Bankless - Stripe’s Trillion-Dollar Bet: How Stablecoins Eat Global Payments | Founder of Bridge Zach Abrams

Episode Date: September 8, 2025

Zach Abrams—co-founder of Bridge, acquired by Stripe—joins Ryan to unpack Stripe’s stablecoin strategy and why tokenized dollars are poised to devour global payments. We cover Bridge’s sale to Stripe, how “fiat L1 / stablecoin L2” rails unlock faster, cheaper cross-border payouts (from startups to government aid), the case for many issuer- and app-specific stablecoins with better yield sharing, and what the Tempo chain targets for payment-scale throughput, privacy, and finality.  ------ 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY24  https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium ------ BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle 🎩DEGEN | JOIN THE COMMUNITY https://bankless.cc/degen ------ TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 6:28 Zach’s Founder Arc 15:47 Fintech x Crypto Convergence 18:55 Founding Bridge in the Dark Times 22:42 Traditional Payment Inefficiencies 26:21 Bridge 101 42:00 Traditional Bank Pushback 42:17 Stablecoin Treasuries 50:22 Post-Genius Stablecoin Market 59:27 Fintech in 5 years 1:05:01 Tempo L1 1:13:30 Too Many Blockchains 1:17:25 Exiting TradFi 1:20:49 Getting Stablecoins to Trillions 1:25:28 Stripe x Crypto 1:29:44 AI Stablecoin Users 1:32:32 Closing & Disclaimers ------ RESOURCES Zach Abrams https://x.com/zcabrams  Tempo https://tempo.xyz/  Bridge https://www.bridge.xyz/  Stripe https://stripe.com/  ------ Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures⁠

You send a staple coin over a blockchain and, you know, you could see when it was sent. You could see when it was confirmed. You could see when it was delivered. You could see that it's not. Just very basic things that, you know, in addition to costs and, you know, things that are more complicated, that made us believe that this was a better, that money would be tokenized. At some point in time, people, businesses, fintech, banks, would. see the value and using this emergent payment rail. And we were building for that future. Welcome to bankless, where we explore the frontier of internet money and internet finance.

This is Ryan Sean Adams. It's just me today, David's out. So I'm here to help you become more bankless. Every company in fintech is about to go through what I'm calling a crypto transformation. Stripe is one of those companies. It's a $90 billion private payments company behemoth, a company that does 1.3 of global GDP's worth of payments volume every single year. They're definitely at the frontier of this crypto transformation. They're moving quite quickly. They've invested big in stable coins, and I think after the genius bill has just been signed, they are doubling down in a big way. Zach Abrams is leading part of that transformation at Stripe. Stripe just bought his stable coin company, a company called Bridge for $1 billion.

about a year ago. And they've made more crypto acquisitions since companies like Privy have been among them. This conversation with Zach is a glimpse into how big fintech companies think about this transformation, how they're going to evolve in the future. And it's a different perspective than the crypto-native one that we typically have on bankless. That's why it's so valuable for us to hear. It's also the story of Zach, who is this tenacious entrepreneur who had this thesis around stable coin, and persevered with that thesis, built this company through some very dark times leading to this major acquisition. Now, shortly after recording this episode, Stripe launched some details on a layer one that

they are sponsoring. People are calling this the Stripe Layer One. There are guests says it's more of a consortium. It's called Tempo. It's an EVM chain. It's being launched with the consortium of FinTech players. We discussed that too and why they didn't go with a Layer 1 or a Layer 2. Big questions. What's Stripe doing next in crypto? What's every fintech about to do?

Zach Abrams helps answer those questions today. So let's get right to the episode. But before we do, I want to thank the sponsors that made it possible. Imagine a world where traditional finance meets the power of blockchain seamlessly. That's what Mantle is pioneering with blockchain for banking, a revolutionary new category at the intersection of TradFi and Web3. At the heart is you are, the world's first money app built fully on chain. It gives you a Swiss iBan account, blending fiat currency, like the euro, the Swiss franc, the United States dollar, or the Rimini, with crypto, all in one place. Enjoy real-world usability and blockchain's trust and programmability. Transactions post directly to the blockchain, compatible with tradfi rails, and packed with integrated defy futures. U.R. transforms mantle network into the ultimate platform for on-chain financial services, unifying payments, trading, and assets like the MI4, the M-Eath protocol, and functions FBTC, backed by developer

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power each other with their generosity, creativity, and ability to get things done. At the center is the DGEN token. It rewards engagement, fuels tipping, and drives the marketplace for builders and fans. That same energy gave rise to DGEN chain, a fast, low-cost layer three for new projects. And now the D-Gen app, the easiest way to connect, earn, and participate in decentralized social media with a built-in wallet and real token utility. In D-Gen, the hat stays on. Join D-DGent. and get on the app wait list at www.dgen.com.com. Bankless Nation, very excited to introduce you to Zach Abrams. First, Zach, it's great to have you on bankless.

And I got to say this at the outset, congrats on selling your company, the company you co-founded, Bridge to Stripe. You did that in October of last year. At least that's when it was announced. This was reportedly, I don't know if you can confirm this rumor, over a billion dollar acquisition, Stripe's largest yet.

So this was like a crypto unicorn, and it's a big deal. Congrats on that. Yeah, really, really appreciate it. And a lot has changed since then. That feels like a hundred years ago. Yeah, I don't know. Like, it's kind of funny to me that Stripe bought a company pre-Genius Bill. You know what I mean?

Like bought a stable coin company pre-Genius Bill. What kind of foresight was that? I mean, you know, it was, it was pre the election when a bunch of stuff started to started to shift right after pre pre genius pre a bunch of a bunch of things but but you know i i think like the main the main thing probably for them and and and for us was that like you could start to see that it was working yeah and it had changed like pretty quickly like you know two years ago or three years ago it was not working terribly well it's like stable coins or crypto in general yeah yeah Like the business stable coins generally, I mean, there was like Terraluna and FTX and so on.

I forgot about that. Yeah, that's like in the long, distant past now. But it was like starting to work. Like there were like real payments companies and fintechs that were building on us. And you could squint and kind of see into the future that this was going to be very meaningful. Yeah, that's very cool. I guess that's what the, that's the genius of the Colson brothers. They tend to be able to squint and see you the future, and they saw this one coming.

I want to talk about them in a minute, but first your own story, okay? Give us your, I guess, crypto founder arc, if you will. And you could begin this wherever you want. I'll leave that open end to you. Where does the story begin for you? And how did you get on the other side? Now you're working at Stripe, Posta maybe a billion dollar acquisition. Well, I guess for me, it kind of started where most crypto founders start with

auto parts. Wait, what? So coming out of college, I wanted to be an operating partner at a private equity firm, which is a very bizarre thing to want to be. And I went into private, because, like, I thought it would be fun to, like, turn around and, like, run these companies. Yeah. And we, I joined this private equity firm that was buying distressed businesses in 2009.

The auto industry was, like, in, you know, complete turmoil. we bought an auto parts company. I was like, Centen as like a 22 year old to like be the CFO of this auto parts company. Oh my God. How did you get that gig as a 22 year old? Yeah. I mean, it was, it was very bleak though because I was like, you know,

you could imagine a 22 year old like, you know, dwee be kid. I was like going to Canada and like announcing to all of this company's, you know, factory folks that we were closing factories in Canada. and then going to Mexico and cutting ribbons. And I was like, this is not what I want to do. I want to, like, build stuff. And this is the exact opposite.

And so I left private equity, and I had heard that people on the West Coast were, like, starting companies. But I went to Duke at the time. There were, like, legitimately, when I graduated maybe seven or eight computer science graduates. At Duke? And all of Duke.

What was everyone doing over there? Everyone was doing econ. Everyone was going into like going into investment banking and so on. And so I didn't really know people that were starting companies. And so I decided I was like, I'm just going to start a company. Like I think that I can do it. And the first company we, I wanted to start was actually like a buy now, pay later. Like Clarnet or a firm.

but in 2010. And it's like the hardest business imaginable to build because you have like large partnerships and you have like credit, you know, and fraud and risk and, you know, all this, all this stuff. And I went to go raise money and, or I went to start this company. I thought the way that you did it is like you put together a presentation. You went to a VC.

