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- [00:00]
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- [01:55]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
All right everyone, welcome back to the Crypto 101 podcast. We're excited to have all of you back here with us. We have another really exciting interview in store for all of you. Today we get to talk a little bit more about stablecoins. This has been a huge talking point this year. There's been all new forms of adoption and regulation and because of that you all have asked for us to bring in all sorts of founders and people who are pioneering the space. And that's exactly what we're going to be doing. We're exploring a Whole new side of it. We have Lorenzo, he is the co founder of USDT0 and Lorenzo, we're excited to have you man, and welcome to the show.
- [02:32]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Likewise. Thank you so much for, for having me and it's, it's a pleasure to meet you, Brandon.
- [02:36]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Absolutely. You know, likewise over here. Now stablecoins are an interesting part of the space because for the decent past that crypto has had, you know, they've always kind of been around, but they've been growing every single cycle, every single year. And they've become this integrated part of the crypto ecosystem where they encourage liquidity and they encourage people to have a safe haven when things go up and there's a lot of talk about them. And now all of a sudden we're starting to shift from people using them just inside of crypto to looking how people can use stablecoins even in the tradfi markets. You know, how can we tie these to governments and cut in countries and treasuries and how can we do so much more with this idea of stablecoins Even looking at tokenization and a bunch of other things. And I think you all have a unique approach to this when it comes to cross chain liquidity and kind of ushering in what stable coins can be in this next kind of step into the future. So man, we're really excited to be able to talk to you about this. I know the audience is as well. Before we even get into the nitty gritty of, of what you're actually doing, just introduce yourself to the audience and kind of where you come from and what got you in, into this and kind of interested in it.
- [03:53]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Yeah, sure. Okay. So my name is Lorenzo. I'm one of the three co founders of USDD0. I've been involved in and out of the industry for the last six years of my life. Basically after my second year of uni. I'm a defi guy myself. So I, my roots in the industry are around the defi defi projects, lending markets, decentralized AMMs and so on and so forth. And then for the last three years of my life I've been basically focusing more on tether related products. First worked on Alloy, which is a very interesting way of creating a stablecoin by basically backing it only with tether gold using a CDP collateralized debt position set up if you will. Then I've been focusing quite heavily on native USDT deployments, how they operate, how they get executed and so on and so forth. And that's basically where the idea behind USDT0 was born and our pitch is very simple. There's one amazing asset that works basically flawlessly, which is USDT. And we just make it 1% better by making it fully interoperable between networks. About myself, as I said, I mean, I'm living in Lugano, which is in Switzerland. Pretty cool place to live. Very bitcoin aligned, very crypto aligned. We can go around the city and pay with like, I think it's like 300 shops with either USDT, USDT0 or Bitcoin. And I am myself. I guess one of you could call me a bitcoin maxi. I've always been around the bitcoin ecosystem. I'm very, very close to a lot of people that are building on bitcoin and I'm a big fan of bitcoin itself.
- [05:23]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
You know, fair enough. He was saying he was in Switzerland and we were joking before we started. I was saying, man, you want to switch spots, you can come to the U.S. i can go to Switzerland. But you know, we were joking that the US wasn't and hasn't been too crypto friendly. But that has started to change here over the last year or so. How has that directly impacted the stablecoin world and the adoption that you've seen as someone who's building in this space.
- [05:50]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
I guess a lot historically, as you said, the US hasn't been the most friendly jurisdictions to build in and out of Crypto, I guess. Right. But thanks to the new administration as well as some of the things that happened with the new administration, I would say we really got a better ecosystem right now. Right. It's been quite clear to me that the positions that the US has taken on stablecoins and stablecoin expansion have been directly tied to the big growth that the whole stablecoin world is seeing. I guess there's also to be said though that the big narrative of this cycle is indeed stablecoins.
- [06:27]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Right?
