Stablecoin Issuance, Canton, New Ecosystems, and Payments Companies Onchain

Alright. Here we go. Ben.

Guys, I'm loving this. The intro is awesome. I feel like how do you guys feel? Like, you're doing it. This is like an idea not that long ago. This is why we put you at the end to bring the heat at the end. And you you got the memo all black. There you go. You must have been watching Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel like we're all caught in the same cloth in some ways. We had to warm up the rails a little bit because the intro broke a few times in the beginning, but that was result. Step in the the squatch transition. We just forget about that one. It's like one little thing each each stream, and we're watching our engineer producer, Andre, just sit there behind the screen, like, okay. Let's go. Let's go.

You got to You know, I was I in that green room a little bit, which is Yeah. He's super cool. Super cool. I also do you do you mute on purpose during the thing? I started making, like, noises of, oh, this is awesome and realized, oh, I don't know if I muted on the stream or not. But, anyway, good to see you guys. Thanks. You too. Thanks for coming on. Thanks for being a supporter of just everything we've been doing.

Looking forward to seeing you next week at the the Very Stable Conference. How's how are you doing in the Midwest right now?

I'm cold. Like, I don't wanna talk about it. Let's talk about Stable Points. I'm ready I'm ready to get San Francisco. Yeah.

I'm pumped. Ben, there's a lot of, things in flight with with Braille right now, like the event we can talk about. We got the podcast season that's been really fun to produce with you guys that we're rolling out currently. We have Braille just independently. There's so much going on with what you guys are seeing. Maybe we start and maybe we go down that order. Like, tell us about next week, what you're excited for, and maybe some context on a very stable conference.

It sounds like if people are in San Francisco, maybe there's are there still spots left? Is it oversubscribed? What's the kind of vibe right now? I don't know if you if you see what it's like. I remember last year was, like, extremely oversubscribed. But I

think the organizers have done a a nice job with that. I mean, obviously, we're not the organizers. Io and Aaron are, you know, running this season just like they did last season. And, you know, I feel like my email is totally unusable at the moment, but I definitely am seeing, like, hey. Can you, like, send you guys a ping to get me in? And I'm sending you anybody walking, like, send me an email. I try to pass everything I I see along.

But I I I do think they've done a great job in really trying to get high quality people in the room. And, you know, I'm obviously really excited. My job next week is more on the moderator side. I get to sort of, like, host Eric from Canton, who I just think is amazing, and get to chat with Matthew from Cloudflare, who I just think is amazing. So, you know, I get to talk with amazing people all day, and that sounds like fun. And, you know, stablecoins are still a thing. Thank god. So it should be quite interesting.

Yeah. It's not a bad gig.

You know, I think also too, I'm I'm on the West Coast. We don't have a ton of conferences. I mean, I think money twenty twenty comes to comes to Vegas. San Francisco gets a few one offs, but, the very stable conference is is definitely the highlight, and I'm looking forward to next week. What what I mean, I guess on the topic of of Canton, you know, we'll have an episode coming out of stable minded soon. We've talked a lot even just off camera about early, you know, emerging ecosystems.

Why do you still get excited to go talk to Eric from Canton, you know, next week at the very stable conference?

You know, you guys have heard my sort of, like, stablecoin maxi spiel a number of times. But, like, in the, like, three forms of adoption that we see, payments, embedded finance, and financial institutions, financial institutions represent the largest one over the longest adoption arc. That could be a thirty to fifty year adoption arc as quadrillions of dollars come on chain.

And if you think about the core primitives that enable them to participate, things like counterparty privacy, there are a lot of actual blockchains that are live, up and running, use usable, and used by existing financial institutions today. And, you know, the TalkPilot, I always like, you know, talking about. But, you know, Braille has a a lot of things that we do through Canton, and our customers really like that privacy element to it. And I think they're a leader in that way.

