You can maybe earn some yield on your Bitcoin. You can shop with your Bitcoin. You can participate in, you can donate with your Bitcoin. can participate in liquidity pools with your Bitcoin. So there's plenty of different kinds of use cases that Mezo.org unlocks that, you know, aren't currently possible on native Bitcoin L1. got it. if you were speaking to the mainstream audience, how would you describe mezzo to them and then maybe help us, maybe take us through the key target audiences and the messaging to each one? Yeah, sure. uh So the core use case or the headline for Mezo.org is bank on yourself. And what we mean by that is it's a place that you can control your entire journey. You don't have to like give up custody of your underlying BTC. You can control and operate as an individual along the way or an institution. There's no third parties or intermediaries that you have to trust. No black boxes. Nothing is off chain. uh So you can take your Bitcoin, deposit it into these contracts that are fully open source, decentralized. We have 21 plus validators on Mezo.org as it stands. So it's already pretty decentralized. uh And moving into the application layer, once you're on the chain, you'll be able to really one of the core use cases is Bitcoin financing. uh So where we believe is a major opportunity is uh moving towards use cases that allow you to hold or continue to partake in the upside of your underlying equity, which in this case would be Bitcoin, and use other uh financial tools, if you will, to make it useful. So uh the flagship product of Mezo.org and the chain is MUSD, which is our Bitcoin-backed stablecoin. And it is a way for you to borrow against your Bitcoin. at a pretty competitive rate. About 1 % of the gates is what we're going to be charging folks or what the chain will be charging folks. So undercutting a lot of the competitive offerings out there, as well as not bringing in any additional risks in the form of like credit risk, for example, or black boxes of rehypothication. Your Bitcoin sits on mezzo at all times and you're able to control that journey and decide what you do with it along that way. which is very appealing to the Bitcoin-style crowd. um That sounds really interesting. um Tell us about MUSD. What are some of the use cases and how for a stable coin to make sense and to uh eventually get traction, it's got to be used in other protocols. What are your thoughts around that? Yeah. So the way we're thinking about this is a sort of a three phase rollout process. Um, and it's a little bit of a chicken and egg issue. You know, you're familiar with kind of bootstrapping marketplaces, you have the supply side and the demand side. And usually when, um, and this could apply, you know, not just crypto like Uber, for example, it's like the classic chicken and egg, you know, you got cars and you've got people looking to take, cars or rides. Right. And so as you scale out this application, if you focus on both, right, sometimes that tends to not really work that well in bootstrapping a marketplace. So that's why I use these terms like land and expand or beachhead. So for us, uh what that boils down to with bootstrapping MUSD on Mezo.org is focusing on the supply side first, and then moving into the demand side next. So supply side is just simply deposits, meaning growing the balance sheet or the capital on the system. because the more capital you have and the more volumes you have, the more things you can do off the back of that. So that's really kind of the key thing is to build that foundation for MUSD on Mezo.org, as well as other places that MUSD might be available. And then, uh you for us, the target is to grow to a billion plus dollars worth of Bitcoin on the system. um And then folks can, you know, as that volume and capital grows on the chain, folks can borrow against that and use it to uh access or deploy on the demand and hold side. So one of the kind of initial use cases for MSD will just be simply getting yield, which creates a nice flywheel and opens up the ability for you to not only access or can maintain the upside on your underlying spot BTC, especially as we might be entering a new bull market here. I think that's, you know, pretty appealing to folks from what we've seen. And then they'll be able to kind of double dip and open up, you know, other types of yield opportunities off the back of that. And taking it one step further beyond just like a yield or a hold use case, actually using it in the real world. That's where we're going. So starting kind of DeFi native first, but moving into off-chain use cases like on ramps and centralized exchange venues, for example, opening up, donating. to Bitcoin Foundation is another example where we'll be able actually to enable that. Shopping and e-commerce is another use case where we think, you know, an MUST use case might make sense for folks because rarely do you see have folks that want to, you know, spend their Bitcoin on like a gift card or a t-shirt or something like that. But if you enable a stable coin against that, they're more likely willing to spend that stable coin and engage in that while still holding their underlying principle. What do you think of the, I think it's Steak and Shake restaurant that announced that they'll be accepting Bitcoin now. What do you think of that approach? Do you think that they're really sincere? Is it just a marketing thing? Probably a little bit both, but regardless, it's a massive moment for Bitcoin development and shows the real world use cases for Bitcoin are not just holding or