Awesome. David, welcome to the podcast.
Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
So we're going to get straight into it.
And you are building a business called Musket.
And you're working on Bitcoin as the rails for payments as a problem.
And we're going to start off with a demo.
And we didn't do this offline.
Let me be very clear to anyone that's listening.
It's like, oh, should we try it first?
Like, no, let's click record and we'll try it.
So David, let's have a crack.
at using Musket. Okay, so our product, just so everyone is aware, we're making sure that we can
use Bitcoin as a payment. So this is a payment device, a payment terminal that you will know and
love. We've got a partnership here with Verifone. So that's our terminal provider. The Musket stack
sits inside or on top of the device as software. And the idea being, for everyone who can see it
there that you have two buttons on the screen pay with card or pay with bitcoin if you press pay with
card you enter the amount if it's synced to our epos and you just press checkout the amount just
pops up automatically you don't need to input anything but if you press pay with bitcoin then
the same thing comes up we put a big bitcoin logo in the background because some people got lazy and
just started trying to process card transactions on bitcoin rails um but yeah so let's assume you've
just come into uh to david's coffee shop ordered a latte with oat milk or whatever it is you like
um i'm going to charge you 21 pence for that so i've just put that in um you have to ignore the
big red not for commercial payment this is a test device i'm just going to press confirm on there
it raises the qr code instantly so now it's over to you as the person interacting or buying products
with that what i'm hoping oh i've got a big red line when that goes hold on
oh we've got a problem with the
riverside blurring so i'm not able to scan that qr code i'm afraid david from here
oh here we go loading payment details done okay 0.0000312 bitcoin must get a demo
let's go for it send okay sent there we go straight through boom oh my gosh cool
your receipt comes out there you go 21 pence bought and paid where are you in the world
i am in melbourne australia okay so that's gone from melbourne to south of london
in the blink of an eye with final sentence yeah oh my god oh you've just bootstrapped
the musket business with you yeah thank you very much my pleasure oh my god i've got i've got like
energy running up the back of my neck oh it's just so goddamn cool okay so for someone out there
that has never heard of you or i and it's like what fuck did those guys just do let's try and
make it as simple as possible to try and explain what we just did yeah so um so what happened there
is you tried to buy a product and service from me.
Usually to make that payment using a card rail,
you would have to physically be here.
There's no way you could have processed that payment
with a card otherwise on a physical terminal.
The option we would have had is for me to raise a payment link
and send you that via perhaps WhatsApp or email
or some other method,
or arguably I could have generated a payment link and shown you a QR code on the screen.
You could have scanned that and then paid with your Visa card.
Now, interestingly, because I'm in the UK and you're in Australia,
paying with that card, what would have happened is in the background,
that would have been an international payment.
It would have incurred incredibly high fees,
most likely interchange plus exchange rates, probably 3% to 4%, I would have said,
depending on the card type used and the bank issuing it.
And we could have processed that transaction.
A bit clunky, but we could have done it.
Behind the scenes, what then is happening is all kinds of permissioned requests
from your Apple account or your phone app
through to all of the scheme providers,
so the merchant acquirer, the scheme, Visa, MasterCard, Amex,
and then the final settlement.
And that whole process can take up to 30 days, assuming fees aren't even, payments aren't withheld.
So, you know, it's somewhat clunky, tons and tons of permission, not a great experience.
What we just did was completely flip that on its head.
And you just sent me final settlement instantly in Bitcoin.
So I'm a merchant that has transferred.
I mean, it's not really transferred if we get deep into the weeds of Bitcoin.
But it's theoretically a payment from one side of the world to another that has settled instantaneously.
So there's no commissions. It's a direct relationship between you and the merchant.
Musket in the middle has provided the QR code and the rails and the ability for the merchant to accept that payment and store the Bitcoin lightning on their channel or in their environment.
and that's moved from you to them.
There's no chargebacks
and the cost of that would have been less than 1%
versus the 4% likely that an international card charge
would have implemented.
So I'm not going to say it's magic,
but it's kind of magic.
It is kind of magic, David.
I didn't understand what a bearer asset was
until I fell very heavily down the Bitcoin rabbit hole,
which has been five plus years of extremely deep research.
I've owned some now for over 10 years, amazingly.
But as an investor, quote unquote, looking at allocating assets,
I've really only seriously looked at Bitcoin in the last, since 2020.
And I'm like, hang on, so what is a bearer asset?
So for someone out there that doesn't know what I'm talking about,
explain if you can what you think a bearer asset means to you
and how, you know, when you're using a MasterCard
and a dollar or a euro or an RMB,
the difference between that is an experience
in terms of value transfer and what just happened with Bitcoin.
Yeah, I mean, in simple terms,
a bearer asset is an asset that you hold.
It's something that is definitively yours
in terms of you own the legal contract
or legal rights to possess said item
and you physically actually have it.
You know, you can have bearer assets, the risk with bearer assets, whether it's a bearer bond or anything physical specie, any other sort of physical asset, is that quite often you have to rely upon a third party custodian.
