From Checkout to Cross-Border: Stablecoins for E-Commerce w/ Eric Barbier

the issue in payments is not swift, it's the payment correspondent model which gets even more complicated with capital control imposed by some countries. That's why stablecoin is not a magic recipe and that's why today all the successful use case or everything which is currently being used with stablecoin is people who are actually bypassing instead of holding my money in my US border into a bank because I can't even open a USD bank account in most countries around the world. For the first time I'm able to hold directly on my mobile phone and directly on my wallet, I can finally open a USD-denominated account. That's what people want. People, they don't want stablecoins, they want US dollars. That's the key. This is MoneyCode. It's a show where we decode stablecoins and programmable money so that you can better prepare for an on-chain future. I'm Chuck Ackburligo, your host and author of stablecoin blueprint and I'm here with my co-host Raj Parikh, head of stablecoins and payments at Monad. How's it going Raj? Action fact, I feel like the stablecoin space never sleeps. Especially this week. Today we're super excited to be joined by Eric Barbier, CEO and founder of AAA, the first digital currency payments gateway to be licensed by the Ministry of thought overseas of Singapore. Good morning Eric, how are you doing? Thanks for having me, Trig and Raj. Yes, so for those who don't know, we me and Eric are currently in Singapore. I'm here for token 2049 and the timing is great to capture all of us on the same time zone. Raj is based in the Pacific and it's just, this is the best way it all worked out. And a funny little note that yesterday as I came in to Singapore, trying to use all the various different ways to get around and they have grab taxi, which is the Singapore version of Uber. And I can see that AAA was a funding option. And so we're going to get into that, how that all works and how crypto is becoming more and more a widely accepted funding mechanism. But before we dive in, just a quick note here, many code is brought to you by stablecoin media and powered by BVNK. The views and opinions of the hosts and guests are their own and may not represent their companies and nothing we discussed today constitutes investment advice or any other form of advice. Okay, so let's dive in. So just to give context to that anecdote there, Eric, for those who are not familiar, can you just explain what is AAA? What are the problems that you're solving and payments? Yeah, so AAA is a company I started like five years ago with headquarters in Singapore. Before that, I started the company called Choose Doing Traditional Cross-Border Payments. And so AAA's role is really to help traditional businesses like grab that you mentioned, working with FAFET. So the traditional way to e-commerce platform to be able to offer to their clients the options to pay with digital currencies, with crypto, with stablecoins, but without them ever touching stablecoins. What we're seeing is like today, 99% of our clients are not ready to jump into the stablecoin world. They're not ready to have their own wallet. They don't want to get questions from their old leaders, changing their process and everything like this. However, they're happy to sell to the 400 million people around the world having some form of crypto stablecoin. That's really the problem we're solving. So how does it work? Let's say, and it's funny, I tried to use the AAA funding mechanism to fund my grab account. I put me through a KYC process and I was like, I'm ready. I've got my card, I've got my ID. And then he asked me for my residency. I put US and I was like, no, sorry, you have to be a local. And so there's KYC, that's part of the flow embedded. But then I'm presumably after that, I could have just sent stablecoins. You would have done some mechanism to change it into local fear and then fund the partner. In this case, grab. If you could just walk through how that process would work, that'll be helpful. Yeah. So today, on top of the existing payment options, so maybe if I take a step back, so grab has grab pay wallet as such events. They are also licensed as a major payment institution. So they can hold E-money. So it's an E-money issuer equivalent. And to fund this E-wallet, you have different payment options. It can be through cars, it can be through bank transfers. And so what we enabled them to do something like over a year ago was to add top up with digital currency. So when you choose this option, you would choose which kind of crypto or stablecoin you want to top up with. So we're supporting the traditional crypto like BTC and ETH, as well as the stablecoin like USDT, USDC, PayPal, USD. We also support the local stablecoin, XSGD and so on. So all those options. So that first step is to choose which asset you want to use. Then you would need to choose which network. So say you chose USDC. Are you going to use it on Ethereum, on Solana? We're supporting the main networks. And then you would get a wallet address and as well as a rate. So what we do is we guarantee the rate, meaning that no matter what is the volatility, if you're doing the transaction, if you like the rate and if you're doing the transaction during, you know, 25 minutes, you as the user and grab as the merchant is guaranteed to receive exactly this amount of money. And then the transaction happens in real time. Your balance is updated and you can use it to purchase from anything grab offers from taxi rights to food delivery and everything. In Singapore in particular, it's available across a lot of the smaller shops. So it's one of the most used cashless options for the, you know, street food in Singapore, which is quite popular and things like this. Yeah, that's super interesting. I mean, I guess even to touch on this even further, Eric, you