Top Questions Banks Are Asking About Digital Assets

Well, hello and welcome to Blockchain for Bankers, a webinar series on digital assets. Our goal here is to cut through the hype of all the things that you see in your inbox on crypto, web3, digital assets, and focus on what matters to financial institutions. My name is Sarah Huisington, and with Mattara, Mattara is sponsoring a series of webinars on digital assets. We have had a session on digital assets 101, the cryptocurrency landscape that tokenized deposits, landscape, and others. Today's episode is top questions that banks are asking about digital assets, and we have some amazing guests joining us today, Brian Mantell, C-E-O of the Adirant Group, formerly 30 plus years, I think, with the Fed, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, Larry Pruss, managing director of emerging payment technologies at SRM, Peter Tapling of P-Tap Advisory. So before we get to the top questions, let's do a quick rundown of what we're seeing happening in the market related to digital assets. So, you know, just a few examples that are publicly available. We've got companies like Cross-Server Bank, Lead Bank, Settling Visa, Transactions in U.S. D.C. over the Solana blockchain, SoFi in their mobile banking app enables you to buy crypto or any kind of stablecoin, JP Morgan coin is available to institutional clients on a public blockchain. We've got City that's got roughly a billion in transactions through City Token Services, the last one, HSBC, and Standard Charter recently executed the first live inner bank tokenized deposit transaction on Swiss blockchain. So, lots of examples of banks not just planning, but already offering some kind of digital assets to their customers in Brian, you've actually studied this and I think found over 200 plus examples of, you know, digital asset use case. You could tell us more about this study and some of the key takeaways of what you're doing. Thanks, Sarah. Happy to be here. So, we did. One third POC is one third pilots, one third live, and really fork takeaways really popped out at me. I'm not going to go too detail, I'm going to take some of the bigger themes. The first one is just to look at it over time. That number increased by 5X over the last five years, and when you think about the energy and insight that's coming through all these announcements, this is like a little bit of a different wave than we've seen in past decades. So, all of these announcements are really building from some incredible insight and some really powerful work. Second big insight, sometimes nice to know that not everything's changing. So, one of the things we see there across those 250 case studies is the pain points the jobs to be done for our customers, and then the market segments are not that different. When you look at all these, you might think there'd be hundreds of new permutations. We were just chatting earlier the week, you know, you really see three pain points, three jobs to be done. One is buckets of money, not always in the right spot, right? That's a classic, and it shows up on different sides of the line. The second one is the customer as a switchboard operator, right? They're not necessarily in control. They don't necessarily have a good visibility. They don't feel like they have a good hand on timing and the ability to kind of influence it. And then third, some factor of cost. It often shows up in different ways, but we see those three factors kind of driving through all of these different 250 different implementations. So, the good news is folks on this call, you've been living this, you've been seeing it. The first spot where you thought, well, we might have thought you'd see something different is, oh, we're going to see use cases and customer segments really split off and go in a lot of different directions. Or maybe they're going to converge and everything looks like it, it will flow onto one, you know, stable coins or tokenized deposit platform. And what you see is a little similar to what a lot of folks on this webinar will have heard and lived before is a separation between retail consumer use cases and business and institutional. The unpack those use cases, the fast thing you see the cross border remins, the payouts, the payroll. I mean, all lining up the strong energy on stable coins, whether it's value or value in some of the real strong energy there, then same way in the B2B and the institutional side, you see that all kind of unpacking there on tokenized deposit oriented. You don't yet see a lot of crossover. Some of those might have thought there'd be either a lot more breaking up in separation or more crossover. And you see it kind of breaking out a lot of the ways a lot of folks in the industry have grown up. So you see kind of a tranche there of things that are a little bit similar to what a lot of folks have seen. What's new maybe is that this is all around platforms and networks. And you're going to say, well, that's not very new, right? Everybody of this calls grown up in platforms and networks and bank coalitions, that all makes sense. I'm going to unpack the technology platform and we all jump to blockchain. And that jumps out, obviously, in all the pilots, interesting, it falls into the backside. I'm going to dive into mobile and social media platforms. What's popping up in the foreground? What is driving so much the attention? What is getting so much additional adoption and helping drive some of this additional usage