Welcome back to Chain Reaction, a podcast diving deep into the stories, backgrounds and latest news with the biggest names in crypto.
For this week’s episode, I interviewed Alex Adelman, the co-founder and CEO of Lolli. Founded in 2018, Lolli is a bitcoin rewards app that lets people earn bitcoin or cash back when they shop online or in-person at over 10,000 stores like McDonald’s, Starbucks, Dunkin’, CVS, Costco and so on. Adelman previously was on the team that built commerce gateway Cosmic, which was acquired by PopSugar in 2015 before ultimately folding into Ebates (now Rakuten) in 2017.
“I’ve been selling bitcoin to merchants since 2013,” Adelman said. “So it wasn’t a new sell — for better or for worse, I was the bitcoin guy for a lot of Fortune 500 merchants.”
Lolli has grown significantly over the past …