So you still introduce risk into that environment.
You know, we saw a few years ago, a lot of people held jewellery and other expensive items in bank vaults underneath the streets of London in a place called Hatton Garden, which is synonymous with the diamond industry.
And there was a famous bank heist and millions and millions of pounds worth of assets were stolen.
You know, they are theoretically a bearer asset.
But by putting the trust in a third party custodian, you're creating, introducing risk into it.
So if you don't hold it, you can't provably hold it.
Is it really a bearer asset?
You end up in somewhat of a philosophical conversation.
Whereas the difference being with Bitcoin, if you hold the asset, if you're not sort of, if you're not relying upon an exchange or another third party custodian,
All you have to do is remember your seed phrase, either remember it or write it down and make sure that no one else has access to it.
And that then is provably yours.
Nobody can take it from you unless force is used.
And you remove all of the risk of third party custodians.
So I think Bitcoin is incredible in a way that we've had.
We do have bearer assets.
They exist today.
But to be able to send those instantaneously across the world without risk, we don't have that.
So Bitcoin stands in a category and a class of its own based on financial innovation and technological innovation.
It's incredible.
When I first heard as well the idea of store of value across time and store of value across space,
it really opened up for me this idea of like, okay, well, gold's done a very good job of store of value across time.
but the the development of the communication networks of the last 150 years let's call it
meant that it was much easier to call someone up and say by the way let's just agree to swap some
gold on this piece of paper because we could do the transaction so much faster so gold failed
at store of value across space and suddenly gold it's it's clear that to me bitcoin's a better
version of gold in that sense because it's like okay well bitcoin's going to hold value across
time because of its scarcity, but also across space, because you can now do what we just did,
which is said 21 pennies worth of Bitcoin across the world as a bear asset. That's never been
possible before. Now, as a customer, I was thinking when you were speaking about how we
might have done that transaction, I could maybe have called you and given my credit card number
across a phone call. And you could have typed that into your FPOS unit. There's different ways
of doing it but i had a fee for that payment and that was kind of the cost to me and hopefully i'd
receive whatever product or service i was buying you know shortly but the the under the hood the
merchant takes so much risk that's not always that obvious right but like yeah people get this whole
chargeback problem that happens all the time um so so how yeah any of that resonate david but it's
it's that it's that idea of transferring value across space that's just never been possible like
before isn't it yeah completely agree um and forgive me just for my eyes flitting around here
that's okay and pull up a presentation just to reference because i wanted to get the name of the
uh of the painting correct um so sorry the the artists i'll come on for a second um
yeah so there's two things here um i think the transfer of value is really really important
So let's cover that to start with, I guess. I do a talk every now and then about the intersection between AI, Bitcoin and energy. And my thesis is that effectively those three things unlock the new equivalent of an industrial revolution, technological information based revolution.
because what you're doing there is you're fusing the creation of energy.
You're linking that with money in a way that Bitcoin is uniquely placed to do.
And then you're using that to power the next iteration of value creation and commerce on the Internet,
which is one of the things that we're building the infrastructure for,
effectively bot-to-bot machine-to-machine payments that don't require any human interaction.
They can just use the Lightning Network that we just demoed.
And the first step from this, I would argue, started, so there's a painting by a chap called Robert Dudley in 1866, and it's called From Two Weeks to Two Minutes.
And it's a picture of, it looks like they're on a ship somewhere, but sort of, you know, 18th century chaps in their nice outfits, all found a candle with some cables on the floor.
And what the painting is depicting, I think it was Dominic Frisby that alerted to me this the first time.
But what the painting is depicting is that moment in time when the first transatlantic cable was laid between the UK or mainland Europe and North America.
And it took that messaging transfer time down from two weeks to two minutes.
I mean, that is just such an incredible leap because with that information, you can start to then really accelerate trade and finance and just general information.
So now, again, we've had this ability to do it digitally to share information.
We've never had the ability to actually shift the asset globally and interconnect trade.
There's always been a final settlement which takes typically 30 days or so.
So I think what we're likely to see here with the Lightning Network and with Bitcoin, but also I think there's probably a role for stable coins on Bitcoin and Lightning as well, is this borderless instant transaction.
In some cases, humans are involved. In some cases, it's just bot-to-bot transactions.
But that's another leap forward in terms of global commerce.
So, you know, the same way that that was the first step to take it from two weeks to two minutes.
I think what we're likely to see is a completely new commercial revolution.
And we've already seen demos of this streaming payments.
You can pay your supply chain by the minute, even by the second if you want to, if you are so inclined.
So I think all kinds of different business models commercial models and settlement types will emerge from the Lightning Network when it fully up to scale fully robust and it fully global And we really pushing the boundaries in a way that
the Visa, the MasterCard, and the international settlements layers just aren't set up to execute
right now. It's so fascinating, isn't it? We're living through an extraordinary time. And I often
come back to this fact that's it's so true and you can verify this yourself information travels
unfairly through markets in that we're lucky to have found out this stuff right now many people
haven't pulled the dots together and that puts us in a unique position to go okay well what what do
we need to do to make this a reality where do we see opportunities to build businesses or build
technology or to improve our lives.
