Epicenter - Learn about Crypto, Blockchain, Ethereum, Bitcoin and Distributed Technologies - Stripe: The Stablecoin (R)Evolution - John Egan

Episode Date: July 1, 2025

Stripe has established itself as a leading payment solution for both enterprises as well as startups and individual sellers. By abstracting away all the complexities of traditional payment rails through simple plug-and-play APIs, Stripe created a facile route for cross-border payments, simplifying e-commerce. Similarly, Stripe’s recent integration of stablecoins could further bolster the adoption of decentralised payment solutions, be them USD or other currency proxies. This allows businesses to reach more markets, at a lower cost, with near-instantaneous settlement.Topics covered in this episode:John’s backgroundStripe’s missionHow Stripe solves the complexity of internet paymentsIntegrating crypto for paymentsSupported blockchainsStripe’s Web3 servicesUpsides of accepting stablecoin paymentsNon-USD stablecoinsMerchant UXExpanding crypto support outside the U.S.On- and off-rampingAcquiring Bridge and PrivyThe best of both worlds: CeFi & DeFiEpisode links:John Egan on XStripe on XSponsors:Gnosis: Gnosis builds decentralized infrastructure for the Ethereum ecosystem, since 2015. This year marks the launch of Gnosis Pay— the world's first Decentralized Payment Network. Get started today at - gnosis.ioChorus One: one of the largest node operators worldwide, trusted by 175,000+ accounts across more than 60 networks, Chorus One combines institutional-grade security with the highest yields at - chorus.oneThis episode is hosted by Friederike Ernst.

Stripe was one of these things that's very obvious looking back, you know, but at the time, sort of took a bit of a zoomed out requirement, I think, to come up with. Stripe historically has thought about here are all of these really complicated, difficult financial systems that have built for all sorts of probably justifiable reasons. You know, and here's kind of a simple API to go and interact with them. You know, and then kind of here comes crypto and now sort of stablecoin specifically, and just said, well, let's forget about all of that, right? What if we just rebuilt it from first principles to be digital money?

And I think that that's really kind of a good capture, is Stripe has been this for the traditional finance world, which is what really makes us so well positioned to also be this for this new world that's coming today. Welcome to Epicenter, the show which talks about the technologies projects and people driving decentralization in the blockchain revolution. I'm Friedricha Ernst, and today I'm speaking with John Egan, who is the head of crypto at Stripe.

Stripe, of course, builds payment infrastructure for the internet and is one of the most valuable fintechs worldwide. Before I talk with John, let me tell you about our sponsors this week. If you're looking to stake your crypto with confidence, look no further than Corace 1. More than 150,000 delegators, including institutions like BitGo, Pintera Capital and Ledger trust Corus 1 with their acids. They support over 50 blockchains and are leaders in governance or networks like Cosmos, ensuring your stake, is responsibly managed. Thanks to their advanced MEV research, you can also enjoy the highest staking rewards.

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Hey, John, thank you so much for coming on. Hey, thanks for having me. I know you are currently on Stripe Tour. Where are you calling in from? I'm calling in from New York today, which is where a good chunk of the Stripe crypto team is actually based. But pretty soon we'll actually be out in Berlin doing that segment of Stripe Tour. And then really all over the world for the rest of the year,

all the way up until the New York Tour, which happens in November. So a big, big moment for Stripe to go around and really reach out and interact with merchants and sort of explain the new features, mostly that we launched at Session. and to go deep. So really, really excited to do it, and it's going to be a packed schedule. Super cool. Maybe before we dive into Stripe and Web 3,

tell us a bit about yourself and kind of like where your career took you so far. I know kind of you were previously at Facebook and also at early start-ups, some of which you actually co-founded. Tell us about that. Yeah, sure. So I'm an engineer by training. I thought I'd go and build robots.

And that turned out to be a little bit, a little bit of a slow industry. So got out of that, ended up getting into startups, ran a YC startup in high-speed data transport, and way back in 2011. It feels like forever ago now. And that company was bought by Facebook, which is how I ended up there. And at Facebook, you know, built all kinds of tools and infrastructure for the organization as it was growing.

And ultimately took over and ran the workplace team. I founded that with Lars Razmussen over there, ran that out of London and sort of grew that up to be one of, one of, Stripes major enterprise pillars, sorry, Facebook's major enterprise pillars, came back here to New York, and that's around when I started to get into blockchain in 2016, where I founded an NFT company called Additional way back before NFTs, anyone cared about them. I remember going up and down Sand Hill Road and being told by every investor that NFTs would never be interesting and never a thing, and never exciting. But we were like an iPhone app, so we were like the Instagram

for NFTs. And it was really fun. It was really early stage, lots of digital artists and digital creation and distribution. And I was just like super excited about the kind of decentralized and open network nature of blockchain. Ethereum was just happening at the time and was kind of having its first kind of ground swell of developer excitement and applications being built. And then pivoted out of that into an incident response company for a little while, taking some of the learnings from Fang and frankly, blockchain, if you really want to have

a great history of incidents, you work in crypto for a while. And then, you know, after that pivot, I really, wanted to get back into the crypto space. I really love the people. I love the technology. You know, we have this kind of saying in crypto. I'm sure you know, you know, it's like, good morning. Everything's early, right? And that's just the best space to be in for technology. And so when I did the math, you know, and sort of worked out, well, what company do I think is going to have the greatest impact, you know, on the world, you know, to take this technology that was emerging. That just naturally brought me to stripe where I found that there was a kind

of young and rapidly growing crypto organization. And I joined about two years ago. and took over that team and been running it ever since. Yeah, that takes us all the way through to Stripe. I think kind of how big and pervasive Stripe is in the payments ecosystem is a well-kept secret because kind of like a lot of this is abstracted away from normal users, right? So kind of for listeners who only see Stripe kind of kind of in conjunction with kind of like credit card buttons, How would you describe Stripe's mission and kind of your cool offerings? Yeah.

So look, first of all, I think a lot of that's by design, right? If you think about Stripe kind of from a user standpoint, we take this very complicated world of centralized finance, right? Let's not talk about blockchain yet, but like all of these kind of siloed parts of the traditional finance world. And we simplify them, right, down to APIs and interfaces and U.X. that merchants can go and integrate in a couple of lines of code without having to think about all the complicated money movement that's happening under the hood.

