Ep 170: Feelings Check-In on Leadership and Building Equitable Financial Systems with Denelle Dixon, the CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation

[00:00] The Feelings Check-In is a podcast for people who love to listen to two women overshare about the challenges of building a business, navigating careers in tech, and trying to have a personal life. I'm Natasha Hoskins. I'm Dina Burke. And this is Boys Club. Wait, is it just Boys Club? It's just Boys Club. The Boys Club podcast? No. No. [00:21] Just boys club. [00:22] Hey, how's it going? Good. We have some pod recordings today. I'm podding it up. I'm living in this booth. My ring light has died. That's when you know. That's when you know. Whenever my ring light dies in one of these, especially in an interview, I look so bad without the ring light because this lighting in this booth is just like insane. It's a crime against me. And I could just see the face of the person I'm interviewing being like, what just happened? This woman aged like 15 [00:52] Oh, thank you. Thank you. Okay. So today's a feelings check in. We have a guest on today's feelings check in Danelle Dixon, who is the CEO and executive director of the Stellar Development Foundation. We have been talking a lot about Stellar on this podcast over the past couple weeks. And we also released a big blog post that was highlighting some of the Stellar use cases. We love Stellar. They're doing really incredible work. What I like about them is that they are [01:22] They're just doing the work. They're just not. It's not about anything else but doing the work. And that is so refreshing. It's really cool to see. [01:29] I agree. I agree. So we had Danelle on and really enjoyed the conversation with her. She is an adult. And I love- Grown up talking to- It's so nice. It's so refreshing. I feel like the bar- Sometimes I feel the bar is pretty low. I had a call today with somebody and I got off and I called you and you were like, wow, you're really juiced up. And I was just like, yeah, it's because this person is like-

[01:55] actually thinking about [01:58] people using their thing. And what is struck by today is how thoughtful this woman is. And wow, it's missing sometimes in this industry. There's just like a maturity in how she's thinking about the work and how she's thinking about the outcomes and how she is thinking about her team that I think that this industry needs in order to grow and to reach the next inflection point that I think we all want for crypto. I just don't think that's going to happen with a bunch of 21 year old [02:28] startups. We need more people like Danelle running organizations. So really enjoyed the conversation. We talked to her about her career. She spent some time at Mozilla. So talked to her about that. She was a lawyer before that trial lawyer. I was like, whoa, wouldn't want to be on the other side of that. Would want to be on her side of the table in that situation. So yeah, really enjoyed it. I hope you guys enjoy it. I think there's a lot to learn from her around making decisions around your career, building a team, and then just a lot to hear about in terms [02:58] world use cases, PTL. So give it a listen. [03:02] Thank you. [03:04] Hey, Natasha. So a question we get asked a lot is, what do you look for in a crypto platform? So let's talk about it. Well, Dina, I look for a secure, no fuss platform that I can dive into right away. That's why I love today's sponsor, Kraken. If you're waiting for the right time to get into crypto, Kraken makes it super easy and intuitive to get started. Plus, if you get stuck, they have an award-winning client support team that's available 24-7, along with a bunch of educational guides, articles, and videos to help you along the way.

[03:33] go to kraken.com backslash boys club not investment advice crypto trading involves risk of loss and is offered to us customers through payward interactive inc [03:46] We have Danelle Dixon, the CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation on the show today. Stellar Development Foundation is a nonprofit that's working to create equitable access to the global financial system through blockchain technology. We're going to talk a lot about that today. Previously, Danelle was the COO at Mozilla, which is one of the most successful mission driven open source organizations. Danelle, we're going to talk about your work there. You [04:16] the disclosure of vulnerabilities by governments and greater user choice [04:20] and control. So we're excited to dive into all that today. Welcome to the show. [04:24] Thank you so much. I'm so happy to be here. I appreciate you guys having me on. We're super excited. There's a lot of things that we want to cover today. We definitely want to talk about the Stellar Foundation. But before we get into that, we want to hear about your career. It's amazing to see somebody in crypto who has had a big tech career. You were an executive for many years at the Mozilla Corporation. We love to see that. We love to see very senior talent coming into this space and building. [04:54] of tell us about your work at Mozilla. How did that sort of lead you to where you are today? And a little bit about sort of your background. [05:01] Yeah, thank you. It's super fun to talk about it because it's like so much about who I am. I was actually a trial lawyer before I started working at Mozilla. And so I spent a bunch of time in doing like really focusing on outcomes for clients. So thinking about like sometimes it wasn't to win the litigation, sometimes it was to like reach a settlement. And so really focusing around what's going on.

