Thanks to Stakwork for helping us transcribe our Twitter Spaces
Voltage – 00:00:06:
Alright everyone, welcome back to another Voltage Spaces. Today we’re really excited to talk to the team at TRUBIT about what they’re building and what they’re trying to get done as far as the Bitcoin system and bringing value to Bitcoin, the bitcoin ecosystem. So welcome guys, we appreciate it.
Stephen Dodge – 00:00:33:
Glad to be here. Thanks for having us.
Rager Major – 00:00:35:
Cool.
Voltage – 00:00:36:
So I got four of you guys here today, so this is really fun. Can we just go around, I guess. And Stephen, you could start and just kind of like tell us what you do at TRUBIT and then we’ll get into what TRUBIT is.
Stephen Dodge – 00:00:48:
Yeah, of course. Yeah. So Stephen here confirmed a TRUBIT, basically heading up product development and the design side of things. Obviously still doing the wearing of all hats at the stage of the startup or pitching brands about finished our raise, but yeah, mostly focusing on the product build and a lot of the sales and branding effort.
Rager Major – 00:01:12:
Awesome. You’ve got Ian here. I look after a lot of our business development that we’re currently doing. I also make a variety of Bitcoin related tutorials as a side hobby. So kind of a much less cool version of BTC session. So it’s exciting to be doing Bitcoin all the time as it works. You guys want to introduce yourself?
Stephen Dodge – 00:01:40:
Yeah, we’re part of Valera. We’re just working to help consult on the development work. Right now I’m mostly on the back and front end. Stereo is mostly consulting on the Lightning end.
Stephen Dodge – 00:01:53:
Yeah. Awesome.
azz – 00:01:55:
Mostly Lightning and infrastructure.
Voltage – 00:02:02:
All right, cool. All right, back to the fun question here. Now we got everyone sort of introduced. What is TRUBIT. What’s the story?
Rager Major – 00:02:14:
Yes, so maybe I can start with the kind of big picture. Our goal at a high level is to get the hundreds of billion dollar per year loyalty economy onto a Bitcoin standard. And so that couple hundred billion dollar a year. This is like all the economic value of things like loyalty points, loyalty rewards that brands all over the world issue to their customers. And so bringing that to a Bitcoin standard, we think not only helps accelerate Bitcoin, of course, but also makes a great deal of sense when you think about some of the different properties of an open network protocol like the Lightning Network, which will certainly get into a lot more. And so we make it really easy for any brand, big or small, to deliver Bitcoin rewards to their customers as sort of an extension of an existing kind of loyalty scheme or program. And when we say Bitcoin rewards, it’s important because there’s kind of two main categories which we can get into with perhaps some examples, but maybe just like some quick commentary on how we got here, which I think is also important. We became pretty enamored by products like Fold and just this idea of being able to stack sats for something that you’re anyway, is already doing right. Like, maybe you don’t have a bunch of dry powder ready to stack the latest dip, or maybe with today’s inflationary conditions, you no longer have budget for. A DCA, even a modest one. But that’s okay, because unless you’re living in a cave, you can still stack sats by making everyday transactions through something like Fold. Obviously, there’s been a proliferation of credit and debit products that we’ve seen over the last really, couple of years, and then you also have more kind of affiliate models like Lolly. So all of these are really interesting. And so we asked ourselves, are there other domains in our lives where that same dynamic can perhaps apply? And that is where we landed on this kind of loyalty economy. So if we can give individuals yet another way to stack sats, that’s awesome, and existing plebs will hopefully appreciate that. But then when you also think about people who have yet to be orange pilled, yet to get their first sats, I actually think there’s like a pretty similar argument to why you’ll sometimes hear proponents of something like stablecoins on Lightning, which we can get into as part of today. This idea of being able to issue fungible tokens like stablecoin via Taro. That may sound crazy to some certain hardcore Bitcoiners, but there’s an argument that this is a very meaningful gateway for people to be introduced to the network. I mean, we merely need to look at the market cap of the likes of Tether and USDC, and the market is clearly spoken. There’s a lot of value in that. And so, in a very similar way, this huge economy of loyalty assets can be a similar vector through which people kind of stumble their way into the Lightning Network. And then on the flip side of that, you also have brands, right? We’ve chatted with a lot of brands, and if you were to rank order, like the different ways in which they might engage with Bitcoin, frankly, accepting bitcoin as payment is probably pretty low on that list. And that’s not to take away from something like what Strike and Jack Mallers are doing. This idea of making lightning payment rails sort of interoperable with kind of fiat like that’s very interesting. But beyond that, this becomes yet another compelling way for brands to kind of dip their toes in, ie. Offering Bitcoin as a reward, where we take care of all the messiness. So I know that was kind of a mouthful, but hopefully that gives a good kind of big picture. I don’t know, Steve, if you want to add anything to that.