speculating. um I think the momentum and hype that that partnership has generated, uh shake and shake with Lightning and some of the providers there is great for Bitcoin because that continues to further drive positive sentiment, especially in the kind of your average retail user. or participant. So for me, think it's a huge and positive development for Bitcoin's evolution. Now, me personally, would I want to go spend my Bitcoin at stake and shake? I think it depends where we are in the cycle. But I think in general, it's a net positive for the tailwinds of Bitcoin and the use cases beyond it. I think, you know, for us, though, we're ultimately more in kind of the camp of let's hold the equity and upside and and open up ways for you to borrow against or get collateral, get T-Loans against your Bitcoin collateral. I think that makes sense and I think I can see a lot of people preferring to actually do that and not not user Bitcoin but instead borrow against it. That seems to be a very kind of popular use case. um Bitcoin lending space too is also just on that, know, rapidly heating back up. think it was hot back in the days of like BlockFi and Celsius with, you know, kind of 2020, 2021, 2022 timeframe. But, you know, it showed that with those companies failings that, you know, they're kind of the traditional like rehypothecation or traditional like bank lending model is not quite a fit for Bitcoin. and its use cases there. So that's kind of why we ultimately as well, like have landed on this sort of bank on yourself narrative and use case for Mezo.org with Bitcoin, because we believe that, you know, folks that are holding Bitcoin ultimately want to, uh you know, continue to keep and holding their Bitcoin, right? Capture that upside. But when you can do when you can get a loan against that and do it in a way that you control your own journey end to end. it becomes quite appealing and do it at an extremely low and competitive cost of capital, right? That doesn't allow you to, you know, doesn't have like forced repayments or, you you can't view your balances or anything like that. You know, there's a, cause you know, lot of times when you look at like your, let's say you're on like a Coinbase exchange or one of these centralized venues, you know, that number that you see on the screen, even like in traditional finance with your checking account and bank account. the number you see on screen when you go into like your checking account or your account balance is not technically sitting there, right? It's this thing called rehypothication. The bank is, know, how they're paying you money with that interest rate in your account is because they're lending your capital out on the other side. And, you know, with the regulatory, especially in the U.S. with FDIC insurance, right, you're covered up to $250,000 worth of capital in your account. But, you know, with sort of the lagging regulatory frameworks, especially in the U.S., around crypto and crypto banking, right? A lot of folks haven't had sort of that um luxury of relying on, you know, the U.S. government to make sure that they have sort of a backstop. And so that's also, you know, we'll see kind of how things play out with uh regulatory and capital markets frameworks. But I think for now, like, you know, people are just generally mistrusting of these centralized players. And so that's why for us, you know, especially if you're a Bitcoin holder, a bank or yourself sort of operation makes a lot of sense. Yeah, the headline bank on yourself has really nice soft edges. It's not aggressive uh and it's very inclusive. Other Bitcoin layer twos, they kind of err on the very technical side and they're clearly speaking to a different audience. Tell us how you're thinking about the Bitcoin L2 space and where Mezo.org fits. That's a question. Well, it's pretty competitive category. think after last year, in 2024, was one of the most well-funded categories by investors in the industry, in the crypto industry. I count probably 100 plus Bitcoin L2s at this point. Sidechains, I'm calling it Bitcoin L2 sidechains, they're all sort of the same thing for me, which in a sense, they're attacking it from different problems, which is one is making Bitcoin useful, I think, and two is scaling the Bitcoin product and blockchain without having to do anything on the L1 hard forks, that sort of thing to make it scalable. And so for us at Mezo.org, ah we are not positioning ourselves as like a generic Bitcoin L2. We are marketing to developers, but uh we have open source docs, GitHub, all that folks can go on and deploy and use. Mezo.org will be sort of a public good at the end of the day. And it's going to be launching, by the way, here very shortly on Maynet. So a little bit of alpha here for your viewers. Yeah, so keep an eye out at Bitcoin Vegas at the end of the month here. But in terms of the sort of the differentiating factor, you can almost think of us as like an application first and a chain second. And what I mean by that is if you look at like the evolution of let's say some other projects in the space that have found product market fit, eventually they end up building down the stack, right? Because usually they'll start out, especially if they're like a DeFi app, they'll start out in Ethereum first, but they're paying those third party fees to the Ethereum network through gas fees, for example. So like a DyDX is a great example of this. One of the first movers in this category, they launched on each and then eventually moved down the stack after finding product market fit and built. you