On The Brink with Castle Island - Daniel Lev (Coinflow) on Stablecoin Payments (EP.662)

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

Wyatt sits down with Daniel Lev, the founder of Coinflow, to discuss the evolution of payments amidst a wave of stablecoin-enabled innovation. In this episode: Lurking legacy issues of payment networks How our current payment networks benefit end users but not merchants Types of merchant profiles and who stands to benefit Creating faster settlement Marketplace models and better rails How blockchain can reduce fraud and help businesses know their customers

Today, I sat down with Daniel Lev, the founder of Coinflow. Coinflow is a payment service provider that uses stable coins to offer faster settlement of both card payments and payouts for businesses. Daniel's vision for Coinflow was inspired by his previous work at e-commerce startups. He had experienced delays in inefficiencies common in payment settlement and realized that stable coins could create a better offering. Without further ado, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Daniel. 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 is 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,

IG, $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 a Bitcoin.

Bitcoin. Daniel, thanks for coming on the podcast. Excited to chat today. It's probably overdue at this point. I'd love for you to start by touching on what was the premise for coin flow. Why did you guys start the business? And what have you hoped to build from the day one? That's a great question. Quick background is I've been building financial products for quite some time in the quote unquote fintech space. And I've been building in crypto since I was an engineer in college. And in between,

I was at a hypergoffintech. I was leading a big product in there. We went through hypergrowth, got pretty bloated, so I had some time to dabble on side projects. Ended up starting a side project-turned-companied. That was a fantasy sports protocol in Solano. We got a lot of free users and classic like VC back company that goes free, try to freemium and convert. The free users couldn't convert because everything was on blockchains and smart contracts, so you needed stable coins to buy things when people try to convert.

This was four and a half years ago, so people you know stablecoins really were. I barely knew what stable coins were when we're trying to use them in our project. And no one who convert, so we started using on ramps, those had horrible conversion. And I was pretty blown away how like this infrastructure piece of like, hey, someone wants to pay you and you can't get paid, like doesn't exist for any of the crypto community. So it went down like a huge payments rabbit hole and then realized that this doesn't exist. And what we were solving for is like, hey, connect a traditional credit card or any form of payment acceptance to,

a smart contract, and as soon as that form factor of, like, credit card is authorized, you can instantly, the merchant as being you, just receive those funds. So that didn't exist, but if that existed, that would actually, like, create an order magnitude improvement in what exists today in hand processing, which is you swipe a card and takes three, four or five days for the merchants to get their money. So I was like, okay, someone should build this. We'll build it in house, built it in house, and then people start asking us like, hey, who's like your infrastructure under the hood?

and immediately we're like, okay, I've seen this writing on the wall. Like, I've seen this before because the other startup I was at, Becoming New Corn, it started as a NeoBank that created their own loan registration software, and banks started asking for it. I was like, okay, this is great. Like, I've seen this before people are asking for this product.

We don't have it. Let's totally spin us out. And my background was building with so. Yeah, we built it, TLDR, built out of a self-need. But like going down the rabbit hole, like that self-need, we understood the market and like the general gap for it and decided to dive into it. And since then, it's just like more and more revelations of like how deeply the system is broken

and leaving us like for tons of room of innovation. You touched on this, but what actually happens with a card payment today? Let's start there. Yeah, I mean, at a super high level, there's like a few different players. There's a card network. So your Visa, MasterCard, Amex, Discover, etc. Your merchant, so the person that, hey, you were consumer buying something from, there is the issuer, so the person that issues the card to the consumer that swipes your card.

And then on the other side of that, for the merchant, there's a payment search provider, someone like coin flow, and oftentimes an acquiring bank. So someone that helps underwrite and communicate to the card networks. All those parties have to communicate. And what's gotten really good in terms of user experience is people swiping the cards. Like the consumer has no issues with that, right? You swipe your card, you see right away that the payment's authorized. So the payment search provider helps the merchant capture that payment.

