On Ep. 72 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, GTM @ Tempo is joined by Nicole Sandler, Chief Ecosystem Officer @ Ubyx and Fredrik Haga, Co-Founder @ Dune to discuss onchain data showing stablecoin supply and exchange holding trends, Blueprint raising $4.25M and more!
On Ep. 72 of Tokenized, Simon Taylor, GTM @ Tempo is joined by Nicole Sandler, Chief Ecosystem Officer @ Ubyx and Fredrik Haga, Co-Founder @ Dune to discuss onchain data showing stablecoin supply and exchange holding trends, Blueprint raising $4.25M 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 presented by M0
Stablecoins are becoming global financial infrastructure. It's time for that infrastructure to mature. If you're a brand, you should have your own stablecoin set to the behavior of financial flows moving through your product. If you're an issuer, you want to be the stablecoin partner for the most valuable brands. M0 is the only platform where issuers and brands get together to build digital money products for the world. Learn more at m0.org
***
We’d also like to remind you that the views or opinions of our contributors today are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the companies they are representing. Nothing we say should be taken as tax, financial, investment or legal advice, do your own research!
Music by Henry McLean
Sy Taylor 0:00
Simon, 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 there's no Kai today, he got pulled into some exec meeting or something. Apparently, the guy has a day job, so I'm sure it was very, very important, but not as important as being back next week, which I'm sure he will be. Thankfully, I am joined by the wonderful and always smiley Nicole Sandler, who is Chief ecosystem Officer at ubix, how you doing?
Nicole Sandler 0:42
Nicole, I'm great, and thank you so much for having me today. It's always great to see you, Simon,
Sy Taylor 0:47
always a pleasure. Of course, one time colleagues over at Barclays many moons ago, and also joining us for a debut is Frederick Hager, who is co founder of Dune, been a fan of your work for a long time. Thank you for joining the show, sir. Thanks for having me. No thank you so much. Just before I get into the content, I've got to remind viewers and listeners that opinions of our contributors today are their own might not reflect those of companies they represent. And also, please don't take anything we say is tax, legal or financial advice, or any advice for that matter. This is for entertainment purposes only. And with that, we can get to the good stuff. Story number one this week was following stripes annual letter. They gave us some new data, some fascinating points in there they are saying that their stable coin volume on bridge quadrupled year over year. They announced a tender offer at $159 billion valuation and there was a really cool line in the piece that said, crypto markets are entering a winter cycle, but stable coins are very, very much in a summer. And then just the very next day, there's a report from Bloomberg that stripe was apparently considering acquiring all or parts of PayPal, also somebody that's been doing quite a lot in the stable coin space, Frederick. You probably saw the news as well about circle having an amazing pop in their stock price, because the world seemed to discover that, apparently, stable coin volume grew dramatically year over year. They should have been looking at their dune dashboards, I guess. So, what do you think of this stripe story and the data generally coming out of these stories? Yeah, no,
Fredrik Haga 2:31
it's quite interesting. All over. Stable coin volume basically doubled this year, and so it's interesting to see. Then the bridge volume 4x ing, so basically grown twice as fast as the market. So that's interesting to see. When it comes to circle, all this information is on chain. So you actually don't necessarily need to wait for the quarterly report to see their supply or see the transaction volume. We did actually launch like a big new stable coin data set this week, and where we track a lot of these things, including also the entities that hold them, and the activities that you actually see in how this is being used. And what you can see is, for instance, that there's still, like, a lot that's just held on exchanges. So out of like 300 billion supply, you know, about 80 is still held on exchanges. So a lot of the like holdings are still, like, very trading related. So I think it's in the stripe context. It's going to be interesting to see how much can you trace back to actual payments over time, and sort of see the use cases go beyond because there's a lot of, like, Dex liquidity provision, and then there's a lot of exchange balances, basically where you see the current activity. So it's going to be interesting to see the payments and other use cases that you can actually see happening, and then sort of other entities that, just like the classical, usual suspects in sort of crypto speculation, right? But it's been really amazing to see the bet that stripe has been taken on this, and it seems like the numbers are actually panning out also, which is incredible.
