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Stablecoins That Settle In Minutes · The Stable Pulse

• 0:00
  Intro: Passage of the stable coin legislation drafted by the Senate, dubbed the Genius Act.
• 0:05
  Intro: Because analysts say a wave of competition could complicate things.
• 0:08
  Intro: Stablecoin issue of debut right here at the Nasdaq today.
• 0:13
  Dante Reminick: Everyone, welcome to another episode of Stable Pulse.
• 0:17
  Dante Reminick: We have a very special guest here.
• 0:18
  Dante Reminick: Avinash, very, very excited to have you on today.
• 0:22
  Dante Reminick: Um, as part of sort of the the running historical flow of this podcast, we always, always, always start out with a section that I call braggadocious.
• 0:32
  Dante Reminick: And the reason that I call it braggadocious is because all I want you to do is brag about yourself.
• 0:37
  Dante Reminick: We're gonna use this as a little bit of an intro, but I don't want it to be a humble intro.
• 0:41
  Dante Reminick: I want you to tell everyone a little bit about you and a little bit about what you are building.
• 0:46
  Dante Reminick: Uh and like I said, leave humility at the door, please.
• 0:50
  Avinash Chidambaram: All right.
• 0:51
  Avinash Chidambaram: Uh so about me, I started out as a developer and then eventually aligned at a company called Blackberry.
• 0:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: You might remember it, you might not.
• 0:58
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um really focused on um the cryptographic side of the business.
• 1:05
  Avinash Chidambaram: And you know, my first job there was to try and figure out how we can implement an identity platform across all Blackberry services, and then I was asked to take care of uh wallets and payments.
• 1:15
  Avinash Chidambaram: So figuring out how you can do payments in 138 countries on your Blackberry, buy apps on a on a BlackBerry, that sort of thing.
• 1:23
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then um so that was a great project, you know, um large-scale global um kind of uh program.
• 1:31
  Avinash Chidambaram: And of course, you know, Blackberry had its challenges.
• 1:34
  Avinash Chidambaram: Uh I landed a company called Interact, which is a debit network, one is a product called eTransfer, exactly the same as Zo.
• 1:40
  Avinash Chidambaram: And uh Interact builds infrastructure for the big banks.
• 1:43
  Avinash Chidambaram: And uh when the Apple Pay was launched, if you remember, Apple came, Apple went to Canada after the US, and so my job there was to build out the token platform, integrate it to all the big banks, and launch Apple Pay on debit in Canada.
• 1:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: Another massive project, you know, it's kind of cool to see it pass like billion transactions and things like that.
• 2:02
  Avinash Chidambaram: So a lot of large-scale infrastructure figuring out how to integrate it to core banking infrastructure.
• 2:08
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then uh decided I'm gonna do a startup.
• 2:10
  Avinash Chidambaram: If I wasn't gonna do it then, I was never gonna do it.
• 2:13
  Avinash Chidambaram: And uh so I did my first startup in the embedded lending space, focused on trade finance.
• 2:18
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um, we built a platform that helped um businesses extend 30, 60, 90 days of credit to their to their customers, um, typically small business customers.
• 2:29
  Avinash Chidambaram: So it was a big data uh uh services business where we would look at customers' transactions, look at their bank statements, and say, hey, you you should give this this person credit.
• 2:40
  Avinash Chidambaram: But instead of it coming off of the balance sheet of the business that's selling the goods, like if you're a roofing manufacturer, you'd put our infrastructure in to extend credit to roofers, and we would originate that to a number of uh organizations uh from banks to subprime lenders.
• 2:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: And that company was acquired uh by a private equity company.
• 3:00
  Avinash Chidambaram: And uh so sort of our first exit.
• 3:03
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um, yeah, it was a great experience.
• 3:05
  Avinash Chidambaram: I learned a lot about how to do a startup.
• 3:07
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then while we were kind of um you know, when I was at that company, one of the things that happened to me is that my brother had a had a child, and my brother lives in Japan.
• 3:17
  Avinash Chidambaram: And uh so this is like shortly after the COVID thing in 2022, 2023.
• 3:22
  Avinash Chidambaram: You know, like you can't easily send money to someone from your banking app.
• 3:27
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so I called them up and I'm like, yeah, I'm gonna send you some Bitcoin.
• 3:30
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like, that's the fastest way for me to do it.
• 3:33
  Avinash Chidambaram: And he's like, okay, what do I do?
• 3:34
  Avinash Chidambaram: I was like, yeah, download this wallet and hang on a second, and then I sent it to him.
• 3:39
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um and it kind of like sparked this idea, right?
• 3:44
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's like, holy shit, I just sent this, I just sent my brother money on the other side of the world in seconds.
• 3:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: And all that that knowledge, all that infrastructure we work with, all the intermediaries that we've had to work with to do a payment.
• 3:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um you know, it just kind of is a bit of a revelation.
• 4:00
  Avinash Chidambaram: You're like, holy crap, I can send anybody money anywhere in the world.
• 4:03
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so that's how the that was the genesis of cyber.
• 4:06
  Avinash Chidambaram: So we put together a little app said about, is it possible for us to acquire digital asset and send it to someone?
• 4:12
  Avinash Chidambaram: And um, you know, that's how we started.
• 4:16
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then it became super obvious that the way to do that is on stable coins, because of course, like, you know, sending Bitcoin obviously sent that a few years ago.
• 4:26
  Avinash Chidambaram: Uh sent him about $1,000 worth of Bitcoin.
• 4:28
  Avinash Chidambaram: I'm not sure what it's actually worth now, but it's a lot more than $1,000.
• 4:31
  Avinash Chidambaram: I'm sure he wished that he didn't spend it all either.
• 4:33
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um but you know, you do that on stable coins and it starts to become very obvious and interesting use case.
• 4:39
  Avinash Chidambaram: And that was the genesis of our business.
• 4:41
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so we started Cybrid to figure out how we can enable cross-border payments using stablecoin rails.
• 4:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: And we've continued to build out the platform to enable that for our businesses and for consumers.
• 4:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like we support businesses that do remittances and businesses that do cross-border payments.
• 5:00
  Avinash Chidambaram: And we're really focused on making that experience as seamless as possible, leveraging stable coins, either pay someone in stablecoins or pay someone in their local currency and do that in minutes.
• 5:11
  Avinash Chidambaram: You know, our goal is guaranteeing our goal is that you should be able to be on the phone and send you money, and there you go, you've gotten it.
• 5:17
  Dante Reminick: That's really interesting.
• 5:18
  Dante Reminick: And I want to backtrack a little bit before we dive into cybridge too much, which is you very clearly have had a successful career in building out traditional payment systems.
• 5:29
  Dante Reminick: Now you are building out sort of a modern payment system on-chain with stable coins.
• 5:34
  Dante Reminick: As the builder and the operator behind this, what's the difference between building out Apple Pay in Canada and you know building out payment systems that interact, and then now needing to build out a stablecoin payment network?
