You've had a dynamic where money has become freer than free.
You talk about a Fed just gone nuts.
All the central banks going nuts.
So it's all acting like safe haven.
I believe that in a world where central bankers are tripping over themselves to devalue their
currency, Bitcoin wins.
In the world of fiat currencies, Bitcoin is the victor.
I mean, that's part of the bull case for Bitcoin.
If you're not paying attention, you probably should be.
Nick Slaney, welcome to the show, sir.
Hey, Marty. Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for coming on.
I think you're at the intersection of something that fascinates me
incredibly right now, which is Bitcoin, obviously.
Been a Bitcoiner for 13 years, but I've been getting into vibe coding.
and you released a demo of integrating your product, Money Dev Kit, into Replit
and making it easier for Vibe coders to accept payments pretty trivially using the Bitcoin network.
And so jump off.
Why don't we give a brief description of your background
and why you decided to start Money Dev Kit and what it is at a high level?
Yeah, definitely.
Nick Slaney, been a Bitcoiner for a long time, since like 2013.
I joined Block as a hardware engineer.
And around that time, that's actually when Jack started talking a little more publicly
about Bitcoin.
Really exciting for me as a Bitcoiner.
And I was also getting into the Lightning Network at the time.
So that was going on.
They internally said they were going to start working on what became BitKey.
I got onto the BitKey team, exactly, as a mechanical engineer.
So I did help do the product design engineer, product design for BitKey.
And at the time, I was also getting the Lightning Network.
I was like, hey, we can do more with the Lightning Network at Block.
We just had cash app withdrawals and deposits at the time.
So I went and put together a doc, pitched it around the company, got the attention of
the right people, and we started C equals.
So at Block, we started ZEquels, which was a routing node on the Lightning Network.
And we wanted to do a lot with that node.
What we ended up doing was mostly serving cache app and making the best routing node we could.
And we saw really big growth in volume, which was really cool.
Fast forward to the end of 2024, early 2025.
I ended up leaving Block and I wanted to pursue kind of the insights we saw at Block.
We saw a bunch of volume on the Lightning Network.
We saw a lot of people paying.
We didn't see a lot of people actually receiving payments.
So kind of that money dev kit was born out of that, this idea of, hey, let's make it
actually easy to receive Lightning payments online.
and it just so happens you know all this vibe coding ai stuff was taking off i actually started
money dev kit it was me and sonnet at the time like hey take ldk node let's try to make it
something i can run um which i kind of had an idea about um but from there i got some help
got some people to uh you know money dev kit is not completely vibe coded it's made by really
legit developers. But yeah, it's been a lot. So Money Dev Kit is basically now a way to take
lightning payments on your website. And we've gotten it to the point where you can just say,
hey, Replit Agent, add payments with Money Dev Kit, and it just works. And that's a dream. So
that's a video we put out on New Year's Eve, actually. And we have a bunch of people trying
it now. Yeah. And so when you're calling a Replit agent saying, hey, implement money dev kit,
what's happening behind the scenes? So we've actually created an MCP server, which allows you
to create an account and do all the money dev kit things via the agent. And Replit has this
integration where you can easily add MCP servers. So the agent actually reaches out to our website,
creates an account, looks at our docs, implements everything in our docs, and puts in all of the
environment variables, everything for you. So the agent is basically doing everything. And we've just
given the agent the right things to poke and prod to make it work. And I think one of the reasons
you're focused on bitcoin specifically money dev kit is because of the sovereign neutral
asset of the protocol itself i think there are many people out there vibe coding many applications
will need payments and many people run into problems with something like stripe particularly
or even stable coins to a certain extent what is it about bitcoin and the lightning network
specifically that is perfectly suited for this explosion in app development that we're seeing?
The way we can get such an easy flow is because we're doing self-custody. And if you go to the
MoneyDevKit website, we're not saying self-custody, care about self-custody. This is the biggest thing
ever. What we're saying is accept payments. With self-custody, you don't have to do all of the
onboarding KYC that you have to do when you use something like Stripe. So, you know, we've kind of
packaged that up so that we can get the access. And it's kind of two things. It's access and ease
of use. So the demo of just pay ad payments, and then you can take a production payment in less
than five minutes. That's huge. No one's been able to do that before. Even if you're in a
supported country by Stripe and you go through the Stripe onboarding flow, it'll take a day at
least to get things going. So ease of use is huge, but also access. Since we're self-custody,
we don't have to have the limitations of Stripe. So there's a lot of people out there. If you go
on X right now and you search Stripe rejected, you'll see hundreds of people, a lot of them
actually in India who are saying, hey, I made this cool app. I'm really excited. I just found
out Stripe doesn't work in my country. What do I do? And they're in a lot of pain. It's like actually
probably the worst thing to put days, if not weeks of your life into an app and find out,
wait, I can't get paid for this. So using Bitcoin is the best way for us to reach those people
because Bitcoin was built with the idea of self-custody in mind. That's what gives us a way
to actually reach as many people as possible as easily as possible.
And what's happening under the hood when you use Money Dev Kit?
With Money Dev Kit, we've basically made libraries that easily fit into what people are using today.
Our first library was Next.js.
A lot of people make websites on Next.js and deploy them for sale.
It's a very easy thing.
We have another library that's Replit.