So within seconds, you know, like, hey, why it has, or whoever the user is, has money in their accounts, and it's going to be good, and it will eventually get to the merchant. After that step, so, like, after it says, hey, money is there, you're good to go. That's where the money starts moving between all those counterparties, and things happen very, very, very slowly. So that's where really, like, the core of it is. and a lot of the, I would say, industry and innovation has happened on the front end, making sure that it's like super easy for you, the end user to spend your money.

And even post fact of spending your money, like, you're insured, like if something goes wrong, you can call to the bank and say, hey, like, I was buying an ice cream coming from Dan, you promised me vanilla, gave me chocolate, like, I should get a refund. So that whole process is like very smooth and I would say more or less solved. But for the businesses, like when I sold you that ice cream cone in this hypothetical instance, it took me three days to get my money because what happens as soon as it's authorized, then the issuer gets pulled their funds, which is a person in the bank that issued your card, they get their money pulled.

The card networks the middleman. They give it to the acquiring bank, and the acquiring bank has to send it to the payment service provider, payment source providers, so release those funds to the merchants. And all those are on traditional banking rails. and if you're doing that transaction globally, then it's like via the Swift Network, which adds counterparty banks. And if there's one bank holiday in one country

or one delay somewhere, then like that whole food chain just slowed down. So, and T.L.P.R. Yeah, it's like a system that's been built for comfort for the end user with a host of structural debt underneath. That's a very good summary. Exactly. It's been built for the consumer,

the ton of structural debt, but it works for them. So like the average person is not complaining. Right. And it's funny. is one of the pushbacks I get on stable coins, particularly in the U.S. is people will say, oh, my card network or my card payments works very well. Like, I don't have any issues. And it's at this point that it's built to suit that person, but maybe not the vendor or maybe

not someone else who's involved in that chain. Yeah, totally. Like, I use stable coins in business, obviously, every day. And our company uses it 100,000 times a day in transactions. But as an end user, I use my card in order to magnitude more. And I think that's like because of the rewards. everything else we get with it. So I totally get that. I don't know if stable coins will fully replace. I don't want to go on this rabbit hole, but like,

as of right now, there's no stable coin product that means the end user would rather use the my credit card for like day-to-day purchases. But if I'm buying something that cards can't accept, so like a high-ticket item, I'm paying my rent.

I much rather do that via a stable coin. I think rent payments are like a mortgage or a car payment, something like that that's larger that someone won't, accept the credit card for, that makes sense with stable points. So I told you, get what your friends are, people are coming from. So how does Coinflow's workflow compare to the traditional payments networks that you mentioned? Yeah, so in that process, let's just go back to that ice cream shop example. I own an ice cream shop. I sell you ice cream

cone. In that traditional example, I say we're using like a legacy provider, let's call it like stripe. As soon as you swag your card and it says, hey, authorized, I don't know, ice cream cone and I give you the ice cream cone. Then it takes, Stripe has to release those funds. Once they get it, let's say they get it instantly from their bank, which is impossible. Let's say they do. They still have to release those funds to me, the ice cream owner and some type of bank payments. Let's call that ACH because that's most banks. Not all banks take real-time payments. It's going to be ACH. That takes one to three business days. It's Tuesday. So quick guess I'll get my money on Wednesday evening, but likely Friday.

So that's like if I'm the ice cream shop owner using Stripe, so I'll give my money one to three days from when you paid. And Coinflow, what we do, as soon as you swipe your card and we get that authorization, because we know the money's coming from the card networks. Like we trust Visa will give us the money. They're legally obligated to. So as soon as the card swipe happens,

we instantly settle funds to the ice cream shops owner in their digital wallet via stablecoins. It looks like a bank dashboard. Where they have money in their wallet, it says US dollars. and then if they hit withdraw, if they want to move it to their bank account, we can then instantly pay out to that bank account or do it through that same bank payout method.

So it's just there instantly can be used. We can attach your credit card and tooth to spend. It can be sent cross-border. It can be done with whatever. If they send it to another vendor, whatever it is. So that's the difference. Instead of waiting like one to three business days, they get their money in five seconds.

