On Ep. 63 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, GTM @ Tempo and Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto @ Visa, are joined by Anthony Yim, Co-Founder @ Artemis and Andrew Van Aken, Data Scientist @ Artemis to discuss stablecoins, onchain cards and B2B payments in their 2025 review.
On Ep. 63 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, GTM @ Tempo and Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto @ Visa, are joined by Anthony Yim, Co-Founder @ Artemis and Andrew Van Aken, Data Scientist @ Artemis to discuss stablecoins, onchain cards and B2B payments in their 2025 review.
Timestamps:
Tokenized is sponsored by Visa
A world leader in digital payments, Visa is bridging the gap between traditional financial institutions and innovative blockchain networks, helping players in the payments ecosystem navigate the ever-evolving world of tokenized fiat currencies with confidence and ease. Learn more at visa.com/crypto.
Tokenized is presented by Bridge, a Stripe company.
Just like the internet made information global, stablecoins are making money global. And Bridge, a Stripe company, is the infrastructure powering that shift. Built for speed, scale, and simplicity, Bridge helps businesses send, store, convert, and spend stablecoins instantly, all without borders or having to navigate the complexities of crypto. Learn more at bridge.xyz
Tokenized is also presented by Fireblocks
With over $100 billion in monthly stablecoin volume, Fireblocks powers stablecoin strategies at scale with infrastructure that enables PSPs, fintechs, remitters and banks to issue, move, hold, and manage stablecoins. And it’s all done securely, at scale, and with built-in compliance. Learn more at fireblocks.com
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We’d also like to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they are representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial, investment or legal advice, do your own research!
Music by Henry McLean
Cuy Sheffield 00:00
It was obviously a very good year for every stable coin issuer. Anyone who had a live stable coin in market for the full year of 2025 did very well. The fact that Dai is technically the only one down which I guess USDS and dai are kind of the same thing. So I would like put that aside. Everyone grew everyone grew in 2025 but then to see that usdt added almost as much supply as everyone else combined. And so adding close to $50 billion of supply in a year like that is extremely impressive at just the pace that they're growing at the size that they
Sy Taylor 00:36
are welcome to tokenized. The show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real world assets. My name is Simon Taylor. I'm your host for today, author at FinTech, brain food and head of market dev over at tempo, and back with me once again, is my colleague, my friend, my co host. Co host, co host. Kai Sheffield, how the heck are you, sir? Can you say the word co host,
Cuy Sheffield 01:01
I am fantastic. I'm excited to get into some on chain data. There's, there's so much that you can learn from the data. And so this show, shout out to Artemis and team has been fantastic. You know, it's fun to get to get on and learn from them.
Sy Taylor 01:14
Definitely, we are doing a 2025, year in review. And of course, we had to have the Artemis guys come and do that. So first up, of course, is Anthony Yim, co founder of Artemis analytics. How you doing?
Anthony Yim 01:28
Anthony? Wonderful. I am actually burning up with a fever, but the show must go on actually. And I'm like, I'm still excited with a fever,
Sy Taylor 01:36
but that's how hot stable coins are. Have been in 2025 Your body knows it. I'm glad it could, it could get with the program. Here. Also joining us is Andrew Van Aitken, chief data scientist at ultimate. How you doing? Andrew? Have you got a fever or
Andrew Van Anken 01:51
No, that's a two step promotion from junior data intern to chief data scientist. So I'm happy to take it. You know, anytime
Sy Taylor 01:58
I just read what's in the notes, man, you could have edited those a few seconds ago, and I have no idea. Ron Burgundy over here the Ron Burgundy of stable coins. I need to remind everybody, of course, that views and opinions of contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. Please don't take anything we say is tax, legal or financial advice, and do your own research before we get into the review, though, we just have to hear a few words from our sponsors. This episode, if it isn't already obvious, is sponsored by our friends at visa, the leader in digital payments. Visa's tokenized asset platform, or vtap, uses smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies on chain, whether it's launching a stable coin or deposit tokens or something else, vtap allows financial institutions to issue Fiat backed tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance check out the links In this episode's description to express your interest in vtap. This episode is sponsored by privy, a stripe company stable coins, can't go mainstream without simple and secure wallets. That's where privy comes in, trusted by more than 100 million accounts. Privy lets users launch wallets instantly with familiar logins like email or social. It's consumer grade user experience with enterprise grade security. Stop building with privy. Learn more@privy.io tokenized is also sponsored by fireblocks. Fireblocks is the stablecoin infrastructure of choice for global businesses, from visa to wallpay, to bridge to Revolut with over $100 billion in monthly stable coin volume, fire blocks powers stable coin strategies at scale with infrastructure that enables PSPs, fintechs, remitters and banks to issue, move, hold and manage stable coins. It's all done securely at scale with secure built in compliance with fire blocks, you get complete control to build your own stable coin orchestration layer, create payment accounts, manage liquidity and access on and off ramps in over 60 currencies. Makes it easier for you to build and scale and expand your business globally. Learn more@fireblocks.com thank you so much to our sponsors. Now it's time for me to hand over the hosting duties to the one and only Andrew Vanek and the junior data scientist intern coffee maker of the day himself. Take us through the data. Give us a data driven review on 2025 let's do this.