Interesting personal piece of history, I have one of the first 100-stripe accounts. I was in Y Combinator a couple of classes after John and Patrick, and I remember getting an email from John. I think back then it was called Dev Payments. It was like they hadn't named themselves Stripe yet. And the pitch was so simple. It was just, listen, we've had tons of trouble just doing payments,

processing for our company. You know, we've decided to make it a lot easier. Here's an API, click here to sign up. And you know, I think what was actually happening, you know, in the back end is they were opening merchant accounts, kind of manually, they were sending a lot of mail back and forth. But I remember as a founder at the time, I hadn't even thought about how I was going to make payments work.

I just assumed it was easy because when you work in technology, you get really comfortable with the idea that everything's Internet native. Of course there's an API. Of course there's a GitHub page. Of course there's some like simple thing that I can build. But the reality was there wasn't for payments. You had to go work with a bank. You had to open these complicated merchant accounts.

So I actually think that very early sort of simplicity of the way that Stripe was presented as this is the fast lane, right, into all of these things that you just need to do to run your business, actually still are present today. And today, it's just that fast lane is now access to a lot more than payments, right? We call just financial infrastructure. So everything from, you know, card issuing to, you know, now after sessions, you know, money management and storage, you know, to loans. And in fact, you can even create companies on Stripe, right? You can go to Atlas. So if you're at the very beginning of like a startup accelerator, you're probably at Stripe well before you even start to take payments. And now it's not just an API, right?

We have like the integrated checkout suite. That's all the U.X. And we have a with a lemon squeezy acquisition, right? We have progress towards like merchant of record. There's all these like amazing capabilities. I'm only probably touching like 1% of what the company does. But really that's what it should be. Right.

As an engineer, especially in the valley, you know, that's every, it's just an assumption. Of course you're going to come and use Stripe. This is the best and easiest and most well documented, you know, and self-service product for accessing all of these complicated financial systems that you really do need to be able to leverage to grow a business. from a couple of dollars of test revenue up to billions. I'm sure we'll get into this in just a little bit, but Stripe is very much a bundler, right?

Kind of like it abstracts a lot of the complexity that is, that's kind of integral to kind of the payments stack and kind of like all these various things, kind of like you can do, kind of, with money on the internet. Behind kind of your smartly kind of collated APIs, why is it so complex? Can you kind of give us some insights into that?

And I think kind of like we'll dive into that when we talk about kind of like the crypto aspect of this later. But often kind of you think in principle, this should be easy, right? Kind of like sending money to a merchant should not require kind of the, the world's most expensive fintech to kind of do this for you, right? Right, right.

Yeah. So the history of money, right, is really, really just what leads us here. It's a long and complicated history, very closely mapped to, like, the creation of society. And so just like we have all of these, you can almost map money down to culture, right? How many thousands of cultures do we have in the world? and each culture sort of grew out of a siloed set of humans in coming up with ways that they wanted to transact with each other. It's maybe like the very simplest way to kind of think about

the evolution of early commerce. And all of these rules got built inside of each of these cultures and each of these silos to define what it means to transact not just money but assets in general, right? What does it mean to move value from like one human to another, one human to a corporation, right? one corporation to another corporation, you know, into real world assets are sort of these complex financial instruments that eventually grew. And you almost have to replay, you know,

these hundreds of years of history to catch up to why it's so complicated today, right? In the U.S., why do we have been sponsors, you know, for processing credit card transactions? But in other countries, maybe we don't. It's just sort of a trick of where, of the history of how credit cards evolved in this country versus how they evolved in the rest of the world. You know, why, why, do we have certain types of regulated, you know, banking systems? And every country has a different answer, right? Like, why was it developed in Germany, you know, for a specific set of rules? I'm sure entirely different than why the state of New York manages its money and sort of rules for its banking organizations. And I think, like, when you kind of carry that all forward, you just get a lot of

complexity. And then you get a lot of players who are trying to work to do interconnection at different points in history. So what it meant to go and interconnect banks 20 years ago through like these correspondent banking networks, right? It was pretty different from how we'd probably connect banks if we were doing it today. And we're really starting to, you know, sort of see that with stable coins especially and kind of crypto networks. But, you know, all of these problems have always existed and there have always been people trying to solve those problems for the world. And I think Stripe was really just the first internet-oriented company to solve this problem, right? And it was very much a, there were systems to go and get merchant accounts at banks.

And there certainly were middlemen back then to go and do it. But none of them were just a forum on the internet, you know, that you filled out and that then returned an API key, you know, back to you. So I think Stripe was, strike was one of these things that's very obvious looking back, you know, but at the time sort of took a bit of a zoomed out requirement, I think, to come up with. Not to put words in John and Patrick's mouths. I'm sure they've talked about the history of the company many times. But, you know, funny story, when I was first onboarding here, you know, crypto wasn't in the best spot a couple of years ago.

You know, we had a couple of major collapses. There were, you know, some sort of scary almost moments of near Deepak, even in the stablecoin world. And in my onboarding class, there was a moment where John kind of came on and would just sort of take Q&A from everywhere. And I just sort of was quietly keeping my mouth shut in the back on the Zoom. But someone else, someone completely unassociated with crypto asked him. you know, about crypto, you know, and sort of how he thinks about it. And he said, I think, what's kind of getting at your point, which was, you know, Stripe historically has thought about here are all of these really complicated, difficult financial systems that have built for all sorts

of probably justifiable reasons. You know, and here's kind of a simple API to go and interact with them, you know, and then kind of here comes crypto and now sort of stablecoin specifically, and just said, well, let's forget about all of that, right? What if we just rebuilt it from first principles to be digital money. And I think that that's really kind of a good capture, is Stripe has been this for the traditional finance world, which is what really makes us so well positioned to also be this for this new world that's coming today. Stripe kind of saw the potential for digital currencies super early on. So you guys started accepting Bitcoin over 10 years ago in 2014.

Can you talk about what motivated that decision? And also, I know it was before your time at Stripe. But you also kind of, Stripe also wound down its Bitcoin support. Just a couple of years later, kind of like, and only started engaging with the crypto ecosystem again years later. So maybe talk us through kind of like this very early exploration of crypto rails for payments. Yeah, I think like most technologies, you know, there are a couple of, I won't call Bitcoin a false start because Bitcoin's, you know, doing wonderfully. But at least in terms of exploring it from a payments rail standpoint, you know, I think we, when Stripe originally got into the space, there's a lot of excitement about this technology really just catching on, becoming more accessible. You know, we were far enough along that most people had heard about Bitcoin.