know, back when I was at Visa, BTC was reviewed as, you know, a potential alternative payment network. It didn't, it didn't quite catch on as like a payment method because of the volatility here. But it sounds like for you guys, you can support both BTC crypto assets and stable coins. Have you seen like a preference from, you know, your customers who are typically merchants and, you know, outside of grab my understanding that you guys have razor and there's, there's many more merchants also, but maybe you can walk through like, have you seen a shift in merchants willing to accept stable coins versus traditional crypto assets? And also like, what is the emphasis for some of these merchants saying, you know what, we actually are okay with this new alternative payment method and we want to support it. Like, I'm curious what the shift that you saw in the last few years that's prompting this as well. So initially, when I started there, they were really, you know, as many assets as possible and so on. And then there's been STX, you know, so you had more of the negative things on crypto. So some merchants all of, okay, on my website, I'm going to only show stable coins. What we've been seeing is obviously stable coin is pretty like 80% of the transaction we're doing. So, you know, the Bitcoin and ETH is still relatively small. I think it's more used for our luxury merchants. One example is Farfetch, fairly big ticket items. I don't think you can find anything below a couple of hundreds of dollars. And so you have the kind of thing is like, okay, Bitcoin went up. I'm going to reward myself. I'm going to change. I'm going to buy myself a new watch or something. That's kind of one of the type of examples. But as we are moving into, you know, traditional payments and especially B2B payments, it's more and more stable coins. Like on B2B, for instance, is 99% stable coins. Hey, maybe we can break that down then actually. I know that you've been in the game for a while. You've seen payments evolve back when, like you were saying, first, you've been crypto assets with a focus. Now stable coins, I'm sure have become a much broader and larger percentage share of what people use. But there's also many different merchant segments and many different types of buyers. So maybe you can kind of break down how Tripoli looks today. I know you have the merchant acceptance side. Maybe you can work us through the types of verticals. You're seeing them as traction. And then the types of buyers that are purchasing, are they global? Let me mention luxury. And then on the other side, you also do payouts and a lot of other types of transactions. So maybe you could break it down the types of use cases that Tripoli's supporting today. Sure. So in terms of e-commerce merchant type of use cases, we're seeing three verticals, which are key for us. First one, luxury. So higher ticket items, like the fart fetch. And in all cases, our ideal merchants are big global merchants selling across multiple geographies. So I've mentioned luxury. Travel is a very big vertical for us, because also one of the big pain point is that if you're from Africa, even if you have a credit card, when you want to purchase from an international site, typically, and travel is considered high risk in the car business. So it's very likely that your car is issued from a higher risk country onto a higher risk merchant. The payment gateway, the add-in, the world pay in the middle just say, hey, I'm not taking the risk. I'm declining the card so that there's no risk of charge back, which is costly and creates a lot of issues for everybody in the value chain. And the beauty of stable payments is that there's no risk of fraud. There's no risk of charge back. That makes it a very merchant friendly payment option compared to card in particular. And the last segment is digital games, video games, mentioning Razer. We have plenty of clients in this digital content. One of the beauty is that those guys, they can sell anywhere because they don't have cheap goods to someone. So last time I checked with Razer, I think we're processing in over 160 countries. So with one single payment option, they really can sell across the world. Yeah. And it seems like there's a clear trend there. Maybe slightly less with the luxury side, but in all these cases, there's a global element, a cross-border international element, particularly with travel, as you mentioned, where the merchants are global, the consumers are global. And luxury, of course, depending on how early you were into the crypto space, some of your assets may be in crypto and therefore makes that a very viable payment option. And then as you said, with digital games again, it's a global element. And so on the one hand, merchants are able to accept payment from customers globally quickly. And we saw that with Stripe as well. They mentioned a huge number of additional countries that buyers were coming from initially when they opened up crypto payments. And then in addition to that, from the merchant perspective, it's just a really simple integration. You integrate once and boom, you've got access to KYC buyers from all these different countries. I guess we could talk about that maybe a little bit on the compliance side, on the purchasing side. Does the KYC process occur for every buyer in all those different flows? So yeah, so KYC, all the compliance process is quite important. And so that's why we're licensed in Singapore, we're licensed in Europe, we're licensed in the US. So we have a pretty extensive checks that we're doing, the traditional transaction monitoring that any PSP would do. But also what we're doing is the things which are specific to the crypto world, because it's based on the blockchain using blockchain analysis too. So what we're able to do is that we're able to detect and block transactions which would be linked to