E (2:01)

Already on the show before. But on top of that we are.

C (2:04)

Seeing now these ecosystem stable coins.

E (2:06)

Obviously USDH got a lot of media attention and then of course we have.

C (2:12)

Had news like apps like Phantom are also rolling their own. Jupyter just launched one using Athena's stablecoin as a service stack.

E (2:20)

So there was just so much news.

C (2:23)

We probably want to synthesize a lot of this and Nick Carter started to.

E (2:26)

Do that with a great piece on.

C (2:27)

X in which he talked about how he had long thought there would be a small number of dominant chains or stablecoins but now he thinks there will actually be many and that will be driven by the fact that intermediaries will want that yield for themselves.

E (2:41)

So Rob, why don't we start with you.

C (2:43)

When you look at all this activity, how do you think the competition will play out in the stablecoin space?

A (2:50)

Yeah, I think I've long been a believer in a lot of what, what, what Nick put out in that piece, which is that just the, if you follow the incentives, right? So I always think about the world and based on what are people's incentives and the incentives have been for a long period of time that people want to do a couple of things. They want to own the end customer and they all want to own how economics are distributed. Right. And in both of those cases that means that the, whoever the application is, whoever the company is that is owning that distribution, they're going to want to have their own stablecoin because that is the easiest way for them to potentially own how economics are distributed. There's ways for them to do that with, you know, service providers, which is, you know, Athena specifically Circle's doing a lot more Rev Share now than they used to. They obviously are a little bit more hampered because of that deal they have with coinbase. They get 50% of the revenue to Coinbase. But you know, there's also, you know, things like, you know, the consortium model with USDG or then there's like white labeling with people like Agora or Paxos also does it. But you know, Brit does it as well and you start to look around and you say, okay, well there's like this infrastructure in place that allows me to own more of the user experience, to own more of the end customer experience, to keep the economics for myself, to distribute the economics the way I want to and then to create a product that is, you know, is that tailor made for what I think is the best for that person. And so I think like reality is, is the vast majority of call it consumer applications, tech companies, even people like a Walmart who has been trying to do financial services for years are likely to want to issue their own stable coins. That's probably the next year or two at a minimum. We're probably in this call it period of unbundling. So I think about it a lot as the FinTech Mid 2010s market where you took a bank and then all of a sudden you had a fintech that did each part of what the bank does a little bit better. And so people started using them. And then I expect sometime in the future there will be what I would call like a rebundling, which is that everyone realizes that this actually kind of sucks to have like all of these different tokens, even if they share liquidity. And I don't want to have to think about, you know, what those, you know, different integrations should be like, how I think about, you know, putting connecting to different APIs. Like, I don't want to have to think about all of the tickers alone. Like that's just a bad user experience. I'm like USD, like we, we were literally debating on a Dragonfly call yesterday, like the difference between like a USTB versus usdtb versus like some other US tb, right? And it was a portfolio company of ours that issued one of them, right, like these, like it's just not a good user experience. So I, I think it's going to continue to continue to follow the, the rate of change here where you know, everyone wants to own those economics and they don't believe they should be giving them to the stablecoin issuers themselves, at least in mass. And how that evolves over time is probably, you know, not that, but it's, it's the current meta.

C (5:45)

Well, wait, and I'm sorry, so when, when people reach that point of being like there are too many, you're saying it's not going to switch back to what it is now, but like, do you have a sense of what that will look like at that point?

A (5:55)

What you'll probably end up having is either one or two things. You'll end up having some sort of like, you know, call it like clearinghouse. The way we see, you know, what happens in like traditional asset classes, right, where fully shared liquidity across not just the, you know, everything issued by Paxos, but everything issued by Paxos plus Agora plus M0 plus, you know, XYZ, right, where somebody share is sort of a middle layer. I, I don't think that is the optimal outcome frankly, but I think it is. People tend to, that's kind of how the legacy payment system got built, which is that you put a lot of like stop gaps on top of each other or I think what we'll, we'll also see is we'll see like a coalescing around like a few major brands, a few major stablecoins, a few major, you know, common service providers and there'll be like five or seven that will like be of any real scale and then everything else will maybe like more closed loop in the future. That's probably more of the optimal outcome than like some sort of clearinghouse. Because frankly, like blockchains themselves should be a clearinghouse, not some sort of like intermediary.

C (6:56)

Okay, And Mert, go ahead and give your vision for how this whole stablecoin competition will play out.

B (7:02)

Well, for the last question of how this plays out, I do have a tweet on this, actually. There was about a two week period where I felt inspired to make a bunch of shit posts around stables and one of them was that I was using Backpack the exchange and I sent some stables on there to onramp some fiat and it then turned into USD. I believe I sent it usdt, but it turned to USD. I did the same thing with USCC and then it turned to USD again. And so that is to say they actually started abstracting all the tickers away and just said you. They got rid of all the last letters and it was just USD. And then if I wanted to take it out, they would give me the option or give me like a default setting. And I think that's if I'm an app and I don't have my own issued stable, let's say, then probably what I want to do is I want to let these stable issuers compete to give me the best yield. And the way I'm going to do that is to make them commodities. And the way I make them commodities is to abstract them away so that I can just fungibly swap them out. And like I'm getting some insight here from being an RPC provider where it's sort of a similar business where people can swap you out in some cases for another rpc. And when you have. So I think like the most interesting part of the Genius act and the new regulation is that, you know, there was four or five years ago, or really even two years ago, you would only use USDC or I would at least because I trusted it the most. And I was like, okay, well Coinbase is not going to rug me, but I don't know about these other ones. But now if these guys are all regulated the same, I don't really care about that too much as long as I'm in the States at least, or I'm using one of these apps that I trust. And so I think the end game looks like the tricker is just being abstracted. And the technical work for that is actually not super difficult depending on, you know, the architecture you're using. But you should be able to swap them out with between liquidity pools. Like even today on Solana, I do.

