Ex Libra Boss David Marcus on Meta Stablecoin Payouts and Global Dollar Accounts

Speaker 1  0:00  

Simon,

Sy Taylor  0:10  

welcome to tokenized. The show focused on stable coins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real world assets. My name is Simon Taylor. I'm your host, author of FinTech brain food, and head of market Dev, over at tempo, and joining me, as always, is my friend, my colleague, my homie himself, Kai Sheffield, head of crypto visa. How about Kaisa?

Speaker 2  0:30  

It's a big week. There's a lot going on. We have an absolute legend on the show today to help unpack one of the biggest announcements so far. So let's get into

Sy Taylor  0:39  

it. Yeah, and not to bury the lead, but yes, we've got the one and only. David Marcus, CEO of light Spark, co founder of light spark, and of course, former CEO of PayPal, former head of payments of meta. How the heck are you? David? I'm doing great. Thanks for having me. Guys. Oh, really appreciate it. We're gonna get to your news in just a second, but before we do we're gonna do our Quick disclaimer, which is, I gotta remind everybody that views and opinions of contributors today may be their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. And please don't take anything we say as tax, legal or financial advice. Stay safe out there, folks, and always do your own research. All right, first story, well, I'll read it out. But David Marcus's light Spark is launching a banking product as a go between for businesses and their AI agents called Grid global accounts, and it has a network of partners, including FDIC insured banks like irreborl, cross river bank and lead bank, and I believe, some little company called visa. So I think they'll do okay one day. Thank you for shining a light on them, David. But David, do you want to tell us about grid, global accounts, what they do and how they help, specifically with AI agents.

Speaker 3  1:47  

Yeah, let me just unpack a little bit, because, like, this has been long in the making, and, you know, there's a lot of thought and work that has gone into this, the key point that we want to try to solve is really putting the power back in the hands of people, businesses and platforms. And I feel like forever, all of those platforms have been tenants on someone else's payments rails and networks. And I feel like, especially on the account side, that's true. Like, if you're a large platform that is the financial nexus of millions or 10s of millions of people when you pay out money like the minute you pay that money out to like an edge bank in a random country, you lose all of the economic value of those deposits and everything that comes next. And what great global accounts actually solve is the ability for these platforms to offer global accounts to all of their stakeholders. So you're a marketplace, you have a bunch of sellers and buyers on the marketplace. You're a creator platform, and you have a bunch of creators earning revenue on your platform. You have a gig economy platform like Uber or Airbnb, like you have hosts and drivers that earn money from your platform. And so what if you could actually give them your own branded account that has $1 balance, that has a Visa debit card that they can use at 170 5 million merchants on the visa network, and that connects to light spark grid so you can actually move that dollar balance to your own bank account in your local currency in real time, 24/7, but not only local rails, also global rails, because grid covers The 65 countries that we've connected domestic payment systems to, and so that's what grid is. Grid global accounts is, and it's like a really a platform and a product to enable those platforms to take control over their own like endpoint accounts, and at the same time give a much better product to their stakeholders than what people have today. I think of it as the most powerful global dollar account. I say dollar, but it's going to be multi currency. And then the last point of it is like, you know, in a world where all of the interfaces are changing, like all of the websites and and apps were designed for clumsy humans to interact with, compute, right? That's like, not what agents need. And so as we change the interfaces to agents, and we communicate to agents, and they do things on our behalf, what is the account? The ideal accounts that an agent needs to have, it's definitely one that has $1 balance, maybe Bitcoin too, that has the ability to actually use a visa token to spend that money that has access to global payment trails. And how do you delegate that control without losing control the humans not losing control of what the agents can do with your money? And so that's also part of great global accounts that we launched earlier this week.

Speaker 2  4:37  

A bunch of really interesting things to unpack. I want to start with the evolution within light spark. And I think you have a really interesting perspective on Bitcoin and stable coins. If I recall light Spark, you initially started with the Lightning Network and saying, how do we make Bitcoin more usable as a currency, when everyone else was saying, Bitcoin. Is just digital gold. Can you talk a little bit about how your views around stable coins have evolved? And where do you see Bitcoin in stable coins being complimentary? How are you seeing clients want to interact with, with both

