On The Brink with Castle Island - Bernardo Bilotta (Stables Money) on Stablecoin Fintech in APAC (EP.640)

Episode Date: June 30, 2025

Wyatt sits down with Bernando Bilotta, founder of Stables.money. In this episode:  Stablecoin usage in APAC, for saving, spending, and beyond Retail adoption that bleeds into institutional adoption The forward-looking path for stablecoin finance

Today, I sat down with Bernardo Bilota, founder of Stables' money. Stables allows users globally to save and spend money in Stablecoins with a focus on Asia-Pacific regions. Bernardo started Stables in early 2021, back when the total supply of stable coins was only about $50 billion, a mere 20% of today's $250 billion total supply. He and the team built and launched the application with the goal of offering a dollar savings account to those who may be seeking alternatives to savings exclusively in their local currency, a theme we've discussed often on this podcast. And this at a time when StableCone

adoption was in its relative infancy and future use cases were somewhat unclear. Stables has found an audience and more. In the process of growing a retail user base, users also started to ask Stables if they could help them with their business needs. Today, Stables continues to grow and services, retail users, and businesses alike when it comes to saving and spending in stable coins with an everlasting focus on the Asia-Pacific region and meaningful penetration in those markets to date. I think quite highly of Bernardo in the business that he and the team have built, but beyond that, I was keen to have him join us as I believe that while we hear a lot about stable coin adoption across the globe, it is insightful to hear these direct accounts from relevant

industry leaders, particularly when it comes to regional activity that we may not see up close as often, if at all. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Bernardo. Matt Walsh and Nick Carter are partners at Castle Island Ventures. All of these expressed by them or the guests on this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Castle Island Ventures. Guest and hosts may maintain positions in the assets discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone on this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only is an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only.

Brought down by Bad Mortgage Investments, Lehman, which has as 25,000 employees will be liquidated. The federal government loans American International Group, AIG, $85 billion. This is a different kind of market, and the Fed is asleep. The federal government is stepping it to stabilize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England has pumped 75 billion pounds more into Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easing.

You print a couple trillion dollars, and all of a sudden, people start to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bernie, thanks for coming on. Who uses Stables? Who does it serve today? Who's your audience? Stables really serves, I say, predominantly two different type of user demographic. Firstly, individuals.

You can think of them as cryptonative. So, like, people that already have stable coins, and understand the benefit of all these stable coins and using them on chain. And the one are kind of utilizing them to the real world. And cryptognosics are, you know, people that they have come about stable coins out of necessity rather than, you know, by being constantly, chronically online. And also we service in businesses. So on the business,

vertical, it's almost something that we stumble on by mistake. You know, we originally started as a consumer product. And I think it's like actually bullish. And when you see people kind of means using your product in a way that you, you were like, hey, I don't fully understand what's going on there. So you go and talk to these people and it turns out there were, you know, businesses, Yeah, it's unexpected product market fit. Right. People or individuals and businesses they go through unnecessary pain

to go and solve a problem. We go and talk to these folks and they're like, hey, we actually have business and we're utilizing the platform for these use cases. And what it really, I'll say, transpires there. It's almost like there is a platform arbitration rather than regulatory and compliance arbitration, which basically means that these people realize

the stable coins are way better to go and run their business operation on transaction. And they just need a platform that allows them to go from stable coin into local currency in one's floor rather than go and stitch it up altogether across different five, six different providers. Those are I'll say like eye level at the two demographics. Going forward, one that I'm quite excited about is the developer demographic. We started with individual, then started servicing businesses. The other thing that we kind of stumble across,

calling it by mistake again, it's people that want to have access to our rails in one single easy integration. And these people are either developer, businesses, or almost like foundation that they really want access to stable coins in a way that fits their use cases and purposes. Where are these consumers and businesses?

