On The Brink with Castle Island - Raj Parekh (Monad Foundation) on Stablecoins and The Next Era of Fintech (EP.702)

Episode Date: February 18, 2026

Wyatt sits down with Raj Parekh, Head of Stablecoins and Payments at Monad. In this episode: Will enterprises build out their own stablecoin solutions? Will card payments continue to grow, or be challenged by other forms of payments? What is the role of governments in driving whether stablecoin adoption will continue, accelerate, or decelerate? How does Monad work with leading financial organizations? Where do you see opportunity for novel tech solutions around stablecoins? Will there be many stablecoins or a smaller number of stablecoins at scale? Will companies run their own corporate chains? How should companies look at embedding stablecoins in their workflows from scratch?

On today's episode, I sat down with Raj Perrick, head of stablecoins and payments at Monad. Raj started his career at Visa and over a seven-year tenure where he spent meaningful time across crypto, stablecoins, product, risk, security, and AI. He became deeply knowledgeable on the end-to-end workings of payment systems. From there, starting in 2022, he founded Portal, a platform that helps companies use stablecoins to move money fast and efficiently. In July of 2025, the Monad Foundation Acquired Portal, where Raj now leads the stable coin and payments effort. Raj is one of the most knowledgeable people I've had the pleasure of listening to talk about stablecoin-based finance.

Without further ado, I hope you enjoy our conversation. For disclosure, Castle Island is an investor in Monad. 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, discuss the 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 a Bitcoin. Bitcoin. Raj, thanks for coming on to chat today. Excited to hear about some of the work you're doing and it's been fun to follow like I was saying earlier. If you wouldn't mind to orient our conversation a bit, could you talk about portal and the history there and the path to where you are today? First of, I'm excited to be here.

It's always been fun jamming with yourself from the Castle Island team. My background started at DZEB. I really was enamored by payment systems for most of my career and even now to the day. Blockchains have really caught my eye. I'm a big believer in just open source payment systems. I think that's just a huge opportunity

and something we've never seen before. I think with a combination of blockchains, we do have something that we can actually achieve. From leaving VZub, I spend a lot of time on the crypto product side, launch stablecoin settlement. and then realized that there's just a lot of missing infrastructure in the space. If I'm a fintech or an FI or someone that wants to go build with this infrastructure,

that just wasn't really a lot of options. So I love to build portal. We work with companies like World Remit, Bitso, PayPal, a bunch of earlier stage companies and what I joke, boring use cases with stable coins and payments, from payroll to neobanking to freelance platforms. And so it's been exciting to see just this convergence of traditional fintech use cases with stablecoins also. About seven months ago, we were acquired by the Monnet Foundation. So I've got two jobs. We still have Portal as a stablecoin developer platform, but also have been spending a ton of

time just building out the Monnet ecosystem as well. Awesome. We talk about this internally because Matt and Nick were at Fidelity and their stories of Fidelity got interested in Bitcoin early on and want to make sure that users could buy Bitcoin on the platform and that led them down to create Fidelity digital assets. And we've seen Larry Fink have his tokenization. I'd call it. call it Discovery Roadmap. How did blockchain become a part of your job at Visa and a part of, call it your team or a broader focus there? It's super interesting, but around the time that I was going down the crypto Ravahole, I was building a security platform for banks and then intersection of security and payments went down this Ravahole. The Facebook Libra Association stuff

was starting to pop up. So Visa was actually an early member, the Libra Association, obviously a really bold, ambitious vision to see this thing out. Obviously, we all know the history. it didn't actually pan out the way that people hoped for. But that became an accelerant across fintechs and payment organizations to be like, wait, we have to take this technology pretty seriously because some of the largest organizations in the world are actually exploring it also. At that point, I was already seeing Visa send wires through mainframes and banking systems, and I was like, this just can't be the future.

