The Use-Case: OpenFX - Prabhakar Reddy (Episode #58)

Hello and welcome to the use case, a mini-series by senior studio hosted by me, Ben Jacobs of Senior's Capital. With this mini-series, we aim to shine a light when commercial businesses generating revenue and solving a real world problem. To catch, these businesses are uniquely built using blockchain rails and crypto technology. The world wants to see more use cases beyond speculation, so we're here to showcase examples of the founders and companies disrupting industries with crypto as their weapon of choice. In this episode, I sit down with Prabhakar Ready, founder and CEO of OpenFX. OpenFX is the fastest growing blockchain startup you've never heard of, and Prabhakar is one of the industry's most revered, yet under the radar founders. OpenFX has built a global FX system, using stablecoins and blockchain rails to process tens of billions of volume per month, while serving many, large, fintech providers. Prabhakar is no stranger to growth, however. As co-founder of Falcon X, he scaled crypto's first prime broker to Unicorn status before starting OpenFX. This is Special Episode and I'm thrilled to share with the senior studio audience. Let's get into it. Ben Jacobs is a partner at Seenis Capital Management. All views expressed by Ben and the guests of this podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of Seenis Capital Management. Yes, in the host may maintain positions in the assets and funds discussed in this podcast. You should not treat any opinion expressed by anyone in this podcast as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy, but only as an expression of their personal opinion. This podcast is for informational purposes only. Hello everyone and welcome to this edition of The Use Case by Seenis Studio. I am your faithful host, Ben Jacobs, a Seenis Capital. As you know with this podcast, we love to interview crypto's best and brightest investors, GPs and CIOs of crypto's top edge funds and VC funds. But this year we took a little break from these manager interviews and instead decided to focus on the perennial question that has plagued crypto enthusiasts, which is, what are the use cases? How is there anything of tangible value being created on blockchain rails? And today's guest has built one of crypto's most successful companies to date and is now on his second venture in the asset class. And one that I think is a flagship example for how blockchain can solve a real world problem at scale. So without further ado, I would love to introduce the audience to Probacar Ready, the CEO and founder of OpenFF. How's it going Probacar? Going very well. Thank you for having me here, Ben. Yeah, I'm excited to have you and this is actually take two. We tried recording a couple of weeks ago, but unbeknownst to us at the time, AWS was having a massive outage, so hopefully nothing but smooth sailing from here on out. And we were just talking right before we kicked off the episode. You are calling from Latin America. What's going on over there? That's right. I'm here in Mexico City today and I'm here this week meeting a couple of our large customers. Latin happens to be one of our fastest growing regions for OpenFF, so I am where my team needs to be. And this week that's, that's in Mexico City. Amazing. Hopefully you get some good Alpastor tacos or whatever it might be or your favorite flavor of taco is while you're there. Oh my God. The food here. Fantastic. I think I put on a few kilos and just like the three days I've been here. You're good. Well, that means you're doing your job correctly. How do we take it from the top? We'd love to learn a little bit more about your entrepreneurial background and everything that led to the founding of OpenFF X. Happy to. So for everyone, I'm Prabhakar, the founder and CEO of OpenFF X, as Ben mentioned. I started this company about two years ago, but prior to starting OpenFF X, I co-founded a company called Falcon X. Falcon X is a dish less at Prime brokerage, it's an 8 billion dollar company now. It's one of the largest in the ecosystem. Before starting Falcon X, I used to be a VC at a venture capital firm called Excel. Excel is a global, you know, multi asset venture capital firm and I used to do at the price access as well as Fintech investing. And during my time at Excel, I started looking at blockchain and crypto. This was 2016. I fell in love with the space. I was young and naive. I drank the cool aid. I started trading a lot of crypto on my personal books and assets and realized that there's a lot of missing infrastructure in the space. One thing led to another. I had one point, one of the largest traders and some of the largest exchanges in the ecosystem. And that led to the buildings of Falcon X. And before joining Excel, I've been an entrepreneur since the age of 19. My first company was, well, I was still in undergrad, so that was a month of graduation. I went out a bit out to more companies and the last company was acquired by BookMashel, which is the ticket master of India. So actually OpenFF X is my fifth journey as an entrepreneur. So I've been very fortunate to be doing this again and again. So what drives someone to strike out on the painful entrepreneurial journey for the fifth time? I based on your success as a VC, as a founder. You could be retired on a beach somewhere, eating all the tacos you want, why are you going after this again? That's a very broad and very powerful question, Ben. I did do that, actually. I did have the fortune to sort of take some time off in 2022 and 2023. I ate all the tacos and also good food that I got. I got a surgery done for my leg and had a lot of time to think. Think about what the next three, four decades of my life are going to be. Is it just going to be me saying and watching Netflix for the rest of my life because I don't have to work? Again, I grew up with nothing, but currently in a very privileged place where I don't have to work for money. So the purpose and meaning