# Verda Ventures, a single $40 million fund, maps over 6,000 stablecoin companies in Stablescape v2 Research, a Stabledash show. Sep 1, 2026. Alex Witt. https://live.stabledash.com/shows/research/episodes/stablescape-maps-more-than-6-000-stablecoin-companies-and-uh5KKPP4LOg Alex Witt says the stablecoin field has grown too big to track by hand, and argues that distribution and local know-how, not technology, will decide who wins. Verda Ventures, which runs a single $40 million fund, has launched the second version of Stablescape, its database of stablecoin companies. General partner Alex Witt says v2 took in feedback from v1 and now tracks over 6,000 companies in the stablecoin space. ## Why a map was needed Alex Witt calls stablecoins "the number one killer use case for Web three." When he started Verda Ventures over two years ago, he counts maybe 1,500 stablecoin companies; now there are about 6,000, and he expects 10,000 or more by next year. Over two thirds were created in the last year and a half, he says. Founders can claim their own profiles on Stablescape. Witt says the founder of Dakota submitted its information the day after launch, and the page now shows a claimed profile. ## Regional champions Witt says over 80% of Verda Ventures capital goes between seed and pre-A. His thesis is that the blockchain is a universal protocol while the application layer is "hyper localized," so he focuses largely outside the US, where he expects incumbents such as JPMorgan, BlackRock and the OpenUSD consortium to take share. He says Tether USDt became an LP, making Verda the first fund Tether invested in, because it holds an aligned view. Co-host Zach Fowler noted that Nigeria is 60% of Africa's stablecoin universe, the UAE is 68% of MENA's, and Singapore anchors APAC at 25%. Witt pointed to Nigeria's population of over 200,000,000. ## Distribution over code Witt says more agentic stablecoin payment companies were created year to date in 2026 than in all previous years combined, yet Verda has not deployed to one. "The tech is not the hard part," he says, noting the original USDT contract was maybe 300 lines of code and that Robinhood forked Arbitrum and Coinbase forked Optimism because they own distribution. He adds that B2B relationships are stickier than consumer ones. ## Exits and licenses Witt counts 25 or 26 relatively large stablecoin acquisitions or exits in the past few years, at least three related to Stripe. He expects M&A rather than IPOs, with acquirers like Stripe driving exit liquidity, and says at least 10 portfolio companies have been approached. He also expects more firms to buy banking licenses, saving 40 to 60 basis points in many cases. Witt says AI money is pulling valuations elsewhere, letting Verda buy into a business growing revenue 300% year over year at a 16,000,000 valuation, which he says would be 10x to 20x higher in AI. Next he plans Corridor Intelligence, a tool covering the regulation and licensing of major payment corridors. ## Key takeaways 1. Verda Ventures runs a single $40 million fund and launched Stablescape v2, which now tracks over 6,000 stablecoin companies. 2. Alex Witt says over two thirds of stablecoin companies were created in the last year and a half, and he expects 10,000 or more by next year. 3. Witt has not backed an agentic payments company despite it being the hottest category, because he believes distribution matters more than technology. ## Chapters - 0:00 StableScape v2 now tracks over 6,000 stablecoin companies - 2:58 Founder-claimed profiles add data found nowhere else - 5:33 Fast growth in stablecoin companies created the need for a directory - 7:13 Verda puts most capital into seed to pre-A regional champions - 9:19 Hyper-local application layers favor regional champions outside the US - 12:26 Agentic payments are hot, but distribution decides who wins - 15:41 B2B stablecoin relationships stick harder than consumer ones - 20:15 Stablecoin tech is easy to copy, distribution is not - 22:53 Market size and clear rules explain Nigeria's and UAE's regional leads - 26:14 Stablecoin companies are more likely to exit through M&A than IPO - 29:31 Stablecoin firms will buy banking licenses and vertically integrate - 33:46 AI hype in the US lets stablecoin investors buy cheaply - 37:47 Corridor Intelligence maps licensing rules across global payment corridors - 41:32 Corridor data could vet providers and send clients to law firms ## Transcript **Drew Rogers** (0:16) We got Alex Witt, general partner at Baird Adventures. How are doing, Alex? Thanks for joining. **Alex Witt** (0:22) All good. All good. It's good to see you again. **Drew Rogers** (0:25) First time on the show. It was great to meet you in person in Mexico City. How have you been since then? It's been... It feels like yesterday, but it's actually... Gosh. That was feel... Two month... Like, months ago now, feels like. **Alex Witt** (0:40) I know. I know. And... Yes. It feels like yesterday, but indeed, it's been a while. That was fun. I had a great time in Mexico City. Such a... Such an awesome city. Yeah. Great event. **Drew Rogers** (0:50) Tell us about yesterday or or this week, the the big launch that you guys had, StableScape. We're gonna pull it up. We're gonna dive into it. You know, as as you know, there are like a handful of folks who have kind of taken a stab at the map... Mapping exercise of this space. But this really stood out to us, so we wanted to get you on to cover it. **Alex Witt** (1:16) Yeah. Yeah. So we launched the v two yesterday. And, obviously, we, you know, we we got a decent amount of traction with the v one and took in all... Like, dozens of, you know, different feedbacks we got and incorporated all of that into the v two. And we now are tracking over 6,000 companies in the stablecoin space, and, you know, we're adding more daily. And we we got over... We got hundreds of DMs yesterday and over a 100 unique submissions, some to edit information that was, you know, maybe incorrect. That's always the... Yeah. Yeah. So