From the Top App on XRPL to a Self-Custodial Neobank on Solana

Well, man, thanks for coming on. Like I said, this is Neo. This is, powered by Dakota. If you haven't talked to that team, go reach out to them. They're doing amazing things for building core infrastructure for the future of neobanks. We're excited to break you know, to dive into Anadose today because, one, we love this a lot of people. They're coming on, Thursday to talk about MoneyGram, coming with a with a validator. We've been out to, Breakpoint. We've been out to Accelerate.

But you had some exciting news, I think, a few weeks ago with coming to the Solana ecosystem. So kinda give us the t l d r. Who are you? Where were you? And where are you going now on Solana?

Great. So, yeah, I'm Panos. I'm from Greece. You know, born and raised in Greece. And, like, everything started from two thousand eight financial crisis. I think, you know, most people here know that Greece was one of the most countries that most affected, like, from from this crisis, from this global crisis. So then I started, like, diving deeper into, like, what you know, what's happening in the background.

That's when I decided, basically, that, you know, I want to study finance to see how the banking system works from within. So I just went to study finance. Then here in Greece in 2015, we had capital controls, which means that basically people couldn't access their savings. They couldn't, withdraw money, like, from the from the ATM. So it was like a very dark period for Greece. And that's actually when I also discovered Bitcoin, and I started, like, reading about it. And I said, you know, this is it.

This is, the real alternative that we have been, like, looking for that, you know, the world the whole world needs, you know, against banks. And that's when, like, I I I decided to, like, you know, go and move a 100% on crypto. And then I started, like, experimenting Mhmm. Using different chains, obviously, like, you know, invested in different tokens and assets.

And then I started my own consulting firm firm like a few years later, started consulting like a few crypto projects, helped some businesses to integrate blockchain payments. And fast forward to 2023 with some people that I have already met from the crypto community and the crypto space, we decided, like, you know, we're, like, very good friends and then we decided to join forces and said, you know, we had the same vision about where the future and the industry is going. We saw that everything is too complicated.

And what's the point if we have all these amazing tools, all these amazing technology, but basically the average person on the street can use it? So we said from our experience, having having like a diverse backgrounds from, you know, working in banking to engineering, marketing, and sales. We said, you know, let's start something together, like, four, five people initially, and let's see what we can do to bring DeFi to the masses. Yeah.

So before we dive deeper, I actually remember I think we queued up. I think it'll be a nice transition going into talking about Anatodes, where where you're going now. So I think you released this. Let me pull it up really quick. Here we go. We're gonna play this. You got it, Drew?

Yeah. I got it. This transition Go for it. Play that? Cool. Yeah. Play that really quick.

It all started with the promise of stability. It's not good. They told you the system was too big to fail. It sucks. They told you your money was safe. Then they showed you the truth. Your money was never yours. Capital controls, frozen accounts, political lockout, a world held hostage by an outdated system. From the ruins of 2008 to the digital lockdowns of today, the system hasn't changed. It just got better at hiding the chains. It's time for an upgrade.

You deserve privacy, control, and a premium experience built for a borderless life. Your money should move as fast as your thoughts, instant everywhere. Gain access to opportunities once reserved for the few. No borders, no limits, no permissions. It's your money. The end of permission is here. Privacy and control are no longer negotiable. Stop being a customer. Start being an owner. Own a piece of Anodos and own your own freedom. Banks have had their time. Now it's ours.

It's awesome. Well done. It's it's cool to personal

it's cool to see how personal that gets for you. Yeah. It sounds like for you the specifically, like, seeing that upfront and personal pain that traditional capital and traditional systems can cause. What was that like for you? Just, like, maybe just dive into this real quick before we dive into the product a little bit. Like, how did that personally impact you, your family? Like, what what what's within Greece? Sounds like you were banking within that area at the time. What was that like during during that period?

I think a lot Americans don't get this, so I just it's important to uncover it.

