Payments & Settlement Infrastructure | Boston Blockchain Week 2026

All right. Well, ve very informative day starting off with two action-packed keynotes. Uh, love it. And last panel was absolutely fabulous as well. Right now, we've got four companies up here.

All four of them solve uh a different problem within the same space, the payments and infrastructure space. That's what makes this panel super interesting. I'd love to start with introductions. If you want to start, Zachary.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah, sure. I'm Zach Robert, co-founder and CTO of Adessic. Adessic is a non-custodial crypto bank. We're focused on moving money on and offchain. Good afternoon everyone.

I'm Kimberly Rosales, the CEO of Chain Mine. I'm in payments infrastructure from Canada, also registered in the US. uh the problem we solve every day. Well, we try to move money cross borders at the speed of blockchain while maintaining the trust and uh expected from businesses like the same way that they would do with a bank. So, building that bridge is the daily challenge.

Hey everyone, I'm Nurop. Uh I'm the CEO and co-founder of Bridgeport. Bridgeport is middleware for institutional trading and settlement. So what we do is we work with exchanges whether it's cryptonative or traditional exchanges. On the other side we're working with uh crypto custodians, banks and wall providers to enable trading firms to hold their assets in one facility and then trade on any execution venue.

Hello, I'm Adam Schwarzba, CEO and co-founder at Almond Fintech. Uh the problem that we are solving is how to optimize crossber money movement across all available venues, tokens, chains and time to improve FX execution and cost efficiency. So it's effectively like Google Maps for money movement. Like I drove here today and counterintuitively I didn't take uh the interstate to get here. rather I use Google Maps which routed me around congestion, construction and even an accident to get me here in the most timely manner.

Um so Almond does the same thing for money movement selecting the best path.

So my name is Mosen Massud. I am the founder and CEO for ACRU. We're a SEC registered transfer agent and we're in the fund administration business. So I am the one person over here who has nothing to do with money movement and that's why I won't be talking and I'm just moderating. Well, uh, one asks of the panelists, go as deep as you like in the topic, but try and starting off simple in case there's someone over here who doesn't, uh, know too much about it and and doesn't understand the details as much and that's what keeps it interesting.

Let's start off with crossber settlements. That's one of the biggest things that we talk we hear about and we talk about when we uh, talk about settlement through crypto. Where does the friction really lie in crosswater payments? Is it the blockchain infrastructure or is it tradefi? Kimberly, you want to start?

Uh, sure. So, I think uh from the technology perspective, blockchain has already resolved a lot of that friction, right? So, we it's already proven technology. Uh, it's everything around it, right? So, when we we can move money from, you know, blockchain to blockchain, uh, the tokens have, you know, instant settlement.

Uh, but then we need to speak about compliance. So fragmented compliance uh banking hours, banking holidays, uh liquidity access, um you know, so there's there's a lot of fragmented steps uh for to in order to complete a crossber transaction, you know, whether uh you know, from one stable coin to another. There's there's so many things that we see on a daily basis at ChainMine. Uh you know, the businesses they don't they they're very happy that we're using a technology that works. uh but ultimately they want to make sure that everything around it works.

So building the infrastructure around it I think it's the biggest challenge in the industry.

Um sure yeah I would say that uh neither um since like blockchains well both halves generally do what they're supposed to blockchain settle banks settle it's the absence of anything that optimizes across them like that fragmentation that you're referring to. So optimizing across all available venues, blockchains, and tokens. Um, back to the uh Boston navigation analogy I for some reason used. Um, there's probably a half a dozen ways to get here. Um, you could drive your car, take an Uber, the commuter rail, you could even take a ferry for most of the way.

Um, but no single one of them, well, first of all, every one of them works the way they're supposed to, but no single one of them uh works the best at all times of day under all conditions and to every destination. So, being able to work across all options is really what's missing.

Yes, settlement in in my world, which is institutional uh trading uh takes on a different u connotation. So settlement gen generally means after two parties have agreed to a trade right. So uh a lot of you here may have heard that uh a lot of the drawbacks with the current status quo is that there's t plus2 settlement and that's generally the case for FX for securities such as bonds and equities it's sometimes t plus one or two and whilst that may seem inefficient there are also reasons as to why those systems might be helpful. Right? is uh generally the way institutions trade and settle are not on a trade by trade basis.

The what makes capital markets go around is uh leverage and netting. So to allow two trading firms to trade with each other or multiple trading firms to trade with each other over a series of uh over a period of time gives the ability to net amongst all those participants and then settle. What needs to happen at that settlement time is generally we want to bring that down from T+2 in FX, T+1 in uh bonds and so on to T0. So maybe at 5:00 p.m.

