The Future of Digital Asset Protection with AmericanFortress ft. CEO Michal "Mehow" Pospieszalski

GM, GM. Welcome to what's going to be another fantastic episode of DevNTell. So if you didn't know, DevNTell is a 30-minute podcast held every week, allowing founders, hackers, and anyone in between the opportunity to come on the show and showcase what they built. And today, I'm ecstatic to welcome back to the show Mehow, who is the CEO of AmericanFortress. Last time he was on the show, he demonstrated SwissFortress, so we're going to see all the great changes that have taken place since the last time he came on. And if you're not familiar, AmericanFortress is a platform making crypto transactions safer and easier by replacing long, risky wallet addresses with simple, human-readable names. So if you stick around for today's episode, you'll get to re-meet Mehow, or meet Mehow for the first time if you didn't tune in last time, learn about AmericanFortress, and how you can get started with the platform today. All right, let's do it.

GM, GM. Welcome back on the show, Mehow. I'm ecstatic to have you back on, man.

Yep, good to be here. Good to be here. Yeah, exactly, exactly. It's been a little bit, yeah. Happy post-Thanksgiving to you, my friend. Hope you had a wonderful turkey day. And thank you so much for taking the time out of your day to come chat with us today. Sounds good to me. We can just jump right into it. I am just turning on all that stuff, and I'm going to show you everything here. So, yeah, let me know what is your first question.

Yes, first question. Perhaps for folks that aren't familiar, would you like to just give a brief introduction about yourself in case they didn't tune in the last episode?

Sure. So I'm Mehow Pospieszalski. I'm the CEO of MatterFi, the co-inventor, patent writer, CEO fundraiser, business officer, everything. I mean, we have a decent team, but obviously I've been with this project since the very beginning. And me, you know, I grew up hacking. I started hacking at 15 and I'm 53, so I've been doing this for a minute, almost 40 years of hacking. So yeah, I started in 1987. And then my first job out of college was right for the, I worked as a contractor for the US Navy. We had a startup in Georgetown. We made a piece of Intel software for the US Navy. And that got bought. And then the next two companies I was doing software security, sort of like pioneering software security work. It was LHCG and Cigital. They both got bought out too. So then after that, I stopped working for companies. So I had this early run where I was like, oh, you know, if I'm going to innovate, you know, maybe I should do it for myself. And then, but basically I just want to work on stuff that's like really meaningful to society and really helpful and adds a lot of value. So that's what AmericanFortress is. It is a project that really fundamentally changes how you use crypto, makes it way easier and safer and really locks out the hackers. So very excited about that. And because we're about to be in production, we're about to TGE, we got a lot of adoption now, like a lot of different chains are like hopping on the platform. And then, you know, for those of you that were on the SwissFortress once, SwissFortress is coming back, but for now we're launching AmericanFortress first just from the business narrative. That seems to be working better. And AmericanFortress is entirely my effort, whereas SwissFortress was a client that I was working with, that we were working with, right? Because the regulatory environment for privacy, you know, in America was like so-so. And now it's like everybody's talking about privacy and we should have privacy in everything. And like, I have the ultimate solution for privacy. Like, you know, we basically created a Zcash for all the crypto without mixing, which is the holy grail of privacy, right? Because mixed funds are always a problem. So actually mixing is optional in our system. You will be able to mix on certain chains that support it, like Litecoin, Dash, Zcash itself, but it's not like a thing that the system has to have to function at all. In fact, it functions just fine with zero, zero mixing, right? Which is awesome. So you know, we'll jump in and talk about like what that is and why. But yeah, so that's a little bit about me. Yeah.

Excellent. Yeah, and you kind of jumped into the next set of questions I had. So yeah, you mentioned the last time you were on the show, showcasing SwissFortress, you hinted actually at AmericanFortress. So it's awesome to get that alpha. Full on. Full on AmericanFortress. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, excellent, excellent. We're full on branded out. We're starting a merch store in case you like the merch, by the way. There you go, there you go. So that's happening. Excellent. And yeah, I mean, yeah, a lot of folks on the show love their merch. But this switch up to the AmericanFortress side of things, you mentioned it also just in your introduction how the regulatory landscape has changed. I guess could you kind of double click on that a little bit just to get a founder's perspective of how much easier it might be to work in the US now if you're a Web3 or blockchain company, especially for something like you're doing?