I had a couple of episodes ago, Jesse from Amboss.
Have you met Jesse before during your journey so far?
No, I love what they're doing.
Yeah, and it's very applicable to this conversation.
Fascinating listening to him talk about how the Lightning Network is going to scale and
how building the plumbing for that as capitalists with Lightning channels and adding capital
to it.
And it's awesome.
and he was talking a lot about stable coins.
So I'm completely with you there as an opportunity.
David, where I'd like to take this now is,
you know, the store of value function of money
is just one feature of money.
It's also unit of account.
It's also medium of exchange.
And I think where Musket is sitting
is very much this idea of medium of exchange.
I'd love to understand,
how did you even come across this problem?
Like, what were you doing in your life?
Were you like, oh, this is what I want to do.
my time? Yeah, so it's a good question. That's part of my sort of origin story. I first stumbled
into Bitcoin 2014, and apologies if people have heard this before. I was working for,
I was in management consultancy before, so I'd spent a period of time in low latency trading
and algorithmic trading technologies for BT, the city of London, for the first couple of years of
my career, spent about 10 years in management consulting after that, and then moved to Sky,
the TV company, launching streaming businesses all over Europe, so Ireland, Austria, Germany.
And that was an interesting corporate career. But it was in 2014 when I was at PwC, I was working
for Boris Johnson when he was the mayor of London. There was a project basically just to remove 100
million of spend out of the UK government, just be more efficient with spend across common goods
and services. It was a classic cost reduction project. I was given a side quest, which was,
could we also look at enormous civil engineering contracts and try and investigate whether there's
any supply chain fraud or whether their declared profits are much higher and they're taking more
money out of the taxpayer base than they've declared in the procurement? And they said,
look, can you look into whether we can use Bitcoin as a mechanism to do that?
And I think what they wanted to do was trace every transaction,
act as the central custodian of record, sorry, exchange of record at the end,
and then basically make sure that the cost of public goods and services
would be driven down, of course, major capital infrastructure projects.
So, you know, it was a really interesting project.
We did it, pitched it.
The answer was sort of, you know, sorry, lads, up for a nighthood next year.
I don't want to rustle the boat too much.
So, you know, maybe talk to my successor.
Really innovative, but it was just too much to go for at that time.
And I think what they wanted really was a CBDC.
But that was 2014.
I was obsessed from that point.
Really?
Wow.
It catches you, doesn't it?
Yeah.
It was the technological side that gripped me first.
and I then spent a couple of years just thinking about it reading about it alongside my career
and just went fully down the Austrian economic rabbit hole completely changed most if not all
of my worldviews and I just had all this information in my head and it was the days before podcasts you
know there was it was before Pump launched his podcast which was really popular it was before
Peter McCormack's podcast it was sort of you know it was really early days there was very little
information is mainly andreas that i was sort of learning from um and um so myself and one of my
eventual co-founders um we just talked about it quite a lot and we set up this training course
so this was sort of 27 early 2017 maybe um we set up a training course we'd hire a room in london
and just off trafalgar square at the iod um and we bring 20 or 30 finance professionals so lawyers
accountants, VCs, anyone who wanted to know about Bitcoin money and how the rest of the
digital asset ecosystem fitted in. We wanted to give them a framework on how to think about it.
It was effectively a light touch version of the Bitcoin standard in a demo. And the reason I give
you this backstory is because we did it every six weeks for about two or three years before COVID
it. And every session, there was one question that would undermine the whole day. And that
was, look, David, you've just spent six or seven hours telling me why you think Bitcoin
is money and how it meets store of value, medium of exchange, user account. First of
all, are you okay? That's a lot of time. Second of all, I can't buy a sandwich with it. I
can't buy coffee with it. Nowhere in the UK accepts it. I don't believe you. It's not
of money it fails on the most basic of tests that i can't spend it and i just didn't have an answer
there's nothing like i said well look just wait you know just wait it will come it will come and
you know there was a few people that i knew at the time and we sort of said look is it possible that
it isn't going to happen that maybe actually we need to take action and build this ourselves
um so the proposition the idea the motivation came um we saw that bitcoin was going to be adopted as
store of value, buy bigger funds, institutions, that was obvious. But there was a job to be done
and we thought actually I think the world is missing a trick here. Everyone is seeing and
thinking of Bitcoin as an alternative payment method. And whilst that's not necessarily untrue,
introducing it into a merchant payment stack adds so much more friction to them as a merchant and
a human being. So the question was actually, okay, let's first of all build an incredible
payment experience but then let's embed it and nest it inside a traditional experience let's not
try let's meet merchants where they are today let's not try and you know tell them that their
existing infrastructure and payment services are are rubbish because let's be honest apple pay
double click is incredible um you know it's just and merchants don't care what happens in the
background as long as they do get paid um and there isn't too high of a transaction cost so we
we needed to make sure that we had a proposition that first of all was very, very good from a Bitcoin payments experience.
