The 2,600 Year Problem With Money, and How Stablecoins Fix It

Every single great societal leap forward, all of it is underpinned by how freely money is able to move. Now stablecoins are the most promising way to exist in a much more advanced financial world, where if I have a stable coin, I can send it to you, and now you have that stable coin settled instantly. Fintech, as we call it, is just like lipstick on a pig. Right? It's just a better user experience for the same really really bad financial plumbing. Stable coins are good for really two things.

It's for financial acceleration, how can I move my money better, faster, cheaper, and financial accumulation, how can I take my money and make some yield turn it into more money? What stablecoins allows for really embeddable finance. So if you are a consumer facing application, even if you're not a fintech, you can now have fintech like properties. And that's really what a neobank describes, is the ability for an application to not become a bank, but to offer services. We're here to do a very very simple thing.

Let's make money move and operate the way that it should in the twenty first century.

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.

Welcome to the show, Dante. We have had a little pre app session. We're diving into it. Welcome to Stable Minded. Thank you. I'm excited to be here. You're you're a friend, a fan, many things to the show. Yes. So wanna start early with you. You have, it seems like, been an entrepreneur since the womb in one form or another. What makes you this way? Like, take me back to the spark of starting you on this journey of being a kind of find a problem guy.

Walk me through the igniting spark and what your journey has been in the last couple chapters. I think it's pretty simple. If I see a status quo that I do not agree with or I do not like, I want to do everything I can to abolish that status quo. I don't like people telling me to do things that I

think are useless or inherently wrong. Like, I'm not a big fan of norms and I'm a big believer of you are in full control of your actions and your destiny and the outcome. And so if I think that I can do something better, I'm gonna go make that problem better. And I like to talk to people enough to the point where, you know, if you have a conversation with me, oftentimes that conversation is literally just me interrogating you for thirty minutes now or two hours and that's... Now it's flipped. Yes. Maybe.

We'll we'll see. But oftentimes it's just me interrogating you not because I'm an asshole or anything but mainly just because I enjoy hearing the opinions of others and oftentimes from that I can gather, know, okay. I've talked to a 100 people about this. This is what their thoughts are on x y z. I think that I can make that problem that everyone has a little bit better. Was that a taught thing? Is that like, this is innate?

Was there a circumstance that said, oh, this made me that kind of semi confrontational, I don't wanna be told because I said so, no more status quo, like, where does this come from? What's what's the hardened foundation of it? I don't know. I think that this is like a three hour long therapy session that I wasn't quite I wasn't quite prepared for. I believe that we're on this planet to make the world better than we left it. More that I can contribute to that, the better.

I'm not a big fan of, like, clocking in and and clocking out. If I'm gonna do something, I'm gonna go and do it. And it just so happens that for the last five plus years or so, stablecoins have

been that thing that I wake up and I think about... I go to bed and I think about, like, this is what I'm gonna do. I love it. So you have a grand sort of noble vision. I wanna make the world a better place. I'm gonna be Yeah. I mean, it sounds cliche when you say it like that, but... Yeah. I I don't mean to make it sound cliche. It sounds good. You know? And not every... We're in New York City. Not everybody actually has that noble aspirations. Right? We were joking about it.

Like, some people in finance are here to find a big pot of money and try to make it be a little bit more big Yeah. Which is sometimes can have sort of positive externalities of making the world a little bit better place, but it's not necessarily a grand why of Yes. Saying, I actually believe that I'm gonna do something about it. I'm gonna put a positive dent in the universe. Like, it's a good thing. I think that

building something at an early stage, it's really, really hard to do it for only the money. To your point where in New York, there's a lot of people who take a bunch of money, turn it into a lot of more money and the reason that they do it is so that they can, you know, have a nice house in the Hamptons or whatever it might be. I think if your goal is to have a nice house in the Hamptons, you wouldn't necessarily go through the pain of trying to build something this early, especially in emerging market like this.

There's there's like there's better ways to make money where you might be a little bit happier, but I kinda like the challenge. I enjoy the difficulty of the of the matter. Well, and at some point, if you're going to be a significant builder, these people almost always reach a point where the money starts to become enough that it's less relevant as motivation.

Yeah. I think though that it's like the word enough is the key point there. It's like, what is enough? There's a line that constantly gets types of people. Some people Yeah. Yeah. I I think of, like, Steve Jobs was, like, wearing his saffron robes or something when he was starting Apple. But it seemed like he really wanted to make great products. He liked nice things, maybe like a Porsche, but he wasn't necessarily doing it for the money. There are other people who maybe unabashedly

want to go for the money and, you know... Yeah. There's also not a dollar amount that you could have paid Steve Jobs or, you know, people of equivalent impact where he would have stepped away from that. No. Right? And I I think that if you're just chasing the money, it becomes really, really difficult to go out and do something big. But if you're doing it for the right reasons, it's actually relatively easy because you can suffer or endure that suffering a lot more than you'd be able to otherwise.

And, like, I really, really, really want to avoid being traumatic here because, like, I live a great life. It's awesome. I'm not... You know, there's a lot of people who are suffering far more than I am. I think it comes down to just, this is a a challenge. Building out a new technology in a new industry is always a challenge, but I like that challenge. Yeah. Like, I enjoy when people tell me that I can't do something or that something's not gonna work or or or they they push back on this.

