Building a Global Venmo on Solana Mike Hudack

Episode Overview

Mike Hudack is the co-founder and CEO of Sling Money, a fintech platform revolutionizing global peer-to-peer payments through the integration of stablecoins and blockchain technology. With a mission to make international money transfers as seamless as sending a text message, Sling Money enables users to send funds instantly across over 50 countries, bridging the gap between traditional fiat systems and decentralized finance. Under Hudack’s leadership, Sling Money has secured significant funding, including a $15 million Series A round led by Union Square Ventures, Ribbit Capital, and Slow Ventures, to expand its innovative payment solutions worldwide.

Before founding Sling Money, Hudack amassed extensive experience in the tech and fintech sectors. He served as the Chief Product Officer at Monzo Bank, where he played a pivotal role in scaling the UK-based neobank’s product offerings. Prior to Monzo, he held the position of Chief Product and Technology Officer at Deliveroo, overseeing the company’s technological advancements. Hudack also contributed to Facebook’s growth as a Director of Product, leading initiatives that enhanced user engagement and platform functionality. His diverse background in product development and technology strategy has been instrumental in shaping Sling Money’s user-centric approach to financial services.

Hudack’s vision for Sling Money is rooted in the belief that financial transactions should be as effortless and instantaneous as modern digital communications. By leveraging his experience in building scalable consumer internet products, he aims to democratize access to financial services, particularly in regions underserved by traditional banking infrastructure. Sling Money’s platform not only facilitates rapid cross-border payments but also emphasizes compliance and security, ensuring a trustworthy experience for users. Hudack’s commitment to innovation and inclusivity positions Sling Money as a transformative force in the global fintech landscape, striving to make financial connectivity universally accessible.

Episode Transcript

Mike Hudack: I used to work at a bank, so I used to be the chief product officer of this bank called Monzo, which is like a neobank in the UK that now got, I think it’s like 13 million, 14 million customers in the UK, which is a very large percentage of the UK population, adult population. I remember I came there from working in food delivery and working in like social media. I worked at a company where the motto was move fast and break things. And at first I had a conflict with our new chief compliance officer. We had a conflict. At first we had, you know, our personalities are different. You know, he’s like, eh, don’t break the bank kind of guy. And I’m a like product, like engineering. Move as fast as possible kind of guy. You know, you’re wearing the.

Mike Hudack: Hat and all that and. Yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hey there. Welcome to PayPod where we bring you conversations with the trailblazers shaping the future of payments and fintech. My name is Kevin Rosenquist. Thanks for being here. Money should be simple, but in today’s world it’s anything but. Hidden fees, delayed transfers and outdated banking systems keep people from having full control over their own cash. Enter Sling Money, a new kind of financial platform built to give people instant, frictionless access to their money without the middlemen slowing things down there like a global Venmo, but with far different technology. And today, I’m sitting down with their CEO, Mike Hudak, to talk about how fintech is rewriting the rules and what the future of money really looks like. We’ll dive into the battle between financial autonomy and centralized control, as well as the role of AI in banking, because it wouldn’t be a pay pod episode if we didn’t talk a little AI right? So anyway, please welcome Mike Hudak. What draws you to the fintech space you’ve been involved in in the world for a while now? What do you love about it?

 Mike Hudack: Oh man, I think it’s just like, so my career I’ve kind of moved from I worked on social media, on online video, on advertising, food delivery, all sorts of different things. And I think to some extent, the way that you can make an impact in the world changes over the years. And, you know, there was a point in time when, you know, digital media was like the best way to make an impact in the world. And right now, it feels like fintech is one of the best ways to make an impact in the world. Money is being digitized for real for the first time. Like it kind of went through this, like, you know, half digitization recently, but it’s now going through a full digitization, which means that one of the best ways to like, build something useful right now is to do it a place where the digitization of money matters. And I think that’s like a very cool thing.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I think that’s really awesome. I love that that mission. And now sling Sling Money, your company is is relatively new player in the digital payment space. Can you sort of break down what what the company is in layman’s terms and, and maybe what problem you saw that you wanted to solve for sure.

