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Building the Bitcoin Economy with André Neves of ZEBEDEE

In this episode, we sat down with Andre Neves Founder and CTO at ZEBEDEE to talk about the way an unexpected collaboration and introduction to the lightning network paved the way for disruption in the fintech side of gaming.

Payments & Fintech Insights In This Episode

  • The power of a global currency that can be accessed anywhere the internet exists.
  • Why a tech-savvy younger demographic quickly grasps digital value.
  • The macro impact of enabling micro-transactions.
  • The necessity for interoperable value across the gaming universe and beyond.
  • And so much more!

Featured on the Show

Episode Transcript

Heather: Hi, everyone. Welcome to PayPod. I’m your host, Heather Bodie. And today we are going to be talking about building the Bitcoin economy. Joining me is André Neves, CTO and co-founder of ZEBEDEE. They’re creating new ways to build that Bitcoin economy with the power of lightning. André, welcome to the show.

André: Hey, Heather, great fan of this show. Thanks for having me.

Heather: Absolutely. So, start us off. We wanna get to know you a little bit. Tell us about yourself, how’d you get to this point? What does your career path look like?

André: Definitely, everyone likes to know the origin story, right?

Heather: Yes.

André: So, we can do the brief version. I’ve been building software for over a decade now, and I really have touched every part of the stack. We’re talking about mobile apps, desktop and web apps, backend APIs, distributed systems, infrastructure provisioning, you name it. And over the past decade-plus, I’ve seen the ebbs and flows of the growth of the internet. It’s something that we’ve grown with. We were born in the ’80s and ’90s, so we’re grown up in the internet times. So, software was inherently part of my day-to-day. From as early as, you know, 11, 12, I was tinkering with software and breaking my CPU computers at home. Most recently, I guess the more relevant connection here is I’ve been building software teams for the better part of that decade. And previously to ZEBEDEE, prior to ZEBEDEE, I was the director of engineering at a product studio in New York called Big Human. And I sort of oversaw the engineering, the product development, the strategy around product and marketing releases, and so forth. So, I had a really big overview of how product development worked at scale. And we worked with pretty large companies, small to medium-sized startups, so things like Vine, if you remember that back in the day.

Heather: Yes, oh my gosh. The original TikTok, really.

André: The original TikTok, yeah. That’s what are buried, unfortunately. And then, later on, HQ Trivia, the trivia live show. I worked with Checkr, the verification software as well. And then even bigger companies, right? Snapchat and Facebook were clients of ours, and we worked on their internal tooling. So, I got to see a lot of it. But my real path into fintech happened when we landed a really big account with TD Ameritrade. So, we became their partners in building any and all tooling for their internal operations and so forth. So, I really had to dive deep into how software and finance worked at the time. And now you could say that that’s legacy finance, given that I work in Bitcoin, but that was the gist of it at the time. And at the same time, I had discovered Bitcoin. So, this was around 2013, ’14. And Bitcoin immediately clicked. So, a little bit more on my personal background. I’m originally from Brazil. And Brazil ever since the, and I wanna say the ’70s maybe, has seen five different currencies.

Heather: Oh, wow.

André: Yeah. As the native…you know, the same way we have the U.S. dollar, and Brazil has had a change of currencies, and that’s due to corrupt government, mismanagement, etc., etc. But it was very easy for me to understand the importance of true internet money that could move at the speed of the internet anywhere that the internet can go. So, that was really impactful. And I didn’t truly dive deep into Bitcoin at the time, it was early days. And honestly, Bitcoin felt a bit foreign. Myself, as a product builder, you try to really think of the user, the customer, and provide the best user experience. And there’s this sort of saying that we take internally at ZEBEDEE, which is, if you’re trying to change user behavior, or inform user behavior, or provide a new capability, 10 times out of 10, you need to provide at least a 10 to a 100X improvement in some facet of that experience for the user.

So, when we’re thinking of new products and saying, “Okay, let’s build Bitcoin-based products.” Bitcoin in 2015 wasn’t approachable to just everyone, right? We’re talking about slow transactions on the blockchain, right? We’re talking about big hash strings that are these addresses that you have to understand, and send, and receive, and so forth. So, it wasn’t then that I clicked, that the two things clicked for me and Bitcoin became the focus. It really was the Lightning Network, right? And this is one of the topics I wanted to make sure to cover in the conversation. Bitcoin is this layer-1 settlement for transactions. And then, you know, it’s payments capability, the ability to make millions and billions and trillions of payments on a daily basis around the world. That doesn’t scale in Bitcoin, but it does scale in Lightning.

