The Pomp Podcast - #1521 Denelle Dixon | Banks Are Going ALL-IN On Crypto

Episode Date: April 3, 2025

Denelle Dixon is the CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation. In this conversation we talk about what’s happening around the world with this technology, how people in emerging markets are using stablecoins and payment rails, Wall Street, and what the future will look like. ======================BitcoinIRA: Buy, sell, and swap 75+ cryptocurrencies in your retirement account. Take 3 minutes to open your account & get connected to a team of IRA specialists that will guide you through every step of the process. Go to https://bitcoinira.com/pomp/ to earn up to $500 in rewards.======================Polkadot is a scalable, secure, and decentralized blockchain technology aimed at creating Web3. Created by Gavin Wood, co-founder of Ethereum, Polkadot empowers users to build decentralized applications with ease. Backed by industry leaders, making it a preferred choice for big names, Polkadot stands out as a leading choice for investors seeking a reliable, future-proof solution in the growing world of Web3 technology. Learn more at https://polkadot.com/.=======================Pomp writes a daily letter to over 265,000+ investors about business, technology, and finance. He breaks down complex topics into easy-to-understand language while sharing opinions on various aspects of each industry. You can subscribe at https://pomp.substack.com/=======================View 10k+ open startup jobs:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://dreamstartupjob.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Enroll in my Crypto Academy: https://www.thecryptoacademy.io/

What's up everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Many of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, which is my effort to find the most interesting people in the world and sit with them for hours while I ask questions in an effort to learn. So it would mean the world to me if you would subscribe to the show on your favorite audio platform, watch episodes on YouTube, and tell your friends and family about the podcast. My goal is to help millions learn from the world's most interesting people. So let's get into today's episode. What's going on, guys? We've got a great episode for you today with Danelle Dixon. She is the CEO and Executive Director of the Stellar Development Foundation. In this conversation,

we get into the dirty details of what's happening around the world with this technology. How are people in emerging markets actually using stable coins and payment rails? On top of that, what's going on on Wall Street? They're going all in on this technology. And why are they taking so many of the different products and services and trying to bring it on chain? Danelle is a wealth of information, and she's got tons of insights you won't hear anywhere else. And so I hope that you guys enjoy this conversation. Here's my latest with Danell Dixon. Anthony Pompliano runs Pomp Investments. All views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Pomp Investments. You should not treat

any opinion expressed by Pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of his personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Today's episode is brought to you by Bitcoin IRA. Are you a crypto investor with a retirement account, but don't have any crypto in your retirement account? Then listen up, this is for you. Bitcoin IRA is revolutionizing the way Americans save for retirement

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with hundreds of applications already leverage polka dots technology to power their platforms if you're looking for a reliable scalable and cutting edge solution polka dot seems to be the top choice for industry players go check them out today at polka dot dot com all right i thought a great place to start the conversation is uh wall street's going all in they have now realized that there may be better technology that's out there in order for them to be able to uh do transactions offer products to their clients and i think a huge part of wall street's interest is like there are users here there's potentially new revenue sources for them there's efficiency gains like all these things that we know i want to talk to you about what are they actually doing right and i think

that you all you interface with these organizations on a day-to-day basis you're talking to them you're listening to them you understand what the products are that they're launching how do you summarize like what has been happening on wall street on chain in the last year or so yeah that's a great question i mean it's been wonderful to have wall street be a participant on this and really they they sort of started to go in like two years ago and now they're all in everyone wants to be have they want to tokenize everything so tokenization it's a key word on the in the united states and also western europe we spend a bunch of time talking with asset managers who are like how can we tokenize this what can we do with it uh some of them are on the slower side some of them

have done it. We've already seen money market funds on Stellar. Franklin Templeton built the first money market fund on any chain. And they started the process in 2019, if you can believe it. So it took them that long to get the SEC to approve it. They now have Benji, which is the asset. They have it live, not just in the US, but also outside the US. And what are they trying to get from doing this? So from their standpoint, they've actually been very focused on internal efficiencies. Okay. Remember beforehand, they had lots of databases that they had to connect and make sure everything

was done right. And they had a lot of people who had to spend time doing that. They now have a single source of truth, which is the Stellar Network for all of their, that is their books and records. So internal efficiency has been amazing. But the other thing that they're trying to get, which is what I love, is the fact that they can now offer this because of the internal efficiencies. They can now offer entry into their money market funds at a far lower entry price. So it used to be $2,500 to get into their funds. If you use the on-chain one, $25. That's huge. So it does open it up to additional retail investors that they hadn't been able to grab before.

