00:00 Hey, Andy, thank you so much for being willing to jump on the Opt Out podcast. I know I haven't done an episode in quite a while, but with the drop of Proton Wallet and just all of the things that Proton's been up to lately, honestly, y'all have been on a roll. I thought it'd be a really fantastic time to get you on the podcast for the first time, answer a lot of questions that people have around this announcement, and honestly, just get to know you a little bit better.

So I'm excited to have you on. Thank you so much for jumping in. Yeah, of course. Happy to be here. I've actually been following your work from the sides for quite some time. And it's always nice to talk to someone that actually understands the space and knows what they're talking about. So yeah, happy to be here. It's a wild space, honestly, the privacy world. I feel like it's polarizing to everyone outside of it and polarizing to everyone inside of it.

So being able to find a little bit of a calm discussion and nuance around really anything in this space is tricky. So I think that we're going to be able to do that today, answer some easy questions, some hard questions, and really dive into what Proton Wallet is, which to get right into the meet, because I know you're limited on time. This announcement of Proton Wallet, I think, really blindsided a lot of people in the space. I'm sure you were working on it with some Bitcoiner, since especially a lot of the language used is very kind of Bitcoiner.

But I didn't see a Bitcoin wallet being integrated into Proton as something that was on your roadmap at all. So to really kind of get rolling, why did you decide to build a Bitcoin wallet? And what's the history that led up to this choice? Yeah, it's kind of funny that people didn't really expect it, because we've had the Reddit and the Twitter accounts for ages. In fact, we've been considering, let's say, launching something in this space since probably as early as 2017.

But Proton being Proton and being quite cautious, we took our time to get here, right? We wanted to do it at the right moment in the right way. But if you think about Proton's history, and you go back really to the beginning, so this is 2014 at the moment of our crowdfunding. Bitcoin has always been something that's been on our radar. And people tend to say that the experiences you go through when you're young sort of color the rest of your life.

I think it's the same for businesses as well, the same for companies, right? A company's early experience with the world tends to actually also color the way that they see the world. And in Proton's case, one of our early experiences was probably two weeks after the launch of our crowdfunding, getting blocked by PayPal. And that could have been it, right? Had that not gotten resolved, probably Proton, as we remember today and know today, wouldn't actually exist.

So I would say our viewpoint of the world was really impacted by this early near-death experience that really made us think a bit more. So something that's always been sort of on the back of our minds for, maybe it's reasonable or not reasonable, but given our past experience, it's quite understandable. Has always been, we are in privacy space. We are building something that actually the established powers in the world don't like, whether it's governments, whether it's Google, whether it's Apple, whether it's the financial sector.

In general, they're not for privacy because it takes power away from them and returns it to the consumer, right? So it's in fact quite easy to kill Proton today, right? You take us off of PayPal, you take us off of the credit cards, it's game over. And that has always felt to me very vulnerable because it fundamentally threatens Proton's mission and what we want to achieve for privacy and for the world. And it's really been a problem that for the past decade we have wanted to address.

So Proton Wallet, first and foremost, is kind of a step in that direction. What it's trying to do is create an easy way for the vast majority of the Proton community, which to be honest, isn't as tech savvy as it used to be, you know, five or even 10 years ago. And give them a means to adopt alternative ways of transferring value online, which is not really linked to centralized institutions, which we know in the long run are not going to be friendly to Proton in our mission.

So this is really, you know, take a step back and you zoom out the high level problem that we're trying to fix. And the reason why Proton, which a lot of people wouldn't expect to be interested in crypto, has decided that this is a step that we need to take. So this is precisely the risk that we want to mitigate. And it's really informed by our historical, you know, life experiences from the early days of 2014. So the real ideal is that Proton Wallet, while it does just serve as a broader piece of the Bitcoin ecosystem and a broader piece of the Proton suite of tools, it's furthering that mission of making sure that people can actually pay for goods and services that, I think you use the phrase, the powers that be, which is a good one.

Governments generally don't want people to have access to. And that's not because obviously Proton is doing anything illegal. It totally exists within a legal framework. It's providing something that is widely viewed as a human right and privacy. But you want to make sure that people have access to actually paying for that service with money, Bitcoin in this instance, rather than just paying with their data, which is the paradigm that a lot of people are used to.

It's a really interesting one. I just kind of viewed it from the broad perspective of the Bitcoin ecosystem and not as much an idea of what Proton needs it for. Yeah, of course. And Proton is also not a company or not an organization or even not even a nonprofit, let's say, that is interested in the short term optimizations of this and that, right? You know, actually, our move towards a foundation structure is, in fact, to position Proton as something that, you know, can be here 10, 20, 30, 50, you know, 100 years or more into the future.

And the core thing that we want to solve is actually the question of resilience. And if Proton is to be here, you know, 100 years from now, what is going to be very, very important is to begin to remove the single points of failure. And payments today is one of the few remaining single points of failure that exists still in Proton's infrastructure. And that's why it's an interesting problem for us to work on. And this is kind of an important step for us to take.

So, you know, it's not because we're Bitcoin maxis or because, you know, we think we can make a buck out of crypto, right? It's because we think actually in the long run, it's something that we need if you look forward further down the road. Yeah. Yeah. And I definitely agree with that. I think that's been one of the longstanding things that has set Proton apart is just the acceptance of Bitcoin. Because there's a lot of people who either they're not able to have access to kind of legacy financial rails, or they obviously want to have a way to at least be pseudonymous when purchasing services like Proton or really purchasing anything.

