OKX & ICE Launch 24/7 Tokenized Stocks

Sy Taylor  0:10  
Welcome to Tokenized, the show focused on stablecoins and the institutional adoption of tokenized real-world assets. My name is Simon Taylor. I am the founder at Brain Food and head of Market Dev over at Tempo, you will of course notice this week that there is no Kai Sheffield. But returning to the show is Naz, who's the CEO of Bastion. How are you doing, Naz? Doing great. Very exciting to be on. Thank you so much for having me, and excited to to dig into the Samsung news. Good to have you back. Lots of stories to cover, and making a debut is Greg Brika, who is the head of product at Morse, formerly known as Sling Money, and former global head of financial services at Cash App. So, Greg, quite a quite a background you've got. Hopefully, you can give us some perspective. Nice to have you.

Greg Bricca  0:52  
Thanks for having me, Simon. Excited to be here.

Sy Taylor  0:54  
Yeah, likewise, likewise, and last but by no means least is another debutant. It's Paul Adrien Ipolite, who is co-founder and CEO at Spyco. Good to have you on the show. So, congrats on the race this week.

Paul-Adrien  1:07  
Thank you, Simon. I'm glad to be here.

Sy Taylor  1:08  
Oh, right. Just before we jump into the news, I've got to remind viewers that views and opinions of our contributors today are their own and might not reflect those of companies they represent. Please don't take anything we say as tax, legal, or financial advice, and I'm happy to remind you that this podcast is sponsored by our friends at Fireblocks. Tokenized is sponsored by Fireblocks. Fireblocks is the stablecoin infrastructure of choice for global businesses from Visa to WalPay 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 stablecoins. It's all done securely at scale with secure built-in compliance. With Fireblocks, you get complete control to build your own stablecoin 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 at fireblocks.com. All right, story number one this week is that OKX and the New York Stock Exchange owner ICE have filed to launch OKX Ice, which does sound vaguely like a '90s rap group, but is actually a 24/7 tokenized stock venue for 63 U.S. companies, and OKX raised more money at a $25 billion valuation. So this JV between OKX and ICE has Andrew Cuomo as the co-chair, former mayor of New York. They're filing this launch under the new innovation exemption rules with the SEC, and so they're going to run on XLR through a permissioned Uniswap V4 pool, and each stock is paired against USDC, USDG, or USDT. To trade, you need a non-transferable soul-bound token, an NFT, I'm guessing, issued after OKX's US entity has run all of the usual identity and AML checks. So this is a pretty interesting model of tokenized stocks coming on chain. Now I'm going to start with you on this. I'm sure you've got a pretty good view of what the what the corporates are looking at. We've been following on this show, you know, sort of Robinhood and the DTCC and many others. What are your thoughts on this partnership with ICE and OKX and and and the role of tokenized stocks.

Nassim Eddequiouaq  3:44  
Yeah, something that we're seeing a lot both across B 2b use cases and and consumer facing use cases is actually the desire to include more financial products and easier access to financial products to jump in and out of on the corporate side. It's more for like balance sheet and and treasury management use cases and and cash reserves, but on the on the consumer side, there's a tremendous amount of interest on accessing stocks anywhere easily 24/7, and embedding those into different platforms. I think that it's going to be less about I need to go on Robinhood to access it, but let's just embed tokenized stocks and way more embedded financial accounts that are available anywhere, and so I'm very excited about that because I think that we're going to see Coinbase, OKX, Backpack, others really push those embedded brokerage accounts in you know all the new neo banking services.

Sy Taylor  4:36  
Greg, I mean you're looking at a pretty global audience. Have you looked at and considered this? What do you think the appetite is in some of the global South populations for access to the U.S. stock market?

Greg Bricca  4:48  
Yeah, exactly, Simon. I mean, we really see interest exploding in the sector. Tokens are money. Money is tokens in in here. When you have 24/7 equities, I think you really need 24/7. Cash and stablecoins like really provide that service there. I think it's interesting coming in what you look at consumer participation and how behavior really looks when you come into tokenized assets as well. Especially if if you look at after hours training, where you have slippage, where you have price impact, do you have liquidity to support all of that? And really, at the end of the day, do customers understand where they sit when you're transacting, but if you have an individual that's not serious sitting in in market hours in New York City, that access is absolutely crucial, and that's where you see consumers really looking to participate.

Sy Taylor  5:32  
Yeah, different time zones matter, and if you don't have a lot of overlap, and it's very expensive, and or it's just not available to you, then that's that's kind of a big barrier. Paul, your thoughts on this story?

Paul-Adrien  5:44  
Yeah, I mean, what I found really interesting behind that is the fact that we actually see that you know something very basic from the U.S. perspective, which is access to securities accounts, is not a commodity. You know, in many places around the world, and in our case at Spycle, we are not focused on equities. We've 100% focused on cash yield specifically, but we sort of solved the same issue, which is access to money market funds, cash firms, and all. So I very much relate, if you want, to what we are seeing here in this space.