Stephen Dodge – 00:06:11:
I would probably just say the kind of two core options that we offer brands is simply sats back instead of your typical discounts or cash back, or just straight up loyalty points. Good example is just, hey, get $5 back in sats for spending, say, $100 during a given time frame, or incentivizing the consumer to take some desired action. And then as I mentioned, the next part could be driving incremental revenue or again placing their loyalty program on a Bitcoin standard by offering these Bitcoin secure digital assets via Taro RGB. An example of that could just be like a premium hotel offers its top guest annual spa pass or something, which has high value to it. Spa asset could then live and be traded as a non fungible asset via Taro and RGB. And as that asset gets traded, then the brand would be able to take some type of royalty from those kind of secondary market sales so it has any revenue stream. And then you have all the attractiveness, quote unquote that these other change all claim to that you can now do over Lightning for a lack of better words. But that’s basically what trouble. It offers two brands with little to no technical integration, so they can just get up and running in a matter of minutes.
Voltage – 00:07:24:
Wow, that was amazing. That actually sounds really cool to me. So it’s kind of like, for example, Marriott has Marriott points, like they would have some sort of TRUBIT account or something or how would they get involved just as an example?
Stephen Dodge – 00:07:40:
Yeah, so they would come to TRUBIT platform, sign up really easily, you could go in and then essentially what we’re trying to really accomplish is giving the brand kind of ownership over the customer relationship and experience. Still, they come out with a lot of different offerings. As you said, we love Fold, we love Lolly, but not really playing within kind of the brand existing loyalty scheme and relationships channels, if you will. Brand could come in, sign up for TRUBIT go through. They make this very simple dashboard that you can go in and create essentially what’s a campaign. And you could say I want to incentivize any customer, for example, to go and try to spend say, $100 during the next two weeks. I make this campaign page. I put in some specifics about what the title is, some artwork if you will, and what the reward would be. Maybe it’s 10,000 sats if you meet that certain metric. And then we spit out this nice clean landing page, simple URL that’s branded for the brand and they can go and then just essentially paste that into their means of communication, whatever channel that is. It could be email, SMS, their site, whatever. And the quality action is just to go and click like, hey, if you’ve gone and spend $100, here’s the email that comes from performing that desired action. All the user has to do is to enter in their email and they get their sats right in their TRUBIT wallet. And it’s as simple as that. We don’t want to have to put any more barriers or kind of friction at this stage between a brand just coming on and saying, hey, I want to offer Bitcoin as a reward. To my customers and for customers to be able to say, hey, I want to be able to claim Bitcoin as a reward without the need of having to download an app, back up your seed phrase, all that good stuff. We can get into the details of how we’re going to streamline all that, but as of right now, we think winning on the kind of consumer experience, getting people on board as quickly as possible to get their first sats, is key to scale quickly.
Voltage – 00:09:35:
And with the idea of Taro, could you guys essentially just sort of be like an interface on top of Taro that these businesses sort of connect to? So they could still call it Marriott points, but it could still be like a satoshi per point or something. Is that right?
Stephen Dodge – 00:09:56:
Exactly. That’s how we kind of foresee it for technical details of that are a little fuzzy to play with.
