On The Brink with Castle Island - Charles Hamel (Opera MiniPay) on Globalizing Dollar Access (EP.643)

Episode Date: July 9, 2025

Charles Hamel, Product Director at Opera's MiniPay, joins the show. In this episode:  Stablecoin habits in emerging markets Prospects for local stablecoins What's next on the stablecoin horizon

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. Guests and host 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 as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Brought down by bad mortgage investments, Lehman, which has 25,000 employees will be liquidated.

The federal government loans American International Group, AI, IG 85 billion dollars. 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. Bitcoin. I'm Wyatt Kazer Shai, and on today's episode I sat down with Charles Hemel, the creator of opera minipay. Minipay is an app for saving, sending, and spending in U.S. dollars in sub-S.-Saharan Africa, and now expanding more broadly powered by stablecoins. There are over 8 million mini-pay wallets, and that number continues to grow. We now are seeing a proliferation of stable enabled dollar accounts, but minipay was an early entry into the market in 2023 with a now sizable footprint. Having witnessed this expansion of dollar access firsthand, Charles

offers deeply insightful views on how people use stable coins, how. governments and large corporations are responding and what is on the horizon. Charles, thank you for joining us. Excited to chat today. Excited to be here. Would you mind touching on to start with how did you become involved with MiniPay? Very much from inception, actually. MiniPay, first of all, it's important to understand as an Opera product, an Opera product browser company. I've been working at Opera for a number of years and was part of the initial team that built this Web3 wallet back in 2018. It was a very early attempt at this hybrid browser. wallet product. So I was very involved in that left for a few years, but then I was keen to get back

and to create something very different, a wallet that was using a lot of the same tech, but gave a very different experience and really focused around simplicity rather than trying to do it all as it can easily happen in crypto. So it was something of a crypto native wallet to start with, which is different from today's product? Well, it was very much think of it as a built-in metamask product. So instead of having an extension, you had a browser that could do it all, very much for crypto natives. And MiniPay is really trying to be something else, something for a much wider audience, really centered around this payment with Stable Coins use case, but leveraging much of the same tech, actually. The MiniPay product has exists today. Did that evolve because that's where you saw

that there was going to be market appetite for the product, or was it that you had a vision beforehand that that's where crypto was going to go and stable coins had a more wide audience case. So it really started as looking what's in front of us. Uprise by now is a 30-year-old company and really focused since inception around access to information in all kinds of context, pre-smart phones to up until now with both desktop and mobile products. And over the years, we've grown to having a large audience, large user base in many countries, a big amount of users also on the African continent. And we started seeing signs about two years ago, and okay, there's a lot of appetite for dollar products and stable coins versus overall

crypto assets. So we started thinking, okay, we have this large distribution. We have this natural demand for dollar-based products. We have technology to build a wallet to deals with those crypto dollars. So let's see what we can build. And learning from existing systems for mobile money on the continent that are very similar to Venmo, but things like M-Pest, things like Airtel money, really sending value with phone numbers and giving access to money versus giving access to information is where the idea started. And then it was about, okay, how do we build this? What is the core user experience?

Is it a self-custody product? Is it a custodial product? And how do we bridge the gap to local currencies, which is a big part of the challenge? And early on, did you see people discovering stable coins like you mentioned because they were crypto users already? saw it on Binance, or was there more of a self-service aspect where people found that stable coins existed even if they weren't crypto users, or how was that early discovery happening? This crypto audience that was already familiar with stable coins, was present then and it's

present now and is growing, but there's a much bigger pie, if you will, of just access to dollars. In a lot of those countries where MiniPay started, there's natural demand for dollar things. the dollar is very much seen as a feature rather than a bug. So having a product that leverages that inherent demand is always a good place to start. Obviously, now we're also growing outside of Africa. We just recently launched our mobile app as a standalone Minipay app, which delivers the same experience, but for a global audience outside Africa. And on that note, can you touch on how are people using MiniPay you alluded to it a bit,

