Neo · · 32 min

Inside Dakota's Agentic Build Challenge: Building a Neobank in Under 9 Hours

Ryan Bozarth

Ryan Bozarth, CEO of Dakota, discusses the company's evolution from building a B2B neobank to providing stablecoin infrastructure and APIs for others to build neobanks. The conversation covers how Dakota discovered that over 50% of traffic to their documentation came from AI agents in January 2024, prompting them to optimize for agentic builders. Dakota now offers a platform with orchestration, wallet APIs, and issuance capabilities that dramatically lowers the barrier to entry for building specialized financial products—from 18 months to hours. Bozarth highlights specific use cases like neobanks for musicians managing rights payments, and demonstrates an "Agentic Build" challenge where developers can build a functioning neobank in under 9 hours using Dakota's sandbox, APIs, and skill packs. The key insight is that by separating infrastructure concerns (compliance, licensing, bank partnerships) from application development, Dakota enables builders to create niche financial products for underserved communities at significantly lower cost.

Transcript

32 turns, about 6600 words. Straight from the recording, so it reads like speech.

S0

0:00

Value transfer is nothing new. Hunt, gather, trade, expand. An exchange that's older than instant. Where the strongest prevail and the fastest survive. The function remains as its form continues to accelerate forward.

Zach Fowler

host

0:45

We're excited to kick off Neo. We just had a great conversation with Panos from Onodos. But, man, I'm excited to dive into this because we've had you back on. I think you were the first stable minded interview. You're actually the first stable dash live guest. Not the first neo one, but that is I think that's okay. We've had some great guests so far. Kinda walk us through first before we I wanna dive into the agentic build, but I'm going to hold off.

Walk us through right now kind of the evolution of Dakota as going from a knee more of a neobank itself to the team powering neobanks. Yeah. So we started out building a neobank for businesses.

Ryan Bozarth

guest

1:23

So a lot of what we had built originally was at the application layer, being able to serve a b to b use case for folks that needed a more global account, folks that wanted to work across stablecoins and dollars, and folks that had more complex treasury management use cases. As part of that journey, we spent a lot of time building the infrastructure of part of that product.

So how the money moved, having direct relationships with banks, becoming licensed ourselves, being able to build out the programs we needed to support that.

And with that journey, we end up spending most of our time and now all of our time building out a stablecoin infrastructure platform in part to kind of service businesses like we were to be able to kind of meet the demands and needs that we had, whether it was through being able to onboard our customers very quickly and have more of a compliance as code approach to onboarding and be able to do more complex setups supporting, you know, foundations as well as businesses as an example, and being able to broad broad array of access to payment rails, to features, not just doing orchestration, but now wallet APIs and issuance as well.

So was this a forcing function of people onboarding to Dakota, and then they're, like, slowly just trying to add each of these on, or was this kinda always the vision for Dakota? Yeah. So it came from like customer demand in many ways, in the sense that people were on the platform, and they'd be looking to do more things with us. They were looking to start moving money on behalf of their customers.

And so the first version of the product kind of was derived from that need to support our most kind of like power users, our most kind of like customers that were doing the most with us and kinda really building with them, in part with us being able to say, hey, to get the experience you really want, we need to bring some of these things in house.

And so it was like a push or a pull from the customers, and a push from ourselves to say, hey, in order to come move the money the way you want to, in order to really kinda speed up the transactions, for example, like, we need to hold the licenses now. We need to be the one that are going to be like, do some of the quote unquote hard parts to make this work the way we want it to. And so I think it was a bit of both those pieces that really has arrived where we're at today. That's exciting.

Zach Fowler

host

3:32

So I was letting Drew go. Huge talk. Was, like, sitting there, I'm gonna let Drew go, and then I'll go Let's keep talking, Ryan. So,

Drew Rogers

host

3:43

I mean, one, we've we've we've been using Dakota since the genesis of StableDash. We've we've used it as a treasury management tool and, you know, payouts to team members and vendors and things like that. And it it's been it's been interesting to see the, yeah. This evolution take place even first party. What's the vision for Dakota

Ryan Bozarth

guest

4:02

as a as an application? Is that still something that people will be able to use if they want to as as a end product, or are you guys going, like, full full infrastructure mode? So we're dedicated to the infrastructure product, but what that means for the operational account is that those folks will have access to an operational account, and so they can be able to kind of have a place to do those payment operations and treasury management.

