Lightspark launches Grid Global Accounts: Bitcoin-powered global USD accounts, Visa debit cards, and agent-delegated payments in 65 countries

Speaker 1: Line go up. Well, we hope that the line goes up on your book sales. Head over to amazon.com and buy The Andoril Thesis by Kyle Harrison of Contrary. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Can't wait to see soon.

Speaker 2: Great to see you. Okay? Congrats, dude. Goodbye.

Speaker 1: Thanks. Up next, we have David Marcus from Lightspark. He's the cofounder and CEO, and he's launching Grid Global Accounts, a Bitcoin powered system enabling global USD accounts, cards, and cross border payouts. We talked a lot about crypto payments yesterday. We'll let you introduce the business yourself. Again, welcome back to the show. Give us the update on what's

Speaker 2: going on

Speaker 1: your world. Great to see you.

Speaker 11: Thanks for having me back, guys. Well, look. So the the big announcement we had this week, so Lights Park has been around for about four years. And, you know, in the last four years, we've been building connectivity into payment systems all around the world, like 65 countries now. And the announcements that we added this week is great global accounts, which is basically a global dollar account that any platform can issue and give to their stakeholders. And that dollar account is what I think is the most powerful money account ever created because you can move money in real time to 65 countries, payment systems, like, really at any time of the day or night. You can move money on any chain with any stable coin you want. You will have a Visa debit card that can allow you to spend that balance at a 175,000,000 merchants around the world that Visa supports and Lightspark is becoming a a principal member of the Visa network as part of that process. And it's got, like, this nice feature that enables those platform to actually be ready for the the complete change of interfaces as we move from websites and apps to conversational interfaces driven by agents. And so this idea that you can delegate safely money to agents so they can buy things or send money around the world for you is really part of that whole GRYT global account platform that that we've announced and launched this week.

Speaker 2: Very, very cool. So how how like, when when did you guys start thinking about this opportunity? Obviously, you know, everyone's thinking about stablecoins. We have more regulatory clarity than ever. Was this always on the roadmap? Or did you guys start to get customers saying like, hey, we want support for stables and not just BTC related products?

Speaker 11: Yeah. I mean, look, I think, you know, we so we've been working on stable coins for a long time, but the the concept of a global dollar accounts that can actually live everywhere is really novel and like the the the there was no chance of us like actually doing that like even twelve months ago because like the the prerequisites, the stars were were really not aligned. Right? And right now with the Genius Act here in The US with MICA in Europe and similar legislation all over the world, plus really really great embedded wallets like, you know, the the self custodial wallets of like two years ago where you had a seed phrase that you could lose and you would never give that to a family member because like they would lose money almost invariably. All of that is gone. Right? So now you have really great wallets that you can log in with Google, with Apple, with a passkey, with any login that's familiar and never lose your your keys or or your money. And the last part of it is actually really stable coin backed debit cards where the networks have really leaned in hard on and like now gives us an opportunity to really basically connect those dollar accounts to a 175,000,000 merchants around the world making that balance really useful for anyone receiving money on them.

Speaker 2: Yeah. Very cool.

Speaker 1: Is the pivot from CryptoMiner to AI Neo Cloud that's happening across the industry having any sort of effect on crypto markets? Or is that a because we we talk to companies all the time that are compute constrained. There's this CPU crunch. There's GPU crunch. There's backlogs for power, and data centers are delayed, and that's what's going on in the AI world. But Bitcoin as a network needs compute as well. Many other chains need compute. And is compute scarcity bleeding over in any way to the upside or downside? I I I just I don't know the effect at all. Does it matter, or is there enough compute for crypto to do everything that they wanna do as a community?

Speaker 11: Yeah. I mean, look, I mean, proof of work is definitely and so, you know, more more specifically for the Bitcoin network, proof of work is definitely using the the level of energy that at times will compete with like AI data centers. Sure. But but, you know, the hardware is like, you know, started GPU based, but it's very a six driven now. But on the energy side, definitely definitely competes for the the same source of energy. But, look, I am personally an acceleration maximalist, then I actually think that we're actually going to unlock unbounded energy in the next, like, you know, ten, fifteen years. So I I I actually don't think that we're going to have these types of issues of, like, actually competing resources with, like, massively, like, you know, forward deployed amounts of capital on Bitcoin miners being replaced with, you know, GPUs. And and also, like, those data centers for for Bitcoin mining are are so specific, like, you know, a lot of those miners are, you know, liquid cooled in a certain way and like operate on certain grids that, you know, they're able to actually like turn on and turn off the the mining capabilities really easily whereas Yeah. Like you know, it's harder for

Speaker 1: necessarily you wanna do that if you're like actively serving inference or even just like training. You might not wanna bring the bring the train down. Interesting.

Speaker 2: Where where are you expecting to see the first real hockey stick growth when it comes to agents leveraging stablecoins.

Speaker 1: Oh.

Speaker 2: Because like right now, it feels like there's a like it's a lot of like potential early experiments going on. But at least to me, it's unclear where we'll see that, you know, really break out use case.

Speaker 11: Well, I mean, I can share a little bit more about, like, you know, my my thoughts and my experience. Like, you know, the the first thing is I think that everyone competing to build, an agent to agent protocol standard is kind of, like, you know, really future forward.

Speaker 1: Mhmm.

Speaker 11: And there's not much happening there. Right? It's like there's a lot of like big news and big announcements and very little volume. And that's normal because like, you know, agents are not moving money at scale by by any stretch of imagination. We took a little bit of a different stance, right, which is that we want to build a mass market money account that suits the needs of people and businesses all over the world. And then we've a safe scope delegation framework that enables those agents to actually use the debit card, use the 65 countries reach of moving money around, use like the multi chain support for stable coins and then you can delegate that. And so what I've done with mine and I've lived with it for the last like, you know, five weeks or so. So I have my great global account and then I have an open claw running on Mac mini at the office and I connected both and and and so it it just takes a scoped debit card, goes buy things online, which is actually more difficult than I thought, you know, starting this but like it now works. It it can message people on WhatsApp that I need to send money to and offer them like, you know, seven or eight different ways to pay them and I don't have to worry about it. And it really works real time really really well and it's been it's been so much fun to actually build on OpenClaw and have like a money account that that that that Lobster could use. It's been it's been a

Speaker 4: lot of fun.

Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. It's awesome.

Speaker 2: Lobster accounts.

Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for taking the time to come chat with us. Congrats on the progress. Thanks for having me.