On The Brink with Castle Island - Anthony Yim (Artemis) on Stablecoin Payments from the Ground Up (EP.629)

Episode Date: May 29, 2025

We sit down with Anthony Yim, Artemis cofounder, to talk about the latest report from Artemis, CIV, and Dragonfly, providing brand new estimates of stablecoin payments volume. In this episode: Why we decided to work on the new report How we obtained the estimates Why we decided to put together a bottom-up estimate Stablecoin b2b volumes compared to traditional b2b How do you measure stablecoin transactions? Download the report at stablecoin.fyi

On the brink, this is Nick Carter. I'm with Anthony Yim, the co-founder of Artemis. Thanks for coming. Thanks for having me. So this is a very auspicious day. This is our second report we've done together. That's pretty cool, man. What are the great working relationship we have?

Thank you. Yeah. No, when I thought about the report, the first person I came to was you guys. I really enjoyed working with you guys last time. and wanted to outdo our last report and come up with something even cooler. Yeah, I think this one blows last year as one out of the water. I mean, I think it was very interesting to do an actual survey of Stibbocoon users, but this is the holy grail. This is what people always ask me about.

Is it the same for you? Yeah, I do think that two reports are also pretty complimentary. One's like qualitative and quantitative, so I don't want to, I also don't want to like poo-poo our work. from last year. It's just, I think they go hand in hand and we just have a much clearer picture of what's going on. And because just there's just so much BS like metrics and stories and sensationalist articles out there that come up. And I was just tired of it. Yeah. And, you know, people, skeptics will ask me all the time. Hey, well, like, okay, we see that there's 10 trillion or whatever dollars of stable coin volume a year. But like, like, you know, people, skeptics will ask me all the time. Hey, well, like, okay, we see that there's 10 trillion

or whatever dollars of stable coin volume a year, but like how much of that's real? Like how much is real payments? So I guess that's the premise of this report. So tell us about how we actually went about getting the answer, not the answer, but an answer. Yeah. Well, you know, I think I took a page from the Nick Carter book of you can just do things. And so, you know, for the last really year, you know, as a data company, we've been getting asked questions by everyone in crypto and fintech of like hey how much

steampcoin payments volume is there really how you know who's using it where are they and so at some point I just got tired of having no answer for for people and I was like wait I can just go do things and I just called up as many uh statement coin players in the space and be like look you know we're trying to we're trying to like lift up the space together I think crypto has this bad rep where it's just used for speculation. And we have all this anecdotal evidence that's not. It's also used by real people for real use cases.

But we don't have the data to back it. And so I, yeah, I think with you, you know, I think I remember calling you up a couple months ago and be like, hey, when I tried and do this report together and you were super enthusiastic. And so I think after that I just started calling up all the major players like BVNK and Conduit and getting them on this, getting them the share the data with us. Yeah, and I want to also shout out Dragonfly and Rob Hedick here because Dragonfly are co-authors and partners on the report. But I mean, I think it's absolutely remarkable.

We were able to get 20 different stable coin payment firms, whatever you want to call them, plus an additional 11 firms with estimates from your team's wizardry based on on-chain data mainly. for a total of 31 firms to participate. I mean, we know there's more, but we still bid off a huge share of the market. What's your guess of sort of like roughly how much completeness we have in this estimate? My figured one answer is probably like 75%, 80%.

What do you think? I mean, between Binance, BVNK, Conduit, Reap, those are probably the biggest ones, Bitso, Felix, Yellow Card. I mean, if you read the report, I think our exit estimate for stable coin payment run rate is $73 billion as of February of this year, which is definitely more now, by the way, but that was just our cutoff for the data. I guess the question is, like, how do you think about that number? So let's say maybe close to $100 by now, $100 billion a year of stable coin payments, like real payments where we know who's sending, who's receiving. We know what kind of activity it is.

How do you compare that against the trillions of Stapeltenance we see on chain? Well, first off, I think we're very, very early. And it's really exciting to be in Stablecoins because I did some rough maths. I think for the B2B volume alone, it's been growing something like 400% year every year. And I was reading actually Visa's like earnings report from last quarter. and they had to slide on the TAM for B2B payments. And I think they clocked it at $145 trillion. And so we're still less than 1% there with stable coins.

And so I think we're exactly around like 0.03% or something. So three bit. Yeah. So our estimate for B2B is $3 billion monthly as of February, which is up from basically zero in 2023. Yeah, exactly. So $145 trillion, 100 billion. Yeah.

So it's really, okay, it's less than one BIP. Less than one basis point of market penetration. Yeah, I think so. That's funny. I was actually on a pitch call right before this explaining why I think Stablecoin investments are interesting. And I was like, the TAM is all the money and all of the payments. And we have not penetrated.

