On The Brink with Castle Island - Chris Harmse (BVNK) on Building Global Stablecoin Infrastructure (EP.522)

Episode Date: April 24, 2024

Chris Harmse, co-founder and VP of Revenue at BVNK joins the show. In this episode we discuss: Chris' career and the path to founding BVNK. The origin story of BVNK and how the company has evolved over time. The key drivers behind the adoption of stablecoins. Segmenting the stablecoin market. Interest bearing stablecoins and the impact that this category will have on the overall market. Tokenized money funds and the future of securities settlement. How stablecoins will refactor the global FX market. The regulatory landscape and how stablecoin adoption is evolving in various regions. To learn more about BVNK visit their website.

Today on the podcast, I sat down with Chris Harms, a co-founder of BVNK. BVNK is a stablecoin infrastructure company that powers the on and off ramps of hundreds of companies building in the stable coin ecosystem. This was a fun episode where we talked about the emerging use cases for stable coins, the segmentation of the types of stable coins that exist today, and the global regulatory landscape in this category. I think you'll enjoy this one. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Chris Harms of BVNK. 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, 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 Mack, the two mortgage giants that have been threatened by the housing crisis. The Bank of England

has pumped 75 billion pounds more to Britain's ailing economy with a new round of quantitative easy. You print a couple trillion dollars and all of a sudden people started to worry. So out of this worry, we have something called the Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Well, Chris, thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast. Always love talking about stable coins. So thanks for joining. Thanks for having me, Matt. I'm super excited for this conversation. It's a hot topic. Stay with Queens at the moment. Well, I think BVNK is probably one of the larger companies in the industry that maybe people in the U.S. don't have a great perspective on. So we'd love to just start with your personal background and the path that led you to start the company.

I actually have a triad-fired by background like I guess many of us in crypto. And I did a bunch of different things at banks, but mainly spent a lot of the time doing cross-asset trading and a little bit of an equity desk. And the majority of the time is actually spent on an FX and interest rate desk at PNP Paraba, really trading FX spots across the semi-a-currency. So that kind of shaped my early years in Tradify. It was my introduction to payments without knowing I was doing payments, even thought you were doing capital markets, but at the core, it's really just payments. So kind of cut my thing there, got a bit jaded with the banking industry, and I guess the

payments infrastructure and financial market infrastructure more broadly where you could execute a trade in a millisecond, but where T-plus-2 for spot to settle, and sometimes when payments didn't settle, you're chasing empty 103. messages around. Being on a spot desk, you kept seeing things pop up on your Bloomberg terminal like Bitcoin and that sort of things. You take notice and you're chatting with the guys on the desk about it, start doing a bit of research, but then it wasn't until I left banking in 2017 and linked up with an ex-business partner mine who we wanted to set up a multistract fund. And so we did that. And inside that fund, we went to keep down the crypto rabbit hole and started

trading crypto. That was kind of through the 2017 ICU boom, very much approaching crypto as a new asset class. But as we did that, we saw these things stable coins pop up where you could start doing arbitrage trading strategies between different platforms. And we were doing that. We started becoming significant use of stable coins in our own day to day. And starting to take that FX and capital markets and payments infrastructure background that I had at the bank and looking at how crypto and stable coins and that's what thing can start solving that, wanted to go deeper down that rabbit hole. HFund didn't really work, but learned a lot at the time that squarely wanted to be stuck in work fully in crypto. And through my business partner, actually got introduced to Jesse and Don,

who are my co-founders. And while I was busy in 2017, working on the kind of hedge fund and the crypto fund and that sort of thing, Jesse and Don, who are both exited founders in their own right, were building a retail crypto exchange in Africa under the moniker of the coinbase of Africa. I think back then, given what happened in 2018, you know, realized consumer crypto probably wasn't as developed as we needed it to be. But businesses were starting to use. use stable coin to do payments, and it was quite an interesting space back then. It was quite early, but we started seeing that, Jesse and Don were seeing that themselves as they were building the consumer business.