Well, yeah, so I mean, it used to be that the first question we got from investors, you know, like pre-Trump time was, hey, you know, if you release this, isn't it going to get banned or is there going to be regulatory scrutiny? And it was mostly a misunderstanding because even then, we've never, like our platform's never been a mixing platform. So first of all, let me just explain what mixing is, you know, and then what's changed in the regulatory, you know, landscape. So first of all, Tornado Cash founders, like they, you know, that essentially that's a, you know, very deliberate mixer, right? So that guy still, you know, the founder, you know, still got in trouble, but it was way less trouble than before. But then there's a lot of other projects that are mixing that aren't in any trouble whatsoever, right? And it mostly seems to be the line seems to be, you know, whether there was like deliberate action to enable money laundering.

Now, what we wanted to do is create privacy without mixing whatsoever because no one really wants that liability, neither does the user. So let me explain what mixing is. So privacy is not mixing, right? Like you can have privacy without mixing. And I'll explain that. But most people think that if you need privacy, you have to mix. So what is mixing? Mixing is commingling of funds inside of blocks between the users so that like if Alice sends to Bob say 10 Ethereum, and it's in a block where there was say a 10,000 Ethereum, you know, that was the volume of the block, like the total amount of trades, what happens in a mix scenario where, and you know, Zcash would be a better example of this because in Ethereum the only way you can do this is very deliberately with Tornado Cash, but in that particular block all the funds are commingled, yet, you know, Bob still gets his 10 Ethereum or 10 Zcash, right? So there is a mathematical guarantee that, you know, all the money from everybody that's transacting in that block goes into the big tumbler, right? The washing machine, and then at the end they all get the money they're supposed to, but all the money was mixed. So when you mix, it's a cryptographic guarantee that like, you know, if you bought coffee, but somebody else bought cocaine in that same block, you're mixing the cocaine money with the coffee money, 100% guaranteed, right? So it's a problem because it's a cryptographic guarantee of money laundering, right? Like literally it's washing, right? So obviously criminal enterprises have been, you know, using this feature, and so the regulators are right in that yes, it's a problem in law enforcement, right?

Now, what do you need to do to, so then let's talk about the meta, you know, but, but ultimately, you know, I'm also a privacy advocate and I'm pro-mixing. Like I want the user to have the option to do it if they really, really want to. There is just consequences that that money, you know, later on you may not be able to deposit into an exchange, etc. or you may not be able to use it for certain transactions. Now, but most people just, you know, kind of do it and they don't realize like why they're doing it, they just think it's privacy. You know, so what the meta that's shifted is essentially, you know, it's been ruled that software that does this, you know, is not illegal, right? Like the software is okay. It's the, you know, deliberate misuse of it that would be a, the software's okay, the deliberate misuse is not okay, is the general line, right? So, you know, but the other thing that's happened is Zcash blew up like, you know, I don't know what their chart's at today, but it's, hold on, let me see. Zcash, Zcash USD. It's still up at 500, right? So it's still like 8x versus what it was like two months ago.

So, and now why did that happen? Well, people started using it. But what did they use in Zcash that, you know, but if you look at other privacy tokens, for example, it's like the only things that pumped are Pirate Chain, Dash, and Zcash. Now, I don't know Pirate Chain, I don't know its specifics, I haven't gotten into that, but I know exactly how Dash works because Dash is one of our partners. And I also know how Zcash works because, you know, super familiar with this project, given that they were one of the first implementations of stealth addresses and so were we. So these chains, they don't, they don't mandate the mixing. On Zcash only 30% of the volume is mixed. So if you look at like the statistics on chain only 30% of the funds at Zcash are, you know, locked or in what they call shielded addresses, so shielded addresses in Zcash speak means that they're mixed. So what's happening with the other 70? Like what, what is that, right? Well, that just uses stealth addresses. Now what are stealth addresses? Stealth addresses are essentially 80% of what you need for privacy. And let me explain what they are. So you can do a stealth address manually, right? So you can open up your Bitcoin wallet and I know that Narb is going to send me money and we're talking on Telegram or whatever, right? And I'm like, all right, Narb, I'm going to make a, you know, special address just for you. I'm going to just, you know, hit my next address generation key in my HD wallet, it's going to give me a new Bitcoin address. And now I'm going to take that address on Telegram and I'm going to give it just to you. And now only me and you know this address. And that's it, that's a stealth address, right?