Andrew Van Anken 04:44
Well, we make, we make good coffee at Artemis too. So you know, nothing is we don't take anything for granted. So starting off, I wanted to, I wanted to get everyone's kind of just general take on 2025 but I think the slide that just. Most exemplifies stable coins this year is the number of stable coins above $10 million in supply is now over 140 and we started the year at roughly 60. And now we are just well on our way, gentlemen, did you, did you and coming into 2025, did you think? Yeah, I think we're gonna have almost twice as many stable coins as we did the start of the year. And and I guess, actually, you know, thinking about 2025 what are your general thoughts here? Of you know, obviously everyone is launching a stable coin now. But it certainly is. The data shows it, literally everyone is launching a stable coin. Kai, we'll start with you. Is this? Does this does this jump out at you? Does it surprise you?
Cuy Sheffield 05:42
Yeah, so when I saw this this chart, I had a few thoughts. One very consistent with our theme of, everyone wants a stable coin, which we've talked about over and over on the show, and sometimes whether or not it makes sense. And there's the debate around, when does it make sense to create your own versus to partner and use an existing one. I think the other thing is, a lot of the stable coins that have been announced in 2025 haven't even actually gone live yet. And so then I was like, Wait, there's Western Union, you know, there's the tether USAT, there's Klarna USD, there's just notes, there's fi USD. And so, like, we're already seeing 140 that are over 10 million that are live, and then there's this whole host of ones that are announced but not live. And then it's likely there's a whole nother round of stable coins that are in progress, being worked on, that are not announced or live. And so I think it looks like this chart is really just beginning to bend, and that you're going to see hundreds of stable coins that are live. And I think the other question I had on the data when I saw this is, what percentage of these are USD, denominated of the 140 versus non USD stable coins, which I think is another big question and theme trend that we should talk about. And then, are these all? Are you only counting Fiat backed, or does this count algorithmic backed? Because then, if it's like, if anyone can create some type of crypto collateralized algorithmic thing, then like you could see these, like defi protocol purchase get launched much faster, without having to have a traditional Fiat reserve. So any clarifying pieces on what the 140 number includes? And then, yeah, Simon, here's your reaction as well.
Sy Taylor 07:30
I have no clue what the 140 includes, so I would really hope you might have a view that.
Andrew Van Anken 07:37
Yeah, so the 140 it's actually I would actually throw it back to everybody else. Do we actually need to rethink what is a stable coin? Because here we are counting algorithmic we are counting Fiat back as well, like things like Athena. We do count Falcon finance, etc, but we also count the p, y, s, ds of the world. But what you think, what we're starting to run up against is, do we start counting these tokenized deposit money market funds? Do we start counting gold back stable coins that are using interstate hedge measures? Simon, you seemed enthusiastic there. Do we need to rename stable coins? Do we need to call them
Sy Taylor 08:15
something else? That was exactly what was going through my head. I actually think we call a lot of things a stable coin, or at least the market does that are not stable coins, right? And if you listen to Guy Athena, he's quite clear that he's building collateral, and that USD is a form of collateral, and that it can be used for those purposes, but he doesn't expect you to be spending this every single day. And so that's one category of thing, of like this on chain collateral that is pegged towards $1 and really the stable coin is a receipt for some sort of reserve, or some sort of access to that reserve. Then you've got, like the traditional Fiat backed, you know, so called tether types, but you've within that now got this second category of m zero, agora, and what bridge is doing, like letting anybody be an issuer of USD stable coins. But underneath it, there's this, like, pool of stable coins that it's all backed by, it's backed by the same reserve. So, so what's that is, is that the same thing? Is it a different thing? Because it's allowing you to have this branded token, and it's allowing you, as a as a non stable coin issuer, to potentially collect some of that yield and represent it as your token. That's really cool for treasury management or loyalty use cases, but that's not the same thing as circle and tether and what they're doing. So it's like this separate category of thing, and then there might be a whole bunch of other things that come off to the side of it. So if we go back to the original question, did I expect this at the beginning of the year? No, but there's, I think. Think about what the key B to B use cases are, and a lot of the interest around corporate treasury, you can see there's some value in branding this thing. You can see there's some value in just managing my own treasury. Like if somebody ran a corporate treasury and they had a bunch of bank accounts and they had a bunch of T bills and a bunch of repo and then you gave them a new technology that allowed them to collect the yield for that and move it across borders. 24/7, they'd want that thing. We happen to call that thing stable coins, but they want the yield themselves, because it's their own funds. It's their own liquidity. So of course, they want the yield for it. This is just the token that represents their ability to do that thing that they wanted to do in a slightly better way. So yes, I think there's a there's an issue with the naming, and maybe we need to subdivide those just to make the whole world a lot more confusing. But I can see a slide in my near future with some sort of diagram where I might have to make this what say you is that, how you categorize,
Unknown Speaker 11:03
oh, a little two by two, if you will,
Sy Taylor 11:06
a little two by two.
Cuy Sheffield 11:07
I was just gonna add that you all should confirm. But, like, you know, shout out to our data team, Tim and Noah, you know, I'm like chatting them on the side of like, what's it? It looks like, you know, they're, according to them, 93% of stable coins above 10 million are USD, and so only 7% of this are non USD. So that will be really interesting to see how that evolves if that number increases over time.