and a lot of the investment coming in? And then talk about the stablecoin, the blockchain in the background, and then what's coming into the foreground and kind of consuming the customer and bringing them in. You know, one of the favorite case studies there is thinking about cross-border remittance and, you know, U.S. to Mexico. And what you can do on a Sunday night when somebody from your family calls calls it at 10 o'clock at night and in the app, within WhatsApp, the ability to get out WhatsApp request and immediately satisfy it and know that both sides are there. That's an example of where this technology is taking us and where you see what the technology really, whether it pulling the background and the consumer experience kind of coming to the foreground and really putting its hand around the change. And so that's, you know, new use cases, but they sound just like the same old pain points that we've all had. Right? But what's fascinating is what this can do to activate adoption. These platforms are wired for adoption, right? In a far different way that most of us grew up 10 years ago, five years ago. So it's really exciting to see that. So you see that, that part really changing. When I step back, you see, you know, you say, Brian, 250 cases, the learning is the insights must be slowing down here, right? We've gone through this huge surge and it's flattening a little bit, right? It has all these incredible, exciting announcements in your ways that this, we must be flattening and we're ready to kind of drive the train forward as it is. And I would suggest there's a couple of things we don't see coming out of the use case about and the testing, the piloting yet. Silicon Valley is, and that would be a genetic commerce and programmable, right? Those are coming. We all know about it. We see down the edges, but when it doesn't come out in the volume of case studies in the transaction volume, the value, the way you see other pieces. And again, we get all that. That's just timing, which to me says we're not yet at this plateau of flattening and just straight ahead. There's still some gas in the gas tank coming along that's going to be fascinating. And some of this might bring some of that blurring of these use cases and rails. As these open up some really strong convergent spaces where there's some real competition between rails and audiences trying to satisfy that. So I think that's going to be a fascinating spot to watch is what programmability and a genetic commerce does in terms of some of these use cases. So I'll wrap up there and hit it back to you in a second so I just noticed that it's nice to know that some of this change is not really new change to anybody on this webinar. You've been living it for 10, 15, 20 years. And networks are accelerating the platform business, the technology is accelerating the pace of change, differently tokenized deposits and stablecoins bringing in some new providers with a lot of investment that's following along behind it, which to me kind of tease up the importance of these webinars and focusing this call getting more and more ready to see how do you meet your customer where they're going to be because there's a lot more coming into their mailbox. Yeah. So thanks, Brian. That's helpful. So a lot of activity going on still room for more is what I'm hearing you say. There's just not a lot going on around the agent and the smart contracts. So that's that's super helpful. I think a lot of the examples we also see tend to be bigger banks, right? And what they're doing and how they're starting out in this digital asset journey, I guess. So so I do at this point want to switch gears to a lot of the common questions that we're hearing from banks. And one of the first the first one is very elemental right when when should I start thinking about digital assets and really that's maybe not the question for the top banks. But if I'm a regional bank or I'm a smaller credit union and I see some of these examples, you know, when do I really need to start getting in this digital asset game? So maybe Peter, I'm going to start off with you and see if you can weigh in on like some of the other sorts of financial institutions and what they should be thinking about in terms of timing of when they might want to join join the fray here. Sure. You know, one of the one of the common phrases I use all the time when I talk to community financial institutions is they say, I want to be first to be third. You know, I'm not going to be the very first guy that goes, but have other people do it and then I'm going to follow along. We see that with we saw that with Zell. We see that with instant payments. Those are markets where people couldn't tell at the very beginning if it was going to happen or not, if they were going to be real use cases or not. I think that's very different in stablecoin and tokenized deposit. You have to remember that stablecoin has been around since 2014, 15. This is a mature technology. It's out there and unlike instant payments, there's an app for that. People are using it today. It's going to show up in front of them in their phone to Brian's point of meet the customer where they are, where are most customers, their noses in their phone, right? And a lot of the challenges that we talk about, a lot of the complexities that we've talked about in earlier webinars about choosing an actual blockchain, choosing a market maker, choosing a particular stablecoin, those things are going to be