On Ep. 9 of Stablecoin Stats, Anthony Yim, Co-Founder @ Artemis and Andrew Van Aken, Data Scientist @ Artemis are joined by Chris Harmse, Co-Founder @ BVNK to discuss the state of the stablecoin market from RFPs to implementation, how to pitch stablecoin adoption within an enterprise and more!
On Ep. 9 of Stablecoin Stats, Anthony Yim, Co-Founder @ Artemis and Andrew Van Aken, Data Scientist @ Artemis are joined by Chris Harmse, Co-Founder @ BVNK to discuss the state of the stablecoin market from RFPs to implementation, how to pitch stablecoin adoption within an enterprise 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 powered by Artemis
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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
Andrew Van Anken 0:10
Welcome to tokenize. The show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real world assets. My name is Andrew Van Akin, stable coin leader Artemis, a crypto analytics startup, I would like to welcome you to a special episode of tokenize where we're catching up with a friend of the show, quite possibly the most guested host we've had on this Chris harmsey from PV and K Sir, how are you doing
Chris Harmse 0:31
today? I'm doing really well. Andrew, thanks for having me back.
Andrew Van Anken 0:34
What's the secret to getting on tokenize so much, I
Chris Harmse 0:37
don't know. It must be the good Benter every time I'm on you. So the good lucks is what? Long may it continue.
Andrew Van Anken 0:44
The good lucks. That's what we heard joining me, as always. Anthony M co founder at Artemis, sir, how are you doing?
Anthony Yim 0:51
I'm wonderful. Is very, very warm in New York City. And so I realized that this is one, the one day the year, in the winter, where I realized I'm not actually depressed. I just
Andrew Van Anken 1:02
needed sun. That's good. We got a little bit of that. And a quick disclaimer, before we get into things, I need 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 should say should be taken as tax, legal, financial or investment advice. Do your own research. And lastly, before we get into things, I am thrilled to remind you that this podcast is made possible by Visa and powered by Artemis. Chris, you you've been busy, for those who don't know, BV and K is an enterprise, stable coin, payments, infrastructure, and I believe, since you were on the show last, you announced around by city, you grew volume significantly, and you guys threw a lovely conference in South Africa. What? Chris, what's the secret? What are you doing right now?
Chris Harmse 1:42
Look, we have definitely been busy, but I think it's definitely been a bit of a stable coin. Summer. Over the last couple of months, I'd say probably the last 12 to 18 months, we've obviously had regulation legitimize the industry, unlocking a lot of momentum. And then I think more specific to us, it was great to bring our annual conference to South Africa, where b and k was actually originally started. My co founders and I are all South African, so we effectively have had this annual conference. We've had two in London, one in one in San Francisco. It's called the currency conference. And we brought together about 150 people, just talking about stable coins, FinTech, FinTech and emerging markets, AI and the impact of AI on FinTech, yeah, which is a great couple days, and I think left a good impression on on how awesome Cape Town is as a place. It is a little bit of far away, so we appreciate everyone that came out and made it a good time.
Andrew Van Anken 2:29
What's AI? I haven't had a priority this trend yet. For all the listeners at home, did you get any skydiving in?
Chris Harmse 2:36
I have not gone for a while. My brother's actually coming back to Cape Town soon. I'm spending some time out here, so I'll definitely get a couple of jumps in, but I've been spending more time on the mountain bike recently because it's some great riding. Wow.
Anthony Yim 2:48
I've always meant to ask you, I learned also a while back that you were avid, like, sort of extreme sports persons. I'm curious if any like learnings from doing all these sort of, like, crazy sports that translate into building a startup, which I feel like I'm stuck in office all day, and I still feel like it's an extreme sport. Yeah.
Chris Harmse 3:06
I mean, I think the main thing really is extreme sports is a good outlet. You know, some people meditate, some people find their kind of their outlet to calm down and calm the mind. And I think if you're doing something, we have to be completely dialed in, for lack of a better term, kind of like a flow state. You can kind of get away out of your head, stop thinking about the business all the time, and actually just relax, even though you're doing something a little bit on on the limit. I find the things that are on the limit, you know, pick your poison really does help you to calm the mind, and you have to be completely dialed in. So for me, it's more a release away from the stress of day to day and the volatility that can come with building a startup.