If we, Visa being like a 60 to 70 year company, if the next 60 to 70 years is also like this, something's wrong. It made a lot more sense for everything to move to open source systems at some point. So I would say it's a combination of convergence of in the market pulling myself and Visa, but also just realizing what got us here is not going to be where we want to go in the future. And I think blockchains are going to play a really big role in changing that. And where do you think this innovation specifically happens? And the way I'd ask that question is,

if you look at some of the payments advance since the last 10, 15 years, I would say that Stripe and Shopify created solutions, which drove e-commerce experiences forward, and that was very much driven by the innovation of those companies, whereas you could say someone like an Amazon at the same time created their own closed-loop improvements to payments experiences. And with that in mind, do you think there will be startups and new companies that build out end-to-end stable coin payment solutions

that drive forward innovation for visas and fidelity to the world? Or do you think it'll be those companies catching on to this and building out their own systems? Where we are in the maturity cycle, you're obviously seeing a lot of innovation, not just happening at the early stage, but the enterprise level, too, companies like Stripe Shopify. At the same time, I think there's always going to be blind spots of these organizations just they can't meaningfully go after or want to build with. And that's the opportunity for startups. I still think there's a lot of opportunity around specific verticals around B2B payments.

I don't think some of these larger organizations are going to go after supply chain trade finance and building out bespoke workflows with import exporters. There's no software that exists with Shopify today for like that use case. Or I think you're starting to see a lot of uptick in companies that are thinking about payroll differently as well because now the user bases are now spread across the world. It's no longer just a hyper domestic use case anymore. And I think stable coins fit the bill pretty nicely. And Stripe's not a payroll company today, but that might be an opportunity for another

payroll company to capture or an earlier stage company as well. So I think there's still a lot of room and payments is such a massive opportunity. And I think sometimes when you think about the global payments overall TAM, if we're just penetrated to 1% of it, there's just a lot of room to run. And I think you're going to have a combination of early stage companies and the larger companies eat into that. And the last point I think is stable coins have effectively made being a global company a lot easier and faster, where a lot of the traditional companies have all this compliance and

regulatory and legal overhead or technical debt. they're not able to think about this new paradigm as fast and saying, wait, I can be global from day one and build a global fintech or a global payment system. I think that paradigm shift is still emerging across most of these organizations. Yeah, I agree. You said your adoption curve is something we agree on, and that will span these organizations, whether they build it themselves or call it work with providers. At the deeper layer, what do you think of corporate chains and do you think those are a feature where these assets are actually settling? Do you think it's on permissionless blockchains, permission blockchains, or what do you think that settlement layer

question looks like longer term? I might be a little jaded because back during my time at Visa as well, dating back to close to a decade, I've seen CBDCs and permission blockchains and a lot of this chatter, I think, has happened for many years. I think what I realize is that a lot of payment systems that have originated for many years, including Swift, Visa, they actually all start off as credibly neutral organizations. Visa used to be a consortium of banks. And then these banks agreed on a standard, and from there, enabled the four-party model.

Swift has done the same thing as well, just having a consortium of bank members that are part of it. You could even take that down to DTCC and it's even capital markets and clearing systems as well. Aments have always been a credibly neutral system that's grown over time. So I'm a big believer that there's going to be a lot of experiments and a lot of bets. If you're a large company of distribution, it's definitely worth trying because it's an ambitious enough endeavor. But I think the true payment systems that are durable and have last the period of time do start off credibly neutral in some capacity. And so I think of blockchains and the set of validators as the early consortium of member banks for like Swift and Visa as well. And so I think that

paradigm was going to continue to be true moving forward as well. It's a great point. I feel like people when talking about stable coin systems or crypto-native companies discuss to what I said things should be decentralized or centralized, but they don't actually think about the histories of decentralized governance outside of blockchain systems. Totally. And this is where, for me, being a visa and actually seeing the history of Visa, Dow's and some of the experiments that we see in the crypto space is actually like,

wait, I've actually seen that before. You see that with Swift. You've seen that with Visa. You've seen this with like early organizations. It now has a new catchphrase and a new term associated with it and a new mechanism for votes and governance. But these things are not novel from an organizational standpoint. With payment systems, just being so broadly impactful for like a market,