know, their own sort of ecosystem, uh top up to top down. um And so for us, you know, we took a little bit of a different approach. started bottoms up kind of in those learnings of, of, you know, builders before us and said, okay, let's build this chain first. Makes, it super competitive from a fee and transaction fee standpoint. And then, you know, as we kind of built that up, launch an application on top that, you know, speaks to folks directly and in immediate product market fit use case. So. It allows us to be super scalable and composable out of the gates while making sure that uh we stay as true to Bitcoin and the ethos of Bitcoin as possible, is open source, community led, decentralization, all of that. You mentioned Mainnet coming up and a really important part of all crypto projects is building a community, a thriving, engaged community prior to launching a Mainnet. How has that effort been for you and Mezo.org? It's a big lift launching a chain, that's for sure. um There's a lot that goes into it. It's not just simply uh spinning up a little code and shipping. really, kind of with launching a chain, your product is the economy. ah It's not just one product kind of thing. You have to think about a lot of other types of use cases. So for us, for example, we have developers as one cohort uh of users. We have validators and chain operators as another cohort. We have users. Just general users who want to come in and use the products as another group. have investors as another group. it just really launching a chain. I think it just really expands the scope of all the different sort of things you have to think about. And for us, though, it's right in our sweet spot. mean, because we've been building on Bitcoin and around Bitcoin for the last 10 plus years at Thesis, a chain was sort of a natural fit of our evolution because we have a track record of shipping A plus apps and companies over the years. So we view launching as a of a completion of this almost 10 year journey of evolution. And for us, it is the first time where we have an on-chain platform in place that we can tie everything together. So it's a nice sort of bow on top for everything we've been building over the last 10 years at Thesis. You know, I love interviewing Bitcoin projects or projects that are, you know, trying to carry Bitcoin forward and making it more mainstream. I've met with lots of them in the last couple of months with Citrea, Cordao, Babylon, Lombard, and others too. And it's really refreshing to see that. um And one question I've asked all of them, you you mentioned Bitcoin Maxi and you prefer Bitcoin Stoic. which I like by the way, it's a lot softer and less aggressive. Yeah, yeah, and it's also more truthful, Bitcoin is what it is, you just kind of roll with it. Yeah, I'm not sure I want to be a maxi, but I'll be a stoic. yeah, yeah, me too. You as you think about Bitcoin as a useful asset, and how do you reconcile the fact that, um you know, some people would just prefer to just hold it, right? um And it's a store value and transacting with it doesn't make any sense to them. um I can see MUSD as a solution to that audience type who might not be interested in doing really anything with their Bitcoin, but they would prefer to borrow against it. And I think that's a very large market. um For those that are uh building programmable kind of solutions for Bitcoin, an L2, how do you respond to the Bitcoin audience that might not view that as a good thing? Like that's against, uh, cyberpunk principles or whatever. Uh, and I'm sure there's, there's probably some voices like that night anyway. Yeah. What are your thoughts on that? Yeah, I think um for us, it's really about use cases, right? So I think those folks that are building scalability solutions or things that are maybe more directly tied into the Bitcoin L1, not necessarily creating a sidechain or an L2, at the end of the day, we're all just trying to make Bitcoin more useful in our respective backgrounds and focus areas. So for us, I think there's been a lot of people that are focused on scaling Bitcoin from a code and use case standpoint, payments, right? That's a big focus of Lightning. um And I think there's a lot of capital going in, but there's not a little bit of an overlooked area is these kind of application layer type of use cases that are on chain. And so for us, it made a lot of sense to focus on this area because number one, we have a lot of background in building consumer and retail focused products. kind of dating back to fold and the work we did there. So it's sort of a natural fit from our skill set and what we think is our kind of advantages as builders in the space. We know this market well. And I also think that some of these other approaches are a little bit more of a boil the ocean type approach. It's going to require a lot of capital, a lot of convincing of different community groups and users to adopt these standards, right? Because if you're going to unlock a payments network, you know, you got to agree on a standard that's going to be, you know, across a lot of different groups of users. And that's going to take some time to kind of get that as we've seen, right? mean, it's, Lightning's been doing this for quite some time, Lightspark and David Mark is his project, right? So there's a lot of different attempts at, you know, kind of taking a bite of that same apple, but trying it a little bit of a different way. so for us, you know, indirectly we're addressing quite a lot of that, but we believe that. you know, the use case should be application