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How The Better Money Company Is Turning Stablecoins Into Real Dollars · The Stable Pulse

• 0:00
  Dante Reminick: Passage of the stablecoin legislation drafted by the Senate dubbed the Genie Senate.
• 0:05
  Dante Reminick: Because analysts say a wave of competition can complicate things.
• 0:08
  Dante Reminick: Everyone, welcome to another episode of Stable Pulse.
• 0:17
  Dante Reminick: We have a very special guest here.
• 0:19
  Dante Reminick: Adam and I have been working on very similar and parallel problems for quite some time.
• 0:24
  Dante Reminick: And so this is where I personally get to do a lot of nerding out.
• 0:29
  Dante Reminick: So very excited about this conversation.
• 0:31
  Dante Reminick: Adam, welcome to Stable Pulse.
• 0:34
  Dante Reminick: As you know from being such an avid fan and listener, we always start out the show with a section that we call Braggadocious, which is where I sit down and shut up and I give you the opportunity to tell us a little bit about yourself, tell us a little bit about what you're doing, and I ask you to leave humility at the door.
• 0:49
  Dante Reminick: But tell tell us everything, man.
• 0:56
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
• 0:57
  Adam Zuckerman: Excited to be here.
• 0:58
  Adam Zuckerman: So I'm Adam.
• 1:00
  Adam Zuckerman: I'm a lawyer by background.
• 1:02
  Adam Zuckerman: I spent um about four years at Latham and Watkins, where I represented um companies in the crypto and digital asset space.
• 1:10
  Adam Zuckerman: So I was the resident uh digital asset guy at Latham.
• 1:14
  Adam Zuckerman: Um from there I went to Eigenlayer, where I was general counsel for about a year and a half, um, and then left Eigenlayer to co-found uh the Better Money Company.
• 1:26
  Adam Zuckerman: Um the Better Money Company is building a stablecoin clearinghouse.
• 1:31
  Adam Zuckerman: Um Sam Broner and I, uh my my co-founder, the CEO, we started talking about this uh this business um about a year, a year and change ago.
• 1:42
  Adam Zuckerman: At the time, it was not a consensus view that the world of stable coins was going to have many different stable coins.
• 1:51
  Adam Zuckerman: Um that was a bet that we made because when we looked at the the market structure, we thought there was going to be many different stable coins.
• 1:59
  Adam Zuckerman: Once we made that bet and we zoomed out, a stablecoin clearinghouse seemed like an obvious product that was really essential to the market.
• 2:08
  Adam Zuckerman: Um and we believe that that uh that prediction is being proven right and that the market absolutely will need a stable coin clearinghouse, and we're here to build it.
• 2:19
  Dante Reminick: Awesome.
• 2:19
  Dante Reminick: I love it.
• 2:20
  Dante Reminick: There is a lot to unpack as part of that statement.
• 2:24
  Dante Reminick: Um, we're gonna get to what a clearinghouse is, we're gonna get to what a stablecoin clearinghouse is, but I want to sort of rewind and start with the the core assumption that the better money company is making, which is there's going to be a world in which there are many, many stable coins.
• 2:41
  Dante Reminick: Can you talk to me a little bit more about why you and your team think that there's gonna be a world with many stable coins and it's not just gonna be dominated by USDC or USDT, but actually there is a world that exists where there's thousands, tens of thousands of different stable coins that everyone is using?
• 2:59
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah.
• 2:59
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah.
• 3:00
  Adam Zuckerman: I I break it down into three different reasons.
• 3:03
  Adam Zuckerman: Um I think the first two reasons are predominantly why folks are are building their own stablecoin today.
• 3:11
  Adam Zuckerman: I think the third will actually be one of the driving um reasons in the future and and really one of the the one of the ones that has like staying power for why there's many different stable coins.
• 3:22
  Adam Zuckerman: So the three reasons I break it down into one is um brand.
• 3:27
  Adam Zuckerman: So it's pretty cool that you get to have PayPal USD and Samsung USD and Deal USD.
• 3:33
  Adam Zuckerman: Like that as a company, the idea that you can have your own branded dollar in and of itself, that's super exciting.
• 3:40
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, you get to have SoFi USD, Fidelity USD.
• 3:43
  Adam Zuckerman: Like that's really cool.
• 3:44
  Adam Zuckerman: Um ultimately I think that's uh that's not the main reason why people will continue to launch stable coins.
• 3:50
  Adam Zuckerman: The second bucket is um economics.
• 3:54
  Adam Zuckerman: So the economics can have a few subcategories within it.
• 3:57
  Adam Zuckerman: It's um maybe you want to control the who has minting and redemption rights, maybe you want to control for minting and redemption fees, uh, maybe you want to control what the underlying collateral is.
• 4:09
  Adam Zuckerman: Maybe you want UX um trade-offs to be made that suit your product better as opposed to suiting a wide variety of products and sort of taking the least common denominator.
• 4:18
  Adam Zuckerman: Um but economics, I think, is is largely the driving force for what's causing people to launch their own stablecoins today.
• 4:26
  Adam Zuckerman: The third that I think is going to be increasingly critical is compliance and the ability to control the freezing and overall sort of compliance posture of the stable coin.
