On Ep. 1 of Stablecoin Stories, Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto @ Visa and Ran Goldi, VP Payments, Fireblocks are joined by Kash Razzaghi, Chief Commercial Officer @ Circle to discuss Circle's multi-chain approach and the Arc blockchain, the difference between using and issuing stablecoins and more!
On Ep. 1 of Stablecoin Stories, Cuy Sheffield, Head of Crypto @ Visa and Ran Goldi, VP Payments, Fireblocks are joined by Kash Razzaghi, Chief Commercial Officer @ Circle to discuss Circle's multi-chain approach and the Arc blockchain, the difference between using and issuing stablecoins and more!
Timestamps:
Tokenized is sponsored by Visa
A world leader in digital payments, Visa is bridging the gap between traditional financial institutions and innovative blockchain networks, helping players in the payments ecosystem navigate the ever-evolving world of tokenized fiat currencies with confidence and ease. Learn more at visa.com/crypto.
Tokenized is also presented by Fireblocks
With over $100 billion in monthly stablecoin volume, Fireblocks powers stablecoin strategies at scale with infrastructure that enables PSPs, fintechs, remitters and banks to issue, move, hold, and manage stablecoins. And it’s all done securely, at scale, and with built-in compliance. Learn more at fireblocks.com
***
We’d also like to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they are representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial, investment or legal advice, do your own research!
Music by Henry McLean
Speaker 1 0:00
Then the question is, all right, how do I work with providers to ensure that I have a stable coin that not only helps the efficiency of my business, but can also perhaps even unlock new revenue streams? And that's what we do at Circle. Every day, we have hundreds of people on the business team that wake up every day trying to work with organizations that don't want to go out and launch their own stable coin, but do want a stable coin for their business, and so I don't think yet most companies understand the difference between getting into the stable coin business or just having a stable coin for their business. That's the right framing. I think you
Cuy Sheffield 0:48
Kai, welcome to tokenized. The show focused on stable coins in the institutional adoption of real world assets. My name is Kai Sheffield, the head of crypto at visa, joining me on the first episode of a special series we're calling stable coin stories is my co host. My good friend ran, Goldie. Goldie, why don't you let the audience know a bit about you and what we're doing here with stable coin stories.
Ran Goldi 1:14
Thanks, Kai. I'm actually so excited about this series, super happy we're doing this, because I really want to know what's happening behind what everyone is seeing. And you know, you and I, we've been here for a while, and obviously the world is, you know, filled with stable coins. There are stable coin issuers. There's use cases. People are walking up to a new reality of stable coins everywhere. We're here to tell the stories behind the coin. These are the untold stories that are creating the tectonic shifts we're feeling today. And we've been doing this for a while, and trust me, this industry has some interesting stories. So today we're going to ask our guest, what's the story behind the number one stable coin, USDC. So I'm Rand Goldie. I'm the SVP of payments and network for fire blocks and Kai, if you don't mind, tell us who our first guest is.
Cuy Sheffield 2:07
Joining us is a legendary builder and operator in the space cash rezagi, Chief Commercial Officer of circle. Welcome cash. Great to have you here.
Speaker 1 2:17
Thank you both. I'm excited to be the first guest. This is an awesome series, and thanks for having
Cuy Sheffield 2:22
me awesome and two quick bits before we get into the content, I need to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own. Do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they're representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial investment or legal advice. Do your own research and a reminder this podcast series is made possible by fire blocks in visa. Let's get into it.
Ran Goldi 2:43
So I think cash, you know, before we get into the USDC circle story, I think people would really love to hear your story, because, you know, you're a figure in this industry by now, obviously one of the top execs at circle. But before joining circle, and this was, if I get it correctly, this was around 2020, where were you, you know, what were you working on? What drew your attention before that, and what made you say, hey, you know what I want to be part of this digital asset revolution.