of what the next few decades of life are going to be, well, there was not a straightforward journey to be honest, but long story short, what I started doing in my time off is I started forming a world view on what the next 30, 40, 50 years so the world doesn't look like. That's my personal view, of course, across different domains, be it robotics, be it AI, be it healthcare, be it money, moment, everything, I just didn't really started writing things down saying this is how I see the world shaping up to be. And then what are the things that I as an individual can accelerate or in what way can I shape the world to basically move into the direction that I want is the next thing that I started thinking about. Then I realized that there are a lot of problems in this world naturally and a lot of exciting things going on at the same time as well. And there are a few problems where everything that I have done and built in my life as skills has led to a founder market fit in some domain as an example. I am an electronics and instrumentation engineer. And so I started looking at robotics of this space and doing, doing three, realize that it is a very exciting space. It is going to be the future in the next 100 years, but I have zero founder market fit in that domain. I'm going to have to start at the same level as a Nike neural kid starting in the space. I realized that that's not a battle that I want to fight. There are probably really good folks, top world class people in this domain who are actually solving the problem. My job should be to discover those people, give them the capital, give them the resources, and if anything, use my network and you know resource available to help unlock and shape that world view of possible. But me, I realized that, you know, the world of payments, the world of effects, the world of stable coins, this global crossbar of money movement infrastructure is a pain point that was personal to me. I realize that the world in the next 20, 30 years is not going to look like the world that was the last 50 years in this space. And I have fortunately a unique skin set, a unique access to a network of people, domain knowledge. And there was a lot of things going right back in 2013 saying, I'm actually uniquely built to bend sort of reality into how I see the world to be, right? And that's how open effects is born. And fortunately, two years in, we are on the path to what I want to do achieve. Because in the long run, the answer right, hopefully that gives you context on how I thought about things. No, that's that's very helpful. So as you were evaluating domains in which you had a unique skill set, you felt like capable of bending reality to channel it being a startup and hopefully creating a immense value for the world. Did you have an aha moment where you were like, oh, open effects is it or the idea behind open effects is the path forward or did you was it a culmination of problems that you ultimately were thinking about that you aggregated underneath the roots of open effects? A good question. Again, it's never one single aha moment, it's, as you've said, an amalgamation of lots of small things as data points that you start observing, then you start seeing patterns and trends. So give a little bit of light into that. So 2022, 2020, when I'm moved back to the bar, after almost a decade, I started realizing that through 90s, through 2000s, I would always see like Dubai has a lot of lower middle-class population, a worker-class population that owns wages at the end of the month. On the 30th of every month, they go, stand in lines outside ATMs, withdraw their salaries. Then the next minute, they go, stand outside lines outside western union and new exchange houses, pay five to seven percent of that income, do the exchange houses and send money back home to India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Philippines, etc. And this was happening in 90s, is that mean, well, 2022-23, still the same thing is happening. That is one reality. The other side, I was reading on TechCrunch and all the other news articles that cross-border payments have been solved. Stable coins are the magic solution. There are so many companies getting funded that money is moving here instantly everywhere. I was like, is this huge disconnect in what I'm really for and seeing here, what's going on. So, call up, you know, a very good friend of mine, and I told him, even list of all these cross-border payment companies have raised recently, you know, doing a good job. I got a list of like 42 different companies. I actually picked up the phone and spoke to almost everyone in that list. I was like, what exactly is going on? What are you solving for? Why is there a disconnect in what you're claiming and what reality is? I realized that most, if not all of these companies back then, were building as a wrapper around stablecoins. In the sense that they're saying we will most stablecoins from point A to point B, which stablecoins anyway do. But if you want last mile fee at liquidity, they're saying go to coins.ph on Philippines or a bit so in Latin or a coin, mean, I knew, and they go off route with there. The next leg of evolution that was happening is some of these platforms are integrating into exchanges themselves directly and saying we will give you that it was all good for small numbers. In the sense that I have, having built Falcom X, I know how much liquidity and depth is there on these exchanges that I need even point in time. You can easily get started on these exchanges, but once you go from $100,000 transaction to a $10 million transaction, you're going to eat through the entire order, but we would not have basis points, but percentage points of slippage, most likely 10, 15, 20%. And suddenly, you're better off transferring money to Western Union, right, it doesn't make any sense. So, those are huge disconnects. So, really, I said, okay, this is not a stablecoin problem. This is an FX problem, right? So, I started unpacking the