Title: S15 E27: Adam Soltys & Cole on Coinos & Lightning Network
Podcast: Bitcoin Takeover Podcast (host: Vlad Costea)
Guest(s): Adam Soltys & Cole
Published: 2024-03-29
Duration: 1:17:02
Episode URL: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/?name=2024-03-29_s15_e27_adam_soltys_cole_on_coinos_lightning.mp3
Audio: https://bitcoin-takeover.com/audio/media/2024-03-29_s15_e27_adam_soltys_cole_on_coinos_lightning.mp3
Transcript: CORRECTED. Base: local Whisper medium.en transcript with automatic speaker diarization, reconciled against the YouTube auto-captions of the same recording (aligned with the podcast audio to within about 1 s) and against a full local small.en (VAD) re-transcription with word timestamps (three-way comparison over the whole episode). Stretches dropped by the base transcript (e.g. 00:15:02, 00:55:25, 01:00:12, 01:02:41, 01:04:18) were restored from the audio, and doubtful words were re-transcribed locally from 7 short audio clips with medium.en (int16, VAD). Speaker turns were checked with a full-episode local speaker-embedding scan (TitaNet reference voices for Vlad, Adam and Cole, 1.5 s windows at 0.75 s hop), the paragraphs were re-segmented on the small.en word timings, and short turns were re-attributed by hand where needed (e.g. 00:08:35, 00:14:42, 00:33:42-00:33:50, 00:35:02, 00:45:22, 01:00:12-01:01:30, 01:16:53). Sponsor reads (Wasabi Wallet, Satochip, Cryptosteel, IVPN) are labelled "Ad voiceover". Names and jargon were checked against the title, the show notes and the web: Coinos (coinos.io), Raretoshi, Liquid Network / Liquid Federation, Lightning addresses, Nostr, Alby, Wallet of Satoshi, Phoenix, Shopify, Visa / Mastercard / Clover, Satochip / Satodime / Seedkeeper, Alex Bosworth and Lucas Ferreira (Lightning Labs), Core Lightning (CLN), LND, ACINQ, Bitfinex, Kraken, PeerSwap, Blockstream, BOLT 12, Cryptosteel (Cassette, Capsule), Adam Back, JAN3 / Samson Mow, SideShift, SideSwap, Boltz, Vulpem Ventures, peg-in / peg-out and the Liquid PAK key, Tether, OpenStreetMap, btcmap.org, Kelowna, Michael Saylor. Light clean verbatim: ums, false starts and stutters removed; factual slips by speakers are kept as spoken. Intro music omitted. Remaining doubtful words are marked [unclear: best guess].
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[00:00:51] Vlad Costea: Hello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. I am Vlad and today we have a very special interview with two guys who are building Coinos. If you haven't heard about Coinos, it's this web wallet that works with the Lightning Network and allows anyone to create their own receiving account instantly. So they don't need any sort of data, they don't need to register with any ID or whatever, they just sign up to the service, they receive their money and they're able to make payments and join the global economy. It's pretty cool, of course it's custodial and I guess this can spark a pretty interesting conversation.

[00:01:32] Vlad Costea: The two people who are working on the project who are joining us today are Adam Soltys and he is the software developer, the engineer who is working on this project. And you might also know him from the Raretoshi project, which is something that is using the Liquid Federation to create a marketplace for NFTs. And also joining us is Cole, who is the business developer. So we have a business mind and we have the software mastermind, both of them are going to be speaking about Coinos. C-O-I-N-O-S for those of you who want to look it up right now.

[00:02:16] Vlad Costea: So hi guys, it's really good to have you.

[00:02:18] Adam Soltys: Hey bud, thanks for having us.

[00:02:22] Cole: Thank you for having us.

[00:02:25] Vlad Costea: So let's start from the beginning. How do you describe Coinos? Because I did a brief introduction, but how do you see it? What is your vision of this project?

[00:02:34] Adam Soltys: I think you did a good job. It's a web-based wallet, so it's something that is accessible anywhere in the world that has internet. You don't even need to go through an app store or play store to download it. You just go to our website and you create a username and password. And that's all you need to do. We don't collect an email or phone number. We don't verify you. We just give you a Bitcoin account and it uses the Lightning Network. And also recently we added the Liquid Network.

[00:03:15] Adam Soltys: So it's using these other layers of Bitcoin that tend to be a little harder for people to run themselves, especially Lightning. So it's saving people the trouble of having to set up their own node or set up their own channels on Lightning. They just get to use our node that we've set up. And it's very easy. We denominate all the payments in your local currency. So we try to detect where you're from based on your IP address and then default to your national currency. But you can go in your settings and change your fiat that you want to see your balance in.

[00:03:59] Adam Soltys: And we take care of converting between those networks. So if you receive on-chain and you want to send out to pay a Lightning invoice, you don't have to do anything to convert, to get your coins onto Lightning. You just put in the invoice you want to pay and we'll do the conversion behind the scenes for you. And it's all very seamless. So users don't have to think about whether they're using Liquid or Lightning or what sort of address format they're dealing with. They can just scan a QR code and it says the amount in dollars and they press send.

[00:04:40] Adam Soltys: So it's more of a friendly user experience that someone used to using like a PayPal or Venmo or doing like a bank transfer would be used to. And we support Lightning addresses, so you can just type in like an email-style Lightning address to send to. Or also, if you're sending to another Coinos user and you know their username, you don't even need to do the full address like at coinos.io. I could just put in like your username. Like for me, you would put in Adam and you could send a payment to me.

[00:05:22] Adam Soltys: So we give everyone a unique username and URL. So if you go to coinos.io slash Adam, that's my profile page. And from there you can send me a payment over Bitcoin, on-chain Bitcoin, Lightning or Liquid. And my profile details will be there. So if you want to use my Lightning address, I'll be adam@coinos.io. I don't know if you've tried registering an account, Vlad, but you could probably get Vlad at Coinos if no one else snipes it from you. And then, yeah, it's just a beginner's wallet or a user-friendly wallet for people that don't want to think too much about technical details of Bitcoin payments.

[00:06:16] Adam Soltys: They just want to send and receive money. And we've got a bit of a focus on merchants. So we have some features, like if you want to add a tip before you pay someone, like for your account, you can go into the settings and tell it that you want to prompt people to add a tip before they pay you. So then if you're like a restaurant owner or something, before someone gets to the point of paying you, it'll ask them, do you want to add a 10% or 15% tip?

