On Ep. 55 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, GTM @ Tempo is joined by Dan Mottice, CEO & Co-Founder @ Beam, Itai Turbahn, Co-founder & CEO @ Dynamic, Matt Marcus, CEO & Co-Founder @ Modern Treasury and Michael Shaulov, Co-Founder & CEO @ Fireblocks to discuss Modern Treasury's acquisition of Beam for payment infrastructure, Fireblocks acquires Dynamic for embedded wallet infrastructure and more!
On Ep. 55 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, GTM @ Tempo is joined by Dan Mottice, CEO & Co-Founder @ Beam, Itai Turbahn, Co-founder & CEO @ Dynamic, Matt Marcus, CEO & Co-Founder @ Modern Treasury and Michael Shaulov, Co-Founder & CEO @ Fireblocks to discuss Modern Treasury's acquisition of Beam for payment infrastructure, Fireblocks acquires Dynamic for embedded wallet infrastructure and more!
Timestamps:
Tokenized is sponsored by Visa
A world leader in digital payments, Visa is bridging the gap between traditional financial institutions and innovative blockchain networks, helping players in the payments ecosystem navigate the ever-evolving world of tokenized fiat currencies with confidence and ease. Learn more at visa.com/crypto.
Tokenized is presented by Bridge, a Stripe company.
Just like the internet made information global, stablecoins are making money global. And Bridge, a Stripe company, is the infrastructure powering that shift. Built for speed, scale, and simplicity, Bridge helps businesses send, store, convert, and spend stablecoins instantly, all without borders or having to navigate the complexities of crypto. Learn more at bridge.xyz
Tokenized is also presented by Fireblocks
With over $100 billion in monthly stablecoin volume, Fireblocks powers stablecoin strategies at scale with infrastructure that enables PSPs, fintechs, remitters and banks to issue, move, hold, and manage stablecoins. And it’s all done securely, at scale, and with built-in compliance. Learn more at fireblocks.com
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Music by Henry McLean
Unknown Speaker 00:00
Simon,
Sy Taylor 00:10
welcome to tokenized. The show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real world assets. My name is Simon Taylor. I'm your host for today, author at FinTech, brain food, and head of market dev over at tempo and no Kai today, he's making his way back from money 2020 he's managed to lose his voice in Vegas, hopefully nothing else. But boy, do we have some incredible guests with you. Joining us is a returning guest, Daniel mossis, who is CEO and co founder of bean, how you doing Daniel,
Speaker 1 00:42
I'm good sir. Thank you for having me Good to be with
Sy Taylor 00:45
us. And another returning guest, it's turban, CEO and co founder of dynamic. How you doing it?
Unknown Speaker 00:50
Tai, can't complain. Still waking up, still
Sy Taylor 00:53
waking up, and managed to make it through the money 2020 madness. But my goodness, that's a good group by himself, but in the middle of a couple of big on chain acquisitions that you might have heard about, we're bringing on the one and only Matt Marcus, CEO and co founder of modern treasury. How you doing?
Speaker 2 01:10
Matt? Doing? Well, I lost a few hands of black jacket money, 2020 but well, otherwise, yeah.
Sy Taylor 01:16
Well, you know, it feels like your home court does money, 2020 I'm assuming for all of you, it's not your first show and not your first rodeo. Would love your thoughts and reflections on money 2020, at some point, if we get time today. But I want to jump into this first story before we do, and I've also got to remind everybody before we get into the content, views and opinions of contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. Please don't take anything we say is tax, legal or financial advice. First story from just about everywhere, there's this company called Modern Treasury acquired another company called beam for a reported $40 million which is very, very exciting. I'd read out the press release, but Matt, remind us who modern Treasury are and tell us a little bit about what excited you about beam and then make Dan blush in the process, if you can.
Speaker 2 02:07
I think we can manage that. So at modern treasury, we're a payments infrastructure company. We're headquartered in San Francisco, and we work with fintechs, marketplaces, really, anyone that moves a tremendous amount of money, and we provide them easy APIs that enable them to connect to the financial system. So to date, we've enabled our customers to move hundreds of billions of dollars, and we work with startups that are getting started up to publicly traded or established businesses. So you could think of folks like Procore launching Procore pay their embedded payments, offering built rewards for helping people pay rent, folks like Navon with T and E reimbursements. And so really, we thrive at the intersection of companies moving money at scale, and we've lived the pain around money movement working with the traditional financial system. And really, how do you build the proper systems to do that? And with everything happening in stable coins, we see a tremendous opportunity to provide modern infrastructure that works across Fiat and stable coins. And really, stable coins is a way to improve on the legacy financial system, but it also needs to be interoperable with it. And so earlier this summer, we got to talking with Dan about what he was building at beam, and we really saw the visions for the companies intersecting around the future of money movement. We were very impressed by Dan, too, his background being early to the space.
