Solana's Maya Caddle on How SoFi, MoneyGram, and Western Union Are Moving Onchain

Of the Solana community. We love Solana here, Maya. How are doing?

I'm good. I'm always happy to hear that you're loving Solana.

Oh, yes. Yeah. It is. Well, there's so many great things being built in Solana. So it's like, you know, you get a lot of ecosystems that say they're doing great stuff, but they're if you actually kinda look under the hood, it's like, well, who's building anything cool here? That's that's never been, a problem with Solana. You guys have a really, really great community of builders

and institutional money and payments, and it's been fun to see that come to life. So excited to meet you. How how does it feel to be on the other side? I've I've noticed lately you've been doing mint condition with StableCon. You've been the interviewer. How does it feel to be the interviewee now?

Sometimes it's nice, to be honest. It depends upon the sort of questions you ask. Maybe you'll ask me a segment rather than the beginning. But, yeah,

I usually am in both of your seats with the mint condition. Yeah. Yeah. Well, no. You've been you've been doing a great job. I'd say I'm a little jealous because you've got to talk with SoFi. I've been an avid SoFi user for four or five years now, and they're kind of on my my interview interviewer hit list. But kind of bring us into the moment we've seen Western Union, Fiserv, SoFi, MoneyGram, just this huge conglomerate of, you know, just legacy financial institutions.

I'd say SoFi being the most forward looking as of late coming on to Solana Building. Bring us into this moment and kinda lay out, like, what's your work look like with them? And I think part two of that would be where is it similar, and where does the work kinda start to diverge? Because I think especially with MoneyGram, there's some interesting nuances with they're running a validator. Others have launched stablecoins. So, yeah, bring us into your world.

Sure. So in terms of our world at Solana Foundation, what generally happens is sometimes we reach out to payments companies. We also, because of our size, because of our significance, and especially our dominance actually in crypto native payments, we get a lot of inbound as well from some of these big institutions. And really what our role is or what my role is is to support them in their ideals. So someone may come to me and say, hey. We're gonna launch a stable coin that does x y zed. My job is to say, okay.

Have you thought about this? Here are some of the partners that you also need to bring in to really bring this to life. Here are different partners you could speak to. And sometimes, actually, it's about being honest. Right? I spend my days thinking, dreaming, breathing crypto. For all of these payments companies, that's definitely not the case. Right? And some of them are their compliance teams are just getting familiar with stablecoins, their loan, anything else.

And so sometimes what it is is just having those honest conversations and being able to speak to a neutral party that can honestly say, hey. Your plan to do x, from what I've seen elsewhere, probably wouldn't recommend that. And that's what I do with these payments companies and help them build out and refine their strategy in a way that truly makes sense for them. It's not just about use a stablecoin or launch a stablecoin and the rest is history, and Bob's your uncle.

It's really about how can we make sure that this whatever you're doing in crypto or on chain is as successful as possible and really aligns with the core strategies of your business.

Maya, when you're meeting with these institutions and as, like, kind of payments, partnerships, sales folks, with Zach and me, inbound always is nice. You know? Like, no one no one's gonna be upset with a great inbound pipeline. It's like, ugh. Love it. Love to hear that. When you have these calls, let's just say, you know, it's a it's a institution that when you see this hit the inbound list, you're like, oh, hell yeah. I'm excited to talk to them.

What is the typical approach that you have as, you know, payments lead and really taking a consultative approach with them? Like, what are some of these questions you ask? What are the discovery what's the discovery process you you take to really kind of help start the conversation? I think a lot of companies are like, one, how do we think about this? Where do we start? Where do we go? Like, how do you kind of start from the very beginning? What are you looking for in in in that first call?

So, I mean, I think, really, the first call is understanding why. Right? Why do they wanna leverage stablecoins? What are they planning to do x with stablecoins or crypto more broadly? What are their key goals? It may be that, for example, there's a number of companies who I am working closely with who are now saying, okay. Well, we are using stablecoins for payments. Right? But we also wanna make sure that we're earning. Not all of our capital is consistently working. Some of it is at rest. How do we do that?

