The user experience in crypto stinks. Metal Pay is building consumer apps that you actually want to use.
0:00:00 Ashe Oro: Hey what's up, Liberty Nation? Welcome back to Liberty Entrepreneurs podcast. I'm your host, Ashe Oro, and today, we've got Marshall Hayner. He is the CEO and founder of Metal, which is basically like a crypto Venmo. They're a payments company that bridges the crypto payments with the legacy financial system. This hits near and dear to my heart. As you know, I was in the banking industry for a couple years, so I expect a great conversation today. Marshall, welcome to Liberty Entrepreneurs.
0:00:31 Marshall Hayner: Thanks for having me on, Ashe.
0:00:32 Ashe Oro: Yeah, so fill in the gaps here of who you are, what your bio is, and how you got into crypto.
0:00:38 Marshall Hayner: Yeah, so my background is, I'm one of these early crypto people. I happened to be lucky enough to stumble on it, in the very beginning in 2009, and part of that was because of my interest in decentralized technology, and just being a geek, looking for things to play with on the internet. And when I was growing up, when I was in high school, when I was going off to college, I was living during the Napster time. Napster was the cool, hot new thing, and then from there, direct connect in college, and Limewire, Kazaa, [inaudible 00:01:15] those that remember it. And then BitTorrent. BitTorrent was so cool, it just blew my mind. 80% of all internet traffic is routed through this decentralized system. And what I thought was really cool was it was harder to censor, so it made journalism in different parts of the world much more possible. It allowed people to share files that they couldn't normally, or just share them more efficiently and faster. And I could see, this is where the internet is going. We're going to become this decentralized system, and the more we decentralize, the more power we give to people, and that just blew my mind. And so I became obsessed.
0:01:52 Ashe Oro: Yeah, I've gotta stop you there, because I was on the original Napster, back in 1999. And I wasn't as smart as you were. I was so focused on BitTorrent, and just seeding and leaching, and trying to download all this awesome content, that just wasn't on the internet yet. Back in the day, Scour and Kazaa and all this stuff, where there was no YouTube, so this was the source for our content.
0:02:16 Ashe Oro: I didn't put BitTorrent and Bitcoin together until about 2011 and '12, but yes. It's always fun. I could talk for hours about this. But what was finally the switch about Bitcoin that you were like, " Oh my god, this is similar to BitTorrent and file sharing, but for money"?
0:02:34 Marshall Hayner: Yeah. So, I was also big on torrents, and I thought it was really cool. I followed the story of [Bram 00:02:42] Cohen, who created it, and I thought, "Wow. This guy created this thing, with not a huge team, but by himself, in his basement, just hacking, builds this amazing protocol." And so I became a part of a lot of these different private communities, torrent tracker sites. And I became so involved, I became obsessed with this idea of decentralized Library of Alexandria. We could have all the movies, all the music. It's not about pirating. It's about just access. I would pay-
0:03:18 Ashe Oro: Yeah, it's about having it.
0:03:18 Marshall Hayner: Yeah. I would pay a fortune. When I was part of these communities, I was paying more money for movies and music than I've ever paid in my life. I'm buying Celine Dion CDs. I'm buying whatever I can, to fill the gaps.
0:03:32 Marshall Hayner: And in 2009, I'm on a site called What.CD I was an administrator on, and a thread pops up and it says, "I'm Trent Reznor. I want to release my music over What.CD. Help me figure out how to do it." And I think the first thought is, "That's not Trent Reznor. [crosstalk 00:03:49] end of this, everybody's gonna go, 'He asked me for money on PayPal. Where'd he go?'" And then, so, it's time to lock the thread now. Let's stop fake Trent Reznor from stealing everyone's money, and I said, "I heard you were Trent Reznor. Can you please prove that?" And he said, "Sure, no problem." He tweets from @TrentReznor, "Verifying my What.CD account."
0:04:09 Ashe Oro: Oh wow.
0:04:10 Marshall Hayner: At that's the moment where I say, "Oh my god. I'm a huge fan. So cool. How can I help? I think it's awesome that you're doing this." And everybody starts chiming in, coming up with different ideas about how Trent can release his music over this platform and how he can get paid in a decentralized manner. And they're all crazy, Rube Goldberg, let's strap all these payment options together and at the end we'll lump it out to him. It's not gonna work. It's clear that it's not gonna work, but I thought it was so cool that he was there.
