On this bonus episode of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Content & Strategy @ Sardine, and Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto @ Visa, are joined by Ayo Omojola, CPO @ Carbon Health to discuss the inaugural ‘A Very Stable Conference’ and the state of the stablecoin industry.
On this bonus episode of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Content & Strategy @ Sardine, and Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto @ Visa, are joined by Ayo Omojola, CPO @ Carbon Health to discuss the inaugural ‘A Very Stable Conference’ and the state of the stablecoin industry.
This episode is brought to you 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.
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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!
Sy Taylor 0:10
Hey, hi, congrats on your very stable conference yesterday. Did you feel very stable?
Unknown Speaker 0:16
Yeah, did it feel stable? It felt
Sy Taylor 0:18
reasonably stable. I mean, we are we are on a fault line. So true. That's true.
Cuy Sheffield 0:23
I have to say SF stablecoin week success. I have to give you a credit of like, this was the first conference or vet that I've been to where I sat there and watched all of the content and got value out of it. It felt like everyone did. You're used to you go to a conference, and yeah, there are panels. But like, the real conferences, you know, networking, talking people on the side, like each panel, you know, the quality of the people, you know, their their perspectives, I think is the right timing. So, like, well done. I feel like those type of events are really needed to bring people together and actually learn. And not 101 you know, not 201 but like, 301401, kind of real content that
Sy Taylor 1:04
people in the industry needs. So remind everybody, like, water was a very stable conference. How did it come about? And just tell the story, and then we'll get into all of the good stuff. Okay, I will
Speaker 1 1:14
keep it all so brief, so brief. So the point of the conference, I asked Tai to do the panel several months ago was, I have a background in payments from Cash App. And a long time ago, I used to do FX and bond trading. And over the last year, from like my vantage point, working with bridge and lead bank and a couple other companies, I've just had the perspective that, hey, stable coins are exploding. I don't think that's unique to me. Yeah, and I think a lot of the actual explosion does like one of my conclusions from the conference actually is more like consumer a true SMB in the remittance cross border world, like Zach and bridge said yesterday, 80% of their business is non US. But I had this hypothesis that I know if it's correct yet, that one day, like the like major brands, mainstream companies, will use stable coins like to run their business. And if you're in crypto, the crypto community is like, very conference hungry. People travel.
Cuy Sheffield 2:13
That's an understatement. People
Speaker 1 2:16
like, love to travel and go to these things, but a lot of the people you meet there are also in crypto, and there are things like money 2020, and fintech meetup that will have, like, you know, crypto tracks. But a lot of people you meet there are in FinTech. So they're like, professionals at financial services companies or at fintechs, if you are a payments finance Treasury leader, not at a payments company. So like, imagine you run payments at, you know, Google, YouTube, Airbnb, Expedia, etc, like a bunch of those folks were there yesterday. There just actually isn't really a place for those folks to meet people building stable coin infrastructure. You know, if that kind of person were to show up at a crypto conference, it is like a really, really tough domain to navigate, because there's just, like, a lot of stuff, and a lot of it is not for you actually, like, like the so the conference was designed for this kind of amorphous group of financial professionals at non financial companies, banking leaders, to connect with stable coin builders or the leader
Sy Taylor 3:21
one gonna freak you out by talking about, like, the latest meme coin constantly? Yeah?
Speaker 1 3:26
And I don't think it's a freak out thing. I think it's just like, you know, you're consuming this information for work, yeah? And you're just not gonna consume, like, there's no, there's nothing a meme coin can do for you, yes, if you're one of these people. And so that's what this was for.
