Will Reeves, CEO of Fold Inc: Scaling Bitcoin and Solving Merchant Issues with Pizza

— Will Reeves built Fold to enable Bitcoin spending and earning through everyday consumer transactions, leveraging rewards programs and merchant partnerships rather than on-chain payments.

— Fold solves merchant acceptance by converting customer Bitcoin or fiat into store credit, eliminating processing fees and chargebacks while letting merchants settle in USD without taking Bitcoin risk.

— Lightning Network is production-ready for real-world commerce; Lightning Pizza proved it can handle $25–$50 transactions nationwide, with current self-imposed limits around $400 for network safety and routing reliability.

— Layer two adoption will likely drive mainstream Bitcoin onboarding in the next five years, with users experiencing Lightning without realizing it through payments, trading, and messaging applications.

— Fold prioritizes privacy by ensuring retailers and banks never see transaction details, pseudonymizing purchases and blocking data harvesting that fuels traditional payment fraud.

— The biggest regulatory barrier is capital gains tax treatment of Bitcoin spending, which discourages everyday use despite being the most transformative real-world application.

— If you use Fold with Bitcoin via Lightning, you earn 3–4% higher rewards than credit card purchases; spending Bitcoin directly incentivizes adoption while teaching newcomers currency mechanics without exchange volatility stress.

— Retailers currently lose 1.5–3% to processing fees and suffer massive chargeback losses; Fold eliminates both while settling in fiat, creating a risk-free experiment for merchants to test Bitcoin's operational benefits.

— Regulatory change to capital gains tax on Bitcoin spending would unlock a second adoption wave: today's speculators could transition to users once small purchases become tax-neutral, fundamentally shifting the narrative from store-of-value to medium-of-exchange.