The Flaw in the USD Stablecoin Thesis: Movement CEO Torab Torabi

To the show. We're gonna hit you with some welcome confetti. We have a welcome confetti cannon just for you.

Thanks for waiting. Great great to have you on, man. Appreciate you appreciate you joining us. Absolutely. It going? Man, I I could tell you have a BD you're a BD guy at heart because you were on me in Telegram, and I appreciate it. So it's good to meet you.

Yeah. Nice to meet you guys. As I I think I told you guys, I'm a longtime listener, first time caller. Really appreciate it. I listen to a lot of your content. It's really good stuff. You guys bring on really high quality content, and I'm not talking about myself. So I'm I'm glad to be here.

There we go. Well Appreciate the kind words, man. It's an exciting day. And so I we have MoveInNetwork, MoveInDustry. I mean, just first kind of bring us bring us into this moment right now of, like, move.money.

Awesome domain, by the way. We were we were complimenting you on that earlier. Yeah. We won't ask we won't ask the the everyone's got a domain story, but we we like that one.

Yeah. So move money because, ultimately, as we've made this you know, today, we made the announcement that we are essentially pivoting to become a more opinionated chain focused more so on payments, remittances, a stablecoin settlement layer, and then yield layer. And so, yes, thank you. There's the website. So it puts it takes a lot of effort. It's a Herculean effort to, you know, rebrand and and make all these changes. But to be honest, the change has already been underway. We've been working on this for a while.

It's just when do we make it public? And so it's been really cool, and, ultimately, it's about moving money. And so it was a pretty easy one to move that money. You know? And we have some other tricks up our sleeve that we're gonna hopefully be announcing over the next few months. And so, yeah, man, today's been incredible. We've got a lot of amazing responses from builders, you know, first and foremost, are in the space that are reaching out saying, hey. How can we work together?

Which is exactly what I was hoping for. So it's been amazing. So cool. So you got 300,000

KYC verified users all over the world. TBL's growing. Settlement.

Yeah. Zach, go ahead. Excited to get into some background on this, Marie. Yeah. I'm that's where I wanna go. That's where I wanna go because I was just commending you earlier in the stream. I think there's been people working in this industry that might have gone what you've gone through and just abandoned ship. I'm gonna go on to the next company. I'm gonna go find a new job. I'm gonna go get equity at the start up, and you you really seem like from the outside looking in, you stepped into a leadership role.

So for the people that don't know, kind of give us a lay of land of where Movement is, what your journey has been like the past year, and then we'll get deeper into where you're going because you've not only, you know, had this announcement today, you've secured some licensing. You've gone through and acquired a few companies. You've partnered with, you know, Cast. There's there's so much to unpack here, but I think to understand where you're going, it's really important to understand where you've been.

Yeah. So I've been in the MVMT ecosystem for almost three years now, and so I was actually the second hire, technically a founding team member, not a founder. And so, basically, what I was responsible for was bringing in builders and working with builders. And so, essentially, when everything that happened happened, we had basically a fork in the road. Do we continue forward, or as you said, do we abandon ship?

And so from my side, as the person who worked directly hand in hand with all these builders, I felt it would be somewhat treasonous to bring them into the ecosystem and then IPs out. And so from my side, I I know that I came in here sincerely to build what I wanted to build, which is ultimately use technology to make the world better.

I think there's a lot of ways to make money in the world, but from my perspective, I wanna be able to put my head on my pillow, stare at the ceiling at night, and say, I actually sincerely try to make things better. And so as we made this transition, we actually saw a lot of demand for stablecoin settlement. Because ultimately, I think that a lot of us, especially if you're in the West I'm born and raised in California, but my family's from Afghanistan.

So when I talk to relatives, the problems they face are very different for us. For example, if I wanna send you money, I have Zelle. I have PayPal, Apple Pay, and then there's all the other things, right, where I can wire, and I'm sure I'm missing quite a few. Cash App. And so in other countries, it's not so simple, especially when there's tight capital controls. And so, yeah, it's been quite interesting to be able to see how much demand there is.