• 4:41
  Adam Zuckerman: What I mean by this is in uh take take a world where you have a bank that is making a bet on stable coins.
• 4:50
  Adam Zuckerman: I believe this is going to be most, if not all, banks in the future.
• 4:53
  Adam Zuckerman: Um they have launched a stablecoin product or or feature um where their users can transact with stable coins.
• 5:01
  Adam Zuckerman: Now let's imagine the future that will eventually happen where there's a hack of that stable coin and $10 million gets taken off platform by who knows, North Korea.
• 5:13
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, and now the bank has to figure out what to do.
• 5:18
  Adam Zuckerman: So if that is a general purpose stable coin, they have to then go to the issuer, encourage the issuer to freeze those assets, give their justification for why they should freeze it.
• 5:30
  Adam Zuckerman: That issuer has like tons of different incentives for okay, well, if I freeze, are my other users gonna get um screwed over?
• 5:39
  Adam Zuckerman: Is there gonna be implications for DeFi?
• 5:42
  Adam Zuckerman: Like they have a whole world of things that they have to consider.
• 5:44
  Adam Zuckerman: Whereas this bank, they don't care about that.
• 5:47
  Adam Zuckerman: They just want to freeze those assets.
• 5:50
  Adam Zuckerman: And that is like an absolutely critical function for a bank.
• 5:55
  Adam Zuckerman: And so just the freezing capability and the ability to be the one to now interact with law enforcement when they reach out asking you why did you know what happened here?
• 6:05
  Adam Zuckerman: Was this North Korea?
• 6:06
  Adam Zuckerman: We want to do an investigation, like that compliance piece is, I believe, going to be a massive reason why in the future many different large institutions and banks in particular and and other regulated entities are gonna want to launch their own stablecoin.
• 6:19
  Dante Reminick: I love it.
• 6:20
  Dante Reminick: And it's funny because when I talk to people about a world with there's tens of thousands of stable coins, a lot of them complain.
• 6:27
  Dante Reminick: They're like, I can barely keep track of the amount of stable coins that exist today, right?
• 6:32
  Dante Reminick: I don't want to have 10,000 different versions of the dollar in my existing wallet.
• 6:36
  Dante Reminick: But I don't think that that is what cosmetically the reality is going to look like, right?
• 6:41
  Dante Reminick: It's like if I went up to my grandma, my grandma knows how to use her Visa card, everyone knows how to use their Visa card, but they don't understand what an acquiring bank is.
• 6:48
  Dante Reminick: They don't understand all of the different elements that happen in the background on every single transaction that they make.
• 6:55
  Dante Reminick: And I think the exact same thing is going to happen with stable coins.
• 6:58
  Dante Reminick: And so for me, what gets me most excited about the Better Money Company and what you guys are building is like if we imagine a world where there's a Walmart dollar and a Fidelity dollar and a Visa dollar and all of these companies that you're already interacting with on a daily basis, there needs to be some way for those dollars to interact with one another, right?
• 7:20
  Dante Reminick: When I talk to you and I talk to your co-founder Sam about this, the words that we use for this is oftentimes like stablecoin ubiquity or dollar ubiquity.
• 7:28
  Dante Reminick: One dollar needs to be one dollar, needs to be one dollar, no matter who's issuing that dollar, what chain it's on, et cetera, et cetera.
• 7:36
  Dante Reminick: And so for me, that's like the core fundamental reason for the better money company existing.
• 7:42
  Dante Reminick: So right.
• 7:43
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah, it's it's uh it's singleness of singleness of money, I mean, is the academic uh term for this.
• 7:49
  Adam Zuckerman: And it's it's I mean, we've worked extremely hard to get to singleness in fiat.
• 7:54
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, like the I think the right analogy here is banks.
• 7:58
  Adam Zuckerman: You know, we could have five banks.
• 8:00
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, there would be network effects around those banks.
• 8:03
  Adam Zuckerman: There, there's real reasons why that could be how banks work, where we just have five big banks.
• 8:09
  Adam Zuckerman: We don't.
• 8:10
  Adam Zuckerman: We have over 4,000 banks in the US.
• 8:13
  Adam Zuckerman: I think that's the right analogy where you're gonna have some concentration of um of deposits, or in this case, uh, you know, market cap with stable coins, but ultimately there's gonna be thousands of stable coins.
• 8:25
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, and we have to get to, you know, putting the product hat on.
• 8:31
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, you you have to get to feature parity with fiat.
• 8:34
  Adam Zuckerman: Like today we do not have singleness with stable coins.
• 8:37
  Adam Zuckerman: We have, in a very micro way, we have each stable coin is worth a dollar when you go to redeem it or when you go to mint it.
• 8:46
  Adam Zuckerman: But when you go to spend it, you do not have feature parity with fiat money, where like you you have slippage, you have other things that you don't have with fiat money.
• 8:55
  Adam Zuckerman: And you know, anyone building a company knows that like in order for a solution to get adoption, it has to be 10x better.
• 9:02
  Adam Zuckerman: And that that's not happening yet with stable coins because we don't have this level of feature parity on the singleness question.
• 9:09
  Dante Reminick: And why do you think that is, right?