Voltage – 00:10:07:
For sure.
azz – 00:10:09:
Yeah. It’s also potentially important just to even address the why. Like, okay, great, you have these two categories of quote, quote unquote rewards, one being the very simple kind of sats back idea. But then you have the second category of digital assets. There are some listening to this, you may say, why is that even important or valuable? In the first place, I know there’s a lot of discourse within the Bitcoin Community around the merits of things like digital assets that are not the Bitcoin token. But a big reason of why that came about is just through our conversations with brands, like, we sit down with different brands and as you can imagine, there’s certainly like an education process to all of this. And we’ll typically start with like, hey, we’re enabling you as a capability to deliver Bitcoin to your customers. And there’s definitely a number of them. Who would prefer that over the crappy loyalty points that you’re currently giving out. But then immediately they’ll start to say, oh yeah, the Bitcoin thing, what about the Metaverse? So they’ll kind of start to go to all these other things that they’ve heard about. And so really this is very much a response from the market that you could have all sorts of debates and discussion around the merits of different types of digital assets that are not, BTC, the token. But this is being very much driven by brands. Interestingly enough, and one really interesting case study of that is Starbucks recently announced what they call their Odyssey program. And this is their kind of like, quote unquote Web3 extension of their Starbucks rewards program. And Starbucks for many, many years now has been the absolute benchmark when it comes to customer loyalty. And so for them to kind of announce this major significant, we could get into the details if it’s interesting. I doubt it is as interesting to the audience listening to this particular discussion, but an entity like that does not besmirch its crown jewel with an initiative like this, unless it has kind of spent some really, really serious time, energy, money sort of thinking about it. So while it remains to be seen exactly how these digital assets are going to be used in kind of a brand context, I think Starbucks is already starting to kind of answer some of that with its Odyssey program that it just recently announced.
Voltage – 00:12:57:
All right, that sounds awesome. So where are you guys at sort of in the process? How long has TRUBIT been around? Is the team pretty much solidified and just working or like, what stage are we at?
Stephen Dodge – 00:13:11:
We’re still building and we’re set to have the first pilots actually launching here in just a few weeks. We’ve got an upscale gym that’s actually going through a rebranding and this is very well with kind of the play on proof of work working out and proof of work, obviously, for the Bitcoin network. But we’ve got a high end gym, we’ve got a coffee shop, we’ve got a legal firm, we’ve got a couple of other kind of channel partners that we can’t name here, but kind of big loyalty arms and payment processing services that were and even brand agencies and ad agencies that again have brands coming to them saying, hey, we want to get involved, what do we do? We know we need to do something. And we’re trying to position TRUBIT as kind of a channel partner for those agencies and for these kind of tech partners that they can just say, hey, Brent, here, like use this. So it helps us with obviously, sales, but it also helps us scale the sales efforts as well. The team is still growing. We’ve obviously want to bring in anybody that wants to help build on Bitcoin. We welcome all. We’re hoping to finish our raise up here soon, but I think the core team is pretty sad but not saying, obviously we don’t have every position filled, so we’ll be looking forward to bringing more happy faces on soon enough.
Voltage – 00:14:37:
Yeah, I was going to ask what kind of businesses are best suited for TRUBIT, but it sounds like across the board, which is really exciting, you have a wide market opportunity. It sounds like we’re trying to tackle.
azz – 00:14:49:
Yeah, I think the diversity, it goes both ways, right. Obviously we recognize as a startup, you.
Rager Major – 00:14:58:
Can’t be everything to everyone. That is a recipe for not winning. And so really through this initial batch of pilots, we’re kind of crafting each one such that we can track a number of different KPIs and really get some good learnings to say, okay, this proof of work concept of Bitcoin is a micro award for kind of working out at the upscale gyms. That appears to be a very repeatable thing that we could really scale and kind of hang our hat on as a real growth vertical early on in our growth as a company. So I think coming out of these pilots we’re seeking to do probably a bit more focused and refinement on the.
azz – 00:15:41:
Couple that appear to be most repeatable. But yeah, our hypotheses currently are something like that.
Rager Major – 00:15:48:
Something like retail has a lot of really good traits. You have this kind of frequency of visitation for retail and then ultimately something like airlines and hospitality, although those loyalty systems are a lot more legacy and tend to have a lot more kind of baggage and can be a lot more difficult to sort of integrate with. So we’re trying to stay pretty nimble at least now, so we can kind of test all this out and get those learnings.
Voltage – 00:16:27:
I was wondering if I was waiting for someone to sort of jump on top of that. Is there something you want to add to that, Stephan?
