Latest / The Stable Pulse / The Missing Layer in Stablecoin Infrastructure

Transcript

The Missing Layer in Stablecoin Infrastructure · The Stable Pulse

• 0:00
  Intro: Passage of the stablecoin legislation drafted by the Senate, dubbed the Genius Act, because analysts say a wave of competition can complicate things.
• 0:13
  Bam Azizi: Hi everyone.
• 0:14
  Bam Azizi: I have uh Nassy or Nass from Bastion joining us as a guest today.
• 0:24
  Bam Azizi: Uh Nass, uh lovely to have you on the show.
• 0:27
  Bam Azizi: Super excited for this episode.
• 0:29
  Bam Azizi: Yeah.
• 0:31
  Bam Azizi: Uh first off, where are you calling from?
• 0:34
  Bam Azizi: Are you in New York?
• 0:35
  Bam Azizi: I'm in New York.
• 0:39
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Greatest city on earth.
• 0:41
  Bam Azizi: Okay, I'm not sure about that because there is a lot of uh debate about like stablecoin headquarters is in New York or in San Francisco, where I am now.
• 0:51
  Bam Azizi: You're definitely team New York.
• 0:54
  Bam Azizi: Um yeah, so this this uh is a podcast that I interview a lot of founders, specifically in the stablecoin and crypto industry, and we would love to uh learn more about your background, and you can go all the way back to when you were children.
• 1:12
  Bam Azizi: How did you end up what you're doing?
• 1:15
  Bam Azizi: So this is your stage.
• 1:17
  Bam Azizi: Tell us more about NAS.
• 1:19
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Oh, the film is like uh like multiple lives uh you know packed into one.
• 1:25
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um so I'm originally from France, uh was born and grew up in Paris.
• 1:29
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: My dad is Mark and my mom is French.
• 1:32
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um I was always very excited about you know Legos and just kind of like systems in in general.
• 1:39
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um I did a detour through med school, believe it or not, before landing in uh in uh computer science and security engineering.
• 1:47
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um I think I just got you know, I fell in love essentially with writing code, the first line of code that I wrote uh, you know, on the first day of school.
• 1:56
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I never looked back.
• 1:58
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I think that I was always very excited about um, you know, solving puzzles and kind of building systems um, you know, in kind of like a competitive manner.
• 2:07
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I think that that led me to security where there is this kind of like cat and mouse game happening constantly, right?
• 2:14
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: You're you're the builder, you're trying to build faster than the uh than the than the bad guys, but you need to understand how the bad guys think.
• 2:22
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so um I kind of started working on pretty deep levels of security, operating system security, um, network security, uh applied cryptography at school, and then I kind of continued from that.
• 2:37
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: So I I after school um in France, I decided to um join Apple um for a very long internship, working on the trusted execution environment team.
• 2:50
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: So that kind of like led me to get very close to uh a lot of the key management that you know we use on a daily basis uh in the blockchain space for custody and wallet management and so on, uh, but really at kind of like the Apple scale and with the Apple level of you know robustness and and and security.
• 3:07
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: So that was kind of like the how I how I arrived in the US and started working on security and key management in the first place.
• 3:15
  Bam Azizi: That's awesome.
• 3:16
  Bam Azizi: When what year was that that you moved to US from France?
• 3:20
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Uh 2016.
• 3:22
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: So it's my 10 year anniversary.
• 3:24
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: 10-year anniversary.
• 3:25
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um are you a US citizen yet?
• 3:28
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Not yet.
• 3:29
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Not yet.
• 3:29
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Not yet.
• 3:34
  Bam Azizi: Uh, and so as part of and then the first company you joined in US was Apple?
• 3:41
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Yeah.
• 3:41
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And then uh after that, so I stayed there, then moved to Docker.
• 3:45
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, so more kind of developer infrastructure, again in the security team.
• 3:50
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Uh a lot of key management, a lot of authentication work and applied cryptography, very interesting, a lot of trust management problems.
• 3:58
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And the um you might be familiar with Anchorage, or some people in in the who will listen to this might be familiar with Anchorage, which is one of the major crypto custodians, um, especially for the institutional side.
• 4:11
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, I worked actually with the two uh amazing uh seem to be founders of Anchorage, uh Nathan Macaulay and Diego Monica at Docker.
• 4:19
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And then when they started uh the left at Docker to start Anchorage, uh brought me in kind of like fairly early to build a lot of the key management there.
• 4:28
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um so that's kind of like when I jumped to crypto uh from from from there.