0:04:42 Marshall Hayner: And towards the end of the thread, somebody said, "What about Bitcoin?" And I'm obsessed with BitTorrent and I think, "Bitcoin? Is that decentralized money? Oh my god. I have to" ... So I click through, I get onto the P2P Foundation website, I read this thread that's going on, I read the original whitepaper. I happen to be just there at the time. I was living in Boston, Massachusetts, at the time. And I just became obsessed. I thought, "Wow, this is so cool." I didn't understand it right away. Took me about a month, or maybe a little over a month to figure it out. Where does it connect to the bank? I don't get it. How do you turn it into money?
0:05:20 Marshall Hayner: And at the time, there were no exchanges. So people were saying, "How do you turn it into money? Well, it's whatever I'm willing to buy it from you for. So find somebody on the forum, and ask them." And pretty soon, Bitcointalk pops up by 2010, and now there's a forum, and we're all trading each other for prepaid gift cards, [inaudible 00:05:39] socks, order a pizza to my house. That was pretty popular, and Laszlo, the guy who got the triple digit million dollar pizza, he wasn't the only one. There were a lot of people getting pizzas and food orders and stuff. I was one of them. I'm ordering for other people, I'm moving thousands of Bitcoins around, on Bitcoin QT Wallet. I downloaded the original Bitcoin QT Wallet and thought, "Oh my god. This is crap." I think it's such a cool idea, but it's 2009. iPhone has been out for two years. No one's gonna send a mobile payment over their laptop-
0:06:16 Ashe Oro: [crosstalk 00:06:16] think of mobile payments, yeah. You didn't even think about sending electronic payments like this.
0:06:20 Marshall Hayner: Right, right. Well, I was thinking about it, but I was also fortunate enough to be one of the first people on PayPal, around Napster days, when they started. And then I was also one of the first people on Venmo. So to see this come out, I thought, "Well, man, this is so far behind the times. It's really cool technology, but first of all, we have to prove that this is worth money." So I'm out there trying to prove that it's worth money, and I'm just, to prove a point, buying and selling lots of Bitcoin, for gift cards and different things like that just to say, "Wow, this is so cool. We [crosstalk 00:06:56]-"
0:06:55 Ashe Oro: It works.
0:06:57 Marshall Hayner: It works. It works. Not really great, but it works.
0:07:00 Ashe Oro: But it works. Right.
0:07:02 Ashe Oro: Yeah, we're giving Bitcoins away to people just to have them ... Just try it. Just let me show you that it works. Here's half a Bitcoin. Let me just show you that it works.
0:07:11 Marshall Hayner: Yeah. I remember in 2011, I moved out to San Francisco, and I'm giving cab drivers ... Like, "Here's a Bitcoin. It's worth $10. It's gonna be worth a lot of money someday." If any of those people held onto those coins, they must be like, "That guy. He was on some other level." Right?
0:07:32 Ashe Oro: Yeah.
0:07:33 Marshall Hayner: But that was what I saw. Bitcoin QT, it took about 30 minutes to open, and this is before the blockchain was really a huge file, for Bitcoin blockchain. And I would say about 30% of the time, it would crash. And maybe 10% of the time, it would actually say, "Your bitwallet.dat file is corrupted." So you'd have to go into your hard drive ... I don't know if you remember these times, but this was really brutal times. And I remember thinking, "Wow, this is so cool." So I started investing, I started stocking up. And I thought one dollar, when we hit one dollar, "Oh my god. This is it. It's happening."
0:08:15 Marshall Hayner: But I thought, "There's no way we could ever go over $20, because that would be a half a billion dollars, and there's just no way that could happen. And if that happens, then most likely if it can go above that, then all bets are off. It could go to a million dollars. It could replace money as we know it, or change the face of money." So 2011, it hits $30. I'm on vacation, in Belize, and I told my significant other at the time, my ex, "Hey, I gotta fly back to Boston. I've got a lot of money in Bitcoin that needs to get sold right now." And I didn't end up getting back to Boston to sell the Bitcoin, and it goes back down to two bucks.
0:08:59 Ashe Oro: Two bucks, yeah.