Are you guys funding that leg off of your balance sheet, or do you have access to a line of credit or how do you ensure that you can maintain that instant settlement when you might have times where there's a lot of flow coming in? Yeah, a little bit of all the above. Some of it's balance of capital. Some of it is like partner capital. And then a lot of it is payouts as well.

So we get tons of payouts of people like, hey, like, I actually don't need my money for three days. So I'm going to choose a cheaper payout option. Like I think yesterday we had like a $10 million, I think ACEH or wire. And they're like, yeah, like we need to get the funds on Friday. So that goes into our liquidity engine and that ice cream shop owner can leverage that. That goes into play as well, a little bit of all above. And then the cool thing is that we are starting to get settlements from acquiring banks. None of the U.S. yet, but in Europe, via Samuel coins five days a week.

And Visa's rolling that out seven days a week. So, yeah, like, not only is it structurally an issue that payments providers can't give their merchants funds 24-7-6-5, but the card networks don't actually have ways to access, send their payment search providers and coin flow, like, let's say this was, let's go back to the Stripe example. If Visa wanted to settle faster, they actually couldn't, like, we're aware right now without stable

coins. So Visa and other Cardinals were rolling up pilots. And yeah, we're starting to settle, get those funds seven days a week. It's not going to be T plus five seconds, like coin flow does it, but that window of like fronting, it goes down. So there's definitely some man behind the curtain going on that we're solving for

with both like financial products, balance sheet, are on liquidity engine, but it's cool to see that gap diminish. And we have all the infrastructure and technology to manage those different ledgers because you're managing an instant ledger, which is the blockchain,

with traditional rails. So you're connecting those two together, not only moving money between them, but connecting those two ledgers and marrying them together, which you've all done in-house and the battle test at scale. And maybe stating the obvious,

your guy's job would become much easier if initial payments actually started to be. become made in stable coins because then you just become an orchestrator of stable coins to whoever the end recipient is or the middle band that you need to route to, correct? Yeah, that's right. Like we take in the stable coin payments today, I don't know if much easier. It's just a little bit different. Like, we orchestrated between a bunch of different payment methods.

And in no world, is there going to be like one payment acceptance winner of some type of method, right? Like today, even, for example, we have merchants. will be 95% of their volume in credit cards, but they still have like 3% acceptance in bank payments. And then like 2% acceptance in stable coins or whatever it is. And even though like in my mind, bank payments is a way should your option pay for like,

I don't know, this is a red bull. Like to buy Red Bull, right? But if 3% of your users want to do it, you're not going to be like, oh, no, screw 3% of my revenue. I'm not going to accept it. So the job of people at Coinflow is going to be, accept a larger amount of payment options and continue to drive the speed of the settlement

down to closest instant. So I think that's why like stable coins, I'm so bullish as an infrastructure play because it's really the only way to connect all these very disparate systems and get as close to real time as possible for settlement. I'm a believer that over time we'll have more rather than less payment methods too. When a lot of these software companies become fintech at the same time, and you have money accounts associated with a lot of them, and you'll probably have a rise of more digital banks. Curious for your perspective, but that's the way I see things going.

100%. There's more and more payment networks. So, like, yeah, I guess like that digital bank example you called out or apps that become like more fintech that you can pay with those balances. So yeah, I think there's going to be more payment networks, both crypto networks, traditional fintem network, etc. But there needs to be a way to interoperate them because the goal of if you have money in an account,

those people want to monetize on those balances. And the only way to monetize on them is one, keep them in there or to allow them to spend those balances. So if they spend those balances, they need a way to transact. And the only way to do that easily globally is either they're issuing a card off that balance or to make them to a stable equity, I mean, transfer. So you touched on pay.

payouts, and we've talked about payments acceptance. Could you highlight coin flow's range of offerings, and at the same time, where you guys have gone based on where you see gaps in offerings from Stripe, Adi, and shift four, and larger existing payments players? Yeah, for sure. I always said there's like two main products. One is like allowing our merchants to accept payments globally

and instantly receive funds instead of waiting multiple days. So like all those people, you said at least one, two business days to get your money. We do in five seconds. And then also, none of them help you, like, get rid of fraud. They help you prevent some of the fraud. The difference between equipment flows, like, we'll eat all the chargeback risk. So the value problem is like, hey, get your money instantly and don't lose any money to fraud. So that's what a payment of step inside.