They gave you money and then you hired an engineering team to build the thing. And so I was like, sorely disappointed when I went into all these BC's offices and then they were like, show me the product. Like you're not an engineer by training then? You didn't study COPSAI at Duke? I didn't study in it. And I didn't know anything. I didn't even know what an engineer did. I didn't know what a designer did. I didn't know what a product manager did. I was like the least equipped person to start a company imaginable. And then I went on this like horrific one year journey

to start this company where I like, you know, realized I needed to teach myself to code. So I went to like coding schools in New York and then I realized I needed a co-founder and it was like co-founder dating, you know, it was like you go to a bar and it was like, you know, a hundred people like me and one engineer. One very, very popular engineer. Exactly. Exactly. And eventually I met Sean.

who's now my co-founder for for for for for bridge but Sean also had gone to Duke and and I met Sean and this was maybe like nine months into that journey and I convinced him to start this company with me and then we were able to like raise money and build some momentum and you know then I moved to the West Coast and and that company didn't end up working out we sold it we sold it to square but that's how I kind of like ended up on this path and you know which started in a wildly different place. So that set you on the fintech path, though. So I guess the Square acquisition, maybe that wasn't like a banger,

but at least it was sort of an exit out of the startup pain that you were in. But you've since, in addition to Square, you had some tenure at Brex as well and also Coinbase. So it's like FinTech plus crypto is on the CV? Yeah, totally. I mean, I did not. So each time it came to like find a new company. I found myself, you know, only in hindsight did I realize that I'm just like really interested

in fintech. It was just, you know, I was given a menu of options in theory of like companies that I could go to. And every single time I happened to pick the same type of item on the menu, which was the fintech company. And in 2016, I think is when I applied to Coinbase, I had this like real excitement around crypto. I had. I had. When I had first moved to San Francisco to start evenly, that was our first company, that's when Bitcoin ran out to like $1,000, you know, $1,000 and then kind of crashed. That was maybe like 2012 or 2013 or something. And so that's when both Sean and I had like, I think, I think it was true for Sean too, but we had bought our first Bitcoin and and like went to like meetups and, you know, people had like,

you know, we're building all, you know, all this Bitcoin mining stuff. And there was like all these hardware companies and so on. Anyways, that had like kind of created an interest for me. And then in 2016, I had this, you know, I was, this was post square, this like, just general excitement that I thought that like this was going to be, I don't know what triggered it in me, but I thought this was going to be really meaningful. And at the time I joined Coinbase and it was you know, maybe 70 people or 60 people. But Coinbase is like a weird company. It's not like a company that exists today where, you know, people have like 70 employees after like three months. Coinbase had like been around for like five years or something. Like I was like employee number like

200 or something. But at the time there were only 70 people there because it's just Coinbase had been through so many different, you know, pivots and iterations and so on. And at the time when I joined, Coinbase had, this is kind of like an intersection with Stripe, Coinbase had just realized that paying and buying stuff with Bitcoin on the internet was like not going to be the next thing. And like the big marquee customers at the time were Stripe was using it and overstock.com was using Stripe was using Coinbase back then? Yeah, was using Coinbase back then for the buy with Bitcoin functionality.

And right around the time that I joined was when, you know, we at Coinbase realized, oh, maybe that's not the thing. Maybe, you know, this exchange, you know, buying and selling on the exchange is like has real legs and going to be going to be a big business. And then 2017 happened and it was like the wildest ride one could imagine as Coinbase went from this like very niche company to a major American, you know, financial services company almost overnight. And then through that journey, one of the last things I worked on at Coinbase was USDC. And the launch of USDC for a lot of other people worked on the actual implementation of USDC, but I was running the Coinbase consumer business. And our goal was to take USDC and figure out how to use it and make it useful. And that's when as we started figuring out how we would productize it,

came to this view that it could be this like first, you know, global store of value. And there was a bunch of things around like turning Coinbase consumer into a Neobank that we wanted to do. But I never actually implemented and then left and then went to Brex. You went to Brex. So you went back to the FinTech side of things before then starting a bridge. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And it helped to have like two years away to kind of reflect on it and see a lot of the problems that Brex faced because Brex was like trying to expand internationally and it was like very clear as I had worked on a bunch of these different products how you know a lot of the domestic problems especially in some of the more the more developed markets had been solved but a lot of the international problems had not been at all. What's so fascinating about your I guess resume and your experience here, Zach and eventually founding bridge is you're one of the few people who are I guess a bridge between fintech and and crypto, which is somewhat interesting. So my experience is I found many of the fintech people

skeptical about crypto, and many of the crypto people just don't get fintech and don't even think it's irrelevant. And so the two kind of camps have been growing independently for a while. It was crypto over here, and then fintech was doing its own thing over here. I think that has changed this cycle. Maybe starting in 23, but now it's definitely crescendoed in 2025, where we're starting to see a convergence between fintech and crypto. In general, all of finance and cryptocurrency, are they different? Are they one and the same? I think that's going to be a major theme of this episode, that convergence.

It's certainly a theme of this cycle. How did you, I guess, bridge that gap? What did you see that made you still not skeptical enough about crypto? in fintech, but you're still open to crypto, right? And then also in fintech, but not kind of, like, you bounce back and forth and you saw both of these worlds. What did you see that the other fintech people didn't? I mean, first, I just completely agree with the premise of the question. I think that one of the unique advantages that we had when we started bridge is that we sat in the middle. we had a deep understanding of the financial landscape and an appreciation for what

crypto made possible. And there were just, there's like so few. I mean, now there are more, but at the time there was, I felt like, and maybe this is true, but we were one of the only teams that sort of sat at this intersection. You either were sort of like a religiously believed in crypto and felt that like the existing financial, financial ecosystem was was like completely dysfunctional and and would be replaced or you lived in the existing financial system and thought that crypto was like purely speculative and like you know crazy town scams and drug deals and crazy jpegs and just like all speculation nothing there right yeah yeah exactly and and you know the the bin the overlap of these two these two circles was uh incredibly incredibly small

which created our opportunity. It made it really hard at the beginning because like, you know, we, because of where we sat, we had to go and work with banks. We were trying to sell to non-crypto companies. And so it was really challenging at the beginning. I mean, because there was nobody else

who was at this intersection. Even today, it's definitely a little bit harder, but it's getting much, much easier. You founded Bridge in 2022, right? And that was a dark year for crypto, and so was 2023, right? I mean, that was just all of the momentum that we had. And I would say public goodwill that crypto had as an industry came crashing down with San Bank Ben-Fried and FTX and the corresponding sell-off

and all of the political goodwill to make something like stable coins happen in the U.S. That completely evaporated. And of course, bankless listeners know, got years of operation choke point and like lots of bad things on the back of that. And here, you were trying to found a, like a bridge between traditional finance, basically, FinTech and crypto during this, this very dark period of time. I mean, what was that like? It was just as bad as you're describing and probably even worse, because, you know, Tara Luna also happened, which, like, you know, Tara Luna kind of made stable coins.

seem, you know, tainted the entirety of the staple coin space. You know, you, you, you also had a bunch of banks that were like crypto-friendly banks that ended up like going bankrupt. So of the folks who were in that bin diagram, a lot of the folks got punished for being in the middle of those two. So you had like signature and Silvergate went out of business. You even had banked rob. That was like 20, 23, right? Is it when the, yeah. Yeah. That was early 2023. And like you had bank prov, which most people don't talk about, but bank prob was another one of the, one of the crypto-friendly banks.