I mean, it's the case when I'm paying for anything, I'm going to pay in the most privacy preserving way, no matter what it is, if it's a sandwich or a coffee, or if it's something that is something I truly need to be anonymous, it deserves the same kind of payment rails, especially ones that are censorship resistant, which is definitely where I can see Bitcoin fitting in there. I think one of the things that surprised me the most and a lot of people in the privacy space or in like the kind of privacy cryptocurrency space like Monero was just that, I mean, obviously Bitcoin is not private.

It's not private by default. And it has its, it's more than its fair share of issues with tracking and surveillance today. And I think that was part of why it was so surprising was that the I mean, obviously, the mantra of Proton right now is private by default, and Bitcoin doesn't fit that mantra. So I think there's a lot of confusion around why Bitcoin you touched on a lot of it, I think, in your response to the previous question. Then maybe you can just expand on that when viewed in the light of the lack of privacy in Bitcoin, why you chose Bitcoin specifically and not something we're privacy preserving.

And then do you have plans to address Bitcoin privacy in ProtonMallet in the future? Yeah, that's a really good question. And I think we can go back to history about this again. And in fact, there's a very, very clear analogy between, you know, kind of the question you've asked. And the question that, you know, I asked myself 10 years ago when starting out to build, you know, ProtonMall, right? Because, you know, Proton at the beginning was ProtonMall, and it became Proton, let's say, probably along that journey.

And so what's the analogy to, you know, ProtonMall? If you asked me today, or actually even 10 years ago, to build the most secure communication system, I wouldn't have built email, actually, right? I would have built Signal or something like Signal. So why did we, you know, build email 10 years ago? Because it for sure wasn't the most private way to communicate, right? And the reason we did it is because our approach to this problem is actually a little bit different.

What we believed in 2014, and actually what I still believe today, is that email is actually the most successful communication system that has ever been devised. And why is it so good and so hard to displace? Because, well, one, it's decentralized. It's federated. Anyone can join the network if they want. And it's not controlled by a centralized organization. So it has these properties that make it actually a very strong network effect, right? And this is why email tends to be so dominant.

But actually, the privacy of email, it really sucks. It's built on SMTP, which was, you know, built in the 1980s and is terrible for privacy. It doesn't even have encryption that can be built in very easily. So actually, email was in some ways also a very, very strange place for Proton to start if we were really focused

10:00 on privacy. So how do you reconcile this? Because it seems like a contradiction, right? And the way that we thought of a problem is the following. For Proton to best improve the state of the world, actually building a new version of email, that wasn't the way to do it. And it's not the way to do it because it'd be extremely difficult to get others to adopt our new email and do it in big enough numbers to overcome the network effect of the existing email ecosystem. So it simply isn't going to work. So what is the second best alternative? Well, the second best alternative is actually to improve the state of privacy of email. So you build on top of email and it's existing network effects, but you actually make it more private. And this is really what ProtonMail tried to do. And I think in large part has achieved up to the limits in which the S&T protocol is able to address, right? So it cannot solve all privacy issues.

But it does solve, let's say, quite a few of them. And when it comes to fighting for financial freedom, our perspective is pretty similar. If you were to ask me today to build the most secure digital money, I would not build Bitcoin. In fact, what I would build probably would look pretty similar to Monero, right? But then why Bitcoin? Well, Bitcoin already has critical mass. It has strong network effects. So if our goal is to go out there and get decentralized money in the hands of millions, trying to replace Bitcoin could be a bit like trying to replace email, right? It's not impossible.

But at this stage, most would say that it's probably improbable. So then the approach, if you take the analogy to ProtonMail, is actually that, you know, if you don't replace Bitcoin, the next best thing that you can do is perhaps to try to improve the privacy of Bitcoin as much as possible. So this is the reason why we decided to start this journey with Bitcoin. And, you know, a lot of people said, oh, you know, it looks so strange. But the parallel is exactly the same with the early days of Proton beginning with ProtonMail.

Yeah, I think that's honestly a fantastic way to make the comparison and connects a lot of dots that hadn't made sense to me yet when looking at the announcement and using ProtonWallet was not, I mean, you'll talk quite a bit about network effect in the kind of literature that you wrote around it, the blog posts, the introductions within ProtonWallet. So that clicked, but that connection back to email of saying, we're going to take the thing with the biggest reach and the biggest network effect. And we're going to try to make it able to be used by the average person with privacy. That fits for sure. And that's definitely, it's an ideal goal. It's certainly a hard one in the Bitcoin space since privacy is very tricky when the chain is transparent by default.

And we've seen that it can get even more difficult when specific tools are taken down by governments with things like the Samourai Wallet indictment that happened in April. And there's actually an interesting tie between those two things in that I know some people had noticed on a GitHub repo that y'all had that there was a kind of a work in progress planned implementation of Samourai Wallet Whirlpool. Was that the approach that y'all were going to take to start building in better privacy into ProtonWallet? And if so, what's kind of your next steps for privacy on Bitcoin now that Samourai Wallet Whirlpool isn't usable pending the trial that they're undergoing?

