S16 E54: Slava Zhygulin & Ros on Stroom Network, Bitcoin Staking

0:46Vlad CosteaHello there and welcome to the Bitcoin Takeover Podcast. This is Season 16, Episode 54. We are live with the guys from Stroom, Slava and Ros, and this is the show which asks the question that others don't even dare to ask. Guys, it's really good to have you. This is honestly the second time when we feature the Stroom Network on the show, and I guess we're gonna have basically a reflective approach, but first let's find out what Stroom is for those who did not listen to the episode two years ago.

1:20RosHey everyone, and thank you, Vlad, for the invitation. My name is Ros and I'm co-founder of Stroom and we're building a yield-bearing BTC protocol.

1:35Slava, do you want to say something?

1:38Slava ZhygulinYeah, hi everyone. My name is Slava, I'm CTO at Stroom Network and as Ros said we're building interest-bearing BTC.

1:48Vlad CosteaSo how does that work? You say interest on your website, there's also the term yield and staking. These terms are to some puritans antithetic to what Bitcoin is about and you're doing this on Lightning. How does it work?

2:06RosYeah, we launched a few months ago. So the first product is a kind of liquid staking on Lightning because currently you can provide BTC to Lightning's liquidity in an easy way and we created the protocol where you can put your BTC and we're using it via Lightning Network. We route transactions and improve the network, improved the robustness of payments, the success rate of payments in the Lightning Network and also take some fees for transaction routing.

2:51This is based on the architecture of the Lightning Network and people can provide Bitcoins and earn some rewards coming from this transaction routing.

3:04And also our users have a liquid token, so we are working on integration of different DEXs, lending protocols, so users keep their deposited Bitcoins in a liquid form.

3:21Vlad CosteaBy liquid you mean something that you can exchange, you don't mean Liquid, the federation from Blockstream, right?

3:28RosYeah, I mean just like a receipt token for deposited BTC.

3:34Vlad CosteaOkay, so to a lot of Bitcoiners this is exactly what they hate. You have a token, you're staking, you have yield, but you're using the Lightning Network and that's the confusing part, right?

3:49RosYeah, yeah, but like the idea this is just a liquid token for accountability, so if you provided some liquidity to the network you need to kind of like have some receipt for this. So it's like a technical thing and the main idea is just to make it transparent for the users for deposited liquidity and so on. And this integration is fully optional and users can decide do they want to use them or not.

4:27Vlad CosteaYeah, I will ask you where the token is issued and how it works, but I also need to give credit to Artem who is the guy that I met last week during the Trezor launch event and he's the one who's responsible for setting up this interview and he did not join the call, so shout out to Artem. So where does this token come from? How did you issue it? Where can people see, for example, what's the total supply, what's the price of it, how it works?

4:55Slava ZhygulinSo the token is issued on Ethereum blockchain. However, technically it can be issued on any other chain, for example Bitcoin L2, like Bitcoin-based blockchain L2s that are built by Citrea, Alpen Labs and other very good teams. So yeah, currently we have it only on Ethereum and it's kind of working like WBTC, which is like wrapped version of BTC. So basically Bitcoins are stored in some like custody, in our case this custody is integrated with Lightning Network, so Bitcoins are stored not only just in custody but in Lightning Network node and these BTC are used to route payments in the Lightning Network.

5:47But in general this token is one-to-one redeemable to Bitcoin and this redeemability is currently supported by the custodian that we are working with.

6:05Vlad CosteaRight, so for the average user they're gonna be, if they want to use the Stroom Network, they put their Bitcoin on the Lightning Network, they stake it with your network and then they get this token that they can use for spending, which is supposedly pegged one-to-one with the Bitcoin that they staked. Is that how it works?

6:28Slava ZhygulinYeah, so you kind of like send Bitcoins to our Lightning node that is stored in the custodian setup and those BTC are locked with the custodian and if you redeem your strBTC token back, so you can receive your Bitcoin back. But if you spend your strBTC to, I don't know, sell it on DEX or whatever, so then you cannot redeem. So basically the other guy who bought strBTC from you, he can redeem this strBTC back to Bitcoin.

7:02Vlad CosteaOkay, so the incentive is for you to actually hold the strBTC until you can get your BTC back at the end of your deposit period.

7:13Slava ZhygulinYeah, yeah, sort of, but deposit period is actually determined by you because in Lightning Network you can remove Bitcoin quickly by closing the channels, so it's not like a very long process. So yeah, I think the main use case for this BTC is not to be sold on DEXs, but the main use case that we see is that people want to use this Bitcoin as a collateral and borrow some stables and do something with stables. For example, I don't know, I'm using some strategy or I don't know, maybe someone wants just to pay their loan for university, for example.

8:00I don't know, like many cases why people borrow against their BTC but without selling their BTC. Yeah, and then you can repay the loan and then redeem your, take your strBTC back and then redeem it to native Bitcoin. I guess that's the main use case.

8:19RosYeah, and at the same time keep your exposure to Bitcoin and also earning some rewards coming from Lightning Network.

8:28Vlad CosteaRight, I'm actually curious how this works with rewards on the Lightning Network, but before that I took a look at 1ML.com which is this Lightning Network Explorer and I looked up Stroom and it seems like there's this public node that's called fortuna-custody-stroom which has 180 BTC in capacity which is like 19.4 million dollars right now with 548 channels. It's one of the top nodes basically right now. It's the eighth biggest in terms of capacity and in terms of channel count it is the 13th largest.

9:12So is this your node? Is this where you run your operations?

9:18RosYep, this is our node. So yeah, okay we bootstrap it. So we have a pretty long time worked on the Lightning Network, we started to work with it I think in 2016 and Slava also at that time worked as a researcher at Bitfury. Bitfury was one of the biggest Bitcoin miners, ASIC producer and supporter of different Bitcoin related technologies. And yeah, so we worked there for a few years and worked with Lightning Network and we started Stroom a few years ago and for that time we had like a test node and this node you mentioned we launched a few months ago. So luckily we bootstrapped it from the scratch, and currently, yeah, we are in top 10 and we think that this receipt token is a big driver for liquidity because before that people needed to choose. If people don't want just to hold, they want to do something with their Bitcoins, usually they like a bridge to some other chains.

10:39At the moment the total Lightning capacity, I didn't check the exact number but it's something around 5,000 BTC, I believe. But like a... but billions of BTC or even tens of billions already bridged in the form of WBTC, BTCB, PBTC and other like wrapped versions, and with Stroom solution people don't need to choose to stake it through a Lightning Network or just bridge it on some other chain. Because they can stake it in Lightning Network, support the Bitcoin native infrastructure and also keep it in this liquid form on other chains.

11:29And we think that this is one of the main economic incentive for users just like to use it simultaneously in different ecosystems.

