On Ep. 4 of Stablecoin Stories, Simon Taylor, Head of Market Development @ Tempo and Ran Goldi, SVP Payments, Fireblocks are joined by Scott Shay, Founder @ N3XT to discuss the creation and impact of Signature Bank’s Signet, the role in the stablecoin ecosystem as a bank and more!
On Ep. 4 of Stablecoin Stories, Simon Taylor, Head of Market Development @ Tempo and Ran Goldi, SVP Payments, Fireblocks are joined by Scott Shay, Founder @ N3XT to discuss the creation and impact of Signature Bank’s Signet, the role in the stablecoin ecosystem as a bank and more!
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 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
***
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
Unknown Speaker 0:00
Simon,
Sy Taylor 0:10
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 of FinTech brain food and head of market dev Uber at tempo. And joining me is my friend and my co host four stable coin stories, the one and only ran Goldie SVP of payments and network at five blocks. How you doing?
Ran Goldi 0:34
Ran good Simon, happy to have another episode. I know this is a limited series, but this is so much fun, and we'll have to think of any series after that.
Sy Taylor 0:42
Yeah, we will. There's lots of stories to tell, and I'm sure we'll find some different ones to work with. But Goldie, why don't you remind everybody what this series is about? Yeah.
Ran Goldi 0:51
I mean, you know, everyone in here, this is probably not your first podcast on stable coins. I'm sure you've heard at least the other tokenized podcast as well. And there's a lot of stable coins out there right now. There's a lot of stable and issuers, a lot of you, lot of use cases. People are waking up every day for more news about stable coins everywhere. We're really here to try and tell you, folks, the stories behind the coin, the stories that have actually created these tectonic shifts that we're seeing right now in the industry. And trust me, there's a lot of underlying tectonic shifts that's happening. And today we're going to ask our guests, what's the story behind I would call that maybe the first fully reserved blockchain bank for B to B payments. So Simon, if you want to introduce our guest, yeah.
Sy Taylor 1:35
Scott Shea, welcome to the show, sir, founder of next, next with a three in the middle of it instead of an E. Really good to have you on the show. How are you doing,
Scott Shay 1:43
sir, I'm doing great. Good to be with you and good to be with Goldie as always.
Sy Taylor 1:47
It's a real, genuine pleasure. Just before we jump into your story, I've got to remind everybody that views and opinions of contributors today may be their own and might not reflect those of companies to represent. And please don't take anything we say as tax, legal or financial advice and a reminder that this podcast series is, of course, made possible by fireblocks and our friends at visa. So Scott, let's get into the backstory before we talk about next. Help people understand your journey. I mean, you founded banks before bank United of Texas, Merrick bank, and, of course, signature, what draws a serial founder to now go into the crypto rails. And are you a glutton for punishment? Like founding banks is hard.
Speaker 1 2:31
You are right? And good thing. I'm wearing a shirt so no one sees the scars. So this is the fourth bank I founded, and my crypto journey really began in 2013 I started writing my crypto I think I was, if not the earliest, one of the earliest folks in the banking industry saying, hey, the banking rails really don't work for the 21st Century. We really need to think about something else. What got me started, frankly, was when folks in the regulatory and the world were talking about cbdc, Central Bank, digital currency. And I thought, boy, if this happens, this is the greatest threat to our civil liberties ever. If the government basically sees every transaction and can block every transaction that happens. Whoa. I sort of was seeing what could happen with choke point one point on 2.0 except much worse. So I thought we really need to think about a private sector alternative to what might be a government or regulatory takeover. And so started thinking about what that could be, what a tokenized deposit would look like, even before I had the vocabulary. And look, I'm a big believer that finance has, like really, some fundamental things it's supposed to do. We do a lot of fancy stuff, but we're supposed to create a common place for people to conduct commerce a common currency and stable value, setting aside stable coin of definitions where I know, if I'm buying an orange today, it's going to cost approximately that in value tomorrow, I'm not going to trade it for another commodity which could have a tremendously different value. So I really thought this was something important to do. Goldie knows me for a while, and knows I'm a pretty passionate person. When I have something, I'm like, sort of the dog that catches the bus and doesn't let go because I'm going to bring the bus back home with me. Yeah.
