On The Brink with Castle Island - Markus Franke and Denney Kwok (Mento Labs) on Stablecoins for FX (EP.628)

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Markus Franke and Denney Kwok from Mento Labs join the show. In this episode:  Non-USD stablecoins On-chain FX Microlending and financing for emerging markets

On today's episode of On the Brink, I sat down with Marcus Frank and Denny Kwaq from Mento Labs for our latest conversation focused on stable coins in Defi. Mento is a platform for currency trading powered by stable coins. I hope you enjoy our conversation. 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 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. Marcus and Denny from Mento Labs. Thank you for coming on the podcast.

Thank you for having us. Really excited to be here. Looking forward to the conversation. Yeah, I'm very excited to be here. You guys are doing a lot of interesting work in the crypto and stable coin space. If you don't mind, love to get a quick background to kick things off. Absolutely. I can get started with that. My name is Marcus. I'm a founder and CEO of Mentor Labs, and I'm coming from an economics background, studied economics, worked on a PhD in economics, worked on portfolio theory and during that PhD and on also some monetary economics. And then worked in TreadFie for a longer time for J.P. Morgan, Merrill Lynch was a portfolio manager

in the Alliance Asset Management Group, was even managing a part of a pension fund from Bank for International Settlements. And then seven years ago, came into the Web 3 space. It was part of the early Sellor team working on Sellor, now an L2 platform, on Ethereum.

And they are always, as an economist, focused on stablecoins and how a stable coin platform should look like. And then around two years ago, we've spun off mentor as a separate company as a standalone project. Amazing. I'm Denny. I also came from a trap-fied background to start my career and did some management consulting

for asset managers. More recently, I did product at Google for about four years and made my way into what three led product for the Circle, USDC team, building our growth there. And then recently joined Mento about six months ago as the chief product officer. I'm excited to be here. So to be clear, Mento started as a project within SELO? Yes, Mentos was the initial stablecoin team inside C-Labs company that is working on SELO. And we've built the early stable coins that were live first on SELO, the SELO dollar, which launched just after Mainnet launch.

We also built the Sello Euro. And then at some point, we thought two things need to happen. One thing is we need to bring other stable coins also onto Selo. We need to have USDT there, USDC and others. And mentor as a project at some point should also be independent to be able to go live on other platforms as well. So in the beginning, we started off as the core stablecoin team. And after the spin-off, we focused on other things. Our first focus actually was to launch more currencies for different use cases and for different

reasons. We always wanted to have a broad range of currencies and mentor today actually offers 15 different currencies, all the G7 currencies and then also more long tail or emerging market currencies like, for example, a Philippine peso, Kenyan shilling or Colombian peso from different regions of the world. And initially, we always had this mission of having a stable coin for every country in the world. And we still think this is important that everyone in every country in the world has the choice what stable coins they want to use. But currently, our focus also is much more on the FX side of things. Having so many different currencies actually enables also sorts of FX trades and FX is a super important market. It's in fact the largest market in the world

with $7.5 trillion in daily trading volume. I think we'll talk a bit later, a bit more about FX, but with MENTO in the end, with having so many currencies live, we now have a proper FX platform that enables all sorts of currency swaps. And this is currently our big focus. And to that point, Mento today is a platform where users can swap among those currencies that you mentioned to confirm. Yes, exactly. So all of these 15 currencies, you can go, for example, on app.mento.org or other places where Mento is integrated, and swap between different currencies. You can go from a euro to a pound, from a pound to a Kenyan shilling, all in a second or two until that trade settles.

to traditional FX settlement times that are typically T plus 2. We also already integrated other stable coins in that. So we also integrated, for example, USDT and USCC. So you can easily also swap from USDT into a Kenyan shilling or into a Philippine peso. And what made you excited about building out this longer tail of currency stable coins early on versus allowing stable coins to proliferate just as US dollars. So having a US dollar on chain has many, many advantages. And especially for people in markets where there is high inflation or in markets where

their local currency loses value against the dollar, having easy access on chain to dollar stable coins is already a great use case by itself because this allows people to access a stable currency, they can save in a stable currency. There are other use cases for stable coins as well. We, for example, talked a lot in the past about credit use cases. When people, for example, want to get a loan, if they, for example, have a small or medium business in Kenya, maybe they don't have access to a bank and they want to get a loan to expand the range of product they can sell, then they have a preference for a

loan in local currency because otherwise if they would only be able to get a loan or to get credit in a dollar stable coin, they would bear the FX risk because their revenues are in local currencies. And when their revenues are in local currencies, this is the currency then they have to pay back that loan. And if the local currency would lose value against the dollar, paying back that loan in dollars could become expensive. So microlending is. a great use case for local currencies and we've partnered with partners in Kenya, in Ghana, in many other countries around the world that now start to do microlending or credit business in general using local currency stable coins. This is also how Mento is used today already a lot.