11:45Vlad CosteaOkay, interesting. I took a look at 1ML. Right now the capacity of the Lightning Network is 4063 BTC which is like $438.4 million. And I was going to ask you why are you so bullish on the Lightning Network? Because you mentioned the number which was 5000 Bitcoin capacity. It seems like we have a thousand less than your expectation. Why are you so bullish on Lightning? Because by all metrics the number of channels and the number of Bitcoins locked on this network is going down year by year.

12:25Slava ZhygulinYeah, but the more important metric for Lightning Network is the volume of payments that this network has processed throughout the year. And so we have really good reports which is published by River Finance. That's a company that is behind one of the biggest Lightning nodes, River. And they are providing payment solutions to their customers on Lightning Network. So they publish a report each second year approximately. So in 2023, sorry, in 2024 Lightning Network processed 1 billion USD volume in transactions. In 2023, yeah, that's correct. In 2024 Lightning Network processed 4 billions in USD value of transactions.

13:21That's according to the reports of River. So that's 4X growth year to year. And this is actually pretty good metrics for Lightning Network, despite the drop in liquidity that is locked in Lightning Network. And I think the reason why liquidity is dropping is because Lightning Network becomes more efficient and channels are used more efficiently. And yeah, so that's kind of like eliminating the need to lock a lot of liquidity in Lightning Network. But answering your initial question why we are so bullish on Lightning Network, because this is really innovative solution from the technical standpoint since it can scale infinitely.

14:15Like the more nodes you have in Lightning Network, the more throughput of the overall Lightning Network. Like if we have 1 million nodes in the network, that means that the amount of transactions that the network can process, it can scale up to billions. And I mean, there is no technological ceiling to that. In comparison, any blockchain, even Solana or any other blockchain, it has ceiling. So there cannot be more than, yeah, maybe some big number like 100,000 transactions per second for Solana or maybe something like that.

14:52But there is a ceiling. So still there is a technical limitation. Basically, it comes from the limitation of the speed of light, because every transaction must be confirmed by every node in the network. And that's what limits the technical limits the scalability of these technologies. But in Lightning Network, one transaction is confirmed by only a small portion of the network. And that completely changes everything and how transactions are confirmed. And that's how the scalability of a network is achieved.

15:34Vlad CosteaRight, but this is purely theoretical, like it can, if you assume that all nodes are using very fast internet, and they're very well connected, and they're able to route this volume of transactions. But what does the data really show? Like how many transactions is your node routing? And how profitable is it?

15:55Slava ZhygulinYeah, that's a good question. So exact numbers, I need to look at it because everything is like updating very quickly. So we have, so we processed 127 BTC of transaction volume, that's for two months. And it was around 65,000 of transactions.

16:27About profitability, I probably can't tell you, and I learned that from other Lightning Network nodes operators. And the people said, telling that, okay, since Lightning Network opening the channel is kind of like public information, so you can see for any node where it has open channels to. And if you know how profitable is that, so you can easily replicate that. And that's why any Lightning Network node operator, they will not tell you anything about their profitability, because they don't want to be replicated. So I think I will adopt this point of view here.

17:13Well...

17:16Vlad CosteaIt is important for people investing or staking on the Stroom Network to know the profitability, because basically, the natural question that stems from this setup is where does the yield come from? And I sort of know the answer, but I'll let you say it. And then we're gonna ask basically, what is the pool of liquidity from which people can actually get their yield?

17:39RosYeah, so as we grow in these two months, we like actively scaling our node capacity and so on. And yeah, at the peak, we achieved more than 1% APY. And this is like a very unique story, because Bitcoin blockchain is not like a proof of stake blockchain. And you need to mine blocks to receive some new Bitcoins. And the Lightning Network is only infrastructure solution without any economical risks, like some price risks and so on, to earn BTC on provided liquidity in Bitcoins.

18:29So and that's why we launched this product, because we believe that this is the true way to use your Bitcoin to generate some profit.

18:42And also, this is the unique way. And maybe in the future, we will have some similar mechanics on layer twos, on BitVM projects, when you can also like provide your Bitcoins as liquidity and earn some fees in BTC. But at the moment, Lightning is the only solution to do this, and like the biggest one, organically grown without any incentivization and so on. Yeah, so that's why we are excited about Lightning Network.

19:19Vlad CosteaYeah, it's interesting that you mentioned other L2s, because I guess next month we're going to have the mainnet launch of Citrea, and maybe in a few months we're going to get Alpen too. And it's going to be interesting to see how these projects are going to take some share of existing L2s and maybe get some users from Ethereum or Solana who maybe want to use a kind of money that makes a lot more sense and they can basically have the same features. To me, it's a very interesting bet.

19:50But if I understand correctly, and to actually ask you a question, your system works in the following way. People have their Bitcoin, they put it on the Lightning Network, they give it to you so that you open more Lightning channels. With the Lightning channels that you open, you're going to be routing transactions and earning BTC. And from the BTC that you earn, you're paying back some yield to the users who basically staked their Bitcoin to you. And as a temporary solution for them to not be completely illiquid, you're giving them this Ethereum token that they can basically swap with other people.

20:26So if they want to get out without closing the Lightning channels, they can just swap the token. Is that correct?

20:35RosThis is correct, maybe a few comments. The first one is that we don't control the money of the users. We use a secure setup with a certified custody and so on. The only reason for this is that the Lightning Network node cannot be decentralized at the moment. So we cannot make a federation to control the Lightning node. And that's why we started with custody stuff. And another thing is that the idea of this liquid token is to make our yield possible without any opportunity costs. So when we say that we can provide some yield or rewards for the stakers or liquidity providers in BTC, that means that users don't have an opportunity cost for this yield because they keep their deposited BTC in liquid form.

21:40So we can launch it on Citrea or we can launch it on Liquid blockchain or at any Bitcoin L2. And it will be also kind of bridged BTC as it works on Liquid, but with additional yield coming from Lightning Network. And with the same price as another BTC bridged or wrapped or communicated to this blockchain layer.

22:18Vlad CosteaOkay, so what is the custodian that you're using for the BTC that the clients are bringing?

22:25Slava ZhygulinYes, as implied from the name of the node that we're running is Fortuna. So it's an Irish-based custodian and fully EU compliant and certified.

22:42Vlad CosteaRight, so basically, what is the percentage of the transaction fees that you earn that you give to the users? What is the ratio between what you're holding to run your business and what you're giving back to the users?

22:58RosThis is around, so we plan to take around from 5% to 10%, just like to cover our operations, but almost all rewards will go to the stakers. On the bootstrapping phase, we started with 20%, but we plan to decrease it to 5-10% in the future.