And so if you think about that thirty to fifty year arc, Canton is relevant in that thirty to fifty year arc. It's not like a in this moment thing. It is a in many moments to come, which I think is very exciting. And, you know, Eric and the DA team, I think, have had a lot to do with sort of the forethought into what do financial institutions need to participate to come on chain. That's why I think that's so exciting.

I could talk all day all day about it, but I think that's really, like, the first blockchain or ecosystem that's, like, delivering on the promise for real.

I know you've talked about moments in, in the stable minded episode we did with you. And I feel like one of the moments that were coming up in you know, you mentioned Arc, but even the Arc blockchain, the Tempo blockchain, the Plasma, the stable, kind of this moment of building on maybe what Kanten started with a more stablecoin centric approach. I think even last week, with Tempo Mainnet, you Braille announced support for for Tempo. How do you see these other ecosystems fitting into this narrative?

Are they servings this a similar ICP? Are they building for different people? And where does Braille maybe fit in in this emerging ecosystem paradigm?

Yeah. I mean, I think some of them are probably competing as we look into the future. You know, the tempo thing, like, they told us to take it down. Apparently, we went too fast. Oh. So we took the blog we took the blog down and, like, you know, we're still doing our testing and stuff. But for those watching, Braille loves integrating with new ecosystems. We love to be a great partner integrating with new ecosystems. And we do. We're, we try to make the thing, great.

And so, like, with Tempo, you know, on the other side of that, there's Radius. And I feel like both of them are sort of working to deliver on the promise for agentic commerce.

Because if you start thinking about operating at Internet type scale, when we think about Visa as, like, a payments mechanism, if you look at the number of transactions going through Visa and then left and right that with the number of transactions going through Cloudflare system, we're entering an era where, like, a new type of scale is, like, entering the room. And that is awesome, but it's gonna require new infrastructure.

And so, you know, whether or not it's tempo or radius, we believe the Internet is big enough for both, and likely there are going to be different types of products built on both. And in such a multichain universe, it's very possible that these things are also interacting in ways that developers developing them themselves today aren't even imagining. But super high throughput systems are important to bring, you know, money on chain, money into protocols, bring it into sessions, bring it into agents.

Like, this is the ground the the groundwork that has to be laid in order to realize the potential.

Yeah. What are so making this a little personal to Braille, something that we just continue to be appreciative of with Braille and what I think is really special about the business in many ways is the development and the ownership that you guys have had on a lot of the infrastructure, the licensing, how you've approached a ton of what it what the Braille API offers to some of these early ecosystems or com companies around the space who are trying to bring stable coins to market.

Like, you guys, I think, have a lot of what either they know they need or don't know they need yet in one place. What what are you seeing while we're talking about these early ecosystems, maybe specifically? What are they most thankful or appreciative of with Braille in terms of what you guys are bringing them? Like, what what are the things that as you look back, you're like, damn.

I'm so happy we built that because these are this is a crucial part of the stack that someone like Radius and and Bench are gonna be really thankful for.

You know, it's an interesting question because I I don't I don't hear the words, like, thank you very often. I hear a lot of, like, urgency and, like, can you just, like, go a little bit faster? But if I think about, like, what are the things that maybe create benefit for the clients or for the integrations in the long term, it's that, you know, we we have our own licenses. We built our own correspondent bank network.

We we we sort of, like, did the hard work to set up the things that would give our customers the ability to launch on the chains that they wanna be in, to go to new chains whenever they want, to have on ramps and off ramps and automatic configuration with all of the bank partners without without having to go negotiate all those themselves. And so we think those are the things that really help.

But then there is underlying technology, like the normalization of how we integrate new blockchains into the ecosystem with mint burn mechanisms that maintain sort of, like, state or, we call it natural supply. So you're not, like, wrapping and bridging stablecoins strangely. You're maintaining the amount of supply that's actually in reserves. And so we think those are enabling things that help us go really fast and help our clients go fast.