[05:21] What is it that we want strategically the outcome to be? And then what are the goals and strategies to get there, essentially? So I kind of took that lens of everything that I did. And I worked in tech for clients, actually. I had represented clients in private practice at Yahoo and actually Google early days, like lots of these players in Web2. So by the time I had hit Mozilla, I had spent a bunch of time in the Web2 space. Maybe it was Web1. I'm not sure. It sort of dates me. [05:51] loved the work that I did at Mozilla is very similar to why I love what I do here. It's this kind of like perfect trifecta of business, policy, and tech. And when you get to bring those all together, the confluence of everything that sort of I love to do, I love to advocate, love to be challenged from like a technology standpoint to understand things. And then I love to be able to look at a business and say, how can we refine this? How can we make this just a bit better? How can we get closer to the consumer? And so that's what I spent the majority of my time at Mozilla doing. [06:21] was really like thinking about the business side of it [06:23] Mozilla is complicated because Mozilla is an open source project and we have the foundation. The reason why it's so easy to be mission driven is because it was wholly owned by the foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, which is a nonprofit, which is a super unique structure. And the reason why I got to advocate for lots of different policy initiatives that didn't even like necessarily have a lot to do with our product is because [06:48] The mission of Mozilla at the corporation level was the open web and to maintain that openness on the web. And so much of what we saw during that time and still today, although sort of there's been victories around it, is that we had too many players who are monopolizing too many different parts of the web and really limiting that openness. And so it was like my fight to try to keep it as open as we could during that time. So I loved my work there.

[07:18] connect those three things, business, tech, and policy, in a way that is beneficial not just for Mozilla, but was also beneficial for the industry at large. [07:28] So you did this incredible work at Mozilla. You've been at Stellar Development Foundation for five years now. [07:34] made the jump into crypto five years ago. What was that 2017 2018? It was May of 2019. May 1 2019. Yeah. What caused the jump? [07:43] So it was really, it was actually, it was because of all the work that I had done beforehand. So Jed found me, he found me through a mutual contact of ours. We literally spent nine months talking about whether this made the most sense for me, whether this made the most sense for the foundation. I loved the idea of what Stellar, what SDF was focused on. And it really aligned with those three things I talked about, business, policy, and tech. And all those three things are [08:13] this, and almost in every role that I had had before, [08:16] So I was the breadwinner in the family. I was a single mom. I had three kids that I was taking care of on my own for the most part. And I couldn't go and be a startup founder. Not saying that I always had the creativity to be one, by the way. I'd like to think I did, but I probably didn't. But I wanted to get that feel of a startup and to be part of something that was growing. Because so much of what I had done is sustain or grew businesses that already existed. And I wanted to grow something from the start. But I didn't have that flexibility. [08:43] And really, like at this point, when Jed came to me, what I really focused on was, okay, like I want this from the standpoint of what I want to do with my career, what I want to do with like all this stuff that I've learned how to do fairly well from the standpoint of advocacy and really bringing this over together.

[08:59] But I also really wanted to work on something that was at the beginning. And it all balanced out. And I was able to do that even with the balancing what I needed from my home. And it was like a perfect, perfect time. And I just am so glad that I did it. The other part of it was that so much of what we did wrong in the early days of the web, and I'm a part of that, we advocated for governments to stay out and to just let us do our thing. [09:29] standards and it was wrong and what I wanted to do on the financial side of the web is write that and to make it so that we constantly engaged and that we were hyper focused on making sure that what we did was in line with the regulatory environment and we could help them to establish the outcomes they wanted and the outcomes they didn't want and regulate there instead of at the tech stack I felt like because of my history of what I had done before I felt like I could really help that. [09:54] Hmm. [09:55] Wow, I love that. There's so much. I'm so struck by how perfectly... [10:00] positioned you are to be in this industry and to do this work. It's really, really nice to hear and makes me excited about the industry more broadly. I'd love to understand how you have made decisions for what you're optimizing for. We talk a lot about at Boys Club, our careers and what makes us happy and what the work means to us and how we can balance that against the realities of our lives. And so I'm curious, as you're thinking about that matrix of decisions, where did you

