Every Bank Will Launch a Stablecoin

Essentially, I think every asset manager, probably every large enough corporation, every e-commerce marketplace, certainly every fintech will have their own stablecoin. There's a lot of incentives, economic incentives for them to do that. They make a lot of sense. The challenge then becomes fragmentation. That's what Bama think was referring to earlier as well. We manned up very quickly actually in a world where yes, you have FIDD and money, right, M1 and Y1 and the PYUSD and UZC and UZT. And again, for each individual institution that's doing that, that makes a lot of sense. For me as a user, for a business, it is extremely complex and probably will become very confusing and very frustrating very quickly. Welcome to tokenized. The show focused on stablecoins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets. My name is Simon Taylor. I'm your host for today, author of fintech brain food and head of market dev. Over at Tempo, no kite today. He said he has a day job or something, I'm not really sure. Maybe he's got something busy to do. Joining us is the returning Carol Gertman, who is CEO of Condoit. How are you doing? Welcome back. We're in great. Thank you. It's funny. We've known each other for several years now, but I feel like we only see each other on these podcasts at this point. Podcasts or random dragonfly dinners? One of those two. Yeah, something along those lines around the conferences. Making a debut. We have Dohan Alpassen, who is researcher over at CyberFund. Dohan, thank you for being with us today. How are you, sir? I'm good. Yeah. Thank you. Really appreciate you being on the show. Always good to have a debut on with us, but joining us is, well, the co-host in our "Agentic Commerce" series if you've listened to our episode on X402 or any of those of the "Agentic Commerce" pieces. It is the CEO and co-founder of Mesh. Bam is easy. How are you doing, Bam? Good. Thank you, Simon for having me. Thanks for being back. And before we get into the show, I've got to remind everybody that views and opinions of our contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of the companies that we represent. Please don't take anything we say as tax legal or financial advice or we'll always do your own research, folks, and I'm happy to remind you that this podcast is supported by Centrifuge. Tokenized is brought to you by our friends at Centrifuge. Centrifuge exists to bring institutional-grade finance products fully on chain. Centrifuge is a full, life cycle, DeFi platform from asset creation and structuring to DeFi integration and its cross asset by design. What that means is they work across private credit, ETFs and equities, making your financial products much more accessible and much more efficient. This is the tokenization you keep hearing about, unlocked for all asset classes by Centrifuge. Thank you so much to our sponsors at story number one. Well, the biggest story I saw this week and the one that caught the most WhatsApp groups and telegram groups was this company called Mesh raising $75 million at a billion-dollar valuation. Now, it was led by Dragonfly and Coinbase Ventions with paradigm also participating. And this company's customers include people like PayPal, Metamask and Revolute. So if you heard of this company, do you know anything about it? Seriously, congratulations and do you want to tell people what's this funding for and what is Mesh? Because I think people still get confused. Yeah, so very quick, our thesis is very simple to understand. We strongly believe that the future of economy will be tokenized, everything from real estate to equity to deposit. And we also strongly believe that this future is going to be heavily fragmented. We will have different wallets, exchanges, different L1s, L2s, stablecoin, stable issuers. It's very hard and challenging for businesses and end-users to navigate this fragmented maze. And Mesh acts as a network of networks, abstracts, all of this complexity and enables basically one click setup for both customers and also end-users like businesses and end-users. Along the way, we work with a lot of companies like Condoid, Brage, BVNK and others. So we act as a network and connecting all of these nodes and remove complexity across the industry. The reason we raise more money is building network is not easy and it's not cheap. It's not like just. We want to chat GBT Prime, like build a network of the networks and then you will have it in the next second. So it requires a lot of compliance, peace, a lot of global expansion and it will work with different regulators, different frameworks, different businesses across the globe. And I wish I could clone myself, but I can't. I need to hire the best of the best to be able to do that, achieve that. So that's why we want again as a leading company in the industry to have enough capital to be able to achieve our mission. Indeed. And I think you mentioned working with folks like Condoid, Carol, I still get this question a lot. I'm sure you do. There's a lot of stablecoin infrastructure companies. You do different things. Do you want to just kind of unpick what you do versus what a Mesh does so people have a good frame of reference? Yeah, absolutely. And I think this is super relevant. But I'm sure by the way, we're going to touch on this several times in this conversation because there's going to be a couple of things we're going to address. I think later on that the super relevant to this, but I think a very easy heuristic, you know, is Mesh is an abstraction layer. They don't