Anthony Yim 3:39
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I think just getting out of your head, I think it's very easy. Think it's very easy to just like, get supplementary everything, and you're like, Wait, hang on exactly. The sun exists, and you can feel something in your face. And, you know, that's something magical
Andrew Van Anken 3:50
about that too. I see the sun shining through that window. Anthony, you're good. Yeah, I'm good today. Back to work. Get back to work. What are you doing? No, that's great. So I wanted to start this show because, Chris, you're probably one of the foremost experts in this space. And as we kind of start in 2026, a few months in here, what is just a general state of the stable coin market? I know last year was all about talking through strategy, developing some sorts of strategy, but I love just your general take of what's the current state of the stable coin market. And have you seen people shift from developing strategies to actually implementing?
Chris Harmse 4:26
Yeah, absolutely. Like, I think 2025, was really a year of RFPs, if you want to put it that way. So we saw significant uptick in kind of formal enterprise procurement processes, whether those were like, initially just request for information and then formal RFPs coming out. Okay, we want to build this by x date. Can you please answer all these questions? These questions? So I think that was really exciting. We also saw our enterprise pipeline grow from about five to 10x you know, in terms of those customers engaging. And as I mentioned earlier, you know, a lot of that was driven by legitimization of the industry, by by regulation, and then for us, taking customers or. Signing deals with customers like world pay and visa direct and tunes. So we really focused on, like, if 2025 was a year of RFP is 2026 about going live with all of these new solutions and scaling them, and really putting actual, you know, ramping volumes up, and putting TPV through these new use cases. So that's kind of how I would summarize last year and this year. And, you know, we continue to be laser focused on execution this year, of taking these customers live and ramping volumes.
Andrew Van Anken 5:24
Have you seen that shift towards like, I'm assuming, I'm just guessing, that the early innovators are probably smaller, medium sized businesses. But have you started to see that shift towards these, like, larger enterprise customers? Yeah, 100%
Chris Harmse 5:37
I think they've taken a crawl, walk, right approach, really, you know, some of them put out some RFIs, like I mentioned, and now they've hired in an in house stable COIN strategy person is kind of re architecting the strategy. So a lot of them had, like, new hires come in through these processes, and now they're kind of figuring out what is right use case. We like to kind of narrow it down, because there's a lot you could do, but rather, just pick one use case that makes sense for your business, double down on that, get something out, live in market, start scaling from there, and then expand, you know, additional use cases on the back of that. So that's definitely kind of the trajectory we see. And a lot of the enterprises are moving faster than I would have originally actually thought, but that's a good thing for the industry, or all around.
Andrew Van Anken 6:16
What's the common question that you get from enterprises, like, is it still like, hey, what's a stable coin? Or have people really,
Chris Harmse 6:21
no, no, completely not. You know, they, they're pretty well versed. Now, coming in, it's really, I think you spend a lot of time and like, what is the right use case, you know? And how can they build their business case internally to get this approved? There's always some sort of stable coin Maxi in these guys, in these businesses, wanting to kind of do this one product manager that really wants to get it done, but at the end of the day, they need to make a business case how much TPV they think they're going to flow through this new payment method, if that's the way they're thinking about how many wallets or users they think they can get live or issue a wallet to. So it's really about like picking the right use case for their business, right region is an important question that's like, hey, where should we launch this? Where does it make most sense? So those are kind of more the questions that that we see now, versus they kind of understand, I think circle listing obviously put USDC in spotlight. People have understand stable coins, understand how they issued, how the reserves are managed, that sort of thing. It's more about, hey, what can we actually use these things for across our payment stack? So if I was
Andrew Van Anken 7:15
a stable coin, Maxia at a company trying to get my company to adopt it, what's the what's the most successful sell you've seen? Or how would you advise those people to get up and going,
Chris Harmse 7:23
Yeah, look, I think the bigger one, especially for enterprise payment companies, is a lot of them look at stable coins as another alternative payment method. So they've got cards in the stack, they've got digital wallets. They've got buy now, pay later, and now they want to add stable coins. So now they've got to make a case for, hey, if I do a stable coin, what is that user is? Are they going to be a repeat buyer? Does the shopping basket increase? You know, all these sorts of questions, what? What markets can I launch in simultaneously? You know, stable coins, obviously really good, because you can launch them in 100 plus markets at once. You know, it's a global first solution, versus an APM, which is a very domestic, you know, picks in Brazil, UPI, pick your pick your local, domestic APM. So I think by ratcheting off all of those questions, picking the right market, and then having some sort of TPV estimate based on, like, speaking to some of the large customers in their pipeline, and they're or doing some AB tests with users, and then what we find is also kind of having an idea of, hey, we actually think this could either grow our overall volumes or cannibalize some underperforming payment methods, and I'm going to Increase kind of wallet share there. So that's kind of we see it putting together a more credible case for these teams to get the internal buy in
Anthony Yim 8:28
these enterprises. To what extent do they care about what chain they launch on and what stable coins they use? Or are they seeing kind of them all just as stable coins in general?
