# Bastion closes $22M strategic round led by Coinbase, Samsung and Sony

Stableminded, a Stabledash show. Jun 17, 2026. Nassim Eddequiouaq.
https://live.stabledash.com/shows/stableminded/episodes/nassim-eddequiouaq-on-building-libras-wallet-joining-a16z-G9XmRU_6vb8

The stablecoin infrastructure company is betting on custodial wallets, bank charters and Asia's corporates, starting with a stablecoin for Sony Bank.

Bastion has closed a strategic round of about $22M led by Coinbase, Samsung and Sony, with NEC, BROG and Hashed taking part. Co-founder and CEO Nassim Eddequiouaq says the round brings the company's total raised to about $47M.

## From Libra to bank charters

Nassim Eddequiouaq co-created the wallet infrastructure and key management for the Libra project at Meta. He then joined a16z crypto as chief security officer after, as he puts it, the US government decided to "not so politely kill" Libra.

Today Bastion works as a full-stack provider under a bank's charter, handling the technology and operations. He says customers can start under Bastion's license and move to their own over time, and its wallets support both segregated and omnibus setups.

## Sony Bank and Asia

Bastion will launch Sony's Stablecoin for Sony Bank through its issuance platform. Nassim Eddequiouaq describes the ambition this way: "Let's replace Visa across the entire ecosystem." He says Sony Bank wants to be able to reverse transactions in cases of account takeover and phishing.

Nassim Eddequiouaq says Asia is "going berserk" on stablecoins. As the yen moves away from negative rates, with short-term rates getting close to 1%, he says Japanese institutions are expanding globally. He points to investor NTT, which has over 90 million users in Japan.

## Policy and yield

He says the GENIUS Act "unlocked a ton" for enterprises. He cites White House research finding that paying yield to consumers would affect deposit flight by only 0.02%, and he expects a negotiated deal within the next few weeks.

## Why adoption is slow

Nassim Eddequiouaq says stablecoins cannot match the FX rates of JP Morgan or Citibank, and that accounting, fraud management, merchant-of-record and tax handling remain. He expects processors and banks to use stablecoins for settlement and widen their margins before cutting prices. He also wants Bastion to act as a clearinghouse between the stablecoins it issues, reusing KYC across ecosystems the way Stripe Link does.

Nassim Eddequiouaq calls Visa Inc "the Holy Grail" and takes from its history that a network should centralize its key structure and decentralize the rails it runs on. He says the custodial wallet thesis took longer to play out than he first expected, but enterprises now ask first whether their funds are safe and compliant, and even non-custodial wallet companies are coming to Bastion.

## Key takeaways

1. Bastion closed a strategic round of about $22M led by Coinbase, Samsung and Sony, bringing its total funding to about $47M.
2. Bastion will launch Sony's Stablecoin for Sony Bank through its issuance platform, with the goal of replacing Visa Inc across the Sony ecosystem.
3. Nassim Eddequiouaq says stablecoin savings are smaller than widely understood, so adoption is slower than the industry expected.

## Chapters

- 0:00 Preview of Asia, FX limits and the Sony Visa replacement idea
- 1:25 Bastion offers compliant stablecoin services under its own or others' licenses
- 3:53 From Apple and Anchorage to Libra, a16z and Bastion
- 6:44 Libra's failure taught staying narrowly focused on one thing
- 11:07 Sony Bank will launch its stablecoin on Bastion's issuance platform
- 17:53 Pick investors by capital utility, including strategic corporate funds
- 22:48 Rising yen rates push Japanese institutions abroad through stablecoins
- 25:58 GENIUS Act opened the floodgates and a yield deal looks near
- 32:55 A common issuer can act as clearinghouse between stablecoins
- 39:27 Visa shows a centralized network on decentralized rails can win
- 42:35 Adoption is slow because stablecoins save less than people think
- 49:26 Custodial wallets took longer to win, but enterprises now want them

## Transcript

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (0:01)

Asia is going berserk on stablecoins at a

**Drew Rogers** (0:04)

level that is hard

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (0:05)

for people to understand. People in the stablecoin industry or just generally in the digital asset space not understanding payments, treasury, fraud, and kind of like all of the landscape around it. The optimization that you're actually building is much smaller than what is typically understood. You're never going to be able to match the FX rate that you're going to get from a JP Morgan or a Citibank. You can't replace it with stablecoins until we have levels of liquidity that are completely absurd on-chain.

So a bank can actually use us under their charter and still perform all of these activities seamlessly and we take care of the technology, the operations, etc. We're going to be launching Sony's stablecoin for Sony Bank. Let's replace Visa across the entire ecosystem. Let's just move money 24-7 seamlessly across the entire ecosystem and you would be a fool not to integrate essentially that new form of payment.

**Drew Rogers** (0:57)

Hey, it's Drew. Quick thank you to Altitude for making this episode possible. Altitude is rebuilding business banking for teams on the frontier. They offer the full stack for the modern CFO and founder, a beautifully designed platform for payouts, bill pay, corporate cards, enterprise controls, and so much more. Move money with speed, yield, and total control, all from your stablecoin balance. Operate at Altitude. If your business is on the frontier, your finances should be too. You can learn more at altitude.xyz.

Nass, how are we doing, man?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (1:26)

Good, and you? Thank you so much for having

**Drew Rogers** (1:28)

me. Always a pleasure. Selfishly, I wanted you here because I just wanted to catch up with you. I always enjoy our conversations, and I'm really excited to hear the latest with Bastion and how things have been going. Yeah, love every time we have a chance to catch up, so appreciate you taking the time.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (1:44)

Yeah, of course. I'm excited for the conversation today.