Sy Taylor  6:14  
You know, I think the the filing here had a really nice little nuance in it, which is tokenized prices might drift from the real shares outside of market hours, and I think the market hours thing and price discovery is going to be really key. I was speaking to a very senior professional, one of the largest custodians in the world, who was saying that's something they're taking very seriously as the DTCC looks to bring more tokenized stocks to market. And as I mean, I'm sure you've spoken to corporates who are thinking about out of hours operations and price drifting in treasury could be a big deal.

Nassim Eddequiouaq  6:48  
Definitely, yeah. I think that, and this is one of the reasons also why we're we're excited about the federal trust bank charters and more companies moving into not just from the money movement and MTLs and MMSBs, but actually having qualified custodianships to be able to offer more embedded securities account. To Pauletrine's points, it is not a commodity yet, and so we're we're very excited about that. We obtained our own OCC charter pretty recently, a conditional approval for the OCC charter, and we're seeing more approvals in this space, which is excellent, and means that those securities are going to have more distribution, basically across the U.S. but

Sy Taylor  7:30  
also outside. Yeah, we we will have a story about exactly that just later today as well. But Paul, I want to ask you the same question as well, because you will, I imagine, have to deal with a lot of corporate treasurers who are probably quite new to anything tokenized, and you know have have questions about the risk, and have questions about the the fungibility, and have questions about access, and you know sort of treasurers care about two things like speed of cash and risk, and how do you answer the risker side of the equation?

Paul-Adrien  7:58  
I think interestingly enough, we got these questions much more from like crypto treasurers than non-crypto or traditional treasurers. To be to be honest, we treat you know crypto rails or tokenization, however you want to call it, just as a technical choice at the end of the day. And in the same sense that when you go to I don't know J.P. Morgan or Bank of America Adeline, with you don't ask you know what kind of database they use at the end of the day to maintain your checking accounts or securities accounts, etc. We have the same approach. If you look at our website, we don't talk much, you know, about the rails, about tokenization, but it's very much an enabler of us to build like better products, better access, better UX. At the end of the day, so we don't get that question too much. Just one thing I will say is that we've seen, interestingly, like rating agencies change also in terms of how they look at these sales. When we started the business, when we launched the products, like two years ago, a year and a half ago, the first discussions we had with rating, the largest rating agencies that that we all know, they all looked at blockchain technology, the underlying chains as an additional risk to some extent. That has completely changed. If you look at the ratings, the latest assessments that they have done in the space, it's not treated in the same way today. So I think you know things have changed quite a lot and relatively fast over the past few months on that aspect. And I do think, at the end of the day, that it's strictly better to have a chain plus maybe a backup register of that chain in case it stops working to operate in terms of just pure operational resiliency than just having a centralized database like a server, right?

Sy Taylor  9:36  
Indeed, it's going to be so interesting to see how this partnership between ICE and OKX develops as well. I think it's really interesting for an incumbent player to be going the partnership route, but they also invested more than 200 million into OKX at that 25 billion valuation back in March 2026, and and this recent extension added SC Ventures. You know, Standard Chartered probably. More and more aggressive banks in terms of leaning into being an off-ramp. Circle, Ripple, Cube root, and Cube Research, one of the big kind of market makers and hedge funds in the space. So, really interesting gathering of folks, Greg. Before we leave this one, I've heard a lot of noise about the sort of the consumer protection and risk of consumer harm around tokenization, and the consumers know what they're buying. I would question whether consumers ever know what they're buying. But how do you think the innovation exemption and the role of the SEC could help here? And do you think that there's going to be demand from the global south user base from this? And and how would you think about education, protection, and that sort of thing when you're dealing with the user base.

Greg Bricca  10:42  
Yeah, it's a really good question, Simon. I mean, really, I think we see an adjustment period as more and more consumers, especially in a global audience, become familiar with these protocols. Look at experiences that are embedded more and more, and financial experiences in their wallets. I think a lot of it comes down to what in those purchase flows and buys and sells. Is it really clear for the customer what they have access to, and not only just the asset, but what this looks like on voting shares, what it looks like on dividends, especially comparing a tradfi experience that some might be interested in into this crypto sphere. At the end of the day, oftentimes when you have the broadening access, this is often like a first experience for for our users, so as you're coming through each of those flows, I think it'll be more and more important, but not stopping any of the appetite here.