 Mike Hudack: We’re building. I describe it to Americans as a global Venmo. Like just like a Venmo that works everywhere in the world. Gotcha. And I describe it to people outside of the United States as WhatsApp for money, meaning that we’re solving a problem with money, which is the same problem that WhatsApp solved for text messaging, which was text messages didn’t really work cross-border and WhatsApp did, which was phenomenal. Is it made text messages work really well cross-border. And then it was like so good. And the fact that it worked internationally, worked with everybody in the world, meant that it also took over domestic texting in most of the world. And we think that the same opportunity exists in money. The problem that we’re solving is that it is like insane to me that in 2025, you know, so many problem statements start this way. But I’m in the UK right now and you’re not. And I can’t really easily send you money such that like right now I can say, oh, I sent it and you can say, I got it. And that’s crazy. How is that? How is that possible?

Kevin Rosenquist: I mean, I can say I got it, but I didn’t get it truthfully yet. I got to wait a few days.

 Mike Hudack: Yeah. And I you may not even get the notice that you got it.

Kevin Rosenquist: Depending on the platform. Yeah. That’s true, that’s true. Yeah. I mean, it’s interesting to me because I, you know, I’ve talked to other other people on this show about real time payments and, and it’s it’s pretty interesting to me how far behind the US is on this, this topic or this, this, this idea. And why do you have any sense of why it is that this country, like a global leader, is resisting that, that shift?

 Mike Hudack: Well, it’s happening now. So there’s like so there’s RTP, you know, which is real time payments from the clearinghouse. And then there’s Fednow, which is the US government version. And then there’s also push to card, which is like, you know, a private version provided by by visa and Mastercard. Right? Mastercard and Visa Direct. It’s happening. I think that most of the places that have really, really good ubiquitous real time payment infrastructure. So I’m thinking of like UPI or Pix or, you know, UPI as a system in India, or Pix as a system in Brazil, or even like in Europe. There’s Sepa Instant, which is which is getting to be pretty common. It’s not as good as UPI and Pix in various ways, but it is fast and it’s pretty good. And the UK has. They all have had a kind of like government top down approach to deploying these payment systems. Mexico has SPI, you know, the US for better and worse, but often for better over some period of time shies away from government led interventions in this way. And, you know, prefers more of a free market approach. So you get, you know, the Federal Reserve with their version, which is not really adopted by some banks. And then you have RTP, which is adopted by some other banks. And then you have pushed a card which is, you know, a it’s a it’s a network mandate, but not universally adopted either or supported. And I think that’s just because the difference is that, you know, in India or Brazil or the UK with faster payment system, there is some government body which is saying if you don’t do this, you’re in trouble. Like, this is the new way that payments are going to work. And the US doesn’t do that.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, that’s a good point. But I mean, I don’t know anybody who uses any real time payment systems. Nobody like I mean, I can’t think of one personally. Yeah. You know.

 Mike Hudack: Well, I guess Zelle is kind of sort of a real time payment system in a way.

Kevin Rosenquist: It’s not real time. I mean, it’s quicker.

 Mike Hudack: Yeah.

Kevin Rosenquist: But it’s not real time.

 Mike Hudack: That’s right, that’s right.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. Yeah. So, I don’t know, I just think it’s just always interesting to me to talk to people who are doing what you do. And it’s always someone from obviously from a different country. And it’s just it’s always interesting to me how how much the US is not seemingly interested in in a real time payment setup. But I don’t know, maybe we’ll figure it out. It’ll happen. Yeah.

 Mike Hudack: It’ll happen.

Kevin Rosenquist: You think? Yeah.

 Mike Hudack: Yeah I do.

Kevin Rosenquist: So I feel like people. One of the things is that people are looking for more control over their money. But a lot of the major financial institutions and tech companies seem to be more centralizing power. How do you see this tension sort of playing out in the coming years?

 Mike Hudack: Great question. So I really believe that centralization and decentralization happen in waves and in technology or in digital media or whatever, and have for years and years. And, you know, there was a time before everything that we know now where people just dialed into local bulletin board systems and everything was like, disconnected. And you were in your local neighborhood, like, you know, message board or whatever with the other people who dial into the same phone number. And then we got like the rise of AOL and CompuServe and prodigy and like true centralization, where they’re like national and you are.