Sy Taylor 3:59
Yeah, it was a big bet, but it seems to be paying off. Nicole, I mean, you kind of covered it from a slightly different perspective. Ubix, I know, works with a lot of larger organizations considering stable coins, and I thought that point by Frederick was kind of interesting, that 4x versus 2x is kind of interesting. I was speaking to a bank the other day who was saying that they view the payments market in stable coins is very, very small, and surely we should be serving the crypto trading market. But actually, if you look at where the growth is, it seems like the opposite. So is that something you're seeing, and where are the enterprises at in all of this? I think there's a really
Nicole Sandler 4:32
interesting question. I just want to quickly go back to when Frederick was saying and that you picked up as well about it being a crypto winter and a stable coin summer. And I think this really shows the 400 billion volume that the utility is decoupled from speculation. And I think that's a really important change, because there's always a lot of conversations where people get confused between crypto and stable coins, and you're definitely seeing that change now. And when I think about, you know, we're talking about stripe, when you think about the Collison brothers, they're not crypto natives like myself. My colleague Kenny will very much say that I'm not a crypto native. I'm from tradfi. I work now with people who have been crypto native, or are crypto natives, and I think that's one of the changes. When you think about what stripe are doing, that's showing you that it's really a payments thesis rather than a crypto thesis, and you're seeing that with the enterprises as well. And I think that's a really interesting change, and something that we're keeping a close eye on. Because we're not focused on crypto, per se. We're focused on stable coins and digital money like tokenized deposits and tokenized money market funds. And that's where you're seeing a lot of the market moving to the 400 billion volume to us is very, very interesting.
Sy Taylor 5:38
Yeah, I think that was an ultimate bit of data about the overall payments market, rather than bridge specifically Frederick. You'll correct me if I'm wrong on
Fredrik Haga 5:47
that, but yeah, they use dune data underneath. So yeah,
Sy Taylor 5:51
everybody does. I don't know how many people have vibe coded a dashboard in the past four or five months using dune APIs, but I was definitely somebody who reached out and said, Hey, can I have an API key? So if you haven't already done that, folks, and you're not vibe coding, then it's very worth it. Any question you have about stable coins, then do go ahead and do it.
Fredrik Haga 6:10
I can give you some alpha or MCP is coming out on Monday, so I think it's the same day as this episode goes live. So we now have a new stable coin data set and MCP, no excuses anymore. You can actually go and do all the things. And I
Nicole Sandler 6:23
think the phrase I've heard most this week in the team is vibe coding. So it's great to be hearing it today as well.
Sy Taylor 6:29
Oh no, I'm addicted. It's problem literally reached the point where I can't close the laptop while I'm commuting. Just it's still running. Claude's still running. I can't close it just yet it happens to all of us having far too much fun. I thought it was interesting that PayPal stock popped 7% on this Bloomberg report. PayPal has not been growing nearly as fast as some of the other companies in payments for quite some time. Adjen sort of got dinged a little bit by the market for not growing as fast as its guidance, so that you have stripe out here at 34% TPV growth, you have agin somewhere in the 20s, and PayPal down at seven, not really growing much above inflation at all. And in the internet economy, it seems to have missed out on that. But PayPal has been a big player in stable coins for quite some time, they have some interesting assets. So Frederick, I'm interested in your thoughts on PayPal as a stablecoin issuer. Can they or somebody else ever activate Venmo and the size and scale of that network that they have, or does it need to get bought by somebody else to make that happen?
Fredrik Haga 7:36
Yeah. So pyusd, their stablecoin, has actually grown tremendously last year. So it's up 750% in supply. So that part of their business is actually going fantastically well, even if other parts are more sluggish. So maybe that even is an angle for stripe right where they're also making all their aggressive stable coin plays. So their supplies at about 3 billion now, so they're actually basically about 1% on the total market. So you could argue that's a decent amount or not that much, but at 750% growth rate in supply, they actually do have a credible play there. I think I don't know how much I would wait on, like M and A of this size on the stripe side, seems like a bit of an elephant to swallow. I checked the numbers. There's the PayPal team is 3x the size of the stripe team. It's like 8000 versus 27,000 or something. It's kind of weird that the like 8000 people company is swallowing the 27,000 people company. So I don't know how they would even think about that from like, an integration perspective.
Nicole Sandler 8:43
But I think it also goes back to something Simon was saying at the beginning. It's, what would stripes play be like? Why do they want to acquire it? Either because of Venmo? Is it because of Braintree? And trying to understand that, and when I think about it in the wider stable coin play, obviously, stripe is doing a lot in this space. You know, Bridget's proprietary owned by stripe. But actually, for me, the more important question the industry should be asking itself is, as volumes continue to grow across multiple issuers and multiple platforms, does the market actually need a settlement infrastructure that is owned by a single player, or should it be a neutral clearing layer? And that, to me is the interesting question, which will come as no surprise to you.