I'm really excited to go share some of those, and maybe I can tease some of those today on the call. Yeah. Because I I was gonna ask Go ahead. I was gonna say, so, you know, when you mentioned, you know, deciding to stay, I think from my side, it was the team also who we kinda galvanized around each other. And so one thing that most people don't know about is we have over 90% retention rate since everything happened, which just in crypto in general is really tough, right, to have a retention of talent.

But we kind of we've been through so much together, and we believe in the mission. We just had our team off-site, and so it was incredible. So we're all full steam ahead. Yeah. That is no the just just so for people who are just getting to know you guys, which I think is the intention of

this right now with Movement is, like, where are you going? Where have you been? What is the for those who don't know what the context is around your talk what you're talking about, what how are you how are you explaining that? What what did go down? It sounds like there were some leadership issues.

How do you describe that now? Yeah. So over at Movement Labs, was pretty straightforward, and it was pretty public where, Binance saw there were some market maker irregularities. So they froze $38,000,000, returned it to the foundation, and said, investigate this and use this money to buy back move tokens. So essentially, what we token supply with that money. And then, basically, there was an investigation. And then shortly after, one of the cofounders, he was suspended, then five days later was removed.

And so that's the story there. And then for us, we're at MOVE Industries, and now we just go by Movement to make life easy. And so, essentially, we're a completely separate organizations, and we're the stewards of the Movement ecosystem. And so that's what we've been focused on. And that's also the new color scheme, the new logo,

same name. And there was a reason why we did we kept the name when we could have changed it. I'm turning turning the page, but we're in the same we're in the same book, and we want we're respecting where we've been. It sounds like a huge part of this is, like, honoring the the team who's mostly retained the mission maybe originally of the organization, which is is still intact or a goal.

But then also, it sounds like the people that you convinced early on to join in and believe in you and trust in your word to be involved in this ecosystem was also personally a really key thing for you, it sounds like.

Yeah. If you knew it, to me, belief is yeah. Belief is contagious. And so I do think that if you don't believe, you shouldn't be a founder. You shouldn't be leading any organization. From my side, I'm also I'm a loyal guy. I've been married fifteen years. I've got three kids. And so for me Congrats. I'm not yeah. Thank you. Thank you. And so from my side, you know, we have a mission, and so it's just making sure that everyone is aligned.

So when you have a small group of people who are aligned, you can accomplish things that maybe you thought were impossible. And so we have a long way to go, so I don't wanna talk too high into the clouds right now. But, ultimately, our team is very focused. And so we're excited to share a lot of the the wins that we've had behind the scenes. And especially when it comes to money, things take a little bit longer than crypto to crypto partnerships. So we're excited to come share some of those. Yeah.

So bring us into this moment. I've been I mean, I'm especially curious, like, where you start. Where where was these moments where you said this is the lane we're gonna go down? We see the rise of, you know, plasma. You see stable. You see tempo. There's, like, know, again, very these stablecoin centric money movement chains coming out.

You started with this thesis, and please correct me if I'm wrong, of bridging the EVM ecosystem with move coding language, and I can remember this just focus on the developer experience. So through working with these developers, were they coming to you saying, hey. I'm actually starting to build in this. I need I need tooling here. Yeah. What what was that kind of yeah. What what were those moments like to realize, like, that this is the path we wanna take?

So I think that ultimately, in the early stages, there was this thesis. You have a general purpose l one or l two, and then what you do is you get all these developers, you give them the tooling, and then you cross your fingers and hope to god they build something really amazing, and then hope you're you know, cross your fingers again and hope that value will accrue back to the chain.

And so what we're seeing, and it's been pretty obvious over the last, I would say, year, especially hyper liquid accelerating, this understanding that, hey. You have to own the product. You have to own some part of the stack unless you do hit that exit velocity. So you look at Ethereum, you look at Solana, you see Monad. But I do believe that ultimately, there is a abundance of block space. And so I do believe that every chain has to basically pick a lane and start winning in that lane.