So it uses Express Vitae, like the kind of things that Replit uses.
And what we're doing in the library is we're actually giving you a little mini lightning
node that you run yourself.
When I say we're giving you a lightning node, I think people automatically go to like, wait,
I have to run a server and I have to do this.
We do it all for you.
So it's an LSP.
We actually let you hold your keys and you're able to run a server on your own infrastructure.
But we are, you know, handling channel liquidity and all the kind of complicated stuff.
The main thing is you're holding your keys and you have a node that's deployed on your own infrastructure.
And how do you make users aware that they're holding their own keys and the responsibility that comes with that?
We have it in the docs.
We have it actually in the MCP server, too.
Like, hey, this is your wallet key.
You want to keep this safe.
but also we think the typical money dev kit user is maybe not a bitcoiner actually we kind of hope
that's the case for bitcoiners i think they know pretty well like hey this is my key um but also
we want people to be offboarding either to their exchange to get their own local currency or to
their own wallet so we don't really see money dev kit as the place where you store all your money
more just an easy place to receive payments. And then from there, you can bring it to your wallet,
your self-custody, or to your local currency. So we do say, hey, it's good to keep the seed,
make sure you don't lose it. But also we expect most people to not be keeping a lot of money on
DevKit. And right now it's only one-time sales, but you have subscriptions and use and space
coming soon? Yeah. So we're going to be covering all of the things that people expect from
a payment product. A lot of people have made like, hey, you can, this is a developer tool.
You can use Bitcoin payments with this, but all they give is send and receive. That's good for a
wallet. But most people who are making websites, they want the full stack. Stripe does a lot more
than just the credit card API receive credit card payments.
They're doing customers, subscriptions, products.
These are all things we're working on now.
We actually just got our customers integration started
and subscriptions and products and all that sorts of things
are going to be following soon.
Yeah.
So let's lean into this.
Do you think, because this has been an ongoing conversation
over the last two years, particularly as AI,
has really hit the scene and more particularly this idea of an agentic framework more specifically
an autonomous agentic sort of digital ecosystem arising and i've always been under the impression
that it makes sense like if agents are going to be running around the internet doing tasks
for humans and some of those tasks necessitating the transfer of of money bitcoin makes sense is
is this your view as well? And if so, like, let's explain to the audience why Bitcoin may be
perfectly suited for this specifically. Yeah, definitely. The biggest thing is what I was
talking about before is the self-custody aspect. With MoneyDevKit, we've made it so self-custody
is super accessible and you don't really have to think about it. And the benefits that gives is you
can accept payments anywhere. You don't need to have like the very rigid, basically set up a bank
account to accept payments. And this translates really well to agents, because I think you see a
lot of people talking about agentic payments and a lot of people saying like, this is going to be
huge, but I haven't seen anyone actually do it yet. And I think a lot of it is they are in,
you know, discussions with all sorts of people at payment networks, and they're talking about
the sort of things that keep people from getting on those payment networks in the first place and
trying to figure out how this is going to work. With an easy-to-use self-custody solution that an
agent can just spin up itself, you don't have to worry about any of that because there's no payment
processor that's taking on the risk of what the agent is doing. The agent is just using a software
tool that lets it interact with Bitcoin and Lightning. So that's hugely powerful when you're
talking about things like, hey, is an agent going to pay for an MCP server? Are agents going to be
paying each other? Are agents going to be creating other agents that then are paying other agents?
All these kind of use cases in the traditional finance world, you have to start with, well,
where am I going to scan the passport? How do I make sure it's the country I support and I know
where the money is coming from? When it's self-custody and it's very much a responsibility
is on the developer and the agent, then it's just so much simpler. So we're looking into the
agentic payment stuff now. And I think we can get to a proof concept much faster than a lot of these
companies that are starting with Stripe or starting with traditional payments.
Or stablecoins. I think you have strong views on stablecoins specifically. What are your thoughts
on the fascination and the energy behind stablecoins as an industry right now?
A lot of people have asked us about stablecoins, especially as we raised our seed round,
kind of, hey, stable coins are the hot thing. We were raising right around the time when Stripe was
spending a billion dollars on Privy and Bridge and all these kind of stable coin things. And I think
everyone was, there was a lot of fervor, but underneath people who know how stable coins work
and they know why Tether is popular, we're pretty confused. Marty, I think you were probably,
I think at least Odell was at the Bitcoin for America conference in Washington, DC.
I was there too, yeah.
Yeah. And Paolo was there. I don't know if you noticed that, but I think that was the first time
Paolo ever stepped foot on US soil He the CEO of Tether And people in the industry know that Tether is popular because it lets you hold dollars in places where it basically illegal to hold dollars
And Tether's whole business was based around having absolutely no US nexus. No one went to
the US. They didn't hire any US citizens. So the whole Genius Act, Circle IPO, Bridge, Privy thing,
I think to most people in the industry, they were kind of like, hey, what's going on?
Like a USDC has always been a lower market cap than Tether because Tether got global access by
completely avoiding the US. And when the Genius Act passed and we saw, hey, this has these kind of
onboarding requirements that banks have, I immediately was like, okay, well, this won't
have the access that Tether had. And I think that's like the real glaring thing right now.
The narrative is, hey, stable coins are going to have Stripe go global.