Sy Taylor 9:23
Simon, yeah, no, the Clearing Company is proposing, sort of the shared clearing layer. How surprising, I think the there's also a part of opportunism here. PayPal, at its height, I think, was valued at three, $50 billion and before this room, moat was valued at about 40. That's a bargain basement price for something with really meaningful revenue. I think they closed the year with $1.79 trillion of total processed volume. Just puts that stable coin volume for the whole industry into perspective, doesn't it, when we're talking about trillions, but stripe got from one point. 4 trillion in 2024. To 1.9 trillion in 2025. They added 500 billion of total process volume in a year, and they noted in their annual letter that was accelerating through q3 and q4 so it looks like 26 could be a huge year for them. So really interesting that there are now two types of payments companies, those who are growing and those who are not. And the ones that are growing appear to be the ones that are indexing themselves towards the companies of tomorrow, the companies of growth. And so by making acquisitions like bridge, by being on the front foot with AI, you put yourself in that right place. And I think sometimes more conservative organizations go, oh, well, stable coins are still small. What's the point of doing that? And I would say this is a case study for why you want to lean aggressively into market share when a market is small. Because when a market is small, market share is very, very cheap. By the time it's massive, then market share is very, very expensive, and you're gonna have to pay more to buy back in, and you're not going to get as much of it as you would have done earlier on. Yeah.
Fredrik Haga 11:07
Case in point, I was looking at the data about so the stable coin supply grew about 50% in the last year, but the market share has hardly changed in terms of on the big fish. So for USDC and usdt, their market share is almost fixed. And it's kind of interesting that there's this much happening in the space, and then with the smaller players, there's more of like a turnaround, or like someone's moved out and someone's moving up, but 89% of the supply is still USDC and usdt, and it's actually pretty fixed, so that, I think, makes your point pretty well that even if there's a lot of buzz happening, these Giga players are still maintaining massive market share.
Sy Taylor 11:48
Sometimes being early in the thing that explodes is worth you sort of taking a few small bets, isn't it for sure? Well, if rumors of stripe acquiring PayPal weren't big enough for one week, then meta, formerly Facebook, have apparently, according to a scoop from Ian Allison CoinDesk, I believe it was so shout out to Ian. He's been doing God's work for a long time. Has sent stable coin RFPs to several companies. So it looks like the tech giant is getting into piloting stable coin integration. H2 2026, with a rumor of stripe being the front runner as a pilot partner. Meta aims to enable stable coin payments across Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, with 3 billion users globally. Can you spell distribution and of course, some context here is the genius Act signed in July of last year. Does ban big tech firms from issuing stable coins starting in November 2026 and meta's launch window is right before that. So fascinating. There's so many places to go here. Nicole, though I do want to start with you because of the regulatory angle. I don't know if you saw today as well, the OCC last night dropped their proposed rule for the genius act. So we have the legislation, we did not yet have the regulation, which I think have been keeping a lot of people on the sidelines. So yeah, there's a lot of history here with meta. What are your thoughts?
Nicole Sandler 13:21
So I find it so interesting that meta are doing this, and I understand the play. I've heard a lot of people today actually talk about it as the Libra 2.0 and I'm like, but it's not Libra 2.0 and we have to be very clear about the distinction between what happened in 2019 and what's happening now. Like 2019 was essentially a new currency, and it was looking at monetary sovereignty. And I, I was actually sat in an expert group at the European Commission when this was all kicking off, and honestly, the regulator's faces when they were listening to the idea that Libra matter was going to create a new currency was not something that was particularly welcomed, I think, is the English diplomatic way to say it, because essentially, they ask, well, forgiveness instead of permission. Now, someone that's worked with regulation for very long time knows that isn't necessarily the right way to go. You should generally ask for permission where you can, particularly in this and I think what's also interesting was Elizabeth Warren's recent letter. Now the shift with warrant letter was about market power. So here is a large difference. Back in 2019 meta essentially picked a fight they couldn't win, because it was about monetary sovereignty. Now it's about market power. That is a fight they could win, because back then, it was against the central banks and the regulators simultaneously. And that's not a great play. So I think that was particularly interesting. You made the point about the ban. November 2026 so to me, that means it looks like they've listened and learned from their past mistakes where they ignored regulation before, and now they're going hang on. There is regulation that we need to be factoring in. We need to factor in and get this going before that. November. 2026, deadline. And also, I think they will have been seeing the news from the SEC regarding looking at stable coins as cash equivalents, or pushing it further towards the cash equivalents, because that's one of the biggest challenges that exists today as well, that they're not treated as cash equivalents, and their market needs to move with that in that respect. So I think it's a super interesting play.