What was the... Yeah. Go ahead. The really cool thing about this is that a lot of the information on StableScape is not available anywhere else. So, you know, we started StableScape basically scraping over a dozen different sources of information, But what we've gotten since then is a lot of user generated content. So this is, like, founders directly claiming a profile, submitting information. And so, you know, we we kind of took everything that was out there and then added unique founder or company direct information that you can't get anywhere else. So we're we've... We're kind of trying to, you know, be the most complete source of stablecoin information and, you know, help people find each other, help businesses grow. And we're, yeah, we're really excited to continue to to build on this foundation. **Drew Rogers** (2:58) Where in StableScape can I see the kind of founder focused or founder generated first party doesn't exist anywhere else? Is that in the database? **Alex Witt** (3:09) So if you go... Like, for example, yesterday, the founder of Dakota submitted their their information. So if you go to Dakota, you'll see something called claimed profile, and that means somebody at the company who has been verified by their email. Right? So they... Their email extension was was, you know, verified that, hey. This is somebody at the company. And then you can see if you scroll down, if it has a yellow dot next to it, it basically means that the information was submitted by the founder. And so we wanna, like, make it very clear to people that, hey. This is information that wasn't scraped by us, but rather directly submitted by by the founders themselves. And so you... And wherever you see a yellow dot, that indicates that, hey. This was directly submitted by the founder. Obviously, it's been vetted by us. Yeah. But this is sort of unique information that, you know, is not anywhere else. **Zach Fowler** (4:08) Hey, Alex. I'll say that this looks like a great place to just embed some media. I I know a few guys that if you want some interviews with Founders Recovering, we might If you want. If want. If if if you wanna if you wanna add that in there, if anybody wants, you know, interviews with Ryan from Dakota, yeah, we can we can help help you out there. **Alex Witt** (4:26) You know, we're we're open to adding information. We've already gotten a bunch of requests of, like, hey. Can you add a licenses section or a corridor section where we you know, as a company, list all the licenses that we have available? Because for some of these people, this is, like, how they get discovered. Right? Let's say you're, you know, a stablecoin bank. You're looking for new customers. You wanna be on here and, you know, present your licenses, present business you focus on so that you can attract additional businesses and grow grow your business. So so, yes, we are we are open to adding additional information. You know, this is like... Like, but but we're also, you know, time conscious. Right? Because, you know Yeah. We're not getting paid for this. This is really kinda meant to move the space forward. Obviously, we we indirectly benefit because stay... You know, Veritiv Ventures is a stablecoin infra focused fund. So, you know, from a branding perspective, we we obviously do benefit, but not from, like, a direct monetary perspective. So we kinda have to balance our our day job with with this side project. **Drew Rogers** (5:33) Hey. Is that why you're doing it? Is that, would you say, just like awareness, **Alex Witt** (5:38) rising the tide of the space? Like, what what... What's the intention behind doing this? The intention is really to move this space forward. You know, when I founded Verida Ventures, like, to me, it was clear that the number one killer use case for Web three is stablecoins. And we... You know, that was that was the original inspiration is, like, how do I express this bullishness? And the the best way that I came up with was to to start a fund. So it stems from that original inspiration. The same inspiration for starting Verida is also the inspiration for creating products like StableScape. The other thing is just in terms of timing. You know, when I started Verta Ventures, there was, like, call it maybe 1,500 stablecoin companies. Right? This is over two years ago. Now we're at, like, 6,000, and I think by next year, it's gonna be, like, 10,000 or more. Right? And so you... You're... We're at this point where, you know, when when I started Verde, it was kind of like everybody kind of knew everybody, like... Or to a great extent. It was it was small enough where, you know, you could sort of manually connect people. But we're kind of reached this escape velocity where, you know, nobody can keep track of 6,000 companies in their head. And and like I... You know, we said, yeah, over two thirds of stablecoin companies have been created in, like, the last year and a half. So... And it's accelerating. Right? So we we we we think that there needs to be a repository where people can easily discover **Zach Fowler** (7:13) business partners in the space. I love looking at this. Alex, right now, in the... Yeah. I was I was actually gonna go into this a little bit. Like, we've looked at some of these companies that you've deployed capital into. What's your current outlook? Like, where are you looking? Are you pre seed... Looking for pre seed companies? Are you looking farther down the line? I think on your website, you say you take a bit of a barbell approach, but help us bring us into that moment a little bit of, like, where... Where's... How is your focus on these stablecoin companies evolved? Because, obviously, I think of the Alfred, Beale, Yelp... Yelp Cars of the world, they've they've definitely come a long way, you know, in the past two or three years. Beam has a lot of solo Acquisition. **Drew Rogers** (7:51) A lot of solo heroes as well or, like, infrastructure ecosystem. Is definitely... **Zach Fowler** (7:58) Yeah. Like, what