touch the money. Right? They don't touch the funds. We do. We touch the money. Right. And so what BAM was referring to earlier in saying there's going to be a fragmented future or many different stablecoins, many different issuers, many different types of stocking assets, right? Not just stablecoins, but stocks, et cetera. One layer of that is essentially the UX layer, you experience layers. So for a customer, whether that's a retail user or merchant or business, whatever they may be, in order to be able to interact with this, they need an easier way to access this difficult and complex ecosystem. And I think so Mesh kind of lives a little bit higher in that stack right closer to the customer in some sense. What we do is the actual mechanics of moving the money around. It's like when you need to convert your PYUSD into use DC, into MXN, into BRL, right? This is what we're doing through our network of partnerships with various banks and financial institutions around the world, who actually facilitate the conversion that happens between a stablecoin, a fiat, another tokenized asset, and so on. I think touches the money versus orchestrates the money of two different things and people who have missed what a network is and how hard they are to build and how many relationships and commercial agreements are needed. So even Clawbot can't get that done these days. Don't. As an investor, you've probably looked at lots of folks in the infrastructure space. What are your thoughts with news like this? Yeah, actually, the stablecoin in-fries is a very competitive market, but I will just you move my investor hat and I will just tell my actually experience with Mesh. I think Ben doesn't know about this, but in my past company, we were building an on-chain your bank in Turkey and it actually laid in life after that, got acquired by the largest census exchange in of Turkey and one problem that we faced with the existing on-run providers was that they were extremely expensive. But if you consider census exchanges, they were like trading it to one to BPS and there's a huge gap between two of them and we couldn't directly inject those census exchanges into our platform because we didn't have a license and that's actually one power of building an on-chain your bank compared to traditional ones. But at the same time, our customers weren't happy. So we just actually did the market research and figured out that Mesh actually, the thing that it provides is the access to finance, access to all the census exchanges so that we could get all of their users into our new bank and we could provide better financial instruments for them that they cannot find on license entities. So as like given this perspective, I think Mesh like platforms, first, they mortise on distribution and they gained the distribution by like leveraging their own network of supporting different regions, different centers at exchanges, different license, financial institutions. And I actually saw a lot of different companies trying to build similar products, but all of them are failing with just like getting the first 10 or 100 customers of new banks. And I see a huge value of the existing players who already has the distribution. So as an investor, I think we already see, I would say, a consolidated market share across the players, but still I think emerging players are also promising and they also provide different volley propositions. Yeah, I think that different value proposition thing is quite important. And also geographic distribution is something people really underestimate. Stable coins are global, sure, but off ramps are definitely not. Partnerships with payments companies are definitely not. And I think you've been saying, I think in the press release that one of your big pushes is for that increased geographical sense of partnership. Can you give me a feel as to what the next six to 12 months look like in doing that and how you're going to get after those different regions? Is there M&A on the horizon? Are you thinking more organic? Is it partnerships? Where's your priority? Mostly partnership. So if you look at Mesh, I wish we were like that genius that we just, they want to start like what Mesh is today. So we went through like an evolution of and in the series of changes to get to the place we are now. And the main thing that we did and we achieved was like we nailed crypto to crypto transfer. Now when I can expand this horizon to Fiat, both from on ramp and off ramp perspective, and you can really build on an off ramp globally yourself. You have to partner with companies like conduit and also there are many companies that you're like focusing US and Europe, but the world is not just US and Europe. There is like lot time, there is Asia, there is Middle East. So I want to work with all of these partners and also starting minting places that it doesn't make sense for a standalone company to exist. So we will go and get our license and do the dirty work so our customers don't have to. So on ramp and off ramp globally is a pain and typically people are focused on areas that there is not lot of money and then they will never expand beyond that region. If you look at companies like BVNK and Praise, they're just focused in Europe and US. But the big part of the economy is on the Asia side and the Middle East side. So what about them? So if you really want to onboard the next billion user, you want to bring crypto adoption to the mainstream, you have to offer it globally and just being in the western part of the world is not enough. So we do that mostly through partnership