Speaker 1  5:12  

of

Speaker 3  5:13  

them? Yeah. I mean, look, I think the key insight and Tai you and I have shared the Libra journey together, so we have, like, a lot of buddy's car tissue. And I think the key learning from that whole epic adventure was that if you're actually really going to build an open internet for money, and it's a closed, controlled network, no matter how hard you try to devolve power, that thing is going to, like, be killed with fire. And so the key here is really, how can you build on top of a network that's truly neutral, truly open, that doesn't belong to us, that doesn't belong to anyone, that behaves like the internet? And that was the Insight coming off of Libra, and that's why we decided to build on Bitcoin, which is, without any doubt, like the most neutral money network ever created. And so the first step on that journey was actually trying to make Bitcoin move fast and cheap, and lightning was the first step. And I think, you know, Tai, to your question, I think there's Bitcoin the asset, but then there's Bitcoin the technology. And as far as we're concerned, we're really more interested in a ladder and like, how can you we actually turn Bitcoin into TCPIP packets for money that can actually be used to interoperate domestic payment systems and other other edge networks that can connect onto this open network and like this has taken shape in the way that we're providing cross border payments for large banks like Sofi. So if you're a SoFi customer and you're sending dollars to someone in Mexico or like in India, receiving local currency, actually, what happens is it goes dollar, Bitcoin, rupees on the other side, and the customer doesn't even know or hear the word Bitcoin. It's just TCPIP packets for money. So that's kind of where we started. And then to your question around, like the how it interacts with stable coins? So I had my own schizophrenic journey with stable coins, and I think that's also because of what happened at Libra, which is like we tried so hard to build on the most open and neutral network. And so then if all of the transactions would actually happen on like, a large, centralized stable coin, because, like, stable coins are fully centralized things, it would have kind of defeated the purpose. So I kind of, like, was in this mode of like, you know, this is not right, like, and then I'm like, wait a minute, like, we're connecting to fiat payment rails in 65 countries. Why not connect to all the networks like, why not connect to Solana and to tempo and to base and to everything, and support all the stable coins and make sure that, like the grid, global accounts like that we actually launched is actually compatible with all of these networks, because then, if you make a balance more fungible by making it spendable on the visa network, but also on Solana and also on pix in Brazil, then you have more utility for that account, and then, like more people and businesses want to use that account, and it actually solidifies the whole thing. But the account lives on Spark, or Bitcoin l2 that lives on top of Bitcoin. And so the network is not ours and is not anyone else's. Or the premise of building on something truly open and neutral remains valid. I

Sy Taylor  8:28  

think it's such a fascinating set of Russian doll nested ideas there that as you come further and further out, grid is something I hadn't, honestly, until this conversation, realized the power of being an off ramp in 65 different markets, and how useful that is as a turnkey product just by itself. Then you add financial accounts to that, and you see ramp is launching a similar product. Stripe just launched a similar product. How many businesses want to have a global financial account without friction? That's 24/7 and then the final sort of cherry on the cake is, and it's not just going to be businesses now they want their agents to do it too. So can you, can you talk a little bit about that last piece of like, how do you make these accounts work for agents? And what are you seeing there? It's something that Kai and I keep coming back to, but interested in your perspective on that.

Speaker 3  9:18  

Yeah. So let me just first make a very, very important key distinction. Everyone that's building right now is trying to build their own accounts that they're trying to sell to all of these platforms, right? And that's true for all of the companies that you mentioned, which are really great companies that we respect, but what we've built is basically infrastructure for those platforms to build their own accounts with their own brand, and like, the accounts is a self custodial wallet with, like the best technology of embedded wallets, meaning you'll never lose your funds. You can log in with a pass key, Google login or or whatever login you want, and never lose your keys. And I think that's an important distinction, because it completely changes the dynamic of. Like who owns the customer relationship and what data you leak to other platforms that then go on and build products off your back, right? And I think that's an important distinction. And on the agent stuff, there's a world right now where everyone is trying to build competing agent to agent payment protocols like agentic commerce stuff and all of that, which is great, and we're going to need this and one thing might win at some point, but right now, that's not the most pressing thing, because it's not like there's a lot of agent to agent volume yet. So the key provocation that we put on ourselves is, how can we actually create a mass market product for humans, but that can safely delegate money movement capabilities, the powerful money movement capabilities of grid global accounts, to agents. And so the way we did it is by building what we call bonded scope delegation, which is like you bond, basically an agent to a grid global account, and you scoped a delegation with clear restrictions of what it can or cannot do, and you can create multiple agent scopes for one account. And the way that I've experienced it myself is by spinning up an open call, connecting it to a great global account that I've been playing with for the last month or so, and it's been really wild to see having an open claw with access to global money movement and a Visa card and all of these things, like, what it can do. And I know, Kai, you've been playing with this a lot like, and I've enjoyed really, the visa CLI experience, which is like, really, this is where it's going, right? It's like all of these agents will have CLIs to all of the things, and then it'll be able to stitch together really great experiences on behalf of people and businesses. And I think what we're trying to do here is just create an account, an all powerful account that agents can use safely.

Speaker 2  11:51  

Yeah, it's such a fascinating ecosystem right now, and I love this as an example of one of my pet peeves right now is whenever someone says, oh, agents won't be able to get a bank account. Agents can't have an account. And so we assume that the entire world is like, going to have to be on stable coins. And in real time, it's like, every week you see products that are they're built for humans, but treating agents as a delegated actor that a human can then bring in. And I think that that's the right model is you still have, you have a customer that is KY seed at the end of the day, but if that customer then wants to bring someone that's authorized to act on their behalf, with the right controls, we should do that. And I think, like, personally, like that is the best outcome for the consumer. It's also really what's going to need to happen for ejected commerce to have some controls in place like, I am actually very concerned about a world where you have a bunch of agents out there with wallets that aren't accountable and are not, like, controlled by any human. I think there are a lot of weird, bad outcomes. And so finding that right model, I think, is going to be really important. But it all starts with just like, the willingness and ability to experiment. So it's, it's always cool to me to see, like, the difference between people who are going down the open claw rabbit hole, setting up open claw, experimenting, creating the product around it, versus the people just like talking about objective commerce. Then you ask them, like, Have you ever made a transaction? Like, no, okay, well, it's, it's like hard to go from there, but you know, Simon would love your, your take on how these, these pieces are starting to fit