buried by service providers. So getting back to the when question, I would say the when is yesterday, to the extent that you're not doing something today to learn, plan, create a strategy around what I'm going to do with stablecoin and how I'm going to help my customers, help my members of the credit union decide how they're going to use these things. You're already behind the game. I hear frequently from financial institutions while stablecoin doesn't matter because that's not on my balance sheet. So they're just taking money off my balance sheet. Yes, that's true, but they also eventually have to move it back into the banking system. And the more you do to make that experience easy, the more likely it is those deposits will come back to you. - Makes sense. Well, Larry, you consult with a lot of banks on the digital asset. Fran, curious if you have an opinion on this question around timing. - Yeah, I would agree with Peter. The time to do it was yesterday. There are, right now, a number of fintechs that are competing leveraging new technologies, whether that's stablecoins, digital assets, prediction markets, whatever. Some of those things probably banks would and credit unions would never offer. But that said, they're kind of playing the long game, right? They're targeting younger consumers that are looking for less friction. And you think about a lot of these technologies, it's to remove friction. Like if you talk to a younger person who's, you know, internet native or mobile native, the idea of having to get an approval from my bank to send money somewhere, why? And it's going to take three days. Like that makes no sense. And you're going to charge me how much for it? I can go do that on my coin-based app. I can go do that through Robinhood. It's going to cost me next to nothing. And it's done instantly. I don't have to get anyone's approval for it. It just happens. Now, you know, how that works behind the scenes, maybe a little bit different. But I think traditional finance needs to really catch up because there are a bunch of players in the space. And, you know, the big financial institutions are already there. I did a talk at, I think it was a bank for, bank association for finance and trade back maybe nine months or so ago. And I like that a lot of times I'll survey an audience and I survey a lot of times how many of you are, like, seriously thinking about some of your strategic plan, you're already implementing tokenized deposits, stable coins, things like that. And the room is, there's a wide range of different large international banks. Half of them. And I was like, whoa, that's something changed from a year ago. Half of them are already there. Now, you think about all of big announcements in the last six months. And you know, all sorts of big players, BNY, City, Chase, I mean, Wells Fargo just recently, now there's a consortium of like 26 international banks, a lot of them in the US that are all started to get into, like, how do we define this space? Is it stable coins? Is it tokenized deposit? Is it a mix? They know it's changing, right? They know that the number of intermediaries are going to be squeezed. They want to continue to participate in payments. So they're making those investments. And particularly if you're a correspondent bank, which are the ones that really are seeing their business impacted because while the number of volume, as it relates to stable coins, is reasonably low compared to the whole total amount of value that gets moved on an annual basis, which is somewhere near $100 trillion. Maybe some number less than probably 14, 12 trillion is kind of true payment activity. But it's B2B payment activity. And B2B payment activity historically goes to correspondent banks. Well, they've seen that business drop off because there are fintechs that are providing that service for those businesses to move money instantly 24/7 and 365. And we're moving into a world where we live in a lot more multicultural world where the borders of economies are kind of falling down, coming down. I can, if I've got a merchant, I can sell anywhere in the world. So why would I not want to have payment mechanisms that can kind of support that? Makes sense. If I could jump in there, by the way, this is not a light switch, meaning on/off. This is a dimmer switch. We're going to be adding-- if we look just at cross-border transactions, banks started losing the sole franchise of cross-border transactions back in the '70s and '80s. You had Western Union and money-grabbing providers like those, PayPal, more recently providers like TransferWise. And so fintechs, generally, the entire fintech landscape grows up around services that banks are not providing. And so the good news for financial institutions is I still get my direct deposit into a bank account. I'm still making my mortgage payment out of a bank account. I still want a debit card. I still want a credit card. Those are all bank products. So I need bank balances. And so rather than saying, if then either or, you have to say in, my customer is going to have stablecoin. I have to figure out how to make that part of a financial relationship that exists in my institution. So if banks can't do nothing, I think is what I'm hearing you all say in terms of timing. That then takes us to getting to your end, maybe, comment-peter to the next question, which is tokenized deposits and stablecoin, right? Like some people talk about it either or, but if I'm a bank, right? And I