On Ep. 33 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Content & Strategy @ Sardine, and Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto @ Visa, are joined live by Anthony Yim, Co-Founder @ Artemis to discuss the Artemis report: Stablecoin Payments from the Ground Up, agentic payments in programmable finance and more!
On Ep. 33 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, Head of Content & Strategy @ Sardine, and Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto @ Visa, are joined live by Anthony Yim, Co-Founder @ Artemis to discuss the Artemis report: Stablecoin Payments from the Ground Up, agentic payments in programmable finance and more!
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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.
This podcast is also presented by BVNK.
BVNK is the leading provider of stablecoin payments infrastructure—helping businesses move money faster, settle globally, and even launch their own stablecoin products. Head to BVNK.com to learn more!
This podcast is also supported by Canton Network.
The groundbreaking Layer 1 public chain where traditional finance and crypto are converging. Visit canton.network to learn more.
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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
Sy Taylor 00:00
Steve, welcome to token OIST. Live from stable con in New York. We are, of course, the show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of real world assets that are tokenized. My name is Simon Taylor. I am your host for today, author at FinTech brain food, and head of strategy at a little company called sardine that you should definitely check out. And joining me today is my friend, my co host, Kai Sheffield, head of crypto visa. How are you
Cuy Sheffield 00:39
What a day. Shout out to nick the team that put this event together. It has been incredible, like, I have to say, just the energy here and the excitement and the builders in the space all in one place together. I hope that they do this every year. And I highly recommend if you've been listening to tokenize, if you're just starting to get into the space, you have to come out. You have to be in person and get to meet so many incredible
Sy Taylor 01:04
people. The only way to know if this stuff is for real is to come see it for yourself. So again, echoing that shout out to Nick shout out to everybody at stable con, well done. And somebody else has got some stuff going on today as well, dropped a very big report. Joining Kai and I is Anthony Yim, co founder of ultimates. How are you, sir, great.
Speaker 1 01:21
Thank you for having me. I'm a fan of a tokenized podcast, and so I listen to it every week. And glad to be here. I'm
Sy Taylor 01:27
so glad you're with us. Look, I have to do the thing now where I just remind everybody, before we get into the content, that views and opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they represent, nothing we say should be taken as tax, legal, financial or investment advice. Do your own research. Please. Before we get into the show, we just need to remind everybody that this podcast is sponsored by our friends at bvnk, and if you've been listening to this podcast, you've probably heard us say every business needs a stablecoin strategy, and if you're looking for the best place to start, that's bvnk. Bvnk is the leading provider of stablecoin payments infrastructure, helping businesses move money faster, settle globally and even launch their own stablecoin products, all with licensing and compliance so you can build with confidence. We're proud to partner with bvnk on tokenized To learn more, visit bvnk.com With that out the way, let's talk about this report. Anthony, you launched a report called stablecoin payments report from the ground up. So instead of me weeding out the report or any of the data, or any of that sort of stuff. Take me behind the scenes of why this report, what was your goal with it? Why did you feel the need to do this type of report, and how did you do it?
Speaker 1 02:49
Yeah, the short answer actually, is, Kai inspired us. I mean, I think Kai challenged us a while back into like, hey, I want to know better what people are doing with stablecoin and how much volume is happening? Who's using it? Well, other use cases. And I heard that question from basically everybody else who's participating in stable coins. And I just got sick of having no answer. And so I was like, well, we're a data fire. We have to answer this question. And so I just started talking to folks from like, weep bvnk conduit, but like, hey, look, if we as stablecoin players in this space are gonna survive, we have to really change the narrative of how crypto and stablecoins are being spoken in general media like week after week, you see all these articles from New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, being pretty like, black and white about crypto and not having a more nuanced view that, hey, there's a lot of things going on beyond just speculation.
Sy Taylor 03:45
You mean, journalists write headlines for clicks, no,
Unknown Speaker 03:52
and yeah, and then I'm trying hard to bend
Sy Taylor 03:54
that curve and so well, it's very hard to write a stablecoin strategy, which every company needs, when you don't have data that you can found anything in. So yeah,
Cuy Sheffield 04:03
exactly. It's interesting, if you think back 12 to 18 months and like the data journey that we've been on, and it's hard to remember sometimes that there's a time when nobody cared about stable coins. Nobody cared there wouldn't be a stable con conference. Stable coins are this weird, niche thing, and so the challenge was, how do you get people to care about stable coins? How do you show that there's something there? And the first approach was, what about on chain data? And it was great to work with yourselves, with Ally and with others, and to understand that every stable coin transaction, it's public. You could look at it, you could see it. And so how do you measure that? And so we started spending a bunch of time around on chain data, putting out dashboards. We did a report last year, then we ran into this question of, it sounds too good to be true. It's trillions of dollars, like, what does this on chain data even mean? I don't know who's actually making this transaction. Are these bots? Is this crypto trading? Yeah, and so it's like, on chain data alone wasn't really enough, and then you needed survey data. You need to, like, talk to customers, but then you're just anecdotal stories. And this seems like this is kind of filling this middle gap of talking to companies that are actually driving stablecoin payments and then aggregating that volume together. So now we have three layers of data in different directions, it's starting to build a more clear picture, and I think that's gonna be really important for anyone coming into the space to have access and understand from all those different angles.