So, I mean, yeah, I I mean, US, you had, you know, Lehman Brothers and, like, some other big banks, like, you know, having, like, like, going bankrupt or, like, having issues, but maybe it was, probably for for a few days. But in Greece, it was, like, I think it was, like, for two or three months where basically the whole country basically defaulted. That was that's what happened. And liquidity dried out. So basically there was no cash. Like banks didn't have any money to give back like to the people.

I mean, you had your own money, your savings in the bank and you could access it. They just told you, you can just, for example, use up €60 which is like about $70 $80 per day, couldn't use anymore. And like for businesses, especially now especially for businesses, it was like even worse because especially think think about having to pay your staff, things to do like all these different things and you can't really access your money as a business.

And our family business, you know, my father had the business like in a restaurant. It had to close because of all this issue. So, you know, we were like also affected very bad like during this crisis. It was there was like many like multiple families, multiple businesses in all of Greece faced the same issues and had to shut down because they couldn't access their own money and had access to their liquidity.

And, yeah, it was like I mean, was like a very dark period which with all of those we said because most of the founding team is from Greece. So I would say that we know the pain and we hate the banking system more than anywhere else in the world, at least most the most like countries.

So we know what feels like to be completely shut down from your own money and like having, let's say, you can say like the big daddy, the bank that basically controls you and like can tell you when you can access your own money, when you can use it, or if you can't use it. And, yeah, with with founders, we said, you know, it's time to make a change, and we have now the tools to basically allow everyone to be their own bank. And this is what we want to enable everyone to do. So I I'd love for you to break down now,

you know, how do you how do you see your product fixing this problem? Because I I love what you said in that video where you were like, hey. Like, they just got better at disguising how bad it actually was. And I think there's some misconceptions at times that in this neobank world that at times you're doing the same thing because you have to you have to tow this line of, communicating these benefits without going through a whole educational seminar on, you know, self custody and on chain assets.

How do you how are you tackling this problem of of of building a neobank for the people that were hurt, you know, fifteen, twenty years ago?

Yeah. I mean, there are like many factors that affect, let's say, I think, from the marketing, which I would say we are contrarians both within the industry and like outside the industry, like in Treadfy, because we see things differently than most, let's say, crypto projects or crypto founders. Because number one, would say, the marketing, the way we market as an industry, like, to to the average person, like, to any user.

I think it's terrible, like overcomplicating things, inventing all these new terms, like, you know, self custody or, like, join, like, create connect your wallet, which doesn't really mean anything to the average person instead of saying sign in or sign up. I mean, why should we invent all this new, like, terminology for, you know, for no reason and con confuse, like, the average person.

So I think it's our own fault as as an industry as a whole that we have made all these things too complicated for the average person. And we're taking taking like a different approach at Anodos saying that, you know, most people don't need to know about most of these things. They don't even care basically about crypto.

I mean, most people, if if you go to a random people, like to a random person on the street and ask them what's their opinion about crypto, they will say probably they have heard of Bitcoin or they have seen something on the media, but they will tell you it's a scam or, like, they will tell you about Meme coins, it's gambling Yeah. Or it's a pyramid scheme or whatever, like Ponzi scheme, like, all these different negative, you know, this stigma that exists around crypto.

So our philosophy, Sandoz, is that people shouldn't even know that they're using blockchain or they're using, let's say, any on chain element. And our goal is how we can basically bring self custody, for example, make them use stablecoins, which is like the equivalent of tokenized like digital fiat, and make them, let's say, they don't need to know that their dollars are, let's say, USDC like stablecoins. They just want the benefits.

They just need to, let's say, know that they can now transfer money all around the world in seconds with no cost. They can now earn yield higher than any other bank can give them. They can, let's say, trade stock 20 fourseven. They don't need to know, for example, these stocks are tokenized or these stocks are on a Solana. Most people just don't care about all these details. So and this is like our approach. We're going mostly to the web two marketing style and to the traditional fintech style.

