Moving Stablecoins Doesn't Have to Suck | Hart Lambur - Across Protocol

Wait.

Um, while you're exporting,

I think we're starting. I think we're starting now.

All right, time to go. All the best, Art.

Thanks, Kesh. Um, guys, Kesh works on Across with me, so he gives really kind intros, which I like. Um, all right. I appreciate that. All right, y'all.

Uh, I'm Haramber. I'm the founder of Across Protocol. Um I also work on UMA protocol uh but that's for another day. And we're here to talk about how we uh prevent stable coins from sucking uh in terms of moving them between uh blockchains and between stable coins. Um, so I actually want to start with just a flashback here to two years ago and I'll I'll share some of the thoughts I slides I gave at Devcon um in Bangkok where uh I gave a talk called unifying Ethereum with intents uh and ERC 7683.

Um this was pretty well received and this is at a time where people weren't still weren't sure how to do bridging in Ethereum. But the problem we really lasered in on two years ago was how fragmented Ethereum was. Uh we started solving scalability with all these L2s and different blockchains which gave us lots of free and cheap block space but it fragmented the user experience massively. And uh the the example here is like you go back to the simpler time like DeFi summer 2020. Ethereum was simple.

You had one wallet. you sent money from that wallet. It's great. Life was easy. And then we added like a gazillion different blockchains.

Uh, and that gave you a gazillion different networks and it gave you like 12 different versions of Ethereum, right? And it's just a total mess. Um, and this is the argument that like look, this is not going to scale. This is not going to be the way people uh use crypto or use use our technology. uh particularly the next billion people.

Um and we needed to unify Ethereum and make it feel like one network again. So this is the prettier slide that our designer Lucas made, but blockchains grew with fragmentation. That's how we made block space cheap. More fragmentation, cheaper block space, horrible user experience. And the idea was we needed to unify Ethereum.

So two years ago, we did this by saying, "Hey, we need to make we need to abstract interoperability and make there be a two-cond experience moving assets between any two blockchains." And instead of it being this old bridging experience where it's like the user finds some bridge, has some pool, they wait a bunch of time, stuff shows up on the other side. Like that didn't work. Um, instead we promoted this intentbased architecture where a user declares their intent. Here's what I want to do and a network of solvers competes to go and fill them and the user gets filled in two seconds and move on with their day.

Um, and in this time, you know, across this process, 35 billion in volume, 15 million transactions, 3 million users, lots of good stats, lots of stuff that's worked. And Athere and the intense architecture really has made Ethereum feel like one more like one network again. But we're like doing this all over again. Dollars dollars are now fragmenting here. And I I I find this almost comical.

So, I literally took my same slides from two years ago and just changed the word like blockchains to dollars. So, dollars were simple back in the day. You had a dollar of USDC or USDT, maybe there are two of them, and you can move that around. But now we have a lot of dollars, like a lot a lot of dollars. Um, Circle and Tether, sure, they're great.

Uh, Paxos, PIUSD, MetaMask MUSD, Phantom Cash, uh, Revolute's got a stable coin, Clara's got a stable coin. Genius Act made it so everyone wants their own stable coin, which we can talk about the pros and cons of this later, but that's that's happening. And it's like I think it's great. I'm here for it, but uh, we went from having like a dollar to now 300 different types of dollars. And you got to swap between them.

We'll talk about this problem, too. But now I'm going between dollar A and dollar B. They're both supposed to be a dollar, but I'm swapping between them, which seems crazy. And then I have this like wallet where I've got my dollars split splintered and fragmented between many different stable coins across many different chains. And this feels hard.

This feels like a bad user experience. So, I just replicated my slides from two years ago, and it's the same conclusion. It's a mess. Now what is the solution? In the same way we wanted to use this intentbased architecture and have this solver network uh compete to do user actions for you.

Abstract away what the user wants to do with this intent. We can have the same solver network compete to abstract away dollars so that your dollars all feel the same everywhere. And so again uh the way we are pushing across forward is now it's not just about unifying blockchains it's about unifying dollars unifying stable coins to make this be a seamless experience. So going to the prettier slides this is today's graphics not from two years ago. The stable coins it it's really the same problem the same fragmentation problem but potentially at a much bigger scale.

uh the the old landscape you had two dominant stable coins and we'll talk about the um the kind of duopoly effects of those two dominant stable coins. We had those exist. Now we have a ton and a I think a really like a long tale of stable coins coming into existence for reasons that make economic sense to their issuers. Um, if you are a fintech business that has money at rest, it simply makes sense for you to start to launch a stable coin and capture yield on that those funds that you otherwise wouldn't. And we're seeing crazy growth both in the volume for stable coin settlements um and in their total TVL uh mean most recent number 46 trillion in annual settlement numbers that truly are rivaling rivaling Visa's network um and the like.

But like look at this experience, right? Um you go and you move $1,000 from one stable coin to another and you end up with $995 on the other side. It It's like Sorry guys, this does not work. You're not We're not going to get normies uh being okay with this. Not when I can like Venmo or use PayPal to send my friends a thousand bucks and they get a thousand bucks.

This is this is not an acceptable experience. Um, and it's confusing and it's costly. So, this is basically what we like to call like a fragmentation tax. Um, and this fragmentation tax uh is is going to be a hindrance to adoption. The solution um I mean feels pretty obvious.

Make $1,000 be $1,000. Make $1 equal a dollar. Um, make bridging free. Um, it's got to be fast, but make it free, too. and we we can do this.