world of FX, I started realizing that there are five, six major fintech companies in the space, where I fully control most of the FX organization in the world. I picked up the phone. I get very fortunate. I spoke to the founders of most of these companies. As it helped me understand how the world of FX works, and I explained to you the entire live crypto. Some of them were very kind. They open the hood. They explained to me how their entire infrastructure is built. And I actually spend time with the offices, understanding what's happening. I realized that most of these legacy FX fintech companies are built as wrappers around big bags. The wraparound, a barclays or an HSBC or a Dorsher bank. And the problem with that is, after 4 p.m., bank doesn't work. On weekends, banks don't work. On national holidays, banks don't work. One single bank doesn't have global banking connectivity, so there is a centaion correspondent banking network. So a bank A to bank B is almost always three to five touch points of different different banks through which money flows. Each bank wants to hold flow for as long as they can. So even if I connected all of these stable coin touch points to these legacy FX vendors, money still would not work. But money was still take two, three, five days to move. Money was still cost a lot. I realized the centaion infrastructure needs to be built up ground up completely differently. And so that was the evolution and thesis of open effects. And me looking at it saying, okay, this is not an easy problem to solve, right? Because you have global licensing, compliance, regulation. You have to have the very strong understanding of FX. You have to have a very strong understanding of stable coins. You don't understand market making. You have to run at 24/7, 365 business. There is no weekends. There's no Christmas. There's no national holidays. And you have to have an ability to raise an infinite amount of capital almost and bend this reality to your world where you're actually making money move like data, right? Because in the next 10 years, the largest users of FX are not going to be you and me, Ben. It's going to be like AI agents, right? And they're not going to wait the five days to basically see the money on the other side. So what I started thinking is, okay, this is a meaty enough problem. And if this problem were to get solved, the world will head into the action which I wanted to add. And so right then, just spending my capital, I want to spend my time, my energy, my resources to bend and shape the world into this shape-performing money does move like data. And that was the birth of open FX. So you said one thing that I wanted to drill into, which is that as someone is sending money or a company is sending money, there's three to five stops. And each of the stops benefits from holding on to the money for as long as possible. So it seems like these providers are disincentivized to enable faster payments and FX transactions and remittances. So how have you found trying to circumvent the legacy systems that maybe what are they trying to implement or trying to halt by lobbying or creating onerous regulation, like what has been the response from the incumbents before we even dig into the open FX solution? Of course. Here's the thing. You asked me this question five years ago, I would like, I don't have a solution for you. But today, what's happened is stablecoins as a pro-taffron PMF. What do stablecoins allow us to do, right? And if I need to move 15 million pounds from UK to UAE, I can go pounds to dollars, dollars to stablecoin, I can move those stablecoins to UAE, convert those stablecoins back to dollars to AED and get into my bank all within like minutes. Whereas before stablecoins, I have to go pounds to dollars who are wired those daughters from barclays in UK to an Emirates and BD in UAE which would take three to five days for me to get because there's no other way around it, I have to go through the Swift route. And once I get those dollars, I have to convert to AED and to circumvent that, what a lot of the large companies like transfer wise do is the pre-fund their bank accounts ahead of time saying, okay, I know that you know, today is when it's day by Friday, I need to basically have 50 million dollars worth of funds, I'm going to pre-fund that you know, three days ahead of time, which is extremely balanced, you know, intensive, right? But now what stablecoins have done is a literally a lot of us to circumvent this entire Swift network. I don't have to rely on intermediary banks. I don't have to rely on nostrils for our guns. I can move my money free 24/7 365 as I see fit. That has basically been the game changer here. What have these incumbents? Not there? Let's just be wrapping their heads around. What are these stablecoins? What should we do about them? Right? Like, UK is a good example. The UK government is like, nobody can hold more than $20,000 dollars worth of stablecoins hitting on the part. So people are still wrapping their head around it, but I think the cat's already out of the bag. Right? Stablecoins have found their PMF and it's going to continue skating rapidly. Got it. Very interesting. So walk me through the solution you've built, the component parts that you've aggregated together to deliver a superior solution. Yeah. You give you a little bit of first a quick summary on what? What is it that we do at OpenFX? Right? With single mission vision statement, Ben, we want to make money move across borders near instantly. My job is not to solve for money movement within a country, because in most emerging nations around the world, local RTP rails, real-damping materials have evolved to a version one, version two, where money is almost always moving 24, 7, 3, 6, 5 within a country. I have a Mexico City right now. There is SPAY, which moves money in New York, recently in India, there is UPI and Brazil, there is SPICS, then Europe, there is SEPA. Most of the geographies have evolved there. But the