A (9:04)

Think like, but the problem with that murder a little bit is like people have tried to do that. Like they're, they're, you know, backpack's not the first one doing that. Managing the liquidity is annoying and costly and there it really depends on like what you, how far you want to go, right? Like okay, you do USDT versus usdc. Like, you know, that's probably fine, right? Nobody really wants to mint redeem directly with usdt. But you're like willing to take that. You're willing to keep, you know, enough USDT liquidity. But as we go down, like, you know, if we get 50 of these, like they're not actually fungible, right? US dollars, they're like, maybe the collateral is, but they're essentially like liabilities against, you know, some other, you know, kind of company or, or bank that exists. Right. And like they shouldn't act because of that. They shouldn't actually trade one to one. Right. So you end up getting like a lot more slippage or a lot more like theoretical like you know, value like leakage. Which is sort of why I think people just end up trying to, trying to create their own and then having somebody else you like and somebody else incentivizes or like an infrastructure provider incentivizes them to, to take their own and do some sort of rev share versus like actually like managing like liquidity pools for a bunch of like a long tail of tokens.

B (10:19)

Yeah, I think, I mean, I agree with that. The way I think of it is, I mean, and you can basically predict everything that I will say based on one concept, which is just a Pareto principle, which is to say there's probably going to be three or four of them that are just the biggest and win. And then of those, I think they will be interchangeable to some extent or I'm completely wrong. I mean, I'm honestly not necessarily. I, I obviously got jealous of what was happening on Hyper Liquid and I was like, how come these guys are getting all, everything back and then we're just getting like wrecked here on Solana Land. So we'll, I'm really curious to see how like Jupiter and the Phantom once played play out because like the thesis is like if you own a distribution, then you in, in theory own, you have more bargaining power. So I want, I, I want to see within the next few months if that actually makes a huge difference or if like Perex is where like us, the stable coins are actually a huge differentiator or, or a very important part are actually like a special kind of A special case.

E (11:23)

And wait, Mark, just to ask you.

C (11:25)

A little bit more about that initial vision that you painted about how the end. Because like, so another way that we could think about this, by the way, is just like there's going to be some B2B sector and then there's going to be like the retail side. So in the vision that you painted, it felt like you were just looking at it more from the retail side. But I wonder, you know, in on the back end, like what did you think it looked like? Was it that more like headache version that Rob was talking about? Or did you have, you know, a vision of like there's just going to be a few and. And like basically, you know, the companies that are abstracting this away will gravitate towards certain ones that, you know, do X, Y or Z or like what were you thinking on the back end?

B (12:06)

On the back end? Well, I mean, I think you need just to accept a few things as truths and then reason up from them. One is that money is generally a network business, so network effects are going to win out for the larger players. This is why you see USDT raising an insane amount. I think what was the valuation? Like 500 billion. Like I don't even. It was crazy, right?

A (12:30)

That's what they're saying.

B (12:31)

Yeah. And like the bigger you are, the you don't get linearly more power, you get exponentially more. Right. It's the network effects. And so I think that probably plays out for about three of them, four of them max. And maybe there's like geospecific ones. For example, in Dubai I went to try to pay for nicotine with USDC on Solana and the guy was like, no brother, no, no, no. I only take USDT on like Tron. And I was like, what? Like why? It's like inferior in my view. But anyway. And so when you work up to there of it being a network business, then there's really going to be a prior distribution and if that's the case, then you should be able to swap out the big ones. Right. Like USDC to USDT today is not a hard conversion and then maybe you add two more and then you know the principle of like. Well, if it's the ideal UX for the user, that's probably where it iterates towards in the eventual endgame anyway. But like, you know, the counter is that if you look at the financial system today, the amount of hops you need. So for example, I used to work at a fintech in Canada and to send money to Australia from Canada. We had to use like Air Wallix APIs and a bunch of other things. And the amount of hops the money took to get from Toronto to Australia was like insane and super nonsensical. It was just bounced towards all these different jurisdictions. And so there is a world in which actually the backend still sucks because the incentives of some of these middlemen are different in B2B. So I'm not an expert there. Rob would know my much better than me.

C (14:09)

Okay, well let's also talk about just the fact that we are looking at a playing field already where there are certain chains or coins that have gotten in the arena and already have become dominant. So you know, just when you look at like where the various, you know, like what, what features different chains are going for, what are some of the different advantages or disadvantages that you think will make or break the competition? Like you know, you talked about the network effect. So do you think that like tether out of the gate is just going to, you know, continue to dominate or like what are some of the other things that you think, you know, could change just the current rankings in terms of rankings.

B (14:55)

Okay, well I'll, I'll, I'll come at this from a left curve retail user which is to say today I have a good amount of cash and I'm much more comfortable with USCC. However I find myself keep swapping that into PyUSD and the only reason is because Camino gives 12% on and PayPal is paying me money to win this race. So I'm basically just trying to extract from whoever's gonna give me the most money because I'm okay with that risk of depositing in a lending pool. So I think usdt. So I think there's like a few different user classifications here. One is that the person who just doesn't care, they're not going to really do borrow lend, they're not going to have any real size. They will just do whatever is the default. It seems to me right like a phantom is making you use their cash token. I'm probably just going to use that. I don't really care. Even within cast, I don't necessarily care which is like the card company. I don't really care which one I'm using. They're all fungible to me in defi I use the one that gives me the most yield provided it's not like a super sketchy one. It seems to me that the new wave is going to be as Rob said, the people with the distribution, the Phantoms, the Jupiters of the world, releasing their own, but then working with one of these people, issuer types behind the scenes. So like Phantom is working with Bridge and Stripe and Jupiter's working with Athena, right? And so the apps combining with these infrastructure stable companies and then whoever has the most distribution kind of dictates the rules.

