Stephen: This is your host Stephen Sargeant Around The Coin Podcast. Banking as a service is such a hot topic. We talked to the CEO Prashanth of Striga. He comes from YC background, Accelerated Companies. He was in Bitcoin and Blockchain early. He's talking all about payments and infrastructure and how to send payments throughout Europe. We get into stablecoins. We talk a little bit about compliance. But he is plugged into the fintech and payment rails, and he's talking about all the use cases, including crypto debit cards that are absolutely blowing up in the European Union. We obviously talk about MICA and the regulations and travel rule, but he, we get through every single one of my questions because his answers were concise, crisp, and they really got to the point.

This is a podcast you need to listen to, especially if you're a business that's touching payments. Tech, crypto, blockchain, or you're just a consumer and you want to get money from India to Switzerland or from UK to Canada, this is the podcast you should be listening to.

Stephen: This is your host Stephen Sargeant We are here with the Around The Coin podcast with our friend Prashanth. Prashanth you created a company. I want you to describe what the company is in a nutshell, and then we're going to go back to, you know, your origin story, and we'll go back a little bit deeper into the company and what you're

doing there.

Prashanth: For sure. So I run a small company called Striga. Striga is a payments platform that enables businesses in Europe to move money without needing to do any of the heavy lifting when it comes to crypto compliance and or card issuing and banking.

Stephen: That's awesome. And you know, you have a strong computer science background education. What were your initial plans in like 2012 when you're, you know, obtaining your master's, I think in 2017 is when you got your master's, what were your plans there? Was it like, was computer science, coding, crypto, blockchain, was that always part of your DNA or did you think that you were going to go another route?

Prashanth: So 2012 was actually when I finished high school and 2017, I didn't actually, I never actually finished my master's. I left midway to start the same company that I'm still building. No, and, and yeah, computer science, I still consider myself heavily an engineer first and computer science was always something that, I mean, I started coding at a very young age, me and my brother, both, and we just both sort of fell in love with it.

And during my master's, I was sort of still, you know, I was still I had these two paths, either to, you know, go the traditional route, finish my master's, it was a pretty good school. And there were like plenty of opportunities and options available to work at like one of the big five tech companies and so on and so forth.

My brother does and for me, it just didn't click. And I really, really wanted to use all the stuff that I'd spent decades or a decade at that point learning to, to try to build something with my own hands. And You know, like a real world product, like what Striga is. And that's I ended up doing. I mean, it was a long shot, but it's sort of, it's sort of worked out.

Stephen: Who's more rested at family reunions? You or your brother working in Baytech or are you starting your own company?

Prashanth: My brother, for sure. I mean, he's he took the traditional path, but he's happy. And I mean, it works out so it's, it's to each their own.

Stephen: I love it. Have you ever thought about going back and completing your Master's, just kind of like checking it off the list, like you see athletes do this when they've kind of built their career, they go back and do school. What are your thoughts, or maybe even your thoughts around schooling now that you left, you know, do you think that getting a Master's would have progressed you faster in what you're building, or do you need that kind of hands on experience?

Prashanth: It's definitely the latter and no way I would, I would never go back to finish it. I think it's too comfy of an option. And in fact, like, I mean, for me, it was one of the wildest experiences to actually walk up to the Dean or the, the administrative office and say like, Hey, I'm leaving. And then they ask you okay, do you want us to like, there's a little checkbox, which says that we can either put your program on hold so that you can come back at any point in your life and pick up where you left off, or we can sort of cancel it.

So this, if you ever do it again, you have to start from scratch. And I said, no, check the box. So, I mean, like having that option at the back of your mind sort of, you know, Would ha would not have taken me down the same path. So..

Stephen: Was that a conscious decision? Like, burn the bridges? Burn the boats? Is that, like, do you think that if you had checked off, like, hey, I could come back at any point, that you wouldn't have had that hunger inside or something to prove to yourself?

Prashanth: No, it was a very conscious decision. I'm, I'm very glad I did it. And I mean, especially, I mean, like building an early stage company, it's, it's basically just a ton of uncertainty and like, and, and we've been through so many ups and downs. If I knew that that was an option at the back of my mind, it would've been so easy to give up and like go back and like, oh, you know what, I can just finish my masters and like, go the traditional route, but not, I would recommend not going through.

I would recommend like people to do sort of the same thing because I think there's a lot of very talented folks out there that can build really amazing stuff in the real world with their own hands. And sometimes, you know, folks take the, like the easier and more comfortable path out. I mean, it's not a bad thing, but there is an alternative available.

Stephen: Yeah, Masters is not exactly easy. I'm not kidding, your Masters is not exactly easy either, but You also are a research student at L3S Research Center. It's become a leader in AI. What were you working on back in 2016 when you were there? Was it big on AI and machine learning at the time? Is that where you learned a little bit more about blockchain?

I'm curious about being a research student back in 2016.

Prashanth: Oh no, at the time I was still like my project and the folks that I worked with, my supervisor and so on and so forth, they were super interested in web archives. So we just had like huge petabytes of storage of. Just webpages. And they wanted to sort of clean this up and run a whole bunch of analysis on it.

I could assume that leads into various machine learning slash ai bits and pieces here and there today, but at the time I wouldn't say that AI was, or like machine learning was the main thing going around. It was a lot of stuff to do with big data and data scraping and data analysis and I mean, it was super fun.

I learned a whole bunch of new cool tech at the time. Not that I ever used it in my life afterwards, but it was fun.

Stephen: I love it. You're also head of IT at Cenect. If I'm pronouncing it right. Which was big on like cash, that was more on the fiat side. But using cryptocurrency, I think it even colored coins. Can you talk about what you guys were working on there? And what, maybe if they're still around, what they're doing now?

Prashanth: Yeah, the company is actually still around. I haven't talked to any of the folks there in a long time, but well, basically the guys there, they wanted to build like an Uber for ATMs. So instead of sort of going to like an ATM machine to withdraw cash, you had an app and you could find people that had cash and you, You walk up to them and they give you cash in hand and you make like a bank transfer.

This was the idea. It still is the same product. But back then it was like I started working. I was like the first, I guess the second person in the company at the time was super early stage. And I was sort of doing this on the side with my studies to pay my bills. And. And this was a time when like Ethereum had just begun and ICOs were like sort of slowly taking off and then the, the guy in charge of the company at the time was really like leaning towards adding in blockchain as an element into the product somewhere.

And one potential idea that I suggested, and I don't know if they still use it or not, but was to enable the sort of cash withdrawal network using their own native currency. It wasn't Bitcoin. I mean, they did not want to use Bitcoin at the time. It was a slow and slow process. Transaction fees and things like this.

So, the suggestion or the idea was like, Hey, we can spin up this blockchain network, which creates these e money tokens, which you can go to, like, if you're traveling in a different country with a different currency, this could be the means of exchange as opposed to using like the regular banking rails to transfer fiat money from one person to another.

But that was like the, the early stages of how I got into the entire Bitcoin slash crypto space.

