Radius Mainnet Launch, Stablecoin Micropayments, and Monetizing the Internet

The stream is working right now. We've built the tech and kinda using our own customized thing. So we got Bob here from Radius. There's a lot of news today for you guys. I was didn't have a lot of time to look at the timeline this morning, but I saw you guys popping up.

What's happening today with you guys? Going live. So we've been working on this technology for on this very specific code base for four years now. And this team has been working in and around digital money since 2009. We have the event you know, this was a team effort of, you know, some of the Bitcoin core devs, the founder of Zcash, some of the guys who built USDC and the team that built the Federal Reserve's Central Bank Digital Currency Code.

Money has been lagging everything else digitally for about twenty five years now. And we have been working on this problem of how do we make it money just native to the Internet the same way everything else is. And everyone the cool thing about this industry is it's not a zero sum game. Right? We're we're all trying to try to solve this problem of how do we make all this work better. So And we're going live today with a system that thinks a little bit differently. Right? We don't have a token.

So there's you when you move money, it costs you a hundredth of a penny to move money, and you're charged that hundredth of a penny. No TGE. We're just trying to move money fast. Because we think if you get stablecoins cheap enough,

this entire new economy emerges. It's too expensive to to buy and sell most things in the world. And so now we think it's possible. Yeah. Yeah. We we have the luxury of already having the conversation Yeah. With with Robert that we're releasing tomorrow. Yep. So tomorrow, we're we had a conversation with Robert in the about all things Radius. We'll we'll release that in the morning. There's a

lot of great one. There's a lot of great content this week. It was Canton yesterday with Eric. Love those guys. Today, stable conference. Tomorrow, radius deep dive. Four years. I mean, has it been hard kind of building in the shadows, I would say, little bit for the past four years? And where where I mean, you start building this four years ago. Stablecoins even two years ago were a fraction of the narrative they are. Like, what led to that vision?

What led to starting building that code base so early, and how has it evolved throughout even the four years? Yeah. So

a lot of this team was the team that had to build USDC. Right? So we had to figure out what network do we put it on. And when we built USDC, the one of the main reasons we built it was we were using Tethr. And Tether was on Omni, which was really slow, but it was better than wires. Right? So Tether was at first, like, wow. We can don't need wires anymore on the Circle Trade Desk. And then Ethereum just had much better tooling. And so when we launched USDC, we launched on Ethereum, but it wasn't perfect.

Like, obviously, you had congestion problems, things slowed down, and networks start kept getting better and better and better. Like, Solana was a big, big upgrade, in in speed. The problem we always saw was, one is the incentive model. Right? The the token incentive model does make things a little janky if you're trying to think about millions of transactions a second, which is where we think the world is going.

Because once you start thinking about programmable money, you immediately go to machines doing the transactions. And if machines are doing the transactions with other machines, which we now are all calling agent to commerce, human latency needs to be removed from the loop, and you're no longer talking about 1,000 TPS or 10,000 TPS. You need to start thinking about seven or eight figures. And so you need to radically restructure everything.

And so starting in 2022, we question, can we radically restructure the architecture of stablecoin networks to just focus on linear scalability with performance and linear scalability with cost. And if you can build that, you start really opening up the type of economic models that start working with millions of transactions a second. And so that's that's what we've been focused on.

So I, you know, I was writing a thumbnail copy in the title for your your Sable-minded episode tomorrow, machines paying machines was just a a common thread throughout. When we say machines, you know, that's a broad stroke term. How do you think about that granularly? Like, what machines are paying which machines for what purpose? I like the Cloudflare

thing you shared. That that that helped me understand. Cloudflare is the the coolest example. And, like like, Cloudflare and Akamai are the two companies that get us most excited. Because if you think about the way the Internet works, you have trillions of daily events. Right? So for example, Cloudflare does somewhere around 80 to 200,000,000 events per second that are all technically monetizable events, but they don't because there's no way to move money that fast. Give an example of, like, some of these events.