**Drew Rogers** (1:46)

So welcome to Stableminded. We interviewed you for the live show back when the USDH craze was going on. That was wild. That was an interesting week. I haven't caught up since then, but let's start with the current intro of Bastion and how you're positioning the company right now. Give the elevator pitch in terms of your So there's so much to talk about here, but let's start high level.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (2:16)

That sounds great. So for context, Bastion is really enterprise-grade stablecoin services, and that really is kind of like the infrastructure that supports building stablecoin ecosystems and products. So custodial wallets, we have on and off ramps, we have issuance, and everything is offered compliant, out of the box.

With APIs, something that actually we came across that is actually becoming more and more interesting for large institutions that we're talking to and are onboarding actually is not only us being the license party, but also doing this activity as a full stack service provider under someone else's license, right? So a bank can actually use us under their charter and still perform all of these activities seamlessly and we take care of the technology, the operations, et cetera.

So it's a very interesting kind of like model. So I'm a co-founder and CEO, which means that my job is tackling the most important risks of the business and setting the strategy and the vision for the company. More specifically, I handle a lot of things around sales, product, technology, and oversee a lot of Where we're headed, but more importantly, where we should not head towards.

And the conflict touches on kind of like the geographic location, the different types of models for the type of regulated services that we offer, et cetera. It's a very complex, it's way more complex than building pure technology, right? Where you have, I build a product, it's pure technology and software, and I decide like which feature to add or not to add. Right, and then you can make it available anywhere. Here it's a lot more complex when you talk about highly regulated services.

**Drew Rogers** (3:53)

Position a little bit of the track record as well. What were you doing before Bastion? You've had some really influential and interesting pit stops along the way. What were some of these key contributions and career moments that you were doing before Bastion?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (4:08)

Yeah,

**Drew Rogers** (4:10)

you've only said this like a million times.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (4:13)

I can do it very fast. So my background is in security engineering and a lot of trust management and key management. And before crypto, I was at Apple in the security team working in the trusted execution environment team, like a lot of HSMs, a lot of key management. Then I moved to Docker, more kind of like development and cloud infrastructure side of things. Again, working on a lot of key management. The thing that I realized then is that everyone is trying to manage trust.

Everyone is trying to manage keys in a way that with, you know, PKIs, public key infrastructure, we're kind of like rebuilding a blockchain ultimately. Every single time that a company becomes big enough to the point of Google, Facebook, sorry, Meta, et cetera, you end up just building a blockchain. And so I just realized that it was the right thing essentially to join at that time. And I was working actually with the two founders, soon to be founders of Anchorage at Docker.

And then when they started Anchorage brought me in already alongside a few others and then built the key management solution at Anchorage, saw the institutional side. Really interesting building infrastructure for institutions. kind of, to me, hit a ceiling at some point because I realized that once you have institutional capital that can enter the space, you need to make the technology available for everyone to benefit from blockchains, especially for payments.

I really connected with David Marcus's vision of sending money should be as cheap as texting people or sending emails, which is $0. And so I decided to join the Libra project at Meta. And kind of co-created the wallet infrastructure, key management, et cetera, and then moved to Andreessen when the US government decided to not so politely kill the Libra project and joined as a chief security officer on the crypto funds with the incredible team at a16z.

Stayed there to help build out the security for the firm and also the security of the portfolio companies for a couple of years. And then at some point realized now is the right time. Institutions are coming to the space. Let's build the regulated and compliant platform that allows them to enter the space safely and build global products with the technology.

**Drew Rogers** (6:19)

Stig Brodersen Yeah. So many key roles there, so many key learnings there. When you think about the current moment you're in, you've gone through some significant fundraising. How long has it been now? About almost two years, roughly? Stig

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (6:32)

Brodersen Yeah, three years actually. Stig Brodersen Three

**Drew Rogers** (6:34)

years into building the business. What's the total fundraised at this point?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (6:38)

We just closed our strategic round of about like 22 million, so 47 million.

**Drew Rogers** (6:44)

Okay, approaching 50 million fundraised.

Right now in this moment, I'd imagine as you're growing and scaling and going through this process of building Bastion, there are probably moments along the way where you can kind of pull back into those experiences and take learnings or take things that you saw like leaders like David Marcus go through or Christian go through like what lately are maybe some examples of moments where you were maybe riding shotgun or you were on the team and you saw leaders like that or teams like that decisions get made in those rooms that you're actually now deploying as learnings first party as as now the leader of this ship anything lately what are some moments that you're pulling from in in the current moment of the company

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (7:30)

Well, this is such a good question. I would actually flip it back a little bit, and I think that taking the key learnings of what didn't work is oftentimes more important, because those situations are more deterministic, I feel like, than the ones that actually did work. Things that didn't work, I remember, for example, on the Libra project, the reality is that Meta at the time was trying to, just right after the whole Cambridge Analytica thing, they just tried to do too much.

They tried to launch a blockchain, launch a wallet, launch a currency. The reality is that you should start narrowly focused on one thing, do this thing extremely well, take the hit of not doing the rest, and then build upon that over time. And I think that kind of taking the key learning from that of what not to do, which is just expand too quickly, too fast, stay laser focused.

on one thing doing extremely well and build on top of that I think is kind of like a key learning that I think about every single day which is really hard because as we were discussing right after right before this conversation companies that we target especially on the larger enterprise side right like the Sony and others they don't buy one product right they buy a platform they buy a one-stop shop solution so that they don't need to cobble a bunch of different vendors together So navigating this line of building the bare minimum that you need to get into those conversations and close those deals and provide the platform that they need to build their product is really, really hard because it's going to be expensive in nature, but you have to be laser focused on doing one thing and doing it extremely well.

**Drew Rogers** (9:12)

What is that one thing for you today? How are you defining that core focus today versus when you were originally getting the, what you joke is like an avocado-sized seed round from A16z? Is that how you say

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (9:25)

it? Mango

**Drew Rogers** (9:29)

seeds from A16z. When you first started versus now, how has that focus changed or evolved for you?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (9:36)

Yeah, I think one thing that was great for us is that we started with custodial wallets, which was not really the flavor of the month at the time.