Sy Taylor  13:25  

together. I've been saying all week that the CLI is the new UI, right, like for customers, we built the mobile app, and we built the dashboard, and fintech came along and just made that like a whole thing. And the disruptors built really great experiences, and then strike came along and did the same with APIs for developers, and CLIs are now doing that for agents. So you need to have that, but you have to have it with permission. I think it was just two days ago, so as we're recording this, it was on the 28th the FIDO Alliance, who invented passkeys and popularized them, announced their standards for agent trusted delegation. And so if we start to get those standards, I think we can start to secure it, because I share your worry, Kai. I think mercury, a couple of days ago, announced their CLI and they launched accounts for agents as well. That's awesome. They already do expenses accounts with scopes, and they already have some of that permissioning infrastructure in place. But I can see two things. One, I come back to David, your point about, well, do I want to own the economics on that, or do I want to give it to a bank like I'm a platform? Do I want to own my economics on the agent? So I take that point, but I think the the other point is, well, maybe I want my agent to operate across multiple bank accounts in multiple countries. And I don't want to tie it down to one specific bank account necessarily, and that's where I think the sort of more open loop, open claw type of mechanism becomes really, really interesting. And a thought I'll leave you with on this story is at stripe sessions yesterday, Stripe had a really good chart, so they launched. Their command line interface seven years ago, and it was bumping along, and a few nerds were using it. And then in December 2025 poof, it was a vertical acceleration. And of course, agents are now using it. So they have, I think the collisons quite cheekily coined the idea that January the first 2026 was the beginning of the singularity, and we're now on a day 120 so welcome to the singularity, folks. And I'm glad that the singularity involves, like, actually, many different people trying many different things. And I think it's early days, gents, if you'll forgive me, I'm going to move us to the next story, which is about meta so handy that we have you on the show, David to give some views on this, they've launched, we didn't plan this honestly, but they've launched stablecoin creator payouts, which is currently available for select creators in Colombia and the Philippines. And it uses stripe link as the receiving wallet, and it's live on tempo polygon and Solana with plans to expand to 160 countries. So David, you were talking a little bit ago about the sort of scar tissue. I almost find it interesting that this story almost got no coverage like meta plus stable coins plus payouts. Five years ago, this would have been like sirens in the streets like crazy. Is that a is that a sign of the times? I don't

Speaker 3  16:27  

know what you're talking about.

Sy Taylor  16:28  

No idea. Is that a sign of where we are? And maybe they're in a post genius world, things are a little bit different. And also, what do you think about the payout to create a business case?

Speaker 3  16:41  

Yeah. I mean, look, first of all, I'm, like, really thrilled, thrilled to see companies and platforms like meta play with digital assets and stable coins more and experiments with it and pilot it in all kinds of different ways. I think this is great. And two reactions to this, like, definitely, definitely true that times have changed. When we introduced great global accounts, like I said, the world had changed in ways that wouldn't have made stuff like grid global accounts possible, like even a year ago. And so the first thing that changed, just to answer your question, on like, the conditions that have lined up, the first thing that has changed is regulation. Clearly, there's the genius act here in the US, there's mica in Europe, there's similar pieces of legislation all over the world that actually establish rules of the road of how you interact with digital assets and stable coins. And so that makes platforms like meta and others actually more comfortable trying it again, which is great. Then there are better wallet technologies. I think you know, if you look at the embedded wallets that have really better modern cryptography that enables you to actually have multiple parts of your keys in different places and completely abstract all of those things to customers, like, really no seed phrases, no mnemonics, like, no risk of losing your private keys anymore. So that's a second prerequisite, the third prerequisite. And like, Kai, you deserve a lot of credit for that. And I say it even when you're not in a room, which is, like, Visa really leaning in hard on stable coin backed cards. And, like, that's a key thing, right? Because, like, if you're a platform and you're actually giving people USDC or usdt on a random wallet to a creator in a country, and they can't actually spend that balance, and they're stuck in a wallet like, okay, good luck with that, right? No one wants that, right? And so I think that's a massive unlock. And so I think those three things have changed the conditions that make those types of products actually possible today. I think you know to the specific question here, there's a real question for these platforms, right? And it's really like, do you want to create an ecosystem where your creators are running on your own accounts, or do you want to enable third parties to create accounts for them and then use these accounts to actually cross sell them a gazillion things, where you'll never see the economic benefits from that. And I definitely think that, like most platforms, want the former. And so while I think it's great that, you know, meta and others are experimenting with that like you know, I would highly encourage them to take control over their own destiny and create those accounts for their endpoints themselves. And it turns out, conveniently, we have a really good product for them to do that now, since as of this week, how about that?