So you know, the cool thing about stealth addresses is that now, you know, you can send me this crypto, and because we didn't publicly reveal, you know, this address to anybody, it's just me and you know about it, it's a stealth address, therefore no one knows that me and you transacted, right? So the problem with that is obviously really clunky. So the way like Zcash solved it is in Zcash the address that you give the counterparty is actually a pay code. It's a different type of cryptographic primitive. We're very familiar with this because we invented pay codes at, you know, Justus Ranvier, the inventor of BIP-47, works here, right? So, and BIP-47 was pay codes for Bitcoin, so it was essentially like Zcash-esque for Bitcoin. But it didn't get a lot of adoption, and I think one of the reasons is is that it's, you know, still really hard to use and it, there's some difficulties. So first of all let me explain what a pay code does. Well, what a pay code does is let the counterparty automatically generate a receive address for me when you get the pay code. So I can hand out the pay code to everybody, and I can even publish it online, say this is my pay code. And now anybody that uses that pay code will be able to generate a stealth address. Now the problem is that this only works for Zcash, right?

And the other problem is, okay, even when you generate this stealth address, like you know, you as the receiving wallet, like I wouldn't know that you sent me the money, Narb, I would just know that oh look, I got another stealth address, right? So my wallet's still going to have all these random addresses and random inputs from people, and I'm not going to know like who I got the money from, and if I send it to someone, I'm still not going to know who I sent it to, right? Like you know, I could track the pay codes again, right? Be like all right. So the problem is now you have twice as much mental mess for people to track. Now they got to track addresses and be like this transaction was from so and so, and then this pay code that I used to generate this, so it's, it's difficult to use, right?

So the breakthrough, the patented breakthrough at AmericanFortress is that we made all this just like, just like, first of all we made stealth addresses for all the crypto. So in our tech, I don't have to modify any chains and I just have stealth addresses for every chain, every token that we just write a driver for. And almost without exception there's very few chains that require any modification for our stuff to work, it's like 99% is already compatible, right? So I can even show you, hold on, I'm going to show you the adoption slide. So give me a second, I need to throw down another, a new screenshare here. Oops, let me stop that screenshare, throw in the new screenshare. Right, so there you go. Yep. So and don't worry guys, I'm going to show you the wallet here in a second, but I'm just explaining you the meta, right? So here's all the chains that were supported now, so we got Solana going live next week, we got Arbitrum also going live next week, we already got Litecoin, Dash, USDT, USDC, Ethereum, Bitcoin, BCH, eCash, Wyoming Frontier Token, hooray freedom, right? So and there's a lot of ecosystems that are, you know, helping us launch this thing, so like that's here, you know, maybe we'll get into that later, but let me go back to the meta.

So what happened is, is people suddenly realized that like, you know, in the meta, hey, actually stealth addressing is really cool. And it's available on this one chain called Zcash and that's it. You know, Dash does not have stealth addressing, guess who's making stealth addressing for Dash? We are.

Right, so there, well, okay, I'll, I'll make a correction. Dash DPNS name service has a two-way protocol for stealth addressing which where you have to like friend someone and then you'll have stealth addresses with them, it's quite clunky. We have a, you know, vastly improved version of that and again, that's just for one chain. So I wouldn't say that like literally this tech doesn't exist anywhere else, but it's one in 100, you know, one in 1,000 cases where it does exist, it's like very clunky and not, not this sort of nirvana that I'm about to show you. So everybody thinks privacy is awesome and but they just don't know under the hood that that's mostly stealth addressing, right? So let me show you, you know, what we did for stealth addressing and how it works in our system with just the send-to-name feature, and then we'll talk about, you know, the last little privacy frontier and how you can now do this without mixing because doing it without mixing is like having 100% privacy on all chains and tokens without mixing is exactly how it should be, it solves all the problems. And at that point regulators can't say shit. I mean, it's like, like right now if I go to the bank, like I don't want the other people in the line to know my balances, right? So this is exactly what we've created, but we've made it like even easier to use than the bank. So let me just show you the wallet unless Narb you have a question.

Uh, no, I am quite keen, I'm quite keen to see the demo. Uh, question wise though, for our crowd that is watching, if you do have questions, please drop them in the comments and we will bring them up. But I've brought the screen up. Go for it.

