# S01E14 · Transcript — Ash Hovhannisyan Full transcript of [The Useful Podcast](https://useful.ventures/podcast) Episode 14, a founder-to-founder conversation between host Gokul Bala and Ash Hovhannisyan, practicing dentist and co-founder of Bitcoin Credit Services. Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/ash-hovhannisyan-bcs). This transcript has been lightly edited for readability. Filler words, false starts, and audio-check chatter have been removed and the meaning has been preserved. Any errors are mine, not Ash's. ## From dental school to a rabbit hole on money **Gokul** Welcome to the useful podcast — I call it that because it's useful for you, useful for me, and useful for the listener, so it's your story, told your way. For our listeners: Ash graduated from dental school, is a practicing dentist, and is also a serial entrepreneur currently working in both crypto and medicine. I'm curious what got you into this dual life of dentistry and crypto — two very different worlds. **Ash** Ash is fine, by the way. I do practice dentistry in a limited capacity right now — full-time I'm building Bitcoin Credit Services with my co-founder, so I'm a co-founder there. The way it started: I got into dental school in 2016, and a good friend of mine who worked at a bank asked if I liked doing research, because he'd heard about this thing called Ethereum — people were calling it the next Bitcoin, though a little different. At the time I didn't know much about Bitcoin at all, and I had no idea what Ethereum was. So I fell into the rabbit hole and started digging. I kind of got the concept, but understanding money itself — for someone coming from the medical space, or honestly for most people — is hard. We all work for money without really asking what "more money" means. **Gokul** What was the actual rabbit hole — the technology, or the concept of money itself? **Ash** First it was understanding the concept of money itself. We all work for it and strive to make more of it, but people don't really examine what makes money valuable, what keeps its scarcity. Understanding finance — where the value of money comes from, that it used to be backed by gold and no longer is — was all new to me. Then I fell into the idea of mining. I'd heard of gold mining, so the comparison made sense: you can mint your own money. That idea hit me hard, and with a whole summer ahead of me, two friends and I asked ourselves how we'd actually mine Ethereum. ## Mining Ethereum on savings and student loans **Ash** With basically zero technical background — I could play FIFA and use a computer, and that was about the extent of it — we had to learn how to source GPUs, understand the different types, and build a rig: not just one GPU, but six or eight. It was a lot of trial and error. In 2016 and 2017 it wasn't as easy to find information as it is today — you had to go on Reddit and watch videos from some Russian guy, and luckily my dad speaks Russian, so he translated for me. After about a month we had a bunch of rigs running. We'd invested all of our savings, including my student loans — I used loan money to buy GPUs. I went all in, kind of psycho mode about it. That was 2016 into 2017, alongside a dental school course load that isn't a joke — twelve classes a semester. Outside of that, it was strictly crypto, Bitcoin, and Ethereum. Once I understood the differences between Bitcoin and Ethereum, I started turning into a Bitcoin maximalist specifically. One thing led to another — I sold part of my rigs to a friend who kept running that business, and I kept learning about Bitcoin and crypto in dental school, evangelizing to my friends the whole time. I made some money, because we went through a bull run and a bear market — my first time experiencing that, and it was a shock, but I kept believing and kept pushing. Five years down the road, with all that knowledge built up in parallel to dentistry, an investor who wanted to buy my friend's Ethereum mining facility and GPUs suggested we start a new venture building Bitcoin mining facilities for investors. ## Building Bitcoin mining facilities, from Montreal to Paraguay **Ash** That was the first startup I really got into — I'd tried a bunch of other things by then, including dental disposable products and sales, just trying to navigate this entrepreneurial life. The Bitcoin mining startup went from a small hosting facility in Montreal to a multinational business. We went to Bitcoin conferences, bootstrapped our way with a tight marketing budget, and business development became a huge part of it — meeting people in the space as a young dentist stepping into a completely different world. There's an imposter syndrome that follows you around until you get comfortable. I did it all — thinking through the whole layout of a hosting facility, repairing Bitcoin miners, literally soldering memory chips on and off, sales, and eventually