Sy Taylor 03:29
You see, there it is. There's the blush in, yeah, that's what I wanted to see. That's it. Very impressive. Dan. Very impressive. Yeah,
Speaker 2 03:35
well, I mean, I'll say, you know, as part of the diligence process, I spoke with a lot of Dan's customers, folks who had worked with him and everybody spoke really highly of the beam team for their expertise, how they helped them navigate this world the product that they built, and beam has worked with customers like sling money, who have enabled some of these off ramp flows, leveraging stable coins and instant payment rails, like real time payments and push to card and so we saw together this opportunity to accelerate our roadmap, but also this vision around enabling seamless Fiat and stablecoin payments through one API and one platform. So we were very excited when Dan agreed to join modern Treasury via the acquisition, and now we're off to the races. Now we're building, working with our shared customers and building an integrated product inside a modern treasury.
Sy Taylor 04:21
Well done. It'd be rude not to bring you in here, but I want you to also reflect on sort of the business you'd built so far, and some of the pitfalls of getting into stable coins and some of the problems you've solved. Because I think that's really educating for a lot of people that have not had to implement stable coins before, but maybe stable coin curious?
Speaker 1 04:39
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And Echo Matt's sentiments about the modern Treasury team as well. We've been tremendously impressed with them thus far and through the process, and we're really excited to work with them a bit more context in what we built while we remained independent, we really indexed kind of the orchestration layer, which was what people are calling it now, as it relates to on and off ramp against and. Payment rails. So a lot of other platforms in market right now have made it very easy to get into and out of stable coins. We wanted to do that instantly via rails like Visa direct and also RTP and more recently, fed now. And so to kind of add a little bit of commentary to Matt's point, they historically have been a key enabler of RTP and fed now in the United States. And as we got to understand where the modern Treasury team was headed as it relates to more directly entering the flow of funds on both the Fiat side and the stable coin side, we really believe that it was a match made in heaven, and we could tremendously accelerate each other's roadmaps. And so, as Matt said, super excited to be building with the larger team now, as it relates to the pitfalls of building in stable coin land, there have been many, I think one of the things that we're very excited about is to become a leading enabler of this technology in a way that's hyper scalable, hyper performant, and can really process the hundreds of billions of dollars that we believe that this technology is capable of. To date, there have been other awesome enablers out there, and a lot of them are now entering the press more recently as it relates to other acquisitions, and we've learned a ton from how they've built their systems and emulated a lot of how they've built their systems as well. But we have kind of in house ideas about how the systems that we're building can be made even simpler and made even easier for people to really take advantage of the tech. And so modern treasuries platform is amazing. The Tech's amazing now that we'll be kind of facilitating money movement as a service for modern Treasury customers. And being customers, there's so much more that can be done
Sy Taylor 06:27
together. It's exciting times, guys, as a FinTech nerd, It's nice seeing the FinTech heritage here. You know, Dan, you came from visa. You've been in FinTech for a very long time before you were in the stable coin space. I think of modern Treasury as like, among the FinTech nerds possibly the nerdiest, like I often reference the explainers you have on your website as the gold standard for like, what I want explainer content to look like. So there's a nerd marriage here that I think is quite beautiful, but it tai I want to get your reflections on this. I mean, we'll come to some other M and A activity in the market in the not too distant future. But what do you think's going on as you see these sorts of couplings, and what signal is this sending to the market?
Speaker 3 07:06
Yeah, so first, I'm biased here, because I think the world of both beam and modern treasury, I think I'm a huge fan of both. So this is really exciting to
Sy Taylor 07:15
see you. Just say they suck. Like, let's have some let's have some anger. Yeah, terrible
Speaker 3 07:19
companies here. Terrible companies here, tough to be even on the same podcast at the same
Speaker 2 07:23
time. I think we have to comment on on your acquisition in a few so watch what you say.
Unknown Speaker 07:27
Yeah, exactly turn about will be fair play. Oh yeah,
Speaker 3 07:30
you got it. That's right. I'm buying some goodwill here on that side note, I've been following modern Treasury since pretty much you guys have been established. Given I went to business school with Dimitri, so I have seen it through outside looking in, and have been a fan from from the sidelines for a while, and same with beam, right? So I've seen it from day one. And for me, it kind of comes back to FinTech rails. And crypto rails are pretty much like the same rails, right? They need to be intertwined, and over time, they're going to be more and more into trunk, right? The movement in and out of stable coins needs to be accelerated. It shouldn't be like a separate topic, right? Today, we talk about it as on ramps and off ramps, but in the future, it's just a thing that your FinTech infrastructure provider should provide to you, right? Just like we don't talk about the exciting world of on ramping into ACH and out of a CH, right? It just kind of works in the assumption is that it's a part of the service that any FinTech infrastructure provider provides, right? And so for me, it kind of looks as a very natural progression of all these rails are financial rails that are getting combined. I'm very hopeful in the future that we don't have anything like crypto conferences or crypto podcasts, but they're just FinTech podcasts, right? And FinTech conferences, right? And that also implies that there are no crypto FinTech companies. They're just FinTech companies that might be crypto first. And so that's why this is very natural as a fit for me, and I think we'll talk about other M and A activity in the space that also fits into that kind of same bucket. That's how we view it from our end. You know the fact that I have to tell someone, hey, you get an embedded wallet in the case of dynamic. But now let me tell you about on ramps. And off ramps is a very weird conversation, and I would rather just say, No, it just kind of
Sy Taylor 09:16
works. Can we get to it just works? Matt, I know you guys have done something really interesting with stable coin backed accounts, or stable coin financial accounts. You want to explain what they are and what that looks like to a customer. So I'm sort of a small business, or I'm a FinTech company. I'm a money mover. What does stable coins give me that I didn't have before, and how does that fit with everything else?