I mean, it was certainly demand, you know, to use it as a payment method. But the reality is, and I think last year at Sessions, John Collison sort of addressed this very directly on stage when we were announcing that we were coming back with stable coin payments. You know, the downside was, you know, almost twofold. One, everyone really regrets every Bitcoin they ever spent. I'm not sure about you, but I rented a hotel in France, you know, back in like 20, I think it was around 20, 2014, 2015, And I think I look back, and I probably spent effectively, you know, $60,000 a night on that hotel, you know, probably not the best, like, feeling to have after, after, you know, engaging in commerce or a transaction. And second of all, look, the user experience just wasn't great. You know, we have high expectations because despite how poor and complex the traditional finance world is, there's a lot of, like, virtualization that's already happened.

I was talking about how there's a lot of players in the space today, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to, you know, to make us consumers feel like that's not the case. Right. So I can walk into a coffee shop and I can tap a card. And I get my coffee right away. You know, there's always been this joke. The day you can finally buy coffee with cryptocurrency will be the day that we've won. And 2014, you know, was not that date.

You know, if you wanted to buy something, you know, online, you'd sort of make the checkout experience and we'd say, oh, we'll get back to you. You know, it'll finish in a little bit. And we would wait for sort of the next set of blocks to be processed and the, and the transaction to be secured, and then we would send an email, and then you would come back, and it was just a very complicated process. And consumers, listen, if my time at Meta really taught me anything, consumers do not have patience for anything less than instant, you know, maybe a few seconds if there's high conviction. And I think ultimately, just for those practical reasons,

it was simply not a great payment method, and usage was not really there. And so Stripe, if anything, is a practical company, despite being, you know, very, have very head in the clouds when we're sort of dreaming here. And I think the decision was made reasonably quickly, you know, a couple of years later to cancel that as a payment method. And we waited, you know, very patiently until the technology caught up to the point where we could do the demo that was done at sessions where it was just like, okay, don't blink, here we go, click, done.

And I think that that sort of piece of magic was missing. And so, so yeah, that's kind of been the history there. skips over some of the other work we've done. We're like just enabling the Web 3 economies through things like on ramps, and we still do offer a crypto onramp to help specifically crypto wallets on board consumers and participate in these new areas of commerce, especially people are experimenting with Dow's and NFTs had a really big moment for a while there. So Stripe's been sort of in and around the space consistently since at least 2014.

But I really think that this moment is, sort of the most native to Stripes mission with stable coins coming onto the scene. And I think that's why we're being a lot noisier about it now. I think it's a much more exciting time. If you kind of had to point your finger at one set of events that kind of made you say, okay, the time is now, what would that be? You know, I went to, I think the first year I was here, about two years ago, I went to, I think it was ETHC.

And, you know, in previous kind of crypto conferences that we've been to, you know, really all of the focus was on sort of those topics I was mentioning before. You know, we really, everyone was building a new NFT marketplace or everyone was building, you know, a new wallet, right? But I remember at ETHC, there was this surprising undercurrent of stable coins starting to pop up. And I, you know what, I can't actually even peg why. It was just something we started to notice. You know, I think there was, I believe there was like beginning talks of sort of like Mika back then and kind of like some regulatory conversations that were happening.

And so that was sort of starting to spur this conversation about like regulatory impact on these tokens and how they might be used. I think we met with a, we met with a couple of folks sort of who were working towards that goal, you know, around like circle. And we talked to, I think, Bonarium back then and a couple of other organizations. And everyone was aware of Tether and kind of its, it's global impact. But that was the first time that I actually heard the developer community talking about it. I really think kind of the slowdown in the NFT space gave everyone sort of a moment to breathe and think back towards, okay, what technology shifts are happening, what like opportunities are there going to be for all of us developers over the next couple of years. And when I came back and I wrote my notes up on that conference, it was at the very top. And I sort of just had like a general note that was like, oh, stable coins, we should really keep an eye on those.

Like maybe we should start to build more in that space. So I, you know, it wasn't really like an aha moment. And like I was making a transaction and the person next to me used a stable coin. And I saw how amazing it was. It was actually much more developer led, which I think is a lot of what happens in crypto. And it's sort of exciting is everyone just sort of quietly starts to talk about it. And then everyone starts to build. And then we get this kind of magical moment.

And certainly they've been a lot happening before that, right? Like the origins of stable coins and cross-border commerce that we were seeing out of existing companies. But that was kind of the first conference where I came away, feeling like maybe it was starting to become something that developers would care a lot about. And that's generally the beginning, right, of starting to see interesting opportunities. One of your previous startups, the NFT project, which was also built on Ethereum. And you went to ECC. So kind of like, was there always kind of this focus on the Ethereum space or kind of like what's your network strategy? I know kind of like your current offerings in the crypto space are on base, right?

So how do you navigate this territory? Because it can be pretty fraught, right? Yeah, so we're network agnostic. I mean, I list ETHCC just because it's one of the larger conferences. And I think Ethereum developers were at the time, especially, like, sort of on the forefront of like these programmable applications and layers. But look, across our products, you know, we support Ethereum. Ethereum, you know, Polygon, Solana, Bass, Stellar.

And we have a pretty wide-ranging list of different networks that we interop with. And, I think, like, Aptos pretty recently, you know, we don't really think about it in terms of like this network or that network needs to win. We are, we are technologists who will take advantage of whatever is available to us at the time. You know, we are very excited about what base is doing. You know, we use base in the stablecoin financial account product that we just announced at sessions. But yeah, I think the same thing with the coin strategy, to be quite honest. It's a common question that Stripe gets. You know, what is your coin strategy?

Which coins are you using? And, you know, right now on the stable coin front, we're pretty focused on USDC, kind of as a publicly tradable coin. You know, with the acquisition of bridge, we now have USB as kind of an internal infrastructure coin, which is pretty exciting. There's a lot to dig into there from a technology standpoint and kind of opportunity. You know, and then certainly we're aware of like the other large players in the space like Tether and kind of how those will start to play out as the regulatory environment changes.