Andrew Van Anken 11:33
Yeah, Anthony Ian, I'm actually going to ask the question you asked me last night in frantic preparation for this, if every major bank issues its own proprietary, tokenized deposit, are we just recreating the same system we already have? But on a blockchain, I will say,
Sy Taylor 11:49
Ooh, I have opinions.
Anthony Yim 11:53
I don't think that's a bad thing, per se. I don't know it's not. I kind of think so. But at the same time. I think I having been in startups for many years now, I think I have a tendency to underestimate how creative people are. And I think like so I'm pretty optimistic that it's still a net positive, like outcome, but I do think that that is actually what's kind of necessary in the beginning, right? Like when we first started artivism, crypto was, like, the absolute Wild West, like, it was unimaginable for me to, like, think of, like, real capital coming on chain. But here we are in 25 we have Simon has a new job at a tempo, and one of the largest, most respected, you know, Stripe, being one, you know, the one of the biggest payment companies in the world. And so, like, I think, like, it's okay that we are rebuilding some of this stuff on a much more efficient rail.
Sy Taylor 12:46
And also, if you go back to first principles, why does that stuff exist? And usually the answer to that is risk. And if you could start again from zero, would you make everything really efficient? Of course you would. But the problem with efficiency sometimes is like, what happens if the other guy doesn't have the money, and what happens if the Counterparty is insolvent? And it's all the edge cases that really are where the cost is in the system. So if we're tokenizing deposit, like I feel for the bankless guys. Sometimes shout out to those guys, they run an amazing podcast, but but I never felt like we were going to go bankless, because fundamentally, the utility of what banks do is the ability to take a balance sheet to have the lowest cost of funding, to be able to create new money supply and lend it into the economy. And now we've got private credit that also does that, and that could come on chain, but that from first principles is a useful function in society. There was just a lot of friction in how we move money because a lot of the technologies didn't allow us. There were Marvels when they were built in the 60s and 70s, but they didn't allow us to settle the money instantly. So we haven't gotten rid of the risk of the money not settling, sometimes settling it instantly does help. But also that can be very inefficient, because you have to pre fund everything 100% so how can we have a best of all worlds? Well, deposits could play a useful role in that. So I don't think that it's an or answer here. I don't think everything goes pure stable coins, because people will want their banks who can lend to them at a lower rate to be able to help them. I don't think everything goes pure tokenized deposits either, because people will want this faster, cheaper, programmable, instant, 24/7, rail. So I've been a believer sometimes that these things will actually coexist, because deposits are money at rest, and stable coins are money that moves. And when you understand that that can be stable coins can be a really efficient rail for the banks, and that deposits can be a really useful thing for the stable coin ecosystem, then why can't we all just get along? It's the holidays, after all, it's the time to be merry, be around your family, like, let's not make this a fight. Let's figure out from first principles what we actually need. Can I say I'll thank you for coming to my TED talk?
Andrew Van Anken 15:11
No, that's a good that's a good segue, because we've gotten through one slide in 10 minutes and we have 30. So if you want to do but it is, but it is a very, I will say it is a very Merry Christmas for two, for two folks here in the stable coin landscape, tether has added, actually, about almost $50 billion in supply, year over year. They have so much money they're actually buying football teams now, to quote the famous Pink Floyd. But we also have circle here also gaining another $25 billion and so you can really see that this huge growth, and even our friends at PayPal, have also added $3.4 billion in supply. That is a 700% increase year over year. So clearly, you know, like, I think I alluded to earlier this, this USD stable coin demand is really driving things forward. And I want to just jump ahead here to a few slides to show you where the supply is like, really growing in terms of low cost chains. And I think I want to spend some time here to talk about it, because I think it's very important, because we've seen these chains like Solana BNB growing incredibly quickly. So Solana supply has grown 200% year over year. BNB chain has grown 100% Tron and Ethereum, not as much so fast. But I guess my first question over to you, Kai, do you think that we finally have the infrastructure on blockchains to really handle these, you know, very quick, very fast, low cost transactions. Is it finally here?