Speaker 2 09:37
Yeah, that was the first foray we had into stable coins was looking at stable coin backed accounts, somewhat like an FBO account that a lot of these fintechs get so a way to hold customer funds through a different vehicle. And I think we've seen over the last few years, it's frankly become really difficult for fintechs, whether they're early stage or late stage, to establish partnerships. Ups, whether they're bank partnerships or otherwise, the regulatory landscape has changed a lot, and so we looked at that as a way to accelerate innovation, so a way to have a medium for fintechs to hold customer funds in stable coins. But the key thing there is the interoperability you still need to interact with the Fiat rails and the traditional banking system, even if you're holding funds in stable coins. And so that's the type of thing we'll accelerate with beam in the modern Treasury product is the ability to hold funds in stable coin back to accounts at wallets. And I think we're going to bring this Fiat lens. Based on our experience, we've done some crazy stuff with Fiat, also some things that are not crazy, just well and at scale. So ACH debits at scale. I think we don't see a lot of that in the stable coin landscape, real time payments at scale. Beam team has done that quite a bit. We're going to add a lot more on there, so you can orchestrate the stable coin to fiat or vice versa flows, and I think even the cross border flows. We've done a lot of that too. And our perspective is it's a lot like effects. You know, we talk about on ramp and off ramp, but at the end of the day, we're moving between different currencies, and you need to orchestrate that well. And one of the things that stable coin backed accounts need is a strong ledger under the hood. And there's been no lack of news about bad ledgering over the last few years. For those who don't remember, of course there was the synapse evolve kind of set of issues there where customers were locked out of their accounts, and some even lost their life savings. And the evidence, it appears to, or is alleged, to, point to some issues around ledgering, we couldn't agree where the money was. I think that's what, Matt, you're alluding to that? Yeah, that's definitely one of them. And one of the things too, is our other product. Our second product is a ledgering database. We built the first Ledger's database product on the market, so we work with, actually, a lot of the leading crypto exchanges, stable coin issuers, and provide that Ledger's offering to them. And so we see what it looks like before they use ledgers. And people aren't ledgering in a lot of cases. And so I think it's important, as we look at like, how do you do stable coin and Fiat payments at scale, hold customer funds at scale, that we don't lose sight of that, and that you have a platform that actually thinks about ledgering as a first class concern at scale, provides visibility to the fintechs. So that's what we're bringing into the space.
Sy Taylor 12:20
I think that's the kind of plumbing that we forget about sometimes when we talk about stable coins, is that if I'm going to build a stable coin linked card, or some kind of Neo bank, or I'm going to do payouts and payroll, or any of those use cases that are really hot, or even just corporate treasury, ultimately, I, as the CFO, I as The entrepreneur, need to build my own ledger and capability, and I need to manage the plumbing between rails and, kind of across rails. Dan, I want to come to you on just any of the thoughts that you have for where we're going now, like, what are you guys going to be focusing on? What do you think the key issues are and the gaps that we have to close to kind of make stable coins mainstream?
Speaker 1 12:59
Yeah, absolutely. In terms of focus for the next call it three to six months, we're really focused on getting to one team, one dream one code base, basically right now.
Speaker 4 13:08
So one team, one dream, one code base. Wow. There you go.
Speaker 1 13:12
You can coin it. Coin it. The various customers that we currently work with at beam will remain untouched, though. It is our intention to holistically integrate the beam product and team into the modern Treasury platform, such that we can arm folks around the world with kind of the best in class technology that the modern Treasury team has created now, with the added kind of capabilities that enable them to use the modern Treasury payments platform under the hood as well. So that's the main focus, and really will be kind of what we're sprinting after over the next couple months beyond that, I think we've yet to see what it looks like when an orchestration platform seamlessly bridges together multiple jurisdictions. To date, we've seen people that have specialized in the United States, for example, a lot of known quantities. In that regard, we've seen others that have come out of the EU that have done very, very well, and, for example, bridged EU to Africa as a corridor, for example. But thus far, nobody's really bridged together all of the above and, in addition, reached into Asia and really assembled this kind of seamless mesh settlement network that we've all been talking about for a long while with stable coins, but haven't yet built. So as a derivative of that right on chain effects will become a thing once that technology and those capabilities are built, and this kind of future state that we all talk about, where a large majority of global commerce exists on chain, will actually come to fruition. And so I personally, and I'm really excited to begin assembling that future on a kind of bigger scale. Now, of course, it will take time. There are business models out there that have you know that we can emulate, that allow for us to do this, but I'm really, really excited for that version of the future where I think the True, true value of what stable coins can offer will really come to fruition. And there probably will be use cases that we've never even thought of that come to market and that are built on top of platforms, like we'll be building at modern treasury and like it Tai and the dynamic team will continue to build now under the fire block. Family. So, yeah, exciting times to come. I think the best is yet to come. And we're, I know they always say this, but we're really still in kind of like any one of many here as it relates to global adoption and true institutional adoption and migration of the vast majority of capital flows actually happens in an on chain environment.