what what are you looking for now? Where's where's your focus? Where are you spending your time and attention? **Alex Witt** (8:04) I mean, I I would say, like, over 80% of the capital is between seed and pre a. So we are looking for companies that have some early indication of traction that generally, like, own, you know, a corridor or an... A vertical, a niche. So sort of regional champions, if you will, that... That's our that's our sweet spot. And a lot of the companies we've invested in that were sort of see the Prix a have now graduated to, you know, series a, series b, and we've been fortunate to to kind of catch that that rising tide. But we continue to actively deploy capital. And I would say, you know, we... There are exceptions, but, generally, we're looking at seed to prey as kind of our our sweet spot. We do look at sort of earlier companies where they're building in a space that we think is underrepresented. And and as you know, we we have sort of the the most comprehensive overview of who's building what and where. So there are exceptions. But in general, you know, we're we're we're... Is **Drew Rogers** (9:19) is kind of our our focus spot. Speak a little bit to the strategy around that kind of geo specific or region specific approach. When I'm looking at the logos here in the the portfolio that you guys have accumulated, you definitely have that theme of, like, market depth and corridor depth. Why is that so financially, like, strategically interesting for you? And why why that strategy? **Zach Fowler** (9:47) Maybe this is a good segue into the the... Would you say, Alex, the geo data that you have on StableScape? I think that was one of the links we talked about pulling up. Drew, I don't know if you wanna pull that up as Alex sort unpacked that a little bit too where we're seeing some of the geo growth. **Alex Witt** (10:02) And so from day one, when I started Verda, the thesis has been that there's going to be a lot of localized regional champions. And, you know, that... Whereas, like, the blockchain is a sort of universal protocol, sort of like the... You know, email's a universal protocol or or the Internet's a universal program. But at the application layer, it's it's hyper localized. So, you know, you have local regulation that you have to abide by, you know, local best cultural practices, local... Localized go to market strategies that appeal to the, you know, the population. So this has been consistent with our strategy from day one, and we've purposefully focused on areas largely outside The US or with a cross border angle with The United States because our view is that the... A lot of the incumbents will take the market share from The US. So think JPMorgan. Think BlackRock. I think you're seeing some of this with the with the OpenUSD consortium. And this this has been... Like, what's hap... Playing out now with these large sort of incumbents in OpenUSD and Stripe being in the mix is what we what we anticipated from day one. So we focused on regions where you don't have these embedded incumbents and where the need is much greater. Right? In The US, we're already home to the world's reserve currency. We have more credit cards than people. We really don't... You know, stablecoins are more of an incremental improvement, right, rather than a zero to one improvement. And in many cases, the stablecoin and for companies are selling dollars to people who don't have access to dollars as opposed to, you know, like, a circle who, you know, is largely selling dollars to people who already have access to dollars. So, yeah, the the regional champion focus has been core to our thesis from day one. And that's also why we, you know, embraced Tether as a... As an LP. We're the first fund that Tether invested in because they're also kind of have a very aligned view of of where the biggest opportunities are. I'm looking at the... I'll pull it back up here, the geo growth, **Drew Rogers** (12:26) the the insights that you you accumulated here. Agentic payments has just become a huge topic of discussion here. I'm seeing this as, you know, in the... What was the the time window here for the growth by geography? I'm seeing, like, companies 13 to 93, 650 per... 15% growth in AgenTic payments in North America, similar trends across the world, at least in more of these developed markets. Like, what what do you... Maybe with AgenTic payments specifically, or when you look at this macro, what are you seeing on this on this chart? **Alex Witt** (13:05) Yes. So so there have been more Agentic stablecoin payment companies created year to date in 2026 than, like, all, you know, previous years combined. Adjenta payments, very, very red hot space. And, you know, that... That's also consistent with where capital is flowing. Right? If you have AI in your name, like, yeah, you're you're more likely to be funded. So a lot of founders are chasing where the VC dollars are. We have personally not deployed to an agentic focused company yet despite that being the the hottest category. And there's a few reasons behind that, but part of it is, like, a lot of the founders building in this space, you know, they're they're they're kind of chasing what's hot rather than, you know, having sort of a a sustainable business in in place. We also view that a lot of the existing b to b stablecoin leaders will be able to layer on Agentic payment services as a, you know, as a better way to kind of capture the value. Because in in our view, it's it's not clear, like, if a purely Agentic payment focused company will capture all the value or whether it will be more of, like, a primitive that anybody can plug into. So our general approach has been distribution is king. So if you own the distribution with businesses and can layer on agentic payments, that's what's most interesting for us. Right? And you... You've seen this trend play out again and again, right, with, you know, Arbitron and Optimism. They didn't benefit the most from their technology. It was the people who