So, one of the things that Across launched late last year, um, Native Markets has the USDH stable coin. For those of you that aren't yet, Hyperlquid Pilled, uh, USDH is the, uh, sort of enshrined stable coin on Hyperlid, uh, that Native Markets has launched and created. And, uh, we built out flows with them where you can bridge USDC and soon USDT, but you can bridge other stable coins into USDH one to one. Can bridge a dollar, you can bridge a million dollars. Soon you'll be able to bridge $10 million.

Um, but you can bridge that money one into the USDH stable coin. no no fragmentation tax to the user. And for us, um this is a real product. It's live. It's in production.

It's working great. But it's also um a proof of concept about what this kind of onboarding experience should be like. Uh and something that I I think is semritical to the onboarding experiences of of other stables. So what's our model here for stable coin growth? Um, we can really lump this into like three categories.

What we want the stable coin issuers, what we think they should do, what we think the ecosystems, the apps, the L2s, the different chain ecosystems, and what I think users demand. And to to dive deeper on that, so if you're a stable coin issuer, you make money off of TVL. You want interest on your your funds. Um, to me, you want to make it as easy as possible to get TVL of your coin into your into your stable. And that's what Native Market is doing.

You're like, we're we're going to pay the onboarding costs for users. We want them to come into USDH. And I think this is going to become table stakes for all the other issuers. They're going to require free onboarding into your stable coin to help you grow. um we just remove barriers to entry for the for an app or ecosystem or L2 chain.

You you fundamentally want users and assets in your ecosystem. So if you're Coinbase, if you're running Bass, you want to make it free to get money into Bass. If you're running Hyperlquid, you want to make it free to get money into Hyperlquid for users to use your app. Running Lighter, Lighter, very much the same thing. They want to make it free to get dollars into your later account.

And anything where you're taxing the user in that onboarding flow is just hurting your business. It's cutting off your own conversion. So again, another reason another place where we think like dollar in equals dollar out feels important. And then of course for users just to fill out fill out the blanks, users want funggeibility. They don't want a world where they have a gazillion different dollars.

They want it to feel like one thing, one abstracted thing. And you have, you know, the US government through the Genius Act putting financial regulations in place that make the risks of these dollars all at least approximately equal. So this feels like something that, you know, users should demand. So the way I look at this is the next year or two is going to be really interesting as we see whether the dualopoly of tether and circle persists or we have a long tale of stable coins flourish and um the way I look at this is there is this fragmentation tax there is this fragmentation uh when you have all these stable coins there's more work moving between them. But there's also benefits of having all these stable coins.

You have more competition. Um, you're going to have just less of a duopoly between two issuers. And I I think the world if I think the world of stable coins in general is net good for the world. Like the world where Pathon with with Tether and Circle being the two dominant stable coins is still far better than before we had them. Uh, but I do think the optimal outcome is a world where we have many, many stable coins competing for your business, um, competing for your assets, competing for your dollars.

And in order for all of those stable coins to ultimately exist, it's got to be worth the user onboarding fragmentation for them to issue their own stable coin. Otherwise, they're just going to go and use like circle. So, I look at this, I call it like the uh the power law distribution of stable coins. Right now, we've got Tether and Circle and then a bunch of longtail folks. Um, and I'm curious if that power law distribution is going to flatten.

So, the longtail grows relative to the two big guys. Um, and if it does, it means that the advantages of these longtail stable coins are working, that they're offering enough reasons for users to hold them, that they are willing to spread their spread their interest, spread their money between this this this longer tale of stable coins. And if it doesn't work and if it stays steep, we're still in a world where we still have two stable coins that serve us well. Um, but I think it's not like the it's not going to achieve the full the full picture of what we can do here. Um I I think it's it's not going to be as as vibrant or as innovative as um as we we can.

And I look at this really as like a cross's job now where can we solve the fragmentation tax problem effectively enough such that it's worth launching your own stable coin. So yeah, what do we need to build here? Um this would be maybe the semi- pitch for across and what we're doing just like what we did with native markets. We have this onboarding into USDH onetoone. Uh we think stable coin issuers should do this all over the place.

Um if you're going to launch a stable coin, we think you should make it free and easy for your users to onboard into it. And that's something that uh we want to provide you with a service we want to provide you with. Um I think this is also true for applications too. Uh again, we'll take the example of lighter. Uh we're at ETH Denver.

Lighter, I think, is a super cool, you know, custom custom L2 on top of Ethereum. Onboarding into lighter should be free because lighter makes money off of more users using their product. Um why are we charging or harassing our users in our onboarding flow? And then finally, and I think the the hardest one for us to solve is if we're going to have all of these different stables, uh how how do we abstract it within the wallet experience for the user? How do we make these things look like $1?

And I think that's going to be um interesting and potentially difficult uh challenge, but something that I think is going to be required to really make your dollars, unify your dollars, make them um make them feel equivalent. So, uh, you know, the across rallying cry in 2026 is, uh, uh, let's make $1 equal a dollar again. Um, and our the direction we're pointing in is to just push this as far as we can to get a dollar equal dollar everywhere that Ethereum and crypto touches. Thanks very much. Um, yeah, I don't know if can I take questions if I have a question if anyone has a question.

Yeah, the question was if a dollar equals a dollar everywhere, how does a cross make money? Well, the person that benefits from that their dollars should pay us. So, I look at this as like if you're a stable coin issuer and you're making interest off of your dollars and we're helping you gather TVL, you should pay for that service. If you're um a perp dex that is making money off of users having free onboarding, you should be willing to pay across to help with that. But good question and very much top of mind for me.

All right, I think I got to wrap it up, but appreciate it, guys. Thank you so much.