Speaker 2  19:27  

It's, it's really interesting thinking back to, like, the early days of Libra, and just like, grateful of like, how quickly that moved the entire space forward that, like, without Libra, I think it would have been another maybe five plus years before we've gotten here,

Speaker 3  19:42  

at least we did something.

Speaker 2  19:43  

You moved it forward.

Speaker 1  19:45  

Yeah,

Speaker 2  19:45  

I'm grateful for that, but it's the infrastructure didn't exist. And so you could take that same use case. I remember talking about creator payouts in 2018 2019, it was like a very obvious problem that needed to be solved, and that stable coins the concept of a. Stable coin. Seemed like that was a solution, but then at the time, it was like, Okay, well, blockchains aren't fast and cheap enough. You got to build a new blockchain. There wasn't any stable coin that scaled. You got to build a new stable coin. There weren't really embedded wallets. You got to build, like the DM wallet infrastructure from so you had to build all of these pieces from the ground up that just hadn't really existed. We didn't have any stable coin, Link cards, 2018, I remember for the first time talking about, we'd love to work with Diem and Libra on, like having cards there and so how much work it required to just try and build those core primitives to get to a use case that now it's really interesting that meta can say, all right, same use case, but they don't have to build anything really, to be able to integrate with third parties to do it. Now, I think it is really interesting of how deep that integration goes, and when you're in a kind of a pilot mode of like, let's test a few markets. Let's see if this is one of a number of payout options. I think that's one way that you could look at creator payouts. The other way to look at it is to say we want to build a massive creator Neo bank and like that could be an entirely new business. To say we've got all these funds going to creators. Why don't we monetize that and offer them every service they need? Maybe they need loans, maybe they need all sorts of things that, if you can control the experience, you can then embed inside of it. And so it seems to be that at some point, ideally this is no longer news of creator platform, ads, stable coin payouts is just going to be like a yes, that is what everybody does, but that how deep they go, is going to be the interesting thing that sets one Creator platform apart from another?

Speaker 3  21:44  

Yeah, I think you nailed it.

Sy Taylor  21:45  

Yeah. It kind of reminds me of the early embedded finance days when every platform was trying to embed a card for a little while, but it never really caught fire, because these platforms are global, and so you need that global nature. I think of stable coins and their acceptability to it without the banking plumbing infrastructure, and the industrial loan charters and all of the stuff that kind of came with that. This is, this is a really different model that's, I think, quite powerful. I do imagine, if you're quite risk averse these days, maybe starting with something like a stripe link that somebody else fully owns and operates is quite a good toe in the water, just to see if anybody like decapitates you. But then you could always move, move on from there, just throwing that out there.

Speaker 3  22:27  

But I think you're like, just to bounce off what you said. I think this is exactly right. I feel like, when you think about it, name whatever creator platform or gig economy worker platform, right? Then you're paying out all of these endpoints. You're really the center of economic life for all of these people and businesses, and you have the data, right? So to your point earlier, about, like, the Neo bank in a box, like for those creators or drivers or hosts or whatever it is that you have, like, at the end point of of your network, like you have the best data. So you should be in a position to actually provide advances like credit and all of these services to your customers, because you have the best data. And leaching that data to the banks at the edges, to all kinds of different third parties, was actually cost of doing business, pre AI, but in the AI world, where you can actually mine that data and build underwriting models like you couldn't do it five years ago or a year ago, is actually negligent, right? It's like, why don't you underwrite with your own Treasury that you have and generate a whole new multi billion dollar business with the data and capabilities you have, versus like, give that to banks at the edges and others that are not really serving those customers well anyways, and can't offer a tailored product for that customer. And so the opportunity for these platforms in the next five years is just massive, and it's really a question of who's going to go into deep end and like, really use the tools to Kai's point that are now widely available to actually build this or just give it up, right? Or continue giving it

Speaker 2  24:06  

up? Yeah. I think the other lens on this that makes it a really interesting time is it seems like the Creator economy has the potential to get 100x bigger in the next few years with AI. And when you think about like, what a creator is which creators are, kind of one of the first classes of, like, one person companies, where it's just like, it's individual that's, you know, making a living creating content. And like, what were the barriers of bottlenecks? Well, it was the amount of time in the day that tell me about it creators. It's exhausting. Get burned out. You're like, you're creating content all day. And like, if you stop creating content, you stop getting views, you stop you can't monetize. Well, now you're going to have every creator that has a team of agents that are they're going to be putting to create content in all sorts of ways while the creator is asleep. And they're going to give creators so much leverage that I genuinely believe you will have one person record labels. You'll. Have one person music studios and film that will be creating types of content that is not just, oh, here's a Tiktok video that, like, I have to create one every day. They will be creating, like, really, really valuable content. And so those creators that might have had a very small business, that had very basic needs of just getting a payout could end up becoming really enterprises and whatever platforms they're using to distribute that content. If you're saying you've got the opportunity to be the core financial layer with everything that this enterprise needs, but that enterprise is one person and five agents like, that's a pretty big business, and so I'm really interested to see how the AI tools and like what you're building today, of like a creator, plus their agents, their agents are going to need to spend on image models, on video models, on data, just to be able to create the content that is successful. And so I think all of these pieces are going to just make that market segment so much bigger, and you've got better tools to actually serve it. It's, it seems like a shame for the platforms to say, I'm, I'm not going to get into that space.