We've found that if people are building on top of Stablecoin rails, one of the first things that they likely will do is be able to hold on to Stablecoins, be able to use Stablecoins as part of their own business, whether that is to support certain workflows, or payouts, or manage a float, something along those lines. And so we found that account to be very valuable to support those pieces, but it is now part of the larger kind of platform offering, or the infrastructure offering.

Zach Fowler

host

4:51

So I wanna dive in now. I've been holding off on the agentic build. I think in the past, you know, six to twelve months, I've been following along with the journey. You've been even just forward on x kind of how you're approaching AI to even just build your own business. But when we saw this last week, I was like, Ryan, you gotta come on the stream next week. We have to talk about the Agentsia bill. It's such a hot topic right now in terms of, you know, building neobanks. There's kind of a chasm.

You know, there's a split right now between how much you wanna pipe code a neobank and and how much you don't. So kinda give us a t l d r. I'm gonna pull this up right now on

Ryan Bozarth

guest

5:26

what you guys did do and what you're running right now. Yeah. So this it goes back to, I I think, a bit about how you kinda build the company, and the kinda like leaning into what it means to be AI native, but also how you build the product. And so, thing that we saw early this year, January timeframe, was that we noticed that there was more agents going to our documentation pages than there were people. Like, across that border, like 50% Wow. Of the visitors to the docs page was agents.

And so that caused us to really spend a lot of time making sure that agents could understand our docs, make sure we were building things like skill packs for agents, SDKs that were authentic in nature, so that when you have people building with agents, that they're being kind of served the right information. The way that you think about documentation for people and agents isn't that different, but the way that you build them, way the that you can kinda comprehend and understood is is a bit different.

And so, we started there. We then saw that, you know, with the ability of saying that Dakota can hold the licenses, the bank partnerships, a lot of the core infrastructure here, we increasingly saw people building technology first or technology only kind of application layers for their own neobank. And so we had our own engineers, we had customers coming to us that were building quite quickly.

They were building neo banks and applications that because it was a pure technology layer, they could do in the order of originally weeks and then hours. And so we leaned into that and said, how do we give you the right tools to make you be able to build these things quickly? And now made important distinction here is like, it's fun to talk about the speed. I think the speed is important, but the speed really becomes a proxy for the ability to build these things that are much cheaper than before.

So, you know, we offer a self serve or a pay as you go platform, which means that if you want to serve a smaller community, if you wanna serve a niche audience, you don't need to wait, you know, 18 to get up and running, and you know, have a billion dollar outcome. You can now do these things where you start with a small community, which all the kind of best startups tend to smart kinda like niche down, and they kinda serve one group Yeah. Very well.

And then of course, they can like, brought into the next group and the next group, but it really kind of like lowers the barrier and makes the, really the economics of the business quite different. And so, we spend a lot of time saying that, yes, we wanna make sure people can build fast, but the reason that we wanna build fast is because it allows you to build at a way that can serve smaller groups, and smaller communities, and more specialized products.

And the specialized products where we think a lot of the magic is.

And we think we're kind of on the era right now where really the cusp of more specialized financial products, in part because the cost to build these things have dropped significantly by this kind of separation of concerns, where you have an infrastructure provider like Dakota that can do the work that sometimes takes quite a long time, is intensive, like compliance, like licensing, like bank partnerships, and be able to leave you to really kind of be able to do the things that are most important to you when it's running your business.

It is creating differentiated features for a market that you know well, and really be able to separate those two things to enable the next kind of era of builders, and in this case, authentic builders. Yeah.

Zach Fowler

host

8:35

I love I love that notion. I kinda had a mini monologue of it earlier where I think there's there's obviously the strong use case for embedded finance. And with the kind of the the rippling HR example we talked about earlier this week offline of, hey. You already have distribution. Bring a bank into your platform. But that other side of, you know, the the solopreneur, the rise of being able to just build a a small successful business for, like you said, that that niche.