have to move forward on this front. Those are the first two areas that I think most are looking at. How should a bank think about and make decisions about each? So Larry, maybe you can help us. How would you answer a bank that asks you that question around tokenized deposits and stablecoin? Yeah, I think I just start by asking what their goal is. Most of them understand tokenized deposits in that, OK, we understand our own deposits, the liability to financial institution. We can lend those liabilities back out on a fractional reserve basis. We could, in theory, do the same thing with tokenized deposits, tokenized deposits just kind of electronifies and moves that money faster, just a little off on a back and maxing of assets that's done through traditional faster payment rails. But all of that aside, tokenized deposits could be programmable, tokenized deposits, depending on your network, could be international and they see it as a way of, oh, we get to maintain our deposits, which are obviously a source for lending against. And that's attractive to them. What I often try to say to them is, look, that's a very narrow use case, right? Because these digital assets of each tokenized deposits are type of digital assets. So over stablecoins, these things require network effects to be valuable, right? You have to be able to send them anywhere in the world to any other financial institution. And tokenized deposit because it's a liability of financial institution. There's a lot of difficulty of transferring a liability from one financial institution to another. Because not all liabilities are created equal if there are no other reasons. And the US domestically is probably not as much of a problem. You get cross-border, you start to get settlement risks and those sorts of things. So I always caution banks that tokenized deposits are probably not as useful as they think they are. I understand why you would want them. I often will use an analogy of the internet versus the internet, the internet. And we still have some internet back in the day, to even today, but closed loop mail system between employees and employees only couldn't send anything out of the organization. You can share files internally, not outside the organization. Most organizations realize that was really limiting in all that valuable. That is a lot like what tokenized deposits are. Where stablecoins are that open, hey, you can send it anywhere in the world. It ends up there instantly super valuable. I can communicate with anyone I can send money anywhere. And so there are some differences there. I also caution banks to go, they're going to go down the route of tokenized deposits because there were stablecoins. We're going to tie up liquidity in the system and we don't have control over and all that. I always say, hey, if we really see an influx of stablecoins in our economy and it starts to become a big thing and it starts to tie up liquidity, a couple of things are going to happen. Either the full reserve requirement that's required now by genius is going to get relooked at. So that not that much has started up in liquidity or another option, which is I've talked to top regulators and raises as a trial balloon. Which is I say, hey, if these things start to gain traction and they're fully reserved, so they're fairly low risk, right? It's kind of a dollar derivative. Why would you not allow a bank to bring that on to the balance sheet as a deposit against demand, use it for purchasing securities, ultimately lend against it. Because again, it's-- fully reserved, it's like a cash derivative. And I think there's some openness to that. But I don't think there's any need to do that yet because it's just not enough volume out there. But if you see the volume grow, you know, some things will have to change from an accounting standpoint and from a regular regulator standpoint. But I think those things will change if we see significant adoption of stable coins within the US. And I don't get to know that that's the case. But early indications seem to be pointing that direction. Just an interesting note on that from a volume standpoint. Just recently, I heard that right now on debit backed debit cards that are tied to stable coin balances, they're doing a billion a month in transactions, a billion, a billion a month, like that's a lot. And it's growing. And same goes for if you look at stable coin growth, it's not the historic crypto use of stable coins. All the growth is in B to B transfers. So like we are seeing that traditional payment usage for stable coins. Now again, whether stable coins tokenized deposits, I think it's probably both to some degree tokenized deposits seem to be a good liquidity treasury management type solutions, stable coins, more geared towards maybe retail cross-border type activity. I'm going to go back to the very literally brought up like five great topics we could have another webinar on back to the topic of stable coin and tokenized deposits. I certainly have heard tokenized deposit much more heavily discussed probably the last four or five months. My observation is that for financial institutions, this is defensive, meaning they're not doing it because they have a great idea on how it's going to be used. They're doing it because of this fear of deposit flight. And I would propose that that's the wrong reason to participate in a tokenized deposit ecosystem. The right reason is I have a set of customers that have a set of needs and I can serve