Then also that we addressed all of the merchant challenges because introducing another degree of friction didn't wash.
It was too much. So that's what we did. We set out on the journey to build everything, had to find the right team,
bring the right mix of Bitcoiners versus traditional payments experience into the team and go from there.
And that's the journey we find ourselves on now, accelerating Bitcoin as money in the merchant payment stack because people didn't believe me when I told them that Bitcoin was money a few years ago.
Let's not pretend that this isn't ego driven.
Basically, they damaged my ego so badly in that session and they didn't believe me.
I was like, right, well, I'm going to prove you wrong.
I took that seriously and let's build an entire business around this one question that's undermined my day.
It's so interesting.
What I love is the genesis of all ideas.
They come from different places at different times and it depends where you are in your life.
It depends like, is this an opportunity you can take right now?
What of all of the 80 ideas you've had in the last two days are actually the one that you want to pursue?
and it can be very difficult to actually figure out
this is what I'm going to focus on.
But once you made that call,
I'd love to learn about the traction of the business
because, and I'll give,
these are admittedly completely anecdotal,
but I think interesting examples.
Big news in the Bitcoin space last year
was the rollout of the Bitcoin option
for merchants currently using the Square terminals.
and the bitcoin news was going crazy but no one else was really talking about it and i i found
this out in two very clear ways one a local cafe that i love um in the town i was living at the time
didn't have a clue that he could accept bitcoin using his square terminal that he was already
using one two there was a butcher that i like to use that's really into the idea of sovereignty and
takes a very holistic approach to how they rear their cattle.
And they're already conscious of being audited in a way they don't want to be.
And so you can absolutely go into their butcher's shop
and you can pay for stuff using a wallet of Satoshi transaction
and they'll take your Bitcoin and they'll sponsor the local meetup
and this kind of thing.
But their question about the Square stuff was like,
if I switch this on, am I going to somehow get someone who's gone,
oh, look, all these different people across the country
are now using this thing and am I going to get unnecessary attention so how have you found it
building a a payments service and incorporating it into merchants like what do they constantly say
I can't do it for this reason or I just I'd love to understand how that's been for you guys
look that what you're sort of touching on here is the exact reason we're doing this the way that we
are. And I'll talk more about that in a second, I guess. The sad realization that I came to
and that I still harbor is that people just, as much as we love Bitcoin, the mass majority
of people just don't care. And they just see Bitcoin as something interesting. And if I
can pay with it, great. Most people just want to pay for stuff. Most merchants just want
to get paid. It's going to take a lot longer than I'd anticipated for the world to move towards
Bitcoin. Now, external factors may accelerate that if we see this continuing rise towards
totalitarianism, all of a sudden having a bearer asset that you can hold and that someone can
transfer to you, all of a sudden becomes incredibly valuable. So that will accelerate.
as we're seeing that right now.
The rollout of social credit systems
and central bank currencies,
I think, you know, will help Bitcoin adoption,
not through the way that we like,
but as a defensive technology for people.
But that's exactly the conclusion I came to,
is that, okay, we can build a world-class payment solution,
a Bitcoin payment solution.
I'm not worried about that.
The problem is scale and adoption.
And you're absolutely right.
you know it was just incredible that square have done what they've done you know for me that just
validates our entire strategy and approach but it also shows and reiterates exactly what you said
from those anecdotes it just shows how early we are and how much work there is to do
on the education front and you know people people don't go on holiday and get on a plane
um and knowing how physics and aerodynamics work they just don't question it they just
I just want to get to my hotel in a nice hot country and have a nice relax.
They don't really care about everything else.
On time, preferably.
Right.
And I think as Bitcoiners, maybe we underestimate that effect.
It's our job to make sure the thermodynamics and the airplane works.
Don't push it down the merchant's throat if they don't want to know about it.
Just tell them how great an experience it's going to be.
So that's what we do.
We've designed the whole business as a Trojan horse.
We want to lay the infrastructure.
and you talked about Amboss earlier and others,
anyone doing anything in the Lightning space,
I'm just in awe of and a massive fan.
I see our job and our role as Musket
as the people who build the destinations.
We aren't going to build the roads.
We aren't going to build the rails.
We're building out all of those destinations
for people to spend their Bitcoin.
Other people can tackle other parts of the problem.
That's not where we're focusing our effort.
If we build out all those destinations,
then the likelihood is we're going to see more and more transaction throughput.
And there's a counter side to that as well, which we can come on to another product that
we're building, which gets Bitcoin and Lightning specifically into people's pockets through
our payroll solution.
But yeah I think it a really interesting space and we designed it this way because when we go and talk to merchants they get hit so many times every week with new payment providers
It could be Elevon one week, WorldPay another week, Square another week.
You know, the sales machine and the incentive based approach for commission based sales in every country is really aggressive.