Speaker 1 3:13
Yeah, this is a really interesting question, because in my closest six years here at Circle, we've always had this question internally about who you hire? Do you hire people that come from in the industry or from people that come from outside of the industry? And it's been really interesting to see this play out. I wish I could tell you, six years ago, I saw the light, and I knew that digital assets would take over the world, and I knew circle was going to have unprecedented success. I wish I could tell you all that, but that's not actually true. What drew me to circle is that I knew the founders very, very well. My background has been in technology and sales and business development, and I'd previously worked for a Jeremy lair company, and so when he had just launched USDC, and was really thinking about commercializing USDC and some of the circle products. I got a call from circle about the opportunity, and the first thing that interested me was just the founders, because I knew them. And this goes to show that I don't think you necessarily have to quote be from the industry to be able to join a company like circle and really do a good job, as long as a, you have that interest and B, you have a specific domain expertise, and in my case, it's been sales and business development. So when I joined circle, I didn't really know much of anything at all when it comes to crypto, Blockchain, digital assets, stable coins, my first couple of conversations with customers, I was lost with respect to what they're trying to build, what defi even means. And so I got in really quickly and began to learn and begin to really go all in on it. But it was a really interesting first couple years, and to some extent, I'm still learning every single day, but my background was definitely. Definitely not banking, definitely not crypto, definitely not financial services. And over the course the last six years, it's been a crash course.
Cuy Sheffield 5:06
What's it like working with Jeremy? And you've done it at multiple companies now, and I feel like Jeremy talks a lot about like his experience in the company's building in the early days of the internet and web standards and bringing video online. And now you're uploading dollars to the internet. Like, how did that vision resonate in the comparison of what we're doing at Bright Cove, and then coming into circle?
Speaker 1 5:30
The great thing about Jeremy is he is a long term thinker, and he thinks about these tectonic shifts, so to speak, around how technology will shape the world over a period of 10 to 20 years. He is not a short term thinker, and so when you hear him talk about some of these things with some of the shifts, you have to think about it in the sense of All right, do I believe conceptually, that is even possible? Is that in the realm of possibility? And if the answer is not, absolutely not, then you're probably going to take a bet that someone like Jeremy can be really crucial making that happen. And so whether it was in his previous companies or circle, he's been very much a infrastructure platform kind of guy. First it was infrastructure for media content, and now it's infrastructure for money. When you work with him, he'll say some things that just sound crazy. He'll say some things around structural changes the world will see. And now he's on, you know, a huge bit with with AI, and how AI is going to change money movement and how AI is going to change everything. And so sometimes you got to step back after a conversation with him and go for a walk, because some of the things he says are Korean saying, but he's usually right. He's more right than he is wrong.
Ran Goldi 6:46
And I have to say, I met Jeremy, and I think in 2017 and circle, like cash, said, circle went through a lot of things, right? They had an app for trading. They had OTC desks. Jeremy just does not stop trying to find the right things that he believes will change finance, and eventually, I think, change the world. I believe cash. We met pretty much when you know 2020 obviously, when you started at circle. And I think you already said that back then, which is interesting. I won't forget this. This was one of our first conversations. You said, Look, I'm still trying to get what this USDC and circle thing is. This was probably like your first or second month, but this guy, Jeremy, he's crazy, but I'm following him, because I believe what he's saying could change the world. So apparently, you guys did that. Yeah. I mean, listen, one of the
Speaker 1 7:40
hallmarks I think, of a great entrepreneur is your ability to try a bunch of things, test out a bunch of different experiments, and not be worried about failure. And that man is not worried about failure, and so he will try many, many different things. He'll push the company to try new projects, try new initiatives. Some of them will work. Some of them will not be as successful, but you use that as a learning opportunity. And so yes, circle has had many different iterations in terms of how it has brought products to market, but I will say, from the very beginning, circle was founded in 2012 the company. Mission hasn't changed, right? It's how do you bring economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value. What does it mean to bring frictionless chain of value? Isn't that? Is that in the form of a stable coin? Is that in the form of other digital assets? Is that in the form of infrastructure? So he has been very clear eyed in the company mission, how he executes it has changed, and it will continue to evolve
Cuy Sheffield 8:37
off it's interesting that to think back to the stable coin ecosystem in 2019 you know, 2020 you know, I remember Gemini G USD. There was true USD. There was Paxos with, I think it was Pax USD. At the time, we were calling them Fiat pegged assets. If you remember pegged or Fiat coin, like they're all these like terms, people were experimenting. We tried crypto dollars for a while that never stuck, and so there were concern over usdt, and this was a time when people were worried maybe it wouldn't be backed, and maybe we need to have some onshore versions. What really led to circle, breaking away from the rest of the pack, and I think that they were all launched around a similar time in terms of gusd, true. USD, what do you think were some of the early differentiators for USDC? And can you talk about the role of partnerships, where it seemed like the partnership you had with Coinbase in the early days ended up really helping to bootstrap it was that one of the main pieces, or what led USDC to break out from the rest of the
Unknown Speaker 9:41
class. Yeah. So when I joined in the spring
Speaker 2 9:43
of 2020, I believe there was about $700 million
Ran Goldi 9:47
of USCC in circulation. Just for reference. Where are we today?