0:09:00 Marshall Hayner: Yeah I'm like, "Oh, well when it hits $20 again, I am not gonna miss that opportunity. I'm gonna make sure." So by 2013, it hits it again, and I sell a lot. I'm thinking I'm really, wow, I'm smart. And at the same time, I'm also had decided that I wanted to make a piece of software. I wanted to contribute to this community in some way, after playing with it for a couple years, that I thought, "Well, if somebody can make a better piece of software, we could really make this ... We could accelerate this whole process. I want to put my name in the cement and say, 'I was a part of making the future of money happen.'" Because I thought I was there, and I thought it was so cool, and it just calls to me. It's calling to me.
0:09:41 Ashe Oro: I feel you. I'll never forget the energy back in 2012 and '13. That's when I got in. And just everybody was Bitcoin everything. And okay, we had Litecoin, we had Doge. They're cute, but Bitcoin was gonna be the thing. It's been an interesting evolution here the past couple years, but I feel you, man. That was an energy. It reminded me of the energy of the old ... I don't know if you were a Ron Paul guy back in the day, but that was the same energy I felt in that as well.
0:10:08 Ashe Oro: So it seems like the concept of Metal and MetalPay, and you can tell us what the difference there is. But it seems like it just came from your experience, just growing up on the internet, just seeing digital files just start being distributed, digital money start coming in, being in PayPal early, understand Vimeo. It just all came together, didn't it?
0:10:33 Marshall Hayner: Yeah, I basically saw that it could be something much bigger and so I set out to build this piece of software. Meanwhile, I'm reaching out to Bram Cohen. "Hey, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency. This could be something for BitTorrent, to really monetize this thing." And by 2013, I started building my first crypto app and I thought, "Well, if we can just make it so easy that you could press one button, and it would spin up your Bitcoin wallet, and you'd have a little bit, and you'd earn it as a game, and everybody was there. If my grandmother could use it, now we're talking. Now we're gonna start to see some adoption."
0:11:12 Marshall Hayner: So in 2014, we launched QuickCoin, which was my first app that I've ever launched, my first tech company that I had built. And it just took off. My grandmother was on there. "Hey Marshall, I sent my tennis friend some Bitcoin. And I sent your sister some Bitcoin too." And I'm like, "Wow, this is pretty cool." I fell asleep and I woke up to my whole entire Facebook thread of people QuickCoining each other, and some calls and messages from VCs. "Hey, what are you doing right now?" And I'm like, "Oh, this is cool. It's happening."
0:11:49 Marshall Hayner: And from there, the journey has just been amazing. DogeCoin started, end of 2013, beginning of 2014. Met Jackson, became friends with Bram, started to connect with a lot of people, deeper and deeper in the cryptocurrency community. I went to the 2013 San Jose Bitcoin Conference. I remember the energy there was, oh my god. This is happening now. It's not just weird alpaca sock people, like, "Take my Bitcoin." "I don't want that."
0:12:18 Ashe Oro: It's like people are paying attention. I can remember the same energy down at the 2013 Latin American Bitcoin Conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I was like, "Wow. Look at this. We're not just alone on our computers."
0:12:31 Marshall Hayner: That's right.
0:12:31 Ashe Oro: This is something that's really starting to happen. Now when did Metal and MetalPay, and what's the difference? But when did that really start to kick off and the vision start to become more and more focused for you?
0:12:42 Marshall Hayner: Yeah, so after QuickCoin, I left and I joined Stellar, and I got the opportunity to work with Jed McCaleb and the awesome team at Stellar. And we did something similar for the Stellar launch, where we created this thing called the Stellar Wallet. And we distributed Stellar based upon Facebook [inaudible 00:12:58] and this gamification, and it was awesome. That wallet, that application grew to over a million users in under a week. And I started thinking, "Oh my god. People really, really want this." And Stellar is a platform, and isn't so much focused on building the front end facing part. And so I left, to create Metal.
0:13:20 Marshall Hayner: There's a little bit of interim time where I worked on some other startups, advised some other projects. But my passion is really in growing this technology and seeing it evolve. And I know you're a big Libertarian, I am myself, a lot of our colleagues and friends. And what hits home with us is freedom, the ability to transact, the ability to say, "This is mine, and it's not just a credit to a bank or just an IOU, but I can own it." I can have ... It's the evolution of money. Now it's cash, but it's on the internet, and I think that that is the fundamental thing that the mass market doesn't understand yet. If you ask somebody what cryptocurrency is, they say, "Well it's something for tech elite people to make money off of," or, "I don't really understand it," or, "It's this thing that you gamble and speculate on the price."