I was seeing that from a different angle being on the hedge fund side, and then we kind of linked up, started building out what BNK is today. At its core, we're really building next generation payments infrastructure, combining fiats as well as stable coins. The mission is really to accelerate the global movement of money, specifically around these pains that we saw in the traditional payments infrastructure. and technology stack, wanting to make payments and stable coins as accessible and faster and more transparent. Fast forward, we headquartered in London now, 270 staff globally. We're doing about

$6 billion in annualized payment volume. So, as you said earlier, fairly significant. Most of that, or majority of that touches a stable coin in some way, shape, or form. At its core in terms of use cases and verticals we still, we really are helping non-cryptor native businesses get access to stablecoin infrastructure and allow them to build stable coin payments experiences in a regulatory compliant way. That's incredible. So you guys were certainly very early to stablecoins. I remember being in the industry back then, stablecoins were really just a blip on the radar, but now obviously I think it's something like 70% of every transaction that happens on a blockchain is a stable coin. So we'd love to just understand what the original insight for the company was from a product

perspective and then maybe how that's evolved over time. What does it look like these days? When we started looking at the stable coin market, seriously, stable coin market cap was $3 billion at the time. We know where that got into $150 billion. Early on, we were finding businesses that wanted to access better payments faster, whether it was cross-border payments or just a better way to pay globally and across borders. And Stablecoin really facilitated that. But back then, what you had was a business didn't really understand yet how to touch or interact with Stablecoin. So we did that for them.

We effectively went from the Fiat's into Stablecoin, move that money on the blockchain, you know, in like a single-streaded payments, got out of Stablecoin back into Fiat and gave that Fiat back to the business. So the net effect was a much faster, cheaper cross-border payment, but just leveraging this better payments technology being a blockchain and stablecoins. There were many companies earlier on that try to do this with Bitcoin, and actually the volatility doesn't lend itself that well as they ever means or a way to actually as a payment technology.

But that was kind of the original. And as we went through that, we very much built, and by design, had to, because it was so early in the market, had to go to the pockets where there was stable coin liquidity, the markets that specifically needed better payments infrastructure. And through that, ended up building a multi-stable coin platform and allowing merchants and then soon PSPs to start accessing stable coins. And as we saw stablecoin adoption drive up over the last couple years,

we really saw business starting to want to interact directly with stable coins. and not to do the Fiat, Stablecoin Fiat, but actually just Fiat Staplequin and then operates into stablecoin. So it started from that kind of very early days, just as better payments technology to now businesses really interacting with stablecoins themselves versus just interacting on the fiat side. It's fascinating. One of the things I always say is that if you go back and look at some of the pitches that

we used to get in 2014, 2015 around Bitcoin payments, as you point out, a lot of those things didn't work because people wanted to hold a more stable asset for these transfers. Bitcoin being as volatile as it is just wasn't really designed, I would say, for that use case. So we see this emergence of a bunch of companies that maybe would have been viable back then if there were stablecoin rails. So I'd love to kind of understand where you see the use cases right now driving stable coin activity. It kind of started in the trading space and now we're starting to see a proliferation of other use cases. So how do you guys think about the use cases that drive most of the activity on your platform?

We've very much been in quite a unique position, given really think of it. ourselves as an infrastructure, payment infrastructure. We enabled merchants directly as well as payment companies to act with table coins. And we see it obviously developed through our product roadmap and we deliver that. Our products really kind of enable a couple of use cases. And the main one really is crypto check out. So this is exactly what it said that allows merchants and PSP to accept crypto payment.

Just like you would log in on a platform, I want to pay with credit card. I want to pay with my PayPal. I want to pay with crypto. Our suite of APIs powers that pay with crypto. And we find that merchants then have a number of settlement options. They can either take the settlement in Stablecoin after, you know, collecting that's their BTC heat and other Stablecoins. They can take the settlement in Stablecoin or they take the settlement in Fiat. So that's a real, very fast-growing use case.