Sy Taylor 05:30
And I wanna run through some of the myths you talked about and the findings. So for you, what was the biggest myth that was out there in your biggest finding?
Speaker 1 05:39
I really think the biggest myth is I really but I would say for folks who are not very familiar with on chain data and crypto, it probably is a huge surprise that everybody is transacting stablecoin payments on Tron. Tron as a blockchain, doesn't really get mentioned here in the US, but fact of the matter is that I think in many ways, us Americans are kind of living in a bubble, like we don't use binance, but really, vast majority of the world uses binance and Tron, especially with tether, offers the best liquidity and lowest fees for transactions, and that's what People care
Sy Taylor 06:19
about. Liquidity and fees drive the reality. I think that's such a such an important, critical point that gets missed good friend Guerra Kawana from sling money paraphrased it to me a little while ago that the people who were selling you air time for mobile networks in the global south now also work with you for binance, tether, Tron, and people use different words in different markets, but that is becoming kind of a norm in the Global South. And then the finding that stood out to me was this idea of B to B payments being a really big deal. So break down for me, like the use cases and the flows that you've seen and what some of the key data points were,
Speaker 1 07:03
yeah, basically, we approached about 31 different stablecoin players and basically asked them to share their transaction data with us under the condition that we will anonymize it and aggregate it so so their privacy is corrected. So at the top line, the headline number is basically annualized run rate is over $70 billion these are KYC, KYB transactions from BB and K re conduit. And
Sy Taylor 07:30
then that's a small segment of the market, right? Like, that's not everybody. There's not 70 billion of annualized transactions at all. That's just in the companies you spoke to, exactly.
Speaker 1 07:39
So this is like, accounted for, I think it's like less than 1% of the total transaction volume you see on stable coins. But we wanted to be very conservative. The cool part is, I do think that we covered like 70% of all volume from these B to B like players and B to C players. And 90% is still more defi related stuff. But we wanted, like, to get to the core of hey, for B to B payments that are KYC and KYB, like, what is the actual number and and for B to B specifically, I mean, the bunkers take away that, it's going at like, 400% year over year. It just reached 40 billion, I think, annualized runway. And then the other use cases were B to C and C to B. So that's kind of like, for example, binance pay was one of the partners. They have this product called you can check out with binance online or on a store. And so that would be like a consumer paying a merchant. And then peer to peer is more like remittance. And finally, stable coin backed cards. A lot of these is over, over the visa network, and that's also growing quite quickly at 100% I think year over year, it was interesting to see, like the gap between B to B and P to P in terms of how much faster B to B was growing than P to P. I feel like most people, when they come into the space, like the first use case is P to P, and that's what they expect. The consumer has a stablecoin, they're sending a stablecoin to somebody else. And so do you think it was a function of just the companies that were included in that sample? And it seemed like you had some other data to show PDP might be growing faster than what the survey showed, or is it B to B is just solving a much bigger problem that P to P there are plenty of apps that are more effective and work well without stable coins to solve remittances, but B to B still tends to be a really challenging space, particularly for small and mid market businesses to move value. So Did that surprise you? Like, did you expect B to B to come out, growing as fast as it was, compared to p to B? I think that, like, it wasn't a surprise in that, like, I think anecdotally, we've just been hearing all this activity. I mean, like, this report came out after stripe Brock bridge, and so I think the PDP side, PDP is very tricky, because, like, ultimately, what exactly is P to P, like, every wallet to Wallet transaction could looks like it looked at a p to p. So I do actually think there for the P to P section. Yeah. There's a bit of like, sample bias probably in that, like the companies we they were part of this first initiative, I think, just weren't very P to P focused, right? And so definitely something we want to improve for the next
Sy Taylor 10:11
the on chain, Venmo sling money and some of the other folks out there have certainly been reporting dramatic growth in what they do, and I don't think they were part of your company sample, right? They
Speaker 1 10:23
actually were. But, I mean, sling does this still very actually, last summer, and so we're a little early on on that side of things. So if
Sy Taylor 10:30
I'm building my stablecoin strategy, I'm at a bank, or I'm at a PSP or a payments company, you have an interesting background that people don't know. You've been there you were building do G Venmo? What are your takeaways in your insights, looking at this data, if you were sitting in your Venmo job now, what would you take from this report to that you could use in your day job?