So, Lightning Network is Bitcoin’s layer-2 payments solution. It’s pegged to the Bitcoin blockchain, you should think of it as like a bar tab. You go to the bar, you give them a card, and so you can transact in that tab in and out, and I can get more drinks, or food, or etc. And then at the end of it, I can close that tab, right? And that’s when you go from Lightning to Bitcoin. So, just very briefly, Lightning really sparked for me because it made Bitcoin approachable in my view. It made Bitcoin approachable from a product development standpoint, but also from a customer standpoint.

And then thankfully, and hopefully in 2018, I was picked as one of 10 engineers to participate in the residency program for a company called Chaincode Labs, which is an R&D company in New York, based out of New York. And they provide support. They teach seminars, residency programs, and funding for open-source developers. So, open source developers in Bitcoin, and adjacent protocols, including Lightning. So, for that moment in time in 2018, I learned from the best of the best, the folks actually writing the specifications and the standard. And then by mid-2018, I was sold. My understanding of Bitcoin tripled, quadrupled. I could see its path and the mission. And then Lightning Network made everything possible on a shorter scale and timeframe. So, that was it. That was my future. And then that leads us into ZEBEDEE, which is where we are. And we started in 2019.

Heather: What an incredible opportunity. Let’s go back to that residency really quick. When you had initially made the decision, they’d accepted you and you’re saying, “Yes, I’m gonna go do this.” What was your anticipated outcome from that time there?

André: Honestly, it’s been one of the things that has defined my path, if I’m being very honest. I think my path would’ve been slightly different if it wasn’t for the Chaincode Labs residency. My understanding of Bitcoin would’ve continued to grow, and it would’ve matured. And I’m sure, as an entrepreneur, I would’ve wanted to continue building something in Bitcoin. But having learned from the cream of the crop, right? That’s really the idea. It’s really the developers building these systems. After the first day, I was enamored with the whole process. And I said, “I’m willing to give up the cushy job that I have, the life that I have because I need to build things in this space, I need to build solutions. This is a whole new paradigm, and I need to be involved.” So, in hindsight, I think it was instrumental in my growth and the creation of ZEBEDEE. But I can’t say that it outlived or things went better than I expected. I think it just was a combination of the folks in the room, the teaching, the topic, and really the passion for change that really drove me. And again, after the last day, we presented our projects, and I was sold. I said, “This is it. I’m ready to take the leap.”

Heather: I know we can’t see each other, but I wish you could see the size of my eyes right now. Because not everybody gets to have those unique moments in life where they’re introduced to something new. And it really does, in that moment, sort of shift the path of their trajectory in a way that they can see and feel. I know a lot of times we can, in retrospect, look back and say, “Oh, you know, I think it was around here, was while I was there that I started to.” But it’s really, I can hear it in your voice that there was almost like an ‘aha’ moment. That’s really cool.

André: It was the moment where part of the residencies we had to build a case study, a product, a project. And it was the moment where I connected my entire life’s work of product development and software engineering by plugging it into money. And that money was global money. And I spoke the language of that money. Does that make sense? It was just code.

Heather: Yes.

André: And that was the epiphany moment it clicked. And I said, “All right, this is it. I can change many things about the world and the industries that I want to touch just by adding money to it, real money that works everywhere.”

Heather: So, this brings us to ZEBEDEE. Talk to us about this decision to launch this new company. And give us a quick overview, what is ZEBEDEE? What do you do? And why is it so important?

André: Yeah. ZEBEDEE is a very particular company in the sense that the founding story is very important, and maybe I’ll touch on that very briefly. So, we’re three co-founders, and Simon Cowell is our CEO and co-founder. He comes from a financial services background. He witnessed firsthand the notion of software eating the world. That’s actually something that we discussed very early on in our engagements. He was in the room when Ben Horowitz was discussing Coinbase in 2014, right? Like, he’s been around all of that. In 2016, he became the head of corporate strategy at Bitstamp, one of the longest-running Bitcoin exchanges in all of Europe. And really, his thinking was, “Okay, I understand that Bitcoin is disrupting finance and this, but what’s the next industry? What is the next thing that is going to be evolved by the presence of Bitcoin?”