Ran Goldi 4:35
And again, Scott, you've been, obviously, you've been doing this for a while, right? So the folks who may have not met Scott through maybe signature or other banks that he was involved, Scott's been doing this basically correct me if I'm wrong, Scott, from 1980 you've been in banks like you really know how they work. You really, you know you saw cloud coming in and on prem and half of our technologies coming in, if we dive into. Signet and signature for a second, right? Signet was one of the first networks that was really enabling, like, real time transfers of both Fiat and blockchain assets, again, in Signature Bank that you were part of, and that was really big back then, right? Like, if you go back to the world of stable coins, even just five, six years ago, we only had two banks, right? Silver again, signature that were holding this entire industry. And you were solving an amazing problem at the time of 24/7, I think now, with stable coins proliferating, it even became a bigger problem, right? How did you know to focus on that when you were in signature and Signet? And is that what really drove you to, you know, not giving up and now creating next so the
Speaker 1 5:46
first thing I want to say is I'm old, but I'm not quite that old. I started being in a bank, inside a bank, in 1988 I started my career before that, but I've always wondered heavily about how to make payments efficient, and what I was seeing at signature was these payment rails are so clunky, like, I have been a banker at your regional bank. I've been a banker, you know, in the credit card arena, Merrick bank, Signature Bank, obviously, and until you get on the inside, it's like hard to believe how clunky these rails are. And I wanted to create what was a tokenized deposit, and we actually did it before anybody knew enough to say no, and that was a good thing. So we demonstrated it could work by the time we originated Signet 12:01am, on January 1, to indicate like this is not dependent on the bank wire systems, but it was like handing people an iPhone in 1972 and nobody knew what to do with it. So for the first six months, frankly, we didn't have a lot of deposits, and people were like, scratching their head. But then once it caught on, by the end of 2022 we had like, a trillion dollars passing through this network, and it was enormous. People like, would come in and thank me before I
Ran Goldi 7:19
could say and people don't notice, but the fact that signature and silver gate were there in the critical years of blockchain adoption, early on again, the first wave of crypto trading is really what enabled the movement of OTC, desk, liquidity providers that were working In exchanges everyone today trades in like Coinbase and Kraken and Gemini and whatnot. They were all running and relying on Signature Bank and Cigna to some extent, right? And that really helped the ecosystem grow.
Speaker 1 7:53
Oh, yeah. I mean, in terms of the US allowed stable coins, they were not that large in terms of market cap until signature provided an on and off ramp. And people don't always get obviously, both of you on this chat do, but most people don't get how critical the on ramp and off ramp is, because part of the utility of a stable coin is that you can convert into the Fiat because people get paid in stable coin, but they can't necessarily make other payments in stable coin, even though that may be an aspiration today, it's not so the instantaneous 24 by seven, on and off, ramping. Which next really? My co founders, my fellow founders, Jeff Wallace, are rel Bonnell, Kyle O'Donnell, we've really collectively been pioneers in that, in in creating that quickly being able to jump from rail to rail. That's something people that really, I'm not going to say signature deserved, or, you know, I, or anybody deserved the credit for the explosion in the in the market, but we were certainly a critical enabler, giving people tools to make it happen, and Signet was a critical part of that.
Sy Taylor 9:13
This makes a ton of sense to me and Scott, as I listen to you, people remember signature for what happened in March of 2023 they don't remember it for Cigna. And Cigna is, to my mind, a genuine pioneer. But what were your sort of takeaways from March 2023 what actually happened in your view, and where are we going? What are the what are the lessons the whole industry's had to internalize from then.