• 9:11
  Dante Reminick: To go back to conversations that we've had in the past, to the analogy that you use as a continuation of that banking analogy is like I do not have to go and buy a Wells Fargo dollar and sell a Chase bank dollar just to have them interact with one another, right?
• 9:27
  Dante Reminick: There's a there's a system of singleness and ubiquity underneath it.
• 9:31
  Dante Reminick: What what is different about the stable coin world that doesn't allow that to happen?
• 9:35
  Dante Reminick: Can you give sort of a a reality check to what the world of needing to interact with multiple stable coins looks like today?
• 9:43
  Dante Reminick: Yeah.
• 9:44
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah, for sure.
• 9:45
  Adam Zuckerman: I I think um I think the main reason this does not exist yet is we ultimately the stable coins, the the first real use case of stable coins was not payments, it was trading.
• 9:59
  Adam Zuckerman: Um so as a trading pair for other assets.
• 10:02
  Adam Zuckerman: And in that use case, there are tremendous network network effects around the liquidity of those stable coins.
• 10:08
  Adam Zuckerman: So USDT and USDC being you know the dominant players in the stablecoin market have enormous network effects that are extremely difficult to displace.
• 10:20
  Adam Zuckerman: Um and that created a duopoly essentially of stable coins.
• 10:25
  Adam Zuckerman: And so when you have just two, like two stable coins is not a particularly fragmented market.
• 10:31
  Adam Zuckerman: And so you could sort of paper over this problem with trading.
• 10:35
  Adam Zuckerman: But ultimately, when you step back and you examine the market structure, when you get into three, four, five, six different stable coins, you do realize that you trading is not a viable solution.
• 10:47
  Adam Zuckerman: Like, like you said, trading one bank dollar for another bank dollar might work if you have two banks.
• 10:54
  Adam Zuckerman: But when you have 4,000 banks, that no longer works.
• 10:57
  Adam Zuckerman: It it just totally breaks.
• 10:59
  Dante Reminick: Yeah.
• 11:00
  Dante Reminick: Yeah.
• 11:00
  Dante Reminick: It's it's interesting to sort of juxtapose what the traditional monetary system looks like with, I would say, the the new monetary system that's being built out with with stable coins.
• 11:10
  Dante Reminick: And to that point, I sort of want to pivot the conversation a little bit and just talk about clearinghouses, right?
• 11:15
  Dante Reminick: The Better Money Company, the way that you guys describe yourselves is we are a stable coin clearinghouse.
• 11:20
  Dante Reminick: And I think to understand what a stable coin clearinghouse is, one needs to first understand what the hell a clearinghouse is.
• 11:26
  Dante Reminick: Can you talk to us a little bit about the clearinghouse?
• 11:29
  Dante Reminick: Maybe we can dive into sort of the history of the clearinghouse.
• 11:32
  Dante Reminick: How do I understand this concept?
• 11:34
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah.
• 11:35
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah.
• 11:35
  Adam Zuckerman: So I I I think that uh a clearinghouse traditionally solves two problems.
• 11:40
  Adam Zuckerman: So the first is taking a many-to-many market and consolidating it into a many-to-one market.
• 11:48
  Adam Zuckerman: So again, I think banks are a super helpful analogy.
• 11:52
  Adam Zuckerman: If I want to move money from um, you know, Northwest Bank of uh Indiana to Chase, it doesn't make sense that Chase needs to have direct connectivity to that bank and every other bank.
• 12:07
  Adam Zuckerman: And then each of those banks needs connectivity to each other bank.
• 12:11
  Adam Zuckerman: That would be each bank needs to know now go deal with the nuances and the intricacies of the 4,000 other banks that exist.
• 12:19
  Adam Zuckerman: Instead, they all connect to one central point, a clearinghouse.
• 12:24
  Adam Zuckerman: And that allows each of them to just have one connectivity point that ultimately gives them the ability to move money to any other bank.
• 12:32
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, so that's what you know you do with uh ACH or or wires today.
• 12:36
  Adam Zuckerman: That's how you move money, they're they're through a clearinghouse.
• 12:39
  Adam Zuckerman: The other structural um uh thing that a clearinghouse solves is counterparty risk.
• 12:48
  Adam Zuckerman: So as the clearinghouse, you ensure that any other party within that clearing network can transact with any other party without having to worry about one of those participants failing.
• 13:00
  Adam Zuckerman: So again, go back to the example of uh you know, a bank in Indiana has to connect with Chase.
• 13:06
  Adam Zuckerman: Does Chase in that world have to worry, like, okay, well, is this bank going to collapse by the time that uh that my, you know, before my money gets to me?
• 13:16
  Adam Zuckerman: With a clearinghouse, a clearinghouse sitting in the middle can consolidate that counterparty risk and ultimately um basically reduce it by certain mechanisms like posting collateral or having you know reserve funds like uh like clearinghouses today typically do.
• 13:34
  Adam Zuckerman: And that helps each other bank transact with other banks without having to worry about the counterparty risk.
• 13:40
  Dante Reminick: Okay.
• 13:40
  Dante Reminick: Uh I want to summarize here, uh, just for our audience.
• 13:44
  Dante Reminick: Essentially, a clearinghouse today in traditional finance is a mechanism where all banks can connect to one another.