All right, so here is a, you know, multi-chain wallet with send-to-name. So obviously first of all is this wallet, you know, you can just generate a classic address and it'll work with all the classic, you know, Web3 stuff. We are making this available as an SDK, so MetaMask will shortly have these features as well. Um, so it'll be a MetaMask snap you can just add to your MetaMask and all of a sudden, you know, MetaMask will function like AmericanFortress. But I mean, if you look in here, other than a few legacy transactions, everything is a send-to-name. So my log, so like this is me transacting on the ZeroG chain, um, so we'll be releasing this wallet next week. This is a hot preview that you guys are getting, um, because this is also awesome for robots. So this receive transaction, this is from their faucet, but everything else you see is just send-to-name. So if I want to send, you know, crypto to someone, let me, I'm going to go in here and send like 10 cents to ZeroG. Um, I just type in, you know, @Sasha or whatever the username is. Next. Security check. Oh, I don't have, I have very little ZeroG or something? Yeah, I got a tiny fraction of ZeroG here. Let me do this with, uh, Ethereum just so you see it work. $1 of ETH @Sasha. Next. Security check. Success. Right, so you know, and I just sent the crypto, right? So, and if you go through my log, it's all, all the same names no matter, you know, radically different chains. There's Bitcoin, Bitcoin running with stealth addresses, right? Uh, here is BCH running with stealth addresses. Here is Litecoin running with stealth addresses. And then like in our beta, like you know, we have a faucet that's like auto-feeding your testnets, like if you want to testnet Litecoin you can do that. So you know, and we got USDC also with stealth addresses.

So, and what you have is it's just like PayPal. Like from, or Venmo or any app that you're used to, but this is actually completely decentralized. Um, so not only is it super easy to use, you have cryptographic proof of who you got the money from and who you sent the money to. And if I blow this wallet away and restore from seed, all this comes back. In fact, I restored this wallet right five minutes into the call and two minutes later the entire log was already back because I was testing another version last night and I was like, oh shit, I got to get the demo working for Narb. So really, really cool tech, right? So now let's talk about, you know, what this looks like on chain, right? So I'm going to look at this transaction to say Sasha, and I'm going to open it up in explorer. So now I'm going to switch the screenshare to explorer. So give me a second here. Stop screenshare, go to share screen again, window.

Okay, so this is the transaction I just sent. So how does my wallet know that this is in this case I think it was Zachary's address, right? So if I click on this I see that I sent some money to Zachary as well. And you see it's just coming from my one source address and it's always going to this guy Zachary. Um, so you know, normally in Unstoppable, friend.tech, all these other things, these are static addresses. Meaning there's a piece of DeFi or a piece of CeFi or a centralized something or other that's handing out addresses, right? So obviously these are, you know, not great things because for example, you know, just to show you how not private it is, I can just go to Unstoppable Domains, and I'm not like picking on them specifically because this is true for all the name services with extremely minor exceptions, like a FluidKey for ENS which is essentially a pay code for Ethereum only, but again no send-to-name. Also DPNS is another example of a like almost correct implementation. And and well, I wouldn't say they're incorrect. They're mathematically correct, they work fine, they're just not as cool as this.

So here we go, this is Lisa, she's their CTO, you know, and I can just look up her portfolio. Like now this is, you can do this for any, like you can do this for ENS too. It's just Unstoppable made it super easy because they created a browser. So I can just clicky clicky instead of having to like run a script and, you know, go scrape like a particular name's addresses and then take that address and run it through, you know, every block explorer that the ad, you know, if you have 10 different blocks registered with say Unstoppable, I mean sorry, 10 different chains registered with Unstoppable, you just pull those 10 addresses and then you just scan them and now you know exactly what this person's been doing, right? So and this is why people haven't really been using it. I mean just as a point of example here, you know, you've got 1,400 USDC came in, you know, 70 days ago from this other account. This other account's interesting because it's got way bigger transfers in here. You know, some 21,000 etc. right? So obviously not ideal. Not what we want, right? So back to our link, how do we do it?

Well, this is the dynamically computed stealth address. So imagine that the second you put your name up publicly, all other Fortress names, AmericanFortress, SwissFortress compatible wallets including SDK, you can just compute your receive addresses, but every time they do that it's automatic stealth address. You don't even have to understand it as a user. It just, the money show up end of story. No one knows what your balance is. So you have public names, private transactions. Okay. Now what's the only problem with my approach? Let me be my own critic, right? Well, if I send this money to now, what this does is obviously and our wallets automatically track this, you have a lot of different accounts. Like you have to have a lot of, you know, it's like essentially and in UTXO chains it's a different stealth address for every transaction. But we automate all this for you, you don't have to worry about it at all. It's just like you just have a balance. It doesn't matter, you know, from a crypto point of view, the address space between me and Narb is for any particular chain is 4.2 billion addresses. We're not running out, right? Like and it's not like that's like stressing out the chain or, you know, using address space, like that's a total myth. Like this is like, you know, we're taking a grain of sand, you know, on earth and except there's like 10,000 earths, right? And they all have trillions of grains of sand available, right? So it's just not an issue. The cryptography behind this is extremely solid.