So the internal efficiency has saved them a significant sum of money from settlement times. And also the settlement cost is really- So like on this, right? The way I describe it is like, as ridiculous as it sounds, but like the banks really weren't able to take money from their right pocket and put it in their left pocket efficiently is basically this kind of internal efficiency stuff. And that's why sometimes if you wired from one account to another, there was like a two

day settlement or one day settlement across borders nightmare like there's all these issues and really what you're saying here is by having this like public blockchain that they now can operate against you take that infrastructure and completely change the way that they're able to move money for themselves well yeah and i think if you you also you know they had to franklin temple just using them as an example and jenny and others have talked really openly about this they had to have training wheels essentially when the sec allowed them to do this so they had to use they had the stellar network that they were running against and then they also had their own internal databases. And the SEC eventually looked at it and was like, well, actually,

there are more decimal points on the Stellar network. It's more accurate and way more efficient because it didn't have so many different databases. So yes, the internal efficiency makes it so that it's one spot for them to look. And they actually don't have to manage and run that. And it's immutable, could never be changed. These are all really, really great things from them. There's also all of the functionality built into Stellar for them that was already there when they started, which is the clawback functionality, the ability to make it auth required so that they can control the asset in a way that, you know, you can't, I can't send it to you unless you're already KYC'd. We like it when they're open assets, but the truth is when you're dealing

with securities, it makes sense, right? So they already had all those tools built in things they had to build in separately in their other databases. So this is actually, it just made it so much more efficient for them. And when they're doing this, they're trying to increase or shorten the amount of time it takes to do these transactions. They're trying to drop the cost. Are they also interfacing with other banks? Like it's one thing to move money

from my right pocket to my left pocket, but some of my customers obviously want to interface. They don't want to move it from one account. I want to pay somebody. They're at a different bank or a different financial institution. Like are these organizations now coming together and saying like, what if we like team up together

and create like a public infrastructure, but create like a trusted network or something? We're not quite there yet, but I think so. I mean, I think eventually moving in that direction, but I think just getting these assets on chain was a step change for them. I think with the new US policy around this and more focus and attention to blockchain

and the ease of use of it, we're going to see more of them coming on chain. They're already talking, a lot of them talk to us about collateralization. How do you use these assets now for collateralization? How do you think about what we can do with respect to not just putting bonds on chain, but then how you can use those bonds after.

So it's a really interesting conversation, which sort of allows them the freedom to think differently about the products they're offering their users, whether that be their business side clients or their retail clients. So it's really getting fun at this point. And then of course, like they all want smart contracts to be in play,

but they don't really know how they can leverage smart contracts yet, but they want to, and they want to think about how they can do that. I mean, if you think about the money market funds and the way that we use money market funds when we write our checks for money market funds or whatnot, You're kind of not allowed to do that yet with these assets.

Although Franklin Templeton is allowing people to move an asset from out of their wallet to other people's wallets, so long as that other people are KYC'd. But eventually think of the world when you can actually just go and pay for your coffee with your money market funds. That's a pretty cool world to be in. That comes in a little bit of competition with stable coins and domestically what stable coins can be used for. But I think that these are the things that you historically couldn't do with the ease

of use that you now can with blockchain. I've heard Jenny talk about Jenny Johnson, who is the CEO of Franklin Templeton. I've heard her talk about how you need to do instant interest. So you can't just like wait to settle once a day. They want to be able to say you've been in it for three minutes, you get your interest for three minutes. That is that is what the technology allows. But we're not quite there yet from the regulatory standpoint. So it'll take time to get there. But those are the things that we want to see happen. Now, are these assets bearer assets and like customers are holding them? Or is the financial institution holding them? How do you think about like some of the security stuff? Or what have they been talking about? You know, it's one thing if you say like, hey, I have, let's say an older client, they've got stocks, it sits there, they have an interface, great. It's a whole different game. If you're like, by the way, if you click on the wrong link in your email, your assets may go away, right? I think that banks get kind of nervous about that. Yeah, for sure. I think they still do. I mean, you can go, you can use the asset and you can send it to non-custodial wallets. But like at this point, like these assets are that, well, maybe they want to move towards that. I'm not officially sure that they've actually moved in that direction, but like eventually that's where they want to go. And you fully tap into like the value of the technology and have that available to people. But right now you kind of walk before

you run. Well, you're in the, right now you're in the Benji app and you can hold it all in the Benji app, but it's still yours, right? It's like in your hands. So it's a, it's an interesting play to see how the sick from the securities law standpoint how they've been able to do that so you mentioned stable coins and that's another huge area where people are bringing this stuff on chain i kind of think of it as like bitcoin was product fit number one right with the global store of value uh now you have these stable coins which far and away or have product market fit whether they're number two or number three who cares right um but people want to use that for medium of exchange uh the money market funds are like yield technically they're stable right and