But actually, when you look at the plays, when you actually go through stable coin flows,
you usually run into the sort of stuff that keeps people from like India out.
So for us at Money Dev Kit, we're maximizing for access.
We're really going for those people who are, hey, I created an app.
Millions and millions of people can do this now.
but I can't use Stripe. And what we saw with stable coins was not a big access expansion,
at least with the US stable coins, but we saw basically a fintech play to replace MasterCard
and Visa, which is totally reasonable for Stripe to do and totally reasonable for basically every
company in the US to try to get around MasterCard and Visa. But for a really big global TAM play,
it doesn't really match up. So for us, Bitcoin was really the thing to go with.
And actually, it's really interesting, Marty. We were talking with a traditionally underbanked
business in the US and they told us, hey, we're talking to a bunch of stablecoin companies.
They're really excited. But with this Bitcoin thing, do you have to, will MasterCard get mad
if you're doing this? And I had to explain to this company, like, no, Bitcoin is an open network.
There's no, I don't have to worry about what MasterCard thinks about our business.
And that to me was a really validating point to this idea of like, hey, these US tables that
everyone's excited about, they don't actually give you more access. Yeah. I think we're very
much aligned on this. My pin tweet on my profile right now, it's been fun. I sent this out in July
of last year the noise of this cycle is going to be stablecoin fervor real world asset tokenization
in a resurgence of blockchaining all the things especially ai and i think the siren calls
of stablecoin specifically are just fascinating because people view them as these they conflate
them with bitcoin's sovereign nature right like stablecoins you have a central issue or whether
it's tether or circle or coinbase whoever it may be and they can blacklist you it's like you're
you do have some i mean props for props are due there definitely are some efficiency and user
experience improvements using stable coins over visa mastercard particularly in settlement times
but at the end of the day these are centrally issued dollar um dollar equivalent tokens that
that can be frozen or blacklisted. And you have a company that sort of dictates who can and cannot
use them or Bitcoin does not have that problem. Exactly. And, you know, the other thing with
stable coins is people would say, hey, Nick, don't you think people want stable coins?
And my response to that is the people are trying to serve. They don't want stable coins. They don't
want they probably don't even actually want Bitcoin. They just want payments. They're in a
position where they've made something and they actually, they can't receive any value. So however,
however we can get to them is most important. And, you know, it being Bitcoin, it means that
we don't have those risks that the stable coin issuers have. And it also means we have more
liquidity, more exchanges available. So someone who wants to just take payments, they can get
their local currency like rupees, or they can get Bitcoin if they want. But it really, I think,
leaning into this kind of medium exchange frame of you can use Bitcoin for a transfer. It's the
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What are your thoughts on the double-sided market problem? Obviously, Bitcoin payments have been
a meme since you've been in Bitcoin, since I've been in Bitcoin. I think Roger Burr,
particularly back in the 2012 to 14 era, really pushing for merchant adoption.
And we've seen a resurgence of that, particularly in the last year with your former company Block and Square specifically integrating it into their point of sale systems.
And I think that's still one of the lingering questions in many Bitcoiners minds is like, when are enough people going to have Bitcoin and be willing to spend it for this use case specifically to make sense?
Yeah, it's a big chicken and the egg thing.
And when I look back at, you know, all the merchant adoption in 2013, 2014, I bought a laptop off overstock.com with on-chain Bitcoin.
I don't even want to look back at that transaction and know how much money that's worth now.
But it was there, right?
You could buy things on overstock with on-chain Bitcoin.
I think the issues were on-chain was slow.
I mean, it's why lightning was invented, right?
And also, Bitcoin hadn't really caught on yet.
We were super early adopter days. Now it's 10 plus years later. Bitcoin has already had its big
kind of investor, institutional investment phase, all the kind of memes around buying Bitcoin.
More people own Bitcoin now. And also the technology is so much better. How far we've
come with lightning is actually really impressive. And I think we're still at kind of the precipice
of people reducing that to real practice, like actually taking the stuff we've done with Lightning
and making it accessible for normal people. So I think back in the day, merchant adoption was a
good idea, but the consumers weren't there. I think now we have the opposite problem. I think
we have a lot of people who either hold Bitcoin or have access to send Bitcoin, and we don't have
a lot of people accepting it. So we're kind of back at the beginning, but now I see a lot of
demand on the consumer side. And we're just going to shore it up on the merchant side.
I was told that lightning is a complete and utter failure.
Yeah, this is what I was going crazy about in 2024. 2024 was such a dark time for lightning
between Phoenix pulling out of the US and all that sort of uncertainty with the Biden
administration. But at the time, that's when at C equals, our volumes were really changing.
and we were seeing what went from something where everyone was just sending deposits to other
exchanges, it started to shift towards payment size payments going to payment looking destinations
in pretty good size for the Lightning Network. And that's somewhat captured in the River report.
But yeah, I was going crazy in 2024. I mean, the fee market was a little wild too,
but um you know i think what i was saying through all of that through all the ordinal stuff was
this is going to blow over in like a year and we're going to be back to one sat per beat bite
and we're going to be cruising and that's where we've ended up so you know lightning is definitely
not dead a lot of people are using it and with money definitely i think a lot more people are
going to be using it well what would you say are the most underappreciated or
is completely misunderstood aspects of the Lightning Network and how it's being used today
and how much activity is actually happening on it? I think people really get tied up with the
technical details. I think as an industry with Bitcoin, we're really focused on science when we
should be focused on engineering. And what I mean by that is everyone's looking at Lightning and
they're looking at, okay, in a high fee market, it costs more to open channels or, okay, if I use
UTXO sharing, then I can spread this cost out. And I think we're kind of looking at the wrong
problems. I think what we really should be focusing on is how do we get this to people?