Cuy Sheffield 3:39
It seems like you you need to have focus. And the space is so broad now, like a crypto conference covers so many different areas, yeah, I think the other thing I found is a lot of crypto conferences, even though they start to have stable coin content, the stable coin content tends to be either 101201, and from this vantage point of stable coins are going to eat the world. Everyone's going to use a crypto wallet that replace all payments that now it's your favorite exchange that is the one that is being used for everyday life. It's very there's not a perspective of, okay, how do stable coins actually interface with the traditional financial system, with traditional payment systems? What are the real problems and challenges and obstacles? And I love how you framed that at the beginning. Of the conference. Of like, we are still so early in the ecosystem of getting from crypto companies to fintechs to traditional businesses, and there's still a lot of things that need to be solved. And so really, having an eye towards just a a sober, realistic here are the things stable coins are good at. Here's where they're unique. Here are the challenges. Here are the barriers. And I feel like that really came across. It's not just everyone drinking the Kool Aid, saying we're all gonna move everything over to stable coins. Is that just that's not how things Yeah, are gonna work in the payment system.
Speaker 1 4:55
Pragmatic, yeah. And I think, like, no matter how you slice it, there's a reason. And Apple doesn't use stable coins for anything, right? And some of it is, some of this technology is new, but some of it is just have like 50 other things to do. And so the the problem that stable coins will solve for them has to, at some point, yeah, cut above the clutter, and has to have a return, not just on that project specifically, but has that return that's high enough that obviates the other the opportunity cost of doing those other things and, like, for it to get there, just people have to do things, like, there's so much work to do to get there, and so, and so I think, like, you know, it may be the case that there's, like, another room with other people who are having that conversation, and maybe I just wasn't invited. And so, like, I made one, and
Cuy Sheffield 5:39
so, so you decided to create the conference. And I remember when we first talked about, first talked about it, it's okay, a small around 200 people and like, yeah, it would be like 50. Then what happened? You know, this thing blew up. How did it progress into being one of the most high demand tickets of a event in the
Speaker 1 5:56
ecosystem that I've seen? I think there are three reasons. First, it was free. Second, bridge got acquired. And third, I think we're just in a time of a huge regulatory tailwind, and it's the administrative change and openness to crypto in general. I don't think that third part is really about stable coins. I think it's just stable coins obviously benefit when the administration is more crypto friendly,
Sy Taylor 6:18
because you had a governor from the Federal Reserve on stage. How does that come about? Through a lot of luck, that's
Speaker 1 6:26
the real answer. We had help from this woman, Seagal, who's a Partner at ribbit, who previously was at FinCEN, and when we were brainstorming with her early on, her commentary was, hey, there's a person who is extremely thoughtful about this and knowledgeable, and comes from the payments world, and we should ask it just
Sy Taylor 6:51
felt like a real moment in time, sitting and watching it. You know, as I was looking at the room, my observation was it's everyone I know in FinTech. Every FinTech logo was there, every payments company logo was there, or at least it felt that way. But it was like the weird mash up and collab between two of your favorite subjects that seemed like they never wanted to come together, because then all of my stable coin folks that I'd been talking to for many years, but these two worlds felt very different. They're in one room and they're all watching a governor from the Federal Reserve Bank give a talk about it was, how did that feel? Like, kind of looking back on it
Speaker 1 7:29
felt great. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I'm sure other people have other perspectives on this, but like, one thought in my head that you and I've talked about a lot is, if you hold aside the geopolitical and sovereignty considerations about, like, the dollarization of the world. Like, there's just, like, a lot of demand for dollars in the world period,
Sy Taylor 7:46
best product market fit, yeah.