traveling to expand into places like Paraguay, small towns where you'd go at night moving hundreds of thousands of dollars of machinery for clients and setting up hosting facilities. It was a concentrated journey of learning, and that's where I really started understanding the greater concept of Bitcoin and what it does for people — because at those conferences you meet a huge variety of professionals who've dropped everything to build on Bitcoin. I've been building on Bitcoin since around 2017. Fast forward to 2021, and that's when I first really thought about what it takes to spend the value of your Bitcoin in everyday life. ## Why spend an appreciating asset **Gokul** That's actually one of my issues with spending Bitcoin — it's an asset class, not something stable like a dollar. It can go five percent up or down in a day. Wouldn't spending it be risky? **Ash** The first time I thought seriously about Bitcoin or crypto cards was with a previous startup called Monbank, where we were hosting people like you — owners of five, ten, twenty machines generating Bitcoin revenue — who still had everyday expenses in dollars. We wanted to find a way to give them the ability to spend from their Bitcoin. That's when I started looking into the compliance side, and that's where I met my current co-founder, Hakob, who was at BDO at the time, advising us on how to set up a compliant card product. There weren't many players in the space then, and most of the ones that existed got debanked because the regulatory tailwinds weren't in their favor — it was very complex to work with banks and hold crypto value in a card-ready form. By 2022 and 2023 we were still thinking about the idea, but I stepped away from that startup for a while, dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin and enjoying life in Florida. Then Hakob — who's the real founder and CEO of BCS — said he wanted to start a new project focused specifically on Bitcoin credit cards. I had a lot to learn, because mining is a completely different beast from understanding issuer-bank relationships, backend security for banking, go-to-market and distribution strategy, which card issuer to work with, who sponsors the bin. Nothing was a given. Hakob had a lot of experience advising big companies in the digital asset space, so he had a much stronger foundation, and I did a lot of reading and sat on a lot of calls with him. ## From Monbank to Bitcoin Credit Services **Ash** In the past eighteen months, the crypto card space has completely changed. It used to cost a lot of time, money, and effort for a startup, app, or wallet to launch a card — now most of it is white-labeled. There are card issuers like Rain who make it plug-and-play if you've got the right team. That's why there are now over three or four hundred cards cataloged by people on X who test these things. But almost all of them focus on the same thing: converting your crypto and letting you spend in stablecoin. That circles back to your question. People hold Bitcoin because they have conviction its value will grow — so why would they spend an asset they think could be double, triple, or ten times the price in five years? Not every merchant accepts Bitcoin directly either — there's a gap between the preferred way people pay, which is a credit card with all its protections and rewards, and how you'd actually spend Bitcoin today. There are really two options today. Option A: sell the asset, on an exchange or through a card, which means losing the upside and triggering a capital gains tax, since you've sold an asset. Option B: borrow against your Bitcoin, using it as collateral the way you'd use gold at a pawn shop, and manage your loan-to-value ratio and interest payments. That route makes more sense because you're not selling your Bitcoin — but the journey from Bitcoin collateral to a working card is genuinely complex. ## DeFi, BTCFi, and fifty micro-steps **Gokul** What's the actual difference between DeFi and building specifically on Bitcoin? **Ash** DeFi is the decentralized financial space where people built apps and financial products on chains like Solana and Ethereum. Bitcoin was never really programmable in the past. Now, Bitcoin layer ones and layer twos let people build financial applications on Bitcoin — that's the BTCFi space. Stacks is one of the clearer players in it. The demand for Bitcoin spending specifically is real. Something like seventy million Americans have come into contact with crypto, and for the vast majority of them, crypto means Bitcoin first. You've got niches within that — River, for instance, has over three thousand small businesses holding Bitcoin on their treasury, and those businesses need proper cash-flow management. Then you've got miners, operators, and everyday Bitcoiners. From hundreds of interviews with potential users, our early market is people already active in BTCFi communities — using Bitcoin