[10:30] I'd love to hear. [10:32] Yeah, it's such a great question and I think it's one of the things that we don't spend enough time there. Early on in my career, I had my first son when I was 29. [10:42] I was a trial lawyer, and when you're a trial lawyer, it's a lot of freaking hours. Trial law is like... [10:48] courtroom, I object to [10:50] Okay. I objected a lot. So, and it was just a lot of time. But the thing that I always felt was really important is that if I was going to have these children, [11:01] I was going to be present for them. And so I always was very honest about, OK, I'm going to be here. And I'm like a super competitive person. I want to do the best that I can do, all those things. But there was one area where I was like, I can't-- like, I need to be super protective of this space. And so I would say, hey. [11:20] I got to go. I got to go to take my son here or there. But I'll get back online later or whatever. Hopefully today we're a bit more rational about these things than we were back then. But I was really protective of making sure that I didn't [11:32] lose, you can't always have it all and I totally get that and I think everybody should understand that, but you can have everything that makes sense to you and so [11:40] Even when, as my boys got older and when I became a single parent and so I was raising them on my own, it was a lot about making sure that they knew that I loved the work that I did and that when I had to leave them, I was leaving them for the thing that I was. [11:53] that really mattered to me. And I would talk a lot about how important my work was for me. And that it made them feel like I wasn't leaving them for something I hated. And that was a really important conversation that I had a lot with them. And honestly, during that time period, I optimized a lot for-- in all the different roles that I had, I took almost a half cut in pay in every job.

[12:17] But what I made sure is I had enough to cover what I needed to take care of them and to take care of me. And the rest of it, I felt like it would work itself out. And so I optimized for the love of the work, for my brain to constantly be engaged, and for what I needed to do to protect what I considered like my perfect little nest egg at home with my boys. And so that was like really how and still like today when I took the role with SDF, [12:43] almost six years ago, it's five and a half years ago, I took also a half cut in pay. And, but I was like, look, this is what I need. I told Jed very clearly, this is what I need to be able to take care of the family. And if I can get that, I'd be thrilled. And, you know, everything comes around and works itself out. So I can't say that I didn't optimize for money, because I kind of like always had to have that in my life to think through what I needed for them. But I never like, [13:06] I could have stayed, you know, that we call it the golden handcuffs in the legal profession. Like as a partner at a firm, I could have stayed there and things would have been different. But I always was optimizing for making sure that I loved what I did. [13:16] And I can honestly say that in every job, [13:19] that I've ever had [13:21] I loved my job and partly [13:23] honestly probably it was because I knew I couldn't not love it [13:28] Because if I did, that means I was making a choice to be away from my boys for something that I didn't love. So I got myself to a place where I created that kind of environment everywhere. [13:36] Yeah, I hear that. I feel like that trade-off becomes very amplified and very crystallized when you have kids and you're kind of thinking about

