Scaling Stablecoin Payments: Compliance, UX & Global Distribution

All right. Hello everybody. Thank you for being here for this panel. Um so the panel is about scaling stable coin payments compliance UX and global distribution. So that's a a whole program.

Um maybe let's start with some introductions. Maybe first um Ununice Lee you are CryptoBD at Revolute. You are XBCG and um just you know fun fact she's been doing kickboxing for five years. So be careful guys. Can you please introduce yourself and tell me how you contribute to scaling stable coins?

Thank you, Emily. Um, great. Nice to meet everyone. My name is Ununice and Emily said, um, I am part of the crypto team at Revolute. For those not familiar, Revolute is a global fintech and licensed European bank.

We serve over 60 million users now across almost 40 countries. Um, and crypto is at the very heart of our offering. So my role at staling stable coins is basically to help tailor our offering to fit the full spectrum of users who crypto with Revolute. Be it retail users, business users, advanced traders who use Revolute X or Revolute RAM. Thank you.

All right. And then next to her we have Denny Quark, chief product officer at Mento Labs. He's exircle, ex Google. uh his hobbies are snowboarding and losing money on purp. Can you please introduce yourself and tell me how you contribute to scaling stable coins?

Yeah, thanks. Um Denny, uh if you haven't heard of Mento Labs, we are a decentralized stable coin protocol. Uh we have 15 local stable coins including USD and many emerging market currencies live. Um we're also building non-slippage FX trading uh powering the future of onchain FX. So you can trade you know emerging market currencies for a euro or a dollar at no slippage on chain whereas like the AMM model um has slippage depending on the liquidity death.

Um yeah thank you. Um then next to him we have Deep Sha. He's the head of growth at at Nosis and he supports circles, not to be mixed up with circle circles. Um, and you are expounding team of Nosis Pay and then also you are a certified scuba diver and a Raike healer. Can you please introduce yourself and tell me how you contribute to the space?

Yes, thank you for the kind introduction and hey, nice to meet everyone. I've also lost some money on burps by the way. Uh but uh yes, I mean I've been in the onchain payments stable coin space since the last um 3-ish years. Um um was part of the founding team at Nosis Pay. Um for those who don't know um we are essentially we built the first kind of self-custodial debit card program that was on chain.

Um and now we help businesses and developers ship like a card program um for their wallets for their businesses in like days and not months or years. Um very cool fact um we just are very close to hitting our like 1 millionth transaction um since launching. So we're super excited about it. Um yeah um last few months uh I've spent time building circles not circle um and it's not a stable coin but um it's what we see as the future of money like a big bet on a future of money. It's an alternative to the dollar or um the euro.

It's a basically a new world currency. And one key feature there is we're decentralizing money creation. So instead of for example the Federal Reserve or central bankers determining the monetary policy determining how to print money, how much to print money, we decentralize it to the individual level. So every individual creates or prints their own money. Um we launched um last month.

So that's been taking a lot of my time. And uh outside of my day job, I also do a lot of research on this space. Um so I am um publishing like a small thesis on the onchain payment sector um in the next few days hopefully. So yeah, that's a little bit about me. Nice.

Thank you. And then next to me we have Sergio Melo, the head of stable coins at Anchorage Digital and advisory committee member on the global dollar network. Uh he's fun fact, he was a crypto adviser for Reddit in 2021. U and he's also a pilot in his free time. I think that's pretty cool.

Hobby, uh, can you please introduce yourself and what you do to scale stable coins? Okay, we go straight to the action. Um, so thanks for the kind and elaborate introduction. I have um past of entrepreneurship. Uh I now am head of stable coins at Anchorage and before that I've been building the stable coin world for a few years and before then I grew up in Italy being an entrepreneur not far from here in Torino and so coming here is is quite quite uh deep experience for me.

Driving down from Torino is uh literally a trip down memory lane. Um but it's fun to be here at DeFi summer now. uh all things uh come back to in circle, no pun intended. And um and uh so at Anchorage is a institutional platform. Uh we are home to the first and only crypto bank as uh licensed by the bank regulator in the US, the OC, the office and controller of the currency.