[00:06:52] Adam Soltys: Or there's a slider, you can customize it to whatever tip you want to set. And we have some other features for merchants, like if you go into your transaction history, you'll see all the payment values in your dollar terms or fiat terms, whatever your fiat currency is, so that that value at the time of sale is recorded. So for accounting purposes, as a business owner, you know the price that you're paying to acquire the Bitcoin that you're receiving from your customers. And that makes it easy to do your taxes and your accounting and stuff.

[00:07:32] Adam Soltys: So it's things like that. Also, like our merchant map, we're sort of focused on highlighting all the businesses that are using us. If you go to coinos.io slash map, you can see all the businesses around the world that have a Coinos account and are accepting Bitcoin payments in like a retail setting. So these would be restaurants, cafes, barbershops, convenience stores, all kinds of places that you can just walk in and buy things directly with Bitcoin. And we're trying to promote that kind of Bitcoin economy, circular economy.

[00:08:15] Vlad Costea: Yeah, so I tried to create an account named Vlad. Let me show you exactly what happened. I'm going to share my screen. We can comment on what's going on. I think this is the most fun outcome possible. So can you see my screen right now?

[00:08:35] Adam Soltys: Yes.

[00:08:36] Vlad Costea: I did try to register with the username Vlad. I have a very random password here, and it says that username Vlad is taken. But I did discover that you have this cool feature. You press this dice right here and you get a random username, which should be available, like junglefowl31.

[00:08:56] Vlad Costea: Junglefowl. And you also get a randomly generated password, which, of course, if you're seeing this, please don't register this account and send any money to it. There's these

[00:09:07] Cole: Keys, everybody.

[00:09:08] Vlad Costea: Yeah, you can rug me right now. Or you can be cheetah27 with the password gold419. If you use this account, at least change the password. But it's certainly interesting that maybe someone doesn't care what they're going to be called. So they're like, yeah, I'm just going to be I press this button and now I'm leopard77 and the password is moccasin. Those are shoes, right? 94 free. It's fun. And you can also choose your avatar, which I guess is interesting for some people. And you can upload your own picture.

[00:09:47] Adam Soltys: These avatars were provided by Alex. He's one of the Raretoshi artists. He donated them to Coinos.

[00:10:00] Cole: These avatars are incredible. I love the artwork. A lot of other people comment on them. We always have fun seeing what the new avatar is going to be when I sign up new people and stuff like that. The artwork is super cool. Very trendy.

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[00:11:02] Vlad Costea: This is very good actually. Yeah, it's definitely something new in terms of user experience because you can generate your username. Of course, it's recommended that you don't use the default password because these are stored in a database somewhere. So you shouldn't trust that, you know, this password is secure. Just use something like my browser tells me to use a security generated password. This is much better, but you're seeing it right now. Don't use it please. But whatever, it's a very easy sign up process. And now maybe I like this avatar.

[00:11:43] Vlad Costea: Maybe I want to be called Mule60 and maybe I want my password to be 696969. Let me try to register to see what the interface is like. So it did identify my location and I'm in Romania. It's put the RON, Romanian new currency, as the default one that I'm going to use as unit of account. Someone sent me 1K. Thank you, whoever that was. Let me see if I can keep track of what's happening here. So this is how I send transactions. There's even swag.

[00:12:21] Vlad Costea: Oh, you can buy merchandise. Interesting. You have a merch shop. I guess I want to. I was a bit too ahead of myself. So I have Mule60 as my profile. There's a Lightning address. There's a Nostr pub key that gets generated, which is interesting. So I can log into Nostr with this public key and my password.

[00:12:50] Adam Soltys: Someone else sent you some sats. Yeah, so the Nostr pub key, we just generate a random one for every new account. Pretty soon we're going to let you import your existing Nostr pub key or link it to your browser extension wallet like Alby or something where you might have your Nostr keys. And you'll be able to use whatever Nostr account you already have from other clients. That's coming soon. But for now, yeah, this is just a random one. So if someone wanted to follow this account or send a message to this account, it'll use Nostr to do that.

[00:13:32] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I also found this. So you are the first one, Adam, who sent me. You have a He-Man picture. You're the first one who sent me 1000 satoshis, or as I like to call them, 10 bits. And there's also Snowbird, whoever this is, who sent me 1000 satoshis. I guess I got rich by doing this podcast. I can also see how the price went down by a bit because by the time I got this second one, it's less money in the national currency of Romania, but it's the same amount of Bitcoin.

[00:14:05] Vlad Costea: Maybe I bought the dip here. But you do have this ledger that you get to observe. You have all transactions, you have monthly, weekly, daily. I guess you did say that you can use this for taxes or whatever for reporting. And it does present you the total, the present value of it, and how much you gained and lost. So I guess it keeps track of how much it was worth when you got it and then figures out if you made some fiat currency?

[00:14:42] Adam Soltys: Yes, exactly. I think that those totals are a little buggy.

[00:14:49] Cole: You can download the Excel spreadsheet for your accountant slash bookkeeper. And then that gives you the breakdown exactly how a traditional bookkeeper or accountant would want to see it.

[00:15:02] Vlad Costea: Taxes.csv. I just saved the file, even though I think it's such a small amount. I don't have to report this. I don't know. I got to ask my accountant. So this is for the history of transactions. This is the home screen. This is what it looks like. But I do like that you have everything so quickly. You get this profile page, obviously, on Coinos. You get a Lightning address and you get a Nostr public key. And it's instant. But what is the threat model here?

[00:15:39] Vlad Costea: And also, what's your business model? These are two very important questions when you assess how a project works. And another question that I'm going to have is most people get on board on custodial Lightning with Wallet of Satoshi or something. And how are you different from that?

[00:15:58] Adam Soltys: We're very similar to Wallet of Satoshi in that sense. We're more web based rather than a mobile app, like I mentioned. So that's a little bit different, although you can install Coinos as a progressive web app. So if you go in your browser menu there should be some way to add it to your home screen and you can get an icon to launch it in full screen mode. Another difference between us and Wallet of Satoshi right now, I guess, is our Liquid support. I don't think they have Liquid yet.

