Breaking Down Digital Payments | DAVID MARCUS

About this episode

David Marcus discusses the evolution of digital payments and the future of Bitcoin as a payment system.

Few people have had a closer view of the evolution of digital money than Lightspark CEO David Marcus. After helping scale PayPal and leading Meta’s ambitious—but highly scrutinized—cryptocurrency project Libra/Diem, Marcus has spent years navigating some of the toughest challenges in the payments industry, in both traditional and digital assets. Marcus more recently turned his focus to Bitcoin with Lightspark, exploring the limits of Lightning payments and building his own Bitcoin layer-2, Spark. After the regulatory challenges of Libra/Diem, Marcus shares why Bitcoin is the only digital assets network he wants to build payments systems on going forward — and why non-Bitcoin payments systems could potentially lead to a "dystopian future" long-term. In this interview, David and I dive into: What really happened with Libra/Diem—and why regulators stepped in so forcefully Why Marcus transitioned into Bitcoin, and why working on centralized digital assets will always carry regulatory risk The “dystopian future” of payments systems settling on “corp chains,” and why this is a real risk for our financial system How Lightspark plans to continue developing Lightning as an…

People in this episode

Host: Isabel Foxen Duke

Guest: David Marcus

Topics covered

• digital payments
• Bitcoin
• cryptocurrency
• financial systems
• regulatory challenges
• Lightning payments

Keywords

• digital money
• payments industry
• Bitcoin layer-2
• Lightning payments
• regulatory risk
• dystopian future

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Lightspark, PayPal, Meta, Libra, Diem

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