and if needed, we will do acquisition and also getting our own licenses to get things done on the ground. Different markets are harder and different places on the Kiro. Yeah, now I was going to say, look, one thing I always tell my investors and my board is the fact that there is no mode in payments except for the network. The network is the only mode, but there could be different networks again in different layers. So what BAM has been able to achieve with matches of distribution network that is exceptionally strong. We're working on actually, as BAM referred to, is the one and all from network in 20 plus or actually more 30 plus countries at this point, within all firms. So there could be many different networks layer that top of each other. But at the end of the day, that's the only thing that you can achieve as differentiation right to BAM's point. Like, can we actually onboard users in Brazil, can we all from into China, Hong Kong, something like that? That's the only thing you can achieve because the tech is eventually a TN of the day replicatable if that's a word. No, it is. I think people forget that the stablecoin industry in Asia Pacific or the Middle East does look extremely different to the stablecoin industry in the US or Europe. And the licensing regimes do. Company I invested in Nala, they have their Rafiki product, which is becoming a popular off ramp and they've gone into every last, last mile country to get licenses. And they've been really grinding it out in places like Tanzania and Uganda, where the licensing regime can be very difficult to do when you need the local relationships. And it's hard graph to kind of get that stuff done. So you certainly got your work cut out for you in the near future, BAM. But we hope to be on that journey with you many more times. I'm going to move us to the next story, though. And this was fidelity, you may have heard of them, very large asset manager. I think about 6.8 trillion assets on demand management. They're going to launch a stablecoin. It's named FIDD, FID, you could also call it that, you know, it's kind of hoping for a better ticker though. JP Morgan had a really great ticker with M O N Y money. Maybe there was something in there they could have gone for kid who knows. But they've been a long time committed company to crypto. I mean, they started mining Bitcoin back in 2018. They've been trying to build in the space since 2014. They've been paying for cafeteria lunches and Bitcoin. They did all of that stuff. And they were first to offer institutional crypto custody back in 2018. They've been doing the hard yards for a long time. So this is a really, I think, interesting moment. What are your thoughts on this, Kirill, as you observe, the big asset managers and stable coins versus the banks and the yield debate and everything happening there? Yeah. That's actually what I was referring to earlier when I said, we're going to touch on this same theme from different directions several times during this conversation, all right? And so we may end up in very quickly, actually, in a world where yes, you have FIDD and money, right? The M1 and Y1 and the PYUSD and UZC and UZT. And again, for each individual institution that's doing that, that makes a low sense. And so I think the solution is exactly again what we're doing with that share, right? So like there's a UX layer on top of that, there's the actual rail or conduit, if you will, to move these funds around. I think one of the things that's interesting about this is the fact that this happened before, right? If you look at the history of your dollar back in the 1800s, there were several banks and several institutions issued in different dollars. What was interesting about them is the fact that they were not all one-to-one. And if you had a dollar that was issued in Ohio and you came to New York City and you wanted to pay for your breakfast in the restaurant, you would not get one-to-one of a, you know, Ohio dollar to a New York dollar. And so I think that's going to be a really interesting future that we potentially can get back to the same state where we have multiple versions of essentially the same thing, right? Dollar-ized assets or dollar-backed assets, but they're not all going to be equal to each other. And I think that's going to be really interesting to see how we all navigate that. It's a famous bit of history, the Wildcat Banking Era of the 1850s. And of course, this stemmed from solving an original problem as the US was moving out west. You couldn't physically get gold out to the frontier because nobody had built a railway line to the frontier yet. So how do you have a bank to fund the expansion of the railway without gold? So the states would let people open local banks with gold held in the vault at the state. The problem was not all of those banks were scrupulous, and some of them were printing lots of dollars, Wildcat Banker printer go burr, I guess, would be the issue. And so not only did some of them not trade apart, there were massive bank runs, and this led to the creation of the OCC, the office of the Comp-Troller of the Currency, so that there would be one national standard for what the US dollar was. Bam, I want to come to you now, though, because I wonder if this is a consumer payment thing, or is this more on the capital market side of fidelity, they're a major institutional player, and they could potentially be looking at collateral and 24/7 movement of that collateral, not relying on the banks for settlement of those assets. Would that be more of an area of opportunity for them, or