Cuy Sheffield 10:52
Yeah, I guess for the audience, I don't know. I'm one of the early engineers of Venmo. I built a lot of the back end infrastructure of Venmo. Honestly, I think my biggest lesson from Venmo was, like, the entire payment infrastructure is completely not suitable for any online transaction. It's just like, we need something that's truly internet native. And, you know, I think in in Patrick collison's words, like a borderless finance sort of type application and so and so, I think stable coins solves that, and now it's up to like the builders to actually like build interesting applications on top of this infrastructure layer that is now purpose built for internet. I think this is something that a lot of people can miss in coming into the space, and when we talk to banks across the world, it's they haven't fully realized how much developers love stablecoins And how much easier they are to build on, even being here today at stable con, the energy and excitement around a class of entrepreneurs that is building financial products at a speed and in markets that they weren't able to before. And so if you're a large institution, if you're only focused on one market, if you've got plenty of capital, if you've got a large team like you could figure out how to build on top of many of these existing rails. What seems like it's new is the lowering the barrier to entry, where there are so many new companies and developers that are coming in that are building products that they had no way to build before. And so it's almost like just even the number of FinTech entrepreneurs today is significantly greater than two years ago. Yeah, because the rails that how accessible they were for FinTech were just much more limited than what stable coins are. And so it's really becoming this FinTech developer platform that is leading to a bunch of products being built on top of it. Many of those products are still early stage, and we'll see how they do. It's also going to be intensely competitive, but it's leading to new products being created that you couldn't build a
Sy Taylor 12:47
few years ago. Whoa, we saw stripe sessions that ramp launched their stablecoin linked cards in 101 markets. What's that going to do for volumes? And if you think about it from a bank's point of view, like, who's your dream customer. If you are a money center bank, you want to get the ramps of the world, but you also want to get the big marketplaces. You want to get SpaceX. You want to win those growth customers and be supplying them because they're growing, but they're massive enterprises, and the buyer there is a developer, and the developer is really loving the idea of working with stablecoins. I've heard
Speaker 1 13:22
you a funny story about this from early Venmo days. So Venmo had this product called Venmo payouts, that it's basically a developer API for sending transactions, and we were still really small. And actually there was, like, no KYC, no Kyp, there's a payment limit. And it was one of the most popular, like, two Kai's point about like, just developers love people just send money instantly, but obviously we can't support this product that's doesn't do compliance properly, and so eventually it was shut down. But like itching to Kai's point, just developers love easy FinTech solutions, talk to me about
Sy Taylor 13:55
developed versus developing markets, because there were some surprising findings in everybody views this as a global south thing. Is it mostly a global south thing? What did you find?
Speaker 1 14:05
Yeah, that's a great question, and that's also one of the most, I think, surprising findings from the support was that so we asked all these, all of our data partners, to also send us the breakdown of which currency, whether it's usdt or USDC their customers were using. And so, you know, to no surprise for the Global South, tether is utterly dominant, 80 90% market share. But most surprisingly, for the customers who are domiciled in the United States and Europe, their preferred currency was also tether. And so I think that that was, like, just utterly shocking, because USCC is very prominent, and circle Coinbase is very prominent United States. And so So I spent the last sort of week trying to figure out what's going on. And I just had a conversation an hour ago with Darren, the founder of reap, one of the participants, and I asked them to say, Hey, you guys are based in Hong Kong. Like. Like, Is it surprising to you? Is like, Anthony, no, this is like exactly what I thought will be, because at re like their customers, nobody's asking to do payments in your CC, especially because the counterparty, even if the one part of the sender is, say, American, the Counterparty is likely an emerging market.
