$43M Raised to Settle Stablecoins into Local Currencies Across 50 Countries

We're really excited to announce that we closed a few months ago a $35,000,000 series a. That brings us total amount raised from Latitude to 43,000,000. When I left Coinbase a year later, I actually felt we didn't succeed in getting USC off the ground. Stripe was limited in its Connect platform where we could only pay out in about 50 ish countries where we had banking rails. But there's 200 countries in the world. Let's do a pilot where we could do USDC payouts to 100 plus countries.

When we launched the product, it hardly was used. No one was using it. What do I do with USDC in Vietnam? What do I do with Ghana? What do do with it in Colombia? I need to buy groceries, coffee, and local things for my family. This was the spark for me launching Latitude. I do not have the thesis that a US dollar stablecoin will be used by everyone in the world. So you've got to solve getting in and out of local currencies with stablecoins, and that was a light bulb for me.

You know, we can pay The Philippines to Mexico, to India, all in under two minutes, all in real time. We use a stablecoin to move the money, put a local partner to off ramp it, but you just onboard Latitude, and it works seamlessly. In mid twenty twenty seven, I would say we wanna be live in '30 plus currencies around the world, maybe up to 50 for the off ramps. The only thing stopping us from succeeding is our execution ability.

StableMinded is proudly presented by Latitude, your go to partner for simplifying global payments. I've interviewed hundreds of teams building in modern money. No one has the enterprise track record of the Latitude team. With Latitude, you can move money to any continent in the world in a regulated, compliant, and secure way. Build with global ramp and payout infrastructure now available in over 40 countries. Single API to build any funds flow you can imagine.

If you want an intro, you can ping me on x or go to latitude.xyz to learn more.

Surril, thanks for joining. This is a really big day for you and interesting new start of Stable Minded with you all as the elite sponsors, so it's a fun one. Appreciate you having us as I've mentioned, which is sincere. I've been a big fan of your guys' production, how you foster organic combos. A lot of people that I've known personally have been on Louis, Meli, Vishal. So I'm just really excited to be here and thank you for the opportunity. Yeah, man. Bring us into... What are you announcing right now?

What's the news? We're really excited to announce that we closed a few months ago a $35,000,000 series a that brings us total amount raised for Latitude to 43,000,000. Quick refresher, we, in January '25, launched as a company and raised an 8,000,000 round led by NEA, which has been an awesome investor. Rick Yang, who's our partner there. He's on the board of Plaid. He did early Braintree. He's in Slash.

Just a renowned investor who's been supportive and we're fortunate to have many other good strategics like Lightspeed Faction, Coinbase Ventures, Paxos, Solana, of Gold. I'm trying not to forget anyone, Alchemy. And so there's lots of folks in the industry that took the danger of going down the logo Yes. Into how you you ultimately will frustrate someone. Oh, true true markets Vishal. Of course, I can't Here we go. Can't forget. We met. Yeah. How we met. Exactly. Big shout out. Good friend and operator of the space.

And tons of angels that I won't list because I don't wanna name names. But, yeah, we've been building for a year and a half and we'll go into Latitude, I'm sure, a little bit more later. But we took the approach of, you know, we're a stablecoin settlement and payouts network that has been busy building licensing in our network, which we'll go into more later.

But a year and a half in, we felt it was the right time to really say, hey, we've got early traction, we've got design users, we really need to put gas on the fire if you will. And so we were fortunate. We can go more into the process but to close the $35,000,000 round led by Oak. Oak is renowned both in healthcare but also fintech. They were investors early in Circle, in Paxos, they were in Bridge and they've just been really great partners.

They understood the thesis, they understood that an experienced team building the right way in a regulated way was something they wanted to underwrite. And so we're excited to announce that round today. We're remiss there's less logos in the series a but NEA also took part. Lightspeed Faction, OpenFX, which is a liquidity provider took part, so we're excited that we have these kind of new investors as well. That's awesome.

You came out with this blog, I believe, after the initial seed, and I I just wanted to use it to frame the conversation up a little bit. We don't do this, but I think just given what... So much that there is to cover, four key parts here. Yeah. And this is how you outline this blog, which I really appreciated. The first section goes into your time at Uber and this idea of instant and affordable.

Yep. The second goes into from Uber going to Coinbase, really talk in circle, talking about simplicity and trust. Yeah. And then the third area is really utility where you're focusing really on where stablecoins as a core primitive come to life and why they're needed and maybe where they're not needed. Yep. And then we can, toward the end of the chat, go really into Latitude and what you're building about it. But bring us back to just that initial kind of like moment

when you were at Uber and thinking about payments in the core mentality that you think about them, is a global transfer system. Bring us into that. Yeah. The high level I would mention is these experiences are really personal to me. That's what I've lived and it's what really drove us to start Latitude. So the first section that you mentioned, when I was at Uber, let's take a quick snapshot. I was based in Amsterdam in The Netherlands, was Uber's international headquarters for tax reasons.

Any driver outside of The US, which at the time were already up to 40 countries, was paid out through that Dutch entity. Why is that generally for people who don't know? Like, what are the advantages of that? Main one is you pick international geos. A lot of the tech companies had picked Ireland, but the Dutch was a friendly regulator for what Uber wanted to do, and friendly corporate tax environment. And so for tax reasons Uber had set up internationally, and you get US paid out.

US drivers, internationally that included Latin America, Africa, Asia, most of the drivers there. Notwithstanding if Uber had a local entity and a marketer too was paid out through that entity. And so it was my first time, I had come from Facebook before, was in tech, but my first time I really started to understand payments because I didn't realize that when you had to pay a driver and it went from country a to country b, all of a sudden the card interchange rates skyrocketed, right?

And so the fees were expensive because it was cross border. And then the settlement times, how long it took to get to the drivers was really long. And so the number one requested feature from Uber partner drivers, and I believe that's still the case even today, even with all this innovation is how do I get my money faster? How could I get paid even more frequently? And just anything about getting those wages and why. And like in...

As western person, still in the Western US to Amsterdam, I still didn't fully understand that. This driver in Ghana or this driver in Argentina, 40% of those wages were put to petrol for their car so they needed it for working capital. And then amongst that, you needed groceries and all these things. So they're relying on that weekly or biweekly wage. And so at the time, we just did these, like, what I would call lipstick on a pig solutions is, okay. Let's front them money with a driver debit card.

We did some partnerships with Canada and other places for that. Maybe let's use innovative ways of looking that they're a reliable driver and fronting them money. If we can dive into maybe some of that Yeah. Like pick apart these early implementations of getting around that in a creative way. Good question. I just glossed over that too quickly. So there's a few solutions then. Actually I would argue, Stills is primarily used now for your everyday company.

Uber is a very sophisticated payments company because they've felt this problem for a long time now. But the first way if you want to pay internationally is Swift. You send wire equivalent through Swift and it gets to the destination market several days later and for a lot of fees. And so you've got to plan that payment in advance because it's expensive, Uber is not trying to do that every day, right? Are the networks that have innovated in some solutions like Visa Direct and MasterCard Send.

That's ways that if they have a card, can push a payment to that card. But again, while it's instant in some markets, the adoption in emerging markets is scarce and it's expensive. You can be paying two or 3% on that way. That's meaningful to an Uber driver that needs that perpetual. Is it scarce because it's expensive or maybe... No.

