Live Space on the future of money and more

But before we get into the Q&A, some big news hit just a couple hours ago, the SEC released their RIG crypto proposal. And I know there's still a public nose period, but Upney was wondering if you wouldn't mind giving us some of your thoughts or early read of that. I know it's only two hours hot off the press. Sure, no. You're right. It came out only a couple hours ago. And it means different things for different people. But I think the big upshot here is it just became a lot easier for projects to get off the ground, raise some capital. And it also provides a little bit of a framework on how to be exempt from certain types of classifications. So I know six, seven years ago we would love to see something like this. I remember those conversations. I remember talking to former SEC people at the time. This is a topic that Danny and I talked about when we visited with the SEC crypto task force a summer ago. And really just a refreshing approach. Obviously this is still open to a comment period. And I am sure there will be lots of comments in favor and supportive. And also some critical feedback. But I think overall it provides a real tailwind for the entire industry and really opens up opportunity for folks to get products off the ground. Really, again, I'm reading this and I'm thinking I really wish this came out six, seven years ago. What a different set of what a different approach companies like Flexa and other projects would take. And so it's really exciting for this. And I'm sure in the coming days we'll be able to distill our thoughts and where we see opportunity in light of this new development. Well, better late than never, I suppose. Hopefully this is going to set a standard for other countries around the world. But it's been a while since we've seen something positive and clarifying come out from the US government. So this is exciting. Okay, well, let's roll into the Q&A. Thanks for that perspective, Abney. And obviously if anyone has any questions about an early read of that, feel free to chime in as we get to the live Q&A later. But Abney, do you mind kick them off? Yeah, happy to. As Trev mentioned, there were lots of questions. And we think this is a really great way to address all of them. We noticed that there were a few themes in the types of questions that were being asked and the topics. So what we did is, we're not going to answer hundreds of questions today. But we'll answer the ones that we think address most if not all of the questions that came up within those themes. And of course, open forum, we'll welcome more questions later today and in future spaces. So we'll start off with the first one. I know this came from a few different sources, but the question was, or the comment was, would love to hear if Flex says at all concerned about the price of AMP? And at what price point of AMP or what year would there be no more operational runway? Yeah. So we got a few questions about AMP. And we are not going to be shy ever about answering questions about AMP. Just don't want to repeat ourselves to save everyone some time. I will say this, we are very comfortable with not only the runway prospects that Flex has established for itself, but also other long-term opportunities to further extend that runway if we need to. I don't think that that is going to be an issue for us. And when we think about the use cases for AMP, and we'll get into this in a second, you know, the way the token is designed in the economics, the model through which we can exert some pressure on that token in order to make it useful collateral as the payment volume of the network increases. That is the system work is designed. And so we are in this for the long game. We think about ups and downs of the market in terms of years, not necessarily in terms of a span of a few weeks or days. I know in some cases, especially folks have just recently started to dabble in crypto. It can sometimes feel like a market downturn is in this sort of like infinite drawdown of patience and energy and focus. I think we've done a good job of being more, say, healthily focused on the long-term, but there is really no price point for which AMP would destroy Flex's runway because of the responsible decisions we've made in managing Flex's runway. And furthermore, even if AMP were to go down to 0.000001001 dollar heaven forbid, that would indicate not a lot of activity is being used against that collateral. But we still believe that this is an example of perhaps the world's only truly independent, neutral digital collateral token and the fact that it has a fixed and cap supply, the fact that it can be used in all the different ways that the collateral managers can draw on it. That would just mean that there's more opportunity for use cases like what Flex says building and what final is building, which I hope to get to in a little bit, to pull on that collateral and try that collateral to be useful again. So I just wanted to make sure we get out the gate. And thanks for asking this question first, Abbie. We're not concerned at this point about the price of AMP. It's not something that we focus on week to week. It's something that we think about obviously in the long-term in terms of sustaining different types of large-scale payments on the network, but it's not an issue for us at the moment. Thanks, Chef. We had another question about AMP. This is from Mike. And the question was that appreciates some clarity on whether AMP still has a role going forward. Yeah, of course. My answer is yes. My answer is yes. You can elaborate. Yeah, like I said, we're focused on the business of creating novel payments experiences and value transfer technology that we believe is rooted in this collateralization technology. We've invested a lot of time and energy and money into patents that protect that collateralization process. We are also at the same time going where there is merchant demand for those business use cases. And I think a lot of our recent focus on agentech commerce is a good example of that, right? We have started to see some of the in-person demand for crypto payments take maybe second fiddle with some of our merchant partners to thinking about new and novel use cases just because they've been tracking some of the adoption over time, or maybe even some of the perspective