And it kept coming back to gaming, right? Gaming, gaming, gaming. And then my second co-founder is Chris Moss, who was an app and game developer. He was actually the first person to build a Bitcoin game back in 2013. He’s seen the ups and downs of all of the tokens and all of the NFTs. And he’s actually known as the grandfather of NFTs because he built the very first one in 2014 before they were even called NFTs, right? But really, from his side, he comes from the game development background. So, Simon comes from financial services, Chris comes from gaming, and I come from building product systems, platform software. And so these are the three legs of the tripod. And we got together and realized that three of us had virtually the exact same ideas at different times. And we were all sort of aching to pursue these ideas.

And we said, “Okay, this is it. Let’s all quit our jobs and jump on board.” And that’s when 2019 we met. And a funny tidbit is, I actually only met in person with Simon and Chris three times before we all decided to exit our previous engagements and careers to pursue this. And so it really was that leap of faith. And, you know, I believe that at the moment we’re just over 55 people as a company. And so it’s really grown tremendously. But that was 2019. And maybe I’ll touch on why gaming, right? So, we have the three legs of the tripod for the company to succeed. Why gaming? So, the gaming industry is extremely prone to receive this technology, right? We’re talking about a younger demographic, we’re talking about tech-savvy folks that know hardware, they know software. They were grown up on the internet just like all of us here, right? And specifically, they understand digital value. They understand the notion of digital money.

But money that isn’t U.S. dollars, yen and pounds, like money that is money inside of some virtual environment. The ZEBEDEE tagline is powering real economies in virtual worlds. And so gaming and gamers out there really understand this notion of value. Every game has points, right? Every game has rewards, every game has economy. And if we were to just strip out these siloed economies, and these siloed monies, and these in-game points and substitute that for real money, that has value in and out of the game, that has value across other games, that has value down the street on the local shop, right? That was the mentality. Can we introduce a bidirectional flow of value here by using Bitcoin, right? The mission is to introduce a better flow of value to any digital experience, whether it’s a game, whether it’s a platform, a service, an app. The same way that you and I are talking right now and sending data, and video, and messages, you should be able to send money. This is 2022. This is not a lot to ask. And so that’s where ZEBEDEE came from is, can we disrupt the fintech side of gaming and provide those capabilities?

Touching on specifically what we provide. So, ZEBEDEE is a gaming fintech, and we provide tools and applications for gamers and game developers. So, we try to target the two consumer sides. The game developer side, if you’re a developer listening to this, you can think of APIs, SDKs, platform, developer dashboards, your entire suite of products that you would need to plug ZEBEDEE, and in this case, plug Bitcoin into your game or into your online experience in whatever shape or form you’d like, right? It’s entirely up to you, whether you want to receive payments, whether you want to send rewards. We just provide the bare bones ins and outs and plug and plays. And that’s for the developer side.

And then on the consumer side, we provide tools for consumers that wish to engage on these now money-enabled experiences, right? So, we’re thinking about streaming tools with the ZEBEDEE Streamer, we’re thinking about community-building bots, and tools like that with the ZEBEDEE bots for Discord and Telegram. We’re talking about mobile apps and wallets, like the ZEBEDEE wallet for iOS and Android. And really it’s a way for gamers to engage with this new world, right? This new world of gaming that has real money, that has the ability to earn rewards that can be used outside of that game. So, that’s a long-winded way of explaining ZEBEDEE in all of its facets.

Heather: Beautiful. You’re incredibly articulate. I’m so grateful.

André: Thank you.

Heather: Simultaneously, I’m like, “Oh, he answered that question. He answered that.” And I was thinking this, and then you answered that. I love it. I absolutely love it. So, let’s talk about what you were just alluding to or just referring to, the powerful impact of streamers, right? They’ve absolutely revolutionized gaming. And a lot of platforms, like Twitch, to sort of jump to the forefront of tech. Now, instead of just accepting payments from premium subscriptions and donations, as I understand it, ZEBEDEE offers ways for streamers to earn Bitcoin, right?

André: Correct.

Heather: So, I guess what I’m most curious about is the response you’re getting. Is there a lot of really positive, and big, and quick adoption, or are you getting some pushback in that process?

André: There’s two important points to highlight. Just before I touch on streaming, I think the biggest question we get, in general, is like, why Bitcoin? Why should I, as a streamer, in this case, why should I use ZEBEDEE Streamer to receive my payments, and donations, and tips, and messages from my audience in Bitcoin, rather than using the existing infrastructure, the existing financial system that currently exists, the tools, and so forth? And I just wanted to highlight, Bitcoin is not just about price speculation, trading, market dynamics, etc. It’s inherently better technology, right? I think it’s important to talk about the use cases. Traditional payment providers incur many, many fees. We’re talking about processing transaction fees, we’re talking about credit card fees, we’re talking about platform fees, international settlement fees.

