WBD657 Audio Transcription
How Fedimint Scales Bitcoin with Obi Nwosu
Release date: Friday 12th May
Note: the following is a transcription of my interview with Obi Nwosu. I have reviewed the transcription but if you find any mistakes, please feel free to email me. You can listen to the original recording here.
Obi Nwosu is a co-founder of Fedimint and a board member of Jack Dorsey’s and Jay-Z’s ₿trust. In this interview, we discuss the mission of Fedimint: empowering communities around the world by allowing them to take control of their money. We also talk about the importance of trust models in relation to storing Bitcoin in Fedimint.
“We’re effectively the outsource business development arm for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem… Inherent in our model is that we win by ensuring the entire ecosystem wins.”
— Obi Nwosu
Interview Transcription
Peter McCormack: I hate my voice, I hate it.
Obi Nwosu: Why?
Peter McCormack: I don't know, because you know the whole thing about voices, right, you hear it different from everyone else?
Obi Nwosu: Except for now, I can actually hear what other people hear.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so I'm hearing and I'm like, "Wow, I sound like a fucking moron; how do I have any friends; why does everyone listen to my podcast?!"
Obi Nwosu: Oh my days.
Peter McCormack: But yeah, Danny's been unbelievable and he's not just obviously a work colleague, he's a friend now, and I want him to be successful.
Obi Nwosu: That's the best way.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, he drinks whiskey now.
Danny Knowles: I do drink whiskey now.
Obi Nwosu: I was just thinking, I repeat this again and again, but I've had different experiences with partnering with people in the past, and the two co-founders I have right now, Eric Sirion, Elsirion, and Justin Moon, they're incredible people, and I always feel the luckiest thing for me was meeting, initially it was Eric, because it was completely accidental. We share a number of core philosophies with each other but we just come from two completely different worlds, and it was pure accident that we bumped into each other, otherwise we would have probably never met, even through we're both in Bitcoin circles, because just the people we hang out with and everything.
Peter McCormack: Well, we're similar; me and Danny are aligned on a lot of our views, we are into very similar things, football, etc, and Danny just dropped me an email one day, he was like, "Basically, mate, your production's shit; can I do it for you?" in as many words, and I was like, "All right, you do the next show", and he's done every show since, but now he doesn't even do that job, he runs the shows.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: He's the gatekeeper to guests, he picks the direction; I manage the partners and I do the business side, but Danny will eventually do the business side as my entrepreneurial spirit goes.
Obi Nwosu: It does feel like Danny's almost already running the business right now.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, he needs to come and run Bedford with me now!
Danny Knowles: Pete's trying!
Peter McCormack: But it's a weird thing because I have a central vision and everything I do now is focused on, "Will that get me one step closer to getting Bedford in the football league?"
Obi Nwosu: Oh, wow.
Peter McCormack: I don't care if bitcoiners don't care about football or not, that is my goal; one goal I have in life is to get Bedford in the football league, and if I can do that I will definitely die a happy man.
Danny Knowles: Is that your biggest career goal now?
Peter McCormack: It's always been. Dad, how old do you think I was when I first said I wanted to buy Bedford; what do you remember?
Dad McCormack: About 43!
Peter McCormack: Shut up, man!
Dad McCormack: Early, early on.
Peter McCormack: It's been in my head since I've been a teenager and I never knew how I could do it, and then figured it, had that little brainwave recently, I was like, "Hold on, I know a lot of rich fucking people, let's get them behind this", and then also there's that trade-off that it's the perfect team because it's a shit nothing team in the middle of nowhere, so you get a whole journey.
Obi Nwosu: For now.
Peter McCormack: It feels like an underdog story, a bit like Bitcoin is an underdog story, and just we can attract a global fan base of bitcoiners, go, "Yeah, this is our team, we'll adopt it", but we had to be the first. There's no second Bitcoin team, there's only one Bitcoin team, and so we had to be the first, and once I realised, we had to do it. I'm not in it for the money, I'm personally losing money on it because I put money into it. The equity I hold in it, my expectation is, over the years, I will sell that off to buy the infrastructure we need.
Obi Nwosu: But it will come back in time if you're doing something that you're really passionate -- you've heard of the concept of ikigai?
Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course, that's Travis Kling's fund name.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, and if you're lucky enough to find your ikigai, then there's nothing more empowering; I feel like I've found mine, it sounds like you've found yours.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: And so everything else, the universe will bend to make it work once you've found it.
Peter McCormack: Well, I think I'm lucky enough to have found it, and then I'm surrounded by really good people who help me, like my dad's here, he's running the kit, and my sister comes up to all the games, she runs the merch stand or behind the bar, Emma, like everyone is getting behind it. So many people want this to work and it is working and we've got nine ticks to do.
Obi Nwosu: It will work.
Peter McCormack: Well, the first few ticks are easier; it will get progressively much harder.
Obi Nwosu: It's going to be really hard but it will work.
Peter McCormack: Yeah. There are just certain stages I'm going to need a billionaire to go, "I'm so fucking rich, here's £2 million, go and get promoted".
Obi Nwosu: Then you'll make it happen.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'll do my best.
Obi Nwosu: You'll make it happen, I can just tell. Once you've found it, you will move Heaven and Earth to make it happen.
Peter McCormack: It won't be me; it won't be because of me it won't happen, like I'll put everything into it; or a lack of work, but we'll see, man. Anyway, listen, we're not here to talk about me, we're here to talk about you, talk about Fedimint.
Okay, a lot of this we're going to rehash what we did last time but that's okay, certain things need revisiting. You're getting talked about a lot and people are very excited about what you're doing and people I know and trust love what you're doing, but I still have some questions nagging at me, so we're going to revisit them, and I know it must be fucking boring for you to do it, but let's do it because I know some listeners have the same questions. But TL;DR, explain to people what Fedi and Fedimint is because there are two separate components; explain the mission.
Obi Nwosu: So, the mission, what Fedi is and what Fedimint is, I'll start with the mission because that drives everything else. So, the mission for Fedi is to empower communities everywhere. The way we see it is that we want to find a way for communities to be able to take control of their resources, including their money and their data, so that they can effectively take control back from Big Tech and so on, and bring it back into the hands of the community. As a result, if we can do this, and repeat and repeat for communities, whether they be families, whether they be companies, whether they be villages or towns, in millions of places eventually around the world, we can help level up humanity; that's the mission.
So, how do we do that? Well, first of all, you start with Fedi as the company. Fedi is the first manufacturer or builder of a federated OS; we don't think this exists, so this is a new category of thing. You can think about it like an iOS for your mobile phone, it's the thing that makes your mobile phone work and it manages your personal life, or an Android OS, but a federated OS is an OS for your community. So of course that includes custody, it includes being able to use different features or services, and so on, but also it goes beyond that. You could be able use data as well, it can integrate with many other services over time, Nostr, even AI systems. Why should it be run by Big Tech; why don't communities have their own AI, etc? So, this is the grand vision.
Now, how is that possible; how are we able to have such a broad vision? Because there was this technology that was invented; the idea came about three years ago and the first line of code was written over two years ago, called Fedimint, and it was invented by one of my two co-founders, Eric Sirion. This is a form of community Bitcoin protocol. It allows you to take Bitcoin, which you would normally run for one person, and run it for a community. With this platform, you have a number of people within the community, we call them guardians, trusted members of community, who run this platform on behalf of the community. It allows you to have baked in, by default, automatically a level of scalability beyond Bitcoin and Lightning, it gives you a level of privacy using a protocol called Chaumian eCash, and it gives you, and this is a key element as well, a level of extensibility, so you can extend it with additional features.
Basically, it's unlimited in what you can do, so it's the missing piece of the Bitcoin ecosystem. With this, you can think of it as the shield for Bitcoin, Lightning as the sword and Bitcoin as its base; as the defender, it allows you to effectively do whatever you want to do to be able to scale resources and data for your community and for Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: There's a lot there.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, there is. So, Fedimint is the protocol, Fedi is the company; could other people create their own companies and compete with you on creating products?
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, absolutely, and we hope to see that happens. As I say, Lightning is a protocol and there are many companies making Lightning services and products, and we will see those. Now, the way we deal with that is proof of work. So, we have an incredible team, we have an incredible set of supporters from within the Bitcoin ecosystem, from within the investor ecosystem, but also many of our customers as well come from broad swaths of the world. We have what we call hyper-communities, which are bitcoiners who are passionate about Bitcoin but also passionate about parts of the world, whether it be Bitcoin Ekasi in South Africa or Bitcoin Lake in Guatemala, and so on.
Peter McCormack: Or Bitcoin Bedford.
Obi Nwosu: When you're ready, we're here; are you ready for Fedi?
Peter McCormack: I know, but I was like, "Hold on, shall we have a Bedford Federation; what can we do with this?
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, are you ready for Fedi? Then we're ready for you. But also, beyond that, it's people who don't really think about Bitcoin or money in this day-to-day, but they have to deal with it because of the challenges they're dealing with. So, people who are trying to help raise or highlight the plight of people living under the yoke of oppressive regimes or dictatorships around the world, and everything in between.
Also we're seeing it in terms of organisations, who want to take personal custody of their treasury and not have to give it third parties and large multinational organisations, and say, "Well, why do we give it to multiple banks who we are increasingly less comfortable custodying with, when we can hold it ourselves? Or our data; why do we have to give it to Big Tech when we, as an organisation, can bring it back in and manage it ourselves?" If we can help with all that, there's interest there.