Last year we had more than 550 million transactions on the Mento platform and we've seen seen that these use cases around microlending in Kenya or in Ghana grew significantly. We are also seeing remittances. And if you're, for example, in the Philippines and you want to send either money home or money from home to somewhere else, you could use a Philippine peso stable coin or you could use a dollar stable coin. So you have that choice. And then again, the recipient of this remittances payment of that transfer again has

the choice if they want to keep local currency, if they want to off-ramp, or if they want to swap into other currencies. Today, in annualized numbers, we see around 20 billion in trading volume on MENTO. And a part of this comes from these, I would say, traditional stablecoin use cases, but we now also see tremendous growth on chain FX in basically transactions where users want to go, for example, from a dollar to a euro or from a euro to some other currency, and in the end, want to use stable coins for that. And I think markets to add to that, as we see more and more adoption from stable coins by enterprises and businesses,

beyond just user remittances, we're seeing a lot of cross-border payments use cases where these emerging markets or non-dollar stable coins really provide added value and increased value in the flow for a lot of these platforms and enterprises and businesses. For example, today, a lot of the cross-border payments used by stable coins are done in dollar stable coins, but we really believe that if you introduce non-dollar stable coins, you can really, really optimize the flow, especially in these less efficient corridors where there's not as good Fiat rails,

there's not as good spreads. And when you go from Fiat to dollar stable coin back to Fiat in two different currencies, you introduce a pretty widespread and that creates a lot more in efficiency. So we believe that's a real big killer use case in the coming year. And with regard to that volume that you guys were highlighting, is that through standard crypto wallets mostly? Is it your standard crypto user? Or what does the activity look like in terms of who the user is and how they're interacting with Mento? So I mentioned we have now 15 currencies live. And we see that in all these G7 currencies,

the use cases are more around trading. Some of these currencies also in the real world are more trading forward currencies. So for example, I think 40% of all the FX desks sit in the UK. The British pound is used in a lot of FX trading transactions. Also, for example, the Japanese yen is used as a counterpart for many Southeast Asian countries for trading use cases. And then we see a lot of transactions also across Africa where users, for example, want to have access to a dollar and do transactions between a dollar and the euro or between a local currency stable coin and the dollar. So we actually see a bit of a divide here between more emerging markets, use cases that are around payments, micro-lending remittances, and then global use cases that are more around trading.

And you would classify that trading behavior is speculative, to be clear? I would say, yes, a part of that is FX speculation. I mean, Web3, when you want to bootstrap liquidity and volume for a product, it often starts with speculative trading. This is how many markets in Web3 emerged. And for us also, it's very important because in the end, this is how we can grow. In the end, a lot of the users that we have, initial users for new products and new platforms, are then traders in Web3 world that want to try out. a product and they are very important for us. We think into the game, we actually can have,

also for traditional traders, a lot of advantages that we can show them why they should enter Web 2. In the FX market today, there are no direct liquid pairs between certain currencies. You always have to go into transactions. If you, for example, want to go from a Kenyan shilling to Ghana and Sedi, you often have to first go from a Kenyan shilling to a dollar and then from a dollar to a Ghana and Sedi. If every transaction in the real FX world or in the traditional FX world takes T plus two settlement, then it takes four to six days, depending if there's a weekend in the middle until your final transaction settles and until you are in your target currency. Now we can offer these markets on chain.

We know that Web3 traders will try it out first. We know that speculation, FX speculation, will be the first use case for that. But we think we can actually offer these markets to many other audiences as well. And they are really, really interesting for many other audiences. I mentioned the size of the FX market in the beginning. It's like $7.5 trillion a day of trading volumes. So this is a huge market and 30% of that trading volume is spot market, 50% are FX swaps, 15% are FX forwards. We can enable all of these use cases on chain as well in a much more efficient manner.