Chris Harmse 8:37
So BB and K has always been a stable coin, agnostic grill, agnostic platform, and we very much let users and merchants dictate kind of which stable coins we integrate. And that's something obviously, we have a vetting policy for all these things, whether it's stable coins or chains. I think at the end of the day, you know, if you're going to really get payments to scale, it needs to be on a fast blockchain. I mean, first and foremost, you know, if you think at like the speed that these are processes payments, you probably got to get a chain that can do a similar thing if you want to similar thing if you wanted to get to that level of adoption. So I think speed is important. Gas fees, high costs, these need to be fractions of a penny, this sort of thing. So I think those are the ones that they gravitate towards. And those are, you know, the large ones you would think of. And then you've obviously seen some newer ones pop up, which you're focusing more on. There's some certain not trading doing some privacy trade offs for decentralization. And there's others that are building in payment specific features, where you can pay gas fees in stable coins, you no longer need a balance of a native token, which obviously is a bit complicated. I mean, for our customers, We've abstracted all that complexity away. They just integrate a Payments API, and it works. So I think the more stable coins that come to market, the more orchestration and that abstraction layer really makes a lot of sense and delivers value to the customer.
Andrew Van Anken 9:47
I love it. Since this is a show about data, let's show some charts, shall we? Because not only do we have data, but this is just a beautiful report that has been put out by I'll give credit to the bbnk design team, who are your designers? Are. They are world class here, world class payments, world class design. So what we're looking at at home is recently, bbnk, in partnership with YouGov Coinbase and ourselves at Artemis, produced the stable coin utility report for 2026 really detailing how different consumers all across the world are trying to use money and stable coins for many different purposes. And we surveyed over almost close to 5000 people in 15 different countries. And it's really great to see how you can really just kind of allude to earlier, you know, one stable coin solution for many countries. I guess my first question to you, Chris is, what were the types of things that you were trying to learn from this survey? And give us your thought process of of why do this type of survey?
Chris Harmse 10:43
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head. We were actually we were trying to tell the missing user story. So there's obviously a lot of on chain data that you can go and shop. And you guys did a fantastic job, and you released reports previously where you're looking at supply and volumes, how much of that is just related to B to B payments, or this sort of thing. But I think we wanted to go one level deeper and actually understand why and how people actually using stable coins in their day to day lives, and then have that complement this macro transaction data that we see in the market. So kind of like trying to move beyond just the anecdote that you hear of, oh, you know, I know someone in Argentina takes a salary in stable coins. I know someone in XYZ market who pays his bills in stable coins, and actually go out and get some hard data. Hence, the, you know, commissioned close to 5000 users across these 15 countries. So I think, to my knowledge, it's the largest recent multi country kind of user focused stable coin survey. And, you know, I think we've had really good feedback from everyone on the survey, and definitely hoping to make it a expanded and make it more of an annual thing, because I think it's pretty good data for everyone. Pretty good data
Andrew Van Anken 11:43
for everyone and a great picture right here. There's a disconnect in how we talk about stable coins. I love it, sir. So the most surprising thing to me, and I would love to get both your thoughts, Anthony and Chris on this, is slide 27 stable coins move. They don't sit still. The question was, how long stable coins are stored before converting. And what we're looking at here is essentially a stacked 100 bar chart of how often people move stable coins once they receive them. So do they convert them or spend them immediately? Versus Hey, do they save them and spend them? And I think even before this survey was released, the conventional wisdom was, oh, you know, people get paid in stable coins, and they just hold them as a inflation hedge or for savings. But what we're looking in here is that across all markets, 28% of people said that they convert their stable coins to fiat within a few days, and then almost more than half, said one to three weeks. So we're really seeing this velocity, if you will, within stable coins. I'm curious, Chris, does this resonate with what you guys are seeing, and does this surprise you at all?