Speaker 1 9:51
Cash right now? I think we're around 75 76 billion. Okay, and so we were in the very early days of USCC. Growing. And what I saw happen were really in the summer of 2022, inflection points. Number one, defi began to really gain momentum. And so this idea of decentralization and companies that are building in defi became quite popular with with developers. And so the company had made an effort to ensure that USDC was where defi was. Where are all the protocols, where are all the exchanges, where all the fintechs that are building and defi and the company made a strategic bet that USDC should be the stable coin of choice for defi. That ended up being a very, very valuable bet. It became a correct bet to make, because defi began to grow, and as a result, USDC became somewhat of the preeminent stable coin in defi. That was really great. The second thing is, this is a little bit more on the circle side. You know, for a long time, I would say in 2020 circle was offering payments. It would enable crypto companies to be able to accept regular payments, but have those payments land as USDC. So if I'm the defi Protocol, or if I'm any company building on the blockchain and I wanted to accept wires or credit cards, I could do that, but then the funds would land as USDC that summer of 2020, I'm sure you remember, the NFT boom happened, and now all of a sudden, nfts are going gangbusters. And we had several partnerships with companies like adapter labs that enabled USCC to drive growth. And it became, I think, one of the first moments where people were holding USCC and they said, Oh, this is a digital dollar. And it became clear that you need to familiarize people with what USDC was. So I would say those were the two very first inflection points in USDC growth. And then since then, obviously, partnerships is an incredible way for us to continue to drive growth, especially when you have these communities that these companies foster to whether it's the finance community, payments community, crypto community, Trad fi, they're all enabling stable coins, and they're all, I mean, back then, they were not, but now they are working with these kinds of companies that understand the power of stable coins and generating partnerships so they can distribute stable coins to their audience has been a key driver of our growth.
Ran Goldi 12:25
The first stop for every PSP, for every crypto company, trading firm, exchange, one of their first stops is okay. We need to go talk to circle, obviously, because of USDC, we want to be part of that. But I want to take you cash if I can, to talk about one of the stories that maybe some of the people that are here today in our space haven't fully heard of. I'll set the scene a bit, right? So, so you joined in 2020 we're now, let's say at, you know 2022, USDC, reaches an amazing amount. It's 50 billion. There's balloons everywhere. I think Jeremy wrapped at some point somewhere. You as well, on a stage that was a good YouTube find that on YouTube, if you can. I think, I think we took that video down. Okay, that's a shame. I'll use it in one of your
Cuy Sheffield 13:15
birthdays. We got to go to the archive. It's
Ran Goldi 13:19
gonna take a while, but then a year later comes a really big test, not just for USDC and circle comes a really big test for this industry. There's a banking crisis with SVB, and suddenly Silicon Valley Bank gets shut down. There's there's rumors about signature and silvergate and then USDC for a weekend. If I remember this correctly, gets deep pegged. I don't remember the exact number, but I think it hits like 80 cents on the dollar. People who are maybe not 100% in tune to how stable coins work believe that now their dollar is not worth $1 and that creates like a craze. How did it feel like to be at the center of that tornado, and how did you guys obviously pushed out of there? Because again, the reality tells us that today, you are that number one stable coin. So listen,
Speaker 1 14:14
I'll preface with a couple of things. That period was probably the most instrumental period in my career, when it comes to hard things are happening, what are you going to do about it? And to some extent, maybe I'm masochist, but I actually like being in those situations where you've got this insane thing happening to you, you and your team have to figure it out. And we spent especially the weekend where Silicon Valley Bank was experiencing that we were on calls, I don't know, probably 120 hours straight, literally, there was a Google Google meet that was just open, and people would come in and out of the Google meet as they needed to. So here's what I'll say. I'll preface it by saying, we rely on banks stable. Coins rely on banks. Circle relies on banks because effectively, we're taking Fiat and we're converting Fiat into USDC, and once that Fiat lands, we need to hold it somewhere. We need to hold it with major banks around the