23:34Vlad Costea20% being basically the fees that you're earning, but as related to the amount that they're staking, is there a percentage like 1-3% of their BTC that they should be expecting to get?

23:53Slava ZhygulinCan you elaborate more, what do you mean? Like some sort of management fee?

24:01Vlad CosteaNo, no, no, no, no, that's not what I mean. So let's say that I deposit one Bitcoin. Are you going to be giving me a fixed percentage of this Bitcoin, or does it really vary according to the number of Lightning transactions that you're routing for which you collect fees?

24:21Slava ZhygulinIt depends on the volume of transactions that we're routing. So we basically operate on revenue share model.

24:32Vlad CosteaThat makes a lot more sense, because otherwise you'd be taking a lot of risk, promising to give a certain percentage, and then maybe you don't route enough transactions.

24:46But I do admire that you're building this on Lightning, and I have to ask you what happened in the last couple of years, because Slava, you were on the show two years ago, promoting sort of the same service, and I'm curious, what's the timeline, what happened in the meantime?

25:03Slava ZhygulinYeah, so from this technical standpoint, that was a big challenge. So the original vision that we had about our project is that we should have it as decentralized, as transparent as possible. And as you probably see, the setup with the custodian is not that decentralized. And the issue with that is that we've been waiting for a big update to Lightning Network, which is Taproot channels. So Taproot is just for a brief review. Taproot update, that's a soft fork that was activated in 2018 on Bitcoin blockchain. It introduced Schnorr signatures and MAST and a lot of different cool technical stuff.

25:55And this one update also made it possible to create a Taproot channel. Basically, the currently in Lightning Network channel is two of two multisig, like original multisig that was available on Bitcoin blockchain since, I don't know, 2013 probably. But Taproot allows you to create a different style multisig that is based on Schnorr signatures and Taproot addresses. And it's much more efficient, more privacy focused and just better than existing solution. Yeah, and everyone was expecting the Taproot channels to be available in Lightning Network, but it's actually a very heavy lift to integrate that into the Lightning protocol, since Lightning protocol is very complicated and making changes to that in a compatible way is hard.

26:53And so Taproot channels was added to Lightning Network as edge nodes, edge channels. That means that you cannot use Taproot channel for routing, you only can use Taproot channel for receiving or sending. And that kind of like, since we desperately needed Taproot channels to create this decentralized Lightning Network node, so it kind of like created this, like we either need to wait several years while Taproot channels will be added to Lightning Network or you need to come up with other solution. So we came up with more centralized solution.

27:40Yeah, but anyway, we still don't want to have full control of funds. In current setup with the custodian, we're only able to open channels, close channels, but we don't able to withdraw money from the node. The full custody is preserved with the custodian of that funds. And the custodian is kind of like guarantees that BTC on that Lightning Network node will stay there. And we have like programmatic security setup based on macaroons on LND that actually programmatically limits us from withdrawing funds. And I think it's a good compromise that you could come up with.

28:22And we've been working on it for several months and currently have it launched.

28:32Vlad CosteaYeah, so I do have to ask you if Bitcoin was to enable some kind of covenant soft fork which allows people to create vaults, would it be possible for you to get rid of the custodian and have everything in a contract that's visible to all the participants?

28:49Slava ZhygulinThat's a good question.

28:54I didn't think about it in depth, but on the top of my head, I think it won't be that. Since Lightning Network channels, it's still 2-of-2 multisig, and it just behaves like a multisig address.

29:23And this channel regulates how you transact with your counterparty of the other end of the channel. And any caveats wouldn't help here to change the trust assumptions that we have in our system.

29:49So the answer is probably no.

29:57Vlad CosteaThat's a bit unfortunate, because we still have to fall back on these custodians. But speaking of custodians, there are at least two other solutions that I know of that do this kind of service, which is staking your BTC. One of them is Kraken, which honestly has a pretty good record of custody-ing Bitcoin, and they promise to offer 1% per year. And there's also StarkWare with their Starknet, and they also offer 2%, if I'm not mistaken. So how are you able to compete with this, and why should users still go for Stroom?

30:36RosYeah, usually this... So to compare Stroom with this solution, we need to understand the nature of these rewards. So most of staking solutions is just staking for rewards in tokens of these solutions, like Babylon. Probably you've heard about this project.

30:56Vlad CosteaI'm not sure, can you elaborate more about Babylon?

31:05RosYeah, it's kind of like, did you hear about EigenLayer and all these restaking solutions? So the idea of Babylon is just to stake BTC and use Bitcoin as a security layer for some applications and other chains. But currently they are paying just in their tokens for the rewards, because there are not any real economic activity there. And if you're talking about Kraken, I think they use these Bitcoins, I don't know, maybe they lend them to some traders for some leverage positions on the exchange or so.

31:52I'm not sure what is the exact mechanic of the yield generation. But most of them, it's like two options. Almost all staking solutions, the first option is just like some speculations and leverage things on trading. And another thing is just like incentivization by their own tokens. So in case of StarkWare, I think we also need to check what is the exact mechanic. But usually this is some nature of the yield. And the main difference is true that our yield coming from the real economic activities, because people just want to send some transactions in the Lightning Network.

32:44And our launch product confirmed that they send a lot of transactions. So we routed more than 60,000 of transactions just like in the first months. And yes, it's a real economic activity. It's the real value of liquidity provision to the Lightning Network, because to send a transaction, they needed liquidity in payment channels. So we route these transactions and collect these rewards for the stakers. And also, I want to mention that we have this liquid token you can use in the same activity.

33:32So we can, for example, launch it on Starknet, and the users will be able to deposit it to some additional solutions to generate 2% or 3% more.

33:46Or you can put it, so when strBTC will be traded on exchanges, Kraken can potentially add strBTC together with BTC to these solutions like on their earning products. So the main idea is that this yield coming from Lightning Network is yield without any opportunity cost. And you can stake your BTC with us in Lightning, keep your strBTC in DeFi ecosystems like on Starknet you mentioned. And for example, borrow some stables for that from some lending pools on Starknet, make some strategies with stablecoins, or you can just provide it to some programs of exchanges and so on.

34:45Vlad CosteaRight, so did you say that you had 60,000 transactions on your Lightning node in the first month?

34:53RosYeah, so we routed, let me check the exact number, but yeah, we routed, we routed almost 65,000 transactions and the total volume is around 15 mil, the volume of these routed transactions.

35:18Vlad CosteaOkay, but if we assume, so can you tell me the average fee that you collected for these transactions? Is it 1 satoshi?

35:28RosNo, actually maybe Slava correct me, but it's around like 0.1% or so.

35:37Vlad CosteaNo, no, no, no, for the 0.1% of the transaction value? Is that how much you're collecting?