• 5:48
  Avinash Chidambaram: I think one of the big things is like when you look at you know card networks, you look at Swift, you look at these kinds of organizations, they're they're all messaging layers.
• 5:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: They don't actually enable the transfer of value.
• 6:00
  Avinash Chidambaram: So you know, even in a in a you know multi-party card network, i the two counterparties who are trying to pay each other are using essentially a tokenized count on the card and saying, I authorize that I can make this payment to this other merchant.
• 6:18
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then that information gets sent to Visa, which then goes and checks with the bank, is there enough money or is there enough credit for this user?
• 6:25
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then they send that same information to the merchant to say this this transaction was authorized, all that has to happen over a certain period of time.
• 6:33
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then afterwards, this settlement that happens where you know the organ, you know, basically the issuing bank says, okay, I've already authorized all these transactions, but I'm gonna go and send this money to an account that Visa tells me I have to go and send it to.
• 6:46
  Avinash Chidambaram: Then Visa turns around and says, Okay, I'm gonna send it to the acquire bank that the merchant has.
• 6:51
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so the movement of money is completely dislodged from the actual information travel.
• 6:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: Whereas when we look at the way you do these things now, we the the two are compressed together.
• 7:03
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like the movement of money and the information travels together into on-chain.
• 7:07
  Avinash Chidambaram: When you send somebody a transaction, you can see on-chain instantly that it was received in their wallet.
• 7:12
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's like I actually sent the money over there.
• 7:16
  Avinash Chidambaram: You can turn around and start spending it.
• 7:18
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's actually yours.
• 7:20
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so all of that infrastructure that's built, all these layers of communications, all these layers of data that's that are created to send information back and forth between parties is compressed down to it's actually all already on the blockchain.
• 7:32
  Avinash Chidambaram: You can see that the money was sent from A to B.
• 7:35
  Avinash Chidambaram: The authorization was done by the sender.
• 7:37
  Avinash Chidambaram: I'm on my wallet, I've authorized with it with my cryptographic key to say, I'm I'm authorizing that you send $100 from this wallet to that wallet, and then the funds are moved.
• 7:48
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so that whole settlement infrastructure is has changed dramatically.
• 7:53
  Avinash Chidambaram: And, you know, the the really impressive thing about stable coins and the the regulatory environment has changed to enable this to happen as well.
• 8:02
  Avinash Chidambaram: So people understand that this is a very trustworthy way of actually sending real value between two individuals and avoiding all of that, you know, I call it like middleware that was there before that took their pound of flesh to enable that transaction to happen.
• 8:20
  Dante Reminick: I love that mental model.
• 8:22
  Dante Reminick: I I talk to people all day about stable coins, but I've never heard anyone explain it as the fact that the traditional system decouples the information flow and the money flow, but stable coins bring those two within one piece of technology.
• 8:37
  Dante Reminick: I love that.
• 8:38
  Dante Reminick: And talk to me a little bit about the advantage of actually having the communication and the money movement happen on one piece of technology rather than the traditional system where you have an acquiring bank talking to a merchant bank and you know all routed through Visa and everything like that.
• 8:53
  Dante Reminick: What are what are like the tangible advantages that you see in cybrid from you know building out a system that is stable coin-based versus what you did in the in the traditional financial space?
• 9:03
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yeah, so one important element of it is uh is everything runs on a good funds model, uh, meaning that you know I actually have to have the money in my wallet.
• 9:13
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then when I transfer it over, I'm actually transferring uh $1,000 from one wallet to another wallet.
• 9:20
  Avinash Chidambaram: There's there's no um you know so one of the so one of the the the obvious things that that helps with is like if you're a if you're an enterprise, like you know, we we have a bunch of enterprise customers that buy um manufactured goods from overseas, buy manufactured goods from China.
• 9:37
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um, you know, CFOs tell us that in the typical world, you go and you'd send a wire and you'd hope, you know, in five to six days it was received by the recipient.
• 9:47
  Avinash Chidambaram: But there's a ton of anxiety that comes up because your ERP is telling you you're running out of inventory, the CFO starts calling the supplier saying, hey, I sent the money.
• 9:55
  Avinash Chidambaram: And sometimes Because you have these intermediaries who take their um cut of the transaction for doing their own processing, the recipient doesn't necessarily get the exact amount that they're supposed to get.
• 10:08
  Avinash Chidambaram: Now, take that and convert that to how that might work with a stablecoin payment.
• 10:13
  Avinash Chidambaram: Now the CFO says, okay, I'm running out of inventory, my ERP is telling me I'm running out of inventory.
• 10:18
  Avinash Chidambaram: It might be my agent actually that tells me, hey, you're running out of inventory, you need to make this purchase.
• 10:22
  Avinash Chidambaram: I authorize it on my so I sign the transaction, the money's gone, but now I can see that my supplier's wallet received my funds.
• 10:31
  Avinash Chidambaram: I know that they received it.
• 10:33
  Avinash Chidambaram: So now when you're calling your supplier and saying, hey, I've made that payment, you need to ship me the goods, you remove those five, six days of anxiety on managing your business so that you know that, okay, I've actually already paid the supplier, now I can call them and harass them and say, send me that uh tracking number.
• 10:48
  Avinash Chidambaram: I need to make sure I I fill up my inventory.
• 10:50
  Avinash Chidambaram: And we've we see this all the time with larger e-commerce businesses.
• 10:54
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like the longer it takes for you to pay and the longer it takes for you to ship, the more you're compressing your margins and your revenues.
• 11:00
  Avinash Chidambaram: You can just imagine the kind of environments where that that can really work, right?
• 11:04
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like we have marketplaces that do groceries.
• 11:07
  Avinash Chidambaram: This is something new that we learned.
• 11:09
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like it turns out, you know, there's like this organization in New York that buys most of like the papayas and mangoes and stuff from around the world, and local grocers go and buy it from that marketplace.
• 11:19
  Avinash Chidambaram: They're not all calling the farmer in in Peru and saying, hey, I'm like to buy some mangoes.
• 11:24
  Avinash Chidambaram: So if we think about it from their context, like we want to make sure that we make that payment instantly, and then you ship these perishable goods as soon as you can.
• 11:33
  Avinash Chidambaram: Because the longer those perishable goods are waiting to be shipped, the worse your your like the more losses you might have because they might get spoiled or whatnot.
• 11:43
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so those kinds of use cases are very directly relevant to the bottom line of those enterprises.
• 11:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so we just find that um because you're now being able to you're able to demonstrate to the to the the payer that I've made the payment, I can guarantee that it's been received by the your some supplier who needs to ship me those goods, you really compress those timelines and you make it make two things possible.
• 12:08
  Avinash Chidambaram: One is I hold on as a business to my cash in my treasury for as long as I need.
• 12:13
  Avinash Chidambaram: And I make the payment only at the last minute for the goods that I need delivered to me.
• 12:19
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so that's like a you know, one of those those use cases.
• 12:22
  Avinash Chidambaram: The other thing is um, if you think about it from a remittance side, you know, people want to send money home to their families.