They did a bunch of loans to Bitcoin miners. And those loans went like massively underwater and the CEO got fired. I mean, it was like almost everybody who sat in this like intersection was, was punished in some capacity. The thing for us is I think when people start companies, There is like, like right now, everybody wants to start an AI company because it's like, you know, the in vogue thing to do. And it's easy to start something when everyone else externally is giving you validation that your thing is like an it thing to do. But at the end of the day, making a company successful was almost always like driven by a like founder or the earth.

team's like just core belief that this thing needs to be willed into existence. And so the nice thing about founding the company when we did is that like that, that, that, you know, desire to will this thing into existence was tested extremely early. And we just had a like very core belief that stable coins were represented a better means of building financial products and not for some ideological reason, but because they literally made it like faster and cheaper and more accessible and so on, and a better way of moving money for the same reasons. It was tangibly cheaper and faster and a better mechanism to send funds. Like a great example that people, you know, I don't think a lot of people think about is like

if you send money through the existing, you know, through AC at your wire, you have no confirmation that your money was ever delivered. Like, you just have no idea. You just send it and you just hope that it arrives. Is Zach, have you ever lost a wire that way? Yeah. I have. And so this was actually relatively recently. I sent a wire from one place to another. It's where, yeah, I do some trad-fi. I do have a bank. I'm not completely bankless, everybody. So, you know, full disclosure there. And the wire, breaking news. Yeah, breaking. Speaking of breaking, the wire didn't end up.

You know, you have to wait. And so I waited like 24 hours, 48 hours. The wire did not end up where I had thought that I sent it. And I freaked out. And then I went through this process of trying to figure out, like, did the wire actually settle? Like, where is it? Where's the ID on Fedwire?

And I must have talked to five or six people. was between a brokerage account I have and somewhere else in order. And they gave it to a wire tracing team. They said, you know, the process would be like 48 hours to 72 hours of turnaround time. I said, how often do these cases get resolved? They say most of the time, but no promises. I was like, you can't even track the wire? Like, this is crazy. Yeah. I mean, it's nuts. And like, you know, you send a staple coin over, over a blockchain and, you know, you could see when it was sent. You could see when it was confirmed. You could see when it was delivered. You could see that it's not. And it's like, like just very basic things that why, you know, in addition to costs and,

you know, things that are more complicated that, that made us believe that this was a better, that money would be tokenized. And at some point in time, you know, people would see the, you know, people, businesses, fintech, banks would see the value and using this emergent payment rail. And we were building for that future. We just had this very core belief. And like I had just seen it. This is one of the things that probably helped the most of having this like history in fintech. I had just seen this over and over again that like fintech products that were successful were successful for super obvious reasons. Like this isn't like a consumer. consumer company or something of like, why is it, why did Instagram beat whoever? Why did Facebook

beat, you know, this thing? You know, it's like, why did Robin Hood win? They had free trading. Like, you know, when everyone else costs $5. It's like, you don't need to be a genius to figure it out, why did Square win? Well, because it costs like thousands of dollars a year and 5% for a small business to process credit card transactions before. They made it, you could sign up instantly and they made it really cheap. Same thing for for stripe and so on. And with financial products, eventually over some arc of time, people are rational. So there was this perceived stigma and perceived risk of building and using stable coins, but there were all these very tangible benefits of building and using stable coins. And we were sort of building towards the future where those perceived risks

would come down and people would realize the tangible, be able to realize the tangible benefits. And For us, it started with those who were, you know, the most, the farthest on the risk curve, you know, like startups and and so on. And then now as we've had like regulatory clarity and so on, you know, folks who are not as far down the risk curve, you know, and increasingly large enterprises and governments are now using stable points, which is really cool to see. But it all emanated from that core belief that this like made financial sense for people to build with. Yeah, that core belief. That was the unshakable thesis, I guess. back in 2022 when it was not obvious, when it was not popular, Tara Luna collapsed, stable coins are dead, this will never work in crypto. Then you also had things like Tether, which is like, what is that? It's just like AML K Y, C, like, what's going on there? Is that, you know, shady sort of cryptocurrency? What's going on? So that's the unshakable, like you're the closest thing I would say, Zach, to like a stable coin maxi that I've seen. We have all sorts of different religions in crypto, as you know, and like you might be the same, because I've heard you say things that

even you, you've been skeptical of some of the Vastew. value proposition of crypto until stable coins. You said that stable coins are the next evolution of money. I think this is also one of your quotes. I'm building in crypto because I love financial services and I believe this new platform can be used to create better products. I'm not trying to free the world from centralization or build a libertarian utopia. Some crypto-native bankless listeners might say, oh, okay, come on, Zach. That's what we're trying to do in crypto. but you're pretty like, you're pretty straightforward in the fact that you think the big value proposition, the thing that you really want to build in crypto is this better fintech

system based around staple coins. So for people who aren't aware, when they think stable coins in crypto, they think maybe circle, they think maybe tether, some of the issuers, but you built something else. Although I believe Bridge does have a stable coin itself, but Bridge is kind of a stable. stable coins payment platform. So what did you build over there from 2022 up until you're acquired and like what mission are you continuing with Bridge? One of the other benefits of having worked at a bunch of these, a bunch of these companies, like work at Square or work at Brex or work at and now, you know, work at Stripe is like I've

just seen how I've always had this interest in financial money is like incredibly important in people's lives, obviously. and even very marginal improvements to the way that people are able to accept or manage or facilitate the movement of money, I've very tangibly seen the disproportionate impact that that has on people's lives. Like, take Square, for instance, you know, you created a dongle. So it made it like easier for someone to accept a credit card payment. And, you know, at the time, a lot of people walked around and carried cash and what have you, but Square is like, you know, enabled success of, you know, millions of merchants, enable them to sell more goods, enabled them their business

to go from unprofitable to profitable, you know, enable them to capture that incremental sale. And it's like totally changed the livelihoods of many, many people. You know, stablecoins are like that, but this scale is so much bigger, you know, like a stable coin can be used and stored by people all around the world. Now with the stable coin, people in every country have real economic choice that they didn't have before. Now, with the stable coin, you can move money between countries at a fraction of the cost than you used to. And the opportunities that this opens up, the applications that people are going to be able to build are pretty profound. So we were always like very, you know, in Iowa, in particular, very motivated by

this like, you know, long-term, you know, belief in outcome and what could be possible. But yeah, some of those things happened, you know, the only thing that was like that did, you know, I'm not going to say that we were like completely unshaked, but we always had this belief, but the one thing that at some point, this was like, like, you know, the week that we launched our APIs was the week that SVB collapsed. And I remember that that I had a. conversation with Sean and I was like, you know, I still believe that we're right, but this might be now like 10 years away.

Like I thought the timelines might be off a little bit. Like little did you know at that point in time, you were just 24 months away from the first major crypto legislation to pass in the U.S. and it happened to be stable coin legislation. and that is going to lead to, basically, it's just overnight legitimacy for stable coins and a stable coin bonanza explosion. And you were only 24 months away from that at one of your lowest points

as a startup founder thinking about your thesis. It's incredible. Yeah. I mean, I think of anything, like going through that at the beginning made us, like, you know, we were always extremely worried about like putting our like proverbial next meal on the table, if you will. Like because the first like 18 months of the company was literally just like signing a bank

partner, them kicking us off, signing a bank partner, then going out of business, signing a customer, them going out of business. And so it was like even when things eventually started to go right, we were like, wait a second, this is not going to last. When did they start going right? Was that more like closer to 2024? They started going right. I would say around June.

of 2020-3-ish. Okay, okay. June of 2023 is like, like we started early 2022, so like 18 months in, they started going, right? And so we had launched the API. Maybe you come back to your previous question.

What does Bridge do? Bridge facilitates money movement with stable points. Our view is that, you know, you have this Fiat ecosystem that exists today, and stable coins are like a scaling layer on top of the Fiat ecosystem. And so you could kind of think of our mental model is that stable coins are like a layer two to the Fiat system's layer one.

And money would need to move up into this tokenized form to take advantage of all these benefits, but it will constantly need to settle back down to the layer one. And like a good example of this is a cross-border payment. Maybe it comes from Fiat because, you know, the business or what have you are moving money in Fiat. It moves up to the scaling layer. It becomes tokenized. moves cross-border and then it might settle back down into the recipient's bank account in

fiat. Okay. And so the layer one in this example, the kind of the fiat layer, what is that? Is that bank settlement that eventually gets down all the way to kind of like Fedwire somewhere? Exactly. Exactly. And today, a lot of that money movement is up, you know, to the layer two and then back down to the layer one. And that's the way a lot of these. And a great example of this is Bridge facilitates people to store money in dollars all over the world. And they're storing those money in stablecoin dollars. And a lot of the way that that lands in their account is maybe they're a, we work with Scale AI.