Cuy Sheffield 16:47
I think it's, it's good enough, and it's continuing to get better. Like, I think there's the question a few years ago of, would blockchains ever scale? I think now you have many options of scalable blockchains to choose from. Now, there are different properties and different trade offs between them, but I don't think that there's anyone that's saying now I can't do anything with stable coins because gas fees are too high and there's no option of a lower transaction fee chain. And I think that the debate around payment chains versus general purpose chains, like there's the differences in even optimizing what chains are built for, matter a lot. But I think we've made a lot of progress as an industry going back. I think the first chart of just it's amazing one. It was obviously a very good year for every stable coin issuer, anyone who had a live stable coin in market for the full year of 2025 did very well. The fact that Dai is technically the only one down which I guess USDS and dai are kind of the same thing. So I would like put that aside. Everyone grew everyone grew in 2025 but then to see that usdt added almost as much supply as everyone else combined. And so adding close to $50 billion of supply in a year like that is extremely impressive. It just, you know, the pace that they're growing up, the size that they are. And I think the other comment on on the the next chart, like by chain, is people have been talking a lot about, Tron in the Tron blockchain, and like usdt on Tron, and I think it went from most people in the US had no idea what Tron was, they weren't using Tron, and then they discovered, oh, it turns out a lot of people are using Tron, usdt on Tron in emerging markets. And then it became this, this target, per se, that you have a bunch of chains saying we want to go and flip that volume from usdt on Tron to other chains. And I think you could argue Tron has been surprisingly resilient that, you know, Tron added $19 billion of supply in 2025, and so it's, it's, it doesn't seem like the effect of transitioning from Tron over to other chains has really happened yet. It's still a big target that people are going for, but Tron is growing, and so I think it'll be really interesting to watch. Like, you know, while the percentage gains are high on many of these, like, new even lower cost chains, because Tron is not cheap, I think it's like a few dollars for gas. Now, how sticky this network effect ends up being of consumers that are used to usdt on Tron. What is it going to take to switch them over and like, this time next year? Will we look back and like, Will Tron print another 20 billion in growth or like, will you finally start to see some of its market share eaten into? I think that'll be interesting
Anthony Yim 19:41
to watch, but I think, I think that's why it's like, so important that we as an industry need to move away from actually the scalability question. I don't think scale is actually what matters. It's actually like, right? It's like, Tron is not scalable, but people use it because it solves a pain point, like, as a founder, it's like, I'm always just reminding my team, it's like, solve. What the customer is asking for. Don't just, like, opt out of some metric that is, like, sexy, right? And I think this is where, like, where it's like, I think Simon, in one of his other episodes earlier in the year, was like, hey, like, tempo, we're trying to solve for, like, all these edge cases that are not being solved for, they're not supported by a generic chain so that you can actually, you know, it's like, offer the suite of services that stripe offers. So I think that's why stripe charges an interchange fee that is, like, hefty. It's because, not because, it's because it solves a real problem. They offer analytics, they offer fraud, they offer, you know, a way to refund. All these things are really important, not scalability, like we've solved scalability, yeah.
Sy Taylor 20:40
And I think people confuse price and value, and the value of Tron is for people outside the West, that is a way to get into dollars and move those dollars around the world that they didn't have immediately available to them before, and that has product market fit. And I do think there's like two worlds emerging of then people who have come into stable coins over the past 12 months have probably done so on a fast, performant chain in something like Solana, for some sort of Western distribution, but for a payments use case, but for everywhere else, it's Tron tether, and, you know, it's just in the UAE, and that's the default. And you know, Anthony, you know, Anthony, you were talking about being in Hong Kong, and that's the default. And we have to recognize that almost these two worlds emerging. And the interesting question is, how do they coexist, and what do you do about them? And I think there's a third question, which is also, what happens next? Because the stable coin payments market is a fraction of a fraction of the overall payments market. It is tiny, so we've got lots of my spaces here, but like, this could be a whole bunch of new chains emerging three, four years time that go on to dominate because the market is still so small. Yeah, I
Andrew Van Anken 21:54
think, Anthony, you made this point last night where you're saying, like, almost every so many chains have pivoted to be almost like payments. Chains and new payments have been launching yet. Tron still gains $20 billion it's just kind of remarkable to see, you know, just there's so much demand for it that all these chains can just keep adding, you know, billions and billions
Cuy Sheffield 22:16
of dollars. Can we, real quick? Can we talk about py USD for a second? Say, I think that was another standout from from this chart, I guess, fastest growing from a percentage standpoint, growing 700% in 2025 and getting to 3.4 billion. So I think that there were some people who are writing pyusd off or saying the chart kind of went up to a billion. It went down. It has had a really strong year on chain in terms of the growth in both supply and transaction volume, but at least from the data, it appears not from the use cases and what you would expect. And so from what I've seen like where most of the pyusd supply is is actually in defi. Looks like there's a lot of it related to Athena. I think pyusd is being used as some collateral there. There's a lot on Camino, on the lending platform. And so just based on like, at least the day I'm looking at right now, is there is more py USD in defi than there is being custody in Paxos wallets, which is underneath what the PayPal platform is. And so if you would have told me, beginning of the year, you know, PayPal stable coin grows 700% but it's not necessarily because PayPal customers or merchants are using it for payments. It's because crypto traders are using it within defi like that would have been a surprise. And so I think that there's like they've executed well in finding ways to drive adoption in these new use cases. It'll be really interesting to see how they execute within pyusd, being used in the PayPal platform. And so I think that's been the other interesting surprise this
Andrew Van Anken 23:57
year, yeah. And, you know, shout out to our own show. We had David Weber, head of ecosystem at pyusd, and I think two weeks later, the supply increased by 2 billion. So we're not looking for attribution, but correlation and causation are pretty tight there. Anthony, I mean, you founding one of the founding engineers at Venmo, and what do you think PayPal needs to do to drive you know, usage on the customer side, and really, you know, increase retention of a lot of these customers.
