This is a transcribed excerpt from the “Bitcoin Magazine Podcast”, hosted by P and Q. In this episode, they are joined by Lightning Lab Business Development Manager Ryan Gentry to talk about how the company is building capacity to use stable coins. on the Lightning Network with their new Taro protocol.
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Q: I want to talk about stablecoins with you and have this conversation about: Are they needed in the Bitcoin ecosystem and why or why not?
Ryan Gentry: That’s a great question, and it’s the one that really drove our decision to focus on Taro this year.
Rewind to Bitcoin 2021 when we got the news about the Salvadorian bitcoin legal tender law, we had Jack Maller’s amazing presentation. This kickstarted this massive wave of emerging market adoption of Lightning, Lightning Apps and Lightning Wallets everywhere from Brazil to Argentina to El Salvador, Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Vietnam, as everywhere in the world.
I think the coolest part of my job is working with bitcoin entrepreneurs and bitcoin developers around the world who are all trying to get Lightning adopted. Talking to them about the last year as they received tons of new registrations, tons of new adoptions, we were very excited.
As the year started to wind down, we kept hearing this thing repeated from these emerging market entrepreneurs who said, “OK, this has been the best year ever, huge adoption , digits all the way up and to the right and I have now successfully acquired all bitcoiners like in Chiang Mai, Vietnam. Neutron Pay: “We have all Bitcoiners. We have acquired them all. They all use our app. It’s incredible. It’s good. The next level of users that we’re looking to acquire, they want the dollar. »
It was just something that we kept hearing from all over the world, from South America to Africa to Southeast Asia is that there is this next group of users that we want to bring into the bitcoin ecosystem, but using bitcoin for daily payments was a bit too much and they really wanted to use dollars.
Of course, being at Lightning Labs, by definition, you are a Bitcoin Maximalist. I think everyone on the team is extremely bullish on bitcoin. We wouldn’t be building a payment protocol on bitcoin if we weren’t bullish on the bitcoin asset. But we kept hearing from these real people around the world, trying to solve real problems and trying to grow the adoption of their apps that they really needed.
I think it’s just one of those things where if we can provide the same lightning experience we can bring more users into the lightning network we can help all the startups that are pushing bitcoin infrastructure and attracting users and trying to educate users on why bitcoin is important, if we can give them this tool that allows them to reach the next 50,000 users, 100,000 users, million users, I think that’s an absolute win . I think it’s a huge, huge boom for the ecosystem and it’s just keeping up with user demand, which I think is really important.
A side benefit of this that I think isn’t discussed much is that Taro runs on bitcoin rails as it requires a full bitcoin node as it also requires a lightning node if we give the market what it wants in stablecoins, we’re taking advantage of these new companies adopting spreading bitcoin infrastructure and spreading bitcoin nodes and spreading lightning nodes and lightning channels in all those places that they wouldn’t adopt maybe not necessarily if it was just bitcoin.
I think this is an underrated point, just the spread of bitcoin infrastructure. Because if we’re right about what the bitcoin asset is then over time the demand for the dollar will decline anyway and this bitcoin infrastructure will be in place for users to push their demand for the USD at BTC. I think it’s a moment that we’re all really excited for and really pushing for, but there’s just this no bridge in the middle where we have to give people what they want.