And are they competing with the stable coins? Are they just all merged together? No, they're not merged together. And it's an interesting question. I don't know if you saw yesterday the markup that where they had on the stable coin act, but there was a question about whether or not they were going to allow stable coins to be interest, like to be able to share that interest with the retail or the business side. And what was the...

They said they're not going to include that in the current... That's crazy. But is it? Like, this is a question I don't know. All right, let's talk about it. Is it crazy? Let me put my notes down here. Because if you think about what, so the technology allows all of this to happen,

like the technology allows it. But if you think about like what money market funds are, they are a security that is an asset that is out there that has been regulated for hundreds of years. And they know like the, what from the retail side, they have all these ways that they have to provide notifications to the users and give them the opportunity to understand what these are and what the risks might be. And if you have stable coins and you're providing those assets, The assets that are backing the stable coins are sitting in money market funds, but then you're providing yield somehow to the, you're sharing the interest with your consumers. Do they have the understanding of that?

It's an interesting question. Like if you think about a stable coin, are you, and you say, okay, we get a four and a half percent yield on the money market funds. So me as a stable coin issuer, I'm just going to share 2% with you. And I'm going to guarantee that 2% to you. Is that a security? But my whole thing is, I think twofold. One, why does it matter if it is sitting in U.S. treasuries, right?

Because you should want to not take the paternalistic view of, hey, let's protect everyone from themselves, and instead say, someone's going to generate yield here. So the stablecoin issuers, they are going to go put it into treasuries anyways, and they get all of it. So you should actually want to help the people. Oh, man, I'm right there with you. Like, I think that there's this, like, certainly the tech allows it. And this is exactly the kind of thing that makes a world of difference. We have a wallet that's built on Stellar where they've been really focusing on Argentina. What does it matter to them in Argentina?

They want to hold U.S. dollars. Why do they want to hold U.S. dollars? The inflation and deflation in their asset just up and down in their local currency. When they have the ability to have yield on it, it's even way more interesting to them because now they're not just hedging against inflation. they're also able to grow their wealth, which is a huge thing. So I would love to see this, but I just think we need to understand that it butts up against all of these issues on the security side and the banking side that they've been doing for 70 years. So should it be put in a stablecoin bill, which is actually allowing just stablecoins to exist? I think that there's

an opportunity to address this issue. Should it be in this bill or should it be something that comes after as we get the technology out there more and more? We've got the stablecoin through, We now know we can have stable coins. We now know they're not securities. So yeah, I agree with you. It should be there. They should be, users should be able to get value from these assets that they're holding.

But I think that that's just a second order issue. And then Brian Monahan, I think is the Bank of America CEO. He came out and he basically said, we're not allowed to do this, but when we are, we're getting in the game. That was just like TLDR, right? Is that they want to issue a stable coin. JP Morgan used to have JPM coin.

It feels like the banks are going to just all be in the stable coin game. And some of it will be for like internal efficiency stuff. But if I remember correctly, JP Morgan wanted their customers to use it back, you know, five, six, seven years ago. And I used to always be very worried about the fact that if they come out and they say, okay, we have the stable coin, it's backed by dollars. Everyone adopts it. In the future, could they just unpeg it? Like, could they basically just like the government did it, right? Like, okay, no more dollars.

Not everyone just uses JPM coin and they essentially back into having like a central bank. Well, technically, if it's a stable coin issued under the Stable Coin Act, no. So then they would have to keep it. You would have to have the one-to-one backing, at least the way the act is currently written. But then banks have always been sort of treated separately. So, I mean, I don't think the banks are like super happy about the current language, although I think they're mostly they're happier with it than they were before. Yeah. Do we know what their big concerns are?