It sort of makes me dig my heels in. Some people call that stubbornness. For me, it's just the way it is. Okay. So you've got that. And that thing for the past several years has been, I'm waking up. I'm in the shower. I'm going to bed. I'm thinking about stablecoins

in one form or another. Yeah. I'm sure you've thought about a few other things, but why this? Why is this such a... An all encompassing, motivating, I'm thinking about it, I'm believing in it, I wanna work here,

this is what I wanna build. Why stablecoin? I come from a little bit of a different perspective than I think a lot of people in this industry. I think, like, the norm of the average Stablecoin builder is like, oh, I worked in traditional finance. I didn't really like it. I like the people more and and the technology more in Stablecoin, so I'm gonna go do this. I have zero background in finance whatsoever. I'll say it very straight like that.

I got into Stablecoins because I experienced the problem that Stablecoin solves firsthand. So, like, if we go all the way back, one of the first things that I ever built was actually an international nonprofit. And I needed to move money from The United States to, in this specific case, countries in East Africa. Doing so, to anyone that's done that, is a real pain in the ass. Like, single day, I was banging my head on the wall trying to deal with a problem that I thought should be really easy. Right?

But, you know, money was getting lost. These fees were crazy. And this was, you know, a while ago before these fintechs got built out as well that are moving money around the But you're doing this on a small scale, international aid organizations are doing this on a billions of dollars scale. And it's not just international aid organizations. This was my foot in the door of moving money around the world is hard. Yeah. K? For all sorts of organizations. For all sorts of And we're do trade, etcetera. Exactly. Exactly.

So I was standing there banging my head against the wall every single day. And my thought process is like, there's no way that this should be happening. I can go on my computer and I can send an email and it doesn't matter what internet service provider you have, it doesn't matter what email provider you have, it doesn't matter, you know, what language are you speaking, I can send you an email and it can get to you in seconds. Mhmm. Now anyone who's dealt with money knows it's the exact opposite, right?

It might take one week, it might take a few days for money to get from my account here to you know, somewhere around the world to the point where literally the fastest way to move money around the world, especially at the time I was doing this is to pack up a suitcase full of cash, get on a plane and fly it to that destination. And there was sort of this discrepancy between the way that money is and the way that money very, clearly should be. At the time was the problem where was like, okay. Right?

The status quo is insane. I was able to experience firsthand now granted on a very, very small scale, but there's no way that money should be this way. That's great though. Any builder usually starts with scratching an itch that they're familiar with. Right? Absolutely. Well, I also got to see the other side. Right? I was building out a nonprofit.

So I was experiencing the issues of needing to move money around the world, but the people on the other side of that nonprofit who were beneficiaries of that nonprofit, they were in emerging market countries that had terrible terrible financial systems. And that was another big wake up. I was like, okay. If I run a business in this country, how do I do things like bank myself? How do I do things like, you know, manage my account? How do I do things like pay my suppliers?

How do I do the very, very basic things that we in The United States in, you know, what is arguably one of the most advanced financial and technically enabled economies in the world, how we do it, that's not the case around the world. And I think sometimes we need to step out of the bubble of The US and EU and realize that most of the world still runs on relatively archaic rails. And especially when it comes to

interacting between those rails, it is an incredibly difficult thing to do. So you're seeing that. And you said you're moving money to East Africa. Like, what's the purpose here? Is it is it

a, loans? Like, what's the nonprofit doing? The nonprofit was literally trying to move money from our bank account in The US to our bank account in East Africa. The goal of the nonprofit was we helped youth get access to micro businesses except for needing to send the money around the world part. But the actual, like, flow of funds should have been relatively easy. I should have been able to take the money that we raised here in The US and I should have been able to send it overseas.

My project manager on the ground should have been able to withdraw that money from a local bank account Yeah. And spend it on whatever the project needed. But instead, you're seeing money does not move easily. There's all kinds of hoops. There's expenses, there's lost funds, etcetera. So you become obsessed with this problem. At what point does the word stablecoin come up or this sort of modern rails money movement? Like, when do you start putting language and technology behind it? How do you go from Yeah.

The frustrated nonprofit director to building here? Funny enough, it was Bitcoin that I discovered first. And I was like, oh, this Bitcoin thing makes sense. Like, I don't need to deal with that really, really annoying bank in The US or or really annoying bank in Uganda. Can send money. Obviously, Bitcoin is not the best value transfer when it comes to sending stable forms of cash. So I never actually did anything with that. I was Sure. That... I read I read the paper, and I was like, this is really cool.

Stablecoins then started to emerge. Right? Tether, obviously, being one of the first on the market, this was as Circle was pivoting from being a Bitcoin company into building out Stablecoins. And as soon as I started reading about that, was like, okay. This is it. I can leverage the rails that excited me about Bitcoin, but do so in an actually practical and pragmatic way that would enable me to solve that flow of funds problem that I personally witnessed. Now, obviously, it's a lot more complicated than that. Sure.

We're still building this out, you know, five, ten years later, but it was there. That's what I really latched on to is Yeah. Okay. I experienced these problems firsthand. I saw what other people are experiencing firsthand, and this is the best possible tool to solve it. I'm somewhat of a history nerd as well. So I I was reading about the history of money, the history about, you know, banking rails and payment rails and everything like this and it made a lot of sense. Right?