• 4:34
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, it's uh it's actually people might uh might ask that it was uh it's a wild pivot from Docker to Anchorage, but actually it is not.
• 4:45
  Bam Azizi: Like my background is also security.
• 4:47
  Bam Azizi: Everything we do in security is based on PKI or public key infrastructure.
• 4:52
  Bam Azizi: The entire blockchain is built on top of PKI.
• 4:56
  Bam Azizi: So if you're in cybersecurity, the most interesting thing that you can play with is blockchain.
• 5:02
  Bam Azizi: Uh yes.
• 5:04
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: The thing that I say often is that every single company that gets big enough ends up building a blockchain internally for one use code for another.
• 5:14
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like that's 100% the case.
• 5:15
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: You will see that that Apple, Facebook, Meta, uh, Google, and others, every single company that needs to manage trust at a big enough scale ends up building some type of blockchain internally.
• 5:28
  Bam Azizi: And then from Anchorage, you went to Meta to basically be part of the Libra project, right?
• 5:34
  Bam Azizi: So we have a we have a similar to PayPal Mafia, we have a Libra Mafia.
• 5:38
  Bam Azizi: Every one of you is just leading a company in crypto now.
• 5:41
  Bam Azizi: So tell us more about Libra.
• 5:47
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: The French mafia, the Libra Mafia, every single mafia that I could be part of.
• 5:50
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um but yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 5:51
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: It was uh so it was very interesting because um that's a very good point.
• 5:56
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um Anchorage was very institutional focused, right?
• 6:00
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: It's let's bring uh institutional capital safely into the crypto space, uh, which is important, right, to fund uh protocols and infrastructure players such as you guys, us, and and many others.
• 6:13
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But I think that I really wanted to bring the value of the technology that you and I just discussed to the broader kind of global population, and and and meta at the time had an incredible um vision for it.
• 6:31
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so I got very excited, joined fairly early there, um, co-created kind of like a lot of the uh wallet infrastructure and custody and key management and so on that underpinned a lot of what the at the time it was called Novi, the Novi wallet within Meta uh would be used for, right?
• 6:51
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so we helped obtain licenses across jurisdictions and uh on and off ramp and core um core infrastructure for the issuance of uh actually the the Libra uh currency, which was you know started as a bucket currency, then ended up being like a USD stable coin basically.
• 7:10
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um but yeah, that was an incredible experience.
• 7:16
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But that was the moment where I realized that, you know, at Meta, we were essentially trying to rebuild an entire financial institution from the ground up within Meta.
• 7:25
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And then you realize that a lot of companies of that scale are just not built to be financial institutions.
• 7:32
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: They're not built from a DNA standpoint, how people think about the decisions that they make from a product standpoint, from a risk standpoint, privacy, etc.
• 7:41
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And it actually plays in like against them, not in favor of those non-financial institutions companies.
• 7:51
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so that was the moment where I realized that at Meta, I wish we had this regulated partner that had very simple APIs, had all the licensing for us to be able to custody those coins at scale and enable payments and converts between fiat and currencies, and then ultimately issue uh a currency as well to get the full economics.
• 8:14
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so um that is essentially where we're headed with with Bastion, and a lot of it is already being used by um, but you you didn't start Bastion right away.
• 8:25
  Bam Azizi: So you joined Anderson Horovitz, the the glorious name that everyone knows.
• 8:30
  Bam Azizi: Like how many years you've been there?
• 8:32
  Bam Azizi: What was your role there?
• 8:33
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Yeah, I mean the the Libra, it was interesting because like the the the Libra project, when this got killed by the previous administration, ended up being kind of like just like freezing a lot of the enterprise interest, right?
• 8:47
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: They were sending these like dirty letters to uh a lot of the players, large players in the uh in the Libra Association.
• 8:56
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so it was pretty clear that it would take a bit of time before a lot of those large companies would want to buy, you know, and kind of like re-enter the space and kind of like leverage that type of technology.
• 9:07
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so decided to join Andrews and Horitz, amazing team.
• 9:11
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um got to work you know closely with Chris Dixon and and Ben Hormet and many of the team there.
• 9:18
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um it's as high EQ and IQ dense of a team as it gets, I would say.
• 9:27
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um just like very, very small, lean team.
• 9:31
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And the thing that was really interesting as part of the project of building this kind of like ASICs in the crypto team was it was not just about investment, it was about an operational team that could support the portfolio companies with muscle, added added muscle, right?
• 9:48
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: That we just saw like the enhanced games.
• 9:50
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I don't know if you followed the enhanced games.