Stephen: The, the red flags from my compliance community are like waving in the air. You're talking about native token. Cash exchanges in person. What was the regulatory and compliance challenges that you went through? Or probably just funny stories. Anytime you're talking ATMs and blockchain based transactions, I'm sure there's a couple of funny stories that you had back at that time.

Prashanth: absolutely. No, again, back then I was purely like a tech guy. Like I was so into the software and I really just wanted to build cool stuff. I did not understand a single thing about regulations and compliance at the time, or like understood what is a license. Like what do you need? So, Why do you need a license to do anything?

But then the guys in charge of the company at the time, they did obtain like a special approval from the FINMA, which is a regulator in Switzerland to sort of pull off this exact thing. And like, now I understand like how high risk cash is and all this stuff would just never fly in today's world without like a very strong compliance function.

But at the time, We, they, I mean, they had this approval to do this like proof of concept in Switzerland with just the app which sort of worked out. I think they had a whole bunch of users, but then I think with, with these tokens and coins and stuff there was a, there was basically no regulation and nobody could sort of wrap their head around it, like, Hey, we're mixing cash and exactly what you said.

So like, is this legal? Is this not legal? Is this a risk we need to take? Like, do we really need this? And I think they leaned in the direction of just doing it as a regular software application with a regular database and not needing to, you know, Use crypto or any coins at all at the time. Yeah,

Stephen: That was probably the smart decision. Speaking about easier routes, that would be the easier route, I think. And then you become the CEO of Lastbit. What was the problem that you were trying to solve? Or what was the gap or the void that you were trying to fill in the industry at Lastbit?

Prashanth: so it's very closely related to this. It sort of stemmed from this. It was, we were trying to solve the last mile of Bitcoin payments specifically. So while I was studying in Switzerland I was mostly financing my own education and I am originally from India and moving money from India to Switzerland was just a nightmare.

I mean, I was a student and I didn't have a bank account. It took like months to get a bank account. I had to pay tuition but I knew what Bitcoin was and I'd just been working with like the core software for a while. And I was like, yeah, what if I just buy Bitcoin in India and sell it in Switzerland and like, Pay my tuition with this, and that's exactly what I did and turned out that, and I just basically sort of figured like, hey, you know, if I build an app or a service or a product around this, this is probably a problem that's big enough to solve and that is exactly what LastBit was.

It was a consumer facing application that sort of used Bitcoin as a payment rail connecting various fiat money services in different countries, but the proof of concept originally started in Europe.

Stephen: It's funny how that's how many people got into crypto, that exact situation. I had a friend coming from London, UK to Canada. So by no means emerging markets when it comes to the financial ecosystems, probably some of the two biggest markets that we see and they couldn't get the money across. Cause to your point, they couldn't get the bank account open in order to transfer the funds.

So they had to use cryptocurrency. And we can see, especially in Canada, so many international students coming from places like India, how difficult that is because it's almost like the chicken and egg, right? You need the bank account in order to send the funds, you need the funds in order to have enough proof that you have money here and that you should be opening up a bank account, so it gets really challenging.

You go through YC with LastBit. Is that when you decide to change the name to Striga or maybe walk through that kind of YC moment?

Prashanth: Yeah, for sure. I think YC was like the biggest like what's the biggest pivotal impact that we had, like that ever happened to the company as a whole. So LastBit was exactly this. So it was this consumer facing money transfer application that used Bitcoin under the hood. So it was, it was a thing that could let, you know, Normal people in Europe on board get a MasterCard, get a bank account, and like a Bitcoin and Lightning wallet to go with it so that you could sort of freely move between all three components and people could use this to, you know, pay their bills, get their salary paid into it, and or send money to other people using this So we went through YCA with this idea, but like at the very beginning of YCA as well, the idea that we actually applied with and the one that we kept pitching was that we were trying to build this more global payments network or payments ecosystem.

We just didn't know how we would do it yet, but that was like sort of the idea. And we just kept insisting that like, Like this consumer app is like version zero. It's a proof of concept. It's the thing that we can start with because it's obscenely hard to get the approvals and the banking, I'm sorry, like the MasterCard approvals and the banking relationships to even pull off a simple proof of concept like this in Europe.

So here's where we're starting and that's where we're going. So we, we signed up a whole, like we signed up a couple thousand users. We started processing a good amount of money through the, the, the consumer application. And, and at some point we realized that like, okay, we need to keep trading on this and adding in a whole bunch of new features that people ask us for.

And as we tried to add in any new feature, we would run up against like a brick regulatory wall. With our banking partners and MasterCard, like we needed to jump through like 10 different hooks. And so we were like super frustrated. Like, there's no way we can improve the product if we need to like spend six months on fighting, like filling out paperwork to get approval for this.

So we basically decided like, you know what, let's just build the entire, like let's just build as much of the payment stack as we can from the ground up and get our own license. And in the midst of building that, like getting our own license and building this, we started getting inquiries. And like, we started, we basically started to see that there were many other companies, just like LastBit, folks that wanted to build their own versions of a Bitcoin payments application or a crypto money transfer application, whatever it was, it all fundamentally relied on having, like having the basic services of like, custody, being able to do trading being able to issue bank accounts and being able to issue cards.

And we sort of realized that like there's a ton more value in us building the infrastructure as opposed to operating our own consumer app. And today we're powering like 15 or 16 different consumer applications, each of which are doing like completely different things, but use the same fundamental tools to move money.

And that's when like we decided to change the name from Last Bit to Striga, but it's still very much the same company.

Stephen: I love it. Where does Striga come from? Like where does the, is the name originated? Just something you thought about? Like I always wonder about names of companies. It's getting harder now that there's company name generators. There's more, you know, names taken, it's hard to go, where did that name come from?

Prashanth: In 2021, while we were going through YC I happened to watch The Witcher, the TV show. And Striga is like this is this monster that the witcher slays. And it's a cool five letter domain name. And I mean, like I figured why not?

Stephen: It was the only domain name that didn't cost 100, 000. You're like, yo, I can get this for 13 through GoDaddy, that's, that's amazing.

Prashanth: It wasn't that cheap, but, but

Stephen: Ha ha ha ha. Tell me a little bit about the YC experience. A lot of people go through the program, like, was there like an impactful conversation where an alumni pulled you aside and said, Hey, you know what?

I, I've been here. I've done that. Here's some things that you're looking for, or, Hey, I couldn't get past this challenge, but I believe that you and your team could. Was there any of those kinds of moments going through YC?

Prashanth: Okay. Let me describe this. Like, I think it's, it's sort of like Hogwarts for startups. I think that's the best description I've heard. Like every single founder that goes through YC takes away something different. And a lot of the stuff that you see on like YC's YouTube, et cetera, is, is very similar to like what they, It all depends on like the questions you ask and the feedback you get to it.

But for me, like I'm definitely going to like go start another company or like keep building companies for the rest of my life. And like, I would still want to go through YC once again, just because it was, it was just phenomenal. We had all of these like various ideas and crazy thoughts. Like we wanted to build product, we wanted to do all these things, but like what, what we took away from the experience and what we learned was sort of like, Hey, like, okay, it's, it's pretty great to have these global ambitions and like, think about like how you're going to dominate the world and so on, like this kind of stuff.