Uh we also have a Singapore major payment institution. Um a Kimman licensed trading desk. Uh we acquired Mountain Protocol, the issuer of USDM a couple of months ago. Uh amazing team uh amazing license in Bermuda and uh amazing tax stack. So we're very um we're very deep into stable coins uh and tokenization and everything that stays just before and after the business of actually issuing a stable coin.

Uh the one thing I can tell you for sure is Anchorage is not issuing its own stable coin. That's not our business. Everything else is. Thank you so much. And uh yeah, I'm Emily.

I'm one of the the co-founders of Chain Security. I do BD marketing and I hand out these bugs. If anybody has seen them, if you want some bugs, I have some for you. I want one. Yeah, for sure.

Here you go. All right. Um before we go uh deeper into uh into the different topics, so we we kind of have these four topics, right? compliance, UX, incentives, um, and then, uh, kind of bottlenecks in distribution. Um, but before we go in that, uh, I was talking with Deep just before coming and you were talking about this teases that you're writing, this research you made on stable coins and there is one thing you know, you think the big winners are going to be a certain categories of actors.

Can you tell me a bit more about this? Yes. Um so I mean my hot take for the thesis is um so I mean maybe some context I've been trying to just map out the entire onchain payment sector um that is currently live and what I mean by onchain payments is businesses individuals etc that are helping money move from point A to point B that constitute as economic activity not just like trading or exchanging um so in that space I personally feel um the orchestration platforms, the stable cocon orchestration platforms um are the best kind of position to have the next Visa or Mastercard like outcomes um in this new revolution of finance. Um and you would think that Visa and Mastercard um like being networks tend to acrewue the most value. I do not think blockchains right now are best positioned to acrew those that kind of value.

do think these orchestration companies are and what I mean by orchestration are basically companies that help businesses or developers um issue blockchain wallets for their customers, move money from point A to point B, deciding which chain to use, um where's the best liquidity, how to move it the fastest um in a compliant and a regulant way uh regulated way. Um I think these companies stand a big chance um to have those next visa mastercard like outcomes. So that's the hottake. Thank you. Um so also before uh going into into more questions I'd like to say two things.

Um first uh you're encouraged to talks amongst each other. So if you have a question for another panelist feel free I'm not the only one to ask questions here. You can go ahead. Um also the audience I think we don't have time for Q&A afterwards. So feel free to raise your hand if you have a question.

I'm very happy to take your questions as well. And then um I love when people tell me stories. Uh so if you have a good anecdote because really what you bring here that nobody knows is your personal your personal experience, your own challenges. So if you want to bring any kind of personal touch to this, I'd be very happy if uh if you could do that. This being said, when did you get in the stable coin game and what has surprised you the most since then?

I go first. Add it. Okay. I got in the stable coin game when um I was designing an architecture for um special type of Visa card. We were making the chips at the time with Tangum.

And um and I understood that in order to have digital assets flow through traditional uh payment rails and schemes like like Visa, you would need um an asset that was nonvatile and was uh uh safely uh pegged to the underlying currency. When was that? Which year was that? 1920. And yeah, 19.

And so so that project eventually became uh the first iteration of Nosis Pay. And uh I guess now you're already at iteration two or three. So thanks for taking the the the lead there. Um and this is a very important application of of this blockchain and payments. But that's when I understood the stable coins were going to be the uh contact point between traditional finance and decentralized finance.

Uh so ever since I've been um working on stable coins, I entered as an entrepreneur in the worst possible moment ever during the Bance uh during sorry the Biden administration. And uh obviously uh if you want to hear stories, uh these are horror stories. I'm not sure how our audience will be happy, but our CEO Nathan Maui has is on record in front of the Senate explaining how um even a bank like Anchorage could get debanked during uh that those dark years. Um time is obviously changed. Uh the new administration is way more friendly and I think we're catching up with everything that was lost to to lack of innovation in the past four years.

But those three four years um were enlightening because they they showed how institutions unfortunately only have so much freedom for as much as people inside institutions may want to drive innovation and uh adopt new technologies. They're still bound by uh the confines of regulation and law and political environment. It's inevitable. That's how the world goes. and uh the trillions of dollars of money supply uh that will inevitably um trickle into the centralized finance and blockchain rails um was contained like a concrete dam in a in a water reservoir for the past four years and now uh the dam is being breached and and we will see a big uh big flood of liquidity going into into blockchain in the form of stable coins.