How do we make this so people want to use it? And right now our fees are much, much lower than
anything someone can use today. Like the person in India example, someone in India wants to take
payments right now, they have to open an LLC in the US, which is just a giant cost right there.
And then once you actually, if you can get on Stripe, once you're on Stripe and you're trying
to take global payments, you start at, it's like 4.4% and you pay 1% on the currency exchange.
So you're at like 5.4% if you're in the US. If you're outside the US, you're at 6.4% because
say tag on another percent to exchange to your local currency. So all of this focus on lightning
fees and like trying to get to micro BIPs for sending payments, it's not really the right focus
because if I give someone payments in India right now, they're going to be like, wow, I could never
have payments before and now I can have payments. So I feel like we micro focus on these things that
are very, uh, abstract to normal people. And what we actually need to give is a nicely abstracted,
uh, experience that someone can just use. Um, so there's so much with lightning and Bitcoin where
it's just like, okay, this is cool. And this will help when we have, um, a hundred million users,
but right now we don't have a hundred million people sending payments. So the actual things
we need to do are totally different. And then when you say like sending payments,
So I think to your point, another big update from the Block family companies, I think, was Cash App's ability to pay a Bitcoin invoice using your dollar balance on the app.
So do you think more companies integrating that particular use case?
Strike obviously has it as well.
I think there are a few others that do that.
but you think that's like a necessary low-level infrastructure
that needs to be widely adopted to really allow money dev kit users
to have incredible success because they're end users at the end of the day.
If they have Cash App or Strike and they know that they don't actually need
to hold Bitcoin to pay a Bitcoin invoice,
that they can buy something without needing to worry about holding Bitcoin.
Yeah, it's huge for us because, yeah, I mean, it's a much better experience.
And it's something that I was really hammering on at Block is, hey, we should do this.
We should make this very easy for someone to just send a Bitcoin payment.
I tweeted about it a lot, too.
But basically, yeah, it fills that medium of exchange use case that I think we're at right now.
We have the UX to be able to convert from dollars to Bitcoin and send it anywhere And we have the liquidity in the exchanges to convert from Bitcoin to local currency anywhere else And that what people want They
don't necessarily, there are definitely people who want Bitcoin and we love them. And they're
going to do probably really well if they hold Bitcoin over the long term. But most people,
they want money in their bank account and Bitcoin is uniquely positioned to deliver that.
So I'm really happy that cashed that experience. And I think if you're running an exchange right now and you can see kind of the, if you're looking ahead, having this sort of auto convert on and off ramp, I know bull is doing it. I think bull Bitcoin is actually in a really good position and cash app and strike, of course.
being able to be the on and off ramp for something like money dev kit is insanely valuable because
we're going to have a lot of users who are creating apps, creating value, and they're
going to want to just get money in their bank account. And that partnership, whether you're on
the accepting side or you're partnering with a wallet, it's kind of the right setup to make money
really flow. So that's why we use Cash App with every demo we have, because it's just so simple
and quick. And it's such a good example. I could use Coinbase or I could use another app and you
get there, but you have to like buy Bitcoin. You have to send it. I think if you're an exchange
and you want to be forward thinking and you want to be in the future, you should be looking at Cash
App and how they actually do their stuff. Yeah. What's the response been like?
since you've been releasing these demos over the last few months i mean i think the replet one
um was probably the biggest because obviously there's a lot of focus on replet specifically
as people are getting into vibe coding but i have to imagine that um having that mcp um server
integrated into replet could be massive for you guys yeah because it just works and people aren't
used to that with payments we actually had um i had like a fintech payments pm say like hey where
you to do the onboarding. I'd explain to them, oh, it's self-custody. You don't have to do this
for self-custody. And I think people are just astounded that they can just add payments in
five minutes. The access story is key, but the ease of use and the UX is actually kind of
surprisingly what people are responding most about. They're like, I can't believe I can just
do this this quickly. And especially I actually had one person say, oh, why should I use this next
to Stripe? And I wasn't expecting I was thinking, OK, maybe most people are using this because they
can't use Stripe. But that international payment story, if you want to take payments globally,
you actually get hammered on fees to do that. So it's been interesting. There's a lot of cool
websites that are being spun up right now. And whenever you put out a video, it's kind of a
lagging effect. It's like, you know, you get hundreds of thousands of views and you get,
you know, a thousand bookmarks. And those are all people who are going to go. It's really
interesting for vibe coding and kind of this industry. It all happens nights and weekends.
It's like someone doing a side project in their spare time. And, you know, it only takes
eventually those hit and take off and people start investing more and more time into it.
So it's been really cool to see what people create.
And we're excited for what's next.
What are some examples of things that people are using MoneyDevKit with?
We have, you know, Matt Belez is a he's kind of a famous vibe coder.
He was early on talking about vibe coding in Bitcoin.
He's created Impressionista.fun.