Peter McCormack: So, let's run through an example use case because that's going to be the best way for me to explain then what the challenges I see or the things I've struggled with, and then we can work through that. So, talk to me about a specific use case of any federation that you think could set up, give me a scenario and how it would work, and the reason they would want it.
Obi Nwosu: So, there are many examples. So, for a number of months, we've already been in closed beta with different organisations; I can give you one example. A community of farmers and farmers' cooperatives in West Africa, in a number of countries, 5 or 6 farmer cooperatives, 100 to 200 different farms, and obviously there are the farmers and all the employees, etc. Now, right now, they have to buy pesticide and fertiliser and they buy it at retail, it's incredibly expensive so they don't buy enough, they don't get good crop yields and so they earn less money for their land. Now, if there was a way for them to access credit at reasonable rates, they would be able to take on money, and also if they could organise as a community and buy in bulk, they can buy at bulk, get wholesale rates, buy more pesticide and fertiliser, massively increasing their production and levelling up their society.
Now, what can be done with that is we can set up a Fedimint federation for that community of different farmers' cooperatives and farmers. People can then send capital directly to the different farmers, the farmers can use the Fedi app, because the Fedi app includes chat and communication, to organise with each other, like a group per cooperative, send value directly within this federation when they're ready to make a bulk order, and then organise for that bulk order, and then pay the suppliers in bulk.
Now, instead of having to move around and transfer lots of cash between different parties and this taking a lot of time, a lot of hassle, a lot of communication, this can be done easily, in seconds. Now, you could say, "Why don't I use digital cash?" But then I'll be paying potentially fees anywhere from 2% to as high as 30%, 40% each transaction.
Peter McCormack: Hold on, 30%, 40%?
Obi Nwosu: For very small amounts, it can be as high, because there's a minimum fee and sometimes, with minimums, it could be as high as 30%, 40% for eCash, for digital cash.
Peter McCormack: But that must be like $1, $2 purchases.
Obi Nwosu: Yes, but even the average is 2% or 3%.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: But this is still a significant percentage when you compare to fractions of a percent.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, 2% or 3%, okay.
Obi Nwosu: And that effectively still takes value away which could be used for productive goods.
Peter McCormack: So, all these different cooperatives send their money into the federation, and then they negotiate with them?
Obi Nwosu: No.
Peter McCormack: No?
Obi Nwosu: So, the different cooperatives would be part of the federation, the different farmers would be part of the federation. So, instead of them having their own wallet, because remember, they could be talking about small amounts of money each, a few hundred dollars each worth of capital per farmer. Now, let's say the alternative is hundreds of farmers, would they buy a hardware wallet for $50 to $100 each?
Peter McCormack: No.
Obi Nwosu: And they'll have to understand how to use it, it has to be very simple, again, it has to be converted to their language; there have to be all of these things that need to be done. With the system we have, it will be multilingual, it will be able to be set up to work and act in the way that they need it for their service without any extraneous elements, because each community will be set up correctly for that community, they will be paying near zero fees for transferring. And, by the use of the Fedimint, it's effectively a multisig wallet. So when it comes to first-party custody, the best way to backup is first party with multisig; that's complex to do. But if you have a Fedimint, you automatically get that for your community. So, you're getting this multisig backup of the data without you having to do anything. You'll have this incredibly simple experience, but a best-practice way of backing up as well.
Peter McCormack: What was that?!
Danny Knowles: It's because I'm connected to the screen.
Peter McCormack: So, every farmer would be in the federation?
Obi Nwosu: Every farmer would be in the federation.
Peter McCormack: Are there groups; do they join a cooperative and they're cooperatives, or is it just every farmer across all cooperatives are in there?
Obi Nwosu: Every community can set themselves up the way they want to be set up, but in this particular example, you would imagine that there would be, say, five cooperatives and each one would set up a group. Just like you have a WhatsApp chat and there are different groups, there'd be a group for a cooperative and the farmers who are part of that cooperative will join that cooperative.
Peter McCormack: Right.
Obi Nwosu: And they will talk in that group, and then when it comes time to pay, they would send the value needed to make a payment. So, they would use it to organise, the Fedi app to organise, and to handle payments.
Peter McCormack: Okay. So, you, me and Danny, we're all different cooperatives, someone on behalf of us is negotiating the rates for the fertiliser.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, or each cooperative would probably negotiate the rates for the fertiliser as a cooperative.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: And you, me and Danny could be three different farmers who are part of one of those cooperatives.
Peter McCormack: I get it.
Obi Nwosu: Then we would join the group within the chat related to our cooperative, we'll talk and agree that we want to buy this fertiliser, bulk-buy it, and when it comes time to pay, we just literally click a button and pay, as opposed to having to transfer cash around, having to organise, having to have village town halls and so on.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: It can all be organised digitally, the conversation, the payment and the disbursement, and so on.
Peter McCormack: And when we pay, do we pay into a central pot that goes out, or do we all pay individually to the recipient?
Obi Nwosu: You would pay, in that case, a central pot and then it would go out so you can bulk pay.
Peter McCormack: Great, I get it.
Obi Nwosu: And that's one example.
Peter McCormack: Sorry, one more question on that; the person we're paying, that we're buying the fertiliser from, do they also have to be in the federation, or can we buy outside of the federation?
Obi Nwosu: No, anyone who can accept a Lightning payment or Bitcoin on-chain payment can be the recipient of the money. Or alternatively, if you could find someone locally who's willing to accept the Bitcoin, like a local entrepreneur or so on, to accept the Bitcoin and then, on behalf of you, give you cash to pay at the point of payment as well.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so that all makes sense, I get that.
Obi Nwosu: And that's one example.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, and I'm sure there are lots of ones, and that coordination is super-useful and that coordination helps people actually negotiate better rates, I get that, and if it saves 3% that's really good. I mean, I guess as a technology, the user experience you could solve very quickly. There is still volatility risk on the price. I could argue that the 3% fee is the price you pay to not have volatility. Volatility can go to the upside and to the downside but it's still going to be a challenge. So, if people used Fedi and they were going to save their 3% and coordinate and then Bitcoin did one of its dumps by 10%, that's a tough situation for someone to go through.
Obi Nwosu: Very.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: So, there are many solutions to that. First of all, Fedimint is multi-asset capable, so it's full reserve in the way it works by default, so you would deposit Bitcoin and you'd be credited a certain amount of Bitcoin within the system, within this wallet.
Peter McCormack: The eCash?
Obi Nwosu: The eCash, yeah, and that can be used within the community. However, if you were to deposit a stablecoin, then you'll be credited a certain amount of that stablecoin instead, so that's possible as well. Third, we can show this later on, but it's extensible, and this is really key; anybody of the millions, not the tens of thousands of people who can build smart contracts on multiple chains, but of the millions of people who can write software for Web2, they can very easily convert and write extensions for Fedimint to be able to allow it to do pretty much anything that you could imagine could be done on a website, could be done on a Fedimint.
Peter McCormack: Amazing.
Obi Nwosu: But in a federated manner, where you're not trusting one organisation, one website, one person; as long as the majority are honest, it continues to run. So, you could take that concept, and there was an idea that was initially put forward by Tadge Dryja, one of the co-founders of Lightning.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: Discreet log contracts with a difference. And technically, with a few upgrades to Bitcoin, it could be possible to do it on Lightning easily, but they haven't yet been done and they hopefully will happen in time, however that limitation isn't there with Fedimint. So we did a hackathon at the beginning of this year and one of the submissions, which went on to win, created something called stability pools, which is a way to basically take Bitcoin and you could effectively think about it as depositing it into this virtual USD, for example, or some other asset, this USD store, account, until you need it, and then you can withdraw. So, you receive payment in Bitcoin but then you can just quickly just deposit it and it will be locked to that USD stability, locked to that value, USD to euro and so on.
So, what could happen is you receive payment, you lock it to USD until you need it and then you unlock it back to Bitcoin; it flips things on its head. Bitcoin is used for payments and Lightning is used for payments because it's available everywhere, it's one standard that everybody knows, it's near instant, it's very low cost. And then you use a stability pool to take your Bitcoin and lock its value. It's still Bitcoin all the way through, there's no bank backing it, but instead of its price being volatile and the amount being constant, while you lock it, the amount is volatile and the price is constant until you need it, then you unlock it, because for you, you're okay with that because you just want the price stability with some other asset that you want to be stable against, and then you unlock it and spend.
You also can partially unlock, so say I receive a salary or a wage or money from a friend or family, then I immediately lock it, and then when I need to spend, I want to spend $5 of it, I unlock $5 of it and it gets withdrawn out. In fact, we can show a --
Danny Knowles: Just before we do that, can I ask you a question? If we had the federation set between the three of us in that cooperative example, so we all put Bitcoin in and get What Bitcoin Did Cooperative eCash, to buy off the fertiliser supplier, do they have to accept the eCash or do they peg out to Bitcoin?
Obi Nwosu: They don't have to accept the eCash.
Danny Knowles: So they can receive payment in Bitcoin from our…?
Obi Nwosu: Yeah.
