Gasless Stablecoins on Sui: Why Mysten Labs Gave Up the Fee

And we have Luisa, head of stablecoins. What this is the dream job. This is what this is what everybody could be wanting when they hey. What do you wanna be when you grow up head of stablecoins Yep. At Miston Labs? Great to have you on the show. How's it going?

Thank you. Thanks for having me. It's it's it's it's going. Not gonna lie. It's been it's been it yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think we're all feeling the pain, but we're we're we're trekking along over here.

Tell us what do what do you mean pain? Tell us about that.

Mean, just Diver it in. In general. I think the markets in general. We I feel like we saw a little glimmer of hope a couple days ago, and then it hasn't really continued that momentum. But, but, nonetheless, I think we we're continuing to build on our end at Mist and Labs, and, we're we're very much, convicts. We have very strong convictions around stablecoins on that front.

And to your point, you know, I didn't I didn't know I wanted to be head of stablecoins growing up, as you mentioned, but I I have been in this role for for a little over three years now. Call it luck. Call it it was just the area I was interested in, but, yeah, been very fortunate.

Yeah. That's amazing. It does look like Bitcoin is at least over 80 as of now. I don't know how that's affecting the rest of the market, but, yeah, here we go. So we got back. Looks like real time. We got Bitcoin at little floating, a little bit over 80,000. So for for someone that feels like we've gone through a pretty quiet, dark period of no action, I feel like there's at least hopefulness on the horizon with with a little bit of the price.

How does that I mean, maybe as we're just talking about this, we don't typically talk about price a lot, but or just like the price and the markets and coins, and we we actually spend a lot of time here on the show talking about, like, what's getting built, infrastructure, things of that nature, but we would be lying to ourselves if if we didn't acknowledge at least the momentum and focus and attention that market price brings to the space.

What maybe maybe just on that point, like, what has that been like for you personally building and and being in this role in a season or an era where that has been not a tailwind? We'll just put it that way. How how is it what's that been like?

Yeah. So it's a very good question, and I will try to answer in a way that will not get me in trouble. Great. So I've been in this space for since, what, 2000 and what? 2016, 2017. Wow. It's bit it's been almost ten years for me. And as I mentioned earlier, missing labs for about three years. And prior to that, I was at Stellar for two and a half years.

So, having now been at two layer ones that have a token associated with it, I think the impact of a bear market or suppressed token prices, it just means that, deal makers, I love that Lumens. Got love for that family as well. It it just means that we have less leverage. We have less resources and capital to be able to partner with, the partners that we'd like to work with. Right?

Because if you think about the way that we cooperate with, institutions, with crypto native organizations, it's I it's either via, you know, in the form of grants or it's in the form of investments or or or other vehicles. And so when you have, suppressed token prices, for an extended amount of time, it definitely limits, you know, the art of the possible, especially if we want to take risks and take, bigger bets.

But having said that, I think, Mist and Labs, we have been extremely deliberate on the areas that we are focused on, and myself in particular, stablecoins, stablecoins, stablecoins has really been the the narrative for the past three years that I've been at the org. And I don't think that narrative will will change or or dimmer, for the next three or ten years. So, yeah, if you wanna talk about that, we can get into it. If you have questions about anything

yeah. Go for it. I love the phrase you used, the art of the possible. And I know we're talking a little bit about what's not always going so hot, but when you put on your optimist hat, what is what sort of picture does the art of the possible paint here? For stablecoins in general? For stablecoins. Yeah. And and maybe for your sort of lens or world within that.

Yeah. So I think if we had this conversation, call it three years ago, I feel like most people would the the dialogue would be, is stablecoins a thing? Is that even going to be something that will be around in three years' time? And today, that's it's definitely a thing. And as you put so nicely earlier about my my title. Now I think the the question has shifted to where do they actually make sense? Where, where can they add value? Because we're not trying to fix something that's not broken.

I think when I look at the existing financial infrastructure, I come from banking capital markets. We know that it's not perfect. We know that it was built for some people, not for everyone, and definitely not for many people. So how can stablecoins, blockchain, call it the entire industry, fill that gap? And, when I think of the art of the possible, me personally right now, I'm thinking about it in three buckets from a stablecoins perspective.

