Why Squads Doubled Down on Solana After FTX

Thanks for hosting us. Thanks for having me, man. Man, this is fun. Alright. So we're we're here with Garrett. We're in the altitude booth in Miami at Accelerate.

You guys are kind of the Yeah. Hosts of this in some ways. How does it feel? This is fun. It feels great, mate, because we just launched, like, five months ago, really, with public launch, and things have moved really, really fast. I feel like the team on Altitude started, like, six people, and now we're probably 30 plus today. And, you know, we just did a fundraise announcement. We have a lot of new features that are launching. 2,000,000 series a? 18,000,000. It's like a series a and a half. Series a and half.

Yeah. Okay. That's huge. Yeah. I mean, that was, like, everywhere last week. It's funny. Certainly, it's awesome. Like, we love it. Brought in a lot of new leads. But, like, internally, one, this is you know, this closed a few months ago, but it's like, we just wanna ship. So this is great. Like, we want people on the platform, but I'm just excited to get it rolling. Yeah. And you've seen I mean, you you the people who are just meeting you with the story of

I mean, you're a very native to Solana coming into Altitude. You've kind of been in the ship since the very beginning. What was that process like to get in and then just see just seeing this happen? I mean, it's so fun to be with you guys and be here and work with you guys on this because it's like to see to have a front row seat of something that's accelerating

so fast is really special. What's that been like for you? I mean, it's it's been pretty amazing. I think if you go back in time I really got into the Solana ecosystem back after FTX happened, when I think if you looked at the majority of the crypto community and outside the crypto community, they probably thought not only was Solana dead, but the whole industry was dead. But, really, we saw some of the builders in the space like Gido, Camino, Helios, etcetera, including Squads. I wasn't at Squads at the time.

And we're like, this is the ecosystem you wanna double down on because they have the talent that actually sticks around. And now I've been at Squads for like two and a half years. You know, if we go back in time, Squads started five years ago. And they were the multi sig of Solana. They secure about 15,000,000,000 in value today for 500 plus teams. So in the Solana ecosystem, I'd say we're pretty much used by everyone. Right? And it's been great. They moved their treasuries on chain. They secure their programs.

But it's kinda like once you have capital on chain, it's secure, it's aggregated, you need to make it productive. So it's like, how do I actually run my business? And the stable coin industry in the last three years has absolutely exploded, and we saw more and more teams asking for like, hey, I wanna do payroll. I need to pay bills. I need a card. I need invoicing.

And we thought about building this into squads, it's very clear that the person deploying a program on chain is very different than the CFO that's gonna run your financial operations day in, day out. Yep. And that's what Altitude is. Yeah. So Altitude is for the CFO. It is like, you can think about it like a bank account, but it's not. It's more of a financial operating system. And the reason we say that, it's like a bank, it all you build on top of a bank account. Right? And all the services are integrated there.

Now, what's gonna happen with startups around the globe is that they're more global than their banks. Right? They're paying people around the world. They do on and off ramps. They're using stablecoins, they wanna move fast. That's why we built a financial operating system where we build on Solana, but you can't really tell as a user. It's completely disappeared in the background. Mhmm.

But then we plug into these licensed providers around the world to give you ACH, SIPA, Swift, and you can start operating like a global business. Speak a little bit about the role that Stablecoins play to unlock this. We last week, we're talking with Stefan about

just, like, kind of the the bare metal nature that Stablecoins provide is dollar dollar accounts and access. What do what do things like Stablecoins

unlock for you from a a customer access standpoint, geographic standpoint? What's that been like to see from your side? Yeah. I mean, like, Altitude, just to make it really tangible, launching a 150 markets from day one. The reason you do that is because like when you build a fintech, you have two options. You can build on top of a bank, and banks are trying to go more global. Right? They start in The US, sometimes they go to Europe next. It takes a really long time to expand markets. We took another path.

We didn't build on a bank. We built on top of Solana, like an on chain programmable account. Right? So you have stablecoins at the core, so you're global by default. That doesn't mean though that you can serve everyone in every market because people need access to things like ACH, SIPA. They need off ramps in Dubai, etcetera. So that's where we have to work with these partners around the globe.

But when you're dealing with stablecoins at the center of your product and not a bank, you can move much faster because you're no longer getting bank a to get comfortable with bank b and c and d. Instead, we just have stablecoin sitting there. We find partners around the world. Now this is a new this orchestration ecosystem is new. So, like, where we are today wasn't impossible two years ago, and so, like, this is the worst it's ever gonna be. It's already a pretty damn good product.