Just the other thing we take for granted in the West, you know, while cards are a great solution, I'm very fans of the card networks, I've worked with them in all my stops, a lot of people just don't use cards in lot of these markets. Africa's a major cash driven market. In Kenya, you know, I shouldn't call Africa one market... Country by country. In Kenya, they use mobile money. I'm really fascinated by the QR code usage. Yeah. Like, no one really does that in The US, but apparently that's like...

Especially in Latin Latin America. And Southeast Asia. Yeah. Like the advent of, you know, Alipay, WeChat. We have an on and off ramp in Philippines, which we can talk more about, but the way they deposit is through a QR code system Yeah. Where you deposit in. Does that change pie level? That kind of changes the economics or the incentive systems for these big card networks if the card actually isn't being used? For sure.

I mean, one of the big incentive that the card networks wanted to push and they would pay tons of incentive money for it is cash to card. How do we get card adoption in these markets and we would incentivize users. It's like an on ramp. On ramp, an on ramp into a debit card in Interesting. This How do we get more cards in the hands of people? Because then we could add all these innovative products on top.

But what happened is a lot of these markets skipped the cards and went straight to the mobile solutions of QR codes and Kenya again mobile money. But again, we take for granted that cards aren't used in a lot of these markets. Or where cards are used, they're expensive if you go cross border, right? So those are two big problem sets, right? Okay. That was at least the v one way that you would do this. Right. For those who didn't participate, affordability,

near instant payments. With some of these solutions,

you were able to kind of see that. What was the key pain that still existed that kind of kept you exploring Bitcoin, Stablecoin? Yeah. So we were using solutions. We had Audient as a card process at the time. They were doing good deals for us. New solutions like Wise and all these things came out. But again, when you're sending to emerging markets, these solutions didn't work well. Everyone was playing complex treasury or float games.

Like, oh look, I keep money in the market so I make it seem like it's selling instantly but didn't work. And so there's a guy on my team, I have to give him a shout out, Anurag Aladi, he's on our cap table. His deal with me is if he started an Uber, you just gotta let me do Bitcoin mining on the side. Bitcoin and Litecoin mining, all this stuff. So he started doing all this mining. That was his deal with you when he came in. Yeah. Like, hey, I'll work here but like. I'm gonna have this side hustle.

I'm gonna have this side hustle. Is that how you first heard about Bitcoin? It's how I first heard about Bitcoin. Maybe I didn't give him a shout on this blog, know I did before. And I particularly, it's a really, you know, I glossed over this fact. I saw at the time that Bitcoin miners were getting all this Bitcoin, how did they actually get that for money? And at the time this very early product called USDT had launched.

Anurag was like going, it's kind of like a dollar, and you like get in and out of Bitcoin trades with this dollar. I'm like, interesting, right? And so I thought, okay, started reading the Bitcoin white paper, went down that rabbit hole. Stablecoins really weren't a thing, but we'd heard of this USDT thing. I thought, man, blockchains could be an interesting way to solve these problems. What year roughly are we still right now?

This is 2017 and 2018 UnderRock was doing this on the side and then I eventually in 2018 made the jump to join Coinbase. At the end of that year I was in Europe, they were looking to launch internationally and I thought man blockchains could be an interesting way. This is the leading brand right now in blockchains and I've been at Facebook and Uber. Said I want to go try that. A lot of my Uber colleagues were like, You're going go into this crypto company leaving this Uber high growth company.

They were trying to talk me out of it, but I thought, I see the trend here and I wanna make the jump. Yeah. I think a lot of people who, myself included, I would definitely say this was the reason why Coinbase was like first stop on the journey. Was like, this company has five to ten years ahead already Yeah. Of what the financial industry is gonna have to go through. Yeah. And their brand, to your point, is arguably still the strongest, most trusted Yep. Crypto brand in the space. Like 100%.

So bring us from the like, okay. You're at Uber. You're you're seeing these things. What was it outside of brand? Like, what was specifically the opportunity and maybe the early role at Coinbase? And really your understanding of where blockchains and things like stablecoins start to fit in to real payments use cases and like actually why that is superior in your view. Yeah. I mean the... First the jump to Coinbase, I had that hypothesis blockchains could be an interesting way to solve some of these problems.

It's hard to say at that time the super crypto enthusiasts but they were, you know, even at then we're kinda like, oh Coinbase is already kind of a major brand. They wanna go into DeFi, Binance, all these things. What stood out to me was like, if I wanted to buy a little bit of Bitcoin, it was the easiest to do on Coinbase. No doubt. It was just like I can load dollars from my bank account, it was simple. So that resonated with me because I knew simplicity had to be a thing as I learned from my previous desktops.

And then it seemed to be trusted. Now I started learning my payments in Uber, I started writing about regulations and bank relationships at Coinbase and I'll go into that. What I was hired to do is really lead the business efforts anywhere outside The US. How do we get launched in UK and Europe, getting our licensing there. Now RAIN and all these card issuers are very famous. I actually did the first CryptoLink Visa card with Coinbase from a major exchange. I launched out of Coinbase internationally.

I joke, I'll do a quick anecdote. I work with Visa at every one of these stops and I love them. I'm going give them a little bit of our time here. When I was at Uber, I used to go into London Visa offices in Paddington for anyone knows it. And because we were one of their biggest merchants in the world, the red carpet was rolled out. It said welcome Cyril and team on the top of it. It's like, what can we do for you? And then fast forward, I'm at Coinbase and I'm launching this first debit card.

I was snuck in the side door. They weren't really like announcing And that I was again Visa deserves credit because they still did it, but it wasn't as welcoming then. Was like a lot of the relationships were Kai Sheffield, shout out to him, was still a big advocate. And so that was, you know, one of the first things I did was launch a debit card for Coinbase. Again, this was a very small pilot, Europe, etcetera. So you really needed to piece this together and push... Like this wasn't like a turnkey...

Like a lot of this feels really turnkey right now. At this time, you were really putting these pieces together. Absolutely. I was doing in Europe what I learned the US team had done, which is underappreciated. Like when I was at another role, the future enamored with how fast FTX was going and all that. And sometimes I felt, oh, why are they going so fast? And I now realize even though...

And I'll throw myself a little shade, like what Coimus is doing, especially especially in in 'fourteen and 'fifteen before I joined is to get a bank relationship so you can accept the fiat from people in a trusted way was so hard for Brian Armstrong and team. And so we were in the Europe team trying to do the same thing. We started with Clearbank and LHV and Banking Circle, some of these really good banks, and then we eventually got a Barclays relationship.

Just getting these banking relationships set up, getting the licensing set up, these are things that are like oh that's boring, you don't move fast that way, but when the user thinks of a simple way to buy Bitcoin, a trusted way that even my grandmother could do it, it takes all this underlying plumbing to do that. And so I give the Coinbase early team credit for doing all in The US. We were trying to mimic that in Europe to get Coinbase kind of everywhere. That was a big undertaking early on.

I would say phase two of my Coinbase journey, we already gave a shout out to Vishal who introduced us. Coinbase and Circle together decided to launch USDC Stablecoin. Wow. That launched while you were there? Correct. That kind of came to life. Yeah, and I mentioned learning about USDT. Actually my exercise to join Coinbase gives everyone like a working trial, give us an exercise, how would you plan this project, all these things we interview. And it was about how should we think about stablecoins?