do you see this more on the consumer side? Ideally, for both of them, so they're expecting FIDV to become the currency of all the fidelity end users, and also they can use that independently to circle and tether so they can basically manage their own treasury, doing their own minting and burning, and own the entire stack and own the profit of it. I think, as Krel mentioned, it has needed internally, but I'm not sure it's perceived as a good thing from consumer standpoint. Eventually, a stable coin, everything will be settled on chain, every single token will come on chain, and I hope that we don't see that the institution is starting owning their own chain or building their own chain as well on top of it. What my expectation is, this competition is good for consumers from fee perspective, but not from UI/UX perspective, but UI/UX is a simpler problem to solve, generally speaking. The way it will be solved is all of these stable coins will be in par, and it will be hidden from user's perspective. You're just interacting with US dollar, and behind the scene, it would be used FIDD when you're using or interacting with fidelity app, when you're on Bank of America, you're using Bank of America stable coin, which is, by the way, my initial BAUSD, and Morgan Stanley or JP Morgan, you will use money or M1FY, but from end user's perspective, you're just sending US dollar. That is my prediction, but you're far, far away from it, so you will have some pains in the short term or long term, it would be good for the consumers because fees goes down. Services are going to be better because of the competition, and I'm not worried about the UI/UX. The company is like Mesh and all that part. People forget that mint and bone fees exist, unless you're minting and burning on a regular basis, and that can get quite expensive for on and off ramping, and people forget that when you're holding those stable coins, unless you have a great deal like Coinbase does, you might not be recognising any of that yield because the issuer itself can't pay you that yield, and it's not like you're a consumer and Coinbase, it's got some other kind of rewards, so for your treasury, wouldn't you rather have your unstable coin where you're collecting that yield? But of course, to your point, that then creates the UI problem. The other thing I think people forget is that you can wrap stable coins, so USDC can be wrapped and branded as something else, and so this is the really sort of gnarly complex nature of this wall worrying of like, you can have a token and wrap it in something else and give it an entirely different brand, and underneath it's USDC, but it looks like, I don't know, Simon, Coin, or whatever else, and how do you think about what the economics of this are going to look like, and how the competing incentives of distribution on one end in consumer recognition versus treasury and yield on the other? How are you thinking about that? I think there will be different networks for solving this abstraction. What I mean by this is basically, right now, we already have actually different federated networks, already networks. For example, M0 allows long-tailed stablecoins to join a liquidity network, which is, I think, valuable, and we have Agora that is doing exactly what you're describing right now. And they are just like raw pink, they're on stablecoin, and they share the yield with you, and there's like a few others, and Temple already has built-in features for this as well. And I think in the future, we will also see different type of abstraction layers on top of this. For example, the first bank to issue their own stablecoin is fidelity, yes, but I think it's not going to be the last. So I actually even invested in a company that is building exactly this federated network that is garnered by banks and they are issuing the same stablecoin with the incentive mechanism and a game tier insight, basically. They're not live yet, but we already have a bet on there. And also, there is another company like Gubiax, and they are also building a settlement there for different type of stablecoins, yeah, Gubiax. Yeah, Gubiax. Damn, Tony on the show, there's sort of more of a clearinghouse than many to many without the UI element of what BAM does, more of the just pure infrastructure level, similar space, but a little bit different in that they make that many to many side work. And good of you to mention as well, that Temple does have a stablecoin deck spaked into it, decentralized exchange. So you can hold whatever stablecoin you want and send it, and the beneficiary will get tether or whatever it is they want to receive. So to your point, I think at the network level, you're also seeing innovation as well. And those innovations are showing a market that's not static, that a market that's constantly evolving and changing. But with big players now coming into the space in quite a meaningful way, though, I'm sorry, I cut across. You would please finish your thought. Yeah, I just wanted to say that I think why fidelity is important is they're not like stator or circle, they own the full stack so that they can even be more transferred with their reserves, they can offer better liquidity compared to what circle faced in the past. For example, their banking partner had faced with some liquidity issues. And I assume that we will see some similar ones in the future with the long tail of stable coins that we have today. So I think this is important, but it's not going to be the last bank to issue data on stable. What I think is interesting is, yeah, I'm aware of at least