Uh but this couldn't happen before. So there were um unmeasurable intangible forces that were keeping everything frozen for four years and now it's a thawing moment. Thank you. What about you guys? What when did you get in this game and what surprised you the most?

Yeah, I can go. I think kind of similar to Sergio, I joined right after the FTX collapse. Uh what year was that? 2022, I think. um joined Circle.

I just to give a little bit of background, I joined from Google. I did a lot of payments work at Google. I worked for the Play Store. Um what really got me interested in stable coins is we Google Play being like a platform with three billion users. A lot of that is in emerging markets and developing markets.

So when we were working on payments, we were really looking for solutions for people that were underbanked and underredited or uncredited. Um, and it made me realize like the value that stable coins could bring to those users. Um, I mean that's how Tron and Tether really scaled in Africa, Latin America and places like that. So, um, that that really piqued my interest. Um, I think similar to Sergio, that was kind of a state where there was a ton of interest in exploring, but everything was just halted to a stop when I got to any senior level review or to the board level review.

And I think like this year, even in the past six months alone, um the tone has completely shifted. Um we I have local congressmen reaching out to me trying to understand um stable coins and crypto rails. Um it's really really encouraging seeing enterprises really come out and trying to tinker with different things in their flows. Um I think Revolute's doing like a great job in bridging that gap. Um I think funny things are people still kind of bucket DeFi into this one broad brushstroke um where there's like different elements of it and I think in the future we'll see DeFi be a thing that's just like infrastructure where people just transact on it and there's like a UI layer on top of it.

So, um I'm really excited to see how like UX changes over the next couple of years, especially as you know a lot of developers in the space focus on infrastructure level things and don't really think about the UI for example. Um you we won't really hit critical mass until you know you don't even realize you're building or using crypto rails. Completely completely aligned and thanks for the shout out for Revolute. Um I personally will probably I'm probably the latest of the party. I started my stable coin journey probably over a year ago.

Does feel like a dog year with everything that has happened, regulatory shifts, M&A activity very clearly shifting expectations of where stable coins fit in in the financial landscape. Uh, but what has surprised me the most is that probably one year ago, no one back home in Hong Kong like even knew what a stable coin was. And now my friends are texting me asking what what are the stable coin regulations in Hong Kong going to do to my financial portfolio? What is USDC? What is USDT?

So, it's like I think really hitting home the message that stable coins are coming to the masses. I think um the funny thing with the circle IPO and the success success of it um it's been kind of funny because everyone and their mothers and aunts and uncles have been texting me and asking me about it. But it's just kind of funny. Everyone thinks I'm rich, but yeah, I lose it all in per. Don't worry, we're going to talk some more about Circle on this panel very soon.

You will see. Yeah, maybe just to kind of build on all panelists points. Um maybe I have two kind of points. um that surprise me today. Um one is it's close to 16 years um from when Bitcoin's white paper was released when we introduced or the proposition of a new electronic money system and we're still nowhere close to it.

Um we are still like uh yeah uh yeah it's been 16 years and we still don't have people actually using stable coins for payments which to me is um shocking. And number two on a positive side is um what I realized over the last few months is today it's easier now than ever to ship a consumer neo bank um which is connected or like which is onchain which has connections to like local bank accounts and which has a card to spend at over 100 million versions worldwide. You can do this in days. um this was something that was probably taking at least a year or so before and that's massive right um the fall on effects of this are going to be huge so yeah yeah yeah this is probably the most important thing that we need to learn is that um blockchain technology allows us to break the barriers and disintermediate and one angle to see it is oh retail self- sovereignty I can have my my own bitcoin and self-custody wallet and I don't depend on the banks Cool. Yes, we all like that.

But really the real transformation is that uh entrepreneurs can start a bank in a day. That's a real transformation. That's what leverages and scales. I think to Deep's point earlier how you said the payment or stable coin orchestration layers are the real winners. Um I think if you think about the banks um with the consolidation into pretty much just the GIPS and all the regional smaller banks have been getting bought up for this exact purpose.

I think those are going to be kind of the real losers in this space in this new paradigm that we operate in. So, oh yeah, makes sense. Good. Um, okay. So, now we're going to move to the compliance section.