Yeah, I guess that's a beautiful open source, right? Anything that we do is in the codes, people can see it. So in fact, you're correct. And I think people that saw that, you know, made the right conclusion, which is the first version of ProtonWallet that we were planning to launch actually was supposed to come out with CoinJoin support. And that was, you know, supposed to be in the initial release. Now, you know, I know, and actually for listeners that, you know, maybe know or don't know, there have been some recent developments on the legal front that made that impossible, right? Basically, everybody that's doing some sort of coin mixing is either, you know, A, in jail, or, you know, B, under threat of being in jail, or being legally prosecuted in some ways. And Proton, you know, given the fact that we have 100 million accounts, and we're serving users all around the world, you know, we are not in a position to, let's say, be the test case of whether or not, you know, coin mixing is legal or not legal. So when that

situation developed, and obviously our lawyers are watching developments in the space very carefully, we had two options, right? Option one was to scrap the wallet project entirely and not release it. And option two was to actually release it, but without the CoinJoin support on it. And then maybe wait and see if the environment around that could change in the coming months or years as those court cases, you know, work their way through the courts. And obviously, we opted for the latter approach, right? It wasn't our preferred approach. It wasn't the approach that we wanted to do at the beginning, but it was actually the only legal possibility given that, you know, all that has, you know, happened. Now, do I think it's the right choice? Well, the future is hard to predict, right? But if you kind of, you know, read between the lines and look at what's going on with the SEC and also DOJ, you know, in the US, actually, this whole environment could just be one election away from changing and, you know, having this be viable again. So it's,

it's hard to predict. But given the choice of not releasing the wallet versus releasing it, I still think releasing it was the right move. But, you know, for obvious reasons, we had to disable some of these features that currently are under legal attack. It makes the timeline make a lot more sense. Because that was, I think, my initial surprise was there's no privacy features right now within Proton Wallet. But then when people did unearth that kind of work in progress plan support for Whirlpool, and now hearing from you that that was planned for the initial release, that makes it makes it a lot clearer. Because I think that was the other most confusing part is there are some ways to gain privacy on Bitcoin, but there are none of those things that were baked into Proton. But I mean, that happening three months ago, I'm sure was a wild pivot for y'all having to decide what to do, how to handle it, and ultimately still to release, even if you weren't able to ship the privacy features that you wanted initially.

Yeah, we had it in there, and then we pulled it out. And the reason we pulled it out was because, you know, well, yeah, the way it works is there was legal opinion, right, written by a top-tier law firm in the US, which Proton's board, its foundation now, went out to commission to kind of understand the legal exposure, the risk that we would run by doing this. And basically, there is way too much uncertainty in this space right now. We'll see what happens in November, we'll see what happens next year, everything could be completely different. But yeah, I think for now, it would have been too irresponsible to go forward, you know, given all that has happened.

It's an unfortunate reality, but it's definitely something that that's just kind of the state of things, how it is today. And hopeful that as well, that will change quickly in the US and that this case against the Samourai Wallet devs in particular will turn out to be a positive precedent. It really could. And I'd urge just as an aside, anyone who wants to learn more or consider donating to the Samourai Wallet devs defense to go to p2prights.org. Some people I know well are kind of helping to fund the defense and ensure that they get the best possible legal care both for themselves and to hopefully set a positive precedent in this case that can enable things like Samourai Wallet Whirlpool in Proton Wallet. Expanding on that take just a little bit more, are there any other kind of future privacy improvements in Proton Wallet or in the Bitcoin space that excite you? Maybe things like silent payments for on-chain payments or Bolt 12 with Lightning support, which I know that you have some plans for Lightning support that we'll probably

touch on later. But anything on kind of the privacy front in Bitcoin that you're excited to see and maybe to integrate into Proton Wallet in the near future? Yeah, the thing that's coming the soonest is probably going to be coin control. And I think this is something that actually at Proton, because we do support Bitcoin by email, we can do a better user experience, right? Because today when you do coin control, you have to filter among dozens of Bitcoin addresses that you don't recognize, you can't figure out who is who and what transaction is what, right? You know, with Bitcoin by email, in fact, you'll see the email. So you'll know who sent you coins and then you can, you know, do coin control a lot better. So this is something that is coming pretty quickly.

What we also want to do, of course, is Lightning. But Lightning, as a lot of people know, it's extremely difficult today to do, let's say, a good user experience on Lightning in a non-custodial way. And if you want to do it, you know, in a custodial way, that's banking licenses, that's money transmitting licenses, that's a whole nother ballgame. So I do believe that Lightning is eventually going to come. It's inevitable. It's something that we believe in and we want to support it. But it's probably not a matter of how fast can devs code. It's more a question of, you know, how fast and searching licenses and legal developments and legal clarity, you know, be achieved. So that is definitely also, you know, planned. I think you also mentioned, I think the silent payments you said, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Silent payments. We, of course, have followed that quite closely. We've been looking into that. As of the last time I checked, and maybe it's changed in the past few months and someone will correct me, you know, in the comments of this podcast later, but I don't believe it's been merged into a Bitcoin core yet. So until it actually gets merged and it becomes a bit more stable, you know, it's not something that we can immediately adopt. And Proton's philosophy is never, let's say, to be the first to implement a new technology per se.

It's a bit like us getting into a Bitcoin wallet, right? You know, we,

20:00 We made a joke on Reddit the other day that actually we got to Bitcoin later than BlackRock, which is kind of amazing to think about Proton in our position, right? But, you know, we tend to be very conservative. And because there are still risks in, you know, selling payments, because it hasn't been merged and fully tested, there are things that could go wrong by implementing that now. It's a bit like alpha or maybe even beta software in a sense, right?