sanctioned entities, which would be linked to illegal activities. And so no matter how many hops people have been trying to escape or to clean their coins, we're still able to go back to that and we're able to detect and block that. So in this case, we would tell the merchants, do not honor, do not ship it with our services, and we would do a manual review, potentially try an STR or freeze the asset if it's sanction related. So that's some of the checks we're doing. On top of that, we're compliant with the so-called travel rule, which is the making sure that all the KYC information, the information about the payer and the payee are being transmitted vast to vast. Virtual assets are provided to the others. So that's all the checks which are being done to make sure that it's fully compliant with the regulation and that people cannot choose, I don't know, the procedure of a scan, for instance, to be able to loan their money and buy something from one of our merchants or protecting our merchants against that. That's awesome. I think that's like a really important point also just on the compliance front, because I think crypto sometimes gets a negative wrap on what's possible on the compliance front. But to your point, you're screening every cryptocurrency address. You're also cross-matching that with the sanctions list. And then from there, you can actually build controls and policies around it so that those assets actually never make it to your customers or in the workflow. And then you guys can work with law enforcement accordingly as well. So I think it's a really important point that is sometimes overlooked and it's easy to dismiss the future of stablecoins as it relates to compliance also. So that's actually a really helpful breakdown. And I guess one question for you, Eric, we've talked about the pay inside. So the grab experience, you can now go and spend your stablecoins and then quickly use the grab app, especially if you're a Singaporean resident. You also alluded to getting licenses across many markets and a payouts business. But how have you seen the business for AAA evolve from that initial route of pay-ins for merchants to now you now have multiple licenses across multiple jurisdictions also? And what else has that opened up for you guys as a business? So we started our first use cases where more like the e-commerce, everything I've been speaking about. And then as we started to work with market cases, so we've been helping them on the payment acceptance. But very quickly, they were also interested in helping some of their sellers, especially sellers in emerging market, to receive their payments into stablecoins. So for instance, we're working with freelancer market cases. So if you're a freelancer, say, I don't know, in Nigeria or in Bangladesh, it is very likely that you will prefer to receive USDT or USDC instead of NERAS or TACAS. That's the kind of payouts we've been processing for market cases. And we're seeing all type of use cases in terms of payouts. It can start like maybe a $1 payout content creator in Egypt. Because the beauty of stablecoins, especially with a modern network blockchain, it's virtually zero the cost of doing a transfer. So it means that you could imagine in a world where instead of paying people on a monthly or weekly basis, you could pay them every five months. And so that's great for a content creator. He's not sure he's going to get the money. And so you can make payouts as well as $1. So that's one of the use cases. Then you have bigger amounts, free answers, and so on. And now we're seeing more and more B2B transaction in PortExport being done over stablecoins. So in this case, the amount can be really large. So the average transaction amount can be really large. So that's all the use cases that we're seeing. And in those B2B transactions, are they going from fiat to fiat through crypto assets? They're starting in stablecoin and sending to fiat. Or is it starting in fiat and sending to stablecoin or a combination of the both? Could you break that down? Because I hear a lot in the supply market, depending on whether they're paying out into Asia. There's often a lot of folks who actually accept Tether as a payment method, but not necessarily on the sending side. Do they have it to send all the other way around? So usually one of the leg has stablecoins or wants to accept stablecoins. That's our primary market. So for instance, you're an exporter from Hong Kong, manufacturing stuff from China. Usually you export via Hong Kong. And you're selling into, say, Africa. You're a client there or in Vietnam. And your clients saying, hey, it's difficult for me to get access to the US dollar. Not enough liquidity, the banks are super slow, super expensive, zians of paperwork and so on. But I'm able to get access to USDT, or USDT for instance. Could I pay you with that? But the guy in Hong Kong saying, oh no, I'm a traditional business, especially with China, crypto is not very well perceived and everything like that. And that's why they're approaching us and saying, hey, can you process these payments so that I only receive Hong Kong dollars or Chinese Yuan or US dollar depending on their preference on my bank account? But still my clients will be able to pay with USDT. So that's exactly the kind of use cases we're seeing and we're processing. Yeah, I think it's super interesting. The stablecoin summit has been the term used to help, I think a lot of folks understand the potential of stablecoins. But actually, and I haven't seen this data, there's no single source of this data. But actually, from anecdotes, from what I've heard, I think the majority of volume is stablecoin on one side, either fiat to stable or stable to fiat. I'm not a big fan of the stablecoin sandwich. Now I'm calling it, to describe what we're doing is like more of the open face sandwich. Yeah, I also don't like that