He told me that image generation is like the hello world of AI vibe coded apps.
where you just make like a nice app that calls maybe the open AI image generation API. And he
has a nice prompt to make them all like super aesthetic pictures. So he's using Money Dev Kit,
which is really exciting. And it's kind of cool because you see vibe coders and you see how they're
talked about online and you think it's just like someone who's really dumb who can't do anything.
But in reality, they're making more and more sophisticated apps. So what started as an image
generation website has now gone to, okay, you can display your images on the website and now you can
receive tips. And Matt has gone from just simple one-time payments to now he's looking for a way
to attract customers and a way to pay out to customers. So it's super interesting how someone
goes from vibe coding something simple to now they're thinking about auth and databases and
stuff like that. Another example is eCurrencyHodler on X. He is building SatDoku. So it's a
Sudoku website where you can pay for more lives when you want to keep going, if you've made a
mistake and you want to actually keep going. So that's a very simple, easy one-time payment.
But now he's gone to add an AI assistant that actually makes you better at Sudoku and you can
pay the AI assistant to actually make you better at Sudoku. So he is another example where he's
started with something simple that's vibe coded, and now he's wanting to track customers. He's got
a leaderboard. He's got all these features he wants to add that are now approaching what someone
on X is talking about when they're making a very nice software as a service website.
So it's really interesting.
Someone who's really super early, they're already getting into stuff like Auth, databases, customers, all this stuff that we're looking at.
What is your ideal customer in your mind?
The ideal customer is someone in one of these countries that aren't served by Stripe.
They have created an app that they think is valuable.
And they pick up Money DevKit because they just want to get payments.
and they don't have any other way to do it.
That's where we really want to be.
Our early customers are Bitcoiners who are excited.
I mean, just day one, we've made it
so that you can vibe code lighting payments
into your website.
And for Bitcoin, that kind of wasn't really a thing before.
You'd have to run a server somewhere.
You'd have to pay a monthly fee here
to have just a library that you can take payments with
is already like, I think, a huge upgrade
for Bitcoin payments in the Bitcoin space.
But our dream is to be in India, to be in all these people who are saying, I can't use Stripe on X.
They start using MoneyDevKit because those are people who are not necessarily excited about Bitcoin.
They're just excited about getting payments.
And in a world where more and more people can make apps now and more and more people can make things that are valuable,
being able to give them a payment solution that gets them that value, I think is tremendously.
valuable yeah and on the topic of vibe coding uh not necessarily well maybe we can focus on money
dev kit but how somebody who's been uh engineering products for pretty large massive corporations
block obviously um for many years now how how profound is the emergence of these ai tools and
what is your preferred stack if you don't mind me asking yeah it's uh it's amazing um so at block
you know i said i was a hardware engineer i'm not actually a software engineer um and we had a team
of software engineers building c equals uh we were using lightning dev kit um and the team would do a
lot of the implementation i would do more like the product work and kind of defining where we're going
But now at MoneyDevKit with AI, my stack, I use Cursor.
I think people might call me an on canal for using Cursor.
Everyone's in cloud code and, you know, on a terminal.
But with Opus, actually, in the past month, there was a bunch of user feedback that we had in Linear.
And we're like, OK, we'll get to this.
You know, over the past few weeks, I've just been assigning them to Opus through Cursor.
and just getting a lot done.
And that's not something,
even over this past year with Sonnet
and all the other models, Codex,
I was doing work,
but I was never really confident that we could merge it.
I would always have a developer look at it.
Now with Opus, I can just,
I need something different on the website.
I need something different with this experience.
I can prompt it.
And it's something we merged like that day.
So our speed has really increased.
It's really dramatic.
A lot of people are talking about this online now, like Opus is one-shotting all these things.
It's true.
And it's now at a point where instead of being the annoying CEO who's like, hey, can we get
this in someday, you know, I can just go do it.
And so now I'm picking up all those kind of annoying, not quite super, you know, hard
tickets.
I can just do all those in a weekend and then we're, you know, we're onto the big important stuff.
So it's, uh, it's truly like a, a really big change.
In terms of the amount of headcount that you think you'll need in the long run,
how does it affect that?
Like how big do you think you can get money dev kit with?
Yeah, we're not really focused on making money dev kit.
Like this giant team, um, will grow to whatever we need to.
But right now we have four developers and we're hiring a designer soon.
And I feel pretty good about that.
I think that's a really good place to be.
And we have a lot of, you know, with Money Dev Kit, we are doing a lot of specialized stuff behind the scenes.
We're doing all the lightning stack.
We're running everything that Spiral has basically.
And we're doing a lot of kind of special stuff.
We're ahead of the LSP spec.
We're doing all these kind of things that are very custom lightning things that AI can't
do.
So we'll always need kind of our lightning experts we've been lucky to hire.
But for the feature work, when we talk about, hey, how quickly can we make something that
matches Stripe in terms of subscriptions and features?
I think we can get there really quickly.
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It would be remiss of us not to touch on it.
Sorry, I haven't done it yet.
But non-custodial lightning, that's been a white whale in the Bitcoin space for a while.
And I know the LDK team, I've been talking to Matt Corallo.
He, in Vegas earlier this year, when I saw him in person,
and he came on the show and said it publicly, so I feel comfortable saying it.
He's like, this is the year of non-custodial lightning.