- [06:28]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Like everybody's building a stablecoin, everybody's building a chain for stable coins and so on and so forth. Interest bearing, decentralized and so on and so forth. So it's definitely something that is on top of mind for everyone who's working in the industry. I personally been around stablecoins for the vast majority of my professional life, if you will. I Remember when in 2015 nobody was using Tether and then people slowly, slowly started using it during the ICO era and now that is grown into a full on freedom tool, if you will, because now stablecoins are being used in third world countries and less developed countries as their main mean of exchange. So it's very, very important and for me personally, it's very exciting to see because I think there's very few technologies in crypto that can be put on the same level of, of stable coins when it comes to, to, to the changes and the, the rippling effect that they create.
- [07:22]
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- [09:20]
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- [09:58]
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- [10:28]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Over here, I think that there's three big categories that are seeing a lot of excitement in crypto. I think it's stablecoins, defi and tokenization. And you could kind of say that stablecoins play a part in boutique buy and tokenization. So you're kind of getting the best of, of both worlds in that sense. But there is a lot of adoption. There's a big push. And you said something that stood out to me. And it's something that we've talked about on the show here in the past. And it's this idea that, you know, you said in some of these developing countries, stablecoins are being used and that's a normal thing for them. And a lot of the time, you know, users like myself who might be from the United States, we sell well, or we say and we think, well, I didn't use stablecoins to get groceries. I didn't use stablecoins to go, you know, pay for my subscription and this and that. And it tends to be a rather limited view of thinking is because, okay, because in my, you know, highest level of my banking system in the United States, in the very fortunate position because I don't use it. It's not being used elsewhere, or people can't use it elsewhere. And I think it's a really flawed way of thinking. And what we are seeing, especially from what you just said, is that this is being used around the world and for the people who might not be as fortunate and have access to this like you know, a tier banking system. Well, I think that's where stable coins come in and eventually I think it will be used. You know, you look at a lot of these, you know, a grade banks and asset managers and a lot of them have talked about filing and talked about their interest in stablecoins or several of them have actually already gone ahead and started filing for, for their stable coins behind the scenes. And so I think we are moving in a direction where people in the United States and people who have a more traditional credit system, I think they're, they're working their way towards using stablecoins on a normal basis. But it's already happening around the world, right?
- [12:16]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Yeah. I mean, listen, you literally say what, what my, what my usual story is like I live in a country which, which is Switzerland where it's very, very easy to get a bank account. You can probably get a bank account in a matter of five to 10 minutes on, on a bad day and, and stable co that was developed for me, I use it and in certain situations they're very helpful. But I am not in my opinion the target group for which stablecoins were created. Right. Like stablecoins were created for people in Africa, in India, in Latin America that live in countries where there is ultra high level levels of inflation and that stablecoins are effectively the safe haven and the only thing that can save them from the failing countries that they find themselves in most of the days, most of the times. Right. Like, think about it like this. What, what, what I always say when I talk about tether specifically because there is effectively no second best when it comes to stable coins. Re when it comes to stablecoin real usage, if you, if you will, all of Africa, all of India and all of our Latin America and a good part of Asia runs on tether and the reason for it are multiples. But effectively what would really matters is that these people are living in countries where you work a lot of, for the vast majority part of your day and then you save and then your saving gets devalued 200, 250, 300% every year just because the currency that they are using gets devalued constantly and inflated constantly. So for them saving in usdt is basically a safe haven and the only thing that they can do to maintain the actual purchasing power and so on and so forth. That's where I think stablecoins were made for. That's that's the people that are using stablecoins. That's the target group that we should go build towards. And the whole Tether team has been absolutely amazing in getting this product market fit and just leverage it to as much as possible. And you're right, I don't think necessarily stablecoins are made for people like me and you that live in Europe or the US where it's very easy for us to access the traditional financial system. But I think this thing is changing. There's more and more usage and it's pretty exciting to see.
- [14:23]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Well, let's talk about what you're working on now. You're working on USDT0 and I already know one of the first comments or questions that people are going to send our way is what is the difference between tether and USDT0? Can you just kick things off by walking us through that?