And we see trading platforms, CFD-type platforms or Stablecoin deposits becoming the number one deposit method on their platform quite quickly. Once they launch with us, we've got customers like Action Global, Equity, I-Cy markets, Neo-Brokers, name brand new brokers globally, who have a global customer base and this one form of digital money that allows them to accept deposits from multiple different jurisdictions is super exciting for them. So that's one use case where very much a C2B use case, allowing Merit to accept crypto payments. A second use case that's really exciting to us. And we've been ideating around this use case and it's been around in the market for quite some time in terms of thinking through it. But we really seeing it come to life, I guess, over the last 12 months. And that's really BTC stable coin payout.

So we've just recently signed deal, the global payroll company where they're using our infrastructure to pay their contractors in stablecoin. When you think through that, why it makes all the sense. These are contractors based globally, generally in emerging markets that have volatile currencies, they can't access dollars very easily. So providing them a way to receive digital dollars as a means of payment or service is rendered is really something that's exciting for us. And you see a lot of growth in this because it's not just global.

or payroll platforms, but you're then seeing gig economy platforms trying to pay creators or even as far as Uber drivers or that sort of thing getting paid in Stable Queen. We see a world where this comes to play over the next couple years. And then the classic one always, remittance flows. Remittance today, you can look at the US Latam corridor, the European Africa corridor, the end beneficiary in these destination markets would much rather receive a digital dollar that's ahead against their local currency and hold on to that. And we do find that many of those end users are actually very crypto-native.

If you look at those analysis, geography of crypto reports that are very good, they show that top 10 index of companies that show where the crypto is moving to is generally the same recipients of remittances. So those are high crypto adoption. They understand that they're digitally native, generally quite young, and we'd much rather receive their remittance in digital dollars. given the infrastructure that we have, pay ins, payouts, the full suite of fiat as well as crypto licensing, we do, and we've started to see fintechs who are looking to launch stablecoin wallets themselves, using our infrastructure to embed stable coins into their platform and offer their customers the ability to send and receive and hold stable coins. And then also, you know, get in and out of stable coins. We've recently done a deal with free market FX, which is a big payments fintech in the UK who had this exact need driven by their merchants and their customers. The remittance one is fascinating to me because some of these companies that have emerged to

really surface that use case, I would say are some of the fastest growing companies in this industry. So I'm curious your perspective on the legacy players in that remittance market. Are they aware of how disruptive this technology is? Are they doing anything to respond? Let's say you go back 10 years and you think about the first generation of fintech. They used outdated payments infrastructure being, I guess, the swift messaging network, correspondent banking network, and they built really amazing UI and US experiences on top of that infrastructure and then really had to do for the heavy balance sheet

lift to them. Free funding accounts in all these markets. You take transfer wise, for example, entities in multiple countries, licenses in those markets and having to hold liquidity in all these markets. So those original fintechs have done a great job at optimizing these flows moving around the world. But I think step in blockchain and stablecoins do now have this upgraded infrastructure where you could rebuild these same remittance corridors using stable coins.

So they definitely looking at it. I think two, three years ago in 2021, they were looking at it from a distance trying to do something. We then saw 2022 is the watershed moment for the payments use case in crypto. When you saw north of 10 trillion in assets more than the VEA net, which is about, I guess, settled in stable coins. And I think that made them take notice. And we've seen fintech starting to move now. So there are a lot of big fintechs that are a couple of use cases developing where they're going, look, I'm going to start first as a treasury optimization.

How do I move money from this market to that market more efficiently using stable coins? And then later, open up the ability for my customers to fund me in stablecoin for a Fiat remittance payout. So that's a use case. We're starting to just see some of the traditional payments and remittance fintech look at. And then ultimately, the direction of travel seems like, look, we are already doing these payout and remittances into push to card, push to digital wallet, whatever, push to mobile money. if you're talking about Kenya or something in Africa, they see that they're going to have to be able to make stable queen payouts as well alongside their product set. I think it's dawned on them.