Googlebot. Right? So Google has massively, outpaced OpenAI Anthropic on their scraping of the Internet because Google, through their SEO search, has the ability to go through the backdoor of the Internet and scrape any website they want at Infinitum, meaning there's no limit to how much they can scrape Reddit or the Stable Dash website. And if your job as Cloudflare is protecting that website from being DDoSed, you have no way of stopping Google going through the backdoor.

Now they're working on it because they're really good at what they do, but if you can charge them even a fraction of a penny for that scrape, one, it prevents the scraping from happening, in a malicious manner, but two, it's a massive monetization event for anyone who holds data on the open Internet. So when we think about Radius, we think way more about Internet infrastructure than we think about, say, a payment system. It's really, really cool. We've been we've been challenged a lot.

We've we've had some really great conversations

the last couple days with, like, the RAIN team and Circuit and Chisel team and ATXP and, like, all this really interesting Agensic. We're my mind is We're just bookmarking Agensic Agensic Agensic. We're just I think that's gonna be a big theme of what people are talking about today. I think we're finally entering this moment where agents are starting to ex like, come to market.

This isn't, like, you know, everywhere yet, but, like, if these things start to exist and infrastructure and systems like Radius networks like Radius exist where those agents can actually have a system to transact, get information. I I know trans even thinking about it from a, you know, using the word transaction is even a limited word probably, but it's it's information.

Do you think about it more as, like, information transferring? Yeah. We we call them events. Events. We just call them events. Right? There's some type of atomic event between two two actors on the Internet, and we think there that there's unquestionably going to be machines being those actors. And I think a lot today and what you're hearing in agentic commerce now is what we call static agentic commerce. This is the, hey. I'm a size nine. I really like Jordans, I and wanna get a new Jordan basketball shoe.

And that Visa will handle that and they'll do a good job at it because people at Visa are really good. And maybe someone at Stripe and the tempo team is gonna say, we're gonna do that better and cheaper than you. And I think that may be where Stripe's trying to go because if you're thinking of buying a $180 pair of sneakers, you need to build in all the controls of fraud and risk and compliance that people like Stripe and Visa are really good at.

If you're talking about doing, call it, a billion sub penny transactions per day, that's a very different fraud risk compliance model. You're really just going for efficiency and speed as opposed to building the what I'll call the traditional Stripe and Visa stack. So today and what you're hearing right now with the Genta Commerce, that's a lot of Visa and Stripe. That's I need sneakers. I need a plane ticket. What we think about is ten years from now, can every action on the Internet be monetized?

So if you're running a model at Jane Street and you want a picture of a petroleum reserve in Oklahoma right now, you can get that picture and it'll cost you x. And that bit of data will come over. Maybe maybe 5¢. Right now, there's no way to really spend 5¢ on the open Internet. It's almost impossible because it's too expensive to do it. So we really think about questions of compute, inference, and data purchasing between machine actors on the open Internet. We think that's where it's going.

We think Visa's gonna win. We think Stripe's gonna win, but we do think there's a space for that micropayments, example. And and we believe micropayments or as Circle's calling them nano payments is going to be a new critical infrastructure of the Internet, and so that's what we're building. So do you see this infrastructure plug in? You know, we've seen trends in the past years of, like, IoT

Sure. Decentralized depend decentralized physical infrastructure. I'm Or even thinking, like you said, about maybe even, like, where the creator economy is going and and using creators' artwork on these marketplaces to when you're using them to train a model, like, is is that the right sectors to be thinking? Are those too small for No. Your minds I think the whole point is that the whole idea here and we have a saying in the company that the overwhelming

amount of the world's goods and services is not currently monetizable because it's too expensive to buy those goods and services. So every single bit of data or every single small bit of compute is very hard to monetize because it's if you just do Visa, it's 30¢ plus 3%. That's a nonstarter for most of these small bits of data. We think that particularly in the in the world that where we constantly have agents looking for data, that there's going to be marketplaces that will emerge. It's new. It's super nascent.