Should we do a consortium? Should we launch our own? All these things under this paper. It would be interesting to go back and look at that. Yeah. Wherever that PDF is, that would be like go put that on chain. Most of it was wrong. So fast forward, Coinbase and Circle do this USDC launch. Know, Vishal, who you had on was leading from Circle. A little bit after launch, I wasn't involved in the early launches. I was in London.

I would raise my hand and said, I'm so interested in this because you go back to what I was joining crypto for. I love Coinbase for trading and all these things but that wasn't my interest. My interest was like, how do we solve moving money across borders? How do we solve moving money globally? And I thought, wow. Because you don't have to deal with the Bitcoin volatility or the other crypto volatility is very interesting to me, right?

So soon after the launch, I just raised my hands like we didn't really have a lead to grow USDC. And so the last year of my Coinbase was, even though was in London, flew to the Barrie a lot, leading USDC, even leading other stablecoin initiatives, rest in peace to LibraDM if you've heard of that initiative. I was Coinbase representative for that, but it was really tough at the beginning. Vishal was my counterpart at Circle and we were trying to grow it, but Tether at that point had gotten such adoption.

Actually when I left Coinbase a year later, I actually felt we didn't succeed in getting USD off the ground. Because when you look at the market cap, I can't even remember now, it was a few million versus Tether was already in the hundreds of millions. If not, I don't think it was at 1,000,000,000 yet but it was in the hundreds of millions and just wasn't really taking off. Now there's a few things to call out there.

One, you know it wasn't the biggest priority for coinbase at time and even Circle because you have to think back, it was a 0% interest rate environment, right? No one's making money off the reserves then, now it's a very lucrative thing. And Coinbase still took the long term view that was important, but it wasn't a big priority. And so I thought, man, we'll talk about my next journey at Stripe.

But one of the reasons I took that jump was I thought a payments company really leaning into the space could be very interesting. But looking back now, two things that Coinbase and Circle did really well, and I think every stablecoin issuer should pay attention to, is that even if you're a payments focused stablecoin or some other focused stablecoin, if you don't build liquidity for your stablecoin, it's not going to take off.

I mean, I'm sort of putting to the side some of the brands that are launching stablecoin that are less glorified rewards points for their own ecosystem, but if you're trying to launch a stablecoin for the masses and for the adoption, two things that work well, Coinbase and Circle put liquidity in with their own balance sheet into DeFi protocols. At the time it was Compound and Aave and all these things.

And then Coinbase was obviously a trading venue and they got USCC also listed on other major exchanges like Kraken and Binance, etc. And so fast forward, my next role I was at Stripe, it was summer of twenty one. DeFi summer happens and USCC starts to really blow up. And I was like, oh, okay maybe some of the things we did actually worked. And it takes a while, but it was a good lesson of what are the important things.

Even if you're a payments focused blockchain, if you don't get the trading volume up, both Tether and USCC grew off trading volume. So I haven't seen another stablecoin that really picked up adoption without that flywheel. You could have adoption

thinking more in the terms of like assets under custody held in like stablecoin backed, maybe less volume but like supply growth dominated by trading? Supply growth and volume and movement,

right? And so what I mean by movement is, and this starts to get into a little bit of latitudes doing, what's important for us when we're trying to move money is how do we get a stablecoin into local currency, right? And so the best way, at least the two proven ways that Tether and USCC had done that is getting listed on trading venues.

Even if I was Uber driver who got a stablecoin or creator who got a stablecoin and I didn't have a nice off ramp, I can at least go to one of these exchanges that listed Tether and you see and get it back into fiat, right? And so that created a little bit of the movement flywheel Yep. Which is important. That's the utility story that we'll get into, right? But the two proven ways for the two biggest stablecoins has been that way.

And Paxos I should give a shout out to has done that quite a bit with their white label stablecoins. But without liquidity, these things don't really take off. Yeah. And I think people overlook that. Like, oh, I'm gonna launch a payments focused one. I'm gonna launch x focused one. Well, you still need that five way level liquidity. Yeah. Specifically here, there's a lot to what you just said, but most interesting thing for me is also something I really relate with was being in Coinbase, seeing

USDC and the properties of it, the use cases of it, the real like utility of that thing and how it is being used within the business in maybe a way that is like, in some ways the first time in history, stable points are being even thought of in this way. Like you kind of had a front row seat to what regulated stable point activity looks like. Right.

When you think back to use cases, clients, meetings, like are there moments that stick out to you around, oh, I'm starting to see the bigger picture of what this really means for money Yeah. Versus admittedly how I thought of it was just like, oh, I'm just solving this problem Right. At Coinbase Yeah. Because we need to accept payments and settle them without fluctuating price. Right. Let's just use USDC books. And then I was like, oh wait a minute. What was that like for you?

Quite frankly it didn't come at Coinbase. Interesting. So I believed in it at Coinbase

and I'll... You didn't ask about this but a lot of the times we were pitching payment type companies to use a stable coin. We thought it could move faster. You have these settlement windows. Again, I use Wise every week by the way, I still have my UK bank account, I move funds between them with Wise it works well. But when I talk to companies like them they laughed at us. So stablecoin is like, why the heck would we use this?

Again the part that I was missing was the plumbing we were laying would really have dividends later. When I say plumbing, mean the licensing part both Circle and Coinbase took that seriously. We'd even set up a consortium for governance and ended up, you know, now it's a little bit of a rivalry there, we can talk about that later. But thinking about liquidity in deep ways, all these building blocks that we were doing that we believed in, we paid dividends later.

And so again, fast forwarding a little bit, was at Stripe, I'm leading my team there. The eye opening piece to me was Stripe actually when I joined, crypto was banned there and I would love to talk more about that. The eye opening thing for me is the call since the leadership there took notice because of how much USCC was growing then. They were like, okay, stablecoins, I see some value here for payments. The other thing was the adoption of these performant blockchains. Like, I'm a big Bitcoiner.

I believe Bitcoin has good value. I don't believe that it's the best thing for payments. And Ethereum was there with super high gas fees, L2s were just starting but Solana had started getting adoption, right? And Avalanche a few over these others. And so I could see Stripe leadership and I think analogous to other non crypto native companies we're starting to see, okay, stablecoins and now blockchains that are actually cheap and fast, I can see how these things work out. Right.

You were kind of in the room as they were thinking through that in some ways. For sure. Yeah and would love to double click there. But you asked when I saw it at Coinbase, actually didn't see it fully at Coinbase. And I actually left there thinking, man, wish we could have done better on UCC, right? But it was a lesson to kind of anyone building the space. Sometimes these things take a while.

And I think if you have conviction, you're doing it the right way, it could pay off even though that right way is methodical, licensing, all these things. One more thing I'd mention is it wasn't just that the industry needed to pay attention. There's some other big tailwinds that have been talked ad nauseam now such as genius passing. So clear regulation was the other tailwind

that the space needed, and that didn't come even until much later. I can't imagine the moment... Because zooming into the moment that you left, Tether was exploding in volume Yep. But facing a lot of, like, gray area with regulations For sure. In some ways. The real moment for USDC hadn't really really happened yet. But you guys were laying all this like super super crucial groundwork

that has ultimately been the main differentiator for that asset. Right. And it's interesting to see that looking back. Yeah. What would you tell yourself... Managing reserves is the other point. How you did managing reserves which is the circle team and other treasure... Know. Like was like a huge... Exactly. Getting it in a very trusted custodian,

be doing audits before they were acquired, all those things. Sorry. Yes. Yes. Like kind of knowing where the puck is going and Right. Operating as if it's already there. Correct. Yeah. Interesting. Any other things from the coin base era that stick out to you other than meeting the shawl?