I think people have always realized that you can't have this concentrated across a single ruler or a leader. It does need to be spread out in an incredibly neutral way so that it can provide benefits to the entire globe versus a few courts of organizations. So do you think whether it's one chain that gets used excessively or multiple blockchains that in that case, the key financial players become validators? Is that their role in that ecosystem or where do they position? They'll become validators. I think of it today is there's multiple. rails. Even if you unpack debit processing, there's six or seven debit processing rails, then you have the credit rails, then you have your domestic schemes, and then you have your

global rails like the wires and swifts of the world. We've always been in a multi-payment rail ecosystem. And I think with blockchains, you're going to start to see a very similar opportunity where, for whatever reason, depending on your use case, if it's cross-border or if you're optimizing for fees or speed, you may try to route volume to a specific rail accordingly just to get to final destination. I think the same things that apply for blockchains as well. And so a lot of these organizations will either become members of a SWIP or they'll become a validator for a blockchain. And from there, they'll be able to provide the proper governance and controls for how they want to leverage the rail. But that's how I typically see things play out. Maybe I'm more pragmatic

and just referring to the traditional payment space, but I use a lot of those mental models and how I evaluate the blockchain space too. And what about stablecoin issuers? Is it a proliferation there? Is it a couple major players? Or how do you look at it? Stablecoin issuance is really interesting because I think when you see the U.S. and you see like the tethers and circles of the world that have really hit escape velocity, they started an experiment almost 10 years ago and have been able to get all the network effects, all the first mover advantages you can talk about it in spades with USD stable coins. I think now as you're starting to see the BRL stable coin or the MXS. End or other parts of the world,

you have to think about them a little differently. USD is just a very different beast than like the Mexican peso. And so even internally, how we evaluate working with the stable coin issuer, we can't think of it as in dollar terms because the demand base and the supply base is just very, very different. So we typically look for issuers that are either working that have political leverage or working directly with their governments, especially in markets where maybe the regulatory landscape might be unclear.

I think having that leverage is really critical. Also having built-in distribution partners, it's not enough to just say, cool, we have a stable We're now immediately going to see escape velocity and growth similar to circle if we survive long enough. How are you thinking about driving distribution across the existing FI or fintech space? And then also, what's your edge? Is it just cool, stablecoin issuance and we do some secret sauce on top? Or are you thinking about the mechanics of yield?

Are you thinking about how to interplay with defy effectively as well? What are the KPIs you shooting for? Is it circulating supply? And if you're doing it for a non-USD stable coin, what does that circulating supply even mean after? But I think a lot of these stable coin issuers that I've talked to, it's pretty clear you can tell the ones that are thinking about this strategically versus the ones that are seeing the opportunity for what it is today. And I'm excited to work with some of the best in class issuers that are out there. I know there's many on the non-USD side that are actively executing on this. We're excited to work with them too. I think some people make the argument or take the view that you see over 99% of stable coins in US dollars. And if they're stable coin believers, they believe that we're arcing towards some degree of global. global U.S. dollarization. But I take it and it sounds like you don't take that view based on the idea that you just need political and regulatory capture, which a lot of these countries

or systems just won't concede their monetary independence to dollarization. Yeah. It's an interesting thing that's played out for the last 20 years or so, too, where you already, even without stable coins, countries have been dollarized. You have Panama, you have Ecuador, you have Zabwe, you have many of these countries that have already adopted a dollar without a meaningful difference in technological innovation. I think we still haven't seen central banks across many markets crack down on this dollarization yet. So I think the verdicts still out. Central banks were like, hey, we're going to innovate and we're going to get ahead of this. And you're starting to see like in India, the RBI is now starting to talk about stable

coins a bit more. The EU has always been pretty forthcoming about it. They've obviously made it a little harder for these issues to be successful just based on how the regulations set up. But I think we're still in the early days where central bankers don't really feel the impact of stable coins yet in their market, but once they do, they're going to either try to innovate and work with the private sector to say, let's go build, or they're going to continue to look the other way, and then they won't be surprised when dollarization takes place in their market as well. Do you guys at Monad aspire to work directly with policymakers in any capacity? That's a great question. It all comes down to who are the policymakers that are willing to listen.