And even if you see these big chunky series A for Stablecoin companies, we're apparently at one BIP of penetration. Yeah. Sorry, my quick math is wrong. It's six, six bibs. So, uh, okay, six pips. Um, but yeah, but still, I mean, it's like minus school, right? I can't even do the math in my head.

It's just I had to use a, I had to pull up my calculator and on my computer. So, so is it, does this like discredit our estimate in some sense that we're only getting to around, uh, six billion, six seven billion of monthly volume for stable coin payments? I mean, I guess it were literally still early. Yeah, I mean, I don't think so. I mean, and I know you, you know, we talked about this before, too. I personally wanted a very conservative bottoms up, like analysis. I think just because of, I think it's just there's too many like top line numbers floating around that is not substantiated and there's like no nuance.

We know that state point supplies are right at a 240 something, you know, um, billion dollars in supply. but like that top line number is not you know it's like it's kind of meanless by itself but by having like a bottoms up number we know the minimum and it's it's growing a ton and I think that that is a far more useful metric than some like random top line number yeah I totally agree and I think I actually think maybe we can start to move away from those top down estimates a little bit because there's been so much concernation over them between the Allie and Visa estimate the coin metrics estimate the artemus estimate those are just heuristics and you're taking like literally hundreds of trillions and you're trying to scrub out some types of transactions and

determine what's a valid payment what's an in like some of its Mavis some of its exchange settlement I mean it's interesting because a stable coin transaction for the purposes of trading or investment is not a nonic that's still an economic transaction yeah but that's not a payment per se so that's just to be so clear with this study we're looking at payments in different modalities yeah no that's that's good point i think it's also in you know and i think citadel's like training activity is not fake activity the citadel's a real company backed by very real investors and so uh so i think that's a whole separate i think podcast about about uh trading activity but yeah you're totally right i know people are going to complain so i want to anticipate this we're sharing aggregates why are we doing

that as opposed to going on a firm-by-firm basis? Yeah. I mean, first of all, I think this is a very novel study of highly sensitive data from each of these firms. And, you know, frankly, these firms, the state point space is very hot right now. It's, you know, there's a lot of competition. And the firms just wouldn't be comfortable sharing their individual numbers publicly. And so the only way we can get any sense of like real bottoms up number is that I,

if I anonymize an aggregate numbers into like a yeah like an aggregate figure um but you know we'll see I think like my my goal is honestly to just like show the world that like stable coin payments are real and like to the extent that these partners are comfortable sharing whatever they want to share like I'm happy to accommodate yeah and I think it's remarkable that we got the likes of Binance and BV&K and Reap and Conduant to share data. I mean, people don't realize how big Binance pay is on its own. I mean, it's just an absolute behemoth. Oh, yeah.

So I credit honestly to your team for persuading these PSPs to contribute their data. Oh, thank you. Thank you. So another thing I want to add some color to is, you know, we go through and on a country-by-country basis, look at blockchain share and specific stablecoin share, generally speaking across the study, I think it's fair to say tether is about 90% of all the payments by volume. Is that right?

Yeah. But there is a lot of variance on a per country basis, and partly that's because some countries just didn't have as many data providers active, and so, of course, you're going to see variance due to smaller sample sizes. Is that the right characterization? Yep, that's right.

I think there definitely is some regional differences. And it's a juncture, for example, that, like, USDC has a lot more penetration in India, for example. I actually don't even though. I try to do some background homework on why that's the case, but I couldn't come to any specific reason. I'm curious if you had a hypothesis. No, that's a good question.

I don't know the answer. There are some situations where the regional breakdown in blockchains employed does have an explanation like in japan xrp is actually used a fair amount that's because i think the japanese have an affinity for ripple as far as i know you know why that's the case i should have no i don't have a context on this i don't know either i don't know why i just know that it's a thing so um and then in terms of the blockchains we basically got similar results from our study last year, which was not identical, though, because Tron was the number one by volumes, whereas in our study last year, Ethereum was the number one by the survey. So I think it was

Tron, Ethereum, finance, smart chain, Polygon. Is that right? Am I getting that order right? Yeah, I think those are the top. I remember the top three was Ethereum, finance, and Polygon, I think. I was looking at this morning. So on the sub-sectors, so we have B-to-B, that's the biggest one. P-to-P is the most mature. It's actually flat. That's the only sector that's not growing. Then you have card-link payments and then pre-funding.

Do you want to kind of dig into a couple of those sectors and explain what they mean? Yeah. Yeah. So for B-to-B, that's the most obvious one. So that's basically business-to-bus payments. that are likely, say, a retailer that is paying its supplier, likely across-border, let's say you're like an Amazon store or like a retailer in Latin America and you're buying goods from China to resell.