Scale AI is doing data labeling for AI models. Scales business operates in US dollars, in fiat US dollars. Scale sends that money to Bridge. Bridge converts all that money into stable coins and then disperses the stable coins to the data labelers all over the world. And so it starts in this fiat layer, we tokenize all this money and then we disperse it out to people to take advantage of the benefits that exist with stablecoins. So is that what bridge essentially is? It's kind of a bridge between the fiat layer, the layer one and all of these banks that settle down to kind of the

traditional banking system in Fedwire and stablecoins, which is kind of the layer two in the tokenized world of stable coins that we know you guys sit in between those. And so when you were talking about APIs, it's APIs between that banking layer and basically, you know, tokenized stable coins. Yep, exactly. And we basically built four developers. So those developers today are mostly fintechs or banks or startups. And they want to take advantage of, you know, moving money cross-border with stable coins or accepting stable coin payments or giving their customers, the ability to store tokenized dollars, or issuing cards on top of the stable and we make all of those accessible through pretty simple APIs. So they don't have to learn

all the nuances of the crypto ecosystem and the Fiat ecosystem and KIC and compliance and all those things. It's just packaged up. And then you could deliver whatever value it is you want to deliver to your end customers. And so do you guys have a stable coin like a USDC? We do. Yep. We have it. We have a stable coin and you know we we basically offer you know today so we started off back in coming back to your other question in June of when things started working our first core product was our orchestration we called our orchestration APIs and the orchestration APIs just facilitate money movement between the fiat layer and the staple coin layer and the first use case that started working was stable coins for cross-border payments and so when it when it

really started working was this company Zulu. They were like our first like, I would say like real customer, you know, like we, I tweeted something. They found us. They were a huge pain in the butt to negotiate with. They like ground us down on fees. You know, I almost gave up on the deal like a hundred times because I had never sold anything in my life. And, but then they came on the platform. and they were taking Colombian pesos and converting them into stable coins. And they needed someone like Bridge to take those stable coins and then convert them into US dollars in the U.S. So they could facilitate Colombian pesos to U.S. dollar cross-border money movement.

And so they just wanted a very simple service where they could send a stable coin and then tell us to deposit a stable coin into a bank account. And so we created a product that basically gives a bank account a crypto address. Wow. And so you just send a stablecoin to a specific Ethereum or Solano or whatever address. And that address is programmed to always take it, convert it into a currency and send it via ACH or wire to the associated bank account. And very simple product for them to use.

They would hit the API, create it, and send all they wanted to that account. And we would deposit it into the account. And Zulu signed up. They were growing, you know, 50 to 100 percent every month. And so as a result, bridge was growing 50 to 100% every month. And basically, you know, startups are this like really funny thing where in one lens, you could look at our company and you could say, wow, this thing is super fragile and there's no product market fit because it has one customer.

We had others, but like really it was a one customer. But on the other hand, you could look at it and you could say, wow, this is like really working because it's growing, you know, 50 to 100% every single month. And they carried us for like the first three, four months. And so I often wonder like what it would have been like if we hadn't have found them. Like the difference between like, you know, now you look at bridge and it's like, oh, bridge is successful and like, you know, we're part of stripe and, you know, stable coins are a thing. And so it's like always going to work. But at that moment in time, the difference between us being, you know, successful and like feeling like we had built something useful versus like,

launching a product and having zero traction, you know, like literally zero traction, no customers, no feedback was like one, one customer. It's incredible. And they gave us the confidence to then go sell the Bitso, they then go sell the U.S. government. The U.S. government was our next big customers, shockingly. Wait, what? What department in the U.S. government? So there was a government aid program where they were dispersing aid to frontline workers across Latam, and all of this aid disbursement happened in stable coins. No way. It happened previously through Silvergate.

And so then when Silvergate went out of business, they had no means of dispersal payments because it's really complicated. You would have to take the money from the government, convert it into stable coins, and then send thousands of stable coin payments up. So it was more than a human could do. In dollars, basically. So I was kind of thinking when you,

you go through this story, I was kind of thinking about, do you remember our stimmy checks? Do you remember the stimulus checks? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Every American received and how weird and janky that was. I mean, I think I got mine through ACH. Some people got checks. If you didn't have a bank account, you didn't have the setup. I don't even know if you got yours, right, basically. But like, with stable, it's a similar thing at a much smaller scale, I'd imagine in terms of you're just trying to helicopter some funds to a specific group of people or organizations. And like, How do you do that in the existing Fiat Layer 1 system? Well, the answer is probably it's a pain in the ass.

And it's super expensive. Like, because you have to take the U.S. file format of money, send it through a U.S. partner, who then converts it into whatever the local file format of money is. Maybe it's like Argentinian pesos or Brazilian Reyes or whatever. That costs money. And then you have to deposit it into the local count, which costs more money. And so in each case, there's fixed fees and variable fees. And so for small sums of money, it literally is like not possible to disperse these funds in an economical way, which is why they, a previous to us, had elected to do these disbursements in stablecoins.

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Want to stay in the loop on Unichain? Visit unichain.org or follow at Unichain on X for all the updates. Let me ask you about this, just like maybe zooming out, if you're thinking about kind of the layer one being sort of the banking and almost the settlement layer for Fiat for stable coins, right? And the layer two is kind of this tokenized stable coin layer with crypto-native platform. Zach, if more and more starts to happen in the layer two,

because it's just more usable, more functional, the quote unquote the fintech apps around the world and emerging economies in the US start using that layer two more than they use the layer one. What it appears to me it happens is you start to essentially bypass the existing banking settlement system

at some degree or at least the rich state, the actual application happens more and more in the layer two and the banking system just starts to become kind of a dumb settlement layer if you will. they're not really doing the kind of the cool value accretive, interesting things. They're not building the apps. But it kind of marginalizes the banks at some level to just doing settlement. And I'm wondering about this in the context of if that is the trajectory that we're on.

Do you see kind of some conflict with all of the existing traditional banks, you know, the J.P. Morgan's of the world. Jamie Diamond and I recently saw this, came out. And he said, you know what? there's a fintech called Plaid. I believe you know more about this, Zach, but Plaid taps into all of the banks, you know, basically around the world

and gives you a way to kind of like through their API connected to all these banks. Jamie Diamond said, you know what? We don't want Plaid pulling customer data, even on our customer's behalf. We're going to start throttling them or we're going to start charging them a fee

in order to do this. Because basically he's saying, we don't want to be relegated to just this dumb settlement layer with like 0% margin compressions, essentially. And so I'm wondering if more moves up into that layer two stack and it becomes more crypto, more fintech focused, will the banks just like, they're not going to tolerate this,

are they? They're going to fight back against this. Are you seeing some of that? I think that they, I think that some will. I think that, so I think that if you take, if you take regulation out of the picture completely And you just say like, okay, the world is this like, you know, government-free libertarian paradise. We would certainly move in that direction where more and more money movement would happen through stable coins. Over time, you know, if you kind of think of the stable coin layer sitting on top

of the bank layer, more and more deposits would aggregate to the stable coin layer. More and more consumers would solely interact through the stable coin layer. and the banking layer, which today is really big and, like, is the primary conduit through money movement would shrink, would shrink progressively over time, and the stable coin layer would grow over time. I think that is, like, the natural way things will move. And the reason is, is, like, purely practical, is that it's going to be easier to build applications on the stable coin layer. You're going to be able to get better economics as a consumer or a business by building on that layer. Money is going to move more cheaply on that layer.

settlement's going to be more, going to be easier on that layer. It's just going to be practical for more and more transactions to live at that layer. I do think like the big question for us over some period of time is like all money movement, all finance, all financial services are downstream of regulatory requirements. And so that's the big question of like, you know, how much moves up to this layer. And obviously the banks are doing as much as they can to protect the size and importance of their layer. I'll give you one example of that layer. So one thing, it seems like the banks really want to protect is yield on essentially treasuries, short duration treasuries, for instance. So as part of the Genius Act, there was this carve out where the bank said,

hey, like stable coins, issuers can't directly offer that, what, 4% yield directly to customers. Okay, only banks can do this, all right? I'm simplifying, you probably know the complexity of it. Only banks can do this. Well, it turns out in the aftermath of this, there's a little workaround that crypto is doing where you don't have the issuer like Circle give those yields to individuals who have a stable coin, that 4%, you have maybe an exchange to it. And so right now I can go on Coinbase, for example, with my USDC,

and I can get rewards up to it's not quite 4%. You know, Coinbase takes their cut, whatever, but I actually get some of that yield just by holding stable coins. And you can imagine crypto and defy, there could be all sorts of different ways for people who have stable coins to get that yield. And the argument, blank slate argument,

would be, why shouldn't they? Why should the banks get to keep that 4% yield? Why shouldn't someone who just owns a stable coin? Why shouldn't that flow back to individuals, citizens? like why should this theft of 4% and this rent-seeking behavior from banks actually happen? Well, it turns out the bank consortium is coming out and they're saying,

no, no, no, no, no. Like, we want to plug this loophole. We don't want crypto organizations to be able to take advantage of this yield. And it seems like there's a fight between the lobbyists right now. So you have like crypto and fintech on one side versus the banks.