Like, in my head at least, and obviously there was a lot of pushback from the world, but in my head, was like, okay. This is a natural evolution. This makes sense on the chronological timeline of of money and the way that value should move. We as a society have gone into a digital age but the money that we interact with on a daily basis has not. How do we make sure that money can move around the world just like an email does, just like data does and what are the positive externalities that can come of that?

Like if we, you know, tap into history for a second, every single great societal leap forward, whether it was, you know, the Western and Eastern trading in Asia and the Roman and Greek empire, whether it was the industrial revolution, whether it's AI today, all of it is underpinned by how freely money is able to move and how easy money is able to access or be accessed for those people that are interacting with those industries. And you can So what what did that look like in some of those examples?

Like, the Greeks, Chinese, like, take us back and then take us forward. Global economy Yeah. During, you know, its earliest stages was primarily a form of bartering. If you and I wanted to interact with another, you needed to have exactly what I wanted and I needed to have exactly what you wanted. If I had five sheep, you would be willing to trade me, you know, six bushels of hay for my five sheep. Now we're playing Catan. I love it. Exactly. Exactly.

And that was the way that the quote unquote global economy worked. Now in around 600 in the Kingdom Of Lydia, which is now Turkey, I believe, there was a concept of standardization of currency that came out with the Lydian seder. And that was the first time that someone said, okay. I am going to create a coin that has a standard metal content. They used electrum. It was like a gold and silver alloy and they stamped it with a big lion.

And what that allowed for is for people to say, okay, I see that stamp and I know exactly what this currency is worth. The standardization of currency. Is there a crypto company called Lydia or Sater? We'll skip over that for now. They stamped the lion that standardized currency. And what came from that is now militaries were able to be paid in a much more standardized way. That currency was able to travel across borders. It was able to fund new roads.

It was able to dramatically increase the expansion of empires as we know it today. Like Love it. The leading state was pre Alexander the Great, but Alexander the Great and his entire empire benefited tremendously from the standardization Interesting. Of currency. Right? Same thing for every successive generation. And so you see that as the technology and the form factor of money changed, so too did society. Now we can argue military good is, you know, our war is bad, whatever.

But the point is is like historically speaking, there was a lot of economic and social growth that came from being able to interact with money in a new way. Right. And and even these geographical movements,

I'm thinking about different examples in history,

like trade between the East and the West, Europe and China. You've got the sort of Arabic numerals and all the knowledge of the Arab world coming into Europe. There's so many instances where the flow of information, the flow of money are connected and so is the advancement of technology and society in general. And I think you make a really good point because information and money has always gone hand in hand in terms of, you know, one catalyzes the other.

It has a very symbiotic relationship and you can see this, you know, in Arab Eastern trade. You can see this in the first banknotes. Like, everyone's heard of the Medicis. No one really knows what they do. They're one of the first to pioneer the promissory note, if you will, saying, hey, if you bring me this, you might not get cash, but like, we'll owe you one. And you can go from one house in this part of the world to another house in this part of the world and redeem that note for actual money.

They also, you know, standardized double entry accounting and everything like that. But the process of I don't have to carry bushels of hay around the world or I don't have to carry, you know... And have just the right amount of just the right thing. Yeah. Like, there's a physical toll to pushing around a wagon full of metal. And the the more that we're able to reduce the physical weight of that now, you know, reduce the burden of moving money around the world, the better.

But hilariously, you mentioned having a suitcase full of cash being the most efficient way to get money from Middle America to Uganda.

It's not so dissimilar from having a pushable of hay. Yeah. I mean, going back to, like, the way that money should be and the way that money is and the discrepancy between those And you're seeing, hey. It's not dissimilar. Wait a second. I can, you know, hop on a WhatsApp or FaceTime with somebody in Uganda right now and chat with them. So information language is flowing freely,

instantly, but our money's behind. Correct. Again, lots of historical precedents like all of the merchant bankers of the eighteen hundreds, right, you've heard of the Rothschilds and people like that. They fundamentally speaking are known for their money, but their actual innovation is an information system. You look at Rothschilds or a lot of these merchant banks, they had houses in various different countries.

And the benefit of that is they built out information networks to the point where they could get information faster than anyone else. They could make loans faster. They can move their money faster, etcetera etcetera. So if I have a boat that's stuck in a harbor in Amsterdam, but I am in London, I can telegram my brother and say, hey, release this money to this person. Let's get their boat out of the harbor. I do not need to put money on a boat in order to make that happen.

And so the information flow and the money flow has always gone sort of hand in hand and I think that's one of the biggest innovations of stablecoins is the fact that it very very closely amalgamates the flow of money and the information that can come with it. Right? You hear the words like programmability a lot.

Stablecoins are programmable money and what that essentially means is that you can have value be directly tied to information and more specifically conditional information around that, which has like really, really massive implications across trade financing,

across supply chain, you name it. Okay. So I'm loving kind of this comparative anatomy of history, history of money, information, and money going together because as people start to throw around buzzwords and... Really? Really. Yeah. People throw... There's a lot of buzzwords. They're starting to maybe mean something, but, you know, if they're overused, they start to mean nothing to. But I'm thinking about stuff like, you said programmable money or agentic finance, all these things that are coming up.