It's, how can they lean in on cross border payments, b two payments, because that's definitely something where the existing infrastructure is not perfect and inefficient. I think about, dollarization, access to dollar in in locations or regions where it's extremely difficult, extremely inefficient, very expensive. I also think about, agentic payments, as we move into the world of agents and as agents are transacting with one another, I feel like leveraging stablecoins is is sort of a

perfect use case for So how to be exploring. Yeah. From from the outside looking in, right, like, you've been with the firm for a while, you've seen you know, you were a seller before this, you have a very, I would imagine, like, payments focused, like, sellers always position themselves as, a very payments focused chain and ecosystem.

When I think about Mistlin Labs and SWE and some of the history, my mind and even looking at the website right now, like, it's very, like, web three feeling, very gaming, very, you know, more more of a crypto native experience. A lot of what you just said doesn't feel like that. It feels more, yeah, payments oriented. It feels more, like, agent to commerce oriented.

Do you see these, like, how you're thinking about those areas applying to that kind of historical ideal customer or builder that Miston Labs has attracted, or do you really see this more as like an evolution and re like, a reshaping of where where the ecosystem is heading next?

That's a great question. So when I when I think about Miston Labs, when I was speaking to them initially when when considering this role, recall that all of the five cofounders came from Meta and Libra. They all worked on the the Libra Diem project. And the original thesis or the original intention for that project was to build a payments blockchain, a blockchain specifically for payment settlement.

So that has always been the, I would say, the original DNA behind why, you know, Evan decided to spin out and create Missin Labs and ultimately, you know, establish SWE, and Sam creating the Move language, because he saw that the other languages that were out there just it wasn't it wasn't going to be sufficient in order to process the the payment volumes that that that the real world was seeing. So that has always been the genesis of Misten Labs and SWE.

Now when SWE launched, because of the move object centricity of how it was different to the account based model from EVM chains, it naturally attracted, gaming companies, web two gaming companies. And so that's sort of where the narrative started, but it was never the intention of any of the founders to build a a gaming chain. It just so happened that it was the fit at the right time and gaming web three gaming was also popping at the time.

So so I think we leaned in, but it by no means, we were limiting ourselves to to only that sector. And I think, now as we're talking about just the overall evolution of our industry and where Vista Labs, is going, I do think those three categories that I mentioned to you before as it relates to stablecoins is very much core to our priorities, and this is is tremendously strategic for us.

With with Move being kind of a I I haven't taken a a lot of time to learn about Move specifically, but the way you're describing it sounds like a really unfair advantage to the ecosystem that you've created and kind of housed this language and and tool in in house, how do you see Move specifically as a piece to that strategic puzzle as you guys look ahead? Like, what what what is so special about what was built there and what's possible there?

I mean, it's open source. Anyone can can look at the code base. It's, it's it's unique in a sense that it was built with the mindset of payments, but more so with the mindset of asset issuance. So when you think about how assets are being created, it's just more flexible for them to leverage move because it is object based as opposed to account based. You can batch things together via PTBs, etcetera.

There are definitely advantages that we have seen and have heard batch from, like, financial institutions because of the way that our smart contracts are written. There's more that they can do with the art of the possible as it relates to finance use cases. So I I hope that the the community, even beyond the Suite community, feels that they they're very much welcome to take a look at it and use it as they see fit. We've had, you know, other projects that that have spun out of the the Move community.

And I think we continue to see builders show interest in learning how to write smart contracts and Move. And and that's definitely something that, you know, our our DevRel team and and some of the community team members are working on across across the globe. Does that answer your question? I'm not super technical here, but at least from my perspective, from a business standpoint, when I have conversations at that level, that's the feedback that that I've heard.

Yeah. Yeah. For sure. So if I maybe if I were a business that you were wanting to position, sell, partner with, or, like, help help me understand on the other side of the table. Like, I'm a I'm a financial institution, and I would be like, hey. This this move like, what what is possible with move for like, pick pick whatever business financially you want.

