Latest / The Stable Pulse / The Infrastructure Behind Instant Stablecoin Payments w/ Darren Wang

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The Infrastructure Behind Instant Stablecoin Payments w/ Darren Wang · The Stable Pulse

• 0:00
  Dante Reminick: This episode is brought to you by OwlPay, a payment brand of OBOOK Holdings with Nasdaq ticker OWLS.
• 0:05
  Dante Reminick: OwlPay provides cross-border payment infrastructure for businesses moving funds across global markets.
• 0:10
  Dante Reminick: More at Owlting.com.
• 0:12
  Dante Reminick: Stablecoin issue of debut right here at the Venecta Debut.
• 0:24
  Dante Reminick: Welcome to Stable Pulse.
• 0:27
  Dante Reminick: With us here today, we have Darren Wang, founder and CEO of Owlting.
• 0:32
  Dante Reminick: This is a conversation that I am very, very excited about for a number of reasons that we're going to dive into in a second.
• 0:38
  Dante Reminick: But as always, for listeners, you know that we start off with a section that we call Braggadocious.
• 0:43
  Dante Reminick: This is an opportunity, Darren, for you to brag, for you to introduce yourself, introduce Owl Tang, brag a little bit about uh, you know, what you have built and everything like that.
• 0:53
  Dante Reminick: So, with that being said, Darren, I want to hear more about you.
• 0:56
  Dante Reminick: I want to hear more about Owl Tang.
• 0:58
  Dante Reminick: And as usual, please, please, please leave humility at the door.
• 1:02
  Dante Reminick: Okay.
• 1:03
  Darren Wang: Hi, Tante.
• 1:03
  Darren Wang: Pleasure, everyone.
• 1:05
  Darren Wang: So I'm my name is Darren.
• 1:07
  Darren Wang: I'm the founder and CEO for Owlting Group.
• 1:10
  Darren Wang: So our company's vision uh starting a long time ago is actually to build a platform globally and using stablecoin to do the cross-border payment for uh business enterprise, and particularly for you know online travel agencies like Airbnb, Booking.com to send the money globally to their BB owners or hotel owners.
• 1:33
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so we actually started to build out the platform by applying the license globally.
• 1:40
  Darren Wang: So uh back to 2022, 2023, uh we started to apply for the license in the state.
• 1:48
  Darren Wang: So until today, we have more than 41 money transmitter licenses in the state.
• 1:53
  Darren Wang: And the other states are still in the process of uh getting more states' uh MPLs, and not just the United States.
• 2:02
  Darren Wang: Um we started by uh going to uh Japan and other corridors, Hong Kong, Singapore, Latin America.
• 2:10
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so I think the most challenging part is actually to build a regulated platform before the you know regulation was born.
• 2:21
  Darren Wang: So for example, we waited for uh a couple of years for the Japanese uh regulation authority to you know pass the stable coin uh regulation.
• 2:33
  Darren Wang: So for example, uh Japan needs free license in order to operate the stablecoin on ramp off-ramp business.
• 2:41
  Darren Wang: And we started uh oh you know before uh 2024.
• 2:47
  Darren Wang: I think we started from uh 2023 and until today is more than three years.
• 2:53
  Darren Wang: So uh we have made some very good process during the uh progress.
• 2:59
  Darren Wang: And in the meantime, uh we also need to partner with uh banks in different regions, right?
• 3:06
  Darren Wang: So you know, for example, in the United States we work with Cross River Bank, uh that's the same bank that uh Elon Musk uh X Money is also using.
• 3:16
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so uh because we are uh building a platform that's enables uh enterprise to connect with our API, switching from fiat currency to stablecoin.
• 3:28
  Darren Wang: So the bank also need to be upgraded from their infrastructure.
• 3:33
  Darren Wang: So that's all the lengthy process for us uh to invest before the business was even born for the industry.
• 3:42
  Darren Wang: So I think uh the company uh we started from Asia and going to global by you know from the United States, you know, and go to go to other regions.
• 3:52
  Darren Wang: But the most exciting thing is we really see the traction in the past couple of months.
• 3:58
  Darren Wang: You know, we have a lot of fintech client, uh, even banks want to be you know on board to become our customer.
• 4:05
  Darren Wang: So uh you know every month the transaction value increases a lot.
• 4:10
  Darren Wang: So that's something that really excites us because uh we spent more than six years to achieve what we have visioned before.
• 4:18
  Darren Wang: Yeah.
• 4:19
  Dante Reminick: I love that.
• 4:20
  Dante Reminick: And Sean or Darren, I actually have the stats in front of us for our audience because I think it's really helpful to visualize the scale that you guys are operating at.
• 4:29
  Dante Reminick: So your first half stats.
• 4:32
  Dante Reminick: Right?
• 4:32
  Dante Reminick: So the annualized payment volume on Owl Pay Harbor, and we can go through the different product offerings in a second, but the annualized payment volume on Owl Harbor reached approximately $160 million based on trailing 30 days as of August 20th.
• 4:46
  Dante Reminick: Uh, across the entire Owl Pay platform, spanning both Fiat and stablecoins, the cumulative asset process payment volume has passed more than $700 million.
• 4:55
  Dante Reminick: And you guys have a target to exceed a billion by the end of 2026, and you're you're on course for that.
• 5:01
  Dante Reminick: The first half revenue is about 3.87 million, which is up almost an entire percent year over year, and have made about a quarter of a million dollars in gross profit.
• 5:11
  Dante Reminick: And so you guys are just absolutely killing it on the growth side of things.