merchants. I think we've seen a little bit of the previous focus on, well, how do I help my customers pay in person with Bitcoin to how do I work on accepting stablecoins so I can be ahead of this upcoming wave of agentech commerce? And I say some, I don't think that all of our merchants have that perspective. But those are the types of telltales that we pay attention to and spend a lot of time thinking about. You know, I just want to briefly mention, I think looking in the list of questions here, there was someone who asked if if FedNow or RTP is still projected. And I know that's been a hot topic that we might have mentioned on the past space. But I just think it bears mentioning that that FedNow and RTP was something that one merchant asked to support a while back. They changed their plans and it's not a longer something that they want us to enable for them. They've since moved to USDC settlement instead. That is an answer to what we're thinking about with regards to FedNow and RTP and it's something we'll still look to integrate as a merchant comes to us and asks for it. But that's our MO. We asked merchants what they want or they come and tell us. We then build what they want and that's how we have run our business for the last eight years. And that's probably what we're going to continue to do for the foreseeable future. So in terms of answering the original question around whether AMP still has a role going forward, I guess I would just say we believe that collateralization is the key to delivering all of Flex's business use cases. And we haven't found anything better than AMP to serve that role. So of course, yes, AMP still has a role going forward and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Thanks, Trevor. We also had a couple of questions about capacity and a little bit more technical in nature. So we had a question about from Barclastic asking, can the team find a way to allow users to rotate wallets in capacity while still maintaining tenure? Yes, I'm glad you picked this one and I think Barkey is with us today. So we love this idea. This has been something that has started to creep up the backlog of priority and is something that we've started thinking about a little bit more recently for a number of different reasons. I don't think it's going to be a six month fix, but we will look to enable some way to maintain tenure against a wallet and assign that tenure to another wallet because key rotation is something that we've been seeing become more and more important to the broader ecosystem. Some we've always cared about even for privacy, preserving reasons and so yes, this is something we hope to launch in the near future and we are talking to the AMPL team about how to most easily enable. Yeah, I think again, yeah, in terms of security for users, security and privacy are both paramount interests for us and preserving for our users. So I'm really glad to hear that and glad to hear that there's some collaboration on that front. There's another question. I know this has come up a few times. It was a question I think most recently asked by Brian, are you aware of the issues that Coinbase based wallet is having when connecting to moving tokens around capacity that appears to be an issue with base mode and legacy mode within the wallet? This is something that you guys are able to assist with base with to fix. Yeah, well, I should just add some color here. The base app has moved around a little bit in the Coinbase internal org chart and is now being run separate from the base chain team, which is a kind of significant departure from how things were set up before. So we are working to counterbalance some of the changes that are being made within the app while it focuses on expanding to support additional chains. I think base app is still a great experience. It's an incredibly well designed app and the addition of more chains beyond base and beyond EVM. My understanding is just going to make it easier for us to have that experience reach more users and that's always going to increase the total available, the total addressable market for Flexus products. So something we're obviously supportive of when features like this break, that sucks and is something that we have to try and troubleshoot and work to fix. Sometimes it breaks in unexpected ways. So we are definitely on top of this. This is something that we are staying on top of a week to week. It's just not been as easy of a fix as we expected as things get changed and then reverted. But we are hoping to have a fix for this within the next couple of weeks. I just wanted to make sure this was included so we could share some of that additional context about why this has happened. It's not something that we have altered on our side. It's just sort of the process of continually staying on top of wallet technology improving and wallet priority is shifting and making sure that we are able to react to that as quickly as possible. This has just been a little bit trickier than usual. Yeah. I mean, it would always be great if the wallet developers would telegraph any anticipated upgrades in advance. But but alas, sometimes we have to address them after the fact. Yeah. We had a question about partnerships switching gears a bit. So we had a question from AMP oil 67 or AMP oil 67 asking what happened with Shopify? Yeah. So I think these next few questions are all about partnerships. And I worked with that need to make sure we can include some of these because I just think everyone deserves to know and I think it's time for us to start sharing a little bit more about these different types of projects than what we worked on. I think the simple answer to what happened with Shopify is the SEC intervened and Shopify's compliance team found that our model of collateralization was not something they were comfortable with. And we went through a number of different processes with them up to and including a model they proposed where we would cut AMP out of the entire supply chain. And we just realized we couldn't guarantee our merchant value proposition when we got to that. So it was very unfortunate. We had had several in-person meetings. We had coded the integration and just the timing of the SEC's case against the Wahee brothers. It really just brought down that entire partnership. And I thought it would be useful to share that