And so for us, this was not actually you know, crypto is known to be a hammer looking for a nail. For us, these were nails, and we're like, we can be a hammer. You know? And so starting from first principles that, hey. We have a chain. We have the Circle integration, the MoveLing, which is created by Facebook, particularly for money. And so this is why you always hear me talking about movies for money. And so for us, it was once you have the stablecoins, you're gonna want yield.

And to answer your question, right, you said it's a it's a crowded market. I would say it's crowded if you're in the crypto Twitter sphere, But out in the real world, it's not crowded at all. We're seeing incredible demand. One of the biggest problems I have is actually saying no to things that sound really cool. So, like, a central bank a central bank of a country reaches out, and they want me to build out this infrastructure, but that's not necessarily a core competency.

And so being able to say no and then not get the shiny object syndrome, that's probably the hardest thing right now because there is so much opportunity. Man, Drew had to run to the bathroom, but he would have been looking giving me side eye because we we've we've quite frankly, we've done that. We started as a go to market consulting agency with a podcast, went down the podcast, launched a live show.

We've had a few different again, we've call we call them side quests that we've started, and we'll probably go back to them one day, but there's a time and place for everything. I wanna go back to what you said, though, about about move specifically. And because I I was challenged by Chris from defense one time where I say, hey. I think our TAM's really small. And he goes, well, there's only there's 20,000,000 developers worldwide. He's like, that's a pretty big TAM.

So how do you think about Move and that that statement of this market is way bigger than I think a lot of people in the cryptosphere tend to perceive it to be?

Yeah. I would say that the whole focus on languages and virtual machines doesn't really matter anymore because our whole goal is to abstract it away anyways. If you know it's crypto, you're not doing a good enough job. And so for a lot of the companies that we're working with, we're actually working with the largest fintech companies in these emerging markets where they say, hey. I wanna be able to accept stablecoins, and I want my users to be to send stablecoins back and forth.

And I don't want them to even know that it's crypto or that there's a wallet, which we handle all of that on the back end for them. And then once they have that, can they potentially earn yield and also have access to tokenized gold? So that's a huge demand that we're seeing is in these countries, I want access to gold. You know, they use the dollar as a savings account, but gold is also very I don't have to sell people on gold. They know what gold is. They know the value.

And so the biggest problem for a lot of these people is if I have gold, am I gonna hide it under my mattress? They don't have the banking system that we have. Even now in America, by the way, these, know, used to go in and have these safe deposit boxes. They're actually shutting a lot of them down. It's like a boomer thing. Like, wait. Why do you have, you know, your family heirlooms at the bank? And so lot people in cash under your mattress? Yeah. It's it's the it's lumpy, but it helps me sleep at night.

And so you see a lot of people, they have that. You know? And so, basically, how do you usher in without them feeling that they're changing consumer behavior? Because that's one thing that I don't wanna do is try to change consumer behavior. You know, if you like Coca Cola, I'm not gonna convince you to drink Shasta. I like that analogy. Rob, it seems like a huge day for you guys. I wanna give you just the the mic on what today means for you

and specifically the like, what happens now? What what's the focus? How are you guys practically speaking, you you're at the off-site,

you're rallying this group of people together, and you're painting the picture for the future of this business? Like, what what were you aligning on in person with your team, and what is the message to the ecosystem around where Movement is going next? I think the first thing is understanding what are you doing and who are you helping. Because if you help people, the money will chase you. Right? But when you if you're just, again, if you're just a hammer looking for nails, life becomes very difficult.

So for us for example, I just came back from Ethiopia. I got a chance to meet with president Tayyet, met with their Ministry of Finance, met with the largest fintech companies. And so we just had a conversation. Right? And so, for example, Ethiopia has $7,000,000,000 in official remittances that go in every year and 9,000,000,009 billion, which is considerably more, actually goes in through the gray market or hawala.

There's different words for it where, basically, you give it to somebody, they give it to somebody, and then they give them a wink and a nod, and then they pay you up wherever they are. Right? And so that is all money and value that's not being captured by the government. They don't know where the money goes. They don't know any details about it.