But once you get your money, a lot of businesses, marketplaces, remittance companies, gaming companies, is crypto exchanges, anything that has end consumers that need to cash out, FinTech, etc, will not only receive money for end users, but need to pay out to their end users. So there's a payout component, and that's other product. We have that in like 70 plus countries. I would say the biggest gap that we've seen in the market is combining those two products together. So when all those types of companies, like especially in marketplaces where you have, let's say in that ice cream shop example, let's say there is, I don't know,

digital marketplace for ice cream shops and you can buy all these gift cards. Now I'm the marketplace and I have all these sellers on my site. You're buying stuff from them. So not only do I have end users consuming and spending, you also need to go pay out these ice cream shop owners and they can be globally. So I think connecting those two products between ledgering, holding funds on platform, which is very easy to like digital wallets, fraud, etc. That's probably the biggest gap we've seen in the market.

And then there's just a lot of payout gaps because of the, how pre-funding works. So connect stable coins to that has been like a huge, huge win. I'll give you an example. So like say you are a business in the U.S. and you're to pay out suppliers over the weekend or whatever it may be. You can pay people out through Visa Direct. If there's small purchases, up to 50 grand, Visa Direct. So you enter your debit card and you get paid out or real-time payment network. But to get there, you actually have pre-fund the bank account be a wire, so like before 5 p.m. on Friday. So if you don't get your wire in like 2 p.m. on Friday, you actually can't use a real-time payment network. So it's kind of contradicting.

Let's say you don't get your wire in, but you send stable coins to us. That's still a proof of good funds. We know that money's there. And then we can burn those funds and then pay off from that balance over the weekend. So this like pre-funding dilemma has more or less been solved if you can use stable coins or payouts. So that's another big gap. But I think the biggest gap is still that like conducting the pay in and payout piece and making both instant. People have done a good job in making like the payout piece instant by pre-funding, but it's not like all that instant if you have to use your own balance sheet or somehow figure out a pre-fund before bank hour close.

Yeah, definitely. That example is helpful. It makes a lot of sense. You touched on the fraud piece. I think that's easy to overlook. How do you guys eat the risk of fraud? that seems very attractive if I were a vendor, for example. Yeah, no, it definitely is.

So the play really is like, it's an AI model and it's a mix between like insurance and a fraud model. It's going more and more towards like the fraud model and insurance is like making sure that we can cover it fully. But yeah, the fraud model learns on, has like 100,000 variables and it's an AI model. So it continues to learn as fraud attacks happen. Fraud is like a cat and mouse game where like you find the problem, you, you, you, you stomp it and then they come back like whatever in a roll hopefully months or years later

but they keep finding new routes and that's why like the AI is so helpful because if you have a deterministic model so for example like what that means is hey Wyatt is a fraudster and he is figuring out that I'm the ice cream shop owner and if I buy a $500 ice cream cone or more we actually don't do any checks because we think that's like a VIP customer they want gold sprinkled in the ice cream cone, and that's, like, super low risk to us. So say you as why the fraudster figure that out and only buy gold sprinkle ice cream cones now. Me as an ice cream shop owner in like two or three weeks, I got those chargebacks,

they'll figure out like, oh, hey, like, maybe we actually shouldn't allow people to buy $500 ice cream cones or do like really strong KYC, make Wyatt tell us his kid's first name, do an eyeball scan, which is going to kill conversion. So that's why these deterministic models don't really work, because, like, sure you can stop it, you can find out what's happening, duct tape it. But when you duct tape it, you actually kill real users. But these AI models will learn really quickly, like, okay, like we used to only sell one gold-plated ice cream code a month. We sold 10 today. Like, what is going on? And the model will learn, hey, saying, this is suspicious activity. Let's stop it.