• 12:28
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um it kind of goes back to my case with my brother.
• 12:31
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's like you want to, you know, if you if you're trying to you want to know that your your family got got the money that they that you're sending to them and that they received the exact amount that they you had been quoted for.
• 12:42
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so the idea that and it's actually really interesting depending on the corridor that you're going after, you know, like um there's a lot of people who send remittances to South America.
• 12:54
  Avinash Chidambaram: And it used to be that you would, as a as a remitter, you'd worry about what's the FX rate, how much is my cousin or grandma or my family going to receive?
• 13:02
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so you're always doing that conversion in your head, like how many pesos are they gonna get?
• 13:07
  Avinash Chidambaram: But that whole thing starts to change because now you're like, well, actually on every one of my paychecks I want to send $100 home.
• 13:13
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so you just send 100 USB C on stable coins home, and now the recipient can decide when do I want to convert it to pesos and when do I want to use it.
• 13:21
  Avinash Chidambaram: But you can consistently not so the sender is no longer worried about like, oh, what's this FX rate gonna be?
• 13:26
  Avinash Chidambaram: How do I maximize it?
• 13:27
  Avinash Chidambaram: Now the recipient can decide when they want to actually convert it and maximize it.
• 13:31
  Avinash Chidambaram: And that's actually also true a little bit on the business side, right?
• 13:34
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like $50 trillion of cross-border volume is in US dollars.
• 13:40
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um and we find that businesses want to receive US dollars, and now they can do that with stable coins, and then if they need to pay their local employees, they can convert it when they want.
• 13:50
  Avinash Chidambaram: I kind of got on a lot of stuff there.
• 13:52
  Avinash Chidambaram: Jump in at it.
• 13:54
  Dante Reminick: I I love it.
• 13:55
  Dante Reminick: I I want to pause because I think that we're getting into some dangerous territory, and that dangerous territory is we're in danger of gross oversimplification.
• 14:04
  Dante Reminick: Because I think a lot of people like when they hear that explanation, they're like, oh, I take my wallet with stable coins and I send you stable coins and it's done.
• 14:13
  Dante Reminick: Right.
• 14:14
  Dante Reminick: And that's how a lot of people describe the process of stable coins, but you've built cyberrid in in a much more impressive way than that.
• 14:22
  Dante Reminick: Like, that's not how cybrid moves money.
• 14:24
  Dante Reminick: You guys have licenses, you guys have banking relationships to actually complete the full flow of funds.
• 14:29
  Dante Reminick: So I wanna I wanna dive a little bit deeper and and really try to stay away from that gross oversimplification of stablecoins is just moving money from A to B, because you guys do so much more than that.
• 14:41
  Dante Reminick: You've spent a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of money on doing more than that so that you can move money from point A to point B in the full flow of funds, legally, quickly, and for as cheap as possible.
• 14:52
  Dante Reminick: So tell us a little bit about what cyber does other than just taking USDC and sending it from here to there.
• 15:00
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yeah, I I mean I think and that's a great point.
• 15:02
  Avinash Chidambaram: I think it's important to highlight that um you still have to do the due diligence.
• 15:07
  Avinash Chidambaram: You still have to make sure that when you onboard a business, you're doing all the KYB and making sure it's in the real business, that when they're sending money to a supplier, you're doing the transaction monitoring on that on that uh that transaction, you're making sure that the supplier is a real supplier, and um this is a legitimate transaction because we ask the the supplier to upload an invoice or a PO so we can our purchaser that we can say, like Dad, this is actually a good transaction.
• 15:34
  Avinash Chidambaram: Because you're right.
• 15:36
  Avinash Chidambaram: We're a regulated entity.
• 15:37
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um we report to regulators in Canada and the U.S.
• 15:41
  Avinash Chidambaram: We have banking relationships.
• 15:42
  Avinash Chidambaram: We we the all of that are all those rules and regulations apply regardless of if you're using stable coins or if you're using traditional fiat rails to make a payment.
• 15:53
  Avinash Chidambaram: And the what we realized was that just providing the stablecoin rails and the on-ramp and off-ramp is not enough because if you're a fintech that's trying to build um you know a vertical product or you're trying to build a new way of uh delivering financial services, bill pay applications or remittance applications, you need to make sure you're doing it in a very compliant way.
• 16:18
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so what we've done is we have the technology, but on top of that, we have all of the compliance services, all the transaction monitoring services, all the wallet monitoring services.
• 16:28
  Avinash Chidambaram: To make sure that if you're sending money to someone, we know that that's a good actor that you've sent the money to.
• 16:33
  Avinash Chidambaram: The wallet is a good wallet.
• 16:34
  Avinash Chidambaram: It hasn't been used in with mixers or with with organizations that as an as an as a uh um not just an industry, but as a community and as as uh residents, we don't actually want to enable bad guys to be sending money to each other and doing things affairs.
• 16:53
  Avinash Chidambaram: So when we say we're focusing on the stablecoin payment, we add on top of that all of the compliance checks for both the sender and the recipient.
• 17:01
  Avinash Chidambaram: And we work with partner banks in local jurisdictions who also need that information so that they can report and say, hey, my you know, my my bank customer received money as a remittance from overseas, and I've done the last mile delivery because I've received it and it I'm gonna they want it in rupees, for example.
• 17:18
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so we've built all those layers into our infrastructure, and we've tried to make it so that it's a very simple uh process.
• 17:26
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's not a simple set of steps, but it's a simple process.
• 17:29
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like, yes, we have kind of made it easy to understand, but it really comes down to you have to verify who the sender is, verify who the recipient is.
• 17:36
  Avinash Chidambaram: You have to report all these things.
• 17:37
  Avinash Chidambaram: These are rules and like and legislation and regulations that you have to do.
• 17:41
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then once you've done that, you can make that payment happen incredibly quickly.
• 17:45
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then that using stable coins allows us to do it quickly, which means you can do things like make sure that the effects that you've quoted is in fact the effects that you get.
• 17:55
  Dante Reminick: You know, can I interrupt you here for a second?
• 17:57
  Dante Reminick: Sorry, you use the word already.
• 17:59
  Dante Reminick: Please do.
• 18:00
  Avinash Chidambaram: I can go on and on.
• 18:01
  Dante Reminick: Use the word quickly and incredibly quickly.
• 18:03
  Dante Reminick: Can you quantify what that actually means for most of your flows and then compare it to what the traditional time would be?
• 18:12
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yeah.
• 18:12
  Avinash Chidambaram: So if you look at a let's think a B2B payment, um when when a customer says, okay, I want to I they're they let's say they put $100,000 into our platform.
• 18:25
  Avinash Chidambaram: And what I mean by that is we've opened a bank account for that business with our bank partner, and they're holding $100,000 of US dollars in it, and say, I want to send money from here to uh Mexico.
• 18:37
  Avinash Chidambaram: What we do is we take the I want to spend $1,000 on goods from Mexico.
• 18:43
  Avinash Chidambaram: So we take the $1,000, we send it over RTP to our partner circle and mint $1,000 USDC.