• 9:52
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: It's basically you have all the uh testosterone, you know, like uh injected uh from A16D, where they have the public policy arms, the security arms, the um kind of protocol design and tokenomics kind of like design uh uh teams.
• 10:08
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: They have just a very deep bench to support those founders.
• 10:13
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I think that I I got so excited about this mental model of supporting in-depth the portfolio companies because then you're not just um you're not just kind of giving money, you're actually increasing drastically the odds of success for all of the portfolio companies.
• 10:31
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: So um I joined as um as CSO on the crypto fund, and I essentially kind of like both secured you know assets for the for the firm, but also like the kind of like as a head of security as a service basically to all the companies that that needed one within the portfolio.
• 10:49
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And um, yeah, we kind of like built a team internally and then helped with a lot of hacks, uh proactive security measures and security architecture and and and so on.
• 11:02
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 11:02
  Bam Azizi: So and then there, firsthand, you saw a lot of founders building in the crypto industry, but you said to yourself like they're not doing one thing or they're not doing this specific thing right.
• 11:16
  Bam Azizi: I'd rather to roll up my sleeves and go from like being Anderson Horovitz to just being a lonely founder.
• 11:24
  Bam Azizi: What was the what was the motivation to just say no to Anderson and go and start your own thing?
• 11:30
  Bam Azizi: That that could be very inspiring for a lot of founders who are listening to this podcast.
• 11:36
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I think that every single founder ultimately has a view of what the world should look like.
• 11:44
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And you're just not gonna be satisfied until this thing actually exists.
• 11:50
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And the way I view the future is in a world where everything is secure and has kind of like the risk managed so that any company and any person has their assets safe and can seamlessly use the best technology that is available.
• 12:09
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I think that there was quite a bit of focus on security, but I didn't see essentially um a partner to large enterprises that would really kind of be the intersection at the intersection of the diagram of uh security, compliance, and then usability.
• 12:35
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And usability includes kind of like scale and uh uh kind of like developer experience and and so on.
• 12:40
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: So I think that you know, left essentially A6NZ with the view of there needs to be a partner that enables building great, highly scalable products that are fully complied from day one under all the license kind of like licensing requirements and um for every jurisdiction uh that they want to launch in and have all the security that that comes with that.
• 13:04
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And that's a lot of my background, right?
• 13:06
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like at by that time, I had been in regulated financial services for quite a bit of time.
• 13:12
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I had done kind of like the the institutional kind of like bank side, the global money transmitter, uh the RAA with with A6 and Z.
• 13:20
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so I had seen enough that it was pretty clear, you know, the path that we should be taking to enable custody on and off-ramp and then um you know down the line issue.
• 13:30
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: So that's uh that was kind of like the path.
• 13:33
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But yeah, licensing takes time, and I think that not so many companies have been or were focused on on this, uh especially at that time.
• 13:42
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, remember 2022, the first we met, um nothing was uh like crypto was a sin.
• 13:50
  Bam Azizi: So we had to remove the word crypto on our website because the the banks wouldn't bank us just because you're working in the crypto space, even though we're not touching any assets, we're not like issuing tokens.
• 14:02
  Bam Azizi: So it's it's hard to imagine that within three years the table has turned.
• 14:08
  Bam Azizi: And now everyone is talking about stable coin, every company has a stable coin strategy, but it was not like that.
• 14:14
  Bam Azizi: So you decided to build in the harshest possible environment.
• 14:18
  Bam Azizi: And I remember it was just you, and maybe uh I remember Zach at Bridge, it was me, like a few other founders of building uh in the space.
• 14:27
  Bam Azizi: Uh not everyone was was in San Francisco either.
• 14:29
  Bam Azizi: So it was a very lonely time frame.
• 14:32
  Bam Azizi: And then I remember what you did initially was like wall as a service, and and you told me that in our first meeting that everybody else is doing it wrong.
• 14:42
  Bam Azizi: So you had this conviction that self-custody really doesn't solve it.
• 14:47
  Bam Azizi: You like you knew that if you had this bastion thing in place five years ago, then Anchorage could use you, Meta could use you, Google could use like all the companies are building could potentially use Bastion if it was ready.
• 15:02
  Bam Azizi: And you had a country view that self-custody is not the right move.
• 15:06
  Bam Azizi: Like, can you can you debunk that myth in a little bit and then tell us what was going on in your mind when you start a Bastion?
• 15:13
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Yeah.
• 15:13
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, and I think that it all comes down to trust, right?
• 15:17
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, and uh it's funny because I actually had a debate on stage against uh Fenton uh at the Solana breakout, actually.