• 13:50
  Dante Reminick: I I'm visualizing this as like a hub and spoke model, where that central entity is essentially a a ledger, if you will.
• 13:58
  Dante Reminick: And they're saying, hey, this bank owes this bank this much money, this bank owes that bank this much money.
• 14:03
  Dante Reminick: And it's acting as a facilitator, not a bank, but a facilitator between banks to understand who owes who what amounts of money and to make sure that those mut that that that that those amounts get settled.
• 14:14
  Dante Reminick: Is that a a fair explanation?
• 14:16
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, that's right.
• 14:17
  Dante Reminick: Yeah.
• 14:18
  Adam Zuckerman: The simplest version is you're you're bringing order to a fragmented market by having one central hub.
• 14:24
  Dante Reminick: Great.
• 14:24
  Dante Reminick: So that's a clearinghouse.
• 14:26
  Dante Reminick: What's a stable coin clearinghouse?
• 14:27
  Dante Reminick: How does this translate into the world of unchained dollars?
• 14:31
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, yeah.
• 14:33
  Adam Zuckerman: So it's it's solving that singleness of money problem.
• 14:36
  Adam Zuckerman: So um a point you made earlier where uh is um no one wants to open their account or their wallet and see, you know, uh stablecoin A on chain X, stablecoin A on chain Y, stablecoin A on chain Z, and then that, you know, a thousand times for each stablecoin.
• 14:57
  Adam Zuckerman: What they want to see is dollars or whatever fiat currency they're transacting in.
• 15:02
  Adam Zuckerman: And the way you enable that is by a with a clearinghouse.
• 15:07
  Adam Zuckerman: And so I hold stablecoin A on chain X.
• 15:10
  Adam Zuckerman: I want to send it to um you, Dante, but you don't want that stablecoin on that chain.
• 15:16
  Adam Zuckerman: You want a different stable coin on a different chain.
• 15:19
  Adam Zuckerman: The clearinghouse sits in the middle, clears, converts from one asset and one chain to another asset and another chain, and gets you the asset you want on the chain you want.
• 15:30
  Adam Zuckerman: So that is the core function of a clearinghouse.
• 15:33
  Adam Zuckerman: That is just the stablecoin version of what um a payments clearinghouse, like like ACH does.
• 15:40
  Adam Zuckerman: I have money in Chase, I want to send it to you, Dante.
• 15:45
  Adam Zuckerman: You want your money in B of A.
• 15:47
  Adam Zuckerman: Great.
• 15:48
  Adam Zuckerman: I instruct my money to move, it goes, passes through the clearinghouse, and you get your money where you want it.
• 15:55
  Adam Zuckerman: And that's it's ultimately filling that same function.
• 15:59
  Dante Reminick: I think that when I define clearinghouse, I I oversimplified a little bit because I I defined it mainly as a messaging layer, which you know ultimately it is, but I think that is sort of uh reductionary to what you guys are actually building and what I know that you and Sam and the rest of the team do on a day-to-day basis.
• 16:18
  Dante Reminick: Can you walk me through what it takes to build a successful stable coin clearinghouse?
• 16:25
  Dante Reminick: Like why can't I sit down with Claude right now and go and spin up a messaging layer?
• 16:30
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah.
• 16:30
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah.
• 16:31
  Adam Zuckerman: So there's there's different ways you can build a clearinghouse.
• 16:35
  Adam Zuckerman: You know, you ultimately do have things like Swift that are, you know, massive uh messaging layers for global money movement that are not actually in the in the uh money flow.
• 16:48
  Adam Zuckerman: We decided that that is not um that's not the the right path for us.
• 16:53
  Adam Zuckerman: Like I think it's really easy to build for for someone who wants to build a stable point clearinghouse to approach it from a very academic lens and say, okay, what is the hard problem here?
• 17:04
  Adam Zuckerman: It's um doing the netting, doing the algorithms to move to to give people the information, do the messaging to move money back and forth, um, and sort of like sit at that messaging layer.
• 17:16
  Adam Zuckerman: We ultimately decided, okay, this is a this is a problem where you have to get a lot of people around the table.
• 17:22
  Adam Zuckerman: And the way we think we're gonna do that is by solving an immediate problem.
• 17:26
  Adam Zuckerman: And in order to do that, we think we need to sit in the money flow and solve the hard problems around um, you know, how do you move the money?
• 17:35
  Adam Zuckerman: How do you do that securely?
• 17:36
  Adam Zuckerman: How do you do that compliantly?
• 17:37
  Adam Zuckerman: How do you give the people the right information for accounting and for other reporting needs?
• 17:42
  Adam Zuckerman: And so we, in partnership with uh with BitGo, we actually do the clearinghouse sits in the funds flow where when somebody wants to convert one asset to another, they don't just send us a message and and tell us that.
• 17:56
  Adam Zuckerman: They actually send us the funds and we handle the hard part of converting those assets.
• 18:01
  Dante Reminick: Okay.
• 18:01
  Dante Reminick: And what is what does that entail in terms of you know licensing in tech?
• 18:07
  Dante Reminick: And what do you guys spend your day slaving over?
• 18:10
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah, yeah.
