Why Every Major Payment Brand Is Building on Solana

We're here. We're in Miami. Yes. We are. And we're here live at Simona accelerates powered by Altitude. We're in the Altitude booth. We're proud sponsors of Stabilize Live, the Modern Money Show. We're here for our second conversation. I really enjoyed our first one Yeah. Powered by man, this was a while ago. This podcast powered by Global Dollar Network. Think that's what the conversation we have. Because you you go on podcasts a lot. Decent about. Per month podcast count. Actually, not that many.

Yours may have been the last one. Really? Yeah. Oh, one and a Yeah. I it high quality. Okay. Let's go. Well, first off, thanks for doing this event and being here. Everyone I know at the foundation is just off the charts amazing. And you guys put on great events, and the builder community is strong. People are excited. I dare to say we're the strongest in the space right now. Like Yeah. It's just pretty

obvious to me Yeah. I mean from this perspective. Well, I was gonna say, I feel like there's a camp of people that get down about the bear market. But for me, for us of a those of us in payments, stablecoins, fintech, it's super exciting. Like, there's no bear. I mean, it's all bullish and from the standpoint of, like, people actually building, like, companies building Yep. And, like, the use case is

clear product market fit and scaling. So it's it's, like, the busiest and most fun it's ever been. Yeah. So, Shiraz, we, first off, when we were listening to this, go back and listen. We we spent probably over an hour digging into Shiraz's background. But briefly give an update on I think the moment we're in right now where it's like, your background, I believe, with where were you before? Were m x Google. M x Google. Yeah.

So, like, seeing both scale, tech, finance, and maybe more of these traditional contexts, it feels like those worlds are starting to really come to the table and start asking, like, hey. Yeah. This is happening. We don't wanna be left behind. We need to do this in big ways. Many of them are doing this in big ways. I think you are probably in a lot of those rooms, having a lot of those conversations. Give us a little bit of, like,

your role at the foundation and what it means, and then bring us just, like, into the moment. What does it feel like? It doesn't feel bearish from what you're saying. No. Not at all. Yeah. Why don't I I'll talk about the moment, and then I'll talk about our our role. Yeah. As you said, the moment is much less about, like, curiosity and scratching around the edges and thinking about pilots.

Literally, any fintech or financial institution that has anything to do with moving money across borders is doing something very aggressively in stablecoins like a like a Western Union, for example, or scoping out pilots and, you know, scope scoping out their build beyond pilots. Yesterday was big. What was the news yesterday? Yesterday was Western Union. It basically had, like, launched their so they had announced it back in money 2020, but I think they they went live with their stablecoin.

And they're you know, that's one example of, you know, they're a 170 year old company who in six months basically did, a startup sprint. Right? Shout out to Malcolm Clar. A 100%. Yeah. They've been doing But it's not just them. It's every fintech is building right now. Building, launching, piloting, scoping. So, yeah, it's a very different moment than anything that I did experience in the last five years, which, you know, has been quite a journey.

So so that's super exciting, which means if you think about a a fintech or payments company, what it means for them, they need to think about how architect their solution. And there's a ton of great infrastructure providers, stablecoin issuers, stablecoin orchestrators, wallet providers, RPCs, etcetera. Our role in that, so this is kind of what Foundation comes in, is like, we're the underlying neutral infrastructure, the the blockchain, you know, the the kind of the the rails, if you will, that they can build on.

So we're a component of that. And to the extent that they are thinking about what chain they want their solution to to be on or if they're multichain, that's where we kind of come in and support the partners from an education perspective, the technical advisory, understanding what primitives are available on Solana for things like confidential transfers, things like that that we've talked about. So we're very much in those conversations, but more from a kind of this is the underlying infrastructure Yeah.