Danny Knowles: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: So think about a Fedimint as a community-owned Lightning wallet.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: So, from the outside world, it's a Lightning wallet and it can make payments over the Lightning Network, it's just that the Fedimint protocol and the eCash protocol handles how the Bitcoin that's been sent to that wallet is apportioned amongst the members of that wallet. Also, it handles people to be able to say, "I want to spend", and then what will happen is that eCash is transferred to someone else. It can work in two different ways, it can be sent back to the guardians and they can destroy it and send out a certain amount of Bitcoin on-chain equivalent to the amount, or for Lightning transactions, what technically happens is it's sent internally to someone else who also is running a Lightning node, and then that person, after receiving that, sends out a certain amount of Lightning over the Lightning Network to the address you sent.
So, this is what Lightning service providers do, but normally it's Lightning connection on one side and Lightning connection on the other side. Here, it's eCash on this side and Lightning on the other side, but from your point of view, experientially, it just looks like a Lightning payment. Whether you're sending it to someone else within the Fedimint or whether you're sending it to someone else on the other side of the world who's got a Muun Wallet or a Wallet of Satoshi or a BlueWallet or what have you, or to someone else who's also in another Fedimint somewhere else, to you, Lightning invoice pay.
Danny Knowles: So, if we were transacting within the federation --
Obi Nwosu: It will still be a Lightning invoice.
Danny Knowles: -- it's still Lightning; it's not like an eCash token swap kind of thing?
Obi Nwosu: So, what the protocol cleverly does is it recognises it's internal and it just does an eCash swap, but from your experiential point of view, you just pay the Lightning invoice.
Danny Knowles: And for internal?
Obi Nwosu: It will just never fail because it's internal.
Danny Knowles: Right.
Obi Nwosu: So, there are no liquidity issues there and also it will be basically almost probably just free or 0.1 millisatoshi or something like that, it will be a tiny fraction of a penny.
Danny Knowles: Okay, so which video do you want me to pull up first?
Obi Nwosu: So, I think actually do you have a Lightning wallet on you?
Peter McCormack: I've got a few. Let's just go with Wallet of Satoshi because that's what I set up for my Nostr recently.
Obi Nwosu: Okay, so if you give me a receipt on your Wallet of Satoshi, I always like it for 21 sats if that's okay.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, man.
Obi Nwosu: It's a good first number.
Peter McCormack: Right.
Obi Nwosu: So, you request to receive 21 sats, and I will, with my -- so, I'm a member of a federation, call it Mainnet 1, and I've got some sats on it, like 17,000 sats, and I will now, so I'm going to click "send" and then I will allow camera access. I'm going to scan your transaction and I'm going to click "send" and now hopefully --
Peter McCormack: Yeah, just received it, there we go.
Obi Nwosu: And I've just sent. Now what happened there is I'm part of this federation and there are multiple members of this federation, it's cryptographically near perfectly private, so I have no idea how many. I know because it's our internal one, but there could be any number because the Chaumian eCash protocol means that it's not possible to know. But I actually sent eCash to someone else in that network who is running a Lightning node, and then they, after receiving that eCash of a certain amount of sats, 21 sats, they then sent on 21 sats to you over the Lightning Network.
Peter McCormack: They didn't know it happened?
Obi Nwosu: So the Fedimint protocol is, as I say, extensible and just like with iOS, it comes with some standard apps. With the federated OS, it comes with three standard apps: one is Bitcoin multisig, so it can handle and deal with the Bitcoin Network in a multisig manner; another one is eCash, so, it can handle and create and destroy eCash in an automated manner; and the third one that we have as standard is a Lightning emulation, so that anybody who's a member of this thinks it's connected to the Lightning Network, but it's the Lightning Network that of course is zero seconds to form a transaction, zero seconds to close a channel, and it costs zero to form a channel and costs zero to close a channel. So as such, I can just form the channel and send it to you because I don't have to wait ten minutes and it doesn't cost money, so I can just instantly create the Lightning channel.
So, when you're connecting to Core Lightning or LND, it just thinks this is just a really fast, really low-cost Lightning channel to route across, and it just magically routes it, routes the transaction over the Lightning Network.
Peter McCormack: And that 21 sats you just sent me, did that destroy some eCash?
Obi Nwosu: No, because in that case, as I said, someone else in the Fedimint was running a Lightning node, so I just sent eCash to them and they -- so the eCash has just moved around from me to someone else, and they also had 21 sats on a Lightning channel and they've sent that on. So, their balance is up 21 sats on eCash but they're down 21 sats in Lightning Bitcoin effectively.
Peter McCormack: But that federation has a certain amount of Bitcoin deposited into it?
Obi Nwosu: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: But that federation is now down 21 sats?
Obi Nwosu: No, in that scenario, let's say there were only 21 sats in the entire federation, and ignoring the four guardians or more, there was myself and someone else who's got a Lightning node, and me, and they have zero sats and I have 21 sats in terms of eCash, but they also have a Lightning node with 21 sats-worth of capacity in it to be able to send. I now pay you, and you're on the Lightning Network, so I locate this other person, connect to them, I send them the 21 sats, so there are still 21 sats within eCash but I have zero of them and they have 21 of them, and then they take the 21 sats that they had in the Lightning Network and send it on to you. So they now have zero capacity on their Lightning channel but they have 21 sats. So, the number of sats within the --
Peter McCormack: Hold on, are their sats on their Lightning channel outside of the federation?
Obi Nwosu: Yes, the Lightning channel's outside the federation, yes.
Peter McCormack: But using that scenario, I might be like, "Well, I wanted those sats".
Obi Nwosu: You, as the Lightning node operator?
Peter McCormack: Let's imagine you're the federation, you're in the federation, you've got a Lightning node with some sats on it; I'm in the federation, I've got the eCash; and Danny's outside of the federation. So, the federation's been created with 21 sats in it and so I want to send eCash to Danny but I actually really want to send 21 sats. So, I send the eCash, it goes to you, so the 21 sats that I have within the federation go to you?
Obi Nwosu: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: But your 21 sats that are in your separate Lightning wallet go to Danny?
Obi Nwosu: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Okay. So, the 21 sats has moved around the federation?
Obi Nwosu: From one person to another.
Peter McCormack: One person to another.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: But you've lost your 21 sats of -- it's a swap.
Obi Nwosu: It's exactly what happens with the Lightning Network right now.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: If there's a payment between myself and Danny on the Lightning Network, ignoring Fedimint, and you're the Lightning node that we use to relay it, my channel has 21 sats of capacity and you have 21 sats of capacity to Danny; at the end, I send you 21 sats, I now have zero and you have 21, and you have zero on his channel and he has 21.
Peter McCormack: I'm trying to balance the books here though. So, you've gained 21 sats of eCash?
Obi Nwosu: Yes.
Peter McCormack: And lost 21 sats in your separate Lightning wallet?
Obi Nwosu: Correct.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: But what you would have done, in reality, is gained 22 sats of eCash because you would have charged a fee, just like every other person on the Lightning Network, and lost 21 sats, so you're up 1 sat.
Peter McCormack: Where did that additional sat come from?
Obi Nwosu: It's the fee, just like the way that Lightning Network works.
Peter McCormack: No, but where did it come from because our --
Obi Nwosu: Oh yeah, in the example, I said there were 21 sats total, so I would have only been able to send 20 because you would have said there would have been fee of 1 sat to do it.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so you would have sent 21 to me --
Obi Nwosu: Minus the fee, yeah, let's say.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, minus the fee, okay.
Obi Nwosu: The example should have been 22 sats I had and I wanted to send 21, so you would have said it was 1 sat to do this, so I would send you 22, and you send on 21.
Peter McCormack: What if no one within our federation has any sats separately in a Lightning channel?
Obi Nwosu: Then you wouldn't be able to use the Lightning Network.
Peter McCormack: You wouldn't be able to convert the eCash into that?
Obi Nwosu: So, yeah. Fedimints are an island without the Bitcoin extensibility or without the Lightning extensibility.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, that makes sense.
Obi Nwosu: Bitcoin, if you send it on-chain, in that scenario, you would send it back to the federated mint, which would be the guardians, and they would receive the 21 sats, destroy them, and then on-chain, Bitcoin on-chain, they would send Bitcoin. But if it's Lightning, then the guardians don't get involved.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know that.
Obi Nwosu: They don't really see it.
Peter McCormack: No, I get that.
Obi Nwosu: Basically, it gets sent to someone else, but if there's no one within the Fedimint who is running a Lightning node at all, then it doesn't have access to the Lightning Network, which is why we always say Fedimint and Lightning work hand in hand.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: Fedimint is the home for your money and resources and data, and Lightning is the way to transfer your resources and money, whereas something like Nostr is a way to transfer your information but this is the place where it's the home for your communities.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I know, I get it. And so, when we set up our federation and between us, say you, me and Danny create a federation, we all put one Bitcoin in, that creates the eCash, do we give our eCash a name; do we called it Pete, Danny…?
Obi Nwosu: Do you give the eCash a name or do you give the federation a name?
Peter McCormack: What I'm saying is, when it appears on screen --
Obi Nwosu: It's all Bitcoin, it would just see it as Bitcoin, just like with the Lightning, because Lightning is technically slightly different properties to base their Bitcoin but we just call it all Bitcoin.
Peter McCormack: So, it's all Bitcoin, so it's still sats, that eCash?