But like. What are you going to do today? Like, what are you going to do for the next three months? Can you build something that's like, that people actually want, that people are willing to pay for, and then like, you know, scale that up into the thing you want it to be. So we really, like, it's all like thinking from first principles, like, like business or startups are not that complicated.

It's, it's very simple. Like you just got to build something that people are willing to pay for or use. And like, nobody cares if you have the fanciest code base and like the most insane tech that does the craziest thing. It's like, nobody wants it. So, getting, getting a lot of those first principles drilled down into, into myself was, I think, Probably the most valuable part of the experience.

Stephen: Do you find that you struggled with focus? I'm sure a lot of companies that come into YC, they have, as you said, global ambitions. All these moving parts, and while you're there, AI is coming, like, there's all these other, you know, shiny balls that are coming around you that you want to implement now into your code, or, you know, you want to try this new regulatory system was a part of going through YCD, do you feel like you really focused on some, one thing versus trying to do everything?

Prashanth: Exactly that. Exactly that. I think pre, pre YC we I mean, we were like hungry, but like we were young and hungry, like to build, like, like to build really cool stuff in a highly regulated space. And we started to understand a lot more about how regulations work, but yeah, exactly that. I think focus is the right word to sum up that whole experience.

Like, you know, we just had this laser focus on like, okay, this is what's going to happen. This is what's going to get built. And this is what we're going to focus on. If this doesn't work, we're going to try this. And then like, you know, like, It was very clear the next couple of months, it was intense, like it was three months during COVID and which means that we were just on meetings like night and day US time, I was in India, stuck in, stuck there during COVID, so on and so forth, but it gave me and the entire team, this like incredible sort of, it sounded like mind blowing clarity, but in hindsight, it was like, man, that was obvious, like this is what we should have done, but you don't really realize it in the moment.

Stephen: In simple terms, explain, like, what Striga does. And then maybe you have a lot of use cases, but give me like, when I think about a product or a SaaS project, like why are people coming to you? What is the one thing that like, Hey, we need you to do this. You're one of the few companies that do this. Can you get this done for us?

And then we can go through some of the use cases after.

Prashanth: Yeah, absolutely. So in very simple words, let's say, I mean, our customers are the people that use us, our companies and these are companies that are usually Kind of in the early stages of building the company or somewhere midway through building the company, and they have a bunch of users, they found product market fit, so on and so forth.

And these companies are building a product that either touches money or moves money. So a very good, a very simple example is like in Europe, the most popular neobank is a company called Revolut. Which basically is a mobile app you download and you get a bank account, you get a card, you can like buy and sell crypto, you can even buy and sell stocks there now, and you can do a whole bunch of cool things like this.

But when, when they started as a small company, like all of these single functions is a highly regulated licensed activity. If they had gone out and spent, I mean, if they had gone out and obtained licenses to do each one of these things, Revolute, for instance, would have probably spent a couple million and at least five years of their time just getting the licenses and getting all this infrastructure in place before they even had, had their first user.

And for all you know, it might have never worked and nobody would have like ever used the app. But that's exactly the problem that we solved. So today companies can come, the platform is public. It's free to try and use. It's a handful of APIs. You build your application. You focus on building like the money transfer bit of your application.

And the kind of thing that you want your users to see and all of the other heavy lifting when it comes to connecting to this bank and that bank and this crypto exchange and having enough liquidity all this other stuff is handled by us. So this is like the most common use case. Like, it's basically fintech companies that want to build financial services without having to do the heavy lifting.

Stephen: Without having to do all the tech stuff and the infrastructure. And you, you mentioned right off the top of the episode about like, kind of like built in compliance for them. How does that work? If it's their customers. It's, you know, they're using your platform, but I'm assuming the accounts are going to be in their customer's name at the bank or crypto exchange.

How do you mitigate risks with them using your platform to transfer funds, around Europe, I'm assuming.

Prashanth: So this is a whole bunch of software trickery. So what happens is like when a customer builds an application, let's say like the first step is the user verifies themselves. So what we've built is this kind of SDK, which they put into that application such that when a user passes through verification, everything goes through our compliance team and the partner never sees it.

And the customer doesn't know that, okay, in the terms and conditions, of course, our name is present, but the customer doesn't really know that like. The compliance function is actually handled by Striga in the background. And the same when it comes to transactions and transaction monitoring. So when a Bitcoin address is displayed on the application, our customer sort of basically fetches it from our API and displays it to the user.

But when a deposit is made, we're the ones that are screening these transactions, reporting these transactions if need be, and so on, so forth. And you know, I think, like, Without gloating, honestly, but I think like we've sort of invested a ton into compliance and have like one of the best compliance functions in the industry that I have seen, like when it comes to transaction monitoring and scrutinizing where money is coming from and where money is going the number of reports that we've had to submit and like the way we've approached compliance has been relatively conservative in that we don't take too many risks but that's also because it's my first time running a licensed business and I'd rather like play it safe than, you know, like open the gates to anything and everything.

Stephen: Is this easier to do in Europe? Because Europe has these, like, you can do everything except for one thing that a bank does and not call yourself a bank. Like they have these payment licenses and money transfer license. I think other jurisdictions, it gets a little bit more muddier. Like either you're a bank or you're not a bank.

There's no in between that you can kind of play. I know in North America, we're trying to find like Challenger banks and Neo banks never really did that well, but it feels like in the UK and the EU, that's a little bit more of a standard process. What are your thoughts on that? Is that accurate or am I getting that wrong?

Prashanth: No, it is accurate. So I think, I think Europe's regulations are very well developed in the financial sector. The U. S. especially has good regulations, but the state by state variations makes it, makes a barrier to entry just really, really high. And it, and it takes like a ton of money to even figure it out.

Like, I mean, we're a, like a U. S. venture backed company and I did spend a bunch of time there when we tried to look at it and like, It's just a sheer amount of knowledge that was missing that we had to pay lawyers to get. It was like, Amanda, there's no way we're going to do this. Like, I mean, we need millions just to get this information, to know what to do.

But in Europe, a lot of this is much more understandable, freely accessible and well defined. So we know exactly the lines along which we can play on, like what we can and can't do and what we can and can't market. So like, for example, when a customer of ours wants to go live and launch their application, we do like a.

Total review of their website and kind of the messaging. We make sure that they can't say things like we're a bank and we're going to give you interest. Like they can't say crazy stuff on their website. Like, so just because like our license, like our license and our partner's licenses are limited to like very specific messaging even.

So we know what we can and can't do basically. Yeah,

Stephen: challenge for your customers? Is it, are they coming to you because of the technology side? Is it because, Hey, you're an all in one shop. I just come there, I can build whatever I want. And then it's almost like I have to set it and forget it. My job is to now market and get customers in our door.

Striga does everything else. What are your thoughts of like around the, is the customers challenges? I'm assuming bank counts is always an issue. I feel like in the EU, that's a little bit more streamlined when it comes to crypto and fintechs, what are your thoughts there?

