Technology, Connected - Banks Don't Want You To Have Crypto

Starting point is 00:00:00 we already have more transaction volume in stable coins, you know, last year, even the year before, frankly, than all of the transaction volume of Visa and MasterCard and PayPal combined. So stable coins far outpace that transaction level. But, hold on, can you help you understand what that means? Because that's blown my mind. When you say it as that phrase, I'm like, what? Yep. Exactly. So much more money is transacted on stable coins than there is transacted through traditional credit card payments.

Starting point is 00:00:30 systems on an annual basis. But the amazing thing is that even though those number of transactions are higher, the universe of people or accounts conducting those transactions is much smaller because arguably only about 200 million people in the world are using stable coins at the moment. Well, people, institutions, accounts, whatever you want to call it. And about $6 billion have credit cards. So if you think about that, that's amazing. And why is it so popular? Well, it's so popular because it's really useful, right? If you think about it, think about how hard, how challenging it is just to solve international payments.

Starting point is 00:01:13 You know, if I live here in London, if I want to send money to Jeremy in the U.S., I need to convert the currency, I need to go down to my bank, I need to open up a telegraphic transfer, fill out the forms. Three days later, he gets it, and I'm short, you know, 6% or 10% or whatever the fee is. that amount. If I send him stable coins, then it costs me a negligible amount of money and transaction cost, probably on the order of less than a dollar, regardless of whether I send him a dollar or a billion dollars. And he gets it instantly, well, within a minute. And anybody can send it to anybody without the need for a bank in the middle. So that's an amazing innovation, because think of all the people in the world who don't have easy access to bank accounts. Think of all the banks that say, well, if you want to send a transfer of money, you know, we have a minimum of $100 or $500 to send,

Starting point is 00:02:05 otherwise it's not worth the paperwork. But I can send Jeremy 10 cents if I want. It's, you can be infinitely small or infinitely large and it's the same cost. So when you have a payment system like that that enables everybody in the world to pay each other at almost no cost, that's actually quite revolutionary. And so one of the obvious places that we've seen big uptake on This are, of course, in emerging markets because payment options for people in emerging markets are more limited, typically. What are those transactions? It runs the gamut from market traders in Nigeria buying and selling vegetables and using their mobile devices as payment rails to, you know, hedge funds and banks settling between accounts, you know, in the tens and hundreds of millions. All right. So what did we just watch right there?

Starting point is 00:02:54 We watched thinking on paper, bite-sized, a shot of technological, technology. keeler to your prefrontal cortex. It's just a taste at a smorgasbord of what awaits you with the full thinking on paper interviews. There really is nothing to like it out there at the moment connecting the dots of all these technologies. So subscribe where you're listening. Check the long former interviews out. And remember, stay curious. Be disruptive. Keep thinking on paper.

Technology, Connected - Banks Don't Want You To Have Crypto

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