A lot of these can go from 1% to 5% to 10% of transaction amount, right? And it’s specifically, it makes it prohibitive for actual micropayments to occur. So, you can make micropayments with cash. Like, I could give you a penny, right, but that doesn’t transfer digitally. The cheapest thing you can buy online is 60 cents on the app store, which is the cheapest app. And really when it hits your bank account, it’s a dollar-plus because of 30% fees and additional credit card fees. So, why do we use Bitcoin? It’s because it’s inherently better technology. With the use of Lightning, we’re able to get fees that are essentially, essentially minuscule, near zero for various amounts, right? We’re talking the ability to make almost feeless payments globally. And then couple that with the ability to make truly micro transactions. So, whereas Bitcoin, right, we talk about Bitcoin being this big…1 Bitcoin is worth $20,000 right now. So, it’s this big item, just like $1 equals a 100 cents, one Bitcoin equals 100 million Satoshis. It’s just a unit of a Bitcoin.

And so in the Lightning Network, we’re able to transact in Satoshis. And what happens is streamers can now use ZEBEDEE streamer, for example, to show a QR code on the screen and interact with their audience members and receive truly micropayments, nano payments that aren’t capable of being done in current financial legacy systems, right? So, that’s one of the important pieces. It’s about what is newly possible that wasn’t before. It’s not just, you know, instead of receiving U.S. dollars, you receive Bitcoin. So, you can’t send 25 cents to your streamer online. You can’t do that, it’s infeasible to do that. But you can send 0.002 cents of dollars through the Lightning Network. So, that’s one of the big capabilities.

So, to your question on impact, it’s actually very, very impactful I think. Sure. Bitcoin is in its nascency when it comes to bridging into other industries. I think the Lightning Network is in its nascency as it relates to a decentralized payments platform. But the impact of these microtransactions is actually very macro. And I wanna highlight one use case. So, we have a large user base in Brazil right now, and that is because Brazil is one of the biggest, most online countries when it comes to per capita access to internet, and phones, and so forth. It’s a very digitally native country. And specifically, it’s a very big gamer hub. There’s lots and lots of gamers there. We released a tool called ZEBEDEE Infuse, which allows you to play Counter-Strike with Bitcoin. So, your life and your game in Counter-Strike is Bitcoin.

And Counter-Strike is, I would argue number one or two, first-person shooter game in the world and has been for 10-plus years. And all of a sudden all, of these gamers that were playing Counter-Strike in Brazil started earning Bitcoin. And Bitcoin in an emerging market is a very powerful currency compared to Bitcoin in a developed market, right? Because it fluctuates quite a bit. And all of a sudden, these microtransactions started having macro impact. What we’re seeing is our users in Brazil and other emerging markets after playing in tournaments and playing games and earning some Satoshis, are able to go out and pay for necessities, buy groceries, pay for their rent. And that’s the macro impact. It’s microtransactions, but this is macro global impact.

Heather: It’s remarkable. I found myself, as you were speaking, I was thinking, the thing that keeps coming up for me around cryptocurrencies that almost feels too good to be true, this globally universal currency, the lack of fees, that true ability for those micropayments you’re talking about, it feels like the future. It feels like…

André: Exactly.

Heather: …there’s no way we won’t continue to explore this space is how my guts feel hearing you talk about all of this.

André: Yeah. I imagine it’s that notion of the Pandora’s Box has been opened, right? I think at this stage, it’s too hard to put it all back in the box and close the box and say, “Forget all about this. You know, don’t worry.” Something that I like to highlight and not to pull the conversation in a different direction…

Heather: No, it’s all right.

André: …but I think it’s really important to highlight the principles of money. We’re talking about money. It’s something that you and I understand, you and I can transact value through money, right? I give you $5, you give me a good. And you give me $5, and I give you a service. The crucial piece there is interoperability, right? You and I speak the same money. And in gaming, what happens is you have these massive, massive worlds like “Fortnite,” “World of Warcraft” that have a ton of value inside of their economies, but there are these siloed economies, right? And everyone likes to talk about the metaverse and the metaverse this and metaverse that. The true instance of metaverse is when all of these advanced digital worlds are interoperable, it has to interoperate, right? And the same way that email interoperates, regardless of provider, I should be able to take my value from “World of Warcraft,” metaverse, and world and move that over to my Activision Blizzard world and move that over to my meta world.