term. I feel like the stablecoin sandwich term is like, yeah, we need to change that. So I'm glad you're on board with that as well. We need to find a new term for it. But yeah, I think someone, I think you mentioned open face sandwich needs to be a catchy, one sided, let's say like a bruschetta, but that's not catchy enough anyway. So we'll, what I find is super interesting about that, the way you mentioned is some of these cross-border payments are just super, super challenging for many different reasons. It could be capital controls in a particular nation, a lack of access to US dollars, or they do actually have access to banking. But because it's south, global south to global south, then that needs to hop through multiple corresponding banks in order to get to its end destination. And that could take anything from three days to 14 days, if you get your money. And if, because oftentimes things still do get lost. And I think there was a really interesting announcement this week at TBOS, where Swift said, finally, look guys, we're going to work on our blockchain related to our Swift payment mechanism. And they went into some details about, you know, how they're thinking about it. And there's a lot to come there, but you can imagine a world where, okay, well, there's lots of different things that are broken in the kind of traditional banking space. I would love to get your thoughts on what you think the potential is for that and the effects of that on global payments, particularly if banks globally no longer need four or five correspondent banking relationships, they can just hold direct non-structured accounts or actually just hold global dollars or global currencies. And now any bank global south to global south can just use Swift to message each other. How do you think that affects kind of the cross-border demand that you're seeing? I think the issue in payments is not Swift, is the payment correspondent model, which gets even more complicated with capital control imposed by some countries. So that's why stablecoin is not a magic recipe. And that's why today, all the successful use cases, everything which is currently being used with stablecoin is people who are actually bypassing, especially in an emerging market, is that instead of holding my money in my US border into a bank because I can't even open a USD bank account in most countries around the world, you can only use the local currency. Here, for the first time, I'm able to hold directly on my mobile phone or directly on my wallet or maybe I'm trusting an exchange, I don't know, but I can finally open a USD-denominated account. That's what people want. People, they don't want stablecoins, they want US dollars. That's the cue. So on your question is whether the banks and especially banks in emerging markets are going to be able to embrace this, I wouldn't hold my breath because the thing is that their local regulators may not be ready to do that. However, just the existence of stablecoin creates a pressure for a lot of countries to open up. And instead of telling many countries are saying, "Oh, my currency is worth this," but the reality is that and you can see that on Binance, on many exchanges, it's like, "No, it's there." And obviously some governments are not happy with that, but you're getting the real market data from the stablecoin markets. So I think for the banks, especially banks in emerging markets, it's going to take a lot of time. Yeah, and it's interesting because this actually dovetails in a way of your experience building tunes. And for those of you that don't know, Eric also is the founder of Tunes. Tunes is one of the premier cross-border payment companies in the fiat world for a long time. But I think the way that you talk about this experience with Swift, Eric, it reminds me of you actually have a lot of hard-earned battles back in the Tunes days as well. I'm curious, just like some of the experience that you've had at Tunes, maybe quickly explain Tunes in your own words, and then how that experience potentially changes with stablecoins or does it at all as well? The idea of Tunes, when I started the company, was to make an international payments into mobile wireless. The idea was to say that in emerging markets, people are going to be banked through their telco, through an e-money issuer or something like this, instead of going to the traditional banks and so on. And the examples were in Tesla and Kenya, Bitcoin, cash in Bangladesh, even back then Alipay or Wichita in China. When I started the company, it was a bit tough because back then, that was 2010-ish. And what I would say, sending money onto a mobile phone in Africa, those guys, they don't have enough food, they don't need a mobile phone first, even less an account on that. But now it's kind of obvious that you want to do a payment like this. And so in effect, Tunes has built over the year a parallel network to Swiss, still using Swiss for the wholesale transfers, but still being able to offer a real-time payment system, because especially one of the big use cases, remittances or payouts to content creators. And so everybody's expecting, especially when you have a technology like a mobile wallet, that things happen in real time. But behind the scene, one of the big issue we had is that for this model to work, you have to pre-fund all your partners through Swiss. And that means that there was a lot of work in capital which were trapped. It meant as well that sometimes you were forced converted into the local currency, meaning that you were taking a currency risk. You were taking a huge counterparty risk. One example I like to give is at the end of Ramadan, people are sending a lot of money back home because it's a festival and so on, but the banks are closed for a week. So it means that you have to pre-fund a lot of money to your Nigerian partners or Pakistan partner and so on. And