That's an example of B2B. And then card would be statement-coint-backed. cards. And so these are likely these are prepaid and debit cards that you can swipe at any sort of visa POS system and basically pay the merchant win in stable coins. And B2C actually technically should probably be C to B because these are a lot of like checkout volumes as well as B2C so these are like payout volumes. And so if you're a business that's paying out for payroll or Or the other way around, you're a consumer purchasing something from a business and you're checking out with, say, like, Binance Pay. That's volume that's included in this like B2C bucket. Yeah.

And then I guess P to P is what we're calling like remittance or just, you know, Venmo style transfers type thing. Yes. I think the one call out is that the P2P volumes is just for the sampled firms and does not include any of like sort of data that. that's outside of the companies we surveyed. Obviously, if you just look at on-chain data, the P-to-P volume estimates are much, much larger, right? Because any wallet paying any wallet is, in some sense, like, probably P-to-P. Yeah, that's a very important point.

Like, our estimate is probably radically conservative on the P-to-P front. Yeah. Because, of course, you can just pay someone with a stable coin. You don't have to tell anyone about it. Yep. Our methodology here is we're going through the intermediaries. So it'd only be if you made a P2P payment through one of these firms, through a Felix Pago, for instance, that it would be counted in the survey.

So again, the data is very conservative, but we wanted to be, we wanted to characterize the transactions where we know who's on the sending and receiving side, where we know there's like a real payment being made, basically. Yep. Yeah. So in addition to the partners, Hopefully they come back. I personally want to run this every quarter.

I'd love to bolster this and keep doing it, keep growing it, add new data partners because it's probably another couple dozen. There's also a bunch of estimates. So we had 11 other additional estimates which we made, including maybe controversially bridge. So we, I mean, that's a very salient one. I mean, how can you not include bridge?

So tell us a little bit about how we made those. estimates. Yeah, I mean, for Bridge, I mean, luckily they, during the Stripe Chef sessions, that was hosted a couple of weeks ago, Stripe shared a like Stripe versus Bridge growth chart, I think. And so I think with that chart plus some sort of VC estimates on trigulating, like, you know, what folks have seen their volumes are against like the time, the timeline. We did a super rough estimate of likely volumes given that we sort of know what the shape of the graph looks like and backed into the like the bridge volume data. Yeah.

And the remainder of it was mainly official dashboards maintained by some of these projects that their transactions hit the blockchain. so we were able to get those numbers pretty easily. Yeah. So forgive me if I'm wrong. This is basically the first study of its sort that's ever been done. Yeah, I think so. I think actually from talking to some of the data partners,

many of them have tried to do something similar. But I think it's hard if you're like, right? It's like if you're not a neutral party, it's hard to pass your competitors to give you their volume data. And so I think we saw this, unique opportunity as like this neutral data provider to kind of like be the Switzerland and not the space and help kind of gather this sensitive data, put it together, anonymize it so that it's confidential, but we can still think paint a really accurate and positive story

about stable coins, which again, it's not, it's, it's, there's a lot of fluff out there, but like first time that we have some real, real data that, you know, of transactions that are KYB getting KYC. I think that's just like unheard of. Yeah. And I mean, I again, I'm kind of in awe of the fact that, you know, the three of us, Castle Island, Dragonfly, and Artemis are considered neutral. But, you know, I'm glad people are trusting us with it. So you guys are becoming a bit of a clearinghouse for stable coin data. I mean, that is a core part of of what Artemis does, right? Yeah. That's, you know, we very much believe in. in an open like finance network and you know i was a early engineer at venmo i first hand know how awful it is to work with legacy payment systems that are very locale specific and so i mean stable coins just to me is a no-brainer for like this borderless finance you know that's a term i think one of the callson brothers uh used during such stripe sessions um and i think with this idea of borderless finance there also can be this like sort of borderless mission control payment

payments data kind of provider and so that's that's kind of where we want to we want to be we want to be this like sort of mission control for the entire space so we have this fancy new domain that we bought yeah what is it stablecoin.fyi is that it yes that's right stablecoin FYI so that is where this data is going to live by the way so you actually don't have to read a PDF anymore it's on there and you also have your market map the now famous Artemis Market Map alongside, I mean, you guys also just have general like stablecoin data on the website too. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. That was, I lost a lot of hair trying to get one of these like fancy URLs. Had to had to go through some bidding wars and all this stuff that I, I

and so I ended up buying it from this nice gentleman in London who who was squatting on this, on this, on this domain for a while. And so I just like LinkedIn messaged him and asked him if he would sell to me and we had a bunch of negotiations and got the deal done just in time well done yeah i mean good for him i guess you know a little prescient and then uh the cover image uh what what's on the cover of this study tell tell us about that i think you should do the honors you're the you're the you're all the tubes all right so in case you're not familiar and if you're born you know anytime after 1980 you've probably never seen one of these. Have you ever used one of these pneumatic tubes? No, but fun story is that I, so I also

used to work at Google back in like 2010 and their New York office is in the former like New York Postal off like, yeah, like post services headquarters. And so if you're in the Google office here in New York, they just have these like pneumatic tubes everywhere or you can like shove in a letter and it just like flies with another floor. So that's that. still work? I don't think so. Well, so anyway, this used to be a thing in offices before email or Slack, I guess, in hospitals and banks.