Like, what do you have any top of mind examples of, like, what Move can accomplish maybe uniquely or or an example of, like, a unique unlock that building on Move provides?

Yeah. I think the example I can think of here are, like, perp decks and the way that they can execute transactions, like, extremely fast and settle near instantaneously. Mhmm. There, we we have two part DEXs, one that's already launched and one that will be launching, on Suite that we're super excited about. But my understanding is because of the way that move is designed, they they're able to, to create, efficiencies from that that that they can't find in in other in other smart contract language.

So, that's one example I can think of.

Yeah. Perptex does have a you're speaking their language with with that sort of thing. Is the one that is available, is that within this like, it's interesting to see Mystin Labs, like, you have this, Something we've seen other ecosystems do, which is actually really cool, where you have more of, an owned product strategy. Yeah. Is the Perp decks kind of falling in this category, or is this like an external partner that's just built on top of this?

Or how how do you even think about things like Slush, SweetPlay, maybe the difference between, like, the owned versus partnered Yeah. Things here? Yeah.

I think the intention of us building first party products is to showcase the art of the possible for the technology for the SuiteStack. And, to answer your question about the PerpDecks, the two that are are being launched, one is internal, one is first party, the other one is external. They're called Aftermath, a great builder that has been, building within the Suite ecosystem since day one.

So, they they have different approaches to to what they're targeting, but I think Aftermath is is sort of the the main perp decks, for for for the Suite ecosystem, and they are external. And we want to encourage builders to continue to build out products and not be deterred from the fact that just because we have first party brought products that that are being built to showcase what the technology is capable of, that it's not a competition here.

We're only doing this very much, to showcase what we can do, and we're very much open to bringing on the best of the builders to create their own ideas, maybe something that we haven't even thought about. So

Shifting gears a little bit, Louisa, something we've sort of explored on this show is where we think we might be headed towards a more dollarized world or a little bit less. Mistin seems to be heavy on the on the dollarized side, USD, stablecoins, I think exclusively until unless you need to tell me I'm wrong. But is that something where Missing Labs is saying, yes. We're doubling down on that. That's kind of where we think folks will want access to the dollar. This is what we're gonna be providing.

We're gonna be operating in a more dollarized world, or is it like, no. That's a gap we wanna work on. We want to get into more of these other currencies on chain.

Yeah. I will I will answer that in a couple of ways. The first is I do think that there are there's definitely more demand globally even from a trade perspective to hedge against the dollar. So we do I I do see that. I do see that trend. However, do I think that the dollar is going to lose its presence and be replaced by another currency or a basket of currencies in the next five to ten years, I think the probability of that is going to be quite low.

However, having said that, it doesn't mean that we're not interested in non dollar stablecoins that are that can be successful in the Suite ecosystem, but I would be very, very cautious on what the use case of these non dollar stablecoins are are created for. Is there actually a need for, I don't know, a Brazilian real to exist in Brazil when the pick system in Brazil is extremely efficient? Like I said earlier on on this on this chat, we're not trying to fix something that isn't broken.

And I think when I think about Mhmm. Stablecoins blockchain in general as it specifically just non dollar stablecoins, we wouldn't wanna create something that's not needed. And, I don't think local Brazilians would see the benefit of bringing their money movement from picks to leveraging, real stablecoin. Now can that be used in global trade? Possibly. But, again, I I think it has to be there has to be a very, very strong use case tied to the non dollar stablecoins for us to be interested in pursuing.

Another kind of go ahead. Go ahead, Zach. Please, sir. I was just thinking kind of continuing in this thinking about different sort of, like, USD. We were talking earlier about float a little bit and different sort of float economics. And we've got OpenUSD now sharing its reserve income across Visa, Stripe, Coinbase, Mastercard. I think it's I think you may have mentioned that, like, midsize issuers here are getting squeezed, and we have these distributors who are also owning the float economics.

When that happens, what's left for a chain that is settling the trade to monetize? Like, what what how is that playing out for for those non open USD players?