• 5:16
  Dante Reminick: Before we dive into why that growth is occurring and what has caused this mass acceleration for Owl Ting, I always like to take sort of the story chronologically.
• 5:26
  Dante Reminick: And so I want to get a better understanding of how Owlting got into the business of global money movement.
• 5:32
  Dante Reminick: Because you guys did not start as most stablecoin companies do, as crypto traders or in the crypto space.
• 5:38
  Dante Reminick: Tell tell us a little bit more about the origins of OWL Ting and how you guys got to where you're at now.
• 5:47
  Darren Wang: Yeah, sure, Dante.
• 5:48
  Darren Wang: That's very good.
• 5:49
  Darren Wang: So uh my background in cryptocurrency has actually been uh more than 12 or 13 years.
• 5:58
  Darren Wang: Uh so uh back to 2012, 2013, I am one of the earliest uh you know people that invest in the Bitcoin and not just invest in the Bitcoin, I also put in my own money to invest in one of the earliest crypto exchanges uh from Taiwan.
• 6:18
  Darren Wang: Uh it's called MyCoin.
• 6:19
  Darren Wang: Yeah.
• 6:20
  Darren Wang: And after I invested crypto exchange and I had the chance to know uh the founder for Ethereum.
• 6:29
  Darren Wang: He went to Taiwan a lot back then.
• 6:31
  Darren Wang: So we actually uh witnessed the rise for all the cryptocurrency industry, you know, from Ethereum to on the later on, you know, in I think back to 2014, I you know uh I know the founder for Tether, USDT.
• 6:50
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so it's actually uh you know very uh long history uh for myself to you know you know step putting my own money in the industry and see you know if the company can evolve into something that's more you know global.
• 7:06
  Dante Reminick: But at the time, were you were you working in crypto or was Owlting doing something completely outside of crypto?
• 7:14
  Darren Wang: Yeah, we were actually doing e-commerce platform.
• 7:17
  Darren Wang: So we are one of the first e-commerce platforms that's accepting Bitcoin as the payment back to 2014.
• 7:25
  Darren Wang: Uh so back then people can use you know one Bitcoin to buy uh milk for one month.
• 7:31
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so looking back, it's really expensive.
• 7:34
  Darren Wang: Yeah, but that's awesome.
• 7:36
  Darren Wang: I think it's awesome.
• 7:36
  Darren Wang: We have the passion to test if Bitcoin becomes the new digital currency, right?
• 7:42
  Darren Wang: And of course, you know, later on, you know, Tether, you know, was more, and later on, you know, USDC was more.
• 7:49
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so I think uh uh having the right direction and some you know experimental uh spirit is very important to build a good startup companies.
• 7:59
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, I I 100% agree.
• 8:01
  Dante Reminick: So you started in e-commerce, you were an early investor in Bitcoin and a few other crypto projects.
• 8:07
  Dante Reminick: How did you go from e-commerce to global payment and global money movement giant?
• 8:14
  Dante Reminick: Right?
• 8:14
  Dante Reminick: What did that process look like?
• 8:17
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so uh my academic background was focused on encryption.
• 8:22
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so my professor is from Russia, right?
• 8:26
  Darren Wang: So I always said the has the passion to you know understand something relative to uh encryption.
• 8:34
  Darren Wang: So when I first saw you know the white paper for Bitcoin, I was very excited because this is something that you know if that is become true, then it become the most you know um pricey, and then uh the the digital currency that can forever change the you know human world.
• 8:56
  Darren Wang: So I started by uh uh taking the Bitcoin as experiment.
• 9:02
  Darren Wang: And uh but it doesn't work out because the the the value for Bitcoin always changes every second, right?
• 9:10
  Darren Wang: So when you want to use Bitcoin as the uh currency like US dollar, it's impossible, right?
• 9:16
  Darren Wang: Because so uh after stablecoin was invented, I always think about you know how to put the stablecoin into the industry, right?
• 9:27
  Darren Wang: So we actually started by building a new hospitality platform that's enabled uh you know uh the Airbnb owners to prevent double bookings, right?
• 9:40
  Darren Wang: So we connect to the largest online travel platform like booking.com, Airbnb, to process their orders.
• 9:49
  Darren Wang: So uh by processing their orders, I actually figured the biggest opportunity is the cross-border payment.
• 9:57
  Darren Wang: They pay to the you know uh BMB owner every month.
• 10:01
  Darren Wang: So this is something that really inspired me that you know we really need to focus on B2B payment if we want to build a global company.
• 10:09
  Darren Wang: So starting in 2018, we scale the hospitality platform, we figure out how to do the payment for then, and then uh we invest in the regulation license for our stablecoin platform and gradually build out the platform.
• 10:26
  Darren Wang: So it takes us about you know seven, eight years from hospitality to what we have achieved today.
• 10:34
  Darren Wang: So I think uh looking back, it's a really long journey because every year we need to invest the new technology license regulation, right?
• 10:43
  Darren Wang: And people.
• 10:43
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so uh I'm very excited to see that we have seen uh what's really important for the company in the future, in the next three to five years, which is the stablecoin payment business.
• 10:56
  Darren Wang: We help enterprise they can settle the money from stablecoin to different local currency globally.
• 11:02
  Darren Wang: Yeah.
• 11:04
  Dante Reminick: I love that.
• 11:04
  Dante Reminick: And you guys have a pretty comprehensive product suite, right?
• 11:09
  Dante Reminick: Anyone who goes to your website publicly, you they can see, oh, you know, Owlting has four different products for businesses and two different products for AI agents and three different products for individuals.