Kevin Rosenquist: You’re you’re you’re I forgot about prodigy that that was a good one. I like that one.

 Mike Hudack: Yeah, yeah. And then, you know, we got the World Wide Web, which was super decentralized. And, you know, you accessed it with like Netscape or whatever. And, you know, anybody could throw up a web server and like, register a domain with network solutions. And the most annoying thing was that, like network solutions charge 45 bucks for it, you know, and it felt like it should have been five, but it was fine.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, I was a big fan of the free GeoCities account.

 Mike Hudack: Yeah, GeoCities. Great. GeoCities tripod, you know? Yeah, yeah, for sure I had both. I loved them, and then you got another wave of centralization. So, you know, you move from GeoCities and tripod in your own domain and IRC again to like Facebook, Reddit and like these Twitter, you know, huge centralization under these kind of like massive platforms. And I think that we’re going through another wave of decentralization. You know, we’re going through everybody gets their own social media platform for who they are and what they are. And, you know, the dark forest. And, you know, it’s one of the reasons also why people like blockchains, because it can support kind of like truly decentralized systems that are not in the control of any individual like the internet used to be. And I think that we are in the middle of one of those kind of phase shifts again, towards decentralization, and that will last some number of years. And then, you know, presumably there’ll be some new technology that drives recentralization. But this phenomenon exists with information like, you know, bulletin boards and prodigy and chat and so on. I think it also exists with money. One of the really wild things that has happened recently is that you can now have truly decentralized money. I mean, it is somewhat centralized still in a sense, but, you know, you can actually have truly, truly decentralized money, which is like Bitcoin. You can have Bitcoin in a self-custodial wallet and it’s like it is yours. And there’s just no two ways about it. You can have stablecoins in a self-custodial wallet and they are yours. But there’s a custodian holding the backing asset either way. That is like a massively decentralized proposition compared to, you know, the way that banks work today. And so I think the same kind of like this is what I mean by the digitization of money, really, where now you can have, you know, a similar kind of wave happen with money, as has happened with like, you know, the written word and photographs and stuff. For the last 40 years.

Kevin Rosenquist: Do you see black blockchain technology, crypto, those sorts of things being that driving force for the this wave of decentralization?

 Mike Hudack: Yeah, for sure. And I guess there’s like different ways that you can imagine the future. But like I always thought it was really weird that Coinbase and Kraken and FTX were built as centralized exchanges. When to my like to my read, the special thing about blockchains was that they allowed you to own your own money and own your own asset without having to have a third party custodian. Now, there might be reasons why you want to have a third party custodian for convenience or for security or whatever, but you don’t have to.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah.

 Mike Hudack: Yeah. And like, they basically just went and recreated traditional banks with the technology, which was designed to be decentralized, which is a classic thing. You know, like when people ask you, you know, you’re like building a car and you’re like, nobody’s ever seen a car before. You’re like, what do you want? You know, like a faster horse. So people just made a bank again with blockchains, which I think a hundred years from now will look back 50 years from now, will look back with the same kind of chuckle as you have for that, like Henry Ford anecdote, right?

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s a funny that’s an interesting thought. I guess I hadn’t thought of it like that because I have Coinbase and you’re right, it’s it’s not. It is. It is a there is they are a centralization or a centralized company that I am using. So yeah that’s funny that you put it that way. I never thought of it like that. So you have Avion Labs too. And Avion Labs is kind of AI driven finance. You’re creating products through this lab, right? Is that correct?