Obi Nwosu: It will still be shown as sats.
Peter McCormack: So why do we say eCash? eCash threw me.
Obi Nwosu: You'll still be seeing it as sats.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, the eCash thing threw me; tell me if I'm wrong here, but I was given the impression that you're creating a new currency within the federation.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, I remember that one analogy was it's like someone taking tickets at the fair and you put your Bitcoin in and get a ticket for this --
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, but again, it's just a difference of perspective where people get bogged down into the detail. But if I go to a fairground and I get tickets, different tokens to use on rides, so I give them $50 and I get given 50 tickets each worth $1 and I walk around, and they say the ride, they don't say the ride is worth 10 tickets, they say the ride is $10, and you're still getting --
Peter McCormack: No, you go to places and they'll say, "It's five tickets".
Obi Nwosu: Sometimes, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think the confusion in that is, if you're right, that's the confusion gone; but in my mind, it was like, "Okay, we set up this federation, we each put 10 Bitcoin in but in our system the denomination's different so you get 100 eCash of this and you get 100". I had this impression there was a different currency with a different denomination.
Obi Nwosu: So, I think denomination is separate to the currency itself because 10 Bitcoin can be 10 Bitcoin or it can be 1 billion sats, it's still 10 Bitcoin, yeah, they're different denominations.
Peter McCormack: But what I'm saying is it's not like we go in there and you get, okay, for your 10 Bitcoin you get 1,000 Obicoin.
Obi Nwosu: No.
Peter McCormack: It'll still be ten Bitcoin.
Obi Nwosu: It would still be Bitcoin, yeah.
Peter McCormack: I totally got a different impression.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, I did too.
Obi Nwosu: Okay.
Danny Knowles: I remember when we spoke to Eric Yakes as well, he was saying that merchants would have to choose to accept different types of eCash, and then if there are hundreds of federations, then that becomes really confusing, so that kind of threw me a bit.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: No, I think if you're not a member of a federation, then you can't use that eCash, so it has to be converted to Bitcoin, Lightning Bitcoin, to go over the Lightning Network or mainchain Bitcoin to be used on the mainchain.
Peter McCormack: Right.
Obi Nwosu: But it's just like Lightning Bitcoin to use on mainchain, you have to convert it, you have to publish a transaction and then it has to be memorialised on the block.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so this is better because essentially what you're getting is you're trading your Bitcoin in sats for a representation of Bitcoin and sats in the system, which you can move around between yourselves free and easily without using the network; it's like a closed --
Obi Nwosu: But without the network, it loses a lot of its power, which is why they work hand in hand.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but within the network, if I send you and then you send to Danny, it's a closed part.
Danny Knowles: It's like the intranet.
Peter McCormack: It's like Liquid.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, but instead of one for the entire world, we're talking about eventually 1 million.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I get it.
Obi Nwosu: It's like a sidechain but a million sidechains, and because there's a trust dynamic where you have to trust the guardians -- because the problem with any scaling solution is there's a natural desire for it to centralise. Having run an exchange, I realise that you can see liquidity begets liquidity, you naturally want to centralise, so if you go to a third party, you will end up with one huge exchange. You see that right now with Binance, etc.
But because there's a trust dynamic, because you need to know and trust the guardians, it never goes above a certain size, so if you want to scale, you have to form another -- there's a natural incentive to form another federation, another federation, another federation, so you end up with this world where there are hundreds of thousands or millions of communities, each one able to have that superpower that normally is resigned to Big Tech and large exchanges, but in the hands of the community. They can make the same decisions that normally they've abdicated to someone else who, often, if it's a curly-haired guy in Bermuda, it doesn't end well!
Peter McCormack: No, I think I get it now. So previously, I thought you were basically almost handing me some Bitcoin and I was going, "Here's my Bitcoin and here's your denomination of it and this is how much you've got", but actually, what's happening, it's a little bit more like Liquid. When you go into Liquid, you get LBTC, it's a one-for-one peg essentially.
Obi Nwosu: In that sense, yeah.
Peter McCormack: And when you peg in and then when you peg out you get the same, it's essentially the same, but what you've really got are federations, they can form bridges to each other. So each one is a federation, but if there's a Lightning connection, these federations can bridge to each other.
Obi Nwosu: And there's a massive incentive to have a Lightning --
Peter McCormack: That changes everything.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, and by the way, Blockstream was the first person to see the genius of the idea of Eric, my co-founder, and they'd sponsored it for, I think, well over a year before I even heard of the protocol. So yes, there are a lot of similarities with the -- that is a federation as well, Liquid is a federation.
Peter McCormack: But it's a closed one.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, and it's a federation as well, but it's one federation for every use case for the Liquid Network; you can imagine each Fedimint is like a mini Liquid in that sense, and each one can have different functionality the way the functionality works, and in Fedimint it uses Chaumian eCash as opposed to confidential transactions, and it's fully extensible. So you can add any application of a web server that could in theory run on a Fedimint, so each community --
Peter McCormack: I'm going to give you a really terrible analogy, I'm going to say that Liquid is China and Fedimint is the USA; my point being is Liquid is a closed federation, you're in or you're out, and when you're in, you can share it, whereas you're like states. So like in America, you have separate states which you can move between, you're like separate states, and as long as there's a bridge or a motorway or an airport between the two, you can travel between the federations.
Obi Nwosu: I would say that does Liquid a disservice because there's no technical reason why, and I believe people already do, where you could not have some sort of bridge between Liquid and the Bitcoin mainchain or Liquid and the Lightning Network as well.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: I guess that, with Fedimint, it's just all baked in as standard so that you get it automatically. It's just like I said, when you get the Android app or you get your Windows PC or your macOS, and you know there are several apps as standard and you're always going to have eCash and you're always going to have Bitcoin --
Peter McCormack: It's the eCash.
Obi Nwosu: -- and also really key, and it really makes it work, you're always going to have this Lightning integration.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: Think about it, if you're a Lightning node operator, if I have 1,000 different users, the first thing they're going to want to do is receive Bitcoin, before they spend, they have to receive. So, the way the Lightning Network works, if I connect to you to be able to provide you service, and my revenue stream is to earn fees from you, but the first thing I have to do is I have to lock up some Bitcoin in a channel for you to receive it in order for you to spend it.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: Even if you're getting it from family abroad or so on, I have to lock up. So, I open up a channel with you, and you have no money, so I have to lock up Bitcoin to you. And so let's say you've got 1,000 different users in a village and average salary is, it could be like $10 a day, maybe less, but you think, "Okay, what's a reasonable amount to lock up? Let's say $100 worth". Well, for 1,000 people, I'm now locking up $100,000 for 1,000 different people just in case they may need a deposit, and so there's a lot of capital locked up. Then some of them may use it, some of them may not, but they have to lock it up just in case, otherwise they try to do deposits and if I've under-guessed, I've only locked up $5 and they're going to need $10, I'm going to have to do a second on-chain transaction because each one of those costs me money as well.
Now, if I compare that to a Fedimint, I need to open up one channel for the entire village and I lock up an amount which I think is the average amount that I'm going to need on a daily basis, which will be a small fraction of that, I only need to lock up $1,000 or $2,000 to cover the entire village; and if I go over that, I only need to do one top-up transaction. So, I get much, much higher capital efficiency for the same revenue, and actually my costs go even lower because I'm doing far less on-chain transactions for the same revenue, so I make lower costs.
My admin cost goes down as well because it's easier for me to manage. My channel rebalancing and predicting is less because to open up a channel on this side, on the Fedimint side, is zero cost and it takes zero seconds, so I can always do it just in time at no cost. So, this is why you see a lot of interest in Lightning service providers to work with us, because we increase their revenues, reduce their costs, reduced their effort, which makes them more profitable, which means more capacity on the Lightning Network. I had a four-hour conversation in Oslo Freedom Forum with René Pickhardt --
Peter McCormack: I love René.
Obi Nwosu: He's a great guy.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: And one of his concerns was fee incentives, and he said, "Look, if we get broad-based deployment of Fedimints around the world, this could potentially go some way towards solving the fee challenges of scaling Lightning", and when I heard that, this was something I wasn't even thinking about at the time, it just made even more sense than it made before.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but there's an alternate risk there in that if you get broad, massive use of Fedimints, are you taking away on-chain transactions that provide the security once the block rewards have gone?
Obi Nwosu: I don't think so because you'll still need, at some point, again --
Peter McCormack: To settle.
Obi Nwosu: You'll still need to settle. At some point you will potentially build up a balance of eCash, and to be able to spend that or hold that in self-custody or balance between different federations or between different channels, you will have to withdraw that and that will require the destruction of that eCash and on-chain transaction.
Peter McCormack: The eCash still throws me.
Obi Nwosu: But it would just be at larger amounts, and even if the fees are higher, it's fine because you're now running this as a business and you're making profit, so you can cover the fee because you may have made $200 in fees, so you're happy to pay $50 on-chain transactions.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, Obi, I think the eCash thing throws me, the word "eCash" throws me.
Obi Nwosu: Then we shouldn't use it in this conversation.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but when I say that, if it's throwing me I think it might throw other people, because it's making me think there's another currency I'm getting, that's what it's making me think; tell me if I'm wrong or you're thinking different.