Sy Taylor  11:30  
Yeah, the appetite's there. It's that first experience that matters. Well, there's as you alluded to some charter news that you'd had. We've also learned this week that both Rain and Modern Treasury, shout out to those guys sponsors, applied to the OCC for National Trust Bank charters. So Rain National Trust Bank would be based in New York, holding digital assets and dollars for institutions, managing reserves for stablecoin issuers, and issuing and redeeming stablecoins under Genius. And it would be the ex CFO of Square Financial Services that would be the president and CEO subject to OCC review, and modern Treasury National Trust Bank would combine its payments and settlement with digital asset custody. It's not intending to lend. Now you've just been through this process, got a conditional OCC approval. You said you were excited about the the role of that trust charter. Explain to me why that might matter to somebody like Arain, to Modern Treasury, given what they do.

Nassim Eddequiouaq  12:29  
Yeah, there are just so first and foremost, so happy for more companies to go in this direction. Also, very big fan of Farouk and Charles and the team at Rain. I think that there are a few things that are important to note. The first one is that you want to have access to all 50 states, right? And problem today is that you rely on a patchwork of very different regulatory frameworks across a large amount of states, right? You need to go to every single regulator, state regulator today, and obtain a money transfer license, and you know answer questions, audit requests, and a bunch of other things. And especially on the stablecoin side, which is more recent, all these kind of criteria are very different. Texas is very different from New York, which is very different from California and others. So that kind of like allows you to operate in a way that is much more efficient, I would say, as a company, rather than really having to spend too many resources. The second aspect that I'm going to say is that everyone is looking at Genius stablecoin, Genius compliance stablecoin issuance as one of the check boxes that you need to do. It's not necessarily that every single company is going to start with it, but ultimately everyone that gets big enough will think about issuing their own stablecoin, and you need to have that that ability to do so. It's kind of like a hedge to be able to to issue down the line at some point. So I'm going to say that this is the second part, and the third part is actually what we were discussing before, which is with money trust meta licenses, you can't touch any other type of asset, right? But if you look at the financial experiences that are being built, both for corporates and and consumers, it's actually going way beyond the money. The money is the great ubiquitous instrument that is common to all of these experiences. But ultimately, people are going to want to trade stocks. They're going to want to trade commodities. They're going to want to trade computes. They're going to want to do a lot of things that you know you're only going to be able to custody with a with a qualified custody license like a trust charter,

Sy Taylor  14:26  
and that does give you so much more flexibility. It helps your unit economics in the process. I find Rain such an interesting business in that they use the Puerto Rico license to be a Visa Direct Principal member, but it allows them to issue cards globally. They're issuing credit cards, which has higher interchange. So a Rain customer doing a stablecoin linked card potentially has really good economics on a what looks like a card program that just happens to use stablecoins. They've acquired both UpTop and Answer, two businesses that were really focused. On sort of almost closed loop loyalty programs for brands, you know, one more around sports clubs, one more around kind of local shops. What Ansa can do is they can make the ability to use Apple Pay with a virtual card work with any point of sale terminal, travel down the network, but also carry your loyalty information. And UpTop was doing some clever things with NFTs and loyalty. Imagine if a sports stadium could issue its own stablecoins to your stablecoin-backed card. You would get certain points for everyday spending, but anything you do in stadium would be, you know, 10% off, 20% off, or something like that, and it what they don't even have to change their existing point of sale systems. So, really interesting acquisitions there by Rain, and of course now they can be the issuer of that stablecoin. And as that's something that you've seen a lot of companies look to move into is that ability to kind of issue. Interested, Paul, in in your views on this story and the increasing role of licenses. I know it's a little bit different looking at it from sort of Europe, but you do have global ambitions. I understand. So interested in your views.

Paul-Adrien  16:09  
Yeah, correct. I mean, important to stress, as you said, that for now we operate in Europe, so less familiar with the the U.S. landscape. Although we are looking at it quite extensively now, but overall, what I'm really excited about is what you can do now with stablecoins. And with stablecoin recognized as a means of payment, you know, as a form of money, both in Europe and the U.S. this opens up for super interesting use cases. I'll give you one example that is directly relevant in our business. We have very recently, together with Coinbase, which we use at the fund level as part of the fund stack unlocked stablecoin payments for the subscription and the redemption of our money market or cash fund shares, and that for us is really interesting, especially in USD because we have a lot of clients that come with us, operate in the you know not necessarily in the US but that have USD and that want to use for moving money in and out of the funds, and doing it via international wires is really a pain. It's strong to settle. It's costly for many of them, specifically for SMBs, retail, and the ability for them to use USDC to send directly money to the fund and to redeem also in USDC is super exciting. And we've seen the volumes in terms of the just the volumes of payments in and out of the funds really skyrocket since we launched a few a few weeks ago, is just to give you one example. Of course, there are many different things, but the use of stablecoin in the payments industry and in country markets for buying and selling securities is is super interesting.