world. At the time, there weren't many banks that were super interested in working with crypto companies. There weren't many banks that would onboard crypto companies. So it was very limited. Well, you're land on this on this infrastructure, and now the world has changed a bit. But once that event, it became clear that these banks were in trouble. First, I find it ironic that crypto companies were impacted based on banks not being able to operate, which is pretty ironic. But when it became clear that these banks were going to have deposit problems, and they were having a bank run, and there weren't going to be deposits there, and the banks were, you know, at risk of shutting down. The Crypto community as a whole, started to really panic. And so what we needed to do is we needed to figure out, Okay, one, we know we're good for it. We're know, we know that we have the deposits that back all the USDC, and so how do we communicate to the industry that we're good for it? But if the banks don't get bailed out, then there could be some challenges. And so we were on pins and needles, and luckily, the government stepped in and did make the right move to ensure that all deposits at these banks were safe, and we were able to maintain that. However, I think there's a little bit of a logistical you know, my opinion is that, in terms of the D peg circle, didn't D peg, we work with companies, and they interact with us, and they convert dollars to USDC and back all the time. We don't face retail. And so a consumer relies on exchanges and secondary markets to get USDC. That is where the D peg happened. So we were actually able to redeem any USDC that came to us $4 we redeemed them one to one, and we satisfied all redemptions. But in the public markets and in the secondary markets, rather, I should say there's a lot of fear about what if circle can't redeem and so people were selling for a lot less, which caused that deep peg. It was an extraordinary moment, because you never know what's going to happen next. You never know if the company can survive something like that. We were at a time where we had around 50 billion in circulation, and over the course of the coming months, we plummeted. We plummeted pretty hard. I think we went down to around 20, 25 billion.
Ran Goldi 17:22
What would you say was, like the number one, I guess, lesson that you took from that time, from that weekend, right? Because I would believe if I was there and that weekend, I mean, like you, I would probably get into like, doing mode, and not oh my god mode, but maybe I would probably had this small fear, like, is it all gonna end? But what did you take away that number one thing, the fear was there.
Speaker 1 17:46
I'm not gonna act like the fear wasn't there. Is okay. We've been building for a long time, and we've had incredible progress, and sometimes factors outside of your control take over, and you can't do anything about it. I will say, though, inside of the leadership team, it felt really calm. It felt like a series of things we knew we needed to do, and you just checked them all through your list. And I don't know this is, this is, you know, one of my, one of my favorite movies, is The Martian. And there's a scene in The Martian where he's talking, he's back home, and he's talking to a class that he's teaching, and he's saying, listen, when you're stuck on another planet, and you can't get home, you can do a couple of things. You can solve one problem, and then you solve another one and another one and another one, and eventually you might get back home. I think that's the same mentality that we had, is like, how do you just solve one problem after another, after another, after another, after another, and hope that eventually you get back home? It happened. And so I think the biggest takeaway is like, keep trying to solve as many problems as possible. It definitely
Cuy Sheffield 18:46
seemed like that weekend was a turning point for the space, and really introduced a lot of people and educated around the challenges that the existing banking ecosystem could have on stable coins being able to operate. And then it's great that today, there have been more banks willing to participate in the space and but pivoting a bit to payments, would love to hear kind of your perspective on the evolution of circle in usdcs role in the broader payments ecosystem. I remember the days with Top Shot, when I would buy my digital LeBron James card with a Visa card, then you would settle with dapper labs in USDC. And so they were that was kind of an early not many people were talking about USDC settlement. Then we started working together in 2021 2022 around. How do we test and experiment using USDC between issuers and acquirers, like what have been some of the major inflection points along that journey, moving circle from defi crypto use cases towards more mainstream payments and and kind of what are you seeing now today?