So, yeah, the way we market it, we don't really care about the crypto users. We don't care about the crypto native. We care about the everyday person. And even though we have you have, like, many crypto neo banks that say, you know, our goal is, let's say, for people to use like, for all people to be able to use our product. But in reality, if you go into their app, I mean, most people can't really use it if they don't know about crypto. Mhmm. So, I mean, it's like the different approach that we're taking, Asanodos.

And it's like all these different elements that, you know, combine, like, you know, with expertise with now we have vibe coding. Anyone can launch can launch basically an app or a new bank in a few days, but I don't think that will turn out well. But

yeah. Why is that? What what I mean, and we and we we're gonna talk about this in our next segment because I think there's there's definitely a fine line. There's the builders that you know, I think about our you met you met Andre, I think, in the green room where he's like he actually built this entire studio. I think he showed us a video one time. He had six agents going and but, again, he's been an engineer for twenty plus years.

So there's this there's the side of vibe coding, which is empowering these extremely talented builders to build the better financial applications. So, I guess, yeah, where do you fall on that spectrum? How how beneficial is kind of this five coding trend for you to build a better neobank and maybe use tools like, you know, Decoder or you've even seen Solana come out with some of their developer tooling for, you know, for building in an agentic forward way versus saying, hey.

Actually, though, from first principles, like, we're gonna be cautious about this because at the end the day, we're dealing with, you know, with consumer funds here.

Yeah. I mean, sorry. I will say, like, in general, that's, you know, AI and, like, VoIP coding or anything like that you have you can do, like, with your agents is great as long as you have the experience and the knowledge and you know what you're doing.

But the problem is that most people, especially like the new builders and new founders or new projects, are vibe coding something without having neither the engineering experience, neither having the, let's say, financial experience or they have never even worked or touched like in any banking element. So how can you build a neobank or any financial product without having the, you know, the basic experience with just, you know, vibe coding? I mean I mean, vibe coding an app is the easy part.

I mean, just building an interface, being, like, some pretty, let's say, buttons. But what happens with, you know, the actual details, like, when something goes wrong with the user funds or, let's say, all these different elements, you know, for the cars, like with the Visa, like the legal stuff. I think, you know, the deal is in the details, and that's where, you know, most things will go wrong when you Vibe code something.

And just like an additional, I would say that, you know, as as some of us, like as as a team, we don't use AI to, let's say, vibe code something. We we we use it just to, for example, do some repetitive tasks that we know that, you know, can save some time. But again, it needs to be reviewed manually by the engineering team.

Nothing can just like, you know, invite Corey from scratch from AI and then just put it into production, which unfortunately that's something that many people do, especially now like the newcomers. So for us, it's a big no no if you don't have already an experienced team behind that can actually manually review and they already know what they're doing.

Yeah. Dhruv, sorry. I'm I'm I'm gonna go one more question, and then I'm gonna hand the torch to you. There there's a there's a tension here. Right? Because you mentioned we want to sell to web two, you know, customers. We don't want them to know what goes on under the hood. Yet there's this this very important silver lining of, for you as a builder, your infrastructure matters, and you made this deliberate effort to go from the XRPL to Solana. Why why Solana?

Why is that important to build the best, you know, financial super app you you possibly could?

So, yeah, I mean, when we started, I mean, we were, like, all part I've personally been in crypto for over a decade. So when I started, like, you know, the XRP ecosystem was, like, the one that I decided to, you know, stick into. I also, like, you know, made, like, a lot of connections there. And when we connected as a team, found out of those, our goal was first to, like, start from the extra ecosystem because we saw, a big gap. We, you know, started building some DeFi tools there that were missing.

And we had already built a big audience and community from that ecosystem. But then going into our field vision, which is the financial super app, we saw that there are many limitations, which is, for example, the extra field doesn't have smart contracts, it doesn't have, let's say, enough liquidity when it comes to stablecoins or like railroad assets, things that we need to offer a great experience to users, especially if we are to obstruct the whole experience for the end user.