maybe it would be worthwhile, it would be better for the guy to take your money and rent. So I was not sleeping very well during that time. And that's really something that stablecoin is really solving now. Right. And I think the pre-funding problem is one that folks in the space are very excited to see get solved. I think there's the inherent scale required to do cross-border payments cheaply and quickly. And so I think there was a, as we probably saw several months ago, huge furor on stablecoin Twitter and LinkedIn when AirWalk CEO Jack Zang said, "Hey, I don't really see the value of stablecoins, guys. Like the modern or like the G7 currencies, it's fine. It's already less than a second, less than a cent. Yeah, sure. Maybe some cross-border flows and exotic currencies, maybe some regulatory arbitrage. Those two things being very big, but the point was hey, we're actually very good already at the G7 currencies. But hiding the fact that to get to that point, billions of dollars in investment in capital were required. And so with today's stablecoins, I guess the promise is that, hey, you can actually start a cross-border payment corridor, multiple corridors and whole operation with far less capital, because essentially the liquidity needed to go in and out of currencies is now held in a more decentralized way. And what I mean by that is by market makers, exchanges, banks, and so on. And if you can plug into that shared liquidity, then your own capital needs are less. And I was wondering if you could help the audience kind of break down. Do you see that as well, obviously, with the experience of tunes and also now having to manage currencies and payoffs and pains across border for AAA? Are you seeing pre-funding as a much lower amount? Are you seeing the process more to be more efficient? How are you managing that liquidity and the volatility of the different currencies? Yeah, for sure. So that's one one of the reasons I started AAA. Once I realized that stablecoins were solving this issue, which was a major pain point, because I had to, to your point, I had to raise money just and raising equity just for that. So that's very expensive in terms of dilution and everything. And we're using it daily today to move our internal treasury through stablecoins. And that's completely a game changer. And it's interesting, the Jack's poster from now, while it was like, I hate it. And I remember I had many discussions with him as well. And it's like, oh, no, it's interesting. Maybe we got a partner and oh, no, it's so important. I want to build everything in the house. So it's very, very interesting to see after, as you said, for pure G7 to G7 currency, I would say for financial institutions, there's still some efficiency to get from stablecoin. But if you look at the level below, like if you take a multinational operating between Europe, Singapore, US, and so on, they probably wouldn't get much value from having themselves and to manage themselves stablecoin. That's my, I think the current banking system is already super efficient. And this may be a hard question to answer, but how can you help folks understand how much more capital efficient it is to use a global dollar for cross-border and treasury management than the pre-funding model? It's probably a hard question because the start-up costs that need to be amortized of all the number of transactions that you do. But if you could just give us a rough breakdown of, okay, for a traditional payment, X percent of the cost is paying off the pre-funding amount. And therefore, that's how much savings there are if you could build cross-border payments just on stablecoins. What's easy to measure is the cost of funding. So it means that you have, if you just take worst case scenario, like four days with a long weekend, a bank holiday, maybe five days and so on. And so you measure how much it costs, you know, having five days of working capital. But there are things you're not able to measure is that if you're sending dollars to your correspondent in India, it gets converted to Indian rupees. And then the rupees fluctuates. And then maybe in the wrong direction, it might be sometimes in the right direction. For some reason, it's always in the wrong direction based on my experience. And then you have a problem is that you have an inventory of currency that you overpay. So if you either have a hard time reselling it, or you need to take a hit on that, and that's difficult to measure. So you could try to measure it. But, you know, I do not know, I would have sort of such a hard question today. I know we put you on the spot there. Thanks for that. But no, I'm sure you can date a model where you would hedge the currency. And so the cost of hedging, you could add that, but we can give that next step. For those who don't know, you know, we shared a bunch of questions with Eric before. This one just popped into my head. I'm like, you know what, we're on this topic. I'm really curious to find out. And the reason for it is obviously, we're all payment payments here. And we're keen to understand all the various different edges that stablecoins have. But, you know, I've spoken to a lot of cross-border payments infrastructure providers who say, look, I've set up my infrastructure in such a way that I am now cheaper than your traditional Web 2 cross-border B2B payments provider. And compliance is the same. But I have less operational staff, less pre-funding capital, I have to raise less money. And so I can still make a good margin and charge way less. And so it's a matter of time before I start to win over their business, because I can just go to their customers and say, hey, I can give you the same thing, but for less. And as you mentioned, it's very, very hard to kind of do a side by side, because there's so many things that go into the traditional pre-funded model. There's the capital you need