The other beauty is of like the blockchain and what the card networks are starting to embrace and have at least these said put in the rules is something like proof of deliverability. So in the Ice Stream example, it doesn't really work well because it's a physical good. But let's just say like a digital good. A Fortnite skin is a good example. If you were dispute right now in Fortnite, like, hey, I didn't get my skin. There's really no good way for the card network to have insight into if that good was delivered to you because it's a digital good. How that goods delivered is a switch in Fortnite's database, like saying, hey, why it's a count, why is a beast, now has the dragon skin.

very, very hard to prove because, like, Fortnite's not going to be like, hey, here, Visa, here's my database keys, go see this. They'll just show like an email receipt. It can be altered. It's not very good. It doesn't win. With blockchain, everyone can see it including the PSP that the item was delivered right away if it's shown on chain.

So you can actually see the transaction happen like, hey, why it paid with the card, funds were settled to the merchant, and that same transaction, that skin was released. That transaction can be attached to the payment to Visa while the transaction happens. So if a dispute then later happens, we can be like, hey, no, why saying he never got this? Look, look, Visa, look, bank. That was actually given. So that's still like very early days, but for a lot of use cases, like the digital goods, it works very well. It even works better for things like remittance or when people are popping up into accounts.

For example, like adding money to an exchange, very hard to argue if you have a wallet that has received stable coins, that you didn't actually get those stable coins. it's very easy to prove in a matter of seconds, and you can tie it to that exact transaction. So there's a ton of innovation happening there behind the scenes, which isn't talked about because it's one, it's early and it's not sexy. But I read something the other day that like $100 billion of losses happen to merchants last year, just by friendly fraud.

What that means is like people know that if they call their bank and complain, that something wasn't right with the thing they bought, the bank will likely sound at them, which is called friendly fraud, even though that, hey, like, this Red Bull tasted funny, the bank will probably honor that, and now the merchant has a charge back, and I, as a consumer, just got my, like, $5 back for this Red Bull. So, yeah, there's a lot of, like, innovation happening there, and I'm excited to see. I think it will, like, definitely be a sleeper to look for in the next few years. Yeah, I mean, from my perspective, there are just multiple layers of compensation and issues

happening? Like, the banks are willing to eat that because they get to keep essentially all of the interest or whatever they're making on your deposits and that business is too good. So they'll pay you back for your Red Bull. But realistically, then in a way, it becomes the and merchant losing, which is a messed up system. So there's a lot to be fixed. A single ledger to your point is very attractive. I think when it comes to tracking something like fraud. Have you guys built your fraud engine in-house or what are you using? Yeah, I'd say our fraud engine is in-house. And then like any other fintech, we've bundled like 10 different providers.

So we have a bunch of different providers, whether like we're using even like some AI models. We have Gemini. We have another platform that has their own AIM model called Insure.A.I. We use them for a part of the insurance. We have our own engine that plugs into all these things and calculates the risk of fraud. plus a lot of it is like data orchestration to FD's models. So yeah, I think like most things in fintech are built as close to the rails as possible and like orchestrated together without end users knowing anything's there.

And it just works. In the backdrop of some innovation similar to what we've been talking about, where you're having more pay with crypto cards, pay with stocks, pay with treasuries type payment cards, do you think the fraud tooling and infrastructure anti-fraud mechanisms are getting better? Are you seeing interesting innovation on that front, especially when it comes to more on-chain assets,

more assets of different types, et cetera? I would say they're getting better. Nothing has been like fully cracked yet. And I think it's because it's so early and only the last year or two have been like a new wave of companies building and innovating just generally around the stable coin space. There's market leaders, like Coinbase, Circle, Tether. Like, there's been people doing it.