Some of them are moving. We're in some interesting early conversations with some of the biggest remittance players in the space, looking to run a couple of pilots. It's an exciting time, and I think they know they're going to get left behind if they don't upgrade to the debt of payments technology and take this seriously. I'd be somewhat shocked if we don't see some of those traditional players start to enter this market from the perspective of being an issuer. And obviously in the U.S. market, the absence of a stable coin bill has probably held back some

issuers who would like to be in this market. But it's been really interesting to me to just look at the segmentation of this market and what types of stable coins are popular in certain regions. Obviously, Tether-on-Tron appears to have a stranglehold on certain geographies. So how do you guys think about just segmenting the different types of stable coins of different geographies where issuers are more or less strong? We've thought long and hot about this. I guess you've got a matrix where the one axis is really like centralized to decentralized stable coins. So centrally issued stable coins, feather, circle, back those decentralized ones like die and make it down.

There's obviously been several others over the years, but I guess that's the main one around. And then kind of somewhat decentralized now falling in the middle is something like Athena, where they've made some tradeoffs on the decentralized side for more scalability. So I think that's how we think of it from a, I can essentialize to decentralized on the one axis. And then on the other axis, you really have to think about privately issued versus, I guess, nation state issued. So now we're talking the TED and the circles of the world versus CVDC. You know, there's north of a 100 CBDP projects.

So that's kind of a matrix or a framework that we used to think through. To your point, we've definitely seen regional differences and use case specific differences across the different issues. Naturally, the privately issued centralized table coins, do they have significant market share? Liquidity begets more liquidity. And they've really had a good head start. We've seen that use cases in Asia specifically, so whether there's B2B or B2, or B2C's use cases, they had a big stronghold out there, liquidity was there, and you saw

UST more prevalent in those markets. Similarly, in Africa, UST was always likely has got a really good market share in Europe and in the US as well. We saw kind of a bificate that way, and then also very much across what chains these were running on. So, inifty, obviously, all of it was almost UST on Ethereum. And you had to go there and do that because it was the only place you really had liquidity to be able to enable any payments to use case at scale.

But we slowly saw that shift a couple of years ago. We had the gas feed bike, and we saw a big swift shift to Tron. So we quickly responded to customer demand and liquidity there and enabled Tron. And we see very much in U.S.C. on Tron, Asia seems to be the main one. So there's definitely these regional differences. And there's a way of market share fight going on between the centralized issue stable coins. But it's going to be interesting to see how it developed as a proper CBDC, I guess, gets launched math market and what that does to the market and some of these kind of more decentralized.

alternatives like Etina and Dice has been doing pretty well as well. It's interesting you bring up the CBDCs because I would imagine that would be a big opportunity for you guys to just off ramp into a CBDC in some of these jurisdictions, depending on how many of these things start to pop up. Exactly. And that's exactly what we're watching is we've very much taken a multi-stable coin multi-acet approach. And the way we think about that is you go back some of the, I guess, ripple in its early days, a singular asset trying to do, you know, cross-border payments messaging for, like,

I'm going to do single blockchain, ripple neck. Then we had the proliferation of stable coins like circle and tether, single asset, multi-blockchain. So we very much were like, look, multi-rale, multi-acid. So multiple blockchains, we support five or six blockchains and, you know, keep responding to that and multiple stablecoins. But as CVDCs come into that, we will just be able to, depending on what blockchain is running on, integrate that into the platform and support those as well. So we do see that multi-rail, multi-stablecoin platform as an advantage and allow us to be quite nimble if some of these come to market and make significant headway. How about interest-bearing stablecoins?

So in a zero-rate environment, I guess no one really cares about the interest that comes off of these things. But in a 5% rate environment, obviously there's a pretty big take rate there for a stable coin issuer. And the stablecoin issuers in the U.S. are just structurally unable to pass through that interest due to securities regulations. But that is not the case, obviously, in other parts of the world. So how have you guys seen interest-bearing stable coins enter this market? Do you see that category evolving and being a big piece of this puzzle? Exactly to your point. It's been a very exciting development for the last couple months, let's say years.