and then then more the distribution channels. Right? So Robinhood forked Arbitrum. Coinbase forked Optimism. Right? They didn't really do anything technically creative, but they own the distribution. Right? And we think there's... It's very likely that a similar playbook will be will be the case here. You have these, you know, x four zero two agent primitives, and whoever owns the distribution channels will fork that and then accrete value. But the idea that you are going to from zero to one, like, you know, without any embedded distribution, get a... Create a huge company, that that is to us less certain. Yeah. Owning distribution, **Drew Rogers** (15:41) you know, in the Robinhood Coinbase example, that is we're building products that we have relationships with. People have given us their driver's license. We've KYC ed them. They have these apps downloaded. Like, that distribution makes sense. Are there other sticky examples in your mind where distribution exists clearly within the portfolio or just in your mind generally where it's like, yeah, that is sticky distribution **Alex Witt** (16:07) examples that that come to your mind. Absolutely. A lot of them you've you've already mentioned. Right? Alfred Pay, MuralPay, Yellowcard, Eldorado, they all have very, very sticky relationships with businesses. And we believe that the biz... B to b approach will be one of the largest markets for agentic payments. So these are businesses that are looking to lower costs, increase efficiencies, automate some things by embedding amount of smart contract logic. But at the same time, they're not necessarily the most technically capable. And so they need these sort of layers of protection that somebody who's curated the right user experience, like, you know, like an AlphaPay, like a MuralPay. So we actually think that those companies are in a very good position to kind of cross sell or layer on AgenTek payments as an additional service. Right? They own that distribution. They own that relationship. They own that trust, and they can now say, hey. We have this additional service that we think could help your business. And, you know, you... You're you're already on board with us, and you just need to click this button to also have access to our new agentic payment service. So we absolutely see a huge number of players. Many of them are not the names that you, you know, or I are, like, everyday kind of hearing about. Right? The big names like Coinbase and Robinhood are very familiar to people because they're direct to consumer. And, you know, I have kind of the biggest names amongst consumers, but they... You have the equivalent in the b two b world. They're just not as well known because the target customer isn't you. It's not the individual. But similar in... The the underlying sort of pattern is the same. Right? Yeah. The papering of relationship is similar. Yeah. Exactly. It's just with businesses instead of with consumers. **Drew Rogers** (18:07) Yeah. We were top of the show, which feels like yesterday. We were talking about the RAIN acquisition of Anza Yeah. In terms of that that kind of business model where trying to think through like, you know, did did a company like that or, you know, acquiring relationships, people who have depth of relationships potentially on the corporate side, that is really, really sticky. It's not it's not easy to convince a SMB mid market enterprise, especially as you go up the stack. It's really hard to convince companies to change their systems, change their way of doing business, get them contracted, get them onboarded, get them implemented, like... Yeah. That can become really, really sticky. So it sounds like for you, in looking at the portfolio of all these great companies, the ones who are going b to b focusing on maybe small mid enterprise going up the stack, owning the relationship. They have, like, a sales team. They have a client services team. They know these people. That's really... Alfred is a perfect example of one of these companies in my view. Absolutely. **Alex Witt** (19:12) And the b two b is actually more sticky than the consumer. You know, if you were... Let's say you have a Robinhood and a Coinbase account, and Coinbase says, you know what? We're gonna offer you 4.5% instead, you know, of 3.5%. You might say, okay. I'm moving my money over there. Done. And you're... You know, you kind of, you know, can easily, with relatively little friction, you know, make that happen. Now for a business, it's not that easy. Right? You you might be integrated into the accounting workflow. Right? You're you're embedded into, you know, your ledger. **Drew Rogers** (19:47) Your employees like it. Your customers are familiar with it. Yeah. **Alex Witt** (19:51) Embedded into your your corporate processes. Like, the friction to switch to somebody else is much **Drew Rogers** (20:15) Good take. Any any more on that in terms of just, like, layer... The... Like, the bottom layers of what you've learned throughout the journey with, yeah, Tether, Sello, Optimism, Arbitrum, like the future of those types of organizations, what you see working there. We've seen definitely... I know you have too. A lot of these what were just kind of, like, very open handed blockchains become way more opinionated and application focused up the stack in terms of what they do and who they're for and who they wanna build for. Like, what what are your... I've never heard someone say that about optimism in Arbitrum specifically, but you're completely true... You're completely on the money with that. Thoughts on just the... What's going on with the chain side right now? It seems like a really weird identity crisis moment for them. **Alex Witt** (21:04) Yeah. The the tech is not the hard part. The the key is distribution. Right? Tethr is, like, original, you know, USDT, like, smart contract was maybe, like, 300 lines of code. Right? Like, not, you know, you could easily re... You know, fork that or copy paste that code, but doesn't mean you're gonna