Sy Taylor 15:16
Yeah, it's tiny, but the growth denominator is really significant, and I think that's what people are seeing. I saw in the visa results that they mentioned their stable coin linked card volumes were up 4x quarter over quarter. Now, if that continues for a few more quarters, it goes from being like two bits of their overall 2024, volumes to four, 812, you know, like it very quickly becomes meaningful amount of their overall volume if we continue to see anything like that kind of growth. And I think that's why, potentially, the next story is an interesting one, which is Fortuna reporting that MasterCard are in talks to acquire zero hash for around this 1.5 to 2 billion mark. And what's interesting that this is a couple of weeks ago, we covered the story of apparently, both Coinbase and MasterCard are looking at bvnk as well. Italian. I know you've worked with quite a lot of the zero hash, bvnk, conduit, bridge, type of players in the market. What role do they play? And why do you think somebody like MasterCard might be interested in them, given the role somebody like zero hash
Speaker 3 16:23
plays. Yeah, absolutely. So first again, biased a little bit. Zero hash is a dynamic customer and a very close partner, and we are giant fans of that team. I have no information about whether any of those headlines are true, but outside looking in here, the role a zero hash plays is a very critical role. Really. What zero hash does is moves money from Fiat to stable coins and from stable coins to fiat. It does it at global scale, and it does it in a compliant and very powerful way, right? So, zero hash has MTL licensees. It has licenses in New York. It has licenses globally, and it takes a challenge that is, again, should be behind the scenes, and moves it to be behind the scenes, right, and moves it from something that is front and center to just saying, you need a digital dollar. Give me $1 I'll give you a digital dollar. You need a physical local currency. Give me digital local currency. I'll give you physical local currency. It's an extremely simple idea, but extremely, extremely powerful. And back to the point of when we get the stable coin rails and global first fintechs that run on crypto, those types of companies like zero hash, like beam bridge and others, serve this massive role for money and money act. If you're a MasterCard, in my opinion, you're looking at, again, I am a giant Financial Corporation. I'm in the business of money movement and global network of money movement, and this is going to be a material part of it, and so, and that's why I think a MasterCard would be looking at a BV and K that also does a similar thing, to an extent, there's some nuances, or a bridge, or any one of those, and say, this will be a potential big part of the future of how money moves. And I want to be in a position where I can have visibility into that money movement have a big impact on that money. So that's if I'm MasterCard. That's how I think about it. I'm curious about what visa does as a result of this, right? Because there aren't that many kind of players in the market left with that scale and that impact that a zero hash or bridge or BV and K have. I am curious what their strategy is. But that's why MasterCard is moving the way it's moving, my opinion, which is, it's this critical part of the rails and connection, or plumbing, I think, Tai to your earlier point, plumbing between OG FinTech and stable
Sy Taylor 18:53
coins OG FinTech, I feel like that's a t shirt that needs to happen for FinTech, node con or something like that. We'll make it happen. Viewers, listeners, if you're interested in hearing from Ed Woodford himself, about four weeks ago, we had him on the show when they raised $104 million so I think it was episode 50 in your podcast feed, or if you're watching on YouTube, and he sort of lays out that, I think that there's somewhat of a different business, as you say, between BV and K and bridge, who are very stable. Current centric zero hash has been around since 2017 so they pre date them. They do a lot more around the on, off, ramping directly into other assets. They help financial institutions, do, buy, sell, hold, which is not necessarily something bridge or BV and K or some of the others have really focused on. And so there may be some interest there in helping MasterCards, financial institutions come into that space. Zero hash is a little bit of a different organization in that sense. And then also, as I look at it, you've got to think, yeah, to your point, this is a different rail and a different way of doing things. And MasterCard, don't forget, runs the. K's instant payment network, Faster Payments, with a business they acquired called VOCA link. So it's a meaningfully different strategy. So fascinating. Fascinating times. Any reflections on this one? Dan, as you look at these stories, I know you've just been acquired, there are other stories of acquisitions. What do you think this says about the market?