Or the underlying kind of, like, rails that will move the money. So touching a little bit your background and equipping,

something I think about is just a guy like you meeting Malcolm, trying to hear what that the vision is, the goals are, being in the room with him. Like, how does your experience and what you did before Solana equip you to really help? Because from what I know about Malcolm specifically is, like, he is he doesn't have a huge team around him. He's doing a lot within a very traditional company with, I think, from that company.

I'd imagine your team coming in as partners and helping them think through that is really big. What is that like? And and Yeah. Kind of value are you Yeah. I think if you think about it from his perspective or others, yeah, I assume it can be overwhelming. You're basically

redefining your entire infrastructure. And as I mentioned, there are so many different components to that. Right? So for every component, you probably have all of these different companies pitching you. For us at the block, you know, we're not really a company. We're open source kind of software. But we still need to explain what what the story is. Like, why someone could come in and look like, okay. There's, like, five blockchains. They're all fast and cheap.

Like, you know, does it make a difference if I choose a or b? And our job is really to explain there's a huge difference. Right? And so I I think a lot of that story with someone like Amalcom or someone looking to redefine their rails is like, why why is Solana unique and different for this these kinds of use cases? In the past, we had focused a lot about fast and cheap because back then, there weren't as many fast and cheap blockchains. Right? We're sort of competing against, like, Ethereum, l 1, maybe. Yeah.

The joke kind of in our world is like, just works. Yeah. It works. So that's why you use it. And then but there are other chains that that kinda have some of those attributes. I think above and beyond that, it's looking at the community on Solana. You you come into an actual economy. Right? Like, you think about the number of when I say nodes, I mean companies or sort of like points of Building blocks.

Liquidity building blocks, you know, whether it's PSPs, whether it's like Visa or Fiserv or Western Union or pay PayPal or whatever. Yeah. Range. So you have an entire community of activity. So you've got 17,000,000,000 and growing of stable coin volume on Solana, huge amounts of velocity. You have a tremendous amount of liquidity on and off ramps. You have a set of primitives that have been built specifically for payments.

So I think that our job, just to answer your question, is really to explain why the the blockchains are different and have different attributes and and why Solana is uniquely positioned.

So you spent a lot of a lot of time on that. We'll wait for this to Yeah. Wait for this to so I guess ten minute warning. You have been at the foundation through a very, very wild season. Like, career there. Many wild seasons. How how many years has it been? Five years. I started labs, and then so I was in Solana Labs and then moved to foundation. But very similar type of role.

Go to market approaches or, like, ways that the salon like, the Solana ecosystem has molded and shaped to the industry and what the industry has needed. It seems like right now, capital markets, like, Internet capital markets is the thing. Payments.org, like, these these really, really bold. Yeah. Just, like, speak a little bit about today

and tomorrow with that focus and what that means. It's a good question. I mean, when I had started, it was a much more consumer and NFT kind of focused. DeFi was sort of, you know, growing. Some trading. Yeah. But to be honest, consumer NFT, like, that was not I don't I didn't really see that as the the purpose for blockchains. Maybe some people do. I mean, again, it's like, you know, everyone has their opinion. My opinion was this is financial infrastructure.

So for me, it was always the financial use cases that made the most sense. Now you could argue maybe an NFT is a financial financialization of a thing, but I don't know. I'm not I'm not here to shit on NFTs even though I kind of am. There's so much more to the story. I'm here to so my perspective was blockchains were financial infrastructure. And if that's the case, then what are the primary financial services?

You've got payments, which we've talked a little bit about, and then you have, you know, Internet capital markets as we talk about. We talk about issuing assets and trading assets, and that is a huge other category that is is growing. So not just thinking about stablecoins, but tokenized equities and credit and T bills and whatnot. So exciting. Yeah. Yeah. So so that's a whole other world that colleagues of mine have been working on.