first. And if you can get that product market fit out of the gates and really tap into, you know, a new user group of, or an existing user group that maybe has been dormant for some time and reactivate those folks and drive excitement, I think that, you know, the rest of the stuff should accelerate. So in a lot of ways, we're all kind of attacking the same problem as just a little bit of a different sort of path to get there. And I think the strengths that your team brings is the, you guys have gained quite a bit of insight on like the crypto consumer and crypto has, you know, one criticism against it is that almost every application is at the infrastructure level and there are no like real users, but you know, we know that's not, that's not true. There are real users, there are, and there's a couple of consumer applications. I'm curious about some of the insights, you know, over the last, you know, seven to ten years, you guys have gained a lot of insights around the crypto consumer. um What are a couple of those that maybe we can learn from? Yeah, that's great question. I'll say that one of the first things that came to mind was the user experience and user. So UI UX user, various user experience. I think we have a long way to go with building a blockchain applications. If you compare like what's in the Apple App Store, the Android, Google App Store, many of those are Web2 or Web2 off-chain. apps that interact with the blockchain indirectly. And I think the next step is building it natively on chain, but still keeping in mind that, users still don't want to have this, they're not willing to necessarily trade user experience for going on chain. Right? So that's been something that's been overlooked. I think in these past few cycles is people designing the best token economics or incentive design or ways to yield farm these types of things. And that's been great. ah But I think it's moved this, we're sort of at the cap of that moving the needle and bringing in new money and new users and new excitement into the space. uh so for crypto to kind of take the next leap, when I say crypto, Bitcoin and all of the other digital assets as well, ETH, Solana, in general, the user experience and sort of friction to using these applications still needs to be solved. I would love it if like my... oh mom or dad who are not crypto native by any means and barely even internet native, frankly, had the ability to easily use and sign up for one of these applications. And I think that uh experience is we're on the cusp of it. We're not quite there yet, but there's definitely a lot of focus going into here from a builder standpoint. And so that's something that, you know, we're, we're focused on kind of moving the needle forward on, um you know, when folks go to the mezzo.org site, they'll be able to see kind of this firsthand. You'll be able to do all this in one place have a great user experience and shop negatively within and use them us to get a real-world application not just for like a yield farming application Of course, we'll have that too But that's kind of table stakes right now in the space really if you want to kind of move the ball forward It's I think it's really unlocking this this seamless user experience and you know They're kind of the goalpost for me on this one is, know folks not even knowing that they're interacting with crypto at end of the day. But having all that complexity abstracted away, you don't even know that you're dealing on a blockchain or that you're working on a blockchain, right? It's just ultimately, it's just a great app, a great use case, something that solves whatever you're looking to solve, which is why you probably went to the app in the first place. But doing that in a way that's intuitive and not crypto and non-crypto kind of thing. I love that and it's so refreshing to hear and I'm seeing more and more projects. Viewing complexity is one of the key kind of sources of friction and really the enemy of the consumer. No, exactly. always the case, right? Cause you know, remember the days of the white papers, like, you know, there was a direct, uh, if your project didn't have a white paper, right? You know, it's like, okay, what are you doing? Right. But now it's like, if you're launching a white paper, most people aren't even reading it. Right. they're putting it into chat, TBT and asking for a TLDR summary. So, um, I think, you know, having that design as, and, from a white paper, you know, an economics design is still obviously very critical. but it doesn't necessarily need to be like the face of the marketing, right? And that's really for us, ah you we just want to build real apps for real users and, you real use cases that solve and make a difference in people's lives. uh And, you know, leading with a white paper is great, but that's not necessarily the best way maybe to market and get kind of the next billion of users, uh group of users adopted. I think there's kind of a weird cultural thing within the crypto space. I've launched a couple of layer ones and have worked very closely with founders and have led growth at a number of uh layer one projects. And I've always found that technical co-founders, they have this like, they're enamored by complexity and by technical jargon. When that's the very thing that's actually kind of drives people, actual users away. But... But I think their background in academia for some reason, like they get extra brownie points for using technical jargon and buzzwords. And it's hard, that's exactly right. Yeah. get by with just like narrative and