And for once, the compliance section is going to be the most exciting one. Huh. Um, so I'm going to ask for some hot takes. And first um so Sergio Anchorage uh released a stable coin safety matrix a few days ago and if you use this matrix it's pretty interesting uh you decided to phase out circle USDC and Agora AUSD um because apparently they're not as good as Tether for example and so yeah my biggest surprise since I got in the stable coin space is hearing someone saying that tether is more trustworthy than circle This used to be so far from the narrative a few years ago and now you decided to phase out the support for USDC. Can you please explain what is this matrix?

Why would you phase out USDC? So Anchorage was born out of uh the need for institutions that have the largest assets under custody and management in in the US and in the world to have a safe and trusted environment to keep those assets. So custody and and trust and uh credential regulation are core pillars at Anchorage and credential regulation was not there with stable coins until now. So the past 5 years of stable coins where USDT and USDC really went from zero to hero uh were a very different world from the next 5 years. Uh the genius act is being accelerated hopefully going to the house next week and uh um our president uh would uh be able to sign it uh within maybe a month hopefully.

uh that means that at Anchorage where we do have a responsibility uh to inform educate our clients about the assets on platform and let them understand what's the the choice of assets and platform we have also a responsibility to align with the future environment of regulated stable coins in this environment in this uh with this decision framework we started working on education. So the stable coin safety matrix is a very simple two uh two axis matrix that um factually uh regroups together um a few stable coins by the credential regulation. So what regulator sovereign regulator is uh is overseeing the issuance and by quality of the reserve assets. And to answer your question, uh, USDC did not score on the top right quadrant, but scored on the bottom left quadrant with other stable coins because their um issuance is not regulated by a credential regulator. Uh, besides a um allegedly a small part uh small portion, you know, where is USDT regulated?

Uh, El Salvador. El Salvador um digital asset regulator and um from the reserve perspective um USDC has about 15% of their reserves in uh demand deposits bank deposits um which is exactly the reason why a few years ago they incurred into some trouble with a dg uh relying too much on liquidity u on the band deposits. Well, that is still the same. That has not changed. SB crisis SBB the 3.

3 billion SBB. So that hasn't changed. It's still the same. And uh philosophically speaking, we think the stable coins are uh gift to mankind because they do not depend on fractional reserve banking. It's not broad money, it's risk-free money.

So if we do put too much um demand deposit in the reserve mix, we are deleting that beautiful property of stable coins and uh we are reverting to uh a tokenized deposits. I know that these days the lines are blurred. Unfortunately, Mika is not helping in mandating stable coin reserves to be heavily tilted toward uh bank deposits. But uh we think that our uh clients deserve to understand what are the metrics they should consider when they evaluate which stable coin to keeps in their wallets. I have a question Sergio.

What's the what's the optimal collateral mechanism for you know a the best stable coin as of today? the minimum possible amount of uh bank demand deposits and and the rest with the most most liquid risk-free assets which is obviously a combination of uh um short-term T bills and money market funds and uh and cash at the Fed if possible cash at the central bank with some some yield uh uh is possibly the best. That's fair. Um I think T bills do carry some risk too though right as you think about like short-term duration risk and things like that. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean liquidity measurement and and maturity measurement is obviously a stable coin issuers uh job and making sure the reserves are well adjusted to to market uh market changes, rate changes and uh and liquidity requirements. Probably still lesser risk than like uh having bank deposits. So makes sense. I mean we are bank so I I'm not saying that banks are bad.

I'm just saying that a stable coin is a very different product from a uh deposit bank deposit. Okay. Okay, so we had one compliance hottake. Do we have other compliance hot takes over there? Unice.

No, Denny, I don't have a hot take. I don't have a hot take. It's okay. We have enough things to talk about. I don't need to to pull them out of you.

Okay. Uh I actually have one. uh um I feel like people are um underestimating or probably not giving enough importance to capital controls also coming on chain. Um so I mean we here we are in Khan um you generally look at the western developed world um where there are fewer capital controls but when you go into emerging economies you are still not allowed to hold currencies outside of the home currency beyond a certain amount and the government really regulates this for a bunch of reasons and obviously when people hold USDC on chain the government has a lot less say on that um but I expect governments to do something about it I don't know what um but I expect them to come in some way, shape or form that should also affect the space moving forward. So that's something I feel is not giving not being given enough attention.