That have been really... The shawl was great. I mean, there's other people who are supporting it. Shoutouts to Sean O'Lell, Max, Jim, all them, Emily who's supporting UCC at Coinbase. Just the other thing that I learned coming in which is if you don't make the UX and user experience simple, people aren't going to adopt it, right? And that lesson continued to resonate in my next stop, but how do I get UCC, how do I spend it, how do I off ramp it, how do I on ramp it, all these things.

It's still a case today by the way which we'll get into. It's not all the way there but like if I don't make it super simple to where my parents or my grandparents could use it, then we haven't quite won yet. It shouldn't, know, that's one of the other things that have been playing crypto is getting my seed phrase, know, downloading my whatever wallet and it can't be that complex. Yeah. Okay. So for utility phase Yeah. 2021,

you join Stripe. You described this kind of first real attempt at using stable points for payouts.

Speak a little bit to that story and what you learned through that. Yeah. Mean... Because utility it feels like we're kind of in the... We're still in the utility phase Yeah. Thankfully. And we probably hopefully will be for a while but we've kind of reached this moment of like where do these things really fit in? For sure. I would be remiss not to mention a quick part of the journey to get get it launched at Stripe when I mentioned...

And again, this is not saying everyone at Stripe was anti crypto or anything like that, but when I got there, crypto was banned still. What I did and maybe a little lesson of people who were trying to get things launched to companies, and I actually ping Kai Sheffield at time, considering my friend, I like, did you get Visa to do so much in crypto? He went through a little of his playbook about getting execs to use it and all these things.

So we brainstormed a bit and I realized that Stripe was so big on documentation culture. They're so thoughtful. Sometimes it's two twenty page docs on everything we do, no slides.

And so I thought I'm one one hundredth of the writer of the call, so I thought I'm sort of the crypto guy here, there weren't many that weren't experienced in crypto, and I wrote this 20 page document on what I think we were going to miss out on if we weren't in crypto, in stablecoins, in these chains, and I laid out use cases and all these things. Again the paper, going back to it, probably a lot of it was wrong. What were the kind of core elements of this paper? Like how did you even approach it?

Maybe what were some of the things that were wrong and maybe some of the things that were really right? Yeah, I think the main thing I was pointing out that since the time they had tried Bitcoin payments, I think back in 1560 with Coinbase ironically. Mhmm. I think it was ripe with fraud, no one was using it. My big point was how much has changed. Like just because you tried it then doesn't mean that it's the same thing now. And I called out Stablecoins, I was pushing USC but I mentioned Tether as well.

I called out these new fast blockchains so you can do things cheaper and faster. I called out a lot of companies that were growing at the time, you know obviously Paxos Coinbase, there was like on ramps that were starting to get adoption, MoonPay and these others. And I called out all the major brands that were starting to adopt stables in some way. Visa started dabbling in settlements.

PayPal was launching their own stablecoin, and so I thought at minimum we should be trialing things and piloting things to see if it's a faster way. I also knew one of the weak points of Stripe's footprint at the time was international. We were in many countries, but we're really only solid in Europe and The US.

In Asia and LatAm we weren't that strong, so I thought, wow, stablecoins could be an interesting way to get launched in these markets and get adoption quickly versus going country by country and make by bank. And so those are the few things I outlined. Somehow that paper got to John Carlson's desk. Think his chief of staff Matt Ziegler like caught it, read it with me because I want John to read this.

And then John did a one on one with me, asked me a lot a lot of things about my past roles and the cultures of these companies. We'll go into that another day. He's like, Sir, I'd love you to set up this time and figure out who the industry leaders I need to meet in the space are because I think it's worth exploring now. So I set up time with John and Chad and Walter at with Brian Brooks at the time who was Binance with XOCC, Jesse at Kraken, even some where John was very astute.

We set up time with no shape to block five but we had a call there and he was like, I don't know that this model will work. He was very astute on what would work and not. And credit to him, he was like, this seems different now. Yeah. Oh, we we met the Solana team. And who's not gonna take that call? Right. Oh, that's why it was a goal for me. I can ping out to any CEO and then say, hey, I'm I'm representing John Collison. Do you wanna meet? And then I'm a fly on the wall and I'm just 10 for 10 outreach. Exactly.

It was the easiest cold outreach I'd ever had to do. I didn't even ask for warm intros. What was his approach? Who on the calls with him? I'm curious like Most of them. For a guy like that, never met with him, but what was his... Something you've mentioned even in this conversation, I keep hearing about them. Is their approach to learning and being acquisitive? Like what was he like in those calls? What was his posture? That's why I was so impressed.

It was just generally even if in a call like the BlockFi one where maybe he didn't believe it as much, he was just like, Tell me how it works. What's the model behind it? With Paxos, why do you issue stablecoins this way? How do you get adoption of said stablecoins? It was just asking questions, asking questions, asking questions. They wanted to know how is Stripe gonna use it. He's like, I'm not sure yet. I'm just fact finding right now. Right? And he definitely said, we're thinking about it.

Here's some thoughts we have. He would always put me on the spot and says, like, are some of the things you think that are synergies? Obviously, all wanted to say, we can support your entry into crypto. And so they're always trying to sell. Yeah. But I just found how inquisitive he was and how quickly he got things. We we had another call with the Bitcoin Lightning team just to explore that. He understood it more than me after one call. Yeah. I was just so so...

Is there a certain call or like theme or part of the conversation that he really gravitated toward or anything that you were like, even... I can't even imagine like being on these calls and hearing how he thinks and seeing what he finds interesting and valuable in the stack. Like Yeah. Is there anything that stood out to him that maybe ultimately led in the strategy that they've now implemented with some of these big acquisitions? Yeah. I mean, I'm I'm probably even forgetting a few of things.

The two things that stood out because it led what we eventually did at Stripe with the crypto was it like, okay, stablecoin seemed to have enough adoption on. Genie still hadn't passed yet to be clear. Yeah. But that was enough for Stripe so we could take a bet here. And he wasn't too keen on like, okay, even the Circle team, respected a lot but pushed USCC on us, Southern team pushed USCC on us. He's not too keen on the tribal nature of crypto.

I remember he didn't like that and even though he's very impressed with the Solana team, he's like, don't want to be one chain or anything like that. And kind of based on what you see now even after I left, you see that. It was more of an open standard, think is what... Exactly. No pun intended, exactly. How open it is is too debatable.

I think Stripe still is very strategic on how they do things and make sure they keep business, but the two things were like, okay blockchain seemed to have changed from just Bitcoin and Ethereum and there's cheaper way to do things now, faster way to do things now, and stablecoin seemed to have adoption. Those two things were resonating with him. I don't know if I necessarily want to go with one of these tribes or do one of the things with them.

We ended up partnering with a few of those companies to be clear, but those are the two things that sit out. It was enough conviction that even though there was, again, no shade, I love being a Stripe alumni, but there are so many people within Stripe who are anti doing anything in the space. Even when you fast forward, I wasn't sure and I really wanted to still be in the space.