But to answer your question more simply, to me, I think this is sort of like where I had envisioned and hoped that this industry would coalesce around is being financial infrastructure. Not to say those other use cases might not have some sort of appeal, but I think the lion's share of opportunity is really in making financial infrastructure more efficient, accessible, global,

you know, twenty four seven and all that sort of stuff and and seeing how we can integrate it into the traditional financial infrastructure in a way that becomes seamless for the user. Yeah. I'm speaking a little bit about tokenized WD specifically because we we've been really excited about that. We had Valve, the XSaaS team. Yeah. Saw that that team just like, hired a new head of sales today. Like, what is the opportunity for tokenized equities for people who are just kind of starting to learn about it?

But I feel like that is just such a massive opportunity for

both Solana and and the builders who are going out, the x stocks and the super states or, like, those folks. Yeah. This will be the my my dumb payments guy view on it, so take it with a grain of salt because that's not I don't work in the world of of kind of Wall Street. But looking from the outside in or from the payments world in, like, me, as we build more of these capabilities on chain, you want just you want more products and more access on chain.

So as an example, the first use case that really started popping on Solana with cross border money movement was just simple remittances. So it's like, oh, it's much easier to move money from US to name your market or whatever the corridor is. Over time, the applications that were doing this realized like, hey, I actually have a user that has a digital dollar in a wallet. Why should I why should they offer it right away? Why don't I build them a reason to keep it on chain?

So why don't we issue a card so they can spend it? Why don't we provide them with yield? If you think about the progression of this, you now have more and more people with on chain applications and wallets. Well, what are the things that will follow from just digital dollars? Well, why not offer equities? Why not offer tokenized bonds? Like, the whole suite of financial services products that you are allowed not allowed, that you have access to in the traditional financial rails.

So to me, I think it's just a distribution and accessing a a new and different kind of customer where some of the barriers are removed, and you have things like self custody, for example, that that provides some advantages in holding a tokenized equity. So I think it's yeah. I think it's just part of the progression of thinking about consumer financial services and also corporate. So now you're seeing a lot of, like, startups and companies that are thinking about corporate treasury. And so you're a business.

You operate in 10 countries. You have to move money in and out of those countries. It becomes a lot easier to do that on chain. And when you have funds on chain and they're at rest, maybe you wanna sweep swap them into a tokenized T bill or tokenized name your asset. Yeah. So I think it's just sort of like And you don't have to leave the world of blockchains to do that. Exactly. So as people come on chain, businesses come on chain, you wanna offer the full suite of assets.

Right now, it's very heavy stablecoins, but why not offer other assets as well? So much more to go. Well, we could pause there. Final thoughts to, yeah, maybe builders, communities, payments specifically, the next Western Union is around the corner. Yeah. So so cool to see big marquee partnerships like that. Well, I think for the the builders and companies wanting to kind of innovate in this space, it's extremely early.

What I see is, like like I said, every every major fintech, small fintech, financial institution building, which means that there's gonna be a tsunami of activity on chain, which means there's a lot of opportunity for builders to build around the edges, build solutions. So, like, you know, the bridges, BBNKs, reigns of the world, there is a whole other cohort just waiting in the wings to build in it, you know, and become the next unicorn. So I would just say, like, you know, it's a fun time.

I think if you're an entrepreneur and know the space, dive in. It's awesome. Are there any spaces that you feel like maybe, like, with Reign, with cards couple years ago, that seem like open gaps in your mind that, hey, I wish I wish we saw a little bit more teams building in that space?

I think it's kinda what I was talking about earlier is, like, if you just look at the progression, like, what is maturing and what is sort of on the earlier stage, I think it's sort of like a more holistic set of financial services to consumers and businesses that are natively on chain and what that looks like. So that seems now there are, you know, regulatory kind of constraints as well. But as those start to drop, the opportunities pop.

So for example, with Claire if Clarity comes through, I think that might provide more wind at the sails for people that are building in this space. So, yeah, I think it I think I think there's there's a lot of opportunity out there. So yeah. Thanks for the time. Cool. Thank Yes.

Thanks again. That was our conversation with Sharas from the Salon Foundation. Thanks for tuning in.