Right? Or they may sometimes approach me and say, we want x percentage return on our stablecoins. Right? That we're, you know, whatever. And so those are the sorts of conversations that I really enjoy because it is really about shaping their strategy and make sure it aligns with whatever is important for them internally.

So there's a lot of understanding the reasoning behind certain goals, what their goals are, what their time frame is, and also how they're thinking about crypto, what is the actual internal appetite because some companies understandably are a bit more cautious than others. So I think, you know, of some of the ambitious companies have really been forward thinking and many of the ones that you've listed. I worked like, SoFi was my deal, for example.

And they definitely are example of a company who have heavily committed to this crypto journey.

Right? They've made Celebrating this one. Celebrating this.

They made some really strategic there's so much confetti. They've made some really strategic hires. Right? Yeah. And, you know, other companies also are making similar moves. Of course, gotta shout shout out Western Union and MoneyGram as well as Fiserv too. And there's many more that are in the pipeline and that are to be announced too. Can

we go to I I really wanna dive into the MoneyGram angle. Right? Because, you know, I've I've had the opportunity to talk with Malcolm Clark a few times from Western Union, very clear on their approach. We had Luke on from MoneyGram recently. But I think the news with, MoneyGram and Solana is a bit different in the sense of okay. So MoneyGram comes out. They issue their stable point on seller Stellar shortly after they follow-up with, hey.

But now we're also going to launch a validator on Solana and this this work they're doing with the Solana developer. Is program or platform?

Platform.

Platform. So break this down from a break that break that deal down for us. Why is it impactful that they're running a validator? And then let's transition into really unpacking from a developer perspective. When a firm is forward looking, where does the Solana developer platform fit in?

Sure. I'll start with the Solana developer platform aspect of it. So Solana Developer Platform, just to zoom out a high level, is fundamentally a API to make it as easy as possible for payments companies, institutions, etcetera, to leverage crypto. And this could be for payments based use cases, but it could also be for other use cases.

Because traditionally, would have to happen is, okay, you know you wanna do x on chain, but then you'd have to integrate directly and manage that yourself with the different partners that you would need to bring this to life. So that would include custodians, obviously, the chain, the RPC knows everything. Right? For a lot of these companies that are new to crypto, that's quite a tall order. And you have to do this even to start experimenting and just testing and playing around.

And so salon developer platform aims to abstract away some of that complexity. And even before or even let's say you're trying to decide what wallet provider to use. It's an easy platform to say, okay, this is what the different experiences are with these different wallet providers. This is what it's like to transact using Solana. Here is the the different architecture stat or stat that we could build and leverage on Solana, etcetera. And that's really what SDP aims to do.

Oh, I love that. Where how are you getting all these? But anyway I don't know this is I don't know what's happening right now. You made Andre. We're making it we're making it rain making it rain. So on a developer platform. This is what it feels like when

you use the Solana developer platform. This is actually what it feels like. It's exactly like that. But actually, we it's in your home. Right? It's in real life. A 100%. Anyway, So, yeah, when it comes to SDP, salon developer platform, MoneyGram's integration is really important. MoneyGram, of course, is a huge network across the world, right, in terms of payment networks.

And this now enables other payment companies, other institutions, other crypto native companies as well, in fact, to leverage easily that network for their own benefit. And, you know, we're really excited. This is the first of many announcements and engagements with MoneyGram, it's been great to work with them so far.

And then you had go ahead. Go ahead. No. You had a two part question, and and I don't wanna cut cut it off. Keep going. Okay. And

then on the other hand is when it comes to moneygrams becoming a validator. So, you know, I think it's really important to have institutions and traditional companies as validators. It also shows a level of commitment to Solana, especially when you couple it with STP. I think, you know, sometimes you could see a company just becoming a validator, but not actually leveraging that chain. I think having the two together shows a real commitment. It's a way for them to actually have chips in the game, so to speak. Mhmm.

And, yeah, we, you know, we have this program for institutions such as MoneyGram, and we're excited to have MoneyGram as part of our validated network now.