They have to do with the marriage of money and information Absolutely. Moving instantly and securely. Absolutely. So industrial revolution or Rothschilds would take me somewhere there in terms of a historical example, money and information going together. And then like fast forward me to the twenty first century and say, and here's what it looks like today. So maybe it's the boat in Amsterdam. What's like a historical example where you saw,

oh, this is how that worked then, but there's a fundamental principle there that is still happening today. One of my favorite anecdotes about the merchant banking boom in the eighteen hundreds and the Rothschilds and everything like that is the Rothschilds were known for having a really, really intelligent information system. Like, they knew the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo before British Parliament did. And what they would do is because they were Jewish family, they were heavily scrutinized.

A lot of the times the government would go through their mail. And so the way that they would pass information is by using essentially color codes on their envelopes. So they didn't even need to open the mail. They just needed to see what the mail actually looked like. Right? What color was on the envelope? Were bonds gonna go up? Were bonds gonna go down? And that's how they passed information.

Later on, especially when we talk about a lot of the story of financial technology in America, it was heavily pegged around the telegram. Like Western Union, we know them as a money company, but they started as a telegram company. Right? And they were backed by JPMorgan and a lot of the big financiers at that time because one of the biggest use cases of the telegram was transmitting financial information.

Now this was for Wall Street purposes and for trading purposes, but it was also to protect the interests of those financiers because they were heavily heavily invested in the railroad. And so Western Union used to lay their telegram lines completely parallel to the railroads. And that was the way in which early financial information was transmitted, especially along sort of the Eastern Seaboard, and eventually at West. Now, again, we're gonna do some pretty big jumps in history.

Wires started to become a modern financial tool. The Internet, obviously called the wire because it was literally on a wire, or it was just a euphemism because of these telegram wires? Bingo. You nailed it. But even still, there's always been a discrepancy, especially when we talk about payments, especially when we talk about the world of finance in between the way that money appears to work and the way that money does work.

So what I mean by that is like a lot of the times, fintech as we call it, is just like lipstick on a pig. Right? It's just a better user experience for the same really really bad financial plumbing if you will. So you look at a lot of like the really big modern fintechs, whether it be Wise or Airwall x or whatever it might be. When those companies started, they started because moving money internationally is really really hard.

But the way that they were able to get it to be, you know, pretty cheap to do and pretty fast to do is not because they have some really, really amazing technological feed. It's because they have really large stockpiles of cash that they can quickly net between in various different countries. So again, they're still operating within the world of traditional finance and the barriers that the traditional world of finance creates.

They just come up with a slightly, I would say, more appealing way for users to interact with that. Right? Zelle is a really great example. Yeah. I have Zelle landlords in the past and allegedly it's a really great way to interact with the financial system unless it's a weekend, unless it's a holiday. Right? And so you sort of have this issue where traditional financial system is so entrenched in the everyday life that it becomes really, really hard to operate outside of it.

Now stablecoins are the most promising way to exist in a much more advanced financial world Yeah. Where if I have a stablecoin, I can send it to you and now you have that stablecoin settled instantly. Now, whether or not you want to finalize your transaction, that stablecoin or hold dollars completely for Instoria, right, this is an entire nest that we need to dive into.

But ultimately, this is one of the biggest steps that we've seen in terms of, okay, the traditional banking system works like x y z to now we have a technology that allows the banking system and allows the financial system to work in a fundamentally different way Yeah. Than it has the last, you know, thirty years, but realistically, the last hundred years. And to the haters, to the doubters who say it's the same or

stablecoins aren't it, you're a money movement geek. You know? You're you're, like, loving this, and you say, oh, here it is. You know? And many people are, right? And there's whole subsection of the economy blowing up around stablecoins and modern money movement and all of this. Oh, what are the detractors saying though? Who might either not adopt,

or say this is high risk, or this is not a fundamentally different or improved technology, like, aren't on the adoption curve that those are the pushbacks that I get the most. Maybe it's just because I'm in New York. Most of the pushback that I get is, like, who the hell cares? Right? Like, I have my Chase card. I use Venmo. Right? Like, my financial life In New York. Exactly. Right? They... A lot of Americans and a lot of those in the West say, like, oh, it's actually pretty easy, my financial life. Right?

I have my credit card, whatever. Sure. I can't sell on the weekend, but who cares? Yes. Oftentimes, they're not the ones that are needing to deal with global treasuries, multi currency accounts. I've had friends come and visit me from other countries and they stay with me in New York. We go out to dinner. Great. They wanna split the bill. How do you do that? Right? Like, if they don't have cash, you're sort of fresh out of luck. They don't have access to Venmo.

Sometimes, you know, they don't like PayPal, whatever it might be. Yeah. And so the second that you sort of step out of the bubble of The United States or or Europe in many ways, stablecoins become exceptionally relevant. But the biggest pushback that I get, especially from, like, the friends and family that I grew up with is like, I don't really need stablecoins. My financial system operates just fine.

But again, there's an entire underlying layer of not what my financial system seems like, but this is the way that the money actually moves within my financial system. Right? They don't understand every time they swipe their credit card, there's four or five people that involved. Right? They don't know what an acquiring bank is. They don't know what a a merchant bank is or anything like that.

And I think that stablecoins fundamentally speaking today when we talk about PMF have primarily found traction either in companies

that need to move money around the world or people who do not have access to the same financial tools that we in the West have access to. Absolutely. It makes sense. That was the sort of inciting spark that made you wanna get involved. Anyway, was global money movement, international markets, and that's where the PMF is especially strong and where it's kind of... It's not a headache. It's a hemorrhage. There's real pain here. Right? There's real reasons to get there.