So we saw some, let's say, missing pieces on XRPL, and then we started exploring all the other, like, all the other chains, seeing where is the best place to actually build this super app. Mhmm. So we saw it from from, like, an objective point of view. We talked like with many different representatives from different like networks. And we realized, I mean, for months we're trying to explore and see which is the best.

And ultimately we decided that Solana is like really the best ecosystem, especially right now, to build overall, especially because you have these let's say, even the vibes, I mean, the welcoming environment, even, you know, when we decided, for example, we talked with the foundation, we talked with some Masovano people. Everyone was so welcoming, so helpful, really like to help right away, which, unfortunately, we haven't really phased in most of the other ecosystems even in the ecosystem like we were in.

So we saw this amazing environments, all these amazing developer tools that you can right away build anything you need. You can get, like, help right away. And it's really built for, you know, focus to consumers. Yes. I mean, Solana is mostly known, for meme meme tokens and, like, all these different, like, you know, perps trading.

But I think now it's it's really, like, evolved into this one stop shop for all finance, like real world assets, tokenized assets, and I think really works and really aligns with our vision. So, yeah, mean, it's like really just the best place to be right now, and that's why, you know, we we decided to to stick with Solana.

Absolutely. Question from my side. Something we're exploring with Dakota is a lot of the infrastructure side of this. Like, you you mentioned just the idea of holding your own keys or holding your own wallets and the the damage or the risk of not doing that and trusting external custodians that you that you saw in Greece specifically. How have you, at the business, what what sort of infrastructure partners or things have you pursued when it comes to building the platform?

Like, what kind of APIs or partners or things on the wallet side specifically with self custody? What are you buying versus what are you building? Would love to learn a bit more about that.

So, I mean, I think we have to be also pragmatic as an the industry because, I mean, full self custody when it comes to, let's say, having like a hard hardware wallet like Ledger and having, let's say, the seed phrase. Mean, that's, let's say, the European scenario where everyone is holding their own keys. But 99.9% of people don't want to deal with this thing. So the industry standard is Preview and then there's also dynamic from Fireblocks which we are we'll be using it with Fireblocks.

We use the dynamic part of which is the self custody accounts which is very similar to Preview. But in our case, we found that dynamic is much more secure and has some elements which we prefer from our solution.

So if we're partnering with self custody, we're using, let's say, this part with people who will able to create an account, self custody account with their social logins, with pass keys, with their email, multiple, let's say, ways and methods that people are already used to in Web two point And some people will say, yes, but this is more like a hybrid or it's not full self custody. Although the user, you know, will always have the option to extract the private keys and, like, let's say, import it to anything else.

Although, as again, like, we don't think that 99.9% of people will want to do that because our target users are like people that have no idea about crypto. So we want to have this scarcity, want to have this benefit, but without all this friction that exists within this industry. So we have to be pragmatic and say we have to build and use hybrids like Previa and other similar solutions to be able to offer simple self custody to the end users.

And then it's like on our, let's say, on the builders, on the developers like us, to be able to obstruct this experience even better and make it as as frictionless as possible.

What what was your experience in this part of the stack in terms of the exploration of what partner was best to use? Did you find that you explored in, like, a ton of different companies in this in this stack, or was it mainly Dynamic and Privy? Did you we're wondering, like, you know, defense is top of mind for us given given the presenting sponsorship of the show and relationship there. This there's so many nuances to this to this layer.

I'm wondering if there were any other, what just generally that experience was like making that decision.

I think we explored, like, you know, four or five different, like, wallet providers. But I think that you hear I mean, we explored everyone. And, you know, in the end, we said, you know, preview and, like, you know, Fireblocks, like Dynamic are, the, you know, the best ones. So we ended up in this tool. And then it was about, you know, finding out, like, you know, the devs and the details, trying to find what's actually better in terms especially in terms of security. I think that's the number one thing for us.