Sy Taylor 15:20
Can I just ask you to explain the impact of stable coins not being cash equivalents for a global treasury, you know, meta sitting on billions, if not trillions, in cash. They have operations in 190 countries. They're probably more exposed to moving money cross border than most companies in the world are given the scale of their operations. They're doing that in Fiat today with the correspondent banking system. They've not yet adopted stablecoins To solve that they possibly could. But this cash or cash equivalent thing comes back into the picture,
Nicole Sandler 15:55
yeah, so it's essentially treated as a financial instrument instead of a cash equivalent, which means that from an accountancy principle, you've got a challenge of having them from accounting that is essentially the challenge for them, that if it's not treated with cash equivalent, there are accountancy issues that come up.
Sy Taylor 16:11
Yeah, it's horrible to deal with the additional capital charges that you have to kind of manage on that basis. And I really do think Frederick that meta could be seen as sort of public enemy number one by regulators so easily, but we now have the genius act as law. And the genius act, rather than making the dollar essentially weaker, if you're holding a stable coin, you are holding something, probably with a National Trust, chartered bank, so there's a bank there that the regulator can grab by the throat, and there's access to the dollar, and it's enhancing the role of the dollar, if anything. So how much do you think that regulation makes a difference, and how much do you think it's just like stable coins have matured? Yeah, I
Fredrik Haga 16:54
think the regulation is definitely like a huge unlock. I know some of the folks that's been working on this. And I don't think they had a fun time flying to Geneva, setting up, trying to be, you know, super neutral and then what, not in every respect they could. But nevertheless, it was sort of very, very hard to pull off for whatever reason. So I think, obviously the regulation is a huge unlock, but I think also the whole tech and everything it, in a way, it's a more practical and sober time, if you will, in crypto, right, where it's actually okay, let's just use dollars. And it seems like they're not even building their own chain, you know, maybe they will be on tempo Simon, but it's, I think, pretty cool if they're taking a more practical approach, you know, I think a lot of crypto has been very out there. And like, you know, let's reinvent all the things all at once. And just if we can send dollars more efficiently around the world and then connect to this type of global social network, that's a huge thing, and very exciting. And if they can do that, we'll clear rules and not sort of piss anyone off in the process. I think that's a incredible thing. I mean, I'm sure they'll piss off some some banks or payment providers along the way, but all in all, for the users of money, so to speak, it's pretty compelling. And I think also, of course, there's this like, theoretical argument of like, oh, the blockchain, you can just send money anywhere. But of course, most people don't care about the blockchain, and sort of are not really like wallet holders, right? So if I wanted to send you guys, we're in different countries MONEY, it's still kind of hard unless we use the same FinTech app, like a Revolut or something, or you guys have crypto wallets. But if it's going into WhatsApp and messenger like, that's a whole different game. And suddenly you can make it real, this sort of theoretical argument of the blockchain being this global, actual thing to facilitate payments. So I think that that'd be incredible if they really lean in. Yeah, I think
Nicole Sandler 18:49
it's super interesting. The you know, if I think about WhatsApp, it's the primary financial communications layer, I think across Africa, Latin America, Southern Asia. So I think you said at the beginning, Simon, like 3 billion users transacting. I mean, that is massive, and it's across multiple geographies. It's also across multiple stable coins, to the point that was made earlier. This isn't about Libra create or Facebook meta creating a stable coin. It's about using established stable coins, and it's also looking at multiple receiving institutions. So from where I'm sat, it's a many to many problem, but in its most extreme form. And so then they'll have to be one. Would have to consider whether bilateral integration can serve that scale or not. And I would sit on the fence of they cannot. So you need to look at the issue. It's connecting to every receiver independently, like the fragmentation that could exist. And I think that goes back to my earlier point about looking at neutral clearing infrastructure to help when you've got 3 billion users, but I think it's a really, really interesting play by meta.