for yield or borrowing against it as a financial tool — plus businesses generating significant Bitcoin revenue that need a credit card powered by that Bitcoin's value without having to time the market to sell it. Getting from Bitcoin as collateral to spending on a card today takes over fifty micro-steps. Even with DeFi products that are supposed to make it easier, in practice you have to bridge your Bitcoin to another chain, swap it, find a platform to borrow against it, manage that loan separately, take the stablecoin you borrowed, find a card provider, and possibly swap again into whatever stablecoin that card provider actually accepts. It's completely fragmented, and there's too much friction for mainstream adoption. I've tried to go through that process myself with a different stablecoin, and I gave up — it was too confusing. ## Borrow only what you spend **Ash** I've had that exact problem myself for the past ten years — I've held Bitcoin and a lot of crypto assets and never really used crypto cards, because spending Bitcoin never made sense to me. I just wanted more of it. Look at the current market: hundreds of crypto cards, and most of their go-to-market is cash back — who has the best rewards, who has the sexiest card, who spends the most on marketing. But if you look at actual spend volume, only a handful of players are contributing meaningfully to it. I think spend through crypto cards grew roughly tenfold this past June compared to 2025, to something like eight hundred million dollars in a single month — which shows more people do want to spend through their preferred method, a credit card. The idea is to make it as easy as that familiar credit-card experience, and go meet users where they are. If we can deliver that, we're not just unlocking Bitcoin-backed spending — we're shifting a credit culture that's currently built entirely around unsecured debt, where sixteen-year-olds get handed "free money" to spend. With secured credit, backed by an asset like Bitcoin, the idea is: own first, access spending power against what you own, use credit with discipline, repay on time, and keep building. We've built the product — it's in beta, waitlist is open. The user deposits Bitcoin collateral, unlocks some spending power on a credit card they can spend globally, manages and tracks everything in one app, repays, withdraws, and spends through Apple Pay and Google Pay, with the same protections and benefits as a regular credit card, all powered by Bitcoin collateral. If you're consistently buying Bitcoin — say fifty dollars a week — your spending power grows every week, but your Bitcoin itself doesn't go anywhere. Centralized lending platforms typically give you a lump-sum loan: you deposit ten thousand dollars, get fifty percent of that as a loan, five thousand dollars to spend — and you're paying interest on that full five thousand immediately, whether you've spent it or not. What we're building unlocks the spending power, but you only borrow as you spend. You don't take a lump sum and start paying interest on money you haven't used yet. ## What happens when Bitcoin drops (and when it rises) **Gokul** What happens when the value of Bitcoin drops? **Ash** If you borrow against Bitcoin and its value drops far enough, there's a threshold where your collateral gets liquidated — the lending platform keeps your Bitcoin, and you lose it. The risk is highest if you over-leverage your spending, or if you took a lump-sum loan and already maxed out your loan-to-value ratio, because then any price movement creates a much higher risk of liquidation. If instead you had ten thousand dollars in Bitcoin as collateral, unlocked five thousand in spending power, but only actually used three hundred dollars that week, you've technically only borrowed three hundred dollars — so as Bitcoin fluctuates, your liquidation risk is much lower, because it only applies to that three hundred. It's much easier to top up your collateral and bring your health ratio back in line. **Gokul** And when it goes up? **Ash** Then it's great — you could sell a bit of the extra value of your Bitcoin and pay back your loan, so you're essentially spending for free. It's similar to a home equity line of credit, backed by the value of your house: if the house's value goes up five or ten times, that's a pretty good position to be in. That's actually why the timing right now, with Bitcoin down over fifty percent from its all-time high, is a smart time to borrow against it — as long as you're disciplined and not spending like crazy. That's the cultural shift I keep coming back to: it's healthier to borrow against an asset you have long-term conviction in, and to do it in a way where you're not giving up your keys. If you're doing non-custodial borrowing, which is what BTCFi and DeFi offer, your collateral stays on chain — it's never handed to a centralized body that might rehypothecate