• 15:26
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um and um it's all about trust management, and you know that as a as a security expert, but I think that like the the average person in the space might not necessarily think about um how many steps does it take for um any type of wallet solution to get compromised, right?
• 15:46
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And that can be any sort of steps, that can be a disgruntled employee that is uh compromised, that can be the same employee that gets fished by North Korea.
• 15:54
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And we're starting to see a lot of this pan out in real time where technically you can say self-custody, but ultimately self-custody versus custody doesn't really matter because it's all about the number of steps that it takes to compromise your solution, right?
• 16:12
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like your crypto, whether it's MetaMask, Phantom, and others, is still gated by software at the end of the day and hardware.
• 16:20
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And both both of those things are deployed and updated by human beings.
• 16:26
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so like you have a lot of steps that can be compromised, whether it's people, whether it's systems.
• 16:32
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, and it and and this is how I look at it.
• 16:34
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um and ultimately, if you think about um family member of yours that is not in the crypto space, my mom, you and I always have been discussing the grandmother's test.
• 16:46
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: My grandmother is a hundred percent not gonna care about a label of stamp label of self-custody versus custody if she loses her money because of some service provider.
• 16:57
  Bam Azizi: Where can I call, right?
• 16:58
  Bam Azizi: 1-800.
• 16:59
  Bam Azizi: I need a 1-800 number.
• 17:01
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Exactly.
• 17:02
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: So the way I think about it is that it is all about um risk management, and ultimately you need to have a solution where someone has to be liable.
• 17:13
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And you can't really put that onto the billions of people that are using the internet every single day and that don't really care about custody versus self-custody.
• 17:23
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I think that it was used as a tool to you know, kind of like a wreck arbitrage tool uh uh to avoid licensing requirement.
• 17:32
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But the reality is that the security of a of a bastion, of an anchorage, of a coin-based custody is gonna be at least equal to the level of security that you're gonna get from a self-custodial solution, right?
• 17:48
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: It's you're gonna have the same properties ultimately.
• 17:50
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: The end user is gonna need to approve cryptographically something for the transaction to happen.
• 17:57
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so the way we thought about it is we're gonna get ahead of that and we're gonna get the licenses.
• 18:04
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: We're gonna say it's our fault if anything goes wrong.
• 18:07
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: We're gonna get the insurance, we're gonna get the licenses.
• 18:11
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so um it's kind of like a very different approach that I think with the crypto space, more crypto native companies were more focused on how quickly they can distribute across jurisdictions, and larger merchants, banks, institutions care about the liability and the risk management piece way more because they know that it doesn't really matter self-custody versus custody.
• 18:34
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: At the end of the day, you're responsible for sanctioned screening, you're responsible for KYC, you're responsible for the safety of the assets, regardless of the label that you put on it.
• 18:44
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: So we kind of like to this approach from day one, and then we've built everything, our orchestration, you know, uh product and issuance and others on top of our own regulated um wallet custody product.
• 18:59
  Bam Azizi: Nice.
• 18:59
  Bam Azizi: And um so basically, you're saying that the stablecoin has a lot of benefits, or blockchain in general has a lot of benefits, but it's a very complicated word.
• 19:11
  Bam Azizi: It doesn't pass the grammar test.
• 19:13
  Bam Azizi: So you want to abstract all the complexity.
• 19:17
  Bam Azizi: And basically, if if a business or an end user wants to use a blockchain-enabled technology, from their perspective, they're just interacting with just another tool.
• 19:28
  Bam Azizi: Um and and you're saying that reg regulatory acts as like the regulation acts as some sort of a competitive advantage for you because you have everything ready to go and you're taking all the liability and responsibility so people can easily just build on top of fashion via thinking about all of this complexity.
• 19:57
  Bam Azizi: Is that is that correct?
• 19:59
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Yeah, and you're you're clarifying the roles and responsibilities, right?
• 20:03
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: You can't really just say I'm pushing stuff back to the end user.
• 20:07
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And more than complexity, it's about safety, right?
• 20:10
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Security is about how expensive is it to compromise something, to access something that you're not supposed to.
• 20:17
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But safety is about making it hard for the client, for the end user, to do the wrong thing uh and to shoot themselves in the foot, right?
• 20:28
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And and we want to build safe systems where it's just hard to do the wrong thing as well.
• 20:34
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I think that a custodial system that you know we control, we can optimize things from a performance standpoint, but we can also make it a lot safer because we can put guardrails that prevent the end users from shooting themselves in the foot.
• 20:48
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 20:49
  Bam Azizi: Um let's segue to stable coins a little bit.