be tethered. Right? It's it's like, yeah. You you you know, the technical part, maybe you can copy paste the code, but you're you're you're not going to recreate that distribution. So we really believe, and and this has been a guiding principle of our investment thesis, is that you need to create this embedded distribution. And that's why we focus on seed to. Right? We wanna start to see that you've built out this distribution mode, or at least we see, like, the beginning signs of it. So with the technical primitives, like, our general view is that you're going to have a lot of them just be open source forked tech. Right? It's it's, you know, it's, I don't like TCPIP or or other sort of protocols that can be relatively easily forked. That's not really where sort of the durable competitive advantage will will be. So, again, tech, not the hard part. Distribution is where the the value will And we we see that to, you know, continue to be this case. This is not rocket science. Right? Like, issuing a stablecoin, like, facilitating a stablecoin transaction, it... It's not like rocket science. You know, you're you're really focused on capturing the the distribution, capturing the brand, owning those those relationships. **Zach Fowler** (22:53) Yeah. Alex, I wanna take this back to the the report a little bit. I was looking through some of these signals with, like, what what... Especially with some of these geos. Like, I know one of the ones that stuck out to us was, like, Nigeria is 60% of Africa's stablecoin universe. UAE is 68% of MENA's track stablecoin universe. Singapore anchors APAC at 25% of the region. Is there any of... Any one of these that you'd like to dive in more more than others? Anything that really jumped out to you and surprised you when you were first going through and seeing some of this data? Yeah. There's a there's a lot of very interesting trends **Alex Witt** (23:30) that we observe in the data. We can, yeah, we can dig into some of the ones you mentioned. So with Nigeria, you know, it is the largest market within Africa. There are over 200,000,000 people in Nigeria, which is basically, like, the fourth largest country by population. So it is a it is a massive market. It's also, you know, in in relative need of of sort of a stable currency. Right? Nigeria has had significant bouts of inflation, relatively an an unstable monetary regime. And so it kind of checks the box for, you know, having both a large market and a large need for stablecoin infrastructure. It is also a jumping off point for for other founders. So that doesn't, you know, doesn't really surprise us. We do think that the market will... You know, it'll it'll become more dispersed over time, and we'll see more sort of Pan Africa businesses emerge. Obviously, Yellow Card has been very successful at this being operating in over 20 African countries. On... So so that's on Nigeria. In terms of The Middle East, there's really, like, not many countries that you could operate from and have sort of regulatory certainty. You know, if you if you kind of look at the region and one by one look at, hey. Is this, you know, viable country to operate from? You find out that it's it's really not. So the The United Arab Emirates, in particular, Dubai and Abu Dhabi, have really proactively created stablecoin frameworks that make it... Make... You know, that attract founders. Obviously, the zero taxes on capital gains and and income is is favorable as well and attracts a lot of businesses. But I would say more than anything, it's it's the regulatory framework and the clarity around it. It's it's... I... You know, I would say it's the only sort of country in the region that offers, you know, that level of of clarity and regulatory assurance. Now it's been a little bit tarnished by the regional conflict with Iran, but it still stands out as the one jurisdiction where stablecoin founders can be based and operate globally without worrying about regulation. **Drew Rogers** (26:14) This is just... This... These 10 insights, I'm just gonna read these here because they deserve to go into the transcript. Okay. We got emerging markets are a large share of global stablecoin infrastructure formation, which your portfolio definitely shows. Two, where stablecoins meet local economies, leans skewed. Is that Ethereum machine? Is that what that stands for? EM, emerging markets? Emerging markets. We're a growth stage in AI live live... Leans US. So definitely emerging markets focus. Three, Agenic Payments leads on formation, the category. Yeah. So Agentic payments as a category is exploding. Most of the map is still early. This one seemed interesting to me. Stripe is consolidating the stablecoin payment stack with m and a. Any thoughts on that one? That one seems really, like, specific. **Alex Witt** (27:16) I mean, I think there've there've been, like, sort of, call it, 25, 26, like, relatively large acquisitions or exits in the past few years, you know, around stablecoins, and at least three of them are are Stripe related. I put out post recently basically saying that, like, the most likely form of exit for stablecoin companies is going to be m and a rather than an IPO. So our our view is that companies like Stripe, acquirers like Stripe, will be a primary driver of exit liquidity for regional stablecoin infrastructure companies. The the other reason for this is that, you know, the the the stablecoins are fundamentally like a global borderless technology. Right? And Stripe and other companies like it have global ambitions. So you could easily imagine, you know, these regional champions wanting to, you you know, potentially be acquired by a larger business to to plug into these sort of global network effects. And, you know, I'm not saying anything that's not public, but, you know, a company like Yellowcard, which, you know, Chris has openly said himself has has courted, you know, different acquisition requests. And we have sort of, call it, at least 10 companies in the portfolio that have