• 11:21
  Dante Reminick: But the underpinning of all of this, and you've mentioned it a few times, is the fact that you guys have aggressively pursued regulatory licenses and make sure making sure that you guys are doing everything that you possibly can to operate within the bounds of every single jurisdiction that you're that you're working in.
• 11:39
  Dante Reminick: To your point, this takes a very long time to do, right?
• 11:43
  Dante Reminick: This took seven, eight years to build out this product.
• 11:45
  Dante Reminick: Can you walk me through what that process looks like, right, from a regulation perspective, from a licensing perspective, to build out a payments company that does the right thing the right way, and how that's impacted your ability to go out and build all of these different products in the space?
• 12:01
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, sure.
• 12:03
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so imagine uh you want to send a payment to your friend in like Mexico, right?
• 12:11
  Darren Wang: How do you do that without going to the banks?
• 12:14
  Darren Wang: So it's actually the first question I always ask people.
• 12:18
  Darren Wang: It's like impossible, right?
• 12:20
  Dante Reminick: If you And why why do you want to avoid going to the banks, Darren?
• 12:23
  Dante Reminick: Why not?
• 12:24
  Darren Wang: No, it's like uh uh you know, go to bank is actually the most convenient way, right?
• 12:29
  Darren Wang: But it's very expensive, like $30, $40 per transaction, right?
• 12:34
  Darren Wang: And uh what if the uh you know the your recipient, your friend is in Nigeria, right?
• 12:43
  Darren Wang: You your pro your your local bank probably will raise the price even higher, right?
• 12:49
  Darren Wang: So that's the probably problem people are facing.
• 12:52
  Darren Wang: But right now, if you are sending a message, you know, reserve quite messenger, right?
• 12:57
  Darren Wang: It costs you nothing.
• 12:59
  Darren Wang: And then the m the message just arrives instantly, right?
• 13:02
  Darren Wang: So I have a theory that uh the fundamental for the financial system need to be you know really rebuilt on the blockchain and stablecoin.
• 13:13
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so that's actually the theory that uh we have you know before we build a product.
• 13:20
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so uh here's the problem we need to solve.
• 13:23
  Darren Wang: The first one is uh you're moving money for other people.
• 13:28
  Darren Wang: If you don't have a license, then you don't get a trust from customer.
• 13:32
  Darren Wang: Right.
• 13:33
  Darren Wang: So we need to apply for the license before we make any sense in the business.
• 13:39
  Darren Wang: So that's the first difficult part.
• 13:41
  Darren Wang: And you know, starting from the United States is really difficult because in the US, it's like a state-owned regulation, which means that you need to go through the application process for 50 states.
• 13:55
  Darren Wang: Yeah.
• 13:56
  Darren Wang: So we actually have no idea how much it costs.
• 14:00
  Darren Wang: But I think as a founder, I just want to start as fast as possible.
• 14:05
  Darren Wang: So uh we we have a legal council in the state that's helping us to you know prepare the application.
• 14:13
  Darren Wang: And as a foreign company, it's actually more difficult because uh we started from Taiwan.
• 14:19
  Darren Wang: So uh it's even more difficult for us to apply for the US license.
• 14:23
  Darren Wang: Uh so in the meantime, we also need to find the technology that can support our vision, right?
• 14:30
  Darren Wang: So, you know, there's a lot of uh different blockchains, right?
• 14:35
  Darren Wang: Ethereum, uh Staler, Polygon, and you know Solana, etc.
• 14:41
  Darren Wang: But when you are removing the real money, which stablecoin are you using?
• 14:47
  Darren Wang: Right?
• 14:47
  Darren Wang: So we started by using USDC because they are the regulated uh stablecoin in the state, right?
• 14:54
  Darren Wang: But uh to support uh multiple blockchain, for example, if if you are sending USDC from Ethereum to Solana, you need to be uh compatible with different blockchains, right?
• 15:08
  Darren Wang: So we have an engineering team that's focused on uh solving the problem for cross-chain, right?
• 15:14
  Darren Wang: And how about liquidity?
• 15:16
  Darren Wang: Liquidity is also very important, right?
• 15:19
  Darren Wang: For example, if if you're sending uh $10 million to uh Japan, right?
• 15:26
  Darren Wang: But not any crypto exchange locally has the $10 million liquidity in the Japanese yen, right?
• 15:34
  Darren Wang: So that's also another problem you need to solve.
• 15:37
  Darren Wang: And the other one is the compliance, right?
• 15:40
  Darren Wang: When you are putting money from bank account to crypto wallet, you know, how do you do the KYC and then anti-money laundry cross-border, right?
• 15:50
  Darren Wang: So you also need to have a new standard for the regulation part, licensing power.
• 15:55
  Darren Wang: So all putting all those elements together, it becomes a huge company.
• 16:01
  Darren Wang: You need to have a compliance team, engineering team, legal team, licensing, etc.
• 16:07
  Darren Wang: So that's actually makes the process very um difficult.
• 16:13
  Darren Wang: So I think that's the the issue we have encountered during the process.
• 16:18
  Darren Wang: And it takes four years, right?
• 16:21
  Darren Wang: So that's actually $40 million investment for the company.
• 16:24
  Darren Wang: Yeah.
• 16:25
  Darren Wang: So I think that's how we figure this is something really beyond our scope because we're coming from Taiwan.
• 16:33
  Darren Wang: When we are building a product without making money, it's very difficult to raise the money, right?
• 16:39
  Darren Wang: So during the the process, I actually pledged my house a couple of times in order to squeeze money for the company.
• 16:48
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so that's really something inspired me.
• 16:52
  Darren Wang: And uh, you know, if you want to be a founder, you need to sacrifice a lot of things, right?