Stephen Dodge – 00:16:35:
I would say that the consumer side of things. I think consumers are actually maybe a little bit ahead of a lot of brands when it comes to this. Most consumers have heard of a lot of these things. So I don’t think the educational piece is actually going to be like terribly hard for the brands. It’s actually just making sure that the brands, as I said, there’s like so many potential protocols and there’s kind of just so many things out there in the space, quote unquote, that brands again, are kind of just looking wide eyed. What do we do? So a lot of our job is just to kind of distill that down and be like, hey, do something that’s simple, relevant and can very easily be associated and relevant for your brand. Like don’t go out there and make a virtual McDonald’s or whatever and decentralized when there’s like 1000 people there and no one’s doing anything. Like do something as simple as like Bitcoin bag because most people know what Bitcoin is and probably want the chance to earn it. We’ve had talks with other entities and trying to make that as easily as attainable as possible like I did and some of the others. And I think there’s a lot of opportunities still in the space to make this as attractive to Branson possible before the likes of Starbucks. Again, it’s unfortunate, but they’re doing their efforts now on I think it was Polygon, right? Or whatever. So I think it’s also our job to try to kind of get ahead of some of this narrative and making sure that brands are building this kind of next phase of their loyalty and reward systems on what we would call the kind of gold standard, which is Bitcoin versus some of these other chains and blockchains. Because I think another piece that’s really interesting, it’s going to keep coming up and probably more frequently than it has in the past, but this whole just ESG narrative of Bitcoin bad, other chains good. And it’s kind of our jobs to still tell these brands as you know, whether they’re as honest as maybe they are not or if they’re just simply virtue signaling. But hey, if you don’t build this on bitcoin, like you’re actually not really helping the environment like you think you are, the only thing actually being a net positive to the environment is building this and putting it on a bitcoin standard. So there is a little bit of additional educational pieces that might crop up, I think, but I think we’re ready to take on those challenges and make the best out of it.
Voltage – 00:19:03:
Yeah. So you’ve mentioned the consumer aspect of it, so let’s pivot to sort of that side. Are you guys planning for folks who want this tax hats through TRUBIT and stuff, having their own dashboard or phone app or something as well to sort of keep everything organized or how do.
Stephen Dodge – 00:19:21:
You envision that we are and let’s say yes, Terry or Lyndon, if you want to take that one. We’ve definitely got some thoughts on that. We want to get there definitely sooner rather than later. We do not want to be people’s sats yesterday, if you wanted to chime in on that.
azz – 00:19:43:
I can throw some stuff in here, but I don’t know how much we want to reveal there is going to be a mobile app, so we are opting towards the non custodial sort of way of things. But it’s going to be a lot more than just your collectibles, I’ll put it that way. There’s a whole lot behind what we’re doing on the mobile app side and consumer payment tech outside of just having the collectibles and app on your phone.
Stephen Dodge – 00:20:22:
Yes. TRUBITs mission is simply put as something as getting brands on board, obviously, but getting consumers their first sats and ideally their first wallet just for the sake of kind of getting this pilot out the door. And the first one said, we are just custodying the sats. We’re actually working with Voltage, you to do some of that, but we want to actually do this for the brands as well. We want to help the Lightning Network grow and have plans to every time a brand comes on boards with TRUBIT, they’re automatically at least spinning up their own Lightning node on Voltage and eventually, if we can get them to run their own node, great. We do have plans to kind of make not just simply like the shiny reward, it’s kind of the overall mission, but actually expanding the Lightning Network and actually having the relationship between the brands and their consumers as it relates to engagement and loyalty, actually utilizing the Lightning Network and helping it grow versus just kind of what I think the current phase is. Just like we said, accepting payments is great, but that’s kind of really all it’s at this point. It’s just accepting payments and I don’t think there’s too many people that want to spend their bitcoin quite yet. That will probably change.
Rager Major – 00:21:41:
And just to be fair, currently I think I was on the team outlined some of what’s to come, but currently just to give a flavor of what the consumer experience is today. It looks a lot similar to Fold, right? Like you’ve got your little for those who have Fold, you’ve got your little balance that accrues in the top right corner and you can click into that and withdraw it once you hit a certain threshold. Like that is the current kind of model. But as folks spoke to, hopefully we were able to move to a more fully noncustodial model with a lot of other really cool stuff that shall be revealed in due time.
Stephen Dodge – 00:22:21:
Oh, yeah. A lot of cool stuff behind the scenes that we’ll be building.