And so what something that most Westerners don't understand is they're actually it's not a you know, the FX rate that you get at the bank is the same one that you'd see when you search on Google versus the one that you get on the street. So for example, in Ethiopia, there's a 13% spread between what you get at the bank versus what you get on the ground, let's call it, in the gray market. So you lose 13% by going through a bank.

That is actually one of the main reasons why people do this 9,000,000,000 around the financial current financial system. But there's a reason why they do that. It's because they don't wanna flight to dollars. So when people talk about, oh, we're focusing on LatAm. We're focusing on Africa. It kinda makes me laugh because every single country is so unique. It's one of those things where, you know, I joke, oh, I like to play sports ball. What sport are you playing? Every single one is unique.

They have their own rules. And so you need to be able to understand. And so that's what our edge is, is that we're going and we're working with these countries, working with their central banks to understand what the problem is and responsibly and compliantly roll out stablecoin adoption. Because, great, if you get stablecoin adoption but tank their economy, that's not a win in my book. Right? So we want to actually make places better, make things better, and just make life easier.

So, for example, in that 7,000,000,000 I mentioned, about 450,000,000 is literally plucked out of the economy of Ethiopia versus from these third parties for fees. Now I'm not one of those guys that say it should be zero. You are facilitating. But if you look at that 450,000,000, right, that's roughly half of the entire export of coffee into Europe, which is their biggest crop, and that's their biggest market. And Wow.

The difference that I and the difference that I always say is this is coffee that, you know, keep to work for it. They have to water it. They have to clean it. They have to you know, the mills, all this, and then that revenue comes in. This is money that's just literally plucked out of the sky, and this is the part that's hard to wrap our hands around with money is if you can fix money problems for people, you are changing people's lives.

Because these people live on a few dollars a day, so when you take away those fees from them, it's incredible value to their quality of life. It means that someone gets to eat. It means someone gets school clothes. Someone gets to pay their cell phone bill. So when you look at it from that lens, again, this was a long winded answer to your question about how do we galvanize the team. It's like once you understand the problem that we're solving, it's hard not to be excited every single day about being able to Yeah.

Fired up with this. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think too excited, dude. We had a who was it last stream, Drew? Oh, it was you maybe should if you haven't talked to Sinclair from Europay, maybe you should. Because he was asking us about on chain FX, and he's like, we're seeing more and more demand in Latin America for these these non USD stablecoins.

And we've seen this tension, especially on crypto Twitter, that people just, nope. Just use these stablecoins. They're gonna they're gonna they're gonna take the, you know, take the crown. Others are you know, we talked with Hanan from Codex, talked with Dave from Euthafuse. We're like, no. Like, this is completely being overlooked right now in the market. How would you position, and and where's where do you kinda stand in this pool of USD stablecoins versus non USD stablecoins?

And what is the solution? Like, let's be clear about what the other guys are doing and and, like, where you fit in. When you're meeting with Ethiopian government. Like, what are they gonna say? Okay. Great. Like, what are you helping them with now

in that? Okay. Okay. So I'm gonna because you have to understand all the pieces for this my answer to make sense. And I am very opinionated, but I'm open to being wrong. So if anyone is shaking their fist at the sky while I'm talking you know, convinced me otherwise, I'm open to it. Alright? So when you look at US stablecoins, there's basically two winners right now, USDC, USDT. Alright?

And this is for the global reserve currency, we and can get into why that is and the petrodollar and why every government has to own dollars. So even with the most dominant currency in the world, you basically have two real players that are dominating the markets in USDC and USDT. For these emerging markets, I do believe that every single one has to tokenize their local currency to compete. Because as of right now, you have no chance against the dollar. Number one, because it's the dollar.

Just just flat out the dollar. Now you start adding yield to the equation, it becomes a no brainer. Not only do I get the currency I want, now I can earn 4% on it. And then my other option is a currency that is potentially getting devalued every single day. I have to wake up every day hoping to god that my money is not worth less and my labor is not worth less.