and where is it being used today? You mentioned Africa as initial nexus. So sub-saharan Africa is a big part of the user base because we started Minipay as a bundle product in the Opera Mini Browser. So Opera Mini is a household name on the continent and bundling Minipay within it made sense because data usage is a big concern, which is also why Opera Mini is popular. Bundling means that people don't have to get another app. They're in the same user experience, visual language environment and it's a trusted place. That was our initial starting point of bundling up from E&E and growing in that sub-Saharan region. Now we're taking that same experience and taking it globally, both on iOS and Android,

and integrating through that with new partners that allow us to bridge with the traditional financial system. And are people keeping large balances for a long time in mini pay? Are they moving money quickly? How are their behaviors? What we see is the velocity is very high because it's a payment-based product. It's not a holding wallet. It's very dollar focused. So we see high velocity on those payments.

And because these payments are basically frictionless and essentially free, and we have all these ways to make your balance useful by being able to pay merchants and withdraw to local currency that a lot of the utility is from that. And I think overall, that's a part of the product that is typically underdeveloped, crypto wallet products is the off-fram part, because typically, Crypto has been about speculation, it's been about number goes up, is the use case, so you let money there. And withdrawal and connecting to the Fiat part on the way out was really much not thought about. So it's something we had to build oftentimes together with new partners to unlock because there hasn't been

really anyone focusing on that so far. I agree. I think the off-bramp piece is actually a gating factor for people not putting more money into systems like this because they have their working expenses and they're going to need to have. instant integration to get money into traditional systems. And I think that has been a place that's lacked. Building a stable coin product where you stay in stables is trivial. Anyone can do that because it's blockchain native and makes a lot of assumptions about what the user knows and what the user has. But building a stable coin product that is self-custody but also connects with the fiat world on both

hands, that's quite hard and it hasn't been done at a large scale before. So the payments that you're seeing people make is it mostly into traditional accounts that vendors will have or into traditional accounts that other people will have or is it mini pay to mini pay wallet or is it mini pay to finance or what most of them look like? So a lot of the activity right now is just first party withdrawal. So you're withdrawing to yourself, right? You're making your balance go from stables into your preferred local currency. But there's a growing trend of third party payments to merchant, to pay bills, to pay for anything, really. And that's where I think the most exciting connectivity part is, is where we connect the stable coin balance to instant payment methods around the world to make this balance useful

everywhere. Which stable coins are you offering to users? So we support $3 stable coins today. We support USDT, Tether, USDC, and CUSD, which is a SELO specific dollar stable coin. Minipay also, I should mention, is a SELO product. We've chosen SELO for a few reasons. I can go into later if you want. But building on cello has allowed us to also build an experience that works well in low

resource environments and is very efficient overall. Has the stable coin landscape evolved as you would have expected when you started building mini pay? And in that vein, would you've expected those to be the stable coins? Or do you think there would be other stable coins that would be at scale now? Well, it certainly changed in the past two years from a regulatory point of view, from awareness and acceptance point of view. The word stablecoin, sometimes I'm a fan of it, sometimes not so much.

I think as an industry, there's probably an exercise there to define exactly that term. Digital dollars is also a good one. But the market has changed from that aspect. Now, I think a big challenge when you build a product that supports multiple stable coins is how do you tell the user, is this a conscious choice? Is this a market-based choice? let's say the local fiat partners use one in particular, then obviously that's the one you'll need to use. So interoperability is something that I hope would have come further.

Between stable coins, between blockchains? Between stable coins and blockchain interoperability is one topic, but I don't think anyone benefits from having 100 different kinds of dollars. Add some letters after USD or before. I think from adoption perspective, it creates challenges if things are not interoperable. So we've done some new stuff in MiniPay to alleviate some of those problems. So you can, for example, merge your USDC, USDT, and CSD balances with just a drag and drop. So you don't really have to think about managing your balance separately. They're all essentially treated like one common balance that you can combine.

That makes sense. What offerings are you getting requested for the platform? Are people content saving in dollars? Do they want interest-bearing accounts or anything of that sort? So what we are hearing is that savings and yield opportunities is more of a nice to have than must have. I think if you look at some of these sub-savoured African countries, the fintech marketing there will shout for 10, 15, 20% interest rates yield with local currency.