But now we have, like, hundreds of companies. And when you're a market leader, like, Coinbase, tether, whatever, circle, you all have your own fraud teams. Sure, like, you need this infrastructure. At some point, you're like, this isn't exist. We're just going to have our own team build internally. But when there's hundreds or thousands of companies already, it's technology, every company can't just have their own, like,

fraud team, figure it out, right? You want to use infrastructure providers or at least supplement it. So I think that's what like innovation stemming of like, okay, now there is a bunch of demand for people to build this type of apps or infrastructure and then there'll be other infrastructure support it. So that's what we're seeing here. I think it's still pretty early days though. Do that make sense? And it seems like over time, regardless, these more complex types of transactions like global are going to be more advantaged. I was curious to ask you in that vein, how much of what you guys do is U.S. to non-U.S. or non-U.S. to U.S. versus domestic. Yeah. I think we're probably a very unique spot in terms of most stable coin companies,

quote unquote, right? Most of our volumes U.S., probably at least 75%. It's like both pans and pads are domestic. And it just shows because, like, our banking rails are so archaic and so slow that, yeah, speeding up payments, using a better rail in between is an example. I think like the best example is our biggest category right now is marketplaces. So when there's a merchant is the marketplace and there's buyers and sellers in both sides. This is for digital goods or real goods or could be either. It can be anything. It can be anything.

I think the issue with these companies right now is the money movement's very slow. and you tell any marketplace, like I got my haircut this week, and I used a marketplace called Squire. It's a place for barbers. So my barber, instead of like setting up a stripe account, managing taxes, managing, like, the booking, Squire does that.

Squire is a marketplace, and all the barbers to do is go sign in. He enters the dates, and you can pay there, you can do everything there. On Squire, they use Stripe. My barber gives me a haircut on Friday. I pay it via stripe. he gets his money Tuesday.

I asked that same barbara like, hey, would you want to get paid today? His answer is going to be like, yes, I want to get paid today. My girlfriend and my friends want to go get drinks, I would love to use the money I made today from your tip to go buy everyone drinks. Can't happen, right?

Coincidentally, stripe most of their volume, I think 70% of their volume or something, 60 to 75, I don't know exact numbers. Majority comes from their marketplace product. So you can think about this as like, everyone who's selling an item through that marketplace is like, hey, I want to get my money faster, and they can't. And that's all domestic. Like, my barber's domestic, et cetera, and that's stripes volumes, mainly domestic, too.

So the long story is most of our volumes of US, unlike most stablecoin companies, but there's still huge things that are broken in very large industries, like marketplaces in the U.S. that you're just having a stable coin in the back end can make way more efficient. In that example, do you think the cost of delivering a free payment will come down to zero or an instant payment, I should say? Or do you think that there will be some kind of a credit market there where you're paying some rate in order to get instant payments versus whatever would be a two, three day latency? I don't think it'll go to zero because it doesn't need to go to zero. Consumers are willing to pay a lot, like right now a lot of money for it, right? I don't know what the average rate to borrow is right now,

but it's 8% for a year, if you're a small business, yeah. Let's call like 8 to 10, right? Let's call it 10 high side. Consumers are paying like 200 base to 1% to get one payment instantly from like Venmo, Coinbase, cash app, et cetera. And most people on Venmo are doing the instant payments, and that's in the U.S.

So like every time they receive a payment, that's 2%. so that, like, one payment that they just paid for instant payment is 25% of, like, the cost of capital to take that as a business for a year. So you can think about how many times they could get recycled, and sure, it might be cheaper, but it won't go to zero because people are just willing to pay for it. And if it's, like, marginally more expensive, let's call it, like, instead of 2% of majority of people in Vietnam are willing to pay 2%, so that's cut at 90% and call it, like, 20 basis points.

I still a solid margin, and on the credit market, That's still pretty one transaction. So I think there's like a lot of room to play with, even if it goes down 90%. Yeah, I completely agree. In the three years you've been working on in this area, essentially, how has the environment around you changed, both from perspective of companies and regulatory attitudes? Yeah, I mean, companies, there wasn't many people building this. It was all very crypto-centric.