Where are they in the world and what do they do, generally? Why would build stable to be like a very good, global product. Inherently, we have these believe stable coins are a global product, and so you need to be able to service the global audience through the common discover you by mistake. However, our vertical and kind of various expertise is really around Asia and Mina. That's where we see the majority of our flaws originating from and going into and as well, like, you know, majority of signups. And I would say strategically also those jurisdictions, at least to me, are way more interesting than, you know, other jurisdictions. They're like kind of far away and detached from us, you know, we all base across Australia and the broader Asia region. I think it's like there's a big opportunity there for stable coin to kind of go and create some connectivity tissue in an otherwise very fragmented market. There's a lot of different currency, a lot of different use case.

and almost country in quite a large geographical area. However, there's a lot of trade remittances and money movement across all of these geographies. And what you notice is like there's a lot of usually like intermediary banking to go from, you know, one place to another. Even though somewhat closely located, then it takes a lot of time and effort to get money from point eight point B. We really believe that like, you know, almost while stable coin have really took either escape velocity in Africa, Latta and Khalilic in the more developer, there is a big use case in going to serve like fragment and enlarge markets such as Asia. A relatively spread out user base, it sounds like, in certain pockets of Asia, how are users

finding you? And what's the scope of how many people you have on the platform and how much money moves today? That is actually like one of the question that I always tried to answer myself because we never done any marketing or incentives for the matter. Today, like it's just through organic discovery and kind of word of mouth. I think it does help when you do have a beautiful product to get discovered that way. People are way more prone to go and say, hey, you should go and try that product is sick.

For instance, I think the other day, somebody from the, I think the Austin Federa from Kex Solana Foundation was talking about, like somebody needs to go and build a product that allows people to go and issue local beans and they're like a gazillion people are just tagging us. It's not like we were there actively. And so I think that's like, it's almost like, you know,

when you have a good product that actually go and solve a pain point for a specific demographic, then like that's how you get this, call it like growth loop of people, just like go and say, if you go and try this product, this sick and works. In terms of how much money we're moving, it's been about, say, 15 months that we are in market, showing numbers. Today we process about $300 million in TPD through Rails. That's annualized?

That is over 50 months. But now we averaging, I'll say, monthly about 12 to 25 mil. I'm expecting to annex that over the next three to six months as we, you know, building more specific features like some of our customers that want to come on board and, you know, move larger volume, are requesting us. And so it's like really, I think like the philosophy building products, at least for us, we do believe we're a product-led growth company,

is we build something that we believe we're solving a problem. Like we, of course, talk to customer and talk to people and understand what sort of problem he was solving. And then by doing that, you know, as I mentioned incidentally, we're solving other problems for other people in demographics. Now we're just talking to this new demographic that we're going to find into a better understanding. A, what do we need to do in order for you to go and move all your volume over to us?

I think like once you go and crack that, that's where things is going to get very, very interesting because the volume are considerably higher. I like how you describe it as growth loops because you have this effect that we've seen in stable coins at least where you have stakeholders in the Tether network. They want to grow Tether, which in turn helps stables grow. You have people who are growing Binance, which in turn might lead users to then find out about stable. So you have these parallel growth narratives. I wanted to ask on a couple of the points you mentioned, what's a typical transaction size and what is a typical transaction insofar as are people sending money to each other in Venmo style? Are they paying for

things? Or what is a typical transaction behaviorally as well? So with Stables, most of these three types of transaction that we can do it, at least the way that we talk about it is you can top up your account. That could be a stable coin transaction or it could be like a purchase of you, to depositing local currency, either through virtual bank accounts or a bank card to purchase stable coins. It could be a cent transaction. So it's almost like going from the platform out,

and this could be eating stable coins or local currencies. And then it could be a spending transaction. So we had stable coin card that connects to a stable coin balance. So on the top-up or purchase transaction average or the sites that we're seeing at the moment, it's about 2.0K. So relatively large. Yeah, it's quite large. It gets skewed up because there'd be people to do like big transaction,

that people do very small transactions. So it kind of end up there in the middle. On the send, it's about kind of similar. I'll say like a little higher, like 3.4K. And that's usually what you see is like most of the time it's people sending into local currencies. And then on the cab size, we're seeing about $70 per transaction average or the size. What's interesting there is we do see increasingly the amount of spending being complete on everyday purchases. So that, at least to me, is an indication of people utilizing stables more and more for their everyday and becoming their everyday digital US dollar account,