But no, I don't, I'm a big fan of Ethereum, you know, and I think at the time, especially when I was building my startup, that was kind of if you're going to build an app, you'd go get, what was it back then? Truffle, I think it was like the sort of like developer tool set you would download to sort of experiment. From consensus. Yeah, right? Yeah, yeah. And so I think that was just like where these conversations were growing out of. You know, we did start to hear about it also in the Salana conferences was another one. I think that was starting to emerge then. It is now becoming particularly interesting from a developer standpoint.

So what are kind of the minimum requirements you kind of have for network integration, right? Kind of like, I mean, you could look at security and performance and level of decentralization and so on. What are the things, or do you guys say, look, we purely go by user need? and kind of because in some way, kind of like building on these rails, you can never be more resilient than the rails themselves, right? Right. Gosh, how do we think about this?

I think we take a pretty practical stance. You know, we have a strong compliance posture at the company. I think, Stripe, we've always thought of ourselves as the honest broker of this space. And we need, you know, our largest users to be able to look to us confidently. So certainly there's a compliance layer here, which is we need to be able to do, you know, the basic checks, right? The sanctions checks and the transaction monitoring and all of these kind of like basic requirements for being able to kind of interrupt with legal businesses across the world.

You know, but really past that, we're just watching for consumer and merchant demand. You know, I think this is shifting a little bit, but we're not really the evangelists of the space, right? We are utility providers helping to connect, you know, merchants to this capability set. And so I think, you know, we probably have fewer, you know, chains and coins than, you know, your average decentralized exchange would expose. But I think that that's okay. I think for now, like, we don't necessarily have to have a thousand different chains available or a thousand different coins. What's important is that we give people this sort of high quality experience that they can rely on. And so, you know, that maps down to kind of the top, I hate to use the word like blue chip,

but, you know, sort of the top, you know, coins and the top networks and frankly the most well regulated ones as well. Listen, I'm sitting in New York right now. And if you go pull up the NYDFS's green list, right, there's only a subset of coins and networks that we can provide to people in this state. And I think that is changing rapidly and adapting throughout the world. But we're just, we're pragmatists when it comes to that stuff. You know, I don't, I don't think that we have too much of a dog in the fight specifically. And certainly, if our largest merchants come to us asking about a specific coin or a specific network, just like we would for any traditional product, we would go and explore that and integrate it.

We skipped over this part a little bit earlier. Tell us about the services you kind of offer kind of on Web 3 rails. You mentioned a stablecoin financial product and so on, but maybe let's go through them one by one. Yeah, I can put my marketing hat on for a minute. So we have all kinds of really cool services right now, specifically in the stablecoin space. You know, the banner services are kind of native to the Stripe products that you would already expect them to be attached to.

So for example, we have a pay-ins product, which if you have Stripes OCS checkout suite integrated, you can offer your consumers the ability to pay with stable coins across a series of different networks. and coins. And you can do that just like any other LPM. You can go into your payment method settings. You can click a button, Bing, bang, boom. Now you can pay with stable coins. So pretty large product there, you know, powering most recently a big announcement with Shopify, rolling out to millions of Shopify merchants powering from behind the scenes with shop pay. We also have a payouts product,

which is sort of the opposite of this. Maybe about pay-ins is a way to get global consumers to be able to pay your business in, say, the U.S. Payouts is the other way around. Whole world wants access to dollars, especially if you're running a digital marketplace or maybe a global gig economy. You can use the payouts product with stable coins to distribute dollar peg stable coins

to users anywhere around the world. We also have a global treasury product that is really offered more through our acquisition with Bridge, which is all about managing your global treasury and money. SpaceX is sort of the example that comes up all the time here, this sort of like global operation that needs to move all of their money back into dollars efficiently and easily every day. That's more of like a low level API integrated service. And then we've also have have some really interesting products that we're building around money management and storage.

Most recently the stable coin financial accounts, which is if you think about, okay, now you have pay ins and you have payouts, but where do you store that money? So Stripe released a general money management suite at sessions. And as part of that, we're also offering stablecoin storage. And what's really exciting about that is it's not just storage in kind of our existing 50 or so markets. It's 101 net new markets in which you can now store dollars with Stripe. And these accounts have access to US and EU rails as well. So if you need to pull money in, you can do it over wire, ACH or SEPA. And then I think maybe the one other big announcement recently was stable coin backed card issuing, which similar to stable coin financial accounts is sort of available

globally and allows you to issue debit cards that are backed by stable coins. So all of these, all of these pieces kind of come together pretty magically. But really what you should be able to do is approach Stripe and think about all of the services we offer today through a lens of what if I wanted global access and dollar access specifically through stable coins. And you should be able to find that. I think you already kind of skirted over this. But when you look at the tools that kind of you offer on crypto rails and kind of you compare them to the tools you offer on traditional finance rails, how would you compare the two? Oh, I don't like to think of them as different. You know, there's sort of at the limit, at the limit,

stable coins should really be thought of as just another currency, right? And then under the hood, like at least from the standpoint of like a user interacting with our products. And then under the hood, everything should be faster and more integrated and hopefully less expensive thanks to the infrastructure. But, you know, when my example on pay-ins, I think is sort of my favorite one for this, right? You shouldn't have to go to a different company, a different website, a different experience, just to be able to offer pay-ins as a type of payment. We think about this as like a global LPM. And just like if you were a merchant and you wanted to accept, you know,

Swish in Sweden, I believe, you would just go to a payment method page, click a button and the switch would flip and it would show up on the checkout screen for the appropriate folks. The same thing is true for stablecoin acceptance, which is you are already processing probably cards or otherwise, and you just want to expand your consumer reach. You can go to the same thing. settings page, you can click the button, turn it on. That's kind of like, I think the bar,

right? It should just be part of the experience. And I really think this is kind of the opportunity Stripe has maybe versus what's been offered historically from other organizations is you shouldn't have to go integrate another product or another service. You should be able to just do it within the experience you already have today. Our users are running businesses that have usually centered, not around payments, right? Not really centered around some other interesting consumer or B2B opportunity in creation. And so I guess that's like that's the bar. You know, for some of these products that are that are certainly more complex where

we're powering, say, a fintech, you know, in those worlds, we are kind of back to the API integration layer. And I think in those worlds, that's what's most effective. You know, Bridge is a great example of this. If you want to really deeply integrate, you know, virtual accounts and you want to deeply integrate like money movement and you have even maybe some custom requirements that you want to work with the bridge team in terms of integrating. You also have that option now, which is to come to Stripe and say, you know, I want to go very close to the metal, right? And I want to enable sort of