Anthony Yim 24:28
I think they should go on a buying spree. They should go buy one of the, I mean, so Venmo was acquired by PayPal because we had, we cornered the millennial market, and, like, Gen Z years, weren't even 18 at that point, but, but, you know, they they bought Venmo to get access to a whole new set of users that they have that, you know, we're not using PayPal because they were too young when the.com bubble was like, what's happening? And now, I think they should go and buy, like, a. A like, a read out, pay or something, right? Like a read up. I've heard it's doing really well. They are basically like, speed up all the users who previously could not have been served by a single provider, because these are the long tail countries like Egypt, Bangladesh, Morocco. But, you know, with stable coins, and you can now, like, have one unified rail to serve all this other, all these users and and I think that's like another sort of, like, Mau growth vector for PayPal. And then if you can tie that all up in the middle with stable coins, you also get this, like, big boost in operational efficiency. And it's, to me, it's kind of a no brainer. I think I'm sure read out pay is pretty cheap on a relative basis. You know, for PayPal acquirers, they should go get a bunch of these companies
Andrew Van Anken 25:46
on the Christmas shopping list. You know, Anthony, I'm always, always looking to make a big move. I want to, I want to pivot, actually, now to something that time assignment talked about was stable coin payments. So we're going to jump ahead here. But stable coin payments, this is data that actually Artemis released with over 40 partners this past year, showing the stable coin payment landscape of p to p, b to b, card, B to C, B to C, and pre funding. And right now, we're only at, we're at only about $10 billion of monthly payments. So that's about 100 $20 billion annualized. But yeah, like, kind of let Tai and you alluded to very small faction of overall payments, and it was actually kind of combining two questions here. How do you think this gets to, you know, you know, a trillion dollars a year? Or is there any features right now that are holding companies back from doing payments on the blockchains. They don't have this, like killer feature, like chargebacks or things like that. Very curious, Tai and your thoughts on that?
Sy Taylor 26:51
I think there's like, 1000 paper cuts. I don't think I'd put it down to one killer feature. It's just like, how does this talk to my existing systems, and how will my customer use it, and where does it fit inside my app, and what does that do with our mainframe? And can my vendor support it? And do, can I screen this for fraud? And what about sanctions? And you could just go down the list of hundreds of different questions we had Luca from cross river on a couple of weeks ago. And they're, they're a bank now that has just gone deep into the orchestration space, where, if you're a client of theirs, you can send money via stable coins or ACH or wire or anything else, and to them internally, it looks just the same. And they're kind of at the forefront of that. I think they're right at the front of people who have really reorganized their internal stack entirely around it, because if you think about the vast majority of stable coins users today, they're using a third party orchestration platform who's using a wallet provider and a custodian and liquidity providers, and like they're hiding a lot of that stack, and they may have partnered on the back end as well for on and off ramp providers around the world, there's a lot of complexity to running this business that just doesn't get seen for a lot of people in those numbers. So we've solved some niche use cases for where stable coins really work, but we haven't necessarily taken the mainstream because it just takes time and it's hard. So it's not surprising to me that the B to B use cases is probably the fastest growing, because that's where the effort, the juice, is worth the squeeze, whereas in P to P there are probably better products. So we'll, we'll start to see that inflect. I don't know if there's one killer feature necessarily,
Andrew Van Anken 28:34
so you're so a lot of these blockchains maybe have a possibility of of success by switching on a few features, optimizing towards something, maybe a payment use case, maybe a peer to peer use case, or,
Sy Taylor 28:45
I think it's bigger than any one blockchain, right, like, as much as tempo will have, I believe, the highest quality of life for any blockchain developer. That's awesome. But it's not the only answer that I think you also need a whole market that knows what minting and burning is. Pretty much every conversation I have with somebody who's been in payments forever is they just want to grasp the fundamentals first. Like, why is this different? Like, from, how is this different to my Pax messaging in ISO 2002, two, and when show me the flow of funds from that customer message to the pack 002 to the recipient of the 008 like what happens on the minting and burning underneath that? And does that sit in an omnibus account? And why? And what does that mean for my capital treatment, and where do you bring in the sanction screening tool? So the question is, is almost less about the blockchain and more about like, just imagine there's a bubble called a blockchain over here, and now think about their internal all the things they've got to do. That's where the work is. And I think that's going to happen over the next sort of 12 to 24 months, that people are really going to get their act together. They're on a lot of that stuff. The Neo banks are. They're coming in a big way. You know, what's your new banks, your revoluts, your all of these types of companies, your ramps, they have announced doing something, but they're getting the wheels in motion. Now expect other payments companies, outside of stripe, to get their wheels in motion. And then, of course, the financial institutions, the sponsor banks, and everybody else, that's going to be an unlock is we get these major institutional on off ramps, and this just becomes another product they offer and a better rail for their customers who want to accept stable coins or move money.
Cuy Sheffield 30:36
24/7, yeah, I think that's that's as well said, and it's interesting to see how quickly B to B is growing, despite not really having privacy, which is one thing that comes up in a lot of conversations with large enterprises and corporate treasuries, and not really having great like ERP integrations. And so my hypothesis would be a lot of the B to B, it's smaller, mid market businesses, emerging market accounts, where it's just it's that much better than their existing solution, that they're willing to onboard new infrastructure providers that might not have, like very tight integrations into their existing systems. And when you're a smaller company, you can figure out how to do it. There are not many, if any, fortune, 500 treasuries that have publicly, really started moving significant value on chain in terms of B to B payments. Maybe, I guess technically, PayPal has publicly paid some suppliers in pyusd. Starlink is one of the SpaceX, one of the most publicized use cases for their own corporate treasury. But they're not many. And so I think if you're seeing this, this early growth, it points like there's just, there's something here for B to B, and over the next 24 months, when many of those integrations happen, that Simon mentioned, I think what we expect to see, B to B continue to grow very quickly.