[13:47] finite amount of time that there is in the day and [13:50] how are you going to be allocating that time starts to rank orders things really quickly. And it makes you like have a very sober view at the work and like, is this exactly what I want to be like pouring my life force into because there's this other place that I could be pouring my life force into. So I feel that I feel that very deeply and appreciate you speaking about it. I'm curious. So you about five and a half years ago, six years ago, you're having this conversation. Yeah. [14:14] and [14:15] You... [14:16] had presumably this great job at Mozilla that was paying well and you wanted to do sort of the startup thing, wanted to get into that. Was there any feelings around the crypto piece of it? Were you hesitant? Were you excited? Two people who have so many feelings about the crypto piece. Yeah, it's funny and maybe I was a bit naive about it. But so I had been in tech for such a long time and I was. [14:39] female leader in tech [14:40] which, by the way, is friggin' hard, at least was hard during the time that I was there. I'm hopeful that it's gotten a lot easier. And so I didn't feel... And then the technologies, we're constantly working on like new technologies and in new spaces. And that's what we were doing at Mozilla and kind of every place that I had been at before. And so I wasn't [15:00] fearful of the tech stack. I wasn't even fearful of the crypto ecosystem. I didn't really actually, to be totally honest, know the challenges that I would face in the ecosystem itself. I was just excited. I was like, you know, Jed talked to me about, hey, we're going to make money move like email. And I was like, oh, that sounds amazing. I know how hard it is to make email move. Let's figure out if we can make money move that way. And so I was just really excited about the opportunity.

[15:24] It definitely, as I got into it, I was like, oh, yeah. So technologies, tech side's one thing. Crypto is a whole other dynamic. But I have to say, I feel like it's gotten a lot easier from that standpoint, too. [15:35] I'd love to hear about your day to day building SDF and how that has evolved over the last six years. I'm sure it has changed a lot. I know that there's over 100 people, I believe now working there. So yeah, I'd love to hear what what is your day to day look like? What's it like building the team? What are some challenges and areas that you think a lot about? [15:52] Yeah, well, I think that the most fun thing and the thing that I'm most proud of is the team. We're like at 160 now, which I don't think we'll ever get more than 200. My sort of thing is like the way a foundation, in my opinion, should work in an ecosystem is that we take on a role, not the role, and that we allow others to build in, to fill in the gaps that exist. And so we sort of highlight some of those gaps and help to create the fill in, but we can't fill them all in ourselves. That doesn't make sense from my standpoint. So we probably hit our ceiling around 200. [16:22] We had 12 people. We had $12 million cash. We had like a lot of lumens, but we really didn't have like a way to like know what we were going to do with all of them. And so the most fun of it then was actually creating structure, which is like my favorite thing in the whole wide world to do is like, let's put structure around this and like, let's make it like sort of work. Let's, let's make it ride a lot more smoothly. And then I got a management team in, which was really fun also. And like, just to, to see the evolution of it.

[16:52] of my time. [16:53] creating that structure, [16:55] figuring out the management team, figuring out our internal structures of our teams. And then, you know, then it became like a lot of policy, a lot of like talking, a lot of BD work, business development work, which I also love. And then. [17:09] And then now I think it's morphed into a lot of like I spend a lot of time [17:14] like focusing around strategy and working with my chief of staff and like our management team to really develop that strategy and to look at our ecosystem. And I spend a lot of time trying to learn about players in the ecosystem and what they're doing. So I listen a lot. [17:28] I talk a lot. I really... [17:30] value the team that's here and I want to encourage their growth. So one of the things I always have felt since the first day I started work was, yes, I have to give this organization something, but they have to give me something too. And the thing I always wanted from an organization was like help to figure out what the next thing could be for me. And so that's what I like to spend a lot of time with people, making sure that they know like, yeah, I want you to be here. I want you to stay here, maybe for the rest of your life. But what if you don't want to, like, what do you want? What do [18:00] from your career. So I love those kinds of conversations. So yeah, that's like sort of like the day-to-day is a lot around strategy, a lot around like business. [18:08] but a lot just around like making sure like the care and feeding of the internal audience that we have, which I think is super important. [18:14] I want to ask a follow-up question quickly because I feel like, well, I have you here. I want to learn some things from my own career. But so much of building the early team is hiring right. And that is, as I get older and as I'm in my career longer, I realize how much that is a superpower. And people who are great at it build really great businesses. And people who are bad at it spend all of their time managing bad fits for their companies.