been approached in some way to be acquired. Now it might not be at the price that they wanna be acquired, and so they or they, you know, they wait for for more growth or a better offer. But really what we're trying to get at in that comment is that we're going to see more M and A activity and champ... And sort of like champions like Stripe are going... Probably going to lead the way in sort of being very acquisitive. **Drew Rogers** (29:22) Aquisitive. I like that word. **Alex Witt** (29:24) Or they look at their **Drew Rogers** (29:26) trigger happy in acquiring companies. Yeah. As they should. Right? **Zach Fowler** (29:31) Alright. As we maybe round the corner here I got you. This is beautiful. Zach, what you got? Yeah. I got a question. What's your just general outlook like when we look about... This is geography of each stack of each stack layer. What's your general outlook like on the neobanking scene? We we have... Looks like you have a few companies in the portfolio. We've been covering them pretty relentlessly on our... We have a neo focused segment right now. Where where do you land on the spectrum of there's already too many neobanks. These are gonna consolidate versus, hey. This is inning one. I think, you know, if there's 4,000 banks in The US, we're gonna eventually see another 4,000 neobanks and not to mention all the ones globally. What's what's... How do you how do you look at this scene? **Alex Witt** (30:18) I do think an increasing number of stablecoin companies will acquire a banking license and vertically integrate partially because they can increase their margins. So we're investing... There's a company we're investing in that's not on here called Finity. And, you know, they have a huge advantage because they spell that? F I n I t y. And, you know, they have a huge advantage because they they are, like... They own kind of the the whole stack. So we view that there will be a trend in vertically integrating and more stablecoin companies acquiring a banking license. You know, in in many cases, by acquiring a banking license and not needing to pay an intermediary, you can save, you know, 40 to 60 basis points in many cases. So that's that's a huge competitive advantage. And, you know, the 0.4 to 0.6% when you're moving, you know, billions in processed volume adds up very, very quickly. And it also creates a very durable competitive advantage. You can also create a much better user experience. Right? It's less... You know, you're you're you're not gonna be sort of chopped up every once in a while. I mean, even for me, you know, we have a Mercury bank account, and they use a correspondent bank account... Bank called, like, Column. And then we had to switch over our our cards. Like, suddenly, like, our cards were were not working for a subscription. Right? So you don't control the full stack. You know, you could... The the user experience is also gonna suffer. **Drew Rogers** (32:00) You define full stack. What does that actually mean, and what is Affinity doing that is full stack that's so interesting to you? Yes. So so they are directly **Alex Witt** (32:10) communicating with other banks, and they are... You know, have a direct tie in to the the central bank. So don't require, you know, intermediary affiliate bank to help them. So the the technical, like, word for this is host to host connections. So in the case of Affinity, you know, they they they have a host to host connection with the Bank of Columbia as well as other banks. Right? Like JPMorgan, **Drew Rogers** (32:42) b b... BBVA. Like a Fed master equivalent type of relationship. **Alex Witt** (32:46) Right? Which is huge. Right? Yeah. Like, you... You're... You you... When you own that, you don't need to pay part of your margin to another bank. And you also have stronger, you know, regulatory assurance and don't... And and compliance assurance. So you're you're getting margin. You're getting regulatory security or certainty, and you're creating a better user experience. Right? You can... You don't have to... There's not a handoff. Right? You can really make the the feedback loop very tight. So, yes, we view that bank... Neobanks are going to be a trend. I I mean, I... You know, I... Neobanks is one, I think, a a fashionable word for it, but but, really, it's, you know, stablecoin companies getting a banking license and building out additional services. So we we see that as, you know, an important trend that will continue. **Drew Rogers** (33:46) Yeah. We were just pinging in a Slack channel about a team that is top of mind that we wanna intro you to that you should know they might be raising. And begs the question just like, where where are you guys at in in... Like, what fund are you in? You said you're actively deploying. What does that look like? You said seed pre series a. How much... And then maybe touch on this mini pay fund specifically if it's relevant. Just what should people raising capital in this space know about you guys? Yo. I mean, we're only deploying capital from one fund. **Alex Witt** (34:17) And as I mentioned, it's stablecoin info fund. For branding purposes, we call it mini pay fund. But it is... Nothing's exclusive to mini pay. So, yeah, we're... You know, it's 40,000,000 in committed capital, and, yeah, we're we're working through that. But, yeah, we're we're only deploying from from that one fund. **Drew Rogers** (34:39) Awesome. Great. I wanted to maybe pull this last thing up here. I wanted to ask about the geography of each part of the stack. It's sort of like a a heat map. I just I know we're over here, but it's too cool looking to not pop this up. On... You got... You guys crushed this. Like, I just... I feel like this is so thoughtful in just the way that it looks and feels and performs on the product side. It's just great job. Anything to call out here in terms of what we're seeing in this heat map? It looks like the main takeaway from everything we've discussed is North America, AgenTic payments is just really hot in terms of