Sy Taylor 19:52
Yeah, they are a very scaled organization, without question. They're massive. And there's something I wrote a while ago that I. Said there's no WhatsApp for money, and I speculated that stable coins would become the WhatsApp for money, but I didn't put two and two together that those stable coins would run through WhatsApp, the WhatsApp for money. Like it's now kind of obvious when you say it out loud, but at that scale, a lot of blockchains aren't really ready for the speed and scale. Facebook or most organizations, if they were to try and run their existing operations through most blockchains, there's a handful that are kind of performing they'd break them. And then if they would try and use that blockchain and do it in a compliant way, again, they'd run into all kinds of edge cases. So I do still think there's value in upgrading the infrastructure. And why I do what I do at tempo, there's still going to be a need for something that's resilient, scalable and robust, but it is to serve that next type of customer that's coming to the market. I think the last sort of five years of stable coins have been about crypto traders and the long tail. The long tail has proven that it works, and now it's kind of coming up the market. One wild card idea I want to throw at you guys and react to this for me, meta is spending something like 115 to 130, 5 billion in capex in 2026 mostly for AI and agentic. What happens when those agents are buying things through Instagram or WhatsApp, or could they be agents that help somebody in the global south manage their money? And would they do that on stable coins? Frederick, there's a whole meta narrative. There's a lot of discourse around sort of agentic and stable coins. What's your take on that,
Fredrik Haga 21:37
from first principles? I think it makes sense. Crypto is sort of money for the internet, and that's always like been the case. Frankly, one of my first epiphanies with Ethereum was way back in 2015 I read some like introduction to solidity or something. And this concept of like, the function is payable, like you paid money and it executes, blew my mind. And I think still, 15 or 10 years later, that hasn't really been like utilized in the large scale way. But now I think really with AI, if they want to transact, running calls on the side, and running agents and all these things, right, and it's very easy to see that they should then want to finance something they're doing. And so I think that makes a lot of sense. And the x 402 protocol, also, where you can have agent tech payments without accounts and complicated API keys and whatnot, is also super interesting. And we have the data on the volumes. It's had some like crazy spikes, and it's dropped down again. So it hasn't really, like seen runaway adoption.
Sy Taylor 22:40
It's hard to say Frederick, whether we're early or it's just incorrect that agents will be making payments. But I think the idea intuitively of I have a personal chief of staff that can do my taxes and can buy things and can also make some shopping and like, just Yes, just take over my life, please. The sooner the better, but I want that to be secure and I want that to be private. So there's a lot of concerns that kind of exist around that, but intuitively, it makes a lot of sense, and we should get it, but if we are early with some of this stuff, then, to your point, about x4 or two volumes going down, then maybe we're in the WAP era of it, rather than the iPhone era. So we'll maybe see this continue to evolve, and we'll follow this story as we go.
Fredrik Haga 23:24
One more I think interesting point on this is, I think a lot of crypto has been, like, very complicated. The financial tooling you have on the blockchain, and I think beyond, like, some very sophisticated traders and whatnot, a lot of this has not been utilized. But one interesting thought experiment is, okay, when, like, intelligence is in abundance, actually, your agent could decide to use a lot more of this tooling that the blockchain has built has sort of been over engineered for humans, because you don't want to think about all these pools, all these parameters, but if you're literally, like, sort of raw intelligence, you could actually maybe go and, Like, buy options to go to, like the cinema or like, do all kinds of sophisticated trading around trivial things, or hedge exposure, and use that sophisticated toolkit that the blockchain has provided to way larger extent, where we've basically been capped by like, human cognitive capacity on a lot of these things. So I find that interesting also, maybe there's more sophisticated in financial interactions that can happen between agents, because they as
Sy Taylor 24:25
an example, I think there's a company called Daydream, forgive me if I got the name wrong, that helps people with Tesla power walls, buy and sell energy when somebody's got too much and somebody's got too little, and then the AI agents kind of negotiate the price for that, and then that settles on a crypto market as poor because that infrastructure is naturally there. It's easy. You can plug into it. It doesn't cost a lot. You don't have to build it yourself. It's just kind of sitting there, secure. And so then it's about building those networks above it. And remember, agents aren't legal persons. They can't get a bank account, necessarily. You can. Give them a wallet quite easily. You could also technically give them a virtual card too. And I think people will start to do that. But we could just be early. After all,
Nicole Sandler 25:08
can I just add something else that I thought was really interesting, because we're talking about agentic AI is the 2025, annual letter from the Collison brothers, which essentially described agentic AI as being very in its early stages in commerce and E commerce. And I think that's an interesting signal, because I actually think for agentic Oi, stable coins are a natural rail for agentic commerce, and that's why the meta play is so interesting.
Sy Taylor 25:33
Great point. Yeah, I think that sort of brought it together almost perfectly. Nicole, I think it's a really good example, and probably nobody has a better window on it than the Collison brothers do.