So you end up with aggressive sales approaches.
um you know uh expletive warning coming up but you know i've done it myself i've been in the stores
and gone and talked to business owners and go in and you go in and tell them who you are and why
you're here if you if you lead with payments my name is david i run a business i work for a
business called musket uh we're here to um we deliver payments for your business they literally
tell you to off and they put the phone down you know it's or you know physically to your face you
award on my team, literally told in no uncertain terms to leave the premises and never, ever
come back.
Wow.
But if you leave with Bitcoin, it's a nice way in.
So right now it's serving us quite nicely as a sales strategy.
We go in, whether it's a cold call, an email or a physical session, we say, look, what
do you think about Bitcoin?
Did you know it's a new payment method?
Everyone's using it or growth is accelerating, whatever the narrative is.
and typically very quickly merchants have got questions they've got questions that they've never
had anyone to ask they don't know where to research it so they'll just engage you in a nice conversation
so as a minimum you can build a little bit of trust you cannot come across as threatening or
and then before you know it you know exactly how much money that is going through their books
who their current provider is why they don't like them what their rates are and maybe there's an
angle that we can win, whether it's through payments, introducing Bitcoin or our EPOS
hospitality stack, which covers all their inventory, stock management, staff shift patterns
and rotors, et cetera. We can typically deliver value in some way, whether that's lower cost
processing or through improved outcomes and business services. And for us, Bitcoin, it helps
lead with that conversation. Sometimes it quite often helps to build that trust, which gets us
over the line. 80% of the conversation though is on rates and outcomes and service performance
about the basics, about car payments typically. So, you know, for us, we had to become world-class
at Bitcoin first, then world-class at payments, and then world-class at telling a story that
stitches all of that together. And, you know, we're on the journey to do that right now.
we've got about 50 million live processing on the platform right now we should end january over 100
million uh this year our target is to grow to about a billion volume processing um with a bit
of luck there's two deals that we're closing hopefully um so there's one if we can get it
over the line um this half of the year that will be over 2 000 venues in the uk uh that we're on
board with and that will be a similar approach to square um so we'll be uh onboarding them uh
onto us but then it will be up to them whether they want to accept the bitcoin component or not
again we won't push it down their throat too much so it's we will just be a critical or friendly
agent to support them and help them along that journey with education and toolkits and other
things but again you know there's a final point there um our journey is such that i want to do
this the right way. If you turn Bitcoin on and then no one uses it, it can have a negative effect.
If a merchant puts their hand up and says, I now accept Bitcoin, and then it's tumbleweed,
no one goes and no one uses it. It doesn't look good to the merchant because they've just been
told by a bunch of Bitcoiners that everyone's going to flop to their store or volume and trade
will increase by two to 3%. So what we try and do is make sure when we onboard someone,
We then make sure we link them into others in the Bitcoin space of interest or other potential business partners.
So we try and do the best we absolutely can to help them along that journey.
And then talking to them about what to do with their Bitcoin.
Once they've accepted it, they then theoretically have their own micro treasury.
And businesses, small businesses that hold their Bitcoin, ideally, we haven't arrived at the maturity of the market yet.
But ideally, I'd love to be extending into the financial services sector so that we can offer Bitcoin collateralized loans.
So, you know, more aggressive rates in terms of fiat that you can structure tight and collateralized with Bitcoin.
So that over time, as the Bitcoin price goes up, actually paying that loan off doesn't become burdensome.
And ideally, they'd never have to liquidate their Bitcoin at all.
but they can use that as collateral to expand their business,
bring new people in, whatever they need to.
So I think we see it as Bitcoin as a Trojan horse
within our broader ecosystem,
but it's the beginning of an ecosystem
that they can then use to pay their supply base.
They can use it as incentives to pay their staff
either bonuses or salaries in,
and they can then use it as a reward currency
for cashback for people shopping at their store.
So that's sort of how I think we're going to continue to roll out.
For now, it's just a hardcore sales mission,
just knocking on doors, picking up the phone, chasing those leads.
We've got quite a lot of subscriptions to various lead gen engines online.
My commercial team are fantastic.
So, yeah, it's growing, but that's what 2026 looks like for us.
you know we did we've done a lot of the building uh most of the infrastructure is in place it's
time to sell and scale now awesome david well i wish you the very very best of luck doing that
because it's in some ways it's just brute force you know you just got to get out there and go and
tell everyone about it um but that's not possible without the hustle to have got to this point
like identifying the problem okay how can we solve it in some way okay we haven't solved it
well enough now we've got to add this this and this okay now we have actually something quite
useful is anyone using it shit no one's using it okay now someone's using it how do we do more of
the stuff that they want to actually use it for um what's really cool though is to to hear that
it's something that's been created with bitcoin at its core and in the not too distant future i hope
that will be the norm but it's not yet the case and so i wonder the timeline it is probably longer
than what I expect to. So I'm with you on that in terms of like the wider adoption pattern.