[18:44] As you've scaled, how does that work evolve or how does it change over time? [18:49] Yeah, so for me, hiring so much is about my gut instinct. One of the things that I learned early on from my dad way back when is he always told me, trust your gut, you got to trust yourself on some of these things. And so for me, so much about like hiring my management team, [19:03] is about that give and take and that feel of, are they going to push back on me? Are they going to make sure that their voices are heard? I don't want someone who's just going to follow. I want a leader. I always want to hire people who are better than me. And that's totally cliche, but it is absolutely true. If you do not hire people who are better than you, [19:20] you will not be successful. So I'm constantly looking for that talent that I'm like, damn, like I wouldn't get this job if I were up against them. And that's totally what I love to see in people. And so that's sort of like the management team piece. But I think most and maybe even the most important thing is that you understand that hiring is about both sides and that there is a time period that you give to both sides to say, is this working or is this not? And you don't let [19:50] and tell you that one of my like [19:52] weaknesses as a leader is that I always think that I can help the person to get past the bump that we're facing. I can fix some energy. Exactly. I'm like, I can do this. I can make this work. And it is the thing I have to fight against because it's not good for that person if they're also, they're probably feeling a lot of the same thing. So I really try to have those open conversations as often as I can. And so then you really get the sense of it. So hiring is a skill

[20:22] look at this resume and they might be perfect on paper, but if you don't get that vibe when you're in a room with them, it's not a good fit no matter what, no matter what that paper tells you. [20:32] And I think that that's like the way that I go about doing it. I also feel like you have to have like-- it's sort of quirky, but I really like to have-- [20:40] the personality types that we don't want the same personality type across the board, but we want to make sure that we have those values that we know as an organization are really important to us. And so we set that out from the very beginning. It was literally like I think in the second month that I was here that I said, I need to have like what do we care about? What are our values? And let's put those out there so that people who are coming to work here know what we stand for and that they can decide whether they're in line with that. And that's a super important part of it. [21:09] And like I said, the word quirky because I feel like we super are here. Like we're a very quirky group of people. [21:14] And I kind of love that because I feel like I am. I would have never ascribed that to myself years ago because I don't know that it was safe to do it at some point. But like now I'm completely like that. I'm an introvert who. [21:25] loves to be around people and listen, but I'm not like, I will put myself out there and I'll do all these talks. And I'm good at that because I was trained to be good at it long ago when I was a trial lawyer. [21:34] But my best spot is like sitting and like watching people do their thing. And so I just think it's like kind of nice to have people who have very different personalities. And so that's what we strive for. [21:44] We love your team at Stellar. You've assembled a great team there. I want to talk about Stellar. When I think about the crypto landscape, there's probably...

[21:54] Three... [21:55] to five, I can count on one hand the number of organizations that I think are [22:01] Truly... [22:02] mission driven. I think that there's a lot of people who say that and I think that that's a popular buzzword. But I do I do count stellar amongst the ones that I think are actually doing that work. And you know, we talked about this idea of global financial access that feels really embedded in the work that SDF does every day. Tell us a little bit about the mission and about about that work. [22:22] Yeah, so I think that everybody says they have a mission. When I worked at Yahoo years ago, we had a mission and it was to delight our users, which by the way is a great mission, but it's not the same kind of mission that resonates with like feeling like you're actually contributing to something that's for the greater good. And I had that at Mozilla and I loved it. As I said, like I got to advocate for things that weren't directly related to like our work. And I feel the same here. And so we actually, Jed, [22:47] an amazing human and really had that mission about making money move like email. It should be very simple. What we did is we tried to put words around that. And we put the words around it about creating equitable access to the global financial system. And why those words are so important in terms of how they got there is that a lot of people jump into like the financial inclusion side. And I would love to say that I have that I like we have an impact on financial inclusion, but that's not our superpower. That's not our strength. It is the superpower and strength [23:17] build on the network. And I want us to stay tight to what our role is. And we can create that access layer, we can help to create access to the financial system by building and supporting the work of building this amazing infrastructure that Stellar is, and making sure standards come in play and advocating for people to build on it. And so I think having that mission, and it really be the core, I really like, and this is one of the things that I think really good companies do. I learned