• 18:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: That typically takes you know 45 seconds to a minute settled on chain.
• 18:55
  Avinash Chidambaram: So you're waiting for the the transaction to settle on Solana.
• 18:58
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then we send that from the wallet for that business to the wallet for the supplier who we've pre-vetted.
• 19:04
  Avinash Chidambaram: We know that it's a real wallet.
• 19:05
  Avinash Chidambaram: We've onboarded that supplier.
• 19:07
  Avinash Chidambaram: That can take you know seconds for it to complete on the Solana network.
• 19:12
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then we have received a quote before we even did that transaction to say, here's how many Mexican pesos you will get if the recipient wants to receive it in Mexican pesos.
• 19:23
  Avinash Chidambaram: And we send a signal to our partner in Mexico to say, please convert this stable coin into pesos at the price that you quoted us in the window that you've given us.
• 19:35
  Avinash Chidambaram: So typically these windows will fluctuate hourly, for example.
• 19:38
  Avinash Chidambaram: So if we have some partners who say on an hourly basis, we use the Reuters rate to change what the FX might be.
• 19:43
  Avinash Chidambaram: But because we've now converted the US dollars to USDC in minutes and we've sent it to them in seconds, you're doing you were able to say, I can guarantee that the FX I quoted you is in fact the FX that you're going to get.
• 19:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then our partner says, okay, I'm going to convert that USDC to Mexican pesos and deliver it to my customer over the local Rails.
• 20:02
  Avinash Chidambaram: Another example is PICS, where you convert it to Real in Brazil, and they can deliver it on nearly instantly because they have local real-time rails to deliver it to the end customer.
• 20:12
  Avinash Chidambaram: So we've taken a transaction, and let's do that in the traditional way.
• 20:15
  Avinash Chidambaram: The traditional way I go to my bank, I fill out a form, or I might even have the ability to do that online, a wire form, and I fill out all the details of who the who I am, who the supplier is, who the beneficiary is, uh, what the bank account information is.
• 20:30
  Avinash Chidambaram: That form gets sent usually to a wire authorization team within the bank who'll look at it on a periodic basis and they'll say, okay, every few hours I might authorize this transaction.
• 20:40
  Avinash Chidambaram: Then they deduct the thousand dollars from your bank account and they send it to what's called an intermediary bank, because not all the banks are connected to each other.
• 20:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: There's about 10 very large banks like JP Morgan, Citibank, HSBC, Wells Fargo, that will take that information and say, I have a connection to another banking partner in Brazil, so another intermediary bank.
• 21:02
  Avinash Chidambaram: So I will review this wire information, I'll take a fee for that, and then send it to the next intermediary bank in Brazil that has also a connection to SWIFT.
• 21:10
  Avinash Chidambaram: So they send that information over to SWIFT.
• 21:11
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then the recipient bank of Brazil will look at that same wire information.
• 21:15
  Avinash Chidambaram: So they're all looking at the same form and saying, okay, I'm going to do my own analysis of this to see what the risks are, and then send it to the final recipient bank to say, please do a PIX transaction to the end user.
• 21:26
  Avinash Chidambaram: That whole flow can take days.
• 21:28
  Avinash Chidambaram: And there's lots of reasons on why banks will hold on to the funds in each of those intermediaries and steps along the way.
• 21:35
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um there's compliance reasons, there might be other opportunities for those banks to monetize those those flows.
• 21:42
  Avinash Chidambaram: Just holding on to cash gives banks the ability to make some money.
• 21:45
  Avinash Chidambaram: But that's the difference between doing that same transaction from the you know, your bank account in the US to Mexico over stablecoins.
• 21:54
  Avinash Chidambaram: We've done that in minutes, versus doing that over your traditional Rails, which could take days.
• 21:59
  Avinash Chidambaram: With lots of intermediaries and lots of fees that get accumulated along the way.
• 22:04
  Avinash Chidambaram: So one of the complaints that we used to hear with enterprises, they say, Man, I I sent $20,000 to my supplier, and he's like telling me he received $19,000.
• 22:15
  Avinash Chidambaram: And now I have to send him another thousand dollars.
• 22:18
  Avinash Chidambaram: That's super annoying.
• 22:19
  Avinash Chidambaram: Right?
• 22:19
  Avinash Chidambaram: Because you don't actually even know how much you're gonna lose along the way.
• 22:23
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then sometimes you'll see like on the wire forms you can say, will I pay the intermediary fee?
• 22:28
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like, should I pay an extra hundred dollars to send this transaction fast?
• 22:32
  Avinash Chidambaram: Or shall I shall I decide that the supplier pays the hundred dollars and they'll just take it out of the cash that's flowing through their system?
• 22:40
  Avinash Chidambaram: So basically meaning that you have to prepay for the intermediary to get their share of funds.
• 22:46
  Avinash Chidambaram: So all that stuff gets avoided.
• 22:50
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um because you know, the the partners our partners in in Brazil or Mexico accept stable coins.
• 22:57
  Avinash Chidambaram: And um they have this large appetite from local businesses that want to access US dollars because that's just how the world tends to work, right?
• 23:09
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um for cross-border payments.
• 23:12
  Avinash Chidambaram: Did I did I get through with all that?
• 23:14
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 23:15
  Dante Reminick: And I want to talk about that appetite that you just mentioned, right?
• 23:18
  Dante Reminick: Like we've established that stable coins for the flows that you're working with are cheaper, they're faster.
• 23:25
  Dante Reminick: We've seen cyber's volume grow tremendously, and we can touch on that in a second.
• 23:29
  Dante Reminick: Why do you think this is?
• 23:31
  Dante Reminick: Do you think that like you see most growth in particular regions and particular corridors where these types of flows are advantageous?
• 23:38
  Dante Reminick: Do you see it with particular use cases?
• 23:41
  Dante Reminick: Where do we see the advantages of stable coins being most impactful for your clients?
• 23:48
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yeah.
• 23:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: So I'll give you the example of uh we had a um an automobile manufacturer in Bolivia, and they sourced their cars from the US and they sell them in Bolivia.
• 24:02
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um and so they said to us that when we go to the bank, you know, we have to pay for these cars in US dollars to the manufacturer.
• 24:11
  Avinash Chidambaram: They ship the cars to us.
• 24:12
  Avinash Chidambaram: And when we go to the bank and say, hey, we need to get $100,000 of from our Bolivar's into US dollars, the bank will charge them about 6% um for that.
• 24:24
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so Yeah.
• 24:27
  Avinash Chidambaram: And you have to have a relationship because there's a lot of capital controls that um governments have implemented and controls around their banks, because they are also trying to manage uh you know how people are spending their local currency and managing the effects of their local currency relative to the US dollar.
• 24:47
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then that same organization said to us, like, if we if you can help us pay with stable coins, we're able to go to a local exchange and get that at one to two percent.
• 24:57
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so there's this appetite locally for businesses that still have to buy stuff from their their partners overseas um for those US dollars.