Speaker 3  26:06  

Yep, couldn't agree more.

Sy Taylor  26:08  

I strongly agree. I also want to just take a little moment for what David was saying about the credit opportunity. I think in the FinTech era, we got used to using alternative data for credit underwriting, so like plaid and cash flow became a thing, and now you have earned wage access, and you have a whole swath of people whose FICO scores were below 700 who suddenly have access to credit for the first time. And that's transformational, but that's like a microcosm of what creative platforms can do on a global scale. But how do you go get a banking license in 160 markets to pull that off for lending, that's pretty difficult to do. But of course, then defi rails and on chain private credit are really coming in a big way. We've seen stories from Apollo and many others looking at how they come into the on chain ecosystem. So there are going to be other funding sources that don't necessarily need your treasury and your CFO having a heart attack in order to, like, actually provide into this space as well. So I really think how modular the defi space is makes it such an interesting opportunity, and it sort of supports your broader point. David, of like, I want to those things to be ownable as much as possible by me, but not necessarily on my balance sheet. And that sort of combination that stable coins plus decentralization give you really start to make a compelling economic case in some interesting ways.

Speaker 3  27:33  

Yeah. I mean, look, this is the first time that we can really truly give people a global money account in so many different countries with the ability to actually spend that balance in so many different ways, just generally speaking. And I think I used to spend a lot of time with a very good friend of mine, who's from Argentina, and who always said, like, the dream of everyone in Argentina is to have $1 denominated bank account at Chase, like, that's their dream. And like, in the US, we're like, Yeah, okay. Like, not that exciting, because, like, we take it for granted. But like, now we can give people $1 account and a Visa card everywhere, almost. And like, that's just like, so profound, when you think about it, right? It's like, you know? And if it's a multi currency account where you have $1 balance, you have your local balance, and you have a debit card, and you know, maybe you have a little bit of Bitcoin here and there to have a savings pocket in your account. It's becoming really super compelling. And like, I think billions of people want this.

Speaker 2  28:34  

How do you think that emerging market regulators and central banks are going to react over time? And like, you've spent plenty of time and kind of, you've seen the defenses of, like, when monetary sovereignty feels like it's under threat, do you think that emerging market regulators are going to look at these stable coin accounts and dollar accounts as this threat of dollarization? Like, what would you do if you were in their shoes of, like, you can't really put it back in the box. And I feel like we just, we haven't really started to see the level of scale that has provoked any type of reaction yet, but I'm still wondering, like, Is that coming? And we spent a bunch of time trying to advise and talk to policymakers, and I think they're still trying to understand what all the implications of this are.

Speaker 3  29:16  

I mean, like, look, I think there are two types of categories of possible reactions there, there's one good reaction, and then there's one, in my opinion, very bad reaction. The good reaction is, oh, well, like people want to hold dollars, and so we just need to make sure that they can hold our local currency as well. And so how do you promote an ecosystem that enables stable coins denominated in your own currency to actually flourish in your market at the end of the day, like, you know, in most countries, like you look at Brazil, you look at Mexico, you look at Europe, you look at like, you know, Singapore, Hong Kong, like all of these places have really good currencies, and all of the goods and services are denominated in those currencies. And so

Speaker 1  29:59  

you.

Speaker 3  30:00  

Most people in businesses need and want local currency, and those countries need to make sure that they can offer them a digital version of that currency that's ideally not cbdc. And that leads to the wrong way. I think, in my opinion, to do this, which is like, Oh no, I'm the central bank. I need to control the whole thing, and I need to issue a cbdc for everyone. I think that's the wrong approach. Because when you think about like, the dollar or the euro today, as represented in bank accounts, this is not central bank money. It's m2 right? So it's like, that's the money that's actually created by the bank, and that's actually displayed in front of customers eyes, right? So, and I think, you know, trying to replace that with an account at the level of the central bank is the wrong approach. But I do think we'll see multi stable coin currencies, and like the beauty of that is that it's just going to improve FX markets. It's going to enable people to move in and out of different currencies in a much more efficient way. And it's just going to be one additional things that stable coins can do to lift the world as GDP by making global trade better. So if we land there, I think we'll be great.