Speaker 1 7:50
And there's two opportunities that creates, like, one is, if you are a very high quality US financial services business, you could service 20x more people. Yeah. And then there's like another which is, if you are a founder who's not in the US, there is now an opportunity. There's just, like, this huge bucket of demand that's been latent for a long time that you can now serve because regulatory and technically we're there that you just couldn't serve before. And so there's like, there are just these huge opportunities to build new things. I just don't think this opportunity to do was there two years ago, actually,
Sy Taylor 8:29
that's fair, and probably I have talked about this before. Maybe the infrastructure wasn't quite there as well. Could you have had the moment we had with the Trump meme coin on a Sunday, doing the volumes it did? I don't know if you just saw the Robin Hood earnings. Hood earnings, but they were sort of like, absolutely skyrocketed, partly driven by that, but partly driven by the fact that Solana stood up. Like, yeah, it dealt with the volume. If that was two years ago, would you have been dealing with high gas fees, network congestion, people getting frustrated, bad user experience. So there's like, the infrastructure story, but there's also sometimes these things happen when the world's ready to hear it. And sometimes, yeah, you know, the hyperinflation that the world's had access to the dollar, that rise in B to B flows as well is kind of an interesting one. Yeah, and the infrastructure providers,
Cuy Sheffield 9:19
I think on your point earlier, Zach from bridge said it really well on stage. It's like there's this new global building block that now developers and entrepreneurs all over the world have, where, if you want to build dollar denominated products, the you can't barrier to entry to do that is so much lower than it's ever been. And so I think that's a really exciting moment. And then I want to start with you some of like, amazing moment for Federal Reserve Governor Waller to be there and to make comments. And I love in the record now it says comments at a very stable conference in the speech. And he mentioned, there's no better place to, like, give these remarks. So like for. For the first year of a conference. Like, that's that's pretty incredible, yeah. But then you know what was in that speech, like the level of depth and thoughtfulness and how clear his understanding was that this was not a stable coin 101 or 201 it was recognizing both the opportunities and the challenges. And so, yeah, what was your take, Simon on, on the actual content of the speech? And kind of what you took out? Well, I
Sy Taylor 10:26
mean, yes, to the content of the speech, but before I get to that, the signaling, I think we just need to take a moment. You couldn't have imagined that two years ago, even if the same governor is in the Federal Reserve, I don't think they go to this conference and make this speech, unless all of those things had happened, like you said, the bridge acquisition, the regulatory tailwinds and the real demand that you see, and the spikes in volume. Patrick Collinson said we expected crazy growth from bridge, but even we've been surprised by just how crazy the growth is in stable coins, and I keep hearing that from everywhere. So there's a bit of a reaction to that, and then the content of the speech. If you go look at it, it's in the public record, like you said, is a very good sort of drive through the role of the dollar in the world and the value that that can create, and the value to the US, but also the role of banks within that, and the role of the integrity within the payment system, and the role of the private sector, which, you know, we're sitting in a visa office. Visa is a global brand, but really grew up in this part of the world, in San Francisco, and became a global network. This is something that the US has done before, with the dollar and done elsewhere. So can you have the private sector kind of lead out on some of this stuff, but stay close to it as a government and make sure that you give it the framework you need. That was my TLDR of the speech. Did I capture it for you guys? Did you see anything else in there that that really stood out?
Speaker 1 11:53
Yeah, I think the only thing I would add is he made some comments about just what regulatory clarity needs come through, and the role of the private sector in innovating, and the role of the government, policymakers, et cetera, in stepping in when there's market failures, protecting consumers of business, etc, that I think there's a real, actual like, I don't know how deep it runs, but difference in belief structures just around like, hey, there's a group people who are all about permissionless, but ultimately, like, the dollar is, like, a very specific
Speaker 2 12:28
thing, and it comes with rules, and it comes with rules.
Speaker 1 12:32
And there are people who are like, hey, the market is actually so big that let's just figure out how to make the rules make sense. And some of that is comply with rules that exist. And some of that is, hey, the rules actually should change. Because, you know, I think, I think Greg Kidd, you know, made this comment about they're going to create this deposit token, and people who hold it will have FDIC insurance if you are a consumer, literally anywhere else in the world. Hey, I don't know if you know what FDIC insurance means, but if you do, the odds are you want to have it more than not having it.
Sy Taylor 13:04
Yes. You think about micro SMEs. You think about the people just holding dollars to deal with hyperinflation. Would you like that to also be insured too? Yes, yeah. Would you like yield on that? Yes, yeah. The big signal to me is the fact that new bank offers, not only the ability to hold USDC, they offer yield on it when the Brazilian central bank rate and the interest rate is much higher on the real and the dollar. Yeah, that's that's product market fit.