But as a business founder and building out this product, do you think the fact that you like,
do you have Bitcoin on the balance sheet of the business, for example? And does it put you in a
better position? I'm with you totally on the Austrian economic stuff, like sitting down and
thinking about time preference and go, oh my God, this stuff makes sense. I went through a business
management degree and the maths and stats i did is just completely irrelevant in hindsight
microeconomic stuff i did it's all keynesian driven and didn't actually make any sense you
just had to regurgitate an exam and move on um with with the bitcoin at the core of the kind of
intellectual capital of your business you're in such a strong position it just might take a bit
longer to to get bigger um do you agree with that and and i hope that more bitcoiners start
businesses you know they see an opportunity actually go out there and try and create something
it might not work but it also might um so yeah and i mean a caveat to that as well being not
caveat but an add-on to that being um did you raise money for the business and take investment
and what was that process like as well?
Yeah, raising investments, awful.
Worst experience I've ever had in my entire life.
Wow, interesting.
But I also, you know, we also launched at a time
when the conditions were awful.
So, you know, it's as a first-time founder rather than, you know,
not coming with a book of investors that would just open a check
because you've got a track record.
Yeah, it's hard.
I mean, so we started July 2023.
We raised 750K.
I started about nine months before that, trying to raise it.
It took a while.
We got about 300K off the bat, and then it took another, I'd say,
another six to nine months to close the remainder.
So we had enough to start and break ground and start building
and paying the engineers.
And then it was a process of continuing to build everything out,
bring the right people in the team, build out our commercial contracts
with our supply chain and go from there.
So that took us through to January, February 2024.
And then we opened up our seed round, which we're in the final phase now.
I mean, it's unbelievable.
It's taken us over a year to, sorry, January 2025.
So the first 750k lasted us the best part of 18 months, I'd say.
We could go much faster and harder if we had more funding.
You know, my team is incredible.
Ben DeWall, who's our CTO, used to be at Lightning Labs and Swan Bitcoin.
He's just got an incredible pool of specifically Lightning engineers that we've got on our books, which is great.
So, yeah, so then it was, okay, raise another round.
So we're raising 5 million at the moment.
Well, we're in the final phase of raising that 5 million.
But we are going to move straight into our Series A.
And what that looks like, I think, is market dependent.
You know, we could 10 million actually gets us to a lot of the,
within two to three years,
gets us a lot of the product roadmap and engineering outcomes.
20 allows us to do a bit more M&A.
There's a few smaller businesses that I'd quite like to acquire
that have got technology and customer bases
that I think would be incredibly valuable to us.
100 million means that we can start to go after Visa and Mastercard.
You know, we can, so it depends.
I've got a plan of how much can we raise
based on the different objectives and outcomes.
Ultimately, the path and the outcomes don't change.
It may just take longer.
So if we had, you know, a bottomless pit of cash,
we can just accelerate everything and go after everything now.
But yeah, that's a very, very horrible phase
and a difficult journey.
Liquidity is tough.
The hurdle rates, you've got to demonstrate
that your product works, that your team is good,
that you've got some traction,
that the revenues markers are met.
So I think the hurdle right now is a lot harder
than perhaps it was pre-COVID for funding.
So yeah, anyone that's doing this, I salute them.
In terms of, I forgot the rest of your question, Jake.
Well, it was a long question, which is a bit unfair.
I try not to do that too much.
Sometimes I'm also thinking about them.
It was more just like the mindset that you can have when you approach business,
when you have Bitcoin behind you and the understanding for what sound money is.
Yes.
Okay, now I can make plans.
So on that, I mean, I guess, do we hold Bitcoin on the balance sheet? Yes and no. Yes, in the sense that we're a very lean startup. I hold it as long as I can before I have to pay salaries.
and we've gone from a team of six to a team of 22 in a year.
So we're in real scale mode.
And again, as I say, we've gone from zero processing volume
to the best part of 50 and a pipeline of over 800
and a revenue forecast with a pretty high degree of confidence
of delivering it that sees us process about a billion
by this time next year.
And that generates about 3 million ARR.
for us. The numbers are very big because we're processing everything, but we make about 35 basis
points per transaction on the fiat side. And again, the reason I give you this is because
approaching it as a Bitcoiner is quite a narrow focus. And the way that we started out, we would
just have been perennially dependent upon handouts or not handouts, investment from VCs and constant
dilution raise raise raise raise raise um i don't like the idea of of raising and and diluting i
let traditional you know certain give me some investment i will turn that into a profitable
business and we don't need to continually dilute you know i don't necessarily like the silicon
valley completely uh dilute until you're worth 10 billion um to the model um but you know i'm
learning on that side i'm learning to soften my approach a bit but because there is a balance i
I think, in between of actually raising the right amount of capital at the right time to fuel your growth.
But I think, so yes, we hold Bitcoin as long as we can on the balance sheet.
I would love to hold it longer.
We pay a lot of the staff in Bitcoin.
We just deal with the accounting on the other side of that.
But I think the two things, Bitcoin's inevitable, right?