those needs better using this ecosystem. In terms of visualizing, you know, what might tokenized deposits and stable coin are, think of them as a venn diagram. The tokenized deposit bubble in terms of volume, meaning number of transactions and people you can touch will be a much smaller circle than stable coins, but there'll be some overlap in the middle where use cases can be served by either. I think because I expect that tokenized deposits will have more valuable use cases for businesses. The dollar volume size of those venn diagram bubbles might be closer together in terms of size and they'll still be a little bit of an overlap. There's some use cases that you could serve with either, but there is an overhead to participating in a tokenized deposit ecosystem. And so everybody who's thinking, Oh, I'm going to jump into tokenized deposits to protect my deposits needs to think about the cost of participating in tokenized deposit relative to the cost of losing those deposits potentially makes sense. Well, kind of related to the questions around stable coin and tokenized deposits is use cases. I know Larry, you were like, how do banks need to think about how they might use each? Well, one of the things I'd like to do is flip this concept of use cases on its head a bit because I think most banks aren't going to hear from customers, whether they're retail customers, corporate customers who are going to come into a branch or reach out to their small business banker and say, Hey, I really want to use a tokenized deposit. Rather banks, there are likely behaviors of bank customers that would indicate that digital assets would be helpful to them. So Brian, I'm thinking about you here where, you know, can you can you talk about like certain behaviors of how bank customers might use their money in a way that a bank would go, I can I can see a lot of my customers are doing that. Therefore, I might need to bring digital assets to them because it could be helpful to them. Great question. Peter and Larry have already kind of teased up and I think the cross border, the nature of having some cross border relationship is one. Obviously, being bubble web centric and having that device in hand 24 by seven a weekends, gig economy is is another one. And I think this is a fascinating place to take a look at institutions data. Data trends can can give you a lot of great insights. The averages often hide some really powerful insights that you're that are folks on the call may not see and Peter teed up a fantastic one. So let's take something like mobile walls. We know that the adoption's grown up significantly. That's great. We know the Gen Z millennials extremely high. We know older generations much lower. That's that's not new news. What might be new news to some is if you start looking at your ACH activity. Peter's point on the ACH and the project deposits very sticky. That same trend is beginning to happen across age demographics where the more mature audiences are still deep using ACH younger generations less so think about how they come on with different types of any institutions, different types of relationships. They may not have that same stickiness. And they're also more likely to have a second relationships. I think really not only looking at your data, but beginning to look at it in a much more segment behavior based to see where those gaps in opportunities are because those are going to show you where some of these early use case opportunities are going to be. And where some of the risk is going to show that we could be putting better spotlights on it. We're not there yet. Are we doing a good enough job of catching it when it begins to pick up because we're already seeing some things you wouldn't think ACH activity would change? It is. And if ACH activity is changing, a lot of other things are changing. In particular to tokenize deposit, Brian used to phrase earlier that I've used a lot, which is buckets of money. Look for buckets of money. For decades in banking, in financial services, in corporate treasury, we've solved money movement problems with buckets of money. I can't get the money from here to there at the time with the speed, with the visibility I need to. So I'm just going to keep a bucket of money there. And so identifying those buckets of money, and why people are keeping them there, and the features of money movement that they need to be able to resolve those buckets of money or reduce those buckets of money, that's where your use cases are going to appear. Good point. So it's sort of you're seeing a lot of money movement outside the US, from the US outside the US, customers are holding buckets of money in different places. Maybe it's different branches. Maybe it's different international. Yeah, it doesn't have to be it doesn't have to be international. I heard a great story with a financial institution I was working with. They have a guy. The guy has a conglomerate of companies. One of the companies is the parent company. It owns a food distribution service and it owns seven restaurants. When do restaurants close? When do they do most of their business, right? They do most of their business Fridays and Saturdays. They close at three o'clock in the morning. So how do I solve the fact that money from the restaurant didn't make it up to the parent to make it down to the food service business for delivery on Monday? I solved it today with buckets of money. But if I can redirect those buckets of money because at three