Cuy Sheffield 13:35
I think some of the specific comments on kind of his ideas of challenges on the regulatory side that I haven't really seen discussed that often, as you have regulatory clarity emerge in many jurisdictions across the world, stable coins are global products, and so if the rules start to stipulate both kind of what the reserve assets are in in A very detailed way, Mika, you have to have 30% of the reserves in cash, but then another jurisdiction doesn't stipulate it, or has different requirements. What happens if you issue a global stable coin product? But depending upon what market it's in, the reserves are supposed to look differently, or the business model is different. There have been proposals to say, you know, oh, stablecoin issuers, you know, shouldn't be able to earn yield, or it has to go back to consumers. And so I think recognizing some of those big, open questions, and kind of calling those out as as both the industry and the private sector side and the public sector really needing to think through, you know, what that will look like. And I love this Red Lobster analogy of like, you have to have use cases on the consumer side, and that seems like that's happening. And there are more and more examples. He referenced the stable coin sandwich, which is amazing that like, that's now in the public record, but you also have to have a business model for the issuers. Yeah. And what will that look like, right? Right now, it's all dependent upon yield. You know how as there's more competition. Minute that yield might go back. It might have to move towards monetizing on payments. And so I think again, these are 301401, like the people on the forefront of the space, these are the topics that everyone is thinking about. And so to have a Federal Reserve Governor that is following closely enough knowledgeable enough to actually call those out, I think that's a really big deal, and it furthers everyone else in terms of their education to really get up to speed, because this is such an important topic on the global point.
Sy Taylor 15:30
I been involved in sort of some of the harmonization around the Financial Action Task Force rules and the anti money laundering stuff that's been done for many years, and like how the various g20 jurisdictions looked at ensuring that their fat F recommendation 16 was applied to virtual asset service providers or vasps, and that harmonization is something that happens. But what happened for a little while on the stable coin side, as you say, is mica just went first and Europe just went first and decided that that's the way it's going to go. But the European kind of regulation looks quite different to the Singaporean Shooks, a little bit different to the one in Hong Kong, which looks a little bit different to vara in Dubai. There's more probably similarity as you move out east. But that's important, because one of the most exciting stable coin projects at the moment, I think, is usdg from Paxos, that is a yield bearing stable coin based out in Singapore at the moment. But the chatter from the very stable conference floor was, everybody's waiting for the genius bill, or whatever the stable coin bill is, to kind of move that to the US. And Robin Hood is saying that they're using sort of stable coins for settlement over the weekends of a lot of their systems in their earnings release. So this is, this is major companies looking at Treasury operations, but it's also where's your stable coin going to be domiciled, and how do you avoid regulatory arbitrage, which you're starting to see already in the stable coin space, and make the us the best place to house your stable coin, because you could go offshore, sure, and you could use Napster. But if the better product is the one that is iTunes, Spotify, whatever, I'm willing to pay for the better product, if it's better, but it has to be a better experience. Was there any other chatter from the rest of the day's conversation that really stood out to you? What were your big, big takeaways from conversations with either the lead bank guys or any of the other speakers?
Speaker 1 17:34
So I think the two things I would say are, it doesn't feel like enterprise adoption is like we're really ready for it. I find that curious, and I have, like, a lot of thoughts about that. About that, which we'd have to get into here. My initial thought when we started this, when we talked about this, like, back in August, or whatever was that, by the time this happened, we would be able to, like, get up on stage and say, like, hey, some brand new grandmother knows he's using these things for x, I think BB and K mentioned the Ferrari use case, which I thought was, like, pretty interesting.