• 16:58
  Darren Wang: So that's the you know, all the you know, trouble we have encountered during the process.
• 17:04
  Dante Reminick: Darren, that's awesome.
• 17:06
  Dante Reminick: That's that's really, really amazing.
• 17:08
  Dante Reminick: Uh I I love hearing stories like this, and I think that the best founders in the world are the ones that are willing to take it as far as you have.
• 17:18
  Dante Reminick: And you know, speaking of founders, you guys have obviously put in the time and the money.
• 17:24
  Dante Reminick: You said it took you, you know, eight years, $40 million to get you know 41 US MTLs, to get a Japan banking API, to start working with Visa Direct, to be part of all of these different networks.
• 17:38
  Dante Reminick: I personally know dozens and dozens of founders that are going down this path, that are not as far as you are, but are trying to end up where you are.
• 17:48
  Dante Reminick: What advice do you have for them as someone who has already done this, who has already gone out and gotten all of the licenses and been part of the networks that they need to, et cetera, et cetera?
• 17:58
  Dante Reminick: What advice do you have for the rest of the stablecoin world that's going down this path now?
• 18:05
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so I think the problem we are solving is the problem we are facing ourselves.
• 18:11
  Darren Wang: Right.
• 18:12
  Darren Wang: So initially, that's how uh you know typical stablecoin company startup is doing is finding a partner, right?
• 18:23
  Darren Wang: Finding a bank using their licensing uh corridors.
• 18:28
  Darren Wang: But when you're really deep in the industry, you will understand how difficult it is, right?
• 18:35
  Darren Wang: For example, uh you have a partner in US, right?
• 18:39
  Darren Wang: But they don't have the Japanese corridor, right?
• 18:42
  Darren Wang: So even you have uh onboarding to become their client using their infra, but it's still impossible for you to send the money to Japan, right?
• 18:53
  Darren Wang: So I think uh from uh my thought and logic is we need to solve the largest problem in the industry, which is licensing, right?
• 19:04
  Darren Wang: So we open up our license for third party, they can use our KYC anti-money laundry protocols, and then the most important thing is we build a rail for them.
• 19:16
  Darren Wang: So they don't need to connect to uh so many countries like us, right?
• 19:22
  Darren Wang: So I don't think every company can go through the process to apply for the money transmitted license in US 450 State and then Japan and other regions, it's too much money to spend.
• 19:36
  Darren Wang: So we want to open up our platform and infrastructure for staller companies so they just can focus on getting the customer.
• 19:44
  Darren Wang: For example, uh for most of the payment companies using stablecoin, they are very regional, which means you know, if you are coming from Mexico, you focus on solving the problem between US and Mexico.
• 19:58
  Darren Wang: If you are coming from Brazil, Nigeria, you know, you focus on those regional payment activities.
• 20:06
  Darren Wang: So we actually open up our corridors.
• 20:10
  Darren Wang: So we have more than uh, I would say 60 countries that can use stablecoin to offer them, and more than 100 countries that can settle with the local currency with fiat.
• 20:23
  Darren Wang: Yeah, and then with the new corridor we are building in uh India, you know, Japan, Hong Kong, China, even the Middle East, I believe the most uh difficult problem to solve is the liquidity in different uh corridors and then the licensing, you know, because uh union, you know, moving money for other people is a serious business.
• 20:47
  Darren Wang: So I don't think people will have so much capital to invest if you want to focus on certain corridors, right?
• 20:56
  Darren Wang: So we are helping those different companies to solve the largest problem for them.
• 21:01
  Darren Wang: So they can easily focus on the business, forget about licensing, you know, technology, you know, MLKYC compliance issues.
• 21:10
  Darren Wang: So it's why the logic and it's very similar to uh how TSMC was succeeded in the semiconductor industry.
• 21:20
  Darren Wang: So uh the logic for TSMC is they don't want to compete with their client.
• 21:26
  Darren Wang: So uh if you don't have any factory to manufacture the fab, right, um you just go to TSMC.
• 21:34
  Darren Wang: And you know that TSMC will not steal your IC design.
• 21:38
  Darren Wang: They just focus on you know helping the customer to deliver the chip, you know, right?
• 21:44
  Darren Wang: So everyone becomes TSMC's customer, Nvidia, Apple.
• 21:48
  Darren Wang: They don't need to worry about uh their patent guns stolen by the um you know by TSMC.
• 21:55
  Darren Wang: Because they know TSMC focuses on helping them to just you know manufacturing the The chip.
• 22:00
  Darren Wang: So I think that's the logic we have.
• 22:02
  Darren Wang: We want to become, you know, a company that's building the infra.
• 22:07
  Darren Wang: So people just give us their volume and we help them to move the money globally.
• 22:13
  Dante Reminick: I love it.
• 22:14
  Dante Reminick: So your advice to founders is don't go down the path that you did in getting all these licenses.
• 22:18
  Dante Reminick: Just use the licenses and the rails that that Owlting has already created.
• 22:23
  Dante Reminick: I love that.
• 22:24
  Dante Reminick: I want to start diving into who your customers actually are and what they're using you for, right?
• 22:32
  Dante Reminick: A lot of people describe themselves as global payment companies or global stablecoin companies or whatever it might be.
• 22:38
  Dante Reminick: But you guys look a little bit different than most.
• 22:40
  Dante Reminick: And I mean that as the highest form of compliment.
• 22:44
  Dante Reminick: Tell me a little bit about who is using Owl Ting and what they are using OWLTing for.
• 22:51
  Darren Wang: Yes, sure.