New York that infrastructure is not set up yet because that requires adoption from banks. It requires adoption from prime brokers. The regulators have to get involved. But I think the technology is there for for the most part to navigate uh towards that. So maybe in the next few years we are going to see uh regulations go towards T0 settlement which means it happens instantaneously after the settlement window is open.

So uh there are still uh paths to cross over here but uh I think the um future is promising on that uh respect.

Uh yeah so this one's kind of simple. uh we see uh on a weekly basis at Adessic uh is uh people want to settle on the weekends and uh it's if the bank does if the bank isn't open, you know, you can't really settle fiat. Uh we do see some other fintexs solving this issue. They have like some sort of subscription model and they'll they'll uh they'll allow their users to settle like a smaller amount of uh a smaller transaction but at the drawback of a higher rate and because they're uh they're fronting the settlement on uh on chain and they're taking the risk of uh of the transaction not settling or having an issue when the bank opens on on Monday. Uh, and yeah, uh, they're essentially offering that person like a a line of credit, if you will.

All right. So, you've talked about Google Maps twice at this point. [laughter] Everyone settles fast when it comes to crypto, right? It happens in seconds, minutes at most. How do you know it's the right price?

What what def what will get you the best price? What is the infrastructure there for it for that exchange? Adam, I think that's your space talking about Google Maps the whole time. Why don't you start off on this? And

yeah, I promise I won't use Google Maps in this [laughter] answer. Um, when it comes to price, it's really hard to know the answer to that. It's sort of like here, here's a different one. All right, so we're at a hotel. Someone stayed here last night and paid $300 for a room.

How do they know whe that somebody else in this room got the same room, an identical room for the same night at $200? It's just it's just hard to know. Um in much the same way like pricing and the cost associated with crossber money movement is equally complex or convoluted. And I think there are three factors contributing to this. One is that liquidity functions less like a pool and more like a moving graph.

So you'll have stable coin depth or a market for stable coin um that goes to a certain degree at one exchange or venue and whereas in another venue is thin and the demand for that stable coin shifts constantly. So the next day it could completely flip-flop or even minutes from now which is why the timing optimization and ability to optimize across stable coins matters so much. Another the second contributing factor is um that uh the the all-in achievable outcome is a function of the composition of multiple variables. Um the variables being you know the the blockchain that you use, the token that you're using and the venue that you're on and off ramping it through. Any one of those changes in a moment which they're constantly in flux and your outcome changes.

Um, and then the uh let's see what would be the last one.

Maybe the FX.

What's that?

Maybe the FX.

Well, yeah, the result is that the FX is constantly moving. Um, fortunately, this is a fixable problem so long as you have the versatility to optimize across all of these um all these routes and these options.

Well, I mean, if if Yeah, I understand exactly. Uh it's it's true that it's hard to tell you know what who is paying what and you know the market starts to become very very competitive as as we grow. Um definitely you know building trust around the fintex that you work with or the counterparties that you work with to make sure that you know they're they're negotiating the best rates on behalf of their clients they're able to move volume and you know all the trusts at the base it's the trust that's built around the businesses that you work with. There's a third one actually. It's what we the measuring stick we use to benchmark our pricing.

We currently evaluate the fee that we pay as a function of the spread to mid-market which is which tells us nothing as to like the cost associated to associated with alternative routes. Um so I think that gets to the FX question like what actually is a good FX rate like is it the interbank rate? I mean in multiple corridors we can beat the mid-market rate through proper optimization. So what is the what is the measuring stick now? Yeah, just on that I uh in in the real world I used to work in FX uh in in the inter dealer space and uh that was uh referred to as um the uh reference price right so what what uh what happens in the interdeler uh market is the dealers which are the banks generally trade with other dealers or in the last 10 years it's been with HFTs and they establish the rate for most currencies generally the G10s and then once you get into the emerging markets it's gen it's done uh on order books and so on and but that price is done at a standardized level so the uh the levels are usually like $1 million clips whereas once you get out of the interdeler market and you go into the DTOC space those are non-standardized markets so the reference price is always established but then what what doesn't get disclosed is the difficulty from that reference price to getting that uh that that those coins or fiat or whatever in the user's account, right?

There's multiple hops that need to go into that. They could be uh corridors uh in in certain parts of Africa and South America that are difficult to navigate because they may not have wellestablished u banking systems or anything like that. So that's where stable coins come into effect. But where stable coins could could fall short is you can't freely uh switch from or rather uh offramp from stable coins into local currency. So that's also an issue that I know a lot of fintex banking regulators banks are actively working on including we heard the um talk from circle earlier how they're able they're offering uh stable coins in other currencies besides just the dollar right I think there was euro uh C and they could even be in emerging market currencies so perhaps as we as the industry matures we get get away from this notion of going into dealer uh DTOC C then stable coin and then the wallet and and maybe there's just uh an abstraction layer where you just go directly from into dealer space into another stable coin.