I think we're always interested in engaging in discourse with policymakers, but I think sometimes some policymakers just have their own point of view in the world, and they're going to rule with an iron fist and will continue to do that in their market. And some of these regulatory regimes allow for that. So I think it just really comes down to who's willing to listen, who's willing to innovate, who's willing to be a long-term thought partner. You've seen that shift in the U.S. recently where they are willing to listen. They are willing to actually be collaborative as well and then release real regulation and legislation around it. Those are the policymakers that we would love to engage with all day every day. And then from there, actually make it a win-win, not just here's what we want

to do in the stable coin space, but what is your market looking for? What are your institutions and your organization than your users looking for? And how do we craft the best win-win policy that actually makes your economy effective also? It feels to me like, if anything, that's even more in the interest of participants outside of the U.S., of policymakers outside of the U.S. core companies and banks outside of the U.S. because it actually is difficult to compete with Circle and Tether to the point that you made post-Genius. We haven't seen any other stable coin issuers really break out, even if they have immense traditional leverage in financial markets. But if you're a major bank or policymaker in another country, call it like a major economy,

it seems in your interest to want to get ahead or be a participant here because people are going to dollarize via stablecoins, then you at least want to offer the accompanying Nigerian Naira balance or Mexican peso balance or whatever it is because you'll have this poll of local payments where you can't spend dollars quite directly yet. That seems really in the interest of those parties to me, but I feel like we haven't seen it that much yet. I think we've seen it, but not what stable coins it. And I'll give you maybe a concrete example is that the organization behind UPI and India has been on this endeavor for the last couple years. and they have this goal that by 2029,

they want UPI to be fully integrated into about 20 different countries in their domestic schemes. And the whole intention is that UPI is really proven to be an effective domestic payment system, and everyone always talks about it as the best in class. But they've realized that it's not connected to Japan or the U.S. or Brazil and all these other markets. And so it's dominated the domestic markets,

but it's not really this cross-border use case. And what they've been doing is that they've actually been building out an engineering team and integrating with these other domestic schemes one-off. They tried this in Singapore. They just announced a pilot in Japan. But what's interesting is that they actually use blockchains instead. They would have global connectivity from day one versus having to do these bespoke integrations. So I actually think that a lot of companies that have been thinking about their payment system that really advanced way, they do want to globalize their currency and their payment systems because they know that

it's in their best interest for their economy. They just haven't been able to make the leap that actually leveraging open source systems like blockchain is connected to their domestic systems could actually be a huge accelerant for what they aspire for for the next five years could actually be done like less than a year or maybe two years max and they get full 100 whatever some country coverage. It's definitely a motivation that I've seen from most countries. I just don't know if they really connect to the dots yet of what's available from a technical standpoint and what they can actually accomplish in the short term too. What's your view on card payments versus some of these local payment methods? I think a lot of people in the U.S. frankly don't even know that

You go to areas like East Africa and card payments are not the dominant form of payment. They're actually far from it. Do you think from an innovation perspective that card payments will continue to be or be increasingly dominant or do you think we see more of these digital native, maybe even call them national payment methods? It's interesting because as you ask me the question, one of the things that we talked about at DISA a lot when I was there is that we didn't think of MasterCard as a competitor. We saw Ash as a competitor.

There was always this view internally to be like, let's open. up the mental model further and not just think of the next publicly traded company that's like a payment card network. We should be thinking about all payment methods as our competitors. So that's cash, that's QR code payments or mobile money operators in different markets as well. Those are actually the real competitors there for Visa. I think card payments is one proven to be a really effective business model. Visa still continues to be an efficient business with high margin with 300 million merchants globally. By that network effect is really, really hard to displace. And I think, think as more organizations and more companies and merchants across the world start to then

see more maturity in their local payment systems, naturally they're going to want to see cards as acceptance method. So I think there's a lot of room for visa to run and I think they're doing a great job adding new payment options associated with it. It's a really tough endeavor because you have to hyper-localize for a lot of different markets. I think at the same time, what I've also seen is that countries that haven't invested in their own payment system are now inheriting blockchains. If your government is not going to build your own UPI, as an actor and a user in your market,

you're going to look for the next best payment system to go towards, and that's ideally the cheapest as well. I think that's where you're starting to see the USDT on Tron and that inheritance that it has across some of these emerging markets, and people are often shocked by that. To answer your question directly, card payments still have a lot of room to run. There's still a lot of market structures

and infrastructure companies that are required to be stood up, But blockchain's just being open source and just available anywhere is an easy payment system for a user to inherit with very little upstart cost. If you want to set up a cardisher, let's just say, pick your country. You need a local bank. You need an issue or processor. There's more pieces involved. You have to make sure it's all fully connected.

