Illia Polosukhin

Even before the war, you needed to sell half of your dollars in arrival into bank.

It's like super, super complicated.

Oh, wow.

You know, nothing worked with Russia even back then.

Like, you couldn't do PayPal, you couldn't do, et cetera.

Like, every country has some kind of complexity.

And we were like, hey, you know,

This is super annoying.

Like as developers who are trying to do something else, you're like, why are we dealing with all this payments infrastructure?

And so we started looking at blockchain to just fix that.

Like, hey, this global payment network, right?

That's what blockchain is.

Like, can we just send people money?

And so this was 2018, and we didn't find anything that actually satisfied our requirements, which was be really affordable.

It shouldn't cost you... Even back then, the fees were higher than what we were paying people.

Today, actually, Ethereum recorded, I think, $20 fees, $20 to $100 fee per transaction.

So if you're paying people 15 cents for some work, that's not going to work.

Yeah.

Then all of this, Bitcoin, Ethereum, et cetera, they were too slow, too kind of complex, really hard to build on, really complex to use.

And so we actually just like, okay, we should solve this problem.