• 18:11
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, so we we are um working with uh with BitGo on the licensing side today, but we have we're we're going through the process to to go get money transmission licenses and the DFAL license in California and the bay license.
• 18:26
  Adam Zuckerman: Um so that is uh, you know, that's there's a reason people want to avoid that process.
• 18:31
  Adam Zuckerman: It's it's expensive, it's onerous, it takes a lot of time.
• 18:35
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, we're you know, we're we're uh like doing it.
• 18:39
  Adam Zuckerman: We're we're baring our knuckles and uh making it happen.
• 18:42
  Adam Zuckerman: Um we're you know, we have a killer engineering team here that's building ultimately like a lot of it is very integrative work um to integrate with different issuers, different banking partners, so that we can ultimately move the collateral between between issuers.
• 18:57
  Adam Zuckerman: And then we've built, I believe, like very sophisticated and robust um ledgering and reporting systems so that um we know where the money is at all times, and we can equally importantly, we can share that with our customers.
• 19:10
  Adam Zuckerman: Um and so we know that for large enterprises that want to use uh stable coins and ultimately use our clearinghouse, they are gonna have their own compliance teams and their own accounting teams and finance teams that at all times need to know where their money is, and so we want to make sure that they can.
• 19:28
  Dante Reminick: Awesome.
• 19:29
  Dante Reminick: I I have a million more questions for you, but I want to take a second to sort of interrupt the flow because we're we're getting pretty uh deep into the monetary system.
• 19:40
  Dante Reminick: And I think for a lot of our listeners, even those that are you know fintech fans or uh finance fans in general, this is this is like really dry and boring stuff.
• 19:50
  Dante Reminick: And I I recognize that, right?
• 19:52
  Dante Reminick: Like this is not super, super sexy stuff.
• 19:56
  Dante Reminick: Talking about you know financial plumbing of of how banks work and how money works is not like the sexiest thing in the world.
• 20:03
  Dante Reminick: Like this is not the stuff you should talk about on a first date.
• 20:07
  Dante Reminick: So I want to get a better understanding from you of like why should people care about this?
• 20:12
  Dante Reminick: Right?
• 20:13
  Dante Reminick: Why not shut off the podcast right now?
• 20:15
  Dante Reminick: Why not shut off the episode right now?
• 20:17
  Dante Reminick: Why should people care about this?
• 20:19
  Dante Reminick: Why does this matter to the average person in fintech or to the average person in in traditional finance?
• 20:25
  Dante Reminick: Like who the hell cares, Adam?
• 20:27
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:27
  Adam Zuckerman: Um I think you need to be going on better dates, man.
• 20:30
  Adam Zuckerman: This is exactly what you want to do.
• 20:31
  Adam Zuckerman: I'm married, I'm not going on any first dates.
• 20:33
  Adam Zuckerman: Don't worry.
• 20:33
  Adam Zuckerman: Uh the yeah, look, one one thing, you know, you when you go to um when you go to conferences, one thing that that strikes me, and maybe I've I've drank the Kool-Aid a little bit, is um it's an extremely exciting time for for technology generally, obviously AI being the the dominant sort of like technological innovation that's happening right now, which is a a generational uh innovation.
• 21:01
  Adam Zuckerman: And then I think stable coins are getting a lot of hype in finance and in crypto.
• 21:07
  Adam Zuckerman: But when I look at the opportunity, um, I I actually think it's underhyped.
• 21:12
  Adam Zuckerman: Like the the opportunity at hand is change how money moves for the entire world.
• 21:18
  Adam Zuckerman: That that is and that's tangibly, you know, in grasp.
• 21:23
  Adam Zuckerman: Like we have a technology our company is called the Better Money Company because we believe this is foundationally a better building block on which to build money uh applications and money systems.
• 21:36
  Adam Zuckerman: That's you know, you look at you compare that to other sort of uh startup opportunities.
• 21:43
  Adam Zuckerman: I mean that that's a uh once in a generation opportunity that you have uh to go ultimately upend how money moves for the entire world.
• 21:52
  Adam Zuckerman: Like uh that's pretty exciting.
• 21:55
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, yeah.
• 21:56
  Dante Reminick: You know, I I think it's funny.
• 21:58
  Dante Reminick: I I've been talking to you about.
• 21:59
  Dante Reminick: About this for quite some time, but I think that when you announce the company with the name The Better Money Project, I think that's a perfect name because a lot of people talk about stable coins in general as being a better form of money.
• 22:13
  Dante Reminick: And to a large extent, they are.
• 22:15
  Dante Reminick: Like stablecoins out of the box are better form of money.
• 22:17
  Dante Reminick: But the reality is that there's still things that fiat Rails can do that stable coins cannot.
• 22:23
  Dante Reminick: And one really, really uh important example is the ability to access the Fed, right?
• 22:29
  Dante Reminick: The ability to access clearinghouses and things like that.
• 22:32
  Dante Reminick: And that's part of the reason why people still transact with fiat.
• 22:36
  Dante Reminick: And there are stable coins that are that's still converted into fiat.