technical jargon. ah There's this flight to fundamentals that has come back around. think a lot of people have gotten burned and, know, sort of falling into some of these complexity traps. You know, and sometimes things can definitely be too complicated, right? And you might lose funds or something because you don't even know what exactly it is you're doing. It's just something that. You read on Twitter, that seems like a good idea at the time. So for us, you know, we're trying to make it super intuitive for folks and just, you know, abstract away that complexity as much as possible. And the same thing goes, we're talking about retail here, but I would say the same thing goes for traditional finance. You my dream is that capital markets, which is generally capital flows across the world or traditional finance, right? We're still separating between crypto and TradFi or traditional finance. Ultimately, I think these two things will converge and we're not going to be calling it crypto anymore. It's just going to be capital markets. Because you're seeing this happen already now, especially with the acceleration of what's now being called real world assets or RWAs. But that's another area that uh these kind of worlds are converging between traditional finance. Banks can now start custody in crypto in the US. It's becoming less and less of a sort of a divisive issue. amongst regulators and traditional finance market operators. And they see it as kind of the next growth engine. So, you know, I almost think of it as like an analog analogy is, you know, the banks are still operating on like paper, thank yous or something. And, you know, we're operating on email and eventually everyone just sort of moves to email. Right. And so that's what sort of I view crypto being the email analogy in this instance. Yeah, you know, another source of friction that I'm really pleased to see projects attacking right now is, you know, bridging assets. Bridging assets is such a weird concept if you really think about it. um And I love how a couple of wallet providers are approaching it. There's one called Infinix. I don't know if you're familiar with them. Yeah, so they've branded this word called swidge, which is, you you swap bridge at the same time, but then the bridging aspect, the user is actually not even aware that there's a bridging activity happening. Abstracting that type of complexity away is so helpful for the user. There are some users that want to know how the sausage is being manufactured, but most of us just kind of want it done. Like we have a job to be done, let's just get it done so I can move on and play with my kids. And I think that's going to be the majority of the audience, I think. And it's really refreshing to see that you and the Mezo.org team are approaching uh product development that way also. Definitely. Yeah. And that's a great example with Infinex. think that's becoming that approach is becoming a lot more commonplace. uh I mean, bridging assets is a complicated feat. So, you know, that's a great area to start. I think a lot of room for improvement on abstracting white complexity, especially when it becomes when it comes to bridging Bitcoin, which is sort of its own ecosystem of standards to like an Ethereum or a Solana, which each has their own standards as well. So. like the ERC-20 token standard is adopted and used in most, which is a Ethereum standard for tokens, is adopted and used in most off-chain and centralized venues. So if you choose a non-ERC-20 venue or a non-ERC-20 approach, then you open yourself up to a lot more complexity there. So it's like thinking about, okay, what are the standards? What are the use cases here? And I think, you know, um That's one of the challenges that Bitcoin has had as it's of isolated in this like fungibility and accessibility standpoint. And so that's another area where a lot of like side chains and L2s are trying to address. And same with these like wrapped Bitcoin assets, which, you know, we call them wrapped Bitcoin assets, but really they're just bridges at end of the day, m kind of under the hood. So that's something that um is an interesting area to watch in space too. think that's, there's a convergence occurring there. I don't want to be too competitor focused, but I think it might be helpful for the audience to get a sense of kind of what the layer two landscape looks like and who the major players are. Would you mind going through that for us and just giving us a sense of like who the players are and where Mezo.org could fit in? Yeah, sure. So I think just to sort of set the ground a little bit. um So you have like kind of the Bitcoin L1 ecosystem, let's call it, and even like Ordinals and Bitcoin NFTs, I would say, are in that camp. And then you have the Ethereum EVM ecosystem, which includes like exchange chains like base for Coinbase, for example, Arbitrum is another example of an Ethel 2. And then you have like Solana. right, which is sort of its own, if the Solana virtual machine, another sort of group of standards um that, you Solana is eating, continually eating into the Ethereum use cases, I think, and, you know, stands out for different reasons. And I think Bitcoin L2s as a category is sort of following these three buckets generally. So you have folks that, you know, maybe are trying to be as close to Bitcoin as possible. So that might be like, you know, a lightning or a light spark, something like that. ah which would be sort of, I would put that as like more of like a technical use case or builder. So like Alpen Labs would be one, Citria