So it needs time to mature. And once it's, let's say, mature and the community has been more comfortable and confident about it, then you could see us implementing that as well. So we won't be the first. We won't be the last either. But we'll do it when we consider it to be, let's say, fully stable and safe. Yeah, I only mention that because I think it could be a really good fit with the pay-to-email function in Proton because it does allow you to have just a static address and would allow you to move away from the pool of GPG-signed addresses.

You could just sign the single silent payment address and any payer could derive new addresses every time. But it is very new. I mean, there's one wallet that supports it right now. The Bitcoin improvement proposal itself has been merged in. It's BIP 352. But you're right that the index functionality in Bitcoin Core has yet to be merged. And a lot of the upstream libraries and SDKs are still a work in progress for silent payments. So definitely early, but I think it could be a really good fit for y'all down the line.

Yeah. And of course, we're working together with Square on some of the software here, right? Together with Jack and his team, which have been, frankly, fantastic. And yeah, at some point, we'll probably pull that up into the upstream as well and get that implemented. But it's new. So it'll take a bit of time. One little extra clarifying thing on that. Y'all are using BDK as the back-end for ProtonMall, correct? Okay. Yeah. So it's silent payments aren't supported in there either.

That's one thing where at Foundation, we're waiting on silent payment support in BDK before we go to merge that into Envoy as well. So I definitely understand. Yeah. I think everybody's waiting on that. But, you know, it's being discussed, right? And actually, I'm also glad that, in fact, a thorough security audit of BDK is going to be taking place as well later this fall, which I think is necessary for the space. So it's a bit like when we did the work with OpenBGP.js, right?

OpenBGP. I believe strongly even in Bitcoin. Standards are important. You know, core and common libraries are also important. And this is kind of like building the railroads that will allow us to colonize this space over time. And not just Proton, but, you know, the space as a whole will do better because of this. Yeah, absolutely. And that's one of the really beautiful things about y'all embracing the open source ethos and that being a core part of the Bitcoin space is that every time a large company like Proton adopts something like BDK, they start pouring resources into it.

It's a net win for everyone in this space. And that's one of the things that I really, really appreciate that y'all have stuck to is making sure that everything you do is open sourced, eventually at least. And that ensures that those contributions help a lot of other people and not just Proton, which is a huge win, something I'm really, really happy about. The question that I'm sure thousands of people on Twitter are waiting to hear from you, will ProtonWallet have things other than Bitcoin in the future?

And I don't ask this to get into like the like, will X random altcoin be a part of ProtonWallet? But just the way some of the responses were handled on Twitter and on Reddit, I think left people a little bit confused. Specifically, my question would be around Monero. But I know that there's a lot of people wondering like, will this be Bitcoin only? Is Bitcoin just the start of this? Kind of what are your thoughts around that? There's a couple of directions that we can go.

And I think the direction we pick depends a lot on the problem that we're trying to solve. And that's always the key thing when building a product, right? You have to understand what problem you're trying to solve. And it's an interesting thing because, you know, okay, let's take out the 99% of crypto that is scam, right? Because, you know, for being honest, most of it is scams. There's still percent, you know, which is quite a few products that I think are doing good things.

But they're all trying to solve different problems. And the problem that you solve versus the tool that you use, you know, it can be different. So I can think of some use cases for Bitcoin is probably a terrible solution. And in that sense, you know, Bitcoin may be a shitty, right? So if we talk about the question of Nero or these other, you know, things, it really has to come out of the question of what is it that we want to solve? And for that, you can't go look at Bitcoin or even, you know, Proton's interest in Bitcoin.

You have to go back a step further and look at Proton's long-term vision. And our vision actually is to compete with Google and Apple. It sounds crazy, but that's what we've been doing for the last 10 years or what we're going to do for the next 10 years and beyond, right? If you look at, you know, Google Pay, Apple Pay, and all that has been done there, it is almost inevitable. If we are to build a competing ecosystem that, you know, some sort of Proton Pay integrated in a Proton wallet, you know, becomes developed.

And for that reason, I would say that fiat is likely inevitable. And this is also somewhat evident, even look at the community reactions, right? There's, of course, the reaction among the crypto and Bitcoin community. But there's also the reaction among the broader Proton community, the vast majority of them who actually, you know, don't use crypto or Bitcoin. And one of the most vocal requests, you know, among our broader community of 100 million people, and, you know, a lot of the people are not on X, they're not on, you know, Reddit, they're not on social media, but they're reaching out to us in other ways, right?

What they're saying is, you know, we love the concept of, you know, of a Proton wallet, but we like it to work the way that a Google wallet or an Apple wallet would work, right? And this is something that we need to take into account as we look at the broader community and how we developed. So most likely, we may go to fiat first before we come back to, you know, look at the other cryptocurrencies that, you know, may make sense. Because it's simply what the broader community of Proton users is requesting.

Now, if I go to specifically the question of Monero, right, we, of course, will look at the market situation. Because the market situation actually dictates what users are asking for. And because we're not, you know, VC financed, in fact, we're a user community finance, what the community wants is, you know, what we have to build. So, you know, let's say hypothetically, someday, Monero displaces Bitcoin someday as the largest network with the most adoption and is the most widely used cryptocurrency out there.