So you know, but what's the one problem? Or what's the one optimization? Obviously this is already way better than anything else out there. What's the one optimization? Well, if you know, I can both me and this user Zachary, you know, can see where the money came from, right? 26 minutes ago I sent it, you know, it's from this address. So now he can look at this address and see oh yeah Mehow's been, you know, stacking some, some crypto into this address. This is all the address from the faucet, right? So this is like the faucet's doing deposits in here and I'm just sending stuff out. But he can see, now what's the security problem? Well in the case of the testnet faucet there isn't one really, right? But what's the problem if like I somehow consolidate a million Ethereum, you know, into one account and then I buy coffee with it. Now the person I bought coffee from with my system can click on this transaction and be like damn Mehow loaded, he can afford a lot more coffee. I'm going to send the wrench attackers to his house, right? So how do we solve that? We solve that also. We solve that with something called balance blinding which is a piece of tech that I am licensing to chains for free. It's another patent of mine. Patent pending, sorry. I have to be very careful with those, that wording because some of our stuff is already patented, some of it a lot of it is patent pending.

And what that does is it creates a L2 essentially or an L1 integration where you can balance blind. Meaning that you still see this on explorer, but you don't know, we solved the change problem. The recipient does not know what's left. And now you have perfect privacy without mixing. For the first time in the history of crypto for all chains and tokens, right? So I get super freaking excited about this because this is the only sane way to fix it without making more privacy chains that are specific. There is nothing actually wrong with Bitcoin, it just needs a tiny privacy upgrade, you know, which is this last, you know, balance blinding issue. But right now if you want to go to here AmericanFortress.io and you want to start downloading wallets, next week you'll be able to download the wallet I just showed you. Right now you can download the Litecoin version which is here. And you can already start playing with it. And then here's the little plug, hey, get your Fortress name.

Because they're limited, right? So like if I go to reserve my name here, voila. You know I, we have a very unique, you can reserve .light .root domains, so root would be like the Narb. And right now all we're selling is it has to be more than minimum six characters. Everything under six characters we're going to auction off, so we're going to start an auction because it's like names like Joe, if you want to be the Joe, then cool. Now this bit is centralized. This is the only centralized bit. Why is it centralized? Well because if you want to do something like hey I want to buy Binance, and I'm not Binance by the way, I'm freaking Mehow, right? And I try to check availability, it's going to say sorry, this name's not available, you know, and our AI bot blocked it. Why? Well because this solves all phishing, right? So now to not get fished you just got to make sure you can spell, right? Like you don't have to evaluate a 40 character hexadecimal string anymore and like see if it's correct to, you know, approve a transaction. Because it also works in hardware wallets, also works in custody, also works everywhere, right?

So reserve your name even in beta. What this does is generates a code that later when the wallet's in production January, February, you'll be able to link your seed to the name. Uh, the names are transferable, there will be an auction system, you'll be able to essentially sell them. The only thing you cannot do is go buy Binance when you're not Binance. And if you are Binance, then there's a link you're going to get to like a form that says okay fill this out and we'll real human KYC you to make sure that you are like say Donald Trump if that's the name that you bought. And that part's centralized. But once you link your name to the seed, your wallet will, now that goes all into the DeFi system, our DeFi system which will live on ZeroG and Base for essentially redundancy and duplication, redundancy purposes. So that DeFi is infallible. And your wallet can prove it to you. So like the metadata written to make this stealth stuff happen gets put in the DeFi and then the wallet can verify before it goes live that in fact you're good to go.

And then we don't know what you're doing. Because again, it's a privacy project, so it's like I shouldn't be as like a special person that knows what my users are doing. Like the only reason I can show you in my wallet like what's up is because um is because of um is because of the fact that I'm one of the parties transacting, right? So yeah, sorry, I'm thinking multiple things. I almost said the Narb, the Narb root domain is available. Check availability. Yeah, that's available. Nice. And I can go back and see.

And then when you do reserve these names, is it like a domain name where you reserve for a certain period of time or?

Yes, so it's one year, three years, or lifetime. And but you can't sub-domain it. This is the same, this is also designed to prevent fraud, right? So like we have a, you know, the we don't want someone to like get through and you know register some brand name somehow, right? And then start selling the brand name to other people and be like hey man you can be you know Mehow.Ford or Mehow.GM Motors or whatever, right? Like because then it's just right for fraud. So the name you're buying is literally the name you're buying, it's just used as an identifier in the decentralized chat in the wallet itself. So like let me show you another really cool side consequence of send-to-name for crypto, and then I'll let you read with questions. That'll be the end of my rant.