• 25:10
  Avinash Chidambaram: And like it's hard to turn off stable coins.
• 25:13
  Avinash Chidambaram: You know, you have to turn off the internet, right?
• 25:16
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so what you can do as as uh as a government is to start to legislate it.
• 25:22
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so that's what we're starting to see in terms of like regulations where you know there's there's there's this this understanding now that stable coins are payment tokens.
• 25:33
  Avinash Chidambaram: They're not they're not securities.
• 25:35
  Avinash Chidambaram: And that was the clarification that that happened in the U.S.
• 25:38
  Avinash Chidambaram: with the Genius Act.
• 25:39
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so now there's this appetite for play for organizations that had trouble accessing US dollars through their traditional bank networks.
• 25:48
  Avinash Chidambaram: So the way that you would normally get US dollars into Bolivia is like someone actually has to send it to Bolivia so that those banks have it in order to turn around and offer it as an effect rate to local businesses that are trying to access it to pay their uh suppliers in US dollars.
• 26:05
  Avinash Chidambaram: But by the way, so there's this huge appetite for it, and now you can access it because stable coins just travel over the internet.
• 26:11
  Avinash Chidambaram: You don't have to go through a bank to access it.
• 26:15
  Avinash Chidambaram: And those enterprises in Bolivia that are buying cars from the manufacturers say, actually, now that there's good legislation in the U.S., we understand that these tokens are really safe, they're backed by really the highest quality of cash, which is treasury.
• 26:28
  Avinash Chidambaram: Treasury is the highest quality of US cash.
• 26:31
  Avinash Chidambaram: Then they feel very comfortable that I will use a you know a genius compliance stablecoin token to make that payment and I can access it from my exchange.
• 26:42
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so you start to see that around the world.
• 26:45
  Avinash Chidambaram: So, you know, remittance to India, for example, there's a premium on the FX rate for a stablecoin to a rupee versus a US dollar to a rupee.
• 26:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: And um so you know, when banks control the money supply in US dollars, whether it's retail customers or it's enterprises who actually want to have access to those dollars, they have another source of being able to secure those from by leveraging stable coins.
• 27:14
  Avinash Chidambaram: So you have a ton of people who are really interested in stable in US dollar-denominated stable coins in the local jurisdiction.
• 27:22
  Avinash Chidambaram: So they pay, for example, in rupees to get stable coins so that they can pay their bills.
• 27:27
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so going the opposite direction, if you doubt doing your ribbons, those same partners say, hey, I have a lot of rupees, and all of my local um customers really want stable coins, and we're saying, hey, we're gonna help you, we're gonna help our U.S.
• 27:42
  Avinash Chidambaram: customers make payments or remittances to India with stable coins as a really good match, right?
• 27:47
  Avinash Chidambaram: You have local Indians who really want stable coins.
• 27:50
  Avinash Chidambaram: We have remittance customers who want to send um using stable coins.
• 27:55
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so that match is how we've start to see really tremendous growth.
• 27:59
  Avinash Chidambaram: And really, like in the last years, we've started to see customers go from millions of dollars to hundreds of millions of dollars of transactions because their suppliers are saying, it's like I received US dollars, but I didn't have to go through all the trouble of doing it through my local banking network, and I trust it.
• 28:16
  Avinash Chidambaram: So now just pay me in US dollars.
• 28:19
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so we're seeing more and more of that, and which is why our you know our volumes are starting to really sort of ramp up with these enterprise use cases.
• 28:27
  Dante Reminick: Yeah, I I think that the the market, and when I say the market, I mean you know, your average business owner that engages in cross-border commerce is slowly starting to realize that the status quo of banks and financial institutions fleecing them on every single transaction is is coming to an end, right?
• 28:44
  Dante Reminick: Like these margins are rapidly compressing, which is which is a good thing.
• 28:48
  Dante Reminick: I also see on the flip side, there's been a tremendous amount of supply increases.
• 28:52
  Dante Reminick: And there's a lot of people that are starting companies to do cross-border payments in stable coins.
• 28:57
  Dante Reminick: Uh, some are doing it, you know, across one API and handling it end-to-end, like you guys are.
• 29:02
  Dante Reminick: There's a lot of people that are injecting themselves in specific flows.
• 29:05
  Dante Reminick: I imagine that in a lot of cases, people are coming to you and saying, oh, I'm talking to this other company that's using stable coins, I'm talking to this other company that's using stable coins.
• 29:13
  Dante Reminick: How do you describe cyber's edge in this case?
• 29:17
  Dante Reminick: Why do people come and choose cyber?
• 29:20
  Dante Reminick: Why do we see your transaction volume increasing so much?
• 29:25
  Avinash Chidambaram: I think there's a there's a couple of things.
• 29:26
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like uh, you're absolutely right because now you can build these fintech experiences just using software.
• 29:34
  Avinash Chidambaram: And um, you know, interestingly, we have a bunch of those companies using us as the infrastructure layer and building on top of us because we take care of that compliance bit.
• 29:44
  Avinash Chidambaram: You know, we're we have regulated entities in multiple jurisdictions that'll do all the regulatory reporting.
• 29:50
  Avinash Chidambaram: They we do the uh we do the the risk analysis, we take care of the um transaction monitoring, the fraud monitoring, you know, it's a lot of people.
• 29:59
  Avinash Chidambaram: Right.
• 30:02
  Avinash Chidambaram: So so that that's a little bit and that comes a little bit with experience, right?
• 30:05
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so if so what where we are winning is we're not saying that, hey, we're just doing this platform that can move the money A to B.
• 30:13
  Avinash Chidambaram: And like any issues here, that's not new.
• 30:16
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um what we're saying to our partners is we've we've done the heavy lifting, the grunt work of making sure we've taken all of the compliance and transaction monitoring and fraud mitigation and embedded that into our our infrastructure so you can feel very safe on sending the money from A to B.
• 30:33
  Avinash Chidambaram: The other thing that differentiates us is that we're really, really, really focused and double down on making sure that when we give you an FX rate, we guarantee that FX rate.
• 30:43
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then the other guarantee that we have is that we will deliver those funds to you and we try and deliver it under five minutes.
• 30:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: That's our goal.
• 30:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: And you don't necessarily get that in every country because you still have more archaic banking infrastructure in some countries.
• 30:57
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like you might be able to get the stable coin there, but now you know it's six, it's five p.m.
• 31:02
  Avinash Chidambaram: in the U.S.
• 31:03
  Avinash Chidambaram: and it's like 2 a.m.
• 31:04
  Avinash Chidambaram: in the country that you're sending it to.
• 31:06
  Avinash Chidambaram: Maybe it's in to Hong Kong or Singapore.
• 31:08
  Avinash Chidambaram: So you still might be waiting until the banks show up in the morning to complete the transaction.
• 31:13
  Avinash Chidambaram: So the two things that we really focus on is we've added that whole compliance and um uh transaction monitoring and fraud mitigation layer on top of all of those transactions for us.