o'clock in the morning, I could take the proceeds from the restaurant, move it up to the parent, move it down to the district. I now don't need those buckets of money. And it's related to speed, right? So they need it to happen quickly. They don't want to wait three days for it to move from one bucket to another and time, right? The time they need to move it is not nine to five Monday through Friday. It's Sunday at three in the morning. So yeah, good. Yeah, and one of the things I hear all the time, by the way, is well, we could do that with instant payments. Well, in theory, yes, if I'm on fed now and you're on fed now and we're, you know, we all have send available to us, then yes, you could do that, which both highlights a weakness and an opportunity, right? One of the weaknesses of things like the tokenized deposits and stablecoin is they will have an adoption curve as well. And we're betting on is the adoption curve of those going to be faster or slower than instant payments, same to ACH, et cetera. And then my drinking word from way back to the faster payments task force, ubiquity, right? Can I reach the places I need to reach when I need to reach them? To your earlier point, this is not or, you know, figure out rails or digital assets is and because there's just going to use cases that make sense. One thing I'd like to add on to that, there is a real advantage to this kind of increasing digitization of money, which is the programmable aspect of it. So yes, we have fed now. Yes, we have RTP. Those still are very much manual type processes, not interchangeable and certainly not global. So when you start to say, hey, we can automate these, especially as we move into a world of agents and agentic commerce, the ability to automate transactions, particularly high volume, low dollar transaction, that's 50, very particular solution, which tends to lean towards stable coins. One thing I will say on that bucket of money, which bought me up to maybe think of something else, bucket money sometimes is at rest. And that bucket of money, it was often sitting in an account waiting to provide liquidity for purchasing vendor supplies, paying employees or whatever. And if you're a medium sized business, can be quite a large bucket of money often at an amount higher than the $250,000 FDIC insurance covers. Well, one of the concerns, and I think it's a legitimate concern. I don't know how much of this will happen, but the Treasury back in April of 2025 had suggested that much is $6.6 trillion of deposits could be at risk of moving to stable coins. I think that a lot of that had to do it yield and stuff like that, but the way I look at it is, let's say we had another big bank failure, like Silicon Valley bank, and you had a bunch of all around the country, a bunch of corporates or medium-sized businesses have more than $250,000, and yes, I understand you can kind of spread them and stuff like that, but now you have an alternative, which is a full reserve asset class. It's almost having it like a narrow bank where in history, we've never really had narrow banks in the US. Now, we have the equivalent of a narrow bank where we've got a full reserve asset where I can keep my money, and I know it's going to be there even if it's the stablecoin collapses, and we can talk about what that would mean. But that is a real alternative, and oh, by the way, that is digital, and I can move it 24/7/365. I don't have to talk to my bank necessarily, and I can move it anywhere in the world. Like, suddenly, that becomes a really compelling value proposition to some that might have just seen a bank collapse and money get tied up from a liquidity standpoint because they had more money than $250,000, and that is covered. Now, Treasury might step in to make them good, but my point with all that is there's an alternative to deposits right now. So, it's not just buckets of money, but if that bucket is over $250,000, that then is an opportunity for them that they might want to go with digital assets because they could serve as some extra protection. To that, I'm a little more control than going to kind of go, "Well, I hope I get, you know, in the case of a failure, things get bailed out." They have a little money. That's another reason we could see. If we see anything in stablecoins, I think we see it in the corporate B2B type space first. Yeah, yeah, it makes sense. Okay, well, that then is going to bring us to our final question for today, which is around key announcements. We are all inundated with product launch announcements, partnership announcements. It's really difficult to kind of figure out, "Okay, which one should we really pay attention to?" So, Peter, I'm hoping you can start us off by highlighting what's a recent announcement you think we really need to be paying attention to. That's going to matter to financial institutions. The one that I would point to is OpenUSD. It's still a very nascent network, but there's a hundred parties who put their name on the effort. The reason I point to that one is that when we look at things like particularly pointing at instant payments, one of the challenges that instant payments faces for adoption is there's no easy way to initiate the payment. I have to know somebody else's bank account. I have to know that my bank is a send bank, et cetera, et cetera. One of the things that's inherent in that OpenUSD network is they're going to have a means for acquiring a transaction. They're going to have a means for