**Drew Rogers** (9:46)

You're using the word custodial a lot. That was also something that was a no-no for a while. Regulated was the word.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (9:52)

Exactly.

**Drew Rogers** (9:52)

We're back to custodial now.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (9:54)

Exactly. I think that the reality is that at the time things were very much moving in the non-custodial kind of like wallet direction and to be able to launch in many jurisdictions very quickly, right? Which is very important. But the way we thought about it is that over time you can build so many products on top of that, right? Like we've built on an offering on top of our wallet infrastructure. We've built issuance on top of our wallet infrastructure. And because for the on and off ramp, you don't have a choice.

It has to be custodial. For issuance, it's the same thing. You don't have a choice. It has to be custodial to manage those keys. Then we actually, by building a strong foundation, it actually accelerated us much faster as we built more product on top of it. And so this focus on getting a foundation that is extremely robust was super, super important for us. And we're investing a lot into it.

**Drew Rogers** (10:49)

Where is the investment going right now? Is that in terms of maintaining or building some of those on-off ramp issuance? Is it putting more toward what's working or is there investment going toward more of the ecosystem of things that might not exist yet? How are you thinking about that?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (11:07)

Yeah, we've built a robust issuance infrastructure and we're going to be launching Sony's stablecoin for Sony Bank through that issuance platform. But the reality is that Sony and Sony Bank and the Sony ecosystem and as well as other large clients that we can't unfortunately announce yet want to leverage Wallets and on and off ramp to be able to make those stablecoins available and useful, right?

Whether that's for merchants, creators, users, it might be for internal entities all around the world who want to be able to move capital at light speed rather than having to wait, you know, multiple days sometimes with locked liquidity. And so having the flexibility of a wallet solution that can accommodate for all of those things And now we're investing a lot in like we're continuing to invest into that.

We're investing a lot into our on and off ramp product as well to be able to just seamlessly switch between fiat and stablecoins across jurisdictions in the US, outside of the US. Leveraging different payment rails is absolutely critical for all of the clients.

**Drew Rogers** (12:13)

Yeah, bring us into the story of Sony. This seems like such a marquee use case for you guys. And speak a little bit about how that relationship came to be. How do you get into a position where one of your first big wins is a company at that size? How did that deal come to be? What was the story there? And then also, it sounds like that part of the world, APAC specifically, is an emerging focus for you. You said you just got back from that. Bring us into what's going on over there.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (12:42)

Yeah, so Sony Bank is really interesting because within this kind of general Sony umbrella, you have a ton of different companies that do very different things, right? You have Sony Semiconductor that produces most of the image sensors that your phone, my phone, autonomous cars are using, right? So they own that market. You have PlayStation, you have Crunchyroll, you have just Sony Entertainment, Sony Music. Most of the creators, 100%. Most of the creators on the music side and artists are signed with them.

And so all those businesses are so complex. Part of Sony is actually Sony Financial Group. And under Sony Financial Group, you have Sony Bank, which is actually a very successful bank in Japan. And they are extremely excited about expanding beyond Japan and coming into the US market, providing financial services, not just in Japan, but also elsewhere.

And especially the US market is ripe for disruption for them because they can provide a lot of those financial services to the rest of the Sony ecosystem, the Sony group, right? There's no really a reason for, frankly, for the rest of the Sony ecosystem to use

**Drew Rogers** (13:57)

another bank than the one that you have in-house.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (13:59)

So we were in conversations with them very early as part of this kind of like strategy building and especially through the venture fund and Sony Innovation Fund invested in Bastion, an incredible team, by the way. And we've essentially got connected with the Sony Bank team. And I think that we connected at a very deep level with their vision. We understood exactly what they wanted to achieve and they understood our compliance first approach. With kind of like the set of tools that we had built.

And so with that, we decided to start the journey together, really. They were working with them, not just on the technology and the operations, et cetera, but also the strategy of how to go about it, how to actually deploy stablecoins and wallets and on and off ramps as part of all this existing infrastructure, right? Like PlayStation is not starting from scratch or other companies, like none of them are.

But you want to be able to provide a very strong data-first, data-backed case for every single use case across the ecosystem that stablecoins can be better than the fiat alternative. And they can be so meaningfully better that you would be a fool not to integrate essentially that new form of payment. Let's replace Visa across the entire ecosystem. Let's just move money 24-7 seamlessly across the entire ecosystem and people can call that a closed loop, but at the scale of Sony, you know, that's gigantic.

**Drew Rogers** (15:26)

It's interesting because by working with them strategically on the VC side and getting the adoption on the bank side, You're almost opening yourself up to a whole basket of customer opportunities that are within this network that is owned and controlled by them that can almost...

I'd imagine if I'm putting myself in your shoes, it would get me really excited because if you can wedge yourself into some of these business models, you can kind of get an interesting go-to-market recipe for all of these use cases across different things on the sentiment of like, doing one thing well and like focusing this seems to me to be like a risky where do we start kind of problem within this massive ecosystem that sony is like how are you guys practically short term what's the first thing you're trying to launch with them like how are you identifying that

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (16:13)

Yeah, so I can't really share the first thing that is going to be launched, but yeah, you're right. You essentially have BDC use cases with them facing retail users, right? In Japan specifically? No, no, in the US, Japan, and others. Let's say kind of like the consumers that are in the Sony ecosystem, whether they're subscribers to one of the, or gamers, et cetera.

Imagine a world where you have so many touch points for them, you have several companies, you have to pick one and you have to just start building the data from here, right? And then you get kind of like this repeatable case study that you can bring to others and It's really also interesting because the large companies have also oftentimes dedicated teams that will build common infrastructure, right? That can be leveraged by every single upco, every single kind of company within the group.

And so this is also a kind of an important partner that we want to have as part of this relationship is trying to integrate once and then be distributed many times as well.