Of course, large part of this market goes via the dollar. And the reason here is what I mentioned before is because there are no direct pairs in these more exotic currencies. But even without the dollar in the FX market, the, for example, euro to British pound market alone is 150 billion a day. So if you can just get a fraction of that on chain, this is tremendous. And I think it's also a market where Web 3 can play out its strengths, that you have common infrastructure that works globally. You have instant settlements. you have a lot of transparency, and in the end, players globally can use that infrastructure. So I think this is a perfect use case for V3.

Yeah, Marcus, I think you made a really good point, especially on the routes at corridors that aren't typically served directly on traditional effects markets. Web 3 Rails can really break down these barriers to existing institutions. And we may see behavior and routes and trades that we don't typically see, and it might actually unlock a new portion of volume or settlement or trading or whatever you call it. Do you have an example of that that you've seen or can think of? I think we're just seeing emerging parts of this behavior coming out, but a lot of the volume goes through these G7 currencies today.

We may actually see more and more volume as this on-chain FX market picks up in more interesting corridors that we haven't seen in traditional FX markets. For example, maybe something like Brazil to India, the Brazilian Realta Indian rupee, we might see tons of volume pickup there. We know a lot of trade happens through this corridor, but a lot of it goes through the dollar market, for instance. So we may see just shifting numbers, shifting dynamics. I think that could be really cool as more and more adoption comes on chain. And Marcus, you highlighted liquidity, new corridors, and settlement as being the two primary advantages. So would love for either one of you guys to weigh in.

do you see those as the two primary advantages here? Are there any other improvements you think on-chain FX makes a traditional FX that are worth noting? So I would mention also in addition to these scaling pairs. I think what we've seen in Web 3 is that this industry is really, really good in offering new types of markets. You can use the same infrastructure for different types of markets. we could offer FX swaps on chain, we could offer RFQ type of markets on chain, we could offer

more exotic pairs on chain, because in the end it's always just a click of a button to add a new trading pair, basically, and therefore I think we can expand the range of markets that users can use. I think also that this technology works 24-7 is a huge advantage. Traditional FX markets don't work 24-7, which is crazy for a market that size that users over the weekend just don't have any opportunity to hedge their FX exposure or to actually even see the value of their Ghana and Cedis in euros or in any other currency over the weekend. I think that is something where this technology can offer a lot of advantages. And then it's also, I think, really, really interesting to see that there is not a lot

of FX infrastructure actually already live in Web 3. There are many different platforms, many different chains out there that have a few different currencies live as stablecoins. I think Mento now has probably the broadest range of stable coins live. but proper FX infrastructure is actually missing in all of the networks out there. And I think this is where we as mentor also can make a difference. We can offer better markets across all of these currencies because the traditional way in Web3 or on blockchains,

how markets are structured are probably also not optimized for FX. There are AMMs as a very typical type. of market on a blockchain and an AMM is using a certain pricing function. And this pricing function depends on basically two buckets of the two assets that are traded in this AMM. And therefore, this AMM is not optimized to mirror an off-chain price. I mean, I mentioned the amount of volume that daily flows through the, for example, euro-dollar market.

So currently at least this price between the euro and the dollar is determined off-chain. So what we need on-chain is actually proper infrastructure that is able to, in very high frequencies, mimic that price of the off-chain world. And here in AMM is not the proper infrastructure. What we have with mentor is what we call FPMMs, fixed-price market makers. In the end, pools that allow users to swap at the exchange rate. And this is what we now have on SLO and want to bring two other networks as well. So we want to bring this in the end to all major networks out there or major blockchains out there that have an interest in being able to offer proper FX markets. It's a great point you make and you have me thinking now about the strategies you can enable with on-chain currencies.

I think about a lot of the vaults that we've seen in crypto and that you could have vault strategies where you own a mix of underline. line currencies and maybe through microlending, they go and each earn their own yields. And you can have this joint exposure across currencies rather than being tied to one, which I'd say somewhat attractive if you're in the U.S., possibly even more attractive if you're elsewhere. How important is it being able to swap among USD stables? You mentioned that as a use case and that you look to add USDC, USDT alongside the USD stable coin they already had. I think there's also an important use case because all of these stablecoins, even the USD stablecoins, offer different features, even with the large ones out there. Maybe some stable coins have better on and off ramping in certain areas of the world.