- [14:38]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Yeah, okay, that's a usual question. So very, very easily. USDT0 is effectively the unified liquidity layer for USDT. Now that's kind of a mouthful, so I can dive into it and explain it. Right. Historically there's been a big problem in DEFI and in crypto in general in having a single standard to move tether between networks. You probably know that the most famous standard for tether tokens, which is native usdt. Now Native USDT is an amazing tool, it's an amazing product, but it has one big problem. It's not interoperable. That means that if I have USDT on Ethereum, it's very, very hard for me to bring it over to Tron and the other way around. And what that has resulted with in is basically a very high concentration on few ecosystems, mainly Ethereum and usdt. Ethereum and Tron. Ethereum and Tron together are like, I think it's like 95% of all the market cap of USDT right now. So it's very, very concentrated. What we are doing over at USDT0 is that we're kind of democratizing this whole system and we're saying, well, native USDT is amazing and USDT is an amazing tool, but we need to make it somewhat better, a tiny bit better by making it interoperable when it comes. What I mean by interoperable, it means that you can easily move it between networks completely for free, without any limitation of size, in a fully permissionless manner, which is very important. USDT0 is built on layer 0. I don't know how familiar you guys are, but layer 0 is basically the leading and most used messaging protocol. In all of crypto, multiple large tokens are built on the same standard that we are built with USD from Athena Pangu, WBTC and so on and so forth. And we're just taking this already battle testing technology and applying it to the best stablecoin in the world. And the way it works is pretty straightforward and elegant. We have one hub chain which is Ethereum, and users lock USDT on Ethereum and then they receive a representation of those locked USDT on Ethereum on whatever chain they decide to go on. That sounds like a pretty simple idea, but since we launched it in January, we really got quite insane traction. As I said, we launched it in early January and since then we've moved more than 13 and a half billion USDT between networks. We are the canonical USDT on optimism, on Arbitrum, on Polygon, we're going to be the canonical USDT on Plasma, we are the canonical USDT on Unichain and on a bunch of other new and exciting networks. And what we have found is that the moment you give this technology to users and you just allow them to move their assets between networks without any barriers and without any frictions, adoption just skyrockets. USDT0 is constantly one of the top two, if not top one bridge in the world. We move between 60 to 150 million USDT between our supported networks every day. And we're just seeing constant uptake in both adoption volumes and usage. So it's been very exciting.
- [17:38]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
So when we're talking about interoperability, you know, does that mean that people don't have to worry about losing their crypto or sending it, Sending their. Because that was a big issue is people would have USDT and then they'd send their USDT on Ethereum to maybe try to send it to like a Tron address, but then there's different addresses and they try to send a Tron version to their Ethereum address and it's an issue and things can get lost. Exactly, yeah, go ahead.
- [18:07]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
It's very complex, right? The whole system is not the ideal UX to get to the next billion people, right? Like you have these fragmented chains isolated with liquidity that is completely isolated between each other because you cannot touch them. Like you cannot easily tap into liquidity on different networks. And then on top of it you have other versions of USDT, you have bridged version wrapped versions, IOUs and so on and so forth, which just increases constantly the risk for the end user. Because let's say that I want to have USDT on five networks, then I'm likely going to be exposed to five different isolated risks and that's not really the way to do it. And not something, something useful. And what we're doing over at USDT0, we're just consolidating everything under one single, secure and battle tested standard. And just, it's kind of like an adapter, if you know what I mean. Like you can just have your USDT0 now soon on plasma and you're going to be able to easily send it over to Arbitrum with the same risk factor and completely for free.
- [19:04]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
So clearly this makes it easier for the users and anyone that's newer to crypto, right. They don't have to come over and they don't have to worry about bridging or making sure that they're on the right chain or any of that stuff. And I think that's one of the big benefits of this, that's one of the big whys as to like why you all are doing this. You know, I guess why else do you believe that this kind of technology, that this kind of use case is essential in a multi chain world? Is that just for new users? What else goes into that?