35:46Slava ZhygulinMaybe less than that, it depends on the channel.

35:50RosYeah, it's like we also have another element, we call it LMS, so liquidity management system, so we have different channels, algorithms and logic, how to keep these flows of transactions between different peers. So yeah, and in each channels we have different numbers.

36:17But the main thing that the payment volume is higher than our node capacity at the moment, or almost the same. So we already turned over all our capacity in payments, just like in months or two.

36:41Vlad CosteaOkay, so if you have 65,000 transactions per month, and let's assume that the average transaction fee is 10 satoshis, I don't know, is it more than this? Correct me if I'm wrong.

36:55Slava ZhygulinIt heavily depends on the transaction size. Sometimes we can route bigger transactions, and since the fee is actually based on the size of the transaction, which is logical because in Lightning Network, scarce resource is liquidity, and when you send a payment, you rent liquidity on all of the intermediary channels, and you pay for this. Yeah, so for small transactions it can be like 10, 20 satoshis, for bigger it can be like several hundreds of satoshis, so it heavily depends.

37:40Vlad CosteaLet's assume that the average is 100. Because I did some math, if you do 65,000 transactions per month at 100 satoshis each, then you are earning $7,000 per month from routing.

37:57Slava ZhygulinThat was actually for two months.

38:02RosYeah, but it's 65,000 from the start of our node, but it started from zero transactions to some number at the moment.

38:12Vlad CosteaI'm not sure if that makes it better, but basically if we assume that you have made 100 satoshis per transaction, then in total what you made in routing fees since the launch of your node is $7,000.

38:31So what I'm trying to say is that you're going to need a lot more than this to pay something that is competitive to someone who's taking on the risk of staking their Bitcoin.

38:44RosYeah, so currently we are scaling and that's why we are just opening the new channels, testing some new payment directions and so on. But if you consider us not just like a...

39:14It's not the final number of rewards you can get. Because if you can... When you, for example, to make some yield on your BTC, you need like to bridge your Bitcoin to some DeFi ecosystems. And usually when you bridge it, you pay a fee for this bridging and then make some yield on DeFi protocols. But with Stroom you can earn additional yield just like for your BTC and also you have this bridged asset to make additional rewards from the same sources you are comparing us with.

40:05Vlad CosteaTo me, it's just interesting for perspective because you have this 180.26 BTC channel, which is $19.5 million. And you are able to make like $8,000 per month from it, from transaction fees. Which I remember when people were advertising that you can run your own Lightning node. They were saying, well, if you open enough channels and you have good liquidity, you can basically pay for the electricity cost. And also for the cost. The cost of opening channels and maybe also make a profit. I remember at one point Alex Bosworth from Lightning Labs, he was saying that he made one Bitcoin in routing fees.

40:51And it seemed like such a big deal. But at the same time, he was also possibly the best connected node in the network. And he was in the middle of a lot of transactions.

41:00RosYeah, but a lot of businesses, so you can also probably remember that Block, Jack Dorsey's company, they reported that they make like a 10% APY per year with their node. So it depends on their capacity. But as I remember, they have around 10 mil of capacity in their node. So they can earn up to one mil per year. So it depends on the performance of each node. Because if you just open some channels, you're not rebalancing your liquidity, you're not doing any integrations, and you didn't have some like a team and algorithms how to work with your liquidity, the APY can be like zero, because you have some non-balanced channels, or you have just only outbound liquidity without any inbound liquidity into your Lightning node. And the APY will be like zero. But some real businesses like Block, they reported up to 10% APY. So we think that the real numbers is somewhere between. And Lightning nodes with good performance can make like a few percent of APY.

42:39Vlad CosteaRight. So if you say that the number is in the middle, it means 5%. You have twice the capacity of Block, you have almost 20 million dollars.

42:49RosNo, I mean, like in the middle, it's like in between zero and 10%. Yeah, but of course, it's not like a 5%. But you can earn like a few percent.

43:00Slava ZhygulinYeah, and I also want to add that Alex Bosworth node is operating since almost the inception of the network. So it's very old node. And the Block node is also operating for several years. We've been watching it for at least three years, but actually I don't remember the exact date, but maybe it even appeared earlier than that. And this time is crucial for building the gravity in Lightning Network for the Lightning nodes. So since we have a very fresh node, which is very new and people are very cautious about opening channels with us, because they don't know, maybe we will close tomorrow.

43:42So I don't know, maybe something happened. Yeah. So like if the node is very old and it's been operational for years and years, so it signals to everyone that this node is reliable and they can open channel with it. And so these nodes tend to attract more traffic than the newer nodes. So for us, we're currently in expansion state when we like just launched the node two months and we like expanding our business, attract more payment volume. So we kind of like playing a little bit of like decrease in the fee size that we actually can charge.

44:29And that, of course, also influences the performance of our node at this stage.

44:35Vlad CosteaYeah, but at the same time, it does seem that the success of your business is directly related to the success of the Lightning Network. So my question is, how would you encourage people on one hand to open channels with you, which is economically productive for yourself and on the other hand to also do more transactions on Lightning? How do you encourage that?

45:01Slava ZhygulinYeah, very good questions. And actually the first question how we encourage other people to open channel with us. And that's the overall adoption of Lightning Network. I think that's like two different topics. And like regarding the first one, like how we encourage other people to open channel with us. So again, that's, as I said before, so we need to build a gravity about our node that we like run a very reliable, can be a very reliable build here. So, like, and we have currently our like, competitive advantage probably here is that we have a lot of liquidity that we can deploy.

45:49So we always have enough inbound liquidity in channels. So if you open channel to us, and you send the payments to some destination, the success rate will be very high because most likely we will have enough liquidity in the channel to send a transaction. So that's what we're using right now when we like talking to people and asking them to open channel with us. And regarding the overall Lightning Network adoption. Oh, that's a very, very broad question. And I can tell a lot about this. But in general, I think what people see right now about Lightning Network that people actually don't want to use their Bitcoins to spend.

46:37I mean, like buying cup of coffee with Bitcoins, probably not a good use case for Bitcoin. Currently, everyone treats Bitcoin as some sort of investment vehicle or some hedge from inflation, or something that just will not lose value. And that you want to keep somewhere in very, very cold storage, and maybe keep it for your, I don't know, retire account or something like that. So yeah, spending Bitcoins is not that huge use case, as everyone expected before. So and I think Lightning Labs and other teams in Lightning Network, they are working hard to solve that and actually introduce stablecoins to the Lightning Network.

47:30And I think that will create a huge boost to the usage of Lightning Network. And moreover, the teams that are experimenting with stablecoins, they are adding it in a very interesting way. So on the edge, you receive USD or maybe Euro or some other currency, and you send it and then this currency converted to Bitcoin. And then it just sends on the origin, like current Lightning Network as it is existing. So it's as a Bitcoin, send it through several channels, and then on the final destination, and again, converted to USD or Euro or whatever currency.