Chris Harmse 12:51
No, I think it's definitely what we've been seeing across the use cases we enable, where customers are starting to see this as money. You know, that's kind of the theme in the report, and you need to spend money. Money has velocity, you know, it's not just sitting in a bank account somewhere. But the beauty of stable coins is that it can be money or it can be this payment instrument, but it can also be infrastructure to build financial products on top of so that's kind of what we see, where on the pay ins and the payouts use cases that money needs to move. So they're either receiving their salary. So you can walk through a life cycle. A developer in Argentina gets paid out in stable coins. He needs to use that stable coin to pay his rent, so maybe he sells it for, you know, local currency. To do that, he's got a stable coin link card attached to that wallet. So he spends it on goods and services. We have a, you know, Visa MasterCard accepted. But then also he's storing and saving and hedging himself with that kind of like digital dollar balance. And then again, you can earn some yield on that dollar balance. So I think it's just showing that it's a multi faceted payment instrument, and you can see that in the way people are using them on the ground. So that's super exciting, you know, in terms of actually, like, analyzing how people are using them, I guess one thing I'd also say is, what we found was the desire to spend stable coins is higher across all current spending levels in almost every category. So people want to actually spend stable coins, but can't. So it's almost like demand is not the blocker. It's actually the merchants accepting, you know, whether they're accepting direct stable coin payments or really being the kind of blocker today. So that's a huge opportunity for for traditional banks and fintech applications to kind of integrate stable coins into their stack and meet that user demand that's kind of been shown here.
Andrew Van Anken 14:28
Yeah, do you think that in order to get more demand, do we need to move the merchants, or do we think we need to get the FinTech apps like, how should we think about how to grow the ability to spend on the stable coins?
Chris Harmse 14:40
I think it's you have to hit it from both sides. You have to go bottom up from the users. The more stable coins are adopted, the more people have them in wallets, the more they want to use them. And then, similarly, more users drive more merchants. But merchants need an easy way to integrate and add them to their payment stack. You know, which is kind of really the problem we're trying to solve. But an interesting stat from the report. Report is that 77% of of users that we surveyed would open a stable coin wallet with their primary bank and fintech app if they offered that. So again, speaking to the fact that, hey, they're these users. They want to use this technology. They trust you already as a bank or their primary FinTech bank, or, you know, primary FinTech app, and if you added it to the stack, they would use it. So I think that's quite a powerful stack. And you know, we've seen that resonate with many of the enterprise customers, going, Hey, we have a theory that our users are going to want this. But you know, do you have any data to prove this out? And now you've got a good survey
Andrew Van Anken 15:32
data point. So really, it comes down to, like, trust, if you will. Like, hey, if my bank or FinTech introduces this product, I would trust them because, you know, I do my primary relationship with it. So it's more about like, trust and like, maybe being like tech forward.
Chris Harmse 15:47
I think it's twofold. I mean, there's a job to be done that stable coin solves for them, just as a user. And then secondly, they already using these things. It's just a little bit more complicated, you know, they got to spin up a specific crypto wallet. Maybe it's a self custodial wallet, and you're doing seed, you know. So you've got to want to use these things today. If it was a little bit easier to use, ie, I have one app where everything is maybe I'm a new bank customer in Brazil, and I don't want to move everything out of new bank. It's already become my primary bank account. I get, you know, lending the credit card, all the amazing ancillary products that get offered through that, adding and accessing a stable coin. What are the stable coin payments do that, not just buy, hold, sell crypto. You know, that's kind of how I think about that, that stat and what we think the users are wanting to do with stable coins.
