Lightning Turns Money Into a Data Network | Jesse Shrader, CEO of Amboss

About this episode

Jesse Shrader discusses the launch of Amboss and the potential of the Lightning Network for peer-to-peer trading and decentralized finance.

Jesse Shrader built Amboss after paying $60 in Bitcoin transaction fees and watching his payment fail to arrive. Now Amboss is launching Rails X: full peer-to-peer trading directly on Lightning, self-custodial, near-instant, with the network itself acting as a decentralized exchange. In this episode of the Conor Chepenik Podcast we get into Lightning doing 40 million TPS vs Solana's 17,000, why stable coins at the edges actually serve Bitcoiners, AI agents streaming sats for compute, the newspaper-page-size tax story, why the four-year cycle is dead, and Jesse's quote that still floats around Twitter: "Never before has greed tempted me to live a very simple life." Plus my kid closes it out, and if a 3-year-old knows what the best money is, well, you should too. Timecodes below: 00:00:00 — Intro & Jesse's origin story 00:05:46 — Rails X: peer-to-peer trading on Lightning 00:09:27 — Stable coins at the edges & Taproot Assets 00:11:28 — AI tools for building & the "vibe coded app" problem 00:20:41 — Self-custody flips finance on its head 00:29:17 — Lightning for AI agents & micropayments 00:36:04 — Arc, eCash, and symbiotic L2s 00:43:03 —…

People in this episode

Host: Conor Chepenik

Guest: Jesse Shrader

Topics covered

• Lightning Network
• peer-to-peer trading
• Bitcoin transaction fees
• self-custody
• AI and micropayments
• decentralized exchange

Keywords

• Lightning Network
• Amboss
• Bitcoin
• peer-to-peer trading
• stable coins
• AI agents
• self-custody
• decentralized exchange

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Amboss

Products: Rails X, Bitcoin, stable coins, AI agents

Books & works: Never before has greed tempted me to live a very simple life

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