I don't know what their big concerns are. I mean, I like, you know, if the crypto people are involved, then maybe we just don't like it. That is a concern in and of itself. But I think it's an interesting question. I was just going through this yesterday with someone about whether every bank should issue their own stable coin and what is that going to do? Like, is that the right sort of methodology

for us to think through? I mean, look, when you have like those, if you're talking about like the JP coin or the JPM coin, whatever it was, it doesn't transfer outside of their network, like officially outside of their network. So does that mean that it's actually a stable coin or is it something else that you're,

And does that actually harm the use of stable coins? I mean, one of the most beautiful things about what blockchain and certainly like an open public network provides is the ability to transfer that value seamlessly. And if you start having these banks not only issue assets, but then issue them on private permission chains, it just sort of creates the exact same infrastructure we have today. It doesn't improve the technology. So the only thing I would say is if banks are going to get into this, wouldn't it be amazing if they got into it on public chains?

And if they're going to issue stable coins, fine, great, but issue them publicly, allow them to move from one user to the other. Otherwise you're going to get into the exact same world that you are today. What about privacy of, you know, do banks want all their transactions? Well, that wasn't a big issue. I mean, back in the day, like, gosh, when I first started here at Stellar, we were working with IBM and IBM was actually building this technology to work with banks and allow banks to do all this transfer using Stellar. And part of the issue was no bank wanted any other bank to know how much volume they were sending on a daily basis? Of course. And so does it become an issue for them? I mean, there are ways to sort of obfuscate like the

amounts, right? Like you can send different, you can send amounts at different times and like you can bulk transactions so that you don't see all of it that comes through and when it's coming through. There are ways to sort of stem against that. But I think that that's like a really interesting competitive question, whether they would want all of their transactions to be on blockchain because it is immutable and it's open. Yeah. Do you think that we will eventually see stocks as well? Like obviously there's a regulatory question, but those just get tokenized. They trade 24 seven on public chains. And then like, I think so New York stock exchange got a risk because there could be a decentralized like public equity chain. I think that they end up, well, it's so

interesting because this has already been, we've seen startups try to do this and some of them have fail just because they were too before their time, where they've actually purchased stocks and then had them custody and then actually issued fractionalized ownership in those stocks out to the retail side. We've seen that happen time and time again. Some of them have made it through and then we'll see how that works. Some of them came in like four years ago doing this, which that was probably too early for it.

So there's already sort of that play where you can do that as long as you have a true custodian and you can prove that it's one-to-one backed, you can issue that same asset and you can buy then a fractionalized ownership of an apple a share of apple wherever you are in the world in south in south africa for example um whether or not that that's going to create competition for the new york stock exchange i mean the truth is maybe they'll just jump in on it and they'll issue their whole exchange on a public chain and that would be super interesting i think that you're always going to have those filing requirements with respect to like you're going to have to be on an exchange somewhere to make it so that it's i mean i just think upending that

whole environment and that whole structure would be complicated. Yeah. Well, or do you just start it from scratch? Like one of the things I keep thinking about is there used to be 8,000 publicly traded companies. Now we're down to about 4,000. And so you have that 50% reduction, but you have this explosion of liquid public assets in crypto. They're not stocks according to the regulators, but it sure feels like you can allocate capital to them. There's things that make them go up and down in price? Like, do we actually just say, hey, this one type of public market, which is the stock market, it's too onerous, it's too expensive. There's a lot of issues that doesn't trade 24 seven. Companies feel like it's not worth doing because they have access to

capital in the private market, but then they built a parallel new public market to a degree and there's been an explosion. And so same thing with stocks is like, somebody just come along and say, hey, we're just going to parallel build something completely different. It could be, but it's also like the fundamentals, even if you don't agree with them, that we haven't seen the fundamentals yet come into the crypto markets in terms of understanding how they move. Other than today and last night, you saw all red on the crypto side. That was because of what happened in the traditional market. So I think that that's the only fundamental that we actually know today that actually moves the market in the crypto side. And it's supposed to

be different on the stock side so that you're supposed to actually have fundamentals in business and that you want to disclose those things. You want people to understand what they're buying. It's very different when you get to like that security side and that security law than when you're actually on the commodity side, which is where the crypto assets sit today. So understanding the fundamentals on the security side, I think is why we have all that regulatory structure. Could you upend it? For sure. That would take a bit given how long it's taken us to get a fricking stable coin law through. And we're not going to probably see it until later this year, maybe in July, right before the recess. And it's, we've been at this for