to raise, which is, like you said, it comes out of equity. It doesn't come out of any individual transaction. Then there's the currency cost, the volatility that you're holding, there's the risk. You know, sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. And then every so often, when you are underfunded in a particular area, and you have a large payment, you need to use emergency funding or capital to get that capital there. So all these different things make it very, very challenging. And I guess what we're going to have to find out over time is how do the customers who make the final buying decision, how do they decide? You know, people will decide with their feet, as it were. And I think over time, the air wallets, the tunes have been taking share from banks. And then now it remains to be seen how much share will shift to the stablecoin driven or stablecoin powered cross-border payments players. But don't underestimate the additional cost or complexity whenever you're adding stablecoins. You know, how do you manage your crypto wallets? What are the permissions? How do you put that into your accounting software? Most accounting software are not able to account for USDT or USDC. How do you get your audit done? You know, most auditors, you know, you go to price, you go to UI, you go to, you know, as soon as you're saying you're touching crypto, they freak out. And the price you're going to pay is like three or four times the usual cost of your financial audit. And I could go on and on in some jurisdiction. It means that you will need to get a crypto license, so Mica in Europe or a digital payment token in Singapore and the other jurisdiction. So yes, there's a lot of efficiency and so on. So I'll leave the last one to say that stablecoin is not working, but you need to be careful when you want to go into all this complexity because whether you like it or not, the risk profile from an AML perspective is higher than the traditional banking system. As I mentioned at some point, there's a way to mitigate the risk and so on and so on, but it's a higher risk profile. And to your point, the tailwinds are just beginning. You've been building AAA for five years now and we've just got the genius act in the U.S. We just have Mica in Europe. So to your point, there's still a long way to go and a lot of the infrastructure is hard. One thing that I don't know if we've touched on enough is the international and globalization of stablecoins and the ability to like, I think you're saying with Razor that you guys can now receive payments in 160 countries, you've built tunes for over 10 years. I don't know if you can draw a parallel to like how fast you could globalize a business with stablecoins versus what you saw in the traditional fiat side and like, what are some of the constraints you're still seeing in stablecoins, maybe outside of the regulatory stuff to like really scale like globally as well. Yeah, you're totally right. It's an order of magnitude because when I was building tunes, it's like you will go to Kenya, you need to do to make a deal with M-Pesa, you need to convince the regulator even to send money into the country, you need to get permission. So that takes a long time. That's really complex where stablecoin by definition is global. So yes, in terms of global deployments, stablecoin is amazing. The things which are still, we need to improve as an industry is everything which is related to the wallet, to the blockchains. It's still a bit geeky. It's amazing that there's like 400 million around the world having crypto. It shows how important it is for people. So even though the UX is not amazing, I have USDC on Solana. I still need to have Solana. So what is Solana to pay for the gas? What is the gas? Even though it's like next to nothing, you still need to have that. So it's far from being perfect. So I think that's this whole UX thing which is getting improved. There's all the new stablecoins. They're really early but the new stablecoin blockchains where the gas fees is paid in stablecoins. If you think there's just so many initiatives, so we don't really know who's going to win in this battle and we probably need something which would be agreed by the whole industry. At the moment, every player is trying to push their own, circle their own and so on. We all know that's not going to work. We need something which is going to be accepted by the whole industry. But I'm pretty sure it will converge over time. But that's all the things we need to work on to make the user experience better. Maybe we can dive a little deeper there as well. Eric, just to get your point of view, I mean, you're kind of a unique lens where you work with these Web2 merchants and to your point, we need to fully abstract away some of the crypto complexities. On the other side, you are seeing the early innings of our industry where there's the Stripe project, there's Circle, there's all these new entrants that are also coming with their own mixture. From your point of view, for your own product, how are you deciding what are elements that you bring into the AAA infrastructure that you then enable for that full abstraction and what are you waiting to see for more maturity to take place as well? On our side, we're really driven by what people are using. If they're using this stablecoin on that network, that's what we add onto our stack. We're not going to be the one who are going to drive this or that blockchain because those things are really, really big. So on our side, it's more like, what is the market demand? If people are telling me, oh, I need stablecoin, why? And we're starting to see that. Maybe local stablecoin. In Europe, it has not taken off, but it looks like maybe in Japan, maybe in the UAE, there is strong push from the central banks. So then we will see the adoption. But on our side, it's for us to adapt to what people