I would say infrastructure was only being, I mean, people. People talked about, like, letting non-crypto customers use crypto rails since I've been in crypto for the last, like, decade. Like, oh, you're like, people are going to use Bitcoin. People are going to use this and that. Same thing in stablecoins. Like, there was some, I think the 2020 bull market saw some of that. People come on chain or businesses come on chain, primarily in NFTs.

And I think a lot of them are like PR stunts. Even ones that did well got shut down, like, Draftings had an NFC marketplace that did pretty well and they shut it down. It did really well relative to other NFC marketplace and they still shut it down. It probably didn't do as well as their actual business that makes money. So there just wasn't many businesses servicing anything outside of crypto and crypto is just really down. But I think there was like a cohort of believers of like, hey, like this core infrastructure does work and it's just a matter of time. And then between like the 2021, 2021, 2022, bare market happened or like bull market ended to a bear market. It was pretty crazy because

most people that were building infrastructure were servicing crypto companies. A number of crypto companies went down. So, like, your core ICP shrunk, and then not only that happened, but regulatory environment got more hostile. So if you're building in something that's, like,

financial, they were cracking down in banks in the U.S. Plus on crypto. So, like, your ICP is going down, and people are out to get you. So that was a pretty crazy time the last few years. And then I would say, like right around the Trump election, some companies started getting scale using stable coins

as infrastructure. The larger companies weren't slung down. And more and more companies like Coinflow and others started getting traditional Webto businesses to use and adapt these tools. And then I think there's a bunch of catalyst, but probably the Trump election just sparked a huge insurgents of like businesses. wanted to learn more about stable coins using stable coins, and then you basically saw every major fintech. And even some before the Trump admin, like PayPal

is one that you can call out because they had launched PayPal USB and started talking about stable coins during the Biden administration, et cetera. But then there was, and Bisa was doing this, there was only a few you call out. And I was telling banks like, hey, look, PayPal's doing it. Visa's doing it. Trust me, it's going to be a thing.

And then, so people started like looking at it, but they still looked at it like a little weird or squinted. And then when Trump got elected and acquisitions started happening, every fintech started announcing their stuff with stable coins, it came from like sideline to like, oh my gosh, everyone has to go and at least do research and development and make a press release that they're doing research development about it.

So yeah, huge tailwinds on like fintechs. And then from merchants or like from businesses that we serve, I would say the biggest change has been like, they're seeing that news. they're seeing that like, hey, like, this isn't going away, and consensus, this is a better tool. I think they were just scared, like, talking in person about it, like, cool, they get all the value process, but then again, the tools are using, they work. There's a way to optimize it, but the mental model they were looking at it was like, okay,

we can get our money instant, but the thing we're getting the money through stable coins, even though it's all infrastructure, let's say the binary mission got elected again or whoever got elected and they were like anti, like, they could just make that illegal. Now, like, sure, we're getting this thing faster, but the company that servicing us can't even operate it more. So that's not a huge win. So that risk is out of the picture now, which is awesome. Yeah, it's an important point.

It feels like there's a sustainability now. Dan, in closing, I wanted to ask, to that point you just made, if there is a seller of goods, a vendor out there who is in this paradigm where you take a payment on Friday, you receive funds on Tuesday, how should they proceed towards trying to iterate towards a next generation instant-esque payment system internally.

Yeah, I mean, they can just talk to us and we can do it all for them. So, yeah, if they want to get in contact with us, we're very reachable. Like our website's coinflow.com. Or you can hit me up on my Twitter or I'm sure it'll be attached to this. But yeah, reach out to anyone from the coin flow team and we're happy to help and map out your flow of funds, map, et cetera. But yeah, I think this is where the world's going because the value pops very simple. It's hard to find someone who doesn't want to get paid for what they're doing as soon as they do it.

Yeah, make sense. Well, Dan, thanks for joining us and hopefully we can sit down again sometime soon. Yeah, man. Thanks for having me. It's been a pleasure. 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-Bronk-podcast.com or just click on the tab in our website.

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