minute you move money from country to country, that's where things break. That's what we're trying to solve. We're trying to make sure that not for small tickets, but someone's moving a billion MXN, it should be able to move in minutes from country to country B and receive it in the currency that they want. That is basically what the ecosystem is doing. And doing it, not while charging in an arm in a leg, but at TR1, JP Morgan, wholesale FX rates. Right? When you send an SMS from your phone to someone else, cost you like. If you're in the iOS ecosystem, it's free, but if you're sending from iOS to Android, maybe like 25 cents. That is what it should cost. I like to move money across the globe. That's the ecosystem infrastructure building. And to break that down further into how we're getting there, we broke our product strategy into three components. First product that we launched, and we went live March of 2024, March we launched a product called trade job to be done, where the trade product is swap currency A to currency B. Now a currency can be an FX currency, a stable coin, it doesn't matter where agnostic, right? You should be able to near instantly convert whatever size you want, and you should be able to receive the currency that you have converted on the other side into your local bank account 24, 7365, whenever you need it, that is a product with it. That is literally what OpenFX has been scaling for the last 18 months. Number two, that you've just recently launched is a product called bank, which means most of our customers today start the day with OpenFX and the day with OpenFX. So at 6 p.m., when they're basically in our closing shop or they need to basically move money out of OpenFX, they take it to some bank account. We're saying why? If the money on the OpenFX platform, you're going to give you a little, you know, partner with our local, you know, global banking partners will give you a named high bank account for you to sort of lead the money on OpenFX, right? Like you say, Remittance Company of Mexico wants to launch in Southeast Asia tomorrow. If they're on launch in Philippines, they'll have to go to Philippines, create a company, get a local bank account, a local director, get their AP integration, take 9 months to 12 months before they can go live in Philippines. Instead, one click of a button, we're going to give them a PHP bank account and they're a company's time to go live with, right? So their business will scale up with it as well. So that's product number two, product number three is payments, which is we want to give the single API that collects money from anywhere, banks it, converts it and pays it out to whoever you need to. Underneath, there'll be lots of players, right? Where they were collecting money through Stripe or Adian and we're paying through G Cash or is ended, it should be completely agnostic to the user. It's going to be under the hood, you won't understand it. We don't need to rebuild all of this infrastructure. We're just going to be the orchestral layer on top that does it so cheaply, so fast and, you know, seamlessly that every from the empty infinitions of this, you should be using this again. That's what we're doing. So given that, I assume this is going to be more of a B2B type enterprise and the other companies will be responsible for the consumer interface, like, so like for me, if I'm working to buy and I want to send money home to the Philippines, I would use some app that facilitates that powered by OpenFX on the background, right? That's exactly right, Ben. And I, you know, before starting OpenFX, I actually gave it some thought. Should we start a retail focused product or a B2B product? And initially we thought should we explore retail and realize that for me to cover 8 billion people in the world, I had this lifetime one suffice. And so I'd rather get 1,000 B2B customers who cover the 8 billion people, right? And make it cheaper, faster, better for them. And I get just pure north of capitalism, right? Like if I'm powering the thousand large companies and their next seven competitors, it's going to become eventually doggy dog business. And that's effectively the role I'm trying to create. Like, and people are saying, FX is going to become a doggy dog business. Yes, 100% I am creating the doggy doggy nest effectively. I am collapsing the entire industry down to like bare bones, FX wholesale rates. So that everyone gets access to these rates and then it becomes their business model. How they want to compete, what they want to offer to their customers. Tomorrow we will have a plethora of options on OpenFX that you're like on a moon money. Here are all the applications that are powered by OpenFX for a US to Philippines, choose any one of them and you can go and use it. So walk me through traction as far. How has it been getting to market? What type of customers do you have? What type of volume are you moving? We would love to hear some metrics. Absolutely. So I think I told you we went live March of 2024. March, you know, we had first institutional customer trade roughly about half a million years, the next month we had traded about you know, two, three million dollars kept scaling. We achieved sort of like hyper growth by Q4 of 2024 where we start doing almost a billion dollars of TPV analyzed by I think November of the same time last year. We ended December of last year around two billion dollars of last TPV, grew that to eight billion dollars by a Q1 of 2025. Then when we came out of stealth in May, we announced that and now as of last month, we just crossed 34 billion dollars of analyzed TPV to send that in context for you. This is all just payments volume, right? For all analytics, we do who our customers are to give you sort of like context. Transfer wise moves about 250 billion to 300 billion dollars a year. We are doing roughly 10% of what transfer wise does within one and a half years of operations and transfer wise has been an operations for like 15 years. So the scale