[00:16:33] Adam Soltys: I'm not sure if they're planning that, but it's something a little different. And also, I guess our focus is just a little bit more on the point of sale side. I think Wallet of Satoshi did add a point of sale feature recently. So yeah, we're just same but different. It's just another option. Coinos is fully open source. So if you're worried about us as the custodians, you don't want to use coinos.io, but you like the UI and you want to have this kind of experience just for connecting to your own node or maybe running a server like this that you can be the custodian for your friends and family or a small community.

[00:17:19] Adam Soltys: Then you could run all the Coinos code on your own website at your own domain. And if you don't like something about the look of it, you can go and fork it and change it and make it your own. So yeah, that's one thing I always like to mention. The risk, yeah, if you're using coinos.io, I am the custodian, I have the keys to the wallet, I could go in and go into the database and set your account to zero if I want to and rug you.

[00:17:53] Adam Soltys: So we always try to be upfront about that this isn't a wallet to put your life savings into or anything more than what you're comfortable losing. I'm not planning to rug anyone. I've been in the Bitcoin space since 2011 and I'm like a well-known public figure that plenty of people know where I live. They come after me if I did something to screw people over, but there is always the chance that I get hit by a bus or the regulators come after me and tell me I need to shut down.

[00:18:33] Adam Soltys: I would, of course, try to make everyone whole if that happened. But yeah, there's a risk of using a third party to store any kind of money. And we are a licensed money service business in Canada, so we are regulated and we're trying to follow the rules and be transparent about what we're doing here. But yeah, it's not like somewhere that you should park your savings. It's for using as a spending wallet, kind of like a checking account versus a savings account. You can use it for the convenience of getting an account really quickly and then having some spending money that's really easy to send when you're going out to places in the real world.

[00:19:22] Adam Soltys: Like if you are going to some of our merchants to spend Bitcoin, it's really fast to just transfer money from your account to their Coinos account. And that's sort of the use case we see for it is just like an easy onboarding wallet. And as a merchant, if you start getting lots of payments and your balance starts to grow and you are getting like thousands of dollars into your account, then what we just added recently was an auto withdraw feature. So you can go into your settings and put in like your cold storage address or even just another Lightning wallet address or a Liquid address that you want to sweep the funds out to.

[00:20:08] Adam Soltys: So if your balance goes above whatever your limit is that you're comfortable with, like it could be $100 or $1,000, then we'll automatically withdraw to your external wallet once your balance reaches that amount.

[00:20:26] Vlad Costea: And I was going to ask you, I discovered something very cool in Coinos as I was walking through the settings. You can integrate Shopify into this, which means that you can use this for your web shop or something so that the money that you receive gets converted automatically into Bitcoin in your Coinos account. Or is it only for accepting Bitcoin and Lightning payments in your web shop?

[00:20:55] Adam Soltys: Yeah, exactly. So if you click on that button, it'll give you a script that you can drop into your Shopify settings. And that'll allow you to add a Bitcoin option to your Shopify store checkout. So we did a small YouTube video on this. If you want to link to our, well, it's my personal YouTube channel right now. I made a video on how it all works. But also if you go to that swag store that you saw on the menu earlier, it's coinosmerch.com. That's a Shopify store.

[00:21:34] Adam Soltys: You can see it in action there if you go through the checkout process. Basically, along with the Visa MasterCard button or toggle, you'll be able to have a Bitcoin option as well. And when you go to pay for the item that you're buying, it'll bring up a Lightning invoice from the Coinos account that it's linked to. And when that invoice is paid, then Coinos will call the Shopify API and mark the order as paid. So it's a really easy way for people with a Shopify store to take Bitcoin payments.

[00:22:16] Vlad Costea: Now I can see this. I was going to ask you something else about Coinos and how are you able to provide service to U.S. customers? Because it seems like Wallet of Satoshi was shut down or at least they voluntarily decided to close down operations in that territory. And do you believe you're going to deal with the same issue if you grow big enough or you think Coinos because it has a special jurisdiction and a different status and it's not an app. It's more of a web application that's open source. You think it's going to have a different treatment?

[00:23:02] Adam Soltys: I do think it was the latter where Wallet of Satoshi voluntarily pulled out of the U.S. And it was just after Binance had been under scrutiny by U.S. regulators, I think. So I think they were just getting out before they got in trouble rather than waiting to see if they'd get in trouble. I'm still doing the wait-and-see strategy. I haven't heard from any U.S. authorities yet. There may come a day where I do hear from them. And like you're saying, if I get bigger and a lot of people are using my service, then I might be forced to shut down or follow some sort of additional licensing or compliance.

[00:23:57] Adam Soltys: I'm just, yeah, I'm taking it day by day and waiting to see what happens there. So I'm not going to pull out until I get a letter or phone call one day. And then if they tell me, you know, you have to do these things or shut down, I will probably just comply. I'm not going to mess with them. I'll just do what they tell me to do. So that's another reason why in anticipation of that sort of event unfolding, I'm open sourcing everything so that if I'm told I can't be doing this in Canada or I'm not allowed to serve people in the U.S., maybe someone else who wants to take the platform and run it in some offshore jurisdiction that the U.S. doesn't have their fingers into as much, or they just aren't as worried about it, that other people could run a similar kind of service. And, you know, it might be large or small. Like, I don't want to get too large myself. I don't want to be custody-ing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of people's Bitcoin because it makes me a target. And it's just extra responsibility to keep the server online and not get hacked. There's all kinds of issues that arise from being a custodian. So I'm just doing it right now to the point that I'm comfortable with.

[00:25:32] Adam Soltys: And that comfort has been growing over the years. So I started really small, like smaller than we are now with less users and less businesses relying on it. And I'm just kind of growing organically. So I have had incidents in the past where there's been bugs that people have exploited to drain the hot wallet on the server and pay themselves money that they shouldn't really have been able to get. And I've just had to eat the cost of that myself personally. I'm always wary of growing too big because the more funds that we're responsible for, then the harder it is for me to eat those costs when I need to.

[00:26:19] Adam Soltys: So just kind of putting it out there for anyone to use and going along for now until something goes wrong.

[00:26:31] Vlad Costea: So who is this for really? Is it for newbies who are going to get their first taste of the Lightning Network? Is it for merchants that want to accept Bitcoin payments? Is it for people who want to do swaps? Because you have all of these tiny use cases, but who is the core user that you have in mind when you design?