Prashanth: so actually like bank accounts is still not a solved problem. I think there's, there's about 17 or 18 e money institutions or banks across the entire European Union that are crypto friendly, so to speak, which means that they charge you obscene fees just to have an account if you're a crypto company, but

Stephen: That's what crypto friendly means. They charge you 19 3 percent for your transactions, right?

Prashanth: it's, it's absurd. I mean, this is not a thing that we do still, like, we don't offer like business bank accounts or anything of the sort, but it's still like very much unsolved problem that we're really waiting for one of our customers to solve on top of us. But so the main reason, like, I think folks choose Trigger is, is a combination of product and pricing.

The fact that, I mean, so this is like this, these kinds of services. are expensive to consume and it's almost always hidden behind an NDA and you need to jump to like 20 sales hoops and negotiators to get to the pricing you want. And what we have done is like, we know the industry, we know what other people are charging, we know what this looks like.

So we're just going to put it up on our website. Don't negotiate it. Like you, what you see is what you get. There's no other hidden fees and people really like that. And then when they, when they sort of try out the product and realize that we don't need to sign any NDAs, we don't need to request special access.

The documentation is very, it is well done. It's sort of like all fits in together. Like, holy shit, this is exactly what we've been looking for. And like the number of times we've had customers, like eyes light up during like a sales conversation and they're like, Oh, wow, you do this, you do that. Well, that's exactly what we're looking for.

And that's, that's sort of what that's sort of why people pick Striga.

Stephen: I appreciate that. That makes a lot of sense. What is it like, you gained a VASP license, a virtual asset service provider, making you ability to do a lot more crypto regulated activity in Estonia. What does that mean for your organization? Like, what's the point of you getting a license versus you kind of just API ing into a crypto exchange that's already licensed and partnering with them?

Prashanth: Yeah. So, so this VASP license is the cornerstone of everything that Striga does. So again, going back to the regulation, the regulatory bit, like. Knowing that we have a VASP license, we, I mean, in a repeated jurisdiction, like the, like Estonia overhauled its entire regime to make these, like, to make VASP licensing almost as intensive as being a fiat service, like a financial service institution.

So it's not, it's not easy to obtain. You need to sort of be patient. You need to know what you're getting into and you need to have a very strong compliance function. So knowing this, it makes, it makes it very easy for, not very easy, it makes it easier for us to work with banks and other regular financial services.

So that's how we're sort of able to plug in card issuing and bank account issuing into the platform as a whole. But the VASP license in itself fundamentally gives us the ability to hold crypto, trade crypto, and transfer crypto today. But just because of the jurisdiction that we're regulated in, it gives us like this freedom to Make better relationships with other banking partners to be able to blend a bunch of other services under the same like set of APIs.

Stephen: Tell me about the jurisdiction. Estonia was, you know, once thought to be, was going to be the crypto haven, the savior of all crypto jurisdictions. And it seemed to like be clearing house because there was a lot of activity in the space with some of the crypto exchanges that was, that regulators didn't appreciate.

And I think a lot of people either lost their license or never got licensed at all. Tell me about the, you know, dealing with a regulatory system that's probably a little bit more cautious than they were three or four years ago.

Prashanth: Exactly that. We got caught in the middle of that. So, I mean, Estonia is always like, so our first investors were from Latvia and we, I spent a bunch of time living there. It was so like, that's when I sort of got to know the Baltics. Estonia is a small country, much like the rest of the Baltics in Estonia.

Among the Baltics has been this, like, Digital first forward thinking nation, at least from my perception on the outside. And they usually stand out with these innovative like they're quick to adopt new innovative things like crypto. I don't know what they're doing about AI these days, but when like the crypto thing was sort of taking off and all these other countries and other mainstream European countries were just sort of like.

Figuring out what to do. As soon as I was like, Hey, we're going to issue these licenses. And as you can imagine that brought over like hundreds or like, I think thousands at some point like thousands of companies are all of whom had legitimate businesses or legitimate use cases. And this country has a population of 1 million overall.

So the regulators are also human, are human, and that's like a small team of people, and when they need to exercise supervision over like thousands of companies it's just, they Like the math just doesn't work out. So, in 2022, they, they sort of realized that, okay, like we're starting to see like way too much activity and we just don't know how to supervise this and we really need to sort of clean up the act.

So what they did was they basically flipped the regulation from being like, okay, you can come here to get a crypto license. So like, if you come here to get a crypto license, we're going to make it as hard as humanly possible. And that's exactly when we moved here. So, and so yeah, we were like the first ones like, so at that point for us, it was.

Either we go through the process and get the license or we give up and close the company and go home. And it was just like, no, I'm not going to give up. And like, we made it this far. And like, we know, okay, it's, it's harder, but okay. We know what we need to do. We need to like figure the, these, this and this pieces out.

And that's sort of what exactly what we did. And like, we were the very first company to get the license after they revamped this whole thing. And like today, I think there's like 60 companies in the space here or so.

Stephen: That's amazing. If I had to like, put a cornerstone to your life, it's like, Prashanth likes the hard way. That's okay. If it's hard, that's the path he's going. But talk to me now about the MECA regulations coming in. Probably, they've been pronounced as the most comprehensive crypto asset regulations, including TRAS, what do you guys call it, the transfer rules, travel rule, in most other places.

Talk to me about how you're going to accommodate that now. Or are you used to kind of like these heavy restrictions because you have to go through the Estonia process?

Prashanth: Yeah, so I think the MECA regulation is a very good thing for the industry as a whole. So again, Europe is, it's similar to the U. S. in this way that it's not, I mean, there are various European countries each with its own laws and regulations, but you also have the European Union that sort of governs everything as a whole.

So now with the MECA regulation, it makes it very easy for us to know what we can and cannot do in other countries. So today, for example, we're not a hundred percent sure about like, okay, if we have customers from, let's say. Spain or Portugal, like what does the Spanish regulator or the Portuguese regulator think about what Striga is building and do we need to do something?

Like it's, it's a bit, it's a bit of a criteria in that regard. So Mika really sort of sets like an even playing field all over Europe. The transfer of funds or like the travel rule, like it's called the DFR, like the transfer of funds regulation here is it's something that we have already been used to, like, I mean, Estonia introduces with its upheaval.

So a lot of the stuff that's coming up in Mika, it's, you know, it's Like, there are some things that are like, okay, that we need to invest a bunch of time and effort into figuring this out. But a lot of it is like, okay, we've done this before. We know what, like, we know what this looks like. We know what we need to do.

So it's it's very sort of easy transition for us. I mean, the, the TFR regulation is, I mean, it's a very complex topic, but like, it's very easy to explain. There's basically two big things that need to be figured out across the industry as a whole. The first one is how data is exchanged between.

Various licensed companies, and if there's no way to exchange the data, what do you do? So, today there is just no data transfer protocol that exists to, like, for example, like, the regulation is very simple. Like, if you're a licensed crypto company and you make a transfer, be it whatever asset, like Bitcoin, Ethereum, whatever it is, like, you're making a transfer to, like, another platform.

to like some external party and you realize that the external party is also a licensed crypto company. You are supposed to transmit a certain set of information to that party. But how do you do this? Like, do you send an email? Do you send it via post? Is there like an XML file? Like, so this is still very much unfigured out.