Speaker 1 19:52
Yeah, there are several things. And I'd say that the company in the industry as a whole is still evolving in payments. And so I by no means do I think it's completely. Built out yet, but I think number one regulation, and the biggest difference between now and two or three years ago is that you're starting to see more regulation around the world. And one of the choices that circle made from the very beginning was that we were going to walk through the front door of regulators and local governments around the world to get them comfortable with how we operate as a business, and we did that in spite of the challenges that it would have for growth for us. And so we didn't pursue certain commercial partnerships. We didn't pursue certain growth initiatives, simply because we felt like regulators would not understand that regulators may not like that. And so our approach was, let's make sure that regulators around the world that are open to understanding what digital assets can represent. Let's make sure we educate them, and we've made an enormous investment in regulatory compliance. And so now we're seeing that begin to pay off right genius acts and mica and governments around the world are beginning to really pay attention and issue laws which make it more obvious for companies to start using digital assets, not just as, you know, an investment vehicle, but as a payment vehicle. That's number one. Number two is you're beginning to see more and more infrastructure that can operate a scale. They're more blockchains. The blockchains are more powerful you're there are digital wallets out there that are abstracting away all the user complexity that may have been there in the past. And so now you know, you're starting to see the shift where the technology goes into the background, and you don't have to necessarily remember pass keys, and you don't have to necessarily be an expert in 100 different digital assets to figure out, how do you send money back and forth? And so that's where I would say the evolution is, infrastructure is strengthening. User Experience is becoming much better, and digital wallets are out there that make it super easy to move in and out of digital assets and stable coins. And so when you combine that now, what we need to do is educate the world. How does moving money with stable coins make your life easier, not only as a business, but for your customers? That's the period I would say we're in today.
Ran Goldi 22:08
By the way, cash, what was your aha moment? I mean, when I started, we were doing a liquidity provider, and someone sent me $4 million in Bitcoin, and it took, you know, like, 30 seconds, and I was like, Oh, my god, wow, now my business can sell Bitcoin for me on Dallas. That's amazing. Did you have that kind of moment when you got to circle? Yeah.
Speaker 1 22:28
So as I mentioned, I joined in early 2020, right at the beginning of covid. One of the first projects that circle was able to work on was a project for Venezuela with air TM and air TM wanted to deliver financial aid to covid workers on the ground in Venezuela, but because of the sanctions and political environment between us and Venezuela, you couldn't go through the traditional banking rounds, and so we actually worked with the US government to send aid For on the ground workers in Venezuela who were helping that country, citizens of that country with covid. And so we were able to send USCC. They received it in an air TM wallet, and now, with a visa back credit card, they're actually able to spend it. And to me like, okay, now I get it. Now I get it. You can settle instantly. You can move money around the world that lands in seconds, and you don't necessarily need all the intermediaries in place. You don't necessarily need to have high transaction fees. And money movement can be like content movement. That was the aha moment for me that made this really, really compelling.
Cuy Sheffield 23:37
You mentioned the infrastructure continuing to improve over the past few years, and particularly the blockchains. It seems like circle, early on, took this very multi chain approach, if I recall you, had expanded USDC into many more chains, I think the 20 some chains now than other stable coins had, and so being able to give developers the choice which chain they wanted to dot. Can you talk a little bit more about the evolution of your view towards blockchains and going from multi chain supporting everyone to now, recently, you announced your own chain in arc. How do you reconcile making USDC available on chains versus building your own chain? Like, how do you think about that evolution?
Speaker 1 24:21
Yeah, it's a sort of complicated way of going to market, I would say. But we still believe in an open chain ecosystem, where there are many chains that have achieved a lot of scale, and they have developers that are building incredible tools and products and applications, and it's great to see. And so we want USDC to be on the most compliant chains. We want USCC to be a an asset that builders on these chains can leverage and use for the for the for the properties that USCC has. And so that actually has not changed. But when you take a step back and you look at the adoption curve, and this is where Jeremy lair is, long term thinking, we're still. People in the very early days of innovation when it comes for infrastructure, with infrastructure for global money movement. And so who knows how this is going to shake out? Are you going to see a world where there are hundreds of blockchains, 1000s of blockchains? Are you going to see a consolidation? We'll see we'll see how that adoption curve shakes out, but we still absolutely are going to insure usdcs on the top chains, regardless of us launching our own chain. But the reason we've launched, or we've announced that we're launching our own chain is we think that there's an opportunity to launch a chain that does three things really, really well. Number one, we want a chain that we believe has predictable gas fees, and we want those gas fees to be USDC as native gas. Number two, a chain that has instant finality, so sub second settlement finality. And then number three, opt in for compliant privacy, so selectively shielding balances and transactions. And that is the unlock that needs to be made in order for organizations and institutions as a whole to really adopt blockchains. And so while we're driving this initiative for arc, the other more important thing is we believe in an ecosystem that is multi stable coin. So the biggest misperception, perhaps, with Arc is that it's a USCC chain. It is not. Arc is going to be for all stable coins. It's a permissionless blockchain for all stable coins, and so you will see other stable coins also launch on arc. We'll have some announcements soon that might include that, and that's going to be really, really important, I think, for the development of arc, we think about it somewhat as an economic operating system for the internet, it creates programmable money and on Chain Innovation, and it's public and it's open, but it's also enterprise secure, and so we think there's an opportunity to focus on a chain just that can create those characteristics. But we're not abandoning our work with other chains by any means.