probably like two and a half years. It's kind of crazy. It feels like it's a very bipartisan effort. Is that kind of your read as well? Is that both Republicans and Democrats seem to be coming together and saying, like, all right, fine, let's get this done? Yeah, well, I mean, it was amazing. Even in the prior Congress with McHenry and Waters on the House side, they were very like they worked together to, like, pull this bill out. And honestly, the challenges of not getting it through had mostly to do with politics, didn't have to do with the bipartisan nature of the bill. And I think French Hill and others who like Liccardo, a bunch of other folks have come in from the Democrat side, Richie Torres, to be able to support this. We saw, I think, seven or eight votes from the Democrats yesterday in support of it to get it out of markup. It's pretty great. I do feel like in this day and age, that's bipartisan. Historically, maybe bipartisan was a larger share of both sides, but I think it's good to see that. And we needed

to see that. And then in the stable coin bill, I know that there's a lot of focus on US. Obviously, Tether and others are outside the US. I think there are different business strategies, right? Some people are saying, hey, let's go and let's offer this in U.S. markets to U.S. users for what I'll call like U.S. use cases, emerging markets, completely different type of user, completely different use case. I know that you guys kind of play in both worlds, right, where you've done stuff in various countries in Africa, et cetera, looks very different than the U.S. market. And so how do you think of the stablecoin landscape maybe? And does it feel like there's a line being drawn and people you have to pick? Are you in the US or are you specifically focused outside of the US? It's an interesting question.

I mean, no, because even the stablecoin issuers that are actually in the US are still really trying hard to grab those markets outside the US. I think that really this regulatory structure is trying to say, if you're using and backing, like if you're using the US dollar asset and you're backing it with US securities, I mean, US treasuries, we should have some kind of say over what your regulatory environment looks like here in the US. Right now, the current bill has, I think, pulling those who are working outside the US and are set outside the US, working them in the next 18 months or so. I'm sure that not everybody's thrilled with that. So we'll see what happens in that language in the Senate side. But

I think that it's not as much of a demarcation between where you're focused. It's more of a demarcation about when do the U.S. regulators get to have a say? And should they have a say? Like if you think about Tether, for example, they don't have operations for the most part in the U.S. and they haven't historically. And they've done exceptionally well outside the U.S. and the high demand for that asset outside the U.S. We see it all the time in Africa, on the African continent, in South America, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, high demand. And they're high demand for stable coins

or high demand, I want Tether. Oh no, high demand for Tether. Like they're just, Tether is like in the market. They've been in the market for so long. They did a really great job about getting in the market there. USDC has actually done a nice job in the short term that they've been focused there

and they've been able to make some inroads in those markets. But I'll just be honest, like you see mostly that Tether is in high demand. So I think that they haven't taken the strategy of focusing on the U.S. market, although folks in the U.S. hold Tether. And so I think that's where the regulators are like,

wait, if you're holding an asset in the U.S. and you're also backing it with U.S. securities, maybe, I mean, U.S. treasuries, maybe we should have some say over that. Yeah. One of the things I heard from somebody, I think he lived in Nigeria, was he said that people on the ground

are somewhat skeptical of USDC because they feel like it's like the U.S. government coin. Oh, interesting. And- I haven't heard that actually. I remember just thinking to myself, like, that is such like a on the ground insight that I would have never expected because in the U S like regulations, a good thing. You know what I mean? Like people are like, Oh, it's like a regulated thing. It's safe. It's backed by, you know, whatever. And his point was kind of like, Hey, there's an inherent distrust for sure. In some areas with the U S and so just with the U S it's with any government, any government backing, like there's inherent distrust. I haven't heard that. I've heard other things like the concern that there was some concern in when I was on the continent last year that they that USDC had depegged. And I was like, that's not what happened. Like, none of that actually happened. But there's like this story that they see they people because they're really looking for hold to hold US dollar backed assets. They want to make sure that they're safe and secure because so much of their the monetary policy in their countries don't allow that their currencies fluctuate so much. And so the US dollar is important to them. So I think that Circle's done a really nice job

of eliminating that narrative over the last year and a half or so. And I think that's good. Like having competition. The user wins. It's the most amazing thing, right? Like, so you don't just want one asset. Sorry, everybody.