And I think there's about like eight or nine months left before somebody comes up with a solution for it, but that's probably the biggest challenge with it.

Stephen: Our friends at Noto Bene are working hard and this is some other companies in this space, but we love, we love our friends at Noto Bene. They have a sense of humor. They said the travel rules, the worst name that they could have called, they could have called a piece of regulation. So they have a sense of humor about the situation. of countries, your website says you move money in almost 30 plus countries in crypto and fiat. Maybe can you highlight some of those companies that countries are interesting to you and maybe some emerging countries like, Hey, now with the EU, we'd like to enter it now that, you know, licenses are passportable due to MECA and you can go across the board.

Talk to me about some of the most common countries that you're servicing and then maybe some of the emerging ones that you have your eye on.

Prashanth: Yeah, yeah. So, so we, with our VASP license, we sort of operate within the European economic area, which is minus UK and Switzerland. So that's what the 30 plus countries basically refers to. And we entirely operate like, again, today there is no sort of clear regulation Europe wide. So we operate on this basis of reverse solicitation, which is why we don't, we don't like actively, we can't put up a billboard in France, for example, we can't put up like a, like a, like a newspaper advertisement in any country other than Estonia.

And we don't But I think some of the markets that we're seeing, like, that are super interesting and, like, unexpectedly interesting are Spain, Portugal, Germany, and France Germany and France, of course, like the big economies, so we figured there's a bunch of activity there, but some of the more Western European countries seem to have a ton of folks that are interested in money transfer.

So especially between like, I guess between Portugal and Brazil and Spain and Mexico and things like this. So, I mean, there's, there's good, there are cool apps that are waiting to be built in these jurisdictions.

Stephen: That's amazing. Is there any outside of Europe? Is there anywhere where you're looking? Like, we saw Hong Kong, Australia, Singapore, they're also getting very MECA like crypto regulations. Is it too hard to go, like, across borders into, like, Asia? Or, you know, anywhere else? Or, cause you know Europe so well and you have a lot of the framework and infrastructure built in Europe?

Prashanth: is, it is like, it doesn't matter which country we look at, like entering a new jurisdiction. It's an extremely hard thing to do for the same reasons I said before. So the first thing even we would have to do is like, we don't have the in house. Okay. I know India, well, like I know that India's crypto regulation is non existent, but if we were going to go to Singapore or Hong Kong, like, I don't know anything about like, okay, I can.

So I can spend a bunch of years and a bunch of money on figuring this out and then build a product there. But then are there companies in Hong Kong that want to build crypto apps or fintech apps? I don't know. So it's like building a new company in each of these jurisdictions all over again. But one jurisdiction I'm really excited about is Africa.

I mean, we've had a ton of companies reach out to us about wanting to do this cross border Like basically cross border payments between various African countries and Europe just because of like the number of people that move back and forth. And that actually solves a real problem. I think there's significant in innovation to be made in the African money transfer ecosystem.

And there's a couple of folks on our team that know the, the market a bit better than I do. And that's something that we may be looking at as we sort of grow into the, into the me coagulation. Mm

Stephen: Yeah, you know, our client and friends Chainalysis, their reports on Sub Saharan Africa and especially with places like Nigeria, the fiat's being devalued and a lot of, you know, people there, how are you going to pay people in another part of Africa, or to your point, in Europe, if you can't get access to the US dollar at your local bank, it makes it really tough to pay vendors or employees.

So they're definitely a place where I think Shriga would do well. Talk to me about, cause you're almost in this area of like Bass compliance, right? Like banking as a service offering Fintech and crypto. We've seen in the news lately, you know, Bass compliance has not been that great. You know, money's going missing, you know, parties are not sure who's the owner of which account and you know, who's supposed to be doing the KYC.

Tell me a little bit about the struggle that you're seeing in industry and how would you make sure Striga mitigates this risk? Especially because you're dealing with other partners that might be exposed to that activity or negative publicity.

Prashanth: Yeah, this, this basically boils down to very strong compliance functions. And I think once you grow to a certain size and you sort of let, like, leave the gates open, this is when you sort of open your company up to numerous problems. So we, we invest a ton of time, like, well, firstly, like starting from the software itself, we don't outsource anything.

It's basically Like everything is handled by Striga in house. We don't sort of rely on anyone else to do any of the compliance work for us. So this already mitigates like one of the biggest chunks of risk on our side where we're not sure if somebody else is doing their job and we need to like supervise them and so on and so forth.

So for example, KYC, transaction monitoring, reporting, all of this is done by us in house. The biggest risks are what our customers sort of go to the outside world and say their company can do. And for this, we have this, we quite periodically and regularly like supervise or observe what our partners are doing.

We have accounts at their own applications. I mean, at our own platform. Like I say, on our own platform and our compliance team is like moving money here and there to see like, is it, is this the same thing we approved? Is it still doing the same thing? Have they changed their messaging? So on and so forth.

So it takes away a lot of the risks that comes with traditional BaaS businesses by building this kind of like on like unmodifiable software. So you can't take the KYC thing and change it to remove a requirement for a document, for example. So, so by building these kinds of tools, we're able to like hold, like hold the golden pieces closer to our chest, so to speak.

Stephen: And you can keep that in house where I take a lot of these baths. You know, partnerships got in trouble as they were outsourcing a lot of that out of their control to intermediaries. And then you're like, kind of relying on that intermediary. And to your point, they can adjust things that they need. If they need to get a certain business in the door, they can kind of adjust the thresholds where you're like, Hey, everyone's using the same thresholds.

We're doing it all here. You guys can't toggle with it just because you're trying to get like a high net worth client in the door. Is that accurate?

Prashanth: Exactly. Exactly that. And, and these days it's so easy to drop the ball just because of like the situation with Russia and the close proximity, like all it takes, like you can have like 20 very legitimate, great customers doing everything by the book. And then you just need one person to like send money to a sanctioned person by mistake and your entire business is crippled.

So it's very easy to sort of drop the ball when you're outsourcing things. And I mean, I'm just a huge fan. Like, I think throughout the journey, sort of realized like building things from the ground up. Like, thinking from very first principles is probably the right path to most, like, hard problems.

Stephen: You talked about compliance. I don't know how operational you are to, you know, close to the ground of trends, but do you think the travel world will stop some of these scams that we're seeing, you know, because, you know, you're going to need to get that information from your customer. Where are you sending the funds to?

And if they're like, well, I'm just sending it to an exchange in Nigeria or this. You know, this crypto investment website that I saw, does this open up a lot more conversation between the customer and the platforms, including yourself, that now you can detect, you know, or at least red flags will be raised more than them just sending to an absolutely new address.

You know, even if it was a dark net market, you wouldn't know it's a dark net market because it's never been used until the transaction is completed.

Prashanth: Yeah, I think, well, the way regulation, the way regulations work is like, they have good intentions at heart to protect the consumer, but scammers are just like scammers, extremely sophisticated, like as much as I hate to see people getting scammed, like at some points in time, like we're not the police.