Danny Knowles: No, I think I was the same.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I feel like I'm going and getting something else but really I'm not, I'm just getting Bitcoin, but you're using eCash to refer to the fact it's like a virtual Bitcoin, it's not actual Bitcoin.
Obi Nwosu: It's still Bitcoin but with different properties.
Peter McCormack: It's a representation, yeah.
Obi Nwosu: Different properties, different trust dynamics, but different features. Some functionalities are increased, some are reduced, so there are different properties.
Peter McCormack: Why do you use the term eCash then; why don't you just say you get Bitcoin?
Obi Nwosu: This is the technical term for what it is. And so this is where I think, as we now move to the point to promote this globally, we are developing new language that is just more comfortable for everybody to understand. But when you're talking to a technical community, eCash is the correct term.
Peter McCormack: I get that, and do you know what I'm going to do? Anyone listening or watching on YouTube, just throw in the comments, we've never done this before, but tell me if the eCash thing threw you; either I'm a moron and I'm on my own, well not on my own because Danny's with me, either we're morons or everyone else is confused by it. I just want to know, and I'll send you all the comments so you can see.
Obi Nwosu: I really appreciate it.
Peter McCormack: That's like a huge fundamental shift in me understanding it, because like I say, I was under the impression you set up a federation, people put in Bitcoin and you're basically creating your own currency. It's a bit like when banks, the free banks that we covered with Matthew earlier, you deposited gold and they gave you notes, but those notes were dollars, those notes weren't grams of gold, they were dollars, they were representation, but this isn't; you're just getting sats and Bitcoin within it.
Obi Nwosu: Within a closed system, yes.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I get it, okay; wow, that's a big change.
Obi Nwosu: Just for the sake of, because there will be people who will be shaking at the screen -- and it's the same between Lightning and Bitcoin, it's still sats, but there are different trade-offs and trust assumptions being made, and the same happens again when you go to a Fedimint.
Peter McCormack: I'm cool with that, okay, now we need to see it.
Danny Knowles: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: So, which one did you want to see? So, I just sent you a transaction, so I think what would be interesting to see, and we can show this at another time, is this is what, say, the Fedi app looks like.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: But before we do that, we have to understand you first set up a federation. So, a group of people, Bedford FC --
Peter McCormack: Real Bedford.
Obi Nwosu: Real Bedford, sorry, Real Bedford, apologies.
Danny Knowles: The Auction Room.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, The Auction Room.
Peter McCormack: No, Bedford, the town, we set one up in the town.
Obi Nwosu: So, Real Bedford wants to set up its own Fedimint and you've got these people who work together, you trust each other, you already trust them right now. If people could right now throw a game, your defenders and your goalkeeper could throw a game and earn money from that, but they don't, but how do you trust that they don't?
Peter McCormack: If we were in a football league, that's a different story.
Obi Nwosu: But imagine in a football league.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, well, I think there's a criminal risk.
Obi Nwosu: But there's always a criminal risk.
Peter McCormack: They don't do it for two reasons, multiple reasons; one of the reasons they wouldn't do it is that their personal moral code doesn't want them to do that.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Their second one is there's no incentive, their incentive isn't big enough, and the third one is there's a criminal risk which then becomes reputational.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, so criminal risk, moral code.
Peter McCormack: Reputational risk.
Obi Nwosu: Reputational risk, criminal risk, but imagine also you're now in not the Premier League but you're getting there.
Peter McCormack: Career risk.
Obi Nwosu: But you're now in the Premier League, but there is a financial incentive there at that point, so really it's moral risk and criminal risk. So, you've just explained it, and that's the key; in a community where you care about the others and individuals, there is social capital to be lost by doing something like that.
Peter McCormack: But SBF had moral and career risk, or moral and criminal risk and took it, and now he's facing jail time.
Obi Nwosu: See, but there's a difference, he's dealing with strangers, they're people at the other side of a computer terminal that he doesn't know, he doesn't have a relationship with, and also if he did something to, he can continue on with his life; whereas if you're a part of a community, a closeknit community, you've spent your life there and then you do this, you can be ostracised from the community, you'll never be able to transact with anyone again, you'll never be able to work with anyone again. Imagine now, every time I want to buy something from anybody in that village --
Peter McCormack: You might be in Panama with cocktails.
Obi Nwosu: Yes, but then you're dealing with amounts which are very significant, but let's just say you're in a village or a community, you did this, now from now on, if I wanted to buy anything from anyone else in the community, I would always have to go somewhere else where my reputation hasn't been -- there is a cost to do that when you have a second-party relationship, ie your friends and family, which isn't the same when you're dealing with a person on the other side of the world.
Peter McCormack: Well, yeah, but there's always a trade-off, Obi. It will be the size of the honeypot and how far they have to go away to deal with that, like if it's a small honeypot --
Obi Nwosu: Which is why there's a natural limitation on how much it scales, which is why you end up with hundreds of thousands of Fedimints versus one large honeypot, which is a very good thing.
Peter McCormack: No, I get that.
Obi Nwosu: We want something that naturally wants to be distributed and has limitations on how much concentration can happen. That trust dynamic solves the natural desire for systems to build up and focus liquidity into one place; you end up with multiple small --
Peter McCormack: Sorry, I'm interrupting you, I think it's a non-zero risk though.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, of course, there's a non-zero risk.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: But there's also a non-zero risk that the Lightning channel is not closed before someone else, a malicious actor closes it; they're all non-zero risks.
Peter McCormack: Let me try and think of a better example. A federation created in a family that's got 25 family members, like here, in the UK, all keeping it in because dad can't manage a multisig, my sister can't, my brother could, so we'll just do one together; how many rogue family members just fuck off and steal all the money, because we could have a lot of money between us?
Obi Nwosu: So, is the example you give money to members of family that you don't trust and you worry that --
Peter McCormack: Maybe you do, but maybe they go rogue. What I'm saying is, there's going to be a scenario where somebody is going to collude with somebody within a federation and say, "We can steal this"; I think there's a non-zero risk and I think it would happen at some point, you'll get a meeting of incentive and moral code.
Obi Nwosu: I think the same risk happens, and it happens more frequently and the risk is higher, with highly centralised third parties who are strangers who have no connection with you at all, so replacing the risk of --
Peter McCormack: I think reducing the risk but not getting rid of it.
Obi Nwosu: You're reducing the risk.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: And that's what we're aiming to do.
Peter McCormack: Okay, that makes sense.
Obi Nwosu: And to be very clear, the best is to use self-custody with multisig.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, of course.
Obi Nwosu: That is the absolute best, and if you can do that, you should, but effectively what happens with Fedimint is we're giving communities the ability, the 90% who can't do that for reasons of technical complexity, cost and just psychologically because it's just the right thing to do, a way to still have this best practice backup approach of multisig but with trade-offs applied for the community.
Peter McCormack: Well, do you know what, Obi, it harks back to when I first, well not first, I think second or third time I went down to El Salvador and I was in El Zonte, and do you know what, most people there are poor and a lot of people, their houses are basically a shack, like tin sides and it's a shack, and I was thinking, "All right, this is great, they're got Bitcoin now, and I've Bitcoin". But when I'm at home, I live in a house with bricks with an alarm and security cameras, and if I want to set up a multisig, I can distribute my wallets to friends, family, banks, you know, I can put in some pretty hardcore security.
These people don't leave El Zonte much at all, and firstly, how are they going to get three Trezors or three Ledgers; where are they going to distribute them; even in their own home, what they are they going to do, bury it in the mud under their bed? Multisig is great, hardware wallet-based multisig is great for developed Western nations; in the developing world, it's no good, and so you've solved that problem, which I think is great.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, and multisig is great, full stop, and what we've done is we've found a way of giving the other 90% access to the best practice.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: We should try and give them as close as possible to that, because currently the alternative is if you can't do full multisig, then go off and give it to a complete stranger, and we're suggesting this alternative, that the community can come together to find the trusted members of the community, and then they can amortise the costs of this across the community.
Peter McCormack: I guess what I'm then thinking about, Danny, is who do I trust more; do I trust Coinbase more than I trust the community? I think I trust Coinbase more on internal hacks; I trust the federation more over regulatory and confiscation risk.
Obi Nwosu: I guess the question is which risks are more of an issue for you?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: Maybe, for you, you've come to the view that that risk is lower for you, but as I say, in parts of the world where we are, and different people have different perspectives on this, but we have a level of freedom and reasonableness, to a degree, and there are different views on this, you may form one view; but there are parts of the world, and it's actually the majority of the world, where there is the lack of freedom and a lack of reasonableness and then you'll come to a very different view, that the risk of confiscation is a clear and present risk.
Peter McCormack: It's a new option with different trade-offs.
Obi Nwosu: And at that point, they still deserve a solution.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I get it, okay.
Obi Nwosu: Then also the risk you mentioned earlier, where there are certain bad actors and they can do certain things, again, the way to solve that problem for bad actors is to give good actors tools that they can use to empower themselves to fight back or to provide an alternative, because bad actors use the existing status quo as well to effectively control good actors.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: We provide a tool to bring that control back into the hands of the communities or organisations that we want to deal with.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it definitely makes more sense now, yeah.
Danny Knowles: Do you think they'll always be community-sized federations or do you think you'll get company-sized ones where it might be like an Unchained, River, Swan and NYDIG all setting up a federation?