[00:26:57] Adam Soltys: It's for everyone. Yeah, it's for newbies, for sure. But I want to have features in there for more advanced users and people who want to swap in between the layer twos of Bitcoin. Really, I just want to make Bitcoin spread more like Bitcoin adoption. I want to see more people using it on a daily basis and making it easy for people. So, yeah, I don't have like a specific target market. It's just for everyone.

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[00:28:17] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I mean, it's a pretty cool project that somewhat reminds me of Alby, but Alby is more of a browser extension. This is a website that anyone can deploy on their own personal server. I was going to ask you about the businesses that decided to integrate your Coinos service. Who are they and what do they do?

[00:28:42] Adam Soltys: I'll let Cole handle that. I've been talking a lot.

[00:28:47] Cole: Yeah, thanks. So the kind of businesses in general have been, our focus is brick and mortar shops, brick and mortar stores where people walk in, walk out. So like small mom and pop stores such as coffee shops, cafes, restaurants. We even have some butchers, barbers, exotic car rental companies in Miami using us. You know, there's even like there's glass shops in Vancouver using us. We have over 400 businesses worldwide using us and 35 to 40 or like over 40 businesses in Vancouver accepting Bitcoin, and over 35 of those 40 plus businesses in Vancouver are using Coinos.

[00:29:36] Cole: And one of the things that separates us from other Bitcoin Lightning wallets is that we have the lowest fees. Our fee structure is very competitive with it only being 0.1% as a conversion fee when you're swapping between the layers of Bitcoin, which is from on-chain Bitcoin to Lightning to Liquid. So only when you swap between those three, you get charged that 0.1% conversion fee. That's why when we go to merchants, I get asked sometimes, why should we... The merchant will tell me, why should we use your Bitcoin wallet instead of other wallets and I tell them stuff like that.

[00:30:16] Cole: I also tell them that we give the businesses free marketing. So we guarantee them more sales because they get more customers on top of the current clientele that they have today. And then we have meetups, we host meetups at some of these locations as well. So that's another selling point that we tell the merchants. We'll have like 10 person meetups at their location to bring more brand awareness to us and bring more brand awareness to the store itself. The business owners really like that. We've had really good results.

[00:30:49] Cole: Doing that, me and Adam, we host about four to five meetups per month on average. And we get new faces almost every time. And it's great. We bring on new users. We've met multiple business owners at these meetups. And those are... Yeah, we are open to onboarding businesses in all countries as long as Bitcoin is legal, but our main primary focus is the Greater Vancouver area. Absolutely, though, any person, any business owner in any country in the world, they can reach out to us on all of our social media pages, if they want our help setting up.

[00:31:27] Cole: We don't charge any setup fees, no maintenance fees. And no credit card fees is the biggest thing because merchants in BC and Canada are paying usually over 2% is what Visa is charging them. Visa or Mastercard, and then Clover, which is a popular POS terminal, will charge you another 1% on top of Visa. So we tell the merchants those kinds of things.

[00:31:51] Vlad Costea: It almost seems like there are two forces within this company, one that builds and is hoping that it's not going to get that big that it's going to end up getting shut down. And one that works against that expectation that it's not going to get too big that brings big customers that have a lot of liquidity, and they move a lot of money every day. It's definitely going to be interesting. But right now, before I ask you what your revenue model is and how you make your money because you did mention a very small fee, but I don't think that's enough to pay for your salaries and stuff like that.

[00:32:31] Vlad Costea: I'm going to perform a withdrawal from the Coinos web wallet because as we say in Bitcoin, it's never real until you withdraw this to your personal non-custodial wallet. And I have this interface right here. So I'm in the home screen. I did generate an invoice from my Phoenix wallet. Which is, I mean, it's not like my own node, but it's non-custodial nonetheless. And I'm gonna show that this is real by copying the invoice and pasting it here. Copy selected text. Let's see, I go to send and I paste the invoice right here. And I hit next. There is a zero... It's two satoshis, the platform fee. And I'm sending 1,500, or 15 bits. Max routing fee. I should put it 500 because otherwise I'm not going to afford to make this transaction. It says insufficient funds, [unclear: 2,000 of]...

[00:33:42] Adam Soltys: Make it 499.

[00:33:45] Vlad Costea: 499?

[00:33:46] Adam Soltys: 498, because the platform fee is two.

[00:33:50] Vlad Costea: Oh, correct, you're right. I didn't do the math to include the platform fee. And now it should transact to my non-custodial wallet.

[00:34:02] Adam Soltys: If we can find a route to it.

[00:34:04] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I'm also using Tor.

[00:34:14] Vlad Costea: Ran out of routes to try after one attempt, see past status. Let me restart my wallet. Maybe it's the fault of Phoenix. This is what happens in live situations. But I picked a very picky wallet and it's actually going to use routing on the Lightning Network. Okay, I got it. It says sent and I got it to my wallet. How do I show it? Let me remove this. Stop sharing. And now I show this to the camera. I did receive it. It wasn't just, you know, a mock-up or something. This is real. This is real Bitcoin that went into my wallet. You have to verify, always, that this is real.

[00:35:02] Cole: Sorry, Vlad. I forgot to mention at the beginning of the interview, me and Adam, we have a rule that we're not allowed to talk about any other Lightning wallets other than Coinos during the episode. No, no, I'm just kidding. That's all good. I'm just making a joke. Like when you showed the screenshot of your wallet. I'm totally just making a joke, though.

[00:35:23] Vlad Costea: No, it's fine because in Bitcoin, we tend to be very skeptical of custodial solutions and we have to verify with non-custodial ones to make sure that the data on the screen is correct. When you receive SPV Bitcoin, you tend to verify that with a full node and so on and so on. We tend to do this because we're crazy about verification and being sure that the digits on the screen are correct. I'm going to keep that in mind. How do you guys make money?

[00:35:57] Adam Soltys: We don't right now. It's sort of a personal project that turned into a business that is not profitable yet. There may come a time where we're able to monetize the app a little bit by charging advertisers or sponsors to have a little space within the app. Or we could add little fun bells and whistles for people to get a custom avatar or badges or fun little things, maybe custom themes or different things within the app that people might pay a little bit for. I might turn on some of those things at some point, but right now, it's just a labor of love.

[00:36:50] Adam Soltys: I'm putting it out there for free to give back to the Bitcoin ecosystem because it's treated me well over the years. I have financial freedom to quit my day job and live off Bitcoin. I didn't want to retire and go and live on a beach. I was a web developer in my previous career. I just wanted to keep my skills up to date and do something meaningful that I think is going to be useful for people and make the world a better place. This is my project that I'm working on.