And obviously, you guys are implementing that at MoneyDevKit.
What's changed recently to make this viable?
i've always believed in self-custodial lightning and what we're doing at c equals was really to um
further that uh the not a ton of this changed i think back to 2023 when we're doing like mutiny
i was so excited about mutiny i was a big mutiny user the mutiny guys shout out to ben and to tony
and to paul they took the first draft of self-custody lightning and they did everything
they could with it and they found all the bugs they found all the hard stuff um you know the ldk
team really kind of decided hey we want to make mobile lightning work and that is really hard and
i think i consider like mutiny kind of the first generation of lightning wallets where
they figured everything out and uh i think um a lot of those bugs are ironed out now and a lot of
that stuff um has been figured out on on the backs of things like mutiny i think matt's right
in the next year, I think we'll see a lot more self-custody lightning.
You know the way everything panned out with the fee market and kind of the early take on self lightning payments people got disillusioned People went and created whole new L2s
Was it super necessary?
I don't know.
But yeah, I think now everything's a lot more refined and we have a lot better idea of how
to make things work.
So, I mean, our entire company is staked on self custody lighting right now and it's working
amazing.
what was the biggest thing that mutiny figured out was the uh keeping private keys and to secure
enclave in the cloud is it channel management lsp stuff mutiny took ldk kind of to its limit
of running in the browser and really being super lightweight which was something no one had really
attempted before um to that extent and i think in doing that they found there's no like one big
thing where it was like, hey, we figured this out and now everything works. It was a bunch of little
tiny bugs that, you know, pre-AI, I'm just thinking about that little three-person team
going through all the support and everything. It goes back to a little bit of what I was saying
before. It's the engineering. It's like, in theory, everything should have worked with Lightning.
But in practice, when you have users and they're actually finding all those edge cases and corner
cases, um, it's really hard work, but what you end up with is a much more refined product.
So like, you know, the force closes the, the fee stuff, anchor channels, all these sorts of things
have made the experience so much better. Um, and now I think it's up to, um, someone with a good
amount of kind of product vision to really take what we have, the lightning primitives and make
it a really nicely polished product. What is lacking from Lightning that you would like to
see and make your life easier, if anything? My big thing is subscriptions. So we can make
subscriptions work at MoneyDevKit in a way that I think is okay for someone who's an early adopter.
But what Lightning really lacks is a native way to do pull payments. I actually talked about this
recently on X said, saying, uh, Hey, we should bring back this bolt 12 or current spec. I think,
uh, Rusty's been working on it and, uh, um, Christian responded as well. Um, just this way
to let people do recurring payments. That's how everyone pays their bills. It's how they pay for
Netflix. It's a very expected thing that you can sign up for a service, um, give your payment
details and just have it work. So that's kind of what I'm ringing the bell about nowadays.
It's more the payment protocol stuff as opposed to we need this very specific low-level feature.
It's the stuff that makes payments work on kind of a higher level.
What's holding that up right now, recurring payments?
I think it's just a classic open source spec process when you're trying to get something that multiple implementations are going to use. Everyone has their own priorities. I think the Lightning ecosystem deserves a lot of credit here because you have three different clients that are effectively interoperating on Lightning.
I think it's actually like a huge achievement and everyone's talking about Bitcoin core all the time.
But what's happening in the lightning spec meetings is actually pretty impressive.
So I have to find out exactly what it's going to take.
I think to actually get something like that and you need at least two implementations.
But the big thing to really make that feature work while it's need to adopt it.
And that's why I say, you know, if you have a Lightning integration, you really want to be on the latest stuff so that you can interoperate with, you know, the coolest features.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's my big question.
Bringing this back to like stable coins versus Lightning too.
Again, it seems like the focus in the broader tech, fintech sectors on stable coins.
And I think you and I both agree that Lightning is a superior technology.
Bitcoin is a superior technology. What do you think it's going to take for the broader market
to recognize that? I think just better high level abstractions, like what we're doing with money
dev kit, it's money dev kit. Like if you go on our website, we actually don't talk about Bitcoin.
We're big Bitcoin believers. We're all Bitcoiners, but we're not trying to sell Bitcoin,
the asset we're trying to sell the access and the ability to actually be on the network and actually
accept and receive value. So I think that's a big part of it. And yeah, I think Bitcoin has a real
clear advantage because when you try to use stable coins right now, Marty, I don't know if
you've ever used a stable coin app recently or even go and try to pay a stable coin payment.
It's pick your stable coin, pick the chain, only send USDC on base or you'll lose all your money.
And then there's no privacy. This is actually a really terrible experience beyond just the
liquidity and the access. People aren't doing this. That's why I'm saying it's a meme that's
going to go away. I think in the US, maybe stablecoin rails get tucked under bank accounts
or something like that. And that's fine. Stripe's going to make more money. But for people around
the world who want to take global payments having something that's really truly interoperable and
is very simple is going to be the thing that wins yeah that's funny i i have avoided
successfully and who knows maybe i'm a load eight maybe i'm not doing as much uh
research as i should be but i've observed enough to understand that the friction
is there and i don't want to i don't want to go through the brain damage and figuring it out
I just have to keep myself honest.
It's funny.
I have contractors that live that will do work for us outside the U.S.,
and I've had them send me stablecoin invoices.
I'm like, I don't have stablecoins.