• 22:52
  Darren Wang: So we have a lot of uh trading company, fintech startup, that's helping money, that's moving money between US, Nigeria, and you know, Middle East to China.
• 23:06
  Darren Wang: And you know, I think once we open up Japan, you know, we'll be a lot more fintech, you know, that's using our rails to move the money.
• 23:15
  Darren Wang: So I would say uh exchange, uh, wallet company from Latin American and uh fintech startup that's helping to uh using stablecoin to move the money between US and Africa, you know, and uh of course uh I think bank is actually catching up.
• 23:35
  Darren Wang: The global banks uh they want to embrace stablecoin technology, right?
• 23:40
  Darren Wang: So I think uh another analogy that people can imagine is right now in US, you can send money with Zale, right, to your friend with you know zero dollars.
• 23:52
  Darren Wang: But in the in the future, if uh Zale is built on our infrastructure, they can actually send the money through blockchain to any of the you know country in the world with almost zero dollars, and the money will be arriving within two minutes.
• 24:09
  Darren Wang: So right now I'm seeing a lot of people, uh company you know sending millions of dollars from you know US to Africa and Africa to Europe.
• 24:20
  Darren Wang: The money literally just arrived within you know two, three minutes.
• 24:25
  Darren Wang: That's really amazing.
• 24:27
  Darren Wang: Yeah.
• 24:27
  Darren Wang: So I think uh the vision for the company is to help other fintech companies to become more successful using stablecoin rails.
• 24:37
  Darren Wang: So I think uh for stablecoin, right, we have circle, we have tether, right?
• 24:42
  Darren Wang: So you don't need to compete with them to have another like stablecoin.
• 24:46
  Darren Wang: Most important thing is there should be some company solving the licensing problem, solving the liquidity problem in different corridors.
• 24:56
  Darren Wang: So it's really difficult, particularly the liquidity part, right?
• 25:01
  Darren Wang: Because you know, there's over 100 currencies in the world.
• 25:03
  Darren Wang: So how do you offer from US dollar stablecoin to those different currencies?
• 25:09
  Darren Wang: So that requires a lot of uh you know business debt partnership in different regions and corridors.
• 25:16
  Darren Wang: Uh so that's really difficult.
• 25:17
  Darren Wang: And we want to solve the most difficult problem in the industry.
• 25:22
  Dante Reminick: Okay.
• 25:22
  Dante Reminick: There's a lot to unpack there.
• 25:25
  Dante Reminick: Uh, and we're gonna we're gonna unpack it bit by bit.
• 25:27
  Dante Reminick: The first thing is you mentioned that you work with a lot of you know trading companies, import-export companies.
• 25:33
  Dante Reminick: Tell me a little bit more about that.
• 25:36
  Dante Reminick: Like why do they come to Owl Tang?
• 25:39
  Dante Reminick: What is broken about the system that they're using, and why can you guys do it better?
• 25:44
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, sure.
• 25:47
  Darren Wang: So in the past, when they are sending money from, for example, uh Brazil to uh China, usually the money needs to be uh confirmed after 48 or 72 hours before you can you know confirm the money is arriving or refunded, right?
• 26:09
  Darren Wang: So if the money hasn't arrived, another like a refunding process take another, I would say, two weeks.
• 26:17
  Darren Wang: So if so we have a really customer case that's sending almost 200k US dollars, the money was disappeared for you know 14 days, right?
• 26:28
  Darren Wang: So the customer didn't receive the money, and you know the refunding process for Swift is super lengthy because they don't even know which intermediate bank they're using during the process, right?
• 26:42
  Darren Wang: So I think that's the problem for the traditional uh Swift network.
• 26:47
  Darren Wang: But for blockchain, you know, it's very easy, transparent.
• 26:50
  Darren Wang: Every transaction you can find uh when does that happen and which local uh partner you are using to settle the money.
• 27:00
  Darren Wang: So I think this is actually uh much faster than before.
• 27:04
  Darren Wang: So I think uh we are partnered with Circle.
• 27:08
  Darren Wang: Uh so Circle is actually pushing the Circle Payment Network globally.
• 27:13
  Darren Wang: So during the last 12 months, I would say it's a super fast uh progress because I I believe in the future uh Swift network will still be existing, right?
• 27:26
  Darren Wang: But it's actually a more uh expensive option for people, right?
• 27:30
  Darren Wang: So imagine if you go to the bank and you want to send the money, the bank will ask you you know, you want to spend $40 or you want to spend zero dollars, you know, and the money will be arriving in two minutes, right?
• 27:42
  Darren Wang: So I think this is the new option that for every bank in the world uh they can have in the near future.
• 27:51
  Darren Wang: Uh it's it's global, it's license regulated.
• 27:55
  Darren Wang: So uh stablecoin is actually a digital currency during the process, right?
• 28:01
  Darren Wang: But when the money arrives in different corridors, they can actually become either in the digital format or the local currency sitting in your bank account or debit card.
• 28:11
  Darren Wang: So this is actually the thing we have actually uh fulfilled by partner with different, you know, partners like Circle, Payment Network, Visa Direct.
• 28:21
  Darren Wang: So everything is real right now.
• 28:23
  Darren Wang: So right now our job is actually to bring more fintech companies to use the rail to you know accelerate the process.
• 28:33
  Dante Reminick: I love it.
• 28:34
  Dante Reminick: You've mentioned banks a few times.
• 28:36
  Dante Reminick: Talk to me about your relationship with banks, how banks are starting to think about stable coins, what you've noticed in the eight plus years you've been building this out, and everything like that.
• 28:47
  Darren Wang: Yeah, sure.