Several guys have been working on this. But if you zoom out, as you say, a 5% interest rate environment, that's great for the stable-point issuer, but not that great for the user, who's effectively driving all that volume and that market cap for the issuers. So we've also seen paid as results on it, you know, on a quarterly basis and that sort of thing. So I think it's really putting some of that choice back to the user. So if you now have a stable coin, you've got five or six different stable coins to choose from. One's paying you somebody yield. You no longer have this opportunity cost of my dollar deposit in the bank is earning me 5%. I can actually keep my money in digital

dollars and still receive that yield. So you don't have to, you know, the consumer no longer has to make that trade off. So I think that's really positive just generally for the consumer and the users of stable coins. I mean, you can look at USDI and the different ways that they've managed under finance and brought USDI to market, super-interesting. So I think the trend is generally trying to figure out how we pay interest on some of these stable coins. And naturally, you think about some of the use case, lots of collateral tied up in trading

positions that is earning many people nothing. Now you can use an interest-bearing stable coin to put in as trading collateral inside a crypto exchange. You no longer have to make the trade-off between Fiat and crypto. So you can now hold crypto dollars, a digital dollars, and still earn your yield. We think it's very exciting development. And I think there's just more to come. Some guys are due to the regulation structure, not able to pass some of that yield over,

but, you know, some markets are making it a little bit easier, given the regulation headed. It's really interesting. We had done some analysis. And I think if you look at stable coins as a category, there's something like the 16th largest holder of U.S. Treasuries, which is pretty staggering. And then you kind of go a step deeper and you just look at tokenized money funds as an opportunity here. So BlackRock has recently tokenized a money fund. If you look at stablecoins, I think they're probably top 15, top 16 in terms of just

comparison to issuers of money market funds in the U.S. So the largest asset managers in the world are obviously leading that BlackRock and Fidelity. But do you see tokenized money funds as being a viable category within stable coins? How do you think about that as a potential new wave of issuers? Great trends that we've seen. But personally, I almost always thought of stable coins as tokenized money market funds. funds on the blockchain that just kept all the limb, if you had to summarize it.

But if you had to break it down to the nuts and bolts, that's what it was. But now, obviously, we've had this BlackRock formalized that for tokenizing one of their money market funds. And it's really good to see that because what that does is it brings the efficiency of the blockchain to stable coins or at least to money market, a traditional kind of capital market infrastructure. Because quickly after BlackRock launched that Biddle tokenized money market fund, Ondo went and said, look, we're now going to back the majority of our collateral in Biddle,

because it gives me that instant redemption. So I no longer have this disconnect between redemption of these assets. I can actually get the efficiency of the blockchain inside my own yield-bearing stable coin. So I think it's kind of a step forward in terms of the efficiency of using a blockchain in capital markets infrastructure. I do think it's going to proliferate into more and more use cases, just like we've seen with Ondo quickly, switching out the traditional trad-fi version of the fund for the tokenized version of the BlackRock Fund. I think it could even create a whole new category.

remember back in 2016 when private blockchains were all the rage and people were talking about tokenizing different types of securities, bringing them on chain. And you'd kind of go through the workflow of how something would actually settle. And it would be, okay, we have this asset on a blockchain. It's going to move. And then you'd get into how do US dollars move on this? And they'd be like, well, we have a wire transfer and it settles two plus two or I think back then, T plus three. But you don't have to squint too hard to see that maybe BlackRock is looking at this and saying, well, what if we could just use a US dollar in the form of a tokenized money fund and actually settle securities transactions at some point? I wonder if we'll see a wave of institutional

adoption here just in terms of security settlement at some point. You're 100% rights. You can definitely see that. A lot of the innovations that happen in capital markets and just securitized products and that sort of thing has been way ahead of that settlement infrastructure. And now you've given a way to actually upgrade the settlement infrastructure on those trades themselves. So I definitely think, and with BlackRock's name behind it, it can easily see that new category developed where a tokenized money fund, as you said, becomes the settlement currency across multiple other real world assets or real world security settlements. It's interesting to look at the regulatory environment in the U.S., which has been pretty hostile,

I'd say, since FTX, against all of crypto, really, but in particular, stable coins in the sense that there's a bipartisan bill that just hasn't really gone anywhere. But if you look at this, you really say, okay, 99% of stable coins are dollar-based. And so this is really just proliferating the dollar in ways that were not possible before. So it's actually making the dollar a lot stronger as a global currency. I'm curious your perspective on just what the composition will end up being in terms of dollar stable coins versus euros versus other types of currencies. Seems like the dollar is really the apex predator of stable coins, at least for now. I think the proliferation of non-USD stable points is an interesting, exciting trend to follow.