three bank consortia looking at issuing their unstable coin. There's probably a lot more out there that is also key value. So that's for just off the top of my head, they're looking to do that. There will be many more, but there's also at the same time this yield debate that's going on of like the bank lobby doesn't want stable coins to pay yield. The crypto lobby does, but as that's happening, the banks are having their risk waiting allocations for capital and margin really water down, I think, by the current US administration to where they can potentially lend more into the economy for holding the same risk-weighted capital until one capital ratios. That's fascinating because they could potentially lend more and compete, but they've been complaining for a long time about the quote unquote shadow banks asset managers like Fidelity, those asset managers that don't have FDIC and shoe charters, but do have charters of their own for settlement, really now can do a lot of what the banks can between private credit and equity and many other sides of the balance sheet. They are looking like very large narrow banks. So while the argument is between sort of the crypto lobby and the banks, the third also in this race staying particularly quiet is the asset managers who potentially could get to win from the whole thing, but it does feel like a much more competitive and level playing field. So this will be one I'm sure we come back to many times and I'm going to pause here while we hear from our sponsors and then we'll go to the next story. This episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at Visa, a global leader in payments, visas, tokenized assets, platform, fee tap, user smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies on chain. VTAP allows financial institutions to issue fiat backed tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. You can check out the links in this episode's description to express your interest in VTAP. This episode is sponsored by Privy, a Stripe company. Stablecoins can move money anywhere, but only with powerful wallets at the core, trusted by more than 100 million accounts across 180 countries, Privy powers secure customisable wallets that enable you to go global from day one. From fintechs to consumer apps, it's the infrastructure making the future of money programmable. Start building with Privy, learn more at privy.io. Thank you to our sponsors. The next story, speaking of banks, is about UBS, according to Bloomberg, they're applying to let wealthy clients trade Bitcoin and Ethereum. UBS manages more than seven trillion in assets for select private banking clients and is going to let them trade Bitcoin and Ethereum, starting in Switzerland, and this is driven by demand, and they may expand that to Asia Pacific. I think we saw Morgan Stanley announce the same late last year, unsurprising that there is demand for this in the ultra high net worth segment, but also seemingly this is sort of a drip, drip, drip of banks coming into this space. How do you think about the financial institutions coming into this space, especially on their asset management side? Is this something that they should be doing, and how do they do it well? What should they be looking out for? What are the pitfalls to avoid? Yeah, I think definitely it's a good news. If you listen to any of my podcasts, my crazy prediction is the crypto market gap goes from four trillion to 100 trillion, not because Bitcoin price is going up, it's because all the real world assets or RWA is coming on chain, and to do that, you need asset managers and banks and traditional financial institutions to get comfortable bringing those assets and chain. I often compared that trend with the trend that we had back in 2010 for cloud computing. I couldn't even imagine that one day everything we were on on cloud, but today like 99% of the stuff that we're doing is on the cloud, but the difference between cloud and blockchain is blockchain is free because you had to pay for it. But still we did that, so as just free, faster, cheaper, better, more compliant, the only thing that we didn't have is the regulatory framework that post genius act and other stuff that's happening on the housing senate, hop these banks to build the guard rails and to get more comfortable to be able to get on blockchain. So I think it's a great news for companies like Mash, but generally speaking, it's a great news for the entire economy, but also the end users because at the end of the day, they will get the benefit of the cheaper services and higher quality services from these companies. One thing that I would suggest them to avoid or pitfall is not trying to own the entire stack. Banks are not owning, so if they're not owning FedVire, they're not owning ACH, don't build your own L1 and L2, please don't do that. Just stick to stablecoin or other type of assets and tokenized assets. Don't fragment the already fragmented market. That's my only suggestion. So is the guy building a network of networks? It's kind of interesting that you're like, please, I don't want this to be out of control. You don't want the problem running away from you. Yeah. You don't want like useless components, so then that's where it's just there for the sake of being there. Yeah. I agree. Also, by the way, I think there's demand because you mentioned Simon, like ultra high network. The demand cuts across every possible consumer segment. From the high net worth to middle class to underbanked retail customers in sub-Saharan Africa, everyone wants basically the same things, and I think the