Sy Taylor  17:33  
Yeah, it's going to be fascinating to watch that volume grow. I know you guys have grown pretty rapidly, and we'll we'll come to your raise a little bit later, but Greg, I am interested. I don't know if you saw the complaint from the Independent Community Bankers Association of America. They sued the OCC and Comptroller John and Gould to overturn a March 2026 chartering rule and interpretive letter 1176 from 2021, and it accounts the 21 trust banks approved by the OCC, and sort of says consumers don't know necessarily what the backings are, and that there's no FDIC insurance on these sorts of things, and it wasn't the intention of the trusts to kind of do that. So, really interested in how you think about again the the consumer here and and their preference for stablecoins relative to the potential harms that we we haven't seen battle tested many times in history anyway.

Greg Bricca  18:30  
Yeah, we're still on the the early side of the adoption of these curves. When we look at the number of charters that coming through, that's not the scarce part. I think as we look on the issuance here, really, it's worth tracking before like commitment as it comes through, and there'll continue to be a maturation of the the process for consumers. I think on the back end, really at the end of the day, what customers are looking for is that consolidation of ledger custody movement, money movement under one supervised roof, and this is really where, like, that is all moving towards as we go forward.

Sy Taylor  19:04  
I mean, Naz, it does feel to me like there are narrow banks here today, and it happens to use this charter that wasn't necessarily intended for that. But I'm a veteran of the banking as a service era, where we had Synapse collapse, and you know there were consumers because of ledgering issues, didn't know where their funds were. I I would posit to you that this is potentially a better situation, even if it's not apples to apples with traditional banking. It is something different. Your sort of reflections on some of the benefits of the the trust chartering route for that safety and soundness and protection of consumer funds.

Nassim Eddequiouaq  19:41  
Yeah, I mean the the bar is extremely high. Having you know gone through the the process ourselves, I would say that the amount of scrutiny into all aspects of subledgering, what goes on chain, what stays in our systems, all the different controls in place. We're also obviously seeing a lot of you know. Ramifications to the synapse case, right? With the synapse rule of like pushing a lot of the ledgering away from the the fintechs and to the banks who are much more regulated as part of the process. And I would say that the other aspect that is also interesting with the the charter is that it actually now enables financial institutions to rely from a compliance standpoint much more on a federally regulated institution compared to a fintechs. If you're a bank, for example, or a PSB, you know, an MSB, anything, you can't really rely from a compliance standpoint on another MSB or or MTL licensed company. It has to be a federally regulated entity, and so I think that these two kind of things coming together, where the bar is much higher, and then it allows much more companies who otherwise might make mistake to actually rely on the compliance kind of risk policies, controls of someone who's held at the highest bar, is extremely beneficial generally for for the space. And obviously, more things pushing on chain is is just generally good for the space in terms of reconciliation systems and accuracy.

Sy Taylor  21:05  
Yeah, I wrote a piece that went out early today as we record this on brain food, looking at the parallels between sort of the the launch of WAP and their ability to build a bank in minutes and the early days of banking as a service. And I think what WAP has differently is, you know, it's kind of using stablecoins under the hood. But I don't believe, or I could be wrong, that there's a trust chartered bank under there historically. Whereas actually, if we do get to a world where there are trust chartered banks underneath, then I think there is a an organization who is responsible to the federal regulators to prove the state of that ledger, and in many cases, that may even be the one that's supporting some of the consumer brands at the top in the end of it. So, hopefully, this brings some regulatory clarity. And to your point, you just have to ask the guys at Anchorage, who I think entered a consent order for anti-money laundering in 2022 and exited that in 2025. Getting a charter is hard, but keeping it is extremely hard. And the work really starts when you get that charter. So you know, good luck to everybody that's doing this, and good luck to the modern treasury guys as well, who I think have made their name in ledgering. That's that's kind of what they were known for. Then they've added PSPs, they've added stablecoins, and now the charter-they're sort of becoming really full stack. So this this sort of evolution of fintech into stablecoins and trust charters is going to be probably the biggest theme for for multiple years to run. Very briefly, before we get to part two, I just want to take a quick pause while we hear from our sponsors that make tokenize Possible stablecoin operations usually mean a wallet from one vendor and on-ramp from another, and then controls stitched together across all of them. Visa's stablecoin platform fixes this fundamentally. You can mint, move, and manage stablecoins across OpenUSD, and you remain your own custodian, all in one single environment. Then stablecoin linked cards let you spend balances anywhere Visa is accepted. That's Visa, the global leader in payments, and of course, sponsor of this show. You can find out more at Visa.com forward slash crypto. This episode is sponsored by Stripe. Launching a card program used to mean expanding market by market, securing new licenses, new integrations, connecting to new rails in every country you wanted to reach. With Stripe, a single integration can launch a fully customizable, stablecoin-backed card program across more than 30 market tickets. Your users can spend directly from their stablecoin balances anywhere Visa is accepted, while you earn interchange. How lovely! Issue virtual cards compatible with Apple and Google Pay, and plastic or metal cards with super fast delivery. All funded by the custodial and non-custodial wallet of your choice. Stablecoin back cards run on Stripe issuing infrastructure, which has issued more than 360 million cards today. That's a lot of cards. You can learn more at bridge.xyz/product/cards. Thank you to our sponsors. Story number three, Bastion, you might have heard of them as will run stablecoin accounts in the Samsung Wallet across 82 million U.S. Galaxy devices, launching in the last week of October of this year. Naz, that's a pretty big user base. Samsung's pretty big company. Do you want to give us the backstory on this one?