I wasn't sure if we were going do something and John eventually assigned Will Gaybrick who's the president of Stripe said, Okay, we're going to launch something. We brought in a head of engineering, GM and I was able to partner with him to launch something and when we announced we're going to do something which we'll talk about payouts which you asked about and I rambled to get there. No. It's good. So that this... The payouts was like the thing. They're like, okay. Go do this. Yeah.

Payouts was the thing but when we lost we're gonna do anything, so many people in Slack and our all hands were like, why are we doing stuff? It's ripe with fraud, all of these things. And then at the minimum I was arguing we should at least just process payments for crypto exchanges that are reputable like Coinbase and all these. And a slight shape to me, also helped do the FTX deal which maybe wasn't the right one in terms of processing payments for damn nothing else.

And so I was arguing minimum we should do that, but we can even do more. So given those themes that John heard, was like, fast forward we're launching a very small crypto unit within Stripe to do some small pilots and we decided, okay, we have so many marketplaces on Stripe, Lyft, you know, Airbnb was on Stripe, even Uber in certain parts.

So all these companies that were using Stripe Connect for those who don't know Stripe Connect, an easy way for creators to be onboarded a business that's in The US that has creators around the world, well, how do I deal with KYC? How do I deal with payments? Stripe built Connect for this purpose to onboard these users. But Stripe was limited in its Connect platform where we can only pay out in about 50 ish countries where we had banking rails.

But there's 200 countries in the world and so how do we do payouts for the creators in the rest of the world? And so our first thesis was let's do a pilot where we can do USDC payouts to a 100 plus countries. And so that was the first product we launched. We did a pilot with actually Twitter, the pre Elon Musk Twitter. They had like the super tipping feature in creators around the world and we launched it. We were excited about it despite all the anti narrative within it.

But when we launched the product, it hardly was used. No one was using it and we were like, And Stripe's very big on user research and asking users why and what. And so when we were pulling users, I'll paraphrase, it was like, what do I do with USCC in Vietnam? What do I do it in Ghana? What do do with it in Colombia? I need to buy groceries and coffee and local things for my family. And so if it's not usable there...

I mean there's a growing population that want USD stables and especially now, that was back in twenty one-twenty two, it's a lot more. But I still have a core thesis and this was the spark for me launching Latitude, even though I had one more stop in between was if this will work to solve global payments or improve global payments, I do not have the thesis that a US dollar stablecoin will be used by everyone in the world.

I still think the Brazilian real will exist, I still think the Indian rupee will exist, I think the Chinese yuan will exist, so you've got to solve getting in and out of local currencies with stablecoins and that was a lightbulb for me. I think they've launched other iterations of that that I'm sure are more widely used.

I know in Argentina a lot of people love USD stablecoins, but I still have a core conviction based on a lot of experience that people need to get in and out of local currencies if this is really viable, AKA a settlement network to local That That was the big thing. That's why I call it utility. It lacked that utility to use. Usable.

Since then a lot of really interesting leaps have happened in the utility conversation. How do you think about maybe since then the big shifts like the macro things that have happened in recent years with the utility of stable coins and what we've seen, but also some of that initial pain that still exists that is still really driving a lot of sounds like kind of bringing us into Latitude now. What are some of the macro things that have happened and then bring us into what you're now building with that spark? Yeah.

I mean I spent a little time in Zero Hash and I saw this too where the other lesson was like a lot of these platforms even if they adopt stables,

they don't want to hold onto it. So it's very important that you reduce that complexity complexity for for the the business. The other part I glossed over with Stripe is in addition to the off ramping, I need some crypto wallet to use this. Do I go download MetaMask and all these things? That part was complicated. So you always lose a lot of people when you make them do that. Oh go download it or go to an exchange and do that. It's like well obviously you're going have a steep drop off, right? Yes.

And so fast forward to what our thesis in Latitude and all the utility that's happened, there's been a lot that's happened. The Genius Act passed and so regulated clear ways for people to hold stables, but even then most brands want someone else to do that stable holding custody money movement for them. There's been all sorts of these wallet providers, a Privy, a Turnkey, Crossman and others who have made the spinning up of these wallets easier and more usable. There's been these card issuers.

I give a little shout out to myself for doing the first one back in 2020 or so for a crypto debit card where RAIN and Bridge issued these cards for a number of these stable lending cards that are taking off. And so if I have a card in said market, I could spend that stable win. But going back to what I said, there's a lot of markets that don't have cards and there still is a cross border charge if you're spending a card from one market into another market or paying out, right?

And so even though there's been more on utility, what I still saw as a gap before I launched Latitude was I didn't see any of the providers that have solved at least in 40 or 50 plus countries how to get from a stable to a local currency. How do I settle? And two great companies that have been acquired, Bridge and BB and K, great companies, regulate them, I'm friends with both of them. You If look at their footprint outside The US and Europe, there's not much there. There's a few countries.

And I think that's why their strategic design, that's not anything bad of them. And then you look at the other point, it's like there's all these new stablecoin native companies and they've started to solve some these international markets. But what I saw with them is they didn't do what Coinbase did and they didn't do what some of the other companies would just get their licenses first. What they're doing is a lot of them are built on top of Bridge so they rent the licenses. A lot of them are using a bank sponsor.

And these are good ways to get out market and I'm going into the weeds a little bit. But what it means is if you're truly going to compete and displace the incumbents for cross border payments, I feel you've got to own your own destiny. That means you have your own licensing, you control your own economics and Latitude in our year and a half journey. Now we're at about 45 state approvals with MTLs and state approvals which is pretty record time I believe in a year and half.

And then so you control your own destiny there, your economics. You have compliance in house so you figure out how you onboard clients and we should get into compliance in a second because it's still a huge bottleneck. And then internationally, we believe we're building a settlement network that is really differentiated. Some just go to small exchanges and you can off ramp. I believe you have to have banks as part of the network. We're onboarding with two banks in Brazil.

I believe you need great exchanges as part of the network. Bitsa is an investor, we have them. I believe you need even payment aggregators as part of your network. We have a D local and others and so we have a number of partners in Mexico. We have four or five different partners for a settlement that we can route and optimize for, right? And so we're still early. We've got several design users but what we believe we're doing is building for the long term and solving this gap where I can truly be global on day one.

Right? Maybe would be interesting to double click on one of these places like Mexico you brought up. Yeah. Sounds like that's kind of an early market. How you are piecing these things together in the categories you just mentioned and why having all of them friendly and working well together matters Yep. Versus

maybe some of these other approaches you've seen. When you think about what this cohort put together on locks, what is now possible with Latitude

Yeah. Today and in the future? Let's go into Mexico. I believe that's a great deep dive. I'm talking in high level terms. I should just double click is like the way this manifests in two products for us. Our first is this global fiat payouts we call it. A business in The US that wants to pay out its creators like we were trying to do with Stripe can do it in stablecoins but they can get to Fiat aka the stablecoin sandwich.

So we can pay out to Philippines, to Mexico, to India all in under two minutes, all in real time. We use a stablecoin to move the money but a local partner to off ramp it but you just onboard Attitude and it works seamlessly. We've got podcasting platform like Zencastr live on it, VeloCFO, etc. The second product using the same sort of infrastructure is a settlement network or a simplified term is on and off ramps.