So we are part of the alliance. We are part of the open standard alliance. We we know, the bridge chain, Zach, quite well. And from an economic standpoint, I don't, I'm not sure if you guys saw, but we announced what's called, gasless transactions or free tier transactions for stablecoins that are natively issued on SWE. We grandfathered in all the existing stablecoins that, are natively integrated to SWE, to date.

So the concept is if I were to transfer you to send you 10 USDC on SWI or 10 SWI dollar or potentially 10 OUSC on SWI, the idea is that it should be free. There's no gas or network fees from that. We never wanted, to make money off of stablecoin transactions. I think our thesis has always been that money should be should move free. We we don't want to add to the cost that ultimately the end user will have to pay for.

Obviously, depending on how many parties are involved in a transaction, everybody wants to take a cut. But as the infra layer, we think moving on our rails should be free when it comes to stablecoins.

I I love that because I love sometimes having the conversations about making intentional choices around where you make money. Mhmm. Right? You're in the flow of funds. You can be someone who's just shaving off at every moment possible, but it seems like missing a saying, like, no. Almost there's, like, a philosophical approach to this. Like, that's not the right way to do this, which, of course, it makes me think of the early days of the Internet. They could have made this a pay for Internet.

The but actually making things move freely, finding a way to make those kind of economics work can be a much bigger game in the end. If if Mist and Lab says, we're not making money that way, what's the bigger game?

So Does does it still feel like it may so framing that a little bit, like, we've seen Yeah. Maybe I would describe it like a Polygon, for example, speaking for myself.

Definitely seen that ecosystem go way more into the, like, we're gonna be an application focused business, treated like a real like, more of like a real business focused on real, like, revenues and cash flows and, like, taking the incubated product approach, but really focusing on that, versus I think what originally the ecosystem model is is, maybe how Solana has really continued to to succeed is, like, we're building a bigger ecosystem here where, like, value is accruing as more people build.

Where where on like, which side are you kind of seeing the future of SWE and and Missing Labs? Can both exist? Are you picking one? Yeah.

No. This is a really, really good question. It's a hard one, and I don't know how to answer it truthfully. Because I think Solana has been successful because of the way that they have been very decentralized and hands off and encouraging the ecosystem to go out and build and they themselves not building any first party products. Polygon's journey has shifted really, really shifted in the past twelve months, I would say, and have refocused, their narrative purely around payments.

And in terms of, you know, the acquisitions that they've made and and wanting to own the entire end to end flow of a payment transaction.

Yeah. That's totally different. Like, that's totally different than, like, we're gonna go help the infrastructure stack. Like, it's a very, I mean, yeah, you're you're acquiring what could be partners and and

you know? But one would argue, had Polygon had been successful in creating the ecosystem community and the network effect that Solana had, would they go down this path? I don't know. And, like, I think it it all I I don't know. Have you ever have you had Sandeep on this call? Maybe we can ask him directly. Or I I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer to this. I think

What do you what do you think is the most successful like like, when you're going back to the team, you're like, okay. Yeah. We can you know, both of these approaches have different benefits.

Yeah.

And maybe both of them happening at once have different benefits. I would argue it could potentially be better to pick one and stick to it than try to do both. I would probably fall in the camp of, like, go all in with I I actually, in some ways, really admire Polygon's strategy in terms of having clarity and knowing who they are and they're being it. And, like, in some ways, it's doing both can can create some complexity and confusion. At least that's what I've seen.

Like, where where where would you say the best case scenario or outcome really looks like if you were to pick one of these three options?

One, know gonna get me in trouble. You're gonna get me in trouble. I know. That's why I'm that's why we're asking. I'm just kidding. No worries. Go ahead. We got it's it's all good. I I know I know both both the teams quite well, and they can come after me later on.

To me personally, given given the journey that I've had and what I've seen, I do think leaning towards owning, building first party products, and being being able to accrue revenue at the app layer is is where I think an organization like Missin should be thinking about. I'm not confirming that that's what we're doing. But Why why is that goes to Why is that so? Goes to well, because I just mentioned, we want money to move for free.

We're not charging anyone anything to to to transact on Suite as it relates to payments, stablecoins, etcetera. So you have to be thinking about why are we doing that. Right? And so it's it's it's very much moving assets on chain should should be free. And now we want to encourage you to look at what is possible when it comes to building different types of use cases and products on our infrastructure where you know that moving value is free. And so that's that's the thesis.