Sy Taylor 18:03
Remind everybody what that was do. You can remember it
Speaker 1 18:06
was that they powered the ability for you to walk into the Ferrari shop and, like, pay for your car with USDC, which I think is interesting. And there's a dimension of like, in practice, actually, there already is a lot of stablecoin Acceptance like that is hap because if you are almost any e commerce, businesses, business, and you're using, like, a stripe or an add in, you already actually have the ability to, yeah, it's just right there. It's just, it's like a fake Tai, you know, you flip a flag and API, you could do it. And this may just be, like, you know, very wishful thinking. I think I've just been curious about some of these B to B flows that exist in these giant companies like Pfizer, Apple, YouTube, et cetera, are like, if you aggregate those, there's like, 10s of trillions of dollars of those flows,
Sy Taylor 18:51
and they're all in Swift
Speaker 1 18:53
it feels really ripe for stables, and they're not.
Sy Taylor 18:57
But do you know this is where your Connexus and cities equivalent. And HSBC has one where, if you're all on one bank, then you can do that settlement and sort of intraday and instant liquidity in dollars and move it to whatever your HQ is. But as you well know, Apple doesn't have one bank. They have, like, 100 banks in different jurisdictions, and they do that on purpose. So that sort of,
Speaker 1 19:26
and I mean, some of it also may just be, like, I don't work at that place, and I don't actually know under the hood, like, if, if these things really are problems that cut above the clutter. So, you know, to your question about, like, things that I took away, like, I might just be wrong about that being that interesting. It just feels it's like one of those, like you can see all the ingredients, but there's no recipe type of things.
Cuy Sheffield 19:46
But I think there's also an acknowledgement in terms of kind of, what are some of the barriers, things that need to be solved? Yes, you need more liquidity in other local currency. Yeah. And so I think Zach, you know, said this during during his panel, like, if you're sending. A few $1,000 at a time, you know, from the US to Mexico like that works pretty well if you want to send $10 million from the US to Mexico, like particularly the state of the role that the local exchanges are playing and a lot of the liquidity on the other side. It's a retail consumer. It's a small over the counter, you know, trading provider, yeah. And so it feels like there's going to be more and more of an important role for banks. And one of my takeaways was, we've been saying on the show every episode, like every bank needs a stable COIN strategy, and some of them realize it. Some don't like where is banks fall different places on the spectrum, and the fact that there were a number of banks who showed up, people working on FX, people working on payments that were there that was, I think in many ways, one of the first aspects of exposure that some of the those bankers had to the people and kind of this level of knowledge and network around how they could start thinking about stable coins, how they could start implementing them. And I believe there's a huge opportunity for banks. You know, if you think about how much volume is going through local exchanges all over the world that you know, Zach mentioned, like, when you think about a crypto exchange, you think about a place someone goes to buy and sell Bitcoin. We're seeing exchanges in Mexico, exchanges in Africa. You know, 50% 90% of their volume is just stable coin to local Fiat, yes. And so that is a business that looks like an FX trading desk, yeah. And what do banks do? Really, really well, they know how to do FX. And so, you know, what does it take for a bank to be able to step in and play that role? And particularly if you want to unlock these enterprise flows, if you want to be able to do $10 million payments, you know, just relying on local crypto exchanges, I think is going to be really hard. And so I think it's that first step of banks starting to upskill, you know, understand the role that they can play, yeah, and then develop a strategy, and then go and execute that strategy. And I hope this becomes an annual conference where we're not gonna hold you to but, like, I think I saw somewhere, it said first annual, very stable conference. And so then it's season one, if we're back next year, 2026 My hope is that you'll see more bankers, and you will see some banks taking a step where they're issuing their own stable coins. They're participating in this ecosystem more. But what do you think? What do you hope when you look to 2026 if, when you do this conference again, what do you think will change? Where will we that?