is one that are sort of, you know, building for the technical audience as much as possible. And then you have like the second camp, is, we'll call it the EBM or hybrid category. Those are L2s like, Bitcoin L2s like Bob, for example, stands for build on Bitcoin. um Hemi is another one, H-E-M-I. uh And these are really kind of going in on uh what they're calling like DeFi or BitcoinFi and sort of trying to merge like the Ethereum world with the Bitcoin world and tapping into both. And then you have a third camp that uh is, call it like maybe Solana or other chain focused. Arch network is a good example of this. uh There's also some ones that are kind of doing more with just like Solana natively. and Bitcoin there. There's a project called Lava, for example, that's doing Bitcoin back alone, starting with Solana. And for us, how we fit in, I would say we're trying to be as close as possible to Bitcoin in terms of the development and focus there. So we want to cater to the Bitcoin stellar, the Bitcoin Maxi group, staying true to our roots and DNA of being as close to Bitcoin and ethos there as possible. But you know, taking some learnings from the Ethereum and Solana ecosystems in terms of the use cases and bringing in new users and adoption to the space. So our application layer is more tied into these types of users and use cases. um So in essence, the way we think about ourselves is almost like an app chain. m And we've chosen a very tech neutral stack that can be directly compatible with Bitcoin. uh Our gas asset on Mezo.org is actually Bitcoin as well. So when you um you know, pay for transactions or use MUSD because we'll have other apps on there. We have a lot of different DeFi, uh decentralized exchange apps. We'll have some consumer apps as well. You'll be able to shop and donate on Mezo.org 2 when we launch. And all of those use cases, you'll be actually able to spend a little bit of Bitcoin to engage. And that's how the validators process and get paid in the transactions. um But the application layer and the tokens themselves will have that ERC20 standard. So you'll be able to tap into any chain you want to that's outside of Bitcoin L1, enable that cross functionality and fungibility, which we think is super important because you want to enable that volume and capital that I mentioned at the beginning. Because if you don't have that, then you don't really have anything to build off of. So you need to get that capital flowing. um And then from there, you know, moving into kind of off chain types of use cases, but ultimately everything will kind of come back to the mezzo core chain, which is the settlement layer and the source of truth for the ledger. Got it, okay. So you mentioned leading with the application first. uh The application that Meza will be launching with, have you announced what that is yet? MUSD, got it, got it, got it. that's the flagship application. We'll have other third party apps. It's an open source community that you can build on. Everything code is open source. um So we'll have about 10 apps on there that launch out of the gates here upcoming in a few weeks. um But yeah, then beyond that, uh really expanding into kind of these real world use cases and further blurring the line between Web2 and Web3. That's awesome. Okay, I apologize for missing that earlier. um That is really, really cool. Yeah. not just a product, right? It's literally like you're building like a small city or economy kind of, you know, so you have, you got the city hall, you got the utilities companies, have, which are almost like the validators, right? The city hall is like the foundation, right? Then you have maybe, you know, mom and pop shops that are opening up on Main Street. You have residents coming in, which is the community, right? The mom and pop shops being like DeFi apps, right? And they offer different services. you know, the community bank, right? So that's, if you think about kind of this analogy of a city, that's really what Mezo.org is creating. It's place that you can come and make your Bitcoin useful, use it, you know, and everything is denominated in Bitcoin. So it's a destination and in the on-chain world, but that's if folks want to go all the way down the rabbit hole. know, especially that's part of the more seasoned and experienced users. And if you're less of an experienced user and maybe you're just a tourist passing through the city, but you still want to use a couple of apps, maybe visit the bank or go get a meal at a restaurant. You can still do that with MUSD, maybe on another chain or another partner platform like a centralized exchange or on-ramp. As you're kind of designing the, you know, as a city planner and kind of ecosystem and economy builder, are you uh designing MUSD to be kind of the center of gravity for this economy? Got it. Outside of Bitcoin, uh MUSD is at the center of everything. I think that's brilliant. And that's actually quite exciting. Yeah. transact or like, let's say, cause when you're, when you are the depositor or when you're the depositor on Mezo.org, um, you can also be the borrower. So you'll be depositing, let's say, uh, people are doing this now. have about $400 million worth of Bitcoin on there to date, um, with line of sight to a billion plus here. So we're scaling pretty rapidly. Um, and then we have, you know, incentives, which kind of like tax breaks, right. Or, or different like grants from the government kind of thing. So same sort of analogies of setting up this city. um that Mezo.org will enable, right, um for folks to come in and build