at which we're growing is massive and I'm extremely proud of the team at the now with a very lean team, how are we able to achieve this? And who do we serve? We serve primarily FinTech to point out companies so far in the sense that anyone who's basically built a side of FinTech company between 2018 to 2025, seed to seed is deep in tech companies. And they primarily fall in three categories, your remittance company, a new age remittance company, your payment processor, payment gateway or you're a neo-back. These have been the three primary categories that cover 70% of our customer personnel. The remaining 30% are travel OTAs, pay loan processors, you know, prediction market platforms, neo-broker ages, right? All of these companies who are basically already natively integrating stablecoins in some shape or form because all of these FinTech companies who are starting now are not trying to use legacy infrastructure. They're already digitally in our advanced, using stablecoins or APF first companies. That's who we are powering. We don't have a very large balance sheet, right? A Western Indian transfer wise remittly has a very large balance sheet in their very happy with where they are. But a new kid on the block who started two years ago and has a train million dollar balance sheet but wants to do a billion dollars a month of low comes to open effects because now you don't have to prefund your assets three days in advance. You can rapidly scale when you can receive your money within 60 minutes of you doing a trade then your balance sheet scales infinitely because if open effects becomes your balance sheet of the service. In a way, right? So suddenly these businesses started scaling from like nothing to like hyper grow through us and their growth has become our growth effectively, right? So that's been open to fix the strategy of the last two months. So it seems to me like it's quite an easy sale and also one that you can make to a FinTech 2.0 company being eyed listen, all your competitors are integrating and therefore they're allowing for faster movement of capital like if you don't work with an open fx and one you need to supply a balance sheet and do your money movement is going to be slower. So have you found it to be pretty frictionless and is there any discussion of unit economics like are they saving a bunch of money by integrating open fx? Are they generating better margins and therefore able to offer other products? What's the conversation like with those types of customers? Yeah, fantastic question. It is fascinating to see how I say as conversations go Ben. We operated in stealth for the entire first year, okay? So there was no large outbound marketing program. Everyone who knew that open fx is offering the best fx liquidity and pricing for some currencies that we are live with literally came to us. It was all word of mouth that was spreading in the first 12 months of our operation because what we realized is if this is going to become a doggy dog business, let's price it low. We want to create that word artificially, I'm trying to run an Amazon S business, right? In the sense that I'm going to make a very small margin on a lot of volume. So let me price it, that we offer wholesale rates to every one of my clients. And so for them naturally, first it's like, they don't believe it, they're like, are you kidding me? Like, I'll get access to tea. I'm going to take the market race. And instead of T plus three, you're going to give me like, in one hour, it's unpilivable. I'm like, is there a lock-in or an annual contract? Nope. If open fx is not the best vendor for you, you have no reason to go up with us, right? That's literally the infrastructure. There's no contracts. There's no annual fees. There's no sign up fee. Come use. It's a pay as you go. Right? And we make our money on a small fee on every transaction. And so our sales cycle time is a 25 minute zoom call, 99% of the time. In the sense that my team jumps on a call, it's based what we do. Most of them already heard of us, they're like, are companies are using you? What exactly can you offer to us? How quickly can we go live? And then our first touch point to activation, and activation is defined for us as fully onboarded, completed KYC and everything else, and have done 10 trades and integrated open fx. That's eight weeks roughly. So about 60 days, they're able to go from first to a conversation to a customer get good and do a completing 10 trades with open fx on an average. So that's a rapid growth that we're seeing, Mark's start language. And the second part of your question was, what are they using open fx for in terms of their own business models? Now, most of these companies, like I said, are new age for tech companies. The having access to lower costs, faster money movement, is it becomes a USB? They're able to compete with the legacy players saying, I love you, much better rates, I love you near instant payments, and I'm available for you for seven. So their job should not be to think about, how do I basically build all the underlying native infrastructure of money movement? They sure drop should be a remittance, could be job to be, let me build the distribution mechanics, let me build a brand, let me get all the customers, let me build a beautiful user experience. Everything else open fx takes care of, and that's what we do. So many questions running through my head. So I assume the transfer wise and these legacy players that have kind of dominated this market for decades are not just going to roll over and die because open fx has come to market and attracted volume so quickly. What are these competitors doing, are they integrating stablecoins? Where does their model break? I'm just curious to hear their response to you guys quickly coming up and attracting so much interest. It's fascinating to see, we thought it'll take longer for them to wake up and realize, but what's happening is, most of the legacy players, the GM's of certain corridors are panic