Sy Taylor  31:07  

I think we've seen multiple attempts as well to do bans. Like China has banned stable coins more times than I've had hot dinners, and yet tether still seems to do pretty well in Hong Kong. And then there's the HK dollar stable coin, which HSBC and Standard Chartered are doing. So typical, China has it both ways. And then Nigeria has tried to ban stable coins multiple times. And there's only so much you can do, like the genie us act is out of the bottle. And so you kind of have to, you have to react to that in a way. And possibly the best reaction you could have is the, I'm a big fan of the way Tony McLaughlin at ubix put it, which is like stable coins are a gift, because what you can do is you can perform FX on that stable coin, and now your local economy gets the FX revenue. And of course, being somebody who lives in London, the global FX center of the universe, I'm consistently disappointed by how slow our policy has been on really capturing that opportunity, because I do buy that the FX opportunity is enormous, and we'll come back to FX in our next story. But I just want to pause here while we thank our sponsors. We'll be right back this episode, if it's not obvious, is brought to you by our friends at visa, a global leader in payments. Visa's tokenized assets platform, vtap uses smart contracts and cryptography to help banks bring fiat currencies on chain. Vtap allows financial institutions to issue Fiat backed tokens, improving financial efficiency and enabling programmable finance. You can check out the links in this episode's description to express your interest in vtap. This episode is sponsored by stripe. Here's a problem so many businesses are up against money still moves like it's the 1970s on financial infrastructure that was designed before the internet was even a concept. It's slow, it's expensive, and it's tied to borders. That's all changing now. Stable coins are fundamentally a better way to move money online. They're affordable with payments that take minutes rather than days. They work across borders, and they're easy for anyone to use, no matter where they are in the world. Stripe allows you to unlock those benefits for your business. One integration and you can accept stable coin payments. Pay out globally and manage your money with stable coins. No blockchain expertise required. Learn more about how you can use stable coins and expand your reach@stripe.com forward slash, crypto tokenized is also sponsored by fireblocks. Fireblocks is the stablecoin infrastructure of choice for global businesses, from visa to WorldPay to bridge to Revolut with over $100 billion in monthly stablecoin volume, fireblocks powers stablecoin strategies at scale with infrastructure that enables PSPs, fintechs, remitters and banks to issue, move, hold and manage stable coins. It's all done securely at scale with secure built in compliance with fire blocks. You get complete control to build your own stable coin orchestration layer, create payment accounts, manage liquidity and access on and off ramps in over 60 currencies makes it easier for you to build and scale and expand your business globally. Learn more@fireblocks.com thank you very much to our sponsors. So the perfect FX story here is Western Union talking about their stablecoin rollout in their earnings call last week, the CEO said that the rollout of their stable coin, USD, PT, will happen in May of 2026 so just days away at launch, the coin will not be retail focused, but will replace correspondent banking by using it for settlement between Western Union and its agents in select corridor. Yours, and then the rollout will then further see Western Union outlets used for off ramps, and then eventually stable coin accounts via the stable card. So this is a familiar rollout pattern Kai to I think what we've seen a lot of folks do, which is start with the internal use case and then layer on the complexity. What are your thoughts on this story? I'm gonna give you first crack at this one. Give David a

Speaker 1  35:23  

rest.

Speaker 2  35:23  

I think we've we've talked about this probably a dozen or more times on the show. It feels like there's a really interesting opportunity for the remittance platforms that they haven't historically really monetized the receive side, and it's kind of a similar story to what we talked about on the Creator side, like they're making remittance payouts all over the world. Sometimes they don't really even have that much data or information about the recipients, and they don't really have many products that the recipients are using after that recipient picks up the cash and, like, walks out of the store. And so being able to say, here's a Western Union wallet that funds can land in, and then you could have a card tied to that wallet. And maybe you don't even have to do FX, maybe it's the recipient actually wants dollars. And now you've got all these recipients who have dollar accounts that have cards tied to them. Like I think that's a really interesting opportunity, that remittance companies can be these emerging market Neo banks using stable coin infrastructure. So I think we'll see most of the major remittance companies move in that direction. It's interesting to see the different decisions around, do they issue their own stable coin? Which Western Union is doing? Do they leverage an existing stable coin or multiple stable coins? I'm not super knowledgeable on, like the specific mechanics around how they interact with agents across the network, but it feels like there is a real liquidity problem. If you have to predict, okay, how much volume is going to happen in certain places, they're trying to net as much as possible of what's coming in and out. And so having a more efficient way to move between their own agents, I think that that's a very clear use case that they're starting with. So it'll be interesting to see like, every time I see like, a new stable coin announced with like us, is it USDP teaser? I can't even keep track of like, all the names now, will the stable coin itself have any brand recognition? Will Western Union customers even know that exists? Or is it just gonna be dollars?

Speaker 3  37:20  

Gonna be dollars?

Speaker 2  37:21  

And it's just dollars in the account, and it happens to be that on the back end, that seems more likely.

Speaker 1  37:26  

Yeah,

Sy Taylor  37:26  

David, your thoughts on the economic side of it, though, because, I mean, if I do issue my own stable coin, and yes, to my customer, it just looks like dollars, am I not able to connect some more of the economics there? And especially if it's somewhat self custodial versus using a third party stablecoin. How do you think about that trade off?