[00:37:31] Vlad Costea: I have to also ask you at this point about how you set up your Lightning node, because you do have a Lightning node for Coinos and I guess you needed to open lots of channels with well-connected nodes. How does that work? Is it hard work? Because I did try to maintain a routing channel on Raspberry Pi like three years ago and it didn't turn out as expected.

[00:37:58] Adam Soltys: I just got off a call yesterday with Alex Bosworth and Lucas Ferreira from Lightning Labs. They're super helpful. They reach out and check in and see how my Lightning node is going and give me tips and advice on things. I'm running three Lightning nodes. I have two Core Lightning nodes or CLN and one LND node. I do have to manage the channels a bit. I opened a bunch of channels to some big nodes like Wallet of Satoshi and ACINQ, which is the one that Phoenix would use. Bitfinex and Kraken and a bunch of other big Lightning nodes.

[00:38:44] Adam Soltys: A few random smaller ones, just as people ask for liquidity or have come to me and said, hey, can we have a channel? I've done a few of those. And people have opened channels to us, so that's always nice that we get some inbound liquidity from that. I did just start looking at this thing called PeerSwap, which is a Blockstream project that allows you to swap Lightning payments for on-chain payments or Liquid payments with your channel partners. So you can say, oh, we have this channel together, but it's all on your side right now.

[00:39:29] Adam Soltys: I'd like you to send it to me so I can have more outbound and I'll send you a Liquid transaction, let's say. And it'll do it in a way where it's using submarine swaps so that neither one of us is holding the bag while we make this transfer, right? So it's not like I send the Lightning first or I send the Liquid first and then you send the Lightning and I'm trusting you. In the meantime, it's done atomically so that neither one of us can take the money and not hold up our end of the bargain.

[00:39:59] Adam Soltys: So I'm hoping that'll make things easier to manage liquidity a bit. I do have to monitor the node balances because if you had deposited into your Coinos account on-chain and then withdrew over Lightning, I'm going to have this on-chain balance on my server and I'm going to be short Lightning liquidity now. So the next person that comes along and wants to withdraw over Lightning, there may not be enough outbound liquidity from our node to handle their withdrawal request. So I constantly have to maintain that liquidity and keep it balanced so that there's enough and you know, I never know what people are going to want to do.

[00:40:45] Adam Soltys: They might want to withdraw on-chain, they might want to withdraw over Lightning or vice versa. So I'm constantly just trying to keep it balanced and I do that by just watching it daily when I see if the Lightning balance is getting too big, then I'll send myself a Lightning payment to another platform and then withdraw back to myself on-chain, this sort of thing. So it is a bit of upkeep but it's hopefully going to get a little bit easier and more automated. I know the Lightning Labs guys or lots of people that are working on solutions to have heuristics and be able to look at your channels and adjust your fees to sort of discourage people from using up your liquidity and then rebalance and splice and all these fancy Lightning things.

[00:41:41] Adam Soltys: So it should just get easier over time to maintain these things. But yeah, it is a bit of a hassle right now.

[00:41:48] Vlad Costea: Now I'm looking at your node now and before I show it on the screen, I just want to crack a bad joke that you're friends with the guys from Blockstream but it seems like you're working with the LND people for setting up your node. How did the Blockstream people let you do this? They'll tell you, no just run Core Lightning, it's so much better and I think they do have some sort of automation for managing your channels and opening with well-connected nodes I think.

[00:42:23] Adam Soltys: Yeah, they do. There's some automated plugins for Core Lightning as well. I haven't really experimented with them yet. I'm a little nervous to hand over my channel management to a plugin or a script still at this point but it's on my to-do list to experiment with these things. And as for Blockstream versus Lightning Labs, I know there's always a bit of competition and contention between them but I'm just a neutral pleb. I'm running both of them and I'm just sort of watching the landscape and trying to stay on top of developments on both of them to see which one emerges as the more efficient or easier-to-run node. And they both have their pros and cons right now, so I think mostly they collaborate and are both trying to push the network forward and make it better for everyone. So I have a lot of respect for both those teams and, yeah, just trying to be neutral on it.

[00:43:35] Vlad Costea: Hashtag adopt BOLT 12. Anyway, I did find your node and it's right here. You can see the public key. Nobody listening or watching this show can complain that there was no verification and it was just pure shilling, and it could have been just the web interface that doesn't lead to anywhere, that doesn't have any Bitcoin that backs it. There is a 0.88 Bitcoin capacity, which right now amounts to $38,000, 39 channels, 37 nodes that are connected with this one. There is even a public IP address. You're not using Tor, as far as I can tell. It's clearnet, probably for speed reasons. And we can see all the channels here.

[00:44:28] Adam Soltys: It's using a VPS as a kind of proxy. So I have a VPS that I just use to proxy all the traffic to where my actual server is, so that it doesn't reveal my server's actual IP address.

[00:44:46] Vlad Costea: It's still pretty cool. You have so many channels. If you want to open a channel, this is their... There was a QR code here. This is their...

[00:44:54] Adam Soltys: This is our LND node, actually. So our biggest node is the... It's just ln.coinos.io.

[00:45:03] Vlad Costea: Oh, interesting. Let me look that up. Oh, this one? Yeah. Oh, you have 8.9 Bitcoin in capacity. That's remarkable. So this is the Core Lightning one?

[00:45:22] Adam Soltys: Yes.

[00:45:25] Vlad Costea: Okay, remarkable.

[00:45:30] Adam Soltys: And yeah, in case anyone is running their own Lightning node, check out this PeerSwap tool. I'd heard about it a while ago, and it had been something I wanted to play with, and I finally got around to it just the other day, and it's really cool. You can just add it as a plug-in for Core Lightning, or it works with LND as well, and it's a good way of just you know swapping your channel balances with your partners, your channel partners, if they're also up for it, if they're running the software too, then, there's communities behind it, like there's a Telegram group and a Discord channel, so you can reach out and meet other PeerSwap node operators and coordinate with each other.

[00:46:20] Adam Soltys: Hopefully someone will build an actual like marketplace tool or something to help automate it and do the swap ads and stuff on a website or something where you don't have to message people on Telegram manually, but I could see that coming around in the future.