But one of the other things in here is like you know, I don't know Narb, are you on Mac?

I am on Mac, yes.

Yeah, I could literally give you the binary right now, you can install it and we can start messaging and sending each other crypto like right in the, if we got the time, we could literally fucking do it right now. But this is the encrypted end-to-end chat. So guess what? Well, you know, if I send money to Sasha like I did in that example, like I'd like to be able to talk to him and have a cryptographic guarantee that I'm actually talking to the guy that's also got the private key. That's exactly what this does. It is a Signal or Telegram implementation essentially, like functionally equivalent, except that the keys used are the same keys used in the spending and receiving of the money. So it's a identity tool, right? Like you can literally talk to whoever you're about to transact with or you've already transacted with. And then we're adding a DID feature to this where you'll be able to get a decentralized proof of your identity like a full copy of your driver's license that only you have signed by the government, you know, in one of the places I'm working with this on is the government of Wyoming, you know, I want them to be the first US issuer of digital identities as my goal because they did Frontier Token so hopefully they'll get around to it. And now like if I'm talking to say Narb in here then voila, you know, I can prove to you what my identity is and it's a cryptographic proof. It's like better than whipping out, like if I show you my ID you're like is it fake? You know, if I have a digitally signed ID verification from a government or a major KYC entity, that is far more trustworthy than anything else. And that too is also freaking decentralized. That's the best part about it. Like you as the user go get the cryptographic proof of your identity, then it lives in your wallet. When you restore your wallet, by the way it also comes back because we encrypt that, we can't see it, we just see oh look what is up, there is a bunch of people with identities, but we don't know you know who they are what identities they have as AmericanFortress, but they can share it with the counterparty, right? And now you have universal decentralized DID. Because now you share that identity in the encrypted chat and now who knows who you really are? Only that one particular party that you as the user decided to share your identity with. But now that party has a you know far greater, far better KYC than they do in the real world, right? Like when they meet you. So yeah, I'm excited about what we're doing. And then yeah and like I said lately mad adoption, just awesomeness. And the TGE looks like it'll be January. There is a token called AmericanFortress token, predictably that's like powering all this and it's the security mechanism for for all the metadata that we're talking about that's decentralized. That's the end of the rant. Hit me with questions, bro.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like first reaction is holy shit, this is freaking amazing. Um, and yeah, you touched on it on the AF token. Perhaps do you want to double click just a little bit on like what exactly the utility is, so you mentioned it securing the metadata.

Well, notice that I just explained to you exactly how you use the system and all you got to, like by the way when you buy a name it's just a Stripe credit card thing, right? So, and the reason we did that is we don't want users that don't understand DeFi or crypto or tokens to have to manipulate a token to use it, right? So like, for example, in a bunch of other name systems like FIO, ENS, like you got to pay for it with Ethereum or pay for it with FIOs, and then when you set up a two-way channel in FIO you got to pay more FIOs, and it's just like grandma lost, she not she not doing it, right? She wants like Wyoming goldbacks if you know that's the sophistication of the customer that we're dealing with. And that's right, like it has to be this simple. If it's not this simple no one's going to fucking use it, which is why you know finally Zcash got their pump, but those guys are still like you know I think most of their users don't even understand that they're using pay codes as addresses and that you know but they're like hooray stealth addresses are really cool no one can see what my balances are, right? So it's like but still that's a very, very small group of people, right? Like you know total Zcash users versus the world, right? Not, not a thing, right? So what do we do with AmericanFortress token? Well, when you buy a name, we buy our own supply, and then there's metadata that's written along with that name, and then that's locked up with AmericanFortress token essentially on your behalf, on behalf of the user, but we do it all for you. So like to the user this is the final, like before production there's a bunch of stuff we're doing technically to essentially to go from beta to production which is basically like right now this this beta is semi-DeFi, the full production has to be 100% DeFi, obviously, right? Like I wouldn't even launch it if it wasn't 100% decentralized. So we have to do a few tweaks. But from the user experience it won't, it won't matter. But you will be able to see, you know publicly, is as our DeFi grows you'll be able to see okay this system has X amount of users. Now you don't know who the users are, you just see a list of names and metadata, you have no idea what the names are doing, you just see that somebody registered a name, that's it. You know, and if the name's like super descriptive, like if it's the Narb DevNTell, you know reasonable chance I can assume that you signed up for our wallet. But can anybody tell what you're doing? No, absolutely not, right? And that's the only right way to do it. So that's what the token does.