what we're seeing. Any any kind of macro things to call out here that stick out? **Alex Witt** (35:26) I mean, it makes sense. Right? You have so much money going into AI from The US and Europe. And, like, The US and Europe... US doesn't need on off ramps as much. Right? I mean, they they were... Again, we're already the the world's reserve currency. A lot of banks now offer one to one conversion between US dollars and stablecoins. The... It's like Erebor Bank, the Palmer Lucky, the guy's bank, guy who does Anderol, like, also provides that. Again, they're full banking. They're full stack. So you... You're not gonna see as many on off ramp businesses. And the the hottest thing in in The US is AI. Right? It's like most of venture capital dollars right now are going to AI. So the fact that agentic payments are hot in The United States to us makes, you know, makes a lot of sense. To be frank, though, we we look the other way. If everybody's looking at AI, we... We're looking elsewhere. Because when everything's hot, you know, you... Valuations get bid up for lower quality businesses. And so, you know, when when others are greedy, be fearful. When others are fearful, be greedy. And that... That's that's kind of one of our our core tenets as we look for high ROI, high value businesses. **Drew Rogers** (36:49) Yeah. We've seen the... I'm sure you maybe saw the Sequoia sentiment chart. Think I last week was getting a lot of attention in terms of these different parts of the conversation of industry and, like, AI completely skyrocketing in terms of hype and then crypto and stablecoins and payments and stuff, like, plummeting. **Alex Witt** (37:10) We are locking in incredible valuations. Like, businesses that are, like, two x revenue and, like, getting in at, like, a 16,000,000 valuation. So, like, revenue's growing 300% year over year, two x revenue, and we're buying in at 16,000,000. You know, the same business in AI is, like, 10 x, 20 x that valuation. So don't tell anybody. Okay? Keep keep Yeah. We won't tell anyone. The only one. Stablecoin suck. Don't invest in this. **Drew Rogers** (37:39) It's good. You... We definitely are aligned with what we find interesting and valuable. We'll just say that. So Alex, thanks for the time. Thanks for going into this. And Yeah. Yeah. Stable Scape is super dense. Take some time. If you're watching Stable Dash Live and you've been following what we're doing, you'll you'll definitely find Stable Scape of interest. Get a coffee. Take some time on the and dive in. Maybe what would be sick and maybe if you're thinking about making some money on this, not saying you... That's why you're doing it, but I would definitely be in the camp of paying money for a physical edition of this. I would probably shill $50.70, $100 if I could get a print, beautiful, like, let me flip through StableScape for you one with a little coffee on the weekend. That would be nice. **Zach Fowler** (38:29) Drew loves a physical a physical I do. He's a big arena guy. For that. Big arena guy. Shout out to You should... If you ever are in St. Louis and you go to... Wait. What are calling it, Andrew? The Lou House? You should see Lou House. Certainly magazines, books, sort of, they're, like, all scattered around. But they're only good magazines. **Alex Witt** (38:47) I think we could do some really killer visuals, and there's a lot of visuals that didn't make it into the website that could definitely go in a printed version. This is not something we aim to make money at. It is more of a side project, but we are looking to grow it, make it as valuable as possible, help, you you know, leverage it as a way to move the space forward. I also have a plug for a new product that we're launching soon called Corridor Intelligence. It's currently in corridorintelligence. But that goes through the regulation and licensing of all major corridors globally as well as the licensing and regulation around swapping in and out of currency pairs. So, again, that... This is this is sort of... We haven't announced it yet. It's still beta. We're still kind of, you know, moving things along. **Drew Rogers** (39:37) But I think announcing it right now. I think that stuff is happening. Soft a soft announcement. **Alex Witt** (39:44) Know? Launching **Drew Rogers** (39:45) some some... Dropping some alpha. You know? You heard it here first on stable dash. Right? How do you imagine this being used? Corridors, licensing. I mean, this is kind of the the meatiest of them all. You know? So imagine that **Alex Witt** (39:59) you are business looking to expand to a new corridor. Right? You... You're currently, let's say, in, you know, doing business between Mexico and and Brazil, and you wanna expand to The US. You can look at what are what, you know, what are the what are the the regulations around a US Mexico corridor? And if you if you scroll down here, you can see that we divided across many different activities, many different business verticals. So you can you can really, like, get a sense of, you know, what the requirements are. This data... This is in beta. It's a much less polished product than StableScape. So, you know, it's it's, you know, use at your own risk at the moment. But this is something we're going to release and I think will be very valuable for stablecoin businesses. It'll, I believe, help provide a lot of initial insight for whether they wanna expand their business to a quarter like this and what are the requirements, what are the licenses that they need to acquire. So, anyway, excited for this. We have other things in the in the works, the cooking up in the oven. A lot of the products that we're creating, hopefully, delivering a lot of value to to companies. And as I mentioned, right, over two thirds of stablecoin companies started in the last year and a half. If that trend continues, you know, there needs to be more resources like this where, you know, you can you can kind of have a a reference point to know who's doing what and where. **Drew