Like I don't want one asset, just like I don't think one chain should actually survive out of this. A multi-chain world is the right thing. A multi-asset world is the right thing. So I think that competition on the continents for all of the, for these assets is important. What we would love, what we like to offer them

is the stable U.S. dollar-backed asset. And I think that's just a really important- Where do these people get their information from in the emerging markets? Are they on, you know, X? Are they watching YouTube? Are they reading email newsletters? Lots of like TikTok, right?

Lots of- I'm so old, I don't even think of TikTok as like the first thing in my mind. I think all these other sources and then I got to remember that thing exists. There's like a, there's a, but there's also a lot of, a lot of it is like their,

like internal networks that they're talking to. So many of them are using all the tools to have those conversations. It's like social media and group chats. Yeah, group chats. It's like a, and so they get tons of information and they, the thing that I love about working in these markets and spending so much time with them is we learn every time because we think that we know what problems are out there to solve. And the truth is we have absolutely no idea when you live in the West and you figure out

like, like are the challenges and we look and we say, oh, we can simplify this, this and this. And those aren't the things that they need simplified. And so I love working with local builders because they help me to understand like the world in a completely different way. I think that that's the reason why it's been so interesting to me on the stable coin discussion and even on market structure and all these things that are so important to us here. Like stable coin is a no brainer, like complete no brainer. It should have been actually pushed through. And had we not had like challenges on the banking side and challenges with the Fed versus the states, it's just a simple thing to do. but domestically it's actually not as important as it is internationally like to go to work with these builders and to understand what like getting access to a dollar-backed asset means to the retail side is like it's just it's game-changing for them and so for me like that's the focus it's like all these things that we spend so much time and so much energy on like we could just get them

right right away and then move this technology and allow it to be used um in the way that frankly it's the best. Cross-border, it's the most amazing tool to be able to leverage. So now I feel like we're moving in the right direction with the policy here in the US. Frankly, policy outside the US has already been pretty strong. We still have a lot of work to do though. And a lot of times we're so focused on the West. We have a lot of work to do with like central banks and with governments in all of these countries that we just talked about. They're fearful because if you bring the dollar in, is it going to create dollar dominance for them and make it so that their currency fluctuates so tremendously so part of it is like getting them comfortable with like

bring it in they can then use the local they can transfer it into local currency or frankly it's not that different from them using momo and all of these different like um the the the assets yeah the payment apps that they're using already so um doge has been really looking at government spending i remember a bill in i think it was 2020 one of the spending bills uh they originally talked about like, oh, if we could just like press a button and get the checks, you know, that would end up being physical checks, right? We could just get it in people's hands. And there was a mention of a digital dollar. It didn't make it past like the first or second iteration. It got taken out mainly probably because we didn't have one at the time. But at least it seems like they

were thinking about that. How do you think about government spending and a lot of these technologies, which, you know, there's a public aspect of like, there could be like auditing, I guess, by the public, but also just like an efficiency gain. Yeah. I mean, it's so, wouldn't it be nice if you could push a button and have thousands of payments sent at once? It actually is really nice. We see it happening all the time.

The technology just allows for that to happen right now. And so I really, I think that, you know, on Stellar, we've built this bulk disbursement platform that you can use for payments. Think about like companies who are already using it to pay gig workers globally. So they can like upload all of the transactions and push a button. And then it all goes through instantaneously to their accounts, to their wallets. This is being used all over. And also, it's even being used if you don't actually have the receive side wallet yet, because you can just get a text message to say, hey, we've paid you and just download this wallet and you'll receive it. It's really simple. So I'm so excited about what we're focused on in terms of government efficiency. We just recently saw the other day that the president talked about USAID, maybe moving under the State Department, focusing on like really getting foreign aid out and using blockchain to do it.

Well, I mean, we've been doing that already for the last three years. And so we would love to be able to use the technology for that. So I am really excited to see government focus on this and just to make everything so much more efficient. I mean, if you get down to it, like think about like taxes and like the payment of taxes, like the payment of tax refunds. How simple is that? I mean, it would it takes a lot of skill to be able to get that put into a government office, even though the technology is there. It just takes time. But it's really exciting to me to see the future of that. What are you worried about? You're a very optimistic person.