[23:47] remind everybody here in almost all of our presentations or when I'm presenting outside, about our mission. Like this is the mission. [23:54] Now, I also want to be very clear [23:58] that [23:58] not every single thing that we do has to have a direct line to the mission. So people get kind of lost sometimes because there are things that are going to be built on Stellar that are not going to be mission aligned very directly. If you think about, for example, the tokenization of assets that are assets that are restricted assets. Why is that part of our mission? [24:18] Well, the fact is that it might not be able to reach those people who didn't have access before, but it hardens and strengthens the network and it makes it so that this network is actually better. What's a restricted asset? A restricted asset means that you have to already had, you have to know your customer, you have to put in your information, you probably have to have a bank account to hold it. All those things that we're actually trying to achieve outside the US that people don't have access to those things. [24:45] But it makes it so that the network is better as a result of it. Having participants from the financial infrastructure of today [24:51] makes it so that this network is going to be even stronger. And so I think the mission, you need to think about the mission not as a straight line, but as this overarching thing that sits there, that we make sure that we allocate our time, our energy and our opinions to support that mission. But we're going to be working with institutions that don't at all have the same mission as us. [25:10] And I'm good with that. And I think that that's actually like, I can help them to make their businesses like amazing. And in the same time, I'm strengthening what Stellar has to offer. So it's a nice balance between, and how to approach the mission. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Could you bring to life a little bit,

[25:26] why it's important to have fiat on and off ramps. Like just really practically, what does that mean for people? [25:33] Yeah, I mean, that's the one thing that I think that we've done super well. And we've done it since the inception and really, really focused on it since in 2018, 2019, when I got here. And the reason why that is so important is, [25:45] is I believe very, very deeply in the interoperability with traditional financial infrastructure. [25:51] We liked to say in the early days of crypto that we were going to disrupt and make them all irrelevant. But the truth is some of these players did some things really, really, really well. If you take MoneyGram, for example, what MoneyGram has to offer on a global basis is this way to touch the human that doesn't have a bank account, that doesn't have access to credit cards, that really relies on fiat and just fiat in its heart and doesn't have access to any of those other things that we take for granted. [26:21] that allows people to walk into all these agents in all parts of the world and to take their fiat in and send it or to receive fiat from family outside. [26:31] Those rails, those on and off ramps, that last mile, is the most important way to reach people who don't have any way to be connected to traditional financial infrastructure. They don't have a credit card, they don't have a bank account, they don't have a savings account, they don't have any way to get into that, because some of the things that we take for granted is the fact that, [26:51] like lots of folks here can do a lot of these things, or you can have Venmo, or you can do a bunch of things in the United States. Outside the United States, it's actually not that simple. And so a lot of people combine money into these, you know, like these family groups, put money together to save their money, and they pool their money. But there are ways to do that that's safer. And the digital asset way is the safest way. And so

[27:10] If somebody wants to get into digital assets, you need a way in. And if you don't have a credit card, you don't have bank account, you don't have savings account, you don't have any other way, [27:18] The only way to do it is through fiat. [27:20] So if you take it into these on and off ramps, so you can convert it to the digital asset, then you're in a system that's bigger than you, that's going to offer you yield and going to offer you credit and going to offer you hopefully like credit reports and all these things because of how immutable the blockchain is. [27:35] And so it's just like the most important thing [27:38] And so many people in our industry lose sight of how important that is because they're focused on [27:43] the United States or Western countries, which have access to all of those things. Yeah, the on-ramping... [27:50] it feels like the existential thing to solve for in crypto and i don't mean like onboarding people to crypto in the way that we say that in the us i mean like the actual onboarding of people's money especially in these emerging markets to crypto rails as you put it the other thing that people talk about a lot when [28:08] they're talking about this like on ramp is through earning. [28:11] crypto, that it won't necessarily be like a fiat conversion, but that it could be some leapfrogged tech where there's a mobile phone and there's some sort of virtual work. Does that come up for you? [28:22] As well. [28:23] Well, once people get into the system, so once you're in, because you have this on-ramp in any part of the world, and by the way, no user should have to be forced to understand the crypto blockchain piece. It should just be super seamless. It should be like one of the things I said when I first came into this space.