A (16:32)

So for Tether specifically, like if you were to go ask Palo today, like, you know, why do people choose Tether, right? And why don't you share any yield? Like you like people ask him this, everyone, every panel he's ever on and what I'll tell you is like, he doesn't need to, right? He has brand recognition. To Mert's point earlier, you know, he went to go buy nicotine and the guy said, no, I only take Tether on Tron. Well, it's kind of a similar story across the Global South. Like if you go to a corner store in, you know, Argentina, they don't say, hey, listen, I want, you know, a US dollar or I want stablecoin. They I want Tether, right? Or I want Tetra, right? Like that's what people say all the time. So there's this brand recognition that exists in a lot of the world in the same way that like every time I call a Lyft, I still say I call an Uber, right? Because I just think of cars coming to me as Ubers, right? That's what's happened. Does that have to persist forever? Absolutely not. But it certainly is very hard to break that monopoly for a lot of these users in the Global south, at least in the peer to peer transactions, right? The way it gets broken is if Nubank all of a sudden decides to only use Circle. USDC and New bank has 40 million customers and they start, you know, just using USDC on the back end, right? And so that is kind of the story that, you know, merch selling. And I think we all agree, which is that if you own distribution, you can theoretically swap people into something else. But a lot of the transactions today have either been for remittance, they've either been for, you know, peer to peer on the retail side, right? And so that happens, there is a brand that matters. There, there's trust. You know, I think you talk to people in the Global south and you talked about Circle and like there is a perspective that like, you know, circle is like, you know, Fed Chain, right? Or the Fed Token, right? And they're like, you know, maybe, maybe it's more risky because like, you know, it actually did depeg you Know in when there was the banking crisis, right? And you know in the US we have people like MERT who are sophisticated users, right? Like he's like, okay, I'm going to Kamino get 12%. Like that's really interesting for me for PyUSD, nobody holding tether in Argentina, I mean maybe not nobody, but vast majority of them don't care about 12% on PyUSD. They, they may have never heard of Kamino. They will probably never interact with Kamino. Like that is not like the thing that they are doing with their stable coins. And so what we've seen right now is there's this group of sophisticated users like MERT who are, who do care about these incentives. And though we've seen a lot of growth for things like py, USD and Solana because the power users like murder care about those incentives. But when we think about what is the opportunity for stablecoins to go from 300 billion to 3 trillion, it's not the Merts of the world, it's people who will maybe never interact with Camino, right? And so I think it's really hard to break that monopoly right now. I do expect though that there is a world where we see, I mean the applications like the phantoms, et cetera, where they're trying to put you into cash. I do expect there's a world where we see a lot more just USD balances on these fintechs to getting all the way back to the backpack example that Merck gave where everybody is saying actually this is just a dollar and what's happening on the back end is that these people are mostly swapping to a token that shares economics with them, right? And they are, and that's how the liquidity is managed. And then the person who is actually managing all that liquidity is a, you know, a Paxos or an Athena or Nagora or like, you know, one of these like white label fires, a bridge, et cetera, that's the world where I see tether losing market share. If we're in a world where we continue to say, you know, I want usdc, I want usdt, I want USD, that world is one where I think tether just like can't be displaced. Right? And so I think it really depends on how the, how the end, you know, kind of consumer apps decide to decide to operate. I mean there's that's, and that's really the consumer side. So we've talked a lot about consumer, right? And because consumer's been driving a lot of these prices but if you think about B2B, um, you know, it's a $200 trillion market. It's 10 times bigger than the consumer market. Right. Right now, most of what we see in the B2B market is very much, you know, like, quote unquote, like a stablecoin sandwich or it's, you know, there's fiat on the end, there's a lot of friction. You know, Mert talked about Air Wallix, but you know, Jack Chong, the founder of Air Wallix, he, he's been, you know, publicly very bearish on stablecoins because he'll continue to say, like, listen, like, you know, you have to go into fiat at the end of the. And that actually has a lot of friction and it's high cost, et cetera. But what if there's a world in which like you no longer have to do that? You can actually do treasury management at scale globally with stablecoins. You can actually do, you know, maybe merchant settlement itself. With stablecoins, you settle, I mean, there's already a card company Rain, which is underneath Cast, which Mert uses, that settles with Visa and stablecoins. Right. And then they settle through the acquirer to the merchant. And merchant wants stable coins, they can also take it. Right. And so in that world there is, I think, more value put on trust at and like counterparty risk and just name brand recognition for like institutions that is different than the retail user. Right. And the retail user definitely has more trust for tether today than the institution does. The institutions, especially the large conglomerates, definitely are looking at things like, oh, access to public markets, you know, circle being publicly traded, you know, maybe like size of the balance sheet, how transparent the balance sheet is, like, how. What do they have audits that you know, are verifiable. And in that world, you know, circle is probably winning today with that group of people. And it could, theoretically, you know, you could see displacement there or maybe there would even be like a JP Morgan token or you know, somebody like that that those like large conglomerates would care about. So I think those are the ways that tether gets displaced. But you know, it's, it ha. The market has to evolve from where it is today.

B (22:45)

You know, I, I have a one. This just came to me. I don't know if it makes sense, but I think one thing that's interesting for the future is like Forex. I don't really see anybody talk about this like convert. So like the context is I Think yesterday or 2 days ago I saw a graph of the ruble The Russian ruble being up 40 against US dollar. And then I was thinking because, okay, my girlfriend's Russian and I'm like, maybe she should be buying me stuff here, right? Like, I mean this, this is pretty egregious 40 difference. And then I was like, there's actually no real way for me to convert between these two today. There's like a euro coin Y circle in usdc, but like what if. And I was just in Singapore for example and I was always trying to do the math between like what is this conversion, how much am I going to get wrecked by the card people, et cetera. And I feel like there is an interesting as like, you know, if you make the assumption that the dollar keeps its relative decline. I wonder if there's like a player that's more of a foreign currency that's not tether, that actually really ends up getting bigger as well. I think there's like an interesting arbitrage there.

A (23:56)

I mean there are a lot of, there's a lot of startups, I'm sure you've probably invested in some of them that are trying to do call it like, you know, ingrained effects and stablecoins. Right. The problem has been that nobody actually, even today with the US dollar performing as poorly as it is, nobody seems to actually want to hold these other currencies. Right. What do we see happening in the euro Stablecoin? The people who are actually holding it are people who otherwise are denominating their business or denominating their income in euros and who don't want to take the effect risk. Right. But when we think about the global south, for most of them, their perspective is still like US dollars matter more, there's more acceptance, there's continue to be just better risk, it's better counterparty risk. There's more places that they can use it. Most of E commerce today globally still takes US dollars even and doesn't take and then takes some local currency. Right. This goes into more like a geopolitical point, but we're kind of in a currency cold war at the moment between China and the US and I think the US despite the devaluing of the dollar, which is you can talk about a lot of things when it comes to like you know, the U.S. debt load, et cetera, but it still continues to be considered, I think the strongest currency globally. And until that goes away, and I think that's like a generational thing and that takes time. I don't know why people will want to hold, you know, whatever the ruble Even when the ruble is out. Because the ruble is a really tough example obviously considering, but even whatever the RMB or something else. But actually this again goes back to the consumer versus business point. The more business that is done in blockchain rails, the more business that is done in stablecoins, the more people will want to hold, call it a different currency because they don't want to take FX risk in their local business. And so 68% of global FX is done in US dollars and fiat. Right. Today it's like 98% in stablecoins. Stablecoins is not going to be 98% in the future. But I also don't think it's going to be 68%. Right. So the question is like where does it, where does it fall? Like in the middle of those two things.