Speaker 1 20:20
Yeah, I think it's, it's awesome. The validation that I think we've all been knowing would come at some point, and is now coming, you know, leaps and leaps and bounds, validation is here. Yeah, exactly. We made it. I was going to mention the same point on vocal link. I think historically, MasterCard has been the first mover from a card network perspective, as it relates to alternative ways of moving money. The VOCA link acquisition happened well before, I think visa entered alternative ways of moving money. And so it makes sense to me that they'd kind of be first mover here. I hadn't thought about the possibility that they could expose the crypto brokerage as a service, capabilities that I kind of allude to, as it relates to zero hashes, key distinction and where they really crush it. And then, as it relates to stable coin orchestration, broadly, they have, in my opinion, and I believe it's kind of the most licenses of any of the folks in this category around the world, by a pretty large order, solid amount. In La Tai I'm obviously fully licensed in the US and many other places. So as I referenced in my previous comment, there's so much to be done to stitch together this fabric with an orchestration layer, if you will, like MasterCard on top of the infra layer and regulatory coverage that zero hash has built out. There's going to be a lot of really interesting stuff that can come to fruition now. So Tai is point cannot confirm. Obviously, I'm hearing rumors. Who knows? We'll see what happens over the next couple of weeks. But yeah, I'm excited to see the validation and rooting for the zero hash team, as always, we also have historically had some done some business with them in the past, and their platform really does work very, very well.
Sy Taylor 21:47
Good stuff. Matt, any thoughts that you want to throw
Speaker 2 21:50
into this one, I think it's great validation. So we'll see a lot more companies pushing into stable coin payments as they see these acquisitions happening. I'm curious to see what the pace of innovation looks like for these larger companies getting acquired by even larger ones. And I think it honestly creates room for the type of products that we're building together with beam, new startups that are coming out with new ways to handle stable coin, native payment rails. And so I'm very excited for the market opportunity overall, what it means for us as we integrate beam into modern treasury.
Sy Taylor 22:23
Perfect. Well, I'm sure we'll hear a lot more about this. I think as there's always a risk we're in a bubble, and that people are exiting the bubble. But I think the opposite is true. And Matt, I really look at folks like yourselves as being people who only respond when there's a there, there, versus sort of chasing trends and chasing hype. And I saw the A 16 Z's annual 22 and five crypto report kind of covered one of the most interesting trends recently, which is stable coin volume growth has completely decoupled from price action in crypto. So I think it's no longer the case that it's a speculative market. It's Tai you saw that too?
Speaker 3 22:59
Yeah, I did. I'm actually extremely bullish on this right, like, historically, we've talked about crypto as a financial asset, and now we're we've shifted the conversation to crypto at a technology rail with things like L ones like tempo, et cetera. It's moving towards being essentially a very complimentary global first super fast, super cheap set of financial rails that you can leverage. That is a far more interesting conversation to me than price of Ethereum, going up, going down. That's where the value is. That's where, by the way, coming back to Money 2020, conversations. Those were the conversations that were being had. Our conversations about, can we pay can we remit money faster to the other side of the world? Can we pay vendors? Can we run a global first neobank? So that decoupling, I saw that as well, makes me extremely bullish, because it means that we're moving towards the dream, which is, hey, this is just a better way to move money,
Speaker 2 24:04
utility revenue. One thing I'd just add too, I mean, there's the VC data, but on our side, just to add other data points, we see our customers, who are fintechs, moving money in the US, like escrow businesses, for example, coming to us every day, asking about stable coins. So it's very real. It's not tied to the asset prices. People are interested in the technology, what it means for their business. And
Sy Taylor 24:28
Matt, that was the signal I was looking for, which is your customers are asking you for it, and they have nothing to do with crypto. They're not even necessarily the most tech forward in the world. They've just heard of this stable coin thing, and they want to know if it can help them operate their business differently. And I think that's such an important signal, because it can be very tempting in the middle of such a sugar high of M and A announcements and other things going on, maybe we are at the Galton a hype cycle moment for stable coins. But there's also a there, there. I think both of those things can be true, and that. Is a really important point. Listen. We'll just take a quick break here while we hear from our sponsors that make tokenized possible, and we'll be right back. This episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at visa, a global leader in payments. 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 back tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. You can check out the links in this episode's description to express your interest in vtap. This episode is also brought to you by bridge, a stripe company businesses need easier global money movement. Bridge is the stable coin orchestration platform that makes it simple to receive store issue and spend using stable coins. Companies like x Shopify and air TM already use bridge to lower their costs, simplify their global Treasury operations and expand their global reach. Learn how you can grow your business with instant global money movement using stable coins at bridge. Dot XYZ, tokenized is also sponsored by fireblocks. Fireblocks is the stable coin infrastructure of choice for global businesses, from visa to world pay to bridge to Revolut with over $100 billion in monthly stable coin volume, fire blocks powers stable coin strategies at scale with infrastructure that enables PSPs, fintechs, remitters and banks to issue, move, hold and manage stable coins. It's all done securely at scale with secure built in compliance with fire blocks. You get complete control to build your own stable coin orchestration layer, create payment accounts, manage liquidity and access on and off ramps in over 60 currencies. Makes it easier for you to build and scale and expand your business globally. Learn more@fireblocks.com thank you to our sponsors. Already, this story I saw in quite a lot of places, and it struck me as one that was quite surprising but really interesting. IBM has partnered with dfns for an digital asset Haven. Now, strange names aside, this platform is designed to manage the entire crypto asset life cycle, from custody and transactions to settlement inside an IBM z series mainframe. And that's important because most financial institutions around the world, 70% of the world's money moves on some kind of IBM mainframe. This digital asset Haven will support up to 40 public and private blockchains, and it also supports programmable multi party approvals for pre integrated services like KYC and identity and AML and predictions and yield generation and a lot more. It's I know you know this world really quite well. What are your thoughts on folks like IBM moving here? Is this we had to catch up? Or do you think that they can really take this to market?