and, and, and, or use um what we offer in this, in this community. And so with MUSD, there's a nice tight flywheel between Bitcoin being used on the chain, as well as the Mezo.org token, which will kind of the key way how the city or Mezo.org economy governs itself. Yeah. This is an interesting question because this is, think, what every project that has an application first and then a chain kind of takes a backseat. that eventually becomes the most, you know, one of the more important parts, right, because of these permissionless systems. How do you deal with like a naming convention with, um you know, MUSD is going to be the flagship product and then it's on the Mezo.org chain, but then Mezo.org has a bunch of other applications on it. How do you deal with, em like, who gets the limelight and how do you help these ecosystem projects get users, and especially around the naming convention, because um you want MUSD to get the limelight, but it's on Mezo.org chain. And you also want Mezo.org to get some awareness so that other projects that want to grow their ecosystem can build natively on Mezo.org. Yeah, exactly. it's multivariate kind of challenge. Yeah, I think, um, so we're, you know, there's a little bit of a kind of a, again, kind of a land and expand type approach to this. So coming out of the gates, just, you know, being super loud and, and educating folks. have a lot of documentation, content blogs, you know, things like this to educate folks on, on Mezo.org and, and MUSD. so those are the sort of the two leading, uh, headlines, if you will, for the chain launch. But as we go along and continue to, to mature as an ecosystem. you know, continually putting the spotlight on more and more applications. And MUSD and Mezo.org, you know, will still be important, but functionally more important in terms of like the center of the ecosystem, but maybe not as upfront from a marketing standpoint. We'll continue to kind of, you know, as we mature and scale, take a little bit of a backseat and try to empower and showcase our community and users more and more. Brian, looking ahead, uh you mentioned uh Bitcoin in Las Vegas. What else could the community rally around, get excited by, and start participating in? So I think the biggest thing will be uh Mezo.org. So Mezo.org and MNOSD is on testnet right now. Mainnet is coming very, very shortly. Can't say the public date yet, but certainly uh very soon. So keep an eye on the Mezo.org Twitter and blogs for that. ah And then be on the lookout for increased use cases for putting your Bitcoin to work and actually beyond just like the HODL use case. That's what. MUSD's focus is going to be, we have a lot in store for that. So we'll be announcing some pretty big partnerships and use cases for that beyond the Meso main net announcement. So those are probably the kind of the core main things that we're focused on right now as a team and scaling up. m And then, yeah, I think there's also gonna be some fun stuff for the community to do. We have a points program right now that you can tap into as a user. And that'll kind of snowball into other use cases that you'll be able to do on the chain with the actual MesoNative token. So keep an eye out for that as kind of the third major thing. And then people can learn about all of that at mezo.org. Is that right? mezzo.org. Yep. Um, have a mezzo Twitter as well. Um, yeah. And we're on pretty much every social platform you can, you want to look on. There's a mezzo announcements channel on telegram. Awesome. Oh, one last question is, as I'm thinking more and more about mind shares, like mind share is in crypto anyway, mind share is market share and um it's, yeah, it's annoying at the same time as it is kind of like almost critical, right? How are you guys thinking about that? In terms of capturing the mind share. mean, yeah, I think obviously marketing and community are the engine of that. uh So outside of just like having content and, know, activating our community, think we're at maybe 200,000 plus members now on our community side. So we're growing pretty rapidly, but we haven't quite come out um fully publicly yet from like a marketing standpoint, but that's obviously you're to be changing now. That main net is on the horizon. So expect to hear a lot more from us directly as a group with Mezo.org. And then, I think just in terms of like driving long-term value and user retention of the products, we think we've done a lot of work on this to make sure that the products are competitive and useful to folks. um So I think one of the key indicators to watch for this in terms of how successful we are in terms of like... monetizing or growing that attention will be actual like unique wallets, for example, and number of users on the platform and also fees in the chain because that's how the flywheel is created. So I think one of the main items there that I'm personally paying close attention to as we kind of roll this out, go to market and scale it up will be those feedback loops from users and how that value accrues to the community and stakeholders within the mezzo chain. And we've designed some pretty uh cool mechanisms around this to create those value flywheels. ah so that's, I think if that works, which I'm feeling like it's going to, based on what we're seeing for testnet data and some initial demand, uh that'll probably be kind of speaking for itself in a lot of ways and folks will show up. We just got to make sure they're educated and that they have a seamless experience to do it. Yeah. Thanks for having me on. Appreciate it, Peter.