 Mike Hudack: Well, the real story, the real avian story is that we, like, didn’t have a name for this thing. So my co-founder and I were originally going to start a decentralized identity company, because when I was at, I used to be at Facebook and I worked on identity at Facebook, and there were a lot of things that people didn’t trust us to build that would have been really, like, very cool, but we just kind of knew we couldn’t do it unless people felt more ownership over their identity. And my kind of like aha moment with blockchains was actually around identity and feeling like, oh wow, you know, we can like build all this stuff because people truly own their own identity. And then I had the experience of moving like ten grand from the UK to my friend in San Francisco on a on Solana with Usdc. And I was like, oh my God, we should just build a global Venmo. And so we started selling money, and at the time we didn’t really have a name for it or anything. So we created a company called Avian Labs, which is just, you know, it’s like a holding company for, for selling money. And then, you know, maybe we’ll do other stuff too, like maybe we’ll have a B2B, like a pure play B2B offering at some point or something. But we haven’t done that yet.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay. How do you see? How do you see AI integrating with finance over the next few years? I mean, it’s moving so fast. I know that’s a hard question. Yeah, but it’s funny. I was just talking to actually had some drinks with my financial advisor last night and we got onto a topic of AI, and he’s not a fan at all. He just does not. He knows it’s here to stay, but he’s just simply not a fan. And it’s interesting to me how many people I’ve met who are very entrenched into the financial world, and half of them might be on this side, and half of them might be on the other. There’s such a large gap between people’s opinion on it. Where do you sort of land on AI and finance?

 Mike Hudack: I think with a lot of things. There’s a Bill gates quote, which is like people always underestimate the amount of change that is going to happen. But you know what? Like overestimate how quickly it’s going to happen. And so, you know, like a year ago, people or whenever people saw the first ChatGPT and they were like, this is going to change everything tomorrow.

Kevin Rosenquist: And it’s.

 Mike Hudack: Like.

Kevin Rosenquist: Oh yeah, everyone was going to lose their job, remember?

 Mike Hudack: Yeah, instantly. It’s like, that’s not true. But in ten years, in 20 years, I think the world will be unimaginably different because of AI. And like in finance, I think there are so many different ways that it’s going to change. Like one very, very simple thing is like, I had a problem with my American Express card recently, and, you know, Amex is a great company, but still, I did not want to like, call them up and deal with it. And I feel like I should have been able to tell an I to just, you know, call them up, tell them about the problem, fix it, just fix it, do whatever you have to do and then like, let me know if you need my help, you know. And I couldn’t do that. It was very annoying because I like, knew that the technology is just on the precipice of being able to do that. And I was like, oh God, I actually have to make the call myself, right? So that’s like a talk.

Kevin Rosenquist: To somebody, oh my God, this is awful.

 Mike Hudack: Yeah. And like not too long from now that’s going to be an I talking to an AI. Right. You know, it’s like my AI agent is going to talk to the AI agent and explain what happened. And they’re going to negotiate a whatever resolution. And in the unusual case that they can’t figure out how to resolve the problem, then they’ll escalate to their hans. You know, that’s going to happen. It’s going to change a lot. We at sling, we already we have an AI agent doing customer service. It’s successfully already deflects more than 70% of incoming queries with a very high customer satisfaction rating, a very high CSat, which is the same as our han agents. Like, you know, the future in that way is already here. And that allows us to, you know, will allow us to offer lower prices, better service, that sort of thing will keep happening. I imagine there are also applications in trading and market making and all these kind of things that, frankly, are kind of already here and have been for a long time. I mean, Jane Street, you know, operates with a tremendous amount of sophistication will continue to that will only build. And I guess we could get into like a long conversation about whether or not it’s worth trying to stock pick or whether or not you should just put ETF and let the, you know, let the AI’s figure out the, you know, the fast trading. And then one of the really interesting things, you know, just like the last thought on this is like, obviously your AI agent is going to want to be able to spend money and send money to other AI agents and send money to people and businesses and everything. And so, like, somebody’s going to have to build a bunch of infrastructure to make that happen. Right.

Kevin Rosenquist: Right. Yeah. That’s a good segue to my next question. I it feels like traditional banks are not adapting fast enough to a lot of stuff. Like, I feel like they’re a little bit behind. I mean, if you think about you look at the tech coming out with companies like sling and these fintech players, these, you know, smaller financial players are banks. Are they evolving fast enough? Are they being left behind? And if so, why are they resisting change?