Voltage – 00:22:27:
No, I mean, just hearing that non custodial is like a long term goal or a goal at all is really what Bitcoin is all about, in my opinion. I guess I’m representing Voltage right now, but we’re noncustodial also, as you know. So I think it’s okay to say that we’ve got a lot of friends in the industry like Zebedee and Fountain and stuff. And even though Zebedee doesn’t use Voltage but they use the LN-URL withdraw sort of set up, which is custodial, but it’s kind of convenient at the same time. So there’s a lot of different options. You can go with that wallet set up for the end user.
Stephen Dodge – 00:23:04:
Exactly. Yeah. And we just again, kind of picking back we want to win on user experience and kind of convenience, at least out of the gate to get some kind of critical mass and scale and then, you know, guide them or at least at some stage just be fully known custodial. So that is the goal. Cool.
Voltage – 00:23:28:
Yeah. So, I mean, I want you guys just kind of riff, tell everyone like, what else is really exciting and stuff. I’m kind of out of questions, but I have some other topics, sort of maybe. But I want to make sure we exhaust everything you guys wanted to get out there today.
Stephen Dodge – 00:23:47:
I don’t know if you have anything. I mean, I could talk for hours, everyone knows.
azz – 00:23:51:
But no, I think we hit on a lot of it maybe just from like a positioning point of view because I do think maybe the average member of the Bitcoin community is probably aware of like a lot of different kind of Bitcoin reward things. And so maybe just to almost self classify ourselves, if that’s helpful for just like mentally picturing where we sit within the landscape. So I often think of like a category similar to Fold where it’s connected to some sort of payment card.
Rager Major – 00:24:24:
Right. That’s pretty clear. Then you’ve got some of the more kind of like affiliate type models. Lolly would be a great example of this where you can go online and you have this little browser extension that basically detects when you’re on a merchant partners kind of web page, notifying you of this potential deal. It’s basically an affiliate offer and then we see the next logical step to that progression being arming brands with an ongoing capability that extends their existing sort of loyalty efforts. So we’re attempting to be the ones providing the shovels, so to speak, for brands to be able to add bitcoin and Bitcoin secure digital assets to their repertoire of loyalty rewards. So just in case that’s helpful kind of framing of how and where we position ourselves in the market could be a useful note.
Stephen Dodge – 00:25:28:
Yeah, I think that’s right. Again, kind of focusing back in on keeping the brand again, maybe from a different context, but just keeping the brand in control of their overall experience and kind of getting them again on boarded with least technical integrations as possible. But I think what we’re probably more personally excited about is just still what’s just to come. We’ve kind of got the feel for what we do have, the feel for what brands are kind of wanting and expecting and trying to make the user experience in the platform just overall very similar to what they do already with other platforms. But I think the exciting part is what’s to come with like Taro and RGB and those possibilities. We know a lot of that is still kind of maybe a bit hypothetical and some of the stuff is still in beta and code is going to come out, but we plan on being first movers with a lot of that and once that comes out, we’ll be full steam ahead. So we’re eagerly awaiting and kind of pestering, if you will, to keep building on that.
Voltage – 00:26:34:
Yeah, for sure. It’s really fun to sort of look at all of the developments happening, especially in the Lightning sort of ecosystem and trying to find markets and stuff. It’s really exciting for startups and entrepreneurs and everything. I really like what you said at the beginning. I’m still thinking about this idea where we have these Taro coins or RGB coins or something and they’re using Lightning. My Lightning node is routing payments and they’re Satoshi is on my personal node, but they could be trading whatever Marriott points for Delta points or some sort of marketplace for that sort of thing. That actually sounds really interesting, sort of in a long term possibility.
Stephen Dodge – 00:27:22:
Yeah. And these brands act like, again, these brands assets do have value. You can get into the nitty gritty of that. But putting them, like you said on Lightning I think offers a lot of opportunities. I’m sure we’re kind of tickling Ian and Australia’s fancy on this.