And from a marketing perspective, that's very attractive. So if you have a product in the market that says, yeah, we have four or five percent treasury level yield. Just from a billboard point of view, it's not as attractive. Even though in nature it is very different and competitive, the marketing doesn't really resonate. So I think there's a challenge there. But also, we don't want to be in a situation where your balance is locked up. The thing is called MiniPay.

We're working so hard to facilitate paying both MiniPay users and existing systems. Having that balance locked up in a yield product, even with low friction, we go against that. So we're looking at that. We're looking at what are the possible solutions. there. It's something that users are asking, but it's not the main value prop for us. Our value prop is really around that connectivity and that ease of use for this new P2P money technology. Have people readily trusted what MiniP was doing early on in these regions who might not have accessed a similar product in the past? That's an interesting question because we

started Minipay, as I said, within Opera Mini. So people trust Opera Mini for accessing information and now they're being exposed to this new product within the same environment. What we found is that even though you have brand trust, building an app that deals with money requires you to upgrade that trust. And people have different expectations when they deal with an app that deals with money. So even though we started with brand trust, you need to work for it. And for a lot of people, having money in their hand, buying money in their pocket is ultimately the ultimate test to know if is this real. So that's why also having really solid local off ramp to local currency is part of building at trust because if they cannot see it in their existing

system and pay for stuff that they do on a weekly basis, then kind of misses the point. It's either not useful or not trusted. And what do you think happens to local currency in that wake? So I think it's to be seen. I think this technology is very powerful and making it accessible. through such a simple interface is something quite novel. We have to see also what now from the regulatory aspect of dollar stable coins becomes more concrete. What will other countries do? Will that accelerate other jurisdictions to adopt stable coin frameworks and allow local stables to thrive, which is not the case today? We'll see. But at the end of the day, connecting blockchain rails to traditional rails, I think will be a relevant problem for the coming years.

and products like ours will try to fill that gap. Can you speak more on local stable coins and the extent to which that's been a focus of opera? Because I think that's a second in the market people overlook. Yeah, it's overlooked because all the eyes are being drawn to the dollar. Like in the way the dollar is the best mean. The one everyone wants. Yes.

So there's a marketing aspect to it. It's hard to just grab attention for local currency on the blockchain. But I think if you ask most people, they don't like converting currencies. It's not a pleasant experience because oftentimes you have big number, it becomes a small number. You have, let's say,

a hundred shillings becoming $10, let's say. So you always have this impression that you're losing somehow. But if you have a product, I think where local stables are super interesting and valuable from user perspective, if the number is the same, if you can open the app and say,

okay, I want to put 1,000 shillings in this and it's a thousand shilling in the app. Then you feel like, I didn't lose any. anything on the way in. Because I think as crypto people, we've been trained to this is how it works and you lose on the way in and there's fees and all that. But if you can create this one-to-one experience with local stables, I think that's a big motivator for adopting those. Then you can go to dollar stables if you want. There's a mental barrier when the shillings can only be

off-chain and the dollars can only be on-chain as opposed to having them in the same account. Yeah. So I think if everything's on-chain and you can come in one-to-one with your local currency, then it's just psychologically a better experience. Then you can do whatever you want with it. So having this FX on the way in, I think some people will feel very good about it, but a lot of people just would prefer to see the same number. I would think regulators would be promoting local stable coins, but I haven't seen it much yet. Yeah, I haven't seen either. And I think in a lot of ways, the US leads the way there. And if there's concrete developments there in the near future, maybe that's going to accelerate other people to look into that.

How have regulators interact with opera historically and with Opera MiniPay? So MiniPay is just like a browser. It's a pure technology product. So browsers allow you to browse the internet. It supports a few protocols to do that. MiniPay is a way to interact with this new protocols, this new networks, where the information is money. So from a conceptual point of view, these are equivalent products.