48:16So it utilizes existing Lightning Network, but also allow people to spend dollars, not their Bitcoins. But for infrastructure companies like us, you still can use Bitcoin, provide Bitcoin liquidity to the Lightning Network and increase the overall throughput of the network and contribute to the adoption of this technology. And yeah, so I believe that will be a huge use case for Lightning Network. So stablecoins. And there are a lot of solutions. So one of them is Taproot Assets protocol that is developed by Lightning Labs. So you can issue stablecoins there on that protocol, and it's compatible with Lightning Network.

49:06And also there is RGB, which is kind of like extension to Lightning Network, which also allow you to create a stablecoin on compatible with Lightning Network. And also there is a Bitcoin L2, Spark, that is developed by Lightspark, which is also compatible with Lightning Network, and also you can issue a stablecoin there. So all of that solutions are very cool and I'm excited to see which one or maybe all of them will succeed and that would be very awesome.

49:41Vlad CosteaI do want to take another look at your Lightning node because it seems to be connected with some of the biggest names and maybe that this will help the listeners to understand that there's some merit to this. They shouldn't be discouraged by the numbers yet. But before that, I got to plug my sponsors. I apologize, guys. So first of all, LayerTwo Labs, which is building Drivechain. Right now you can go to layer2labs.com slash download and you're going to find the sidechain that basically features everything that you find on Ethereum, everything that you find on Zcash.

50:14A big block sidechain, which is prunable, which is optimized for high throughput, basically to support 8 billion users since bootstrapping. And it runs on the Bitcoin Signet, so it's not activated on livenet. I'm not sure if we're going to get BIP 300, but you can test the software and you can make up your mind whether or not this is something that you would like to use. Once again, the URL is layer2labs.com. There's also SideShift, which is the place where you can swap something that you have for something that you really want.

50:49For example, if someone offers to pay you on stablecoins, and as you know, stablecoins are CBDC wannabes and they are not censorship resistant. They are not really private and you should not be holding on to them. And what you can do is basically to put your Bitcoin address on SideShift. You pick the USDT or USDC to BTC pair. And what's going to happen is that the person wanting to send you stablecoins will actually send them to SideShift. They're the ones taking on the risk and you receive BTC to your wallet.

51:23And the liquidity is pretty good. The fees are low. Unfortunately, it's not available in the US, but otherwise you can use it for whatever you may find interesting, including betting on meme coins if you're into that. So the URL is SideShift, which is S-I-D-E-S-H-I-F-T dot A-I. Also, Noones.com is a peer-to-peer marketplace where basically you are trading with citizens of the global south. The CEO of Noones is Ray Youssef, who is known for Paxful, I guess. And he helped that business go to the top. And then he realized that having your jurisdiction in the US is not the way to go if you have this mission to help those who are not helped by the mainstream financial system.

52:14And now with Noones, he made it a lot more decentralized and more peer-to-peer and closer to the hearts of people from Africa, from South America and from the Middle East. Basically, if you trade on Noones, you're going to provide liquidity to these people and you're going to help them hustle their way into this world of uncensorable, decentralized peer-to-peer money. So the URL is N-O-O-N-E-S dot com. And if you're into that, they also have a debit card for spending and a spot exchange. And last but not least, there is Bitcoin.com News.

52:51I'm actually curious if they covered anything about the Stroom Network. So the URL is news.bitcoin.com. Because usually what I like about them and the reason why I advertise them is that they have a much more diverse approach to news. Meaning that they're not solely focused on the US or solely focused on institutions. They seem to be much more grassroots. And I typed Stroom, let's see if they wrote anything about you guys. No, it doesn't seem like it. Anyway, maybe that they will after this podcast, they will find something interesting.

53:30What I usually find on Bitcoin.com News is news about gold, news about other markets, the fear greed index. And basically news about parts of the world about which you don't usually hear on Bitcoin Magazine or CoinDesk. So if something happens in Africa or the Middle East, it's more likely to get covered on Bitcoin.com than other outlets. So check them out. Thank you for sponsoring. And now let's get to the interesting part about your node. Let me put that on the screen. I think it's this one.

54:07Yeah. So I've basically covered my face with this, but you can see that the most connected nodes or the ones with the most capacity to which fortuna-custody-stroom is connected. Include NiceHash, which has 79 BTC. OKX, which has 211.8 BTC. Also Kraken, which has 269.7 BTC. Binance 355.59 BTC. What else? There is also Wallet of Satoshi, if I'm not mistaken. Around here, LN Markets, this is also a big one, 32 BTC. Unbank.com, another Binance one. Wallet of Satoshi that has 161.2 BTC. And so on. So you seem to have gotten all the big names in terms of Lightning nodes to open channels with you. And I guess this is helpful. The main drawback, I think, is if you keep going with this policy of charging 0.1% for relaying transactions, maybe some advanced users will put a setting that will bypass your node and you will not collect their fee. Because if you use something like RTL, which is Run the Lightning, then you can basically choose when you send the transaction that you set the base fee that you want to pay.

55:46And it will search for a route that will basically allow you to pay that fee. If you use a newbie wallet like Wallet of Satoshi, it will just route to the fastest one. But you can also have some custom settings. And I'm curious how you guys were able to make these partnerships and also if you're thinking about relaxing this relay policy to charge a big fee. Because maybe you're going to be able to collect more fees that are small.

56:16Slava ZhygulinYeah, actually 0.1% numbers that I just mentioned for reference. But as Ros already mentioned, fees in our channels vary greatly. In some channels we have two basis points, or even one basis point. In other channels it can be above 0.1%. So it heavily depends on the destination, since some destinations are more popular, some destinations are less popular. And as you have already mentioned, the possibility to set up maximum fee that you have, that you want to pay in Lightning Network, it can actually result in that your payment can fail.

57:11Because usually very cheap routes they use very quickly and then liquidity in the channels becomes imbalanced. And you will not be able to send payments anymore on that destination. So in our setup, we're using super dynamic algorithms that adapt to the conditions in Lightning Network. So if some directions become cheaper, we also lower our fee. If those directions become a little bit more expensive, because of some surge in payment volume to that direction, so we can increase fee a little bit. So it's really adaptive in that sense. And I forgot the first part of your question.

58:06RosYeah, but the main idea is that we don't charge fees directly from the users. We're just acting as a routing node. We understand that some high fees will mean that we will not have any transactions from our node. Because a routing algorithm in the Lightning Network also uses fees as one of the parameters to build the best route to send transactions. And we act here more like scientists who are exploring the network and trying to find the best offer for this liquidity to have more transactions routed.