which I think is like it could unlock a bunch of very interesting stuff down the road. But it's all like, you know, very encouraging, especially on the frequency of, of how often this transaction, like all of this customer that transact, usually they are repeat transactor. And the interesting insights is that once you manage to give somebody a card, they becoming a much better user than a user that doesn't have a card. I remember seeing that also back in the fintech days, once you manage to get a person to utilize their phone and give them a card,

their LTV grows exponentially, exactly. They can use it daily at that point. They don't need to rely on joint financial products. Right. How do total deposits compare to volume? Do people keep a lot of money on the platform as well that they're not immediately using for payments? Not really, because at the moment, the platform is really optimized for velocity of money

rather than like kind of money sync. And it's also like no reason for them to hold the balance with us other than spend it or on ramping and off ramp it. just because at the moment there's no yield component or any sort of incentives for you to hold the balance there, which is a great opportunity there to go and do something about it. I think it's like you can go and start gamifying it even further. Like, wouldn't it be cool if you have a magic balance that goes up in real time that you can spend, buy stuff from or remit from, it's like that big kind of UX unlock that I think only programmable money really allows you to go and do.

and it actually happens rather than a number in a database kind of thinking out. So I think there's like a lot of stuff there. Like it's yet to either play out and, you know, big opportunity on optimizing them almost like for deposit size versus velocity of money. It's interesting that especially given the parts of the world

that you guys serve, that this more of a spending friendly product already has that level of traction because I would imagine if anything, the main demand would be to, store money and maybe earn yield in dollars as opposed to for the spend aspect? If I was to listen to my customer, I would already have yield out. It's one of those like more requested feature. We did explore it for a while. That's how we actually originally started.

But at the time, I think like now there's a lot more regulatory clarity there. Even like until more recently, it was seen as a very risky and kind of gray area to go and offer yield on customers deposit, like you see other people that just say earned reward, like this other structure that you could go and do it without passing through yield. But yeah, definitely that's one of the things that customer wants. They want to have the ability to just store stable coins, C number goes up, spent from that balance without having to go to different platform. That being said, I think it's like this is just an indication almost like how stable

coins are in fact a superior form of money for payments more broadly. these people come to us because they either go, the financial system kind of failed them. They don't serve because they consider it to be either high-risk clients or it's hard for them to go and stitch all these different payment methods together. While I do want to do yield, I also think payment itself is like big enough of a vertical to just go and be the whole business on it. It's telling also the transaction size, like you mentioned,

that these are a couple thousand dollar transaction. right now. It's clear that for meaningful movements of money, people are preferring this system. If someone makes a card payment using stables, how does it settle? Presumably, that'll be to merchants in a variety of countries, right? Yeah, so the way that it works is we do this process called adjusting time funding. So effectively, the difference is from at least the traditional concept of having a card balance, back in the day, you have a card, you got to move money onto the card. The card becomes a value store card, and then you got to spend all the money on the card.

And usually it wasn't possible to go and take them out. So the only way was like to spend it all. It's like Starbucks. Right. Yeah, yeah. And while it's functional, it's not ideal. Also because I think like back in the days, there were a lot of these crypto cards that they were like using this model and then they like disappear overnight.

It happened to me once. Yours went away? No, they don't run away. Well, pretty much because they're basically doing things they're not supposed to. Back in the day, Cadizure weren't as friendly towards crypto more broadly. And so these people are actually saying we're doing something completely different. And then once they get caught by the scheme, they get cut off.