Gotcha. Excellent, excellent. That's great to hear. And yeah, just curious, do you have any plans to like have like a virtual card kind of associated with this as well? Like I can totally see like you have the Fortress name set up and then you load up your account basically with like a prespend or something and then you have a virtual card that you can spend at like any.

Yeah, so I mean I think our wallet's going to grow and we're going to add a bunch, you know but the first thing people want is is DeFi. But the other thing everybody's really excited about on is the AI stuff, right? So like here is an example of a card, this is a card we did for a customer, this is just a hardware wallet card. Now do I want a spend card inside AmericanFortress wallet? Yes. So AmericanFortress is operated by a company called MatterFi. I'm also obviously CEO of that, it's really the same entity. AmericanFortress is just like a we're spinning it off as a subsidiary you know for essentially operations purposes. So we have a retail wallet. So AmericanFortress is our retail wallet. But you as a consumer or as a business can get the white label version of this. You can also get like a white label lite like AmericanFortress-Litecoin, which is what we launched with Litecoin Foundation a month ago. It was you know very well received. So, you know, and we also make custody, and we also make hardware wallets, right? So, so like it and in our retail wallet, we do want all this cool functionality, right? So but the first thing we're going to do is the on-off ramp and the DeFi. And then also what's getting released by January is the AI agent. In fact I'll be showing it off next week. So we've already finished this work, but you can have your Claude or your Eliza you can just chat to the wallet and be like hi how many what's how much crypto do I have? And you know I want to send money to Mehow and it just does it, so there is a Model Context Protocol interface we wrote for this that's open source, that part of it is open source. And so robots will be able to transact with send-to-name with stealth address university which is incredibly incredibly important for just human and robot safety and anti-hacking period because you don't want to know like people you a robot doesn't want to be like yeah man I got stacks right? Because remember like the way payments in crypto work right now like if you just want to receive all payments you just got to post an address or you got to use Unstoppable. So like the second you do that everyone's like all right well this is how much money now imagine that that address is even the they're Coinbase just released this super fast payment system for AI agents that processes really fast and like in the API it's like here's my address. Like the first thing the API does is just hand out the address. It's not a stealth address, it's just the address. So now all the robots interacting with that interface are going to be like oh just give me your address okay cool oh I see how much you have right? So I mean it's broken. Like what people are doing is broken and what AI agents are going to do is going to make this problem way worse because you know a robot doesn't give a shit like it you know doesn't get mentally tired when it does 10,000 transactions in a minute. It's just like if that's profitable that's what it will do, right? So, so you have to have privacy for the robots, right? So this is lot of exciting announcements from us on that end as well.

And um yeah and like I said lately mad adoption just awesomeness. And then the TGE looks like it'll be January, there is a token called AmericanFortress Token predictably that's like powering all this and it's the security mechanism for for all the metadata that we're talking about that's decentralized. Um, and then you know from a regulatory point of view this is awesome because everybody's now holding cryptographic proofs of exactly what they did. So like if you're the government and and say, you know, Binance is running the system, now they have cryptographic proof they didn't commit money laundering. Because guess what? They're getting sued for $4 billion again, you know, for saying you know did they were they willfully negligent? Really hard to say because the tech to prove that a particular address belonged to a terrorist doesn't exist. Okay? Like I'm obviously anti-fucking-terror, you know, not cool. Uh, but the only way to tell that an address belongs to a terrorist is to pry the ledger from its cold dead hands. Right? And so reading that lawsuit which by the way I analyzed because I was asked to do an article on it to do a counterpoint. Reading that lawsuit is like and then we found out that you know all these transactions actually belonged to terrorists like three years later, but somehow miraculously CZ and Binance were supposed to know this shit when the stuff was happening. They don't have a prayer because it's super easy to fool the exchange right now. It's like you set up a legitimate account and then a terrorist pays the legitimate account person that's got the KYC and says okay what's your deposit address for Bitcoin and they give that to the terrorist. Okay what's the and by the way here is our terrorist withdrawal address right so they give that to the legitimate account and now the legitimate account's operating but they don't actually have control of any of the funds. Right? In our case if that account was running send-to-name you would know if the funds were coming from a different private key. We actually have a patent on that tech right? So, so you have cryptographic proof that the money comes from this particular user that you KYCed. This makes money laundering incredibly difficult, in fact we can also have a proof where like you as the user say you're Narb you deposit into Binance right and Binance is like hey this is over 10k we're doing extra screening I want you to prove to me where the funds came from. In our system in our system only you can do that. You can generate cryptographic proofs that like say Narb received it from Mehow and then Narb sent it to Binance. And you can prove to Binance that you got it from me. Which is awesome, right? That is the sickest anti-money laundering tech on planet earth yet fully decentralized, fully opt-in right? You don't have to prove, you don't get to do the thing, you know at Binance that you want right? So I am just extremely excited.