So I do believe that not only do they have to tokenize their currency, they also have to tokenize their T bill or their bonds, their government bonds in order to compete. I mean, that's why the bond market exists to begin with. That's why Turkey is giving 40% for their lira bonds is because they want to be able to compete with the dollar and with the euro. And so I do believe that there is a huge market for on chain FX.

However, here's the however, is you need one every government has to choose basically one stablecoin issuer for their currency to basically be in debt with and respect and be able to redeem. So that's where the liquidity issues are gonna happen. So I believe that what's gonna happen is just again, the US dollar only has two big winners. Every other country is gonna have one. And so the question is, who is it gonna be? And I think it's gonna be a winner take all.

And my hunch is that the central banks will want to issue it themselves because they don't want to give that out to a third party. The dollar is so dominant. They don't necessarily need to control Circle or Tether, like, so closely. But for these countries, they will. And so that's where I think there's a disconnect. Right? Because there's, like, 20 different teams wanting to do the Brazilian real. And so only one is gonna win because, first of all, liquidity, even with one winner, is difficult.

I know that's a I I gave you a lot of context, but I do think that is what matters when you're discussing these things because the question is is who's your target audience? If if I who just wants to hold lira or who just wants to hold, you know, Brazilian real? Like, there might be a few people, but do they need blockchain to do that? So I do believe that if we can get OnchainFX and the redemption side taken care of, then this it's a 100% a market. I do believe that is where it's going.

I I have have a question for you. And this is you know, we're we've talked about neobanks, and I've I've often wondered,

you know, there is this dominant dominating conversation of, you know, the consumers. They just want access to the US dollars. You know, I've seen a few people. I don't know if you follow Artie Eberman in Argentina. He does a lot of work with with Stablecoin cards, where I just can't help but ask the question, like, what would consumers do if in that app as well they have their native Stablecoin? What would what would merchants want to do? And it I I think it's a it's a chicken and the egg question sometimes.

It's, you know, do do the apps turn it on first even if there isn't a strong demand, and then they start using it? Do they need to wait for demand among the merchants that are saying, hey. We want non u like, we'd rather settle you know, if if somebody's paying with stablecoins, we'd actually rather you just pay us in our local currency. And if I wanna convert it to USD stablecoins, I will.

Do you do you see a version where neobanks globally are are more apt to integrate their local stablecoins, or do you see right now, let's say, we're just gonna focus on USD stablecoins, the consumer experience,

and let's just focus on that. Great question. I think the first thing to understand is only Steve Jobs can really get away with, I tell people what they want before they want it. It's very difficult for others to do that. And so, ultimately, a lot of these vendors so when you say, for example, I'm a vendor in Brazil. I'm just gonna use Brazil as an example. Some people pay with their neobank, and they give me USD.

The reality is that they probably get enough flow from the local currency where they don't need to then demand that the local currency also be from the stablecoin payments. So they probably have, like, their own barbell of $40.60, $30.70. So I don't see that as a I haven't seen that because with a partnership with CAST, our community was went bonkers over it. They're amazing partners. Yep. And so the main issue actually is not that. It's FX rates that people really care about.

That was more of the discussion around when I do wanna send my spend my stables, what's the rate that I get? So I think that generally speaking, most people are happy to keep dollars because if you're living in a country, you have some exposure to the local currency. You're not just walking around with dollars in these countries. So I I don't see that, but maybe I'm wrong. You know? I think the consumers will tell you generally

what they want, what they need, and then it's our job to figure out how to serve them. Well said. It's refreshing to have someone who's it sounds like you've spent a lot of your career selling and being interfacing with the customer and, like, focusing on the revenue side of a business and working in that space. And it's like, you can just tell when someone has that priority in terms of knowing what it takes to get things done and how decisions get made and how real money starts moving hands.

Like, we talked to a lot of founders, and I'll admit, I think a lot of founders, especially venture backed founders, will miss prioritizing the emphasis around what you're saying because, you know, you can obsess all day about what you what you're capable of. Right? And that's, like, really fun for people who are building products and raising capital, and you need both. But you you really need both.