But what happened is like you have the money on the card. The money is gone. And so it's like ideally the way that these things work is really like do things properly so that that doesn't happen to your customer, number one. Number two is like just in time funding cards. you don't actually need to store user balances on a card. You can just use Delegator of model to basically go and say, when you go to a store and you tap at a post,

what's happening is there's a thing that goes from the post to our backend to check, hey, do you have enough money for these transaction size? If you do, return to Android, return, clear the transaction, and then at the end of the day, when the merchant goes and captured the transaction, we would do all the on-chain settlement. And so you say it's a $5 transaction for a coffee. The merchant at the end of the day goes and capture the transaction,

there's $5 in chain that moves to like a float account, a settlement account. Then from the settlement account, we are ramping, and we do the settlement and, you know, with the merchants directly. And, you know, that happens on a number of currency, of course. People travels and do a bunch of stuff in the day-to-day life with the scheme. Like, we just need to settle with the scheme. Usually that's how it works. So the card issuer, we just send them money in,

into local currency and then they take care of the merchants. Yeah, it seems like an attractive product, especially if you're a digital nomad type remote worker and you just want to have an account denominated in dollars where you can use in any country or a place that you go to. A hundred percent. I mean, I don't know if you ever, I did pleasure. Or try opening up a brokerage account,

like when you would try and get like T bills or, you know, access to dollar. For some people, it's actually not that hard. But then giving certain jurisdiction, is actually quite impossible. It's either like capital control that don't allow you to do it or the amount of documentation that you require just to like even buy one single dollar is staggering. This onboarding form that just coming straight out of the 70. It takes you like six hours to complete it and maybe you get it done in a month's time you're onboarded versus

just streamline it completely in a mobile first experience that you just go, let's get where see you. Let's make sure that we have enough details about who's actually initiating these transactions, we make access to dollar simple and easy and fast. Like, you should be able to go and buy your first dollar, spend your dollar or like, you know, send money in three minutes, type of things. Like, those are the benchmark rather than go and say, yeah, we'll get back to you in six weeks. It's a big unlock when it comes to almost like the zero to one moment. Like what stable coin really unlock is that magic moment of, hold on a second,

And I can go and access dollar in under three minutes versus legacy system. It'll either prevent me completely from accessing this dollar or they're just like putting all these red tape around me being able to access this dollar. And so like, you know, making everything slower and more conversant. We've talked a lot about your offering. Why did you guys choose to call it stables? I think you hear maybe the word dollar or send a lot in names of companies operating in this space. Why did you go after the namesake stables?

It's actually a bit of a funny story. Stables is a rebrand from our originally previous name that we had. It's called T-3-I-K. At the time, at Stable Coins, we're in Dachau in general, and we were like A, because really the way that we see is there is a problem to be solved for a crypto-native. That such as ourselves, they have digital dollar, but it's actually hard to go and use this digital dollar in the real world.

And then there is the next iteration of the product It's like go and get the normies to utilize all these special rails, magic internet money rails. And so stables is really, it's the jargon for stable coins in their industry. But it's also like, I think there's a funny comparison that is also a place where the horses stay. And so like the way they were thinking about it was we're going to have a stables of product. We thought it was funny. Yeah, it's a stable for stables. Right.

But it's a great asset because now stable coins are hot. and we are stable's money. It's our own trademark. Maybe that's valuable on his own, I suppose. That's probably a valuable domain, too, I figure. Right, yeah. And at the time, it wasn't very hot. We got a good deal on it, and let's put it that way.

When people talk about your guys' platform, do they describe it as a neobank or a savings product? Because a stable coin account isn't something that I imagine, like you said, you have this viral effect. I wouldn't think people are describing it that way. I have a mixed feeling at times about the word new bank because you should be calling things for what they are. We're definitely not a bank.

But that is also like the things that people resonate, I'll say, the most. It's like, oh, it's a new bank. I can buy things. I can store things I can spend from it. Familiar with Revolut or the wise, that's how they probably like to categorize it at. But I think it's more about payments. The way that people talk about Sable is more like a payment platform.

Like you can load it up with Sable coins and you can give your stable coins really utility. I think it's probably going to become a quasi-in-your-bank. Once you're able to go and offer like a more of a earn-saving offering, because then you have payments, you have money-sync, you have broad opportunities.