Sy Taylor 15:19
So it's more about what the recipient wants. That drives the demand for the stablecoin My
Speaker 1 15:24
understanding from talking to Darren is that it's also very much driven by what we talked about earlier, where it's just like deepest liquidity, easiest to on ramp and off ramp, and just look low fees,
Sy Taylor 15:34
it's hard to compete with network effects. We've
Cuy Sheffield 15:37
talked about this on the show a number of times. If when you think about the costs of stablecoin transactions, a lot of people go straight to, Okay, what about the gas fees? And how much does this gas cost? Tron is not the cheapest blockchain overall. There are cheaper blockchains, and so it's interesting to see that Tron has continued to become used, or the most commonly used chain in many of these markets, and it feels like it's this preference for usdt, because usdt has a better depth of liquidity, you can be able to convert usdt to a local currency at a better rate, and so it doesn't matter if you pay more in gas fees, if you're able to convert at a better rate versus There might be a chain or a stable coin that has much lower gas fees. You save a few pennies there, but then you lose 5% when you're actually converting it. And so it feels like that liquidity piece is one of the strongest areas of a network effect, and it'll be really interesting to see over time. And even in your data I was looking at you had the Latin America section. There were certain countries like Argentina, where it was much more balanced. You have, you know, I think the market share was like 5050, between USDC and usdt, and then you had other countries that were almost entirely usdt. So it interesting to see how other stablecoins can find specific markets and try and build an advantage on the liquidity side. And is that going to be able to be in crypto markets? We talk a lot about banks, and what role can banks play with stablecoins? Well, if you want more liquidity in FX markets, moving between a stablecoin and Fiat like, it'd be nice to have some banks here participating in that space. And so is that an opening where, even if USCT has this dominant liquidity in crypto markets, as more financial institutions come in, are they going to use usdt and deepen it even more, or are there going to be other stable coins that they use that will now be able to be more competitive? Yeah, usdt banks
Sy Taylor 17:28
coming in with regulatory clarity, shift the liquidity dynamics. I think it's a very good question, because there's a note that you added into Oh no, here about some processes didn't support Tron at first and lost out on business. What do you think about Kai's comments and the ability to support Tron and tether is, is that going to be necessary? Or do you think that regulatory clarity and then bringing in institutional liquidity could change that?
Speaker 1 17:57
One thought is that, you know, this is actually from the visa report on last year too, where when the survey participants aren't particularly loyal to any of these blockchains or currency. So I actually do think that, despite what the recent report says about 10 dominance circle very much has an ability to like. I think if they can offer better liquidity like, they can definitely eat into the into the market share. I think it's the future is to be defined.
Sy Taylor 18:24
It's all that to play for. Any other thoughts on the
Cuy Sheffield 18:27
report, Kai, I think it's fantastic work. Highly recommend reading through it. I think every conversation around stable coins as a larger institution coming into it, it should be grounded in data. It's just, it's very hard whether you're an institution, whether you're a regulator, to just talk about this as an abstract concept without clear, real evidence of who's using this, what are they using it for? But you have to look at it from all angles, so appreciate all the work that you all put in there. And it's a fantastic resource for everyone to read.
Sy Taylor 18:55
I was in a conversation with some very large banks and some fortune 500 Treasury managers a day ago. And what was interesting is how in that room, the people presenting were presenting numbers that look very different to yours, more of the headline numbers. And I do think if you are going to build a strategy, you need to get close to the facts. So I echo Kai's point entirely. So where do people get the report. Yeah, if you
Speaker 1 19:21
go to stablecoin dot FYI, you can that's our landing page. You can download the report straight from that
Sy Taylor 19:27
site. Great URL. All right, from stablecoin stats to saying thank you to our sponsors. We'll take a quick break whilst we hear from the folks that make tokenized possible. This episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at visa, a global leader in payments. Visa's tokenized assets platform vtap uses smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies on chain. Vtap allows financial institutions to issue Fiat backed tokens improve. Enabling financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. You can check out the links in this episode's description to express your interest in vtap. This episode is brought to you by Canton network. Ever wonder where real tokenized asset volume is going? Canton network the groundbreaking layer, one public chain where traditional finance and crypto are starting to converge. Why? Because Canton is the only public network with privacy, no workarounds, no compromises. This is 24/7 markets on demand, financing with real yield, where value moves as freely as information on the internet. This isn't just another blockchain. No, this is where the serious money is flowing to solve real market demand and risk. Visit Canton dot network to learn more. Thank you to our sponsors. We are back, and there was a big story this week. I don't know if you guys saw it, but apparently, the Wall Street Journal is reporting that big banks are exploring venturing into the crypto world together with a joint stable coin. So this would be conversations in a group co owned by JP Morgan, Bank of America and Citigroup called Early Warning services. They are in early stage discussions, but see an opportunity for stablecoins to speed up routine transactions, cross border payments and things that can take longer in the traditional payment system. Kai, your reaction to this? First of
Cuy Sheffield 21:36