You're very positive. That's I think why you and I get along. But what do you what keeps you up at night? What are you worried about? I do worry about the fact that sometimes we all get ahead of ourselves. Like there's a lot of shiny objects out there in the crypto and blockchain space. And I think that they're actually super useful because it demonstrates the flexibility of the technology. But sometimes too many people focus on the shiny objects and not on like the real tech and what's happening with the real tech. And I worry that as a result of that, maybe the technology takes another beating from the regulators or from the just governments, not just even domestically, but internationally that we don't need to take. I also get worried that we don't actually understand the monetary policy implications

on a global basis enough. And we don't spend enough time thinking about that. And sometimes we're like, technology here, make it work. And we need to, I think, really, I've spent a lot of time with central bankers all over the world to understand what they care about. And then I've also commissioned studies with universities to say like, hey, can you help? In Nigeria, part of the reason why the Nigerian government, like the SEC, flipped the switch and said no more crypto four years ago or three and a half years ago was because they were really concerned that crypto was fueling the rise against the government. And actually, we probably could have showed them that that's not what was happening if we used the tech stack to do that, but also made them fearful of having any crypto within the country.

All the ramifications of things we've seen happen in Nigeria result from that fear. we got to eliminate the fear and really focus on the facts and then the outcomes that they want to see for their internal constituencies. And so I get worried that we don't spend enough time there as an industry. So, but big picture, I'm super optimistic about what this tech can do. Let's end on a positive note. You guys have done a lot of work with the UN. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of funds that have been dispersed across some of these technologies. Describe a little bit as like what that work is and kind of what the technology is actually doing.

Yeah. So that is the, the, the bulk disbursement tool that I mentioned. I think it's called the stellar disbursement tool or something that, um, we've, we've, we're really good at really creative at naming things. Um, don't worry that whoever created Bitcoin named the network and the asset the same day. So I'm sure better than that. Um, so the, the, the technology allows for aid organizations like, um, the UN, um, high commissioner on refugees. Like they, they used this to deliver aid into different countries. They've sent, I think about $5 million worth of aid over the last couple of years. And they kept the wallet on the receive side very simple so that you can receive the value and then you can send it to your bank account or you can cash out at

MoneyGram. Nothing else in the wallet to do. Eventually, I'd love to see that grow. We can flip the switches back on for them to be able to do it. But why is this important? It makes it so that like that text message that the refugee receives to say, hey, you have received aid from the UNHCR download this wallet. They download the wallet. Their aid is in their hands in two and a half minutes because they have to fill out the KYC. That is what this technology does. That is what we've been doing for the last three years. Not only is it efficiency and ease of use for the aid recipient and all of those things, it also saves a ton of money. When I think about USAID doing this, it saves a ton of money for them to be able to leverage this technology. Just in

like sending the $5 million, they were able to save $12 million in just like internal efficiencies, not having to take cash and to put it in these countries and to have all the security around it. They could actually do it digitally and it made so much more sense. And they can like now do it like on a, you know, they do it on a monthly basis to some folks, depending on the country and the work that they're doing. And they already have that contact and can do it so easily. So the efficiencies with using blockchain technology and especially all the tools that Stellar has built makes it so that it's a really great. So it makes me really excited. That is like the, i look at that and i don't look at it it's a payment that is what we have been focused on

since jed founded uh the the seller network you know and and 11 years ago we've been focused on payments and asset issuance and this is using both it's using the payments but it's using those assets that are the dollar backed assets that are issued on the network so it's exciting it seems to be working it's working it's working super well like there's like they they love it and i think that then then in terms of like the immutability of the blockchain and having that transparent way to show, no, this aid was actually sent and they can demonstrate that to their, any of the folks that are giving them aid. So the U S government can do the same thing with USA ID. That is like huge, right? That's the value of blockchain. Like everybody talks about like fraud and all those

things happening, more fraud happening in the world outside the money in your pocket than it is on, on blockchain. So yeah. How do people help you? Like what is it? You need talent, you need partners, you need what? Well, we need, always need talent. Talent is the most important thing, like keeping the, um, the quirkiness, the, the sophistication and the, um, passion for the work that we do at the SDF is really important. So we need talent partners, or we have lots of amazing partners that have done a tremendous amount of work to build up Stellar. I'll be honest and tell you that I think historically we haven't done the best at tooting our own horn, but others have done it for us. We're trying to get better at doing that ourselves. Um, so yeah,

both of those things are really important. And also just like, give it a go, like take a look the tech stack and take a look at what's happening we need developers to really embrace it we see a lot of that right now and it's amazing but we can always use more amazing thank you so much for doing this we'll definitely do it again in the future yeah thanks so much