- [19:33]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
I think it's mostly new users, but it's also, it's also the fact that we're going towards a world where every single large institution will have its own chain. Right? Like we have seen multiple chains come up in, in the last, in the last three to four years. And the more time goes on, the more I'm seeing new networks and new new technology and fintech providers create their own chains. There's Tempo, there's Plasma, there's Ark. Coming up now, Monad, Mega, if Parachain, all these new networks, they're trying to build their own ecosystem in their own siloed entity. And what we are doing with USD0, we're just unifying all of those different entities and all of those different ecosystem into one single large shared liquidity layer. And that's been quite exciting for me. And I think it's also very, very important when it comes for everything that is built on top of those ecosystems. Defi, tokenization, centralized exchanges, payment processors. If you live in a fragmented world, it's very difficult to build solutions and tools that are well executing, if you know what I mean. While if you have this shared liquidity layer, then it becomes very, very easy and every single product can just focus on being the best product it can be rather than having to focus on also growing a lot of USDT liquidity on its own. If you know what I mean.
- [20:50]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Yeah, absolutely. And what I take away from this is that if we're building a multi chain world that kind of insinuates this idea that multiple chains are going to be able to succeed and be around for a long time. And it kind of goes against this idea of a one chain wins it all. Victor. Right. And there's a lot of maxis out there who say no, the future is only Ethereum mainchain, the future is only xrp, it's only Solana, it's only this or that. But I think this kind of idea says no, it can be more than that. Would you say that the world is big enough for multiple chains to succeed here and all be interconnected?
- [21:32]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Yes, absolutely. And I mean if you think about it, that's basically how fintechs have always behaved. Like you have multiple isolated solutions that are very vertically integrated in their own niche, if you know what I mean. And I consider somewhat of a maxi myself, to be very honest with you. I'm a big bitcoin guy. I have a big percentage of my net worth in bitcoin. I trust bitcoin and I believe in bitcoin. But I also understand that there are certain use cases for which bitcoin is not built for stablecoins maybe are one of those. Now there's a lot of new technologies coming up. Lightning, rgb, spark and so on and so forth. But at the core bitcoin was built for something different, which is being the plan B. If the whole world was part of my English to go to shit. So that's quite important. And to me, the way I'm seeing this whole thing is everyone will come up with their own ecosystem. Some of them will consolidate under Ethereum, some of them will live on Solana. We as a stablecoin provider and as a liquidity solution, we shouldn't pick winners in this. We should be agnostic and we should make sure that each one of those ecosystems can tap into this unified liquidity layer that we are creating.
- [22:41]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Yeah, I mean I think you said it well. And I mean there's just clearly a lot going on. And one of the biggest things that stuck out to me lately was that Tether hired Bo Hinds, who was a former White House crypto advisor. And it kind of got my brainstorming. I was thinking out of everywhere that he could have gone, like, why did he choose Tether?
- [23:01]
Mack Weldon Advertiser
Right?
- [23:01]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
And that's not like a good thing or a bad thing. I'm not saying any of that, but I'm Saying like he came out of the White House as an advisor in charge of all this stuff and he said he could basically have gone anywhere. He could have gone to Coinbase, he could have gone directly to Ethereum, he could have gone anywhere. And he says, I want to go to Tether. Like why from your perspective, clearly you work closely with Tether. Why is that the case? Why did he choose Tether in your opinion?
- [23:25]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Well, I mean, I don't want to speak for Bo or for Tether, obviously, but at the same time for me it's quite simple to understand it. Right. Like Tether, I have a strong belief that Tether is going to be one of the most important companies not only in crypto, but in the whole world in the next five to 10 years. There is nothing that is going to be able to leverage up the current geopolitical situation or financial situation in the whole world as good as what Tether is doing. They're building products that are not specifically only for crypto. They're building products with one goal in mind, and that goal in mind is freedom. Freedom of speech, monetary freedom, freedom of information, and so on and so forth. And if I could choose any company in the whole world to be contributing towards and that's what I chose, it would actually be Tethered because your pushing forward these very important ethos and these very important missions that are fundamental for, I think, humankind in general. So I totally understand why he did that. There's, there's no better company to join if you are. If you're coming out of the White House and you want to help shape the regulatory frameworks and the way this whole ecosystem, this whole new industry will work then rather than Tether.
- [24:35]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Well, as we've said earlier, there's a lot of different groups getting involved with stablecoins now, right? I mean, you have governments, you have the retail traders who have been around and now you also have institutions. And so there's this clear shift that's happening where more attention is being put into stablecoins and the idea of them and how they're going to be used. But who do you think benefits the most from them? Is it the governments? Is it retail traders? Is it institutions? Is it all three?