C (26:10)

Yeah, I almost feel like the answer to Mert's question is not like another currency but frankly more like bitcoin or gold. Because there's no like basically like when you're looking like just from a geopolitical lens like nobody's going to want to put their, their savings and like something related to that that the Chinese government can, you know, influence. Right. Or like the Russian government, they like people would be more willing to do that with the U.S. government than like pretty much any other country. Maybe, maybe you guys disagree, but that's just my perception and. But it is true. Yeah, okay. Like the US has its own issues. You know, I say this as somebody who lives here and is like watching the dollar fall and just being like, oh my God. But the point is that, yeah, that's why I feel like it would be something that's like maybe just non fiat related, more like a bitcoin or gold. Which is probably why we are seeing gold going to you know, new all time high. Same with bitcoin. But okay, we're string a little bit from the stablecoin thing. So I actually want to just move us through like you know, and so we have actually talked about tether already. But I do want to just hone in a little bit more on that point about how they're not sharing the.

E (27:24)

Yield at least so far because it.

C (27:27)

Sort of feels like they can only do that so long. It feels like as long as soon as like consumers realize oh we can get a similar product and everybody's offering yield, like I feel like they're not, they're not going to be able to keep that up. Like maybe they could do it for another, you know, like 3 to 5 ish. Years or something but at a certain point I feel like they won't be able to. And you know like their USDT is kind of like, you know, I don't even know what to call it but it has like you know, a special place in plasma which just launched and that one, you know, has this little Neo bank attached to a plasma one which is offering you know, 10% plus yield, it's advertising on, on its website, 4% cash back when they use the, the Plasma One card, stuff like that. So it almost feels like a GBTC BTC ETF situation with Grays where they kind of like have one product where they've got like consumer lock in and they're, they know that they can sort of milk it for all it's worth but they are getting like another horse in the race. I don't know, this is my perception but I'd be interested to hear you know, just how you think Tether will try to compete now that there's just going to be so many new competitors.

A (28:40)

I don't know if they like, I don't know if they care that much to be honest. You got to look at like what, what, what, what Tether's doing, right. And you know they're very focused on owning the end distribution. Right. So you know like Plasma 1 is part of that. Right. But they've also invested in like three or four other chains, right? They invested in Rumble I think you know in, in Singapore on the panel that I was on with Paolo, he specifically said they were going to distribute USAT through Rumble in the us. I believe they you know, have invested in a lot of other like types of companies. Whether it's like COMPUTE or AI or you know, other things where they're I think going to try to denominate things in stables. I think they strongly, strongly believe that distribution is all that matters and yield itself on 3, 4% doesn't matter. I mean the yield you're talking about Laura, like 10ish percent on plasma and this cash back that isn't Tether that is providing that yield, that is XPL tokens that are essentially incentivizing with emissions people to go and use plasma specifically. Right. And then the next, you know, Tether chain stable will probably do the same thing and then the next, you know, USDZ chain will probably do the same thing. And so that, that's a, it's good for Tether in so much as like, you know, they can increase their distribution but the, the fight that is happening there is actually for the end user from a, a plasma specific point. Right? So like for Tether, like theoretically they don't care if Plasma beats Stable or Plasma beats Botanics or Plasma beats any of these other chains as long as somebody who's using Tether actually wins. Right. And from their perspective, I think they would, they would believe that, you know, distribution is what matters most. I actually think, and I don't know, maybe Paolo will send me like an angry telegram message after this but, but I think he like mostly cares about like long term. I bet you Paolo cares more about Bitcoin than he does Tether itself. Right? Like I think that he would rather denominate have bitcoin win more than he would like to have Tether win. And so like if there is a, a world in which he can incentivize that, I actually think that's where, where Tether would move less around like you know, US dollar hegemony and like, you know, I don't know, things that are, are, are that you hear other people in the US talk about, you know, it's a, and Tether's not a US company, right? It's a, it's a US dollar denominated company, but it's not, I don't know if they have, you know, the goals of, you know, the US government and a lot of what we talk about here in the US in terms of stablecoins in mind when they think about going to market.

B (31:12)

Any thoughts on like what's the specific question?

C (31:17)

Well, basically, you know, as we discussed, Tether is not sharing yields and now there's going to be a lot of competitors that are. And I wondered, you know, if you feel like they're going to change course or just generally what would be the best avenues for them to compete going forward.

B (31:32)

If I were them, I would not care too much, I don't think. And, and one of the reasons is like what Rob said about, you know, the random clerk in Argentina saying tether instead of USDT or you know, USD whatever is actually a very vivid and correct example. And I just know this from my own dad, like I just because I'm from Turkey and, and people there are like this too. It's like the familiarity aspect matters much more than earning yield on your money. Like earning yield on your money is a very crypto native or like a New York New Yorker kind of thing in my experience, which sounds ridiculous but like it's relatively true. And so like if you can just be one of these companies that is the category defining name. So like Kleenex for tissue, for example, is another one that's an extremely difficult network effect or. Yeah, network effect to beat. It's one of like the four monopolistic advantages that like Thiel talks about in his writing, right? There's like actual technological secret, there is distribution, there is, you know, economies of scale and then there's like branding, which is like the most elusive one. But once you have it, it's like it doesn't really go away. It takes many, many years or it requires an own goal. Like if Paolo does something absolutely absurd like an FTX or like SPF style, that's the only real shot that I can see of USDT not competing.

C (33:03)

Yeah, they don't need to do that because.

E (33:06)

Go ahead.