It's compliant with visa rules. That would take you like a year or two, if not longer, depending on your jurisdiction. But blockchains can be set up today if you really want to as well. I think your point of the visa view that the competitor's cash is really interesting because to your earlier point about trying to position in places where you're going to have regulatory capture or tailwinds, I don't think governments can ban cash, at least most of them in the intermediate future, because of things like property rights. But what you can do is lean into technology that makes cash increasingly inconvenient and try and do this polite push of people

in the country to use cash less, which I think benefits governments. it's easier to make sure that people aren't evading taxes and generally have some sense of what people are doing with money, which they certainly want. So that makes a ton of sense. It seems like, first off, we will collectively be aided by eventually the governments would lean into this sort of technology. And hopefully that'll make for better built payment solutions. Totally. And I think if you're a government today and you were like, hey, we are going to go build a payment system from scratch, you probably have to consider leveraging blockchain's in self-capacity, just because of how fast other markets are expanding as well. And you want to

leapfrog ahead against your competing countries or also just making it available for your own currency to be exported overseas as well. Everyone wants to see more demand for their own currency. And if it's all just stuck in cash at the same time also, then you've basically constrained your economy to a domestic market domestically. I think everyone wants to internationalize their currency, attract foreign investors. I think that's what you want to do in a payment system. It may help you with taxes and all that sort of stuff, but it also helps you in informing better investments from other markets overseas too. In the U.S., you've had these rumors of CBDC projects within the government.

Do you think that government adoption, they would require that they build a blockchain internally and run on that ledger? Do you think in the foreseeable future that governments would use permissionless blockchains? Yes, and, you know, this is going back. I've seen the CBDC research exercise for a long time now, and I think you see it flip-flop. I think before you saw public-private partnerships was the big thing. And the next thing you know, there's these permission blockchain that will also pop up as well.

In terms of just speed of innovation, we've seen this with Fed now, it took forever to get launched. I think if there's an endeavor that's serious for like a CBDC, if you're a government, it's a tough design decision, but you may want to opt for a permission system just if you want more control over the different nodes. I think if you want to build with as little tech debt as possible, then permissionless blockchains are going to be the best. in class for both cross-border and domestic use cases, and I think present the right paradigm for it. So I'm obviously a big believer in commissionless public blockchains. I think that's the way that things are going to move longer term. They're just going to move a lot faster than a bottom's up effort for many, many years and then maybe never see the light a day, which is

something that we've seen time and time again from some of these government-backed technical endeavors as well. In terms of adoption, some of the areas we're talking about, you and I were chatting about agentic payments a little bit, but before we got started, do you think that agents or AI instances can have money accounts, at least in the near future? Does that constitute any sort of illicit activity with money or risks there such that that shouldn't happen in your view? It's really interesting because even just like taking a step back, I see payment systems in reality actually require two parts. It requires authorization and then settlement afterwards. I think blockchains have been historically really good at settlement. It's the best.

network possible. I don't think we've quite figured out the authorization side when it comes to blockchains. I think different companies have been building on top of it. You could argue wallet companies might be the authorization layer. But I think ultimately with agents also, there's going to need to be some form of authorization that takes place. Now, it could also be authorization for the fiat side or the stablecoin side. Just similar to how today traditional payments work, I think when it comes to agent transactions, stablecoins and fiat transactions are going to compete every single day, and the agents are going to make a hyper-rational decision to what they want to achieve. If they want, hey, this needs to be sent right now, stablecoins are going to make a ton of

sense. If they're like, no, this transaction, why don't we schedule it for like five days from now? If that's the rational decision to make for that specific use case, then maybe a swift transfer authorized by a user behind the scenes for an agent actually makes sense as well. So when I think about agents transacting, I think of it as hyper-rational individuals that are just going to look for the most efficient path. And then they're going to be able to do that at really, really high speeds. And I think what that's going to do is you could argue the agentic commerce stuff, maybe there's open AI plug in with Stripe, and maybe that solves the agentic commerce side.