Speaker 1 22:21
Yeah, so I think there's a conversation about consumer uses that, just like remittances and cross border, that I think we didn't create the space for. So that's, you know, probably, like, a really obvious one, and a lot of a lot of it is, I wonder how much you know, if you look at, like, slings, dolar, etc, everybody doing sort of remands work. Are they cannibalizing Western Union a milligram? Or is it like net new that's like one type of question, or is it just like they're eradicating non consumption? There's like flows that wouldn't have happened, or that would have taken like days that are now like happening faster. So I am curious about like that. The second saying around, you know, like, again, this is just the way my mind works. But like, like, is Apple using stable coins? Like, why? Like, and what are they using for, and what do they have to overcome to get there? Like, I would love, I would love to have a big non financial enterprise actually talking about, like, using it.
Sy Taylor 23:17
I should hook you up with the euro. Wanna see, guys, there's a conference for Chief Treasury officers, yeah, like, that kind of thing would be very interesting, right? And I'll connect you to those guys, because we'll flush them out. Because I look Robin Hood, their chief Treasury officer will be a great one to speak to, because in their earnings, they're saying they're using stable coins to settle settling over the weekend. Because, as many of you know, fed wire is closed on Sundays. Yes, it's 23 six, not 24/7 and when you have big volumes at a weekend and you're exposed to that, anything you can do, even if it's limited liquidity, yeah, reduce
Speaker 1 23:52
your exposure. Yeah, yeah. So I think my only nuance with Robin Hood is Robin Hood is like an extremely sophisticated snatching Yeah. So, like, I would expect them to be aggressive, yeah? So the last thing I was gonna say on banks is, I think, like, a very interesting you mentioned, like, banks issuing their own stables. And I think a handful of people mentioned it there. I think there's actually, like, an interesting, weird gap that I've only seen a half of people talk about where, like, why don't banks accept stables instead of Fiat, like, around
Sy Taylor 24:18
the world? Yes, I've had this conversation.
Speaker 1 24:21
It's weird, right? Yeah, imagine you're back somewhere. You have some demand for dollars. You have some demand for, like, the equivalent of $1 with a tire load depends on your jurisdiction, like, all that stuff, if you believe, like USDC or usdg, or, you know, any of these things are actually $1 My instinct is we have to go through a bunch of crises for people to see, like, where the weaknesses in the system to like, really believe, but just assume, I think, is a reasonable assumption, that, like, you know, 15 years from now, there will be a synthetic equivalent of $1 that persists or multiple. If you're a bank that's dollar hungry, or generally financial institution that's dollar hungry, they. There's inherently, a bunch of dollars you can accept in stables that you're not doing today for some reason, like, I don't know of a single bank actually, that, like currently is like, Hey, if you have stables to sell, I will take them from you, because I have so much dollar demand that I'm happy to do this.
Sy Taylor 25:15
They're hungry for deposits on their balance sheet. So that's $1 that's look that helps my balance sheet. I can do more lending if I've got more deposits. But that's what I was sort of saying with the recording it as a deposit. Because the definition of settlement is when a bank updates its ledger and records that with the central bank, right? So if I receive a stable coin, then I have considered that settlement versus, no, this is some abstract thing. Yeah, I think that's just a, just a mind shift, yes, kind of get through.