• 31:24
  Avinash Chidambaram: We do all of the analysis of both the sender and the supplier, we do all the regulatory reportings, we take care of all of that infrastructure for our customers, and then we really focus on we will deliver those funds with the FX rate that we've we've quoted to you so that you don't have these weird mishaps that are happening with our customers when they receive it, and it's not exactly what they had hoped for.
• 31:46
  Avinash Chidambaram: And in some countries that's it's becomes really quite important, right?
• 31:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: Because the FX fluctuates quite a bit.
• 31:52
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um, and so you know, we use Oracle to sort of say, what is the FX that we think we can really guarantee?
• 31:58
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then we'll guarantee it, and we'll make sure that you deliver it for.
• 32:01
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so that's like, you know, doing the painstaking work of making sure you do that and delivering that kind of value is what we're finding is like really helping us with um with our client-based.
• 32:13
  Dante Reminick: Interesting.
• 32:13
  Dante Reminick: So we've we've gone really deep into the weeds of stablecoin payments and the full flow of funds and everything like that.
• 32:20
  Dante Reminick: When you and I spoke before, we talked about how most of your customers, they're not stablecoin native people right now, right?
• 32:28
  Dante Reminick: They're just saying, hey, I need to move money from this country to this country.
• 32:31
  Dante Reminick: Can you help me do it better, faster, cheaper?
• 32:34
  Dante Reminick: When you're talking to those folks, right?
• 32:36
  Dante Reminick: The people who run traditional businesses, who have built their financial stack on traditional banks, what does that conversation look like, right?
• 32:45
  Dante Reminick: Do people care about what stablecoin on what chain happens?
• 32:49
  Dante Reminick: Right, how how how do those conversations normally go?
• 32:53
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yeah, we break it out into, you know, our our our ICP initially was really focused on other Web3 savvy fintechs that we're trying to build and build new products on on uh stablecoin platforms like us.
• 33:08
  Avinash Chidambaram: And what we're starting to see, I think in the last year, has been that virtually everyone that does payments has heard about stable coins and they're trying to figure out their strategy in their stablecoins.
• 33:18
  Avinash Chidambaram: I would actually go as far as to say virtually every bank has someone that they've hired who is now thinking about stablecoin strategy for the banks.
• 33:26
  Avinash Chidambaram: And you see these announcements all the time.
• 33:28
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so where we are with that is when we go and we we present to customers what we're able to do, we're able to focus on the value to the business.
• 33:37
  Avinash Chidambaram: So we're no longer going in there and saying, hey, look at how amazing this stuff is, and it's all it's stable coins that runs on Seoul or Polygon or ETH or whatever.
• 33:46
  Avinash Chidambaram: Because honestly, that's actually not the value to the business.
• 33:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: The value to the business was can you tell me that the money has been delivered?
• 33:54
  Avinash Chidambaram: Can you make it go really fast?
• 33:55
  Avinash Chidambaram: Can you guarantee me the FX?
• 33:57
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so we've really seen this adoption because now a CFO or a risk person in an enterprise can say, Oh, this is these guys are using you know Circle.
• 34:08
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's a genius compliant stable coin or even Pi USD or whatever, you know, where there's a few that we support.
• 34:15
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so we're comfortable with the risks associated with that.
• 34:18
  Avinash Chidambaram: We understand that the government has created the rules to prevent you know stuff from going bad.
• 34:24
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um and so now the the the the conversation has shifted to how can I take advantage of this?
• 34:30
  Avinash Chidambaram: You don't like it's not like you know when you tap your card on uh on a when you're buying McDonald's, it's not like we're sitting there going, well, how does this messaging get transported around and how does the money go from A to B?
• 34:41
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's like if you're a merchant today, you're like, man, it's like taking me three days before I get my money.
• 34:46
  Avinash Chidambaram: And now you're saying I can send the money and you get in five minutes, like that's crazy, right?
• 34:52
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um so we we start to see more and more organizations seeing the value of stable coins around speed and transparency, saying, How do I get that in what we're doing?
• 35:02
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um so you can imagine a world where, and this is starting to happen with all the agent e-commerce stuff, right?
• 35:07
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's like if I'm gonna buy something online, even now, one of the biggest challenges that e-commerce companies have is like people who buy stuff and be like, eh, this is stuff I'm gonna send it back.
• 35:17
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so you deal with all the chargeback risk and all that sort of stuff.
• 35:20
  Avinash Chidambaram: But now it's like, okay, I'm gonna buy something by scanning uh um my wallet.
• 35:26
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's good funds that went to the merchant, they received it right away.
• 35:29
  Avinash Chidambaram: They don't have to wait for the payment to settle to send ship.
• 35:32
  Avinash Chidambaram: You know, they they can ship it immediately.
• 35:34
  Avinash Chidambaram: They already got the money.
• 35:35
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then if there is a return, they're like, okay, well, send me the stuff back and then I'll give you your money back.
• 35:39
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so it starts to feel more normal.
• 35:42
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's like I received the money, so I'm gonna send stuff, and then because you send them a goods back, they'll give you your money back.
• 35:47
  Avinash Chidambaram: And all that, all those layers that were in there that were, you know, like you'd have to deal with in terms of like chargebacks and returns, all that starts to go away because you send me real money, like I got it.
• 35:58
  Dante Reminick: You you said it feels more normal, right?
• 36:00
  Dante Reminick: I think that's a really funny way of putting it because to your point, like this is the way that money should work.
• 36:06
  Dante Reminick: If I worked hard and made money, I should be able to send it to you, and you should be able to receive that money instantly.
• 36:12
  Dante Reminick: Like I can send you an email and you can get that email regardless of what email provider you use, regardless of who your internet service provider is, instantly.
• 36:21
  Dante Reminick: And the same thing happened with money even though it doesn't today.
• 36:24
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yeah, and it's like actually good money.
• 36:26
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like, I it's it's like I gave you cash.
• 36:27
  Avinash Chidambaram: I took it out of my wallet and put it in your wallet.
• 36:30
  Avinash Chidambaram: You know, when you when you do a Zell transfer and I'm like, I want to transfer you 50 bucks, it's actually, you know, again, a messaging layer that says, this guy is sending money from his bank, I'm sending money from my Citibank account to your BFA account.
• 36:43
  Avinash Chidambaram: So a message goes to Citibank and says, Does this guy have 50 bucks?
• 36:46
  Avinash Chidambaram: You go, yes.
• 36:48
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then a uh a transaction gets recorded in a ledger saying, Okay, Citibank, you owe 50 bucks to Bank of America.
• 36:58
  Avinash Chidambaram: So, and a message gets sent to Bank of America.
• 37:00
  Avinash Chidambaram: Bank of America says, Well, I have a credit agreement with Citibank, so I'm gonna honor this credit agreement, and I'm gonna let him let you spend the 50 bucks because it looks like you just got it.
• 37:12
  Avinash Chidambaram: But actually, nothing moved.
• 37:14
  Avinash Chidambaram: There's just there's just agreements between banks that they have to manage, and there's all this infrastructure that they're managing around it.