very unique and powerful money movement systems to build my fintech app or otherwise. And I think, I think we're going to see that split exist for a while in the stable coin space. It should be something that's kind of easy and instant for the vast majority of the world, who's just trying to kind of turn these things on and make and enable on top of services they already have. And then you're going to have these kind of close to the metal, you know, super APIs that will allow you to go and create the fintechs of the future. And I think that's, that's probably the right split, right? You sort of want a little bit of a choose your own adventure here. If you're selling, you know, a shipped product through a TikTok marketing campaign, right? Or, you know, if you're building a, you know, a Robin Hood or

something like that. Yeah. So maybe a revolution. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. For the merchants themselves. So there's, I would argue that there's a very small set of customers who, who were unavailable to them previously, right? Kind of like there's very few people who say, I will pay in stables and stables only. So does the experience kind of become better for the.

merchant if you pay them in stables because in principle kind of like you could make this faster and cheaper so kind of like one of the one of the main pain points for merchants and kind of like accepting card payments is often that kind of like they actually settle weeks later right so kind of like and in principle kind of like on crypto rails you can make it almost instant so kind of like what's what's the upside for the merchant yeah so i i i i do actually think there's a pretty large portion, just to challenge the very first statement. I do actually think there's a large and growing group of consumers who would prefer to pay with stable coins, especially in geographic regions that were previously unreachable, you know,

by the card networks, especially as we see kind of a growth of digital services. You know, one of one of our like large users of pay ins and payouts is sort of a digital trading organization. And that's success all over the world, you know, from Africa to Asia. to the US. And in that environment, you're actually doing like net new consumer reach. So I do actually think there's a pretty strong angle there. But outside of that, there's sort of two other categories, right? One is, you know, merchants are looking for, to your point, you know, a faster ability to settle kind of inbound. And they're also looking for, you know, especially U.S. merchants are looking for sort of like local currency, right, payment rails. So how do I process everything in dollars

globally, right, without necessarily having to deal with, say, the FX coming from these regions that I'm otherwise transacting with. But I think the settlement side is actually a good one to dig into, just in general, from a business operations standpoint. And the amount of time that you have to wait for an average credit card settlement can be, you know, days. The amount of time you have to wait for cross-border payments, you know, can be days to weeks, depending on the networks that are in between. You know, with a stable coin payment, you should be able to operate and you can't operate, you know, near instantly. And, you know, maybe in the worst case, a couple of hours. And I think like that capability has business operations benefits, whereas sort of like the consumer reach just has sort of like business, you know, revenue reach benefits.

And I think just like any good disruptive technology, right, you can put a bunch of different lenses on this thing and say, okay, what are these specific reasons that this is going to work better for my organization? And I think if you take like a digital marketplace, that reach might be the thing that's most interesting. Or if you take a small, you know, startup that's maybe a little bit cash strapped, right? The settlement time might become more important. And then if you take other types of organizations kind of in the middle, there's actually simplicity layer, which is like, can I just turn on this like one new capability and still run my business in dollars without having to think about all the different LPMs? So I think there's like three or four different lenses you can put on it.

And they all sort of just add up to the product being better. I think again, like I come back to this point a lot. A lot of this is just sort of happening. Like the number of businesses and consumers transacting and stable coins is growing anyway. And providing that capability is something that just like if there was another. credit card network that was growing really quickly. We'd have merchants knocking down our doors saying, you know, why don't you support this new network? It's very similar. You know, what is what is the volume? It's like 7.7.3 trillion, I think is like the yearly adjusted transaction volume. And if you

actually take the like unadjusted volume, I think I've written down here, it's like 34 trillion dollars, which exceeds like the combined value of the two credit card networks in terms of transacted volume. So this, this trend is occurring anyway. And like merchants will always want to reach into whatever financial capabilities, their consumers or their buyers, are adopting. And I think sometimes it's almost hard for us to even know the exact reasons, right? Like there's certainly the crypto natives, right, that have kind of ended up in stable coins after years of trading other types of volatile assets. But there's also just this like rapid global growth of dollar access demand that we're seeing, especially across like Latin America, where this is the currency that they

hold that's most transactable. And then you get this benefit on the other side of like, and business operations and money movement and treasury management. We've talked about dollars a lot now. And kind of like when it comes down, I mean, it is the globally dominant currency. But kind of there's 400 million Americans and there's 8 billion non-U.S. residents. What are your thoughts on non-U.S. dollar staples? So today, the stable coin market, I think it's like 99.9.9. I don't know if there's a second nine, a fourth nine there, you know, in dollars. And, you know, I think, I think being a practical actor, that that means great. So, so we can almost look at the stable coin market today and say, okay, it's dollars. And then it's various sort of versions of dollars, right? It's like if you, if you look across, say, you know, a circle versus like a tether, you know, versus some of, you know, the other stable coins that are coming onto the market, you know, what actually backs it and pegs it

to the dollar is a little bit of variance. You know, are you getting yield back when you're holding them or otherwise? In terms of like the growth of non-dollar staple coins, I think it's pretty exciting. Like I think, I think it would be embraced in general. If you think about, you know, the complexities, we even talked it all by the way about like on and off ramping into these things, which is its own like huge challenging space, right? Yeah. But like, like really if you look at that There's two lenses to look at it, right? One is to say, okay, how do we on ramp from the local currency into the dollar, right? Which is really, we're just right back to the FX problem, right?

There's some centralized actor there somewhere like defining the FX, you know, as you come in. Maybe it's a crypto exchange, so it's more efficient. You know, but in the future, I do expect that there will be significantly more local stable coins that are issued locally and have kind of that connectivity back into the traditional finance world through like the bank that's backing the issuing. And then the actual FX can happen on chain, right? So you like on ramp into, say, the digital euro, and then you transact from the digital euro into the dollar

in an on-chain FX environment that's potentially more, hopefully at the limit significantly more, you know, efficient than you'd otherwise have. I think taken to the limit, that gets pretty exciting, right? If we actually have all of these different coins, you know, mimicking their local currencies globally, then you get a really interesting effect of sort of broad-scale global, decentralized effects, which again, should be significantly more efficient for getting into those local currencies, which people still rely on. It's a bit naive to say, okay, great, your organization

in Brazil only needs dollars. Maybe we're primarily transacting, perhaps they want to store there, but the reality is at the end of the day, they need to get back into local currency, probably to pay their local employees, to pay their rent, if nothing else. And so I think of that space is getting pretty exciting. And I'm personally really excited about the idea of a pretty large-scale decentralized FX market. Just because I think it'll do what stable coins have otherwise done, which will be increased access directly to the market, as opposed to having to go through layers and layers of middlemen. I used to tell the story of at Stripe, all the meeting rooms have like the meetings that are happening printed on the digital screen outside of them.