So capital controls may be coming also stable coins. Okay. I think um this is not a hot take but um I believe in like the next in the short term we're going to see a lot more other countries and regulators and central banks take a more adversive approach to dollar stable coin dominance. If you think about what your incentives are to promote like economic flow in your country, um let's just say like India for instance, they're they're really disincentivized to have dollar stable coins be a medium of trans uh transfer, right? Um so you're going to I think you're going to see a lot more come out in the next year or two.

Governments move slow, I guess, but um you're going to see a lot more of that push back on the dollar stable coin dominance. Yes. Nice. Thank you. Um I don't know hopefully that is going to open the the door to those um countries with exotic uh currencies to facilitate stable coin environments regulated stable coin environments in their currency which I think is the big big opportunity here to have onchain effects and uh and leaprog completely the the CLS uh environment of today you guys good for you guys.

That's the thesis we're building towards. Um, so we want to be kind of the infrastructure layer so you can trade um onchain efficiently. You're welcome. Thanks for the softball tea. Um, so I had another question in the compliance uh but you know if it's not inspiring we can also skip it.

Um, I was wondering how do you think Mika and the Genius Act are going to impact stable coin scalability? Uh, go ahead. Yeah, I think putting the legal specificities aside, I think it's these regulations, these frameworks are something that institutions have been waiting for for a long time. Um, institutions such as Revolute who try to play by the rules. Um, we have been reading between the lines in terms of what we do with crypto, what we do with stable coins, but now there are actually black and white rules about what we have to do with them and what it means to issue um a compliant stable coin, what it means to support compliant stable coins on our exchanges.

And so, like regulations aside, it gives the clarity that exchanges or other players need to be able to support these stable coins. Um, and I think it also marks a turn in how we perceive stable coins, right? like they're no longer just a define native cool thing in crypto, but it's more about like embedding them into key infrastructure day-to-day facilitating payments now and these regulations enable us to do just that. Thank you. Um, so now I guess we can move on from compliance or do we have some last thoughts on on the topic?

Well, I can say it out loud. I think that unfortunately Mika has uh uh under the guise of uh clarity and transparency actually hampered the possibility for uh stable coins to grow in Europe. Uh it's very obvious that um the banking infrastructure in Europe is really good and SAPA and SPA instant are a fantastic settlement uh environments. So clearly the need for stable coins in Europe is lesser than it would be elsewhere but at the same time uh forcing stable coins to have a 2% extra reserves and three 30 to 60% of the reserves in uh in demand deposits defies the whole point. So today it is non-scalable and and anti-economical to run stable coins out of Europe.

It's unfortunate. I think there will need to be changed because uh like a competitiveness will translate into into lesser money for European uh corporates and less uh business. Thank you. Um so now that we talked about compliance, I'd like to see the audience uh raise your hand if you think compliance is a big bottleneck for SK stable coin scalability. Raise your hand if you think it's a big bottleneck.

Okay. A little bit. Little bit. All right. Now, we're going to move on to the next topic, UX.

Uh, and maybe I'll ask you first. Do you guys think UX is a bottleneck for stable coin scalability? Raise your hand if you think it is a bottleneck. No. This guy should He knows.

All right. So, UX doesn't seem to be that big of a bottleneck. So, I'd love to hear you, Unice. What do you think um about this? like what are the biggest UX bottlenecks and are there any and how can we solve them?

Yeah, we've actually done a lot of user surveys on this and I think the biggest bottleneck that we're facing right now is that users are pres presented with an unprecedented amount of accountability when they want to try out crypto. So like say you download Mantam Mask or any other wallet, you get a bar barriage of risk warnings. If you don't back up your seat phrase, if you lose your private keys, nobody can help you. If you accidentally miss a character in the wallet address, sorry, no customer support. And so it's just like whenever people want to try and test it out, they get scared basically.

And how we solve this problem at Revolute is that we try to mirror the UX that users are already used to and already trust. So like for me when I I I came from London, I flew here yesterday. I exchanged £300 from pounds to euros and the users can actually do the same with crypto. So they can change from GBP to BTC or euro to USDC or whatever. It's just any to any conversion.

So the buy and sell is something that they're already used to and they already know. No additional steps there. Spending crypto, people already pay with our Revolute cards. We also have our crypto cards which are accepted everywhere with Google and Apple Pay. So the way that they would pay is also exactly the same as how they would pay fiat.