demand is still very much unsatisfied probably at every level. I would agree with that. I think the appetite will always be ahead of it, but banks eventually have to listen if enough of their big clients say, do so. I hear a lot from the corporate banking side that they're trying to figure out how to become off-ramps because they have large corporate clients that want them to be their off-rank. They want a big stable off-ramp, and it's unsurprising that you would react to it. But whilst there was, I think it was 1179, the OCC staff reporting paper that essentially said you had to go get a no-action letter before you could even onboard a customer. I was such a high-bar that coming away some of the other guidance as well as the Genius Act has created a bit of a different environment where the institutions are slowly doing it, but it's interesting they're doing this in Switzerland, well away from the US and dealing with that private high net worth space. Do you want thoughts on large institutions that are role to play in how to get this right? I think UBS-like big pride banks just increases the pressure for the other pride banks to serve crypto to their customers, which is beneficial for all the customers. I think that will be the best thing that users will get and customers will get. And I think UBS is in a strange position today because of the geopolitical reasons and also not only geopolitical, but also Switzerland banks in general. They were positioned as one of the safest banks in the world and somehow the credit. Yeah. Credit Suisse. I see you. Yeah. And then the merge happened in 2023 and right now, I think they are right now in the phase of trying to be as natural as possible, but the localization of the world that we are having today is pushing themselves to be more political. And I think crypto can be a way to avoid it. Let me expand it a bit because I think Ethereum or Bitcoin, they don't have a political power, like sanctioning the person, sanctioning the people and yes, they don't have a privacy, but they can be anonymous. So I think given that manner, moving money can be a bit easier compared to traditional world, this is why I think they can also offer much better features rather than just custody for data customers, given the UBS and then similar largest banks. I think that's so fascinating that people forget the local regulations and your position in it. Switzerland is always seen as the safe haven country and safe haven currency, but that has its problems and that has its issues. And also that Swiss regulation for a long time has seen is very, very permissive, but in some ways, because it was so early, a little bit like mecha, it's not always ideal and there are some real issues on their ability to keep yield on a stable coin and in Swiss Frank and how in full sight of FSMA, all of this has to be done. So an organization of the size, people forget UBS is the second largest FX brokerage in the world. Should these oil tankers turn around and really start facing this for multiple years at a time and they really come up the knowledge curve, I think they could do some really interesting things. They don't have to move quickly. They just have to move with direction and consistently. I care that any more thoughts on this one before we move to the next one. Like BAM said, eventually everybody will be in the same boat to use your analogy with the tankers. It's got to be the same fleet. It's just that hopefully they do this in a way that is as BAM said, smart and don't introduce unnecessary complexity where it does need to be. Yeah, I know there's a lot of new ones. I've seen lots of folks try to figure out all that space that I think is going on every organization, neither the stablecoin strategy in 2025. Now they're trying to figure out how they implement some of that stuff and good luck to the wall. The next story was Tether are going to launch USA T and they are doubling down on gold. So a couple of big stories this week, which was USA T has launched onshore in the United States. This is their onshore genius compliant issue. There's no such thing as a genius compliant stablecoin, but certainly onshore registered stablecoin and you have quite a market change for Tether, who was seen as the USDT was the dollar of the global south, but it wasn't as onshore as a circle, which was more cap markets. It's essentially gives them something interesting. And then also linked to this was they bought more gold than the Polish Central Bank last quarter. They're buying about a billion dollars of gold per month and they're positioning themselves as a gold central bank in a post dollar world. And if you look at the price of the dollar lately and the Trump administration's attitude to that, suddenly doesn't sound so crazy, does it? Are we looking at the central bank for the internet or something else? Who wants to go first on that? Go on. Kirill. What are your thoughts on USA T. I have a bunch of thoughts, actually. I think it'd be quite interesting. I think a lot of people dismiss this as a some bit of a nothing burger because they're saying that there is not actually serious about this. Maybe that is the case, but I actually think there's really interesting opportunities for Tether here because as you mentioned earlier, Simon, right, there is minting fees. There's on and off from fees. USDT does not actually trade on part with USD like in actual reality. You do not get a dollar for one USDT, right? It's always a bit off because there's always the liquidity and many different markets and so on and so forth. What's interesting