Speaker 1 9:41
So look, and I've said this publicly, I've testified to this publicly, the taking of signature was wrong and unnecessary. Signature should have, could have opened Monday morning and kept doing business people. May vaguely recall on this podcast that there was a time when the government, when the US, took a whole of government approach to sort of trying to quash crypto. I'm sure it rings a bell with many people, yeah, yeah. We have the scars, yeah. So nobody's taking their shirts off. So unfortunately, signature was, you know, a victim of that, as I said, it was unjust, it was wrong, it was unnecessary. But my father also taught me something. Two people had the same expression. To me, my father was a Holocaust survivor. He left the concentration camps when his Liberator was less than 70 pounds. And he told me, you know, his, his, I mean, his whole family was wiped out. He came here to the United States with literally, the clothes on his back. And he told me, he said, if you look back, you're going to be like Lot's wife. You'll turn to salt. You gotta go forward. And I also, after March 2023, it was terrible, it was un it was just like, felt like, so wrong. But I knew if I just kept focusing on what happened and didn't move forward, and there were some critical lessons, and we should talk about those of how I think and things I learned that, in all candor, I might not have been as sensitive to at that time. And so June 1, 2023 I got with Jeffrey Wallace, subsequently with Kyle O'Donnell and with Orel Bunnell and the rest of the team, and we built like this, really first class team. I mean, I'm like, so proud of everybody, and I'm always proud of the team effort that everybody works together. And we decided to rethink the way that banking is done and do it in a robust way. So maybe
Ran Goldi 11:52
it's gotten again not to have but maybe let's now look at that specifically. So lots of learnings. And then you brought this stellar team, and you decided I want to create another bank. You know, Simon said, you're very obviously masochistic, but next is described as like the first narrow bank in the US, fully reserved, no lending trade for seven payments on a private blockchain, right? That's a very specific design choice, right? A lot of banks are rethinking their tech stack right now. They're thinking, is this, this tech stack we need? Should we be looking at these type of technological decisions like walk us through the thinking of that? What's the story behind that specific selection
Speaker 1 12:30
for a bank? So that's really good to focus this that way. So first of all, in terms of the learning, one thing, I came away really understanding Signet and understanding what we were doing and what we were building is that in a traditional bank system, creating a tokenized deposit is sort of like stapling a piece of cardboard to a piece of paper. You can do it, if you work hard enough, it can happen, but it's clunky, you know, you've got to really work at it. What we wanted to do was create sort of the clean protein of banking within a crypto environment. So look, when you let's get back to basics. When you move a block of Bitcoin or Ethereum anything, you're essentially moving a full reserve amount of that commodity, even gold, even the other entities that have been, you know, or it doesn't matter the current, but anything that's on the crypto raise, you're moving that essentially full reserve amount. There's no question about it, with a tokenized deposit, actually in a fractional banking world, you're not doing that, because, remember, I put $10 in the bank, and the two of you put $10 in the bank, and Tai your producer puts $10 in the bank. We put $40 in the bank, right? The bank then goes out and lends that $40 maybe there's $10 left. The average is like, you know, 25% actually. Signature was more liquid than most, but we're all looking at that same $10 so when I transfer it, I'm now talking at the atomic level. When I transfer money on a tokenized deposit, I'm really transferring a liability of a bank. I'm not transferring the US. So what we wanted to do with the full reserve bank, and this is so important, and this is like, where first principles having, like, grown up, I don't think, personally, I would have appreciated this without having lived through a regional bank and a credit card bank and a regular full service regional bank, is that by creating what we do at Signature, what we did at signature was lend out money. What we do at next is, you put in your money, we take that money and we lend out none of it, we put it into a t plus zero environment, immediate availability environment and short term treasuries, duration of. A month. So we take no credit risk, no mismatch risk, no interest rate risk. So if everybody wants all their money on the same day, we don't have to call anybody. We don't have to do anything. We just give it to them and we open the next day. There's no need to worry about liquidity ever. And if someone wants to move a billion dollars. We don't have to worry about that if someone wants to move any amount. And that's sort of the clean protein in that when you move $1 in the tokenized deposit of next you're actually moving $1 it's not a liability. It's just like Bitcoin. It's just like a theory. So at the fundamental, the fundamental soul of the product is the same as crypto. And that's why we like to say, you know, build in crypto bank and dollars, because we've turned them into the self. And, you know, it takes some work to open our full reserve bank. It's not so easy, you're right, there's it's enough because we're doing something that hasn't been done before, but we did it very intentionally.