• 20:53
  Bam Azizi: Why is stablecoin exists?
• 20:55
  Bam Azizi: I'm happy with my Bank of America and Chase account.
• 20:59
  Bam Azizi: I have a card, I can spend money.
• 21:02
  Bam Azizi: Why do I need a stablecoin uh as an end user?
• 21:05
  Bam Azizi: Uh, what do you see in Bastion?
• 21:07
  Bam Azizi: What are the trends and use cases you're seeing that stablecoin works and fiat doesn't work properly?
• 21:14
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Yeah, I think that uh every single this is why I think that we're we're seeing very strong immigrant founders actually in this space.
• 21:25
  Bam Azizi: Because they experienced the life without US dollar.
• 21:28
  Bam Azizi: Yeah.
• 21:29
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Have you tried sending money through Western Union to Morocco?
• 21:32
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Have you tried, you know, kind of like all these cross-money, uh cross-border money movement apps and and flows?
• 21:40
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like this is as as bad as it gets.
• 21:44
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, when you have your family who needs to go stand in line in the sun, you know, and and go kind of like get uh bills in their uh in their pockets to leave kind of like the post office.
• 21:56
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like that, those things are just after seven days and like 15%.
• 21:59
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Some times of fees.
• 22:00
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like this is this is real.
• 22:02
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I think that um stable coins really come as a way to um it's kind of you're you're essentially saying that the the field is now even for people where wherever they are in the world.
• 22:23
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: They just need to have a phone, to have an internet connection, to have a laptop, and they can actually participate in the financial ecosystem.
• 22:33
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I think that before that, giving anyone access to the currency of their choice was nearly impossible.
• 22:43
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like you can say that for some businesses, right?
• 22:46
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like you can get like if you're a global business, you have a JP Morgan account and a Citibank account or like standard charter, etc.
• 22:52
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: That's perfect.
• 22:53
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But the vast majority of those businesses are not in this position.
• 22:57
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: The vast majority of the people in the world are not in this position.
• 23:00
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: They're just kind of like left um alone and they're just gated by antiquated rails.
• 23:07
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so I think that stable coins are this like perfect neural network globally that can transmit information at light speed into these different hubs, and then these hubs can be improved, right?
• 23:22
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like we're doing some work within the US financial system domestically to improve real-time payments, right?
• 23:30
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: We're like Japan is doing the same, and Brazil is doing the same, and that's great.
• 23:34
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But then you need bridges that work 24-7, uh, extremely that are extremely efficient to bridge also these local hubs.
• 23:43
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so I really do see those, the stable coins that is essentially the neural network that just bridges all of these hubs together.
• 23:51
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, it doesn't and allows anyone with an internet connection to um to participate and get access to the best of finance.
• 23:59
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um now you have 50 companies, neobanks, for example, that are competing for businesses all around Africa.
• 24:07
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: That was not the case before, right?
• 24:08
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: With those like incredible yield, uh money that can be spent anywhere without insane FX fees.
• 24:15
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like that was not possible.
• 24:16
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: You could not have 50 businesses fight for your business um, you know, uh a few years ago.
• 24:23
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so that is the most excited that I've been about finance in a very, very long time.
• 24:28
  Bam Azizi: Do you can you can you hear me?
• 24:30
  Bam Azizi: Yes, can you hear me?
• 24:34
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, yeah.
• 24:35
  Bam Azizi: Sorry, I got disconnected for a second.
• 24:37
  Bam Azizi: We'll cut out this part.
• 24:38
  Bam Azizi: Um so let's let's go to the next question.
• 24:43
  Bam Azizi: The question I have for you is um other than cross-border remittances, what are the things that you're seeing that basically at the institutional level, you're seeing a stablecoin option?
• 24:59
  Bam Azizi: Let's say if I am a business, 99% of my business are in US, I'm not working with anyone outside of US, why should I embrace a stablecoin?
• 25:09
  Bam Azizi: What do you see the typical use cases within the US itself?
• 25:15
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Yeah, so we we've uh we've announced uh we've announced recently that uh Sony Bank is a is a client of Bash and there are more that can't uh share yet.
• 25:26
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But if you look essentially at those uh corporate um enterprises, they have multiple entities across different jurisdictions and countries.
• 25:39
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: So many of them are responsible for receiving money, holding a sufficient amount of liquidity to be able to pay who they need to pay, whether it's contractors, employees, rents, what have you, uh, and then move money to another entity, and then that other entity might move it to the treasury management, to the one that is connected to the treasury management system or elsewhere.