A (33:07)

Yeah. Just to add one thing though, I do think like the one existential risk for tether is that they like, like how has tether gotten so big? Right? It's mostly gotten big on the back of the exchanges, right? Like the, it's like, you know, everybody uses tether for like peer to peer, but also tether is used for all basically centralized trading and that's really how it's proliferated. So USDC dominates DeFi, USDT dominates CFI. And I guess there's a world which we had Binance USD for some period of time until the regulators killed it. But I guess there's a world in which those endpoints which like the exchanges themselves decided that, hey listen, they looked at what happened at Hyper Liquid and they got mad like MERT did as well and decide that like they need, they don't yield or they need something else and they decide to change the way that they think about utilizing usdt. That's probably the biggest existential risk for them right now.

E (34:04)

All right, so in a moment we're.

C (34:05)

Going to talk about the other incumbents plus also the upstarts and the banks. But first we're going to take a quick word from the sponsors who make the show possible.

D (34:13)

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E (34:25)

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E (35:56)

Back to my conversation with Rob and Mert.

C (35:59)

All right, so the other big incumbent that we need to talk about is Circle. I have a feeling you guys aren't going to say the same things about Circle that you said about Tether, but I would be interested to hear, especially now that they have launched their new blockchain arc, how you think they can compete in this new world.

B (36:17)

Well, I have a lot of thoughts on the payments chains, but yeah, certainly I don't have the same views as Circle as I do Tether. I would say, by the way, that chain is not live yet as far as I know.

C (36:34)

Oh, I thought it had like.

D (36:36)

No.

C (36:36)

Okay. Sorry.

B (36:37)

Yeah, thanks.

A (36:38)

No, probably Q1, I think.

C (36:39)

Yeah, okay.

B (36:41)

Yeah, you know what, I'll let Rob go first here because I, I get pretty feisty when it comes to chains.

A (36:50)

Well, I mean she was asking more about Circle specifically and then we can talk about the chains. Listen, I think on Circle specifically, like their position is definitely more tenuous, right? So the, you know, being the first publicly traded, you know, kind of call it stablecoin company, you know, kind of positioning themselves as the regulated stablecoin company here in the U.S. you know, something that's more fit for businesses. I mean, even Mert said that he trusted Circle more, which actually surprised me. Like that is a been an advantage for them to date. But I also think it's probably an area of attack for them going forward because they're obviously going to lose that, you know, that battle if like JP Morgan decides to issue their own. Right? And like that's they're going after a market where they are, you know, they're the second biggest player globally. They don't have the economies of scale that Tether has. They have an advantage based on, you know, trust, based on the way that Tether has, has, you know, interacted, you know, previously and how they thought about some of their, you know, their, their audits and their collateral usage etc with certain types of players. But they're going after a market that like kind of everybody else is going after, right? You know, when, when I see new deals for like new stablecoin issuers, they're either going after like really niche, like affinity groups or they're going today after what everyone sees as the, you know, the, the really big prize which is like, you know, B2B payments and like regulated payments and like, you know, call it like very big, you know, addressable markets and that's the one that Circle's playing. And, and so I, I, you know, they need to scale as quick as possible. I think they know they need to scale as quick as possible, but I also think they know that they need to like not just be a stablecoin issuer. Right? That's why they launched arc, that's why they launched Circle Payment Network, you know, that's why they continued a year. I think when you listen to Heath and Jeremy talk about, you know, they talk about Internet money, but a lot of what they talk about right now is related to like how they can think about, you know, specifically money movement. Right? So it's a bit what can we build around money movement? How can we build. I think they see themselves as, you know, at some day competitive against bridge and stripe, not just competitive against, you know, what Tether, right. I think that's where the North Star is. And so listen, I think for them it's, and that's part of the reason we've seen them decide pretty, pretty recently to not only what are they sharing the 50% of yield with Coinbase that they've had since the beginning, but now they're kind of sharing the, with everybody. Right? Like they paid Binance to put USDC in there, they're paying like a lot of startups to the yield on the USDC and you know, over time, you know, I don't know exactly where it ends up but based on what I'm seeing like my guess is that their gross revenue to net revenue, you know, margin ends up being only like 20% right. Like they share 80% plus of that yield which is an entirely different model from, from Tether And I think, you know, belies how they're thinking about, you know, what the future of the business is going to be, and especially as they continue to talk about payments. And so that's why they launch Ark. Right. As I think they see Ark as a way to figure out ways to monetize and own the end customer better. You know, whether or not that's going to work and, you know, whether or not they're their best positioned to be launching their own blockchain, I think, is a story that maybe I'll let Mert comment on first. But that's a. I do think, like, it's very clear that's a lot more of a tenuous position for them than it is for. For somebody like a tether.

C (40:21)

Yeah. Just one comment before Mert speaks, which is that watching kind of their strategy and just like the positioning, it makes me feel like it's sort of similar to the ETF world, where just, like, everything kind of gets compressed down because it's so competitive. Yeah. So that it feels like their strategy is in that world. But anyway.

E (40:41)

Go ahead, Mert.

B (40:42)

Well, I have nothing too interesting to add, I believe. I agree with basically everything Rob said there. I was going to put it a bit more aggressively in that I think they know they're in trouble, which is why they need to launch this chain. I do think there's many ways to get out of being in trouble, by the way. I think they're competent. They've obviously shown they can execute and all these things, but I think they are. I was talking to one of my trader friends who's a pretty big crypto Twitter personality, and we were talking about, like, the next trades and stuff, and I was like, you know, Circle seems like the easiest short here over a long time horizon. And not that I was short. I'm not going to short. I don't really short anything. But that was, like, my sentiment, which is to say, like, that's just a very difficult position. And I really don't think these payments companies, especially Circle, understand the amount of disease you're going to get by building your own chain like it is. It's way harder than you think it is, at least to win. Right. You can obviously launch a chain and have it do nothing, which people have certainly exploited in the past few years. But I think if they want to actually compete as the top two, top three, I think the chain is not going to cut it. And, you know, they need to, like, if I were them, I'm just thinking this through. It's interesting because. So I used to work with Coinbase and I trusted USDC much more than I did usdt, which does not seem to be a very common position and I was much more familiar with it. So I do wonder if there's more of a. Like this is more of an American coin or like there's the, you know, the trust from the Western types for USCC as opposed to the usdt. Now, of course, now they have Bow Hines and everything. And USDT is also becoming more American, so to say. But I would say, like, that's probably an interesting edge that they can. That I would consider if I were them. But other than that, I think they're in. I think Tether is doing roughly everything better. Like, just looking at it from like a CEO perspective, I am jealous of how Paulo is running his business. And if I were him, I'd be like, yeah, this is going well.