Speaker 3 28:18
Yeah, it's a great question, by the way. Side note of the day, I used to be an IBM Research employees about 15 years ago. So Wow. On the list of full circle moments that was not on my 2025 bingo card of IBM coming into the space. First huge shout out to the dfns team who are awesome for kind of partnering with IBM, I'm still on my end. I still don't know that I have a really good grasp of what is the go to market offering that IBM is going to go with. But what I have learned about IBM is that, even as a former IBM employee, is that my understanding of their business is very limited, and yet, IBM controls the world, right? They have this massive amount of things that move through the IBM System. My outside, in looking perspective, they probably have identified a lot of customers that are coming in their way and saying, Look, I also want to now move stable coins. And for them, they have to choose a system that is an MPC, right, a multi party computation type system. To do that, they have to establish some kind of first step in the market, in my opinion, again, outside looking in, they're probably leveraging this to test out interest from their customers as to how to bring stable coins into the business. So I read this much more in the land of a giant corporation putting something out there at the first test to gage market interest, versus, kind of an all in IBM's now a stable Coin Company. That would be the interesting, yeah, the lens, I would look at it, and I would argue that if this successful, if in a couple months. And years we see follow up announcements from IBM as to more and more integrations into their system. I think that would be success. I count that as kind of the opening bell for IBM, not the full
Sy Taylor 30:11
product. All right. Well, I gotta move to the next story in a second, but very briefly, mark your thoughts on this one. I don't have much
Speaker 2 30:18
to add here. I think it's a sign for what's happening in the space IBM's giant company here, I think also about products like IBM Watson and so I'm not still totally sure what the products do, like Yu Tai was saying was the go to market offering. So we'll see well,
Sy Taylor 30:35
for our next story, we are joined by another incredible guest, Michael, who's the CEO and co founder of fire blocks. Thank you for joining the show. Michael, how are you? Simon, great to see you. Good to see you. And thank you for being a great sponsor as well. So the next story may even involve you, sir. So hold on to your seat. This is about a company called Fire blocks acquiring a company called dynamic. Now it Tai, actually, I'm going to come to you first. Just remind us if people have forgotten what you guys do at Dynamic
Speaker 3 31:05
first, and sad if people forgot what we do, I hope everyone listening already knows I'm kidding, but just in case, dynamic is a wallet infrastructure company for developers. So if you're building your next remittance app or global Neo bank or payroll app and you want embedded wallets, non custodial, embedded wallets in your app, in order to store money for your end users, in order for your end users to trade new asset classes, we give you the infrastructure to do that. So as a developer, within 10 minutes, you can spin up non custodial embedded wallets for your users within your own UI, own interface. It works today on companies like Kraken and Stripe and zero hash and many others leverage the technology to power embedded wallets and external wallets for their users.
Sy Taylor 31:50
And so Michael You said in the press release, this means fireblocks has the complete stack for on Chain Finance, from custody to consumer. Can you expand and simplify what that means and where dynamic fits into the fireblocks ecosystem.
Speaker 5 32:05
Yeah, sure. So hopefully some of the users are familiar with fireblocks. For the last seven years, I think we've been able to power most of the FinTech and crypto Native organizations that were working in the digital asset space, broadly in crypto, and it really spans across anything from the most forward looking crypto native companies to the largest fintechs like, you know, Revolut and new bank and so on, to all the market makers like winter mute and Falcon X and Cumberland and so on. And then, of course, like the banks now, in the last 24 months, a lot of the inbound that we were getting, and the market that was pretty important for us is also the various remittance companies. So the international money movers, from our standpoint, what we've been focusing for the last couple of years is really empowering both their operations teams. From a treasury standpoint, it's kind of like the fire books UI that people are familiar with, and also the back end development that we're using are what we call direct custody, while there's a service infrastructure and key management to basically create experiences that it's kind of like, you know, more of a sci fi experiences, in some cases, also defi experiences. What we're seeing now, more and more people coming is that they really want to provide their users something that is a much more defi on chain experience, whether it's using non custodial wallets or custodial doesn't really matter. But like, you know, they really want this to be an on chain wallet or an on chain account. I think that's almost the terminology they want to use. And maybe the most important thing about all that is that they want to do it very, very quickly, right? So they literally want something that is a few lines of code to integrate on chain capabilities and on chain functionality into their consumer experience. And from our standpoint, now, we basically have the full stack to enable him to do anything from Treasury, their back end, wallets, their custody, and also then to essentially propagate all this functionality to their end users in a very, very simplified offering that, from product and business standpoint, gives them the fastest time to market.
Sy Taylor 34:20
And so it Tai coming back to you sort of what is it that enables some of that time to market, and what are you hoping the next few weeks and months look like now you're part of the fire blocks family?