• 26:01
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so you have essentially these very complex webs of uh money movements that happen internally within the uh the within the kind of uh internal operations of of those corporates.
• 26:17
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um very inefficient, a lot of trap liquidity, a lot of FX conversions as well, um that kind of like you know just add up in terms of fees and the time that it takes essentially to make that money to move that money around.
• 26:31
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I don't think that people realize generally how big B2B flows and kind of internal money flows are compared to to B2C payments.
• 26:41
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: They're like on average orders of magnitude higher than what the B2C side is gonna have, or like a CDC, because we're talking about the entire funds collected from all the sales and purchases that are kind of constantly moving a bit everywhere.
• 26:57
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so we're seeing a lot of pain points there.
• 27:01
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, and and Bastion is helping essentially um some of those corporates set up wallets per entity to be able to receive custody and send safely those assets and then convert seamlessly between the local currency when needed and that and the stable coin, whether it's their own stable coin or whether it's an existing stable coin.
• 27:24
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, because you want to make sure that you capture the yield in transit, right?
• 27:29
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: You you don't want to wait.
• 27:30
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Typically, right now, they wait until the funds are at the treasury management system to capture the yield.
• 27:35
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: They don't want that.
• 27:36
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: They want to make money on trap liquidity, they want to make money on the money whether it's in flight, and they want all of this to happen 24-7 and not have to wait until Monday morning to start uh moving funds again.
• 27:51
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 27:52
  Bam Azizi: Um I often compare blockchain um to what we learned in cybersecurity about encryption, that you have if you have data, you want to encrypt it at rest.
• 28:05
  Bam Azizi: Also, you want to encrypt it in transit?
• 28:07
  Bam Azizi: Uh in the last 16 years or so, crypto was more focused on building the best custodial services that you can hold your value.
• 28:16
  Bam Azizi: It was less about movement of the value.
• 28:19
  Bam Azizi: It was like value at rest, not value at transit, right?
• 28:22
  Bam Azizi: So um what is bastion?
• 28:26
  Bam Azizi: Is are you more focused on custody?
• 28:29
  Bam Azizi: Are you a security company?
• 28:30
  Bam Azizi: Are you a crypto company?
• 28:32
  Bam Azizi: Are you a payment infrastructure?
• 28:34
  Bam Azizi: What is your focus uh at Bastion?
• 28:39
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I think you're very right.
• 28:41
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I think that, and I saw that kind of like at Anchorage and other places where for the longest time it was really about securing the assets.
• 28:48
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um but ultimately custody is about custody is about building, should be about building value for the assets while you hold them, being able to use those assets.
• 29:04
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I think that for us that was why we were unhappy with what we saw on the market before we started Bastion, is that holding the assets should not be separate from uh making the assets useful.
• 29:18
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so we kind of like we decided to have this kind of all-in-one solution.
• 29:23
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: It was kind of like part even of like our very first pitch where we have kind of like the fiat infrastructure and then kind of like the crypto infrastructure, and having kind of like seamless interoperability between the two, because ultimately your dollar is as valuable as it is spendable, right?
• 29:41
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: If uh NAS proposes to ban like a trade between a digital dollar that you're gonna have on your bank account versus a physical dollar, the majority of the time you're not gonna want that trade.
• 29:53
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: You're not gonna want that physical dollar because it's not gonna be as spendable.
• 29:56
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: You can't really use it as broadly as possible.
• 29:58
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so this is why the way we think about it is that it's kind of like you know, the dollar you had, the physical dollar in the form of dollar bills, increasing the spendability with having cars associated to those dollars, and you can actually spend them on the internet, and then now having uh a wallet uh solution that has uh earning capabilities on it, that has conversion capabilities on it, that can have actually cars issued tied to them.
• 30:27
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like those are kind of like the levels of um utility, and this is everything that we think about.
• 30:33
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Obviously, it it needs to start with security at breast, right?
• 30:36
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Because you can't give hacked, your funds need to be to be safe.
• 30:39
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But the way we think about it is that it has to be about utility on the dollars that you hold.
• 30:46
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so everything, the entire payment infrastructure that we've been building, is all nicely integrated into um our City, like skip the highly scalable custody solution.
• 31:00
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 31:01
  Bam Azizi: And what should happen in uh the space in next five years that you feel like Bastion was successful and uh in in your mission and your vision become a reality?
• 31:15
  Bam Azizi: Or 10 years, if five years is not enough.
• 31:19
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I I think that you see that like firsthand.
• 31:21
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like the stable coins are as stable coins get more and more valuable the longer they stay as stable coins.