- [25:02]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
I guess all three. I mean, again, we go back to the same, to the same argument that we, that we talked about in the beginning, right? Like the real people that will benefit from stablecoin, stablecoin adoption and decentralized technology are, are the people that are currently sitting last in our societies, right? Like the people that have been debanked, the people that do not have access to our financial toolings, that do not have access to all of the things that we sometimes give for granted, right? Like I can go on Amazon and I can buy myself a phone online with my credit card. And that's something that most people in the world actually cannot do. So given as a fact that they are the real people that are getting their life changed and that we should all build towards helping, I think that all three categories that you mentioned are going to be benefit heavily from stablecoin adoption. I mean, if you're asking me, there's no better tooling than a US dollar based stablecoin to benefit the US dollar regimen in the world. Because what Tether is effectively doing is that it's bringing the US dollar to all of those countries and all of those people that would never actually have access to the US dollar. So government benefits from it. Especially because if you're buying a lot of T bills, you're effectively one of the largest lender of money to governments like the United States. So that's very powerful. Users like us, more experienced users also are going to be able to have better ways to access traditional financial system through stablecoins. I think payment processing is one of the best application of this technology. I always tell this story, which is that I had a bitcoin account before a bitcoin wallet before I had the bank account. So when my dad had to explain to me that it takes three days to get a bank wire, I was like, what are you talking about? You know, like I was living in London and, and I was a student, so my dad was sending me money to effectively live. And I was like, hey dad, I have no more money. And he was like, okay, I'm gonna send you a bank wire and it's gonna take three days. And actually today's Friday, so it's gonna be five days. I was like, what are you talking about? Like five days to get my money and can you get me a transaction ID so I can check the status? And he was like, no, like just wait. And then you're gonna, it's gonna pop up in your account and that's terrible. Especially when it comes to like global trade and so on and so forth. You need to settle stuff fast and efficiently. So that is also a good part. And then, yeah, at the end of the day we're talking about a better technology. I'm a big supporter on the fact that whenever you're gonna improve the technological layer, you're Just gonna get adoption. And that's, I think what we're seeing so far.
- [27:33]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
It is silly that with how far technology and just humanity has come, there's still this idea of oh, it's going to take three business days to move money from point A to point B without crypto. And I think that has to be one of. You're right. You know, one of the best arguments for this stuff and for it to be to be used. But you know, I like that all three groups benefit, right? You look at governments, they get buyers of their debt, you look at institutions, they solve that issue of having to wait multiple business days for transactions to get moved around. They get something that's instantaneous and it's a fraction of the cost of what they already are using. And then for retail they get the freedom that comes along with that kind of benefiting like institutions, they get to have their funds instantly. You know, you, you could get your funds instantly. You can move it around and you can also scan it. You know, whether you're scanning for a payment in Switzerland or the United States, you know, if you're scanning that, that, that your crypto wallet and paying with that, it's going to be the same. You don't have to worry about the transfer fees. You don't have to worry, oh, does my bank work here? Does my card work here? Do they accept my cryptocurrency or sorry, do they accept my, my fiat currency or my crypto or this or that? And I think that's where USDT0 comes in pretty, in a pretty cool way is that it can be multi chain. And so this takes it to another level of not only can you use crypto anywhere, but you can use crypto on any chain anywhere. And so regardless of whether they're native to one ecosystem, you're saying, hey, there's like a one size fits all solution. And to me it seems like that kind of interoperability is just the next logical step in crypto.