It obviously hasn't kicked off yet in earnest. But if you look at some like IMBF data on the official FX reserves, UFX reserves, probably like 59, 60%, somewhere there, if you look at the dollar as percentage of all international SWIP transactions, it's about 46%. So it's still way ahead in keeping its UST dominance, despite the kind of de-dollarization narrative we had for a while over the last 18 months. And then, as you said, you look at stable coins, then it's $99%. So if we see a world or a trend to where stable coin market looks the same as global reserves or payments where it's maybe dollars or 50 to 60 or 70% of that, you start seeing an exciting world where you've already got a couple of GDP stablecoin issues that are out there.

There's a few euro issued table coins that are out there, not really got the traction you would see. But let's say hypothetically, we get to a world where you've got a couple of local issued stable coins, whether they privately issued or CBDCs, we've got dollars still as the main one in there. Then it gets really exciting because then you can effectively bring a full end-to-end payment on chain. So you could take a dollar in the US, get into stablecoin. You wouldn't even need to send that stable coin to a centralized market maker. You could send it to a Dex like Uniswap traded for a Singapore stable coin, send that Singapore stable coin to the issue in Singapore, burn it and get SGDR out, bringing the entire end-to-end payment chain on chain, so to speak.

So it's an interesting trend that we're watching. I don't think it's kicked off in earnest just yet. I think, you know, as you can see, the data showing you that dollars is full dominating across the space. But I think there's a lot of interesting momentum specifically with some regulation coming in the EU around Mika and how they want to regulate euro issued stable coins and that sort of thing. So I think more to come there, definitely something to watch.

But I think definitely gets really exciting because you're bringing a lot of the traditional type effects on chain end to end. You could also imagine a world where you can just hold a stable coin balance at a bank at some point in the future. I think that would also make things a lot more frictionless. You mentioned the FX market. I'm curious your perspective on just how stable coins fit into that landscape. Is this going to fundamentally change the way that FX works as a category? Yeah, I think to some degree it needs to.

We were just talking about settlement infrastructure. You think about how OTC spots settle and how payments settle today in the FX market, it's still this T plus two. It's still pretty manual. It's still using outdated infrastructure or messaging like Swift to, you know, and correspondent banking networks. Step in this infrastructure that's now showing you that there's a different way to do this. It's done 10 trillion of settlements a year at scale.

And I do think the only thing lacking to really bring some of this to life is this kind of non, you know, the rise of non-US stable coins. And then we've also seen, I guess, treasuries and TFOs starting to think through and put stable coins alongside their other treasury assets on their balance sheet. So they've got their dollars, they've got their G7 currencies, maybe they're operating in multiple markets with all the emerging markets. And then they've got stable coins right alongside there. Obviously, the Visa Treasury has approved stablecoin settlements in that pilot that they're doing.

So we know that Visa Treasury is handling stable coins in a separate treasury asset. It really does from a couple of different angles. The one is definitely end-to-end kind of on-chain remittance slows that you could bring on-chain. The efficiency is you going to get in real-time settlement. And a couple of those things kind of coming to life on the back of this is quite exciting. Obviously, the regulatory landscape is going to dictate where stable coins proliferate at scale, which markets take off faster than other markets. You guys, I'd imagine, have to have a view on all sorts of different jurisdictions

and how you can play in those jurisdictions with stablecoins. So how do you guys just view the global regulatory landscape broadly? And how does that inform where you want to take BVNK in terms of geographic expansion? The Latscape is moving globally. We're making some serious progress, I think, first and foremost. Being EU and UK headquartered, really, we're quite excited about MECA and that getting access to their rules and regulations obviously always allow you to build in a lot more unambiguous way.