Just send me a Bitcoin address, and they reply in five minutes
with a Bitcoin address.
It's much easier for me.
Obviously, I'm a hardcore Bitcoiner, but it's just as easy to spin up
a Bitcoin wallet and send an address and receive that money
and the complexity of the stable coin landscape as such,
where it's like, I think there's a lot of noise
and there's going to be a lot of capital burn focusing on that.
And that's a testament, actually, to the pain people feel
when they're trying to take global payments.
It's like they're going through all of that complexity
just to be able to get something.
So I think we can give them a much better experience with Bitcoin.
yeah what um what would you say to anybody listening to this uh how could they
get involved and help money dev kits uh dream come true in terms of getting bitcoin payments
spread on the internet as vibe coding includes make something cool we're at a time where you
can just make stuff and we you know the barriers to actually writing code have been tremendously
lowered. I think a lot of people, like some people have like an aversion to AI. I understand where
that comes from. But if you have an idea, you can just build it right now and you can go on
replet and you can say, hey, make me this. It's not perfect, but it works really well. And if you
want to take payments, you can just use money dev kit. We're working on integrations that let you
very easily get cash in your bank account. So you don't necessarily have to be a Bitcoin
believer but the more people who use this stuff and show that it's valuable it's better for the
ecosystem because more people are sending bitcoin payments um better in my mind yeah
it is great i mean i think the example that you gave earlier is very in line with how i've been
vibe coding where like when you were starting out money dev kit just using sonnet to get the the
proof of concepts mvp together like everything that i vibe coded that's how i use it like i'll
use repliator plot code get it to a certain point then have the self-awareness to understand that i
don't understand the um the the holes that could exist in the thing i vibe coded and then i find
a competent developer and say hey here's this thing do you see what i'm trying to build here
like can you make sure it's not insecure and actually works and and it off and the thing
gets built i think it's that's another important thing to recognize with vibe coding if you're not
a software engineer and you don't understand um where you could foot gun yourself you can get it
to a certain place find a developer doesn't know what they're doing and they can take it from there
pretty sure yeah i mean that's how i felt in april i think now i feel like you could probably
just send it. If you're going to build a business where you're handling or helping people send and
receive payments, maybe have someone look at that. But for most ideas, they're pretty low stakes.
And you're not handling other people's money. And if you're using MoneyDevKit,
we've got all that taken care of for you. So I would say don't lose your confidence,
I think you could send it without a developer right now.
Well, I still need to get better at the, uh, just like the backend.
So like setting up for sale, like I'm still learning how to do that.
Like getting the domain and sending up the DNS, like all that, all that stuff, that system admin stuff that, uh, I'm not trained in getting more familiar with it.
So stuff like that, where I need the last mile help.
Yeah.
Yeah, the cool thing is you can actually learn a lot too,
like just telling the agent to do it.
And if it can't do it, a lot of times it'll be like,
well, here's what I would do.
And yeah, there is still, I think I'm a little bit of an advantage
because I definitely am a bit of a nerd
and I'm running nodes and doing all that stuff.
So there is some base level knowledge, but you can get really far.
So having been in Bitcoin for a while now
and being on the cutting edge of building products
that have touched millions of people.
What are your thoughts on the current state of Bitcoin broadly?
The network, the sort of social movement behind it,
I don't know, for lack of a better term,
the awareness, the brand awareness.
Is Bitcoin exceeding your expectations?
Has it come up short in 2026?
Is it right where you thought it would be?
Like, how is Bitcoin doing in your mind?
I like where Bitcoin is, honestly. I think we've come really far. I think we still focus on things
that are too low level that people don't care about. Most people, HTTP, TCP, these protocols
that run the internet, very important. They're very passionate people who have put a lot of time
into making that work. And they're there with the Linux Foundation on all those mailing lists,
and they're still slaving away at the low level things that make things work. But most people,
they just use Facebook. They don't care about HTTP or TCP or anything like that.
So when I think about Bitcoin, I see us focusing a lot on the very low level things that no one
cares about. And not a lot of people are building the high level stuff that people will actually
about. So, you know, I'm really happy where the tech is. I think there's still things we have to
do. There's always upgrades we have to do. There's always things we need to fix. Nothing is perfect.
But I think the real focus for Bitcoin 2026 and beyond is making things that people actually want
to use. And that's a different kind of heart. Like it's not the spec work and, you know,
the interoperability and, you know, um, consensus and the mempool stuff, it's more taking it up to
a level where someone's actually using it and finding out how they break it, where the sharp
edges are. Um, it's different hard work that we need to be doing. Um, and that's why I say also,
if you have an idea for an app, um, and you want to take payments or you want to send payments,
or you want to make a wallet, you should just do it because we need it.
this may be controversial, but do you think we need better tastemakers on
Bitcoin app development specifically? Oh yeah, absolutely. Um, Matt Belez is actually really
good with this. He makes some cool stuff. Um, and you know, when you talk about tastes,
there's like technical taste, which is actually a big part of it. Like just the way you use Bitcoin
and lightning, there's like a certain technical taste there, but there's also just, yeah, the
higher level, more broadly appealing taste of what do people want to use? And it's not even just...
I think when people talk about taste, they're thinking like the way something looks, but the
way something is used and feels. A lot of people out there, the first thing you do when you have a
new cool tool with a bunch of configuration options is you make an app and you expose every option.