Nicole Sandler 25:43
And I think it's Patrick Collison who's on the meta board. I think he was appointed in April last year. So it doesn't seem so coincidental, all these things coming together. How about
Sy Taylor 25:53
that great point? I'm glad I didn't throw to the ad break immediately, and we got that one in. But now I really do have to throw to the ad break, because we we have to thank our sponsors that helped make this show possible. This episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at visa, a global leader in payments visas, 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 sponsored by privy, a stripe company, stable coins, can move money anywhere, but only with powerful wallets at the core, trusted by more than 100 million accounts across 180 countries. Privy powers, secure, customizable wallets that enable you to go global from day one, from fintechs to consumer apps. It's the infrastructure making the future of money programmable. Start building with privy. Learn more@privy.io This episode is sponsored by mzero. Stable coins are becoming global financial infrastructure. It's time for that infrastructure to mature. If you're a brand, you should have your own stable coin set to the behavior of financial flows moving through your product. If you're an issuer, you want to be the stablecoin partner for the most valuable brands. M zero is the only platform where issuers and brands get together to build digital money products for the world. Mzero. Make your own money. Get started on mzero.org. Thank you very much to our sponsors. The next story was about redot pay. Who are apparently, I ring eyeing a $1 billion IPO at a $4 billion valuation. So they raise a billion. This is the Hong Kong based stable coin payments company looking at a US based IPO, targeting that valuation of 4 billion. They're working with big banks like JP, Morgan, Chase and Goldman and Jefferies on that offering. And of course, if you're not familiar with read up pay. They offer crypto linked payment cards and stable coin payment infrastructure accepted by one 30 million merchants worldwide, so similar to a rain, similar to what bridge now does in card issuance as well as other infrastructure. Talks are apparently in the early stages, but it could be interesting timing so Nicole Hong Kong and us, IPO and geopolitics. What are your thoughts on this one? Well, to me, a
Nicole Sandler 28:45
Hong Kong company listing in New York shows a US regulatory clarity is coming. And you know, when you talk about the companies advising so jpm, Goldman, Sachs advising a stable coin payments company, and I can't talk for you, but if someone had told me they were going to be doing that 24 months, 24 months ago, that would have seemed unusual, not not out of the question, but unusual. But now I wouldn't really raise an eyebrow about it, and I think that's a fundamental difference. But I think
Sy Taylor 29:15
everything is meaning. Yeah, meaningful. It's interesting. It's meaningfully different. Some context as well. Redot pay is a licensed virtual asset service provider in Lithuania and Argentina, but it has money lender and trust licenses in Hong Kong. I saw this week as well that Hong Kong are going to issue the first stable coin licenses in March For 36 applications, so that you'll see Standard Chartered ant group and Bank of China among the applicants. Very hard to get a read on where the Hong Kong China split is on stable coins, because a lot of the Western reporting of what's happening in China is that, like stable coins, are very much banned. We want to move away from them, but Hong Kong's kind of going the other way on it. So. Still some strategic autonomy that appears to be happening. Frederick, do you have anything on read up, pay. Have you seen these guys before? Do you have any context on them?
Fredrik Haga 30:09
Not particularly familiar, to be honest. But it's a peculiar thing to go public at this type of scale. These days, it seems to me like you know you kind of need to be 10 billion plus, or at least hope for that to get real attention. So it does indicate to me, or I presume, that you're trying to lean into the momentum of, like, stable coin narrative and whatnot, and if they can raise a billion dollars on the back of that, well, good for them. But listing on in New York, $4 billion company seems like typically under what you usually see these days.
Sy Taylor 30:42
Yeah, and I wonder how much of that's a stablecoin narrative, right? Like this is a Forex valuation jump in the past year Nicole. That's quite meaningful too.
Nicole Sandler 30:52
It is. But just going back to Frederick's point, and it picks up what you said. So I said, of the Hong Kong company listed in New York, you spoke about Argentina and Lithuania as being licensed, perhaps. But to me, they're now being in New York, which is a signal of where the institutional capital wants to sit for the sector, or one of the institutional and I think that's something to consider as well.
Sy Taylor 31:14
Yeah, if you're listing in New York, do you go NY, DFS, and do you look to go bit license like it's a very hard place to get directly regulated. And then are you trying to get access to institutional capital? You know, what's the goal? And when
Nicole Sandler 31:26
you're talking about a jump from 1 billion to 4 billion in under a year, are we looking at explosive growth? That's one consideration, or is it that they've actually the market's priced in the broader stable coin situation at the moment? And I think it could be both, but I would lean more towards the latter.
