The Pomp Podcast
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.