 Mike Hudack: You know, I used to work at a bank, so I used to be the chief product officer of this bank called Monzo, which is like a neo bank in the UK that now got I think it’s like 13 million, 14 million customers in the UK, which is a very large percentage of the UK population, adult population. I remember I came there from working in food delivery and working in like social media. And, you know, I worked at a company where the motto was move fast and break things. And at first I had a conflict with our we hired a new chief compliance officer. We had a conflict. At first. We had, you know, our personalities are different. You know, he’s like a don’t break the bank kind of guy. And I’m like, you know, product like engineering, move as fast as possible kind of guy. You know, you’re wearing the.

Kevin Rosenquist: Hat and all that and yeah, yeah.

 Mike Hudack: You know and then we bonded over backpacks of all things. Oh. And great. And we, you know, went out and had dinner and we became really good friends. And I remember him telling me that, you know, you have to realize that banks, like finance, has been responsible for, like, more individual societal collapses than like anything else in history. You know, financial crises lead to great social upheaval, lead to revolutions, lead to poverty, lead to, you know, the Great Depression. And it is appropriate that when you are in this business, you are respectful of your obligations to society. And, you know, that has really stuck with me. You know, influence the way that I think about all these things. And so, like, you have to realize that when you are, you know, JPMorgan Chase or Wells Fargo or, you know, Barclays or NatWest, you have a very special, very specific place in society, in a very specific obligation to society. And so it is natural that you’re going to move more slowly. Now, some of these organizations, like if you’ve been inside of them, like move very slowly and that is like not necessary for the preservation of society. That’s just like there are a lot of people who have used that as an excuse to get nothing done for the last 20 years, you know, so, you know, there’s a balance here.

 Mike Hudack: They the thing that you have to understand about a bank, I think, is that they have a monopoly on creating money, you know, outside of the government on lending, on storing your money. And in that way, they don’t have to move super fast because they have this like special permission, which is very, very powerful in the same way that, like, Apple is in a special position in society because they like, you know, they like make iPhones and they make, you know, all these things. And so they don’t necessarily have to be the first people to ship anything new. They just have to ship the best version of it. And I think that to some degree, banks might be in the same spot, like they’ve got the money and they have the monopoly on the money, and so maybe they can afford to wait and watch everybody, like, duke it out and figure out what the future is going to be, and then come in and say, hey guys, we have a monopoly on storing money and lending it out. And you know, that’s valuable to you. So you’re going to come over here and help me with this thing. I don’t know. Or they can just like take their time building something great.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s a really good point. I mean, that is a really good point. I mean, obviously it’s, you know, take take. You know, Chase is a perfect example. I mean, to, to overhaul their, their, their, their system, their technology. It’s a monumental task. It really is.

 Mike Hudack: Momental.

Kevin Rosenquist: So and the idea that to sit back and say, okay, let’s see what happens here with all of this, this is, you know, there’s so many tech companies, fintech companies popping up. And let’s see, let’s see what they do. And then we can adjust from there and then yeah, steal all their talent. Yeah.

 Mike Hudack: We have billions of dollars to deploy to either like hire all the people to do this properly or buy one of the companies or whatever companies.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah.

 Mike Hudack: You know, and I, I wouldn’t underestimate the value of that. At the same time, I think that the system of fractional reserve banking that we have today is likely to really dramatically change over the course of the next, you know, however many decades. And in that sense, I suppose it is possible that they will be left behind if they don’t really pay attention and do the next most important thing. Like, I think that the really interesting thing about blockchains is that anybody can hold money of their own, and that that money then can be transacted with anybody else instantly. And so like, you know, previously like it basically it’s like cash but cash that can be sent to anyone in the world immediately. And then anybody can write software to put rules around that. So, you know, any software engineer can build a lending protocol. On top of that, any software engineer can build a security on top of that. I mean, which is why we get into the whole situation with the, you know, SEC in the last administration, you know, and all those things. And that those capabilities are, like entirely new. And I think it’s very likely that the whole structure of the way that money is managed and moves will change to be almost unrecognizable as a result. It’s just a question of how long it will take.

Kevin Rosenquist: Just. Yeah. When, how fast we can make the transition. Do you think with peer to peer transactions, does your approach differ from the PayPal’s and the venoms of the world? I mean, do you have a different way of handling it?