But the banks are pretty powerful. They've been in D.C. for a while. They, I don't know, they control some aspect of how the game works. And this does seem like a clash of the Titans in the making. That's what you're saying. It does. I would also say, though, that it isn't necessarily crypto versus the banks because, like,

it's not like Tether is giving that yield back. Yes. Nor is it like Circle is giving a lot of that yield back. Nor are they incented to want to give that yield back. Exactly. Exactly. And this is one thing I think a lot about is that, like, the, you know, before I started, bridge, I kind of had this view that things that were, that made sense were like kind of inevitably

going to happen. So like to the point that you're making of like this, this yield going back to consumers, it's like it's inevitably going to happen. Like, you know, it just makes so much sense and so on. But, but now it's like much more clear to me that like, no, nothing, nothing is inevitable. The only things that happen are the things that somebody or some small team of people or some large team of people fight to make happen. And the yield going back to consumers will really only happen if someone like us build the mechanisms for that to happen very consistently and change the market dynamics. Because even if stable coins are successful, if only USDT and USDC are the primary stable coins, in existence, then, you know, and nobody else issued stable coins, Tether's never going to pay yield back. That's just not their thing. And so at some point in time, circles and Coinbase are going

to stop too, you know, and that surplus is actually not going to go to consumers and businesses. That surplus is just going to aggregate to the new equivalent of like a Visa MasterCard. And so you actually need folks to build, you know, and this is one of the reasons why we have our stable coin is to create mechanisms so that, you know, the benefits of stable coins, the economic rewards from stable coins can be better diffused down to end customers and diffuse down to end businesses, which then, you know, improve the economics for the platforms and so on. So we think this is like really, really, really important. There's like the regulatory fight that's going on, but there's all. also like just the long-term stable coin market structure fight that needs to happen to make sure that this creates surplus for consumers. It doesn't just rearrange value between, you know, these previous financial institutions and these new financial institutions. So being, not having a dog in the race, except the dog of just like being a, you know, a staple coin holder at some level and, you know,

representing just individuals who want to receive these yields. I definitely would love to see the rent-seeking, you know, kind of go away and for more of these yields return to the customer. And so let's talk about maybe the genius bill itself. And right now, crypto is almost in a duopoly of stable coins, I'd say. There's tether, of course, with the dominant share, and then there's USDC. And it appears like these like liquidity, it gets liquidity. And it does appear to be that there's kind of power law dominance at play here. That said, we're only at what, like 270 billion or so, okay? And stable coins are going to grow well into the trillions. And the genius bill opens the door for all sorts of new issuers to enter the market. We already have some fintechs playing

the game. There's the PayPal stable coin they've entered. You guys have your own. I imagine stripe is going to do something big here. There's also talk of, you know, Amazon could enter the ring. Walmart could enter the ring. And so it does seem like post-Genius, we're going to be in this a period of time where we're going to see all sorts of different issuers enter and all sorts of different experiments at play, all trying to get as much liquidity as they can and get a dominant position and all will have different takes on it. So how do you think this stablecoin market will now play out post-Genius?

Maybe you can talk about like Stripe, what you guys are thinking there, but then also just like generally, do you see a... a whole bunch of experiments that will play out? Or like, what is the structure here? Our view is that there will be many, many different stable coins. I think that every platform should have its own stable coin. I think that, you know, we could see a world where there are tens or hundreds or hundreds of thousands or millions of different stable coins. However, the differences between these stable coins will be like totally abstracted away. And so I think you're only going to have a handful of like branded staple coins that people know and name, you know, the USDT, USDCs. And I think USDT and USDA are going to be way more successful tomorrow than they are today. And like we obviously hope that they are because they're doing like an enormous service to the space. And they're real network effects to their businesses. They're building liquidity. They're they're building FX trading pairs. You know, this is like very.

hard for you know PayPal tried and spent a ton of money to break in and build liquidity for PYUSD and it's been hard it's a very you know there's probably room for five or some handful of these branded stable coins and then I think that platforms when platforms are building with stable coins you know like Robin Hood is building with stable coins or you know a Amazon you mentioned or Walmart or, you know, banks are building with stable coins. They're going to choose to have those stable coins, be stable coins that they control. And the reason is that they're primarily going to be internal stable points that they're going to be using to move money amongst their users to disperse funds to their customers. Those liquidity benefits the USDA have are irrelevant for

their internal use case, like Walmart moving money between its like 20 different entities or whatever across Europe is just internal transfers. They're going to want it to be in their own stable point. They're going to want it because they want to control the reserves. They don't want them to be held at, you know, with circle and commingled with everyone else. They're going to want direct access to the yield. And they're going to want to control the dollar that it is, you know,

like right now some of these issuers are charging burn fees to get out of the money. Like, why would you ever move? a bunch of your internal funds into a stable coin that charged you money to convert back out of. It makes it worse than Fiat funds. So, you know, you're going to want to control your own money. It is like, like, not in like a decentralized way of it, but like you don't want to be beholden it to some other platform whose interests will be supreme to your own. if money movement is core to your business in some way, shape, or form.

Okay, fascinating. So let me make sure I understand the world that you're described in your world. So you see a world of maybe, call it a handful of branded external stable coins, the types that we see in a tether or USDC, and each of those, I got to imagine, it's going to have its own schick, its own thing, right? It's like right now tether is kind of used mostly outside of the U.S. and the rest of the world, international world, kind of prefers it. USC is known as kind of the compliant coin.

Maybe there's room for another. Maybe there's room for one that kind of provides a way to pass yield back to its customers. Or there's some other things that might be it. But these are a small set of external kind of stable coin players. But then every major company is going to have their own internal corporate stable coin as well. And I almost think of like, you think about Starbucks gift card points right now. I mean, they sort of have that in a way. It's not in a fungible E.R.C.20 stable coin type of setup.

but it exists inside of the Starbucks balance sheet. So you see a world of that. And then you see a world of many thousands of these things, hundreds of thousands, many millions of these things. But I got to imagine they are all composable with each other, right? Like I don't want to have my Wells Fargo dollars and they're no good at, you know, J.P. Morgan because J.P. Morgan has J.P. Morgan dollars.

I got to do a swap here. That all has to work the way it works today, which is all be kind of fungible. Anyway, just like, is that the world that you're, You're thinking, can disabuse me of some of these things, if you will. Yeah, I mean, I mean, totally. And two really quick examples. So let's say that every bank is moving funds with stable coins

because of settlement benefits or what have you. Wells Fargo is never going to use J.P. Morgan's Stableport. It's just never going to happen. Internally to Wells Fargo. Yeah, never. Because all of JP Morgan, you know, stable coins have reserves held at J.P. Morgan. So that would mean that Wells Fargo.

reserves are now held at JPMorgan. It just makes no sense. So that's like never, never going to happen. Okay. The another example is like, let's say you're Polymarket. So Polymarket today operates primarily with stable coins. You're going to enable, just like Polymarket does today, for people to bet with whatever stable coin they want. They could send in USDT, they could send in USDC, they could eventually they'll be able to send in dollars, they can send in whatever. And then internal to Polymarket, you're going to want this to run on PolyUSD or some stable coin that is internal to Polymarket because you're going to want to make sure that if Polymarket ever builds their own layer two, that their stablecoin could go to that layer two.