[28:40] after spending so much time in tech, was like, where are UX designers? Like, where's the UI? Like, where's the user friendliness? Like, we have to figure out how to do that. And I feel like we're getting it now. And it's just so beautiful to see these wallets that are seamless. And the users don't need to understand back-end tech. They don't really even need to understand that this is like a crypto asset that they're leveraging. So that is like the first thing. Let's make it simple and easy, get them on the system. And then once they're in, they can educate themselves and decide, like, do we want to go generate yields by getting into some [29:10] some pools or getting into a Dow or actually like holding a yield bearing asset are those things that matter and they can decide those things. It empowers them to be in control of their money in a way they weren't historically and that's what like [29:22] Honestly, I travel throughout the world [29:26] to these regions that are so different from where I'm from. And I am so impressed [29:31] and enthusiastic [29:32] about not just like what we can do to help them because it's not that it's actually about what they're already doing to help themselves and they're so excited about new tech that can deliver these kinds of things to them and they're building around it and making it real and i just love it so [29:48] Yes, we talk about it. We want to institute it. We want it to be UX designed beautifully and simply and easy. And we want everyone to be able to have access. [29:55] I love that. We're going to take a short break. [29:58] Thank you. [29:59] It's time for a more open, inclusive, and transparent financial system. A system that serves nearly everyone, everywhere, all the time. That's why we love today's sponsor, Kraken. Kraken is a crypto platform that provides a super simple on-ramp to the world of crypto with a 24-7 support team. Crypto transcends physical and imaginary borders. No matter where you are, you can send funds easily and quickly to almost any part of the world. Plus, forget about waiting times and waiting lines. You can send, receive, and trade crypto anywhere near instantly.

[30:28] kraken.com backslash boys club not investment advice crypto trading involves risk of loss and is offered to us customers through payward interactive inc no third-party transfers available [30:41] I'd love to spend some time talking about some of the projects that are on Stellar. So tell us about some of the projects you're excited about. Yeah, there's so many. I'll go through like there's a real world asset side. So we have like Franklin Templeton building a money market fund on Stellar. They did that starting in 2019 earlier than anybody else did. And they chose us without us. [31:00] Like we didn't even do any, they like chose the tech because the tech's amazing. Super proud of that piece of it. And they, it's, you know, we're the second chain for real world assets. [31:08] behind Ethereum and my focus is trying to make that bigger and better. So WisdomTree, lots of other players are in that space doing that. [31:15] Real world assets are also just like fiat backed assets. And it's just really cool to see all of these like awesome things happen there. [31:21] We have like debt funds, like ClickPaste had just put out a debt fund. [31:25] There's so many opportunities to take what we are so used to seeing in traditional finance and to put it on chain and to make it real. [31:34] for humans that have never had access to that. That is super cool. So anything that you can think about from micro-loans to folks that can pay back, because by the way, if you give people micro-loans, [31:44] and they know they can get another one after, they pay it back by 98% of the time. It's remarkable, particularly women. And so when you see these kinds of tools that are built on Stellar, Tala's building on Stellar, they do microloans out to folks in Peru, and they pay back, and they love it, and they create then their own individual credit score, right? Because you can prove that you made that payment on the blockchain. And so it's just a really nice thing to be able to see.

[32:08] Then of course, we get to like payments and remittances, which is the thing that I spend so much time and energy on, because it is the thing that makes the world go round. If you think about having money, that's the savings, [32:19] That's the like a checking type account. But being able to spend that money and use that money and send that money is so important. And that's what payments allow you to do. So we have our work with the UNHCR where we're delivering aid into Ukraine and other parts of the world. And just to not only see the value of the tech like working so beautifully for humans and giving them empowerment and choice and things that like in a terrible time in their lives. [32:43] But also that on the UNHCR side, [32:45] it's actually benefiting the UNHCR and they've saved like 12 million dollars [32:50] to deliver aid of 4 million because of the digital asset usage. So that's the benefit of the tech, right? It's not just amazing for the consumer of it, it's also amazing for the provider of it from their standpoint. So that's another fun one. [33:04] to see. And you guys actually recently shared the video about decaf wallet. And that to me is like a super special [33:12] because it's payments, because it's remittances, because it's human. And I love that. UNHCR, for folks who don't know, is the UN... [33:20] And refugee organizations, the High Commissioner on Human Rights. Yeah. Yeah. The humanitarian aid corner of crypto is so powerful and not nearly enough airtime is given to those efforts. I know, especially because to me, it's like. [33:37] When you see the humanitarian aid in action with crypto, it becomes immediately apparent and it's 10x better than...