Are there any niches right now that you've either seen somebody on your team start to build for, or anybody, like, in your ecosystem that you're like, hey. Again, small, underserved niche that I'm excited to see people building a bank for. Yeah. We see a few of them. One of my favorite ones is, and this kinda holds a special place in my heart, I started my career at Sony, and Sony has a lot of

Ryan Bozarth

guest

9:26

work behind the scenes to manage things like rights management. And so, we have people that are now building neo banks that are specific to musicians who have to deal with things like rights management. Rights management decides, you know, how you get paid based off of the asset or the music, for example, that you have, based on what is being played on, where it's being played geographically. It's a fairly complex system behind the scenes. And to date, it's really never made sense.

It'd be hard to justify building a bank or a neo bank just for artists or musicians. But now we see people coming and building products like this that are very specific.

There is a feature set that that audience cares a lot about, because they spend a lot of time trying to reconcile how they're getting paid, that often means they're getting paid not just months, but quarters after they would have otherwise, because there's so much back office work to be done here, and then translating that into a financial institution is not an easy task. But having a purpose built vehicle now that can service this community, and you can see how this could start relatively scoped or niche, right?

You have musicians that you maybe will have like on your record label that you support, but also as you kind of broaden this out, you know, rights management applies to a rather large group, you know, as to a number of different entertainers across different industries, and that could actually become a very big business in itself, but they're starting in a way that is much more approachable, much more scoped, and follows a very specific problem. And so that's one of the ones that I think is incredibly interesting.

We see a lot of products like that, where there's this unique feature set, and in this case, it's a company that is plugged into the entertainment system or entertainment industry already, and so they have distribution, and they have a way of going to artists and nominees people well, and they're gonna grow from there. And so I love those stories. That's just one that we've seen lately. Yeah. Stay

Zach Fowler

host

11:10

stay tuned for the end, because I will pull up that demo of the one that I think your team has been chipping away at. I did get zero to one on my own Sandlot needle bank, I but think what Panos was talking about in the last one, it's it's a great example of what you probably don't wanna do if you're building a neobank because I'm outside of my wheelhouse here. Drew, sorry. I cut you off. No. You're good. I mean, what what Panos was saying, Ryan, before you joined was a lot about, like,

Drew Rogers

host

11:38

danger in his mind as a builder of building some of these things in, like, a vibe coded fashion and how there's been a lot of pitfalls or risks associated with this historically in terms of trying to build products like this. What what are the things that you're most proud of when it comes to the infrastructure piece and and some of the things that you guys have built on your end?

One of the pain points he mentioned that I think you guys are solving is the fragmentation of different pieces of, like, specifically cards was one thing he mentioned of, like, we have this, like, great system for wallets and accounts, but, like, no one has cards baked in yet in his mind. I'm wondering how you how you've approached this, like, fragmentation piece and and what Dakota is now offering. Yeah.

So we are very much geared towards being a platform offering, which means that we continue to kinda build out the ways in which we can

Ryan Bozarth

guest

12:29

service or or offer our services. And so, like, money movement, we often describe as like orchestration in industry is one of those areas. We offer wallet APIs and issuance. And those kind of three core pieces allow you to start building and kinda shipping financial institutions. So it gives you a way to have money in in the form of like dollars, for example, in the form of like stablecoins, money out in front of dollars and stablecoins.

And while it's at rest, you have a way of producing income or a revenue line for the business. Between the money movement, you have the ability to say, I'm going to earn rewards on those assets. And then naturally, you would see these products that would start to extend other payment methods, including things like cards, other currencies as well. But for us, I mean, one of things we talk about internally, a little bit jokingly, is like you can't like buy a code licenses.

And so we talk a lot about like, the responsibility of the infrastructure platform is to invest a lot of time in these areas that the application might not need to. And those separation concerns are actually really important. That like the work that we do, for example, on the compliance side is justified almost by the business model.