Mhmm. It's exciting. Do you think makes it seems like MoneyGram specifically just says we're talking about this or SoFi if if that's, like, more relevant or personal to you. What what are these priorities or maybe business units or or goals that these companies have that make them a really great fit for wanting to work with your team and use the Solana developer platform and maybe become a validator? Like, I'm I'm imagining not all companies will fit the mold to be in these positions.

But from what you're seeing right now, where where are you guys really finding resonance and momentum? And what are some of these themes across the Sofis and MoneyGrams of the world?

I think there's two themes. Right? So one is international cross border money movement. And the reason why Solana is especially strong on that is this. We can talk about the fees. We can talk about the speed. We're all familiar with that. But the key nuances are, one is in terms of some of the privacy controls that we can have in place, and this is especially important for now institutions.

We have something called Contra whereby, essentially, you can almost have your own private instance of Solana Mainnet and then also have the same connectivity to Solana Mainnet. Right? So if you're, I don't know, a bank and you're doing internal ledger money movement, that becomes really important. And we also have, of course, privacy permissions or credentials, so to speak, to be that can be attached to assets if you're launching your own asset.

So that enables confidential transfers if you want to enable that, enables the ability to programmatically enforce that. You can whitelist, blacklist who's using or holding your asset even if assets being leveraged off your platform. Now the other key thing is a global reach of Solana. So Solana has never just been a western only blockchain, and that's really important. We have big partners in different regions of the world.

From Asia, I mean, we just announced a partnership this week with one of the key banks in Korea. We have, of course, partnerships in The Middle East. Right? We have agreement with Vara, which is a virtual asset regulatory authority in The UAE. And then we have deep networks and also partnerships in LatAm and in Africa as well.

And so when you're thinking about cross border money movement, you need this player that can't, you know, can say that actually we have big institutions that have the local connectivity, local rails rather than just having this out an aggregator style approach. We're trying to get as close to the local rails as possible, and we have been doing that historically as well. We have that reach historically. And that's really important when you're thinking about the cross border money use case because otherwise Yeah.

Awesome. Now that's one thing and that's why we're really achieving strong, you know, traction, which is why you have these big remittance companies choosing to use Solana. In the context of Western Union, they're exclusively using Solana for for for especially their stable coin as well as some of their other activities. On the other hand, the other thing is embedded finance.

And what that means is, let's say you're a of company and you haven't been able to offer financial primitives or solutions to your users whether there's a retail or merchant. Or equally, maybe you have offered some solutions but not others and you wanna offer more. And so that's really where Solana really shines because Solana is not just payments chain. And anyone who's claiming to just be a payments chain is probably a bit limited in their understanding of crypto and actually their offering.

Because at the end of the day, you start with payments, but you quickly start to look at credit. You quickly start to look at tokenized RWAs and ways you can build that into your system. So, you know, I've had really interesting conversations recently with players who are let's say they they have a treasure they have a float. Right? But then a lot of their float is moving and it has quite a high velocity. It may only be resting for, let's say, half an hour.

Now in traditional fiat rails, you wouldn't really be able to earn from that. Now there's ways that you can on Solana. Right? We have tokenized money market funds from tier one institutions where you can actually earn by the second. That's something that isn't doesn't really exist or doesn't isn't possible to actually ascertain because in traditional fiat money, because of the just the speed at which money moves currently. And that's unique to Solana.

So there's this whole broader ecosystem when we talk about embedded finance that goes beyond just payments. It goes into credit. It goes into tokenized RWAs and much more as well.

I wanna pull up the the website because it shows these three areas, I think, really beautifully, like issuance payments and then trading. I'll just pop this back up because it at least for me is a helpful visual. Zach, go ahead while we while we do that. No. It's it's funny. You I'm glad that you mentioned Toss Bank.

Can you break that down a little bit? And I think specifically what you're seeing coming out of the APAC region. We were talking about some of the news with with Canton and and and Japan. And this is a beat that is coming up more and more, Japan, Korea, APAC. Even though we were just in Mexico City focusing on Latin America, I think a good of one of the conversations ended up trickling over to what's happening in that part of the world.

And, again, I think with some of this western mindset, we don't realize how impactful it is with some of this involvement we're seeing coming out of Japan and Korea, China. So, yeah, help us understand what happened with TOS Bank and the the greater impact that has on the APAC region.