Maybe some of them are more optimized for saving and some of them are more optimized for payments. maybe some of them are more optimized for trading on-chain with other FX currencies. So in the end, this is the beauty of these markets. You can offer users choice, both what currency they want to use in terms of do I want to use a euro or a yen or a dollar, and what dollar stable coins do they want to use for a certain use case. So making also swapping very easy between a dollar and a dollar stable. coin is, I think, also a part of the Mento platform. To make a very concrete example, if users

today, for example, go to Minipay, a wallet that opera launched, they can actually easily drag and drop one dollar pocket onto the other dollar pocket. And this swap in the background is powered also by Mento because this is in the end, the core of our platform that we make these swaps available easily. And users can try that out, that swap between two dollar stable coins. And the reason for this, again, could be I have better on and off ramps in a certain region, or I can save with one stable coin, but I can pay with the other, or my friend only uses the other stable coin.

So also here, swaps are actually extremely important. And one really key feature that we think will bring a lot of value as the stablecoin space develops and matures is that the mental platform can also integrate other non-dollar stable coins as well. as we see more and more issuers come online and build sufficient liquidity and have good enough peg models, we can actually integrate those into the mental platform so that they can tap into this FPMM model that Markets described and not rely on the need to boot shop liquidity and permutate that across every single currency pair in traditional AMM liquidity pools. So for example, if there is a new British pound stable coin or Australian dollar stablecoin or what have you, they can actually plug into this infrastructure and be tradable and usable

across all the different currency pairs too. So we believe that's going to be a huge value to the industry and the space and other stable point issuers as well. Could, for example, also be a CBDC that is launched in a certain market, which is maybe widely accepted. But the problem then is that the CBDC doesn't have all the integrations or all the on and off-rams that maybe UST has in other markets. and then being able to swap from your Brazilian Real CBDC to USDT is a very important feature that this swap works efficiently. And again, an AMM is probably not the most efficient market for that because then arbitrators actually have to balance the pools always at the price where

currently the Brazilian Real and the US dollar trades, which is an inefficient setup. Yeah, understood on the need to go back to a currency that might have the integrations that you need at that moment. In the context of this longer tail of currency stable coins, if I hold a Nigerian Naira stable coin, for example, how is the support for that with payment cards? For example, because I know with USDC, there are a lot of evolving ways that I can stream that to a credit card and make a payment using USDC somewhat seamlessly. granted that's still early and evolving. So how do you see that evolution with this longer tail of stable coins that is still emerging? From the product perspective, I see it in an arc because USDC or some of these more established stable coins have developed these rails. You can actually use the mental protocol as a stopgap in between and productize that entire

flow and abstract that away from the end user. For example, in the Nigerian Naira case that you just described. If the issuer or the card payment provider only accepts USDC, you can actually use a mental protocol on the back end and integrate that and deliver USDC at the current exchange rate to the merchant or the payment provider and take away that entire flow. And as the stablecoin market develops and there's wider and wider acceptance and regulatory clarity, we'll see those integrations from those issuers into their local rails and into their local ecosystems. So I see it as an arc and I think you can productize a lot of that out and build a good user experience from both the companies integrating and also the end user as well.

And do you guys feel like you're competing with larger players, traditional institutions, or software businesses for those kinds of use cases? Are they awake to that now? Yeah, I really don't think so. I see us is really complementary to the value stack and the value chain. We are building this platform where you actually can trade and swap at the current exchange rates. I think these financial institutions, when you're talking about stablecoins, that is, will kind of use us in what they offer and the end product that they offer. Of course,

we are looking to disrupt the actual traditional FX markets and bring more of that on chain. But as more and more institutions come on chain, we see us as a complementary base layer infrastructure to power all their services that they provide. And it's even compared to existing marketplaces. we offer an additional marketplace here, and therefore I think this, I would say, creates a lot of arbitrage volume that again then helps both the existing marketplace and it helps the network, and it just makes then trading on-chain more efficient. Also, as we've mentioned before, we can integrate other stable coins there, so everyone can integrate here and benefit from these new type of market. places. And then people, I think, that want to engage on chain with FX trading in some way have then a broad range. We can, in countries where there's no currency live yet, we have by now 15, we are relatively fast in adding more currencies there. So we can help with these,