0:14:06 Marshall Hayner: But the reality is, is that it empowers people, like we've never seen before, and breaks down barriers, and is permissionless. And these are all the things that Andreas Antonopoulos and Eric Voorhees are saying. This is very true. This is what it does. And when people really witness that and say, "Wow. I can move Metal from San Francisco to London to Africa, and back, and it can all happen in five minutes, and nobody needs any permission to receive the payment." And it's final. It has payment hardness. That is really, really amazing. That is mind-blowing. And that is what I think for the mass market, when they realize that cash isn't just paper anymore, that's gonna be ... Oh my god.
0:14:51 Marshall Hayner: And we know that as crypto people, but the mass market hasn't been able to play with it yet, or see that yet. And we're going to have this moment where, we started with, you had a wallet, and I had a phone in my pocket. And then I had a phone, with a wallet attached on the other side. And then, we're gonna cut this off ... So you cut that off, and it's just gonna be a phone. In fact it's probably gonna be just a watch.
0:15:18Ashe Oro: Right, exactly.
0:15:18 Marshall Hayner: But that's ... Yeah exactly. It's just gonna be a wearable, and you're probably gonna have some eye-
0:15:24 Ashe Oro: Contact lens of some sort.
0:15:25 Marshall Hayner: Yeah. [crosstalk 00:15:26]-
0:15:27 Ashe Oro: I want a HUD. I want a financial [crosstalk 00:15:29] know my health stats and stuff and my financial stats, and see when there's dangerous objects coming, or-
0:15:37 Marshall Hayner: Yeah. Whoever is building that please get in touch. I want to invest. I want to influence that product.
0:15:42 Marshall Hayner: But that was what was so mind-blowing for me, was to see that, and to see that evolution, clearly where we could go. And it is my mission and my dream, and our company's mission and vision, to share that with the world, to give that experience. But cryptocurrency is very technical, very hard, in its current form, even almost 10 years from the inception of Bitcoin. And now, I think we're finally getting to that inflection point where we can say, "Now we've got something that everybody can try." And when everybody sees the value, I do believe it's gonna be this explosive, just momentous growth moment for the world, where business starts happening at a higher rate, people are more empowered, parts of the world where a woman can't open a bank account, now that can happen. You can be much younger, but you could amass a fortune, at 12 years old.
0:16:37 Ashe Oro: Yeah. Blockchain is the great equalizer. It offers the equal access to anyone. Blockchain doesn't care what sex you are, or what race you are, or where you were accidentally born. This is true separation of money and state. And every Libertarian should appreciate that.
0:16:56 Ashe Oro: And all this weird infighting ... If there's one thing that Libertarians are great at, it's pointing out things from each other. But in the bigger scheme of things, I think that this, be it Ethereum, Ethereum Classic, Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, whatever. All this infighting is gonna play such a little part in the overall monetary revolution that we're having. And it's the separation of the money and state.
0:17:21 Ashe Oro: Everybody wants separation of free speech and state, or religion and state, but what do you think it is? Why do you think ... And now we're getting a bit Libertarian, philosophical here. But why do you think that people don't yet appreciate or even think about the separation of money and state?
0:17:39 Marshall Hayner: Well, I just wanted to just rewind it for a second, what we were saying earlier. I was inspired by a lot of books, when I was younger. Cryptonomicon, and another big one was Ender's Game. Recently they turned that into a movie. I thought that was so cool, because the premise of Ender's Game is that these two young kids, in the book I think it's seven and nine years old, become a politician and a military general. And they can do it because they can do it over the internet, and it's all decentralized, and nobody knows who's who. And politics is like Reddit, where if you have great ideas, you get upvoted.
0:18:13 Marshall Hayner: And so, now to fast forward to what you're saying, I think that this technology, and where the internet is going and what a bit part of Web3 is, is building these economies of scale, over the internet. And that is what I believe is going to fundamentally change the world in a lot of ways, and is gonna be this spotlight moment for the internet. Because I do believe we're about to have radical transparency with the government, with voting, with money, and it's going to shed light on a lot of things that are really serious problems, but we can only fix them unless we start to pay attention to ... Maybe we don't have the voter transparency we thought we had. Maybe we don't have transparency into political systems, or the monetary system. One of the things that I think is so interesting is that, money is like a car. We all drive cars, but very few people know how to completely take them apart, and take the engine apart, or even change