signing up a merchant. They're going to have a means for moving value. They're going to have a means for financial institutions participating on the back end. By creating that ecosystem, they're building in roughly the equivalent of a card network for stablecoin. Again, very nascent network, but pay attention to that and pay attention to other initiatives that make acquiring these transactions simple. Makes sense. Larry, do you have an announcement that you think we should pay attention to? I've got two. The recently announced bank chain alliance. It's an industry owned governed by a 39 state banking association's interoperable network targeted for 2022. They're currently looking for a technology partner. They would offer a potential direct ownership and access pass for community, regional banks, access governance, operating rules, technology, selection and core integration. In a 39 state banking organizations, there's a lot to coordinate, but if they can make that happen, they do have some network effects. That's one. The second would be stripes. Stripes will be making all sorts of acquisitions these days. Back about two years ago, I think, was when they made their announcement of acquiring breaks, which they recently formalized, which is a stablecoin infrastructure provider. Last week or the week before, they announced that they were acquiring open router, which is an AI routing company that routes different types of AI queries based on cost and complexity with the idea of cutting costs. But there's actually a revenue model in there, right? So every time you use their model or whatever that model of saving you money, they're also taking a slice or from a fee from that. But the interesting thing about stripe is they're making these investments in stablecoins. They're making these investments in AI. They get to see what small, medium-sized businesses are building, because that's who their clients are. They're making investments in what they think their small, medium-sized businesses are going to need in kind of skating to the puck. So to me, that is a really strong signal that stablecoins and agentic payment, maybe the combined combination of those are going to place a really important part in our economy. I know that there's been some studies to say by the end of this decade. So that's only four years ago that 20% of e-commerce transactions could be driven by agentic type solutions, machine and machine payments. I think he's going to be a potentially big thing. All of this is small, but the potential is huge. Yeah. So I was going to say they're building kind of the foundation of agentic to support the stablecoin, which to Brian's point earlier, he's looked at all these use cases. Agentic hasn't played a real big role yet, but likely the fuel of the digital asset use cases that we see going forward. So that's a great example. So Brian wondering if you have another headline that you want to share? I do. Larry and Peter just teed up a really exciting energy coming forward, right? I'm going to go to one of your past guests here, Tony McLaughlin with UVIX, and I'll point to two things. One is original paper, which is the acceptance network, which is it's all of our responsibility to get every customer in a spot where they can accept stablecoin or tokenized deposit, which is going to make all of this possible. And then just recently, I think here in the last two months, he wants a new work group, which is bringing corporate treasures, cash managers together. I think when we think back, Larry and Peter to other foundational work that's been done the last 10 to 20 years, when you start getting small groups and you let some of the end customers have even more visibility to help kind of shape rules of road practices and give input and create that buy it. I think those things combined with what Larry and Peter just teed up have the potential to be really powerful, kind of a one-two punch. Definitely will be something to watch. Well, maybe Peter, I know that you've made reference to some remarks that Jonathan Gold made recently at a conference that might be a great way to tie a lot of what we've been talking about here together. So can you give some context to what he, how you're interpreting the remarks that he made recently? Yeah, I'll really focus on one comment, but you know, a lot of financial institutions are looking to regulators and, you know, and Congress to protect them. And at the Salt Conference in Wyoming recently, Jonathan Gold was a presenter, and he, one of the statements he made in his state in his comments is, I'm not here, I'm here to protect the payment system, I'm not here to protect in currency. And so essentially what he said is, it's a broad landscape and people want to move money, a bunch of different ways. And to the extent that we can legally, safely, you know, with some visibility and with some, you know, BSA, AML protections, etc., allow new entrants into this payment landscape, we're going to go ahead and do that. Oh, it's not, it's not like our regulators are going to say, hey, wait a minute, thanks. They're basically saying you better participate, because that's really the way everything is going. Well, with that, I think it's a great place to wrap it up. Thank you so much to Brian and Peter and Larry for joining us today, until the next episode of Blockchain for Bankers. We look forward to that conversation. We'll have another one and another week or so. Until then, have a great day. Take care.