And as a deep deep believer in Bitcoin Yeah I completely with you Bitcoin wins It outlives humanity It you know if this is a simulation I think I tweeted this morning then Bitcoin is simulation man
You know, it's so hard-coded into the laws of mathematics, physics, thermodynamics, just the universal laws that govern our world and our universe.
But it wins at the end of the day.
You just cannot.
I spent so long in those early years trying to think of, well, how can Bitcoin be broken?
How can it not work?
And I think Seyfedean outlines the only way that Bitcoin could not succeed is likely by total global cooperation from all governments and all institutions and a return to a gold standard type of environment.
That's never happened and it never will.
There's just too much risk and too much geopolitical division.
So if that's the only risk, really, we can address the quantum computing risks.
We can address any other risks that are thrown at Bitcoin.
So if it therefore becomes inevitable, building products and services around it that help it and accelerate the adoption becomes inevitably successful.
The only problem you've got to solve for is survival and cash flow, which we've solved through alignment with payment card schemes.
because actually you can make a small clip on every transaction
and by providing value-added services.
So we do have a next-generation hospitality and management system
that can completely transform a restaurant or a pub or a bar's front of house and back office.
So by providing the good, bolting all those amazing merchant outcomes
together with a Bitcoin outcome, you've got a really powerful product.
So I think that's given me the belief in the business. And I did have to think about this a lot before we launched. It's just, we're just in that phase where now it's just making sure we've got enough funding to grow and that we are growing and we're making the right partnerships.
And, you know, I'd be worried if I was sat here and we were spending money and we weren't seeing the traction or the interest.
But the people that we're speaking to, you know, the businesses, these are enormous businesses.
We're not going to win the card processing volume for all of them, but we might start with Bitcoin and then we can work on the card processing volume over time and move that over to us again as we mature and grow.
but you know as I said we've got an 850 million sales pipeline right now that's split across
e-commerce for our online gateway with our e-commerce plugin and across food and beverage
hospitality merchants UK European footprint so we launched our first merchant in Spain a couple
of weeks ago we've got a really great I mean the three partnerships that I'll just finish this
section on that we've got one Gibraltar International Bank. So a small bank in the grand
scheme of banks, but we are their in-house payments company. So they don't have a payments division.
They signed an agreement with us that we are their exclusive payments provider. Now we have a revenue
share with them, but effectively they've got a wonderful customer base in Gibraltar and we are
in the middle of rolling out there.
We think there's at least a 500 million volume opportunity there
that we're rolling out across.
And in the gaming and gambling space,
Gibraltar processes 40% to 50% of the UK gaming and gambling volume
because of its unique jurisdiction and tax relationship.
So that's slightly changed recently,
but it's still enormously advantageous.
So our links into there through that partnership
are incredibly valuable.
Verifone, as I mentioned, is our hardware provider.
So we'll be using their next generation hardware, both for the EPOS and for the card payment terminal.
Inside the Verifone device is a Vodafone SIM and eSIM.
So our merchants then can make sure that they can process transactions wherever they are.
If they're at a festival, if they're in the middle of a dead zone of no signal,
well, it will swap from the Vodafone network onto whatever network is available.
So again, you can always process the Bitcoin transactions alongside card transactions.
And then Google as well.
We've partnered with Google Chrome OS team because our EPOS, they want use cases to demonstrate how stable the Chrome OS browser is.
And they use us and take us along to their demos across Europe.
We went to Barcelona, Paris, London with them last year to demonstrate our EPOS.
solution so you know they've got a so they build a check a checkout environment and you go and have
an awful experience on one checkout and then they say we'll go next door and use the musket checkouts
which is running chrome os that was a another provider uh please come this way there's the
musket one so so that's nice so you know we struck a few uh a few big partnerships so i think we're
doing both you know we're getting the ones and twos on the board uh from smaller merchants as
as well as going after much bigger retailers and scale partnerships.
And Bitcoin's a difference maker.
You know, everyone from board level to CEO,
we don't bother really going in and building our relationships in the business.
We go straight in at the top to talk to the leadership
about how Bitcoin can transform their business.
We can help them with payments.
Their CFO can benefit from a treasury strategy.
And, you know, we can give them all of the infrastructure they need
to do one or all of those.
So it's a really powerful thing.
And as you say, as a final point, anyone that is thinking about starting a Bitcoin business,
yeah, just make sure you've got a route to revenue.
But attaching Bitcoin and a Bitcoin strategy onto existing business processes or a business
proposition, it's incredibly powerful.
It doesn't really matter what it is.
I just think Bitcoin wins regardless.
That's very cool, David.
Well, well done with all the progress.
We're shunting up on the hour.
So I'm going to keep this as just one final question.
It's a difficult journey, entrepreneurship.
So if you could share, like, if anyone's out there thinking about it
or maybe just at the very early stages,
like what was just the one thing, if you could remember so far,
that you wish you'd known?