But yeah, I think it's at the moment it's more on the payment angle side of things. On an offer, I think that's how people really, especially in this industry that's how people see it. As much as we believe stable coins are new, I think there's actually way more understood that, especially I think like in the deeper south, way more understood than us in the West,

just because we don't need to use them necessarily, right? And people do understand the stable coins are for payments. And people understand what a stable coin is and what are the benefit of the stable coins. And so once you have a stable coins, you can do one or two things, right? Like you either all day or you own and off rampant. And so I think that's the easiest way to think about it. You go from magic impending money to call it real world money. and do stuff with it.

At the moment, that's how it is in my change, we'll say. How do banks behave towards you guys? Do they want to work with you? Do they not like you? What's their sentiment? Now, it's been for a year that, you know, we've been swimming against the current, I would say. I think this is evolving especially,

you know, now with the progress and, you know, changes in administrations and almost respect it towards what stable coins going to enable. It was really hard. It's still very hard. One of the things are actually very hard in this space, which is basically, I think, the only thing that actually worthwhile doing, by the way, everything else will eventually get commoditized.

If it hasn't been already commoditized, getting the banking rail and working with the bank is one of the two things. If you do things properly, if you have proper compliance framework, K-Y-C-A-M-F, totally like global program, then now banks are way more open. and receptive to go and work with stablecoin provider. Like to give an example, four years ago, we started working one of the largest payment processor in Southeast Asia. We started as a pilot in only one country in the Philippines.

And it took us for a year to get to the point that now they want to go and open up all of the rail to us, which is going to be highly significant. It takes time and it takes a lot of work to get where you at because they need to get comfortable with you, They need to see that, like, you have the right processes and framework in place. They need to see that, like, you last the test of time. They actually run a real business.

They're handling compliance and, you know, like, all of those processes appropriately. And then you have the right people to go and operate the licenses. And usually they just want to work with licensed businesses, which, you know, we are in a number of jurisdictions. And so that kind of gives you, I think, now a structural advantage versus just like, you know, go and utilize somebody else's infrastructure. The way I see it's either going to be almost a, you'd have like a million customers and you can distribute to this customer very quickly.

I think user experience plays a big role in that. Or you actually own the licenses and the infrastructure that you can allow and enable other people to go and build experiences on it. I think that's something that has always been very misunderstood about stables is that we do both. While we play at the app layer, we also have all the licenses to go and do all the info. that we want to, right? And so now, because we've been in market for so long,

because we got traction, like now this conversation, they're becoming a whole lot more streamlined, interesting and almost like fruitful, because now these people that come and talk to us because they want to get their food into stable coins, they want to get stable coins flowing to the platform. A company that probably back in the days,

like a couple of years ago, didn't fully understand the space. Now they understand that not playing in the space is going to, there's an opportunity to cost there. And so they just want to go and play with people that the license, they've done it for a while, and, you know, they're the right people on the team to go and serve those types of close. And use cases, of course. It's never easy. They're late to the game, but you start to realize the cost of not participating is higher than a cost they had perceived up participating before.

You touched on compliance. The primary criticism that I hear for an app like this, let's say, is a user onboards funds, they convert to stable coins, they send it to a wallet. How do you know that wallet isn't in North Korea or that transaction is illicit or used for money laundering? What's your response and how do you guys look at compliance and avoiding potential illicit activity on the platform? Maybe the good preamble here is the other non-consensus things that we've done back in the day. And aside from getting excited about stable coins, when nobody was excited about stable coins.

It was like, okay, these table coins are going to become the future of money, and they're actually better for our money the way that we understand it. However, because it's money nonetheless, you need to approach it like a fully already regulated financial product. And at the time, it was kind of on the outskirts of it's still unsure what this is. And we always approach it like a fully regulated financial product. So we got financial licenses to go in structure,

regulated financial product. We literally structure a fully regulated and compliant remittance product powered by stable coins. Some of these product they structure across Australia, Europe, Canada, and soon UAE. And in some of these countries such of Australia, like the regulator pride themselves to be one of the toughest regulator in the world when it comes to financial services. And so for us, the fact that we've been able to construct a product that clears Australia standards basically mean that we can then go and scale this globally because the Commonwealth is like, while not the same everywhere, it's like quite shared across the major economies. So if you can go and cover it there, then you can go and export it as far, which is like,