Speaker 1 25:46
My instinct is, there's also a regulatory thing that's, like, market specific, that that I just have, you know, I haven't dug into, and I'm sure there is. But like, My instinct is, at some point, my thing at some point, like, the way regulatory, like those banks treat Fiat dollars and the way, regulatorily, their central banks, or, you
Speaker 2 26:04
know, they don't count it as m2 they just exactly, I will say, like, but they should, I think, like, my point
Sy Taylor 26:10
RWA dot XYZ on its page for stable coins, actually counts the overall market cap of stable coins as a percentage of m2 now, even if you assume that that's kind of over inflated, or there's something else going on with it, the top line figure is it's 1% of us, dollar and two but even if it's point 1% that's still a massive amount of money, yes, and so that's a big chunk of dollars that could be helping you fund your lending activity as a financial
Cuy Sheffield 26:42
institution, I will say we, we've started to see some forward thinking banks, particularly in emerging markets outside the US. Look at exploring, okay, could we actually send and receive payments? And USDC, yes, could it? Can't name me. And I think if you get regulatory clarity, I think that's one step, like in the US, like that can have big implications around how banks outside the US view it. I think there are clear benefits in the sense of particularly banks who've struggled getting and maintaining correspondent relationships. It is a replacement to a correspondent if you can access dollars through a stable coin, rather than having to access dollars through correspondence. I think that there are major barriers on the infrastructure side, figuring out things like custody, things like compliance, like to be able to onboard a custody provider, particularly many of them that really came out of the crypto ecosystem get them through internal vendor onboarding, risk reviews, yeah, figure out, how do you screen transactions? So I think there are a lot of really practical infrastructure things that banks need to learn how to do, yeah, and I think many of them are in the early stages of exploring that, and then happen overnight, but, but I do think that that that is a big opportunity, and it opens up things like you don't really have a world today where a small or mid sized bank in Kansas City is directly able to send money to a smaller mid sized bank in Brazil. Like if those banks are transacting with each other, they're going through a correspondent. But if you have a world where banks get equipped with this infrastructure, they can now start to transact with each other directly, and I think that that's a really big deal, but it's going to take time. And I think one of the big questions will be, do banks start with saying, Let me issue my own stable coin, and particularly outside the US? Do I issue it in my local currency? If you're going to issue your own stable coin. You also want that to be convertible to a global dollar stable coin? Yeah. And so I think that, you know, at some end state in the future, I would expect in many emerging markets, you will have large banks with their own version of a stable coin that has some pair to do on chain FX with a global US dollar stable coin. And I think that could drive a bunch of interesting
Sy Taylor 29:04
ones, a Euro, dollar, and when's it $1 dollar, and when's it a stable coin. This semantics is going to be interesting to watch. The banks kind of unpack. Is there anything else we haven't asked you about yesterday that we should have asked, like, what are your like you unpacking earlier? Some takeaways you had, like, we got into the first one, were there any others that really come to, you know, you kind of reflecting on some of the speakers and some of the who was in the room, and yeah, kind of where you go next.
Speaker 1 29:31
You're asking me too soon, is there is the honest, yeah, I'm a, I'm a, like, thinker and Stewart and Noodler and, okay, I'm not, definitely
Sy Taylor 29:40
not attempt to think stew and noodle. I like think stew and noodle. That would be the name of your podcast. Pretty fun podcast, and so talk me through what happens next? Are you just going to process it? Are you going to think about doing it next year, like
Speaker 1 29:55
so the real answer is, I don't know. The more known as answer is like this, pumper. Originally was Aaron Frank's idea. Actually, he was like, I was like, Hey, there's this weird thing, like, who's talking to these people? He's like, we should do a conference. We should call it a very stable conference brand. It's a great brand. It's like, much more on the nose now than when we started. What happened yesterday was like a actually, large distance from where we started and where we started. We were just like, hey, it would be great to get these people in. People in a room together. And if this was the only time it happened, we would be very like, we'd be fine. I don't think it is the thoughtful thing to do to just be like, yes, there will definitely be a season two, because it was great to be there. And it is very easy to, like, take that emotion and just assume, Oh, everybody's gonna be as enthusiastic here. If not, I think reality is for stable coins, a year from now, the world's gonna be very, very different, like it does not feel like, I don't even know if the questions I have right now will be relevant in 12 months. It's moving too quick. It's moving super quick, and so super open doing it again. A lot of it just depends on as feedback comes in from people. Do we think we can, like, move the needle on the conversation? There are other stable coin conferences happening. I think money 2020, is going to do a track. So my instinct is, I don't feel selfish about like, it has to be my thing. Yeah, sure. It's more like, if the conversation is happening, I'm like, very happy to be a part of it, a participant. Yeah? And if we feel like there are, like, some questions that we would like to have answered, and we are the right people to bring the people in the room, then we'll, we'll try again. But like, also some of it is like, well, people have to agree to do it, and they have kids and other obligations, and they're, they're gonna do, like, many other of these things, yeah. And so I think it has to be both useful to the participants and useful to the speakers. And if I think if those, if we have a framework where that ends up being true, then we'll do it again. And if we have a framework or and if we don't, then we'll just, like, let the world kind of
Cuy Sheffield 31:54
move on. Yeah. Well, thank you for organizing. It was an incredible event. And I think just as an industry, we need more events like this. We're excited for stable con coming up, I guess in May. Yeah, like this is really the first year of kind of purpose built, dedicated
Sy Taylor 32:10
stable coin events, and it's where you can get excited the operator depth, I think, is kind of the keys. The other big takeaway for me was the conversations in the room, in the breaks and the happy hours and whatnot.