Something that I've seen in your writing recently and in some of the stuff you're talking about though is like, okay, so whether or not US consumers and individuals are clamoring for this, some of the big institutions are. Internationalemerging markets absolutely are and maybe have been for a long time before we were even using the word stablecoin. Mhmm. So there actually is adoption.

There's kind of an explosion of solutions leading to fragmentation, leading to all kinds of, you know, some might say some kind of cluster. I don't know who, you know. But talk a little bit about that. Like, we're having in some ways like a Cambrian explosion of fintech, if we wanna use that or Yeah. Of of solutions to harness this new technology. What's good? What's bad? What's a cluster? Like, speed me up to being a student of the era today. Stablecoins are good for really two things.

It's for financial acceleration. How can I move my money better, faster, cheaper? And financial accumulation, which is how can I take my money and makes a meal turn it into more money? Mhmm. And those two things because of stablecoins are now easier than ever to do. Mhmm. Right? You see to your point, an explosion of neobanks Mhmm. Which is essentially just like how can I take my existing product and actually own the financial elements to that?

So we see a lot of fintechs starting to horizontally expand their offering. Oh, now we do cards. Now if you keep your money in our account, we're gonna start offering you yield, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah. And the ability to do that used to be very, very, very difficult. Right? You need to have highly optimized banking relationships. You might have needed to have regulated banking partners, etcetera. What stablecoins allows for really embeddable finance.

So if you are a consumer facing application, even if you're not a fintech, you can now have fintech like properties. And that's really what a neobank described is the ability for an application to not become a bank, but to offer banking like services. And, you know, that is a very legal definition that people cannot call themselves a bank, but it's also, hey, I am a social media application. I have this wide distribution. Now I can also offer services that allow me to interact with people's money in a better way.

And this honestly is the win win for people. Right? These companies are able to interact with their consumers on a deeper level. They might be able to make more money off of the average consumer. They can expand their revenue flows. And for the consumer,

they don't need to have to juggle 900 different applications in order to do the 900 different things that they need to do with money. I hear this phrase a lot, maybe because being in the media game. Yeah. But people are talking about, oh, distribution is the mode. Distribution is the mode. Blah blah blah. You have companies that are not traditional financial companies, social media companies, LLMs that have massive distributions that are starting to financialize or maybe have already taken that step. Yes.

This kind of everybody's a bank moment is kinda Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. It's interesting. It's it's fun. Whether people like it or not, money controls a lot of the world or underpins

a lot of the world. Right? I think it's very, very hard to run a business without constantly thinking about money even if you're not a financial business in any way, shape, or form. Right? Even if you're Instagram or whatever it might be, like you were created so that people could share pictures, guess what? Now you can offer, you know, embeddable finance tools, whatever it might be. In theory, this is awesome. In theory, it's really, really amazing.

I'm glad that it's easy for small nimble teams to start to offer better services to their clients. Like I'm a capitalist at heart. Right? And I think that if you are a business and you can help provide the best possible services to your users and enable them to enjoy themselves, to make more money, to provide them value in any way, or form, you absolutely should do that. I think that what's starting to happen though is that there's a divergence between being able to build and being able to manage. Right?

So I think what you're referring to is I just came out with an article titled the clusterfuck of fintech, which is a really apt way to describe it because these companies can go out and they can build whatever they want. Right? There might be a service for an embeddable wallet. There might be, you know, a few different ramps that you're using so that you can be global from day one, maybe a custody service that you're using, compliance service that you're using. Great.

You can essentially assemble a neo bank or a fintech like it's Allego house or a Lincoln log house. Right? You can take all of these pieces and assemble it together. We were kind of chuckling about Dakota is Yeah. How some build a neo bank in nineteen hour challenge Yeah. Or nine hours. It's a it's a very short amount of time. Which is great. Which is great. It's it's very exciting. Like It is. Shout out to all the love to Dakota and to everybody who's building their neobank for farmers right now.

But you called it the cluster fuck fuck of fintech for a reason. What's all clustered up here? To our discussion earlier, like, you have all of these different providers. You have custody over here. You have wallets over here. You have ramps over here. You have, you know, your yield provider over here, and you can build it, but it's a very different thing to be able to manage it. Right? If you have five different providers, that's five different MSAs that you need to manage.

You need to make sure that you're tracking every single transaction. You essentially need to have one really, really awesome person or an entire team to be able to manage all of the externalities

and the the peripheries of the Solutions become a problem.

Yes. And I think that it's one of those things where, yes, it's a problem at the beginning, but the more you scale, the bigger that problem becomes. Yeah. Because if you're leaking 3% in fees or whatever it might be, that's, you know, $3 if you're making $100. But if you're making $3,000,000,000, it's a very, very different story and it becomes a lot more pertinent. And what we're seeing right now in the stablecoin field especially is sort of the verticalization of these products. Right?

You see some of the biggest companies that are offering wallets now. They're offering ramps now. They're offering yield products now. And they're trying to offer this, like, all in one API so that people don't have to do it. But the reality is is like you can't be everything to everyone. Right? People are building niche products. You're gonna assemble those niche products already. You're gonna have to deal with this in some way shape or form.