Rogers** (41:32) Or who's who's who's not doing anything. I just feel like you just got China here just dragging their feet across the Poland restriction. On China. But, yeah, this is really interesting. Or do you imagine... I know this is kind of like the last question for me, then we can wrap. Just the... Because because you... Here, you have corridors, what's possible, and and the rules of the road are the intention eventually to make this as accurate and comprehensive as possible. Do you imagine this also being effectively like a... This is the wrong word to use, but like a policing system as well where you can kind of... For me, I'm thinking of like, how would I actually use this? If I had an agent that would have access to all of this data, and then if I could go into a product or if I'm a business, and let's say I'm wanting to use a b to b platform for my company, I'm choosing between a neobank or I'm choosing, should I use MuralPay or Alfred or Yellowcard or whatever, I could apply Corridor Intelligence to this... To to whatever I'm looking at as a way to kind of gut check. Like, hey. Looks like they're offering some on and off ramps, but, like, doesn't look like they're licensed to do so. Do you do you imagine it transforming into that? Yes. Yes. And that's part of the goal of corridor intelligence, right, is to help get people informed. **Alex Witt** (42:55) Because let... Let's be honest. There's no way you can understand all of the licensing requirements for every corridor in the world. Like, you know, you... The... There's, you know, there's there's a lot specific parts of, like like, even, like, custody versus transfer versus, like Oh, we're these new yield. It's crazy. All these different things. Right? Like, so that's why we have, you know, like, a dozen different lines of activity and the related regulation around it. So, obviously, there's over a 190 countries in the world. You know, there's thousands of different corridors that you can create amongst those different countries, and there's over a dozen lines of business within that corridor. How on earth could anyone, like, know all of them? Like, it's not possible. And so that's why something like corridor intelligence, we feel, is quite valuable. You know? It's like a repository where you can get a high level overview. You still... You should still get a lawyer if you're gonna, like, expand your... To the business, but at least you can become somewhat informed. Right? You can you can have, like, a high level overview of, like, hey. This is... These are the intelligent questions that maybe I should be asking or something I should... You should be knowing about. But we we view that, like, the amount of regulation that a company needs to tech know about is is impossible for any one person to keep straight in their head. And that's why something like Corridor Intelligence could be extremely valuable. **Drew Rogers** (44:15) Yeah. The partnerships for this could be really interesting with law firms or industry bodies or different different... I feel like a resource like this is so valuable in opening ways to... Like, having a having a go to law firm who's, you know, leaning on this or industry body like what Beth is building with 100%. **Alex Witt** (44:37) Yeah. You could imagine. Right? You're a business. You're like, hey. I wanna look at The US Mexico corridor. And then you're like, hey. This is a viable option for me to expand my business to. And then we have a link on the website that says, like, hey. We have a partner law firm that can help you take it to the next level. We're not trying to be a law firm. We are not legal experts. The idea... And and the information we're sourcing is directly from regulatory websites. Right? These are .gov regulation websites. So the idea is like, hey. I have a general idea. I wanna sort of explore this further. Let me contact the partner law firm that specializes or or has expertise on this particular corridor. So so that that... That's definitely a a direction we can go in. And, again, the the basic information we're providing all of this free. Right? So you you can you can get any... Whether it's StableScape or Corridor Intelligence, you know, all of this information is is is freely available. I mean, I I do think if I were a law firm, like, I would want to collaborate with somebody like Corridor Intelligence because it's like I get an immediate targeted client referral. Otherwise, if you're you're a lawyer, you're like, you have to take these reference calls, right, where it's like you kind of figure out on a call taking a lot of time, hey. Is this an area of expertise that I can even help with? Whereas with quarter intelligence, if they say, hey. I wanna know about US Mexico, US law firm know immediately, hey. This is a relevant client for me, you know, because they've already expressed interest in this specific quarter that I know a lot about. So honestly, if I were a law firm, like, I would definitely reach out to Quarter Intelligence. Not not a pitch, but I'm just saying, like, if I were in their shoes, I would. It's awesome, man. **Drew Rogers** (46:22) Think it's pretty good. For the time. I'm sold. Yeah. It's it's a good pitch. It's a good pitch. Just just use it. We'll we'll tell you to use it. Views and opinions expressed, **Zach Fowler** (46:32) not legal or financial advice. No. But use corridor intelligence. This is awesome. Thanks for thanks for the thanks for being game, and thanks for the quick response. This was this was definitely a highlight of the show today. **Alex Witt** (46:42) Awesome. Well, I'm glad it could be helpful. Let's continue to to collaborate. And, again, our goal here is to move this space forward. So anyone who shares in that, like, let's let's work together. Teamwork makes the dream work. Will you and **Drew Rogers** (46:55) potential team that you might wanna meet? You might know them already, but we'll we'll do that today. Cool. Thanks for the time. Cool. Alright. See you guys. Thanks, Alex. Yep.