Being able to have, like, to have, like, the ultimate security, also, like, backup methods. If something goes wrong, you know, what can be, like, done there. So that's why we found, like, know, the dynamic for us, you know, is, like, the best solution. But again, yeah, I think premium dynamic are the industry standards and probably the best to go with. But again, it's only about the details. Some might be worse in something else, someone else might be better.

But, ultimately, it depends for you as a project and what you're building and who you are also targeting on.

What do you so so that was, you know, more of the buy side of what you are you know, there there's, like, a ton of infrastructure there that you can get out of the box. Is there anything that you're building right now internally that feels like maybe I'm having to go build this for, you know, the the banking platform or the app that you're that you're building that you wish existed similarly out of the box? Anything come to mind there?

So the only issue we have found is that there's no, let's say, one stop shop, like, one stop vendor that you can actually go to and, like, provide, let's say, you know, cards or, like, issue three or, like, virtual accounts or, like, you know, I mean, there's this fragmentation across, like, the whole industry. So I think this is, like, the main issue we have, like, found.

I mean, we've talked to, like, multiple like, tens of different providers the last few months, like, for all these different, like, key parts, like, you know, from cards to virtual accounts to payouts Mhmm. Like, you know, KYC, AML, like, all these different kind of stuff. And we found, like, this issue that, you know, you always have to, like like, there's always, you know, one vendor that will be missing something. Nobody has a complete solution, at least yet.

So I think that's something that the industry as a whole needs to fix. So we know you need, like, some things. Probably, I think, within the next year Yeah. This will be solved.

But, yeah, we had to, like, find, let's say, the best solutions and try which, let's say, the best two or three vendors or maybe because, you know, the less vendors you have, ideally, the better for your products because you have, like, five, ten different vendors, and there are, like, many things that can break and many things that can also, like, create friction for your users.

So for us, it was very important to, like, choose maximum two, three, like, vendors for all these different features connecting, let's say, to to be able to make the seamless onboarding and interaction

possible. Yeah. There's a tension between, like, we need redundancy. We need to make sure we're we're protected. But on the other hand, like, I don't wanna go through and go through 10 different onboardings and and then create 10 different solutions.

And you always has have, like, to have backups because, you know, sure, I mean, you're you're going with one vendor. But if something goes wrong or let's let's say some kind of support, you you always need, like, to have a backup and have something ready to go on if which I think most likely I will say most of crypto neo banks are not prepared for this. But I think as a general rule, have to be prepared for everything. Even for example, we have partnered with Rain for like the our own cards with Visa.

But, anything can go wrong. You you always need to have backups and have multiple vendors and partners to to go on.

Yeah. Absolutely. Well, Panos, it was great having you on. I will give you a quick shout out. I think you are fundraising. I think you're one of the few neo banks I've seen out there. We've seen some raises on, you know, MetaDow, but I think you're raising on Republic. So, yeah, go check out your website if you wanna support their mission right now. Panos, we'd love to have you back on the next coming months to kind of follow along, like, as you as you go to market, as the product, you know, matures, post fundraise.

But thanks for joining us today for Neo.

Yeah. It was a pleasure. Yeah. Thanks for having me. And, yeah, make sure you join, like, the wait list, and, yeah, be sure to be, like, one of the first to, like, have access to this, you know, banking super app and, you know, banking belongs to to everyone, not to the banks. So, yeah, it's time for banking without the banks.

Sounds good. And then I will say, hey. If you want some some wanna get into the juicy agentic build side of things, tune in on x right now to Ryan, you know, with Ryan from Dakota when we get off work. Actually, gonna go through a Vyveco to neobank. So we'll see.

Perfect. Sounds great. Alright. Thanks, Thanos. See you next time. Thanks, guys. Yep. Thank you.