Andrew Van Anken 32:08
Yeah, that absolutely makes sense. Let's, let's totally just shift gears here and let's go into defi because, because why not? So, actually, so here's a trivia question. Over the last 30 days, what application on all blockchains Do you think had the most stable coin transactions?
Cuy Sheffield 32:30
I already looked at the deck ahead of time. I actually flipped through so it's but I don't think most people would
Andrew Van Anken 32:36
have no not many people would have predicted that poly market is the top, the top application on Polygon, with almost 40 million transactions in the last 30 days. You can see here that we're looking at a chart right now of spot volume of poly market and it of poly market versus Cal. She actually and trending downwards until the middle of the year where it just, you know, absolutely explodes. I don't really have a question here, but I'm curious. I'll throw it open to anyone. It's very just, it's just fascinating to me that you can in one conversation, you can have a discussion about stable coins, powering B to B flows, ERP systems, and then you can bet on if Zelensky will wear a shoot in six months. So maybe I'll throw this to Kai. How do you think of this? You know, ever increasing, you know, financialization of everything that's like, driven by stable like stable coins, is the underlying, you know, root of all these things. Curious, how you think about this?
Cuy Sheffield 33:36
I'm still a bit distracted looking at the slide. When I see pancake swap is number three. And just how to, how to explain that to institutions. There's an application called pancake swap on the binance chain that is apparently the third largest on chain application. And like, it's a decentralized people like pancakes. I mean, you can't put the branding. The branding in crypto is just it's sometimes leaves a lot to be desired. But I think with poly market, it's clear that there's a lot of interest in prediction markets, both from like a bottoms up consumer standpoint, and a top down institutional interest. We saw ice the company behind New York Stock Exchange making an investment in poly market. It seems like every week there's a new announcement of a calci integration. Really interesting to see the poly market versus calci battle. It seems like those are the two largest players by far. What I don't understand enough, and maybe one of you could correct me, is I understood poly market was just kind of always built as, like an on chain application on Polygon, and it always used USDC. And so it, just as poly market grew, USDC would grow. And you know, that was just how it was. Was designed. I didn't know of like, is Cal she 100% stable coin enabled on the back end? Or, I thought Cal she was more like web two. Off chain, but like, you could fund it with stable coins. And so it seems like there's some distinction in, like, the amount of on chain activity between poly market and Cal she, which may not be directly correlated to the amount of overall activity on the platforms. And then you kind of get to the question of, okay, well, what stable coin? What problem did stable coin solve for poly market, and why did they build it entirely on chain? Well, Cal, she did it. And then, if poly market is one of the biggest users of USDC, are they gonna create their own stable coin? Like, how does that evolve? If this continues to become poly market, is this like major on chain application?
Andrew Van Anken 35:40
Yeah, that's we need to add more stable coins to our first chart. Is really just kind of the takeaway of this entire chart. And then the other, you know, the thing I want to get into this is actually, from the visa on chain dashboard here, is that, you know, lending markets have really, really sizably increased in beginning of the year, we went from about $10 billion in loans outstanding to now we're sitting about roughly in the 25 to $30 billion range. I know Simon and Kai. You both, I believe, have written about Morpho. Kai, you hosted a session with Morpho A while back, but I'll start with you, Simon, how do you see this lending market evolving over time? Because clearly we have, you know, a lot of these are uncollateralized loans that you know, people borrow to buy other crypto out. But clearly there's a huge and enormous design space here. So what is stable coins via lending solve? And where do you think the opportunities are going forward?
Sy Taylor 36:42
I think it's much easier private credit for Neo banks. So if I was a NEO bank that did not have a banking charter, did not intend to use my balance sheet for lending, because I wanted to maintain a technology company multiple, rather than a lender multiple, and I wanted my primary activity to be payments, because payments companies that are technology businesses have a great multiple lending businesses do not and they often struggle pure play. Lending businesses can be very difficult to operate. One way around that is if you do lending, you get you know, you set up a securitization desk, and you just sell forward flow. So, you know, a ramp, a lot of these companies, they will go work with banks but private credit funds, and they'll go secure a big line of credit, and then they can use that to lend to to their customers. So they're not actually doing the lending off their balance sheet. That is very, very hard, very expensive and very slow. And so now what you're seeing is this alternative model for Neo banks, where they can just have this off the shelf or product almost that they can drop into their application that gives their customers yield on one side, but on the other side lets them borrow, potentially, if they're enabling that product. And so there's a lot of flexibility there. There's still some commercial deals. There's still some risk to be built. But I think the Neo banks are looking more and more at this as like, we don't have to do the classic lending model that people always thought banking would become, there's a much narrower version of a bank here that we could start to build out in the future. So I think that design space is really, really interesting, that these markets almost bring private credit and that lending market towards the developer in a really fascinating way.