It's, you know, there's some people in the Monero community who believe that is inevitable and going to happen. And, you know, we don't know, but, you know, let's take hypothetically that to be the case. And, you know, if that were the case, of course, we, you know, as a company that's trying to show the community would have to then, you know, add Monero because it would be at that point the biggest community. So that's how kind of I will look at it.

It's a bit like if someday signal protocol displaced SMTP as the main means of communication in a network way. Then, of course, you know, ProtonMill, you can expect, would also maybe update from using, you know, OpenPGP to using double ratchet instead. Right. So, you know, these are all things are possible, but it really has to depend on how the space evolves. And that's really how we look at it and how we make the decisions around, you know, product.

Yeah, I think that gets into a lot of the heart of the issue here. And I think a lot of the kind of the initial concern, especially like, I mean, I've been in the Minero community for a very long time. So I'm in tune with how they reacted to this announcement. And obviously some people just totally overblown in the response, took it way too far and were just way too upset that Monero was not implemented in ProtonMill, even though it is obviously much smaller than Bitcoin.

And the network effect argument is a legitimate one. And the same one that I made in a blog post that I wrote when I decided to go work for a Bitcoin company. I mean, it does matter that you actually have broad reach with a tool. I think the common concern is just, is that broad reach worth the loss of privacy for the individual user? And then pairing that with just the kind of the way that some of the language was, I think there was like a tweet that said like, no shit coins in ProtonWallet or something like that.

Yeah, that's right. Yeah, there's a line. But you know, people took that tweet out of context, right? You know, if you look above, we are answering a specific question about shit coins, right? You know, someone asks us, oh, you know, here come the shit coins. And, you know, obviously we're not going to implement a bunch of shit coins, right? This I think everybody, you know, can understand. Yeah, for sure. And that's the hard part. Shit coin is a trigger word for anyone who's not in Bitcoin, because the tribalistic Bitcoiners use shit coin to describe literally everything else.

But I think the nuanced Bitcoiners would not include things like Monero under the term shit coin. And that was a lot of the question was like, I think the immediate, the gut reaction that even I had was like, oh, they're just calling everything. That's not Bitcoin a shit coin. There's some tribalism going on here, and that's going to be a problem in implementing the best tool or

30:00 instead of just implementing Bitcoin no matter what. But you've already touched on a lot of the fact that your focus is network effect, your focus is reach. And then if that tool that you choose to use because of the reach that it has does not have the best privacy, finding ways to actually iterate on that privacy and improve it until hopefully something with better privacy comes along and makes that simpler. And I think that answers a lot of the question there. Yeah. And I think it's the only way to do it, right? Because, you know, like I said, right, you know, email, no one in their right mind that wants to build privacy first, you know, tech in the 21st century would pick email as a starting point. But it is the dominant, you know, communication tool out there. So whether you like it or not, it's the biggest one. And from that perspective, it makes a lot of sense to try to go as far as you can towards improving the privacy of, you know, email and also Bitcoin as well.

You know, it's not by any means the only way to do it. But I do think it's consistent with Perron's philosophy because, to be honest, right, most of the people who are privacy-conscious and privacy-focused, they don't need us. They don't need what we're doing, right? They have, they know how to get access to all these things and they know how to protect themselves and stay private. How we really change the world is by making that a bit more accessible to the other 99.9% of the world. And this is a huge challenge. But I think it's also the one that truly moves the needle. And this is why we focus the way that we have focused. And it's controversial sometimes, right? Not everybody subscribes to this approach. But I do think if you look at the results that we have achieved in the past decade, and, you know, the amount of penetration that we were able to get that past privacy companies were not able to achieve, it does show that there's some merit, you know, to this approach, despite the fact that a compromise is being made, because there's always a compromise that has to be made.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Everywhere you look there, there's compromises when you're choosing to build a product, especially when you're aiming at something as potentially difficult and, yeah, just difficult as doing privacy the right way. So I definitely, I definitely grasp that. I think, obviously not to give you, give you marketing tips, but I think leaning into that concept of building a Bitcoin wallet that will become more and more private over time is something that, that didn't seem clear to the people I talked about, and it wasn't clear to me. And I think that was the biggest concern was with just the drop of Samourai Wallet, Whirlpool integration, and then dropping a wallet that seemed to not have privacy features up front. It doesn't have privacy features right now.

But knowing a little bit more of that kind of roadmap of privacy that y'all have planned out and how you want to approach that is very, very important. And even like coin control, like you mentioned, being a next step is one that's vital and one that should be the first step for everyone's Bitcoin privacy journey. Like that is the core of what people should be doing as a reason. Like in Envoy, our mobile wallet foundation, that's a big focus for us when we spent months and months building out a really intuitive coin control feature, because that's the simplest and most approachable aspect of Bitcoin privacy that you need. Even if you're doing CoinJoin or something like that, you still need coin control. So I'm excited to see how y'all approach that. Because honestly, y'all do a very, very good job with the actual user experience and the accessibility. And making Bitcoin privacy actually accessible is not an easy task. So I'm fascinated to see how y'all actually take a stab at that. Yeah. And that's why we're excited by this as well, because, you know, the real