Andrew Van Anken 16:31
Anthony, question for you. I always think of questions that I send you before, and then I never ask them, and just think of them on the spot to make your life harder. But it seems like at Venmo, you, kind of you guys probably went through this right? Like, I mean, no offense to Venmo, but early years, I don't think anyone was gonna put their money in Venmo. Well, first off, how did you overcome this, like, trust issue, if you will, and then, like, how do you get people to use, like, more of it? Because I'm assuming that, like, in the early years, people would just, like, pay each other, and then, like, off ramped it. But it kind of seems like in stable coins, we're at this pace where people are just sort of off ramping it like, how would you then advise these apps for like, people to keep their money on the platform, if you will, to, like, further, like, grow what they do with their primary app? Yeah, it's a
Anthony Yim 17:12
really great question, especially the trust part. So that actually is why most people were confused about, or are confused still probably about why Venmo has a social feed because it's like such a weird really, still, the only payment app that has social feed in it. And the reason is actually, quote, unquote, like social validation. The way that it works is that, especially pre the days where people Venmo was a household name, what happens is that when you log into Venmo, the first time you are asked to, like, sync your contacts. After that, immediately, the nick the first screen you land at is actually all your friends pay each other. And so by seeing all your friends pay each other, you're like, Okay, you know, I trust Bob. Bob. You just app is probably fine. And so that that is, like, actually the reason why there is a social element, it's entirely actually to do with trust, and it ended up being really helpful, also from like, an anti fraud perspective, because you had this like, social graph that you could build anti fraud algorithms on top of, but that's how Venmo tackled the trust piece. And in terms of, like, keeping capital on the platform, to be honest, we never really, like tried to maximize that, at least when I was there for the first six, seven years, because TBV was always the thing that mattered the most, and user growth. And so don't have a great answer for you, but if I put my macro economist hat on, I think it's just probably gonna come down to like interests, right? I think that's how, that's how you drive, you know, user behavior is like, as interest rates go up, people will save or keep it in cash, but something like that.
Andrew Van Anken 18:38
Well, this past week, everyone was an oil analyst, so now we're all back to being macro analysts. So are we going to get social feeds on BB and Kris? Are we going to see, you know,
Chris Harmse 18:47
I think you know, we're a B to B infrastructure. So we all enable BTB to see use cases, but very much focused on helping our customers add the stuff to this tech.
Andrew Van Anken 18:56
Okay, I can't wait to start a company and let everyone know I'm importing, you know, silks from Nigeria to Kenya or something like that. Any other things you wanted to cover Chris before we kind of do a round robin of questions. I mean, there's so many good little nuggets in here. Clearly, like people are looking at stable coins for a variety of different uses, lower transaction fees, better security, ability to use internationally. I feel like, yeah, there's so many good nuggets in here, and anything else you wanted to cover on this part.
Chris Harmse 19:25
So I think just generally, like, despite this being quite consumer focused, BTB payments is a large part of the stable coin story, you know, so we still have B to B payments. It's probably 50% of our volume today. So I think the nice thing to see is, like consumers are adopting. Consumers want to use it more across many consumer type use cases. But B to B is still at the core and growing significantly, you know, so I think it's, it's just all around hopefully we keep seeing that stable coin, TPV, eat away at Fiat TPV through time, which I think we all think is probably
Andrew Van Anken 19:54
going to happen. Okay, we got, we have a lightning round for you, sir. Non USD stable coins, some. Thing that I feel like in the beginning of the year, people were trying to meme into existence, but it's still less than 1% of total supply. I mean, first, like, what do you think that's low? Do you think it's high? And then what do you think needs to happen for non USD stable coins to really break out?
Chris Harmse 20:15
Yeah, I think so. I was have an FX trading background, originally at bank, so I traded all the weird and wonderful exotic stuff back in the day when I was in banking and yeah. I mean, look, settlement infrastructure has been broken for a long time. So if you can move multiple currencies on chain, you can solve for that instant finality and settlement piece that kind of still runs on the SWIFT system with messages with correspondent banks. So I would love to see more market cap in other domestic stable coins, so you could move domestic currencies and FX on chain. So that's one, I mean, that's always kind of been the promise of like on chain effects and that sort of thing. But today, I think the 99% USD stable coin is really it just shows you the demand for dollars globally. Just it was an easier way to export dollars globally through this technology, and you see that reflected, where should it settle? Long term, hopefully it starts looking a little bit like global trade flows. So where maybe, like USD is only 70% and you've got other ones coming to market. How we get there? I think is an interesting thing that has changed over and over. But for me, personally, I've been keeping a good eye on tokenized real world assets moving kind of equities and bonds and these sorts of things on chain. Because if you think about a domestic bond market, you know, whether it's South Africa, Brazil or even domestic equities market, it needs the cash leg to be on chain for it to make any sense. Otherwise, you actually don't get the benefits of a tokenized equity because it's not settling. It's still, you execute it in a digital in a tokenized format, but you settling it in an analog world. If you can put the cash leg, ie, the domestic currency on chain and settle the equity against the cash leg, you now have a fully on chain asset, and then that hopefully drives liquidity for these non USD stable coins domestically. And once they get to a specific size, you can start doing these direct on chain FX transactions. So that's my theory of, hopefully, where this goes. But, yeah, I guess the tokenization trend needs to stay strong and more equities and things. But I mean, you can see this happening ice investing in, in, OK, X for, like, tokenized futures and all these sorts of things. Kraken is partnering with many different companies to bring this to life.