Obi Nwosu: I'm really excited to see what's going to come forward, but when you say "company-sized", I think you'll see companies setting up federations for themselves because companies have employees, they have expense accounts, they have treasuries and so on, and right now they use multiple third parties who charge fees, and so on. They could instead bring that inhouse if it's easy enough to manage, which we can show you, they can bring that inhouse and manage it themselves and reduce their costs and increase their reporting when they want, and the transfers can happen when they want it to happen, etc, without having to wait for weekends and evenings, and so on.
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I want to see it.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: Let's see it.
Obi Nwosu: So, the first thing is what you do is you set up a federation.
Danny Knowles: Cool.
Peter McCormack: We will share these videos out.
Danny Knowles: Yeah, we'll put these videos in the video.
Obi Nwosu: So, if you go back to the beginning and so on this screen, before we start, if we pause it, it's just four screens. Just to be clear, and the show notes you can see afterwards, you'll see the address, the URL, the address of each one is a different machine, but it's just we're showing them in one place to see what's happening.
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: And so you can imagine this is four different people, downloaded a piece of software, the Fedimint software, our particular fork of it, Fedi OS, so it has a nice interface but it's basically the same as the open-source protocol, and they would have run this application to load up and it displays this in a web browser for each one. And imagine they're also communicating on something like Signal or WhatsApp or so on to talk with each other and just chat, some sort of chat interface, and that's it. So they've all loaded up and it says, "Let's get started", so if you just zoom into one, the first one, call themself Alpha, second one Beta, second one Charlie, second one Delta, but I could be whatever.
Peter McCormack: Shit, that was quick!
Obi Nwosu: That was it, and it's going to get quicker.
Peter McCormack: Where does it get administered from?
Obi Nwosu: This is the beauty of the protocol, it's a headless protocol, so there is no manager; the system manages itself. Each one, you all download the software, as long as the majority of you are running, then if one is a bad actor or one goes offline let's say, then the system will keep running. It's like the operating of this, the guarding of this is equivalent to guarding a set-top box or Bitcoin node in the sense that if you turn it off, where's the administrator? You turn it on, it connects up, resyncs with the Bitcoin network and carries on going. This does the same; if one of those goes offline, the others will still service the Lightning requests and Bitcoin minting and instruction and eCash transaction requests seamlessly, and any other things.
This is extensible, so you can add modules which, as I say, the stability pools, it could service those requests, or password managers if you want to. Instead of holding my passwords with Google Drive, why don't I hold it within my community, or my Nostr password; passwords are going to become more and more. If I'm using Nostr and I lose my password, my private keys, then that's it, I have lost access to my Nostr, so I want to be able to back that up, so do I backup with Google Drive, which is a third party, or do I back it up with a number of trusted third parties?
Anything that I want to be able to take ownership of and I don't feel comfortable completely doing it myself and I don't want to give it to a third party, I could have the Fedimint run. But for the guardians, their job is just to guard this box, they just keep it fed and watered with electricity and internet and that's all they've got to do.
Peter McCormack: Love it. Okay, so the next step would be…?
Obi Nwosu: So, you've set up the federation.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: We skip to a bit because it will display a QR code for you, and I'll show you it here, but that QR code would be -- actually, let me put my phone onto "do not disturb" -- that QR code would look something like this.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: And it would have displayed that. And so you download the app and you would just scan that QR code and that's it, that's the sign-up process.
Peter McCormack: That's it?
Obi Nwosu: No email, no phone number.
Peter McCormack: Love it.
Obi Nwosu: At the same speed as it takes to share your details between two people on an instant messenger client, so it's even faster than signing up to an instant messenger client.
Peter McCormack: Okay, so say I sign up to the federation, I'm not a guardian, I sign up and I deposit some Bitcoin with it, I get my Bitcoin representation -- we're going to do it, okay.
Obi Nwosu: No, you've signed up.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: I've signed you up already.
Peter McCormack: Great.
Obi Nwosu: And you're going to send me a request now.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: And now your experience is like a Lightning wallet.
Peter McCormack: But currently, I don't have any Bitcoin in there.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, so request --
Peter McCormack: But rather than request, say I wanted to deposit some Bitcoin in there, okay, so I go ahead and I deposit in there and I get my representation, my eCash, dealt with that, but my representation in there, I lose my phone.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, so this is where we'll show you a video. So actually, if you go to Admin, if you click on Admin at the bottom.
Peter McCormack: Admin, yeah.
Obi Nwosu: And there will be an option called "backup".
Peter McCormack: Yeah, "backup your wallet".
Obi Nwosu: And there are two options, so just click on one which is the bottom one which is the normal one you expect, the 12 words, and you'll be shown 12 words, you record them down and fine.
Peter McCormack: Cool.
Obi Nwosu: But here's one of the benefits, you're part of a community. We'll go on to an option now, and I'll show it on the screen because it's really good for people to see.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: So, you have the ability to do something called social backup and recovery.
Peter McCormack: This is interesting.
Obi Nwosu: And let me show you on the screen.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I want to see that, yeah.
Obi Nwosu: Basically, it effectively allows you to do a backup of your private key, but if you think about the backup of your keys, you create the key and then you've got it, and then you have to figure out, "Well, who do I give it to?" and so on. And also, when I give to them, how I know that they don't go off and lose it or run off with it, go to the Bahamas, as you said?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: And also, even if I trust them, how do I know that when, in 20 years, I want to get it recovered, they didn't lose it or the cat ate it or so on because they haven't been checking it, it needs to be constantly checked?
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: So, what we do is we have a way of automatically taking your backup, encrypting it, splitting it up, and then luckily we already have a number of trusted members of the community who are there running software 24/7 in the background that can take a copy, a chunk of your backup and store it for you automatically.
Peter McCormack: Right.
Obi Nwosu: And, because it's software, it can be constantly checking those backups to make sure that they aren't corrupted or damaged, and the moment one of them is, you can be alerted that second, not when you need it in ten years' time, because the software is doing the checking, not the humans; they're checking that it's fine.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: So, you'd go in, in this example, and you'll click "social backup" and then you just say the word "Fedi" and your name, and then you just confirm it; it looks like you and it sounds like you. Now, in this background, what's happening is it's creating a very long password that's very hard to guess, it's encrypting your password, your 12 words, it's then breaking it up, let's say there were 4 guardians in that example, into 4 chunks where you need at least 3 to recover. It's then taking your image and creating a hash of that image, so it's not the actual image, it's like a fingerprint of the image, and using that to tag each one of those shards and then sending that hash-tagged backup to each one of the guardians. So, a lot of words to say it's just done the best practice backup of your 12 words in 2 or 3 seconds.
Now, you're left with the video, because they don't know who they're backing up for, you have that, and you're left with the password. It combines them into a file, called backup.fedi, and then you can share it. You can share it to your Google Drive, you can share it to yourself on WhatsApp, you can share it to multiple friends, and you're encouraged to share it in multiple places, because to recover that, the person would need to log back into your federation, know which federation is yours, and then, if they lost their phone and recovered it, but then, at the point of recovery, only at that point the video is sent to the guardians, because they need that video to locate the backup. Then they would check, "Is the person coming to me the same as the person with the video?"
Peter McCormack: Do you have to refresh it every few years just in case you a get a little bit older, grey hair?
Obi Nwosu: So, it's a good practice to do that, and within the app, a certain extension that we want to add is this concept of a Fedibot which, again, will be able to give you reminders of certain things that you should do, also monitor things like your balance is above a certain amount, it will suggest maybe you should consider self-custody now, for example, because it makes sense for you.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: You're ready to take that graduation point, for example.
Peter McCormack: Yeah like it, okay.
Obi Nwosu: But it can still be used to help backup your private keys of your personal custody wallet as well, if you're having trouble finding people to do that too.
Peter McCormack: So you, me, Danny, Papa Smurf over there, we set up a federation, Emma comes in, she creates an app, she deposits her Bitcoin, she does the social proof, yeah, and she does the social backup, distributes that amongst us four --
Obi Nwosu: And then she needs to recover?
Peter McCormack: She needs to recover, but the night before, me and Danny, gone out for a few drinks, get in a fight, get killed, we're both dead, how does it recover when we're gone, the two --
Obi Nwosu: Well, you'll have to get dead and then your computers will also have to turn off; the Fedimint server is a piece of software, it's a set-top box. It's like you dying and your set-up box is --
Peter McCormack: Yeah, but we're not checking the video against the video and saying, "That was that person".
Obi Nwosu: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: So, in that scenario, where we're gone, the two people left cannot recover that person.
Obi Nwosu: In that scenario, yes.
Peter McCormack: Okay.
Obi Nwosu: So, you would have to have a coincidence of both of your dying and the person, the same day, losing their keys, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, so we can't travel together!
Obi Nwosu: But that's a number of coincidences that have to happen.
Peter McCormack: No, I know, but on purpose, I'm trying to break it.
Obi Nwosu: But it's the same if you gave your backup to someone and their house burnt down on the same day you lost your key, it's the same, so that could also happen, or there was a flood in the vault, the bank vault, the same day that you lost your key, then you'd also have the same problem.
Peter McCormack: So, I'm 3-of-5 on mine.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, but if you had three people go the same day as you --
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it's just a different risk model, it's three versus two, it's 2-of-4 versus 3-of-5.