And then you can configure everything. And you as a person who appreciates the technology, you're
like, yes, this is so cool.
I can do all these things.
But someone who just needs a technology,
isn't actually isn't actually into it.
They want the very highly opinionated paved path that does everything for you.
And that's what we need more of in Bitcoin.
Yeah.
What is an app that doesn't exist that you think should exist and could basically unlock
that that recognition?
Because I agree.
I think Bitcoin app developers are people integrating Bitcoin into their app.
We still haven't crossed the chasm of like tapping into the zeitgeist and being part
of something that goes viral.
I mean, outside of like Cash App and all that, but those are like exchanges and payment wallets.
But I'm looking for something outside of Bitcoin that integrates it in a novel way that the product's so good that even though it has Bitcoin integrated and that may seem to be a hurdle for most people want to use it, the experience is so good that they figure out how to use Bitcoin anyway.
The big thing for me was MoneyDevKit.
That's why I wouldn't make that.
but beyond money dev kit, it's all these websites. I did a video on this. There's all these websites
where you just Google, you have to do one thing. I did SVG to ping. You have like a nice SVG logo.
You want to put it somewhere else. You have to make it a ping file. I could, you know, there's
probably some terminal app that I could install that'll do it super easily. But what I actually do
is I Google SVG to ping. I go to a really gross website with a million ads on it and I put it in.
So I made a website where you can do that, but instead of seeing a bunch of gross ads,
you just do a quick micropayment and then you're done. There's so much low hanging fruit like that
that I think could be a lot nicer. And yeah, just like anything where you just want to do
global payments so you just want it to work Just anything that cool just make it add payments to it There a bunch of really interesting industries that Stripe doesn serve
It's beyond just, you know, the 120 countries they don't serve.
It's like fortune telling apps.
One of the coolest things I actually saw recently was this website called Chart2AI.
And it's are you into astrology, Marty?
You got to.
I, there are many people in my, my, my family that are into astrology, my sister and my wife.
They would love this because basically what it does, you put in your information,
it gives you a birth chart. And then someone has just gone through and integrated with AI to
basically put in all the astrology knowledge ever, and they've made it. So you basically put
in your information, you get this super long prompt and you plug it into chat GPT and it gives
you like the best horoscope reading you could ever get. Like it was, I, I did it, you know,
I'm not a big astrology guy, but you know, just see, see what it's like. It was like telling me
about my life, like current life at that moment in ways I was like, wait, how do you know this?
So, um, that's really cool. But the interesting thing, so you should try as chart two dot AI,
but the interesting, interesting thing is Stripe actually doesn't serve fortune telling services.
So if you are, you know, you're driving along and you see like the psychic on the side of the road, they can't use Stripe because, you know, it's a high risk industry for that.
Maybe some chargebacks or something like that.
If you make an app like that, you basically need to use MoneyDevKit.
There's a lot of businesses like that where it's like totally legal.
Everything's above board, but you can't actually be banked if you're in that business.
So maybe your wife or your sister, you said,
maybe they want to make an app with astrology or something like that They could use Money Dev Kit uh i gonna have to give i gonna have to give them the advice ladies it time to start vibe coding
and you can work on it together um this is fascinating this is awesome thank you um thank
you for building money dev kit number one i think i completely agree we need something as simple as
like an api call in cli to get payments integrated in apps and the fact that i think the way you've
approach the market specifically building a replet mcp at a time when it's one of the hottest
companies in the world is strategically uh incredibly sappy um and so i hope and obviously
amjad is a bitcoiner too and don't want to dox anybody but i know there's bitcoiners in uh very
strategic places within replet specifically and so uh it will be cool to see if they lean into it
And do they do you know if they have any plans of like highlighting money dev kit within Replit?
Like, hey, if you want to add payments, here's one of the easiest option.
Amjad already blasted us out.
It's a dream for Replit because we were talking to Replit a few years ago and, you know, they were talking about how they had all these users.
But 80 percent of them were outside the U.S.
That's where Replit started really with the underserved.
And now I think maybe that balance is a little different.
but they have 30 million users and I'm willing to bet a big proportion of them just can't monetize
these cool websites that they're making. So I think it's a match made in heaven. And of course,
we're talking to Replit now about how we can keep going with that. But yeah, it's exactly where
Amjad wants to be. He's talked about how access to creating software and creating cool things
is kind of Replit's mission.
And our mission is access for payments So I think it a really cool thing And I hope we can go further with it oh yeah working uh anybody is so curious find out more about money dev kit more about you
um get involved for me i'm nick slaney on x for money dev kit just go to my dev kit.com
docs.moneydevkit.com um just ask your agent to add money dev kit to your app and uh yeah feel
feel free to ping me if you need help.
I'm happy to hop in Replit multiplayer
and help you out if something's getting stuck.
But the idea is you just ask your agent
to add my dev kit and it just works.
Go do it, Freaks.
I know a lot of you are vibe coding out there.
Get on it.
Nick, thank you for your time.
This has been incredible.
Hopefully we can do it again
at some point in the future.
Thanks a lot, Marty.
Yeah, I had a good time.
Glad to, happy to do it again.
Awesome.
Peace and love, Freaks.
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Okay.
Thank you.