Andrew Van Anken 22:16
Oh, you set us up too Well, Chris, we've got the data for you. This is a data podcast. You just asked us the questions. We bring you the data. Yeah. Here we're looking at monthly volume of tokenized gold and tokenized stocks trading. And yeah, you can see, like, early November, that like 2 billion. Now we're pushing nearly $70 billion a month. There you go. Yeah, there you go. Any good currency trading stories you're too young to look like you went toe to toe to toe with Soros or Stanley Druckenmiller, but and
Chris Harmse 22:44
definitely too young for that. My only, my only thing is I was on a FX desk when kind of Bitcoin was popping up on the Bloomberg terminals, but had some MD on the desk that convinced me not to buy it back in 2014 so it took me another two years. So that's the faint, that's my faint trade story with Bitcoin. So you had
Andrew Van Anken 23:01
to start a company. Yeah,
Chris Harmse 23:03
how to play catch up. How to play catch up. Somehow, from the early Bitcoin, miss, I
Andrew Van Anken 23:07
love it. No, that's a good story. Talk to us about AI and fintech. Do we hear a lot about agents taking over? I do have a an open cloud claw bot, whatever you call them, underneath my desk right now. Luckily, it hasn't, you know, made any transactions for me quite yet, but love general thoughts like, are we just getting way too ahead of ourselves? Or what have you seen so far?
Chris Harmse 23:26
Well, look, I'll speak specifically of I mean, you've obviously seen a big trend with, like, agentic commerce and kind of agent driven payments and these sorts of things. And I think we thinking long and hard about what that needs to look like. I think there's a lot of fluff in it. Now today is like, a lot of like the art of the possible, but this is normally where these things start. Where these things start, you know, so we paying close attention to that, obviously, you know, there's a separate question of how you're using AI in your business. I think everyone's already using that, and there's enough people talking about that stuff. But specifically on agentic commerce, we've been thinking through, look, if you've got AI agents out in the world, you spun up your opencloud agent, that's out there doing things for you, booking flights. You know that agent's going to need a payment instrument. And there's, again, a job to be done. You know, if it's going to shop at a merchant, maybe today, the best way to do that is to provision a card, a virtual card, and go shop and that sort of thing. But there's definitely a world where it needs to pick a certain payment instrument for a specific use case. And that's where, like, if you are able to provision a virtual account for a certain use case, a virtual card for another use case, a stable coin wallet for a different use case, maybe that's a micro payment use case or a pay per API call use case, and on these kind of agents with that infrastructure. But then what's also quite important there is, like, how you tie that? K, ya, I know your agent back to the developer who's releasing it into the wild. So to speak to the KYC. So know your agent, it's like, that identity layer is pretty, you know, super important. So you gotta, you kind of have to solve this with regulated payment products. It's not really giving your agent a self custodial wallet and let it go wild. And I think we thinking through that quite a lot, and there's some exciting stuff brewing in the background inside. Out. My co founder, Don's Busy, busy building and vibe coding, some stuff, some prototype stuff, so we'll release some stuff in the coming months. But John, I think that's really where we applying our minds, and how this intersection of stable coin payments, agent, e commerce agents all come together.