Ran Goldi 26:59
I think that's actually a really important point about the three things you said. Arc wants to really bridge the gap around because obviously, over the last 18 months, you know, we've been into this stable coin craze, stable coin hype. All the incumbents are coming in. They're all now, you know, they're not asking why stable coins anymore. They're just asking, how, how can I do this? How? But as they actually get into the nitty gritty, they ask exactly those questions that you guys probably asked yourself when you were looking at maybe designing arc, which is, wait, this is not private. Or, wait, I can do reconciliation easily with this. Or, what do you mean? You don't know how much it's gonna cost me to move money. And for these payment companies that are not crypto natives, they're not bought into this narrative that don't worry it's all gonna be all right, let's just do this on EVM Bitcoin, whatever. No, they actually want to run a business right then for them, those are real problems. I will say, I think what you guys are doing with Arc, first of all, it makes sense. Obviously other blockchains are trying to do the same, but couple that with and I think this is important circles ability to make it interoperable. Because other companies might say, Hey, we're not going to make this interoperable. We want to make money. We want to be the only one. We want to be the monopoly circle. Now, being a public company, being at the position where it is, can actually allow itself to do this, and allow itself to bring in other stable coins. And I think that's great, by the way, and I'm really excited about that part of the story, the arc story, and see how that evolves. I also want to ask you about what other parts of the story are in circles future. I know that again, obviously, you guys, you can't expose too many things that you can't expose, but we've been hearing about gateway. We've been hearing about other things. What's the next story for circle?
Speaker 1 29:00
It still all coincides with our mission statement, which is, how do you create economic prosperity through the frictionless exchange of value? And what do you need in order to have frictionless exchange of value across the board? And so I think we are, you're seeing a transformation of circle, from being the stable Coin Company to really evolve into being more of a internet finance platform company, and so you have the infrastructure with Arc, you have components and tools and products that make that user experience much better, like gateway and cctp, and those are specific products To make seamless payments and money movement across multiple chains really easy and abstracting away all the unnecessary bad user experience that comes with having USCC on one chain and trying to send it to another chain. And so those are tools that are specifically focused on that. And then you also layer a payments network that we just announced recently this. Here to really create real time settlement and liquidity movement between stable coins, banks and fintechs. And so when you add it all up, you have the digital assets, which aren't just USDC, but you know, we also have eurc, our Euro stable coin, and US YC, our tokenized money market fund. You have the middle layer. You have the you have all the products and services that are meant to make money movement easy, like gateway, cctpe, circle, payments network, and then you have the core infrastructure layer with Arc. We think it's really exciting time to build a full stack internet finance platform where, regardless who you are, you can leverage circles tools to start really seeing the benefits of online money
Cuy Sheffield 30:42
movement before we move on, let's hear from the sponsors that make this series possible.