And so if I'm a neobank, all these neobanks are launching, I'm trying to be global on day one or I'm trying to just get into one market but if I'm trying to get to 40 markets, am I going to go plug into on and off ramp providers in all markets? Or our goal is you come to Latitude and we'll have all the currencies there for you. You onboard once, you can get from Mexico peso to stablecoins. So let's double click on Mexico for both of those products.

If I'm a platform that wants to do payouts across the globe, Mexico is a very important market for me. Mexico is a more robust and liquid one, and so it's a good one. There's less robust ones we should talk about in terms of liquidity not being as mature. But what Latitude can do is take the dollars because we're regulated. We have bank sponsors and it custody in a regulated efficient way. Mint to stablecoin which is near free, going from dollars to stablecoin near free, so really no cost there.

Let's say we're sending on a blockchain. Let's say it's sending on Solana, also near free, so no cost there. So there's one cost per component which is getting that stablecoin back to Mexico peso if they want to deliver pesos.

And so for Latitude, if we have three or four partners as part of that network, all compliant and regulated, we've collected the KYB on the user, we've done our checks on the contractor so compliance is built in and we've worked that out, We can now route to who has the best liquidity and that's important. Liquidity, the term that's thrown out there a lot but if you're doing $100 or $200 payments may not matter as much but if you're doing $5 or $6,000,000 payments that matters.

Or even on a $100 payment, if our off ramp provider's charging 1% on a $100 payment, you're losing a dollar, right? Or three or 4%. And so the reason having redundancy matters is that we can route to the cheapest route to get to Mexico peso. And then the last thing I'll throw on, the boring stuff, I'll throw on our Stripe DNA. My co founder and CTO Brian is from Stripe as well. It's like we get the boring stuff right. If the payment fails, how do we retry it and pick the other provider to make sure it delivers?

And that all happens at Bindacy, right? Interesting. So you're building really a network of networks.

Network of network is a great term. Yeah, like you'll go within a specific corridor,

build a network there and then eventually that becomes a really interesting network of networks. Correct. And one that's abstracted from the user. Like what happened back in the day or even some stable companies I say now is okay, hey brand you want to pay out. Here's the four providers you go and we built the API for them but you still have to onboard with all of them and you have to do your own checks with all of them. That's too clunky.

We have to be like, onboard Latitude on the back end we're doing this routing with our network. Interesting. What is the different roles

that each of these different pieces play in your mind? It sounds like options, network effects, routing, you have... I know I saw like Morse and Sling Money is like on the cap table. Like you have a platform

like that. Yep. You have a bank. What types of roles do each of these specific market makers? Like what do they all play? Yeah. Why all of them? Yeah. Great question. We found... Again, we're early. We're a year and a half in. We've built the connectivity. If I say countries, it's 50 because it includes Europe but for the Fiat payouts product almost up to 20 currencies now including Europe, is 20 countries. And on the on and off ramps, we're building up to 10 currencies.

On and off ramps, a little more difficult because you have to build virtual account infrastructure. We can double click there in a second. That's relative to Morse. But what it means is like, first for the payouts product, you have to have reliable banking partners in The US to take dollars and make sure that's custody and all the safeguards in place where people don't even trust you. You have to do the boring stuff as well like SOC two and all these things that we're doing, right?

And then when we use our network of networks, people want to make sure one, that it's going to deliver fast and reliable, but second, it's going to be affordable and cheap. So one thing we've done today which we feel is still basic is we just route between different providers. So if the exchange is the better route we'll go that way, if the bank is the better route we'll go that way. What we're doing in phase two is introducing even more competition into that middle phase and I'll give one example.

Right now we may either get regulated in one of these markets internationally, we're going to continue to get regulated, or we may find a bank partner that just does the payout. And in between what we do and we mentioned OpenFX is one of our series a investors, they're doing this core infrastructure of market making on stablecoins in several markets in Mexico and in Europe.

And so they're getting that stable to Mexico cost basis down to a few basis points, one or two basis points down from what may have been 10 or 15 or higher in other markets. And so we can plug in OpenFX to get liquidity very, very huge and shout out to them, right? It won't always be them so I'm not their single only player, nothing like them, but we get that cost so low and then we just have a small payout cost. All of a sudden, we're doing cost so much cheaper than incumbents can do it, right?

A lot of the incumbents I see in the space are like, oh well, it's so cheap, cost of capital is not important, use one of these platforms wisely and go US to Colombia, US to Philippines, US to India, these The emerging

rates start to go to 3%, 4% and you know... I tried doing Wise to one of our teammates in India. India. I told you it was really painful. Funds released, they still don't kind of know why. Held funds, how to get it back, took like a week. Yeah, our first few mark clients we've won from partners like that going markets

like The Philippines and so in these emerging markets is where you see these problems come more acutely. Now let me throw a shot at the stablecoin side of the house. Some people with stablecoins act like it's solved everywhere, it's going be cheaper everywhere, faster everywhere. That's not true yet. There's a lot of markets where whether it's not clear regulation or there's just not an OpenFX there or there's not a bit so there, the liquidity is not there yet.

Many of the African markets, many of the Southeast Asian markets And so they're a wiser. There is a painful... What countries specifically feel like there's a really awful opportunistic relationship with pain and opportunity and also What

are the key markets that you're like, damn, if we could actually get that unlocked,

this would be huge. Markets that work well, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Philippines, clear regulation, good liquidity. Again, this may not be scaling to a billion dollars b to b payments yet liquidity, but at least for... And it's working there. Yeah. It's growing, right? And again, someone for who's going to attack me and say, Well, you can't do huge treasury movements there. I get that. It's still maturing and I'm not arguing that it's all the way there.

But markets that are huge that yet don't have that infrastructure: Indonesia. How big is the population there? Thailand. Maybe not as big of a population. Pakistan, Bangladesh. There are some solutions there. We're actually working on one of the local Pakistani player now, but huge populations, huge remittance corridors and we don't have your stablecoin info and liquidity.

Japan is a major market, not necessarily considered emerging because regulation and banks are doing some stuff there, not clear on an off ramp bid for us. A bunch of these Southeast Asian markets Nigeria has got there but a lot of the other African markets still a little bit painful even though there's players like Flutterway, Belafar that are doing interesting things. There's all these huge population markets don't have the proper info and that's what we're trying to go.

Either we're going go try to solve it if there is an exchange and someone and be a network of networks play there or we may go get licensed or we may find a local bank partner and help bring the market maker there. I think all of those options are on the table for us, right? So this is the best part of the chat where like, I don't know, most of the people had stuck around for the big announcement. Yeah. The real like the nerds are Yeah. Here, you know. You've just closed this round. Congrats.

I don't think I said that in the beginning. Thank you. It's not easy to do that. You speak to a lot of investors really really even forward looking. Like if you think about a VC, VCs are paid to

make good decisions, but also research. Like where is this all going? Yeah. You've just finished talking to dozens and dozens of these people. What were some of these key themes that were common misconceptions about latitude?

Things that you think maybe a handful of them might not be getting yet. Like, were some of these things that might be misunderstood or things that you heard thematically that you wanna just like, hey, this is here's the truth. Shout out to VC friends. We ran into one on the way here. Yes, did. Leon's bagels. I hate fundraising but it's a That's little bit tough. Necessary part of the business. But at the same time I appreciate you need the capital to grow. You know, one thing is the process.