I think there's a whole bigger pie that I'm particularly excited about, where you have back office treasury operations that maybe you have a treasurer who's flipping back and forth between a money market account and was trying to optimize interest every single day, but in reality, an agent can actually be given an instruction. And then from their process in a high-frequency style, all these transactions, whether it's Fiat or Stable coins, depending on the workflow. So I think we're just scratching the service right now. Obviously, the LOMs are just getting a lot more mature. They couldn't do basic math just maybe a few years ago, and now they're starting to get a lot smarter and are winning math competitions. And so I think we're

just scratching the surface there, but there's a lot of room to run. Blockchains are going to play a big role, but also the Fiat system is going to have to adopt to this new agentic world as well. I like your point that authorization has been a point that's not well enough served, because I agree. We've talked about chargebacks as being one functionality that could be interesting there, potentially some sort of on-chain notary. What do you think do you see a clear-cut potential solution to that issue, at least in the near term? A lot of these primitives haven't really been built by the blockchains itself. It's been a lot of the organizations have been constrained to blockchains. For the most important, I have to build around it. So we've left that decision to

the wallet providers, the card issuers to manage themselves in from a risk standpoint. And we haven't really built a standardized system around it. But that's what you've seen traditional payment systems have done like Visa or Swift. There's always this messaging layer that has enriched data and transaction information. And from there, you can like build the rules and other policies around those transactions. So I think we're getting there. There's still some work in the crypto-native context in terms of some of these policies, but we haven't really seen it fully realized at a larger scale with some of these payment systems. I think the wallet and card issuing layers are probably the most interesting places, especially as they lean into stablecoins a little

bit more. I think they'll have a lot of room to run up this authorization layer. Yeah, I think it's a great point that a lot of that call-it-accompanning infrastructure has been built by other providers. And in the wake of that, we've seen Stripe, Acquired Bridge and Privy, Modat, and you guys teamed up, obviously. Do you think you see more consolidation like that, where you're you see these key functions built out outside of blockchains or major financial players, and then they expand and go acquire those sorts of businesses to expand their purview and capability? I kind of think of it is like, what does the market need? And I think what's interesting is that if I go to a fintech today, large fintech and say, hey, go use stablecoins. And let's say they're

signed off. They're like, great. I think stable coins are fantastic. It's like, cool. You need an RPC node provider. You need a wallet provider. You need an orchestration company. And by the way, if you want cards, you need an issuing partner also. And so we've actually made it really difficult as an industry to actually implement this technology. We've basically have asked people to cobble together multiple vendors in order to accomplish their goals. It's like a Lego set. You would never do that for a traditional B2 sales motion if you're a Web2 company. You wouldn't say, oh yeah, buy us, but also you're going to have to buy these three other companies in order to use it effectively.

And so I think the market's typically always right. The market's telling us that, hey, we need to be better and have a better package solution. I think Stripe has recognized that. I think many other companies have also recognized that as well. I think a lot of companies are getting beefier to then expand their set. And I think it's ultimately going to provide a better product for the market where we think we're mature, but we actually have a lot more maturity that we have to go through before we're ready for the big league still.

So I think it's a chapter in our story as an industry, but it's ahead in the right direction as well. I get asked this question frequently and I'm trying to refine my answer. I'm curious for your view, but who do you think are the companies who are less obvious but clear beneficiaries of this technology? And more so talking about public companies that people wouldn't think of off the bat, but you think will benefit. There's a few. I still think banks are actually a big beneficiary of genius compliance. It's like you get batteries included to be a stable coin issuer. Now, you could argue what does a business model look like? Are there in the business of deposits?

Did that actually work? So I think there's a lot more unpacking that needs to get done. but I think genius has actually shown that, hey, banks, you guys can innovate. Don't be afraid of touching this technology. I think companies like FISA are doing a great job of thinking about their FIUSD from first principles. I'm like, hey, let's not just launch a stable coin for the sake of a stable coin, but if we have a thousand bank partners that now can use this technology in a compliant fashion, that's something that we should be paying attention to. I serve definitely like a sneaky winner.