• 28:48
  Darren Wang: Yeah.
• 28:49
  Darren Wang: So in the in the in the very beginning, uh you know, the company has gone through a very difficult time where all the crypto-friendly bank, so there's Silvergate and uh signature bank, you know, they all went bankrupt.
• 29:06
  Darren Wang: So uh I think for bank, uh they need to have a, for example, sub-account, you know, for company like us, right?
• 29:16
  Darren Wang: So we have, let's say our customer is a fintech company, and those fintech companies have, for example, the wallet company has you know one million users or 20 million users, right?
• 29:29
  Darren Wang: So it's like the bank has needs to need to have the capabilities to open up MASA account for company like us, and then we will be open up the sub ledger, you know, either bank account or wallet.
• 29:44
  Darren Wang: And the money really needs to move very fast.
• 29:47
  Darren Wang: For example, we receive $10 million, right?
• 29:50
  Darren Wang: And we well we want to send the money immediately with stablecoin.
• 29:54
  Darren Wang: So the bank needs to have a capability to instantly switch the sphere to stablecoin, right?
• 30:01
  Darren Wang: And once the counterparty, for example, in Japan, they receive the stablecoin, they need to offer it to the local Japanese yen.
• 30:11
  Darren Wang: Right?
• 30:11
  Darren Wang: So that's a very good example to tell people how difficult it is to have a local liquidity using stablecoin to offer on frame in different corridors.
• 30:24
  Darren Wang: And we are solving the problem for countries, uh, almost 100 countries already, uh, and keep expanding the network.
• 30:32
  Darren Wang: So I think in the future the real winner will be uh people who really control uh the infrastructure and willing to open up the license for other fintech companies because uh you know license means responsibility, right?
• 30:49
  Darren Wang: So if you have uh one million users, whenever they are making transactions, we need to do the instant KYC anti-money laundry for your customer as well.
• 31:01
  Darren Wang: Yeah.
• 31:02
  Darren Wang: So they really need a lot of like engineering effort.
• 31:05
  Darren Wang: For example, how do you uh utilize the usage for AI, right?
• 31:11
  Darren Wang: So using AI can shorten the path, you know, the time you do the KYC anti-money laundry for your customers.
• 31:19
  Darren Wang: And if there's you know transactions that's billion dollars per month, right?
• 31:24
  Darren Wang: You need to do this back and forth, back and forth every second.
• 31:28
  Darren Wang: So I think that's actually what have hasn't happened in the fin tank industry.
• 31:34
  Darren Wang: For example, PayPal didn't have the you know technology yet, right?
• 31:40
  Darren Wang: So it's gotta be a new company that has the right vision and execute the vision and build a product for uh you know fintech startup.
• 31:49
  Darren Wang: So that's something that we're building for the world.
• 31:52
  Darren Wang: Yeah.
• 31:53
  Dante Reminick: Yeah.
• 31:54
  Dante Reminick: Like I said, I've talked to a lot of founders on this podcast, and it seems to me that every single person who is building a fintech company sets out to build a fintech company or a payments company.
• 32:07
  Dante Reminick: But at the end of the day, everyone ends up building a compliance company because it's so deeply ingrained in how payments operate globally.
• 32:15
  Dante Reminick: So I love that.
• 32:16
  Dante Reminick: And Darren, you're gonna have to remind me after this podcast.
• 32:19
  Dante Reminick: I have a lot of folks who I think are gonna benefit from using Owl Ting Rails that I want to send over to you.
• 32:23
  Dante Reminick: And I think that there's some banking introductions that I can make for you as well.
• 32:27
  Dante Reminick: But uh we'll we'll take that off air.
• 32:30
  Dante Reminick: Um, tell me a little bit more about how Owlting has evolved from you know getting your first uh getting your first licenses to today in terms of the services that you're able to offer.
• 32:43
  Dante Reminick: Like I said, you have a variety of different services for businesses, you have different services for agents, you have different services for individuals.
• 32:49
  Dante Reminick: Tell me about what it's like building out that entire product suite.
• 32:54
  Darren Wang: Yeah, sure.
• 32:55
  Darren Wang: So I think that's actually uh uh very simple logic, right?
• 33:01
  Darren Wang: For example, uh there's a company like Circle that's issuing stablecoin, right?
• 33:08
  Darren Wang: But what you really need is uh you need to onboard a platform, instantly uh you know, have API to support your fiat transaction to stablecoin.
• 33:21
  Darren Wang: And then when the money flows between different wallets, right, or to different bank accounts, uh the platform also needs to provide the anti-money laundry KYC process.
• 33:34
  Darren Wang: Otherwise, the money is not moving legally, right?
• 33:37
  Darren Wang: So if you go out to the market, uh take a look for who's providing the service, there's actually very few companies that's doing this, right?
• 33:46
  Darren Wang: So uh so that's why you know we designed the platform to fulfill the gap between, for example, uh USDC and banks.
• 33:57
  Darren Wang: So I think that's actually the most important part we are solving, right?
• 34:02
  Darren Wang: For example, if right now, if you go to like a Bank of America, right?
• 34:06
  Darren Wang: Tell them I want to have a you know stablecoin account, it's like impossible.
• 34:12
  Darren Wang: So that's the thing we want to solve.
• 34:15
  Darren Wang: So you can imagine in the future, uh, when you open up your banking uh wallet app, right, you need to have uh you will have a fiat account like usual, but when you are transferring money through all the corridors, so you don't need to enter the Swift number, bank account, blah blah blah, address, you know, those different columns.