So, like, that's what gets me excited. Yeah. The orchestration piece, when when you guys announced the round

recently, you mentioned that there was, like what I thought was really interesting was that kind of cohort of orchestrators or I don't even know if that's the right word to call them, but just, like, the license providers that are integrated. I don't wanna get anyone or leave anyone out. It was Infinite

The Moon. The Yeah. Okay. And as we see it, like, Altitude launched with just Bridge, and Bridge is amazing. Right? A lot of people know Bridge. They got acquired by Struggs, and they power a lot of our it's once you have all these partners, it's like, how do you do KYB? Yeah. How do you do customer comms? How do you ensure that every time you bring on a new partner, your customer doesn't have to do KYB again because you're gonna lose them time and time again?

So it's crazy how much of Have you talked to Nikhil about this at Infinite? No. But I experience this firsthand all the time. Would love one, Nikhil would love to talk to you about this. He was actually, Altitude is sponsored with podcast. We had Nikhil on. He would they crushed that. And then Borderless,

I know we we made that connection with Great Taylor. But, like, they're very involved in this sort of piece of the stack because it's really it's really complex. When once you start adding more to the table, you almost introduce

a whole different layer. Yes. When you're just with Bridge, it's like kinda simple because you're just with Bridge. Yeah. There's an orchestration difficulty here. But And to do it right to do it right is really hard. It's funny, you know, we were a pure crypto company, permissionless. Anyone can use Squads. Anybody.

And then you start getting more in the fintech land where we have not only traditional crypto payments, and we now have cross networks, like you can pay anywhere, but we have ACH, SIPA, Swift, all of that. Then you get into traditional compliance. It's a whole different ballgame. So that's the hardest part of scaling this, And and I think it's gonna be really important. Banks bundled everything together, which is a great user experience for the last hundred years.

The reason why that's great is you KYB with the bank once, so you get every service that you need. But the problem is that people are out scaling their banks, especially new companies. Let's say, like, you've raised a million to 5,000,000, you need to move fast, you probably have a global team. That's who we're trying to build for. And obviously, I wanna go after the very large companies too, but it's like, who's next? So very they lean into new tech. They probably have been like a lot of people now are remote.

They operate around the globe, and they're into Sablecoins because they know they're faster, they're more efficient, it's cheaper. It takes a special person right now to understand that, but, like, you see the market adopting this. And so I really would target that 5,000,000

funds raised because they're ready for it. Yeah. They see the vision. I think you guys are doing a great job of going after that, being really clear, like, hey, we are we are building this for founders on the frontier. Like, this is who we're who's who's our target. Talk a little bit about, you know, we're here at Solana Accelerate. You guys have been your history is extremely embedded, native, and, like, focused on Solana.

But I know that for us as a user, something I'm excited about is to see more networks and more capabilities outside of just Solana. Like, speak a little bit about just

the growth of the product and some of the things that you're most excited to see in the remainder of the year. Yeah. It's been selfish. Okay. Well, there's a few components here. One, if people know that we're squads, it's the company. Altitude's one of the products. We came from the Solana ecosystem, so people sometimes think of us as just Solana. Altitude, though, is chain agnostic. Now a lot of our infrastructure back end is on Solana, but in the next weeks, we're gonna have multi chain pains and payouts.

And to me, that's extremely important. Like, I've been pushing for this for a This long month. This This month is happening. So it doesn't matter if you're on Ethereum, base, wherever you are, you just want access to better financial services. That's what is for. So like I know the Solana teams really well. Right? And that's where we started. They also have very complex operations. It's a great place to start. But that's just the beginning. We're already servicing now.

Because people always say like, do you service traditional businesses around the globe? The answer is yes, but it's not like we're dealing with someone who doesn't know stablecoins at all yet. It's usually like a designer, an accountant, a lawyer that probably touches a crypto business in some way. So maybe they have a crypto client, and for the first time they were asked to receive stablecoins. That's like a perfect user for us. So that's what I'm going after next.

And also just like the wider crypto ecosystem at large. And then the next is like, okay, we're abstracting as much of Sablecoins as you want. So you don't even have to know that's there. It's just like, want access to local on and off ramps in all these different markets and better financial services. Yep. That's a beautiful experience because right now, we use Altitude. And when we pay our vendors, pay our team, like, we're withdrawing to external crypto addresses a lot of the time.

Even Zach on our team, who you've met, more of a, like, newer person to the crypto space than have a wallet. So I like, can go spin up one externally. To pay. You know, he was doing that on Pointbase. That's great. But what a more delightful experience to just stay in Altitude and, like, have something like that native. I'm really excited to see that.