It's just a matter of how do I want to manage that cluster fuck of providers. Yeah. And so traditionally, like whenever you see an announcement that someone is gonna launch this stablecoin program or that stablecoin program, whether it be a small company or a large enterprise, it's all through partners. Right? They might use this person for their bank. They might use this stablecoin issuer over here and it's just an amalgamation of those partners. Again, that's really, really awesome for a press release.

You might get out there, get a really awesome MVP, but to manage that to be scalable over time is a very, very different story. I think it's gonna bite a lot of people in the butt, and this is not a warning saying, hey, don't build these out. It's just making sure that you sit down and have a thoughtful conversation about what product am I actually assembling? What Lego house am I actually building? And do I have the tools and resources to manage that? Getting specific.

You don't have to call out any brands here, but, like, what's an example of a bite in the butt moment that either has happened or could happen? Yeah. I mean, let's say that you work with five different ramps. For the general audience, they help you go from stablecoins to fiat and fiat to stablecoins. Different ramps have different coverages in different areas and different rails.

So some ramps might be really, really good at Apple Pay in this region and some ramps might be really good at banking rails in that region. So oftentimes to assemble a truly global operation, you're going to need to have multiple different providers. Now who's in there assuring that those providers are charging you correctly? Who's in there assuring that you are billing your clients correctly?

Who is in there assuring that the rates that you are getting are actually competitive rates and not just, you know, a sales guy that pulled one over on you. So there's a lot that sort of goes into that and there's technology out there to help you manage that, but a lot of sort of the expense management technology out there is designed to exist within a walled internal organization. So Ramp is a really great example of this. Ramp is an awesome company. I love Ramp.

But they're designed to take the relationships that one company has with itself. My employee is going out there and spending x. But when you're building out a neobank, your employee might be interacting with a Ramp through you. And so it's just a little bit more of like a complex four d web of providers that you have to manage. Thinking about all that, it's got crazy amounts of fragmentation,

everybody's new solutions, sort of complicated consequences to this. There could be a lot more fragmentation coming. More solutions are gonna keep pouring in. Local stablecoins are gonna get built in a 196 different currencies. Is that how many countries we... Or currencies we have? Roughly. Maybe more. Yeah. You mentioned this earlier. There's not just the currency version, but the bond version. There's there's so much. Right?

We could have a thousand more solutions causing that level of fragmentation and coordination costs and and complication there. There's also gonna be convergence. There's also gonna be gobbling up. When you look at it, is it just like, oh, this is just equal and opposite force kind of reacting and it's just gonna have to play out? Are we gonna end up rather with some kind of, like, oligopoly where there's just, like, a few solutions? Yeah. I wanna clarify what you mean by fragmentation because fragmentation

in the operating stack. There's fragmentation in the minutiae of stablecoin issuers. There's fragmentation in this, that, or the other thing. I think what we're going towards is, like, what does it look like when technology is really easy to build and you can go out and issue your own dollar backed stablecoin Yeah. Your own local currency backed stablecoin. Right? Is there a world in which there are tens of thousands of stablecoins? I believe the answer is yes.

But this is where I get the most pushback, not only from people outside the industry, but also from people in the industry. Right? I work a lot in deposit flows, which I know we're gonna touch on later. And like the worst possible thing in the world is when you go to interact with an on chain application and it pops up and you have all of these different wallet providers and you have 90 different stablecoins on 30 different chains that you're gonna choose from. Yeah.

That is not the future that I envision when I say that there's gonna be thousands or tens of thousands of different stablecoins at all. Right? Instead, the way that I view this is very, very similar to how you interact with your debit card or your credit card today. Again, when you go and you tap your credit card at the bodega, you don't know back end rails. You don't need to know what acquiring bank is. You don't need to know what interchange is by any means.

The UX can remain exactly the same, but the way in which settlement happens in the background is different. Now the reason that I think that there's going to be so many different stablecoins is because, again, fundamentally speaking, stablecoins are a technological improvement on the dollar or on whatever currency it is. Now today, when you look at the market, there's many, many, many different stablecoins that are pegged to the dollar, what we call dollar backed stablecoins. Sure. Now I think this is a good thing.

You and I are sitting here recording in New York. We're in The US. We're both American. I generally think that is Go dollars. Yeah. Seriously, like, stablecoins that I've written about this in the past and I'll continue to talk about it are a really, really great self defense mechanism for The United States. Like, stablecoins, in this term, a lot of people call it fintech. I think it's defense tech. Right? Because we're propagating these dollars all throughout the world.

We're increasing the reliance on the dollar as an American. I am happy about it. There's another longer form piece on the intersection of inter... Information, war, and money Yes. As a historical historical West. Dive into OPEC later and euro dollars and and everything like that. But But you think of it as defense tech in some way. Absolutely. Yeah. I think when we see USDT and USDC doing so well, we must absolutely recognize that these are dollar backed currencies. Mhmm.

For every single token that is minted, this is the fundamental premise of a stable coin. For every single token minted, there is a dollar or for the most part dollar equivalent that is sitting in a bank. And when those dollars are dispersed throughout the world, it increases global reliance on the dollar. Like Yeah. Stablecoins and the ability for stablecoins to spread around the world is like one of the most important things to happen to the United States dollar since Brentwoods in 1944, like, post World War two.

Really, really truly. Again, I don't wanna be, like, a dollar maxi here when we dive into local stablecoins, but, like, stablecoins are defense tech. Stablecoins are great for The US. If you are United States legislator, if you care about the prosperity of The United States, you should want stablecoins to succeed because they are a way for our economy to grow, and they are a way for international economy to grow in parallel to the US dollar.