But this is why you this is why you build in places like this. This is why you go go to people like Aaron over at Lightspeed and tell them your idea and they back you. Because this is this is why we get up in the morning. You we see a problem. We try to solve a problem. And the fact that our Internet is still run on advertising is kind of nuts. Right? It's still it's still running on an advertising market for everything we do.

We think it can be run on money, on real value, as long as you make it fast and cheap enough. You know, we're we're charging a hundredth of a penny. We know we can go lower. And what does that look like when we're moving value at millions of transactions a second for upwards of a hundred thousandth a penny. It gets really exciting, and that's why we're building. It's extremely exciting.

We would love to be, we would love to open our business. I know we're not, like, probably the ideal customer for this, but, we have so many interesting things to, like, experiment with this because it it's been an interesting process to think about what is valuable, what is insightful. You know, ideally, day, Radius is a a company that you know, maybe maybe there's someone in the market who wants to make a decision, and they wanna get to know who can solve this problem.

And maybe, you know, the interview that will come out with tomorrow, something like this Mhmm. This can serve as knowledge. That can be insightful. And if someone if if an agent or a person is in the position where this can be a conversation that equips them to go with Radius or use Radius, like, that's a really valuable piece of insight that currently lives, I guess, within the stable dash world. And Yeah. How do we think through, you know, the value of that information? Right.

There's so there's so many that that's what I'm wondering next. It's like, do the IP or owners of these events that could happen Yeah. Actually go about pricing them

for the market. That that's the coolest thing is we have so much data being slowly monetized, how these markets emerge. And I think that's a cool thing about being in places like San Francisco Yeah. Is you have people building each component of this marketplace. We're just trying like, we we something we refer to ourselves as as a filament in the light bulb. Right? You had electricity. You had generators. You had wires.

But it took Einstein many years and about 10,000 tries to figure out the filament that let light bulbs exist that actually made electricity important. We just think of radius as that filament. We're just that little piece that makes us all work, and opens up a new economy. That's kind of what's our big speech this morning,

but we're excited for it to grow. It's amazing. I love the filament. We'll click that. No. I was I was even gonna say it reminds me of, you know, Ben again, but, Ben from Braille, he kinda brought up the city. He's like, hey. You guys best. X x, you know, x four zero two. I forget what he said. Silotator probably. Yeah. And then,

our engineer looked at us and was like, no. Not now. What you guys what did you launch in Braille today? There's news today on the timeline. Yeah. So so Braille we have we had two we had three critical launch partners. So one was Braille. So Braille does our fiat on and off ramping. If you wanna get money onto our platform, you go through Braille, and Ben's been an incredible partner throughout. Braille has a partnership with SBC, Stablecoin, run by Jeff Milinski. They're our Stablecoin partner.

So when you when you upload money on the platform via Braille, you get SBC. And then Privy is our wallet provider. Privy has been a fantastic partner from day one. You know, our team is pretty much pretty OG crypto folks from Circle. And, what Privy does best is they make the thing as simple as possible. It's one click, you have a wallet, you can go. So with those three partners, Braille, SBC, and Privy have been fantastic throughout. It's a good stack. It's a good stack. And GCP. We run everything through GCP.

Rich Weidman at GCP is awesome. Awesome. Final question. Four years to get to main net. Yep. What's next? What's on the horizon? So today's our starting day. We've we've been an MIT r and d shop for the last four years, with much patience from our investors. We've become a company today. Today's, like, very much this is how we we think differently. Yeah. Our mainnet day is not the finish line. Right. Our mainnet day is a starting line.

And so now the question is to the team, every day can we know how we make ourselves better. Right? That's what we have to do every single day, in my mind, for the next thirty years. That's where we're going. That's how we're thinking, and we're excited to get going today. Incredible.

Robert, thank you so much for coming on. This is awesome. We'll we'll I'm sure we'll talk more times throughout the year. And we'll and we're on tomorrow morning. We'll see you tomorrow morning. We were even just talking about I think we we met with Rain, over a year ago at this point. So we're we're excited to have you in the ecosystem and and