A (42:54)

I think on the chain side, maybe we should dive a little bit more deeply in there because I think Mert said something that was important, which is that it's actually really easy to launch a chain today. Easier than it's ever been. It's hard to win, right? And that's why I think it's so tempting for all of these people to launch new blockchains. There's kind of this weird middle ground that's happening right now though, where people are like, okay, well, I'm going to launch a general purpose blockchain, then. I want to. And I'm telling everyone that I want all of these developers to come and build whatever they want. And I'm not going to have permission validators and I'm not going to require certain types of people to be on my chain or act a certain way. But also it's going to be purpose built for this, like, B2B use case, right? That is going to be regulated, etc. And that doesn't really make any sense to me. You kind of have to do one or the other, which is you need to either be more opinionated or just not opinionated. Right? Like Solana's basically decided, hey, we're not going to be opinionated. And we're going to decide that we're, you know, a fast chain that, you know, is. Has ability to do kind of like all of like major financial use cases and we'll let you do whatever you want, right, Essentially. Or you have, you know, something that's saying, like, I am very opinionated about the fact that my customers that I already own should be doing this exact thing. On this chain. And I will do everything in my power to make this product and this chain allow for that type of transaction to proliferate. Right. And if you're somewhere in between those two, I don't really know what advantage you have. Right. And I thought, I sort of feel like the, the language out of Ark and increasingly out of Tempo as kind of, I think Stripe has kind of stepped back and tried to distance themselves from it a little bit is a little, it's a little odd because it's, it seems to be trying to appease the crypto natives who are like, we hate this like centralized, you know, like fed chain or whatever at the same time while, you know, trying to say that they're going to go and you know, win some new market with a fully integrated product set that is, you know, enhanced by, you know, owning their own chain. So that's what I find weird, to be honest.

E (45:09)

Like basically you don't feel like they.

C (45:11)

Have a natural audience to or market to go after at the moment. It's sort of like they've launched this chain.

A (45:17)

You just either need to really be really opinionated or not opinionated. And being like a little bit opinionated is like the absolute worst space to.

C (45:24)

Be and is a little. By that you mean like it's a payments chain, so it's not like a general purpose blockchain. But then like, like what do you mean by a little opinionated?

A (45:35)

Yeah, if you look at their docs now, right. They're like, okay, we're not general purpose, we're purpose built for financial use cases. Right. Okay, great. So I'm purpose built for, I own some end customer and I purpose built for payments. And what does that actually mean? I have enshrined fx, I have the ability to pay gas in my stablecoin. I have kind of this ability to potentially do like opt in privacy, you know, I have, you know, et cetera. Right. Like, and I'm, I'm going to build everything for my chain and I'm the way, same way I do my data indexing and the way I'm allowing you to do reconciliation like it is everything I'm doing is going to be built for like a payments company. Right. Okay, that makes sense. Like you're, you're building a payments company that is enhanced by blockchain and the blockchain that you are building is enhancing the way that you align economics and you align your product. Right. But then if you come out to the market and you say I'm general purpose chain, this is Crypto native. But also like, I want you to know that like it's really good for payments and you should use this for payments. But also you can build Pump Fun on my chain and you can launch a bunch of runners. Well, like that doesn't really work, right? Like you, you have to either be like unopinionated and let you know, Pump Fun guys do whatever they want on your chain and everything else do what they want on your chain. I mean, Solana has X stocks and they also have Pumped on and they also have like, you know, a decentralized version of OnlyFans, right? Like nobody cares what happens on Solana. It does all of these things, right? Or you have like a payments company that uses a blockchain. If you're a general purpose chain that is like kind of in the middle, you sort of end up like Stellar, to be honest. Right? And people forget that. But Stellar was the first blockchain that Stripe invested in. Stripe was the, was the seed investor in Stellar. Like it was supposed to be the payments chain, right? And so I, I don't, that's, that's what I find really odd about the current iteration of a lot of these, you know, call it these, these stablecoin chains. And, and I find them like, I, I, I just find it to be that people are trying to appease a lot of people and anytime you're trying to please a lot of people, you probably end up pleasing none, to be honest.

C (47:44)

And so this maybe is a stupid question, but in that sense perhaps it's, it's a good question. Obviously you guys probably know right now there's like a civil war in, or maybe I shouldn't call it a civil war, but there's a disagreement in Bitcoin about, you know, the ordinals and meme coins, like all that activity. And you know, some people like, don't they want to filter that out. And so like in this world, you know, how is it that they can restrict the usage to payments or like stable coins? Like is there, is it? You know, I, I actually don't really know what the answer is to that.

B (48:23)