[33:44] the current existing aid structures in terms of speed and transparency and fees and reducing middlemen and all that. So that is something that I always, always love. [33:56] can't get enough of those stories and love to hear it. - But we don't get it talked about enough. It's so funny, I hearken back to like the day that we launched [34:05] with the UNHCR and the IRC, and this was in December, [34:11] a year and two almost almost two years ago the day that we launched was the either the same day or the day after sam bankman freed was being arraigned in new york and the headlines of crypto were all about that and we were like we took out a full page ad in the new york times we're like look at this this technology is doing amazing things we still don't get the attention to it it doesn't really matter in my opinion like whether we get the attention the real life use is happening and so i just get so excited about it to be able to deliver aid in three minutes [34:41] to someone who is in need in a country, and then they decide what they're going to do with that value in that moment. Are they going to cash it out? Are they going to move it to a bank account? Are they just going to hold it? Are they going to move to Poland, and then they're going to take the cash out in Poland? Having those choices is pretty remarkable. And to see it happening over and over. And now it's like... [34:59] The coolest thing about this whole work with the UNHCR now is that [35:03] It's no longer a thing we are like, okay, it's going out today. No, it like happens every day and we don't have to do it. Like it just happens. And that's exactly, you want it to be a tool in their toolbox. It's not going to work everywhere, but a tool in their toolbox that they can leverage when they need it.

[35:16] So I want to close with hearing about [35:19] your Merdan conference. We've been talking a lot about it over the last few weeks on this podcast. Really exciting things. A lot of what we're talking about today around real world use cases on Stellar will be talked about at this conference, but I'd love to give a little bit of air time. You guys have done this conference, I believe six times. I think this is the sixth annual conference, which is amazing. So we'd love to hear about how you guys are thinking about that conference, what it's been like the past few years and what you're excited about for this year. [35:45] Yeah, so the reason why we started the conference, it was in 2019, was our first one. [35:49] And we called it Meridian. The reason why we called it Meridian is I looked at, tried to find a way to sort of talk about us as a convener, and the Meridian that goes around the world. It's the thing that sort of brings the world together. And so we're the convener of this ecosystem. [36:05] I believe that building an ecosystem around kind of everything that we do is so important. It was really important to me at Mozilla. We had a community. We had an ecosystem that thrived. Here, it's like so amazing to see like the global nature of it. Not everyone is here for the same thing, and that's okay. And that is the purpose of Meridian, is to bring everybody together so that we can celebrate, first of all, like the tech stack and like what the tech stack can allow them to do, but also let them showcase their work. [36:35] really awesome people that are going to come and talk. But my favorite part about it is to just meet [36:40] all these humans who are building on our tech stack that I get to hear about in like bits and pieces and like, I even like watching the work that you guys have been doing with the team. It's so great to meet you because I like, I'm so jealous that the team gets to be in the field and meeting everybody. And so it's really fun to meet people and hear what they're doing and hear what they care about. And one of the things I think we get lost on sometimes is we don't listen enough. And when you listen to what people are building, which is what the purpose of Meridian is,

[37:08] you understand a whole different dynamic about what the world looks like. And that is why Meridian, we have it every year. And it is super exciting. This year, we have like 800 people coming to Meridian, which is our biggest Meridian yet. We try to keep them like smallish so people can like get that feel of, you know, coming together with like a group that is very, very, very different from one another, but like aligned in certain ways. But it's going to be really fun. And it's October, I think, 15th through 17th. It is like the thing that we line up to every year. [37:38] and we get so excited about because it's sort of the, the ecosystems moment to shine. [37:43] Amazing. Well, it's going to be a great time, I'm sure. [37:46] Danelle, thank you so much for the time today. I've so enjoyed this conversation with you. Yeah, great. Thank you guys so much for having me. It was wonderful.