you know, what happened with us? In terms of how do we approach like risk and compliance and more broadly like customer onboarding. When you come to the platform, you can decide to sign up either as individual as a business. We KWCU or KWBU, and that basically means selfies, proof of address, UBO, director, shareholders, whatever, you name it. So once you have an account, I mean, it just doesn't stops there. Compliance, it's one of those things. So like, you know, as a founder, you go and say it's painful because it costs a lot of money, but then it's really one of the few assets, you know, going back to licensing, that you really have a hand.

And if you do it properly, that's what makes the business valuable. Because you can go and grow very quickly by kind of turning a blind eye to compliance, but then that actually devalue your business a lot, especially as we become more and more and more institutionalized. People value the fact that you're running things properly without compromising there. The things that we do is, you know, we build our own proprietary fraud and risk engine, where we're feeding a bunch of data that we have on our customers to making sure of we have identified certain risky patterns that we know they usually led to fraud.

And so that would kind of flag certain activities. We're also using like, you know, transaction monitoring tool. We also using KYT tools to the point that like, you know, we know that you don't send money to a North Korean wallet. These things, by the way, it's a never-ending battle. Every time that we usually launch a new product, the way that it works is like, You have all this control, you launch a new product, and then what happened is you realized there was an area that you were exposed.

Somebody comes and kind of exploited, and then you go and say, cool, now I got the data to go and make my system stronger. Over time, that's how you build battle tested systems, because, you know, similar in fintech is the same. Fraudsters very smart. Getting better. They're always changing the system. They always adapt into the new meta and the new tooling.

And so you always need to be up to scratch with that. Otherwise, they're always going to find a way to go and exploit loopholes, platforms, and whatever. Right now, the way that we see working is, you know, like KWC, transaction monitoring, KYT, and then like in our own proprietary, fraud and risk engine where all the data effectively get fed into. And then like there's like almost a decisioning engine there. Based on all of these data points, then we're able to go and make decision in real time. This is a piece of the puzzle that people talk about publicly a lot. But for you guys internally, what are the risks or the single risk that you keep in mind

mostly as being paramount to the business and that you do most of your work to try and mitigate or avoid? So, first of all, it would be we need to make sure that we know what our customers are. Our biggest risk single-handedly is KML and KOC. And again, like, while it adds to your business value, if you do properly, it's highly the and if you don't do it properly, right? Like, if you let bad actor through your platform, then that's how the business goes to zero. You get fine.

You literally, you go and destroy all the things that you built from the dogs. So, like, I think for us, that is the main risk and concerns. It's like making sure that we are abiding to AML and KOC. Roads and laws. We have a full-time chief risk officer and general counsel on the team that usually you don't get to see, like, in many early days, startups. But that's because we understand, like, you know, we dealing with people's money. And so it becomes paramount to make sure that you don't screw it up there.

The other thing is security, more broadly. We want to make sure that we have all the right control for to prevent account and to prevent loss of funds and whatnot. So, like, you know, we have implemented to a phase, the device that the intelligence, there is, you know, biometrics. There's a bunch of smarts that when you're using the product, you might not necessarily appreciate that it takes a long time to go and build.

But those are the things that are actually important when you go and build consumer purchasing products because if your customer come and use the app and somehow somebody is able to come and enter into the account and drain your funds, then it's never good. It's almost like those two things, at least they keep me up at night,

making sure that the money is where it's supposed to be and making sure that nobody that is not supposed to go and touch the money, touches it. I think good pieces to keep in mind for anyone building a product in this general areas. I'm sure we'll see many of them. Yeah, don't screw that out.

Bernie, thank you for joining. I really enjoyed the conversation, and I'm sure we'll chat again soon. It was like a plan. It was a pleasure being here. Go stables. Yeah, thanks, Ben. See you later. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island.

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