And that's something that's critical for our economy, for our military, for our technology sector, all of it. And could be helpful for some global stability because, hey, you don't necessarily want to light a match around your pile of dollars. Right? Absolutely not. And even...

This is a rabbit hole we don't have to go down, but it's interesting in the modern warfare landscape to see the militarization, or rather maybe the, like, financialization of warfare. It's like, oh, what do we do to Russia to stop them? It's all about economic sanctions and oil. Yeah. And how do you get somebody's attention? You grab them by the wallet. Right? You know? Yes. But but jumping into, you sort of nodded to it a little bit. You're a student of the game here. You will continue to be.

I know you'll continue writing things that spark discussion and putting things out there, including hopefully a little bit of this. But what are you working on right now, and how does that kind of play into all this? Can

we dive back into the multiple stablecoins? Because Please take me there, and then we'll go asked me about a world of thousands of stablecoins, and we got in the military industrial complex. Right now, there are hundreds of dollar backed stablecoins. Most of these are private companies that are just looking to build their business around being able to move money better. The awesome thing about stablecoins is that they are an on chain version of the dollar and there's a few different benefits.

Yes, you can move money around the world, but you can also spin up your own stablecoin and take advantage of what it's like to actually be a stablecoin issuer. Right? So for example, a lot of stablecoins are backed by US treasury. Now you have for your access to US treasury yields, things like that.

And so I think what we are going to start to see and what we're already seeing right now is an explosion of private enterprises that are launching their own stablecoin so that they can improve their global treasury operations and improve their relationship that they have with the customer. Right? We've seen MoneyGram do this. We've seen Western Union do this.

We've seen a whole host of private enterprises not linked to any one particular government who are launching stablecoins because yes, they wanna be able to move money better, faster, cheaper, which we talked about before. Yeah. But they also want to be able to do things like collect yield. Still a lot of room to go in private enterprises launching their own stablecoins because there is really big quantitative benefits to that. To your point before, a 194 different currencies in the world.

One thing that the dominance of dollar backed stablecoins is going to do is force the hands of a lot of governments to launch their own stablecoin. Right? Because a lot of these governments, they already have strict capital controls. They do not wanna lose their entire economy to the dollar. Now there are a lot of economies out there that are based on the dollar today. That's all fine. I think a lot of governments won't want that.

And so I think a lot of governments are actually going to want to launch their own stablecoin. And the way that I see this working is that these stablecoins will be the best route in and out of a given economy. So let's say that I want to send money to Mexico. Right now, the way I can do that off chain is wire money, there's a series of corresponding banks, they'll settle it eventually and they'll charge me way too much.

Via stablecoins, what you need to do is, you know, maybe I send USDC, for example, and you either need to hope that the counterparty on the Mexican side is comfortable holding USDC or that they have a good off ramp and can off ramp it directly into pesos. Now, if there is a peso stablecoin, which there is, you know the people that are issuing it, great people, what you can do then is use the Peso stablecoin as a means to sort of go around FX a little bit.

One of the primary benefits to having an on chain version of a currency is the increased level of composability and liquidity sourcing. And so if you have a local currency stable coin, it could be, you know, MXN. We see a lot of countries out there that are starting to to launch this is you're creating a much more seamless way to get in and out of a given economy and in and out of a given currency. Right now, one of the hardest things to do in stablecoins is what people call first and last mile.

It's getting from fiat to stablecoins and stablecoins to fiat. But by having a local currency stablecoin, a version of that local currency that is on chain, you can reduce that expense and say, okay, we're gonna keep everything on chain and we're just gonna move between USDC or USDT and the MXN stablecoin. And so you're able to make that process a little bit more efficient.

It also becomes a lot cheaper than to be able to move like MXN stablecoin into MXN fiat currencies because you're not needing to deal with exchange rates, things like that. So in my opinion, every single currency is either going to get eaten by the dollar, which, you know, again, I'm an American. I don't hope that happens to the entire world. I like a little competition. Or you are going to see governments or private institutions, private banks in those

geographies launch their own local currency stablecoin. And that's how we get to a world that functions with thousands of currencies, thousands of on chain stablecoins. And there will be incumbents, of course, who will resist this. Of But there's also a lot of people rushing into the game. Alright. Now I wanna ask you, in terms of how you're in the game, you're in the arena on this Yeah. With a newish company Yeah. I mean, Holiday terms of the world?

Holiday focuses on universal deposits. Right? Holiday has been around for a while. Universal deposits are where we have planted our flag, fundamentally speaking, because we solve the problem orchestration around various different on chain and off chain rails. But the premises is like you can build a really, really badass application, a really badass protocol, whatever you want. But if money can't get in there, you're screwed. You're screwed. You're you're dead in the water.

And so what Holiday does is we provide the best way that we possibly can for your users to get their money wherever that money might be, in whatever form factor that money might be in into your system in the easiest way possible. Our biggest focus is on conversion. So again, how easy is it for your users to get their money into the given system? And it sounds like a really, really simple problem, but it's not. Users might have their money in a bank account in this country.