Yeah, so I have a post on this. There's, there's really three ways. One is you do it. So Stellar is actually a good example. One is that you make the chain non turing complete. Meaning, you know, the reason Ethereum exists is because Vitalik said, what if you made this chain programmable, right? What if you could do more general things than just send and receive Bitcoin? And that's how you got smart Contracts and that's Turing complete. So one thing you can do is just actually make it like stellar, which is basically bitcoin, but only for payments. I'm exaggerating a little bit. They have added functionality since then, but that was like a low resolution idea of how that works. Right. So basically make it such that you literally physically cannot do these things. Okay, that's one way. And we know that way is probably not going to work. I mean it could still, but like seller didn't do great, right. And that was stripe backed. Moneygram for example, uses it, although I'm not sure if they will going forward. Right. So the second one is permissioning the block space, right? Like where you literally have validators who, you know, who sign certain agreements or whatnot who say, well, we're only going to allow such and such activity. These are the only things you can deploy on here. Right. So it's, it's at that point I still don't quite understand why you're using a blockchain, to be completely honest. Perhaps for transparency reasons or something. Because you can, I guess verify it, but you can't necessarily do anything about it. But that's another way. I think that way is certainly not going to work. It's like a slight iteration on Swift. So like it could work, I guess. I don't know how the Europeans think, to be honest, but that's one way. And a third way is I think the much more interesting way, which is what Tempo is going to do. So Tempo is going to launch permissioned. However, I was talking to Dan Robinson from Paradigm about this and they are actually going to add specific sequencing rules to the block space. So one example today is hyperliquid, where in hyperliquid one of the reasons why it works well for perps, not the only one, but one of the ones is because as a market maker your cancels get prioritized over the takers. Meaning if you have stale quotes, you have the priority in basically not losing money. And so that means more market makers come to the chain, better liquidity, such and such. With payments you can do something similar, which is to say you can have specific block space rules to say we're going to preserve 90% of the block space for these payments use cases. You know, there's like interesting MEV around that. I think that is going to be quite difficult. And this is actually why I said I think it makes much more sense to do as an L2 instead of an L1, which people are like, oh, merged at L2. But like it's, it's the obvious solution, right? Because with an L1, an L1 is just an L2 where you have a bunch of different leaders. So every time there's a new block leader on the L1, they have the option to not obey the sequencing rule, which is why on Solana, for example, we're adding something called multiple concurrent leaders, so you can pick between the ones that actually produce the correct rules or something. So now I think what's going to happen though, with the third approach, which is the paradigm and stripe one, is people are going to game it such that, like, let's play this out, right? Imagine that stripes chain succeeds, tempo succeeds, and there's a lot of liquidity on it, okay? So now that there's a lot of money on it, you will attract the mercenary types, the traders, all these different things, and they'll want to start doing something with that money. And there's going to be ways to then game that block space similar to ordinals with Bitcoin, such that it's not actually prioritizing payments, but maybe the payments is actually like a weirdly encoded version of a trade, right? Like it's going to be a game of cat and mouse and MeV, and then you're going to descend into the MeV, chaotic world of crypto native stuff. So that's why I think they're relatively futile unless they're an L2 where you can actually have some consistent enforcement by a trusted party.

C (52:35)

I don't know if there's any last words you guys just want to say about stablecoins, because one big topic we didn't touch on was banks. You know, there is some reporting that like they might kind of band together to launch a stablecoin. But I don't know if you just want to leave us with anything about, like, how this competition will play out in the broader world.

A (52:55)

Listen, on the bank consortium side, a lot of good businesses have been launched at a bank. Consortiums, right? That's essentially what Visa and MasterCard are. There's, you know, things like synchrony and Symphony and other things that have launched that way. I. I'm probably pretty bearish on it happening on stablecoins specifically, because there's like a bit of a. I think there's like misaligned incentives, right, in terms of why they would want to have a shared stable coin, because then essentially you're really just becoming like the central bank in that case, if you're doing so like a bunch of g sibs and then we Basically have a CBDC and then I don't know if it really ends up working in a way that is what people are looking for. So all that said, like, you know, we'll see. I, I, I don't know if the banks will be successful in trying to, you know, repeal this quote unquote, like, you know, yield loophole they keep talking about in the bank lobby in terms of like, you know, sharing rewards. I would expect no, to be honest because they, I mean it wasn't like this is a new topic, right? Like we, everyone knew that, you know, it was a loophole when Circle was paying Coinbase and Coinbase was paying its end users. But we'll see. I, that said, like, listen, I, I know a lot of the people at these banks that you know, are working on stable coins. Basically every single one of them is leaving the bank. Right? Like all of them have looked around, they're like, holy, they're like crap. Like I can go make money in, in crypto. And you know, I'm, I've got this job as like a mid level manager doing like something that actually nobody really cares about at this bank that makes no money. Like they're all going to leave and that'll slow them down. And so I, but my perspective is that any time that people tell me that a bank is going to win at something, they just haven't spent enough time working with banks.

C (54:45)

Okay. And Mert, go ahead and leave your last thoughts and then we'll wrap.

B (54:49)

Yeah, I mean I worked at three of the large five banks in Canada, which is basically an oligopoly of the incompetent and they are super antiquated. And I actually made a tweet two days ago, basically seeing exactly what Rob said, which is if you're working at a bank, you should quit like ASAP and come join crypto. It's just like it's time for finance to enter the Internet era, right? Like it's, it's taking this long and then the one thing I'll say in terms of fear mongering to leave this off with is you should be very scared of stablecoin stuff that doesn't consider privacy in any way. I, I would really encourage people to be a little more cognizant of that.

C (55:36)

And I know that you're part of this like zcash Renaissance we can call it. Is that, is that your veiled attempt to, to promote zcash?

B (55:47)

Hey, I didn't say it, I just said privacy. Okay, okay, yeah, you can use, I mean there's a bunch of other things. Even Ark, it seems like they have some privacy option. Just privacy over. No privacy. I'll live with that.

C (56:00)

Yeah, well I agree with that. All right you guys, this is super fun. Rob, thanks for hanging out. A little bit of extra time and yeah, we will catch you all later. Sayonara.

E (56:12)