but we also can add others here when there are already currencies live. So I think, as Danny mentioned is just adding more tools for users and enable actually then a part of the FX market to come on chain. And then we really all benefit from this infrastructure, that this infrastructure works globally on the same rails and takes away a lot of the frictions of today's FX markets. Yeah, that's exactly right. Super excited to see everything that's going to be built out. I think it's still really early days for this space and really, really exciting things on the horizon, I think. Yeah, to your point, I think it's interesting in the arc of crypto. A lot of times it's been the arbitrage and early opportunities to provide liquidity at

high return, which attracts the first more traditional players to interact, and then they stick around once they see a lot of opportunity. Early in crypto was the high-frequency trading firms, which were some of the early actors and continue to be very active. This is the way our industry always bootstraps. We have to find an optimum between basically giving these incentives and being a sustainable platform. I think this is then in the end finding that optimum the task of the protocols and projects that are building in this space. But in the end, yeah, absolutely. You're right. Do you get any regulatory pushback for providing these products to potentially people globally? So I think one important point there is first, that is the beauty of building

fully open source of building smart contract based. In the end, we build infrastructure that users then can use. And in most of the markets out there, if then users use that infrastructure, that is very transparent. Most regulators are fine. The on and off ramps are in most countries and should be regulated when you basically go from fiat into digital currencies. And I think this is also good and important. And then in the end, we still, even though we build in the more decentralized way and we are focusing on building infrastructure and not regulated products, we still want to engage with the regulator and basically tell them, hey, this is what we're building. Do you like it? And in most of the countries where we are now live, actually the regulator likes this because,

again, it's all smart contract-based. It's all open source. This collateral for the stable coins sits on chain, so everyone can directly verify it. All transactions can be verified. And therefore, I think there is a lot of openness for this. And we've seen also a shift globally from regulators, and not only because there's a shift in the US, but also because every country around the world is now looking deeper into this technology. and therefore we are very, I think, positive on regulation. I think it's needed and I think it's good for us as a infrastructure builder. Yeah, the Genius Act just passed Senate last night.

Yeah, I was about to say, big day for us all. Yeah, we'll see as that moves up the chain and I think a lot of countries in the world and regulatory bodies will use that as a baseline for their framework. So sending in the positive direction. I've heard a lot of stories like that already, how companies operating in other regions are seeing a positive way because of friendly or crypto regulation in the U.S. What products are you guys seeing demand for when it comes to the tail of currencies that you support and maybe even touching on some of the microlending directions? What do you think people want in this market regime and how are you positioning? So I think maybe to get started, again, there's different directions, how do you?

the mental platform can be used. You mentioned micro-lending, for example, and here we've partnered with many micro-lenders, and I think for them is good to have that choice to be able to offer loans to small businesses now on-chain and can give access to capital on-chain. And there's huge demand for it because there's a huge credit gap in many regions of the world. Many regions of the world actually don't operate the ability and not because people are... You're saying small and medium businesses just don't even have access to credit. Yeah, exactly. And the reason that they don't have access is actually what holds many regions of the world back. The entrepreneurs in these regions are at least as creative as in any other region of the world, but lack of capital is the biggest

problem. And now being able to offer access to capital both in local currency and in global currency already removes some of these frictions. So if you look into microlending, I think this can unlock a lot. Paring this with giving people the ability to hedge currency exposure and to speculate also on currencies makes these currencies,

these digital currencies, even more liquid, and therefore, again, this also helps the microlending case. So I think all these different use cases actually benefit from each other. huge network effect there. If I have three traders that want to speculate on, I don't know, how the dollar evolves over the next two weeks, they actually make the dollar stable coins

more liquid. If they speculate against the euro or against the Japanese yen, they make these markets more liquid. And these markets then can enable micro-ladening use cases. So I think the network effects of this are huge. And this is also why we see these crazy trade. volumes in the FX markets every day. Not all over the speculation, a lot of it is hedging, there's all sorts of other operations and this is what we can bring on chain now. I mentioned earlier in our conversation, but cross-border payments, both from an user admin standpoint and also from B2B standpoint, I think is really unlocked by non-US dollar stable points. Actually, there's some loose data around this, but there are a ton of businesses