Yeah and as you should be, right? This this is yeah this is crazy this is like one of the biggest problems like that was hampering crypto adoption and a lot of the FUD that like 10, 20 years that crypto has been getting is like because of like money laundering and all this and now you're solving it and it's just like holy shit. And and I would say that right now we're the I mean I'm sure there'll be other solutions but I humbly submit that right now we're the only people that have this working end-to-end um and maybe there'll be you know other ways of doing it cryptographically but um you know I haven't thought of those and this is all I think about. So for me it's really exciting like the thing that I you know been thinking about for six years and then working on for like four years you know in stealth mode is all of a sudden like the rage right like and I was just like dude I told you so guys like you have to this is how you have to do it right um and so you know blessed in that regard and but you know still not easy so you know hope everything continues and continues to stay awesome and we just continue to crush. This is the way.

And um you did share a affiliate link with me as well. Uh how can people um start using it, start using AmericanFortress, I know you said the launch is coming up. Yeah, so but if you want your name right now you can essentially pre-reserve it. So the link you have will take somebody to the checkout they can and it's literally exactly what I just told you. You get the link automatically gets you a 10% discount, so like subdomain names are really cheap. It's like nine bucks for you know a year. Um, now you might okay one last before so so use the link, get whatever names you want, you know let us know if there's bugs you know report it on our form etc. I'd like to think we have a you know fairly robust setup there right now but you know may not be perfect. Um, and the other thing I'll say is like okay what happens if your name expires? Well, so the reason that every other name provider makes you buy a lifetime name for 400 bucks or whatever. Now we do have lifetime names for 400 bucks, if you have a if you want to be the Mehow then yeah that'll cost you lifetime. But and then the top-level names are not 10 bucks, they're 50 bucks a year, um with the 10% discount obviously a little less. But um so yeah Black Friday name special. Oh yeah there you go. Buy names for your friends that then you can gift them. Um so you know but what happens if a name expires? Now first of all when is the expiration when does the time period start? It doesn't start till the wallet hits production. So like if you buy a year name now it's not like it expires next November you know 28th. It expires from the time so if we start production February 2nd it'll be February 2nd 2027 that that name expires. Now what happens if it expires?

Well, there's a fundamental problem with like all other name systems is that they can't have you know the subscription periods because like what if I register a name in you know ENS and I and I put my address in there and I forget it's there. Uh and then the name expires. Like what happens? So the answer has been like there are no time periods you have to buy a lifetime name, right? That's been the answer for every other system. In our case because of the dynamic stealth address computation, uh that mechanism is a forward to your private keys right? It is not a copy of your private keys. If like you buy the name the Narb and then you let it expire and then we have a three-month period where it's just like still forwarding to you but it's essentially in limbo. Then I buy it on you know one month one year three days and like a day. Now it gets forwarded to me. You don't lose your money. There's nothing nothing changes. It's just like the new transactions to the Narb go to to Mehow. Uh so there is no issue with you know like loss of funds or anything right? So like it's safe to buy like if you just you know you just want a one-year name you know sure try it. But if you really believe in a name then get the lifetime. I'm not going to discourage you from sending us revenue for this awesomeness and supporting us but but um that's how it works.

Well said, well said. And yeah I hope everybody gifts the gift of privacy um this season. Gift the gift of privacy this holiday oh dude I am so stealing this is going straight to marketing. Good. Gift the gift of privacy oh my gosh that is freaking legendary. Okay cool. Very early Christmas to you there you go. Mehow I love doing spaces with you super cool. Yeah likewise man, likewise. And yeah unfortunately this brings us to time but I felt we could probably have kept going for another hour or so. But Mehow thank you so much again for taking the time out of your day to come chat with us today. What you're doing with AmericanFortress is super super cool especially with the rise in popularity with privacy and and security. So viewers definitely do check out AmericanFortress. The production is right around the corner as Mehow mentioned. We will drop that affiliate link in the description below so you can get that sweet discount to reserve your name but yeah thank you again man really appreciate it.

Peace Narb, have a happy holiday and chat soon. Gift the gift of privacy. Gift the gift of privacy this season. There you go. Cheers all, have a good one. Peace. Bye.