Andrew Van Anken 25:14
Well, Anthony, yeah, I'm looking forward to my BV and K agent, ordering my lunch every day, you know, and just seeing how I feel, you know, what kind of meal I should get and making an authorized purchase? Yeah, exactly. If you had to start a new stable Coin Company, what would you do differently? Yeah, that's an interesting question. That wasn't my question. It was Anthony's question. So I'll give him, I'll give him
Chris Harmse 25:35
credit card. Yeah, I don't know. You know, what would I do? I think there's still, there's a long way to go. I mean, payments at the end of day is about scale. So, you know, we've been fortunate enough to build a really good business, get to $30 billion of payments volume, and the scale starts to help and becomes a moat in and of itself. But one thing I wouldn't do, which I think a lot of, yeah, maybe I'll answer the question that way, is like we operated on third party, let's say, wallet infrastructure, node infrastructure, for quite in the early days, and realized about two, two and a half years ago, if we really wanted to scale this business, we had to build this infrastructure in house. So we built our own entire stack so we don't run on like, third party wallet infrastructure, like a fire blocks or anything. We built that stack in house, and that's significantly allowed us to scale and build products really quickly. What I think many people have done in the in the stable coin summer and craze is, you know, they took a circle mint account. They got a bank account, stitch a few APIs on top of it, and said, Hey, we do stablecoin orchestration. We did stablecoin payments, forgetting about all the KYC things you got to build into that. So I think those are the ones that are are not standing up. So I mean, maybe the way to answer your question is, like, the lessons I've learned is like, there's actually just no shortcuts to this. You got to build a tech in house, make sure it scales, get the customers, get the volume, and then there's just a lot of brain damage and pain that happens to get the stuff right through time. And then, you know, sometimes you need a bit of luck. You know, you go, you're going to be at the right place in the right time. But an industry that's got some tail wings that can really kind of break you out of the early years of building, you know,
Andrew Van Anken 26:58
I was looking for the shortcut to a series B rays, so can't find it here, people, unfortunately, got to get another broadcast. Finally, last question, what's the most contrarian take on stable coins that could be it right there? I mean, building from the ground up, everything that's quite controversial, but anything else to leave us with? You know,
Chris Harmse 27:14
the one thing that came out of the research, I'll come back to the report, you know, is, like, just the demographics of the stable coin users. The biggest stable coin kind of ownership group is, like, 18 to 34 they tend to be kind of entrepreneurial with, like, disposable income. People think it's like, you know, the local guy trying to take his remittance that's living hand to mouth type thing. It's not really so I think it's this new generation of users. They're digitally native. They already using and investing crypto using digital dollars is just going to be, like using any other banking app or that sort of thing. So I think this new crypto native generation moves as they move through their careers, the purchasing power increase and stable coin adoption, I really think they are going to be pushing stable coin adoption forward, specifically in developed markets, because you're seeing a lot of use cases in emerging markets today, and developed market companies looking to add it. But I think you need developed market usage, ie, you need people to not just be venmoing themselves, but actually be sending USDC for full payments, I guess, in the US. So I'm hopeful that this new kind of digitally native, crypto native, stablecoin native generation are the ones that kind of really keep pushing this forward and help us just move digital payments on chain as much as possible.
Andrew Van Anken 28:19
Yeah, and I think, I mean, obviously we don't have this data over time, but it's interesting to see here that, like, obviously, like online gaming and prediction sites is kind of like, comes to the top. And this essentially happens with every technology where you get it for these, like speculative use cases and crypto trading is here too. But it does look like there's significant demand and plans to integrate for a lot of people, parking, freelancing, selling through marketplaces. So it always kind of seems like this is, like, the year in which we kind of break out of this, like, trading, gaming, gambling aspect, and really, like, move towards this working and creator marketplace landscape.
Chris Harmse 28:57
Yeah, I think so. And I think you're seeing some early signs of this, you know, across the industry.
Andrew Van Anken 29:01
Chris, thank you so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure, sure, and we just want to maintain your record for a number of times on tokenized is really what we're trying to do. Where can people learn more about you? And bvnk, yeah.
Chris Harmse 29:12
First, it's been a pleasure, gentlemen, you can learn more about pages. Chris Holmes on LinkedIn, I'm fairly active there. And then bvnk.com to hear about PB and K and get in touch with us.
Andrew Van Anken 29:22
And Anthony, how about yourself, sir, where can we find more about you?
Anthony Yim 29:25
Yeah, you can find me at Anthony Yim on X or former Twitter. And also, you can find more about Artemis at Artemis analytics.com if
Andrew Van Anken 29:33
you haven't already, please subscribe to tokenize on Apple, Spotify or whatever podcast you use. Finally, if you enjoyed this show and you want to learn more, please leave us a review. Stay stable everyone.