Andrew Van Anken 38:39
Yeah, no, it's and now anyone could tap into this market. I mean, we've even seen Gabe AI companies like that, selling, you know, tokenized GPU stable coins. So it's almost like, how creative can you get with stable coins? Is really, you know, what you can what you can bring to the market. Kai, curious, like, because I know you hosted Paul from Morpho at an event A few months ago. Yeah, we'd love to hear, you know, kind of like a repeat cap from that. And how do you think that fits into the overall trend we're seeing here?
Cuy Sheffield 39:13
I still hate the term defi like, I just, I don't think it resonates well with banks or with regulators, like the point of having everything decentralized in a mainstream lending ecosystem? I don't think is the right fit for a lot of regulated institutions. I just don't really think it works, and so we like to say on chain lending, or on chain credit, where there are benefits of the technology and the ability to build protocols that can connect the lenders and borrowers. But you don't necessarily want everything to be decentralized by definition, for some of these things to work. I think that the metrics in how you measure this, it's really important, and this is one of the things that we've tried to do, and the impetus behind. Kind of putting some of these, these charts up, of traditionally, in a crypto world, like, the most common metric to measure defi is this concept of TVL, or total value locked. And we found that that doesn't really resonate when you talk to traditional institutions. Like, what does that mean? How is the total value locked grown like it's and so what we're trying to do is to say, Okay, well, if you think about on chain lending as a use case for stable coins that leverages the programmable nature that they have the ability to use smart contracts, how much lending is happening in terms of what's the volume of stable coin denominated loans that are being originated and dispersed on chain through smart contracts? I think that's the right question to ask in the right metric to really follow and analyze. And so that's what we've been doing. And I think when we show this metric, and so just in 2025 having over $200 billion of loans originated and dispersed in stable coins that gets a lot of people's attention, like whoa. Like this. This stuff seems to work. The technology of smart contracts is working for representing this type of a lending arrangement. But then there are a bunch of questions, and you know, a lot of the one questions being, okay, well, 100% of this is basically crypto collateralized. These are entirely permissionless pools that anyone's like lending or borrowing from. And so there are a number of major challenges and obstacles for on chain lending to move from defi crypto native to mainstream finance banking, but I think the technologies and the protocols that are really innovating becoming more modular, having more kind of permissioned capabilities to know who's lending or borrowing, having more data standards to do underwriting that might not have to be fully collateral, all those things are developing. And so I think we're still at a very early stage, and the primitives are starting to emerge. And now the question is, how do they become more adopted in traditional lending environments? And that's what's going to be really interesting to watch going forward.
Andrew Van Anken 42:15
Yeah, so as we get all these different things that we have in traditional lending markets will, you know, almost we'll be able to grow much faster because we have, you know, things that more financial institutions are comfortable with. And the last few minutes we have, I wanted to see, we'll make a few predictions and see what's in store for 2026 Anthony Yim, I will first ask you, because you have so many HD DVDs and, you know, we're forever burned by the adoption of blu ray technology, right here, we're looking at x 402, daily transactions, and they're they've been increasing pretty quickly, and as this theme of agentic commerce slowly gains traction. Anthony, yeah, my question for you is, is, obviously it's still early. But do you think we're still early to depict a winner in this protocols of x 402, versus open, AI and and do you think that stable coins are really best suited for handling agent, commerce?
Anthony Yim 43:14
Yeah. I mean, the heads of the first ones. I definitely think is way too early. I think we're, we're in the like HD, DVD versus blue. A battle where it's like, yeah, it's too early to pick the winner. I just like that little throwback, because I feel like all I completely forgot about that battle. But when Andrew and I were as millennials, reminiscing on our on our 20s, we realized that that was a thing for sure. And so I think we're in this moment. I'm excited about agentic payments. I think that will be a thing I was just thinking about, like, hey, I really want, just like an agent to decide what my meals are for me for this week based on my analytics. Like, like, my health, how if I went to the gym, my sleep, you know, like, all that stuff, and just, like, offload that for me, and it just makes it just buys my Uber Eats for me. And I just have to prove it wonderful. But like, which one will win? I don't know. I think it's weird, too early to tell.
Andrew Van Anken 44:12
Yeah, no, makes sense. And then finally, one thing here is we briefly talked about how USD stable coins have been totally dominating. Right now, we're looking at about $600 million in supply of non USD stable coins. While that's grown pretty well, that's grown, you know, a little bit year over year, from about 400 million to 600 million. I will note that that is almost entirely Euro denominated. So if you look at the non USD, Fiat stable coins, almost 90% of it is actually in euros. So Simon, throwing it over to you, is what do you think is holding us back? Or is this really, truly people, just everyone wants dollars. Or do you think there's a lot of infrastructure that needs to come online to really boost this number? Yeah?