need. Yeah, absolutely. And this shows why distribution is so important. But just before we move on to the next question, I just wanted to take a quick moment here to thank the sponsors that make this show possible. Every business needs a stablecoin strategy. And if you're looking for the best place to start, that's BVNK. BVNK is the world's leading provider of stablecoin payments infrastructure, helping businesses move money faster, reach new markets, and even launch their own stablecoin products. Global licensing and compliance are covered, so you can build with confidence. Learn more at bvnk.com. Okay, thank you to our sponsors. So one of the things that I think we touched on a bit here was just the number of people and different stakeholders and the stack that you need to interact with. We mentioned that a lot of the transactions are stablecoins on one side, which means that there's a lot of interoperability, I'll call it backwards compatibility with Fiat. That's the way that business is done today. And so you need to have, I'm sure, strong relationships with banks and other avenues into the Fiat world. But I'm sure over time that has been challenging just with the notoriety of crypto. And so given the risk aversion to banks, can you maybe talk about your journey of how you've built trust with them and how they're becoming more and more familiar and comfortable with the various different risk mitigations that you mentioned? Yeah, so yeah, as you rightly said, banks, they hate crypto or anything crypto related, as simple as that. The good thing is like, because in my previous business, I choose, we were already in the renaissance business and they hate it as much more or less, because, you know, person to person transaction are very, you know, I have the higher risk of AMN on special interest financing. So I've been used to taking banking relationship as something very serious. And that's the reason we've been investing so much into licenses compliance team, because getting on boarded by a bank is even worse than getting a license. So it's a one year process. Fortunately, or unfortunately, they're putting the best compliance guys on those tough topics. So they're asking the tough questions. So all around our control in place and so on. And that's also one of the reasons we have a fairly conservative risk appetite in terms of the clients were on board. We don't work with higher risk merchants. And so we're very selective on that in order to and to align with our banking partners. But yeah, they are absolutely essential. It has obviously improved since, especially in the US, where it was extremely difficult, you know, we like most people in the crypto industry, you know, we lost like two or three bank accounts after a second value bank disaster. So absolutely today, the risk appetite is slowly going up, but it's still not like, you know, open door, and so on. It's still one year each due diligence process. Some banks are clearly more open. And that's the risk is that some of the banks, they don't tell you no one's there. Oh, yeah, it took to me more. But it's just about education. And, you know, they are not do that. So it's a big waste of time. So you need to be you need to be careful with with those guys. Yeah, so so it's very slowly improving, but still a big, big, and it's the biggest, I would say it's the critical element. Do you think that that is one of the if not the major unlock, as we think about the next five to 10 years. So obviously, the Genius Act has been passed in the US, the working market structure, the largest G-Serves are getting into the game. And people often say that the US really sets the tone in financial markets regulation, given that its size and its maturity, despite Singapore having been very, very far ahead and with a really strong framework, UAE also, and then Hong Kong and others catching up. The expectation is, and I look to get your thoughts on this, that global banking regulation and compliance frameworks will follow what's happening in the US. And so over time, either by, you know, it coming from top down leadership, or because the competitors start to enter the game and start building business, banks globally are starting to become more and more will increasingly become more and more amenable to crypto type businesses. Are you seeing that? And if so, what does that unlock for your business and crypto in general? Yeah, in the US, as I said, it's slowly going back. I think they're still missing a lot of guidelines. So they just got repeating a lot of the negatives, everything from the previous administration, but they still don't have positive guidelines. And so I think they're also still waiting for their regulators. I know some banks which have, you know, they were asked not to, in the US, asked not to get more business, especially not more crypto business. I think they still didn't get the green light. So I think because everything is still so new, the genius act is more on the issuing side than, you know, the all the money laundering risk, CFTG risk. I think that, you know, they have not yet translated through the regulators. And so probably in the US, there's plenty of regulators. We were so spoiled in Singapore, we have only one regulator for everything. So it's going to take time. Banks are not willing to move super fast, and especially some of them which got burnt when they were too crypto friendly, and some of them shut down. So I think it will take time. A lot of, to your point, a lot of the international banks, the non-US banks, because they're hiding a big correspondent business with the US banks, they are waiting also for their counterparty to give them regulation. But usually if you take Europe or Singapore, regulations are super clear of what you can do in terms of everything crypto related. But they are not able to take more risk because of the risk appetite of JP