59:04Vlad CosteaOkay, that's interesting. Something else that I want to ask you is if the Lightning Network is going to get replaced as the most popular L2 for Bitcoin, where do you think you're more likely to move? Or will you continue this business model elsewhere? I think that's the first question. And which layer do you think is better optimized for what you're doing?

59:29RosYeah, so that's a good question. So we updated our long-term vision for more products from Stroom. The first one is Bitcoin layer twos, like a proof-of-stake Bitcoin layer twos when users are taking BTC and receiving rewards in BTC. Something similar to Botanix, probably you've heard about them. So the user is paying their fees in BTC. And if you validate the network, you can receive also rewards in Bitcoin. So for us, it's very important to have yield sources with rewards in BTC. Not just like some Bitcoins or other chains or just incentivization and some coins from other networks.

1:00:25So we are looking for sustainable models to generate yield in Bitcoin for staked coins. And some layer twos work for us because they have this architecture where you can stake BTC and receive rewards in BTC as well. Another thing is BitVM projects. You can also act as operator of BitVM and stake some BTC, receive rewards. This is the second way. The third way is cross-chain swaps. For example, between Bitcoin and Citrea, let's say. Because to unwrap your BTC from layer 2 to the original one, you need to spend some time because of the architecture of BitVM. And if you want to make it happen instantly, you can use some cross-chain swaps. And it's also our vision because you can provide liquidity in Bitcoins. So BTC and some version of Bitcoin on another chain. And you can make instant swaps and charge some small fees for that. And you don't have any economical risks because of all your assets in BTC. So these are the main directions we are looking at at the moment. And technically, almost all of them are already developed. So we plan to launch it in the coming months. And yeah, we'll be happy to share some performance metrics and news in January or February.

1:02:32Vlad CosteaI'm not sure if Nick Schteringard, I think that's his last name, but he was on the show two years ago as one of the team members of Stroom. I'm not sure if he's still around.

1:02:47RosHe's our early supporter, investor, so I just met him yesterday. But he's our advisor at the moment.

1:03:00Vlad CosteaI remember he told me one time that maybe it's not nice to divulge a private conversation that we had. But he told me that it's very hard in Lightning to run a profitable business.

1:03:15RosIn Lightning? The question is, what is your business in Lightning?

1:03:23Vlad CosteaNo, even LSPs are struggling. And theoretically, something like Phoenix or Breeze should be printing money, but they're really not.

1:03:34RosI think that both companies you mentioned, they have cool teams. And I think here, if we speak only about Lightning, I think the main thing is that to make more payments into Lightning Network. And we see that people prefer stablecoin payments, not Bitcoin payments. We expect that launch of the stablecoin on Lightning Network will drive the volume of payments. But of course, we don't see some huge growth of the users in the Lightning Network. But long term, it's still one of the best solutions to focus on, I believe. Because if you understand that people will need to transact Bitcoins in 20 years from now or 30 years from now. I think Lightning Network is still one of the best solutions for payments. If you want to make it without any middlemen and with the same security level as Bitcoin blockchain.

1:05:11Vlad CosteaFor the record, I do like Lightning, but it did not take off and it was sort of misadvertised. The way in which it was presented that it's the only one scaling solution that Bitcoin will need. And that it's going to work no matter what. I mean, there were like 10 years of engineering time that were put into this. And there was no hedging approach like saying, well, if this doesn't work, let's also try this. I mean, there was, but not enough of it. And a lot of capital was deployed into Lightning.

1:05:46And it seems like on one hand, the fact that Bitcoin went up in price so much disincentivized people from spending. And it made them more cautious, plus the regulations that make it more difficult from a taxation point of view to spend it. And on the other hand, I don't know, it always seemed to be a bit buggy or suboptimal. And not as nice of an experience as, say, just setting up an SPV wallet on your phone and receiving funds on chain, even if the fees are high.

1:06:23And Lightning never really got there. It always had some sort of quirks.

1:06:31And I feel kind of sorry because I remember four or five years ago I was running a Lightning node on Raspberry Pi 4. Maybe it was three, four years ago. And I was really hoping that this is going to take off. I was part of Telegram channels with people who were opening channels in circles, were calling this rings of fire. So basically everyone was opening a channel with someone else and we had circles connected to other circles. And there was this mastermind who was creating this topology for everyone to be better connected.

1:07:03But it still wasn't great for two reasons, at least for my node. First of all, because I was using Tor and the slowdowns caused by the network meant that most of the time transactions were avoiding my node because it was not responding fast enough. And on the other hand, I did not have enough liquidity that was optimized well enough. My strategy was to just open small channels with as many people as possible, hoping that I get the microtransactions, but it did not work like that.

1:07:36RosWe started with Lightning Network because this is the best way to generate yield on BTC, we think. Because this is like fully decentralized and without any additional risks, so you don't need to give it to some centralized exchanges or so on. But yeah, if we compare Lightning Network, but yeah, interesting. So when you're saying that it is not taking off, can you maybe tell about some products you like for payments in crypto? Just wondering.

1:08:22Vlad CosteaWell, I still use on-chain, to be honest. There is no reason not to use on-chain when the fees are low for Bitcoin. And then when the fees are high, it becomes difficult to use Lightning, and that's sort of what broke it to a lot of people. The whole HTLC system.

1:08:42RosAnd are you using stablecoins or not?

1:08:44Vlad CosteaNo, I'm not a fan. Okay. If someone offers to send you stablecoins, actually practice what I preach, I swap them for Bitcoin. I believe in free markets. There's actually an interesting article, and I'm sorry for changing the subject a bit, but I read this on Bitcoin Magazine yesterday. And it's called, Tether is buying Bitcoin's revolution, how devastating will the consequences be? And I'm not sure who this guy is who wrote this, they just used like a generic name for the author, Plain Memo. But it's very interesting because it's so true that everything that we wanted Bitcoin to be and all the network effect that we wanted Bitcoin to have is going to stablecoins.

1:09:29And many of the guys who say they're toxic and they're maximalists in terms of Bitcoin adoption, they just look the other way when it comes to Tether or Circle, because most likely their companies are funded by Tether or Circle. And they're working on their pet projects, there are lots of these tiny islands of projects that are being built, which are not really interoperable. Maybe that Lightning in the future will actually help bridge everything together. But it seems like these stablecoins are getting much more real-world use, which we wanted Bitcoin to have, and it's just not happening, at least not at this stage.

1:10:08And maybe that Alex... what's his last name? The guy from the Human Rights Foundation. Anyway, that guy is gonna say that stablecoins are great for the third world, but they're not censorship resistant, they're not private, they don't have the qualities that Bitcoin has. They can just get censored by the mint or the issuer at any point. And if more of these are coming to Lightning or any Bitcoin layer, they're not gonna come in a more free way, which is exempt from this censorship. They're gonna come with the same conditions and it's gonna become possible for holders to get censored also.