I wish I'd known how hard funding was going to be.
the trouble is if i'd have known how hard it was going to be i probably wouldn't have done it
because there have been days when i've wow oh there have been times when it's been so close
you know um and you know i don't take um you know we bring the team i brought the team in at the
right stages and the right growth but there's been times when you're staring down you've got 24 hours
to find 50k um and you know it's not as drastic as that because at any one time you know you've got
typically millions of pounds worth of conversations live but about investment but
talking to getting getting that investment from a discussion through to signed paperwork through
to funds in account takes time and you and you know if it's just you doing it and there's a
there's a handful of others building the product it it takes time but it also takes quite a big toll
um it certainly has on me um you know right now my role is very much guidance um and direction
but focusing i'd say 80 plus percent of my time on closing the next funding round you know we've
spent a lot of time in the last quarter defining our vision our product roadmap what we want to
achieve how we want to achieve it and the team are now able just to go off and execute that whilst
i focus on bringing the investment in because for us we've got another year before we're truly ebit
and um and cash flow positive uh from that point we're fine but you've got to survive and if you
don't survive then it doesn't matter how good the idea is um you know you need that oxygen so i think
funding is is the hardest bit so you know plan that out figure out where you're going to get it from
on make sure you're ready for funding as well um again i i sort of i probably watched too many
startup films and assumed that a good deck and a great story and a nice suit to get your investment
but the hurdle rate's just so high um and i think you know reflecting on that what does that all
boil down to if you're not willing to give everything i'd hesitate stop short of saying
if you're not willing to die for it you know i think i don't think anything's necessarily worth
dying for but you have to be willing in my experience to sacrifice everything everything
to make it work because it takes and it takes such a strong mental toll so if you've got a great
you know stable setup where you've got supportive family partner maybe your kids that you either
don't have kids or they're a little bit older um you know you need a buffer you need to know it's
going to be okay if everything went wrong um not too much so that you're comfortable and you don't
push hard um but those days when i was sort of a couple of years ago waking up thinking
i've got to find 50k by friday how it's tuesday um i don't know how i'm going to do it
but i did um only because you know i think the mission was so clear the drive was so um so strong
and I just didn't see any other option.
You have to just do whatever it takes
to make sure that each step is made.
And then you look back and all of a sudden
we've made an absolute shit ton of amazing steps,
whether that's funding, a product build,
a new launch, signed a client,
found a couple of team members.
And all of a sudden there's a sort of trail of success
in inverted commas behind you.
and you're just staring down a wall of fear again.
It's like, well, how the hell are we going to...
Next bit, yeah.
Yeah, how are we going to go from there
to a billion sales and profitability
and raise 10 times the amount?
And it's just doing just the same ethos,
just get up, work hard and network
and live and breathe the mission.
And theoretically, I think what's the phrase?
I don't know who it came from.
maybe it's some sort of cheesy Chinese proverb,
but set off on the path and then along the journey,
the way will appear, something like that.
But if you know where you're going and you do that
and you commit to it, then I think quite often events
and circumstances can serendipitously go in your favor.
Yes.
I really like the phrase, David, that action leads to clarity.
Right, yeah.
It's kind of similar, right?
yeah um well david that that's all we have time for in the call today i like to keep it to about
an hour thank you so much for joining me and taking me through all that if i could share one
last thing just listening to you the the ability to be sensitive to your own frustration and
difficulties is an incredible thing to witness and i'm sure it has been very hard what you just
explain but fronting up and actually saying that was really fucking hard is crucial i'm sure to like
working through it because a lot of people just take on the stress and ignore it and be fine do
you know what i mean just being like i don't know what the right phrase is being sensitive or being
willing to be vulnerable and publicly with a conversation like this absolutely awesome
and it's why people like podcasts because they listen to that and they go oh they're real oh
do you know what i'm going to check that musket thing out i'm going to tell my mate about it and
it's suddenly like you get a phone call from someone who's listened to this podcast because
i know a crew of pubs or i know do you know what i mean and that's how the snowball continues yeah
um and i think it's authenticity if i could summarize it as one word so yeah david awesome
thank you so much for sharing your time with me today i wish you the very best of luck building
musket over the years to come um any where or any final send-off that you want to share that we might
not have covered or how can people reach out look it's been thanks for having me it's been great to
be on and you know it's a really interesting point yeah i didn't mean to turn this into a therapy
session no no i love it that's what long form podcast all about mate but um but you know you
raise a really good point it has been a very tough journey both personally professionally and you know
it's been incredibly hard if there's anyone out who's whether you're building a bitcoin business
or not just you know i didn't have really anyone to chat to about it just rattled around in my own
head and trying to solve problems so if anyone does want a therapy session and just uh shoot
please drop me a note i'm on i'm on x musket m-u-s-q-e-t underscore david um on x uh drop
me an email david at musket.tech um but yeah reach out pretty easy um if you're in the uk always
happy to meet uh typically in london uh and i tend to be at bitcoin um bitcoin events uh and
conferences a few times a year so always reach out and um yeah happy to help anyway especially
anyone working in Bitcoin or generally just going through a similar journey.
Always happy to share and help.
Awesome.
Well, thank you for your time, David.
Awesome.
Take care.