because these new kids on the block, if you can think of the vans and dollar apps and yellow cards at the world, they're eating a line share of the market in so many corridors for some of these legacy players. So GM's with these regions are waking up and like, what just happened? In one year's time these new kids on the block came of nowhere and are eating 20% of their market share, how? And then when they double click and realize that, okay, there's this company got open fx that's powering them. A lot of these companies have actually started reaching out to us while their board members saying, hey, we want to understand what this infrastructure is and it's fascinating to see how rapidly it's grown. It may June of this year, the conversations were around, what is this stablecoin? What is this Solana? What is this blockchain? How do we create a wallet? To now some of them are going like, okay, we need to launch our own stablecoin, right? So the growth has been happening in their integrating with us because the end of the day, their job is to basically show that they're competitive with the market. As long as they continue using legacy infrastructure and banking, they have to refund their money, they have to sort of like rely on banking car of ours, they have to work with the infrastructure that is provided to them. But with us, we're like, give you SLA's and we'll come into that within any amount of time or any amount of capital that you need, we'll move the money for you and give it to the other side, right? At the same or better rates than you're actually getting for the last 15 years. So it's a fascinating trajectory to see. I want to talk a little bit about crypto. Obviously, stablecoins have been the killer use case for the industry. We see circle doing its IPO that was very successful. We see tether raising at a $500 billion valuation. And then we see projects like stable and plasma. I'd be curious to learn more about how OpenFX is built on blockchain rails. Are you your own blockchain? Are you built across a number of different chains? How do you think through the core blockchain strategy? And is there any risk for being built on specific chains if not your own? Good question, Ben. So Ben, while I'm a big fan of crypto and clearly I've been building at this place for the last eight years, I'm also a pragmatist in the sense that when there is no reason for me to decentralize my product, I won't. There's a lot of advantages of running OpenFX and decentralize my today. And so OpenFX is a fully centralized company where we're able to like centralize our trading engine, our execution engine, and our payment engine. Right? Where we do use on chain stuff is when we have to rely on moving stable coins from point eight to point V. Our algorithms will figure out what is the cheapest fastest chain at that given point in time and move it across there. Right? We are not built on any particular chain. We have your chain agnostic. You don't care. It's if DRX is faster at this point in time. My algorithm is a pick up DRX in mode of it. So Lana, it's a Lana if it's in a polygon, it's polygon. It doesn't matter to us, right? In fact, it's like, we leave it to our clients as well. They're like, you want to withdraw your stable coins or assets in any shape or any chain you want. It's available to you. We are chain agnostic and we allow three cross chain swaps as well. Don't open FX. You can do whatever chain and you could go. Interesting. So it's easy for these various chains for OpenFX to plug into them and therefore get the best of all worlds and ultimately be routing orders in accordance to the best liquidity, lowest slippage, fastest speed, etc. And you've been optimized for all of this. Yep. And look, we are the one way to think of us is we are not just the Robin Hood, but we are also the Citadel Securities that sits underneath the hood. And we are the market makers, we take positions and we do all of that stuff. And so what chain do we take it on, what, like, it doesn't matter to us, we literally leave it everything to our clients. Now, in the future, 10 years out, if there is a clear advantage of decentralizing certain continents of the OpenFX business, we actually may take that call, but today there's a lot of advantages, speed that comes by making centralized decisions and they'll continue updating that. So we've talked about where OpenFX has been and where it is now. But walk me through the roadmap. If things continue to succeed, what are, I assume you're going to get more customers, you'll expand beyond Fintech 2.0, maybe you'll talk to more traditional enterprises. How are you planning on scaling the existing solutions and what are some additional products you think that could be highly attractive? Let me just correct you on one point. We started off with the Fintech 2.0 use case, but that's not all we serve today. Like the plethora of use cases we serve just boggles one mind, given example, we recently started serving the shipping industry in one particular country. And to give you a little bit of a flavor for how impactful what OpenFX does is to that industry, I'll give you a specific use case as well. Let's just say from Latam, a shipping container arrives with a large container of bananas. To let's just say the port of the buy in UAE, right? Now once the ship is arrived, the buyer has to go to the port, go into the container, inspect all of them, and it'll take like a few hours or a day for them to inspect everything. And once they give the thumbs up, they have to issue the payment to the seller, right? And when they issue the payment from UAE all the way to Latam, they take three days to five days. If there are no national holidays and no protests, there is nothing else going on in between, right? What's happening in that time in those five days is number one, it's bananas again. But two, the shipping company is paying hourly docking fees at the port of two to five thousand dollars in R for nothing, no productivity is happening, it