Speaker 3 34:31
Yeah, absolutely. So the way we enable this time to market is that you can wake up in the morning as a developer, show up on the dynamic site and have a fully working set of wallets for your customers by midday, right? You're able to implement these better wallets. Show balancers to users, bring in on ramps and off ramps, bring in send capabilities, all within a few hours or a few minutes, actually, very, very, very quickly. That's what we mean by go to market. It means that. If you were to build your version of Venmo or your version of Nubank or Revolut a couple years ago, it would take you years to integrate that infrastructure. Today, you can wake up in the morning and by midday build a very basic version of a global Cash App or global Venmo app or a global remittance app. That is the powerful thing about dynamic, and that's what we do over the next couple months, really, all you'll see from dynamic is abstraction of more and more of that complexity. Can we take it from an hour to five minutes? Can we do it so that you don't have to set up five services in order to do on ramps, in order to think about gas payments? The goal is that any web two developer, any developer that is building again, their next remittance app or payroll app or anything of that sort. Can they do it within five minutes, without knowing anything about crypto? We have lost the plot if we start talking to folks about gas payments or on ramps or anything of that sort, right? And so the goal is to abstract more and more of that away, move that behind the veil, just in the sense that, you know, I don't show up and pitch you why ACH is better than cart, right? It just kind of works in the background. And you don't necessarily need to know that is the dynamic roadmap is abstracting more and more of that, leveraging the incredible kind of security capabilities of fireblocks to do that, the incredible capabilities on the payment network that fireblocks provides, but helping developers accelerate their time to
Sy Taylor 36:25
market. And Michael, before I throw it over to the rest of the guys, I'm interested in your market read on the web, two companies and sort of the broader ecosystem, you probably have one of the best perspectives of like, who are the newest adopters? You sort of mentioned some of the Neo banks that the big ones. But who are you seeing as, like, the customer segments, where momentum is gaining the fastest,
Speaker 5 36:47
so the fastest now that is really, think, massive wave that is now hitting. And I think what people are seeing in terms of, maybe the outside is kind of the beginning of it, but what we are seeing is already the middle, is basically all the international money movers, you know, companies like Ria and MoneyGram and all those guys, right? That's actually is coming in as we speak. And on the back of it, we are seeing the web two platforms, right? So a lot of the conversations that we're having right now that started to pick up post genius act, and especially, I think, after people came back from their summer vacation and actually had a bit of a thinking about what they can do. Here are the big platforms, the big tech platforms, that the situation they have is that they have a very global contributors base, right, that they need to pay money to and they want to understand how they now leveraging stable coins to do it in real time at a low cost. And it was transparency. And I would say, like, you know, that something that that is actually not obvious from the outside, because usually you go, you talk with some executives, and they will tell you, ah, you know, like, I can use a push to back or push to cart or push to whatever, to do those things. Even when you go and you talk with those companies, you understand that, yeah, like, there are corridors that works perfectly fine. You want to push money to people in the United States, or you want to push money to people in Europe solve problems, more or less, you ought to push money to people in Indonesia and Philippines and in Africa or Latin America and certain countries. It's far from being solved, and you will get like different SLAs and different code structures, and that variable user experience or variable SLA, is part of the reasons why it's pushing them to look into stable coins as a first order solution. And then they're clearly also, like, you know, interested in the programmability of that, which is basically the second
Sy Taylor 38:50
order, yeah, the first order. Oh, it gets me to markets I couldn't before. And then once I've got it, oh, wait, it's programmable. I've been talking for a while about the rail above rails, and I think what Dan and beam and the modern Treasury guys who've been doing is to try and make it almost backwardly compatible with tribe fi, but to have this global rail that sort of everybody uses interested dan in your reflections, as you were listening to Michael and it Tai there, yeah,
Speaker 1 39:14
I think obviously they'll know a lot better about what they can do together. I think, from my perspective, what Michael and the fireblocks team have built out over the last several years. Is this kind of segment and industry defining in many ways, and from my experience in the space with time, fire blocks has kind of moved up market into basically an enterprise, kind of go to market motion and customer base, though, I know they also serve a lot of other smaller startups, but the way that I thought about it, without letting this discussion influenced things was that this allowed for kind of the full stack completion of the kind of custody and wallet infra layer. Therefore the fire blocks team can now kind of service, really any customer that comes to them. And now I've known e tai now for a while, so super excited for you guys, and we should find a way to work together now that we will continue to build and you know, we're now entering this next chapter of. Adoption cycle. What I love about doing
Sy Taylor 40:02
this podcast is not just the loving, but it's actually the market signal I get from it, and how much I see, how different people look at the market. And I think it's hopefully the listeners get that as well. Matt is my other trod phi guy here. How do you think about some of the completion of the provider ecosystem? Do you think it's getting more integrated, and what does it mean for that bridge back to the tradfi infrastructure?
Speaker 2 40:25
I love what it Tai was saying about the simplicity of building. I think that's something. As we're going towards more features, it's not to add complexity to it. So if you're a developer building, you still need things to be easy, to build fast to build like fast to market, because then you have faster learnings. And so I do think, from our seat, the so called Web two companies, or Trad two ones, want web three to work like web two, at least initially. And so that, you know, that's like the APIs, the ways of integrating. They expect it to work that way. The other aspects of web three, they can add on later, and you know that I introduced new paradigms for them, but to start with, they have a mental model. We need to meet that mental model, otherwise you're going to hit a wall
Unknown Speaker 41:09
fascinating times.