I also think existing payment companies think your pioneers, your wisest of the world, I think all these folks have really strong payments people. And I actually think payments is actually a much deeper rabblehold than crypto is in some capacity. I think you can argue crypto and totality if you're going to go down defy, smart contracts, protocols, still a very deep rabblehole. But if you're constrained to just stable coins and blockchains as what you really need to know from the crypto space, the payment side is actually the deeper rabblehold that you need to go down. So I actually think a lot of these companies that have deep payment expertise are going to be able to go down.

the stable coin rabble hole fairly fast. And I think we're seeing that already with some of these announcements that are coming out, like Western unions, the money grams, the world, the remits of the world. They're not just talking about it. They actually have products and engineering teams that are actually around it. So I think a lot of those public companies are going to make strides fairly quickly, and they're starting to see more resourcing towards this endeavor as well. It's funny. We get clear regulation. I think companies in the space get really excited, but it's also like, okay, now we need to go get this licensing to be compliant. And to your point, it seems like banks are really well positioned just already being there. I was talking to Bavin, who's one of the

founders of Birch Hill, which is an up-and-coming risk curator. And we're talking about how if you're already and registered RIA, registered investment advisor, you're pretty well served to go and get into the curation game if you want to. And if you think that there's going to be a sizable market at the intersection of tokenized assets and traditional financial asset classes. Totally. I think it's just a matter of is that one, what does the demand look like? What is the quality of assets. It just goes back down to the same type of curation that they would do for their clients anyways. And then what is available on chain today? And I think that's where there's still some more maturity that we have to do as a space to, we obviously know what those mature

assets are. But if you're going to go down to a family office or a high net worth individual and you're curating a vault of some sort for them, you're going to want to make sure it's battle tested in some capacity. You've done the underwriting on what the profile of the product is, what's the reserves around and the collateral. So I think all those things are definitely batteries included for like these RIAs. It's just there's more work for them to do. And I think they have to assess the demand associated with it as well. And as we get this proliferation of stable coins, of tokenized assets, obviously you still have this core blockchain native crypto asset class like Monad has the Monad token as to most, if not all L1s and L2s. How do you think these

things coexist having those native crypto assets along with stable coins and tokenized assets? A lot of it's going to be abstracted. away, especially depending on your use case as well. I think we're starting to see that with some of the account abstraction, primitives that we're seeing pop up in the ecosystem as well, where you can now use your stable coins to pay for gas fees and then it's all auto-converted underneath the hood as well. Especially for like a fintech or a tratsy audience who's like, hey, we still want to process transactions, but it's hard for us to hold crypto on our balance sheet. They're going to want to look for some of these primitives to leverage. Now, at the end

of the day, it doesn't mean that the native asset is still not used to actually process the transaction. being used, but it's done indirectly sometimes. So I think you're going to start to see maybe more of that for the FinTech TradFi audience. I think what gets interesting is what we talked about these organizations becoming validators. I think that's where it gets really interesting. You're starting to see some of these larger organizations

saying, hey, this valetter thing is pretty interesting. We could actually contribute back and we can contribute back to the security of the entire network. There's actually emissions that we can earn from it as well. It's actually a very interesting model that feels similar to other maybe consortions or organizations we've been a part of. So I think we're not quite there yet,

but you're starting to see, I'm honestly sometimes surprised the number of organizations that proactively asked me about how to become a validator sometimes. But I think that might be something that we see longer term also. And I think more organizations

and blockchains that are designed for context and institutions will start to like bake that into their overall go-to-market motion too. And what would be your messaging to whether it's corporate companies that are integrating stable coin flows? Because I think one of the things

we see often, you've probably seen a ton of payments, is it's really easy to accumulate tech debt if you make decisions early on that you then wish, I wish we'd structure this differently or you have users in a certain workflow. So what advice would you give to folks who are making these design decisions

as they're working in this space? One is, what is the actual pain point and problem? Really just unpack that. I think the sake of doing a stable corn innovation project for the sake of doing it is not a good endeavor. I tried to really get to the root of it. A good example of that is we see companies that have large treasuries and they want to optimize the most amount of yield, but they still

need to do transactions with those funds. Stable coins present a really good opportunity because you can still tokenize your entire treasury. You can earn interest on it, so you're still optimizing the yield for it, but then you can still sling the stable coin thing around to all the counterparties, depending on what you're looking for. So I think unpacking the problem, and then from there backing into what is this unlock and what are your future plans for your business is the international expansion, which I've heard from many organizations. Is it okay? You know, we're seeing a lot of users complain about waiting five to seven days to a week sometimes for these transfers.