 Mike Hudack: Yeah. Wildly different. So Slatten money as an app is actually a self-custodial Solana wallet. Uh, Solana is a very fast, very cheap blockchain. And so when you sign up for sling, you complete IDB, you complete KYC, and then you’re, you get a Solana key pair generated on your device, which is yours. And we don’t have access to it whatsoever. It’s stored on your device wrapped with a key from your secure enclave. So you have to unlock it with your face or whatever. And then we have a third party that helps back up the key. So if you like, lose your phone or change platforms or whatever, you can still get access to it. You don’t have to remember key phrases, right? That is already like radically different from the way that like PayPal or Venmo works because you have your own unique, you know, unilateral control over your wallet. We can’t freeze it. We can’t initiate a transaction on your behalf without your permission like it is yours. And I think that that’s like a very important principle and something which is going to be, like increasingly important to users over the course of the next few decades. It also has like a bunch of regulatory advantages because we’re not a custodian, we never store money, which means that that sling app is actually legal everywhere in the world. Everywhere.

Kevin Rosenquist: Okay.

 Mike Hudack: There isn’t a country where where it’s illegal. Then we provide very high quality, very fast fiat on and off ramps in so far 75 countries, and we have a path to like 120 countries. So like most of the world outside of like China, Russia, Iran, etc.. And you know, you could argue we could do China, you know, Iran. And we can’t do Russia. We can’t do. But maybe one day we could. So, you know, in those 75 countries that we have now, you can add money in about a second and then you can send it to anyone who has slain using we have a directory and they get it in about a second and then they can off ramp it about a second. So like one of my favorite stories about this is we had a user who lives in Amsterdam tweet that slings great because you can buy anyone at anyone in the world of beer in like a minute. And another one of our users who lives in Nairobi replied and said, buy me a beer. And the.

Kevin Rosenquist: Guy?

 Mike Hudack: Yeah he did. Yeah. So the guy found the guy in, uh, in Nairobi in the sling directory, and he sent him $2, which is how much a beer costs in Nairobi. You know, the guy in Nairobi was like, thank you. And the Dutch guy was like, send me proof of beer. And so, you know, 30s later there was a photo of a beer being proof of beer.

Kevin Rosenquist: I like that proof appear.

 Mike Hudack: All of this happened within the span of like a minute and a half on Twitter. It’s like it’s like seven tweets and you know, you can’t. That is wild. Like, nothing else can do that. Yeah. You know, and that’s a result of the way we built the thing, you know, which is on a fundamentally different technology stack, fundamentally different approach than any of those things.

Kevin Rosenquist: That’s really cool. I love that story. To be your new tagline, buy someone a beer in under a second.

 Mike Hudack: Yeah, it’s actually a good tagline.

Kevin Rosenquist: It would have it would resonate with a lot of people, that’s for sure.

 Mike Hudack: For sure. For sure.

Kevin Rosenquist: So what’s next for for sling. For avian. Like what? What are you on the horizon that you can share or that you’re that you’re able to share?

 Mike Hudack: Well, definitely. We’re growing pretty quickly right now. And like total.

Kevin Rosenquist: Sounds like it. I mean, in two years, 75 countries. That’s pretty impressive.

 Mike Hudack: Yeah. We removed waitlists like, I don’t know, 5 or 6 months ago or something. Well September is right. So like pretty recently. Yeah. And, , you know, we’ve been growing total transaction volume on the platform, like 50% month over month since we did that. , and, and that growth feels like it’s accelerating right now. And a lot of our work at the moment is just like keeping up with the demand and making sure that, like, our sign up works really well everywhere in the world because building KYC in 75 countries is like, hard, you know? Yeah. And getting our payment success rate to be higher and all of this kind of stuff. , and transitioning from like a product development shop where we’re almost like an R&D shop, you know, designing and building something new to a company that has customers like moving money and, you know, all the customer service and all of the operations that come with that. So that, like, takes a lot of our time just making sure that we’re offering a great service that can scale. You know, we want to build a multi-billion user product. We want billions of people to be using sling. Like I look at the number of MoU, the number of monthly active users that Facebook has around the world that meta has around the world. It’s like 3.5 billion or something. And I’m like, that’s a Tam for sling, you know, because those are all people in countries where we can serve them. And that just requires a lot of fanatical focus on the quality of that core service. And then we will add some set of additional features over the course of the next, you know, six months. We have a couple of things up our sleeves, which we’re very, very excited about, that increase the utility of the product and the nber of times per month it can be used. , yeah. You know, we’re early in the journey.