in jurisdictions that aren't served by traditional banking rails that actually use USDT today to move value across borders. And that is mainly due to the fact that there aren't many other options to do this on chain historically. As we see more and more of these come live, we can actually see local currency stable coins powering these transactions in their currency of choice and being able to swap at real world FX rates without that. I think longer term, to your point around regulatory clarity, we'll actually see some of the more trad-by-type FX use cases come on-chain. For example, a lot of firms, enterprise is actually used deliverable FX boards

to hedge their receivables or some of their revenue. That can be unlocked with local stable coins on-chain, and actually it provides added benefits because of the programmability of blockchain rails that you typically had to rely on a prime broker or an OTC desk for. And it's crazy, but you still pick up the phone and call your broker to do some of these trades today. And that removes a lot of that need and inefficiency as more of these things come online. And maybe one more example of a typical flow that actually both enables FX trading

and enables use cases that benefit end users, for example, microlending. If you're a market maker that makes the Bitcoin to Kenyan shilling book in Kenya, then there are times where you actually have demand for Kenyan shilling, and there are times where you have excess supply of Kenyan shilling, always depending on how Bitcoin evolves and depending on the volatility of Bitcoin. So you as a market maker in that case have a need for going in between Kenyan shilling and other currencies to, in the end, satisfy your FX needs. What you also do then with that is actually you,

make a Kenyan-Shilling stable coin much more liquid with that, that then again helps a microlender in that market to give more loans to users. And these users, again, find liquid markets not only on Mento, for example, between a Kenyan shilling and a dollar. They also not on Mento, maybe find very liquid markets between Kenyan shilling and Bitcoin, but then maybe with their loan, they also want to do other use cases off-chain. But these two use cases, micro-lending, and then actually trading in the end support each other. I imagine life becomes a lot easier for that market maker of the Kenyan shilling when all of a sudden firms all over the world, individuals all over the world,

have actual access to get shilling because it's a stable coin and it's physically accessible versus, to my knowledge, it's not the easiest currency to actually get access to if you're a firm in New York, for example. Totally, totally. And I think offering these markets then, we need to do it. it in a way that is efficient for these firms because, of course, they benefit them from small spreads between the assets. They trade and therefore accessing this currency needs to happen in a very efficient way. And we think with our FPMMs, these fixed price market makers,

we allow them users to actually get the currency they need at the price that is the right price for these assets. I want to close with a parting thought from you guys, which is I think there's clear utility here for the evolution of on-chain FX and financial markets. Why do you think the wider audience should care about on-chain FX and about Mentos' mission? And what is the impact on your typical user? So I think why people should care, A, because this is the largest market in the world, and Web 3 has a lot of advantages for that market. So we actually should bring a fraction of this market on chain.

Again, $7.5 trillion trading volume every day. If you only look at the FX spot market, it's still more than $2 trillion every day. So if you get a fraction of that spot market on chain, then actually all the stablecoin projects out there, all the networks out there, all the blockchains out there actually benefit from that a lot. And therefore, I think people should care.

and I think we offer a very open solution. We are now bringing this solution to the multi-chain and want to partner with other networks out there that have an interest in FX. So we are basically not tribal. We are very open to partner with anyone here to bring this solution to the world. And I think this has a lot of advantages.

And these advantages are actually ranging from trading use cases to end user-focused use cases. and therefore are relevant for both retail markets and in-sea markets as well. Yeah, I think markets wrapped it up really nicely, but FX, cross-border payments, all these use cases, has been like a pipe dream for all of us building in this space for many years. And I think having this infrastructure, being able to swap at real world prices,

will really open up Pandora's box on what could be built on top of it. So just really, really excited there and what it enables in the rest of the industry. Well, I'll leave it there. Likewise, very excited. Thank you guys for coming on and hope to have you back soon. Amazing. Thanks, Wyatt. Really appreciate it. Thank you so much for having us. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To find out more about Castle Island, visit castle island.Vicc. To listen to all of our podcast episodes, please go to On the brink dashpodcast.com or just click on the tab in our website. Thanks for listening.