Sy Taylor 16:08
I think that intention is important, but I want to bring it to the statement that next is designed for interoperability with stable coins, but it's not a stable coin issuer like you'd think about circle or tether or anything like that. So what role do you play in the stable coin ecosystem if you're not issuing them and you're sort of working mostly in tokenized deposits, why would the stable coin ecosystem want to work with next and what is it you bring them?
Speaker 1 16:37
Okay, so two things. Number one, we do offer stable coin functionality to USD, so you can use the dollars, as long as you're on a closed loop, in the exact same way as you can use a stable coin. Some people will like that, but you do it in a US Bank environment. So it's not like stable coin in that one, stable coin is in the wild. Anybody can actually utilize it. They can't on and off ramp. What we do for stable coins in terms of on and off ramps is that we provide a like kind on and off ramp, instantaneous on and off into Fiat. And because, as I said, we're the same ethos, because it's $1 versus $1 that we have $1 versus dollar, except we have capital requirements on top of that, because we're a bank, so we have to maintain capital adequacy, et cetera, et cetera. But the stable coin folks know that in a fractional bank system is always some risk. For example, I mean, this is public knowledge. Sadly, after the taking of signature, the bid for USDC was 88 you know, I mean, and for other stable coins, they were off but with a full reserve being able to on an off ramp, you never had that risk, because there's no
Ran Goldi 17:58
run risk. But I think this is also an interesting point, which is, banks right now are looking to adopt stable coins. You're creating tokenized deposits within there. That eliminates the risk when a new bank, like you folks, is coming online. What is really your also like, how are you thinking about stable coins? Are you thinking, Oh, well, we're going to be native and we'll support all of them. Or you're thinking, No, we're just going to do tokenized deposits. Maybe we'll have interoperability with other banks, and again, maybe to even take us to the next question. As you think of the answer to this one, you're going to launch with clients that are both on FX world, on crypto world, and shipping logistics, yep, doing it now they're looking at stable coins. They want stable coins, they don't, because they're thinking about that, I think, as what they need, maybe to move faster. So maybe, how are you guys thinking about it? And what is the pain point that cuts through all these industries that you actually wanted to bring in? Yep.
Speaker 1 18:55
Okay, so first of all, there will be people who will want to use stable coin for functionality. Cross borders. Cross nothing to do. And once the stable coin is in the wild, it can be used by anybody. But let me give you a real case that will probably be happening in within two years. You're a shipper, Goldie, you're sitting in Brazil. You're going to have a conference in Brazil in a few weeks. So you're going to get people to say this real thing, and they're going to experience this. I get I'm shipping some auto parts to the United States, or I'm shipping some of let's take a retail product. I'm shipping irons to the United States, and you know what? I'm getting paid in Amazon coin, and I'm getting paid in Walmart coin, and I'm getting paid in Costco coin, and I'm sitting there with these three coins. So here's the pain point, and here's where we want to be, everybody's friends. We're not we're trying to help, because the in this crazy frenemy world echo structure, you know, you got to figure out where you can
Ran Goldi 19:54
help the most. Yeah, but I wanted to say I'm not sure that works in banking, but I'll let you lead with pain. Yeah, approach,
Speaker 1 20:01
okay, but this is a real so in shipping and logistics, people end up probably with the coins of many providers. Because why are they going to do that? Because it's going to be better than paying t plus 30, because they'll hold the reserves. And so they may say, I'll pay you an Amazon coin instead of NRT plus n plus 30, because they're figuring they're going to hold the reserves forever. So this could be superior, which is why I think stable coin, of the reasons I think stable coin adoption is actually going to be hastened. But now you're the guy, you're the company building whatever the the auto part is, you can pay maybe some people in Amazon coin or some people in Costco coin, but you can't pay them all. So our role is to actually take the coin, burn it, give the proceeds if you're going to pay an Amazon burn the Costco coin in this example, give the money to Amazon or Walmart or circle, you may want to probably actually most likely move to circle, because it'll be more of a common carrier in all candor.