innovation here, which maybe people don't realize, all the discussion was, oh, you know, are they into Bitcoin only? You know, what does Bitcoin mean? There's all this discussion, right? But actually, the main innovation that came out, I would say, from this release, which we're going to iterate and improve upon, is actually Bitcoin by email, right? That is the thing that breaks down the entry barrier and makes it possible, you know, in a few months time for 100 million people to, you know, in one click, have access to Bitcoin. And that, by the way, is also something that in my belief is game changing for CoinControl. Because the fact that you can see all the addresses and easy associating identity to a transaction, you know, at least within your own wallet, that changes things because it actually makes, you know, CoinControl usable for the first time for a mainstream audience. So I do think there's a lot of potential here. But of course, you know, we're still early. We've been out for less than a week. And it

will take some time to fully explore and find the best way to get that potential. And to really increase the audience of people in the world who are, if not, you know, crypto aware, maybe becoming a bit more crypto savvy. Yeah, absolutely. And that the user experience improvement of just being able to send to like a user readable contact listable address is a massive step forward. That's something that I've enjoyed lately in the Bitcoin space. There's a new DNS based version of that essentially, that lets you have a username at domain.com that can resolve to silent payments, it can resolve to a bolt 12 invoice, it can, it can make it really simple for someone to send to a user readable name, but that still requires that the person on the other end already has that all set up. Whereas with the Proton sent to email approach, that's not required, right? Like even sending to somebody that's not a current Proton user can create a Proton wallet and claim, claim those funds. How does exactly does that work for a non-Proton user?

Yeah, well, actually, anybody can create a Proton wallet account. It doesn't even have to be Proton mail, right? It could also be your Gmail account. So it works the way, exactly the way that PayPal works. You know, as long as you have a Proton wallet account, anybody in that network can actually send value in a seamless, easy to use way. And I think the beauty of what we're doing is that there's actually a hundred million accounts out there already. So, you know, I think some people say there's maybe 500 million crypto users out there. I don't know what the actual number is, right? But, you know, assuming that is true, we could be increasing this number by 20% overnight. And I think that's incredibly powerful. So that is why we pioneered this approach because actually it ties in very well with the work that we've done on email. And it's early to say, we don't know if it's in work or not, but I do think it has massive potential because, you know, you don't have to fill up the DNS, you don't have to configure anything. You just get an account and it's done. And then you're part of a

network of a hundred million people that you can seamlessly transact with. And it doesn't get easier than that, honestly. Right? Yeah, absolutely. It's the, that's the easiest user experience you can really ask for. I think the one, one more little kind of privacy focused question on that, and then we'll, we'll shift focus a little bit more towards the future of Proton wallet and Proton itself. But one more question that I think is something that I wasn't able to find a clear answer to when I was digging through the docs and the frequently asked questions. But when you're leveraging the send email feature and you're a recipient, you enable this for a Proton email address. What does Proton get insight into as far as the actual Bitcoin on-chain activity, like the address pool, that's GPG sign that I mentioned briefly earlier?

And how does that pair with your email address? Like what kind of visibility does Proton as an entity have into that? Because I think that's another bit of a concern with the Proton wallet integration into Proton services. It's just that this will be an added potential avenue for Proton surveillance or for a three-letter agency, et cetera, to force Proton to surveil. And that concerns people a little bit, I think. Yeah. So of course we have access to the pool, but then it's a question of what we retain. So I would say it's very similar to our, to our VPN business, right? You know, Proton VPN in theory has access to all your traffic because that's the way TCP/IP works. But, you know, we simply choose not to log it.

We do public audits to verify that we don't log it. And also we have the backing of Swiss law that is very clearly saying we are not obliged to log it. So if you, if you take that concept and you apply it to, you know, the pool of addresses that are linked to Bitcoin via email, it's the same thing, right? Of course, if we wanted to, we could record everything in that pool and keep a record. But now, as soon as an address is used, we throw away. That's not being logged. That's not being saved. And there's also, under current Swiss law, no legal way to compel us to log that information. There's no other way that it can work because obviously if you're, if you're, let's say, coordinating the transaction, you will have that information and it is inevitable. But, you know, we don't log it.

Yeah. I think that that definitely is fitting. And I'm sure people will watch just like they do with, with the current VPN policies and email policies. If there are court cases in the future where Proton is asked to provide info, what info is provided is usually a good tell of what actually is being logged or not. I think some people have really overblown the fact that obviously y'all can sometimes give an IP address over to a law enforcement agency. But I think that it's, that that response has been very overblown, but I'm sure that I'll be keeping an eye on that to, to obviously just confirm via third party means that that policy is abided by.

Yeah. And actually the scale of Proton makes that pretty easy because there are usually, let's say large number of cases that come through. So, you know, there's some people that say, oh, you know, we don't log. Well, you know, you never had a case yet. So we don't actually know if you log or not. Right. But, you know, in our case, there's been, you know, a big enough history of cases in the past for, I think people can, you know, pretty credibly understand what we have or what we don't have because you don't go through thousands of cases, you know, over 10 years and have that still be, you know, a mystery.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's one of the best litmus tests of whether a provider is actually committed to, to non-logging. And it's something that, that I use and talk about. So let's, let's pivot.

40:00 for our last few minutes that we have here, I want to focus on the future of ProtonWallet and then the future of Proton as a whole. So we've touched a little bit on where you see ProtonWallet going, really on the general desire for better privacy in Proton, the addition of Lightning. Was there anything else that you wanted to touch on about what you're excited to add in or improve within ProtonWallet? Well, myself personally, right, I would love to take out, you know, Google Pay and compete with that eventually. But, you know, that's a tough one. So, you know, we may not be able to see that through with all the legal challenges that that will pose.