• 22:39
  Dante Reminick: But ideally, right, if slash when you guys are successful, there is going to be not only dollar ubiquity between fiat dollars and stablecoin dollars, but also complete ubiquity between stable coins, which will give it the ability to actually be able to brag that it is truly and genuinely a better form of money compared to the system.
• 23:02
  Dante Reminick: And not just the actual piece of money, right?
• 23:05
  Dante Reminick: Not just the actual bill versus the actual stablecoin, but the the plumbing behind it is going to improve so, so, so much as a result of taking a lot of the systems that Fiat currently has an advantage in, again, clearing houses, and bringing that into the world of on-chain dollars.
• 23:21
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah.
• 23:22
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah, I think um one thing that the uh that I I lovingly say the the crypto industry often gets wrong is sort of thinking you can build a new way of doing things without any transition period.
• 23:37
  Adam Zuckerman: Like ultimately, again, going back to the singleness of money, we're not trying to build so that stable coins are have singleness solely with other stable coins.
• 23:48
  Adam Zuckerman: Stable coins need to have singleness with other dollars.
• 23:51
  Adam Zuckerman: They need to have singleness with bank dollars, they need to have singleness with you know the the dollars in your pocket, with you know, money, fiat money sitting in a PayPal account, and ultimately with deposit tokens, tokenized deposits, like these are all different dollar forms that I think have a place.
• 24:08
  Adam Zuckerman: I don't think we're gonna be in five years talking about how fiat money disappeared.
• 24:13
  Adam Zuckerman: I I don't see that world happening.
• 24:15
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, and so ultimately it's a process of integrating this form of better money into the existing infrastructure and making it so that people can access it, but also living in the real world where knowing that not everyone's gonna be able to pay their rent with stable coins in the immediate future.
• 24:33
  Adam Zuckerman: Like that's gonna take some time.
• 24:35
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, and uh so yeah, that that's you know a core thesis for us is that we we have to operate in that world where where stable coins can ultimately interact with the fiat world.
• 24:48
  Dante Reminick: I I think that's a really interesting point because to a large extent, and everyone who is working with stable coins understands this, is that we're trying to treat one dollar in stable coins as one dollar in fiat.
• 24:59
  Dante Reminick: But the reality is there's two different worlds.
• 25:00
  Dante Reminick: There's the fiat world and the stablecoin world or the the on-chain dollar world.
• 25:06
  Dante Reminick: And where this divide most often shows up is actually when you need to move between the two.
• 25:11
  Dante Reminick: If you go ask anyone who knows anything about stable coins, they always say that the hardest problem is first and last mile, getting money into stable coins and getting money out of stable coins.
• 25:21
  Dante Reminick: Always, always, always the first problem.
• 25:23
  Dante Reminick: But the more that you are able to blur those lines, the more that you're able to add to the financial stack and the capabilities that stablecoin has, the the fuzzier that those lines get, and the easier it becomes to move in and out of one to the point where that problem no longer exists because someone really does treat one dollar in my Chase Bank as one USDC in my wallet.
• 25:45
  Dante Reminick: And they are operating at full parity.
• 25:48
  Dante Reminick: And when that happens, you're able to, in my opinion, customize flows a lot more to, oh, this person wants a settled in fiat, no worries.
• 25:56
  Dante Reminick: Right?
• 25:56
  Dante Reminick: Oh, this person wants to stable in stable coins, no worries.
• 25:59
  Dante Reminick: And I think that we're at such a big inflection point that we're gonna see such rapid acceleration where we haven't before.
• 26:06
  Dante Reminick: Like the reality is that a lot of the world still uses paper checks.
• 26:09
  Dante Reminick: And to me, that's a very archaic system of transacting.
• 26:14
  Dante Reminick: But the reality is a lot of people still use that.
• 26:17
  Dante Reminick: Now, with stable coins, at least in my opinion, what's gonna happen is that as more plumbing gets built out, like you know, TBMC clearing houses, whatever it might be, the faster you're able to accelerate from what we have towards what we could have, which is like, hey, my money, my dollar is a dollar, it can be a dollar here, it can be a dollar on the other side of the world, and all of that can happen instantaneously and ubiquitously.
• 26:40
  Dante Reminick: That's what I'm talking about.
• 26:42
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah, I I think that's right.
• 26:43
  Adam Zuckerman: And I think if you look at who has successfully grown stablecoin payments adoption, it's the people who've understood that that's the core problem.
• 26:53
  Adam Zuckerman: So Visa, stablecoin backed cards, excellent way to go from stable coins to fiat.
• 26:59
  Adam Zuckerman: Visa makes that very easy.
• 27:01
  Adam Zuckerman: Stripe.
• 27:02
  Adam Zuckerman: They nailed that.
• 27:04
  Adam Zuckerman: Like they're doing a ton to integrate stable coins directly into their core payments products and make the on and off ramping very easy.
• 27:13
  Adam Zuckerman: PayPal, Coinbase, Robinhood.
• 27:16
  Adam Zuckerman: These are all folks who have like really nailed that the core challenge is moving between stable coins and fiat, and they're very well positioned because they have um they have a lot of users and they have great fiat integrations to to solve that problem.
• 27:35
  Adam Zuckerman: The thing that they haven't done, they've gone vertical, they haven't gone horizontal.
• 27:40
  Adam Zuckerman: That's what we want to help.