Sure. So yeah. Exactly. As you said, it's not just about The US. Right? There's a lot going on in the APAC region. And if you actually zoom out and look at the history of stablecoins and crypto more broadly, anyone who has a strong appreciation for that would know that they should be doubling down on the APAC region, and they should have those relationships in place. From a Solana perspective, you can see that we are and we have, and there's a lot that we haven't yet shared.

A lot of big announcements that truly are monumental and really change things for the crypto industry as a whole from the APAC region. You know, I think there's also been a big shift, positive shift from a regulatory perspective in the region. Right? We're seeing now Hong Kong, for example, enabling a few players to launch Hong Kong dollar denominated stablecoins such tokenized deposit. These are big moves that open up that region a lot. Solana has historically had a strong presence.

We have had conf whether it's through conferences, we had a big conference, I think last year and as well as earlier this year in Hong Kong. And that wasn't just attended. That wasn't just crypto native place. That was attended by big institutions and payments companies in the region. There's some I can't unfortunately share at the moment or a lot I can't share at the moment. But APAC is definitely Solana pilled. Let's put it that way. Yes. Solana pilled.

Good teaser. Good teaser.

I wanted to just maybe my last question or thought on on this is the infrastructure that Solana plugs into and the ecosystem for enterprises that you you sit in. And I think when you're going back to that kind of discovery call and you're meeting with these these larger institutions and you're listening for these opportunities or these issues that they're facing.

And then you're going back to the ecosystem that is so robust within Solana, and I kind of see Maya U as like a quarterback between all of these great builders and all of the ecosystems Solana has. I wanted to pop up, at least just this visual, on the site today that I think is showing this a little bit.

Talk a little bit about the ecosystem that Solana has been able to build with these integrations, and more specifically, what opportunities you see in the ecosystem for things that need to be built or problems that these institutions are facing where you actually wish there were more builders or wish there was more focus? I'm I'm wondering if there are any, like, opportunities from your vantage point where you're like, hey. I actually don't see many people building here, but I wish there I wish there were more.

Yeah. I think in terms of opportunities, there are a few. I think there's a lot of opportunities in credit and ways in which credit can be could be structured. Right? So, of course, we have defined native primitives and credit and borrowing platforms, and they're really important. But what does other credit primitives look like? So, you know, we we have a number of companies that offer some form of credit credit primitives. So, of course, the likes of humor and art, etcetera.

And these partially focus on the pay fi narrative as well as heavily on working capital and stablecoin native working capital, which is a big request that actually I get as well from a lot of the payments companies that are doing cross border money movement. The thing that I think is missing is there's a lot more room for innovation in the credit space, and we're starting to see some companies emerge, especially going now beyond working capital. But there's a lot there's a lot of room, in my opinion.

Payments come first, savings come next, credit will follow very shortly after. Mhmm. In terms of other opportunities and how we're thinking about it, from a Solana Foundation perspective, our job, my job is to make it as easy as possible for these institutions of payments companies to build and leverage or be on chain. And so one thing that's really important to me is really some of the treasury and earning based use cases. How do we make it as accessible as possible for someone to leverage, for example, DeFi?

Because one of the big things about our DeFi ecosystem is that we really have baked in risk parameters from the get go, right, at the protocol level. Whether that's, for example, the way in which the likes of a Camino, right, which is one of our bigger borrow lend protocols, is transparent about how it re not how it rebalances, but the frequency it rebalances, which is structurally impossible on chains where they don't have such low fees, transaction fees.

And that's of course, we know rebalance is is rebalancing is fundamental within crypto, where markets can move so rapidly. So you need to be leveraging a protocol where that is possible, where that's feasible. And also just the way in which all of the economics and structure and mechanisms are created within our DeFi ecosystem.

I think our ecosystem is really uniquely placed to be able to say we're not just a payments chain tacking on or trying to attach ourselves to, I don't know, a DeFi protocol, whatever else, we have those native players with deep liquidity. And that's the other important part. Right? We have a deep liquidity base. Right? So from a stablecoin perspective, we did 10,000,000,000,000 and over 10,000,000,000,000 US dollars worth of stablecoin money movement last year alone.