But that would, of course, be a dream, right, if we could do that. And that's something that we're actively, you know, looking into. So I would say, you know, if you go to our user voice where there's a bunch of suggestions, right, it's not one I'm ready to mark as in, you know, in progress yet. But it's definitely something that is being thought about a lot within Proton today, not just from a technical standpoint, but also from the legal team, you know, thinking about this.

So it's that's that's one that's out there. And obviously, you know, the limit features that we mentioned, point control coming very quickly, whether coin join and other things like this can happen. This is going to depend on the cases that are currently pending in U.S. court. I think there's also a case that was pending in a Dutch court as well. And that one actually ended quite badly for the, yeah, for the defendant. So we're watching this. And I do think that, you know, anybody that has an interest in this space should be supporting these cases. And, you know, and yeah, actually, we actually are reading every single filing of those cases right now. That's how close you are following it. Because it's, it's really going to decide in many ways, the future of, you know, the freedom to transact and freedom to self custody.

Yeah, I'm glad that you're, you're aware and up to speed on those as well. Because I think there's a, I don't know, it's just easy for this space, the crypto and the privacy space to quickly move on, just because there's so much news happening all the time. And I feel like that's a little bit happened with the Sam Raulet case and the Tornado Cash case, which is the one you mentioned. And in the Netherlands, which also has an accompanying case in the US that I think is up for trial or up for the next meeting for the trial in December, I believe. There's a lot of work to be done on both of those. And I would say on the, the Sam Raulet side, if you haven't already gotten connected with the P2P Rights Fund guys, I would love to connect you if there's any interest in either just just talking about it publicly, or any kind of donation. I know them well, and they're doing fantastic work, work to both support the actual defense of Sam Raulet and to put in a lot of effort towards amicus briefs, which can go a long way there as well. So that's definitely something that we can

chat more about offline. But I would love to get you plugged in there if at all possible. Yeah, I think, don't quote me on this, because I may be wrong. But I believe, you know, our legal teams, our policy teams have already been in touch with some of these folks. Because obviously, you know, we do want to support them as much as possible in these cases. What I think is worth mentioning is, there are also very clear differences, you know, between some of these cases, and say, you know, what an afterlife proton would be involved in.

So the problem with these cases, and I'm, of course, supportive of, let's say, the overall principle that these people are trying to uphold, right? But I do think sometimes the messenger that is upholding these principles is not the right one. And what I mean by that is, you know, in these cases, they do what is called legal discovery. So they go back through, they look at old tweets, look at old chats, and look at, you know, things we won't have written, right? And the problem here is, there's so much other stuff that, you know, unfortunately, was said, that can be used to muddy the waters. So, you know, they found old tweets and old emails, you know, where people, even if it's not direct evidence of facilitation of money laundering, it's, you know, certain statements are not helpful, right? That seemed like compliance was an afterthought, as opposed to something that, you know, was paid attention to from the very beginning. And ultimately, these are a bit, you know, kind of fly-by-night operations, a lot of these. And that's actually the problem, is that the

values here, the principles are correct. But the messengers, oftentimes, unfortunately, are, you know, deeply flawed in various ways. And it makes it very difficult to win these cases. So, you know, I do believe if there was another case with, you know, somebody that maybe did compliance a bit more carefully, the outcome could be different. And then this is also why, the DOJ is smart, right? So they picked the specific cases for dealing with these vulnerabilities. But unfortunately, this might set a precedent for the whole industry. So as much as people like to say, oh, you know, forget about compliance, we don't care about compliance, you know, we're libertarians, and we're for, you know, anything goes. Yeah, but, you know, that doesn't really correlate to the real world. So at a certain point, we do need to have a balance between compliance and, you know, not compliant at all. And I think, unfortunately, a lot of people in this space don't quite strike the right balance.

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head when you said that the DOJ is smart and chooses these cases intentionally. They're trying to find the low-hanging fruit that they can find some bits and pieces that will dirty up their reputation enough to try and get this passed a judge and jury. So it's definitely an unfortunate situation. But I understand the perspective there, for sure. Last question for you, definitely not the least. But I know that at Proton, obviously, you'll always have a ton of things in the works. You know, I've had some synthetic acquisitions lately with things like standard notes. Obviously, you dropped the Proton wallet without a lot of us being prepared for that. Are there any other tidbits you can share with us that you have planned for Proton in the future that you want to kind of maybe end off on a good note here?

Yeah, I'm always surprised that people manage to get surprised when we release things because, you know, a lot of our code is open source, right? And if you look carefully enough, you will find it. So in fact, if you were, let's say, closely watching certain repositories, you would have seen Proton wallet at least mentioned on GitHub, you know, at least a couple months back. But yeah, I suppose we've been pretty good at, let's say, keeping things confidential so we can work on them in peace. You know, it's a bit like Apple, which is also very good at not letting people know kind of what they're up to. So what can I confirm? Well, what I can confirm is actually we're not going to be, let's say, launching any other major products this, let's say, in the next couple months.