is until money reaches, right? But now come open effects, we're like, okay, you've checked it, done, give the money, we'll send the money on the other side, and under one R, you could dig your car, go and go away, saying where the ship leaves the container. The world becomes more efficient as a result of these use cases. Fascinating new emerging, use cases emerging when you create real time payment infrastructure across borders, so, yeah, we're not just servicing the FinTech two-point doors, but even like very fascinating enterprise use cases across the globe. And one of the things the reasons I'm here is to meet a very large legacy, e-commerce company a very large car manufacturing company that wants to actually move billions of dollars of the treasure on the world, a lot of interesting use cases we're solving for there. And that is going to continue to answer your question of where is open up excited, right? So expanded many use cases, but also increased depth, in the sense that we're only live at about 15-hour currency span. There are 150 currencies in the world, we're launching currently at a pace of one currency a month. And that, to launch one currency, it requires six to nine months of effort ahead of time for my operations team to ensure that they're getting all the licensing groundwork infrastructure in place. I want to go for a one currency a month to one currency a week, you know, soon enough. So that's going to require a lot more effort. So we're going to go deep very fast and also go wide, go wide in terms of use cases we're solving. But also the products we're offering as it will you only do in trade today, we just converted currency A to B offering multi currency banking and offering a single APF of payments where we are collecting the money and paying out the money and everything in between is happening in single digit minutes across the globe. I'm glad you raised that topic about obtaining licenses and onboarding a currency. How difficult is that? I assume you have to hire local experts in the specific fiscal and monetary systems within a specific nation and integrating with some of their apps, CN and getting compliance from government officials. How do you think through that and how do you ensure maximum speed without sacrificing accuracy and ensuring that things are done properly? Great question. See from day one, we've kept compliance as a key focus for our operations because we're touching free add currencies, right? We're not running uni software. I don't have the luxury of saying, I don't know what's going on. I have to basically k by B every single customer and every single transaction that's going in and out of open effects so that we've been doing from day one and every geography we expand to we have to understand the local jurisdiction laws, local compliance laws, comply with them, find the local either initially get a local partner will be our local, you know, a license partner and then eventually get our own licenses as well in each region. That's how we've been operated. Got it. Well, seems like you've built a wow oil machine there and I'm very excited for you. Seems like things are trending vertically and soon this could be a flagship episode for the use case where everyone's like, oh, look at open effects, like crypto is doing some real things. What is your biggest fear about your own business and what is the criticism of your business that you think is valid that you would want to respond to? Good question. Let me answer your first question and then I'll answer your second and I'll answer your first question in two bites, apologies for this. My thoughts initially on the biggest fear and my biggest fear used to be security. And the sense that we are moving hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stable coins at any given point and one fat fingering mistake can destroy trust, balance sheet and everything that we built and so when you're starting off, that was one of my biggest fears. But I think, you know, here the half end we built extremely robust security measures and also it's not a first rodeo, our team comes from extremely strong backgrounds and we've also built one of the largest brokerages in the world so we understand how to move money. So that is in a very good place and we get audited every month so I'm actually less fearful about that. My biggest fear to be very honest is as my team scales from the 65 people that we are to 250 and eventually maybe say 500 people in the team not caring about the why you do, right? That often happens. As a team expands, folks stop seeing the larger picture. They stop seeing the temple that you're building and only focus on the bricks that you're laying. So when you stop caring and you stop then you stop going fast enough. It becomes harder to basically bend the forces of reality to your right. So that is my biggest fear. How do we continue maintaining the same momentum, the same speed, the same rigor that we have with the last two years over the next five to seven years? Can we continue doing that? Because if we do that, I think the world will be a different place. Open FX would have reached some level of maturity where the world does in a way that we didn't do it. Money does more cross-bodies like they did. So that is my biggest fear that we have of action before. Or you answer the final question, which is a piece of criticism that you believe is valid and how you would respond. How do you plan on embedding that culture that you just referenced where the Y is always top of mind as opposed to and focusing on the temple rather than the individual bricks? And I think that comes down to a couple of things, number one, adding the right people who are drawing the team and the company for the right reasons. And once you do that, it's my job as a CEO to keep continuously, almost to no monthly basis, keep reinforcing us, why we do what we do. The impact that we have on people's lives, the way we are changing the world, showcasing that drives