My guest today is Tyler Spalding, a Co-Founder of Flexa, a blockchain payments company based in New York City. Flexa is a versatile digital payments platform that offers several key features. Payments are collateralized by Flexa’s ERC-20 token Amp, which can be staked as collateral that receives additional Amp as a staking incentive. Flexa uses “flexcodes,” unique barcodes that are generated and scanned for each transaction — enhancing security and consumer privacy. Flexa supports dozens of digital currencies for consumers — including cryptocurrencies, tokens, and digital dollars — for payment at thousands of stores throughout the United States and Canada — including Nordstrom, GameStop, Lowe’s, and Petco. Flexa has a mission of eventually enabling digital asset payments for any app, using any currency, at any store worldwide.
Tyler is the former Chief Technology Officer at Raise, the world’s largest gift card marketplace with over $1B in sales and $150M in venture funding. Tyler has more than 20 years of technology experience, has founded and sold three software companies, and is an active seed-stage investor in 25+ startups. He is an author of more than 50 technology patents and was previously an aerospace engineering faculty member at two universities. Tyler is also a former engineer for the United Space Alliance, the United States Air Force, NASA Mars Crew Module, and the NASA Space Shuttle Program. He holds two Masters degrees from MIT and UIUC. Tyler has spoken at various retail, payments, and blockchain events, including Money 20/20, Consensus, ShopTalk, Intersect Retail, Internet Retailer Conference and Exhibition, and the E-Commerce Conference and Exposition (International Keynote). We discuss various topics, including the Flexa and AMP, the payment industry, why we are still early, and much more. We begin our conversation by discussing the various inefficiencies in the payment industry.
I share my personal experience with the challenges facing merchants when dealing with payment providers. Tyler explains why the inefficiencies are so prevalent. Tyler shares his experience from helping run Raise, the world’s largest gift card marketplace, where they developed various systems to combat the fraud and other inefficiencies of the payments industry. Our conversation naturally leads us to Flexa, where Tyler explains how Flexa enables people to pay with crypto across millions of merchants and retailers. Tyler describes how Flexa easily allows merchants to process crypto by integrating it with their existing payment stack. Tyler discusses the tokenomics of AMP and how AMP powers the Flexa network. We have a fascinating conversation comparing the engineering challenges in blockchain and aerospace engineering. We also discuss the philosophy of Voluntarism and the importance of individual choice. Our conversation pivots back to Flexa, where we discuss the company's commitment to transparency. Our next conversation topic was how Flexa is supporting the infrastructure of El Salvador’s transition to a Bitcoin Standard. Our conversation shifts to how the crypto industry is still very early and why it is inevitable. We discuss why the industry will begin proving the thesis behind its value proposition. Our final conversation topic centered on the social challenges of educating people on the proper custody of digital assets. Please enjoy my conversation with Tyler Spalding.
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