But if you want fiat then then there's a lot of work to be done on that uh side especially in emerging markets. Yeah, and uh following up on Europe there, uh it is important if you're working with uh you know USD to that stable coin jump to get as close to the issuer like circle as possible because then you can kind of cut out any fees that are associated with middlemen and then there's no spread to a lower spread uh when you move up on your tiers. So Sullivan time super short. Uh for true institutional adoption uh what kind of counterparty risk exists one and two uh what all needs to be true around the transaction to take place?

Uh yeah counterparty risk is something we deal with uh all the time not from Bridgeport's point of view but rather our customers that face um other customers. Right. So two trading firms uh let's say they they do an OTC trade uh how do they settle uh they generally what happens in in FX and other markets is there are clearing houses um uh that that get involved in crypto there there aren't clearing houses so what happens is uh a taker is expected to send assets first to the liquidity provider so that the taker is taking on the counterparty risk of the liquidity provider and the liquidity provider is taking on the risk of the taker before they do the trade. Right? So there there are solutions where smart contracts can get involved but then you have smart contract risk as well.

So that that that that finality of settlement is I think a blessing and a curse. uh and where I think the industry is uh heading towards is um bringing up uh sorry creating new solutions that aren't just relying on the existing blueprint which is uh clearing houses CCPs and so on and maybe it's onchain uh settlement between two counterparties or two exchanges or or multiple counterparties that can be netted across um and this is an active solution that Bridgeport uh the company I work for is uh is piloting with a lot of trading firms is to move away from what we know into something new uh which allows for disintermediation of existing processes um and and quicker settlement time and uh finality which uh which which which is what determinism uh everyone wants. Uh yep I agree. We we also work in that non-custodial environment. Uh institutions, businesses, it's important to always ask uh you know at least understand where your money is sitting at all times, right?

So we we tried to really eliminate that that time frame that we're sitting on funds for any reason or the other, but understanding that yes, it can be fragmented between liquidity providers, banking partners, other banking or local rails that may have been set up for for that local environment you're of the counterparty you're trying to pay. Um I think businesses and institutions ultimately care about the settlement being there, right? So eliminating that counterparty risk is definitely something that the industry continues to work on.

Yeah. So tying all this together, what must be true uh when settling funds. So for Adessic, that's my company. Uh we have uh a virtual account solution where we spin up uh a bank. So when on-ramping we spin up a bank account in our client's name and any funds that go into that to the user, they send a wire or um an a uh it just appears in their wallet uh that they have specified.

So there's a lot that goes on behind the scenes of that if you would. Uh a lot of these guys already touched on what goes on there. Um what is kind of fragmented is is the compliance that like getting started is um an iterative process to say the least. Seems like kind of like a moving goal line. Um we we have uh liquidity fragmentation like like Kimberly touched on.

Uh where uh you want to use the cheapest rails possible. If you end up using like Ethereum for example, uh you're going to want to wait for uh extra block confirmations and blocks come slower on Ethereum. So uh if you're moving liquidity around mid-transaction on Ethereum, you could be looking at an extra 10 to 15 minutes for settlement, which is obviously not ideal. Um and then yeah, that that's uh

10 to 15 minutes is better than three to five business days, though. Sure. Yeah. All right. Well, um I would say the uh main thing missing is just um well the missing the remaining piece that's currently coming into play is adoption.

Um and I think adoption of like stable coins in not just the US but elsewhere uh is a function of um reliable convertability and um until like a stable coin comes becomes mainstream there will always be a hesitation to to use it. It's like um all right sorry another analogy um it's like water pressure. water pressure might be fine until there's a five alarm uh fire down the block at which point all the fire hydrants are in use and then your water pressure is going to drop. Um so in the same way like you need to reliably be able to convert a stable coin into your current your local fiat currency um not just in comm markets but also in volatile ones and I think that's that's kind of the next hurdle for us. All right.

So, what I heard so far is Adam says it's the price, the rep says it's counterparty risk, Kimberly says it's last mile, and Zach says it's the ramps, which is what the bottleneck in each of these spaces is. Let's say each of you get one problem that you could fix over the next 12 months and it can't be yours. What would you fix that would really ramp up the volume uh the most within the industry? Uh what comes to mind is price. Capital likes low prices, low less fees.

Um we kind of see that with bonds. That's not my area of expertise. I will not speak to that. Um and then uh so that that's that's like king right there. If you have the lowest prices and and you have fast execution, you're you're kind of you're ahead of the game there.

Um but what ties everything together is this counterparty risk. Without any of that or a proper version of that, none of this exists. Um I think institutions and businesses uh you know they don't care about blockchain being exciting. I think they need it to be boring enough for them to trust to move money at scale in in a reliable manner.