But once they find, like, a new hurdle, you know, that's where I I think I spend a lot of my time hearing about those hurdles. And today, I was talking to a client this morning. They're trying to work through getting wire reconciliation down to, like, you know, minutes. And in a world where we think now on chain and everything is instant, five, ten years ago, it was like, man, if you get the wire cleared today, good for you. And now we're optimizing API webhooks, I'm thinking about, like, minutes.

Those are two wildly different problems. And once that's solved, you know, there's gonna be another opportunity on top of that. My, 'm very self aware that I hear it all the time from Jim. The reward for good work is more good work, and, you know, we got a lot of work to do. Yeah. I think we we need to Zach play.

Maybe we'll go back once we're done streaming and and kind of replay step on from Altitude, some of the things that he said around ACH poll. But I was just you know, Ben, given your background and some of the things, we had the CEO of Altitude and Squads on before you on the stream. And he was talking about all the complexities around building, you know, stablecoin banking products and and dashboards and things where you're kind of going in and out of the fiat world.

And it and the the specific thing we we centered on was the pain of, like, ACH poll was something that came up. Given your given your focus and history around this stuff, I'm wondering if you had any thoughts on that just since that was a conversation we just had of what makes sense. Even made me instantly think of, you know, your work with Coinflow. Yeah. I was I almost asked. I was like, oh, I almost started shilling Braille and Coinflow, but I I held back.

Like, have you looked at this as far as the solvent problem? But, yeah, maybe maybe that's this so hard, Ben, in terms of, like, stablecoins and ACH pull? Oh,

man. I feel like I don't wanna talk about ACH anymore. We were having such a great conversation. You know, it's ACH is one of those things. It is funny. Somebody on x called me an ACH Maxi, and I'm like, I'm I'm in the back of my head, I like, no. No. I'm not. No. I'm not. I just, like, we had to deal with it. And, you know, it's it's one of those things. It's beautiful in that systems like ACH or other systems like it around the world are connected to, you know, everybody's accounts.

It's how you get connected to everyday Americans and make the workflows work for people that wanna use these technologies. But in terms of, like, the complexities of how to manage ACH pull and all the different return codes, like, none of us wanna deal with it. I feel like that's one of the things I wish the agents would just solve that. So, like, we don't have to talk about it.

But for the time being, you know, that is the way we get money into new ecosystems and back out so that everyday people can have the experiences that they expect with their bank accounts.

Yep. Well, maybe specifically with Braille's current stack to get a little bit more granular, like, what are the things that are currently available that you're proud of that with Braille, I can go I can do now? I know you guys are you you're rolling out so many different things around issuing, minting, redeeming, interfacing with things like Plaid, and all these other things.

Like, what what are what's currently available in this kind of conversation around ACH and, maybe also what is yet to be built that you're looking into?

Yeah. I mean, if you thought about it, then the easiest, like, way to think about it is you can roll out a stablecoin that's custom on Braille. It's instantly interoperable with all other Braille issued stablecoins, Circle and Paxos assets, and we're adding other issuers. It is also instantly compatible out of the box with every bank account in America, credit or debit.

And there are other products and services that surround it like APIs that allow you to build that particular functionality into applications to service end users. So the number of, like, complexities and variations inside of that, like, that fill a book this big with, like, what you can do. But generally speaking, it's all about, you know, empowering people and developers to build applications to get in and out of different assets and making it possible for businesses to basically utilize the new protocols.

And, also, obviously, we love integrating with new ecosystems where each new ecosystem tends to have its own unique profile like agent to commerce on Radius, institutional applications on Canton. You know, these are totally different than what you might see as a payments company building on Solana, which payments companies love Solana. You know, like, you gotta be everywhere.

Yep. What got a question. No. I was gonna say, so we we look at the breadth of of the Braille ecosystem right now. You know, we've seen SBC. We've seen MXNE. We've seen Coinflow stablecoin. One that really interests me is is the LitUSD. I think that's a a mortgage related stablecoin.