Nassim Eddequiouaq  24:42  
Yeah, that sounds great. So Samsung has been excited about the blockchain technology for quite a bit of time. Initially, they had built hardware capabilities for blockchain transaction and blockchain wallets a few years ago, and actually decided to add stablecoins as part of their. Samsung Wallet offering as kind of like a a great place for everyone here to hold their funds on any a Galaxy phone, and they decided to partner with us and and Coinbase we kind of like work jointly. Bastion is kind of like the regulated service provider. Everything runs under our licenses. We do all the subledgering orchestration of fund movements, cross-border payments as well. We're going to be enabling over 60 countries right away at launch for remittances, and we partner with with Coinbase on the the you know sub custody leveraging Coinbase institutional for added security of of the funds at rest. And so yeah, we're going to be launching later this month to a very large user base, and we're going to be expanding, you know, over time to other markets as well.

Sy Taylor  25:47  
I'm interested in what you think the attach rates for this would be, and what the ideal first user wants from this stablecoins in a Samsung wallet. I mean, we've seen buy now later in the Apple wallet. We've seen those wallets are starting to become the everything wallet for consumers. We're in the age now of personal agents. Like, what's your thesis on on where consumer wallets go from here?

Nassim Eddequiouaq  26:10  
I think that the remittance use case is such a powerful one to start with within the the Samsung user base. So many people with you know Samsung phones can actually now connect very easily to people all around the world and their family, their friends, and more. I would say that this is really kind of use case one and enabling people to have easy access to accounts with rewards, with you know financial incentives and connectivity, financial connectivity, and then we're going to be adding capabilities to pay at merchants and really just expanding the spendability and the utility of those accounts far beyond what we started with. And so can't share too much on this, but we're going to drastically increase the the spendability and the utility out of those accounts.

Sy Taylor  26:58  
Ooh, that's that's interesting, Greg. Your thoughts on this? I mean, that's quite a quite a distribution there for stablecoins. I know consumer is near and dear to your heart.

Greg Bricca  27:06  
Yeah, first congratulations to to Nas. Really exciting announcement here, Tommy. I think you've said before, every financial product is a decision, a record, a way to reach you, and distribution is king, especially in consumer. We're in the age where distribution is moving from branch to phone to agent. Being able to to reach people on device is is really really powerful. So I think it's really interesting to see how the relationship develops, especially looking at at Samsung and and be able to create those new financial relationships with individuals.

Sy Taylor  27:39  
Paul, any any thoughts on on Samsung and and kind of the role of consumer distribution?

Paul-Adrien  27:45  
I mean, super exciting congrats as well. When when yield, I would say.

Sy Taylor  27:50  
No, as you don't have to answer that one, I'll jump in and save you. I felt the awkward silence. I just wanted to let it hang. But look, again, huge congratulations! I mean, sort of, what does it take to pull off something like this? Because very large company, but they're not your first very large company. Sony's Sony Bank's stablecoin also runs on you is a partnership with yourself. You seem to have carved out a bit of a niche for getting these really big enterprises. You're still a relatively young company. So, like, what what's what's the what's the approach here, and and how you're pulling this off?

Nassim Eddequiouaq  28:28  
So, the DNA of Basham really comes from the problems that we saw firsthand at Meta, working on the Libra project. I was, you know, tech leading all of the custody, Catholic wallet, and cross border payment infrastructure there, as well as the the issuance of the libra currency, and got to see problems at a scale that only appear within a certain type of companies, whether it's like the growth that certain companies are experiencing or the scale that they already have with a very broad distribution, and so really Bashan I would say has focused on stablecoin infrastructure specifically for enterprises that are you know experiencing certain set of requirements and need a certain level of security compliance, but then I would say just integrations that work for them. And so that is really I would say our focus, as you mentioned, Sony is going to be leveraging us not just for issue ones, for custody on and off ramp corporate use cases with little-facing use cases. Very excited about you know broadening the Disney ecosystem. We have more very large companies that are giving us can't announce them yet. But I'm very excited about that because it is clear that the enterprises, the largest companies in the world, are very excited about stablecoins. They don't ask anymore what can do? What can stablecoins do for me? They actually understand it, and it's more about how do I go about launching that? Where do I partner? What do I build myself? Where do I obtain my own licenses? Where do I leverage someone else's license? As you know, Sony, for example, decided to obtain their own charter via Connectia Trust, whereas Samsung, for.