Um, and then once they get more and more comfortable, we get them introduced to the essence of staking and sending, receiving, multi-chain remittances, and we kind of introduce them on this like step-by-step journey instead of throwing at them, look, we have to do a completely separate onboarding, download a new app, back up your seat phrases, etc., etc. Um, but yeah, we've seen this work really well with our users. It's yeah maybe just to build on that point I think it makes complete sense from a consumer standpoint to have or to not alter any existing user habits. So if a user is used to exchanging money with at a at a click of a button they should be able to do that.

Um a user should not be seeing 10 different USD variations on their bank account. it should be one USD and whether it's a blockchain representation or a bank representation or fiat representation it doesn't matter to them and I mean that's what our driving force at Nosis at Metri which is this consumer wallet um we're building has always been and I guess revolutes to so I mean from a consumer standpoint until we have more user empathy uh um like yeah I feel user empathy is the bottleneck to distribution from a consumer standpoint Um and I feel like the other kind of big distribution uh I mean other bottleneck is distribution to merchants. Um like what I mean by that is for merchants to accept stable coins. Um it takes time. Um for example Visa and Mastercard, they probably have over 100 million merchants across the globe.

It took them 50 years to reach this point to go merchant to merchant onboard them into an existing system that's commonly used by multiple parties, right? Um so for us to expect that hey you can go buy coffee tomorrow um with stable coins and not use a Visa or Mastercard but directly do it through blockchain rails it takes time. It's not easy and we probably need incumbent that's 50 years it took them. Yeah, I mean sure. Yeah, they I think Visa was born what 1960s um more than that actually.

So yeah. Um yeah, so we'll probably need like incumbents coming, acquirers coming into blockchain, learning about blockchain, integrating them them in their POS systems and so many other things that I'm probably not even thinking of right now that needs to happen for actual all merchants to accept stable coins without knowing they're accepting stable coins. We're doing so at Nosis Pay through Visa and Mastercard. You can spend your staple coins at any Visa merchant, they do not really know they're accepting it. Um, but the true holy grail is when like consumer to merchant is happening on blockchain and they are actually holding stable coins like and not off ramping it to fiat.

So I think we are still a while away. I think we underestimate how much time it takes to get merchant adoption. I think you bring up a really good point about how many decades it took for these card networks to scale. I mean, I'm American. It took a global pandemic for us to integrate tap to pay when Europeans had it for.

I don't know how long you guys had it for ubiquitously, but um I don't think this is going to happen overnight. It's going to be a long long slog and I think companies like Revolute and other fintexs are doing a really really good job thinking about the product design choices and consumer behavior and slowly kind of moving them on this arc. um until you you know we we have to kind of zoom out in the world we live in because not everyone else thinks or is accustomed to custodying their assets. They're just looking at their bank account and looking at their credit card balance. I don't think we need more developers in crypto.

Um can I add something? Yes. I know you're passionate about merchants. Please I'll make a long story short. We only have six minutes.

I I'll hope hopefully not take the whole another thing that's very important to discuss after. So I'm not sure the space for that but okay um the audience here is rather young. So how many of you do remember the days where you were defragmenting the hard drives? What? Not many but I'm surprising I don't.

You don't. Okay. So in the old days you would run a PC with a hard disk uh with a physical disc spinning and um the information on the file system was rather rudimentarily spread around those discs and uh in order to optimize the reading speed you would need to consolidate all the files on one single uh around the reading. Okay. So uh you would want to put all the the pieces of the same files together so it was easier to access that.

Uh today with random access memory obviously it's it's not necessary but back in the days every once in a while you need to get your computer to actually work by defragmenting and you have this half an hour of of listening to this uh beatboxing by your by your box. So this is what's happening today with uh global settlement systems and stable coins are again a gift from for mankind because they are uh the def fragmentation moment where global rails institutional interbanking merchant payment schemes retail defy all come together in one single rail that is blockchain you can debate about that but it's a single common common technology layer uh with one single type of instrument the stable coin that runs over it. So the def fragmentation is inevitably going to lead to a lot of efficiencies and that's why I think that trillions of dollars of money supply will trickle on the chain. Coming back to our question um is UX going to improve? Are are merchants going to accept stable coins?