all, a ton of thoughts. I think we've talked about this a bit of a lot of banks are going through this challenge where it's almost like they're experiencing this whiplash of six, nine months ago, it was very hard to justify any investment resource allocation towards stablecoins. There were plenty of other things that you would allocate those resources to, and it was unclear if there would be regulatory clarity to enable you to participate in the space, and then now, much faster than even I've expected, that out about you. We're in a world where stablecoins are on a potential path to regulatory clarity. We don't know what exactly is going to happen, but like, there's some probability that they get there, and the US is potentially going to be promoting itself as the crypto capital of the world, which is the polar opposite of what the environment was six to nine months ago. And so for any large institution, it's very hard to flip that quickly and be able to get up and running. It takes many months to understand a space, to develop a strategy, to get through risk committees. And so I think we've seen banks go from disinterested in stable coins, not even willing to spend the time to let's learn about them. Let's understand what these are and what impact they could have, and then let's figure out what to do about them. And like, what, what should our strategy be? And we've always said, like, if stable coins are going to be successful in the long term, you need banks to participate. You need stable coins to be integrated into banks across the world that there's a very important role for them to play. It shouldn't just be a non bank technology forever. And I think many of the banks have wanted to participate, but they haven't really been able to. Yeah, and so I think now this is a question of, well, how can a bank participate? And the way I look at it, there are only a handful of options that they have. One is, do you integrate existing stable coins, and that might be a faster path to market, be able to test and pilot and do something with an existing stable coin. Do you create your own stable coin? But what does that mean, not just from a technology standpoint, but how are you going to get distribution? What are the use cases going to be? And if every bank creates their own stablecoin, is that gonna be much of fragmentation? And then it seems like this is a third path that's starting to emerge, of Will there be consortiums? Will people align around common brands with many banks going together? I think we've seen some approaches working on this in Europe and in other markets. And so I think it is still very, very early days. I think it's going to take years for this to play out. I don't expect that there are going to be banked stable coins live in 2025 or 20 even, potentially 2026 but I think it's a clear indication of this shift from let's learn about this and study it to let's do something, and what are the different options, and how can we do something? Does it make sense to do something the other and I think it's still really unclear what direction it's gonna go. Anthony, your thoughts on this? I think similar to Kai, but I understand the early warning system is actually the builders behind Zelle, right? Yes, too. And so, I mean, I think there were a formidable, actually, competitor to Venmo, so I remember them from the Venmo times. I
Sy Taylor 24:41
think that's the thing with early warning services, is don't bet against them, and don't bet against the big banks. I think there's this view in the builder community sometimes that, oh, well, of course, we're going to disrupt those slow, lazy banks. And then there's far from it, right? They just have different constraints. And Zelle is, yeah, as you say, more than. Cash App, more than Venmo, the dominant P to P app. But I wonder, is to your point about B to B payments. Are we missing the use case here, and what's going to be interesting for banks? Have you seen any conversation or anything on the domestic side of that? Because the note here says they're thinking about a cross border rail. Where would you be thinking about it? If you were still sitting at Venmo today, if you were sort of looking at like, let's get into stable coins, let's try and compete. Would you be thinking about cross border first? Would you be thinking about domestic first? Frankly speaking,
Speaker 1 25:33
like, because there exists things like Venmo Zelle and cash app, it just like, that will be something that stable coins, yeah, it's gonna be hard for stable coins to compete against that. Like, technically, Venmo payments even cheaper than a stable coin transaction, because you're just updating a Postgres database a number there. But I think the things that Venmo were not good at, as we never were able to expand beyond United States, like I meet so many people still overseas, where they're like, Oh, I wish I have a Venmo for Black Country, and that just does not exist. And then also Venmo never was able to. There was a lot of demand, but the team was just too small to go after, like the small business long tail use cases. And those folks are not the Walmarts who are doing huge volumes, but they also need payments solutions and existing Yeah, solutions like toast are even probably too big for like a small yoga studio, like somebody who's like a sole proprietor, but there are millions of these small businesses out there. I'm curious how you think about this, but it feels like there could almost be this bifurcation where the domestic use cases tend to be more capital markets. They're more institutional defi on chain lending. What are the things
Cuy Sheffield 26:42
that you can do with the properties of stable coins that are programmable, that are doing something other than just value transfer, if it's only value transfer, sending money from A to B, domestic payment systems work really well, and so it's almost a few years away in some of the more advanced programmability based use cases, as well as we're seeing The asset managers in the capital markets, industry in the US, BlackRock and fidelity and others, very active in the space. If they're more tokenized assets than being able to have stablecoins as part of it, and then have another set of use cases, being cross border focused. I think it's still a challenge for banks in the US, if your customer base is US based, particularly if you wanna try and create your own stablecoin, the biggest market for many of these stablecoins is outside the United States. If you don't have built in distribution in many of the countries where there's the demand for stablecoin and your customers in the US don't really need it, then, is a cross border payment alone enough? Or do you need more partnerships, more distributors in those emerging markets to actually create the stablecoin effect as like a flywheel that becomes used outside of just one payment.