Sy Taylor 31:42
Yeah, entirely possible. I mean, again, the circle news sort of speaks to that, although in their last earnings, I think visa said that stable coin linked cards had exploded something like from 1 billion annualized run rate of volume to about 5 billion in about two quarters. So 5x in two quarters. That's pretty meaningful. If it continues at anything like that growth rate. There is explosive growth there. And again, the market at the moment, is rewarding growth. Look at PayPal versus stripe. Look at all the stories we've talked about today. There are two types of companies, those that are growing and those that aren't. And I think capital is trying to find any way it can, and it's really becoming a bit of a power law to get to those ones that are growing and speaking of a company that just seems to print money, literally and figuratively, tether are investing in wop with a goal of bringing stable coin payouts to the Creator economy. So wop is an internet marketplace where creators have generated over 2 billion in sales, selling things like training courses, access to communities, and wop is going to integrate tethers wallet development kit to enable usdt and USAT stable coin payouts to those creators. And recent history of wop was that they raised 18 million at an $800 million valuation in mid 2025 and so this is potentially a big, big old jump, if tether is getting involved in what they could do for them. So tether International, you know, really is the currency of the Global South. It's the offshore dollar. Frederick, they really are pushing hard at payments in lots of different ways, sort of buying adjacencies. Is this fitting that narrative, or are they still very much the trading coin?
Fredrik Haga 33:30
Yeah, good question. I mean, obviously, as you alluded to, it's just the insanely profitable business, I think, first and foremost. So they have a lot of lot of cash to do things with so and it really does seem like they're going more aggressive into various categories and adjacent venues. But yeah, I think there is probably some play where they want to see tether being used in more places, and not just for crypto trading and things like this seems to be interesting to them. And if you have very long tail payouts, or like to sort of the edges of the network, and you have a lot of cross border stuff, and this creator economy, I can see how that fits, maybe their strategic objectives, if they want tether to become more global payment and beyond, sort of the crypto trading thing.
Nicole Sandler 34:20
And I agree, what I thought was really interesting was that they were taking equity rather than just having a commercial partnership. And that seems to be a broader pattern at the moment that I frankly think is worth watching. You know, that's increasingly making strategic equity investments across multiple companies, which could make them look less of a stable coin issuer, and almost more like a holding company, with stable coin distribution as a strategic logic, potentially, I think it's something that's definitely worth considering and thinking about.
Sy Taylor 34:51
Yeah, if you are throwing off that much profit, what do you deal with it? And as a holding company, you know they're getting into gold, they're sort of buying. In a lot of gold. I think they're one of the world's largest buyers of gold, outside of the central banks. So this is cheering an incredible organization.
Fredrik Haga 35:08
They did 10 billion in profit in 2025 it's a lot in profit, so
Sy Taylor 35:16
rates coming down might impact that a little bit. But even if they did 5 billion in profit like they're one of the world's most efficient companies. And so what do you do if you are the I think there are some countries like Bolivia and Ecuador and other parts of the world where stores will price items in the store in usdt with the tether logo specifically, and that is now how you interact in dollars in many parts of the world. So this is the currency of the Global South, and in the Global South, why can't we have creators and why can't they get paid? So fascinating times the modern day Berkshire Hathaway might be here. We've got a little bit of time left over. So one story we didn't have time to cover this week was Kraken launching its tokenized equity perpetual futures exchange with 20x leverage. So it trades the s, p5, 100, NASDAQ, Nvidia, Apple, Tesla, around the clock, Frederick, these RWAs pups, sort of exchanges are popping up. What's your readout on Krakens move and we saw Coinbase are now launching tokenized equities in just regular old stocks. Are all the crypto businesses and the exchanges trying to become super apps? Like, what's happening here? Yeah, I think
Fredrik Haga 36:32
there's definitely, like a bit of a convergence between the crypto world and the fintechs, the payment providers and these trading venues, right? So first of all, I think it's great actually, that more of these real world assets are coming onto the blockchain. Like for a long time, there was a critique that, okay, there was all this fancy infrastructure, but no real assets, only magic beans on the blockchain, and they had all this cool tech, but now you have stable coins and real world assets. And I think that's great. So why shouldn't these assets be available 24/7 around the globe? I think that makes a lot of sense. And then the other aspect of it is, of course, this, like, 20x leverage piece, which is like, you know, then you can ask a question, like, Okay, how far should you go in, like, enabling retail speculation and day trading and crazy things? And I think that's, of course, you could draw, like, a moral argument or discussion around that, but it seems like folks want it, so I think you might as well do it on the blockchain. So I think ultimately, it's great that there's better access, and then hopefully, you know, these are responsible players that inform people of the risk they're taking when you take like, 20x leverage bet on something. But all in all, I think it's an exciting trend that the blockchain world is sort of converging with more of these other players and asset classes.