It's not like we can't tell you what to do. If you're convinced that, Hey, I need to buy a hundred thousand dollars worth of Bitcoin and send it to the exchange. It's like. Even if I tell you it's a bad, okay, it's a bad idea, it's like, you know, you might not just listen to me, right? So, I think that like, okay, with the trial rule or this transfer of funds regulation at least within Europe, to some extent is likely to save customers some money.

I like to, to save folks that are getting scammed from not getting scammed, but then Again, just like you said, I mean, with with crypto and Bitcoin, especially is it's super easy to sort of, okay, if you know that these are the rules, these are the new rules, like, okay, here's how I'm going to like get past them.

And there's so many ways, like, like folks could just move money around in different ways to bypass the existing regulation, but we'll see how it evolves. Exactly.

Stephen: scams and, you know, You know, even Western unions, like we're not allowing you to send any more money. And then they would go to a friend who would send the money on their behalf. So to your point, like once you're kind of involved in the scam, it's not so much about where, how to get the funds there.

It's more about like education and being able to identify that the person may not be you know, they, they may not be talking to a legitimate person. An interesting partnership I saw on your website, and I'm probably going to butcher their name Limpid, where you're allowing Euro consumers to use Fiat via decentralized protocols.

What's that partnership? It seems like you're just dying to use Fiat and crypto together, Prashanth any way you can from the early days. Maybe talk about that partnership and maybe it was close to your heart or something that you could reboot from your Cinect days. I

Prashanth: is the right way to pronounce it. No, they were actually one of the, one of the very first companies to launch on the Striga platform. And I think it's a great product and the guys, like the guys who run it are pretty great. And like what they've built is pretty cool. In fact, like, so what it does in a nutshell is when, when this whole DeFi stuff, like when, when DeFi started as a thing Well, what it achieves is very cool, but for the average layman to understand, like, okay, like, I get you can tokenize various things.

You can you can buy all these like sort of yield tokens. You can do all this like cool stuff in the space, but I, how do I do it? Like, I don't really understand. Like, I don't need, I don't know what MetaMask is. I don't know how to like interact with a smart contract. I don't know what a smart contract is, so on and so forth.

So what they've done is they've built like a lot of They've done a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to interacting with these DeFi protocols and made it super easy for consumers to access at their own risk, obviously. So it's basically looks like, yeah, like fiat is coming in. It gets, and then it directly goes to, if I want to, like, if, if a user wants to buy, let's say a tokenized real world asset that somebody's selling like a piece of land, like Like a piece of a house in London or whatever, which is on the blockchain or like somehow tokenized with these new concepts of real world asset tokenization.

What li less you do is basically you put in Euros and with those euros you may get this, but what's happening behind the scenes is Euro sort of get, Euro, gets converted into USDC and then it gets moved into an external service providers account. And from there it interacts with unis warp or some other d defi protocol.

to actually achieve this to, to get a piece of this token, which is then held in a non custodial wallet on the user side, all within the same application. So this is, this sort of breaks the gap between like fiat money and crypto. And then this new DeFi thing, I mean, like the DeFi stuff is all like, it's all the logic that they have built.

Like, again, like we provide the most basic tools to access like fiat and crypto, and then you build all the cool stuff on top. And that's a very good example of how DeFi works. Companies can build cool stuff on top of these like basic tools.

Stephen: love it. Now DeFi seems really struggle or problem some for institutional capital or institutions because they can't interact with DeFi. They don't know if, you know, the USDC that they're setting in, you know, it's being converted is going to a sanctioned actor because they have no idea to identify who the other counterparty is.

What do you say, like, how does, you know, maybe you and Limpid, how do you get around, not even get around, how do you mitigate the risk for somebody that has to check certain compliance bullets off of their, you know, their regulatory conversations with their internal legal counsel?

Prashanth: Yeah, so, so exactly that. Like, so building these kinds of, like doing this stuff yourself. If you have a license, you are obliged to do those activities and you have tools and controls and screening, like screening procedures in place for these things. And I mean, I think that the bigger institutions or some of the larger companies may not fully grasp the compliance side of this stuff.

And which is exactly why you use a company like Striga or Limpet or any of these other applications that are built on top of Striga, which are fundamentally subject to all of the same requirements. And so you can sort of be sure that like this license company is compliant. Doing all of these checks, checking the boxes and doing whatever reporting needs to be done on any of this money.

So you're like sort of completely out of the scope of the stuff because the penalties are high. Like if you don't know what you're doing by mistake, you like, you don't check all the boxes and you sort of do the wrong thing by mistake. Like the, like the personal liability is pretty high. So, it's always safer to use, like, especially if you're working in Europe, just use an EU licensed VASP.

Stephen: And sanctions is what shuts you down these days, right? Like sanctions, terrorist finding, nation state sponsored actors, like that's where the governments are going to come. And that's where the U S usually has that extra, that extra reach into jurisdictions that they're really not a part of is when it comes to the sanctions or, you know, proceeds of ransomware, that's usually when you see the U S law enforcement get involved anywhere around the world. Talk to me about your crypto debit card program. That seems to be pretty popular. I can't remember who the mastercard I think is just coming out with a credit card with a crypto company. I think I saw yesterday, but I can't remember the company. So it seems like these products are pretty popular. Why are people needing a crypto debit card?

Like what's the, what's the basis for the popularity?

Prashanth: Yeah. So there's a ton of crypto debit cards that the credit cards are still, I mean, it's not a thing in Europe, at least in most jurisdictions, like people don't really do the credit card thing, but with debit cards, there's surprisingly no shortage of folks that want to sort of use their crypto in the real world to Spend, basically, and there's like, I mean, until today, there was like like the only way you could do it was like you convert your crypto into fiat, like euros or something.

And then you withdraw those euros to an account to which, with which you have a debit card. But then there were these apps that built these crypto debit cards, but you would, you would put crypto, which gets converted to euros, and then you have a euro debit card. And what we've built is like, we let, we let.

Our customers sort of choose how they want to structure their card program. We have like the relationship with Visa and, and, and issuing bank to be able to get these card programs through the door, like that in itself is a nightmare, but like, okay, you get the card program through the door and now customers can sort of build experiences around how they want their crypto card to look.

So for example, you could even have a card that like natively. stores Bitcoin, so to speak, but that's basically like debits from like a Bitcoin balance such that you can spend money today and then the Bitcoin price goes up tomorrow and then like you have the same balance as yesterday. So like your Bitcoin is always in Bitcoin and we only take it out at the time of a transaction which is some cool software trickery in the background, but these kinds of like various crypto programs are seeming to take off.

And I guess there's no shortage of folks wanting to use their crypto in the real world.

Stephen: What are people spending their crypto on? I always hear stories about, you know, the most expensive tablet for me, it was Andrea Santanopoulos book. I probably bought like 2, 600 worth of like 15 books back in 2017 to help teach a course, to help teach a course. I was like paying Bitcoin sounds amazing. It sounds like Andrea's got the better end of that deal.

But that's what makes this system. Everyone talks about those things, but if it wasn't for all those transactions, we wouldn't be where we are today, right? If nobody spent it, if nobody utilized it, do you have any kind of idea of what people are using there? Debit cards for, or is it just anything?