Sy Taylor 27:47
It's difficult, because not we're saying banks as if they're one homogenous blob of thing, but actually, you know, there are community banks, and there are even credit unions, and then there are regionals, and then there are money center banks, and there's everything in between. And I think the answer to Is it a domestic thing? Is it a cross border thing? Sort of depends on where you are on in that spectrum. So if I'm a global money center bank, and I have lots of multinational corporates, if I can help them get in and out of exotic currencies, faster, cheaper with my liquidity, my biggest customers than the fortune 500 be super grateful for that, but that's not going to happen overnight, because a fortune 500 doesn't change its internal systems overnight, and a bank can't change its systems overnight. So where do you start? And that's why I come back to the Starlink is a very big company by the amount of money it's doing, and it's a matter of valuation as a part of SpaceX, the ability to support this for growth customers in that middle Global Transaction Banking side, I think, is a really interesting thread to pull on. And what everybody's missed about the genius Act is that if you are a ppsi, a permitted payment stablecoin issuer, then all of your stablecoins are, from an accounting standpoint, treated as cash and cash equivalents. Now what does that mean? Hands up, if you've ever had to issue a prepaid card, it's very complex. The full benefit of account structures are very difficult to deal with, and prepaid cards have really struggled. The business case for prepaid cards was always really high, the fraud levels were always really high, and you ended up having a lot of breakage. You have a sheet month like it's just so complex. But cash is a lot less complex to deal with, and using cash regulations. I think this is the thing that the banks haven't really started to unravel yet, which is, what are the things I've always wanted to do, like serving certain segments with more of a fee based account structure for prepaid for the lower income segments domestically? What are those things that I can do that this regulation allows me to do that I kind. Do before, all right, I'm going to move us to our last story of the day, which is a company called World pay. You might have heard of them. They're enabling stablecoin payouts for global businesses in a collaboration with our friends at bvnk. So this global payouts would be available to all world, pay clients in the US and Europe, and they'll be able to pay customers, contractors, sellers and other third parties in 146 markets instantly. So that's more than 101 and without having to hold or handle stable coins themselves. So Anthony, from a PSP perspective, could you see why this is valuable to somebody like a world pay, and why do you think they started with payouts? Yeah,
Speaker 1 30:48
I think that's one of the biggest hurdles in sort of non stablecoin payment use cases. So a vast majority of the B to B use cases that we got this data for is for this payouts use cases. And I think again, it's just because, like, for payouts, especially in the now, more like internet native world, where, you know, I hear stories of, hey, like, I'm a Brazilian company, but I hired a freelancer in the US, it's not easy to pay them, right? Because you basically rely on correspondent banking. And, yeah, you have and correspondent banking infrastructure is very well defined, and what thoughts are for, like the major corridors, but anything else is pretty tricky. And so I think that's just the most obvious first use cases. And I think, for example, bvnk is also partnering with deal.com to do the payouts. We're also a deal customer ourselves at Artemis. And so, like, we have engineers in Romania, like, I don't actually, don't know how I would pay them without deal. Wow,
Sy Taylor 31:45
yeah, that sort of pandemic driven globalization of the workforce that happened for a generation of companies has been kind of missed and remote.com and deal kind of enabled that. So you said something interesting, which is a lot of the B to B payments volume is payouts. Did I hear you right when you said that? Like in your data about B to B, you're including the payouts use case,
Speaker 1 32:08
I believe so I might need a double check in. Yeah.
Sy Taylor 32:13
You see, that's why I like it. Intellectual honesty and data we need. We need that stuff.