And how are you gonna do that with siloed in-game coins? I can’t take my V bucks from “Fortnite” and send them to my Microsoft virtual world. They’re worthless. They mean nothing. So, if we want the true metaverse, if we want this real notion of digital money to thrive, it has to be interoperable. And in order for it to be interoperable, it can’t be controlled by a company. There can’t be incentives, misalignment here and there. Bitcoin is this neutral platform, this neutral blockchain that just exists and isn’t controlled. And it’s the best chance that we have at getting this interoperable money globally. And again, it just goes back to our gaming focus, right? All of these worlds in gaming could use Bitcoin. They could just use Bitcoin because it’s native to the internet, it’s natively digital. So, one of our goals is to disrupt that and introduce the capabilities and the benefits of Bitcoin to all of these game developers and providers as well.

Heather: You’d mentioned a few minutes ago that Bitcoin and crypto, in general, is in this nascent stages of existence. We’ve seen some major fluctuations. How has your base weathered those market fluctuations?

André: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s actually funny because it’s a nascent industry in the grand scheme of things when you compare it to current financial systems. I think if you compare Bitcoin, which is now 13 years old, to give or take…

Heather: Isn’t that wild?

André: And compared that to the iPhone. The iPhone was released the same year, 2008, right? The iPhone is everywhere, okay? It’s not as impactful. You know, you could argue that Bitcoin is slower in adoption, and vice versa. It’s just a comparison. iPhone, it’s part of society nowadays. And Bitcoin was released at the same year. If you think about the Euro, the Euro is maybe another 10 years older than Bitcoin, maybe not even that much, right? So, it is nascent in the infrastructure stages, it’s nascent in all of that. So, then when it comes to our user base, when we talk about the crypto markets fluctuating up and down, up and down. Our business is not cyclical. Our business is around provisioning of payments capability for in-game currencies, in-game monies, in-game rewards, in-game points. Whereas other companies in the space are dealing with the buying and selling of Bitcoin. We don’t actually do that, we simply provide the ins and outs to power experiences.

So, while the market has cooled when it comes to trading and finance, and this and that, and market dynamics, our charts have been up and to the right. And they continue to grow because gamers will continue to play, game developers will continue to build games, and the experiences are only getting better and better. It’s irrelevant to our gamers and to our users that the fluctuations are happening. Of course, as I spoke about earlier in emerging markets, that is actually beneficial. I go back to Brazil. Brazil currently has, I believe, 11% inflation rates. And in the past, I just named it earlier, in the past 40, 50 years, it’s had multiple currencies. So, currency fluctuations is something that, in a lot of parts of the world, that is a common, that is a known, that is something that happens. And so it is not as impactful. I would argue that it’s much more of a net positive that these folks are engaged in this new economy and this new world, rather than if they weren’t engaged. So, it’s not as impactful as with other cyclical companies like exchanges and so forth.

Heather: So, what’s next for ZEBEDEE? Is there anything on the horizon that you can let us in on?

André: Yeah, definitely. If I can highlight two things that we just released, and then talk about some future projects that we have. So, we just released the login with ZEBEDEE, and I think this is really important to understand. So, if you’re familiar with login with Google, login with Twitter, or Facebook, these are the notion that you can carry around your identity, right? You can log in using the same sort of password, the same account system. This is based on a standard called OAuth 2.0 for authentication. You can now have the exact same flow of clicking a button and logging in with Google, but you not only carry that user profile, you’re now carrying your wallet around, right? So, we released login with ZEBEDEE. That means that any game, any app, any experience can have the same user flows. And I go back to familiar user experiences, right? We want users to engage in this. So it has to feel familiar, it has to feel normal, it can’t be too foreign.

So you click one button and you log in with your ZEBEDEE account, and immediately that experience, that game, and that app, sure, it has your profile image and your email address as it normally does, but now it has the ability to interact with you with money. So, it can send you money, it can request money from you, and you have an account that you can carry around, regardless of app, regardless of website, regardless of game. And that’s the same account that you carry with money. So, think of login with Google, but with money, right? That’s really, really impactful. And we just released that two weeks ago. It’s called login with ZEBEDEE.

Heather: Very exciting.