Sy Taylor  30:00  
Relies on Bastion's licenses. Super interesting to see this model emerge, but also a specialist in dealing with really large enterprises, kind of pulling off these deals. You know, you would have expected in the enterprise space it would be somebody big with distribution. You know, sort of I'm thinking about publicly traded companies solving this sort of problem, but actually sometimes it's just the experience of having been there and done it before makes such a difference. So hats off to you guys! And whilst we're doing sort of the the victory lap here, we should talk about Spyco, which you know, Paul, you might know a little bit about those guys. You you of course run tokenized cash funds in four different currencies. You raised more than a $90 million Series B, led by NEA, as your assets hit $2.7 billion. So tell me the story of this asset growth and the company. Just reset for everybody. What are you? What do you do? And what are the assets?

Paul-Adrien  30:53  
Sure. So we started this company two years ago. That's when we launched our first product. We operate from Europe, where there is actually a massive product gap, I would say, when it comes to access to cash funds compared to the U.S. if you look at the U.S. the money market industry as a whole is like I think more than 8 trillion U.S. dollars at this point in time, and the ratio of like assets that sit in MMF divided by bank deposits is north of 40% So it's massive market. It's 7x smaller, more than 7x smaller in Europe, where the market is essentially dominated by banks. So most of the money supply sits in in bank deposits. It's fine, but you're usually not earning any yield, similar to the U.S. I think on checking accounts. And when you want access to yield, your I mean, the product that you are being offered is a term deposit, so you have to tie up your cash for three months, six months, 12 months. It's fine, and it can be quite interesting when the yield curve is upward sloping, but it's not for all of your cash, right? You need some cash to stay liquid, hence money market funds, right? So the first thing we are solving is just this product gap issue and access to money market funds, and we've decided from the very beginning to build everything on chain because it's a better way to facilitate access to these products. To to the previous discussion on you know equities in emerging markets, for instance, so that's what we are solving first, and then there are a lot of interesting things to be built, even for the U.S. markets. I believe. If you look at money market funds in the U.S. most still work with one cutoff per day, which means that you often need to wait several hours before having your cash start earning any yield. And then, when you want access to your cash, it's the same issue the other way around. You need to wait for several hours to get access. So we are working on the fund machinery, if you want to enable 24/7 a call of yield and instant access to your cash, 24/7 whatever currency. That's a super exciting problem. A few folks are working in on this. It's challenging. Everything is not solved by blockchain and tokenization. By the way, it's a lot of accounting issues, market issues, etc. But that's a very exciting problem. And the last thing that I would mention that we very much like that we are super bullish on is just unlocking also programmability when it comes to treasury workflows. Most cash allocations today are super manual. You have like a treasurer deciding on which term deposits or which money market funds to allocate the cash into. We want to automate that basically for treasurers for agents tomorrow, and on this tokenization is super interesting because you have you know your money as sitting in a smart contract with stablecoin, for instance, and also your cash funds, which is a smart contract, and it's very easy to have rules that enable instant allocation of your stablecoins into the fund. If you have 24/7 yield, it's instant accrual of yield, etc. So that's the sort of stuff we are working on from Europe, where the product gap is very big and it makes it quite new on the market and potentially, hopefully, global at some point, including in the US, where these issues also exist to some extent.

Sy Taylor  33:57  
Yeah, I remember this company in the US called Meow that came out and did this in a very tradfi way and did really well, kind of on on the back of that. And there are some fintech applications like Wise that offer BlackRock money market funds, but for the corporate treasurer, they're less likely to be using Wise. They're probably using a large bank. So to have something like this that's that's kind of giving them that. What I found interesting as well is you support euros, dollars, pounds, and Swiss francs, which I guess for the European region is is hugely beneficial. And you've got the Spico and Monday overnight swap fund, which by itself reached a billion assets in July. So, do you want to talk to me about some of the different funds here and some of the roles of the different geographies and countries that fit within your portfolio.

Paul-Adrien  34:45  
Yeah, to your point, like the sort of multi-currency angle is super important for us because, as opposed to the U.S. Europe is very fragmented, right? There is the euro, which is the the single currency, but in effect, like countries in the Nordics and Eastern Europe. Still have their own currencies for for the majority of them, and then you have the UK, Switzerland, etc. So and the USD, of course, for everything international. So for us, starting with products in multiple currencies was very important, and this is where we differentiated first from our US peers who only have cash funds in in USD, and then on the type of products, we started with supervenient money market funds, only investing in T bills, and that was like super important, very transparent, etc. And then we started working with more and more tai drivers and receiving, having demands for other products, basically. So for now, we still only operate in the, if you want overnight, sub daily liquid part of the treasury landscape, but there are many different products to be built there: term products, fixed term products, also yield strategies that are a bit more risky, like cash and carry trades, for instance, but are very hard to access and quite interesting for for treasurers that have more cash. So that's how we are seeing the roadmap launching more and more products in this space along the sort of term and risk axis, and the Spico among the overnight swap fund specifically is quite interesting because it leverages the balance sheet of very large banks. Today we work with BNP Paribas, but we could work with some of the largest U.S. banks in the in the future, and you enter effectively into a total return swap with these banks, whereby you hold instruments for them, like equities, for instance, they want exposure to, and then you swap the performance of the equities basket against a predetermined yield that is being offered by the bank. And by doing so, you are enabled to you are able, sorry, to beat the risk-free rates and the money market yields, so that makes it quite a compelling product. As long as you're comfortable with the credit risk of the banking auto party, effectively, and when it's very, very large banks, it's something that's you know it's quite quite common actually because most people have money in in banks. So,