Speaker 3 41:11
I think that's honestly the name of the game, and that's true across dynamic. That's true across modern treasury. You've seen, I think historically, innovations in web two that were really just around abstraction of very complex things and putting them behind the scenes, right? Whether it's pod with bank integrations or stripe or Twilio with global communication, right? The name of the game is, really, can you take a very complex set of things and put it behind a very simple SDK or an API, right? And that is what we're going for here. I think that's true for both modern treasury and beam and ourselves in Firefox, right? Removing all that complexity and just getting the upside value of hey, you get to tap into this global 24/7 live financial rail that just kind of works. Just don't talk to me about gasses, right, like that. That's really the name of the game here, I think for next couple months and years.
Sy Taylor 42:07
Yeah, Michael, any any final thoughts before we close out today and what you're looking forward to?
Speaker 5 42:12
Yeah, I don't think that we are in a very exciting phase, but I just like, you know, ground everyone, there is still a lot of work, right? Especially, you know, with the dynamic acquisition, right? It allows us to move much faster with the product team and with the technical teams. And the technology teams are definitely the ones that are way more equipped, right, to adopt stable coins and digital classes and web three in general. There is still a lot of heavy lifting that we need to do with the kind of gatekeepers in those organizations, right? So to spend 45 minutes with a 70 year old CFO, you know, and expand them. What is a non custodial setup? What is multi party computation? It is something that's still happening, right? And I think that it will continue to happen for quite some time. This, by the way, why we excited to partner with it. Tai, is that we can now tag team and like, you know, he can do the fun stuff and I can do the the other fun stuff.
Sy Taylor 43:07
No, I think that's such a good point. Is how it's one of the reasons for this podcast is, hopefully this is the episode that you can send to that CFO and say, Look, this is the the sober place where we'd say honest things like that. Michael, which is ultimately, look, Visa said, naught, point naught. 2% of their volume is stable coin linked cards or somewhere around that. It's tiny, and it's not going to solve world hunger overnight. And there are meaningful things that you need to do. But also you've got Matt saying, Well, we have escrow customers using this today who are not at all interested in stable coins or Fiat. They just want a thing that works, and it works better for them, for the problem that they're trying to solve. And once you get to that utilitarian stage, then you can have a different conversation with the CFO. But yes, there are lots of questions. I've spent a lot of time with lots of boards recently doing this similar stuff, but there's a curiosity and an appetite to learn, which is, which is a really exciting thing. Well, listen, this brings us to the end of the time we had today. So I want to thank everybody so much for listening and so much for watching before we close out. Dan, let's start with you. Where can people find out more about you and everything you're doing now? At modern
Speaker 1 44:11
treasury, absolutely. Yeah. And thanks again for having me and for including both the modern Treasury team and assembling this great cohort. Easiest place to find more information on me is on x at Daniel underscore, Mo Tai s and now both at modern treasury and at get beam, underscore cash. So more to come on that front,
Sy Taylor 44:29
more to come. Matt, how about you?
Speaker 2 44:31
Likewise, you can follow modern Treasury, and then I'm on x and LinkedIn, yeah. And then, Simon, you alluded earlier to the content we love writing these like nerdy posts. And so you can subscribe to the journal like I've written some our engineers write them. And so they're meant to be, like, for builders in the space, not just marketing pieces. Oh, heck yeah, it Tai How about you?
Speaker 3 44:52
First to Matt's shameless plug about blog posts and writing. If you want to learn about stable coins, we have a stable coin hub and a great report that you. Can download. You can visit dynamic dot XYZ, follow us at Dynamic underscore XYZ on Twitter, or turban, which is my handle on Twitter, or LinkedIn, if you prefer that. If you are already a firebox customer, you can also reach out to your fireblocks Counterparty and talk to them about dynamic, and they'll connect us. So lots of ways to reach out.
Sy Taylor 45:21
Yes, there's a few firebox folks with some existing customers those exciting times. And Michael you and fireblocks,
Speaker 5 45:26
yeah. So if you want to find us on X, you actually need to follow it. Tai, because I'm not on x, that's part of the reasons we bought them. LinkedIn, fireblocks.com we have a lot of content that we provide there. And clearly we have a very robust presence right across the world and all the territories. So feel free to reach out to us. We have representatives that will be able to work with you. Phenomenal.
Sy Taylor 45:52
Michael, thank you so much, and thank you everybody for watching listening. You'll find me at sy Tai Luon, name your social here, you'll find me ranting into the void at FinTech, brain food.com, and if you're curious about tempo, check out tempo. Dot XYZ. If you haven't already, go ahead and hit the like button, subscribe buttons, or any button in front of you to leave a review and spam all of your friends and tell them how great this show was and that they should subscribe too. We appreciate you, and we'll Catch you next time.