• 27:41
  Adam Zuckerman: So, you know, Coinbase or Stripe, they can solve that problem for a relatively narrow subset of stable coins from going stable coins to fiat or vice versa.
• 27:51
  Adam Zuckerman: We want to help them go vertical so that in this world that we know is coming, where you ultimately are a uh merchant um on on Stripe, and you want to be able to accept, in addition to USTC, many different stable coins.
• 28:08
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, we we want to help that happen.
• 28:11
  Dante Reminick: Interesting.
• 28:12
  Dante Reminick: So let's let's talk about that more right now.
• 28:15
  Dante Reminick: Who should be using your clearinghouse?
• 28:19
  Dante Reminick: Who should be using TBMC?
• 28:21
  Dante Reminick: Who should be reaching out to you?
• 28:22
  Dante Reminick: Uh, how do they know that they should?
• 28:24
  Dante Reminick: Like what problems emerge that sort of light the light bulb in your head of oh, you should be using TBMC?
• 28:32
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah.
• 28:32
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah, ultimately, anyone who is building a product with um with stable coins, we want to talk to you.
• 28:41
  Adam Zuckerman: Um we are B2B, so we we want to talk to businesses building products with stable coins.
• 28:47
  Adam Zuckerman: We believe that you can build really powerful integrations when you prioritize outing adding additional stable coins.
• 28:56
  Adam Zuckerman: So you want to build direct integrations with companies like uh Western Union, PayPal, SoFi, integrating their stablecoin is a great way to have basically native interoperability between those different products to varying degrees enabled by those those companies.
• 29:14
  Adam Zuckerman: So if you're building a product with a stable coin, uh with stable coins, we want to talk to you and we want to help you broaden your acceptance.
• 29:22
  Adam Zuckerman: We also want to help you simplify your own treasury operations.
• 29:25
  Adam Zuckerman: It's a nightmare to have to yourself handle you know 15 different stable coins and make sure you're holding the liquidity for all those assets.
• 29:35
  Adam Zuckerman: We want to make it so that you can just hold your one or two preferred assets on your preferred chains, and then you can still support the acceptance in or the payment out of all those different stable coins.
• 29:45
  Adam Zuckerman: That that's core to what we want to enable.
• 29:47
  Adam Zuckerman: And then obviously, if you're if you're launching a stablecoin, we uh we absolutely want to talk to you and and have you, we want to come help you solve that same liquidity problem.
• 29:56
  Adam Zuckerman: You should not, when you're launching a stable coin for um for payments products or neobanks or or uh any kind of payments functionality, you should not have to go seed the market with 20 to 50 million dollars of liquidity in order for anyone to just access your stablecoin.
• 30:14
  Adam Zuckerman: Again, this this is a core singleness of money problem that we're solving, where you should be able to access that stablecoin through a central point through a clearinghouse instead of having to go and buy it off an exchange.
• 30:27
  Adam Zuckerman: So if you're launching a stablecoin, we we think that's a we talk to a lot of people issuing stable coins, that's probably the number one problem they face is like how do they come up with the money to see the liquidity?
• 30:37
  Adam Zuckerman: And how do we solve the fact that that's still not enough to compete with USDC or USDT?
• 30:45
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, that's a a really, really interesting point.
• 30:48
  Dante Reminick: I think you know, we talked about this in the beginning of the episode.
• 30:51
  Dante Reminick: There's a lot of reasons why someone would want to launch a stable coin or want to have their own stablecoin, but there's a very, very big difference between wanting to launch one and actually successfully launching some.
• 31:00
  Dante Reminick: And not only do you guys sort of solve the the what happens after it's launched, but you actually do help with that cold start problem of getting them live.
• 31:09
  Dante Reminick: I've like you have talked to pretty much everyone who's issuing stable coins out there, and that is a really, really big problem.
• 31:14
  Dante Reminick: It's like, okay, I want to issue a stable coin now.
• 31:17
  Dante Reminick: What?
• 31:17
  Dante Reminick: Right?
• 31:18
  Dante Reminick: Like the liquidity is the number one issue, and you might blow all of your budget on just trying to see the liquidity.
• 31:23
  Dante Reminick: And to your point, that liquidity is never, ever, ever enough.
• 31:26
  Dante Reminick: I've seen this happen for dollar back stable coins, yield-bearing stable coins, local currency stable coins across the board.
• 31:33
  Dante Reminick: Uh and I think it's part of the reason why a lot of these, I would say, emerging stable coins get really shot, you know, shot dead within a few months of launching, dead on arrival, just because they they're not using the right mechanisms of liquidity management.
• 31:53
  Dante Reminick: They're just sort of throwing in a liquidity pool and calling it a day.
• 31:56
  Dante Reminick: But I think that as more like traditional institutions want to come in there and launch it, like to me, it doesn't really make sense for a regional bank in Kansas to launch a stablecoin and then go and deposit a liquidity pool on Uniswap.
• 32:09
  Dante Reminick: Right?
• 32:10
  Dante Reminick: Those types of folks are going to want to plug into a system that's analogous to the one that they use on standard transfers.
• 32:17
  Dante Reminick: And to me, like it it makes a lot of sense for a either TBMC or a TBMC type product to come in there and and fill that.