**Drew Rogers** (17:20)

But it is really important

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (17:22)

to start with one use case, right? Like our goal is essentially having one case study on the consumer side. And case study is pretty broad, as you can imagine. It's just very large scale. Just making one work really well on the consumer side and then one work really well on the internal money movement side as well. That gives us the repeatability on treasury use case and internal money movements and internal operation optimization use cases.

So having those two is extremely important for us and then kind of like making that repeatable.

**Drew Rogers** (17:53)

Yeah, so segueing a little bit. For this show specifically, a theme that we're having is founders building things on the frontier, people who are really pushing the edge of what's possible with the businesses they're growing or the products they're building. And something that has always seemed so obvious to me about you as we work together directly, it's like you are an incredible leader, but fundraiser specifically. You are able to inspire people to trust you, to put capital behind you.

I think there are a lot of founders that are listening to this. We probably have the majority, about half, if I'm guessing, of our listeners are founders or product leaders building businesses.

What you've learned raising capital, you've sat in that position as a founder, you've also sat in that position At a16z, on the other side of the table, what are some things that you feel like are secret weapons or things that you've learned really work well that has allowed you to keep passion going and keep capital coming in that founders who are trying to do the same thing should know that you may often see not happening right now? A little fundraising masterclass in the middle of the episode.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (19:01)

I would put essentially the types of investors in three categories. I would say there is the big household name VCs, right? There are smaller funds that contribute actually generally a lot in terms of supporting you as well, right? And then there is the strategic capital that can come from CVCs, which is corporate venture capital. So it's going to be the venture arm. The Sony Innovation Fund, Samsung Next, etc.

And I think that you have to constantly think about the, I need to put the name on it, I would say kind of like the capital utility, right? That's the amount of dollars that you're getting divided by the support that you're going to get from that investor. And I think that just making sure that you're constantly getting the most out of the capital that is coming in is absolutely critical. And sometimes that means taking a pretty different approach than most companies.

So for example, for us, our last round, It might not look like a traditional round, but it was led by Coinbase, Samsung and Sony coming in, NTT coming in, Biproji and NEC, who are major system integrators out of Japan, and Hashed, which is like prominent VC, especially out of Asia. You have to have the capital that aligns with, that is going to provide you utility for what you need as a business.

If what you need as a business is closing companies on the other side of the world that are typically large enterprises and won't talk to you otherwise, then you might want to optimize for a specific jurisdiction from those venture capital firms that are well connected. You may want to optimize for CVCs as part of your investment, right? And so your cap table might just look different from A company that is just very US-centric, wants to focus on getting all the household name large venture funds.

We get a tremendous amount of support from a16z, right? a16z Crypto has been by far the most helpful fund I've seen in my entire life across companies, not just at Bastion.

**Drew Rogers** (21:11)

What does that look like? What are they doing to help you support?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (21:14)

I mean, you know, our CTO, he was introduced to us by a16z. Many of our employees actually come from introductions and supports by a16z's talent team. The go-to-market team is constantly connecting us with all of the largest corporates and startups for our mid-market sales motion.

**Drew Rogers** (21:32)

I know Mark, I recall, has been a really key I don't know if you still have regular calls with him, but they seem very connected to you personally as like supporting you as an individual as well.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (21:48)

There is support at a kind of like founder growth support. There is like just leadership and just being better at making decisions. Sometimes it's just telling you what the hard thing that you need to hear, right? Of like what's helping you debug basically. And oftentimes the problem is you as the founder and they help you through that process. They help you kind of give you the lay of the land of like what's working and what's not working that you might just be too deep in your own company to look at.

There's just like a very broad range, but I would say regulatory, it's been incredibly helpful. Public policy as well, very impactful for us, you know, where the Genius Act and the Clarity Act and Market Structure Bill are extremely important for us, right? They dictate who we can share yield with and our activities as an issuer.

Having the support from a venture fund who is so deeply connected essentially to all the source of information and can relay to you this information before everyone else is incredibly powerful. So we optimize for that, like really just getting connected to all those large enterprises and companies in the US. The reality is that we also care a lot about Asia. Asia is going berserk on stablecoins at a level that is hard for people to understand.

**Drew Rogers** (23:07)

What does that look like right now? What do you

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (23:09)

mean? You have to go to understand because the financial markets in Japan are incredibly strong. The yen is really the only free-flowing currency in all of Asia. And the problem is that for the longest time, the yen had a risk profile and a yield profile that were less interesting, right? So the currency was getting devaluated, the obviously problem with the size of the population. So like the TAM of these companies just decreases over time, right? people get older, the population shrinks.

So companies and financial institutions and the yen specifically was getting devaluated and the interest rates were negative, which means that you're losing money as you're holding the asset, which is completely different from And so now that it's completely reversed, the interest rates are like getting close to 1% on the short term rate and like very fast growing. The economy is really stabilizing and getting stronger and stronger.

And those companies, all those financial institutions are realizing our time is shrinking. We need to expand outside of Japan. They've maximized like some of the companies. If you look at NTT, for example, who invested in Bastion and has been an incredible partner so far. If you look at just their raw numbers, they have over 90 million users in Japan. They're not a lot more than 90 million people with a phone in age of like actually using a digital wallet, right?

And they have almost all that population as customers. How do you sell more? You have two options. Either you sell more financial services to the people that you already have as customers, or you expand. How do you do those things? Stablecoins and on-chain financial products. And so they've realized that this is the next opportunity for them is expanding globally, doing the thing that they do extremely well in Japan, outside of Japan, starting with the rest of Asia, sometimes the US.

We're starting to see SMBC and others really kind of do more in the US and outside of Japan, but really expanding and stablecoins are the primary opportunity for that because they don't need to get a banking license in each one of those jurisdictions. They can really just easily Build their stablecoin, make it available in wallets, on an off-ramp infrastructure, everything that we know, and then build a stack that looks like what they have in Japan, but then expand it.