And where the crypto team used to be based in our old office, there was one room next to to us. And every morning, it had this really scary meeting title that was like, there's like daily FX global risk standup. It's just like very scary title. It happened every morning at like 9 a.m. And I used to try and, you know, sit close to that room just to hear what was happening. But I think, you know, these markets aren't always running 24 hours a day. They have difficulty in liquidity. Stripe is having to make these decisions about where are we holding our money to make sure that we can settle to the local merchants at some rate that's faster than it would take to go through the banking networks to get there. In a world of local stable coins, those

problems really fade away. And treasury management, you know, selfishly for us, but preferably for all businesses, just becomes easier, right? It's the same thing that has happened across, this is a strange analogy. But, you know, every other part of internet commerce, you know, Hotel Tonight, right, we don't book our hotels days in advance. I would expect the same thing to happen in finance. we shouldn't have to think about how much money we need in a specific currency days in advance. We should be able to say, great, there's a local stable coin there. We can transact a decentralized nature instantly to get there. And then if we really need to off-ramp into the local currency, there's a local financial institution

that's backing that currency that makes off-ramp simple. So I think that that space will be a huge tailwind to the wider stable coin ecosystem. And I think I imagine where we are today, where it's all dollars, is kind of analogous to the internet. Okay, for a while, a lot of this was coming out of the U.S. and almost all of it was English. And now we have a very much more interesting and diverse internet. And I think it's the same thing. Walk us through the experience that kind of imagine today has kind of when they accept staples, right? So kind of say, I'm a TikTok influence and I sell something on kind of like a custom website. And I have a Stripe integration and an example.

accept stables. So kind of you, you accept US dollar stables on my behalf and then kind of like, how do I actually then get them? Do I have the option to kind of just get the, get the stables from you? Because in principle, you could kind of just send them on to kind of like a wallet of my choosing, right? Or kind of like, do I need to have them off ramped into a traditional bank account. So today, when you, stable coin acceptance is available primarily to U.S. merchants today, expanding very soon. And all stables that are paid into a strike checkout experience settle to Fiat. So our merchants today are accustomed to storing in Fiat. And so the easiest way to make this appear like any other LPM that they're local payment method that they're accustomed to accepting

is to settle into dollars. Now, what's kind of cool is in the most recent integration with Shopify, powering shop pay, those merchants for the first time actually have a choice. They can settle into USDC directly, I believe, on base, or they can choose to settle into Fiat. And so that is the direction this is going. So today, primarily settlement down to Fiat, just to map the kind of user experience that the merchants are accustomed to,

and to lower the friction of number of things you have to learn when you're coming on board as a merchant who's accepting stablecoins. But as we think about this more globally, that stops making sense, right? Like especially in countries where the merchants would primarily prefer to store in, say, dollars, but can't today. They have to settle to their local currency. Like the natural capability, and you can squint a little bit and imagine our roadmap when you think about like stablecoin financial accounts that are rolling out,

this is the capability that should be there, right? you should also be able to store down into stable coins. So today, stores down to fiat, Shopify merchants, the choice of either, future choice of either for anyone. What about expanding these stable integrations for other jurisdictions outside of the US? Because I imagine, I mean, I understand that kind of the pain points for merchants in the US are particularly big because kind of the fees on credit cards are often higher than in some other jurisdictions. So for instance, I think in Europe they are pretty tightly regulated. But I imagine

that lots of merchants worldwide would love to accept some sort of stable. What's the blocker for you guys? I mean, in principle, it seems like you have this feature. Why can't you wrote it out. Right, right. So to be clear, the most recent, the Shopify integration, which is available to those merchants, that is actually globally available. So that's available and I believe I think it's like 40 or 50 countries. So we're already doing it. This is sort of the nice way to answer. The complicated answer to your question is it's just integration and rollout timing. So availability of these products, you know, per country, per like local financial rail, especially where we want to support direct settlement to those local currencies is just product build time.

So it has nothing to do with us not wanting to have it there. And I think Shopify was the first real big step towards being able to support that with the pay-ins integration. But you should expect global availability of this product in the very near future versus it being something specific to Stripe that we would ever choose not to. In fact, actually, the Staplecoin financial accounts are a really great example of where this has almost happened

in sort of an unusual way, right? It was actually the fastest method for us to go and release this product was to release it in all the country's stripes not in yet. It's actually a little bit easier to go and say, okay, let's, let's go, you know, it took us 15 years to get from like one to 50 countries. But it took us 15 months to get from 50 to 151. So I think like that's the kind of disruption that we, just like everyone are sort of learning how to wield, is exactly like what order of operations should we roll things out to which countries. But yes, stable coin pay ends we expect to be available to all Stripe-supported countries plus these 101 countries that we've rolled stable coin financial accounts out to in the very near future. Jory said that kind of on and off ramps are clearly a huge pain point for the ecosystem, right?

And if you zoom way out and you kind of think about kind of blockchain, infrastructure as the next evolution and kind of how financial rails will work, kind of building good on and off ramping experiences is absolutely crucial, right? Because kind of like, quite frankly, legacy financial products is where all of the values. And kind of, yes, we have super cool protocols and so on in web three, but kind of like a lot of the problem is how do you actually get the value across, right? So talk us through how you see that problem set today and how you see it evolve. Yeah, look, we are clearly in the dial-up era of like on and off-ramps globally. Depending on the country that you're in, let's even take the U.S. as an example.

Even in the U.S., it's reasonably difficult for your average consumer who has never held any sort of stable coin or crypto asset to get on chain the first time. You know, as we provide an on-ramp that I think lowers this barrier pretty significantly. But even there, you know, you're sort of going through a K-YC flow. You know, you're providing a credit card. The networks aren't always huge fans of on-ramping into crypto. So maybe you're actually providing a debit card, you know, where you're connecting your bank, you're sort of making this movement happen. You're learning the network as you go. So it's one of the biggest gaps that's out there.