You don't have to convince some issuer somewhere else to move the stable coin over and make it work. You're going to want to make sure that there are never burn fees tied to this so that you can always handle redemptions without any cost. you're eventually going to want to program some aspect of the smart contract of these dollars yourself. And so it's going to be important for polymarket to control the dollar that it, the programmatic and tokenized dollar that it builds on so that they can control their future. They probably also want to share the yield, right? If you're polymarket.

Yes. Yes. Yes. Exactly. Exactly. So we think this is the world that should exist, but it's one of those things. like it has to be built. And so the Genius Act is like very important first step to enabling it to be built and enabling much more receptivity to it. And then there's a bunch of work that we need to do to actually make it happen. But back to your example. So let's say Wells Fargo pushes money to J.P. Morgan, what do they use? Like what's kind of, do they have to go to an in-between stablecoin? Do they have to go to USDC or something in order to get it to J.P. Morgan? Or do they handle that, you know, in the back end, back to the kind of the layer one, the Fiat system again?

Yeah, what I imagine will happen is there will be a whole like clearing house for stable coins. Okay. And so every day these stable coins will move between banks. And then at the end of the day, reserves will only will net and move like the actual layer one settlement will be cleaned up and balanced at the end of every day. And so you'll only end up moving the net amount, which is roughly similar-ish to how things kind of work today with kind of different settlement windows. But I think that's how it will work. One really cool thing about maybe what you're doing at Stripe is it appears to me it's in this

era where fintechs are all going through their crypto transformation. And it seems like Stripe is now signed up to fully go and be one of the pioneers of going through their crypto transformation. So it's interesting. I've been tracking the Colson Brothers for a while and they tried some things in crypto previously, right, including Bitcoin in the past. They were skeptical of that. It seems like now this is the first, and I think they tried to integrate in the Lightning Network and all of these things, early just crypto experiments. This is the first time we've seen Stripe go all in on something in crypto and it started with stable coins, the acquisition of bridge. And now they've also purchased Privy, which is sort of a crypto wallet infrastructure type company. So they're making some big plays here,

but it's just a macro meta of, you know, FinTech companies going through a crypto transformation. I'm wondering if we could project maybe use your mind. You're kind of seeing the futures. You saw Staplecoin very early five years later or so. And what does FinTech look like five years later after we've gone through this convergence period? You know, something like Venmo is something maybe our American listeners use every day. Does that turn into like a crypto wallet? Are we using rather than the dollars inside of PayPal, are they, is the backing of those? Are they actually all stable coins underneath?

Like, what sort of things do you think will see happen through this convergence if we project five years later? I think that most financial assets will be tokenized. And as a result, I think the foundational building block for every Pentec will be a wallet. Wow.

And I think that it's like, You know, today people think of it as like this whole new world that they have to go and like learn about and participate in and so on. And it's just going to be, you're going to hit an API like a bridge and you're going to create an account for a user. And that account is just going to be a wallet. And you're going to, in that account, you're going to enable U.S. currency, which will just be a stable point. And then you'll enable euro currency, which will be a different stable point. And then you'll enable, you know, RayIs, which will just be a different stable point. and then you'll enable stock trading, which will just be, you know, another tokenized form of stocks and so on.

And I think that we're sort of like, you know, barring any regulatory, dramatic regulatory changes. We're sort of on this glide path today. And one of the things I think that's like that is kind of the most interesting dynamic that will play out to me is, you kind of have all these crypto wallets that started, you know, obviously in the crypto space that are over time going to move more into the, you know, traditional financial services realm. And then you have all these more trad-fi companies that are moving into the crypto direction. Yeah. And, you know, over time, they will become blended. But like, take Robin Hood as an example. You know, Robin Hood obviously started very traditional with stock.

and so on, they've moved pretty heavily into crypto trading. And now one of their big bets is to go international. And so how do you go international as a fintech? You know, the way that I think they're choosing to do it, I don't have any insider info on them, but like one of the ways if I were them, I would do it, is you build a wallet core to Robin Hood. And then the amazing thing about a blockchain is it's like, is it's like, you know, open-sourced financial services. And so then you're building on top of, let's say, Solana or some blockchain, anytime, any developer, anywhere in the world adds something, you know, to Solana, that is now accessible to Robin Hood. It's global state. It's open 24 hours a day. It's accessible in every country with an internet

connection. It is the old way of building financial services is you had to build everything yourself. as a company, you know, if someone wanted to replicate Revolute, they have to build all the, you know, they have to build the regulated infrastructure in the next country and the next car product and the next stock. They have to build it all themselves. The amazing thing about our blockchain is that people build a tokenized BRL for Solana. And now, boom, Robin Hood doesn't have to add that. But now Robin Hood has, you know, Brazilian RayI deposits natively. And now you can store a balance in BRL in Robin Hood easily.

And someone else built that. And then someone else builds Euros. And now they can store Euros. And then someone else builds tokenized treasuries. And now they can offer treasury yields. And so you actually open source your financial stack and let the world build. And then you internalize those services. And this is why I think that everything will move on chain

because you move from this world of like individual companies building up, which are limited by their own capacity, to a world where you have this massive shared resource of everything that's built on a blockchain, and you're just internalizing those services. It's funny because it's a simple narrative, and we've said this is the way it's playing out, and now it seems like you're saying it's actually playing up this way,

which is basically all of the bank accounts that we use, they become crypto wallets in the future. Whether we know it or not, you know, it could be on the back end, but they all become crypto wallets. And all of the assets that we hold, they become tokens. They're crypto tokens somewhere. One other question, I guess, with this is we've seen some fintechs, like Robin Hood, for example, and even Coinbase, I guess maybe Coinbase is now more of it, like moving toward

the fintech company. They also launched their own ledgers. So those two have layer twos, of course. And then we've seen some companies. you know, Circle, notably recently, launching a layer one, and they're having kind of a stable coins, maybe a payments layer one. There's also been news recently that Stripe is going down the path of launching its own layer one.

In fact, there was an announcement recently that of the Tempo project and some detail of what you guys are doing there, how does that fit into the stack? Do all of the banks, they're effectively, I guess, private ledgers on the scenes anyway, do all of them convert to become sort of private slash public ledgers, blockchain ledgers essentially and launch their own layer ones or layer twos? How do you see that evolve? Well, for us, it has evolved very naturally. I mean, we, I would say Bridge was probably one of the first.

I don't know if we were the first, but we certainly felt like one of the first companies is to try to build payment scale infrastructure on a blockchain. And it was really hard. And continues to be really hard. Blockchains are good for a lot of things, but they are not great at payment scale functionality. Like building something on Ethereum, I could imagine.

Just you have gas fees. Even Solana. Take the blockchain that everybody loves and thinks is like the poster child for TPS and so on. So we had a customer come to us the other day. They have millions of accounts. They want to enable stable coin accounts for all of their customers.

In order to do that, you have to spin up a Solana wallet for everyone, and you have to prime that wallet to accept USDC. Both of those things require soul and about 30 cents of soul in order to do that. So it was going to cost them hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars, just to enable this product,

because that is the way that Salana blockchain is designed. It was just not designed within, type of use case of like some developer coming along with millions of accounts and wanting to enable it. Like no one is going, not no one, but very few people are going to just like spend, you know, a million dollars just to enable functionality that your users haven't even tested yet. Or there's, you know, very early on with the deliverability of, you know, these aid programs, we had to send thousands of payments out at the same time. With Fiat infrastructure, You know, Fiat moves super slowly.

It moves so slowly, in fact, that we have built insane amounts of infrastructure on top of it to make sure that money does not move. And so with Fiat infrastructure, what ends up happening is, let's say you wanted to pay tens of thousands of people all at the same time. You know, you would use something like PayPal, you know, and you would load all the money into PayPal, and then you'd click a button, and then it would just be ledger update. to update people's accounts. So the money wouldn't actually move.