azz – 00:27:39:
Well, even in our sales pitches to brands, we’ll sometimes throw this kind of fluffy phrase out of open loyalty. And it’s this idea that as a consumer, you’ve got all these little piles of points that you’ve accumulated and all these various silos and those points have certain rules to them. You can do certain things, but on the others and one of the really long standing pain points from the consumer standpoint around loyalty programs is a lack of flexibility, a lack of relevancy, a lack of value and so I think someone like Jack Mallers says it really well, like closed networks just over the long term cannot compete with open networks. And so over the last decade even have started to see inches of movement towards what we might call this more open loyalty concept where you do have more interoperability between brand A’s points and brand B’s points. You have more possibilities in terms of exchanging value within that. And so I think you nailed it. Like, think of those different tokens riding on Lightning rails, all settling in this universal unit of account. That is sats like, that makes a ton of sense. We believe because you even have like. Marketplaces today that someone can come and kind of bring their loyalty points and for what is usually quite a steep fee, you can convert those points into some other currency. And so imagine a much, much more competitive market process for those different conversions that would result in something like Lightning. Obviously, the presence of additional assets can improve the economics of routing nodes. I think you hit on a very important point and we think there’s a lot of interesting potential now that’s also. Risky to some brands. They’re like, well, I don’t want to open my four walls and expose myself. Perhaps to more competition than I already am, but at the end of the day, this is going to be a consumer driven movement and brands are largely reactionary to that. So we’re starting to see the beginnings of that and I think it’ll continue to really ramp up in the coming years.
Voltage – 00:29:58:
Yeah, I think it would be really cool to have sort of an app and just be like, hey, I travel a lot, right? So I can now convert all these travel points I have either to Sats or maybe like, I need a laptop or something. So I convert it to Best Buy or whatever. Not convert, but I guess trade, whatever the market terminology is. But I think that’s a really interesting thought. I hope that sort of comes to fruition. That sounds really cool to me. But on the sort of like the lower mom and pop side of things, what would incentivize a mom and pop coffee shop to use?
Stephen Dodge – 00:30:36:
TRUBIT.
Rager Major – 00:30:37:
Yeah, so I think in our conversations with some of the smaller brands, the hypotheses, they want to prove out through kind of they’re going to naturally want to test this out and see it usually revolves around two business KPIs. Number one, does this novel reward incentivize either additional transactions from my customers? Right? Does it drive additional stickiness? Or to the extent that we’ve got some brands that are going to do some social media marketing and some marketing in their existing channels, to what degree does this actually attract new customers to the brand? Right? So. That’s usually how these smaller businesses that may not even have honestly a structured loyalty program at all, this is how they would typically put the business case together. And so that’s part and parcel of the pilot process. We want to kind of identify those types of KPIs with each of these clients and track them. And so at the end of that, it should be unambiguous that hey, great, your average ticket size is $40 and you raise that to 45 by doing this particular campaign. Furthermore, you got an uplift in the number of new customers that you’ve never seen before. You can start to really quantify real hard business value to that. I think the other really important dimension that we’re admittedly continuing to think about is what are the sort of compliments to that from a marketing standpoint that could be useful. What I mean by that is, given where the level of adoption is currently, it might be the case that like 10% of my customers know about Bitcoin, like, would indeed value this, et cetera. And the notion of being able to attract those individuals who may not currently. Be my customers, well, that’s really interesting. Like, how do I reach those individuals? And so going back to something that Stephen said earlier, we’re having a lot of conversations with local ad agencies or. Marketing agencies that can partner with us to say now we can go to a brand and say like, hey, we are going to provide this technology that enables you to deliver this really novel reward. And what comes with that is this little marketing wrapper that’s going to allow you to tap into this really, as we know, like, totally rapid community of people who will literally switch behavior. And we did a poll on Twitter recently and we posed the question like, brand A is offering Bitcoin, would you switch from Brand B to Brand A? And not surprisingly, over 90% of people are like, absolutely, I would drop Brand B in a second. There can be marketing rappers that, that go around that that help really maximize the bang for the buck that these smaller brands can get at this currently still early, as we know, level of adoption. But as that number goes up, it. Becomes more and more the business case becomes more and more obvious for brands over time.