Kevin Rosenquist: Uh, it’s interesting because, you know, I mean, the technology, uh, part of it, you know, I think of, like, my parents and I think of them, they’d be so intimidated by by sling money that they would be like, you know, they’re in their 70s. They would. They would be like, no way. I don’t understand what on earth is a Solana like? It would be like it’d be this whole thing. So it kind of is it’s education. But also within that education, there’s a trust element too.

 Mike Hudack: Oh for.

Kevin Rosenquist: Sure. How do you handle both of those? How do you how can how can you educate and build trust with people because their money is, you know, people are sensitive about that stuff.

 Mike Hudack: As they should be.

Kevin Rosenquist: As they should.

 Mike Hudack: I mean, the first thing is we have not built I think that most of the kind of like, if you’ll excuse me, crypto products out there, blockchain products out there, feel like you’re using a Linux command line or a DOS command line from 20 years ago.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah.

 Mike Hudack: And like, sling money is not like that. It feels like you’re using a modern, slick neobank like most of our team built Monzo, which is known for it’s very easy, very slick user experience. And so we abstract away, like all of the complexity of Solana and stablecoins and all that kind of stuff, we tell you just enough that you know, you understand how the system works and you, you know, it’s clear to you what you’re using. But like, we don’t do it in a way which is hopefully confusing or alienating, you know.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, setting up a wallet, a general wallet is. It’s a weird process. It’s a confusing process. Weird. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. You’re like, is this legal? Like, it’s kind of a funny thing.

 Mike Hudack: Yeah. And with us, you’re just kind of like, choose whether or not you want to sign up with Apple or Google. And then you enter your name, your phone nber. You know, you either take a photo of your ID, or you share your address and your Social Security nber. And then you click submit. And then you’ve got a wallet and you’re done. And, you know, it feels like you’re signing up for a bank or a, you know, PayPal or whatever. It’s the same thing. We just tell you, it’s like, you know, we can offer instant free transfers across all these countries because of the stablecoin. So, you know, it’s like presented as a part of the value prop. And I think that the world is moving very, very quickly in that direction where like, you know, it is accepting of this. And we use the term blockchain instead of crypto. And, you know, we don’t talk about how we use modern blockchains, modern technology and modern In stablecoins, we only use reserve backed, fully currency, reserve backed, regulated stablecoins. The highest quality regulated by the best regulators in the world. And we ourselves are regulated. So, you know, unlike a lot of people who build like wallet software, we are a money services business. We’re registered with FinCEN.

 Mike Hudack: We file SARS, we are regulated by the Dutch in the EU. You know , we go after the best, the most respected regulators. We could have picked any country in Europe, we’d pick the Netherlands. , and we do that very, very intentionally in order to, to drive, trust and communicate to people that we are a serious organization. You know, we hired when we didn’t know when we started the company, we knew that compliance and these issues of trust and everything were going to be some of the most difficult things. And so, you know, no joke, we hired the guy who wrote the financial section of the Patriot Act to help us write our crime policy and whatever, whatever you think of the Patriot Act, whatever, you know, this is the person who knows the most about how you’re supposed to do sanctions, how you’re supposed to do transaction monitoring, how you’re supposed to do KYC. And we literally went to him and said, we want to figure out how to build a compliant product, like compliant with the law and society’s expectations with blockchain self-custodial wallets on a blockchain with stablecoins. And a lot of other people we talked to said, you’re crazy. And he was like, that sounds great. And, you know, it was a wonderful collaboration.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah, yeah. Found the right, found the right guy. Found the right person for the job. Yeah. That’s awesome.

 Mike Hudack: Yeah, 100%.

Kevin Rosenquist: Yeah. All right, well, the company is sling money. Mike, thanks so much for being here. Really appreciate your time.

 Mike Hudack: Thank you so much. I really enjoyed it.