You load it in like three days before, make sure it settles and so on. But with a blockchain, that's not how it happens. Everybody has their own wallet. So you actually have to move the money into people's individual wallets. And sending 20,000, 30,000, 50,000 transactions on a blockchain

at the exact same time is not possible. No matter what blockchain, you try to send it on. And so the first time we did this, aid disbursement on Stellar, we were super naive. We were like, okay, click button, send money. And it took like 18 hours for us to process through all of these transactions on Stellar, which is another pretty high throughput blockchain. And a huge percentage of them failed and were picked up. And then there were all these support requests that came in because people were like,

hey, you said my money would be delivered at like 9 a.m., but it's still not here and so on. And so then we had to build all this infrastructure to simulate, to like make it such that, you know, we prioritize different transactions and we could like minimize the number of support requests. Like a quick example is that like we took every transaction that was over like $50, which was like a big payout. And we prioritize those first because those are the people who are going to check. And then we like set up, you know, seven or eight different like synchronous jobs to send out these payments.

And then we progressively would move down. There was no way to deliver them all in real time. Anyways, blockchains are just struggle with payment scale problems. And so the way we came into this is that we needed to build the infrastructure that solved our unique pay points. We weren't focused on, and we still aren't focused on trading. We just want something that's super high throughput that has like some core functionality that's important for payments, payments companies, and has the deliverability that

everyone is looking for if they're going to run their bank, if they're going to run, if they're going to pay all their customers, if they're going to run payroll on top of this rail. And so for us, building and investing in tempo became super important. But just to be very clear about tempo, tempo is not like a strike blockchain. We also did not believe that these like private corporate blockchains would be successful. Because people aren't going to want to build on someone else's blockchain. They want to build on like shared infrastructure that they believe is going to be good for everyone. It's the same reason that the same skepticism we have about everyone building on someone else's stable coin. You don't want to subordinate your interests to those of some other,

you know, economically interested party. And so that's why Tempo is actually a, a, Stripe is a major contributor to Tempo. Bridge is a major contributor and collaborator on Tempo. But Tempo is an independent entity, you know, and a neutral blockchain built outside of Strip. So Tempo is going to be an independent entity, a neutral blockchain that is also a Layer 1 EVM type of? Is that the layer one, layer one, EVM, super focused on TPS, no noisy neighbor problems. You know, your your transactions are not going to get stuck because like Trump coin came out, which happened to us on Solana. You know, there's going to be private transactions, which are super important to every payments, payments company. There will be very quick finality, which is also really important. You know, Ethereum is like 12 minutes to get

final, like sub one second finality. So a bunch of stuff that's very, very important to pay. And it would allow you guys to do a use case, like if you had a million people, let's say, in the U.S., and you wanted to just send them each a stimulus check. For instance, You could just do that on this chain, basically. They could pick it up and they could pick it up in their base, you know, any EVM compatible wallet that they used and boom, it would be there, right? Basically, you don't, you know, it has the scale to do that. Yeah.

And importantly, we could do it or PayPal could use it and do it if it was helpful for PayPal. You know, this is like, this is where it is, we view this as like a very important public good for the broader stable coin ecosystem. And so, you know, Stripe is a major contributor to it. We are investing and building on top of, on top of tempo, but we will have the same rights and interests, you know, to roadmap or what have you as anybody else. So how do you think, Zach, this will evolve, like specifically layer ones, you know, fintechs like Stripe getting kind of the layer one business. We've seen Circle again into kind of the layer one business. It is the case, definitely, that within crypto generally, you know, the advent of more centralized stable coins

has not taken away from the crypto-native assets that we have, like something like Bitcoin or Ethereum or Ether. You know, actually, it's kind of accelerated the growth of some of these core assets. And so they're kind of growing in parallel. They're not, they don't settle down to kind of the, as you call it, the layer one of fiat at all. They have this whole independent settlement network, and they've grown alongside stable coins. What do you see happening with layer ones? There are some people out there, and I'm specifically talking about maybe a stripe layer one, like tempo. And again, you're saying it's not a striped layer one, but something like tempo, right? Do these eat the market share away from some of our public blockchains, the Ethereums of the

world and the layer twos and the salinas of the world? Do they complement them? How do these interact? And how do you see this evolving? Will every fintech, will every bank, you know, publish its own layer one or maybe kind of a layer two? Or will there be some power law winners to that game? How do you see the ledger piece evolve? I think that, you know, with tempo, it's very complementary. Our view is that like we, the reason why tempo needs to exist is because the functionality that it is providing does not exist in the market. And so the stable corn space itself would be much smaller without something like a tempo in existence. Because you just do not have the infrastructure on top of which someone can build payment scale operations today. It just doesn't exist and it's not even close. And so in that respect, I view it as extremely complementary. to all of the other, you know, blockchains that exist today.

I do think that my mental model is that you will have a few kind of like general purpose blockchains that exist, you know, and I think like base is a great example. Like base is like clearly going to be a winner. It's a great serve, great, great product that the Coinbase team has created. It's a general purpose blockchain. And, you know, Solana is another one. There will be a few of these. I think it's very hard for someone now to create, like,

I'm just going to create a generic blockchain and hope that it attracts a lot of volume. Now I think we're entering a phase where folks are going to build blockchains that solve very specific problems that these general purpose blockchains don't solve. This is what we're doing with payments use cases. I've talked to other teams who are building blockchains for trading use cases, like very, very, very high, throughput, low latency trading use cases,

which requires a totally different set of requirements. And these blockchains will solve very specialized things that the generic blockchains will not solve. And then I think there will be a third type of blockchain, which will be like maybe like coming back to the Polymarking example, a polymarket might build its own blockchain

so that it controls its own block space and so on. These will be application-specific blockchains. And so you'll move in like there will be a few very general, then a few sort of like feature specific blockchains, which is where we're going with tempo. And then there will be many application specific blockchains. That's my mental model today.

Very much subject to change. A whole bunch of blockchains. It's a whole bunch of movement on chain. And so five years from now, where does this like position fintech or just how finance works, maybe in the U.S. and around the world? So if you kind of go down enough layers, I think traditional finance and the banking system and back to kind of the settlement layer of that layer one, I don't know, it's all like IBM main

frames written in like cobal. It's like some nasty weird stuff and a whole bunch of paperwork. If you do anything in finance, it's still, it appears digital on the surface layer, but like, I think there's offices of like people doing paperwork in the background and not faxing things around, but like, the legal documents are all just like still paper and I can. can't believe this. And they might actually be faxing. Yeah, exactly. And so are we basically doing a, I don't know, a switch from that existing legacy system and just like migrating more and more to these new crypto-necropro blockchain-based systems and doing that over time? And so basically what happens is the fintech user interface stops using the mainframe tradfai backend and start settling more and more

into blockchain. Yeah. I mean, I think that's what's going to, I think that's what's going to happen. And I think that, you know, today, to like take a bridge specific example, you know, our business was built, our very first product, the product that kind of like made our business was Stablecoin orchestration, which was moving money between Fiat and Stablecoin, this layer one and this layer two, and doing it a lot because because people needed to do it a lot. And still today need to do it a lot.

What I think will happen for our business is that will become an increasingly niche service over time. That's what I hope happens is that you decreasingly need to settle to the layer one. And like, you know, take the bank example that I went through before, you're going to have, you know, millions of different stable coin movements for every one fiat movement. Whereas today, it's kind of like one for one. you know, or even two Fiat movements for every one stable coin movement. And I hope that ratio changes over time. And I think that's what successes is more and more of the financial services that we have today can be facilitated and settled on this blockchain layer.