Cuy Sheffield 32:18
The freelancer and contractor use case seems to be growing quite a bit. I think we're hearing about that more and more that if you are a freelancer in an emerging market and you have the option of getting paid in dollars versus getting paid in local currencies, getting paid in dollars via stable coins makes a lot of sense. One of the things I think is going to be interesting to see is, I think these type of products that are doing stablecoin payouts, historically has been like a almost like a push to crypto wallet, where the end recipient would have to be in crypto, they'd have to, like, know what a crypto wallet is. They'd have to go and get one. And so maybe, if it's a freelance engineer, then they know what crypto is, and they're in the space, and they have a wallet. And so there was kind of this expectation that it was gonna be limited to a specific crypto segment on the recipient side, where, at the same time, I think we're seeing so much innovation around wallets and the ability to create wallets that you can spin up, you can bet into different applications. You don't have to write down seed phrases. You have, account abstractions, smart contract, wallets, there's no gas. And so as it becomes easier and easier to generate wallets, I think you could see these use cases where you don't have to necessarily say, I can only send a stablecoin payout to someone who's already in crypto. You could actually create these types of experiences where maybe whoever the merchant is sending, the payout gives you the option to, one click, spin up a wallet right there within the experience, and then the stable coin lands on that wall. And so I think it's there's so much of a network effect that the more wallets that come online, the better the wallet experience becomes. You move from just this very crypto audience on the recipient side to anyone being able to receive a stablecoin payout. But then you're also kind of, we talked about this before in the show, is like you're pushing the off ramp onto the end recipient, where it used to be like you'd have to solve the off ramp. You have to figure out who are the local partners in all these markets. Here you're saying, let me just give you the stablecoin. You figure out how to get it to what you need. And like, it seems like people are able to figure that out.
Sy Taylor 34:20
How much do you see when you said push to crypto wallet? Immediately, what came into my head was push to card. And that's kind of a major payouts use case that's become very popular in recent years. And it says something that Venmo does, is there a push to stablecoin linked card model that you've seen, or that you've seen that could be a possibility here? Or is that too well that you say,
Cuy Sheffield 34:42
I think there, there are a lot of ways that stable coins can become integrated into global payout solutions. And I think ultimately, like, if you're a merchant and you want to be able to pay out across the world, you don't want to just have a stable coin solution or just have a Fiat solution. I think that the end products will be stable coins. Just one additional rail, and depending upon which market you're sending the funds to, depending upon the preference of the recipient, some will prefer a stablecoin, some will prefer Fiat. So I think that the future is like, how do you integrate all these things together into one comprehensive platform? And I think we're seeing that more and more in the space of companies come to an era of like combining Fiat and stable coins together that are really unique, of leveraging the best of both worlds, rather than stable coin only as a payout solution that's limited and doesn't have the same Fiat connectivity.
Sy Taylor 35:30
Any thoughts Anthony on where that payouts model goes? Yeah.
Speaker 1 35:34
I mean, I think it's going to be very highly localized to geographies and but I think that, well, I think that's interesting to me. That keeps coming up again, and actually now, as it did, like 10 years ago, when I started at Venmo, was that people dismiss how good the card form factor is. Venmo tried to kill the card form factor. Oh, we can just do it purely by NFC. There were like crazy startups that were doing, like, sound based like, yeah, payments, you know, all of them, just Venmo, not just issues a Venmo card, yeah, because basically, you know, this card form factor, you know, it can be offline. It's just, like, so versatile. It's durable, it's durable, and everybody recognizes it. And so I think, like, I personally, am very bullish on basically, like, the card form factor, so being like, the end interface, and, you know, it could be stable coins in the back end, or whatever is the infrastructure that's the most suitable.
Sy Taylor 36:26
Cards are really an authentication and acceptance rail. I think about the value proposition. I mean, guy from visa might correct me here, but it's like, what do I view Visa and MasterCard and others are selling they're selling acceptance. And that when you see this logo, it's going to work, and it's going to be frictionless, and they're selling to the merch, and we're going to get you that cash, and we're going to bring it to you. And then here's a bunch of rules about what happens when things go wrong. Yes,
Speaker 1 36:50
the network rules is very range. I think that's something that also nobody ever talks about. Where I'm like, I think that's like, a value add that everyday consumer doesn't realize where. Again, with a Venmo, we had to kind of reinvent, hey, what happens if you pay with Venmo and, like, there's a dispute? Yeah, well, it's like, actually, Visa MasterCard have, like, established all these rules for many, many years about what exactly happens if I'm unhappy with this purchase, and, you know, the merchant has X days disputed, and all this stuff like this is actually a really important part of, I think, the value proposition that the Visa and MasterCard network
Sy Taylor 37:22
happens when something goes wrong, stuff. I mean, how are you thinking about that with stablecoin Link cards? Have you seen anything emerging as best practice? I know you guys partnered with grain. What's kind of happening in that space? Yeah, I