And actually some like drive-throughs. Like if you do drive-through banking, which I've never done, you can sometimes use it. It's a pneumatic tube. So as a canister goes in a pneumatic tube, I don't know how the technology works to route the tube towards destination. But anyway, that's our analogy. We're thinking of stablecoins, the series of tubes. that span the globes.

The point is that people think stable coins are like people creating a new form of money. I think that's wrong. I think it's just like cash, just like think of cash and you can send it anywhere on the planet instantaneously. Like that's how we should think about stable coins. We're not really engaging in money creation, you know. For every unit of a stable coin that you're creating every liability, there's a corresponding asset, which is like a treasury held in reserve.

So that's why we did the tube analogy. to point out we're just moving bundles of cash in a digital form. And the Stamblecoins are big tube. Don't work. So that is that's the point. Yeah. And I think I also like it because I always see, just like broading this a bit,

like I also see crypto as infrastructure for any asset, right? And so like it's kind of like the equivalent of these tubes where like you can tokenize anything. It could be cash. It could be, you know, it could be equity at some point maybe. I think Cracken is trying to do something like that. I know that I think that was something that you guys mentioned in your podcast like a week ago.

And that like in many cases it doesn't make sense to reinvent what cash is. But crypto I think is very great for this like borderless finance. In your words, Starling for finance use case. Yeah, I actually like that metaphor a lot better than the room temperature superconductor for finance, which is what the Stripe guys call stable coins. Because Starlink actually works and exists, and room-time superconductors don't. They're theoretical. Yeah, that's true.

I got confused the first time, rather, because I'd heard that because I'm like, wait, but I thought, you know, they debunked this whole, like, room-temperature superconductor thing. So is it saying that crypto's, like, fake? I think. Yeah, those end up not being real. Whereas Starlink for finance, like, the whole point is Starlink brings billions of people online for the first time that we're not online. Stablecoins bring those online people into the economy. in a way they weren't able to participate before they didn't have access to dollar banking they couldn't

receive payroll directly from some offshore firm they had to do expensive remittances or expensive cross-b payments on the b-to-b side so it puts the whole global population on an equal stead for the first time people don't understand i think how exclusionary and how like how expensive it gets if you're not near to one of the main like nodes on the dollar network. So the further away you are from London or from Hong Kong or from New York, the more expensive is to do business. And you can't go directly from Mexico to the Philippines. You have to go through the node.

So stable coins radically change that. Now in terms of your wish lists, like we've done two, I think, pretty groundbreaking studies, not to pat ourselves on the back too much, but we've created information that we wanted that didn't exist. right so we went and found it what is on your what's next what's next for artemus what do you want to know about stable coins you know i think we talked about this a little earlier where our estimate for coverage here is maybe this 75% kind of like range and you know i would love to get more folks on board um you know notably missing obviously it's like coin base from this um from this from the

study and so you know and and a couple of the larger exchanges in in asia too i think like okay X by bit and folks. And so my dream is to have as much like perfect coverage as possible. And then for the more like if possible just like drill down into the use cases more kind of granularly because again it's like we hear this across the board

from whether it's you know, congressmen, you know, when I was talking to like various folks in Congress like they are also asking like, hey, what are we what are stable coins being used for? And like we're not able to really answer that question. beyond this high level. And I think that would go a long way, for example, to just keep pushing this genius bill through.

And so, again, just setting more data, more granularity, more specificity. And so if you're a state point player, orchestrator, PSP, and you're listening to the podcast, you know, let us let Nick or me know if you want to be joining in our next state-bony report. Yeah, totally. Well, thanks for, you know, bring this study to us and working with us. I think we're very, very happy with the result.

And congrats for your success in the stable coin realm is the kind of data provider of choice there. So yeah, thanks for joining us today. Thanks, Nick. Yeah, thanks for having me and being down to collaborate on this report. I think it's, yeah, it's been the joy working with you and the team and Wyatt and Henry.

And yeah, we'll love to do this again. Yeah, next quarter, we'll run it back.