Nicole Sandler 37:50
I think the regulatory scrutiny, though, on 20 times leverage in the US will be pretty significant, or I'd expect it to
Sy Taylor 37:57
be, yeah, and I imagine this is going to be for sophisticated investors. Only going to be really interesting to see perpetual futures becomes a broader part of the market structure going forward as well. This is kind of very different to classic options and other derivative contracts that are always time bound. Perpetuals have no trading limit. They've been very popular in crypto, but they also do have unintended consequences, as we saw in October of last year during the whole auto de leveraging and sort of, was it a D peg? Was it a binance Oracle issue? Thing that sort of washed a lot of leverage outside of crypto back then? Do you really want that to come into the regular financial system? And it's kind of interesting to me that the CFTC, at the moment, seems much more interested in legitimizing and leaning into prediction markets as it's kind of overall top line narrative. But there's another story here Frederick, which is apparently on chain RWAs, are now worth $24 billion backed by more than 365 billion in underlying assets with tokenized treasuries and private credit leading the growth. So what are you seeing in the RWA space, and what's driving the demand?
Fredrik Haga 39:12
Yeah, so it's still definitely way, way smaller than stable coins, if you think of that as RWA also, so it's still, I would say relatively nascent. And then what we've seen most is T bills. I'm gonna have to double check the numbers here, but it's
Sy Taylor 39:29
live, checking the Doom dashboard. Of course. Think this was planned. It legitimately wasn't, but it's good to be able to do that, isn't it good to be able to
Fredrik Haga 39:37
pull it up? So yeah, it's basically, by far the most is stable coins, and then you have about 3.6 billion of T bills, and then commodities, and then you have equities and these things. So I would say they're still making more like headlines than big numbers on the actual stocks and these type of instruments coming on chain. Mean, it's still T bills, but, you know, I think that's part of the whole like yield story, right? Because do you give the yield to tether or circle, or do you, like, go through some instrument where you actually get the base rate?
Sy Taylor 40:11
Well, if you are an on chain treasury, you want to have the options that you would have in the TRad five world, and you want it to be 24/7 that makes complete sense. The final thing I want to point out this week is blueprint, company, led by Dr Chris Brummer, who was one of our first guests on the tokenized podcast, has raised its $4.25 million C round led by valor capital. This is a compliance operating system for on chain finance. So they help with mica compliance, and soon, I imagine, genius compliance, and they're backed by folks from Robinhood and Coinbase ventures, as well as lots of former senior regulators. So Nicole, I think you know Chris quite well. He's very well known in the policy circuit. What do you think the importance of something like him with his credibility and this platform is going to be for everything we're trying to do in stable coins and beyond.
Nicole Sandler 41:04
I think one of the key things for the industry is trust. And whether people like regulation or they don't like regulation, it helps with clarity and it promotes trust. Is someone like Chris. He's what I would describe as a legitimate person. And to move this industry forward, you need to have legitimate people who are trusted in this industry, and he definitely portrays all of that. So it's great to see Chris even more involved than he was before.
Sy Taylor 41:27
Yeah, shout out to Chris. Always good to have you back on the show at some point, sir. All right. Well, that sort of rounds us out for this week. I want to thank everybody for watching and listening. Nicole, if people want to find out more about you or ubix, where do they go to do that?
Nicole Sandler 41:40
You can find me at ubix, at ubix dot XYZ, and you can also find me on LinkedIn, phenomenal
Fredrik Haga 41:46
Frederick on Twitter, haga, etc. We're at dune.com and yeah, we just launched a big new stablecoin dataset. So go check that out and also connect with our MCP, and you can query directly from Claude or chat, GPT or your favorite AI tool, phenomenal.
Sy Taylor 42:03
You'll find me at sy Tai know on all the socials, at tempo, dot XYZ and screaming into the void at FinTech, brain food.com, finally, if you want to help others find this show, please remember to like, subscribe, leave reviews and spam your friends, because if you don't, then other people won't find it, and that would make me very sad, and you don't want to do that, do you? So I appreciate you. Thank you so much, and we'll catch you next time.