So this presents a new opportunity where we can send transactions quickly. Or if you want to start to add specific strategies around how you convert back and forth between different FX currency, that maybe using a combination of an MXN, DRL, and USC all in stable coins, actually present a much better yield optimization plus revenue opportunity for your business as well so that you're not dealing with the analog. or like another pain point is pre-funded accounts across all due different markets. I think that's what I would really stress a lot of organizations, get really, really sharp about the problem.

Because once you're really sharp about it, the solution is actually fairly straightforward afterwards. You may realize that Fiat might solve your problem, or you may also realize that stable coins directly impact this, and you could actually do a full re-haul and really accelerate your business accordingly as well. But I think starting with the problem is what I would say for most of these organizations. I think that's a great first one. Some of these large international or multinational organizations, it's amazing the balances they need to keep across accounts, across markets, across different

financial payment systems. And just by creating efficiencies there, where they can become more cash efficient, or they can pick up margin or spread when converting across currencies or assets, it's amazing how much of a difference that can make, especially for these companies that might be large about trying to become profitable or increasingly profitable. I mean, I've talked to multiple fintechs just in the traditional fiat world where they may be growing really fast. And then they realize like, oh, damn, our cash balance and our OPEX requirements, it went from 20% of our balance sheet to now like 60 to 70% of the balance sheet because we grew so fast. So there's like a natural graduation for most traditional fintechs.

How well can you grow the business from a transaction volume standpoint? But are you also efficient and like how much you're using your balance sheet accordingly? And it's not uncommon for a company and a founder to be like, oh, damn, we're doing so well on growth, but now we need to raise debt or we need to go raise more capital quickly because our runway is now three months for our core business. So in one side, you think you're growing really fast. On the other side, you have a real big problem. And I think a lot of fintechs have had to face that. And I think an opportunity with stablecoin is just given how fast some of these transactions can move. You can potentially think of a new strategy versus just thinking about pre-funded accounts all the time, too.

Yeah, this is a whole other conversation. But it's really cool with blockchains, how quickly debt capital and working capital can move now too. Because that used to sometimes be a multi-day process and now you can call on these lines quickly and providers can extend them quickly. And I think one thing that I've been thinking about quite a bit is we think about programmability a lot in the blockchain world. No one really knows what it means, but everyone talks about it. Like, it's a cool thing you can do. But I think, well, we've come to the realization on that we're working with 20 plus blockchains on the portal side, especially, is that programmability without speed is actually really bad in UX. It's like, you're not going to wait

for all these transactions to be fully settled. If I want to borrow and lend or if I want to take debt on and now, it's taking me a long time, it's also really expensive. But with blockchain like Monad, if it's millisecond block times, you can now do six transactions prior to like whatever you needed to do before. And so you've now maybe taken on a loan, you've maybe able to pay that back. You can unwrap a token, you can wrap a token. You can do maybe a swap in between as well.

And then you can meet the same settlement window that's required for you as well. And that's something we've seen on the card authorization side where the card off windows are about three seconds or so. On Monad, you could technically do about six transactions prior to the card authorization settlement. And that's a whole new design space that we haven't really fully unlocked yet just because legacy blockchains have been so slow. But I think speed actually unlocks programmability. And so I think one of the early days of that design space too. Raj, it's always a privilege picking your brain about stable coins and payments. If people want to get in touch with you or the team, how should they do it and how can you help potential partners?

First off, I'm on X at R Park, and then you can find me on LinkedIn at Raj Parik as well, and then Monad.x.x.Z is where you can find all things about Monad. Awesome. Raj, thanks for coming on. It's been a pleasure chatting and looking forward doing it, hopefully soon. Always a pleasure nerding out with you, Y. Thanks for having me. Thanks for listening to another episode of On the Brink with Castle Island. To learn more about Castle Island, visit castle island.vc. And to listen to all of our podcast episodes, please visit Castle Island.

dot vc slash podcast or just click on the tab on our website. Thanks for listening.