And then in Japan, they can start expanding access to financial services that get tokenized, access to Aave, access to lending protocol and other vaults that may have different strategies. Directly back home. And so we're seeing a lot of interest on those two things. And Asia is ripe for disruption today.

**Drew Rogers** (25:58)

Got to connect you with Mario. That would be a good one. Yeah, thinking about the use case here and specifically around compliance and regulation and some of these, I don't want to put those two things in the same bucket. I'll say specifically regulation.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (26:09)

What have

**Drew Rogers** (26:10)

you realized lately? We're in a kind of weird limbo moment, it feels like with some of this, with Clarity, with Bastion and how it's structured and the trust charter and acquiring that and going through that process. Regulation seems like a really, really key thing for what makes Bastion great, what makes Bastion unique, how you can offer services like what you're doing. What's the current state of the union in your mind of the conviction of we're going regulation first, we're going custodial first?

Is that thesis playing out successfully in your mind, if you're being honest? Is that still strongly held? And also just what's the current feeling around some of the regulatory clarity that The Frontier is apparently coming soon. What are the things that maybe the policy side of a16z you've mentioned is very helpful? What are they saying to you right now?

How are you bringing us in a little bit to your mind around the current state of regulatory clarity with things like yield and some of the stuff and how is that impacting what you're building tomorrow? Loaded question,

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (27:11)

but got to ask. A few questions there. I'm going to take the second one first. So in terms of the regulations, there were really two parts. The first one was obviously the Genius Act and that just unlocked a ton, right? Companies realized, okay, The current administration is actually behind this. We're actually pushing that. Entering the digital asset and stablecoin space is not going to be resulting in massive issues with the current administration. Let's try to do something.

And so it kind of opened the floodgates. Phones started ringing tremendously after that. I think that, and that was true for holding stablecoins, moving stablecoins, right? And then the question came around the yield and issuing a stablecoin because most companies, large companies want to issue their own stablecoin. They want the economics. They want the risk management. They want to have full control over those. We saw that with like the Drift hack, like the Drift protocol hack, for example, recently.

Those companies, they want to be in a position where they can control their stablecoin. They can freeze the assets. They can reverse those, revert those transactions because ultimately it's a permission system. A stablecoin is a permission system where the issuer can Undo transactions. And if you think in a world of Sony, for example, like Sony as an ecosystem, Sony Bank wants to be able to revert transactions in the case of account takeovers, in case of phishing.

There are a lot of reasons why you want to be able to undo transactions or have full control. And so there's a tremendous amount of interest in that, but obviously the economics around earning the yield is absolutely critical. And so being able to understand what you do with that yield, with those rewards, Can you build like a loyalty program? How does it change depending on the authorization that you have around the yield sharing?

It's something that some companies decided not to wait for and kind of take the risk essentially to just go forward with the plan. And some companies that we're talking to are still waiting for that to be clarified. Now, I don't know if you saw earlier today, there was kind of the White House put together...

**Drew Rogers** (29:16)

I definitely didn't see whatever you're going to say.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (29:19)

The White House put a research actually underlining that Allowing yields to be distributed to retail and consumers would only impact deposit flight by 0.02%, or something kind of negligible, saying that really the bank deposits are not going to be impacted by the yield. And I think that this is kind of a common view that a lot of people in the industry have, if you actually take more time to do This

**Drew Rogers** (29:50)

was a, just so I'm understanding this, this was like a research, kind of like a one-off, like...

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (29:55)

By the White House.

**Drew Rogers** (29:55)

By the White House came out with this kind of owned research around what they believed to be true, which... From what it sounds like, it's very optimistic toward

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (30:05)

the stablecoin yield being

**Drew Rogers** (30:07)

something that can be...

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (30:08)

And those negotiations are happening. It sounds like in the next few weeks, couple of weeks, we're going to land on a negotiation and hopefully get that to pass before the summer, essentially. And then in the next few weeks would be ideal to get everyone to agree, banks, stablecoin industry, and just move forward with a plan that allows probably with some constraints, some restrictions, It should be on the yield, right?

Like you can't really say, hey, someone in the wild holds a stablecoin, we're just going to distribute to them. There has to be something around compliance. There has to be kind of like a usage for it naturally. But I do believe that we're going to land on something that is very beneficial for the stablecoin industry based on what we're seeing and hearing.

**Drew Rogers** (30:53)

What are you hoping for personally? What do you want to happen?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (30:56)

I mean, I want myself, my family, you to be able to open a bank account or a stablecoin account and be able to get as much return on this and as much rewards as possible. And the bank or the issuer are going to get And the goal is for your Y number to be as close as possible to what they have. But you can't increase that amount if you don't have competition, right? There needs to be competition.

There has to be competition between banks, between financial institutions that are able to provide risk-free rates guaranteed by the US government. And that will apply essentially some pressure For banks really to just share more of their revenue with people, with their own consumers, right? Like it's really just a free, it should be a free market. And so I do think that more competition is just going to be more beneficial. There has to be competition in the free market.

**Drew Rogers** (31:51)

Yeah, it's an interesting place because in some ways either side of how this shakes out, Bastion is still, as an infrastructure, going to still be able to serve whatever reality we find ourselves in.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (32:02)

Yeah, and we serve banks and we serve non-banks, right? We have, we're either the licensed party or we act under someone else's license. The reality is that you can still structure things regardless of kind of like what the outcome is. You can still structure based on the Genius Act so that the yield or kind of like rewards are part of a broader loyalty program. And the companies that we target do have Stablecoin is a global loyalty program.

Whether it's discounts, whether it's the ability to have premium offers as part of the ecosystem, we target companies that have fairly large ecosystems for this issuance product. And so from our standpoint, we're in a good position regardless, but I do think that for the sake of just consumers winning, there has to be more competition around deposits.