• 37:19
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then at the end of the day, they go and go through the clearinghouse or something like that to say, okay, hey, Bank of America, you owe 50 bucks, or say bank, you owe 50 bucks, bank of my pay, bank of my pay, you might have sent money to someone else, and they all vent it all out, and then money moves, you know, hours later, maybe sometimes the next day is when it actually moves.
• 37:37
  Avinash Chidambaram: So now you get to imagine how complex that infrastructure is.
• 37:40
  Avinash Chidambaram: So then let's change that to like, you know, we went out for drinks and uh you paid, so I owe you 50 bucks.
• 37:46
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's like, okay, man, I'm just gonna send you 50 bucks of stable coins.
• 37:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: Nobody's involved, nobody's in the way.
• 37:51
  Avinash Chidambaram: He's like, you just got it.
• 37:53
  Avinash Chidambaram: That's how it should work.
• 37:54
  Dante Reminick: Yeah.
• 37:55
  Dante Reminick: I I think that's the irony of FinTech over the last, you know, we'll call it 20 years, is that most of the history of fintech has just been, you know, putting lipstick on a pig.
• 38:05
  Dante Reminick: They're gonna say, hey, I'm gonna use the same old rails, but I'm gonna make it, you know, a better user experience.
• 38:12
  Dante Reminick: But now we have this like really, really big paradigm shift in technology where you're not using the old rails anymore.
• 38:17
  Dante Reminick: You're not putting lipstick on a pig, you're actually enabling that money to move and to settle faster than it ever could before.
• 38:23
  Dante Reminick: Like Zell's a great example.
• 38:24
  Dante Reminick: I use Zell, it's fine, right?
• 38:27
  Dante Reminick: It's fine because I'm used to the standard system of money being so slow that it's whatever.
• 38:34
  Dante Reminick: Yes, it's a better user experience because I because I can go to bank from bank to bank, but it doesn't change the speed or the velocity of how that money moves.
• 38:42
  Dante Reminick: But now we're entering a stage where again, you can actually see that paradigm shift and see, okay, now my money can move better, faster, cheaper because it's not using the same archaic rails that are built in cobalt 50 years ago.
• 38:53
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yeah, I mean that's that's really what it comes down to, right?
• 38:55
  Avinash Chidambaram: Is like the the technology is really old.
• 38:58
  Avinash Chidambaram: And if you think about it, like traditionally in retail banking, most of that revenue comes from things like swiping cards and getting interchange revenue.
• 39:06
  Avinash Chidambaram: So if you're a banker, are you gonna invest a whole bunch of money in improving the technology infrastructure here?
• 39:13
  Avinash Chidambaram: Or can you just kind of make it good enough for most people's use cases?
• 39:16
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so I actually think FinTech has done a phenomenal job of figuring out how to make things look and feel like they're they're giving you a decent experience.
• 39:26
  Avinash Chidambaram: You don't see all those like little tags where you send money, it's like it's pending, it's settling, and then you know, like you might not be able to use it, and then okay, now I can use it.
• 39:35
  Avinash Chidambaram: It's because behind the scenes they're trying to actually work around the core banking infrastructure.
• 39:41
  Avinash Chidambaram: But I think a really important point there is oftentimes fintechs are using their own cash to front some of those transactions.
• 39:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: So they have to then build this pile of liquidity to say, man, I really want this guy to be able to use this to this money.
• 39:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: I see that someone is trying to send money into the my customer's bank account.
• 40:00
  Avinash Chidambaram: So I'm just gonna like loan him a thousand dollars and wait for that to show up.
• 40:05
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so now you have to manage this pot of cash to fake out like it's almost instant.
• 40:10
  Avinash Chidambaram: Right?
• 40:10
  Avinash Chidambaram: So there's a lot of that complexity that's built into these fintech solutions, um, which is starting to go away because now you can just actually lose the money on-chain.
• 40:21
  Dante Reminick: I mean that's I think we would need another like three hours to really dive into the capital efficiency of building fintechs with stable coins as opposed to your typical Nostro and Vostro account structure.
• 40:31
  Dante Reminick: Um but I'm gonna save the sanity of a lot of our listeners and brush over that for a second.
• 40:36
  Dante Reminick: Because I think it's worth noting that we're seeing a huge shift in the way that money moves, but there's sort of a micro progression that's happening even among stablecoin adoption.
• 40:48
  Dante Reminick: Like, you know, five years ago, maybe three years ago, we saw a lot of these big financial institutions say, okay, we're gonna take step one.
• 40:54
  Dante Reminick: We're gonna build a stablecoin strategy, right?
• 40:56
  Dante Reminick: We're gonna plan, we're gonna hire Accenture, or we're gonna hire this person, or whoever it might be.
• 41:01
  Dante Reminick: We're gonna build out a point.
• 41:02
  Dante Reminick: And then step two is like, okay, how do I use a stable coin?
• 41:06
  Dante Reminick: I am gonna figure out the most basic MVP level use case of a stablecoin.
• 41:11
  Dante Reminick: And now we're seeing that market move from you know, step one to step two.
• 41:16
  Dante Reminick: I'm curious as to what your thoughts are and what you know, step three, four, and five might be in the stablecoin journey, how people are gonna be using stable coins in a year or two years or 10 years, and how and what Cybert is doing to sort of prepare for steps three, four, and five in that case.
• 41:33
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yeah, I think um that's uh you know, it's always hard to predict what the future is going to look like.
• 41:41
  Dante Reminick: I know, I'm putting you on the spot here.
• 41:42
  Dante Reminick: Very intentionally.
• 41:44
  Avinash Chidambaram: I think the the really interesting thing to me is when you start to see um like a Visa or MasterCard um say, hey, we're going to enable people to start using stable coins on our platform.
• 41:58
  Avinash Chidambaram: And you know, Visa's built some infrastructure to say, hey, we can also enable things like intent to commerce on our platform where you're giving an agent a card.
• 42:06
  Avinash Chidambaram: It seems weird to me that you give an agent a card as opposed to just giving the agent stable coins.
• 42:10
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um and one of the challenges, and the reason that that's starting to happen more and more is this idea of acceptance.
• 42:17
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like those you know, Visa spend billions, if not hundreds of billions, of dollars on marketing and getting people to accept a visa in a bunch of different locations.
• 42:28
  Dante Reminick: In 16 years.
• 42:30
  Avinash Chidambaram: In 60 years, exactly.
• 42:32
  Avinash Chidambaram: And um what's happening naturally with um say uh you know cross-border um commerce for buyers or for remittances is you know there's this idea that that we can leverage stable coins to make these things feel faster and is faster and cheaper.
• 42:52
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so naturally, those remittance companies that are now adopting it, which include more traditional companies who are starting to adopt it, are just driving more and more volume over those those rails.
• 43:02
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so I'm with I so what I believe is going to happen is the core payments infrastructure is going to all run on stable coins.