it into riskier bets and put your money at risk the way it did for people caught up in the SBF collapse. You can check where your collateral lives every single day. What we've done differently is automate and abstract that entire borrowing flow: you say you want to unlock a thousand dollars, it tells you to deposit two thousand in Bitcoin, you connect your wallet, and it walks you through the rest. ## Who BCS is built for **Gokul** What's the vision behind BCS, and the direction you two wanted to take it? **Ash** For me and my co-founder, it started simply — build a way for us to spend against our own Bitcoin. At the time we started, we had more of a B2B lean, less consumer-first: vertically integrating this Bitcoin-secured card into applications that already had hundreds of thousands of Bitcoiners, using that as a distribution play. In the consumer space, we think there's enough opportunity to serve both individuals and small businesses before we make that transition to wider distribution as an API service — for other cards to offer Bitcoin-secured credit, or for wallets to add the card as an off-ramp. Some Bitcoin lending platforms let people borrow against their Bitcoin but still have to off-ramp onto another platform before they can spend — so it's adding a spending solution to their existing stack. The bigger goal is creating a new cultural shift around credit — credit powered by Bitcoin as the most pristine collateral that exists, in my view and many others'. There's a big part of the market this unlocks that we haven't talked about: credit-thin profiles. My parents are immigrants — if you come into a new country with, say, ten or twenty thousand dollars and no credit score, you're typically forced into a secured card from a bank, similar to what we offer, and eventually that money just disappears as you spend it. If instead you convert that into Bitcoin, you've invested in a long-term asset and unlocked something like fifty percent of its value for spending on a credit card that never checked your credit score. It's still fully KYC-compliant — you still provide your ID and go through the standard checks — but it unlocks credit for people who have real assets and no credit history. That applies to Gen Z users who've damaged their credit and can't borrow a cent right now, as banks tighten lending across the board. It also applies to startups that operate natively in Bitcoin — get funded in it, get paid in it — and need to cover everyday fiat expenses without selling their treasury. **Gokul** Why would a startup want to be Bitcoin-native in the first place? **Ash** Some get funded in Bitcoin, or sell merchandise and prefer to get paid in it because they believe in the asset. It's a way of detaching from the fiat economy. If you're a Bitcoin miner, Bitcoin is simply what you're paid in. If you enable Lightning payments and accept Bitcoin on your site, you'll get paid in Bitcoin whether or not you convert it — and converting to fiat triggers the same tax friction as any other asset sale, whereas borrowing against an asset isn't a taxable event. So a Bitcoin-native startup doesn't have to sell its Bitcoin just to cover its bills. For a more traditional business, the advantage is holding an asset you believe will grow in value, one that's safer to hold in a cold wallet than trusting a bank with your money — plus around-the-clock access. If a supplier calls you on a Sunday with a time-sensitive deal, and all your money is parked at a bank, you're stuck. With Bitcoin, you can transact within minutes for fractions of a cent. The underlying advantage is the same whether you're a startup, an individual, or a small business: it's about living off Bitcoin instead of fiat. ## The global opportunity and the compliant path **Gokul** Given how the US has handled its own currency and people's access to it lately, do you think this is a bigger global opportunity — people elsewhere who might not trust holding Bitcoin as their spending currency, but want the credit opportunity that comes with it? **Ash** The opportunity is absolutely global. But as I said, there's a lot that goes into issuing a card the right way, and this gets back to the classic startup question: go to market fast, or take the time to do it right. We've chosen to do it right — we've been studying every card that's come out well before it launched, and what we've landed on is that we're really solving for abstracting the complexity between Bitcoin collateral and card spending, compressing it all into one flow that feels as familiar as spending any other card. If we can deliver that, we're not just unlocking Bitcoin-backed spending — we're helping build a smarter, more disciplined credit culture, especially for a generation that's grown up on unsecured debt handed out too freely. --- Back to the [episode page](https://useful.ventures/podcast/ash-hovhannisyan-bcs) · [[podcast|All episodes]]