1:10:55Slava ZhygulinYeah, that's a very fundamental question or fundamental ideas. Yeah, I agree with what you're saying, but maybe I have just thoughts, that's my thoughts on this topic, but like we live in the world where dollars is reserve currency over the whole planet, and I don't remember the exact number, but it's like 85% or something like that of all payments happening in dollars on all planets. And so it's some very big number. So, and that's maybe okay, but in cryptocurrency space, and like in Bitcoin and in broader cryptocurrency space, people tend to pay in dollars and spend it in dollars, because it is just used to it.

1:11:55And maybe someday we will end up in the world where Bitcoin will be a reserve currency over the whole planet, which is censorship resistant and open for everybody, and everyone can use it, and it's privacy focused and all of that stuff. But I think this change cannot happen very quickly. We cannot just like switch from American centric world to Bitcoin centric world during one night. So it's just a lengthy process.

1:12:37Vlad CosteaYeah, but I don't want to play on this tune for too long, but if you look back 10 years ago, Bitcoin was accepted in more places for payments. Now you can do more with your Bitcoin in terms of borrowing stablecoins or fiat against it, or using workarounds like Bitrefill or something to buy gift cards, or using a third party that will take your Bitcoin and pay fiat for the stuff that you want. I know that there's such service for Amazon or whatever. So today you can do much more of this, but 10 years ago, you could pay with Bitcoin directly at Dell, at Microsoft, at Steam, at Expedia.

1:13:17There were rumors that eBay was gonna support it, and it seemed fashionable until of course we hit the scaling debate. And it seems like since that scaling debate, the actual adoption, which means directly accepting Bitcoin at merchants, has gone down.

1:13:34RosYeah, at the moment like the narrative that Bitcoin is a digital gold is much popular, that it's like a peer-to-peer cash system. And I think this is the main idea, like why people not transact a lot with BTC. They like consider BTC as something you need just to hold and do nothing with it. Yeah, but another thing maybe that like the current world works like an inflation economy and the Bitcoin nature is like a deflation and that's why also people this is not, maybe this is not like the best architecture for like a digital currency.

1:14:35Yeah, but I think that if you want like it to keep your funds in BTC and like you don't want to keep it in USD, you should like make Bitcoin transactions as well, because it's like it's pretty like natural not to like it to use Bitcoin everywhere, not only like it for holding.

1:15:08Vlad CosteaYeah, I very much agree and maybe that I gave you a hard time with some questions during this interview, but at the same time, I do respect that you're basically generating the yield that you're paying to your customers from actual use. So there is a real business behind this, which relies on the number of transactions that your node is routing, which is different from, let's say, what we had like four or five years ago with BlockFi and Celsius that were offering you 3, 4% on your deposit. But what they were doing was to borrow your Bitcoin, so rehypothecation to short sellers.

1:15:44That was their business model. And that was a lot less transparent, a lot less honest, and a lot more risky than something where basically the business model is that you get a share of the transactions that your Bitcoin liquidity is generating. And it's really unfortunate that we're not there in terms of adoption to basically enable this kind of use case to make it scale and make it very profitable.

1:16:14RosYeah, absolutely. Yeah, but we still believe that Bitcoin should be used like only for some economic activity like payments or some security things when you can provide like a security to other like applications or solutions with your BTC and so people will be paying for some real value.

1:16:52Vlad CosteaYeah, is there anything about the Stroom Network and its current design that we haven't touched upon that we haven't mentioned and maybe is interesting to know?

1:17:04RosYeah, also, so we developed kind of decentralized solution for management of BTC. And even like as our first product launched with custody setup, but the second one we plan to launch with like a federation of decentralized entities, much more transparent for the users. And we think it will be cross-chain swaps and all other possible solutions you mentioned before, like L2s or BitVM projects, to be also realized in more decentralized and transparent version for the users. And yeah, we'll see where it goes. Okay. Do you want to add something from technical standpoint?

1:18:06Vlad CosteaNo, I would be curious. Okay, I'll let Slava talk and then I'll ask questions.

1:18:13Slava ZhygulinNo. We covered almost everything. Yeah, so I actually don't have anything to add.

1:18:21Vlad CosteaLike what do you believe is the ultimate purpose of the Stroom Network? Is it to act like a cypherpunk kind of banking service to pay people for the liquidity that they provide?

1:18:38RosWe think that the ultimate goal is like to support some real economic activity on BTC, not just like a model use case, but something more sophisticated, at least payments and like a support different native Bitcoin solutions and solutions with real economic activities, with BTC, with our liquidity, and make some interesting solutions how to use it in proper way for Bitcoin adoption and for yield generation and so on.

1:19:27Vlad CosteaWhat does your community consist of? Like, can you give us some numbers about the users that you have or what countries they come from or I don't know, do you have any metrics about it?

1:19:42RosWe don't know what countries they're from, but usually it's, again, Europe, States and also some Asian countries and at the moment, we have like 10,000 followers across all our platforms. So, yeah, and we have the team is not very big, ever up to like eight people. Most of them are developers, so we are more like a technical focused team at the moment, not like a marketing team. Yeah, but yeah, with the launch of the first product, we plan to facilitate the interaction with different communities more and attract more users with the existing project and working product on the market.

1:20:52Vlad CosteaSo of this community of thousands of people that you have, how many of them actually staked their Bitcoin with Stroom?

1:21:00RosAt the moment, we have like a few big funds who are interested to put their BTC and also some retail users, but proportion of liquidity is I think around 50-50 from the number of the stakers.

1:21:29Vlad CosteaWhere do you see this project in, say, I know it sounds generic, but if you're going to keep doing this and you're going to scale it and you're going to get payments to route a lot of transactions on Lightning or some other layer, where do you think you're going to be in 10 years? And how do you see this evolving?

1:21:49RosYeah, so we plan to launch a few additional products in the coming months and all these projects are Bitcoin related. But yeah, we experiment with different liquidity approaches to use liquidity to support Bitcoin native projects. And we also want to be fully decentralized and transparent in a few years for the users. And talking about like 10 months or like 10 years, you asked, we think that it will be one of the biggest community for management of the liquidity in BTC. And yeah, and some solution where people can not just like model their Bitcoins, but make it work for the coin economy.

1:23:01Vlad CosteaA few minutes ago, you asked me a question about what I use for payments and what kind of experience that I have. I'm curious what you guys are using for payments and if there's any network that offers some benefits that you wish Bitcoin had already.