Prashanth: is super interesting for me. Like I actually work with this on a daily basis. So, and I, again, it's, it's still the cross border use case. So it's usually a lot of folks that are traveling, like it's Europeans, and then they go on vacation to Latin America or wherever, like a place which has a different currency and we don't charge any FX fees.

So what they have is basically a Bitcoin debit card, which, with which they can spend for, Free in a currency that is not their native currency, which is Euros. So it's sort of this cross border transaction and a type of use case where you travel abroad and then you, you just need to use a card for your daily expenses and you don't want to use your bank because they screw you on the exchange rates.

So you just have a regular Bitcoin. I mean, so you just have Bitcoin in your regular wallet and then a debit card attached to this and you can spend in Mexican pesos, like Japanese yen, whatever, and you're sort of getting a good deal on the rate and not losing more money than you would if you had used a bank.

So

Stephen: Yeah. The exchange fees are the way, the banks kill us on the exchange fees. And then, you know what I mean? And then you get, yeah, the exchange fees are crazy, especially when you're using your credit card, I find. Are there limitations that customers have using the card to make direct payments in the real world?

Prashanth: The only limitations are the types of merchants like, I mean, it's a standard limitations, like no gambling online casino, stuff like this. And a couple of countries like sanctioned countries, like Iran and Afghanistan, so on and so forth. But outside of that, it's a standard. That's pretty much like a worldwide regular Visa debit card.

Stephen: Why no gambling? Cause I find Europe is a lot more lenient when it comes to gambling than places like in North America, like the US. They look at gambling as a little bit more speculation. Now you can't watch a sporting event without, you know, fantasy stats going across the board or over and unders.

Why is gambling a limitation as it seems to be, you know, getting increasingly popular around the world?

Prashanth: This is purely because of the fact that there's crypto linked to it. It's still the same topic as before in the sense that traditional finance and like you just slap the word crypto on anything. It doesn't matter like how, like how good your controls are, the traditional financial institutions and the card schemes, Visa, MasterCard, so on and so forth.

In reality, Crypto is still very much seen as a very high risk thing that like, Hey, we don't understand this stuff. We're going to let you do these cards, like crypto cards. There's going to be like a 15, 000 year old limit on it, but don't get too crazy. That's basically the messaging. Like there's a lot of like cool marketing around these debit cards and so on and so forth.

But like, if you really dig deep into the industry and the card schemes, you start to see that like most people are really afraid of this for no good reason. I mean, okay, there is some reason, but not good enough of a reason to like say like, this is complete, like this is a very bad industry, but it's not.

Stephen: Can you tell me about maybe what's another, tell me about the, you know, maybe a dud from Shiga. You're like so excited about a product or an offering or a feature. And it just never caught steam. You know, customers said they wanted it. You release it and they're like, they barely used it. Was there anything like you had to pull off the shelf or had to restructure to offer it in a different way to get traction?

Prashanth: Hmm. That's a good question. I mean, there's, there's a whole bunch of features we engineer on an ongoing basis and not all of them get used as much as we would like to. I would actually say like, I would actually say the DeFi thing for for Limpet especially, actually, this was a feature we engineered for them very specifically for them and we thought it was a cool use case.

But they use it for a whole bunch of months and then they found a better service for just for the DeFi thing because of the fact that like, well, we support like, I mean, or rather on the platform, we provide deposit addresses for custody and trading for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDT, USDC, just like the top, like the most commonly used things.

And what they were sort of going after was, you know, Basically every coin slash token under the sun and like all of these new things that come up with this real world assets, so on and so forth. And while the use case is cool we couldn't sort of, we couldn't just arbitrarily list or add random things to the platform because for us, we need to write an internal memo, do our research on every single coin and token, so on and so forth.

And it just didn't meet their full requirements. And this feature sort of slowly went into the background. It's still on our documentation, but I don't think it's going to stay too long.

Stephen: You can tell me the truth. They want meme coins. They want,

Prashanth: Yeah,

Stephen: they want meme coins and meme tokens. That's all. You have lightning in your Twitter bio and a Medium article where you think, you think lightning is the most. Pragmatic or realistic solution to scale Bitcoin. Are you touching anything to do with the Lightning Network?

It feels like it lost some steam. Like El Salvador really put Lightning Network on the map, but I don't hear anybody talking about Lightning Network in normal conversations. That was supposed to be the savior of Bitcoin like four years ago. Lightning Network was the only way to go. We'd be silly to use Bitcoin in a regular way.

Can you talk to me about that?

Prashanth: yes, I still am very much a huge proponent of Lightning purely from like a software engineering standpoint. Like when I first stumbled across Lightning in its very early days before the first version of it was out, it sort of just blew my mind. Like, I was like, man, this makes so much sense. This is awesome.

And the engineering behind it was just phenomenal. And that was sort of what got me excited about it. I mean, to this day, we support Lightning on our platform. Like we have a whole bunch of customers using it. For example, BitRefill, like the biggest retailer of Bitcoin gift cards and a huge innovator in the Lightning space I mean, they're sort of doing the integration for Lightning and they move probably the most money on the Lightning network.

But I still think that, yes, for Bitcoin, I mean, there's been a whole bunch of other very cool, new, innovative, like, engineering ideas around, like, how to scale it and how to move Bitcoin faster and cheaper. But, like, out of all the other options that exist today, Lightning still, I think, dominates the race in that sense.

But there's, There are severe fallacies when it comes to getting the average user accustomed to how this thing works and what are the risks associated with it. And all of which require, like, each of these things require a very hard software solution to. And most of the companies that are building these software solutions are often running on a tight budget and not venture backed and so on and so forth.

So I just think that it's going to take a lot more time before you see it. If it does become like this huge mainstream thing, these things take time. It just, it's not like a magic pill that like is going to solve Bitcoin overnight. But I think Lightning is still, yeah, it's, it's also a real problem for a very niche set of use cases for very specific things.

And. It's still a while away before it solves all of the problems that Bitcoin has.

Stephen: Do you think from a mass adoption standpoint, the thing that keeps it is that it's actually functional? You know, when you look at like content these days, like people are leading, reading less white papers and watching more TikTok for their insights on anything from protocols to parenting. Do you think that it doesn't have that luster and hype like DeFi on Bitcoin or Bitcoin originals that it needs to get that mass adoption and for people to speculate and try out the technology?

Prashanth: Well, so mass adoption, like this, it's a very complex topic, but like mass adoption in itself should fund them. Like the only reason that anything would achieve mass adoption is if it fundamentally solves the problem for someone. So it like. People are not going to randomly start using Bitcoin just because it's faster and cheaper to transfer Bitcoin in itself.

But if there's like a very cool global payment, like if there's a global payment system that's built on top of Bitcoin and the user doesn't really know that it's Bitcoin, but like, Hey, I can now send euros to anywhere in the world, like literally free. And it takes like five seconds to do it. That's, that's a pretty big problem to solve.

And I would then start using this thing. So I think it's a race between either Bitcoin and Lightning Network or either like one of these stable coins being Being able to use, being able to be used as a payments rail. But if, if, if crypto or Bitcoin doesn't fundamentally solve a problem for people, it never will reach that mass adoption scale.