And, again, I think Solana approached in a way because they were in a certain spot in a certain situation, and I think they have a this is probably philosophical as well. Right? Like decentralization versus centralization, which I'm sure you guys have discussed many times over. So I think it's it's it's it's in along those veins as does it make sense to also build products on your, internally as well? Yeah. Last question,

just how this takes shape. So let's just imagine we're doing this now. Right? Like, miss like, this is the this is the strategy, hypothetically, we wanna go down. Does this mean, like, because you said at the top of the like, the top of your, segment here, like, the idea of grants and incentives and how do we get more builders in. Like, are you taking that approach similarly where you're like, hey.

If you have an incredible Agenza Commerce platform or neobank or money movement app or unique approach to building something that's needed in the world at the app layer, like, please, like, come to Missin. What is the benefit to that person? Like, what's the pitch to them? Why would they what do they get by coming to your team and choosing to build with you guys? Like, what's the what's the what's the biggest yeah. What's the what's the pitch to them right now?

So I think we have a lot of tools in our toolbox to work with. Right? I I think, from a technical perspective, we are different. As I mentioned, the move component, the programmability of our chain is is very unique compared to others. We are tremendously fast. I know everyone says they're fast, and we're all we're all cheap and fast. But I think we're also reliable. And, in addition to all the technical aspects of it, what I would say is we, we have our own stablecoin.

I we didn't even get a chance to talk about that. So we also have the ability to, leverage Sweet Dollar, to to partner with these neo money apps or, payments companies and be able to share rewards with them from that front. And then on top of that, we're building functionality to stablecoins en suite. So I mentioned that it's free movement, gasless, and it's not based on a sponsored transaction where someone is paying for it on their behalf. It's at the protocol level, which no other protocol can implement.

We are building out confidential transactions. So now you can look at newer use cases like payroll. If you're getting paid in USCC, you don't have to be worried about someone looking at your wallet address and figuring out how much you're getting paid on a monthly basis. So we're building out all of these key primitives that is meant to make blockchain payments to be just payments. It should feel like the infra of blockchain is invisible. Right? You use the the the metaphor of the Internet earlier.

I think right now when I'm sending a message, to a friend, I'm not gonna say, hey. I sent you a message using WhatsApp, or I sent you a message using Facebook. It's just, hey. I I sent them a message. I want people to be able to transact on SWE in a way that they don't that it's completely invisible. And I think that's the value proposition that we are sharing with builders today, and that is the value proposition that we're constantly, like, heads down working towards.

So cool. I love this this segment. This was definitely one of my favorites mainly because, you just keep it real, Luisa. Thank you for, keeping it real and and, yeah, bringing us into the current, but also the future vision for for where you're going next. Exciting stuff.

Thank you. Thank you for having having me. This was fun. This is the first time I've ever done a live live one, I feel like. So this is cool. I don't realize. It's not as hard as people think. It it's just kinda like going on a Google Meet. You know? Yeah. I mean, I feel like, well, you the two of you are very friendly. You made it very comfortable. So so I appreciate you guys.

Yeah. We'd love we'd love to have you back. We wanna be friends. We wanna be better friends with Mist and Labs and SWE. There's a lot to cover, especially to, like, maybe the relationship we would like to explore is, like, staying really close with who is building and what is getting done and covering the the application layer.

It's really interesting to hear the perspective of people on your team, but it's also really interesting for the PerpDexes or whoever ends up, like, we're we're coming out next month with a new series on modern markets and people building things like PerpDexes. So being able to maybe work with you guys on that series or just, like, have more awareness of the app layer in that sense would be interesting. So, yeah, there's more to do. So we'll stay close to you guys.

Would be great to have some of our builders on. Talk about that.

Yeah. He doesn't wanna talk about perfect Xs all day. You know? And what can we get at?

Exactly. Well, thanks. Thanks, guys. It was it was it was fun. Let's do it again soon. Look forward to Well, thanks, Wiza. Take care. Bye.