They might have it on Apple Pay in that country. They might have it in USDT on Tron, but you wanna be holding USDC on your own chain, whatever it might be. And so the increase in financial technology has also meant an increase in the fragmentation of the way in which money is held and we reduce that fragmentation so that people can get money in and soon money out in the easiest possible way. A good play if this world of extreme fragmentation and many players and many rails and many coins is going.

Again, I think that there's gonna be a world with tens of thousands of stable coins and that's just stable coins. That's not talking about Yeah. You know, non stable assets. Let's say that you're a big Bitcoin guy and you wanna deposit Bitcoin in a bank that only takes USDC on tempo or whatever it might be. How do you reconcile the difference between the money that my user has with the money that the merchant or my bank wants?

And you need to have the plumbing that offers that level of composability and interoperability to the point where the experience is akin to you using your Chase card and buying a bottle of water from the bodega. Thinking about that, so you're providing that sort of interoperability

layer. Right? Helping that coordination cost of... Just like there was an app for everything, now there's a there's a stablecoin for everything. Right? How do you win? If this goes right, how does holiday win? How how does this sort of, like, help the world, and and how might it shift next year? First, I think that we're very fortunate to be surfing a tremendous

tidal wave. Like, stablecoins are coming. They're here. Right? More money is moving on chain in terms of tokenized equities, in terms of tokenized deposits. Value is coming on chain. And the more value that comes on chain, yes, the more fragmented it is, but also the easier that Holiday makes it for people to move between those assets. Right? That's primarily what we focus on is the orchestration between one asset and another. And we wrap that all up into a really beautiful deposit experience.

But at the end of the day, it's how do you move from a to b in the easiest way possible. Now the amount of options that people have are expanding and that's really, really great for holiday. Right? We want there to be a world with tens of thousands of stable coins. We want there to be a world in which people are holding money in the way that is most useful to them. And the question becomes again, how do you connect A and B? How do you connect user with merchant or user with bank? I think that there's two ways.

The first is we just build out the most robust channel. Wherever your money is and whatever form factor it is, we are going to be there. The second is we do so in the right way, right? Holiday is a fully non custodial system. Okay. We do not hold money at any point in time. We work with really, really amazing providers. We work with really, really amazing compliant teams, but we are 100% fully non custodial. I don't want to dive into like the nitty gritty of the tech and GMs and EOs and everything like that.

But what you do need to know is that a lot of the people that are trying to accomplish the same thing today are doing so in quasi custodial way and they're starting to get nipped in the butt. They're gonna continue to get nipped in the butt especially as, you know, clarity comes out and genius comes out and everything like that. We focus on doing the right things the right way and doing so also in a way that is going to scale as this tidal wave continues to grow.

So, you know, we're here for people that want to build on chain for neo banks, for prediction markets, for DeFi platforms, for merchants, whatever it might be who want to bring money into their system regardless of where that money rests or what form factor it's in. Okay.

One potential curveball. Do it. Zooming out a little bit. We took a historical lens, talked a little bit about some of the stuff here. Thinking about yourself in fifty years, sitting on a rocking chair in the land of a thousand lakes, talked about a thousand stablecoins. Now you're in Minnesota. You're on a you're on a... Minnesota. You know? Minnesota. You're you're on a rocking chair, and you're sort of thinking back on this all. How has the world changed over the course of your lifetime and career?

And what's happened in that last half a century? What do you expect if you can get a little bit visionary

after you've been quite historical on us? It's a dangerous ask that you have of me. I think that in The US, it's a very, very different conversation. Like, yeah, my bank is gonna run on Stablecoins, means I'll be able to pay my rent on a Sunday. My bank is now open on President's Day. It was closed before. That's all fine and dandy. I think that though this is a very, very, very big step in the world of global finance. Right? How easy is it for my shipping company to move money around the world? Right?

How easy is it is for... Will it be for me to send money to my friends and family abroad? Right? That type of stuff is going to be different. And truthfully, I think it's going to be a relatively understated and underrated change. To our point, you know, bringing it full circle, there's a way that money should work. Stablecoins will enable that, but there's still a big discrepancy between the way that money does work and the way that money should work.

But when stuff works the way that it should, you don't really realize. And that's part of the magic. Right? Like, good engineering is indistinguishable from magic. And so when things work the way that they should, don't I think that there's gonna be this big, like, eureka type of moment. But you're not gonna think about it. Right? I might dedicate the next fifty years of my life to making sure that you can pay your brother overseas in an easier way that you can now.

And I consider myself to be someone who's on the cutting edge of technology, but my kids, they're gonna have no idea. They're not gonna sit down and and appreciate this and, you know, for for better and worse, but, like, I don't really use checks anymore. My parents, their entire lives Sure. They have used checks. It's gonna be a very, similar thing. You know, our kids are gonna sit down. They're gonna be like, what do you mean I can't just send money around the world and have it instantly be settled? You know?

What do you mean that the money that sits in my favorite social media app doesn't make me 4%? What do you mean that I used to have to pay to send money to my friend? Like, these are all really, really big concepts that we take for granted today, but that our kids, they're just gonna live in the world where money is moving the way that it should. And I think that that in of itself is going to be the goal of, like, does money move in the way that it should?

And we can, you know, dive into my predictions on the externality of that. But at the end of day, we're here to do a very, very simple thing. Let's make money move and operate the way that it should in the twenty first century. Hey. Money moving the way that it should.

D. P. Remnick, everybody. Appreciate you having me. Thank you, man. Thank you for coming on. My pleasure. Awesome.