Obi Nwosu: Well, it's two in a case of 3-of-4, but you could also set up 5-of-7, or you could set up 7-of-10.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, okay.
Obi Nwosu: So, I think the minimum we suggest is 3-of-4 because that protects you from one person being a bad actor or losing access for a period for time; 5-of-7 protects you against two.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, great.
Danny Knowles: Very cool.
Peter McCormack: So, we're created, we're backed up…
Obi Nwosu: And if it came to recover, if you click on "recovery", what would simply happen would be you would go in, find the file, download the app again because you'd lost your phone, it's a new phone, and double-click on the file. It will open up the file, recognise it as a .fedi extension so it knows it's part of Fedi, so you'd join the federation again scanning a QR code, click "recover", find that file, open it up in your file system and it will load it and it will say, "Here's a QR code", get, in this example, three of the four guardians to scan it, and you've got your Bitcoin back.
So, you just have to get them to scan that. If they're not in the same town, you can do it over a WhatsApp call or a Hangouts call or a Zoom; if they're in person, you can do that personally. But they will always see you, and at the point they scan it, only at that point is the video sent, and they will say, "Is this person the same as this video?"
Peter McCormack: Tyler or Cameron Winklevoss could steal each other's Bitcoin; have you got twin protection?
Obi Nwosu: Twin protection, yeah.
Peter McCormack: Identical.
Obi Nwosu: Well, I guess, again, this is the advantage of it being with your friends and family because friends and family can recognise the difference between twins, hopefully.
Peter McCormack: Twins can fall out though; I don't know.
Obi Nwosu: The point is though that friends and family know them well enough to work out who's who. If you've got friends who are twins and you've known them a while, you know, but someone who's on the other side of the world, who's in the West Coast of America in some Big Tech company who's underpaid and overworked, to try and figure out who it is versus three or four people who've known you all their life, I'm going to bet on the three or four people who've known you all their life to determine the difference between the two twins.
Peter McCormack: We've got twins who play for Real Bedford, James and Rob Ducket, and I still can't tell them apart.
Obi Nwosu: Well, give it a few more years!
Peter McCormack: I can't.
Danny Knowles: There's always an evil twin!
Peter McCormack: I keep tweeting out the wrong ones when they score goals and shit, I keep getting it wrong.
Obi Nwosu: It is embarrassing.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it is because these two are identical. Okay, I get it, so what we're really talking about with all of this are just different trust models, everything is just a different trust model. We've got a capability and a trust model relating to storing your Bitcoin, whether it's exchange versus single hardware wallet versus multisig versus Fedi.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: It is just another thing, another option out there.
Obi Nwosu: It's a different trust model.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: Look, it's part of a bigger story though. So ultimately, if you can, you should self-custody, that is the absolute Bitcoin standard.
Peter McCormack: And you're encouraging that with this anyway.
Obi Nwosu: I believe that that's the best possible scenario, but being pragmatic, I think you're going to get maybe 10% of the people of the world being able to do that.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: We're about getting the 90% away from complete trust of Big Tech companies, big companies who don't have your interests at heart, and taking that control into the hands of communities, and that is where we see the comparison as opposed to the comparison against the Bitcoin standard, the gold/Bitcoin standard of self-custody.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: And when you're ready, when you've built up enough experience, knowledge and capital, you should self-custody.
Peter McCormack: I want a federation.
Danny Knowles: Let's do it.
Peter McCormack: Let's do it.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: I think we should have a What Bitcoin Did federation.
Danny Knowles: When would it actually be available?
Obi Nwosu: So, in May, now.
Peter McCormack: Hold on, are you launching at Miami?
Obi Nwosu: No comment, but we're going to have our first launch. It's actually available already for a number of months, but in closed launch with a number of a communities in LatAm, in Africa and other parts of the world. We've already been getting feedback and adjusting the product. But in May, we are announcing that we're having what we're calling our Silent Running launch because I like my sci-fi, and this is a launch for the product, which you can download and use, but it's targeted at builders because the real power here, this is an OS and imagine your iPhone without a suite of apps of things that you can do to fit your personal requirements; this is a federated OS for communities.
Communities around the world will have different needs. If you're a company, you'll have a certain set of needs in New York. If you're a village in Venezuela, you'll have a different set of needs. If you're a large family in Nigeria, a different set of needs. And so they need a suite of different services to meet those needs, whether it's community savings and loan schemes, or whether it's the stability pools, or whether it's password managers, or whether it's federated Nostr relays, or whatever it may be, there are many things that could be extended and run on top of this.
So, that's the launch we're focused on, it's not designed for consumers, although if you're an enthusiast, I'm sure there are going to be a lot of enthusiasts who want to download the trial, I'm sure that's going to happen; but we're going to focused on builders, and then later on in the year, once we have a suite of really exciting Fedimint modules we call them, that are available and ready to rock and roll, that's when you launch.
Peter McCormack: Could you, at the Miami Conference, create a federation for the conference that everyone goes and joins and then they deposit their Bitcoin in and then use that for buying everything while they're at the conference?
Obi Nwosu: That's a great idea.
Peter McCormack: Could that be done?
Obi Nwosu: That's a great idea. No comment!
Peter McCormack: What day are we releasing this show?
Danny Knowles: I think 12 May, if that works.
Obi Nwosu: You've got some very good ideas, I'll leave it at that.
Peter McCormack: It makes sense though, doesn't it?
Danny Knowles: It makes a lot of sense.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it makes sense; I would do that, that's what I would do.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, I think that concept is cool, like the temporary federation.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: And I think it's quite exciting; imagine festivals.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking, festivals.
Obi Nwosu: Imagine concerts, imagine conferences, imagine all these sort of things as opposed to these apps that you download, never use again and forget about, you can mass orange pill; that would be a really cool idea, great thought!
Peter McCormack: You should give me a board seat! Okay, cool, right, what have we not covered?
Obi Nwosu: There are loads of things.
Peter McCormack: Important things that we've not covered.
Obi Nwosu: So, let's just take Chat.
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: That's the next. So, in the Fedi app, because it's a home for your money, chat and data, so we have Chat within the app. So, instead of your chat being hosted by a third party somewhere in the world in one location, like a Signal or a Telegram or a WhatsApp, where you don't know for sure what's happening, and even if they're doing everything perfectly correct, there's always a suspicion -- you've seen the news around Binance and CZ and the Signal information that was shared, for example -- each chat is able to run within the federation. So each community has its own private chat server for the community, and when you're talking to people within your community, direct to direct, it's an encrypted conversation so you know that it's encrypted between the two of you and you also know it's being served by the community for the community.
Now, within the Chat though, because it's within this community, you're able to make payments while you talk; you can send conversations; you can also send eCash, you can fling eCash from one person to another. And if you see, in this example, we're having a conversation with someone and then they send you a request to pay them and you just click "pay". So, instead of me scanning this QR code, I just click "pay" and it's just sent eCash directly. And then the other way round, I sent you a bit too much, I click the wallet icon there on the left and instead of me sending a QR code, I just send the amount I want and I can cancel it before they click pay, but if they click pay it will say "pending", it transfers the eCash directly between the two of us.
So, when I'm now sending money, I've got family back in the diaspora who are part of my community and me, instead of me figuring out multiple things, we just all join the same federation, and if I want to send money home, for example, I would just say, "Okay, here's your money for the day", "pay", and it just sent.
Peter McCormack: Or, say I'm at conference and I've got an event on, and you're like, "Do I want to come; have you got a ticket?" "Yeah, it's a million sats", boom, "Here are a million sats, here's your ticket".
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, or you pay for the conference and you go and you join and you download this QR code. So again, you just download the app and scan a QR code at the entrance and that's the sign-in process, no email, no anything. You can now have different subgroups in Chat for different discussions happening. On the home page, there's a series of apps being displayed and each one of those apps is configurable by community. So, this is an example set, we've got things like Bitrefill and Geyser and Stakwork and Stacker News and BTC Maps, but for you it could be the show guide and it could be the programme guide and it could be whatever makes sense for your community.
Also, you can then make payments, and guess what, what happens if I want to go and see -- what happens if it's a concert and there are like 10,000 people and there's just no cell reception, or it's underground for part of it, so you lose connection? Can we go into offline sending? So, eCash is a bearer instrument, and this is one of its things, it works the way you normally naturally expect cryptocurrency to work, but after a while, you realise it doesn't work like that, it's one shared ledger. But when I have eCash in my phone, I literally have a different file effectively, I mean it's a simplified version, a different file for each coin of cash I have.
So, if I have no internet, it can recognise that, and we can do this right now. I have no internet, no Wi-Fi, no SMS. Instead, it will recognise that and it will create. It will only work if you're both in the same federation, but if you were in the same federation already, and I saw this when I was in El Salvador, I had Bitcoin but I had no signal on my SIM card and there was someone I wanted to buy some pupusas from; I had the money, and they were right in front of me, and I couldn't pay them because we had no internet. With eCash, I can still go in offline mode and literally have an animated QR code of the different eCash notes, and as long as they have their camera, I can beam through the sky, through the air effectively, without Bluetooth, or anything, the payment.
Danny Knowles: That's very cool.
Peter McCormack: How does it work if there's no connection; how does it work?