• 34:40
  Darren Wang: All you need is actually to put a contact and you know fulfill the wallet address, you know, in your banking app and click send, the money will you know instantly arrive to the other countries, bank account or crypto, you know, wallet address.
• 34:58
  Darren Wang: So that's the thing we are building.
• 35:00
  Darren Wang: So for uh banks, they need a wallet infrastructure, right?
• 35:06
  Darren Wang: But they also need anti-money laundry, KYC between for the money movement.
• 35:13
  Darren Wang: Because right now, the bank, the banking system, they can only scan the fiat movement, right?
• 35:19
  Darren Wang: So the fiat movement becomes stable coin.
• 35:22
  Darren Wang: They have no idea where the money goes, right?
• 35:25
  Darren Wang: So you need to have everything to complete the bigger platform.
• 35:29
  Darren Wang: So I think that's why uh when we go to the market, uh, get the banking infra ready, stablecoin infra ready, a lot of fintech companies come to us because we solve the problem for them.
• 35:43
  Darren Wang: Right.
• 35:43
  Darren Wang: So I think uh the the reason is uh we are actually in the industry for a very long time.
• 35:52
  Darren Wang: So we understand what's you know what's the most difficult problem that people are facing, right?
• 35:59
  Darren Wang: So when you want to build a company, say, you know, I have a lot of customers from my hometown, you know, Nigeria, right?
• 36:06
  Darren Wang: I want to send the money back to my uh hometown people, but you don't have a license in the state, right?
• 36:12
  Darren Wang: So it's like if you start, then you immediately become illegal in the state.
• 36:17
  Darren Wang: So that's why we want to uh be a platform that's supporting those fintech companies to be succeeded.
• 36:25
  Darren Wang: Yeah, and that we don't have the capability to go to every market ourselves, right?
• 36:30
  Darren Wang: So I think uh the the story for TSMC really inspired me, right?
• 36:37
  Darren Wang: So uh I I don't think most people understand TSMC a couple years ago, right?
• 36:47
  Darren Wang: Because uh when they are not a trillion-dollar company, I don't think many people heard about TSMC, right?
• 36:53
  Darren Wang: But everyone knows Apple, everyone has iPhone, Android phone, but everything is actually coming from TSMC, right?
• 37:02
  Darren Wang: So that's something that that's the company we want to build to help the fintech company to be succeeded in the industry.
• 37:10
  Darren Wang: Yeah.
• 37:12
  Dante Reminick: I love that.
• 37:13
  Dante Reminick: I love that.
• 37:14
  Dante Reminick: So you guys have gone out and built all these different relationships with different providers, right?
• 37:18
  Dante Reminick: You have, you know, to your point, licensing everywhere, you might have a banking partner over here, and you're partnering with a RTP solution over there.
• 37:26
  Dante Reminick: I know a lot of founders right now, to your point, that are analyzing what providers to use in various different geographies.
• 37:34
  Dante Reminick: How do you go about analyzing what a good partner and what a good provider looks like as someone who has done this for almost a decade?
• 37:44
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so I think the the most important thing is uh you really have the capability to deliver the money.
• 37:53
  Darren Wang: You know, that that's actually very important.
• 37:55
  Darren Wang: It sounds very simple, stupid, but important.
• 37:59
  Darren Wang: Right.
• 38:00
  Darren Wang: So uh so when you are looking for you know solution in the market, you will actually find it's very difficult to find a company that can actually help you to settle the money from stablecoin to as many corridors as possible.
• 38:19
  Darren Wang: Right.
• 38:19
  Darren Wang: So let's say if you want to send the money to Singapore, you don't want to sign out another problem in Singapore, right?
• 38:28
  Darren Wang: So there's over you know 100 countries in the world.
• 38:32
  Darren Wang: So you you it's impossible for you to connect to 100 um companies locally to build out a network.
• 38:40
  Darren Wang: Yeah.
• 38:40
  Darren Wang: So uh so it's very similar like the concept for Visa, right?
• 38:46
  Darren Wang: Visa is a global brand, and once you connect to Visa, then you have capability to uh you know solve the problem for settlement.
• 38:56
  Darren Wang: But Visa itself doesn't have the license, right?
• 38:59
  Darren Wang: So uh when you want to work with Visa, yourself need to be a licensed player to be partnered with Visa.
• 39:05
  Darren Wang: That's something very important.
• 39:07
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so we want to become the platform that's you know, first is we are licensed, so we open up the license for you.
• 39:17
  Darren Wang: And second is we got all the settlement corridors, so you don't need to connect to 100 companies globally.
• 39:24
  Darren Wang: You can connect to one API to our platform, and whenever you're sending the money, uh you don't need to have two options, you know, as a partner.
• 39:34
  Darren Wang: You can just connect to one partner like us, and then we'll help you to settle the money globally.
• 39:40
  Darren Wang: So that's the thing we are building for the industry.
• 39:45
  Dante Reminick: Love it.
• 39:46
  Dante Reminick: And I I want to look to the future now.
• 39:50
  Dante Reminick: Tell me a little bit about what you're building for not payments as it is today, but payments as it will be tomorrow, right?
• 39:59
  Dante Reminick: You guys have come out with agentic payment solutions.
• 40:03
  Dante Reminick: You guys have sort of been on the forefront of again, not just building for where payments are today, but where payments are tomorrow.
• 40:09
  Dante Reminick: How do you think about this?
• 40:10
  Dante Reminick: What are some predictions that you have and how are you building for that?
• 40:14
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so right now, uh, for example, you know, PayPal, Stripe, they are winning in the credit card era, right?