I think that's gonna be because for me as a business owner or user of Altitude, I kinda want to bring a consolidated experience to people that you work with or yeah, man. I'm just excited to see that. So if Steph is watching, we're on the record this month. This month. It's coming out. You know, people talk about intents in crypto a lot. You heard that? It's kinda like Intense. Yeah.

It's like if you wanna trade an asset, you could go to a particular platform and say you wanna trade, like, extra wide, but instead, you just abstract all of that. You know what the user wants, and you execute it in the back end. The user doesn't have to know how it happens. That's how payments should work. Right? Like today, you might say, I want ACH. I want Stablecoins. I wanna send to this network or that one. At the end of the day, it shouldn't matter to you.

It's just I want this person to receive their money now, and that's like what Altshu is building for. Yeah. So like, again, it's like we talk about Stablecoins because like that right now is what's gonna enable what we're building. In, But five years from now, I don't think that's gonna be talked about at all. It'd just be this is probably a cliche, but it's like, we're building an Internet company. They of course, you are. Yep. Of you are.

It's kind of an interesting thing to just say out there is, like, you know, stable dash, stable mind Yeah. Like, our our whole thesis for our media is focused on stablecoins, but I completely agree that, like, people are like, oh, that's so niche. But it's like, actually, it's not niche at all. Like, this is embedded financial infrastructure for everything. Yeah. So I don't I don't see it even what we're talking about is like a niche topic. Yeah. Modern money. People get confused because it's the container.

When I say the container, like a tokenized asset. Yeah. And people are like, NFTs, Meme Coins, Sable Coins, all the same. It's like, not at all. It's a container for completely different assets and use cases. So think that's where people kinda get lost. Same thing with, like, have you ever used Venmo before? Like, it's like Venmo dollars. You don't necessarily think about that. Right? But it's just dollars. It's the same thing when you're using Altitude.

The only difference between us and Venmo is Venmo is an app with one company. Like, we're building on a global distributed ledger, and that's how you can access anyone anywhere Yep. And build a product like Altitude on top. Alright. Last question. So we gotta we gotta turn the table. Thirty second shill. What's the pitch? Yeah. We're gonna clip this. We're gonna scale you. We're gonna scale the sales team. Like, what what's the pitch to the founder? You're hopping on a sales call, and they're like, hey.

Why should I use Altitude? Like, what how is this different than, like, all these other neo banking products or things that are out there? Like, what's the what's the The pitch. Man, just put me on the spot. Put me on the spot, man. I think one thing that's kinda crazy about our team, you compare it to anyone that's build building in this space, is that we've never had a bank account ourselves. We've operated on our own infrastructure and Sablecoins for the last five years. So we just Wow.

I mean, when I got hired at this company, they're like, we're paying Sablecoins. And for me, at first, I was little shocked. I was like, what do mean? How am I gonna handle that? Quite annoying when, like, these modern stablecoin native companies are, like, paying you with, like, build.com Okay. So every crypto team out there is not paying in stablecoins. And just, know, we only get paid in stablecoins. So we have a lot of experience in this space. We're also, like, out of the Solana ecosystem since 2021.

So we come out of crypto, but we also now have more and more, like, traditional fintech experience. I'm saying this more from a builder side. It's really hard to come into an industry and just, like, jump on. You see stablecoins as a better technology, and then you often, like, tack it on to something that already existed. I think we're coming from the opposite end, which gets me really excited because, like, the fintech space, everyone is building towards the same thing. Mhmm.

They're all building on top of the same thing, is a bank, or they're trying to become a bank themselves. We're taking the complete opposite approach, which we think if you if you build on a programmable on chain account and have stablecoins as like a first class asset, that is how you can enable, one, faster speeds, better access, and also automation in the long run. So, like, I can already see the things that we're gonna automate in the next, like, three months.

But if you jump forward, like, two years from now, I think that's gonna be the giant differentiator. An agent with a card is really cool. But, like, if you wanna do treasury management, you can't do that with a card. That is where you need the asset to move permissionlessly on chain twenty four seven. And you can do it with guardrails. Like we said, policies, we have rules and permissions. We do all that at a program level.

Just sounds technical and abstract, but you can just unlock things that you'd never be able to do on a bank account. Hell yeah. So that's what gets me excited. I'll do that x y z. X y z. And hit me up. Yeah. DM me on Twitter, Garrett Harper at Garrett Harper underscore. I think. Let's go. Yeah. Let's go. I'm excited for today. Thanks for having me on, man.