• 31:29
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so I call that the time to live of stable coins, the time between the minting and the burning of that same unit of value.
• 31:38
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: That needs to increase, right?
• 31:39
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: It needs to stable coins need to stay as stable coins for as long as possible.
• 31:44
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I would love for us as an industry to have that as a common success metric of the stable coins when we on-rend them.
• 31:51
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: It needs to last for as long as possible until we off-ramp them.
• 31:54
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And um I think that I just want to see this number go very, very high.
• 32:00
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I want to be able to see uh round trips between me and my employer and then back to me, and then like my merchants, and then back to me at some point or someone else without having to off-ramp it.
• 32:13
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: We're not there yet.
• 32:14
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, typically the merchants that we see um may off-ramp very quickly themselves.
• 32:21
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: This is why we also help um issue stable coins so that those merchants can hold the funds as stable coins, maybe not in kind of like the same format that's like USDC or USDT that everyone else might be using.
• 32:34
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But at least they can hold it in a format that stays on the blockchain, keeps the stablecoin as a stablecoin, and doesn't need to uh go back to the painfully slow and inefficient traditional uh financial system.
• 32:47
  Bam Azizi: So you're thinking basically, basically the the wire transfer, ACH, all these local transfers will be obsolete.
• 32:55
  Bam Azizi: So we're just using blockchain and then US dollar is US dollar.
• 33:00
  Bam Azizi: Who cares like what's the medium of transfer, right?
• 33:03
  Bam Azizi: So you're always keeping a stable coin.
• 33:05
  Bam Azizi: Unless you really, really need cash from ATM, then that's where the off-ramp happens.
• 33:11
  Bam Azizi: Otherwise, wherever like digital you're moving money, it should happen on top of the blockchain.
• 33:16
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Has to be the case because those ledgering systems that are it that underpin you know those like traditional kind of cross-bank payment systems are so slow and are just not using the best technology.
• 33:31
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: That's as simple as that.
• 33:32
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so I think that if you have a bet better technology, you should be using it.
• 33:36
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And hopefully over time, as the technology diffuses, we kind of like get more of that um approved.
• 33:43
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But wire transfers and and other uh other kind of like slow, um slow kind of like uh transfer methods are already antiquated compared to traditional kind of like real-time payment systems, right?
• 33:57
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like it's just that it takes so much time to get those large institutions to move to new technology stack.
• 34:04
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so I'm just hoping that the blockchain piece is strong enough and the network effects are strong enough that um it gets adopted before everything else.
• 34:14
  Bam Azizi: Yeah.
• 34:14
  Bam Azizi: Um another question that people are asking me often, because I'm also building an infra, is like why so many people are building infrastructure in crypto, but not many are building applications.
• 34:26
  Bam Azizi: What what would be your answer to those critics?
• 34:30
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Yeah, um, I think a lot about it.
• 34:33
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um I think that there are a lot of applications today in the world that have access to the you know to to the internet users that have the reach to give access to stable coins, right?
• 34:53
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um that can be banks, that can be uh new banks, that can be um like Apple and Google and Amazon and Walmart and you know everyone else.
• 35:05
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Ultimately, it really comes down to giving them the tools to launch embedded financial services.
• 35:12
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I would rather focus, and I think that it's extremely important for you guys and us to focus on building the tools that enable those companies that already have the distribution to make the life, the financial life of the end users that they already have better.
• 35:32
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: We don't really need, I mean, it's great that there are more products that come to the market, right?
• 35:38
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: That are uh uh better design and and feel more native and so on and more performant.
• 35:45
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But ultimately, the distribution is already connected to the internet.
• 35:49
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: They just don't have access to the best of finance yet.
• 35:52
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so building the tools that enable the companies that already are connected to those users on a daily basis, this is what I'm excited about.
• 36:00
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I want TikTok, I want Facebook, I want all these companies, meta uh and others, WhatsApp, to be able to give the best of finance um to their own existing billions of users.
• 36:12
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 36:12
  Bam Azizi: So basically we're saying a lot of companies they already have the distribution, like we don't need to reinvent the bill, we just need to give them the tools to enable them to offer better, cheaper, faster service using blockchain and stablecompany.
• 36:25
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Yeah.
• 36:25
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And then smaller companies that are faster might get their you know first.
• 36:29
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so that that's great because it kind of like gives the this window of time of opportunity for um others to come in and um take a share.
• 36:40
  Bam Azizi: Makes sense.
• 36:40
  Bam Azizi: Um let's switch gears a little bit.