• 40:23
  Darren Wang: So I know stablecoin uh Stripe is also moving very fast into the stablecoin space.
• 40:30
  Darren Wang: So which means that we are actually seeing the same vision, like uh, you know, big company like Stripe, right?
• 40:37
  Darren Wang: But I think as I mentioned, uh the most important uh problem we need to solve is the capability to settle stablecoin to different currencies.
• 40:48
  Darren Wang: That's that's that's something uh I believe the most difficult part to solve uh for the industry.
• 40:56
  Darren Wang: And uh talking about payment gateway, right?
• 41:00
  Darren Wang: In the future, uh AI agent will actually helping people to you know find a hotel, book an airline ticket, etc.
• 41:10
  Darren Wang: So I think uh every website, either booking uh airline ticket, airline company, ish, you know, e-commerce site, will be redesigned to fulfill the needs for AI agent.
• 41:23
  Darren Wang: This is something that completely different from uh Stripe is building successfully in the last you know 10 years.
• 41:33
  Darren Wang: So I think the thing we're building for future is uh we have an AI agent checkout with AI agent for consumers, right?
• 41:44
  Darren Wang: So AI agent checkout is for an e-commerce company that's using X402 standard, and A agent will you know using the standard to you know find a hotel in the shortest time and finish the checking out process.
• 41:59
  Darren Wang: And the most important thing is the cost structure is totally different.
• 42:03
  Darren Wang: For example, in the payment gateway industry, uh, they charge you for you know 4 to 5% for each of the transactions.
• 42:13
  Darren Wang: So it's actually is not the margin for small business, right?
• 42:17
  Darren Wang: But if you are settled with stablecoin, we only charge less than 1%, which means the margin for business owner is much higher compared to the past.
• 42:29
  Darren Wang: Uh so the thing will happen in Shopify, Booking.com, Airbnb, etc.
• 42:36
  Darren Wang: Uh, BNB owner, e-commerce side will make more money because they reduce the cost for payment gateway.
• 42:43
  Darren Wang: So this is something that in the future, uh, you know, it's actually a longer future, but when you look when we build a company, we vision everything, right?
• 42:54
  Darren Wang: The cross-border payment will be much cheaper instantly, and checkout prices will uh be smooth using AI agent, and e-commerce company will have much fewer uh payment costs because they are switching to X402 stablecoin industry uh standard.
• 43:14
  Darren Wang: Right?
• 43:14
  Darren Wang: So that's the bigger picture we are building.
• 43:17
  Darren Wang: But everything is actually under the same infrastructure that is licensing anti-money laundry, KYC, it's open up to you know the new tools.
• 43:28
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so I think it's actually one company, one product we're building, but it's a global scale uh product that we are building for the industry.
• 43:39
  Dante Reminick: I love that.
• 43:40
  Dante Reminick: And tell me more about what still needs to be built.
• 43:44
  Dante Reminick: I think there's always a gap between what marketing says and what products are actually capable of today.
• 43:52
  Dante Reminick: And a lot of people go out and say, oh, we've solved payments, right?
• 43:55
  Dante Reminick: We've done it.
• 43:56
  Dante Reminick: I don't think that's that's the case.
• 43:58
  Dante Reminick: You guys are certainly you know building for for the future of payments, like I mentioned before.
• 44:04
  Dante Reminick: What still needs to be built in this industry for you know payments to become truly global, for a genetic payment to have all the infrastructure that it needs?
• 44:12
  Dante Reminick: Where do you spend all of your days from a building perspective?
• 44:17
  Darren Wang: Yeah, so I think uh as a company, we have actually built uh the basic infra for the future.
• 44:28
  Darren Wang: So right now we just need more uh clients to use the platform.
• 44:33
  Darren Wang: And I have a theory that you know once you reach 100 client scale, then you're gonna be becoming you know a rolling snowball.
• 44:42
  Darren Wang: You know, everything will start to accelerate.
• 44:45
  Darren Wang: So uh right now we are close to 100 clients uh for enterprise clients, which means that we actually will have the same, you know, a much better experience to quickly unboard the client and push the product to uh so initially in the last you know uh starting this year, we start to focus on uh B2B enterprise fintech companies.
• 45:08
  Darren Wang: But right now we have started onboarding uh you know B2B2C companies, like a wallet company.
• 45:16
  Darren Wang: So they have uh you know millions of users that can use the Visa direct product to unramp and off-ramp globally.
• 45:24
  Darren Wang: So that's something really excites that uh we find a growth momentum for the platform, and then we gradually expand the momentum to other categories of the clients.
• 45:38
  Darren Wang: So that's something really exciting us.
• 45:40
  Darren Wang: We find the right path to growth.
• 45:42
  Dante Reminick: That's amazing.
• 45:42
  Dante Reminick: Darren, I I really appreciated this conversation.
• 45:46
  Dante Reminick: I love all of your historical analogies that you take in terms of, oh, TSMC did this and checkout.com did that.
• 45:53
  Dante Reminick: I think that that mental model resonates with a lot of people.
• 45:56
  Dante Reminick: I am certainly a much larger fan of Apple Ting than I was 45 minutes ago, and I think that our audience will be as well.
• 46:03
  Dante Reminick: So I appreciate you coming onto the show.
• 46:05
  Dante Reminick: For our listeners, I highly recommend if you are building a fintech, if you are building any type of company that needs to move money around the world, please, please, please go check out Ableting.
• 46:15
  Dante Reminick: Their team is incredibly responsive.
• 46:17
  Dante Reminick: You can find out everything that you need to know just on their website, Ableting.com.
• 46:21
  Dante Reminick: Um, and as always, stay stable.