about USA T is that two things. Number one, what is the kind of mint and burn strategy will be? Are they going to charge fees? Are they going to do it for free? And then secondly, how can it interchange between USA T and USDT and can you do this on chain? Because if you can, that solves a really interesting problem for Tether because as you said previously, or up until now, it's been essentially the fact of the dollar for the global south had a lot of challenges accessing the US market or the global north, if you will, right? Not just US, but Europe and other other markets where circle dominates today. But out there in the global world, the Tether is still larger. It's losing market share, but it's actually still much more widely used, much more liquid than USDT. That can potentially solve this problem for Tether, right? Or they have a regulated USDC equivalent and they have a little bit less regulated, a little bit more liquid USDT. And if you can interchange between them, that creates interesting opportunities for actually maybe off-ramping back into US dollars through US AT or on, on, on, on, pin in the US through US AT. But I'm actually using USDT in Brazil or Nigeria or in Philippines, etc. So I can actually potentially a bigger move than I think a lot of people give credit for. So they're going to take advantage of this opportunity or not, they can't obviously say. The gold one is interesting as well because there's a lot of people who would love to go back to the gold standard and no one's actually doing it. Like this is all very conceptual and ideological at this point, nobody's practically doing anything about this. Maybe Tether will be the first one. And again, if it's interchangeable, would I regulate a dollar coin and then a less regulated dollar coin and then you have a gold bag coin and you have an interesting portfolio of assets there? It's certainly going to be fascinating. I do think you're onto something with that sort of off-ramping on ramping thing as I also thought about the crypto-native institutions that hold a lot of Tether that are domestic but that want to off-ramp into dollars and having a fairly efficient way to do that. I should point out that just quickly pulled it up, that people's bank of China has been aggressively accumulating gold for 14 consecutive months. They've bought 74.15 million troy ounces or 2,306 tons over the last 14 months, becoming with the largest buyers. The total value of his reserves are now 319 billion. So, they're certainly out buying Tether at the moment. And there's a geopolitical aspect to some of this as well. It's the so-called sell dollar trade where people are looking away to get off the dollar standard. And it seems again from comments recently that the administration isn't entirely unhappy with that. But it is there to be observed. And when set against that context, what Tether is doing again doesn't seem that different to what the major central banks are doing in some parts of the world. Your thoughts on Tether, I know you've sort of been a veteran of this space. The more I look at them, the more I find them less and less crazy. Yeah, if I was a traditional financial guy, I would ask this question, if you are building a central bank for the digital or for the internet, why you're not buying Bitcoin, which is a digital gold, if you really believe Bitcoin is going to be the new gold? So I think I would have been happier if Tether would have bought more Bitcoin as a reserve versus gold. But set, I think krill is absolutely right, USDT has an amazing distribution globally. And USAT is going to be the compliant, more US version of USDT. We are working closely with that team, which is Bullhines and then Jesse at Tether. And I think they are solving an amazing problem that basically can connect the global economy, the US economy through the US DT and USAT. And of course, by design, it's going to be one-on-one power between USDT and USAT. And I'm excited to see how they execute and how the institutions in US would consider USAT or building their own wrap around it and name it whatever XYZ they want to name it. And I think that is something that we have to watch. So of course, it's ready. So I'm looking at the execution in the next 12 months to see how it works. In terms of buying gold and being the central, I think it's inevitable. I don't know if Tether really has the intention to do that, but I think it's the right move and it's going to happen at some point. We need something that is not just relying on one country and one party. We need something bipartisan when it's something that is global and when it's something that is as distributed as internet. And I don't think there is any other way than building something that is unchained. So that's the future. We will have a global central bank and we will have something that is not owned by one single country. That's the future, whether we like it or not. Yeah, and I imagine that at some point, the AI agents are going to want their own central bank, something that's internet-native that's 24/7. It's scary. Don't say that. But do you know like it is one of those things where like if you just do the thought experiment and wind the clock forward enough, yours is it five, is it ten, is it 20s, is it 30s? I don't know. But it sort of feels inevitable. The internet will have its own central bank. Like the internet is the nation of the future. Like what Balaji has been talking about for a while is probably not wrong. Just the time horizon is almost impossible to guess and there could be all kinds of things that derailers