Speaker 3  37:44  

No, I think it's the exact opposite, actually, because you always have to meet customers where they are, right? And what do people want? No one wants you as the PTX. Whatever people want dollars, right? So if you give them dollars, and you make those dollars fungible, that was also one of the insights by the way of building great global accounts in the way that we did, which is that we can help platforms that launch great global accounts issue their own stable coin. And the concept there is not like brand your thing. It's like, actually offer dollar balances, but make those maximally fungible, right? If you want to send it to a USDC wallet on Solana, great, you can do it, right? It's like $1 is $1 it doesn't matter. But as long as that dollar is in that grid global account that is yours, you collect the yield from the reserve, right? And so I think, I think that's the way. And like, I think people will have more of an incentive to actually issue their own stable coin if they're not worried about how you can use the stable coin. Like, the main barrier of entry for companies and platforms issuing their stable coins is they're worried that it's just not going to have the liquidity that is required to actually be useful. But if you make it fungible across like all the stable coins and all of the payment networks, then why not? Because why give it the yield away to someone else?

Sy Taylor  39:08  

Yeah, that pungibility becomes such a critical point. Kai hadn't considered just how essential that is. Does

Speaker 2  39:15  

it even have a brand? Like, I'm curious how you're implementing it. Of like, if someone wants to issue a stable coin. Do you even brand it? Do they expose the brand at all? Or it's more of like, it's just their back end ledger infrastructure that they can spin up, but they don't even have to give an announcement to their customers that, oh, we launched a stable coin. It's just like, yeah, that's like, we offer $1 account. Like, it's a very different

Speaker 1  39:39  

thing,

Speaker 3  39:40  

yeah? I mean, it's honestly, ultimately, it's the choice of the platform. They can do it however they want. But my advice to them would be exactly what you said, Kai, which is, like, just give them $1 it just so happens that it's your dollars, but like, no one cares. Just, you know, get the economics where you can maybe pass some of that if you want, not in the US now, but, but, you know. So the way to do it is, here's $1 account, and the account itself is branded beautifully in the brand of like the platform, and that's how you get your brand across. And no one cares about your dollar. People want $1

Speaker 2  40:12  

you mentioned that not in the US. How do you see like in the current debate discussion around yield? What does that mean for this value prop and like, is it relevant? If you're talking about, it's Western Union and they're offering a product to someone in Argentina. What are the different like, second order effects, if you end up with a more restrictive yield environment that you think will will play out, I

Speaker 1  40:37  

think it's going to be

Speaker 3  40:38  

like, to your point about arbitrage and like, what's going to happen there? It's going to be really interesting. Like, it's interesting. Like, it used to be that people wanted to have accounts, dollar accounts in the US, but like, if you can pay yield on stable coins, on dollar stable coins outside of the US, but not in the US, you might see, like, you know, the reverse happen. It's like, you know, people will want offshore dollar accounts to receive yield on their stable coin deposits, which would be kind of like probably one of the biggest self goal of the banks here in the US, which is handed a double whammy. But, yeah, I think, I mean, look with clarity in the way that it's like currently constructed, like, you know, you're not going to be able to pay interest to stable coin holders in the US, but like, if you're issuing $1 stable coin outside of the US, and like your customers are outside of the US, you can do it. So I think it's an interesting thought to think about, like the second order effect of what that will do in terms of money flows and where people have their accounts and where they operate.

Sy Taylor  41:34  

It's not unsimilar to the origin of the Euro dollar, with dollars held, I think it was originally in London banks. It was Midland Bank in the 1960s and they were able to offer a higher yield on dollars stored in London than you would get on the dollars stored in the United States, because of one of the regulations at the time. And so, of course, dollars start flooding into London and then everywhere around the world, but only at banks. Now we have the euro, dollar for everybody else. And I don't know that that's really entered the psyche of the debate with the bank trades, and they've really thought through some of those second order effects. I don't know who first said it, but yield finds a way. It's like a pin cushion. You're going to squash it over here and it's going to pop up over there. Maybe there are other things to focus on, but, but maybe it's all posturing. Who knows? All right, last story for this week was about securitized and computer share announcing an agreement to enable tokenized shares for us issuers, so share issuers can now include issuer sponsored tokens as part of their issued capital alongside their existing shares, and including those held in the direct registration system compute share will, of course, act as a transfer agent for its clients. ISTS, including processing all the Corporate Actions alongside any directly registered holdings. This is, of course, the world's largest stock transfer agent, making on chain and off chain just be kind of interoperable. So we're sort of getting into another generation of RWAs, real world assets here. David, curious on your thoughts on that whole broader tokenization space and where it might fit into your universe and kind of the market itself.

Speaker 3  43:20  

Well, I think, you know, look tokenizing more real world assets, like, notably, securities and, you know, equities and everything else, I think makes a lot of sense, right? It's like, if you can have, like, a digital, atomic version of everything, it makes markets more efficient. And I think as far as we're concerned, is, this is not what we're focused on, but like we would be second order beneficiaries of having more tokenized things that those accounts can actually buy and sell directly, and it's just one more thing that those accounts will be able to do by virtue of, like others doing that. So I'm definitely very, very supportive of that trend.