• 36:43
  Bam Azizi: I want to kind of understand your entrepreneurial spirit and like why you become a founder, why immigrants, love immigrants are becoming a founder.
• 36:52
  Bam Azizi: Like part part of it you answered, partly you answered that.
• 36:56
  Bam Azizi: But like what was in you that you felt like you can do it?
• 37:01
  Bam Azizi: Um and what can you share with other first thing founders who are listening to this podcast?
• 37:08
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I think that every good founder has to have some chip on the shoulder.
• 37:16
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: You have to want to prove something, you have to be extremely competitive.
• 37:19
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, you have to be um to have kind of like a healthy dose of obsession, um, because it just takes a lot to keep your conviction, even though at times, and at times I mean quite often, you the entire world, the market, the internet is gonna tell you that you're wrong and you need to keep your head above the water, like breathe.
• 37:50
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: This is why like sometimes my wife says, like, every single person says the opposite of you.
• 37:56
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like, how can you not listen to these people and uh on other things that like bash it?
• 38:01
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um, and I tell her, like, that's what I do for a job.
• 38:05
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Literally, just not listening to people like as much is is what I do for a job.
• 38:09
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so I think that just um the resilience is is kind of like a uh is a key and is like a I think a result of uh just a lot of experiences.
• 38:20
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I think that this is why kind of like the immigrant part is also very important, right?
• 38:24
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Like you're kind of you're you're leaving family behind, you're leaving you know a lot of things behind you, and you kind of go against all odds, uh moving somewhere else in the world.
• 38:36
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And I think that that forges kind of like a just a very strong character um and and kind of like certain personality traits that are absolutely critical.
• 38:45
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, 100%.
• 38:46
  Bam Azizi: Uh why we have so many big crypto companies out of France.
• 38:51
  Bam Azizi: We have Ledger, we have Morpho, we have Privy, you what's in the water?
• 39:01
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I uh yeah, okay.
• 39:02
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: There, there you go.
• 39:03
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Uh no, I think that we have just people who are so I think that like uh the engineering talent in France is is just very high.
• 39:12
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Generally, there's a culture of excellence around maths, uh physics, just generally science and and engineering.
• 39:19
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um and I think that that kind of like pairs very nicely with um that pairs very nicely with a lot of interest in generally like privacy uh-centric aspect that I think crypto is just like very strong at.
• 39:36
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um the the the European culture generally, but especially French, is is is actually uh I don't trust as much the government.
• 39:46
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I don't really trust the the companies that kind of like just only trust myself.
• 39:50
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And so I think that like crypto is kind of like the the the right um the right kind of like industry yeah for for all of those.
• 39:58
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: But I think that paired with the engineering talent and scientific um uh culture, I think that it it it kind of like played a big role.
• 40:07
  Bam Azizi: Yeah, that's awesome.
• 40:08
  Bam Azizi: Uh I think like we are going to close this podcast with my last famous questions.
• 40:14
  Bam Azizi: Uh, what's your favorite restaurant in are you from Paris or from Provence?
• 40:20
  Bam Azizi: Okay, what's your favorite restaurant in Paris?
• 40:22
  Bam Azizi: Your favorite restaurant in New York that that we should try?
• 40:26
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Okay, I'm gonna start with New York.
• 40:28
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um I think I'm a very uh easy person.
• 40:32
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I'm gonna go with Franchette, which is a French restaurant, actually, uh in Trabeca.
• 40:37
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And then uh, if you go there, the Steco Poivre is the best thing ever.
• 40:42
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: And then uh back in France.
• 40:45
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um oh wow, that's a tough one.
• 40:47
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Should have sent me the questions ahead of time.
• 40:50
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Yeah, give me a Moroccan restaurant in in Paris.
• 40:53
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Uh the name.
• 40:58
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: I can't come up with the name.
• 40:59
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: It's actually like uh you just know it by your heart, you can just go there.
• 41:04
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Yeah, literally.
• 41:06
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Um I I can't remember it, but like uh I think that the the um the pillish is is definitely uh one that I that absolutely love.
• 41:14
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Uh you know, on the on the rooftops in in Paris.
• 41:17
  Nassim Eddequiouaq: Beautiful view.
• 41:18
  Bam Azizi: So that's awesome.
• 41:20
  Bam Azizi: Thank you, Ness, for joining us.
• 41:22
  Bam Azizi: It was an awesome conversation.
• 41:23
  Bam Azizi: I really, really love this session and episode.
• 41:26
  Bam Azizi: Um, and thank you for joining.
• 41:28
  Bam Azizi: Thanks so much, man.