Because we support, you know, at this point hundreds of businesses, like we can invest into our compliance program, into the technology in a way that a kind of like zero to one, if you're doing this all on your own, might not be worth it. If you're trying to get your first ten, one hundred, even thousand customers on your neobank, you might not be able to afford or spend the time on some of these areas, where when you view it as a platform infrastructure layer, you really can.

And so, in my mind, like, we do need to be thoughtful on how these products are built. But we can actually learn a lot from what has been happening over the last, you know, few decades here, and things we've seen to be successful. And one of the things we've been really successful is that when you have focused providers that are able to invest a lot, they tend to do really well. They tend to build very good fraud controls.

They tend to build the right level of controls, both on like understanding where the risk might live in the system, And so those things are actually a huge value add. But the difference is not everyone needs to build that zero to one again. Yeah. I know the call center is specifically around

Drew Rogers

host

14:32

the compliance piece is also pretty full. Like like, typically, the whether it's the per per user or the per business check on that is is something that's pretty it's a non negligible amount to to to to cover just to get someone on the platform. So if someone's not even, like, moving a lot of volume to go to a persona or some sub or whoever whoever it might be, that can get very, very like, the unit economics of that can break pretty quickly. So it's it makes a ton of sense.

Are there any other, like, key pains that you think that kind of unit economic system applies to? Is that something, like, across the infrastructure stack you're seeing? Compliance seems like a very painful one that, for me, makes a ton of sense.

Ryan Bozarth

guest

15:17

Yeah. So maybe a couple other good examples. One would be around, like, payment operations as an example. So you think about kind of money money moving through a system, there's like this golden path in which like it happens very quickly, and it goes from point to point B in seconds or minutes, whatever it might be. But in order to even achieve that golden path, what really is happening behind the scenes is you're oftentimes having inventory that you're drawing down on.

You're plugging into liquidity providers, both in terms of stablecoins, as well as traditional institutions like banks to get access to dollars and other currencies. You're investing at things like float management, liquidity management, reconciliation. You might have a team of people behind this with their own kind of internal tooling to do all this well.

And those are the pieces that I think that they're not necessarily the thing that you need, like zero to one, but the product experience is gonna be so much better if you have a team that has backpounded these things. And there's a mix of the relationships you need to have, the integrations you're gonna have, the people, the processes, the tools to all make that happen. And it's probably one of areas that are probably most under looked, but then we, you know, you hear about the non golden path.

You hear about the stuff where people go sideways, and they say, hey, it took, you know, nine hours. It took three days for my transaction to go through. I thought this was crypto. I thought this was gonna work in the way I intended. And it's like, well, that's like the level investment has been made on those areas. And so that's another area where we spend a lot of time that I think the next person needs to as well.

But if you're going to build on top of these APIs, you don't need to do that same level of partnership, investment in human capital, investment of technology they would otherwise. The last piece might be on the bank partnership side. So to get up and running, if you want dollars to access, dollar access, you're gonna have to partner with the bank. That's great to get up and running, but as you grow, you're gonna need to have access to additional payment rails. You're gonna want some level of redundancy.

Those are also those areas where those costs can be quite significant, and can kinda sneak up on somebody when they're first getting started, where it makes sense to say, I can really kind of adjust the unit economics of this business if I can take those, put them behind an API, and offer you effectively a pay as you go model. Yeah. It's beautiful. It's beautiful.

Drew Rogers

host

17:20

Zach, just last question on my on my side before we show, I think, some of the stuff that you're mentioning. Ryan, just given the last couple years of building Dakota in the v one sense, what do you feel like is the biggest competitive advantage you now have to resonate with these bank these builders and these people building on the application wouldn't have had otherwise?

Like, if you didn't start Dakota in its first state being on the application frontier, what would you not be able to resonate with, or what would you not have had as much empathy for? I know there are probably a lot of things, but what what are what would you be missing if that wasn't the case?

Ryan Bozarth

guest

18:01

I think a lot of this comes down to the first phase of Dakota we effectively in many ways. You could think of us like dogfooding these products. Like, we were the ones, like, we were the customers, and we did dogfood our own product. Like, we built our own operational account on top of our APIs. And so, both figuratively in terms of, like, how we were the customer for many providers in the space, but also our own APIs, it gives you a appreciation of what matters.