• 32:26
  Dante Reminick: In in your view, do you see this happening a lot where a lot of traditional financial institutions are A, launching their own stablecoin and then B looking to use you simply because it's mimetic of what they're actively using?
• 32:40
  Adam Zuckerman: Um I think um I think the market is getting smarter on a few things.
• 32:48
  Adam Zuckerman: So the first, um I think people are looking to use us in part because people are realizing that the end metric that you should be targeting as an issuer of a stablecoin for most companies is not market cap.
• 33:05
  Adam Zuckerman: So I think a lot of people looked around in 2023, 2024, and they saw Tether making, you know, arguably running the best business in the history of the world on a per person basis, and were like, I'm a big company, I can do that.
• 33:23
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, I think most uh companies now that are thinking about launching a stable coin are realizing that's a really difficult um uh network effect to disrupt.
• 33:34
  Adam Zuckerman: Like Tether's network effects of having 150 billion plus in TBL are extremely difficult, difficult to disrupt.
• 33:43
  Adam Zuckerman: And people are realizing that actually the most valuable way to launch a stablecoin is to target other metrics, whether it's volume or users or specific behaviors.
• 33:54
  Adam Zuckerman: Uh, people are realizing that they should be using their stablecoin to drive those types of uh metrics and behaviors that drive value to their business in some other way, other than just sort of like capturing the NIM on the on the treasure yield.
• 34:11
  Adam Zuckerman: And so I think that is what is ultimately driving people to realize like, oh, okay, my goal isn't actually to get liquidity out into the market, it's to make my stable coin usable.
• 34:21
  Adam Zuckerman: And I can do that way more cheaply by using our product than by trying to go seed $50 million of liquidity around all these different exchanges and um and across DeFi.
• 34:34
  Adam Zuckerman: And the last thing I'd add is you know, never miss an opportunity to talk about compliance.
• 34:39
  Dante Reminick: Um people do not get to bring a lawyer on the show, by the way.
• 34:43
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 34:43
  Adam Zuckerman: You you never you know, you you gotta learn that lesson.
• 34:46
  Adam Zuckerman: Um the uh the like people don't want to worry about if you're a bank, you don't want to worry about the you know, having having the source of your funds on your platform coming from places that ultimately you don't have visibility into and you you don't ultimately trust.
• 35:03
  Adam Zuckerman: And so that that's another key reason why people I think look to our solution is they know that funds flowing through the clearinghouse are ultimately from issuers, most of whom are at this point OCC trust charters or other highly regulated institutions under Genius, or um KYB businesses.
• 35:21
  Adam Zuckerman: And so they have like from a risk and compliance framework, it's it's very similar to what they're they're used to dealing with in fiat.
• 35:29
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, and I I mean I think that that's the case for a lot of stablecoin products out there.
• 35:35
  Dante Reminick: It's just a matter of you guys do a really, really good job at bridging the gap between what traditional financial institutions are used to and what they're looking for and you know what they need on a transparency perspective and on an auditability perspective and everything like that.
• 35:52
  Dante Reminick: So again, super excited about this.
• 35:54
  Dante Reminick: What is next for TBMC?
• 35:56
  Dante Reminick: I mean, you guys started building six months ago.
• 35:59
  Dante Reminick: You are already starting to move your own funds, moving really, really fast.
• 36:03
  Dante Reminick: What can we all expect from you guys in the next six months, year, two years?
• 36:09
  Adam Zuckerman: Yeah.
• 36:09
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, yeah, next for us, you know, we're we're focused on scaling.
• 36:13
  Adam Zuckerman: Um, so we uh just in the month of June, you know, switched from uh building to to in production and moving customer funds, you know, supporting customer flows through the clearinghouse, processed uh a million and a half in volume last week.
• 36:30
  Adam Zuckerman: So we're extremely proud that we moved that quickly um into production because ultimately this is um this is a hard product to build.
• 36:38
  Adam Zuckerman: Um and now we're focused on you know building the product better, scaling volume, scaling our ability to sport higher volumes, adding more stable coins, really just we're laser focused on we you know we we view this as just a core structural problem that absolutely needs to be solved in stable coins.
• 36:57
  Adam Zuckerman: Someone's gonna solve it, and we want it to, we we obviously want it to be us.
• 37:01
  Adam Zuckerman: Um and so we're just laser focused on that mission.
• 37:04
  Dante Reminick: I love it.
• 37:04
  Dante Reminick: Well, Adam, I appreciate you coming on.
• 37:07
  Dante Reminick: Um, for our audience members, I highly, highly, highly recommend going to you know, wherever Claude to Chat GPT to Google, learning more about TBMC.
• 37:18
  Dante Reminick: What they're doing is is really, really cool.
• 37:20
  Dante Reminick: You know, follow them on socials, keep up to date with them because they're very, very much uh about to hit that inflection point of of taking off and making a really meaningful difference in not only the world of stable coins, but also the way that you know money moves in general.
• 37:34
  Dante Reminick: So, like I said, Adam, thanks for coming on.
• 37:36
  Dante Reminick: Everyone else, thank you for watching the Stable Pulse and uh as always, stay stable.