Sy Taylor 45:00
I think everybody wants dollars and dollar treasuries in particular. So the problem with the Euro is there isn't a mutualized debt market, so you can't back a Euro stable coin in quite the same way. You have to back it in cash. So the yield performance doesn't look the same. And right there you've killed one of the key benefits of stable coins is they're this cash like asset that I can move instant 24/7, and I get this extra yield that I would have almost from a money market fund. If I'm the sub issuer of it, like a Kalani USD, or if I'm the Neo bank, or something along those lines, that's got a distribution partnership with circle or things of that nature. So there's really no lack of demand for last mile stable coins. I think it's the obvious thing. There's just a lack of an incentive to be able to do them, and there's difficult regulatory regimes, frankly, to be able to do them, whereas the US now has a lot more clarity and it had a lot more momentum historically. I do think this will change in time. I actually think, weirdly enough, the consortia of European banks called kivalis could be an interesting one to watch, and if we start to see the euro as like an actual solution for just a European wide settlement that's instant, 24/7 because we have sepa, but it's not instant in all cases, there's separate instant, but the volumes of that are incredibly small. So I think we could see the Euro make a play, because it's what, 25% of the global currency markets, versus like, less than 1% in stable coin markets. The euro should have a right to be in this conversation, but Mika makes that very difficult. The lack of a single debt market makes that very difficult, and that will need to change, and maybe that will take a couple of years, and we need to think about like, if I'm a new bank, I'm holding lots lots of MXN and BRL, like, what do I want to do? I immediately want to get into dollars, because I want to hedge out of that volatility. There's nothing making me there's no incentive for me not to do that. So right now, the the incentive structure is kind of backwards, and we need truly liquid, deep on chain FX markets, and we're a little ways off
Andrew Van Anken 47:21
that in the moment. Yeah, very nicely said. So in the last two minutes that we have, we have the most controversial, or even a single prediction for 2026 Anthony Yim, you are first on the list.
Anthony Yim 47:34
What is your prediction, sir? I think nature will heal in the sense that there will be a bunch of actually stable coin blow ups because of two things. One is that we talked about this earlier, like they're not actually stable coins, and people find out the hard way that you know if you sell something as a stable coin, but it fluctuates, it might erode confidence. And I think of this because, like, we get pitched a lot of stable coins all the time to be added to, to Artemis as, like, a neutral data provider, and a lot of things, I'm like, that's not a stable coin, that it's not very stable at all. And so I think there's because, you know, stable coins have such strong part of marketing crypto. Like, every now crypto founders like, Oh my God, I need to launch a stable coins like, that way I can, I can build a company. And it's just a lot of these things are not stable coins. And so that's one thing. And another one is that I think people will realize a lot some of these founders who are launching, you know, Fiat backed stable coins, maybe underestimate the amount of how hard it is actually to get real volume and real liquidity. That's a really strong moat that is hard to penetrate from tether and also from actually now the incumbents are coming in, right, like PayPal stripe. These guys have real users. They have they own the end customer. That's really, really hard to snatch away. And so, yeah, I think a bunch of these guys won't make it. That's kind of a more somber prediction, but I think overall it's good. It's like, it's like, nature's healing. We will crypt stable coins will continue to grow, but some people will have to learn some hard lessons.
Sy Taylor 49:13
Yeah, power laws are a thing, and Darwin exists. Andrew, I want yours though. I want your most controversial prediction. You see that?
Andrew Van Anken 49:20
Here we go. Here we go. I think, I think binance will buy circle next year for and the reason why I think that is a few things. One is, if you look at the data, binance USDC is going to flip where binance is going to be the number one holder of USDC versus Coinbase. And actually us YC, circle's tokenized money market fund, or tokenized Treasury fund, is actually now over a billion dollars, where 95% of it sits on binance. So I'm protecting some some very high class drama with maybe circle Coinbase and binance, you know, swoops in and buys them and. Yeah, it's just going to be a fun 2026 and also tokenized gold will also be we'll have to pivot this show instead of stable coins, we're going to be talking about tokenized gold. Is my crazy predictions for 2026
Sy Taylor 50:11
that's a great place to leave it, because Kai and myself will be doing a full prediction show, which will be the next episode in your feed. But thank you guys so much for taking us through the year in review, the year in stable coins, for having actual slides and charts. I feel like you know, we got to up our game. Kai, we're going to have to start doing some real work for the podcast, not just relying on show notes that Patrick produces. Like this is this, is this, is this is the a game here. Really appreciate it. Look, if people want to find out more about Artemis or what you're doing, Anthony, where do they go to do that?
Anthony Yim 50:47
Yeah, they can find me on Twitter or x at Anthony Yim and, of course, also at Artemis for our company,
Sy Taylor 50:56
Andrew, if people want a coffee or they want to talk to you, where do they go get that
Andrew Van Anken 51:00
they can just follow at Artemis, I'm, you know, doing a lot of the messages there. Sometimes I answer DMS, so it's all about playing
Anthony Yim 51:07
for the team. Heck, yeah,
Cuy Sheffield 51:10
Kai, how about you on x at Kai Sheffield and visa comm slash crypto. You'll find
Sy Taylor 51:15
me at sy Tai on Twitter, and then Simon Taylor on LinkedIn, FinTech, brain food.com, and tempo, dot XYZ. If you haven't already subscribed because of the data show, then go ahead and hit the subscription button right now. Leave a like, leave reviews. Do all the things that hosts bug you to do, and please tell one friend today about this show. And just because you have Andrew's soothing voice like, that's the reason you need to be into this? It's just, it's just pure ASMR, and I'm glad, I'm glad we got to do this. Thank you so much, and we'll catch you next time.