It gives you an appreciation of what's happening behind the scenes, where to make those investments.

And so, kinda use the example of whether it's kind of the compliance as code and making really big investments in the internal tooling to make sure that that onboarding process is really seamless, or the fact that, like, we can be very kind of clear around, you know, how we think about certain parts of our program to the payment operations side, and kind of making an outsized investment in those areas are things that you, I think, have to live at firsthand to really understand their importance and appreciation.

And so I think those might be the two kind of quick ones where I think about by being the person who was dogfooding this product and was dogfooding many products, we made the investments that will end up being the way that customers can onboard their end customers very quickly, move money on transactions really quickly, but all that kinda comes in service of that those early days and how much time we spent as a customer of our own products.

Zach Fowler

host

19:25

Exactly. I think it's the best way to start. Yeah. No. We're gonna let's let's dive in. We'll just do kind of the quick overview of what you guys did on the on the topic of dogfooding your own product. I think that's a great transition into the AgenTic build, what you guys did in nine hours, and then we'll so we'll kinda go through the challenge. If anybody does wanna enter, how they would do it, and then we'll kinda end with that demo of what was actually built. Was it you, or was it somebody on your team built it?

So

Ryan Bozarth

guest

19:53

the Nomad Pay was built by an engineer on our team, and that we'll see a little bit later. But also the really, the original idea of this campaign was because we had an engineer that built NeoBank over the weekend. They were working on the APIs, and they're like, let's just like build and see how long this takes. Like, we've invested a lot into these, like, skills and these other pieces. Like, I wonder and so, like, that first build was, like, a true nine hour build. So I did it on one weekend.

They were able to kinda complete a neobank and come up to, like, a Monday meeting and be like, hey, guys. Like, I was able to build a neobank, and in many cases, it was just like a a fun exercise to see, you know, what we could do based on the investments we're doing for AgenTic builders. And so that's really where it started. But since then, we've had a number of engineers that have kinda built their own neobank.

And most recently, this one, I'll say beat the sub by an hour and was done over the last couple days here. That was done by one of our engineers that will look at you shortly. So, yeah, if anybody wants to, go to dakota.xyz/agentic-build.

Zach Fowler

host

20:57

But, Drew, bring bring back up my screen here because I kinda wanna I still wanna walk through this. So I'll I'll wait till we bring it back up here. There we go. So you mentioned skills here. So you guys have invested. Once you do go in, you can actually create a sandbox environment. I actually where did mine go here? I had my own here we go. I had my own sandbox environment that I hooked up my API.

You can actually see some of my my customers onboarding from all my little leagues with some on and off ramp accounts. My agents started using these skills. And and bear in mind, I'm far from an engineer. I'm a content guy. But anybody can go. They can access this. They can open the sandbox. But, Ryan, walk us through. So they open the sandbox. They can go to your docs. They can get they can go to the GitHub environment, get the skills.

What do they actually have to do to enter this challenge, and what what could they possibly Yeah. Get out of So

Ryan Bozarth

guest

21:52

the first thing, if you're at this this site, you can get access to that sandbox with an email and your name, so it's quite straightforward, happens automatically, provision behind the scenes.

Once you have that within the sandbox, you can generate an API key, in which case, you can start to whatever tool that you're using, might use the example here of like Cloud Code, you can start to work with your agent, if you're choosing to build that way, by providing it an API key, of course, responsibly, and then going to GitHub and pulling down that starter pack, or the skill set that we have.

The skill set is a set of skills that allows an agent to kind of understand Dakota's API and our MCP with a little more context and detail. And so it just makes it a little bit more easier to build around the same endpoints, the same product. And then, of course, we get them to give it its the docs itself, and so you can just plug in the docs. Those are available at docs.co.xyz, and then we have an SDK as well. So those three pieces after you get into sandbox are really a set of primitives that you can use to build.