Stephen Dodge – 00:34:12:
Yeah, we’re actually working with and talking still with several mom and pop and just kind of given the broader macro environment, obviously it’s every other day, it seems like it’s the end of the world, but they’re dealing with a lot labor shortages, supply chain issues like these small mom and pops, or one looking for any break they can get. But I think they also acknowledge that they need some differentiation to again, to kind of speak to everything that you just spoke to, but also they know that this customer segment or maybe they don’t come to our job, but this consumer segment tends to skew younger but also higher income. And if they want to be able to keep a customer base that is able to purchase their actual products with rising costs and just kind of more and more strain and friction between them and the end customer, they’re going to need to have some type of solution to that. And bitcoin is probably not the only answer. I think it’s a critical one for kind of a global crisis that’s kind of unfolding before us. So I think that might become more apparent as things continue to kind of unfold. But it’s kind of something that I think we could do a better job of, say, hey guys, look at this asset standing the test of time. Zoom out a bit. It’s obviously appreciating in value. And typically the people that own this are, again, pretty savvy involved in loyalty programs skew higher income. These are the kind of customers that you want to attract if you want to have your business be around for another decade.
Voltage – 00:35:50:
Yeah, I’m just thinking it probably is a lot easier to sort of cold orange pill a business into just giving bitcoin as a loyalty thing instead of accepting it outright. Even though that’s sort of what a lot of bitcoin is go for. When they’re you know, every time I go to a mom and pop sort of coffee shop and I see them using toast or clover and I know that they’re getting charged like $0.50 plus 3% or whatever it is on a $4 cup of coffee, it like, hurts my soul. I know his margins are already super thin and stuff.
Stephen Dodge – 00:36:24:
We hate it because they don’t want us to integrate with it, and integrating with them is a pain in the butt. Yeah, that too, right?
Voltage – 00:36:30:
When I talk about bitcoin, it’s like, okay, yeah, sure, put it in the system. It’s like, no, it’s getting easier. Things like IBEX and Open node stuff. But as far as going that loyalty route, that might be like the foot in the door that we’ve been missing instead of going from this, like zero to 100, it’s a little bit of a softer onboarding on a bitcoin for a lot of these businesses that haven’t even thought about it.
Rager Major – 00:36:58:
Yeah, exactly. I almost think there’s an analogy to. How we at times observe that folks in the Western world tend to have different behavior as it relates to bitcoin versus the arguably much more kind of colorful peer to peer activity that we see in places like Africa, in places like Southeast Asia, et cetera. You see all these dynamic communities springing up. That’s awesome. And we believe that is inevitable to see more and more of that, even in the Western world. But I think the same sort of dynamic is at play. Like, all fiats are melting ice cubes, but some are melting faster than others. And so the ones that are melting slower than others you tend to have. I think that message of using Bitcoin as a medium of exchange is just something that takes a little bit more time in those markets. And so for the same reason as we see that dynamic I just described, I think that’s been our observation, is that for brands kind of in this part of the world where we’re based, the notion of extending their loyalty program with this additional reward type tends to be a little bit of, as you said, easier stepping stone.
Voltage – 00:38:19:
Kyle, you requested to come up.
Stephen Dodge – 00:38:20:
What’s up, man?
Kyle Meinhold – 00:38:22:
You love this conversation. Excited about what you guys are building, especially so that I can show it to all my places that I shop. One thing. I don’t know if I caught it or missed it. But have you guys seen much interest or do you use this as a selling point that by offering rewards. You could have. Like. Local Bitcoiners essentially bootstrapping these businesses and then they’ll see a spike. Hopefully in purchases or visitors. And then that’s like kind of that beach head to the ultimate kind of orange pilling of the business owner and kind of get them on board with what we’re doing here.
Rager Major – 00:39:16:
Yeah, definitely. Honestly, I think there’s more of that that we can be doing. It’s funny, we’re based in central Virginia, which is not exactly known as a Bitcoin metropolis. Like, maybe Austin, Texas would be, but. You’d still be surprised. Like, we recently discovered that, lo and behold, there’s a local Bitcoin or group. We’re going to be meeting with them next Thursday for a meet up. And that exact idea you just painted, I think is something we definitely want to approach with them. And you could tie all sorts of interesting referral mechanics to that because you’re right and that is a selling point. Like, we talk about just how motivated Bitcoiners are, not even just to stack more sats, but to see this become more of a reality is such a powerful force. So the short answer is you’re spot on. And we definitely have some work to do to further capitalize on that. But I think there’s also steve, keep me honest, I think there’s another there’s an app called, like, Oshi that I think is doing a sort of similar strategy in Austin. So 100%. And for other entrepreneurs that may listen to this recording or who are on the call currently, like, never, never underestimate your local market. That has been a huge learning for us. And of course, never underestimate Bitcoiners.