- [29:11]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Yeah, I mean that's obviously agree with you. That's, that's kind of what we're building towards. And in our mind it's just again, we're trying to give more freedom to the users. Right. We're still very early on in this technology, meaning that I try it every day, I go around and I try to live my life only spending USDT USDT0 and Bitcoin. And it's hard because you're in front of you, you have vendors and you have people that really don't get this. So you're going to pay me with this thing that it's US dollar base. But then why cannot I am sending you on, on this network. But you're telling me that there are five other networks? Like, it's too complex, it's too convoluted. While with USD 0 and with the technology that we are trying to pioneer here, it at least makes it a little bit better, which is that we're still working closely with payment providers to actually pilot these old programs. But what you're going to be able to do in the next five to 10 months is that you're just going to be able to say, hey, I'm accepting USDT on any EVM networks, for example, this is my address. And as long as USD 0 is deployed on any of those EVM networks, I can accept payments. And then automatically you're going to be able to receive USDV0 on any of our networks and converge it on the chain that the merchants want to have. And funnily enough, this is something that also end up being very useful for centralized exchanges, which are some of our closest partners and some of the infrastructures for which USD 0 was built for. Right. Like exchanges have huge, huge problems to maintain their float supply, to rebalance constantly their float supply. When I talk about float supply, it just means that you need to have Treasuries of USDT sitting on each of the networks that an exchange serves to be able to process deposit and withdrawals. But guess what? Sometimes those Treasuries end up being empty. And then before us, the only thing that you could have done was go back to Paolo and the rest of the Tether team and ask for a chain swap, which is expensive, takes a lot of time, and sometimes it's not so easy to integrate in your infrastructure. Now with USD 0, you can completely on your own, manage fully your whole reserve balances on any of our networks. And that's obviously very, very powerful. So we're just trying to build technology following these ethos, which is people should be able to move on whatever network they choose in total freedom without having to pay 50, 60, 70bps per transactions and basically still relying on the underlying security and technology that they already trust.
- [31:42]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
I mean, well said. And we're seeing more and more of that happen. And two unique situations that stuck out to me a little bit of a. I don't want to derail us, but kind of putting us in a different direction because it just kind of came to my mind. But two different examples that come to my mind specifically were Wyoming's launch of the Frontier Stablecoin FRNT and then we saw different talks from a different area of the world on a more global level with the green light for the first yen pegged stablecoin. And there's lots of conversations about like, how do we make sure that this doesn't go the route of CBDCs? Because I think a lot of people are scared of that and how do we stay this. This path where we can see growth and we can see maturity. And I know in the US now we have regulation that's kind of making sure that that doesn't happen, but how do we make sure that even if it's not a year or a couple years from now down the road that we don't get towards this idea of a cbdc?
- [32:44]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Yeah, lots to unpack there. So first of all, about the Wyoming Stablecoin. This was insane for me, really. I was here when there was only one stablecoin in the world. And I was here when decentralized stablecoins were just born through Makerdao. And to see state in the US actually issuing their own stablecoin, it was a very surreal moment. We also have one big thing in common with Wyoming Stablecoin, which is that they were both built on the OFD standard. The Wyoming stablecoin is powered by layer 0 like we are. So that's definitely exciting to see. I haven't dived too deeply into what kind of distribution layers and railways they're building, but. But I think it's going to be very, very cool to see. And it's. I'm definitely expecting a world where we're going to see hundreds of thousands of stable coins potentially issued by the most different entities in the world. Right. And then the other big topic here that you mentioned is CBDCs.
- [33:42]
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- [33:42]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Like, I'm really, really scared about CBDCs. I'm a big truster of decentralization and everything that the crypto stands for. And CBDC is the exact opposite of it. It's effectively a narrative that people in power and the traditional financial system is taking to be like, hey, look how cool I am, I'm doing crypto too. And then you're doing something that is the exact opposite of the industry that we're building on. I don't know what we can do to stop them from happening, but I know that I think it's a responsibility that every single participant of this ecosystem, builders and users alike, should always have a heart and always be careful on like, we cannot allow CBDCs to happen. We cannot allow central banks to control the monetary supply in that way. And I think it's very, very important for it to make it happen.
- [34:33]
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- [35:33]
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- [36:01]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Argument though, is the fact that we're seeing way more regulation and way more adoption, which from an institutional perspective, it's always good because I'm a big fan of the fact that the more regulations, the easier to follow the regulations are, the better it is for everyone. Because at least we have clear guidelines. And if we have clear guidelines, it's very, very easy to make sure you're not doing anything outside of those guidelines, which I don't think anyone is trying to do. So yeah, yeah.