**Drew Rogers** (32:55)

I know it's maybe not the best term to use, but it helps me think about like, and we've talked about this many times, I'm going back into a couple of years ago, but the idea of a successful bastion means that you are going to be able to scale these ecosystems and within a certain ecosystem, there's going to be efficiencies that get created as stablecoins get issued, moved and earned within an ecosystem like Sony that we've mentioned. If that happens within just that ecosystem, that's really exciting.

But if Bastion continues to succeed, you're going to start to be able to do that across other ecosystems, across other businesses.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (33:32)

The

**Drew Rogers** (33:33)

network effects of that, I'm thinking, are just extremely powerful. What's the vision that you have for how this really becomes hyper-efficient and then what types of business models do you start to then challenge? You've mentioned like Visa earlier in the conversation, like what business models does that start to challenge where you can start collapsing economics down?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (33:54)

Yeah, I mean, that's the question, right? Like if you're looking at people, companies building wallets, on and off ramps, issuance products, et cetera, what are your network effects? What makes it so that every single time that you add a customer, it builds more value for everyone else that you have as clients? And us, for example, being a common issuer of multiple stablecoins mean that we can actually be pretty much like the clearinghouse between them, right?

Because we can seamlessly convert between one and another. So imagine that you have a Sony coin and someone like a merchant actually receives Sony coins, but they want to their clients into something else. If we're actually the issuer of those two currencies, we can actually do so at one-to-one, right? And not just one-to-one in terms of price, but actually in terms of settlement time, right? The settlement time is also pretty critical. You don't want to wait T plus one for your YROCH or what have you to settle.

And so that's the part where us being Being kind of like a common provider to those companies actually builds a lot of value. Every time that, you know, you become a client of Bastion, you actually get interoperability with the rest of the system. Now we have that around the on and off ramp. We have that around the wallets, right?

If we can actually do KYC in one ecosystem and actually cross match up with someone else that we've done, you know, that is onboarding elsewhere, but that has already done KYC with us, That actually makes it also kind of economies of scales worth it for us. And you can see that with Stripe, right? Like Stripe identity is extremely powerful and Link is very powerful because you've onboarded in one for one merchant and then you log into another one and you don't, you know, you just provide your phone number.

Oh, that's you. I remember you. Okay, no need to KYC. I think that this experience is really what we're aiming for across ecosystems, and we're hoping to launch, can't share too many details, but with one of the largest companies in the world, and that plus that is not Sony, and then that plus Sony plus others will actually give us a tremendous amount of value in terms of reducing the load on the KYC side, making transactions just much more efficient because the addressing is a lot easier.

And then, yeah, with issue ones, we can just do more.

**Drew Rogers** (36:11)

So compare and contrast this a little bit because we started the day with Better Money Company. You used the word clearinghouse and it's interesting because they're building this kind of clearinghouse network for multiple issuers and multiple partners. I believe you guys are a part of this. I'm remembering that you guys launched with them. Exactly. So that for me seems like A similar model, but within other network effects you'll be able to interoperate with, like M0 and Braille and the rest.

What type of efficiencies can get created? You've mentioned compliance within the clearinghouse internally. Is this a Is this where you really start to maximize the revenue for Bastion that you can create? Like I'm imagining if there's like economics built in at the transaction level, you know, things like that can become really, really fast and really low cost. Is that how you're thinking about this when stablecoin sends or transactions happen, clearing house within the family, if you will?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (37:05)

Yeah,

**Drew Rogers** (37:06)

think about it as kind of like concentric circles,

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (37:09)

right? Like you have kind of like you're the platform that you serve directly as the infrastructure provider, right? In our case, that would be kind of like the Sony Bank and Sony ecosystem. And then, and kind of like other clients that we have, this is our inner circle, right? Of like ruthless top efficiency across the board, converting between the stablecoins, sending funds, compliance, et cetera.

Then you have the second layer around it, In the second circle, where this is going to be the partnership that we built, where we have a specific integration with great companies like Better Money that provide interoperability between stablecoins that we issue as well as other issuers, trusted issuers. There, the counterparty risk is also pretty important.

We want to be part of networks that maintain a very high bar from a compliance standpoint, because whoever sources from us needs to also be able to kind of trust the other partners similarly and so this is why you know we're not going to be necessarily building relationship with every single clearing houses kind of like stablecoin native clearing houses out there right you want to maintain a a trust collect level because then over time you can actually adjust your liquidity ratios to actually account for those things you can maybe even do a delayed end of day settlement right if you actually trust This is what a lot of exchanges might be doing.

End of day, you actually settle with Circle or with Tether or others. You don't want to be minting and burning every single time that you receive a request.

**Drew Rogers** (38:44)

That's only possible if you're regulated in a permissioned environment, I'm assuming, because trust it to hold the waiting period.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (38:52)

Exactly. And so you want to make sure that you also have enough trust in the other party to lend them this kind of like intraday liquidity, right? Because that's a credit that you're kind of making. So over time, our goal is essentially building more of these strategic relationships where You know, we want to build relationship with other issuers. I think it's critical. I don't think that there's going to be a gazillion issuers that are going to be trusted. There's going to be strong network effects.

But it's important to have interoperability in between those stablecoins, especially those who are not USDC and Tether, basically.

**Drew Rogers** (39:27)

Yeah. Do you still regard Visa as one of these historic examples of businesses that you look at or success stories that you look at as you think about what's possible with a company like Bastion?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (39:40)

100%.

**Drew Rogers** (39:41)

Are there any others that you think of like business success stories over decades and decades and decades that you think about when you imagine a successful scaled Bastion one day other than Visa?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (39:52)

I think, I mean, Visa is the Holy Grail. They're the absolute... Why do

**Drew Rogers** (39:57)

you say that?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (39:58)

It's the best story ever. It is just like the best story, right? Like they started essentially as kind of like a subset of Bank of America, like Bank of America at the time. Then, and this is kind of like, it reminds me a lot of our industry in a sense, right? Like it was very centralized on company. And then it tried to decentralize by actually being extracted out of Bank of America into something that could be integrated by all the top banks in the US. And they tried to make this model work, right?

