Crypto Bridges and Payment Rails with Tyler Spalding

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. Flexa has point-of-sale (POS) hardware compatibility as a merchant-focused app and is designed to reduce costs, settlement times, and fraud. 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 is accepted all over North America; Flexa aims to scale globally and integrate with numerous apps and payment options. For merchants, Flexa offers a variety of payment integrations and plug-ins to enable digital asset acceptance using existing point-of-sale (POS) hardware and software. 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. He has been preaching/mining/coding cryptocurrencies since 2011. Tyler is the former CTO of 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. We discuss various topics, including the Flexa and AMP, the payment industry, why we are still early, etc. We begin our conversation by discussing the multiple inefficiencies in the payment industry. I share my personal experience with the challenges facing merchants when deali