- [36:26]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Well, taking us back to a point that we were talking about a little bit ago, back to tokenization. Our community loves hearing about this. Clearly it's a hot topic. Like all these different groups are building towards it. You even have like mainstream brokerages now, like Robinhood has talked about it and I think Kraken and Coinbase and all these different players who want to get in on this. Do you Think that the growth of RWAS and other tokenized assets exemplify the need for interoperability and stablecoins as a solution?
- [36:59]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Well, to a certain degree. First of all, it's definitely helpful if you have a bond or anything else that's being tokenized on chain to pair it against something like the US dollar, right? Like you don't necessarily want to pair it against something as volatile as Bitcoin or Ethereum. You probably want to pair it against something that is stable proven and that the whole financial system is already being paired against effectively. I'm a huge fan of tokenization and tokenization platforms. I actually just spoke today with the guys building Hadron. Hadron by Tether is the tether tokenization platform and it's insane. They're really building anything from bond to other stable coins and so on and so forth. I think it's very, very important. And there's two main takeaways here. The first one is that each one of those tokenized assets, as I said, will need to be paired against a stablecoin. And if you add to this equation, to this equation, the fact that you effectively have. Let me think how I can describe it, but effectively you need to pair it and then maybe you also want to pair it on a certain network. And now you have to effect, basically coordinate within every single network to get a unified liquidity, enough liquidity to actually trade it again. So that's where we come into play. And that's pretty cool. And secondly, what, what I really love is is RWAs under the form of differently stablecoins that are denominated in non US dollar assets, if you know what I mean. The one that I like obviously the most is tether gold. I'm a gold bug myself. I love gold. I think it's one of the. I mean it's not that. I think it's that it's one of the safest way to store money in the history of humankind and it's absolutely insane. And that exemplifies perfectly the need for RWAs. You can bring gold unchained to the gold and it's really amazing.
- [38:40]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Yeah, I mean, shout out to gold. We don't hate gold over here. The world's big enough. Yeah, I mean, shout out to gold hitting new all time highs at the time of recording this. It's done great. And listen, we like to see all these different forms of assets. Bitcoin is oftentimes referred to as digital gold. So yeah, I mean, good stuff around the world.
- [38:59]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
I think it's a very different system. Right? Like I don't think gold is in competition with bitcoin. I think gold is in competition with the US dollar. I would love to be able to live on gold and to be able to spend gold every day and saving gold very easily. And it has never been easy enough until stablecoins pegged to gold actually were bored. You know like we're living in a situation where I tried to buy some gold with my bank. They asked me for like 75 bips and took like seven days. I was like I can buy it on. I can go on Uniswap right now and buy some xaut by simply routing USDT through Kaoswap like where 2. It's such an outdated technology that it's crazy.
- [39:46]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Well didn't you. I mean you have a history with gold, right? Because if I remember correctly you were part of the crew that launched Alloy and that linked tether gold which is I think xaut to the on chain world. Is that right?
- [40:02]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Yeah, absolutely. So Alloy is kind of my baby. Like we contributed to it from the get go. We actually came together with Paol and the rest of the Tether team to actually execute this launch. It hasn't grown much yet because I think it's. It's a particular product. Right. The power of Alloy is that we had this idea of basically this came after the 2022 Circle Depeche when Silicon Valley bank failed and USDC traded nearly $0.03 off for five days. And our thought was we need a way to basically detach to have a stablecoin that is completely detached from the traditional financial system. And there were only a few options back in those days. There was Liquite which was you may see in my opinion one of the best designed decentralized stablecoins ever. But it had one problem. It was backed by Ethereum. And our belief was that Ethereum was not mature enough to be able to scale to 10, 20, 30, 50, $60 billion in collateralized position. And our idea was very simple. We're just going to take this battle tested design which are CDP based stablecoin where the idea is I put some collateral and I borrowed a certain stablecoin percentage out of that collateral and we're just going to back it with the strongest and most resilient currency in the world which was gold. And I think we're going to hear a lot about Alloy in the next few years because all it takes is one big fuck up, if you know what I mean or one big stablecoin that blows up to basically explain to everyone why it's so important for ale to exist. The way I see it is basically an apocalypse protocol, right? Like as long as one ounce of gold backs one third of gold, there is effectively nothing that can blow all the way up. And it's very important. And it's just one of the multiple ways where you can utilize theta gold in a defi like environment, right? Like you can use it as collateral or nave. The proposal just passed recently. You're going to be able. You can put it into AMMs, you can do all this kind of stuff that I think it's very, very powerful and it's really going to do the next step for tokenized gold on chain.