It's a wrong question. I think that the sorry apologies it's the wrong question. The real question that we have to to pose ourselves here is uh do retailer really need to know that there's a stable coin behind the dollar balance or the fiat balance they see on their on their app or their their phone? And um how well is the stable coin rail going to work alongside existing rails? It's not going to be a click switch that all of a sudden goes overnight from everyone works with 16 settlement rails and schemes all the way to just a stable coin.

Clearly not. Uh I think that the strides that Mastercard Vis are making in helping and facilitating the last mile the the merchant settlement uh with stablecoin is the first good step because from there you can walk backwards to rebuilding the whole uh money flow over stable coin. But today that's the most important part. sell merchants to date. Some merchants that are willing to to use it are willing to work with large PSPs and and uh and card schemes and having their final settlement the money that they finally get at the end of the day or week to be intraday in over the weekend and uh and removes all the trapped liquidity and working capital because it's on stable coin.

Let's start from there. And that's already working and that is the part that is going to scale up dramatically in the next year or two. whether retail will actually transfer its own stable coin of choice directly to the wallet of the merchant. Absolutely not. There's compliance um uh considerations.

There's today I was listening at a podcast by um Shopify and they were saying that uh um the device a smart contract that takes a um a stable coin payment by retail on escrow first doing the the the authorization part and then swaps over to capture in a second part. Of course, they have to keep it in escro for a while. What if it's North Korean actor paying there? You can't just have everything at once. So, the right question is where do we start from?

We start from merchant uh backend settlement and then slowly it's going to uh expand like a virus into the rest of the financial systems. Open question. How do you um do you not reading more questions now? Yeah, I'm sorry. So, we only have two minutes left and uh so I know that you guys are cooking really cool things for the future and I wanted to ask a little bit kind of what's coming and I'd love to start with Revolute.

What's coming next for Revolute? Great timing, Emily. It's almost as if we prepped this yesterday. Um but we are actively revamping our stable coins proposition. We want to make it much easier for active stable coin users to use Revolute.

So, first thing we're rolling out in the coming weeks is one:1 USD to stable coin conversion. No fees, no limits, no spreads. Um, and so it will be, I think, even better than if you use fiat. Second, we are waving all withdrawal fees on stable coins. And if you're depositing a lot of stable coins into Revolute, we'll even cover your gas.

So, do stay tuned. Um, we hope it makes it much easier, much more accessible for especially users that get paid in stable coins to use us to hold and spend crypto. What about at Mento Labs? Um, we are I guess sneak peek, this hasn't really been announced, but we're about to ship V3 uh very soon, which makes the protocol much more scalable. um allowing folks to mint and redeem at scale um and allowing you to swap all currencies, especially the longtail emerging market currencies at little to no slippage um in in an extension of our V2.

Um many more things to come, but I don't think I'm ready to announce that yet. Thank you. Nice. Um well yeah just building on to his point before I think at Nosis Pay what we are continuously doing is integrating local payment rails in each country we go to. Um so that means you can now simply do like for example in Brazil we launched last month you can simply do a Pix transaction to a Pix ID we give you and it gets on ramped onchain without you really knowing and we're doing this locally across different parts.

Um and we also don't charge any money to on-ramp or off-ramp since the past 2 years and that's how we see the world to be. Um so that's one and number two is working on circles um the other project um yeah scaling that global currency um to as many people as possible and it's a big bold bet and um we're super excited to work on that. Um and yeah if you are working in this sector at Nosis um myself generally we are doing generally a lot of investments we are partnering with a lot of companies for our products or if you're just like intellectually just want to have a chat about what the future of money and stable coins look like please find me um so yeah thank you for having me here. I can't really make announcements, but uh Anchorage being the the most regulated crypto institution in the US and the Genius Act uh having a real quick path to becoming law soon. Anyone from crypto protocols to institutions and uh merchants that are thinking of stable coin issuance should definitely have a chat with us and they will see some more news coming up in uh in a week or two.

Yeah. And on our side, nothing new. We keep auditing a lot of the projects who are here on this stage and here. So if you need an audit, come say hi. And if you want bugs, um, come say hi as well.

Thank you very much, guys. Have a great day. Thank you. Thanks everyone.