before getting there. Don't you, your thoughts on Tether? Yeah. So when you go to any country outside of the Western world, you will figure out that in most of the places, they value the USDT and more than a dollar. The reason is, let's say you have a $100 cash. If you go to any local exchange, they don't give you one-on-one conversion. But if you go with USDT, they actually give you much better rates than the cash. And this applies to any money in your bank and so on. So the reason is USDT is super easy to move. And this is why I think the US move is also super important because in Turkey, in Africa, in Asia, no one uses circle. I can't clean this area. Everyone uses Tether. And if you use Tether, you have no access to the US market, and that was one of the biggest issues for the companies that is not located in Western world. Given that, I think this is going to be super important if they can allow one-on-one conversion between USDT and USDT. This will be one of the biggest improvements that they made to USDT in last year. And for the gold move, I think it's also the same. So in countries where the currency is not trusted, everyone accumulates gold. That's like under the pill of no one trusts banks, no one trusts any other authority. They just get it and store it on their physical cases. But I see a huge trend of buying from Tether, gold, especially in countries like Nigeria, in Turkey, and similar developing countries. The reason is pretty much simple. It's just because there is no financial asset to access gold exposure directly, except buying gold from the exchanges. And I think this is why Tether's gold move is super important, and it's much bigger than just tokenizing an accumulating gold. They are basically becoming the way to own the gold in the financial world, and I see a huge value, and I see Tether's gold in almost everywhere in any exchange of the dual-open countries. Fascinating insight, especially given your Turkish experience and across different regions. People forget there's another world down there where I think it's widely understood. Stablecoins were wanted by people that wanted to avoid hyperinflation, but so is gold. So why wouldn't the people that gave them the dollars give them the gold to in a digital way? That's just perfectly logical. And if you look at Tether based on who their customers are, they seem a lot more rational all of a sudden when they're companies serving those customers, then when you just see the headlines from the US, they tend to get perceived as that's weird and risky and over there somewhere versus I think it was in Bolivia or somewhere I saw supermarket shelves that were priced in Tether. This is a common thing, and unless you see these things exposing them to yourself, then you won't know them. A bunch of stories we didn't have time to cover this week. Apparently the market cap of tokenized US treasuries hit more than $10 billion. The UK government has said banks need to stop blocking crypto firms if the UK wants to become a global hub. It kind of feels like they should do something about it rather than just say it. The SEC clarified rules for tokenized stocks. The market cap for Euro C is up by 300% year over year. It's at 400 million as of January this month. The UAE Central Bank has approved a US dollar backed stablecoin. Morgan Stanley veteran Amy Oldenburg is coming in to lead digital asset strategy on middle crypto push. One money is introduced in M zero powered stablecoin issue and shout out to M zero. They did get a shout out earlier, issuances of service doing a lot more. tokens launch DeFi earn offering up to 8% APY via privy. Shout out to those guys friends at the show. Bitwise has debuted an on-chain vault with Morpho and zero hashes in talks to raise another $250 million at $1.5 billion after walking away from a mastercard takeover according to some reports. We'll have to see how that one plays out. Big numbers indeed, one wonders what the dilution is. That was all the time we had for this week. I do want to thank my guests for being on the show. Yo, and if people are interested in you or cyber fund, where do they go to learn a little bit more about you? I'm on mostly on Twitter and X. My account is DorganEath if you type on the X. And our cyber fund is just cyber dot fund. You can find the website and I'll read for you. And Carol, you and Condo it. Yeah. Condo pay.com is the easiest way to find a company. And I'm probably most active on LinkedIn. We just search for my name. I'll be there a little bit less than X. It's like you're trying to sell to businesses. Weird, right? Thank you. Thank you for being company. And crazy idea, man. Bam. How about you? What did they find you and Mesh of a popping champagne after your recent news? Sure. MeshPay.com or MeshPay on Twitter and LinkedIn. And Bamazizi Mesh on Telegram and X. And I'll link to just search my name. Bamazizi Mesh. If you're building a future of economy, we'll love to work with you and just reach out. And don't be shy and ask questions. I'd love to hear from you. You'll find me at S. Y. Taylor, everywhere you get your socials at fintechbrainfood.com, screaming into the void and at Tempo.xyz building the future of the on chain economy. And of course, you will find me once again here the next time you check out this podcast. And I hope when you do find me here, you have told all of your friends that they need to listen to the show and to subscribe and to like and to do all of the things that I'm supposed to ask you at the end of every show. I wish you a good week and bye for now. (gentle music)