Where it's like very decentralized and it's like consortium based and so on. They kind of like failed at it because it was way too hard to get anything done, right?

Like when you have too many companies coming to get, trying to come together from their own vantage point and with their own incentives this is why most bank consortiums or any consortium just fails right like 95 of consortium fell at least and so they had to re-centralize they had one person at the head of it who kind of like re-centralized everything and said like okay i'm just going to be building one entity out of this i'm going to take this out of your hands and we're going to make it extremely efficient and we're going to be redistributing to everyone based on the volume that you bring to the network and this is and then starting from there by getting all the banks on board with still kind of like having this third party handling all of that and then going merchant by merchant right and kind of just acquiring all those merchants Yeah,

**Drew Rogers** (41:26)

it's almost like centralization was the vehicle that allowed them to exist, maintain, grow, and solidify. Without that centralized moment of like taking back control, which some would have in that moment regarded as like a bad thing or a risky thing, whatever, but like that centralization moment. I don't remember what year this was. This was like... I

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (41:50)

think it was 60s.

**Drew Rogers** (41:51)

That laid the foundation for what Visa is today. I don't think if they would have stayed in this decentralized model, someone would have come in and disrupted it somehow.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (41:59)

100%. I do think that this is a key lesson for us that decentralization is just not always the best path. Sometimes the best way to build a network It's to actually centralize the key structure of it, and then you can decentralize the rails that this thing runs on. You can tap into SWIFT, you can tap into ACS, you can tap into blockchains, you can tap into a lot of other things, and then people get to decide, do I use Visa, do I use MasterCard, do I use other things?

But yeah, I do think that Visa is the ultimate business in my mind from this standpoint.

**Drew Rogers** (42:35)

So going back to the practical moment that we're in right now. And the sentiment that I'm feeling, a lot of people we're talking to are feeling is like, we're kind of in this weird limbo or plateau feel. Sentiment with Stablecoins, Agenda Commerce, all this stuff is really, really optimistic. But there's a sense of why isn't this growing as faster than we thought? We have all of the Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Nassim Eddequiouaq on Building Libra's Wallet, Joining a16z Crypto, Powering Sony Bank's Stablecoin.

Drew Rogers, Zach Fowler, Nassim Eddequiouaq on Building Libra's Wallet, Joining a16z Crypto, Powering Sony Bank's Stablecoin.

**Drew Rogers** (43:23)

And if you look at the volumes, it's like they're impressive, but they're not actually as big or as impressive as we thought. Do you feel that way? And do you have an inclination as to why that might be? Any thoughts on like the sentiment right now with some of the customers you're speaking with or leads you're talking to, where that might be coming from?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (43:40)

Yeah, I think people, I think that this is typically a consequence of people in the stablecoin industry or just generally in the digital asset space not understanding payments, treasury, fraud, and kind of like all of the landscape around it. The reality is that take, for example, like treasury use cases.

Citi and JP Morgan and a few others have been able to build systems over decades that are extremely strong at what they aim to do, which is moving large amounts of money into the top currencies at an extremely, extremely cheap price. And you're able to do that very efficiently.

You're never going to be able to match have like the fx rate that you're gonna get from a jp morgan or city bank especially for those like large corporates you can't replace it with with stable coins until we have you know levels of liquidity that are completely absurd on chain

**Drew Rogers** (44:35)

those things those systems

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (44:37)

are integrated into Highly customized treasury management systems such as SAP and Jira Treasury and others that have decades-long contracts with those companies. It's impossible. You can't rip it off. The entire team, the entire treasury team uses that from morning to the evening, and they're just trained on that one thing. And the first question that they're going to ask you is, how does that integrate with SAP? We're not going to replace anything that we have. Just let us know if that integrates nicely with SAP.

And so that's kind of like the mental model. And it's the same thing for the consumer payments, right? Like the stablecoins, when people say like, oh, like you avoid the 2.9% to like 3% fees. The inefficient rail that you're actually swapping out for stablecoins is actually only a smaller portion of those 3%. You have the actual accounting, you have the fraud management, you have the merchant of record and tax handling and reporting.

You have just so many things as part of that that cost a tremendous amount of money and The compliance and KYC transaction monitoring, all those things, case management, so on. Like the optimization that you're actually building is much smaller than what is typically understood, right? So this thing of saying, oh, I'm replacing those 4% with 0.0001 cent, it's kind of like a meme.

**Drew Rogers** (46:04)

You're undermining what is actually baked into everything. Exactly.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (46:08)

And so the optimization that we're going to get to are typically much lower than bar for change is for those large companies, especially the scale that we're talking about. They're already integrated with Stripe and Checkout.com, ADN and others in terms of payment processing. And those payment processors, they're going to be starting to roll things out with stablecoins as well to better optimize and their banks, right? Like these payment processors, banks are also going to become crypto native.

Like LEED is starting to add support for stablecoins natively and others as well. And so I think that You're going to start seeing those margins increase first because they're not going to change the price. And then when there's going to be more competition, they will decrease the price because behind the scenes, stablecoins are already going to be used for settlement. And so we're starting to see that quite a bit.

And I think that this is one of the reasons why we're not seeing the adoption is that there has to be a strong, clear use case that is easy to implement at a scale that justifies change. And

**Drew Rogers** (47:15)

even if there is a justification to change, To your point, there's a lot of stickiness and unwrapping and unfolding, untangling to even get real change to happen due to all of the embeddedness that this stuff comes with.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (47:32)

Maybe you won't even realize the majority of the transaction. Do you know how much like PayPal, for example, is selling internally in US dollars versus PYUSD? You're not going to see those things happen until it's published in a very big thing, etc. And they started doing more of that. And we're going to start seeing more and more companies do that, especially for non-G20 currencies. But the reality is that in G20 currencies, things are quite optimized, honestly, more than people give it credit for.