I mean Yeah. How how This is Braille issue? I don't I haven't heard of this one.

Yeah. I guess what I'm trying to get into is, you know, we hear these payment centered use cases, with payments, but I'm curious on these ones that are in the fringes and kind of where stablecoin issuance is going, especially I mean, if anybody's bought or sold a house in The US, I mean, that that day where you're waiting for the wire transfer to go through is painful. I used to work in the mortgage industry too, so I can remember missing the wire cut off.

I mean, could you talk to maybe a little bit about Stablecoin, but even just kind of this broader vision? Like, who who do you want to start building Stablecoins? Who's not building them that should be and thinking about building a custom branded Stablecoin?

Pulling up lit USD while we while we speak of this. Hopefully, this will hopefully, this will work. Here we go.

Okay. So you're not lying. This is this is a real thing here. No. It's real. You know, the the the other the other thing, guys, is, like, these things are launching all the time, and they launch every day. You know, it it's it's not a thing where we stand on ceremony anymore when someone launches a stablecoin. It's, you know, it's it's Tuesday at noon. Of course, they're rolling out stablecoins. And in that way, developers are constantly finding new applications for them.

And I do think there is an element of this of, like, oh, if you could create your own money or you could create your own Stablecoin, what would you do, and how would you make use of that? There are lots of people that, like, I'm playing with agents on the weekend to, like, get to know them. There are people that are playing with stablecoins on the weekend just to understand, like, how these things work. So, you know, I do think that's that's one, aspect of some of it.

But also from a business perspective, guys, you know, payments and embedded finance companies that are going into protocols, this is a business decision. It's a way to reduce cost by going on chain. Chains are now faster, better, cheaper than the relational databases to move the money. And also, similarly, the actual assets make money. So it reduces your costs and it generates revenue. Guys, it's good business. So if you're in the business of moving money, why wouldn't you be taking advantage of protocols?

You know, we're we're not a payments company, but we we partner with a bunch of them, and we sell to a bunch of them. And, you know, we have a bunch of them as vendors. And so they're just a great way to get value from point a to point b that reduces costs, generates revenue. Again, it's just good business. Like, this is the most boring sale of all time. Can you speak on this to the paradigm shift for payments companies specifically that you've seen?

This is one of the most, like, exciting unlocks in the world of, like

payments is such a interesting you know, taking little slices out of each transaction traditionally is the the business model of just, like, how things like stablecoins with Braille can totally reframe a kind of a cost taking fractionally, like, taking slices out of transactions into actually a net new revenue producing activity. Just shill shill that a little bit. I think it's a really powerful thing.

I'm gonna do my best. You know, there are all these companies that are they're they're you want a fed master account, so you get down to, like, below that two or that two decimal threshold on, like, the cost of a transaction. Right? Think about how many companies have basically tried to kill themselves to go get that account to re get their cost down below that, like, mythical threshold. Blockchain's already do it, like, for free, basically. We're already there, and we're not at two decimals.

We're, like, six, nine, 10. Right? It it's like, how many transactions can you do for a dollar at that point in time without ever having to manage state in your database for, like, a balance? It is mind numbing how big the delta is in terms of, like, the new system versus the old system.

Not only that, but imagine there are thousands of developers all over the world thinking about the throughput on these blockchains, where you as a developer can build on top of it without ever having to become, like, an expert in throughput. Suddenly, like, what your systems can do is orders of magnitude faster and more meaningful than what they were before, and your costs are lower. You know, it's like that's a big deal.

And I think the other thing is, like, if you're building on the old systems, the old systems were all built in a pre Internet era. Like, they're all defined by the physics of human beings. The new systems are defined by the physics of the Internet, which is always on, always open, and it, quite frankly, when implemented correctly, has, like, magical experiences. Like, who doesn't like, that sounds like fun. You know? And it reduces cost and it makes money. So it's good business. Yeah.