Obi Nwosu: So, what's happening is that you're not actually sending information over the internet, you're sending it through the QR code. Think about the tokens in the scenario of the fairground, each one of those is a bearer instrument, ie, each one of those is cash in a way you consider cash. So, when you receive eCash onto your phone, on your phone is a separate file for every note.
Peter McCormack: How does that get from your phone to my phone?
Obi Nwosu: So, if you show him the video again, a QR code is a visual representation of information.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Danny Knowles: Are we looking at that offline receive now?
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, on the offline send, I was creating an animated QR code.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I saw that.
Obi Nwosu: If you look at the bottom, it's saying 60%, 70%, 80%, so if you play it again, so you notice at the bottom there's this sort of a count up or the percentage of the eCash that you've received. So, at the bottom of the screen you'll see again, and once you start scanning it, at the bottom, it's going 20%, 30%, 70%, 80%, 100%, and what will happen is, as this animation is playing, each frame of the animation is the unique code of a different piece of eCash.
Now, even though I have no internet, because we both know the federation we're part of, the way the eCash protocol works is every eCash note issued is stamped by the federation of guardians; they use their private key to sign it, effectively. They sign each one, so that you know that even though I have no internet, because I know what the details of the federation is, I know that if I receive this note, this is a valid note because only the guardians could have signed it and therefore, even without internet, I can receive it and go, "Okay, this is valid, I'll accept it".
Peter McCormack: But because there's no connection, when a connection comes back, is there is a syncing process?
Obi Nwosu: Yes, so there is a syncing process when the connection comes back, but this is where the community aspect works as well. So there are two things: the bearer instrument allows you to send it through as QR code; but then, the fact that you have this sort of community trust model means that, for example, you would say, "Well, what happens if someone tries to double-spend, send it to two different places?"
First of all, they'll have to take the code, recompile it and change it and modify it, so you're in this village and you're starting to recompile this application to do something completely different, which is unlikely. But let's say you did do that, you would then have the challenge that, upon syncing, it would be clear that you double-spent to two different people. And again, you have the risk then of being ostracised by the community and therefore, from then on, you'd never be able to transact with anyone in the community again for that $2 transaction --
Peter McCormack: Okay, that makes sense.
Obi Nwosu: -- which again, if you're doing it to someone on the other side of the world, then that's a real risk, but when you're doing it with people you're transacting with daily, that risk becomes much smaller because the punishment is much higher than the crime, so this is the power of working within communities of trust.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: That, combined with the properties of eCash, allow you to send value in this mechanism and in this way.
Peter McCormack: Okay. So, my conference ends, does everyone have to withdraw to close down that temporary federation; and if you don't withdraw and the federation gets closed down, do you lose your Bitcoin?
Obi Nwosu: Well, you don't lose it, the federation retains it in that scenario. So, the Bitcoin is not lost but you would lose access to it, yes. So, if you were doing something like a conference, you would say you would keep it open for one or two weeks afterwards, and you would use that opportunity to say, "Hey, after the end of this --", and you would say at the point of depositing.
It's similar if you go to some music concerts, you get tokens and you say, "If don't use them then they go back to the organiser", and it's the same. You'll buy a $50 ticket, say, and you get $20 worth of eCash to get going immediately as part of that ticket, and you can obviously deposit more, but you make it very clear that by depositing, if you don't withdraw it by this point, two weeks afterwards, it goes.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: But obviously you can use that period of the two weeks afterwards to make them aware of other ways; they could set up a Lightning wallet themselves to self-custody, or they could come talk to Fedi and we can help their community set up their own, if they liked what they saw here, the power of this approach, "Why don't you set up your own community and we'll help you set it up there". But whether it's us or whether it's Muun or Wallet of Satoshi or so on, you've just given people mass visibility on the power of Bitcoin and Lightning and so on, so you're going to have some percentage of those people, even if they came for a football conference or so on, they just realised this experience is just way better, and that's what we're going for.
Peter McCormack: Yeah.
Obi Nwosu: We're going for just where people are having their most enjoyable experiences in their life, festivals and so on, that's where you orange pill them because this becomes a much better alternative; one tool where I can organise, I can talk to other people, I can share connections, people I meet when I'm just passing by, I can pay for food and hotdogs and water and drinks and memorabilia, I can also have show guides and so on because of the fact that it's extensible; then, for the next two weeks afterwards, I can be told or suggested ways in which you can continue that experience now that you've understood first-hand the power of Bitcoin and Lightning.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, I'm thinking we're got our event next Friday, next year we're going to turn it into a one-, maybe two-day conference, and I'm already thinking, okay, we would have our federation for the conference. In there, there would be the running order of events, there will be incremental things you want to buy. You want to buy a ticket to the dinner on the Friday? Cool, you can do it within the app.
Obi Nwosu: Exactly.
Peter McCormack: When you go round to the merch stand, you can buy stuff; you meet someone, you want to buy something from them, you can tap; chat, you can organise little side events.
Obi Nwosu: Unfortunately you won't be the first one to do it by then!
Peter McCormack: No, but that's fine, it'll be proof tested.
Obi Nwosu: Yeah, it will definitely be proof tested by then.
Peter McCormack: It's super cool. So, can I put my own fees into the transfers within it?
Obi Nwosu: Technically, there's nothing stopping that with the Fedimint protocol, but with the Fedi app, no, structurally, we don't do it for our system.
Danny Knowles: And that's because you would have issues with regulatory bodies?
Obi Nwosu: I think it makes the experience much simpler for users and also, at least at this stage, it focuses on who would adopt it. If there's no profit motive, you tend to get people who are doing it for non-profit motive-focused reasons.
Peter McCormack: Casinos, so when you go to the casino, you have to go to the stand, you have to convert it, and then when you've cashed out, they give you the ticket, you go back and convert it, you could just stay entirely within the app.
Obi Nwosu: I think there are multiple use cases, yeah, so that's another very powerful use case.
Peter McCormack: Okay, how do you guys make money?
Obi Nwosu: So, there are multiple ways in which we can make money for Fedi. The core way we plan to make money is the Fedi app, that when people download the app, they don't have to, just like they have to use any given Lightning app, but our app is a pay-as-you-use model, so whenever you do any form of transaction, we'll charge an additional small amount on top, a few basis points.
Peter McCormack: Nice. It's growing on me.
Obi Nwosu: So, we use that to improve the product and service, but the other thing we do which is a core part of this OS, this operating system, the human part of this -- so we recently just closed a Series A round.
Peter McCormack: Congratulations.
Obi Nwosu: Thank you very much for that -- and a big part of that is to bring Bitcoin, Lightning adoption global, and obviously we think Fedi is a powerful engine for mass Bitcoin adoption at an accelerated rate. But what we realised is you need humans on the ground who understand the local context to make that happen. So, we'll be, over the coming years, hiring hundreds of Fedi Knights, as we call them, to locate, educate and inculcate communities and organisations around the world; we're effectively the outsourced business development arm for the entire Bitcoin ecosystem.
As you said, the thing with Fedimint, it's very powerful, but it's an island without other things, it needs to run on servers, so it'll need Umbrels, Start9s, Voltages, and so on; it needs to connect to the Lightning Network, so it needs to partner with people like Voltage and IBEX Mercado and all the other companies who provide Lightning LSP services. Then, for every given community, they have specific requirements, so integrations with Bitrefill, with Stakwork if you want to earn money and so on, but all of these things are in the Bitcoin Lightning ecosystem right now, and as a whole already, are incredibly powerful, but you want one place to bring it all together and then one engine to bring that out to the world.
That's what we do, we bring it all together here and we bring it out in the world with this workforce of people who, the ideas, they're going to make me look like I'm comatose, they're going to just want to promote and make people aware of what's possible with Bitcoin, Lightning, Fedi, Fedimint and the Bitcoin ecosystem. So, inherent in our model is that we win by ensuring the entire ecosystem wins.
Peter McCormack: It's growing on me.
Danny Knowles: Are you Fedi pilled?
Peter McCormack: I think a little bit, now I can see the use cases; that eCash thing was a massive --
Danny Knowles: Yeah, this cleared loads up for me too.
Peter McCormack: Yeah, it cleared up loads for me. Obi, what do you want to tell people; where do they go; how do they find out more; what's going to happen now; where do we go with this; when can I set up a federation?
Obi Nwosu: So, yeah, there are lots there! So first of all, to find out more about us, you should go to fedi.xyz, that's the good starting point, and you'll see about the mission, what we're trying to do. About me, I'm always on Twitter, @obi, and you can find out what I'm doing. Where do we go next? So, we are looking to hire, so on our site you're going to see a number of roles and we're looking to just find people who are not mercenaries, missionaries; it's really core that this is something that they are really passionate about.
Beyond that, you're going to see us a lot at various conferences throughout the year. If you see us, come up, talk to us and we'll figure out ways of partnering with your company if you're in this space and you want us to integrate it within our product, or you want to join the team, or you want to use a service, we're all here for you.
Peter McCormack: Very, very cool. Appreciate you coming in, Obi.
Obi Nwosu: No problem.
Peter McCormack: It's cleared up a lot. I'm really excited to see the comments on this.
Danny Knowles: Yeah.
Peter McCormack: All right, man, listen, best of luck, we're always here for you, we're friends, anything you need, give us a shout. I look forward to Miami.
Obi Nwosu: Thank you very much.