Sy Taylor  36:56  
and I think this is the sort of stuff that in TradFi, the largest corporate treasuries have known about for quite some time, but I think this hourly yield accrual or even real-time yield accrual that's 24-seven accessible and just going straight after the corporate treasuries is really interesting as an approach. Greg, your thoughts on the story?

Greg Bricca  37:17  
Yeah, I mean, I really think it's interesting how you can abstract away the complexity in the backend to provide that end customer the experience. I can't wait to try it, but really, just is letting individuals, consumers, put your money to work for you. Having programmable money from a product perspective, sweeps get simpler. is a lot more useful for on-chain collateral, moving money in and out the same day, no longer costing individual yield. And so, really, really putting the speed of the underlying technology into real use cases at the end of the day.

Sy Taylor  37:49  
I think that would be interesting actually to take this corporate treasury approach and see if you could power it down to a consumer level. Obviously, it's a little bit easier selling to corporates than it is to consumers, but with personal agents now, I imagine Morse could do some really interesting things with with what speakers got under the hood. You know, I would love an agent that's sweeping my cash in and out of money market funds, depending on the time of day and depending like, do I really need the amount sitting in my current account, my checking account, or is that just there to cover the the month of potential bills that might accrue. So yeah, interesting to watch. Naz, your your thoughts on speaker's story?

Nassim Eddequiouaq  38:29  
So first and foremost, congratulations! Really, really excited for for you guys and seeing like the the very very rapid growth. Something that I'm actually quite excited about. I know that we talk a lot about stablecoins being the future money, I'm actually pretty excited about tokenized money market funds being used for settlement and as payment instruments. Ultimately, stablecoins are going to be basically money market funds and and overnight rebirth repos with a buffer of cash, right, for for redemption requirements. And so, I'm actually pretty excited about those kind of like future money movements that actually happen natively with tokenized money market fund. I also hope that we make it easier for transparently regulated money transmitters to use or hold money market funds, and without necessarily kind of like a lot of the the securities kind of like implications for it, because ultimately it's a it is also going to be part of money to certain extent. So I'm very very excited about that. Very excited about funds that are highly accessible and can be embedded within accounts for wealth building for individuals as well as corporate treasury use cases for businesses that you know have stuck liquidity everywhere around the world, basically, and we see that all the time. Paul, who's your ideal client profile? Sort of size and scope of company. Where are they operating? What type of business are they?

Paul-Adrien  39:50  
It's a great question. So we started with tech companies, but now we have really diversified away. I mean, we still have a lot of tech companies, obviously, but also very. Traditional SMBs, public institutions, financial institutions outside the ICP is a client that has between five and 100 million in cash, and you know quite a relatively short sort of decision cycle as well. Because in the business of firms, you want to grow your AUM fast, and the more AUM you have, the bigger the client you can target, because the largest, most sophisticated treasurers will have limits. You know they will not want to own more than five or 10% of the AUM of a fund. So for us, it was quite obvious when we launched it that we had to go first with the like the smallest businesses. Sometimes it's even a company with a single decision maker on on this, and then gradually go up the value chain if you want, and diversify from startups to many different types of clients. And today we have like 10k businesses on the platform, Europeans only, a few beyond Europe. But we don't serve U.S. persons yet because of regulatory constraints. But that might change when we get the right license. And yeah, it's a really very wide sort of client base in terms of profile, but concentrated among SMBs.

Sy Taylor  41:08  
So interested to watch what happens next with you guys. We did have a couple of stories we didn't have time to cover in full depth this week. One of which was the S and P launching risk scores for on-chain lending vaults. Paul, I do want to ask you your thoughts on that one because you did mention the rating agencies not taking this seriously a couple of years ago. What what's the importance of things like that?

Paul-Adrien  41:30  
Super important. I'll give you a practical example with us because we just got the triple A F rating for our fund actually last week, so it's quite quite fresh news, and so we've been through this process with S and P Global Ratings, actually of you know getting the spike one the overnight swap fund rated. It was very important for some clients that actually required this this rating. So really important that you know the agency stands towards the use of blockchain of tokenization for sort of ledger management has changed on that perspective, and now the fact that they are looking also at Vault is really, really interesting because it's obviously a super interesting technology to build new types of fans, allocates into DeFi as well. So we are following that very closely.

