05 - Network State Conference 2026 - Josh Swihart on Building Money Without Banks

[music] tried to fist bump me on the way up and I totally missed it. I was distracted by you all. All right, so a few years ago, I applied for a refinance on my home to a bank that I had been with for over 30 years since I was a teenager. My credit was perfect. My payment history was perfect. It went to the underwriter and it came back and they said, "We're sorry, Josh. You've been rejected. You've been rejected because we don't like the company that you're working for. You do work that we don't like. Last year, the OC released a study showing that nine of the largest banks in the US were denying financial services to people because they were doing lawful work, lawful work that they did not like. I first kind of fell in love with um privacy and um being and and free speech and with bulletin boards. This is before the internet. You had to dial up with a modem and I was able to be somebody nobody knew who I was. I could engage on ideas. I was talking to people that may be 10 years older than me, 30 years old. I had no idea. So speech became very important and then I kind of took it for granted and then what happened was the internet blew was was born. It blew up and we tried to get encrypted speech on the internet and there was a battle. So Phil Zimmerman created PJP PJP. He was put in under criminal investigation for three years and a group called the cipher punks fought back. They wrote code. They put it in books. They shipped it overseas. And they argued this is not amunition. This is speech. And a federal court agreed. And so I thought we had won. So when we got into like encrypted money, I reached out to a guy that I that I sat down with named Adam Susben. And Adam was a former director of OFAC and I said we are going to do for money what the cipher punks did for speech and he said that was about communication. This is about money you will lose. And the implication was that money was more dangerous than speech. that the government wanted to control money more than they uh wanted to control what you can what you can say online. And for a while I kind of dismissed it. I knew that it was there. It was like, "Okay, Adam." But then things started to happen. People's financial services were rejected like mine. Some opens source developers went to prison for writing open source code that protected privacy. Things got real and then I got summoned to a meeting with a white house and I was instructed to figure out a way to include a back door within Zcash. At the same time, Zcash was kind of languishing. So the amount of Zcash that was shielded or made private had kind of plateaued and then in early 2024 something started to shift. For the first time we introduced software that made it easy for people to opt in to this new form of money. It was called Zashi. Now it's called Zotle. And the amount of shield execs started to grow. We added hardware support because people said we want hardware devices to be able to sign. and it grew exponentially. We added the ability to swap in and out and it went completely vertical. It the it did these things because people wanted the option. We found product market fit. We met a need. We created a user interface that was easy and intuitive and we delivered on that. So what we are focused on is creating a new financial system outside but adjacent to the uh the old financial system in order to make banks optional. In order to do that we have to have basic capabilities. The ability to save you be able to spend when and where you want and to be able to run on infrastructure that you trust. We've created these simple interfaces. This week we launched a new product uh auto vault. Um there's additional products that will be needed to be able to deliver this because the reality is we're trying to get Zeke in the hands of billions of people. We started by saying okay we're going to get the first 100 then the next 1,000 then 10,000 then hundreds of thousands. Now it's on to millions and then to billions. The infrastructure and the hardware is there. the software is not yet there but that is what we are building towards in after this conference uh you all will receive a link there will be a gift from us of free some free shielded Ze you'll be able to download Zotto wallet accept that Ze save privately spend how and where you want and run on infrastructure that you trust thank