Sy Taylor 21:07
And so you act as sort of Scott like a clearing layer and an off ramp, and you're sort of making as backwardly compatible with money, like what you bring is the dollar, not a flavor of dollar, not many flavors of dollar, not a conversion issue. You bring the real dollar, and it can always be off ramped and on ramped, but you're sort of giving us that anchor back to the world. But I'm I'm interested then if I can on an off ramp really easily, if I have this clearing function from stable coins back to the dollar in between stable coins with something that is fully reserved, which is really, really powerful. And as a payments note, I think people don't appreciate how powerful that is. What is it that you then enable? That's net new, because people today, I think, understand the cross border use case, and they understand some long tail use cases for remittances and payroll, but programmable payments have always been the promise of stable coins. Are you talking about any of that in your business? Are you looking at that new capability for institutional clients and things of that nature? So the
Speaker 1 22:20
answer is, yes. I just want to give one more, two more sentences on the last answer, because I think, as a payment nerd, this is, like, important to me to spit out. Is that cool? The reason why that on and off ramping that I'm describing is so important is Amazon can take Costco coin and use it as a reserve. We actually have the role of switching into cash, so that if you've got Costco and you're trying to use Amazon coin, Amazon needs to buy treasuries or other so actually converting those coins, it's a it's a short it's not a hugely like amazingly profitable business, but it is mission critical to allowing a proliferation of stable coins. It doesn't work without an intermediary. I learned this in my last life. This is a critical part, and if it doesn't work, everything else we're talking about in the proliferation of stable coins really doesn't work. So I'm gonna leave it at that, and I could talk about that for like, the next hour.
Sy Taylor 23:25
I'm sure you could, but I do want to come to the programmable payments though. Like, I just think there's so much potential there that's been untapped. Is that because there isn't a fully Reserved Bank involved? Like, how do you enable it, and how do you think about that value for clients?
Speaker 1 23:41
So this is something that, I think, is that we're bringing that's a little bit new under the sun as a fully Reserved Bank in that if you're shipping a product, you're that same Brazilian supplier, or Mexican supplier, or wherever, shipping something to the United States you want have to do in the historically, one of three things, either you ship and take the risk, you say, I need to get paid first, and you got to hope your product is differentiable enough so that you're able to do that, or you get a letter of credit. We're there to stand in place of the letter of credit because it's fully reserved. We're full reserve bank when the buyer puts the money up, the seller can say, here's the bill of lading, here's the certificate of origin, if it's a perishable product, here's the veterinary report, here's the agricultural report. When they had arrives at 3am to whatever port, whether it's Dubai, Dakar, Dublin or Detroit, and the value can change hands, and that's better than a letter of credit that you use today. You don't need a lawyer. We've made them self service. It won't work for everything. If it's too complex, you may need a lawyer, but for 95% of use cases, you. You do it yourself, with your counterparty. And I think that, to a certain degree, is the proverbial Holy Grail of what we offer, in that these delivery versus payment means that, and because we're able to do 24 by seven payment as a US Bank, it's instant settlement. That's a huge thing. Most banks, it's instant debit, but it's not instant settlement. Instant settlement.
Sy Taylor 25:24
Those are two wildly different things, Scott, as you well know, but I think maybe the audience doesn't do you want to just unpack that for a second as well?
Speaker 1 25:32
So let's take the easiest case. We're you're on one of the many platforms that is consumer based when you pay on Venmo or any of these. You know what it looks like. It's an instant transfer, because immediately the money is removed from your account, but it's two days later until that money is actually put into the other account. Why? Because behind the scenes and and Simon, you're working on this very much in your day job, your other day job, to make that faster and to make that instantaneous. But right now, people are schlepping through the they're going through the stored payment rails, and whether they're Visa, MasterCard or others, and it's about two days, but the debit is immediate, so you'd get the money. The money is out of your account right now, but if I receive it, I can't spend it. What we do is it's debited from Goldie's account. It's put in your account, and the next second you can spend that. You don't have any worry about availability or any delay on availability. Right now, it's Goldie's money is debited right away and you're waiting two days for your money.