Uh if it's a problem that our company's not directly involved in then uh probably something to establish trust in the industry itself. So, I'm so grateful the period of uh NFTTS is behind us. Uh I don't think anyone wants to see another cartoon monkey. Uh and and then we had to go through the memecoin era. I'm hoping that's behind us as well.

Uh so uh once all this is flushed away hopefully there's just serious people in the room that that want to tackle problems in a new manner and it makes our jobs a lot easier when we go talk to banks and regulators uh and institutions and they don't have the skepticism of u if this is a legitimate pro product or not. So, uh, my my, uh, wish is, I think, coming true. A lot of those, um, fly by the night operators are starting to fall away, and we're seeing serious people in the room, which, uh, I'm really grateful for.

Um, the problem I would want solved is Zach's problem, the ramps. Um because at Alman we can optimize how fiat moves from one country to another back into fiat via a 100 different tokens and chains um to deliver the best pricing. But if we don't have a way to offramp it to deliver currency into the destination account, then it's all a moot point. I mean a a corridor without ramps is like the runway having a runway at Logan Airport without terminals. the planes can land just fine, but nobody can get off.

Yeah. Like I like what some of the conversations I have, I I do a lot of education online and I speak to a lot of, you know, just real businesses, not necessarily people that are in crypto or even invest in crypto. And ultimately, they just want to make sure that their money lands where they want it to land, right? And and in a timely manner and that it's actually solving something for them. So, you know, really understanding that counterparty risk and trusting the institutions you're working with at the end, that's that's how we're going to get adoption down the line.

So, we're down to the last few minutes for the panel. It would be great if each of you could speak about what has to be true over the next 24 months so that we can really see institutional adoption for stable coins or blockchain as true settlement in infrastructure. Adam, why don't you start this thing? Um I I think that would go I would defer to the previous um point I made about reliable convertability um driving adoption. So you need to know that whatever your like how are however your money is represented is translatable into something that you can use and spend and won't just disappear.

So, um I'd say that's the main thing and that and that comes down to, you know, regulatory frameworks for, you know, to govern how um stable coins are backed and so on and not just USDC but other stable coins in other countries and having licensed exchanges through which you can um reliably transfer fiat into crypto and back out and so on.

Yeah. Yes. I'd say for adoption on the on the user level which is at the retail level which it needs to be convenience. I don't think uh hitting someone over the head saying this is a blockchain based product or here's stable coins this will save your life is is is a way to market or uh entice adoption. It needs the UX needs to improve just as easy as it's opening a Robin Hood account.

You have a wallet and you can fund it, right? That needs to be easier than going to Chase and uh spending 3 days to open a account. So convenience needs to be put forward, not the backend technology. Users don't care about that. Uh I can't remember the last time I I looked into what kind of APIs Robin Hood is running, right?

So that that's on the user side. On the institutional level, they care about uh safety of funds. So that's why we have regulated custodians. And now we're seeing the likes of uh State Street and Bony getting involved in crypto custody. uh that that elicits a certain level of trust uh and brand name.

A lot of the institutions want the institutions I'm referring to asset managers, hedge funds in the traditional space that want to come into crypto and they whether they like it or not they will. We're already seeing the participation in RWA uh perpetual futures uh the RWA tokenized versions of uh of oil contracts of equity contracts and so on. uh so they they want over convenience, they want safety of funds. Just like fiat is held in a safe vault somewhere, the same uh application needs to be applied to crypto. And I and I think both of that will uh come true at some point.

Um I will have to agree with what you just said. Uh yeah, definitely not continue marketing this as necessarily a crypto product. uh you know because I feel like institutions and businesses everybody's still relating it to the meme coins and to the NFTs and you know so I think uh definitely having a separate narrative understanding that this is an instrument the new highways of uh you know better Google map directions into getting money from point A to point B for cross borders or just direct local payments

I'd say one thing that needs to hold true is is regulation and we see like regulation linked to banks. So banks are generally they are risk adverse and uh are slower to adopt to newer things. That's always been true. Uh and what we see is new these uh I like uh like newer like online banks I call them like neo bankanks uh like uh like slash for example uh offering uh onchain settle so receiving stable coins uh and immediately offramping those into dollars. So that that that's that's something that's kind of going towards there already, but we're we're not we're not there yet where you can go to like Chase and send uh send some stable coins to a wallet on Tron or something.

So infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure along with regulation is what it sounds like is what we need to really uh speed up the adoption on on this front. Well, thank you so much everyone for this amazing conversation. Um, if anyone has questions, the panelists will be out back of the room after this. I'm sure they're happy to chat. Again, thank you everyone for the time.

Really appreciate it.