These are pure technology products. We're a self-custody product. So people control their funds. They can export their keys to other products. And the regulatory aspect to MiniPay really lies on the connection to the Fiat world. So everywhere Minipay is available, we have one or more partners that allows to bridge that gap from the traditional world to the blockchain. And that's where the regulatory and compliance requirements come in to either deposit or withdraw into Minipay.

And do you see MiniPay functioning like a bank at any point in time? If you are embedded financial services, say a mortgage on a home, something that you guys will aspire to provide? MiniPay is, it's interesting with that because, yes, it's a very simple app that allows you to access dollars and send dollars with phone numbers. That's the first level of it. The basis. And we have this Fiat connectivity on both sides, but we also allow third-party developers to build mini-apps that are integrated in the wallet. So things like you're suggesting could be built by a third party that has their own company, their own brand that can get distribution through this easy-to-use dollar wallet.

So that's something that we're really pushing for this year is how do we make that developer experience better? How do we make these feel more integrated so that users don't feel lost? because a lot of these crypto-native products are not really taught for a non-crypto audience. So when you bring them in MiniPay, you need to rethink from which words we're using to describe this and what interface challenges we have. So we hope that third-party developers build mini-apps that really expand the use cases and that we can help drive distribution and users to those products.

Do you think that banks and other local financial institutions will in a way be forced to interact with stable coins and provide stable coin offerings? Absolutely, because at the end of the day, it's about efficiency. And banks are in the business of making money. There's a more efficient way to make money, then there's a natural incentive to do that. So I think it's inevitable that more banks will integrate stable coin technology somehow. And I think we're probably going to benefit from that as a side effect, because then they will be treated more like money, from the financial institutions point of view, they will be hopefully more interoperable. The on and off ramp will feel more natural like a traditional fintech flow versus crypto on ramp.

So I think we will get the side benefits of that. With that in mind, what do you think are the biggest areas where we still need improvement? Is it card payment integration? You mentioned off ramps. But what's preventing this adoption from happening faster already? So the part that I'm most excited about, and I think is being on the, underlooked is per party payments using local payment methods. So what I mean by that is being able to use your stable coin balance and pay directly to whatever the local relevant method

is. For example, in Brazil, that's fixed, in Philippines, SG Cash, in Kenya, that's M-Pesa, things like that. So a lot of countries have these dominant instant payment methods. And being able to pay directly to those, pay directly to people, pay directly to merchants, and allow stable coins to connect to these existing network effects within each country. I think that's being overlooked. And a concrete example of that is if you land in Kenya today, you have two choices. Either you queue up to the Safaricom booth to buy a Safaricom SIM card and top it up with cash, or you just have mini pay, which you've topped up in your home country.

But you can pay both ways are equivalent. You can now pay any MPA subvert merchant with this app. And the same story can be replicated globally. So cards, I think, it grabs a lot of attention because we, in our countries, and I think you're in the U.S., we all use cards on a daily basis. But a lot of countries have either skipped cards or have found more direct alternatives. And being able to connect directly to that is, I think, the most overlooked. And we have some pretty exciting stuff coming in that regard. And as those systems continue to evolve, is dollar hegemony a long-term byproduct of this stable coin adoption?

Or where do we land in terms of the distribution of global monetary systems? Oh, that's a Nick Carter question. Yeah, I stole it from him. So, look, I'm not a macro guy. I think it really depends on what the response will be once the U.S. passes some kind of stable coin legislation and basically entrenched allow all the financial institutions to interact with this in a way they haven't been able to do before. It's all going to be down to the response of all the other countries.

Are they going to just sit in wait and let that USDA stable adoption continue to grow? Or are they going to be aggressively promoting local alternatives? It remains to be seen. I think it's more of politics and regulatory questions than a technology question. That makes sense. I think it's to be determined to where we go a little bit. But the dollar is the best meme. It is.

And memes are powerful. So we'll see. And there's a lot of momentum. There is a lot of momentum. Well, Charles, thank you for joining. I've enjoyed our conversation, and I hope you join us again soon. Love Castle Island. Thanks so much for having me.

Thank you. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the Brink-Podcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.