Thanks for tuning in to the weekly news recap. Let's begin. ICE invests $2 billion in poly market amid US re entry plans Intercontinental Exchange, the parent company of the New York Stock Exchange, is Investing up to $2 billion in poly market, valuing the crypto based prediction platform at $9 billion post money. The agreement, confirmed this week, makes ICE a global distributor of Polymarket's event driven data and includes plans for future tokenization initiatives. Founded in 2020, Polymarket enables users to trade on binary outcomes tied to real world events such as elections, sports and cultural trends. The platform recorded over $2 billion in trading volume during the 2024 US presidential election. The investment comes as Polymarket prepares to return to the US market following a 2022 settlement with the Commodity Futures Trading Commission that restricted domestic access. Polymarket also disclosed previously unannounced funding rounds totaling $205 million, including a $150 million raise in early 2025 led by Founders Fund. Its earlier investors include Coinbase 1789 Capital and Blockchain Capital. Also this week, Polymarket added Bitcoin deposits as a funding option, expanding beyond its existing support for Ethereum, Polygon Base, Arbitrum and Solana to attract more users to its event betting platform. S and P Unveils hybrid index linking crypto and blockchain stocks S and P Global has launched the Digital Markets 50 Index, a new benchmark combining 15 major cryptocurrencies with 35 publicly traded companies tied to blockchain and digital asset infrastructure. Developed in partnership with blockchain firm Dynari, the index marks S&P's first hybrid product bridging crypto assets and traditional equities. The index is designed to provide diversified exposure across the crypto ecosystem. Eligible assets must meet minimum market capitalization thresholds $300 million for cryptocurrencies and $100 million for equities, and no individual asset will account for more than 5% of the index. Constituents will be rebalanced quarterly under S and PEAS established governance framework. Denari will also issue a token version of the index, enabling investors to access it through on chain instruments. BNY Mellon Explores tokenized deposits for blockchain based payments BNY Mellon is assessing the use of tokenized deposits to support blockchain payment infrastructure as part of its broader push toward modernizing real time, cross border and instant settlement systems. The move would allow clients to conduct transactions using digital representations of bank held deposits processed over decentralized ledgers. Carl Slabicki, executive platform owner for Treasury Services at BNY Mellon, said tokenized deposits could help quote overcome legacy technology constraints initially within internal systems and eventually across broader markets as standards evolve. Tokenized deposits function as bank issued digital coins backed by commercial bank money offering near instant settlement and 24. 7 availability. BNY Mellon's treasury services process approximately $2.5 trillion in payments daily and oversee $55.8 trillion in assets under custody or administration. Grayscale becomes first in US to offer staking in spot ether ETFs Grayscale Investments has introduced staking to its spot Ethereum ETFs, marking a first for US listed crypto exchange traded products. The feature has been added to the grayscale Ethereum Trust ETF and Ethereum Mini Trust etf, both trading on NYSE ARCA and will allow investors to earn staking rewards without managing validators or crypto wallets. Thanks to recent regulatory guidance, staking is now permissible within 1933 act compliant ETFs. Thanks to new regulatory guidance, investors can now benefit from the value accrual of staking. No action needed, no change to exposure, said Grayscale CEO Peter Mintzberg. On X staking has also been enabled for the firm's grayscale Solana Trust, which is pending SEC approval for ETF conversion For eth. Rewards will be distributed directly for ETH and gsol rewards will be reflected in fund price growth. Grayscale will use institutional partners like Coinbase and a network of validator providers to manage the staking process. Coinbase seeks National Trust charter Coinbase has filed an application with the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency of OCC to obtain a national trust bank charter aiming to expand its institutional custody services. The license would allow the company to safeguard customer assets and manage payment related activities, but unlike a full service bank charter, it does not permit lending or deposit taking. Greg Tushar, Coinbase's vice president of institutional product, said the move is intended to support innovation between crypto and traditional finance. Quote an OCC charter will streamline oversight for new offerings and enable continued innovation to integrate digital assets into traditional finance, Tushar stated. He clarified that Coinbase has, quote, no intention of becoming a bank, emphasizing the company's focus on regulatory clarity and customer trust. Coinbase joins several other crypto firms, including Circle Ripple, Paxos and Bitgo, in applying for similar charters amid a favorable policy environment shaped by recent federal stablecoin legislation signed in July. Trump meme coin issuer seeks $200 million to build digital asset treasury Fight Fight Fight LLC, the company behind the Trump Meme Coin, is working to raise at least $200 million to establish a digital asset treasury focused on accumulating the token, according to sources cited by Bloomberg. The effort, which could expand to as much as $1 billion, is still in development and has not been officially announced. Launched days before President Donald Trump's second inauguration, the meme coin reached a high of $44 in January but currently trades near $8. Around 35% of its supply is unlocked, with the rest primarily held by Trump linked entities. The token has a circulating market value of approximately one $1.5 billion, according to Messari. The DAT initiative is being led by Bill Zanker, a longtime Trump associate. It follows other promotional campaigns around the coin, including a May dinner with President Trump for top holders. The project joins a broader wave of digital treasury ventures emerging across the crypto sector. Morgan Stanley recommends up to 4% crypto allocation for growth investors Morgan Stanley's Global Investment Committee has advised portfolio managers to allocate up to 4% to cryptocurrency in quote opportunistic growth portfolios, according to its October guidance note. The recommendation is aimed at investors seeking higher risk high return strategies for portfolios with more moderate objectives. The bank suggested 2% for quote balanced growth and 3% for quote market growth strategies, while advising a 0% allocation for income focused or capital preservation portfolios. Describing crypto as quote a speculative and increasingly popular asset class, the GIC noted its primary focus remains on Bitcoin, which it likened to quote digital gold. The report also highlighted the need for periodic rebalancing, given crypto's potential for volatility under macroeconomic stress. Defi Llama Aster volume data over trading pattern concerns Crypto analytics platform Defi Llama has removed Aster's perpetual futures trading data from its platform, citing concerns over data reliability, according to 0xNgmi, a pseudonymous co founder of DeFi Llama, Aster's trading volume showed an almost perfect correlation with Binance's perpetual markets, raising suspicions of potential WASH trading. Quote Aster doesn't make it possible to get lower level data such as who is making and filling orders, 0xNgMI stated, adding that until verifiable transparency is available the data will remain delisted. The move comes as Aster's daily perpetual volume had recently surged to $60 billion and briefly overtook competitors like Hyperliquid. The delisting triggered a 10% drop in Aster's native token, which is currently trading below its previous highs. Investor pushes for major changes to Polygon's tokenomics A proposal from pseudonymous investor Venture Founder is gaining traction in the Polygon Governance forum calling for a significant revision to the POL token's supply model. The plan includes eliminating the current 2% annual inflation rate and introducing a buyback and burn strategy funded by the Polygon treasury or ecosystem revenues. The investors cited POL's prolonged underperformance as a key motivation, noting a 46% decline over the past year and a drop of over 90% from its all time high quote. Despite significant ecosystem development and innovation, Token Price has dropped underperforming virtually every comparable layer two or ecosystem, Token Venture Founder wrote. The proposal suggests either immediately adopting a 0% inflation rate or gradually tapering inflation by 0.5% per quarter until it phases out. While the initiative has received support from community members and recognition from Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron, concerns remain over how validator rewards would be maintained without inflationary funding.

D (66:16)

Unchained is produced by Laura Shin, with.

E (66:18)

Help from Matt Pilchard, Juan Aranovic, Margaret Curia and Pam Majumdar. The weekly recap was written by Juan Aranovic and edited by Stephen Ehrlich.

C (66:26)

Thanks for listening.