And that's because, you know, we've done a lot. Actually, people saw, you know, the Proton AI for businesses, you know, they saw docs, and they saw wallet all landing in, you know, July. And they thought, oh, okay, Proton's gone crazy. These people have lost their minds, and they're stupid and not caring about the community, etc. Right? It's not like that, right? It was, you know, obviously, development is hard to predict. These things were not all supposed to land within a span of two, three weeks, but they happened to get to the finish line sort of at the same time. And that's why, you know, they all came out. So I would say July is probably an anomaly. This is not, you know, the usual situation, right? You know, we're not spending every month launching three products. This is not what we do.

We do have a lot of focus, attention, and effort on existing products. There's romance that we'll be sharing pretty soon. There's a lot of exciting things are coming for, you know, things already that exist in our ecosystem. You know, we're improving the VPN. There's a lot of work that's happening on Calendar. I know Calendar people are, you know, are unhappy with it. In fact, I think there's some serious issues there that we need to improve, and we're going to do that, right? I think, you know, even on the mail products, there's some longstanding features that that we're very close to getting out. So, you know, we haven't lost, let's say, our focus on what is our core mission. This will still be ongoing. And you, you know, won't hear any product announcements from us for new things, at least for a couple months. And we're going to spend the rest of the summer quite focused on the core things the community cares about. And on that note, you know, we work for you. Ultimately, we work for the community and for the users. We don't work for VCs. We don't

work for investors. You know, we don't work for governments. We work for the people. So come on Twitter, you know, go on Reddit, just email us, again, touch with our support team. Let us know what you want. And it's our obligation actually to, you know, meet the needs of the community, and we will do that. Speaking of that, I do have one more question that I forgot to ask that I know that the Monero community would skewer me if I didn't throw out there. Any plans for accepting Monero for payment for Proton services? Not integration to Proton Wallet, but just allowing us to pay for Proton with Monero. Because I know that's been one of the most highly requested features on your platform for a long time. Yeah. And I'll actually give you kind of an answer that is not public, but I'm okay sharing it, right? And because it's because, and in the end, it's just a kind of a legal but kind of a stupid thing. Proton is a Swiss company. And Swiss companies, you know, above a certain size, have to undergo what is known as, you know, a mandatory legal audit. And to get a legal

audit done, you need to find an auditing company that is willing to run your full audit. And generally, because, you know, because Proton is a, let's say, a bigger company that is, let's say, you know, more credible in many ways, we try to go with one of the big four up

50:00 accounting firms, right? So actually it's public information because it's on the Geneva Registered Commerce, but actually, you know, we use PwC as our auditor. And the thing about big for auditing firms is they are pretty wary of crypto in general. And to pass your audit, you need to have, you know, very good revenue recognition because it's something that you have to do properly. So already the fact that we accept Bitcoin has made it so that certain auditors refuse to work with us. And the worry that we have is, you know, if we do Monero, that may further limit the auditors that are willing and able to work with us. And at some point, you know, that poses a problem for us from a legal standpoint, because we're required to get an audit and we want to get an audit from a reputable firm. So it's, you know, I hate to say it, right? But Monero has a reputational problem that needs to be, let's say, separately addressed first before it can gain more widespread acceptance. Because for a lot of companies, there are real business reasons why

they are simply unable to do it. It's a painful answer. It's not an unexpected one. I mean, the specifics on the auditing firm's unwillingness to work with Monero is not obviously a detail that I've known before now. But just that distancing of the reputation of Monero from what it actually is, which is a tool for freedom, a digital cash, not just a tool for criminals, even though that is the public perception, it's a hard one. It's a hard one to escape from. And I know that it does have real world impacts.

And I think the Monero community above all understands that the easiest way to prevent its usage and thus prevent access to easier financial privacy than something like Bitcoin is to just make it harder to use in the above board, legit world. And that has been their approach for a long time to make sure that exchanges can't list it, banks won't handle anything that has to do with Monero, etc. So I'm not too surprised by the answer. Obviously sad.

But I'm grateful that you were willing to get into the details a little bit there because I know that there hasn't been really any public statement on that. Yeah, it's tricky, right? To be honest, even on Bitcoin, it took Bitcoin probably 13 years before it made it off the blacklist, right? And look, of the big four, I won't name names, right? But there are some of them who even today would not be willing to audit Proton because we accept Bitcoin. And that's Bitcoin we're talking about, right? So it's just going to take time.

It's something we can hope for. And in the meantime, I'm excited to see how Proton Wallet will push Bitcoin privacy forward. Because that's a unique advantage that Bitcoin does have, is it has a reputation generally for being an above board, okay thing to accept and list and use. So anytime that privacy features are built into the wallets and tools that are kind of built around Bitcoin, it's a huge win. It's a huge win. So I'm excited to see where you'll take that.

I know I've eaten up a lot of your time. You're very busy, man. So I don't want to keep you any longer. I just want to say thank you so much for coming on. I know there are a ton of questions here that we got through. We kind of went rapid fire through them. But a lot of things that the community really wanted to hear more on. And you did a great job answering them. So thank you so much, Andy, for coming on today. Yeah, of course. And I am personally on Reddit and Twitter sometimes.

In the end, we're transparent. We work for the community. And if there are questions, we're afraid to answer them. Because I honestly believe if we're not ready to answer the hard questions about something, we shouldn't be doing it. So I'm also happy to have the opportunity to clarify these points, not just for you, but also for the community that follows you. And looking forward to continuing the conversation and continuing to engage with everybody in this space. And hopefully we can make this wallet a good one.

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