I actually think that a lot of folks globally won't really have to on ramp in that way in the future. I expect that they will start to gain access to stable coins more through some other type of payout, right? Just like the way that we get money today. I would expect employers to start offering payments in stable coins and that to be the method. by which, for example, an average employee in Latam, like, receives access to their first stable coin. You know, when we look at, like, the pay-ins and payouts marketplaces that are operating on Stripe, right, these are basically giant systems of distribution for stable coins globally. I just don't think the world we're in today is really a sustainable one. And I wonder often

how long we'll be in the hybrid space. You know, I'd like to, it's always easier to think to the future and say, oh, great, when we're all just on what we are today, which is, you know, basically there's Wi-Fi everywhere, and we get to take the internet for granted. Like, when do we stop having to have a phone number that we have to call for dial-up? Unfortunately, I don't think we're going to be there tomorrow. And I do think that it's going to be primarily powered, you know, in the extreme short-term, you know, by some of these really interesting organizations that are growing that are kind of consolidating the on and off-ramps, especially in the most difficult countries. So Yellow, Yellow, card is a really interesting example here, right? That is, it's run by Chris Maurice and he is,

he is, he's creating these on and off ramps with all of the local financial institutions all across Africa, which would otherwise be very difficult, right? It'd be very difficult for a company to go show up over there and make each one of these integrations and relationships such that they can start to on and off ramp. That will then provide a lot of the liquidity access in and out to the businesses that will then be making the payouts or otherwise to consumers or other merchants. So I think it's a little bit of a roundabout way of thinking about it, right? It's not that like the average on-ramp is just going to get better. It's that you probably won't need an on-ramp in the future.

It's probably more likely that you'll simply have stable coins as an option in another way that you would be acquiring money. At the limit, your bank is hopefully just providing it as an option as a payout as well. But probably in the short term, it's much more likely to be coming from, say, your merchant account at Stripe. So if you're taking payments in, we've been talking a lot about stable coin payments that come in and settle as dollars, well, the other way around, right, is just as interesting is you're taking payments in in local currencies, but you're settling them instead to stable coins. Those types of capabilities, I think, will actually drive consumer holding and

adoption far faster than kind of these, you know, these sort of like Windows apps that we have today for like on and off ramping, especially the consumer layer. And we're seeing this, we're seeing this happen really fast at major financial institutions, right? I think like the Biddle Fund is like a good example of like a non-stable coin, but like rapidly growing like on-chain asset that will just be much more native in terms of how it will pay out or pay in from stable coins. I think things like that will just propagate these coins across the kind of commercial world. And then that will then propagate to the consumer space. Hope that answers. It's a little bit of a roundabout way of saying kind of kind of what it is. I just, I think, I think it'll be a different method by which people get

access to these things versus an improvement on the existing system. Yeah, I mean, I mean, you're completely right in that kind of like if there's more net inflows, then outflows, then kind of like the entire Sablecoin space kind of will become less reliant on future inflows. I think there's still a very wide spectrum of on ramping experiences, right? Kind of like if you kind of look at the very, I mean, yeah, kind of like you can, you can on ramp with a credit card. Typically, that's very expensive. Kind of like, often kind of like people go via centralized exchanges. So kind of they do KYC with a centralized exchange.

They kind of sent FIA to the centralized exchanges bank account and then they kind of off ramp into the decentralized space on the other side. Clearly, that's a terrible experience. But kind of, we've seen kind of the rise of these on-rength. ramping tours. So for instance, in Europe, we have, we have Monarium, which kind of lets you identify your wallet with an Iban. You kind of send euros to that Iban and within 20 seconds, it's magic shows up in your wallet. Kind of like obviously, and at zero fees, right? Because kind of like it's priced into their business model, because kind of like they get

custody of your euro. So kind of obviously there's some sort of yield play here. or kind of, I mean, we see the same thing in principle with kind of like PICS integrations in Brazil or kind of like even in the U.S., kind of like their players like Noah now would kind of offer this kind of service. What are your thoughts on these? Yeah, so we have actually, if you look at like bridge and virtual accounts and like stablecoin financial accounts, very similar, right? like access to these these integrations between the traditional and and crypto financial rails. So with like a stable coin financial account, you get an I ban as well. You get an ACH set a, what is it, a routing number right?

And an account number that you can move ACH or wire into. I think that it's a really important step towards like integrating, especially on the commercial side, how how businesses move this money in and out. And I think it's a core principle to the idea that I'm just trying to access what the stable coin represents. I think like we kind of come back to this idea of like, what is the conviction? You know, is the conviction to hold a stable coin or is the conviction to hold a dollar? Right. And if the conviction is to hold a dollar, then you're going to expect dollar like rails.

Or if the conviction is to store euro, the expectations of euro rails. And then what's actually backing the thing that you're holding, right, is, is all the is almost irrelevant, right? So this is, I think, what these kinds of on and off ramps are encouraging is this idea that you can make the stable coin act from a rail standpoint, just like the fiat currency that you're otherwise accustomed to. And over time, we expect this to become more invisible, right? You won't really be talking about how, oh, I can use ACH to on ramp into a stable coin. You'll just be saying, I can use ACH to get into dollars. But then the organization that's doing that is maybe using a bridge virtual account on the back end.

And what they're actually doing, right, is they're storing USB, you know, or or maybe a custom stable coin that they've minted, right? But to the user, it can just feel like dollars. And so I think that that's, that's maybe like the next evolution in the on ramp from sort of the classic consumer. Let's go use a credit card in this very explicit I am on ramping experience over to I'm accessing a currency type I wish I had. And I'm utilizing the rails that I'm otherwise accustomed to. I think if you take it one step farther, we'd hope that those rails kind of disappear. I don't, I don't, I don't, in Europe, you all have much better like systems for sort of eye bands and rapid movement.

But like the, the ACH network is not, is not like positively thought of in the U.S. It's like a wonderful way to move money around. You know, we think much more in apps here. You know, we think about, you know, what's, do you have, do you have Venmo? You know, do you have PayPal, like for, especially for consumer to consumer experience? So I think a lot more of those products will be powered by stable coin backing, and they'll have the access to that rail for onramping and off ramping, but it'll all happen very much behind the scenes.

