Latest / The Payments Shed / Ep. 6 - Stablecoins, Networks, and the Future of Digital Asset Payments with Fireblocks @ Money 20/20 USA 2025

Transcript

Ep. 6 - Stablecoins, Networks, and the Future of Digital Asset Payments with Fireblocks @ Money 20/20 USA 2025 · The Payments Shed

• 0:05
  Welcome to another episode of the Payment Chef podcast live
• 0:07
  from Money 2020 USA. We're very lucky to be joined by
• 0:11
  Goldie SVP Payments Networks at Fireblocks.
• 0:14
  Goldie, welcome to the show. Please introduce yourself.
• 0:16
  Yeah. Thank you for having me.
• 0:17
  I basically have been to Fireblocks for probably about
• 0:21
  four years now and I manage everything related to our
• 0:24
  payments industry, go to market, the product, R&D everything and
• 0:30
  including our network. So if there's a payments company
• 0:32
  out there that want to use digital assets, that's my ass is
• 0:35
  on the line that they'll use us. And we're really interested in
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  how you guys have expanded across that full digital asset
• 0:41
  stack over the last few years. Can you talk to us about that
• 0:44
  from a payment perspective? Yeah, of course.
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  Look, I think that payment companies have actually looked
• 0:51
  into this space several times, right?
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  They looked at the space when it started in 20, let's say 1718.
• 0:58
  They looked at it, they thought, oh, we don't want to accept
• 1:01
  payments in crypto. We'll, we'll go back a bit.
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  Then 20/21/2020 around with the COVID era, people were looking
• 1:08
  at this, stablecoins were already almost there and they
• 1:10
  people were saying, oh, maybe we should start doing stablecoin
• 1:13
  stuff. But then there was this whole
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  banking, obviously, you know, colossal shit show, if I, if I
• 1:22
  may, with SVB and others. And a lot of these payment
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  companies went back a bit And now what happened over the last
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  18 months, right? So obviously Stripe acquired a
• 1:34
  company called Bridge for a billion dollars that made
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  everyone notice, right? So add the end Nuvet check out
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  will pay. They're all like, wait, they
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  spend a billion dollars on something that's big and then
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  administration change, obviously more regulation and all these
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  payment companies are now in this, I guess, huge sort of like
• 1:55
  FOMO of wait, stable phones are actually happening.
• 1:59
  And we're they're waking up to see smaller fintechs stealing
• 2:03
  their payment flows. And they're now coming in and
• 2:05
  they're saying, wait, wait, wait, we need to understand this
• 2:08
  better. We need to be in this.
• 2:10
  But also they're saying, and we're very likely to be in this
• 2:13
  position. We actually want to work with a
• 2:15
  company that knows how to serve enterprise, we that knows how to
• 2:17
  do scale. And when we tell them, when you,
• 2:20
  when we tell a payments company that this year we're going to
• 2:23
  process $5 trillion, they are like, oh, wow, OK, we want to
• 2:27
  work with you guys. And where are you seeing the
• 2:29
  most meaningful adoption of stable coins at the moment?
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  It's mostly around, I want to say payouts over the last 12
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  months that has quadrupled. So payouts to gig economy
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  employees, payouts to even salaries for example, that's
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  been growing tremendously. The number one use case, which
• 2:49
  is 40% of our volume in payments is still the importer exporter
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  use case. I love that use case because I
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  say this a lot. Stable coins are not cheaper,
• 3:02
  right? They're faster, but and if you
• 3:04
  can find economic value in that speed, then great.
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  And the importers, exporters, if they pay someone within an hour
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  and now within two days, that saves them that container being
• 3:16
  in the port, that saves them like $100,000 a day.
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  So the speed equals money. That's the number one use case.
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  It's my favorite use case. I just fear after work in
• 3:24
  harmony with stablecoins, you know?
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  Is there a happy medium? Is there a happy medium between
• 3:30
  Fiat and and stable coins, you mean?
• 3:31
  Yeah, Look, I think they complement each other today.
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  I think that, you know, stable coins are great for some things,
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  not so great for other things. The world still runs on Fiat.
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  That's great. If you're in the US, you don't
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  necessarily need stable coins for to pay for anything.
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  If you're in Europe, Sepa's great.
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  If you want to move money between these nations, between
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  borders, then you sort of have to, unless you just want to
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  waste your time time. How do you guys work
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  specifically with fintechs and PSPS as part of your ecosystem?
• 4:05
  Right. So I think the first thing that
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  we tell them is, look, your users believe it or not, want
• 4:11
  stablecoin accounts and we start this education process where we
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  show them that this is coming from the grass roots.
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  This is not Fireblocks trying to shield you on a new technology.
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  Your users actually want to either be protected from
• 4:26
  inflation in different countries, or maybe they just,
• 4:29
  you know, want to hold that money so they can move it
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  faster. So we start slowly.
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  We start with Stablepoint accounts, then we bring them on
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  to, hey, here's yield. Imagine this.
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  You can actually earn yield, share that with your clients,