But I think, I strongly believe that it's, there's so many problems that it can solve. And it's just sort of waiting for those companies to, or those products to be built to solve those problems. And we're hopefully playing like this little part that enabling folks to build more companies.

Stephen: Why haven't we solved this payment problem? You know, archaic system, broken rails, you know, there's a rail for small payments, a rail for big payments, a rail for international payments. Bitcoin's been around for 15 years. Why haven't we been able to solve this problem? Or are customers just okay with the solutions?

Even if it's, you know, you have to go to a separate bank to send a transfer through Wwise or something else and then use your regular bank to deposit the funds, like, why is there still such a disconnect between, you know, real life applications and payments?

Prashanth: I think it's a combination of infrastructure and and, and, and regulations. So, I mean, like, like I said, like I started this because of like the India, Switzerland money transfer problem. I would still love to build an application that makes this easier, but there's just no regulations in India. And if I'm starting a company, I would not start it in this way.

Like, in a place where it's a gray area and I could have my company shut down in any area. So it's very hard to enter this market, for instance, right? And it's sort of the same in like various markets around the world. So Europe is sort of caught up now to some extent, the U. S. is still catching up some parts of Asia are slowly catching up.

So it's going to take a bunch of time for that to, like, sort of, Like for the dust to settle, and then you need companies that have the infrastructure to allow other folks to build these products in these jurisdictions. Again, like in the U S there are so many really great Bitcoin and Lightning based products that want to solve the, the global payments piece, but like there's, there's no way that like these companies are just going to randomly set up an office in Singapore, get a license and then, and then try to find product market fit.

So there's, there's a lot of moving pieces that all need to come together. And I think it's a matter of time. It's not really like an if question, it's more of a when question.

Stephen: It's not like an application where you can try it out, see how many users you get. Like, you can't try anything out. You might end up on the wrong side of the law, especially in the U. S. where enforcement is their kind of leading action, not guidance. So, you're not only playing with a failed business, you're also playing with heavily, as you said, personal liabilities in a lot of the parts of the world that are trying to stand up these businesses.

Prashanth: Exactly. You know, spot on. So there's, there's a lot of maturity that needs to happen. And it's, it's been happening. It's just low. It's like, it doesn't happen overnight. But if you spend enough time, like, like if you, if you believe in it, like long enough and you sort of see the software that's being built and the cool things that other people are building, you start to gain that conviction that like, yeah, this is real.

It's not going away. And there are problems that are going to be solved by this. And it's just a matter of time.

Stephen: Talk to me about Striga. What does the future look like for you? You talked about areas like Portugal and Spain. Any partnerships with soccer players or soccer teams or heavy soccer culture in those areas? Soccer seems to be like the international language for crypto promotions and marketing. Talk to me about the future.

Any features that you're looking forward to or unique use cases.

Prashanth: Yeah I'm very disconnected from soccer. I'm a basketball guy myself, but I mean, we're not a consumer app, so, we don't really seek out these kinds of things, but I would assume that some one or more of our customers might do this. Yeah. Right. There are, there is a huge connect between soccer and crypto for some reason, but for us, the very near future.

I mean, we've. Like, we're a very lean team. We've grown from zero to a couple million in ARR. I mean, like the business is sort of going in a very good direction, finding product market fit and stuff like this. And we're learning, we're getting the hang more about listening to customers and like continuing to build the stuff that they want.

So, like, as I mentioned, Africa is a very interesting jurisdiction for us. So I think One of the more exciting things after the MECA license is looking into potentially other markets and like where we can still continue to solve the problem of, I mean, I would love to see if this money transfer use case just happens across anywhere in the world.

It's not just because it's good business for us. But at the same time, it's like, I think that this is one of those killer apps that crypto really needs, but like not mass adoption, but a country with A big enough population would start using this on like potentially a daily basis. So it could replace the Western Unions, replace Swift, like this age old story, but like, I'm just waiting for it to happen.

Stephen: Who do you feel like, and I hate using the words competitors, but like when people compare you, like, Oh, you're just like, like you mentioned the Uber for ATMs. Is our company, whether it's, you know, Revolut or something that people like to compare you to just because they're more known and more comfortable in saying them?

Or do you look at other companies like, yeah, we want to do like what they're doing, but in Europe kind of thing and more jurisdictional.

Prashanth: Yeah. I'm like, we get compared most often to the banking as a service space. It's, it's the most comparable. There are a handful of like smaller companies that do almost exactly what we do. But I would say like the most common ones are like, so Modular is a company that used to power Revolute for the longest time.

I think they still do, I don't know. But that's what got this company, like this banking service company on the map and and then this one in the U. S. called Solidify. I mean, I don't know how well they're doing nowadays, but yeah, these are usually the companies that we get compared to.

Stephen: And where can people find you? Twitter? In between drumming and basketball, where do you spend time on social media?

Prashanth: LinkedIn is pretty much the only social media I use. I mean, I try to stay away from social media as much as I can. It's I've grown to enjoy it.

Stephen: LinkedIn's the best. That's where I, you know, I built this whole business from. So I love LinkedIn, but your inbox is probably, you know, you probably have 150 pending invites. So, if you try to stay away from social media, LinkedIn can be tough.

Prashanth this was an amazing conversation. I think if we, our guests, our listeners look back you, we are, you're the only person that we've gone through every single one of the questions that had on my list, your answers were so crisp and concise that's, that's amazing.

I, I'm floored by like, I was like, Oh, not even worried. I'm like trying to think of even more questions in my head. Cause I'm like. Within an hour, you've gone through every single one of the questions and made such impactful points. I love that you are focused on compliance because that's what we just had Chris Harms from BBNK on the podcast.

And he talked about, you know, they want it to be the most regulated platform for Stablecoin payments. Maybe with the three seconds that we have left, talk to me about your thoughts about Stablecoins, because it seems like that's an integral part for any payments infrastructure, whether it's traditional or even in crypto now.

What are your kind of thoughts about Stablecoin and the regulations of Stablecoin now emerging in places like Canada and the and Europe?

Prashanth: so like going back to the money transfer use case that I'm most excited about, stablecoins today seem to hold the most promise in actually solving that problem in the short timeframe. Just because of the fact that Bitcoin is just absurdly volatile. And the one thing, again, I think that was missing for stablecoins was the regulations and in Europe, it's super well defined.

Circle was the very first one to do it. And USDC is now like, has got the green check mark. It just needs to happen in a bunch more jurisdictions and probably the ones where people send or receive money to from the most Canada maybe, but I would love to see this happening in Mexico or in India or, or, or Africa, where like the, the, the, the remittance corridor is just massive and then it solves the real problem.

So from that perspective, yeah, I think regulations for stablecoins is probably the biggest thing that's maybe holding it back from actually being, actually solving the real world problem.

Stephen: I love it. Prashanth let's know you guys can connect with them on LinkedIn. Really great conversation. We covered so much ground payments, stablecoin, Bitcoin, color, ATM, fiat. We covered the gambit here. I love this conversation. Thank you so much.

Prashanth: Thank you so much, Stephen.

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