You don't need to use all three, you could use none of them, but we make them available because the end result tends to be a little bit more faster, a better understanding of Yeah. The APIs and how they work by the agents that we commonly use, whether that's Cloud or Codex or anything else.

And so from there, I'm going to start building my Neo bank in order to kinda submit something that has to be kinda fully featured in the sense that you have to be able to log in, make a deposit, be able to hold a balance, make a payout. Be able to see your deposit in the screen. And so, some of those kinda core pieces are what's required to enter the contest, and be able to submit your application. And we see a lot of people, both technical and and not technical, that are able to do that quite quickly here.

And so we've seen Yeah. You know, submissions that are oftentimes, today, already beating the the nine hours by a pretty wide margin. So, yeah, like I said, key takeaways,

Zach Fowler

host

23:42

go to the sandbox. That that kinda starts your clock. Once you've created the sandbox environment, start screen recording and start building. How many hours are you on with Sandlot? Are you? Man, well, you know, I'll say mine mine's local right now. I'm not hosting it on Vercel or or Railway right now. I'm definitely past the nine hours mark. I will say I was doing it, like, in the background of, like, prepping for the show today and, like, other content stuff.

I would you know, you've kinda send your agent to work and and check-in on it every two or three minutes. But, I mean, I'll I'll show you. I think I got a little bit of the way here. I'll bring my my screen back up. So this was this was Sandlot. I think Zach teased, hey. Go build one for for banking. So this was the the bank This is yours. Old player. This is yours that you just built? This was mine.

So if you haven't played around with Quad Design, I started there, did the whole design, was hooking up the APIs and all the other SDKs kind of on the back end. And it it I don't know how much it's totally that's got a good ring to it, the bank for ballplayers. Like Yeah. You know, there there were some league dues getting paid, some teams signing up and cards. I I this was totally random. I just I just took it and and ran with it.

I self detested, but like I said, we were I was in the sandbox environment at least, and I was telling it to just, you know, run the transactions. And like I said, at least from the sandbox Ryan, correct me if I'm wrong. I think I have some some paying customers and some transactions that have run here.

Ryan Bozarth

guest

25:13

Yeah. So all of this is is things that will live on, like, test nets and things like that. So you can see on the screen there, like, Ethereum, Sepolia, as the example here. And so in the sandbox, you're gonna be working in really like a test environment. And then when you're ready, you can these are the same APIs. You can flip it to production. And in production, you'll have customers that go through onboarding, whether it's like KYB or KYC.

You'll start to leverage your all bank partnerships behind the scenes and things along those lines. Yeah. Maybe if I if I did do an entry, Drew, I think I would do the

Zach Fowler

host

25:44

it was calling I was calling it Kin, which was just the the simple business banking most simple business banking app you could or I should say personal banking app that you could ever come up with, the one so easy your grandma could use because I know we all love that phrase. But, Ryan, let's let's now this one's we I know we're a little bit on time here. Let's actually dive into what your team built and what actually a more production polished example of a of a vibe coded neo bank would look like.

So this one here is Nomad Pay. Now it's here. So kinda walk walk me through it. Should I exit out of this, you know, steps one through 10 or or get Yeah. We can just talk through it here. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. So we can exit out of this and just kinda talk through some of this. And so

Ryan Bozarth

guest

26:29

similar to the one that you built, this is building a kind of pure technology layer, which means that all of the regulated activity, all of the compliance, all the bankruptcy happening from Dakota, but that means that you can get up and running quite quickly. And so you have the ability here to kind of make a deposit.

You can just simulate up a deposit here with that white button near the bottom of the screen, and it'll show up in a couple minutes, because it is actually gonna go through, and it's going to admit some, in this case, USDC, on Sepolia. You can see your balance there. You can see you can make payments. If you scroll down a bit on that page, you'll see things like routing and account numbers, and addresses. But again, I'm kinda going back to test accounts. Yep. And then you can kinda have more advanced features.

So And this is a good example of kinda having a payroll feature built in, where if you kinda just like click on run payroll to open up that model there, you'll see how you could have a number of workers that you might wanna send payouts to, and that would fire off, you know, end number, in this case, 17 kind of payouts or transactions kind of back to back.