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[00:47:48] Vlad Costea: It's a pretty cool service, I gotta admit. You're very well connected with other Lightning nodes. You have a lot of capacity, so you can handle pretty large transactions. I think I heard Cole mention something about motorcycles or something. If someone buys a Harley-Davidson, I think you have enough capacity to handle that type of purchase, which is useful. And it's so simple to use. So...

[00:48:20] Cole: Well, like, the thing is, is with those size of transactions, it might not always be Lightning. I myself have done... A lot of people who don't understand the Lightning Network, they talk bad about the Lightning Network, like even people in the Bitcoin space. Like, I shouldn't say a lot of people, but I've come across many people who are Bitcoiners in the Bitcoin space, and they say bad things about the Lightning Network. They don't really fully understand it because they haven't used it very much, is what I've... is the pattern that I've seen with people who talk bad about Lightning Network. And like, I've done five-figure transactions on the Lightning Network, like meaning $10,000 or more. I've done that. Like, it works, right? Some people say, oh, well, you can't do 500 or more on Lightning transactions or it'll fail, right?

[00:49:07] Cole: Well, I mean, sorry, I mean, you're wrong. So regarding your point about the motorcycles, so it's a luxury car rental company in Miami. So for those transactions, even if for whatever reason, you know, Lightning doesn't work for a $1,000-per-day rental, because those are the rental costs for that company, you can try on-chain, just do on-chain, right? On-chain transactions will also work if a really large Lightning transaction doesn't work for whatever reason. I don't know, Adam, if you want to add to that.

[00:49:38] Adam Soltys: Or Liquid. Liquid will be cheaper and faster, but it can handle arbitrarily large amounts.

[00:49:48] Vlad Costea: Yeah. How do you see the Liquid Federation? Because it seems to have these waves of adoption, and at one point, because of, or thanks to Raretoshi, which was a platform that you built, it started to grow organically and have a community. And then ironically, Adam Back was saying on Twitter that NFTs are a scam and you should not do them and stay away from them. And that sort of prevented people from actually joining Raretoshi. And at the time it was a Blockstream platform. It was not associated with JAN3, which is Samson Mow's company.

[00:50:30] Adam Soltys: Yeah, I really like the Liquid Network. I like the technology behind it. I like the team behind it. The fact that it's federated custody doesn't concern me too much. Yeah, it's on the spectrum of ultimate security. Bitcoin on-chain is still... This is going to be the king. But when you want a little bit more convenience and, yeah, like cheaper, faster transactions and more private transactions, because they support confidential transactions on Liquid, it's a good kind of middle ground between on-chain and Lightning. That's the way I look at it.

[00:51:16] Adam Soltys: So it's better than trusting a single custodian like me, which you're doing with Coinos, or a single custodian like Coinbase or something like that, where it's just one entity. Even if it's a corporate entity, it's still one company that could go wrong or get shut down or have problems. With Liquid, they were careful to select the functionaries from multiple different jurisdictions and geographic locations. So they're spreading out the risk that if any one of them gets into trouble from regulators or there's a natural disaster in their data center or something, there's redundancy, that, you know, you need five of them, I think, to go offline all at once to cause problems.

[00:52:10] Adam Soltys: And even then, there's like another emergency backup that Blockstream can step in and rescue the funds if the network were to halt like that. But yeah, as long as 11 or more of them are online and signing blocks and processing transactions running the network, then it should be okay. And I have a lot of trust that, you know, Blockstream did it right. And were careful about selecting these functionaries and setting them up with these hardware signing modules and stuff, to do it in a way that's very secure and reliable. So I always encourage people to look more into Liquid, because I think it's kind of an underrated thing that had a lot of FUD and naysayers saying that it's custodial, and it's... I don't know.

[00:53:07] Adam Soltys: I don't know what all the FUD is. It's not that... Yeah, it's had a bad name or bad rap from some people, but I think it's really interesting tech. It's like a sandbox for new Bitcoin developments, like a testing ground for covenants. And previously, like, they tried out SegWit on Liquid or Elements before they launched it on Bitcoin. So because it's a fork of Bitcoin, it's a way for the developers to play with new and interesting technology before they actually deploy it to the main Bitcoin network. So it's good to support it because, I don't know, as Bitcoiners you want to see Bitcoin constantly improving, right?

[00:53:55] Adam Soltys: So you got to support the developers that are working on these new things.

[00:54:02] Vlad Costea: Now, it's nice that you spoke about the security threat model in Liquid, but my commentary was more about the adoption of Liquid and the fact that it seemed to get traction at one point, and then the users kind of left, and now it's getting traction again. But it seems to have these cycles where usage goes up for a while, and then for the rest of the year, I guess, nobody pays too much attention to it. And what do you think it takes for Liquid to get constant usage?

[00:54:37] Adam Soltys: I think a bull market will help because when the fees go up, then people are going to be looking to keep their costs low and they'll start to explore these other layers. And Lightning is kind of complicated, like we discussed a little bit here. It's not super easy to manage your channels and run your own node. So Liquid has this nice property of if you want to cold-store your Liquid on a hardware wallet or a paper wallet, it's the same model as Bitcoin. You're generating a private key and deriving an address from that, so you can move all your funds to this like offline wallet and you don't have to worry about liquidity management.

[00:55:25] Adam Soltys: You can put in as much Bitcoin as you want there and it'll just sit there offline. But it's going to be less congested than the Bitcoin network because, yeah, it's a second layer, so it's always going to be cheaper, the fees are going to be lower. And if the fees on Liquid started to actually, like, go higher and Liquid started getting full blocks in some sort of scenario where it's really getting a lot of usage, then of course you could have Liquid two or Liquid three. Like, there's no limit to how many sidechain networks you could run. You could even have different functionaries or other custodians running the network.

[00:56:11] Adam Soltys: So you could have multiple kind of Liquid clones all running, and people just use the one that they trust and that is the cheapest, whatever balance between those two factors they're comfortable with.

[00:56:31] Vlad Costea: Coming back to Coinos, I wanted to ask you how the swapping mechanism works. Because you can deposit or withdraw, let's say you receive Bitcoin over the Lightning Network and you want to withdraw to the Liquid sidechain. You have this option to do it, but how does it work in the background? Do you actually have liquidity in Liquid that backs this swap, or do you use a third-party service like SideShift or whatever?