So we're quite excited. There you've obviously got really pragmatic regulation in Singapore through MAS, where they've brought in the DPP token permission under their kind of payments directive, their NPR life and things, that major payment institution. There's definitely regional hubs of regulation developing. So Singapore, out and APEC seems to be the UK and the EU fighting for that position in Europe. But I think they're kind of feeding off each other to some degree. Sadly, I guess the US is lagging behind.

But I think they're watching quite closely and looking at this long and hard and going, look, we're going to need to do something on the stable coin bill. And I actually saw there some movement earlier today. Some of the senators came out and said they were going to bring this bill back to life, the stable queen bill. And they're going to have to be because otherwise they're just going to get left behind. So you definitely see regional, pragmatic regulation pop up with some very competent and capable regulators.

We're excited for this regulations go live and come into force. You mentioned the U.S. market. We're recording this on the 17th of April. The Lummiss-Jillabrand bill was just reintroduced, I guess, which is the Senate version of the McHenry Stablecoin bill. They're broadly similar, I would say. So it'll be interesting to see how that unfolds. But yeah, I'm curious just generally how you think about the U.S. market in terms of

opportunities for the company and what this stable coin bill would mean to the growth of the industry. Especially if you're building in Europe and the UK and globally, the US has always seen of the big market. It's getting the pace for the last 25 years in terms of technology and innovation. And that's the thing. And we very much see that. We were looking at the US from a distance, but very much thinking about how do we go in, how do we get access to dollars? We were for tutors where we more recently brought over some of the execs from Silvergate Bank. They've come over to kind of lead the US expansion. So that's been going really well.

We're going state by state on the MTLs to get those licenses in place. I hope this ball comes into play. It's pragmatic. It seems to be looking specifically around payment stable coin issues and how to regulate those, what good reserve management looks like. In its current form, it does hold some really good measures to bring innovation back to the US specifically in the stable coin. Otherwise, you do get, which you guys have been talking a lot about,

a kind of a full euro dollar market pop up for stable coins. all over again if they're slightly behind on this. So I think the guys are thinking long and hard about it, and hopefully this bull that's reignited itself today is the step in the right direction. It's one of my favorite things about working in this industry is that it unearths all sorts of historical things that have happened in the past. So the euro dollar market is a perfect example of it just got really large and eventually the US had to come to grips with it and bring it into the fold and establish things like

swap lines. And really, I think that is the risk of stable coins that the next 10x. here happens outside the U.S., but there are U.S. dollars being issued on these chains, and they're all happening outside the U.S. So it's really kind of the disaster scenario. I also worry about an infrastructure in the U.S. where you have to go state by state, as you point out, where there's not just an easier option. It makes it really hard for startups to have to spend $5 million to go to every state to get the licenses where you can. It just doesn't seem like the way that that's how it should evolve as an industry. No, no, I would agree with you. I think the U.S. could probably

take a fair out of the EU's hat, you get access, you get this passporting capability across all EU member states with one while written, well thought out, the legislation. And hopefully at some point, it unifies that way and you can get that same sort of state level regulation, but it remains to be seen, I guess. Well, Chris, this has been fascinating. Always love to talk about stable coins, and you guys are certainly at the forefront. Where can we send people to learn more about BVNK and to get in touch? Come check us out on our website, BVNK.com. We also super active on LinkedIn. We actually have a really interesting report dropping soon at the end of April called strategies for stable coins. So we've spoken to several leaders across the payments ecosystem, whether those are

VCs issuers, embedded banking providers and trying to get their views on stable coins and looking at some of the emerging use cases. So if you want to get after this to that report, best way to B2D, LinkedIn, VNK.com, come through and that's dropping it at the end of April. And then if you want to contact me directly, LinkedIn's the best place. You could just reach out and if there's a couple of collaborations you want to explore. That sounds great. Well, Chris, thanks so much for joining us today on the podcast. Listen, thanks so much, Matt.

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