Morgan or, you know, a Citibank, all the big correspondent banks. And, you know, if you're DBS, there's no way you can lose access to the US dollar, right? Yeah. And so what will that unlock for you there? Because it does seem, and this is definitely a cliche, people always say we're so early. But when I hear these factors, it seems like we truly are still so early from a regulatory perspective, the banking relationships, and yes, the infrastructure is being built, all the UX problems that you mentioned. And so today you have worked really, really hard and leaned on prior relationships to get the access that you have. When this, let's say over the next several years, it takes time, but over the next several years, it becomes easier. Does that reduce your cost? Does that enable you to access more markets than you already have? Is it more really redundancy? Like how does that unlock things for you? Yeah, it's going to be opening more countries. It can mean, you know, reducing the cost. For us, yeah, it's really important. And in the future, as banks will embrace this technology, and I think it's going to start by banks in developed markets, so US Europe and so on, there will be also an opportunity to work with them as clients. As clients, as in help them to receive an OSAM. Okay, yes. Maybe Eric, before we jump into a few rapid-fire questions, maybe you could just share, you know, we oftentimes have a lot of fintech founders that are listening, you know, to the pod here. What are some of the hardest lessons that you've learned from either building AAA or tunes that, you know, you would part with, you know, for some of the founders that are listening in right now? Also, especially in the crypto financial and fintech in general, so you need to invest in compliance yourself. You need to understand that compliance is not a, it's not like technology, which you can outsource. It is a control function that you need to understand. So the logic is very different when you say, "Oh, I need something for finance. I need something for tech." You know, "Oh, I'm going to find a finance expert." Compliance doesn't work exactly like this, and that's the knowledge you need to learn by yourself. The other thing is, like, go to market as early as possible. If you talk to your clients, show them an MVP, don't wait for your product to be perfect. That's the biggest mistake we do as entrepreneurs, that you think that, you know, what the market wants, and you're trying to get something perfect instead of talking to your customers as early as possible. Yeah, I think that's great. That's great feedback. And I think the best fintech teams that I've ever seen, they treated compliance like a product. They would staff like a product manager there. They would have like an engineering team in addition to like the legal and compliance analysts also. So I think it's a great piece of feedback right there. Yeah, I'm going to jump on that, actually. So for all the new folks, all the new founders building in the space that listen to this episode and say, "Eric told me I need to be a compliance expert." Okay, now I need to go figure out compliance. How do they have to go about doing that? Yeah, very often people are saying, "Oh, I'm going to get a license. I'm going to get ready-made compliance man." But he's really ready-made. Maybe you pay the lawyer to do that and which has nothing to do with your business. Any regulator is going to throw back at you saying, "Hey, this is just generic things. Yeah, getting trained. That would be my biggest advice." Okay, sounds like there's a business opportunity there. There's all these startup founders who are going to be looking for compliance training that focused on cross-border stable-clone compliance. A little tip there for anyone building companies. Okay, so we have some rapid-fire questions for you. So start with an easy one. If we project out five years from now, what does success look like for AAA? Five years. Fully, we would be at what, 200 million revenues? Awesome, exciting. When we're still doing the podcast then, we'll get you back on the show and we'll talk about how you're doing 300 and 400. So next question against personal interest. Favorite book, movie, TV show, or other content? This one is tough. I don't spend a lot of time doing anything else than fintech. I'm a big fan of René Girard that Peter Thiel likes very much, but I'm not really understood or we maybe disagree with the interpretation. So all the René Girard book, you know, he was at Stanford, I would advise. There's a very nice one on Shakespeare. I forgot the exact title. Awesome. And then last one. Who else in the space do you admire that we should bring on the show? Lots of admiration for the people at Flodesk doing market-making. I think you should think of inviting them. Also, that's a good one. So that's the wrap for us today. Thank you for a great conversation. Eric, it's always good chatting with you. Where can listeners go to find more about you or AAA? You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm trying to connect with most of the people. LinkedIn is the best way to reach out to me. If you're not following Eric already, you should. He puts out very insightful posts on a regular basis, so highly recommend. What about you, Raj? Where can folks go to find you? Yeah, you can find me on x@Rajparic_ and monad.xyz. Awesome. And for me, you can find me at stablecoinblueprint.com, on x@chuk_xyz, and on LinkedIn, chukocplugo. Thank you for listening, and Eric, thanks for your time. Thanks again, Eric. Thanks so much for listening to Money Code. There's so much to take away from today's conversation. I learned a lot, and I hope you did, too. If you enjoyed this episode, do us a favor, share it with someone you know, or give us a five-star rating on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast from. Until next time.