[00:57:01] Adam Soltys: Yeah, we have our own liquidity. So I'm running a Liquid node and I keep some liquidity in there to handle the withdrawals. So I mentioned, sort of talking about monitoring the balance between on-chain and Lightning. Well, it's actually three different balances I'm monitoring, to keep all of them sort of in balance. So if someone wanted to do a big Liquid withdrawal, I have enough there to handle that. And then I will have to go out to a SideSwap or do, like, a direct peg-in or peg-out on the network myself to, you know, rebalance that liquidity once in a while. I did have a Liquid PAK key, which was supposed to give me the ability to do my own peg-outs on Liquid.

[00:57:48] Adam Soltys: So I could take Liquid Bitcoin and convert it back into regular Bitcoin myself without having to go through a third party. But I lost the key for that, I'll sheepishly admit to that. And I'm waiting for them to roll out, like, an update to the functionaries with my new key, so I'll be able to do that again. So right now, yeah, I have to go through, like, a third party to trade Liquid into regular Bitcoin. And yeah, there's SideSwap, or Boltz offers that as well. But I really like the Vulpem Ventures team. I'm a big fan of theirs too. They're working on more, like, decentralized exchanges for Liquid, so that you can, like, atomic swap into Liquid and other Liquid assets as well.

[00:58:47] Adam Soltys: You could trade Tether on Liquid for Bitcoin and do it in a way where there's no counterparty. You're directly doing a peer-to-peer trade with whoever you want to swap with. And they're building automated market makers and using covenants and doing all this sort of moon math to facilitate that, where it's, like, truly trustless and decentralized. So yeah, they're working on interesting stuff there, but just need better UX and more awareness and volume and liquidity to make it more interesting. Yeah.

[00:59:33] Vlad Costea: And something else which I missed during my presentation, but I guess it's nice to leave what's flashy for the end: you have this map. So here in the menu, you go to map, and you see all of these places which accept payments. I guess they accept Lightning in general, it's not exclusive to Coinos, but you can use your Coinos wallet in one of these locations. And these are all across the Vancouver area of Canada. You seem to also have something in... Where is this?

[01:00:12] Adam Soltys: Kelowna. That's the town in British Columbia.

[01:00:19] Vlad Costea: Okay, you also have places in Minnesota and close to Detroit.

[01:00:26] Adam Soltys: I don't know what those are. I haven't clicked on them myself yet.

[01:00:31] Vlad Costea: Yeah, it's a lot of fun. I guess this is a collection. Oh, you even have the username of that. This is an optometrist, and they sign up to Coinos and they have this username.

[01:00:44] Cole: Yeah, he's actually getting volume too. Like, he's actually having sales with people paying for their eye appointments, and he's posting videos about it on X and other socials.

[01:00:56] Vlad Costea: [unclear: You] also have some businesses in Tampa: the Selfie Museum. Wow. The Embassy Flex.

[01:01:06] Adam Soltys: That's the luxury car rentals.

[01:01:09] Vlad Costea: And there's a third one here, Simona Flowers Design. I just gave them free advertisement on my podcast. And you also have in Guatemala... No, it's El Salvador. Interesting. Some Bitcoin clothing shops. You have Blanca...

[01:01:30] Cole: I actually bought a shirt from the clothing shop there when I was in El Salvador, and it's really, really cool clothing. I recommend everyone to check it out.

[01:01:42] Vlad Costea: There seems to be also a network effect on the East Coast here in South America. Is this Paraguay? No, it's Brazil. Sorry. So you have on East Coast of Brazil. Some shops. I'm surprised that there's nothing in Argentina going on because honestly it's a huge country with a lot of Bitcoin adoption. Interesting. So all around America, North and South, you have these merchants, nothing so far in Asia or Africa or Europe or Australia. But it is interesting because you started out in Canada and you branched out, you started getting more merchants to accept payments.

[01:02:32] Vlad Costea: I see that you have a couple of places in Mexico: [unclear: Dulcería Mauri Sabel]. Hello.

[01:02:41] Adam Soltys: Yeah, I haven't even looked at all these.

[01:02:46] Vlad Costea: It's definitely an interesting way to look at your product, you know, because some of these are users who have their Coinos IDs listed. And you can see, oh, this is this guy, Sea Salt Restaurante.

[01:03:01] Adam Soltys: And actually, all of the pins on this map are because they've tagged themselves as using Coinos on OpenStreetMap. So these merchants presumably are using Coinos to take payments, which means they can accept Lightning, Liquid, or on-chain payments. But if you want to look at a bigger map, if you go to btcmap.org, that'll have all Bitcoin merchants, no matter what wallet they're using. And of course, the Coinos merchants will be a subset of those. So you'll see all of these ones, but many others as well.

[01:03:44] Vlad Costea: Hey, it's a fun hobby just to click on businesses. See... Oh, this is... What is this? A restaurant and bar. If you're ever in Vancouver, you can look for Poseidon Restaurant and Bar, and they're gonna accept Bitcoin payments, and they're also on Coinos. The more you know, I guess. I'm not sure if I'll come to Vancouver anytime soon, but it does seem interesting. Minnesota and Wisconsin, you know, congratulations on getting so much merchant adoption.

[01:04:18] Adam Soltys: Thanks. Yeah, it's in large part due to the Bitcoin community in Vancouver here. We've got, like, a lot of Bitcoiners who are willing to go out and spend their sats and want to see an actual economy develop, and not just HODL and save it and hoard it. So we're always encouraging people to go out and spend your Bitcoin in places that take it, to support them, to show them that there's real demand and volume, to hopefully encourage them to talk to their friends, get more business owners on board, and actually have a Bitcoin economy develop where you don't have to cash out to fiat or load, like, a credit card and continue paying these processing fees and stuff when you could just be doing direct Lightning payments to each other and saving all those fees that are being extracted by middlemen.

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[01:07:04] Vlad Costea: It's definitely interesting that you're trying to turn Bitcoin into a currency for payments, and most people see it as a pet rock, basically. They buy it, they put it in cold storage, and they even brag about not ever spending it on anything.

[01:07:21] Vlad Costea: And they think that long-term it's going to make them rich. But there is no way anything can make you rich unless there is real demand for it. And for it to have demand, you need to build the market. And by building markets, you're actually making everyone else who's not participating in the economy rich. And I was going to ask you, how do you reconcile the thought that you're building something which gets discouraged many times and people will call you crazy for attempting to make Bitcoin a currency when people like Michael Saylor say, no, just buy it and never touch it. Just hold it.