1:23:22RosYeah, so speaking about payments, I think Bitcoin and stablecoins are best, but I prefer more Lightning Network. But also it highly depends on the counterparty I need to send money because not all accept Lightning payments at the moment. And from technical perspective and features of other chains, I pass the word to Slava.

1:23:57Slava ZhygulinYeah, like I still use stablecoins a lot because just lots of my counterparties where I pay into, they just want to accept dollars. I mean, none of them, but most of them. And that's just a reality. And I think that's the biggest, I mean, the topic that we touched briefly before that just everyone in the world use dollar for payments. That's how it is.

1:24:35Vlad CosteaOh, I appreciate the honesty, but let me reframe the question in another way. Like if you had this magic wand and you could make Bitcoin have a certain feature from another network or improve it in a certain way, what would that be?

1:24:55Slava ZhygulinOh, that's a good question.

1:25:01I'm not sure about like full Turing complete programmability like Ethereum or some other chains have. Maybe Bitcoin doesn't need that, but definitely I want to increase block time... decrease. So maybe we make the blocks every one minute because waiting for 30 minutes for three confirmations, sometimes it's so... I don't know, you're just sitting and looking, oh yeah, my block is mined. Yeah, cool. So yeah, decreasing block time. Definitely want that on Bitcoin.

1:25:41Vlad Costea10 times faster blocks would also mean 10 times more transactions per second, to put it this way, more throughput. But I guess that would require a big change like a hard fork and also a decrease of mining rewards to keep the 21 million cap intact.

1:26:01Slava ZhygulinYeah, yeah. But you said about magic wand. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, if I had a magic wand, yeah, that's what I wanted.

1:26:10Vlad CosteaI mean, there would be tradeoffs, but I think most users like 90 something percent would not be affected. I think that Litecoin proved to us that it's not such a big deal to wait for 10 minutes. That's a very conservative amount of time. I think the first version of Bitcoin, which got launched in 2008, like the alpha version, had 15 minute blocks and then Satoshi decided to decrease to 10. And honestly, we have some very interesting research happening nowadays, like once you discover DAGs and stuff like that, you'll have your mind blown.

1:26:48I don't know if Bitcoin will ever get that, but it's still interesting how much you can push one design to make it more efficient and faster.

1:27:02Slava ZhygulinYeah, I think still overall Bitcoin and other blockchains, all of the technology is still very young and we probably will see a lot of innovations happening in recent years.

1:27:20Vlad CosteaSomething that we also see is that more blockchains are sort of tokenizing BTC. I think Ethereum was the opener or the first one to do this with WBTC, which is not really cypherpunk or trustless because it's custody by BitGo. But it's still, so if Lightning Network has 4000 BTC, WBTC has like 25 times more, more than 100,000 Bitcoin that's locked in it. And it seems like the users just accept the tradeoff, that they get extra programmability and DeFi features for a bit more trust that they have to put into the way that this is set up.

1:28:06But there are two ways basically in which we can extend what Bitcoin does. We either improve the Bitcoin network or we move the BTC to other networks, like lock it and issue it on something else that gives us more advantages. And maybe it will be sidechains, maybe it will be blockchains with tokens of their own, which have different incentives. But if Bitcoin is going to be the money, I guess these are the two paths forward. We can either make it work to have everything that we need, which I think is the preferable solution and is the reason why I promote drivechains.

1:28:45Or we can end up in a world where there's going to be a need for an Ethereum, there's going to be a need for something with privacy like Zcash or Monero or whatever. And there's going to be a need for maybe super scale like Casper or whatever is very scalable.

1:29:11RosYeah, but actually regarding this, like wrapped Bitcoins on other chains. So some Bitcoin layer twos or just projects who position themselves as Bitcoin layer twos. This is something similar to Ethereum with bridged BTC. But they're just like saying that they are Bitcoin layer twos and scaling solutions for BTC. I think that it can work. It will be not just like a one approach in the future. So we still have a lot of different approaches, some experimental technologies and so on. Yeah, but at the moment, I think the biggest use case is still just like a holding and speculating on BTC. But we'll see. As we discussed, the ultimate goal is to create some Bitcoin economy with some native mechanics, how to use Bitcoin and support its adoption.

1:30:25Vlad CosteaComing back to the topic of Stroom, what is the best way for listeners to go and check out the Stroom Network and find out more about how this works and how much they can potentially earn and yield by participating?

1:30:43RosYes, so currently, I think the best solution is to subscribe to our Twitter and we keep it updated and share all our uses there. Also, we have a Telegram group and Discord, but the main idea of a Telegram group and Discord is just to ask some questions and communicate with the team. So all information and news you can find on our Twitter and also you can check our website, I guess, stroom.network, and you can find all our user interfaces there.

1:31:34Vlad CosteaAnything else? Any other resources that people might find interesting? How can they follow you personally, maybe to get to know more about what you're doing?

1:31:44RosYeah, I think you can follow us on Twitter as well and also you can check the statistics of our node on 1ML or on Amboss. Yeah, we have more numbers. But yeah, I think Twitter is the best way to follow us.

1:32:09Vlad CosteaIs there anything that you guys would like to say before we wrap this up?

1:32:19RosYeah, so we think that the future of Bitcoin is bright and we think that this is the best ecosystem to build in something and to work with. And this, like a lot of innovations last year show that there are huge interest for BTC and everything only begins. And Bitcoin is a big hope for our financial system and for our civilization as well.

1:33:10Slava ZhygulinYeah, I also think that Bitcoin has a bright future and we already, I mean, at least two years ago when we spoke, Bitcoin price was much lower than today, as usual, which is great. But also, I believe that everyone needs this open financial world where you can access a lot of financial products and you can choose. And maybe it is a little bit more risky than trusting your money to some banks which are regulated and they are protected. In crypto there is no such protection, so it's much more risky. But I believe all that will come with more products being launched in this ecosystem. And maybe also we need to pay more attention in educating people how to deal with crypto. Because in general, I believe that it's great for humanity because it's open and inclusive and just for everyone.

1:34:38Vlad CosteaYeah, that's beautiful. But it's more open and inclusive as long as we keep it this way and we don't decide that we should filter it to basically create two classes of transactions and say this is fine and this is not fine. Or if it comes from this address, it's good. And if it comes from the other one, then we should try to keep it away. Anyway, no politics here. I'm trying to stay away from it as much as I can, even if it makes me crazy. Thank you very much, guys.

1:35:09Once again, Slava and Ros from the Stroom Network. Check it out. And also I want to thank Artem once again for setting up this interview. And once again, thanks to the sponsors, LayerTwo Labs, Bitcoin.com News, Noones.com and SideShift.ai. Thank you very much, and I'll see you in the next one.

1:35:32Slava ZhygulinThank you for inviting us. I really appreciate it.