• 43:10
  Avinash Chidambaram: And there's a bunch of different stable coins that are sort of positioning for things, and they might be that in certain verticals, you know, um organizations are more comfortable with a particular type of stable coins because it gives you some additional benefit um or specific networks that give you some additional benefit, and my which I mean blockchain networks.
• 43:28
  Avinash Chidambaram: But my real view is that the movement of funds globally is going to run over stablecoin rails, and the settlement of funds globally is going to start running over stablecoin rails and over blockchains.
• 43:41
  Avinash Chidambaram: And you start to see that with like traditional organizations like Swift, you know, who are saying, hey, we're going to go and try this thing out.
• 43:48
  Avinash Chidambaram: I I just think that that fintechs have this opportunity to not wait for those organizations because they have their own concerns, right?
• 43:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: So banks are worried that people will hold funds in wallets.
• 43:59
  Avinash Chidambaram: Not in bank accounts, and that could affect things like fractional lending and so on and so forth, and like worry about leakage.
• 44:05
  Avinash Chidambaram: That's not a real concern for everyday uh you know CFOs.
• 44:10
  Avinash Chidambaram: He just wants to pay faster.
• 44:12
  Avinash Chidambaram: So I think that over time we're gonna start to see this shift in more and more people using stable coins, and the acceleration is already happening, right?
• 44:22
  Avinash Chidambaram: Every year you you hear about how the volume of stable coins being settled is like bigger than Visa now.
• 44:27
  Avinash Chidambaram: Now it's bigger than Visa and MasterCard.
• 44:29
  Avinash Chidambaram: You know, we're so there's this massive shift that's happening.
• 44:33
  Avinash Chidambaram: I think before you realize it, consumers are just not necessarily gonna know, they're just gonna see that on the back end, everything is just happening faster, it's happening more transparent.
• 44:41
  Avinash Chidambaram: And I think that's where you're gonna see most of the leverage in stablecoin payments.
• 44:46
  Dante Reminick: Yeah.
• 44:46
  Dante Reminick: I mean, if I were to summarize our entire conversation, I would say that you know, stablecoins help money move the way that it should.
• 44:53
  Dante Reminick: Money should be able to move differently.
• 44:55
  Dante Reminick: Money should be able to move around borders, you know, for Yeah, it's kind of crazy.
• 44:59
  Avinash Chidambaram: We've had the internet forever.
• 45:01
  Avinash Chidambaram: And somehow, and most of the messages go over the internet, but somehow we're not able to actually move real value over it.
• 45:09
  Avinash Chidambaram: Now you can move real value over it.
• 45:10
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yep.
• 45:10
  Avinash Chidambaram: Until now.
• 45:11
  Avinash Chidambaram: Now you can move real value over it, and that's how it should be.
• 45:14
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yeah, I shouldn't have to fly to Japan to give my brother cash.
• 45:18
  Avinash Chidambaram: I can just send him stables.
• 45:19
  Avinash Chidambaram: That's how it should be.
• 45:21
  Dante Reminick: It's 2026, and there's still many, many cases where the fastest way to get money from point A to point B is to take a bunch of cash, put it in a suitcase, go to the airport, get on a plane, and fly it overseas.
• 45:36
  Dante Reminick: It's ridiculous.
• 45:39
  Avinash Chidambaram: Well, you I'll put it the other way.
• 45:40
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like, you know how businesses used to collect cash?
• 45:43
  Avinash Chidambaram: It used to be that you would take the cash and you take it to your local branch, and be like, here, deposit in my bank account.
• 45:47
  Avinash Chidambaram: People are like, deposit fine.
• 45:49
  Avinash Chidambaram: Those same businesses, when they take cash and they go to the bank and say, deposit this, now banks are saying that's gonna cost you 2%.
• 45:55
  Avinash Chidambaram: But I have it in cash.
• 45:56
  Avinash Chidambaram: Why is it costing me 2% to take my own cash and put it into my bank account?
• 46:01
  Avinash Chidambaram: So why would you do that?
• 46:03
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like I think that eventually people like there's gonna be guys like my dad, he's an old dude, he's gonna have to like pry the cash out of his cold dead hands, probably.
• 46:11
  Avinash Chidambaram: And because he just that's just what he's knowing, that's what he's comfortable with.
• 46:14
  Avinash Chidambaram: But I can tell you my kids, like, they don't know what to do with a card.
• 46:17
  Avinash Chidambaram: They're like, what is this card?
• 46:19
  Avinash Chidambaram: I'm just gonna tap my phone, I'm just gonna use my wallet, and so we're just gonna start seeing this transition, and I just think it's gonna happen faster and faster before you need it.
• 46:27
  Avinash Chidambaram: Because the benefits are so obvious.
• 46:28
  Dante Reminick: Have your kids ever seen like a check before?
• 46:30
  Dante Reminick: Like when you read a check, never seen a check.
• 46:34
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yeah.
• 46:34
  Avinash Chidambaram: No, that that is, I don't think we will even talk about that.
• 46:37
  Avinash Chidambaram: They don't even know what to do with cash.
• 46:39
  Avinash Chidambaram: No, they're like, buddy, why do I have cash?
• 46:41
  Dante Reminick: It's 2026.
• 46:42
  Dante Reminick: We're bending the laws of physics and catching skyscraper-sized rockets with chopsticks.
• 46:47
  Dante Reminick: It's about damn time that money works the way that it should.
• 46:53
  Avinash Chidambaram: Um I love the way you put that because it's crazy that it doesn't now.
• 46:57
  Avinash Chidambaram: Yeah.
• 46:57
  Dante Reminick: It is.
• 46:58
  Dante Reminick: But I mean, again, there are there's companies like Cyberd, there's people like you who are out there trying to change it.
• 47:03
  Dante Reminick: Um, and so I think that this this reckoning and this rebirth of money is is gonna come a lot sooner than than people think, right?
• 47:11
  Avinash Chidambaram: But I mean, go ahead.
• 47:14
  Avinash Chidambaram: I was gonna say it's kind of like the AI thing, right?
• 47:16
  Avinash Chidambaram: Like it's like people have been working on AI for like 20 years.
• 47:19
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then, you know, when Chat GPT 3 came out, we're like, holy shit, this thing's amazing.
• 47:24
  Avinash Chidambaram: And then it's like boom, there's uh I think every single person I know is using an AI tool at some point.
• 47:30
  Avinash Chidambaram: And so I think that's just gonna start happening again with on the stablecoin side.
• 47:34
  Dante Reminick: I I hope so, man.
• 47:35
  Dante Reminick: Um, I want to wrap up here.
• 47:37
  Dante Reminick: I very, very much appreciate the time, Avinash.
• 47:40
  Dante Reminick: If anyone wants to go and check out Cybrid, that's cybrid.xyz, I highly recommend that you do so.
• 47:47
  Dante Reminick: They're some of the best in the business of what they do, and just so that everyone knows, that's c y br I d dot x yz.
• 47:54
  Dante Reminick: Um, highly recommend that you check them out.
• 47:56
  Dante Reminick: Um, thank you all for listening.
• 47:57
  Dante Reminick: And and as always, stay stable.