Ben, it's so cool to see the the business that you're in. Any any kind of as we lead into next week, we're excited to see you in person. We're excited to be there. I know we we tried to do some things with there's some news on day zero that we're excited to get more into with you guys. Day zero has just been such a great business, and and I wouldn't even call it a business, but a an educational extension of of braille. And it's I'm so I'm so excited to see the evolution of what that could be. And yeah.

For those who don't know what day zero is, maybe we can end end with that. Like, give us the update on day zero and maybe how you're thinking about the future of of that.

Yeah. Day zero is basically a place where we show demos, guys. We we try to put demos in front of clients, but also from the ecosystem. I think the last thing we did was focused on Canton. Maybe there's some self custody wallets. We've done some other ones for, like, payments companies and things like that. And then after the demos, which are made public, we try to have educational sessions, which are kind of like a safe place to come learn about stablecoins and things like that.

Where as you guys all know, it's like if you're talking to an executive who's thinking about how to get the pilot going, then now they have three months to get the pilot going for stablecoins now that they have budget because, you know, we've kinda, like, crossed the chasm in that way. Those people are trying to figure it out with trusted, you know, folks. That's a safe place to learn. And, also, it's a different conversation than developers that wanna figure out UTXO management on Canton or Spark.

These are different breakouts.

Yeah. What are some themes this year, day zero, that maybe we can for people who have been involved in that experience in the past or have gone to some of these breakouts, virtual virtual events? Any any sort of ecosystems like Canton or different different learning opportunities that you wanna think through this year that you think would be really interesting or giving a little tease of what's coming thematically?

I'll be honest, guys. I'm just, like, trying to get to next week in the previous conference. I know you we we're gonna, like, after that, take a deep yeah. Take a deep breath and figure it out next. We're, we're trying to sort some of it out, and I think we need to be mindful of pulling, you know, the ecosystem about what people want to learn and what education they think needs to be put in place.

If we were having this conversation a year ago, it was almost unthinkable to imagine that there would have been, you know, consortiums of banks and credit unions and all these other things that are trying to figure this out at the same speed as sort of like the weekend developer. And it's all happening right now, and in some ways, it can be a little bit overwhelming.

But I think for outlets that you all are building and, hopefully, Braille will continue to contribute to, they become really high leverage and trusted places to just learn how to build with this stuff and how to get going.

And it's just so exciting because there's so many people that are entering the space to try to build with all of us that, just I mean, it's stressful, but just it's a good reminder for all of us of, like, we are in an incredible moment in time that is rewarding and exciting, and people are, by a large majority, like, really fun to work with. Like, this is awesome. Like, let's just keep building stuff, guys. Yeah. You know, you you you know a good point.

There's there's always this tension that we feel where how much do, you know, we kind of impose what we think people need to learn about versus

making education for what people are saying they need to learn about. You know, Drew and I have been you know, you've been in this for five, ten years thinking about stablecoins. Drew and I, probably three or four years. How how do we really serve the person that's three, six months into this conversation without, you know, them hopping on a stream and getting scared away because everything just goes over their head?

You know, I guess I'm I'm kind of of the mind that you don't know. So just have a bias towards shipping, and it's like if you ship it and it doesn't work, you know, at least you didn't spend three weeks thinking about it. And if you ship it and it works, you know, just do more of that. It's amazing how binary that can be, and

shoot, you can ship two things and both of them be right. Like, two things can be true at the same time for two different people. Right? Yeah. Well, that would definitely be a call to action if you're listening to this. We wanna hear from you. We wanna know what are some of these topics, braille related, issuance related, early ecosystems that you want more you know, go go look at also the existing library of DayZero. There's a lot of really great stuff in there from some of the names that we mentioned. And Yeah.

You can find that on Braille's YouTube. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Ben, this was fun, man. Thank you for always being in the kind of early parts of new things with us, and it's it's great to be in it with you. And, yeah, we're excited to see you next week.

Awesome. Thanks, guys. Congrats. Keep shipping.