[01:08:00] Adam Soltys: Yeah, I think you kind of nailed it. Like, if you want to see Bitcoin grow and get into the hands of more people and become adopted, then we have to show people that it's not just a speculative investment, that it actually has some utility. And savings, you know, having an inflation-proof savings vehicle is, you know, probably the number one utility, but payments is a huge utility too. It's like, and it is better than the status quo there. Like merchants, like Cole was mentioning, they're all paying 2%, 3% to take these credit card payments.

[01:08:48] Adam Soltys: They could be saving quite a bit by taking Bitcoin. And once a merchant acquires some Bitcoin and they get a feel for how it works, they get to see number go up, and they have a balance in Bitcoin that they're now wondering, well, what do I do with this? They might then go and spend it at other merchants, or they might start to pay their staff with Bitcoin. They might start to ask some of their suppliers if they can pay them with Bitcoin. And this is how we are going to get to a Bitcoin standard or a Bitcoin economy where it's not just a niche thing that libertarians use and sit on. It's, you know, the global money of the world.

[01:09:35] Adam Soltys: And that's going to grow the whole market, right? There's going to be more people investing in it, holding it, and that's going to drive the price up, which is going to allow more people like me to quit their day jobs and start working on better things. It's a virtuous cycle. If we get out there and spend our Bitcoin and spread Bitcoin to as many people as possible, then the world's going to become more efficient and become a better place sooner rather than later.

[01:10:08] Vlad Costea: I guess by now the people watching and listening, they made their opinion of what Coinos is and whether or not it's useful to them. But let's say that you get another chance to persuade them. Maybe that they're not interested based on the presentation so far. What would you tell them to convince them to sign up to the service and try it out?

[01:10:39] Adam Soltys: I don't know. Yeah, I think we covered the basics. It's super easy. And I'm not that interested in like convincing people to use Coinos specifically. I more want to see Bitcoin in general adopted. So if it doesn't sit well with you and you like a different wallet, I don't care. I just want to see more Bitcoin in general, but I do think that Coinos is one of the easiest and simplest wallets. And we're trying to have like the best user experience for merchants specifically. So we didn't even mention this yet, but I've been pushing out these Coinos printers. So this is like a little receipt printer that we've been giving to a lot of the merchants that are taking payments in store.

[01:11:29] Adam Soltys: And I believe this is a bit of an innovation because rather than having the staff have to pull out like a phone or a tablet or some like device and generate a QR code and then have the customer come in and scan it. And it's just a little bit, it's cumbersome compared to just tapping like a credit card. So with these, you don't have to do the whole QR code thing. The customer just goes in and they go to the merchant's profile page on Coinos and they send the payment. Like, the merchant has to tell them what they owe first, and they put it in dollars and it converts it to sats, and they send it and the merchant just gets a receipt. And it's a way simpler, more friendly process for staff and people who aren't like trained on how to use a Bitcoin wallet because they just get a little paper receipt that comes out and it tells them you got, you know, like a $10 payment or whatever and they just put it in the till and treat it like cash.

[01:12:33] Adam Soltys: So it's a, yeah, just like a better user experience for both the merchant and the customer. And it's these kinds of, you know, little innovations that we're trying to work on to just make Bitcoin as easy as possible so that you don't have to think about too much of how it works behind the scenes. It's just you put in the amount, you press send, and the payment goes off, and you're done.

[01:13:04] Vlad Costea: No, that was the most [unclear: convenient answer]...

[01:13:05] Adam Soltys: Maybe Cole should give his pitch as well, because I'm just rambling here.

[01:13:13] Cole: Yeah, I would say that we have over 400 businesses using us worldwide with success. And then the 35-plus businesses using us in Vancouver are all getting increased sales. And they're really happy with using it so far. So that's just some more evidence that the system actually works and the Bitcoinization amongst users and merchants in general really is being helped with our wallet. We do have the lowest fees in the world: 0.1%, a conversion fee, which is optional. You do not pay that. Coinos does not charge you at all when you're doing transfers from Lightning to Lightning. So you stay within the Lightning Network, Coinos doesn't charge you anything.

[01:13:58] Cole: And then with our auto withdrawal feature, that can help you use Coinos in a semi non-custodial way. You would have your cold storage wallet. I'm a massive believer in cold storage. Of course, me and Adam both teach people about non-custodial and how important it is with cold storage. So you can have your account threshold to $100, so that when your account balance reaches $100, it auto withdraws to your cold storage wallet as the sweeping feature. And it's extremely easy. You can make an account in less than 30 seconds. And yeah, you can make an account in less than 30 seconds. No KYC, no email. We don't store your personal data. So those are some good points to consider.

[01:14:41] Vlad Costea: For people wanting to follow the Coinos project or follow you personally, what is the best way to do that?

[01:14:52] Adam Soltys: You can go to our homepage, coinos.io, and down at the bottom of the homepage we've got a Linktree that has a bunch of our socials linked, so you can get to our other social media accounts on Twitter and Nostr and YouTube and Instagram, Facebook. We've got everything, so find us wherever you like to hang out. Probably personally, I'm most active on Twitter and Telegram, so if you want to reach me, or send me an email, I'm adam@coinos.io. Yeah, Cole, anything else you want to mention?

[01:15:35] Cole: Yeah, I would say I'm most active on Telegram and you can reach out to me in the Coinos Telegram group chat, and the link to that is on the bottom of our homepage. We'd be more than happy to talk to everybody who's interested in using Coinos, not just as a merchant, but even if you're just a singular user, reach out to us in the group chat and we'll be more than happy to help you.

[01:15:59] Vlad Costea: Yeah, I'm really proud of you guys. Now that I look at what you built and I see that this web wallet, which seems so basic in principle, has so much depth hidden underneath it. And much more than that, you were able to have some real world merchant adoption. And that's the most difficult part. And the fact that you were able to get some of this done is really impressive. And I'm happy that I got to interview you now that you have about 400 businesses accepting. Maybe we'll do another one when you are way over 5,000 or whatever, and that should not take too long if we get a bull market. And thank you very much, guys, Adam and Cole. You did a pretty good job presenting Coinos. Guys, go to coinos.io if you want to check it out, and I guess I'll see you in the next one.

[01:16:53] Adam Soltys: Thanks, Vlad.

[01:16:55] Cole: Thank you very much for having us, Vlad. We really appreciate your time.