And this year, of course, we're seeing that continue to grow. We do, as you can see on the screen, we do on average way over 3,000 transactions per second. And this is in practice. This is not in theory. And we already have these big payment companies and institutions around the world leveraging Solana, and that gives you optionality. You're not just trapped into leveraging one player in x market. You have the optionality based upon what your needs and use cases are.

And I think so when you start to talk about Solana from an ecosystem perspective, it truly is unmatched. The tech is unmatched, but there's I don't know another ecosystem that can that truly has and addresses or is a leader across multiple different verticals and use cases from DeFi to tokenized RWAs to payments, etcetera, and also has that global reach and that global network of partners. It's giving you as a payments company that true optionality because that's important.

You may think you wanna start with player a as your info provider, but over time, you may realize that actually there's another use case that they don't fully address. You need to have that optionality. Otherwise, you'll become uncompetitive quickly.

Yeah. Well, we we have our we have our next guest joining here, but I do wanna ask a question that's kinda more bigger picture, more kind of a little bit selfishly from the media perspective. That that seems like is it have you always been doing media? Is the mint condition, is that a newer endeavor?

And I would love to know, like, what is the inspiration behind Mint Condition, and what role do you see media playing as you're engaging these, you know, remittance companies, payments giants, and, yeah, just the impact that media has just generally to to move this space forward?

No. Media is definitely incredibly important. I think, you know, pre Genius Art, we were really speaking to each other, right, within the crypto industry more broadly. Post Genius Art, we now have these institutions that are actually able to come on chain in a meaningful way. This is beyond POC. This is beyond design partners. This is a lot deeper, and that's what we're seeing on Solana.

And so it's our job to make sure that we can communicate use cases in practice as clearly as possible and the possibility as clearly as possible. So media is definitely important. And that's a strong contributor behind the launch of the Mint Condition. So Mint Condition is a podcast in partnership with StableCon who, of course, pulled together amazing conference last year and one also earlier this year. And then also with Solana Foundation. So it's a podcast from both of them.

And the whole premise is, you know, there's a lot of announcements. There's a lot of press. But what's actually going on? Right? So with the kind of context of SoFi, which was our first episode, it was digging deep into what SoFi USD means and how they can integrate that in a meaningful way. And on top of that, their Send, right, network or their Send which are rebuilding, which is really, really smart play from Certify. From a Western Union perspective, you know, it was breaking down. Okay.

These are the actual economics of using or launching your own stable coin for Western Union. Here are the actual financial benefits and how to think about those. And that's really important for a lot of other institutions and payments companies when they're making their decisions, when they're setting their strategy. Right? This is a whole new world. It's a it's a there's a lot of unknowns for them. And so, you know, the Mint Condition is a key part of that.

And from a startup perspective, we'll continue to push out content like through podcasts like the Mint Condition, etcetera, as well as, of course, written content. And we have an amazing platform payments.org to help you read more about some of the different solutions as well. And that's really important just to be able to better communicate to these pay payment players, to these institutions who are new to crypto, what is actually really going on behind the scenes. Yeah. Yeah. Payments.org.

I love that. That's such a great domain. It's so so baller. I love it. Maya, thanks for thanks for joining us and providing the providing so much wisdom. We as a part of the show, we're just we're continued to be excited to highlight this ecosystem, what's going on. It's been a really great experience to you know, for us, we're not like, candidly, we're not going to any ecosystem and being like, hey. We exclusively wanna work to do something with you guys or only cover this space.

Like, we've never taken that approach. We think there's so many great things being built. That is the priority priority for us is, like, let's go cover the best things getting built. And this by the results of that, we tend to find ourselves in rooms with Solana Mhmm. And talking with a lot of Solana folks just because I I think, yeah, that's just been where a lot of the serious builders are. So thanks for what you're doing.

And speaking of serious Solana builders, we have Lewis Amira, I'm sure, a friendly a friendly name to you guys. I think he was actually speaking at Accelerate recently on some stuff he's building. So, anyway, Maya, thanks for joining. We'll have you back soon.