You made two very big strategic acquisitions this year, namely bridge and privy. Talk us through kind of like what both of them do and how they complement what Stripe already had before. right so very excited by the way about about both of these i can't comment very deeply on on the privy front that's that's sort of an in-progress acquisition but on on bridge um listen first of all the bridge team's just incredible like fantastic group of executors who have been working in the stable coin space exclusively and you think about kind of first mover and second mover advantages

like Bridge came in and started to build with a very clean philosophy towards we are going to go and engage and make stable coins as magical as Stripe was able to do for sort of the traditional finance world. I'm not 100% sure. I think at one point, even on their website, I think they described themselves as the stripe of stable coins. But listen, what Bridge really does is they've really optimized this API experience to access all of the underlying power of stable coins. And they've done this with these virtual accounts, which power things like what you were describing in terms of being able to move in and out of traditional finance rails into stable coins for organizations. They've really created wonderful orchestration systems for being able to command movement of these stable coins. They've optimized a pretty exciting set of on and off ramps that you and I were talking about a little bit, but they've made them all abstracted away. So if you're trying to get out into a local network, maybe you're using like, you know, one of these crypto exchanges. partners in the back end, but you don't have to know that. You're just running a command to pull the

money out into a local account. And I think they're just iterating really successfully in that space and executing with some of the most interesting organizations in the world. I love the SpaceX example. I think it's just like it's one of these unique examples of treasury management that it would just would look like a phone book of processes and money movement and decision making to do in the traditional finance world. But with Bridge, it's just an API call. And so I think Bridge has really just been on that forefront. And for Stripe, being able to leverage an internal infrastructure partner is just step function impact for the organization. I think, you know, if you look historically, we mostly used external partners for stable coin access, liquidity management, orchestration. And so it was

very natural, I think, to find, you know, who believe is the best in the industry to bring in to our organization. And certainly for my team, who's operating, you know, primarily on the product build side, you know, it just was like hitting, hitting the easy button across the ability to go and make these products happen now with an in-house partner. And so I think, I think, most natural and obvious acquisition out there for us. And obviously very exciting, I think, for the crypto world to see stripe leaning in that deeply, but also just the validation, I think, of that space in general. Privy, again, I can't go super deep into Privy. I think Privy is doing some really amazing things with just general decentralized wallet access and non-custodial

wallets. And there's a lot of interesting opportunity there. But I'll leave it at that. I think there's a lot of future news to come out on that front. Yeah. I have rather philosophical question to kind of end on, kind of when the Web 3 movement kind of started, it was very much in the vein that kind of like these will be kind of better, it will be peer-to-peer kind of money. It will make kind of big financial players redundant, kind of like people will kind of be able to kind of do things on their own by themselves.

and now kind of to some degree, to a large degree, it's kind of morphed into kind of just giving more efficient and resilient tools to the man. So kind of like large financial institutions kind of now use these rails to kind of reap efficiency gains. How do you see that kind of in the larger, picture kind of like coming somewhat from the other side. Yeah. I don't think I'm coming from the other side, first of all. But I think I think like I've gone back and reread the Bitcoin white paper a couple of

times. I think it's easy to put different lenses on on that statement. Right. But what we're really trying to build is some sort of a peer to peer system of cash transfer, right? That's open and accessible to anyone and does not require an authority. in the middle for it to exist, right? And just a very simple kind of set of capabilities. And I think any system that's developed that permits you to have infinite, you know, optionality, right,

will certainly spawn versions of itself that do have, you know, centralized actors. And those will be adopted, I think, where they're most beneficial to the users. And so like my example a minute ago, I think is a good one. I think while kind of the barter system of like I have cash in my back pocket and I've walked into the town square has great optionality of the types of things I could maybe trade for and the types of engagements, you know, that maybe I wouldn't traditionally have access to. Like I also just want to go to Amazon and like buy, you know, paperclips or or or, you know, a light bulb or something that I need. And in those experiences and in those transactions, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of like just expectation from consumers today about the types of protections and and sort of management of the payment.

And they don't really need to know what's happening under the hood and they don't really need to hold the dollar in their hand. So I just, I don't, I've never felt like these two things are particularly deeply at odds with each other. I think that like one is simply an iteration or a branch of the other. And I guess you could argue that in the traditional space, maybe we've started to lose the first a little bit. Because the history of money is also pretty decently decentralized and open, right? As we all sort of have dollars in our back pocket and we're going and purchasing things from, you know, our neighbors or other people who are selling something and we're making a value transaction. And this really wasn't too much of a middleman and they're except backing, right, the value of the dollar itself. And I think the reason a lot of that has sort of has shifted has been to do with like scale and and like trust and kind of expectations of of additional services that are built on top of it that maybe aren't available.

But I think I think we'll just blockchain and stable coins, they'll push us steps towards the advantages of like peer to peer networks, hopefully without also absorbing. like the downsides. And this is, this is what I was getting out a minute ago, which is like a lot of these kind of consumer trust assurances can likely be built on chain. I was at a conference pretty recently. I think, I think Salon Accelerate. And someone was asking me, you know, what, what other startups ought to exist? You know, what should people be building? And very much, you know, the statement here is with like a disruptive technology like crypto, like all of this stuff gets to be rebuilt. Like, who gets to define what it is to do off and capture? Who gets to define what it is to do a refund? You know, who gets to define what it is to make a real estate transaction? Like, there are

just endless iterations of commercial actions that you might, you know, describe today as primarily centralized, right? Like, buying a house is a great example. And I'm not sure what it's like in Germany, but in the U.S., buying a house, right? This is very, like, centralized and, like, And I think having the capability to do it entirely in a non-centralized way actually probably lands us where most people get somewhere closer to the center, where we lose a lot of the downsides of like an extremely centralized system, but we don't maybe absorb 100% of the risk of an entirely decentralized system. So I think both sides of the barbell are necessary to kind of get to the future world that we want. And I guess that's sort of my answer to that. I don't think Stripe or most actors are really philosophically opposed to either side. I think what we're looking for is, you know, what are the best capabilities at this technology

and how do we expose it to the people who are trying to run their businesses and make their purchases every day? Famous last words. Thank you so much, John, for coming on. It's been a pleasure. For sure. Thanks for having me.