Sy Taylor 26:43
We'll just take a quick pause here Scott while we hear from our sponsors, and we'll be right back. This episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at visa, a global leader in payments visas tokenized assets platform vtap, uses smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies on chain. Vtap allows financial institutions to issue Fiat back tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. You can check out the links in this episode's description to express your interest in vtap tokenized is also sponsored by fireblocks. Fireblocks is the stablecoin infrastructure of choice for global businesses, from visa to WorldPay to bridge to Revolut 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 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 All right, thank you very much to our sponsors, including Goldie. Goldie, you had a question,
Ran Goldi 28:21
I believe, yeah, I want to ask you, Scott, something. I mean, look, we have this thesis right now that in the market, you know, a lot of people think that we're sort of like a tale of two cities, right? Like, on the one hand, you have the crypto market that is, you know, not exactly, maybe the best environment right now from liquidity and pricing standpoint. But on the other side, you have, you know, stable Coin World and tokenized deposits and banks are coming in, and combits are launching new services with payouts. You know, large card companies are buying payment companies. So maybe it's a tale of two cities, but our thesis really is that we're at something that is probably more a triple point. And for those who are not aware, a triple point is this, you know, term in physics, where, basically, you have the free conditions both liquid, gas and matter live at the same time, right in the same temperature. And the reason I bring this up is it's not only Trad, Fi versus defi right now. We think it's a triple point of business models. We think there's like the crypto trading business model, and this is like the companies that have been here for a long time, crypto natives. And then they need to grow up into sort of, maybe in the future now, to how they're dealing with the incumbents. And then we have the traditional folks, the banks, they need to sort of reinvent themselves there might be disrupted tomorrow, so they're trying to adopt as many new services as possible. And then we have the crypto utility. Like the companies who are like, in a way, early adopters, were able to get a lot of the margins of stable coins for B to B money movement and what. Not they're also, I would say they need to reinvent their own business model, because all of these actors are coming to the same place. And I guess my question to you again, maybe thinking we are at this triple point, Scott, is that you have definitely attracted investors from various sides of the aisle, from paradigm and hack VC to Winklevoss capital to traditional family offices, right? There's crypto native investors. There's traditional tradfi investors like family offices, who never invest in anything seriously risky. Probably what is next, is it a crypto company? Is it a banking company? Are you a tradfi? Are you a defi? Are you what are you really Oh,
Speaker 1 30:46
boy, that sounds existential, teleological and epistemological, all at the same time. And it's a really good question. So here's what I think. And I think the illusion that you gave of a triple point is really a good one, because essentially, it's a triple phase transition which is inherently unstable, like it's not an equilibrium state. Generally it'll resolve to something. And I think the exciting thing about what's happening now, and both of you folks on this, Simon Goldie, you, you've been pioneers, because we're at a place where there's going to be a tremendous amount of change. I mean, I don't think things are going to look the same in 10 years in the financial world that they look today. I think they're going to look profoundly different. And it's going to to some degree, resolve, and to a certain degree, I believe people on both sides of the traditional family offices that invest in, you know, banks and really deep the TRad fi who have invested in us and the investors on the crypto side. I think the thing that they had in common is they both realized that we had a different take on this. That's important. I think, I think the current structure of the banking system is going to change dramatically. I mean, you have the G sibs, which operate essentially with the government guarantee, and then you have everybody else. I don't think that's stable. And I don't think it's necessarily stable to use the illusion that I started with as well, which is to staple cardboard onto paper. It's not the long term solution. So you have embedded legacy systems that are using really old code that you're trying to match them to new systems. And honestly, I think they're going to be a lot of people are going to be strategically challenged in a serious kind of way in the coming years. And I think what we're all trying to do is to figure out what that phase transition equilibrium ends up being. But when it happens, the other thing is, I think it's gonna happen pretty quick, just like face positions, like they resolve. It's one of
Sy Taylor 33:18
those things. Sometimes, if you've been around in these phase transitions, you have a feeling that they're coming, but you can't time exactly when, and so it's sort of setting yourself up for when it does, is the crucial thing. And as you well experience, companies with legacy code, Legacy core systems trying to bolt this on will get into all kinds of mismatch errors, because the stable Coin World is real time. But if their systems aren't, that can create all kinds of horrible scenarios. And if they're fractionally reserved, and they're in a run scenario, there's a mismatch there that people haven't really experienced in the full level of depth. And now we have the genius act. So this could be a bit more systemic, and people will have to, I think, get more real time and get more instant. But as and when that phase transition comes, you're quite uniquely placed in that you're a fully Reserved Bank. There's obviously irrevocable out there doing, like a slightly different model. There's a few of the folks that are going for trust charters. You're a fully Reserved Bank, and that's a kind of a unique spot. You're an experienced banker in terms of having built real time tokenized deposits in the past, having built like many banks. So you kind of really are this unique space, but possibly one of the best kept secret weapons of the industry, a bit like Cigna itself, was only really known to the industry insiders. So talk to me about why somebody should be coming to you, who's your customer, and what is it you say to them, of like, why you Okay?