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  and then we get them to the more complex programmable money use
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  cases, but slowly, slowly. I guess that's a nice agree into
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  banks and how they're looking at this from a liquidity and
• 4:53
  interoperability point of view. Can we maybe dive into that in a
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  little bit more detail? Yeah, I, I, I think, you know,
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  the banks are still in this stage where they're trying to
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  understand what is their role, right?
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  Stable coins are still aren't they're not the bank's best
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  friends because stable coins means 1 to 1 reserve.
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  You can re hypothecate, OK, But at the same time the bank's
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  clients are sort of demanding to get paid in a stable coin or
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  send money in a stable coin. And by the way, this is true for
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  JP Morgan and this is true for your regional bank that has, I
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  don't know like 1000 clients. It's becoming a thing now.
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  The banks are slowly understanding they have to be in
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  this. I will tell you one thing.
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  I don't think stable coins are the end result.
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  I think they are just a patch in a way until we get to a
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  different tokenized method, maybe tokenized deposits where
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  the banks will you know bring that as a product but also be
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  able to benefit as a bank that wants to re hypothecate funds.
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  And how far off are we from that, if you were to be
• 6:01
  guessing? Probably five years, five years.
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  I think that, you know, and, and again, I, I'm come from tech, so
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  my estimates are always wrong. I always think that things will
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  happen faster than they are. This is what I'm trying to say 5
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  But I, I think that, you know, the, the bigger banks have
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  understood this and they're now creating tokenized deposits.
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  You see JP Morgan and Citi and others.
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  I, I, I think we'll get there in, in five years probably.
• 6:28
  Obviously we're at Money 2020 so be ruining this, so that's not
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  to talk about why this event's such an important event for our
• 6:34
  blocks. This has been, we were just
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  talking about this Michael Shahl of the CEO and myself, we've
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  just, this has been like the best event we've ever had
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  because we usually need to come here where all the most
• 6:48
  important companies in the world come to talk about payments.
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  And we used to need to convince people why, why stablecoins, Why
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  is this good? Why using digital assets This
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  year, they're coming to us with the why because people are
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  asking them, this is what I love and we're just here to tell them
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  how. So the whole narrative has
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  changed. And you know, people watching us
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  can't look at the booth, but the booth is not if you would see it
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  here in real life, It's not about us showing demos.
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  We just they can show the booth quickly, give us a quick pan.
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  We're not. We're not doing demos.
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  It's basically a huge meeting room where we're trying to just
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  get as many people to sit down and tell us what they need.
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  It's not even us trying to shell a technology or something.
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  They're coming to us with their use case, very different than
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  before. I'm loving it by the way.
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  No great endorsement for the the biggest event in payments,
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  right? Yeah, just one final section.
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  Then all of our guests get asked to nominate something for the
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  Shelf of Shame. Ohh, wow, shelf of shame.
• 7:50
  I'm going to put LinkedIn on the shelf of shame this time because
• 7:53
  I think that what's happening right now with stablecoins that
• 7:56
  are in LinkedIn is, well, probably pure bullshit.
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  Because if you are just going on LinkedIn for the first time and
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  you're a bank or a payments company, you don't know nothing
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  about stablecoins. You could by accident think that
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  they're going to cure world hunger, right?
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  Stablecoins are not the answer to all of everyone's problems in
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  this world. They're great for some things.
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  Some things they're not. So don't believe every Schiller
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  on LinkedIn. Yeah, I don't think you'll ever
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  get just tonight to fully nominate LinkedIn for the Shelf
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  of Shame. But if we take stable coin,
• 8:24
  stable coin misinformation on LinkedIn, Brilliant.
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  Thanks for joining us on The Payment Show.
• 8:31
  Thank you so much for having me. Thank you.