You need to be able to build amazing products, but also understand the real incentives around why people choose to use something over another thing, why a country like Ethiopia or a president would even give a shit to take your meeting, and how you frame what you're talking about to that kind of person. And it's it's cool to see someone in your position. One, the story of, like, redemption here.

I don't know what your your personal beliefs or views of the world is, but I can I can just tell that you have a very mission oriented view of your work? And it's as someone who's, like, thinking through that as well of, like, what's meaningful? Why are we doing what we're doing? Like, should we just go donate a bunch of money?

Like, I love how you have taken a mission focused approach with what you're building and made it profit focused, but it's a you know, it's not it's actual productive it's the capitalism at its best, could argue. Right? Yeah. Excited for

Yeah. We've I was so you know, I told him the story of basically, I got one of the Monad Air drops. And these guys Monad's amazing team, amazing tech. And so I got the airdrop, and I never sold it because I wanted to be supportive, and that's just kinda how I roll. And so you know what? Why don't I take this money? And then I actually built some wells in Afghanistan for people that don't have access to running water. Right?

And it was it was pretty emotional to see because, basically, someone on the ground, they sent me videos of, like, the actual families, and you see these are actual human beings that are benefiting from clean running water. And this was in the cold. Afghanistan gets really cold in the winter, especially in the mountain regions. It's like ice cold. So having running water towards your village is a huge deal because you don't have to go far and get it.

The point of me telling the story is that was just a few thousand dollars. Now when I talked about Ethiopia and the $450,000,000 that is essentially up for grabs, that's not even counting the 9,000,000,000. Right? Just that 450,000,000 from the official remittances, how many wells is that for people? How much extra help are we giving to human beings and not just one country, not just one corridor that we can potentially help with? And so for us, at the end of the day, you do only have one life.

You're gonna you're gonna have a roof over your head unless you do something really wrong. Right? And so for me, it's, okay. How do we make a life worth living? And the reality is that if you're just chasing I I don't wanna get too philosophical here because, like, at the of the day, are here to make money. But what I told the team is we wanna do well so we can do good. Right? So Mhmm. But you do have to do well first. You know?

It's like that whole that adage of it's easier to be a philosopher king when you start being a king first and then become a philosopher. And so for us, it's easier to do good when you're doing well. And so from our side, our team is absolutely heads down, and we're focused on this. And we just see again, there's it it's funny because people ask me, wait. Why are you doing this when there's so many other so much other competition? And my answer is, you know, there's there's so many movies.

Why do we make other movies? Why do we launch any other business? At the end of the day, there are people who are not being served, they're not being focused on, and that's where we come in. And so I I know that I sound almost too idealistic,

but these are things that I've seen with my own eyes. So it's been amazing. One of my mentors healthy. Said no no margin, no mission. Well, I was like, that was their thing. Like, you don't have any margin. You don't got any mission. That was like back in cause when 2015, Tom's shoes, like, cause cause marketing was, like, a big buzzword. And that was, like, the the advice a mentor of mine gave. Because I was I was in high school, like, starting a cause based thing, a margin of mission.

And it was, like, the business model was trash, and we were just giving away a lot of money, and there was no real, like, value. And my mentor was like, hey, man. Like, gotta have margin if you don't have any margin. And that something something we're excited about is at StableDash, like, that we take that very seriously. Intentional part of our profits and revenues go toward this stuff. So we would love to, like, think through that, and I think there should be more ways.

I was kinda bummed to see Glow Dollar Oh, I literally just thinking about them. Or unwinding and going back into, like, the Braille ecosystem. Like, love stuff like that that, you know, maybe that's an example of no margin, no mission gone wrong. Like, I I think that there is such an opportunity for this industry to think more holistically about what matters, and I love that story of The Well. I think there are there are a lot of people in our space looking to contribute to things like that.

So if you find anything that we should know about to highlight or amplify or help people get on base with that, I think to bring yeah. So keep us in mind that this is really encouraging. We'd love to have you back on the show. We need to transition to our next guest. But, yeah, man. It's Rob. Congrats on a big day. Yeah. Thanks for coming on.

Thank you, gentlemen. It was an honor and a pleasure, and I hope to see you guys soon.