Speaker 2 32:24
Wow, oh. Say. More about that? Just really high level.
Sy Taylor 32:27
Just people who really know what they're talking about and really have worked in payments for a long time. Know the edge cases have thought a lot about stable coins. They live in the details, and that is not something you see on most stages, because you're having to take most of the audience with you. And it's definitely like you can tell a lot about in place by the water cooler conversation. And this had the highest quality water cooler conversation. And I think that's a trend generally for conferences. There's a hunger for that. Yeah. And hopefully stable con has that. Hopefully a future conference I'm involved in is going to do that as well, like I think that's the big, big thirst, yeah. And if you do do another doo, doo, then I think anybody who's into stable coins, I mean, I flew from London to be there, my spidey sense went, Yes, that's the room. I have to be in that room. And as soon as I walked into it, it was validated because of the four or five conversations I had immediately awesome, and it was the depth of it so well done.
Speaker 1 33:28
Tai can ask you two questions, please. What are your takeaways? Yeah, tell us about this conference.
Sy Taylor 33:34
Yeah, I can't tell you about number two yet, but we'll kind of do that after we hit record, throwing me off him.
Unknown Speaker 33:44
Got him with the Razzle dazzles?
Sy Taylor 33:45
Yeah, you got to do it. My takeaways, I think the signaling value is one. I'd come back to number two
Speaker 2 33:52
is what was I mean, having the industry
Sy Taylor 33:56
itself see each other in that room and notice that everybody else's depth of conversation was as deep as it was, yeah, and so that was the signaling value, and then the what's going to happen next from that signaling value, from everybody seeing everybody, and the problems that the people in that room can go on to solve Now that they're paying attention to it, because the stable coin, for stable coins sake, stuff always just felt like, yeah, it's really interesting. It's a nice petri dish. It's not really going to go anywhere. Feels like the payments nerds have gone, right? I get stable coins now, or I already got stable coins. And stable coins get me now like that? That was, that was kind of the thing I
Cuy Sheffield 34:43
think we've been talking about on the show for a while, of and it's still kind of a shock to me, of like, when something you've worked and spent a lot of time on and a long time thinking about has been non consensus, just generally, in a lot of like FinTech and payment circles become. Consensus. We've been kind of feeling it, and there are these moments in time that happen with stripe and bridge, with executive orders around the space, but there's something about kind of being in a room, in person, and seeing who's in that room and the discussions that have that you can viscerally feel. This is now becoming consensus that there's something here, but at the same time, the question now goes to how, and it's not if it's how, and I think that's really where we are as a space. And there is a lot of work on the how, and it's going to take many, many years to figure it out, but it takes having the right people in the room around the table to figure out the how together, yeah. And so I think that was one of the first experiences I've had in this kind of new era of stable coins that we can look back on and have a speech in the Federal Reserve record of like, a very stable conference was when you felt that we've kind of gone from if to how, and we've got the right people there to help figure out how to do it, and it'll take time, but I'm excited to just continue to try and make progress one week at a time.
Sy Taylor 36:12
I think that's why we'll leave it super into that. Thank you, Kai.
Unknown Speaker 36:16
Appreciate it.
Unknown Speaker 36:18
Thank you. Appreciate You coming in.