Speaker 2  43:57  

It feels like one potential implication as as the space emerges, is just it could reduce the amount of working capital that both consumers and businesses need to hold, which, to me, is pretty exciting. Just sitting on a bunch of cash doesn't make a lot of sense, like, if you had the choice, like, I think any consumer managing their finances or any business doesn't want to have to sit on any more cash than they need to. But because you need liquidity, whether it's for bills coming up or for invoices and doing payroll, you always have to figure out, Okay, how much cash do I need versus what could I put in yield bearing securities like tokenized treasuries, and if everything becomes easier to convert, and more 24/7 more globally accessible, you could then have a world where you just, you don't need as much cash on hand. And I think to your point, Simon, like the yield will find a way. You could say, Okay, you can't pay yield on stable coins, but if you could pay yield on tokenized money market funds, and if they're 24/7 Like markets between stable coins and tokenized white market funds. Anytime money is at rest, I would just hold a tokenized money market fund, and then when I need to pay, I would automatically convert and be able to pay out. And I think you'll have these, like, really interesting. Eventually we'll get to this world of like, treasury management agents that you can literally create a treasury policy and say at all times I want to maximize my yield while still having certain liquidity that I need for these expenses. They'll also track what your expenses are, and they will just automatically hold the funds in the highest yielding asset that you can and so it's just, I really struggle in the yield debate of entering an era of like hyper optimization with AI and tokenized securities, regardless of like, what you do with stable coins, you're just gonna have a lot less cash at rest, sitting there, not earning yield. And so it just seems kind of like a moot point of what happens on the debate, to some extent.

Sy Taylor  45:55  

Yeah, definitely. I think some listeners will know, of course, the importance of a transfer agent is they bridge the gap between, like a blockchain record and the financial regulations. So they say, under the SEC Rule 17 ad 10, that you actually have the legal share, rather than just a price tracking derivative. And of course, there are lots of tokens out there that might be a claim on a claim of an SPV of a fund, and what do you really own? And do you actually own the thing? So it's nice to have some legitimacy to that claim, to the legal ownership that the court system could actually help you with if you ever lost your wallet or whatever else. It's nice to have those protections. And so it's kind of interesting how there's this yield debate going on on one side, and have we got regulations? And then on the other side, we've got this question of it's just normal transfer agents are coming in now, and it's being regulated. Last story, I want to give a couple of moments to Kai, just to give you your flowers. I saw in the visa earnings that stable coin backed cards hit $7 billion so that's up from 4 billion, I think last reported period, what are you seeing? What's driving that growth? And, yeah, any other thoughts you have?

Speaker 2  47:07  

So the 7 billion was the annualized run rate of stable coin settlement, of on chain settlement, kind of moving through visa net, and the vast majority of that are on stable coin link cards. My biggest takeaway is, like it is just so early $7 billion dollars of the context of visas. It's a fraction of a fraction of a percent. Like it just, it doesn't move the needle. But I think we've figured out how to do this. And every month, like, it grows, and every client we talk to, it's like, if you're offering a stable coin link card program, why wouldn't you settle that program in a stable coin? Like, it's much more inconvenient to have to kind of bring that back off chain, convert to Fiat and pay to us. And then I think just getting into this rhythm of like seven day a week settlement, like I am on a crusade against bank holidays, I just, I object to the principle of bank holidays. In 2026 I just object, object. We do not have to tolerate bank holidays. And so that's what I'm like shouting every day of the week. And yeah, I think between treasury and credit settlement risk and, like, they're all these, like, back office processes that just we want to move money faster, underneath visa net, and I think it's our obligation to try and do that with our clients. And it's exciting that every new stable coin, Link card program that's going live that we're engaging with, they all want to settle in stable coins and and I think we're just going to keep growing this every month.

Sy Taylor  48:24  

Yeah, I think USD is about to get a lot more open chi, for sure. All right, some stories we didn't have time to cover. State Street are also launching tokenized fund servicing paradigm back to liquid. Raised 18 million in new funding for 24/7 multi asset trading block work. Shout out to those guys. Announced a series a extension at $192 million so ya know, Well done, sir. Moon pay has acquired so dot and launched Moon pay, institutional fence finance announced a $20 million series, a led by Galaxy fence finance. Are another on chain, private credit company. Disclosure, I have a small seed investment in them. Altitude Friends of the show raised 18 million in funding building sort of the on chain equivalent of sort of B to B. Neo banks then anchorage partnered with m zero to power some stable coin issuance. So really interesting, M 01, of our sponsors, is popping up everywhere since they were on tokenized. How about that? All right, so that's all we had time for this week. I want to thank everybody for watching and listening. And of course, David, we're going to start out by asking you if people want to learn more about grid or your financial accounts or everything you're doing up at light spark. Where do they go to do that?

Speaker 3  49:38  

Light spark.com?

Sy Taylor  49:40  

Fantastic. And Kai you and visa on x at Kai Sheffield beast, calm slash crypto. You'll find me at sy Tai though on all the socials screaming into the void, at FinTech, brain food.com and, of course, at tempo dot XYZ. And now I have to remind you, folks, please, please, please, Like, Subscribe, share the show, do all of those things. It's the only way we. Can grow so please help us out. Tell a friend today, and we'll catch you next time.