Speaker 1 34:51
Well, first of all, thank you for that question. So in terms of why us, we are, like, think of us on the safety side. A AAA money market government fund, super short. Except on top of that, we don't do repo. Everything's direct government obligations. We have bank capital, which a money market fund doesn't have. We keep everything in a t plus zero environment. So on the safety side, and I think the first thing everybody always ought to think about is comparing that to a fractional bank system. So we thought of this very intentional and, you know, I just don't think there's anybody with that combination of a bank capital plus the AAA money market fund environment on the payment side, I will tell you, for those people that use Signet, and I say this without exaggeration, we're 10x better and a good day, people who use the system. I The functionality, the maker approvers, the speed. I mean, on a good day, Signet could do 1015, 20 transactions a second, and I'd like that would be fantastic. Next, can do 3000 transactions a second. So Scott, I
Ran Goldi 36:10
have two final questions, because, again, we can talk to you for hours, probably with the stories that you have. One and maybe just answer briefly. You being entrepreneur, creating another bank, such an innovative bank, are you thinking this will eventually get acquired by a bank, or are you looking to be a G SIB,
Speaker 1 36:32
no, I want to make this so useful that if you're doing well and you're making a ton of money and your product is useful, then you have choices, and that's really what it was for us. Deb, just to be really useful. And I honestly feel very passionately about bringing this new thing under the sun to life. And we all do. I mean, the whole team does
Ran Goldi 36:57
no and we're cheering for you guys. Definitely. Last question of all, you know, we ask this every guest, 20 years from now, stable coins. And you know, you're in the stable coin, but also tokenized deposit, new wave. But stable coins specifically, are they just a story of something that we used to work with, or are they a fact 20 years from now?
Speaker 1 37:19
Well, it goes back to your question about phase transition. I think we're in a transition, and I think looking 20 years out, we will probably have evolved
Sy Taylor 37:33
interesting times. All right. Well, listen, that's all we have time for. Unfortunately, Scott, I want to sit at the Learning Tree, and I want to learn everything you've experienced. I think that would make a great story someday from all of the banks and all of the journeys, especially as a FinTech guy, so much to learn from somebody who's done so much and contributed so much to the industry. So thank you so much for being on the show, and thank everybody for watching and listening. Scott, if people do want to find out more about you and next? Where do they go
Speaker 1 38:03
to do that? So I'm on LinkedIn. Next is on x. Next is also on LinkedIn, and you can go to our website, N, 3x, t.io, you can contact us. You can open an account at B to B only, but you can find us, real easy, and please come to this. We're doing some interesting stuff.
Sy Taylor 38:21
Heck yeah, certainly sounds like it. And Goldie, how about you and fireblocks?
Ran Goldi 38:25
I'm both on x and LinkedIn is ran Goldie. Fireblox is fireblocks. HQ, come talk to us if, if you're a bank, if you need a bank, we'll definitely send you to Scott.
Sy Taylor 38:35
Indeed, you'll find me at sy Taylor on all the socials, at tempo dot XYZ, and@fintechbrainfood.com screaming into the void about how important things like what Scott's building are, indeed. And if you haven't already subscribed, please hit that subscribe button. Like us, leave comments, leave reviews, all of that helps the show so, so much. And you want more conversations like this. Tell us why, tell us who, And we'll be back soon.