And so this is an example where you can kinda start to think about how these features might work together to be able to offer a more kind of differentiated product. But obviously, this is also built very quickly, really kind of to kinda show what you can do here, and be able to kind of, in this case, make payouts to a number of remote workers for Nomad Pay. Then That's so exciting. You wanna yeah.

And if you wanted to go back to the dashboard, go scroll up on dashboard, we might be able to go and see on Etherscan those $2 that were simulated. Let's see. So where are we going here? If you click on that address so you see that address? You can kinda copy it over there. Okay. Yep. It's gonna be on Sepolia. So you can it's kinda Sepolia network on on Etherscan there.

We'll be able to see either very shortly or now that kind of the $2 kind of drop just to kind of demonstrate that this is, like, happening in real time. Let's see here.

Zach Fowler

host

28:23

We're searching.

Ryan Bozarth

guest

28:24

Cool. So if we go to the token transfers, it's just right at that blue button. Yep. Yeah. One minute ago, we saw $2 drop in, and a few more for that.

Zach Fowler

host

28:33

And so this is one of those areas where it isn't on a test net as opposed to main net, but we're starting to, like, see what you could build. Starting to feel a little bit more like a product, which in the course of hours is pretty exciting. Yeah. I know. I'm gonna probably continue to to oops. Sorry. Wrong wrong screen here, Ryan. I got it. My screen's so tiny right now because I'm screen sharing that one.

I'm definitely curious to see how much farther I can get with with one of mine now because I think it is good to have that baseline of, like, what should exist in in this app. But, again, like you said, what are those little nuances for those very specific niches that you hope people are going to to go build for. Yeah. Exactly. And while I think the idea here is you can get up and running very quickly, like we fully expect people to take more time to build something that would be like ready for production,

Ryan Bozarth

guest

29:21

but really that comes back down to the ability to get up and running in a way that historically might have taken fourteen to eighteen months and millions of dollars in compliance to be able to do this, whereas now, you're accessing a set of regular APIs to build a pure technology product on the kind of like wave of AI and agentic building, which makes that even easier, more approachable to more people. Ryan, last question before What

Drew Rogers

host

29:45

we is it like to see the current moment of what's now possible with this? Looking back at the role you had at Coinbase Custody? Like, what does it seem a little wild to to see now what is possible just a couple years from that moment? Or did you kind of think this was at this pace? I think at that moment, you are

Ryan Bozarth

guest

30:05

when you're building in this space, you're very excited about what it can be. I think you're very optimistic you have to be. There's a lot of ups and downs that come with it. But you have to believe that this is going to work. But I don't think anyone would have predicted the ways in which the industry is changing and the pace of what is changing.

So Coinbase, Kasiya, as an example, we spent years to build an architecture that was safe and secure, but really didn't kind of promote the type of like money movement that we have today, and the needs and demands we have today. And of course, a number of other products have some, and kind of really built products that are geared towards things like moving money through the system at a more global scale.

And so you can look at this and say like, I could see where that would happen, but something like this, where you say, now there's a separation of concerns between the infrastructure and the application is not something that I think really any of us, I speak myself, like, saw that in the beginning that this was the obvious next step, but it is, and it's very exciting to see what that unlocks when it comes to the ability for folks to build different types of financial accounts that will serve a broader array of communities.

You know, it's amazing to see, and something that I don't think a lot of us would have even guessed would have happened, you know, five years ago. Yeah. It's such it's such an exciting moment for builders, man.

Drew Rogers

host

31:18

Well, thanks for many things. Thanks for being first in across different parts of our business and the history of it. We're really excited for Neo and the segment and to continue to both highlight builders who may not know Dakota yet, but also those who also might be building within this agentic build system. We'd love to just work with your team for any of these these specific competitors or people who are in this challenge, highlighting what they're building, talking about how they're thinking through it.

So we're pumped for the next couple months working on this with you guys. It'll be really fun. So thanks for taking the time today. Thank you for having me, and I'm excited, Chris. Cool. Thanks, Ryan.

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