Stephen Dodge – 00:40:55:
Yeah, we have found some very hardcore, hardcore bitcoiners and Lightning devs right here in our backyard that we never would have known of. It’s crazy. They’re right here. But even, like, Bitcoin meetups are big. But even just acknowledging that there’s a lot of crypto ones and blockchain ones, and if we can kind of just show that, hey, these brands are seeing these kind of groups come to them and host events or do things at their locations that’s just, again, another selling point for them. Like, hey, this is growing. Hey, this is not a fat, it’s not going away. You should probably start doing something to kind of cater to these. Again, this consumer segment that’s growing and you’re now actively engaging with, we plan to do more of that.
Kyle Meinhold – 00:41:45:
Yeah, I think that’s one of the things that has me most excited about what you guys are offering is giving the community something to use to expand. Right. By landing a business, you’ve provided a beacon for the community of Bitcoin and Is to support them. And now that business is like, okay, I see there’s an asset and the rewards are a thing. It’s getting some interest. Oh, I guess there’s a network where I can actually transact on and then layer three, if you will. Right. The community of people and how it’s expanding or how they’re like, what kind of people it’s bringing into the business. I think you get a lot of compounding effects there. So yeah, just super excited for it.
Stephen Dodge – 00:42:37:
And it’s kind of funny too. Just like one quick note on that. We kind of like seeing a little bit and kind of didn’t mean to discover it, but talking with brands is even just not even from the consumer perspective, but employees like benefits to the employees themselves for small mom and pop and it’s size bigger. But that’s actually a pretty attractive kind of offer for brands to attract employees and reward them. I’m sure many people are aware of internal rewards programs for doing certain things or hitting certain milestones, stuff like that, but it is kind of something we have more recently heard and seen from things as far as just employee benefits, health benefits, things like that. So kind of something we’re keeping a tabs on.
Voltage – 00:43:33:
Cool. Well, I’m excited to keep tabs on you guys and see how this develops. Where can we learn more or contact you guys for like a demo if we need to?
Stephen Dodge – 00:43:49:
You can always DM us on Twitter. We’ve got a Discord as well. All our emails are on the website as well. It’s TRUBIT tech. We try to stay pretty active on Twitter when we’re not building or in meetings pitching, but those are probably the main three is Twitter Discord and you can always email us something.
Voltage – 00:44:14:
Cool. Yeah, I think I’m going to wrap it up here in a second, but I’ll open it up to final thoughts or if anyone has a question that’s out there to raise their hand right now. But let’s just do final Thoughts real quick.
Rager Major – 00:44:31:
I would be remiss to not add that. Number one, appreciate the opportunity to chat in this forum and appreciate the partnership with Voltage. If there’s any other entrepreneurs listening to this, trust me, each of us on stage here have mucked around with our own personal Lightning nodes. And while that’s been a blast sometimes that’s not exactly the kind of enterprise grade infrastructure that you need to deliver on what we’re trying to deliver of bringing that several hundred billion dollars a year loyalty economy to a bitcoin standard. You’re probably not going to do that on my crypto cloaks Ranger major customized little Raspberry Pi that’s sitting in my room right now. So would encourage folks to check out voltage as well. And it’s been awesome as we’re getting this off the ground, and I think we will have a lot more a lot more to come. But yeah, I would just say thanks to everyone and if you’re interested in any way, DMs, and we’re always happy to chat, share more.
Stephen Dodge – 00:45:46:
Yeah, I would echo that. It’s been a blast already working with you all and got a lot more to look forward to.
Voltage – 00:45:56:
All right, likewise, guys. I really appreciate it. And thank you for telling us about what you’re building. And for those that missed it, trubit. T-R-U-B-I-T tech T-E-C-K-H.
Stephen Dodge – 00:46:11:
Right.
Voltage – 00:46:12:
So check out these guys. Keep an eye on them. I think they’re building something really cool that is going to be a game changer going forward. That’s all I got. If you haven’t yet, voltage is that voltage cloud? No KYC. Sign up, you get $10 of free credit. So around, make a BTCPay, hang out with us, and we’ll see you guys on Twitter spaces next week, every Wednesday. See ya.
Rager Major – 00:46:45:
Cheers, guys.