Sy Taylor 30:51
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 tokenized is also sponsored by fireblocks. Fireblocks is the stablecoin infrastructure of choice for global businesses, from visa to WorldPay to bridge to Revolut with over $100 billion in monthly stablecoin volume, fireblocks powers stablecoin strategies at scale with infrastructure that enables PSPs, fintechs, remitters and banks to issue, move, hold and manage stable coins. It's all done securely at scale with secure built in compliance with fire blocks. You get complete control to build your own stable coin orchestration layer, create payment accounts, manage liquidity and access on and off ramps in over 60 currencies. Makes it easier for you to build and scale and expand your business globally. Learn more@firebox.com
Cuy Sheffield 32:17
so it seems every week we're hearing new announcements of companies getting in the space trying to create their own stable coins. What do you say to an enterprise that wants to create their own branded stable coin? How do you think about the broader white label stable coin space that we're seeing more announcements
Speaker 1 32:36
from this is a hot question. Ma'am. This is a hot question, and it's really interesting to see how people are thinking through options. Here's what I would say. I think you have to fundamentally ask yourself two questions, do you want a stable coin for your business, or do you want to get into the stable coin business? And those are two very different approaches and two very different things, okay, getting into the stable coin business means you will need to have licenses. You will need to work with government officials. It means that you will need to build in distribution. It means that you will need to have banking. It means that you need to ensure that your technology stack works and competes. And it means that you need to be able to withstand different revenue models. When Fed funds go up and down, you need to be able to withstand that. And so now you're going to officially enter the stable coin wars and issue a stable coin that maybe is or isn't differentiated from the top stable coins that are already operating. So getting into the stable coin business is not something that you would just do on the side. We have 1000 plus people at circle that wake up every single day driving utility for stable coins, and we have invested hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars, in building out what we have at circle to get to $76 billion in circulation. Okay, so if you don't want to play that game and effectively put in the resources that are required to scale a stable coin, then the next question is, okay, will a stable coin in any way benefit my business, and I think for in most cases, certainly for organizations that have that deal with Mass Money movement as a whole, then stable coins can make it better for you. And so then the question is, all right, how do I work with providers to ensure that I have a stable coin that not only helps the efficiency of my business, but can also perhaps even unlock new revenue streams? And that's what we do at Circle every day. We have, we have, you know, hundreds of people on the business team that wake up every day trying to work with organizations that don't want to go out and launch their own stable coin, but do want a stable coin for their business. And so I don't think yet most companies understand the difference between. Between getting into the stable coin business or just having a stable coin for their business. That's the right framing. I think,
Ran Goldi 35:08
Kai, I think we need to take Cash's answer and put it on a huge LinkedIn post like, you know, this is how you should think about this, guys, and stop issuing stable coins for nothing. You do not want to get into the business of stable coins. You want to use a stable coin in your business. I think that's a great distinction.
Speaker 1 35:27
And most people, I think what they've seen. And I get it, I totally get it. Most people see that circle just went public. Circle has really great revenue associated with USCC and circulation. And I get the urge, but I think there are better ways of leveraging stable coins for your business versus going out and launching your own and trying to get the entire ecosystem to adopt it. And you know, I've seen posts on X lately where people say, is stable coin network effects game, or is it not as network effects game, etc. If you want people to actually hold your stable coin, it is absolutely a network effects game. What's the point of launching a stable coin that'll just get converted to another stable coin? Why would you do that? Right? Why would you create all that operational burden to create a stable coin that people don't want to actually hold and they want to hold fewer stable coins. So if your goal isn't to create a stable coin that has staying power, that people are going to use and trust to transact with, why would you launch your own? And so if the answer is, we do want people to hold our stable coin, it is 100% a network effects business, and you're going to need businesses around the world, many of whom might compete with you directly to support your stable coin and to drive growth with your stable coin. I think that's the phase we're in today. In terms of, what do you actually really want? Do you want the revenue? Do you want the branding? Or do you want to get into the stable coin game? There are ways to do the former without doing the latter. Cash.
Ran Goldi 37:00
You were the first guest in our stable coin Story series. And you know, just towards the end, I want to ask you our final question. We asked this to all of our guests. Again, you're the first one to get this. But 20 years from now, stable coins are they just a story or a fact?
Speaker 1 37:17
They're a fact of life, businesses and consumers are interacting with them much differently in a world of AI, but money movement will absolutely be in
Ran Goldi 37:27
stable coins. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, cash rosagi,
Cuy Sheffield 37:31
fantastic framing on that note, I think that's all the time that we have. Thank you so much for listening. Goldie. Where can people find more about you?
Ran Goldi 37:39
You can find me at Rand, Goldie at x or rangoli on LinkedIn. What about you?
Speaker 1 37:43
Cash, cash, rosagi at cash, rosagi on x and same on LinkedIn,
Cuy Sheffield 37:49
and you can find me at Kai Sheffield on x in LinkedIn or Visa comm slash crypto. If you haven't already, please subscribe to tokenize on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you enjoyed this you want more, please leave us a review. It really helps other people find the show. Really appreciate you both coming on. Excited for the series. Bye for now.