But we're still like, it's like hard to even begin to express how early we are in this journey. Just coming back to it, like the basic things of like sending a bunch of transactions simultaneously are really hard to do. Like really, really, really hard to do on a stable coin. We don't have any local stable coins. You know, the stable coin market is like 99.9% US dollars, which is great, which is great for the first use case of staple coins, which is like trading and like access to US dollars. But if you want this to become a core part, of the financial system, you need local staple coins. I'm very optimistic that those will be very important in the next five to 10 years. So there's just a bunch of pretty big building blocks

that we don't have today. So the Secretary of Treasury says by 2028, he's citing other research that we'll have, you know, three trillion or so in stable coins on chain. I mean, do you agree? Is that the kind of scale we're going to grow to? I mean, how quickly and how fast does this grow and how large does it become? I mean, I think that's U.S. stablecoins. So I think that's the U.S. stablecoins. So I think that there, it could be orderism, like an order of magnitude bigger, you know, if we're successful at bringing on, you know, tokenized euros and tokenized pesos and tokenize yen and so on. But that is also downstream of regulation. So today, you know, one of the great things is like the U.S. is kind of, you know, very quickly went from a laggard to a leader in sort of

regulatory clarity, which helps us sort of speed run a bunch of these markets. But we need the same thing all around the world. So what is holding us back at this point from basically the entire world, all of finance adopting crypto and making that switch even sooner? I mean, you mentioned regulatory. And so maybe that would be in your top three list. There's also, I mean, U.X still is kind of hard in crypto. I mean, we still have wallets with seed phrases in many cases that are sort of difficult. There's also, you know, do we have the chargeback protection, consumer protections that something like Visa or the established credit card companies have? Do we even have on, I guess, the compliance and privacy side, you know, AMLKYC that would be necessary for countries to adopt this? Like, what are the top three things missing, do you think, still in the stack for crypto to get to the trillions and go completely mainstream in the way that you've been describing? I think the most straightforward answer is like, you know, regulatory clarity and accounting clarity. That's probably the most straightforward answer.

But I would say more tangibly for us, what I have felt is the biggest barrier is education. So Stablecoin, we've had decades where teams and have built expertise and we've built expertise. and familiarity of building on top of Fiat systems. And so you go into any company that moves money and there are dozens of people who understand how to do FBO accounts and build internal ledgers and maybe even send, you know, ACH batch files and like all this crazy stuff.

But people have built those skills over many, many, many years. And then you go in and you talk to them about spinning up a wallet and everyone's like head explodes. You know, you would think that you're at, asking them to go to Mars or something. It's like a totally new financial stack that's completely unfamiliar. And so the biggest thing that we face is this like this lack of familiarity with this new platform. Like it's a new technology. It's a new platform. And it touches the thing that is like

the lifeblood of every company. And so people are very risk-averse. And I would say that's like, you know, we'd probably be moving like 100x faster if we had one person in every single company who is deeply familiar with crypto. The other thing is that there just are not very many engineers on the planet that understand crypto. The number of folks who understand smart contracts, the number of folks who've built with wallets,

it's probably one of the smallest engineering community, in the world. Like, if you're an engineer and you're looking for, you know, where do you position yourself to have, like, the most unique skill set imaginable, it is, like, very obviously in the crypto space, like super obviously in the crypto space. It's something that's going to be phenomenally important to the world. It's something that's going to touch money movement at every company, you know, on every continent. And there are, you know, only, you know, hundreds of people, it feels like in the world who know this space really, really well. There are a lot of engineers at Stripe, of course, and now you're part of a bigger engineering team, let's say. And so for Patrick

and John, we talked a little bit about their experience in crypto and kind of moving to a more bullish stance. How crypto-pilled are they at this point? How crypto-pilled is Stripe? So when I, when we were like going through the acquisition process, I went to the Stripe offices to have launch with John and Patrick. And I like walked in and I think this maybe was like the first time I met John in person. And the first thing he said to me, he was like, So can I tell you a joke? And I was like, yeah, sure. He's like, what's the difference between a bank and tether?

And I was like, I don't know. And he was like, well, one of them is like this big institution that holds a ton of money and you have no idea where the money is. And if you ever want to get your money out, you may not be able to because it's in all these super esoteric assets. and there's literally no visibility into where the money is held, and the other one is a stable coin. I mean, he has a point.

And so I think that, like, at a pretty deep level, they are very, you know, big believers in, like, the stable coin space and, like, very much understand the promise of the technology. I mean, they were believers. in Stellar. I think Stripe was one of the original investors in Stellar way back when. They obviously experimented with Bitcoin, realized that wasn't going to work super well for payments for a bunch of reasons. And so I think when they like, you know, as Stablecoin started having those moment and they sort of learn more about Bridge and the use cases that we were solving, pieces

clicked into place. Stripe is an absolutely massive company with tons of relationships. So what's your hope for how crypto kind of saturates Stripe and, you know, how this fintech company converges into a fintech company going through a crypto transformation. I mean, I think one of the things that I am the most excited about is, you know, with the products that we build, I kind of am like, like, I don't think anybody is going to want to use a stable coin just to use a stable coin. People are going to want to use a stable coin or build with wallets or use our APIs because we deliver some very tangible business value to them. We enable them to enter a new country. We enable them to serve more consumers. We enable them to save money. We enable them to

generate revenue. But there needs to be some very tangible benefit that we provide. And one of the really nice things now about being part of Stripe is that the feedback loop on understanding that tangible value is like, you know, the minimis. Because now we have a first best customer for everything that we want to do. And so, you know, it's not like Stripe is, you know, Stripe is 8,000 people. So even if like John or Patrick or whomever are like, hey, we want to build with stable coins, there needs to be, you know, dozens of people who deeply understand the benefit to actually work on the thing and do it. And so if we encounter pushback from those teams at Stripe. It's the same pushback that we would encounter if we were like talking to

Walmart or talking to Robin Hood or talking to Revolut or Newbank or whomever. And so it gives us an opportunity now to like as we push Stripe, you know, stable coins deeper into Stripe to understand where concerns are, figure out how to overcome those concerns and turn Stripe into like our first best customer. And then it becomes like a great proof point for all these folks externally. I guess you're full circle back to Zulu all over again, right? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. As we close this out, Zach, we've been talking about staple coin users as if they're all human. There is another future where the biggest stable coin users out there, the actual unbanked could be AIs and AI agents. What are you guys going to do at Stripe to play a role in that transformation? You think AIs will be huge staple coin users? And if so,

how far away are we from that future? I was, so Simon, Taylor shared this thing with me the other day, forget like maybe it was on Slack or something. But he said that he was talking to this like money historian and every single time there's been some new technological revolution. There has been a new form of money that helps facilitate the progress of this revolution. And a great example of this that we can all relate to is credit cards and the internet. You know, the internet wouldn't be what it is without credit cards and obviously credit cards wouldn't be what they are without the internet. You know, credit cards were around a long time before the internet, like, you know, in the 60s, but they really took off credit and

debit cards and so on in the late 90s into the 2000s. And now you could not imagine the internet without credit cards. It's like the default way value is transferred. And obviously, Stripe is a big accelerant of this trip. And I think stable coins are going to be the same thing for AI. I think a new form of money is going to be required to facilitate, you know, economic activity between all these agents. You know, the existing Fiat system has some like challenges for AI, you know, one of the most obvious of which is that in order to store Fiat money, you need to be a human. Yeah. That's kind of a problem if you're not. That's a real problem. And so what I think will happen is that we'll go through this challenge

progressively. At first, a lot of AI agents will be tethered to humans, so they will piggyback off of human KYC and so on. But over time, they will need their own accounts, their own, be able to make their own decisions. And, you know, stable coins and wallets make that possible. The other thing is that stable coins and wallets end up are really good for small transactions, for variable transactions for streaming transactions. And so they make a lot of different types of money movement possible that are not really possible today when you actually have to move money across this layer one that's super expensive and super slow. Yeah, it's incredible. It does seem super obvious to me that the finance stack, the banking stack that AI will use will be crypto. How could it not be wallets and ledgers

and smart contracts and actual tokens that they can hold? That's got to be the future. So maybe the next move for you guys, Zach, is to build the bridge between kind of the AI layer and the rest of crypto. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today, Zach. I know Stripe's got some big announcements to come in the future and we appreciate you hanging out with us today. Thanks for having me on. It's been fun. Got to let you know, of course, bankless listener, none of this has been financial advice. Crypto is risky. You could lose what you put in, but we are headed west. This is the frontier. It's not for everyone, but we're glad you're with us on bankless journey. Thanks a lot. Thank you.