Cuy Sheffield 37:34
think we've talked about this aside, we see stablecoin cards as a new category, and it's great to see your data and showing some of the growth from the companies that you've talked to, and I think historically, like we've had crypto linked cards for a long time, but crypto linked cards were generally associated with exchanges, and they were you made money on an exchange and you wanted to sell and be able to off ramp. But if stable coins end up powering this new generation of Neo banks and general purpose financial products, we think that these stablecoin Like cards, can be very much top of wallet everyday spend, and whenever I think about the consumer to merchant use case, I think ubiquity is such an important thing, I don't wanna have to think a lot when I wanna pay for something like any amount of friction that you Add to commerce, you're less likely to make the sale. And so if I have to think, does this merchant accept the stablecoin, I have to look around and see, and it's called different things, and do they accept the stablecoin that I have? And this one does, I don't even wanna think about. And so I think what we're seeing is this really significant growing demand from a whole new wave of developers that are building stablecoin based financial products that want those products to become a everyday, general purpose account that is top of wallet. And they don't want consumers to have to think and wait for hundreds of millions of merchants to figure out how to accept. They wanna just be able to have you show up in the same way you don't think when you tap your card. You can do that out of these stablecoin accounts. So we think there's a huge amount of runway, and we're excited that we've got a number of amazing partners that we're working closely with just to make it as easy as possible for developers to be able to roll these stablecoin
Sy Taylor 39:11
Link cards out. If you are a developer looking at like, I'm gonna go build a new financial product, do you think consumer domestic? Do you think B to B domestic? Like a ramp type of spend management. Where are you seeing the hotspot opportunities, like, what would excite you? What would get your juices going? Or are you so into data now that you're just like, You know what? I'm done building financial products.
Speaker 1 39:31
The thing that I hear most nowadays, I was at a dinner a couple days ago with Chris from bbnk and Kiro from conduit, and we spent two hours with a dinner talking about agentic payments and AI. And so I think that, again, I think stable coins and smart contracts allow you to have programmatic payments, and you're not gonna let an agent run around with unlimited spend power, and you're gonna have like, guardrails and. I
Sy Taylor 40:00
think what's interesting about stable coins is the cryptographic guarantee of settlement and the proof of where something is in the ledger, which is kind of really, really misunderstood. It's not just the program ability, it's the cryptographic guarantee of the program executed faithfully. And so that is kind of a hard thing to do with agentic AI, there's like, you know, sometimes it, quote, unquote, hallucinates and all that sort of stuff. But no, it followed these rules. And here's the evidence, and here's the proof, and you can do clever things like escrow, and you can make sure the money only moves in certain conditions. So I think that additional programmability lab is gonna be really interesting. We got all the way here to anybody said agentic AI, I know the visa guys have been playing with that as well. Do you wanna just talk a little bit about some of the stuff that people who are maybe not as familiar with intelligent commerce? Just what is that? And how does it start to fit into this picture? I think
Cuy Sheffield 40:54
in general, if you're going to have agents be able to transact and participate in commerce, you need to have a ton of controls in place. And I think that that's where we're really focused on, is, how do you have trust? How can you set guardrails and controls around what an agent can do and and how do we partner with the leading companies in the space to do that? I think stable coins could have a role to play. I think it's still very early. I think smart contracts have really interesting properties, but there's also a ton of risk, a ton of questions. So I think that, like most things, the future is going to be some intersection of there's a major role for existing payment networks to continue to evolve and upgrade and be able to support new types of commerce. And then there'll be other types of payment flows that new platforms like stablecoins and smart contracts can uniquely facilitate, and then there'll be ways that they both interact together. And so we're just excited to participate. Yeah,
Sy Taylor 41:49
what's the payment flow? What's the flow of funds? Is it a new one? Is it an existing one? I think that's a very fair question. All right, well, that brings us just about to time. So I wanna thank everybody that was here in person. I wanna thank everybody that's watched or listened so much for joining us. And I want to thank Anthony first time on the show, but hopefully we'll have you back. Where do people find out more about you? And Artemis,
Speaker 1 42:09
my ex or Twitter handle, is Anthony Yim, my full name, and then Artemis is Artemis dot XYZ, perfect.
Cuy Sheffield 42:16
And Kai, how about you on x at Kai Sheffield and visa.com/crypto and this has been an amazing day, amazing event. It's it's awesome to see so many incredible builders in one place, and hopefully this happens again. We need
Sy Taylor 42:29
to make it happen. We're going to make it happen. We are if tokenized, can do anything about it. We're going to make sure that it happens again. You'll find me at sy Taylor on LinkedIn, on Twitter, or wherever you wherever you look. Please. If you have ever enjoyed the show, make sure you subscribe to it. Respond in some way on YouTube, like it. Do all of those things and tell somebody who might care about it. If you enjoy the show, that's the best way you can help us out. We really, really appreciate it. Thank you so much, and We'll be back soon.