**Drew Rogers** (48:00)

You mentioned LEED, Erebor is making a lot of news. These are like on-chain native modern banking institutions. Do you see, when you think about Bastion, are you kind of imagining those as ideal partners and customers, or are you kind of saying the stack that Bastion has and the ability To have all of this out of the box is actually something that can help maybe these more legacy banks or scaled larger banks that are trying to not lose business to those types.

You're actually saying, hey, let's future-proof you guys against some of these new, modern, fast-moving Arabors. Is that more of the play or is it kind of both?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (48:37)

Both actually. So we do partner with those banks essentially on the kind of like access to core fiat rails, right? They have the direct access to the banking rails. But we want to provide infrastructure. Banks will integrate core fiat infra from existing infra providers there. But on our end, we want to help them on all things blockchain.

We want to give them the orchestration of funds, the wallet infrastructure, and then potentially collect the stablecoin earning capabilities so that they can actually provide this ability to hold, move and earn on stablecoin to their own clients. So enabling these kind of neo banking as a service models that are stablecoin focused is definitely a core focus of ours.

**Drew Rogers** (49:26)

A couple rapid fires as we close. You mentioned that Mark Andreessen and team are very involved in helping you see things that you may not be seeing or challenge you. What are some things that you've thought would be true or forecasts that you had that turned out to be incorrect or things that you thought would happen maybe in the last couple of years that you've realized Okay, I was wrong. We need to pivot. We need to change. Any examples of that?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (49:58)

Sure. I think that the custodial wallet thesis against non-custodial is something that didn't play out as I was envisioning initially. I think that part of it is timing. So right now, we're seeing a tremendous amount of interest in custodial wallets, including from non-custodial wallets who actually want to go upmarket. And they're knocking at our door actually saying, and companies that you remember that we actually used to compete with. It was a

**Drew Rogers** (50:25)

really crazy moment. In 2020, gosh, when was this? 2023, because the custodial nature felt like a downside because the pitch with all these other non-custodial wallets is like, oh, we can scale anywhere. We can scale, because we don't hold the keys, that's an advantage. You can go, you can grow. And it was a really weird, difficult thing to deal with because that is such an advantage. You can scale user access to these financial services all over the world.

And that felt like, in that moment, like a really like, man, what did we get wrong? What is going on here? For context, I was working directly with Bastion at this time. And so I got a front row seat to that moment. But it sounds like as time has gone by, that thesis has kind of come full circle to say there actually are limitations to this that are now being realized. Say more to what that means.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (51:16)

Yeah, the reality is that, so just kind of giving a very quick background on like non-fusorial is going to be companies that put at the forefront were unable to move the funds without the end customer, the end client. And as a result, we shouldn't be regulated and we're just going to provide that as a pure tech play, right? Like here is your software, use it as you want. And then we kind of like build the back end and the front end infrastructure to manage that.

Bastian took a very different approach from the get-go, saying, we're actually going to offer that as a regulated product that is KYC-gated, that actually performs all the transaction monitoring, we handle all the compliance for you, and we're a licensed entity. It's an insured product, a regulatory compliant product, etc. As a result, we can only offer it in the jurisdictions that we're compliant in and that we're licensed in.

So a lot of, from a jurisdiction standpoint and rate adoption standpoint, definitely more constraining, especially for more crypto native companies. But if you look at the enterprises, the companies that are facing large merchants, what is the first and the second question is, are you keeping my funds safe? Are you compliant? Can I get in trouble with the regulators or with local law enforcement? Do you manage all of these things for me? Those companies think about it from a standpoint of, How do I manage my risk?

How do I reduce my counterparty risk? And the counterparty risk is most managed when you're actually working with a regulated financial institution like us that is handling all of this and is liable for lack of compliance. And so I think that this really resonated with not the first wave, right, which was really between like 2023 and I think that it really took genius to actually open those floodgates. And so it's taking time.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (53:28)

Exactly.

**Drew Rogers** (53:29)

These companies don't move as fast as the NFT marketplace. But startups are all

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (53:33)

about timing, right? It's all about timing.

**Drew Rogers** (53:36)

What is, when you think about, what's the most undervalued thing about Bastion? What have you built that you're actually really excited about that is behind the scenes that you're like, man, this is kick-ass? If people knew how good this is, anything come to mind there?

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (53:52)

Yeah, I think that actually our wallet solution is something that I'm incredibly excited by because that is ultimately something that is hyper flexible. We accommodate for segregated wallets, we accommodate for omnibus wallets, right? Like some institutions actually want to have the funds in a Sam Breckenridge, Stabledash Global, Stabledash Live, Stabledash Live, Stabledash

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (54:27)

You may start without your license, choose us, and then as you get your license, no problem. We'll just operate under your license over time. And we're seeing a lot of, every time that we're in conversations with those larger financial institutions or enterprises, they love this model of, okay, I'm just going to get to market in the current state of things super fast. And then as I want to own more, I'll be able to do that because bashing gives me the flexibility.

**Drew Rogers** (54:50)

It's really good. And it's sort of like the same thing I'd imagine with the stablecoin strategy too. It's like, maybe I want to work with something like an AUSD or a USDC or a stablecoin that I don't own and manage the program. Or I can get on base with something. And then over time, you can actually say, okay, great. Now you can issue your own through ours. You can graduate into that. It doesn't need to feel like this or that type of thing.

Because Bastion integrates and works with many different stablecoins, not just the ones that you And then

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (55:18)

we can own more and more of the compliance, less and less, whatever you want, financial operations, everything. We kind of like build the full stack of technology, services, operations, et cetera.

**Drew Rogers** (55:28)

So cool. Nass, thanks for this. Thank you so much for having me. Time flies, but really appreciate your time here today.

**Nassim Eddequiouaq** (55:33)

Thank you so much. Always a pleasure.