André: That’s very, very exciting. And then the second one is ZEBEDEE Bots, right? So, in gaming, as you touched on earlier, there’s streaming. Streaming is a tangential to the gaming industry, but it’s very much part of the gaming industry. Additionally to that, you have community tools like Discord, right? Discord is where gaming happens. It’s chat. It’s video. It’s live voice. So, we built ZEBEDEE Bots, and we recently released that last week for both Discord and Telegram. So, immediately the same interface that you have, and you’re chatting with your friends and your guild buddies, and you’re saying, “Hey, let’s start.” And you’re sending messages, you can now say /sendHeather50, and I’m just sending you 50 Satoshis in money, like real money is being transferred, transacted inside of Discord, inside of any platform. And that’s really impactful as well for community building, for tipping, for interacting with other gamers. So, those are two products that I think are really cool.

And then for the future, we’re really trying to blurry the lines between the notion of gaming and earning in games and then using that elsewhere. So, we touched on this, you can earn a bunch of Bitcoin, but then what do you do with it? And so part of the ZEBEDEE app and part of the future of our platform is to provide easy ways for you to use that, whether it’s to connecting through bank accounts, or cards, or even just partnering with third-party vendors and exchanges that can provide that capability. So do look out for many, many cool updates on the ZEBEDEE app and the ZEBEDEE developer dashboard platforms as well.

Heather: Incredible. To close us out today, I wanna circle all the way back to the top of our conversation and talk a little bit about that founder experience you had with ZEBEDEE. If somebody is wanting to take that leap, what’s a piece of advice you have for someone who’s looking to branch out and start their own tech company?

André: Do you mean in general as a tech company or specifically in the industry?

Heather: Good question. Let’s go with the specificity of the industry.

André: Sure. I would argue, like I said, Bitcoin is still a very tight-knit industry. So, I think specifically with software, in general, you get to go to Google and say, “Hey, I’m having this issue.” And someone out there in the past has had some version of that issue with new things, with cutting-edge technology, with new things. A lot of the times you don’t have the answer because you are finding the answer, because you’re the first person to potentially do it. I come back to cases where I wrote blog posts and research pieces in 2018 and 2019 that my engineers are finding as the answer to their questions. And so I would argue, if you’re trying to bridge into Bitcoin, and specifically in Lightning, you need a lot of know-how and actual expertise on the protocol. That’s really important. More broadly, I would argue that taking the leap of faith, yes, it’s important if you’re an entrepreneur and you’re feeling that this is your calling, like it’s really important and it’s very satisfying, of course, but I guess more of a precaution, maybe not an advice, is really, really truly be ready to dedicate your entirety to this, right?

I live ZEBEDEE, I have worn 500 different hats at the company. It fascinates me and it drives me. But this is a big ask for a lot of folks that think, you know, maybe I’m the CTO, I’m gonna do the technical things. No, you are gonna touch every facet of your business, from marketing, to business developments, to strategy, to accounting, right? Like, I’m part of accounting. So, it’s really interesting how quickly you learn, but really the point that I wanted to make is be ready to do more than what you’re expecting. Be ready to work harder than you’re expecting, because successful high-growth startups really, really take the toll on you. And it’s amazing, and I get gratification every single day, but it is a tough, tough ask. And so if you marry that with Bitcoin, that makes it potentially even harder. So, it’s a big ask, but I would say follow your dreams and follow your ambition. But be ready to wear more hats than you’re imagining. You’re gonna touch every facet of your company.

Heather: André, thank you so much for joining us today. If folks wanna get in touch with you or they wanna learn more about ZEBEDEE, where can they find you?

André: Best place is, head over to zebedee.io. And then also on our Twitter, there’s plenty of information. We have a blog, blog.zebedee.io that talks all about our products, upcoming releases that we’re having, and partnerships, and even game releases. For myself, the best way to reach me is on Twitter, just André Neves on Twitter, DMs are open. I’m happy to talk to anyone and even happy to dive deeper into any of the many exciting things in Bitcoin, Lightning, gaming, and all things ZEBEDEE.

Heather: Great. Thanks again for joining us.

André: Thanks, Heather. This was a pleasure. Appreciate your time.

Heather: If you enjoyed this episode and wanna hear more, head on over to, soarpay.com/podcast to subscribe on your podcast listening platform of choice, that’s soarpay.com/podcast.

Industry Spotlight

ZEBEDEE

We’re creating new ways to build the Bitcoin economy with the power of Lightning — starting with games and digital experiences. ZEBEDEE will develop software and infrastructure to introduce first-class Bitcoin and Lightning support into digital experiences and environments. This will allow players, developers, streamers, and watchers to interact and instantly exchange value in a frictionless manner. We are building the engines that will help power the emerging digital economy, and the fuel that powers that engine is Bitcoin.