Our seed investment, very supportive during this process. He was coaching us through raising the Series A, and even though it ended up only taking us about three to four weeks end to end, he was like, Dude, you're getting in the door with all these major investors, you're getting second meetings, they're all meeting with you in person. He was saying, Be patient. You're being impatient because this thing usually takes three or four months for the amount of money you're asking for, especially with how early you are.

With that in mind, our approach was like let's meet everyone in person, back to back New York, Bay Area and then as many as can get in person and so it was grueling. The other thing we did is we went aggressive and we didn't get aggressive just to be aggressive. We got aggressive because our strategy we felt long term will be differentiated.

And again I've glossed on it here but to just over summarize is like getting regulated on day one was very important and we had a lot to show for it over the 40 plus states approved, now 45. Building a network that's differentiated, it's not completely there yet. We saw the building blocks, we had banks part of the networks exchanges and the network of network strategy. And then our team.

You know we're not the twenty year old YC startups and I love those times but we're a little bit more grey haired and we had experience from Stripe Point with Uber. But it also meant we've seen how to scale these places... Scale internationally like an Uber, like Stripe with Payouts. And so I think the combination of those things was what we were going in with.

The tough part in Sell was that because we took this methodical approach first to get regulated first, we had great early design users and we had a really strong pop up, still do with major enterprises part of it. But we weren't raising with 5,000,000 ARR or 10,000,000 ARR. It wasn't a revenue story yet, but we did that. We told our seed investors that's what we were going to do. We were going to build a working product. We could settle in 50 countries under two minutes.

The challenging part was that there's been so many stablecoin cross border companies, so that's challenging part number one. How do you differentiate between all of them? And it's hard to explain, even me doing it on this podcast in long form, it's sort of hard to resonate. Fact that no one's first built through US regulation, no one's second built this international network and that is network of networks. And third, there's this team that has to know how to do it, how to get into markets, how to grill and operate.

So that's what we have to show investors of. And I think some of the ones that passed were passing very politely. One of them even called us the Avengers and the Stablecoins, our team, Avengers and the Stablecoin era, but we'd like to see a little bit more revenue traction first. What the lesson for us was, Rick being a supporter for us in the seed phase, if we were raising 15,000,000 to $20,000,000 I think we would have gotten it done in three, four days.

But we were asking for 35,000,000 because we felt licensing is still going to be important. Again, go back to the Coinbase story you were asking me. They didn't just do it in The US, they hired me and others in Europe to do it there and other markets. So we know we're going to have to do something very similar. We know that's going to be painful. We can do it more efficient in the age of AI. We may not need 20 compliance people, can use three or four and put AI tools at their disposal.

We need to keep talking about this country specific go to market. Yeah. Keep that Yeah. That's my idea. Talk more about that. But... Country by country, bit by bit, you know, and so that capital is needed. If we didn't raise that capital, we couldn't really grow in the way we wanted. Right? And so having a thesis driven investor like Oak was very important.

We had a few others that were similar that were competitive in the process, but we felt Oak who had been a part of Circle and Paxos early, who had been a part of Bridge, who's improved, who's in a lot of fintechs. Having a partner who understood what we're trying to do and was patient, patient in the short term, patient in the long term is a term that we use internally, to say we've got to move fast but we've got to do it the right way.

We move with urgency, we take that Uber launching mentality but we still want to do it the right way. Getting licensed, building the network because if we're going to win enterprises, the one thing that I found with anyone who's claiming to do stable and cross border, again Bridge and BB and K are good companies, they do a lot of enterprises, but I haven't seen enterprises do cross border volume with any major stablecoin companies.

And I believe we'll be one to crack that, and so if we can do that, and why do we do that? Again, licensing, compliance, all of that in house, and if we can do that the right way we believe we can win enterprises which is the real long term prize. That's what Oak wants, right? You can serve these big brands, the deals doing everything and eventually Visa, Zelle announced Stablecoins, all these big brands is who you really want to enable to support while still supporting small business to be clear.

That's the big part of our ethos and so that was the important part of fundraising for me. It did take a lot of patience. My co founder of Eck was asking me how do you become so patient and calm during all these rejections that were happening? I think one is I'm faith driven and it's not the most important for me. I'm family driven, but I believe we're doing the right thing and the right thesis driven investor will come. That proved to be true with Oak. That's

really good. So how did you formally

start the company? It's been how long now? I mean we incorporated in late twenty four, but we finished the race in January '25, it's been about a little over a year and a half, and we just closed the Series A three, four months ago. Came out of stealth three, four months ago as well. We did those things at the same time, so. As you've built the business and you've seen this thesis that you've had, the initial spark, be right.

Be directionally correct. Essentially like right on the money. And specifically the piece of the stack around last mile. In my view, this is where all the action is right now. Yeah. What has it been like being right but also seeing others in their approach also kind of point toward this direction?

How does it feel as a founder to feel the validation of like, hey, we're going in the right direction but also potentially see, okay, there are others who are maybe taking a similar approach or like we're not the only ones. What's the vibe like right now? The one thing I would push back on respectfully

Yeah. I'm gonna channel someone who I admire a lot, rest in peace Kobe Bryant. Job's not finished. We haven't won. I don't think we're right yet. I do believe our hypothesis is right and I have conviction on it. We're far from having proven it. I just want our team to remember that as something I say internally like, we're still so early and I don't mean that to be cliche. But getting to your point which I think you're going for is Validation. Is very validation of our hypothesis.

What I firmly believe, and there's other players gonna do this and it's not a winner take all market, is the only thing stopping us from succeeding is our execution ability. Mhmm. And so What I see is we're literally getting referrals from a lot of the wallet providers, a lot of the L1 blockchains that are saying, We have clients that want to use either our wallets or they want to get live on said blockchain, but they lack off ramps in all these markets. They're coming to us, Glad to, can you solve it?

We heard you're moving fast. There's regional players to be clear who offer these off ramps but I haven't seen a global player that does it in a regular way and a network of networks way. That's huge validation. Think validation from the investors who talk to customers every day and said, I see that clearly as a gap. And so it's validating and it's going back to all these experiences that we walked through that sort of formed that hypothesis for us.

And I would say the big challenge for us is how can we execute fast enough? The exact player, the exact solution in every of these markets I mentioned in Indonesia, Japan, Pakistan may not exist today. That's still the challenging part. While I'm validated on we need the off ramps everywhere, we need the stablecoin settlements everywhere, How do you go solve that market by market? Yeah. So that's the biggest undertaking for us I think going forward.

Is that where you, like going back to that point of like these big markets that seem painful but untapped, is that really where you think the biggest opportunity lies? Yep. And what are you doing about that right now? How do you actually unbundle that problem? I think the two sides of it is make sure you have the coverage in the markets that have had maturity and a global coverage. And so that's part one of what we've been doing. We're not all the way there yet.

Part two is these difficult markets that may not yet have a solution, the regulation may not be clear. And so that's where we're going to channel one of my co founders is Brian, CTO of Stripe. My other co founders Vivek Murzaria, he worked with me at Uber and Zerahash. We're going to channel a little bit of that TK from Uber, that Uber launcher mentality is how do we get people in the market that are experienced to know how to launch in that market and just figure out ways to get in there.

Like find the bank partner that's more forward thinking, build a playbook. Some of these markets even advance clear regulation, the central banks will give authority to the bank to do this activity. India is a good example of that. There's a few players, Soup exchanges that are able to do on and off ramps.