Sy Taylor  42:14  
Yeah, and Nazi, you did you see this story? And I guess it's kind of crossed your radar as well.

Nassim Eddequiouaq  42:19  
Yeah, definitely. I mean, we're spending a lot of time thinking about the kind of like spectrum of yield, ranging from you know very simple reserve yield from issuing your own stablecoin versus partnering with let's say Open USD or some existing stablecoin or joining a consortium versus more complex financial products and like vaults, for example, on chain and so on, and obviously you kind of like take on different kind of party risk. I think that this is great news because of the large companies that we talk to think about counterparty risk all the time, and rating essentially on vaults and funds is basically what is part of the equation of that prevents them from you know going to the the end of the slider on on DeFi. I would say so. Really excited for just stamps of approval on those financial products that really help them think through the the scale of of risks that they take on.

Sy Taylor  43:14  
Yeah, rating agencies aren't perfect. We've seen in financial crises, you know, that that they're not always, but they are still the least worst option we have to understand the risk of an asset, and they they do act as a good proxy, I think, for a corporate's ability to move. Do you think, Greg, that we'll see similar sorts of initiatives for consumers buying things? I know own buttons have become a real thing in consumer applications lately. And would you like 5% or 7% yield? And do you know where that's coming from? And you know, is this figure prime underneath the hood, or is it some vault? Is there some looping DeFi going on here? And as as Naz was alluding to there on the risk curve, how do you think about that? Is there a role for thoughtful product builders on what gets out to consumers? Do you think?

Greg Bricca  44:00  
Yeah, absolutely. Right, like in building trust, it's it's a two way street, and you have to earn it every single day, but you can lose it in an instant. And so, if you're really building for the long term, making clear for the customer what is underneath the hood, and that you don't have a mystery meat sauce under there. But as we keep on seeing with these developments, really the the line between a stored value balance and an investment product blurs, making sure that you know what you unders what you're holding for a consumer. Is it held in USD? Is it something else? But at the end of the day, really opening up this participation for this end customers is is happening quickly.

Sy Taylor  44:34  
Yeah, it's certainly something we've seen at Tempo. Is that once you can stick an earn button on something, whether it's corporates, MSBs, or consumer remittance businesses, they get the business case straight away. You know, with direct custody of stablecoins, the ability to potentially through the white label yield sharing potentially earn some revenue there. But also with the urn, there's some further spread that you can take on that, and the consumer feels like they're getting a. Great deal on you know what was historically maybe a bank account or a local bank giving you nothing now you can be getting 345 percent and it's U.S. dollar backed and and so we've seen that fly off the shelves and a lot of demand from fintech companies to have a bit of handholding as a bit similar to yourself you know Tempo we spent a lot of time with the corporates, really on the education and the FDE sort of approach, but as much on the solution end side more than anything. In fact, it's it's helping people understand you know what is this product, how do you get comfortable with compliance, what are the differences between these funds, how do you separate them all? I think that's going to be the the big area now. A lot of companies are stable curious and token curious, but can you guide them by the hand and answer all of those gnarly risk questions and things that come under the hood? All right. Well, I'm gonna I'm gonna pause it here because we could list off the rest of the news and keep going for hours, I'm sure. But I do want to thank everybody so much for participating in today's conversation. Naz, I'm gonna start with you. If people want to get hold of Bastian and they want to learn more about what you do, where do they go to do that? Yeah, Bastion on on X and on LinkedIn. Nasiwizi is my handle on X. Very excited that for more conversations. If you're building in the stablecoin space and you're a large or fast growing company, just you know hit me up and and I will respond. Greg, how about yourself?

Greg Bricca  46:20  
Yeah, you can reach me at Greg at Morse Money Morse Money for for X or on Instagram. You can find me on X at Gbrika.

Sy Taylor  46:29  
And look forward to it. All right, and Paul, how about you and Spyko?

Paul-Adrien  46:32  
Same X or LinkedIn on X. It's Spyko Finance available on LinkedIn. Email is p a ul Adrian at Spiker.io.

Sy Taylor  46:42  
Right. Well, definitely look out for Spiker.io. I think we're going to hear a lot more from you. We're going to hear a lot more from from Morse Sebastian as well. If you want to hear a lot more of this podcast, you should go ahead and subscribe. You should like and you should leave us a review. You should do all of those things. It really really helps us. And if you want to find more from me, I'm at S Y Taylor on all the socials, screaming to the void at brainfood.xyz and of course at tempo.xyz as well. And you'll find a lot more of this show if you subscribe to it. Tell all your friends to hit like buttons if you're watching on YouTube. Thank you very much, and we'll catch you next time.