- [42:09]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
What do you say to the people? I've seen a lot of people talk about this idea that bitcoin and crypto is going to take market share away from gold and we're going to see gold's market cap bleed down while crypto bleeds up and the two kind of even out. There's been a lot of conversation about that, but I haven't seen any evidence, if that makes sense, that like that is going to happen. There's a lot of theory out there and maybe this has something to do with the US gold reserves. There's all these theories, but not necessarily any proof. I mean, listen, you work with both. What are your thoughts on the matter of maybe crypto taking metals market share?
- [42:47]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Yeah, good question. I mean, I'm a weird edge case. Most people have like 5% of their portfolio allocation into Bitcoin maybe and 10% in gold. For me, it's the exact opposite. Like I have basically everything I have in bitcoin and everything that I don't have in bitcoin is either in USDT or gold. But I think they work synergetically. Like effect. If you think about it, gold is. Bitcoin is a better version of gold because it's mathematically scarce, while gold is not really mathematically scarce. Like you could find a huge chunk of gold somewhere and it could just inflate the supply. But the reasoning behind it is the same. We need something that is not easily inflatable by human greed or human decision makings. And to me, like what I think will happen in the next five to 10 years is that we're going to see gold eat up the market cap of the US dollar. Not of bitcoin. Bitcoin will keep rising. But the big. I have a personal belief that in five to 10 years, one of the largest Stablecoin in the world will be a gold backed stablecoin and a gold denominated stablecoin because it's just logical to me. So what I personally do is that again, I treat gold and bitcoin in a pretty synergetical way. And I mean I got pretty lucky I guess, because the price of gold has been steadily growing and it was a good trade, I guess, but I just want to keep saving in gold effectively.
- [44:14]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Fair enough. This whole topic of stablecoins is fascinating and there's not a doubt in my mind that as we move into the future, five, ten years now from now, people are going to be using these as essentially the same way that we use checking accounts. I think people are going to be transacting all sorts of different daily activities right through stable coins, right from wallets, and it'll evolve a lot until we get to that point. But there's a lot of exciting stuff to look at. So Lorenzo, we really appreciate you coming on here. Where can people follow everything that you're working on?
- [44:50]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
Okay, so you our our main social medias, I guess at USDT0 underscore till I have a Twitter, but I usually post about Pokemon cards that I'm not too interesting to follow. But if you want to follow me, I think my Twitter is. I think Z E R O L O R E. Yeah, exactly. So. So that you can follow as a mirror and then you can definitely where you're going to see us around on Twitter and multiple other places.
- [45:20]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Awesome. Well, you all heard it here first. If you're interested in cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, gold or Pokemon cards, make sure to check out Lorenzo. Certainly check out all the stuff that he is working on. And once again, man, you know, pleasure having you on and you have to keep us posted as the stablecoin world evolves.
- [45:39]
Lorenzo (Co-founder of USDT0)
It was my pleasure. And whenever you need me, I'm always here for, I mean the front lines pushing this new technology. So it's gonna be exciting, I guess.
- [45:48]
Brandon (Crypto 101 Podcast Host)
Absolutely. Well, everyone that is listening back home, thank you all for tuning in. Of course we're gonna have lots of more episodes coming your way. If you ever want to make sure to check out and get more content from us, head over to our YouTube channel at the Crypto 101 podcast on YouTube over there. You're going to get all the videos, all the charts, everything else that all the data that comes comes along with it. If we screen share or present anything, it's going to be over on our YouTube for all of our Spotify and Apple Podcast listeners. So thank you all for joining in and we'll see all of you at the same time, same place, next week.
- [46:31]
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- [46:58]
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