There's not a clear genius type framework there, and so how do you get creative in this Uber launcher style mentality to get into these markets, to figure out that bank that's forward moving, to do it in a again approved way, but do it in a way that we're understanding that region, we're understanding that local market. And so phase two now that we have the capital is getting these launcher type mentalities to go in and figure out these playbooks and repeat that and going on. We saw that at Uber work really well.

Not apples to apples because Uber wasn't moving money and so the regulation's different, but that mentality of building that playbook, feeling the pain, getting in quickly, acting with urgency is sort of what this next phase of Latitude is. It's so exciting. Yeah. Okay. So next phase of Latitude as we kind of turn the corner here. When you think about success,

we talk a year from now, what needs to be true for you to be really excited or satisfied? You said Kobe Bryant, so maybe you'll never be satisfied. But what are some really key goals as you guys end the year and kind of kick off this like huge window of execution phase for the business and how can the listeners and people who are like tuned into this conversation

help you guys accelerate? What are the goals and what do you need? Great question. I keep saying impatient in the short term, patient in the long term. There's been these companies that built these global networks in the fiat side that took ten years to do it, right? And so we do need to understand it takes a while to build this sort of network, but in mid-twenty twenty seven I would say we want to be live in 30 plus currencies around the world, maybe up to 50 for the off ramps.

We want to have licensing built in The US and several other markets where we're the licensed local player. And then we want to have... Now we've built a lot of the infrastructure. We should have several enterprises using us and when they use us, there's a very important point. I think this is one of the hot takes we talked about off the record. One thing I see enterprises doing when they get into the space is what we did with Stripe is like, oh, they're stablecoins, they're cool, they're getting adopted.

I'm going pay out my contractor or my freelancer or my business in a stablecoin. And I talked to all these brands today and I'm like, How's that going for you? Have a billion in my let's just say it's a billion in my core flows. What's your stable and payout flows? They're like less than half a percent or half a half a percent. If you had an off ramp for those flows, I believe that could grow into at least 5% if not 10%.

So it's important to say when you have a logo that's an enterprise on your website, it's good and we want that of course, but we want to be in their core flows. We want to be in the core flow of how you move money to pay your vendors. We want to be in the core flow for how you pay out your contractors, end up in fiat, not just end up in a stablecoin. We want to be in the core flow where if you're building a global Venmo, they're not thinking about their seed facing crypto wallet. It's just simple.

It's been paid out either in their wallet and it looks like a dollar and it happens to be a crypto wallet but it looks like a Web2 wallet, or it's paid out in your bank account. And so I would say success in 2017 is network of networks built regulation is coming along, but we have enterprises and we're in their core flows, right? Not just these vanity stablecoin pilots, right? I think those are cool, love them, but in core flows is how latitude really disrupts. Yeah.

Are these conversations from your experience typically like, hey, you have this flow going on, give us like part of it so we can kind of prove our value. Is that... It always starts that way where I'm under no impressions that someone's gonna say, oh, I'm gonna do a 100% of volume with you overnight. And we're happy with that. We're like, give us a percent of your volume. Yeah. Prove that we can do it. We're confident and reliable and that's usually how these enterprise conversations start.

We'll start with the pilot, you prove it well, we'll go beyond the pilot. And again, I'll just call one more time is why the stable and payout only pilots, I never see scale beyond that. Sure. And so if we start a pilot that says, sure, we'll start with stable and payouts, we can go beyond that, we think we can actually scale from 1% to five to 10% of these enterprise volumes.

You know, listen, everyone in payments still ends up using a few providers, but we believe if we're getting into 10%, 15%, 20% of these enterprise flows, we're really going to disrupt the space. And that's not even thinking about future, we could talk about agentic or all things, these other new flows that could exist. Sky's the limit. I'll mention one more Uber anecdote that you didn't ask for but I'm going to go into. When they made taking that taxi experience so much easier, it changed the whole industry.

I'll give you one anecdote. When we were at Uber, they gave the stat that the market cap if you look at taxi rides on its own based on GMV and all of these things, the market cap of the taxi industry in San Francisco was about 200,000,000. I'm very abbreviating here or sorry rounding here. Fast forward six, seven years when I was at Uber, the Uber market cap in San Francisco alone, not just taxis, Uber alone, not Lyft and all Volume going was 2,000,000,000. 2,000,000,000. Right. Crazy.

And so you made it so much easier to take a ride that you just grew the whole industry. And we believe like if you make it so much easier for now to do cross border payments with stables but still get out to local currencies, just thinking about the current TAM is not thinking big enough. We think this TAM could explode with all these new use cases and I think that's a very important point. I've seen it firsthand. When you make it easier, can't even imagine what will grow.

These are use cases you're going to ask me about. I'm talking about neo banks today and contractor payouts. There's something I'm not thinking about next year and I think that's what Bridge did well for example. They built an API that people build on. We're doing similar but globally and so what are the use cases going to pop on, you know, come out of that global use case, right? Yep. I think that's very exciting. I find those that really understand the opportunity,

they're not thinking just about what's the piece of the pie that exists today that I can win? It's like with this technology and why we're so passionate about covering this is with this technology, the possibilities and the volumes and speed and the competitive edge, anyone who works in payments long enough, trading long enough, whatever the use case is, it's like the edge will go to those who move the fastest for the least amount of money. Yep. And it's just a continuous game of who does that best.

We're starting to see I think that competitive, some of these clients that start using Latitude, they're a competitor seeing that like, oh, like they're moving faster, they're moving cheaper. Like we're just now starting to enter that phase and it's gonna be really fun to see that 10x or that Uber style Yeah. Happen. I hope in the next one to three years, we're gonna really start feeling that. That's why I tell our team all the time, we're early.

Sometimes you get a little bit, okay, these conversations take forever. Oh, that's too early. We're not like early where we're like back when the call centers were like thinking Of course. Like they'll be like, it's happening but it's validated. Yeah. And that lesson I told you about leaving Coinbase and thinking USCC hadn't grown,

I just channeled that internally as like, we're building the building blocks now. I know that growth will come if we execute, right? That's on us to execute. Yeah. Well Strel, very

one grateful for you as the new sponsor of the show. Excited to be in the journey with you. Yeah. Anything as we kind of close that you want to leave the audience with? Things that we may have missed or just... Yeah. Mean you asked me a little bit of what we need from people. Yeah. You know Latitude,

building this global payouts and settlement with stablecoins. The two products Fiat payouts if you're a marketplace that needs payouts globally, stablecoins or fiat we can help. If you're a neobank prediction market, any fintech app that's bringing stables globally into your apps beyond and off ramps. We think we can help. Ping me, I'm latitude, handle is RTP on Twitter, rx, r real time payments or sierrolmatthew or just ping me sierrolatitude. Xyz.

And partners, If you're in one of those markets that I mentioned is hard in Japan, Indonesia, Southeast Asia, you're a bank thinking about giving liquidity to stables and doing off ramps, you're a payment provider and you need that right pilot partner or thought partner, we believe we can help accelerate or investors who know these partners, we would welcome that opportunity. I just wanna say thank you for having us on. We're a fan for what you do for the space and how you guys do it. So appreciate you having us on.

Appreciate it, man. Thanks for coming on. Cool. Thanks. So fun.