people as every single person, when you have two parts, you're just working for money, whether you're driving, working for a mission, we'll always choose to work for a mission and all that's equal. So continuing to convey that mission as to why we're doing what we do is my job and that's what I said. I'm afraid that I'll fail at my job and it's given how distracting this industry can be. So I'm ensuring that I'm always on top of that is something that's stopped from mind for me. Got it. So how would you respond to that piece of valid criticism? See, now whether it's valid or not is a secondary thing, but one piece of criticism or, you know, what do you want to call it, that I constantly do, they see for people who are not fully well worst with how this industry operates is, would banks build all of the things eventually, right? In the next few years, they're all launching their own stable queries, they're integrating stablecoins, why does open effects need to exist? Now here's my less cons to that, per se. Look, banks, if they all unanimously, globally across the world, decide to do a couple of things. One, not shut off at four p.m., work on weekends and national holidays, integrate with dish lassets, not sit on float for long periods of time, become API friendly, right, ensure that they build scalable systems and move money across the borders and solve the problems that we're solving. I'm very happy to let the lanes down and let them solve the problems because it's a fucking difficult business to be in, right? It is very challenging to run a business that runs 24/7, 365 at very low margins. I can empathize with business as to how he went through 20 years ago in the skating Amazon, is equally as difficult. And if banks are going to say, they're going to solve all these problems and in fact, chop their own legs off and their own margins and basically do it this way, great and very happy to get that. But unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way. And in fact, if anything, I just came back from money training in Vegas last week. And these thoughts were reinforced, but it's so many banks, so many legacy Fintech companies. They'll be experimenting with stablecoins for about three years now, but all they have is not even a POC to show. They're doing some KYC implementations, they're trying to figure out what chain they like, they get distracted because there is not a single non-star metric that they're trying to move by launching this POC. They don't know why they're doing it. And then I realized after speaking to several different people that actually what they're trying to solve for is not the real problem itself. What these large companies, especially publicly listed companies are trying to solve for is the perception of innovation when they go on their quarterly learning calls, they want to show that hey, we are at the top of things because if I am not on these latest technologies, I'm going to the same thing that happened to Pfizer last week is going to happen to me. So they need to show the order of, or build the order of perception that we are launching cool things. In 2017, everyone was launching a blockchain. In 2021, everyone was launching an NFT and today everyone is launching a stable card. Will they actually move the needle for anything? I don't think so. It's an experiment and we speak to them, PMs who are working on these things and don't have a clue as to what's going on. They're not right to be in this business, right? Because it's a very different line of business in the way they're operating. So yeah, I don't see the validity in it, but hey, it's quite often the criticism that I get from a lot of people, I'm banks, you're kind of ending up doing what we're doing. Yeah, I think that's spot on, it's funny, I saw some report about the percentage of companies that are happy and satisfied with their AI effort. And it's very low because everyone knows they need an AI strategy, but actually implementing something that's valuable and serviceable, few companies have cracked that, not in the majority of them, unless you have very sophisticated engineers who are capable of embedding this tech or even outside consultants that really know the best way to integrate it, oftentimes it's just a total failure. And it is the upstarts who are born with it from day one that are actually able to create change. Provocard, this has been a ton of fun. Where can people fall along with your and open fx's journey, right? Openfx.com is a website, we actually have decided as of Q3 to start building publicly. So we actually post our monthly data, how we're doing, everything we're building, right? Publicly, because my belief is that if there is someone else in this world who has a stronger willpower than me to change what we're working on and make sure that the reality comes through, let them go away. It's fantastic. I don't care who wins. My goal is to ensure that the world does shape into the way that I want to see it happen. So far, I'm yet to find anybody who has a stronger willpower than us to make this happen. But yeah, everything we're doing, everything we're building is on our website, including our mission statement, who we are, how we operate our number is everything. Also, constantly post the recon Twitter, you can follow me on Trebakker to ready, and also on LinkedIn. Amazing. Well, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and sharing your knowledge about this broken market and how Openfx has reinvented it. And I'm very excited for you and all your traction and I wish you guys nothing but this success. Nothing but the most success possible. And thanks again for coming on. I really appreciate it. Thank you for listening and we hope you enjoyed this episode of Senior Studio. Please leave us a review and rating wherever you listen to podcasts if you love today's show. For more senior capital content, check us out at seniorscapital.substac.com and shoot me a follow on Twitter @bennypjcubs. We'll see you next time.